Making It Personal
Translating Public to Private
My increasingly strong commitment to personalism and particularism has prompted me to make some changes in how I read, think, and act. Specifically, I have taken to translating universal claims and observations into practices that I can apply in my own life (and ignoring them if they cannot be so translated).
Consider, for example, the following opinion expressed by Eric Hoffer in his book First Things, Last Things: “My hunch is that to keep stable and healthy a free, affluent society must become a creative society.” Universally speaking, that claim may or may not be true (it’s not clear to me how we would prove it). However, if I agree with its underlying aim then there are two paths I can take.
The public path would be to advocate for a more creative society, write books and articles about the importance of beauty and the arts in human experience, donate time and money to museums and other cultural organizations, lobby the government for increased public funding of the arts, and so on.
The private path, by contrast, is simple and direct: I could be more creative. For instance, I could study classical guitar, compose music, write poems, pursue nature photography, observe the movements of birds and animals, read great literature, watch the sun rise and set, gaze up at the moon and stars, contemplate paintings and sculptures in my own house or at museums and galleries, learn more about the history of the arts, apply my mind to answering novel questions in philosophical aesthetics, and so on.
Oh wait, I already do all those things! It seems that at a deeply personal level I agree with Hoffer’s claim, because I’m working to make it real in my own life - taking, however, the quiet, private path rather than the noisy, public path. Since nowadays our society seems to honor public things far above private things, we could even call this taking the road less traveled by. So far in my pursuit of human fulfillment, doing so has made all the difference.
How perfectly personalist, Peter! :o)