Power The Calling

A Philosophical Novel
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-0983-0318-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Andrew Donelan did everything right. He attended the right schools, married the right woman, had a satisfying career and a happy family-so nothing could have prepared him when he woke up one June morning to a hollowed-out world. Instead of his comfortable Manhattan existence he found a world emptied of meaning, color, and interest. Overnight, the purpose of his life had vanished. In the mirror he saw not a man with hopes and dreams, but a thing among things. Looking inward, he saw nothing at all -no purpose, no goals, and no idea what to do next.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Power, Chris

Leseproben

Chapter 4 The Seminar Coming downstairs the next morning, I found Janácek sitting ramrod straight at the kitchen table, as though he were waiting to be served. “Good morning”, I said, “would you like some coffee?” I received a polite reply –“Yes, thank you.” I knew my way around the house, so I made coffee and attempted small talk, with no success. Soon we were joined by Rich and some others. Few of us had finished breakfast when Janácek rose silently from the table and walked to the living room. We followed sheepishly along. At precisely nine o’clock, he began the seminar. “Gentlemen.” He nodded to each of us as we settled in chairs and sofas around the big room. “I regret missing dinner last night. My flight was delayed. But I trust we are now rested and ready for the day. We have so much to do, so let’s dive right in. “As a psychologist and clinical researcher, my professional interest is in motivation. I have always been fascinated by what motivates people. Motive is the engine of the world’s greatest novels. In Crime and Punishment why does Raskolnikov kill the helpless—though vile—old pawnbroker? There is little chance you will put the book down before you find out. In Anna Karenina why does the heroine abandon a perfect family and social respectability to pursue the womanizer Count Vronsky? You are compelled to discover what drives her. Motive is at the heart of character. It is a decisive criterion for detectives and prosecutors in establishing guilt. In my last book, Reach for Greatness—I have a copy here for each of you—I devoted an entire chapter1 to character and motive, if you want to explore this question further. “One of the most powerful motivators is fear of death. Extraordinary acts of bravery and tremendous physical feats have been reported in life-or-death situations—for example, in war, or a general disaster, or getting lost in the wilderness, etcetera. The fear of imminent death causes us to abandon every scruple, giving us access to hidden human powers. In such dire circumstances, death motivates us negatively, or defensively. “But death also motivates us another way, which we could call positive. Awareness of the inevitability of death and its incessant march—always getting closer, no matter how distracted we are by a sense of comfort and security—can provide positive motivation by focusing our attention on the unknown remainder of our lives. Awareness of death implicitly demands a plan: ‘What must I do with the rest of my life?’ “To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, nothing clarifies the mind like the hangman’s noose. The two years I spent in Soviet detention taught me this much. Not long after the Soviets invaded Prague in August of sixty-eight, I was rounded up and arrested, along with many other street agitators and ‘subversives’. I happened to be with a group of students who were throwing Molotov cocktails at tanks. My first cellmate was tortured and beaten then finally strangled to death, with a wet towel, before my eyes. I had no reason to believe my fate would be different. When you are counting the days or hours you have to live, every moment is precious and demands total concentration. “Death can reveal our most important values. Heidegger’s concept of ‘being toward death’—Sein-zum-Tode—proposes that clarity about one’s own death is essential to individual ‘authenticity’. In his inimitable poetry, Heidegger calls death ‘one’s ownmost potentiality for being’. A proper understanding of death is essential—not in the end, but now and at every moment—to the discovery of one’s authentic self. “Can we somehow access the life-changing power of death, without our lives being directly threatened? How can we capture its motivating power to drive us to our highest potential? In the face of death, what great things might we achieve? “The answer to this question is not the popular notion of a ‘bucket list’, a touristic interpretation of preparing for death. For that notion is about broadening one’s experience. We cannot meet death on its terms while we are diverted from one experience to another. Varied experience helps us forget death. To wrestle with death, to meet it on its own terms and leverage its power, requires a different sort of undertaking. It requires