EP. 104: THE BEAUTY IN THIS LIFE

WITH NICK RIGGLE

Mar 20

WITH NICK RIGGLE, PHD

A philosopher discusses how engaging with the beauty in everyday life answers the question: “what makes life worth living?”

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Episode Summary

We didn’t choose to live this life. In its most difficult moments, it's all too natural to ask the question, “What makes life worth living?”

This question, so central to philosophy since ancient times, is what we explore in this episode with Nick Riggle, a professor of philosophy at University of California, San Diego. Riggle is the author of several books, most recently 2022’s This Beauty: A Philosophy of Being Alive.

Over the course of our conversation, we discuss aesthetics, which is the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty and art; the various ways that we, successfully or otherwise, have attempted to find meaning in life; why finding beauty and building an aesthetic community is so crucial to human well-being; and much more.

Nick Riggle is a philosopher who specializes in aesthetics—the branch of philosophy concerned with questions about beauty and art. He has taught at the University of San Diego since 2015. Professor Riggle dropped out of high school at age 17 to pursue a career as a professional rollerblader. From age 15-21, Professor Riggle traveled around the world skating in world class competitions, and for demos, videos, and magazines. Professor Riggle restarted his education on his own, reading, writing, and exploring while traveling the globe and eventually discovering his love for philosophy. At age 20 he ventured into community college to study philosophy more carefully, and in 2004, he transferred to UC Berkeley where he studied for two years and wrote an honors thesis under the supervision of Professor John MacFarlane. He graduated in 2006 with Highest Honors and was the recipient of the Departmental Citation Award in Philosophy that year. Professor Riggle went on to pursue a PhD in philosophy at New York University where he wrote a dissertation under the supervision of J. David Velleman. He earned the PhD in 2013.
In this episode, you will hear about:
• 2:29 - Nick’s path from being a pro-skater to becoming a philosophy professor and author
• 8:41 - How Nick approaches surveying philosophical thought through history
• 10:22 - The importance that aesthetics and beauty play in Nick’s studies
• 19:13 - What motivated Nick to write his book This Beauty
• 21:04 - How Nick conceptualized answering the central question of his book
• 23:51 - The takeaways that Nick personally found for what makes life worth living
• 29:15 - What it means to pay attention to the beautiful things in life
• 32:18 - Are some kinds of beauty and art “better” than others?
• 34:47 - The value of creating an aesthetic community
• 39:12 - Living an aesthetic life when your physical or mental state is limited
Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:02] And I'm Tyler Johnson.
Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and health care executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine. We will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.
Henry Bair: [00:01:03] Life can be hard, sometimes unbearably so. In these moments, it's all too natural to ask the question what makes life worth living? This question, so central to philosophy since ancient times, is what we explore in this episode featuring Nick Riggle, professor of philosophy. Nick is the author of several books, most recently This Beauty A Philosophy of Being Alive. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss aesthetics, which is the branch of philosophy concerned with beauty and art. The various ways that we successfully or otherwise have attempted to find meaning in life. Why finding beauty and building an esthetic community is so crucial to human well-being, and much more. Nick, welcome to the show and thanks for being here.
Nick Riggle: [00:01:54] Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
Henry Bair: [00:01:56] So, Nick, I first came across your book, which carries the ambitious subtitle of A Philosophy of Being Alive while browsing in a bookstore last year. Your book tries to answer the question, what makes life worth living? And, you know, we in the health care profession, whether or not we are aware of it, are often faced with the opportunity to engage in this very question when talking to patients, especially those facing debilitating or life limiting illnesses. So I'm excited to hear your answer to this question. But before we get there, you yourself actually have a fascinating and quite singular life story. Can you share with our audience how you went from being a pro skater to a professor of philosophy and a writer?
Nick Riggle: [00:02:43] I dropped out of high school in my junior year to pursue a pro rollerblading career. This is probably 1997 or 8, and I was getting a lot of opportunities to travel the world and skate in competitions and record video sections and be in the X games and all kinds of things like that. And my parents hadn't graduated from college, so I didn't I didn't really have that kind of influence in my life. And they were seeing all these opportunities that I was getting, and they supported me pursuing them. And that meant dropping out of high school. But when I did, sort of surprisingly to me, I fell in love with learning when people weren't telling me what to read and write and do. In high school, I found that I had all this energy for reading and writing and exploring the world of ideas. And so while I was traveling as a pro skater, I found myself just exploring science fiction and religion and philosophy and music composition and all kinds of things. And ultimately I really fell in love with philosophy on my own, just exploring all those things. And when it came to my early 20s, my parents had divorced, and with the family breaking up, I and the fact that I had been traveling the world as a pro skater for several years at that. By that point, I realized that I kind of had to have a bigger plan for my life. And for a lot of athletes, that means kind of doubling down on that industry.
