Damned good life!
We are all looking for her.
Where is she?A good life awaits us in our inner life. We usually take our inner world for granted, even ignore her. Historically speaking, the inner world has mostly been studied by mystics, idealists, theologians, but she should not be left to their monopoly. So, what is the role of inner world in attaining a good life?
I live in an outer, public world. There are friends, enemies and their ongoing agon in this world. I have impressions, feelings, thoughts, expectations, intentions about this world. So I look at outer world from where I stand, through inner world, inner land. (Let us call her wonderland, the wonderland of inner life!) Inner world is necessary to live the outer. These two worlds are complementary to each other.
I come from my innerland! She is my home. In fact, she will be my home if I can be sufficiently wise to make our inner world a wonderland instead of a hell! Most of today's intellectuals live their inner lives as if they were in hell. They don't know how to live in their innerlands, without interacting and communicating with themselves. They hide themselves, and they are not sincere enough to confess their boundaries and faults. They are so lazy, and so pragmatically minded, that they are not able to appreciate the richness of their insides. (This is also what most mystics say!) They search for money, fame, social status, and immortality; few of them seek truth (what ever that may mean!). They take the world at face value, concerned about cost and benefit. Everyone becomes everyone else's tool, to help reach a desired aim. Ethics becomes business, and aesthetics is a play! We make other people our own playthings.
Where is the innerland? She is what you have lost! Without her guidance one tries to find a good life! But, no good life without inner life. There is a full of life inside you. All psychotherapeutic theories and Eastern wisdom are after her. But she is so difficult to grasp. We are strangers to our inner life. In is not in; it is not in our agenda. In is already out & she is gone! We usually think that under our skin there are only intestines.
Those who try to insist that life is one, in their mono-vitalistic attitude, suppose that we live altogether in one single, common, outer world. Sure! No objection. We live in this common world, in this Lebenswelt, by coming from our inner world. Inner world is our origin, this is our house (for some of us, home!). Making an allusion to Heidegger, we may say that inner life is the house of outer life.
Inner world is partly constructed with the bricks of outer world, e.g., with body, culture. The outer world is partly independent of the inner. You can change the outer world to a certain extent by your intentions, hopes, and passions. You can destroy your fantasies, but you cannot do the same for the external world. Topology between the inner and the outer should change! These two worlds are not mutually exclusive. They exhibit a strange topology, inner is in the outer, and the outer is in the inner!
The reason is simple: in perception, in the realm of aesthesis, is the aesthetic land. I am not alone, aesthetics is not solitaire. We perceive the world through others. (This is one of the main theses of this paper; which requires several books to defend it!) I begin to perceive the world through my mother's womb. (When gene-technology sufficiently develops, a child may be born without the aid of a mother; but in that case also, the other, as a technology, or a product of technology, is still there!) My pain, my most confidential thoughts, are all language laden, culture laden!
Following such an argument we may come to the conclusion that others in my outer world are also in my inner world, through my perceptual processes. Others gain access to our inner world by means of perception like Heraclitus' theory of perception: the channels of perception work as a kind of window (A 16).
Ethics is related to others. How to live with or for others is a typical problem of ethics. Ethics is public. Care for and responsibility to others make us an inhabitant of the ethical world. Ethics begins with the other. Aesthetics, too! So coordination of ethics and aesthetics requires consideration of others. Others are unavoidably tied to my inner and outer worlds.
When I aesthetically perceive the world, or create some works of art, they are there; always around me, always in me. They are in my aesthetic and ethical life. I am not alone. Not a monad. I have windows and doors open to others. Those who cannot discover the others in themselves may think that each human individual is an isolated other. We are not completely isolated, nor seamless cells.
Yet, there is such thing as inner world, severely neglected; taken, usually, at her face value. Deep inside me, I am the only experience (one who experiences), but not the sole experiendum (that which is experienced). I can perceive the others in me. They live under the protection or destruction of my power. I may love as well as hate them. I may take care of them as well as kill them.
So, I may achieve and become aesthetically ethical, ethically aesthetic. In fact, ethics is outer aesthetics, aesthetics is inner ethics. Isolated ethics and isolated aesthetics can no longer be defensible. Ethics in aesthetics and aesthetics in ethics should be developed. One way of doing this is to understand the relation of me to the others in me. Love, for example, is such a relation. It is an aesthetically ethical relation: care and aesthetic excitement go hand in hand. My inner land is the land of rehearsal. I, by trial and error, may learn how to live a good life and become a good human being (living and becoming should not be separated!).
Here, the 13th century Turkish mystic/poet Yunus' stanza may be appreciated: "As he passed by, Yunus chanced to meet the Friend. And remained at the Gate and the deepest end."
At the doorsteps of my friend's innerland, hopefully of her home, I am the visitor; careful enough not to intrude on her, because she is so delicate, so fragile. There is an interaction between my and her inner worlds. No need to invade her, trespassing her miraculous world. (She is a miracle, because she is my friend. We, together, try to learn how to be open to miracle - in Heideggerian or non-Heideggerian sense! A caress (thanks to my teacher Levinas!), an affectionate touch, is enough for her to take me to her deepest end. Because I have a mighty respect for her (Yunus says: "I have a mighty respect for an ant!").
How can we achieve this wonderful, miraculous relation? (P. Feyerabend, in his autobiography, "Killing Time," claims that love is not an achievement but a gift. I don't believe it. How can we appreciate the gift if we are not well prepared?) Just seeing our inner worlds through our faces! Innerization or to innerize, a word coined by me in order not to use the term interiorization, which, in my opinion, is already worn out, is a kind of travel into the other's world. This is not a penetration or invasion; this is just an invitation coming from an other's voice!
Do you think that mine is nothing but sheer wishful thinking? Then let us wish, let us try to visit a heart. Probably this heart may tell, aesthetically and ethically, how to achieve a good life!
Notes
1. Living into, a term coined by me, is a certain achievement in which one lives others without dominating, assimilating, expelling, abolishing, even penetrating them. This is not a kind of empathy at all, nor a verstehen. This is a careful, delicate, fragile experience that can be learnt by seeing examples. It may cover friendship or love, not in the sense of Eros, nor agape nor caritas; it is a reciprocal relation in which both sides will to sail into the ocean of others world. This may easily be misunderstood in our modern world, for it has nothing to do with business or money or any material interest!