a single goal that strains our capacity to the utmost, leaving nothing in reserve. Not through varied outer experiences but by one Great Goal alone do we encounter death and the opportunity to master it. And that is the primary purpose of this seminar, to help you find your one Great Goal. “By ‘great’ I means three things. First, the goal must be a true challenge for the goal setter, who will need to draw on their deepest inner reserves to achieve it. In other words there must be a substantial risk of failure. For this reason, the Great Goal must be an individual achievement. Its value comes from exhausting one’s own reserves, not others’. Second, the goal must feel inwardly, subjectively necessary. It must have unquestioned value to you. It cannot be a means to an end; it must be an end in itself. Finally, this goal will serve as a legacy, as something we wish to be remembered by. “I have corresponded with some of you extensively, as you attempted to determine on your own what the goal is, or should be. I am frankly concerned that I have not heard from the rest of you, because choosing the Great Goal can be quite tricky. It is rarely easy or obvious what this might be. It must strain the limits of your ability because it is in fact an attempt to reach beyond yourself. You must prioritize this goal above all others, and may need to dedicate a great deal of time and energy to achieve it. For this reason you must not commit to a goal that does not feel necessary. “From our correspondence it appears that many of you are on the right track; others may need to find another goal. In any case, I’ve set aside some time for one-on-one meetings with each of you. Some will have doubts, quite naturally. Everyone varies subtly in these things. But at the end of the day, as you Americans are fond of saying, you will have chosen a life-defining goal, and declared it before the rest of the group. “As you know from the materials you received from my colleague Kamila, we are not focusing on business goals today. Business goals, for the purposes of this seminar, are compromised by their pragmatic bent. Business goals are means to ends. Though they may be very rewarding, it is rare that they have truly intrinsic value. I know that the line separating an entrepreneur from his business is not fixed and clear, and in some cases my proscription here may be unfair. But it is very rare that one’s business goals are identical with one’s deepest personal values and goals. More often, they are a means to achieve these goals. Bill Gates had an audacious business goal: global dominance of the PC software market. A Windows computer for every person in the world. That vision catapulted Microsoft to a company of tremendous extrinsic value. This enabled Gates to attempt the far more audacious—and intrinsically valuable—personal goal of saving millions of lives by the eradication of malaria. The latter goal is his greatest contribution, his true legacy to the world, worthy in and of itself, and the achievement that will represent him best in remembrance.” There was a uneasy silence in the room. Behind me, someone coughed nervously. There was a good chance that, like me, the other guys here were proud of their business achievements, and did not like having it radically discounted. Competition, winning, profit and reward: these things are baked into business owners, and by disavowing these motives, the coach had moved us—deliberately I am sure—onto uncertain ground. Janácek pressed on. “In my first book, The Phenomenon of Choice, I explored the conflict of goal setting with our natural roles. One of the great paradoxes of modernity, as it came to accept the basic precepts of science (such as material causation), is that even highly educated people believe that our actions are caused by our intentions and motives. We perversely insist in this belief in free will though we know the truth is otherwise. We need motives to explain, after the fact, why we did what we did. Indeed only by this illusion of our individual agency are conscious, deliberate actions possible. “The conviction that our intentions and actions are freely chosen stems from what Schopenhauer regarded as an illusion based on natural bias.2 Like everyone here, I passionately want to believe in my individual freedom—but I’m afraid all evidence points in the opposite direction. When we examine our intentions and actions closely, we can always find their cause or ground in an external force (what the environment compels us to do); in physical forms (what an object does or how a creature acts, according to how it is formed or made); in social conformity (what social forces compel us to do); or in mental reflection (what motives or inner causes impel us to do). The illusion of freedom is certainly preferable to the truth—namely, that our choices and actions are exhaustively determined by a necessary series of material causes. This is the crux of a distinctly modern dilemma: knowing we are not free, how should we act? What should we do next? On the...