Nick Riggle: [00:04:19] So starting a company or becoming a tour manager or getting into graphic design, people do all kinds of things to kind of stay in the industry. I didn't really want to do that. I loved skating, but I couldn't see myself as a kind of business person or whatever. So I realized, well, I can skate whenever I want, but I could also go to community college and study philosophy, which is what I had just really fallen in love with, and that's what I did. It was really scary to do because I had dropped out of high school and up to that point had never really cared about school. I didn't have a conception of myself as like a student or scholar, so I didn't know if I would succeed. And that gave me a lot of anxiety, a lot of trepidation. And as a first gen student, I really didn't know anything about the atmosphere of college and kind of the rhythm of it. And but I gave it my, my, my all. And I ended up doing really well. I transferred to UC Berkeley, got a great degree, and ended up getting into the top graduate programs in philosophy and just kind of never looked back. I also never had any other ideas about what I might do. It was just kind of straight from skating to philosophy. It's a very, very active life to a very inactive life.
Henry Bair: [00:05:33] Active in different ways, active of the mind, shall we say?
Nick Riggle: [00:05:36] Yes, exactly.
Henry Bair: [00:05:37] Yeah. I mean, that is a life trajectory. I don't know if I'll ever hear again. Yeah. You mentioned that early on in your career, your skating career, you became very drawn to philosophy. Now that's very broad. It's kind of like someone saying, oh, I became drawn to science. There's like, there's a lot of philosophy. So do you remember what you were reading, or was there a particular school of thought or particular questions or particular philosophers who really caught your attention?
Nick Riggle: [00:06:04] Yeah. So I grew up with the Christian religion, and my mother was very involved in the church, still is, and I never really felt that connected to it. I sort of always alienated me. I didn't really understand the mythology that well, and I could kind of get my head around existence of God, but I never really felt that connected to it. And so when I was getting older, I wanted to sort of explore that, like, what do other people think? And, you know, what are these other religions out there? And I really felt connected to Buddhism when I started learning about it. I thought it seemed really fascinating. I loved the emphasis on practice, on sort of mindfulness and meditation, and I started learning more about that and exploring that from a religious, but also from a philosophical point of view. I was interested in the kind of, you know, the versions of Buddhism that emphasize kind of self-improvement and nirvana and not so much kind of deism and, and ethics and stuff. I mean, there is an ethical element, but I actually started practicing. I was meditating a lot and learning about Theravadin Buddhism and different sort of metaphysical beliefs behind the religion. And then I was sort of starting to critically study those beliefs and I think, you know, sort of not satisfied by the Buddhist conception of the mind. What else could I learn about that? And that took me into Western philosophy, because I thought the dialog there about like, what is consciousness and how is it related to the body and what is free will? Do you have free will and thinking more about kind of like those issues that really got me excited. I sort of kept the practical side of Buddhism. I got so much out of meditating, and that ended up being really useful in my life, especially at a time that was really existentially difficult for me with the, you know, the divorce and changing careers and like a weird like, I retired at age 20, like, you know, who does that? And so it was useful to have this resource. But then the other, aside from Buddhism and thinking about religion and then, you know, leading to philosophy of mind. I also remember just reading, like Plato and Descartes. I like read Plato's Republic and I read Descartes's meditations, and I just found that those things challenged me in ways that other things didn't. And I wanted to understand those arguments better. Think about them with other people. And, you know, there were even things that I read that I felt like they were so mysterious that I, I wanted someone to explain them to me. It seemed like there was real insight here, but I couldn't get it on my own.
Henry Bair: [00:08:41] Here's something I'm curious about. When you study and think about the course of philosophy, do you approach each school of thought critically and dispassionately? Or at some point, did you find a specific way of thinking that you identified with that made you think, I could make this my own? And I could incorporate this philosophy into how I live my life?
