minimum viable philosophy - a top 5 list
What a pleasure to have found Peter Limberg’s Minimum Viable Philosophy post last week. I am not a Stoic, not even a “hyper-minimal one” like Peter, but I was inspired and energized by his post. How would I define my own minimum viable philosophy? Here’s my Top 5 list.
Love. Love is the main thing. It is the first principle among first principles, the greatest fruit of the spirit, the only commandment Jesus gave, the greatest principle in the Torah, the heart of every great pop song, and the power whose presence or absence seems to make the most significant impact in our lives and communities. Wisdom about other areas of life can resolve a great deal of mental suffering, but wisdom about love rises to meet a whole body longing.
It is notable that people who achieve success in a variety of different domains often report feeling fundamentally unsatisfied by their accomplishments. People who have learned to connect to love, and to give and receive love well report the opposite of this.
“When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered.” - bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Dignity. All people have a fundamental dignity as children of God. This is a potent first principle regardless of whether God is, technically speaking, real. Someone else wrote that we should hold this truth to be self-evident, to noteworthy effect. Connecting to love is possible for everyone, not just special individuals. It is not a question of deserving. There are no disposable people.
Hospitality. One of the most powerful ways to put love into practice is to cultivate a default stance of warm welcome to ourselves, to others and to reality itself. Critically, this welcome must extend to all parts of ourselves, including the embarrassing, mediocre, ugly and perverse bits. It must extend to others who we find unappealing or who we judge as low status. It must extend to emotions that we don’t want to feel and situations that we don’t want to be in, but are nonetheless happening.
This doesn’t mean we have to pretend to like anything we don’t like. It doesn’t mean that injustice is somehow “meant to be.” It doesn’t mean that we have no agency to effect positive change inside ourselves and in the world. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that neither denial, rejection nor humiliation create fertile ground for positive transformation. They often make such transformation impossible.
It naturally follows then that we should avoid understanding reality as fundamentally a battle between light and dark or good and evil. It is occasionally useful to understand a situation this way, but to see it as the primary organizing principle of reality distorts our perception in ways that are reliably harmful, and also just inaccurate. Most of human life is full of weird textures and contradictions—we have to give in to the mess of it all.
Experimentation. Or: on the ground application is everything. Testing our hunches about love in real life activity is how we grow in wisdom. We try different approaches and reality gives us feedback.
In this iterative process, it is important to proactively resist overarching, eternalist “theories of everything.” In most situations, the operative question is not, “What is happening?” but “How do I relate to this wisely?” For wise relationships, some level of understanding is needed, but often much less than we think. The Buddha’s parable of the poisoned arrow is relevant here. Transformation becomes possible when we stay utterly focused on our current situation. Helpful reminders:
Don’t get sidetracked by trying to understand the fundamental nature of reality or how everything might fit together in some way that feels intellectually or emotionally satisfying
Pay attention to the day-in-day-out
Pay attention to cause and effect
Keep experimenting
Practice. Loving well takes practice. Hospitality takes practice. Welcoming uncomfortable emotions and situations takes a lot of practice. It also requires humility, and the willingness to look like a fool while learning and trying new things. But, with practice, we improve.
Practicing with others helps tremendously. We also become more like the people we spend time with, so it’s important to spend time with people we are proud to call our friends.
photo by Geoff Leeming
