Encouragement

Regarding Three Posts by Helen De Cruz

Ashok Karra -

The philosopher Helen De Cruz announced on Bluesky that she is in hospice care:

Skeet by Helen De Cruz: "Saying goodbye now. I'm in hospice care" Response by Ashok Karra: "my philosophy club on campus has been reading your blog and getting so much from it. thank you for all you've done. 'But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.' Response by Ann-Sophie Barwich: "May the positive thoughts that so many people are sending your way make you feel a life well lived."

I do encourage you to stop by her Bluesky account or Substack and leave a tribute.

A few of us meet on campus each week to discuss philosophical matters. Recently, her blog has featured prominently, as we've spent considerable time reading it together. She makes it easy to ask good questions with her; she grounds her observations and thoughts through how life is actually lived. Without further ado, I'd like to share 3 posts of hers which have made a difference for my thinking.

"The philosophy social media dilemma"

I confess I never related to Facebook the way Helen De Cruz does, not even when I was greedy for eyeballs and readers. She speaks of a "philosophy community" growing on Facebook out of philosophers who had regularly blogged. A number of informal interactions turned into something rich and special. In her telling, "philosophers [found] community, fellowship with others, [and] they signal[led] cooperative intent." You could say a "rational ritual" was established.

Her dilemma comes from these concerns: What happens when the platform is really, really bad? When it is profitable right-wing poison? It isn't just stealing your data; it pumps money and visibility to extremist causes. Moreover, isn't chatting with your professional friends on Facebook incredibly privileged? And how private or public is anything on Facebook anyway?

De Cruz's musing on these issues points to the larger problem of dependency on corporate-controlled platforms for communication. Promoting extremism, hate, and mindlessness makes far more money than anything positive. When we contribute worthwhile content, we help legitimate the worst actors. Her post pushes us to articulate exactly what we want out of social media. For myself, it is primarily a space to learn and promote those who need visibility. If I've learned anything over the last two decades online, it is this: visibility isn't optional. Even if you don't think you need it, someone else in your life does. Speaking on behalf of others is easier when you've established a voice.

Photo by Ayanda Kunene / Unsplash

"Zhuangzi on disability: the radicalness of challenging ableism"

I know virtually nothing about Eastern thought and I felt this was an incredible introduction to it. You know something amazing is going on when you have nearly all your assumptions challenged at once. ("Amazing," in this case, in the good way. I have been amazed by the baseness and terribleness of things, too.)

De Cruz highlights the work of Zhuangzi, a "Daoist Warring States thinker" who challenged ableism by celebrating "disability as a valuable difference." Zhuangzi takes the time to relate the lives of those he knew or heard of who had disabilities. Here's an excerpt De Cruz offers from Book 1 of Zhuangzi's work:

By sewing and washing, he gets enough to fill his mouth; by handling a winnow and sifting out the good grain, he makes enough to feed ten people. When the authorities call out the troops, he stands in the crowd waving good-by; when they get up a big work party, they pass him over because he’s a chronic invalid. And when they are doling out grain to the ailing, he gets three big measures and ten bundles of firewood. With a crippled body, he’s still able to look after himself and finish out the years Heaven gave him. How much better, then, if he had crippled virtue!

Right away, I'm struck by two things. First, the counterfactual animating Plato's Republic may not mean to be ableist ("one man, one job"), but in practice it serves as a cornerstone of generations of future work. So it ends up contributing heavily to so-called serious thinkers not even seeing disability. It feels like an earthquake in a classroom every time I mention that we will all be disabled someday.

Second, Zhuangzi takes the time to detail the lives of those with disabilities. I know I said this above, but it is remarkable inasmuch as people want to create formulas and propositions for how to account for disability in general. A better approach is to actually look at how people live. It pushes you to reflect that there are entirely different notions of "happiness" and even "being" at stake, and some of us have access to them if we care to ask.

"Creative responses to illness: the case of Matisse and Spinoza"

This post got our community college philosophy club to start reading Spinoza.

It concerns how illness and creativity relate. I highly recommend looking at what Matisse produced with the help of assistants and comparing it to his previous work. De Cruz offers photos in her essay.

The discussion of Spinoza runs deep, not shying away from the first and last things. Questions center around his concept of beatitudo, or blessedness. De Cruz: "Blessedness is not just happiness, but a supreme state of happiness and wellbeing; it's the best state you can possibly get. You don't have to wait until some afterlife—you can achieve blessedness in this life."

Our club discussion started with whether scales could be created for happiness and wellbeing separately. If so, can a gym-bro type logic be deployed here? "I'm happy because I have dopamine. I have wellbeing because I'm working out. I have blessedness, right?" It sounds ludicrous and I know many are eager to reject that approach, but I don't think it is entirely removed from what Spinoza would like us to reflect on. Consider how it contrasts with other forms of beatitude: "blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy" – here, there is no end to sacrifice. Or the summum bonum, seeing the face of God. In both cases, there is no trace of anything earthly. In order to get people thinking about how happiness works in this life, it isn't the worst idea to start with a separation many of us practically make. We do build our minds separate from our bodies, and merging the two endeavors has various degrees of success (for an example of a striking failure, consider what has happened with wellness influencers, vaccines, and fascism).

Ultimately, it does seem that happiness is had relative to wellbeing, which is itself relative. The principle uniting these is personal, tied to how we deal with hardship such as illness or disability. We are happy not because of wealth or honor or health, but because we learn to accept, strive, and truly be. We are no less than modes of God in Spinoza's Ethics. The full realization of this goes hand-in-hand with the last line of the Ethics: "Everything excellent is as difficult as it is rare."