Nick Riggle: [00:09:01] Yeah, I think it's more typical to approach it critically, in part because the history of philosophy, not just in the West, but it's typically a critical history. So you have Socrates espousing various views. You have Plato sort of taking up those views, critiquing them, making his own views. Then you have Aristotle taking those up, critiquing those views. You know, Aristotle was Plato's student. And then you have, you know, the aristotelians and you have the ancient Roman philosophers who, you know, critiqued the ancient Greek philosophers. And so when you learn about the history, you kind of think, oh, yeah, so and so had this argument, but then so and so critiqued the argument. And then there was a critique of that, and then there was a development of this idea. And then so it's all kind of related in these really, I think really beautiful ways. I mean, it's it's kind of amazing when you do philosophy that you're thinking, I was just teaching Plato this week and, you know, it's like this was written in 300 BC and it's still intriguing and thought provoking and worthy of discussion and study. And I think that's, you know, that's still happening today where, you know, a lot of our I think a lot of philosophers don't approach what they're doing as a way of finding a way of life and fixating on that. It's more a kind of the way of life is critical. You know, the way of life is exploratory.
Henry Bair: [00:10:22] Let's see. So now fast forward to at this current moment, what areas of philosophy do you most enjoy thinking about? Do you enjoy writing about and researching?
Nick Riggle: [00:10:33] Yeah, for me it always comes back to esthetics, which is not the most. It's a slightly unusual answer. Some people would say, oh, I'm always thinking about knowledge. How can we justify what we know? Or I'm always thinking about reality like what is really real. Yeah, for me, I just always find myself interested in questions about beauty, about the arts, about related things like what is it for a person to have style? What is special about, say, film or painting or music philosophically? Yeah. So, um, aesthetic stuff is is the answer.
Henry Bair: [00:11:11] That's at one level that is very intuitive because people generally enjoy the arts. I like reading books. I like looking at paintings. I like watching movies, listening to music people generally have. They know what they like. So on one level, the study of aesthetics seems intuitive, like, okay, yes, what is beauty like? What's beautiful to me. But on the other hand, because it is so intuitive, it might lead some... Certainly I start thinking about what does it even mean to study that? Like, why does it matter that we think about these things? Why should we make something that I enjoy when I relax? Like, why should I make that an academic study? How would you respond to that?
Nick Riggle: [00:11:48] Yeah. Good. So I think you definitely don't want to ruin your enjoyment by thinking too much about, you know, you can you ever watch a movie with someone and right when it's done, they want to talk about it? Oh, yeah. Wait, I'm still, like, in this space, like, leave me alone. So I wouldn't recommend, you know, being a philosopher all the time, right, when it comes to these things. But within philosophy, I mean, on the one hand, anything's fair game in philosophy. I mean, you know, it's all open to philosophical kind of inquiry and scrutiny. But I think beauty or esthetic value in general has a special claim to philosophical attention, and that's because of the importance of beauty in our lives. So I think that whenever there's something this grand, this significant, you know, it's important to have a philosophical understanding of what that is and why it merits this level of significance or centrality in our lives. There's that, but also there's this other thing that I mean, personally, you might want to have a better understanding of what it is that you're doing when you place literature in your life as this thing that you care about, why is that important? What are you getting out of it? What is that value exactly? And these are some of the things that philosophers write books about and have theories about and disagree about.
Henry Bair: [00:13:16] So when it comes to this discipline of aesthetics, what are the major ways that people have thought about it? Like you've posited several questions already over the over the last five minutes or so about what does it mean for something to be beautiful? Why does it matter that things are beautiful in our lives? What are some of the answers that people have come up over the years?
Nick Riggle: [00:13:38] Yeah, so take my aesthetics class. This is a very difficult question, but, um, there's a lot to say. I mean, so you might have this question of, well, you know, what is beauty? A knee jerk reaction that a lot of people have to that, well, is, is this cliche? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Right. So and I think if you flesh that out, what that means is something like there's no real answer to that question because it's all subjective. You know, beauty is just some kind of feeling. Different people have different feelings. And so there's no real significant or substantive answer to this question, what is beauty? But a lot of philosophers have found that response to be extremely dissatisfying, because if it was all subjective, then it seems like we couldn't go wrong in our judgments about what is or isn't beautiful. But it does seem like we can go wrong. So if someone I don't know take a beautiful sunset or something, something simple, you're enjoying this beautiful sunset and someone comes up to you and goes, you know, it's just ugly. And I think, yeah, okay. Like you've made a mistake, right? It's not just your opinion. Like you might have that opinion, but it's wrong. And we want resources to be able to say or justify the view that although beauty and esthetic life in general has a lot to do with emotion and feeling and responsiveness of certain sorts, nonetheless we can go wrong in those responses. So how do we make sense of that? And there have been numerous attempts to make sense of that.
