What the love of wisdom looks like!
A dancing dialogue with Daniel Garner of O.G. Rose
It was an immense pleasure to connect in conversation last week with the philosopher and unorthodox musical educator Daniel Garner of
.And that pleasure wasn’t just because Daniel is such a freakin’ nice guy.
As it turned out, a central theme that we explored together was the inherent pleasure of the very kind of dialogue we were engaged in - where two or more people wrestle together with the “walking contradiction” of being human.
Despite being extremely well read, Daniel emphasized again and again that philosophy is not about reading Plato or Nietzsche so much as it is about loving the adventure of trying to make sense of our lives - and forming friendships in the process.
Long before digesting ‘the greats’, a young Daniel was struck by a piece of folk wisdom heard on his grandfather’s porch while enjoying fresh watermelon:
“Nobody gets married expecting to get a divorce.”
This simple statement got a young man who didn’t yet identify as a ‘philosopher’ wondering how a person could go from living for a mere glance from their beloved to not being able to stomach the same person’s presence just a few years later.
He concluded, our brains aren’t as reliable as we think they are! And that it would be valuable to take on a life-long practice of thinking about thinking.
As he told me, “It simply wasn’t a good bet not to do philosophy.”
What I loved about Daniel’s origin story and subsequent descriptions of the practice of philosophy is that I felt included in them despite not having read ‘the greats.’
For example, I don’t know anything about David Hume. But I was delighted when Daniel recounted how this philosopher emphasized the importance of a ‘return to common life’ as the mature trajectory of a philosopher. That is,
How do all these highfalutin ideas make our lives better on a daily basis?!
Despite having written many books with plenty of footnotes, Daniel described the heart of philosophy being our every day investigation of experience. “the love of being wise in every situation you are in. Wisdom is the present moment application.”
Another important way of “doing philosophy” is joining into conversations like the ones on Daniel’s grandfather’s porch - or the conversation Daniel and I were having, which is now posted to my YouTube channel.
But what about that?
What about all these people recording long-form conversations (yes, on Zoom) and sharing them online these days?
Daniel sees a powerful new cultural current unfolding in this phenomenon.
Referring to the hundreds - perhaps thousands - of new conversations popping up daily on YouTube, Daniel says that the ‘Liminal Web’ provides a new “social coordinating mechanism” where one can see people modeling the love of learning in a way that has almost completely vanished from institutions of formal education.
Readers familiar with me will know that I teach unusually creative curriculums for embodied practice and talk about what I do as a pathway to falling in love with your life.
The more we talked, the more I saw parallels between Daniel’s practice and my own.
Despite his facility with words and encyclopedic capacity with quotations from greater thinkers throughout history, he was also eager to join me in championing the key role of the body as a whole in the cultivation of wisdom.
Our conversation was a kind of ‘part 3’ to two previous conversations with clinical psychologist Aspasia Karageorge (one with each of us).*
*Links to both conversations can be found in this previous post:
These exchanges explored the phenomenon of ‘authentic resonance’ - those singular moments when we experience clarity of thought and action in the midst of our complex lives, moments when body and mind function together in seamless harmony.
In my conversation with Daniel, we returned a phrase that came up previously in his conversation with Aspasia, ‘the phenomenology of the artist.’
What does an artist do?
An artist makes thousands of decisions in the course of creating a new work of art.
These are not merely the individual “artistic choices” to do this rather than that in myriad moments of literal creatiion. In addition, the artist inhabits their body and inhabits the world in a particular way, making it possible to see and feel possibilities that no one else is aware of, to recognize the presence of the masterpiece before it is born.
Daniel: “I am of the opinion that the artist is a very powerful case study for the space between the body and the mind.”
We agreed that the way the artist inhabits the world is a useful way to understand the overlapping realms of embodiment and philosophy that characterize the challenges faced by every human being living in this era.
That is, you don’t have to think of yourself as an artist, body worker or philosopher to find yourself in this conversation. Your daily life already repeatedly calls on you to thread a complex web of thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, confusions, circumstances and relationships in order to execute harmonious actions in the world.
To me, the whole inquiry we were engaged in (including both previous conversations with Aspasia) can be summed up in the following question:
How can we make use of the unprecedented opportunity we have today to engage with other human minds - and bodies - to improve our collective capacity to arrive at moments of authentic resonance in order that humanity can flourish and move in the direction of its true potential rather than decline into algorithmic dystopia?
The direction we seem to be pursuing up to this point is the possibility of reimagining our relationship to learning. While Daniel and I mainly looked at this question in terms of our individual lives, a recent conversation between Daniel and
(uploaded just an hour after this one) considered similar themes on a societal level.I’ll post both videos below as they pair together very well. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to a conversation sometime soon with both Daniel and Aspasia!
I invite you to listen with your body as well as your mind, to hear yourself in the dialogue and see yourself in the mirror of what is being wondered aloud.
And please leave a comment!
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