James Song

I thought understanding humanity was a human being’s highest calling. Now I think living an Abrahamic hero’s journey might be the most important.1 It’s the best I’ve encountered. And not because the hero’s journey is simply meaningful. Meaning is easy. You find meaning in the experience of optimal engagement. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this flow. Find anything that’s not too stressful (anxiety-inducing) and not too boring (boredom-inducing), and you’ve found a good time. And there are possibly transcendent, out-of-body moments at the peaks of flow. But even Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is rightly clear about the neutral moral status of the harmonious play between anxiety and boredom. Being meaningful is not enough.

Beyond meaning, the hero’s journey aims at the highest good. But the highest good has to go beyond mere ideas. It has to be embodied. There, Aristotle is wrong. He says exercising reason for its own sake is the highest good, as if any non-Greek nerd would believe that. 2

By contrast, the hero’s journey aims at the embodied highest good. Plato’s Cave is a better picture. Down the dark cave you go to the lost, up you come with the saved. He might have rounded out the story with a fire-breathing, gold-hoarding, virgin-guarding dragon. But Plato’s enlightenment is serene. Greece was in a lot of turmoil, and he kept philosophy an intellectual haven.3

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Notes:

  1. I am indebted to Jordan Peterson, especially his lectures on the psychological significance of biblical stories. All I could say about Abraham would be badly regurgitated material from his lectures. Check him out. ↩

  2. Anyone who reads the history of the Greeks can’t help but be humbled and full of admiration. They were soldiers, rhetoricians, theater-goers, athletes–Plátōn (Πλάτων) means broad-backed, as in the wrestler/philosopher Plato’s huge back. On nerds, Paul Graham writes insightfully. Recently, nerds have taken over and yield the most power. Anything new or interesting probably comes from nerds. ↩

  3. Thanks to Daniel LaPointe and Sam Popuolo for reading earlier drafts of this essay. ↩