Nick Riggle: [00:15:11] So one is from Immanuel Kant. He's a really important philosopher. Some would rank him at the very top of all philosophers. Some, you know, it would be unreasonable to rank him below three, probably. He's such an impressive mind. And he wrote about everything epistemology, metaphysics, politics, ethics, and one of his most famous books is called The Critique of the Power of Judgment. And part of that is about esthetic judgment. And what he said was that beauty is the capacity to put your mind in a really special state. He called it the free play of imagination and understanding, and what he meant by that, I think, is something like when you experience beauty, you're not interested so much in just categorizing what you're what you're seeing. You know, it's not just like, oh, this is a horror film or oh, this is a sunset. There's something about the colors and the forms and the shapes that you're looking at or hearing. If it's music that allows your mind to kind of just contemplate it and sort of play with it, you kind of like apply certain concepts to it. You kind of explore it in this open, playful, curious way. Kant thought that mental state is something we can all get into, and when we do, it's pleasurable and we want to share that with other people. We want other people to see it too. So beauty for him is a capacity that certain objects have, or certain things we can experience to put us in that state of mind, this communicable, universal state of mind. And so if something doesn't merit that state of mind or doesn't doesn't merit that kind of feeling, then, um, if someone says it's beautiful, they'd be wrong. It doesn't. They're wrong. That doesn't merit that free play of imagination and understanding.
Henry Bair: [00:16:54] At some level, though. Isn't that also kind of subjective, like what puts us into that state of mind? I mean, there are certainly things that other people find beautiful that I don't, and there are types of music that I just do not resonate with me whatsoever.
Nick Riggle: [00:17:06] Right. So. Oh yeah. Yeah. So it's subjective in a sense. So console problematic in the third critique is that clearly our esthetic judgments are based on a pleasure, he thought, but they're not based on a pleasure, what he called a pleasure in sensation in a certain sense. So it's not just a mere liking. That would be very subjective. You like cilantro? I don't, you know, it makes no sense for me to be like. But cilantro is gross. How could you possibly like it? Right? That argument is, is sort of nonsense. So Kant thought, we have to find a way to make sense of a judgment that's based on a feeling, but that nonetheless is something that we could like, argue over or disagree about in a substantive way. And so, you know, if you said a certain film was bad, but I thought it was really good, it seems like that's not just like cilantro. That's like we could have an argument about that and that there could be something at stake in that argument. One of us could be right and one of us could be wrong. And so he wanted to make sense of a pleasure that was nonetheless kind of universal. He thought that we had to have. Everyone has to be capable of entering this free play of imagination and understanding, because imagination and understanding those are the faculties we need to make any judgment whatsoever.
Henry Bair: [00:18:20] So the things that might put me in that state of mind, that might not be universal, but the fact that I am able to enter that state of mind, that is the universal experience upon which we can debate over. Right?
Nick Riggle: [00:18:32] Yes. I think what I think Khan also thinks that the things that put you in that state of mind should put everyone in that state of mind. But, you know, there's lots of contingencies here. I mean, maybe there's something about the way you are in particular that blocks your access to, you know, the beauty of great wallpaper or something like that. But when it comes to literature, like you're keyed in.
Henry Bair: [00:18:54] Okay, interesting. I'll have to pay more attention. I don't know, I didn't realize that. I mean, I know caught more for like, his, like, ontological thoughts and writings. I did not know he, uh, did aesthetics. Really. So I'm going to have to, uh, take some time to explore what he's writing about.
Nick Riggle: [00:19:08] You should. Yeah. Let me know if you have any questions. I have all kinds of notes I can send you.
Henry Bair: [00:19:13] Yeah, well. Thank you. So this is good because this leads us to your book, which is titled This Beauty. Can you share with us what motivated you to write this book?
Nick Riggle: [00:19:23] Yeah, I guess in short, it was having my first child during the pandemic. So that was that was fun. Um, that was challenging. Really challenging. But yeah, I think as a philosopher, I was thinking about. What justifies me bringing a person into being, into existence. You know, like you, I mean, I didn't choose to be alive. No one had a chat with me before I became conscious and asked me, you know, hey, what do you think about kind of like hanging out on this spinning orb in deep space for 80 years or so. You know, you're going to get poked and prodded and bones will break and you'll have all kinds of emotional challenges. And yeah, there's going to be some moments that are great and and lots that are not so great. And, and so, you know, no one had a chat with me to sort of get my consent about this. And so here I am in this position, you know, without their consent, bringing a child into the world. And I thought, could I say anything to my child? His name is Wolf. That would make me feel sort of justified in doing this. What could I tell him? In all honesty? You know, about the world, about existence, about his life as I could foresee him living it? Yeah. Is there any advice I could give him or sort of justification I could give him about, you know, how you might be able to accept your life and think well about it under those existential circumstances.
Henry Bair: [00:21:04] When I read this book, I found it a rather meditative experience. You freely dive into your memories and explore the various ways that life can be worth living. Can you tell us how you thought about structuring this book and answering this question? The chapters, as I flip through this book right now are titled This Body, This Day, This time, etc.. What is the meaning behind these chapter titles?
Nick Riggle: [00:21:31] Yeah, so the question really is, you know, why should I value this life? Why should Wolff value the life that he didn't choose to live? Especially given that there seems like a lot of reasons to not value it. It's hard. It's difficult, it's full of pain. And in thinking about that question, I started thinking about what I call in the book existential imperatives. So people tell each other these things all the time that presume or suppose that life is indeed valuable, that it is worth living. So they'll say things like, you only live once. Yeah, embrace life. You only live once. Or sometimes those existential imperatives are focused not on life as a whole, but on like, your body. Right. Something like these sort of imperatives to self care. Treat yourself right, embrace. Embrace your body like go to that spa or whatever, take a bath, enjoy it. Or there's other ones focused on like the day, right? Carpe diem, seize the day. Other ones focused on time. Live in the moment. So I thought, I'll organize the book around investigating whether there's any sense in these existential imperatives, and if I can kind of mine them for wisdom, that might give me a sense of an answer to this difficult existential question.
Nick Riggle: [00:22:47] To give you an example of why they might be intriguing in this sort of philosophical sense. Someone tells you, hey, you only live once, and they seem to treat this as a reason to like, embrace life, right? Yolo. Right? There's this kind of extreme version of it. Yolo like jump off that cliff into the water. Yolo. Eat that hot pepper. Yolo. Right? Like do these bold, risky things. And you might have that a response that says, yeah, YOLO. I'm going to stay inside. Like I'm not going to take the risks, right? Yolo. Like I'm going to be afraid of the world and lock the doors. And so it seems like the idea that you only live once can go both ways. And so why is it that we use that phrase to inspire risk, or to inspire adventure, or to inspire boldness and challenge and such? So the book is structured around kind of critically probing each sort of set of existential imperatives those focused on life, those focused on the body, those focused on a day, on time.
Henry Bair: [00:23:51] Um, so over the course of your explorations of these different responses to this big question, can you share with us, like whether or not there were one or a few of them that particularly resonated with you? I mean, you can answer this in a very personal level that really cements for you why this life is worth living.
Nick Riggle: [00:24:11] Yeah, I love that question. I started thinking about YOLO. That was my first. It was actually a kind of follow up thought to my first book on being awesome. I started thinking about YOLO and as like a kind of another thing I could analyze, like like I did with On With Awesomeness in the first book. But I think in writing it, I came to appreciate a kind of new perspective on, I guess, a kind of related. Thing between carpe diem or seizing the day and living in the moment. I started to think, you know, I've always sort of liked the idea of living in the moment. It's sort of useful, but I realize that people think about it in all kinds of different ways, and I came to appreciate a way of thinking about it that's more esthetic than I typically did before. And that's actually the thought there is that if you look at the sort of Horace's advice, carpe diem, he follows it up with this thought about lowering your trust in the future. And I think, well, what happens when we lower our trust in the future? Why should I do that? Well, if you think about it, a whole bunch of your sense of self is wedded to the future. How you think about who you are as a person. So much of that is projected into time. You think, oh, I'm the person who has to go to work, who has to do these things, who wants that promotion, who you know, so on and so forth, who has to pay the mortgage and so on, and go on that vacation.
Nick Riggle: [00:25:50] And you might think, well, if I'm lowering my trust in the future, then whatever sense of self I have when I do that has to be provided to me in the moment. And how can I have any sense of self when I'm just kind of present to the world as it is right now before me? And my thought was, well, one resource you have is to pay attention to the beauty around you and to let that fill your sense of self, and as it were, to put all your trust in your esthetic self. You lower your trust in the future and you sort of diminish or quiet that sense of self, and then you can kind of fill that up, back again with your attention to the esthetic present, the beauty that's around you. I think that's kind of transformative, like being good at that is something that I think a lot of people could be reminded about or to or, you know, could practice more. That was an insight from writing the book that I didn't sort of predict. And now I that sits with me more.
Henry Bair: [00:26:55] That's wonderful. When I think about, yeah, of course I've heard of the term YOLO. I have never really been convinced that that is a reason that I should sort of take risks and that that's why, like, I should live my life in accordance with that mindset. You know, I think most of us don't. Even the people who say it, like most of us, live our lives for the future. We don't really live in the moment. Like everything I do. You invest, you save money. You. You're talking about mortgages. You put yourself through school. All that is in the hopes of a better future. Our society sort of revolves around an assumption that, like, tomorrow is going to come and we can try to make it better, or it's going to have the things that I want that I don't have today. I'm in residency right now. It's brutal. I would not be in residency if I only if I knew I only had one year left or two years left. I am where I am now because I assume that I'll still be here like ten plus years later, you know, and that I have better things to look forward to in my life. Yeah. So the idea of you only live once has never been that convincing, or I've never even been that comfortable with that idea.
Nick Riggle: [00:27:54] Yeah. Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, I, I think one of the, you know, one of the things in the book is this, is this thought that like, well, people when people say you only live once, another sort of the flip side of that is, you know, you might die tomorrow or something. You might die soon, right? Like it's like, let this fill your fill your thoughts and shape your life. And you might think, yeah, there's something to that. But on the flip side, I mean, what if I didn't only live once? What if I lived twice? What if I lived forever? What if I was immortal? The way I set up the philosophical question, you can see that it stands even if you live forever. The thought being this life is utterly mysterious. I mean, we we really don't know what's going on here. Like to get kind of trippy. I mean, you know, we did not consent to this, like Earth, a planet in space. Like what? What? Like, you know, and like, it's difficult and it's short lived and it's, you know, but what if this just, like, went on forever? That wouldn't solve the mystery. Mere immortality wouldn't give us an answer to the question of why we should value this life that we unwittingly, you know, sort of find ourselves in. So that's kind of the trick with, with YOLO is like it doesn't really answer the question.
Henry Bair: [00:29:15] So I guess your primary response, at least, certainly through your explorations, is to focus on the beautiful things in life. And you mentioned that you your hope is that more people pay to start paying attention to this. Can you share with us what you actually mean by the beautiful things in life? I mean, what should I be paying attention to?
Nick Riggle: [00:29:36] Yeah, good. So I can't really give you specific advice like that because as you said before, people. Will find beauty in different places. Um, you know, there's a lot of community around beauty, too, and I think that's really important. But the sort of argument in the book, it comes down to this thought, that look. Maybe we can never. Have a definitive answer. You know, why should you value this life that you did not consent to? And that is full of challenge. Maybe there's no answer. I mean, you know, people try to give answers like religions, cults, um, like other sort of blueprints for living life will tell you all these stories about, you know, its meaning and its and its importance. But if you don't really buy any of that stuff, then you're just kind of left with this, with this mystery, this kind of this question of why you should value. And my thought is, well, what if there was a practice that you could engage in a social or, you know, a kind of regular practice that you could take up in your life, that although it didn't answer the question directly, it nonetheless sort of quieted the question or. Provided you with a satisfying justification for living your life. And the thought in the book the last couple of chapters is that the practice of esthetic valuing, of being kind of committed to beauty, to finding beauty, to sharing beauty, to creating it, to imitating it, to putting it, you know, in your heart in some way or other.
Nick Riggle: [00:31:15] That's what I wanted to say to my son, that you could take up this practice and. You know, I can almost guarantee that in taking it up sincerely, you will find reasons to value your life, right? It can be all kinds of things. I'm wearing an Annie Arnaud sweatshirt because I love the French writer Annie Ernaux, winner of the of the Nobel Prize last year in literature. You know, reading Annie Ernaux, listening to, you know, your favorite metal band, being in a metal band, you know, reading poetry, writing poetry, taking up these practices, interior design, landscape architecture. Um, you know, I can go on and on and on. Maybe it's even like getting into sneakers in a deep way. You know, I'm open to this, like rich variety of of of possibilities where at the center of your engagement is the love of beauty? I think that you're going to be put in touch with these reasons to stay alive, to be alive, to enjoy or to value your life.
Henry Bair: [00:32:18] So you've just listed a bunch of possible sources of beauty. Which leads me to my next question. Are there some types of art that are, for lack of a more nuanced terms, better than others? Are there sources of beauty that are more worthy of our attention? The way that art and cultural criticism has traditionally conceived of it. There are high arts and there are low arts. As someone who studies esthetics, what are your thoughts on this? Is Tchaikovsky better than Taylor Swift? Is the art of the Dutch Old Masters better than the art in superhero comic books?
Nick Riggle: [00:32:52] Yeah, I mean, so historically, a lot of philosophers have been interested in, in the hierarchy of the arts, right? They want to distinguish the fine arts from the other arts, and then they want to say among the fine arts, like which one is the best? You know, people have argued that poetry is the best or music is the best is to, you know, disagreements about this. So officially, given the way I think about esthetic value, it's possible that some aesthetic practices, like specific aesthetic practices like Western classical music or comic books or superhero comic books, get more specific or, you know, Japanese cuisine, maybe some of these esthetic practices are are truly better, all things considered than others. My knee jerk reaction is that there's probably not going to be a very good arguments to single out any particular practice as better than another. Maybe you can get a loose ranking, kind of like these tend to be better than these or something like that. But, um, I don't think it's going to be a ranking that will issue like advice. Right? Like, so it's so clear that like you're there by it's clear to you what you have to do. Right? Um, maybe at the end of the day, you'll have to avoid certain types of movies and children's books or something. But even then, I would like, as a dad who's reading, you know, four books a day to his kids, I've learned to really love the art of of a children's book. You know, it's a very specific art. And, you know, do I want to say, oh, it's inferior to. Well, no, I mean, it has its it has its role, it has its space. It has its time. So I'm skeptical that there's a, that there's a hierarchy of the arts to put a little more meat on those bones. I mean, I think that for me, aesthetic value, what's good ultimately sort of what explains the deep goodness of aesthetic value is the value of aesthetic community, the sort of human relationships we can form.
Henry Bair: [00:34:47] Talk to us about that, because your book kind of builds up into that. And then the towards the latter parts of it, you start talking about our connection with other people instead of just other things from which we can appreciate beauty from. So tell us more about the aesthetic community.
Nick Riggle: [00:35:09] Yeah. So a kind of intuitive gloss is just that you and I form an aesthetic community when, when we love the same aesthetic goods and we can kind of bond over that. I think there's a special connection we might have, you know, maybe we're in a band together or, you know, we support each other's writing in poetry or in or in literature otherwise. Or we have the same fashion sense and we, you know, we like to go shopping together or you can make clothes together. I think that when we connect over esthetic goods, that's a really special type of relationship that we can have with one another. And what it comes down to, in my view, this gets a bit technical, but I think basically humans have two really significant capacities that aesthetic community enriches and even kind of transforms, makes, makes better. One of them is what I call discretionary valuing. And that's just this capacity to value things at our own discretion. You know, you you said, you know, you like this, that and the other thing. And I actually spend more time with this, that and some other thing. And, you know, we overlap a little bit, but we don't overlap entirely. And so a lot of things that we value in life are not up to us. You know, our valuing is kind of compulsory. Like we can't decide to value murder, right? We have to dis value murder. We can't decide to, you know, disvalue, uh, love or something like that, right? These are just things that everyone should care about in a certain deep way.
Nick Riggle: [00:36:38] But when it comes to valuing discretionarily, we have a lot of choices we can make. I might like big trucks and you might like a sleek Audi's or something, right? Like we can make these decisions about, you know, whether to paint our nails or whether to wear, you know, certain types of clothing or how to decorate our house or what music to put on in the car. And so I think esthetic life is a place where we get to freely make these choices, and that's kind of what's really cool about it. And that's partly why there's so much disagreement or variation among esthetic agents. And then the other thing is what I call volitional openness. And that's another capacity we have to kind of break out of our normal sense of self, our normal routines, and act from a more open and exploratory and curious place and respond to the kind of values that are present before us. You know, maybe a vivid example is when you you're out and you're just kind of like, ah, dancing with friends or dancing with other people, you know, and it's just kind of open responsiveness. You're not sitting there thinking, oh, like tomorrow, I'm so busy, right? I have this 12 hour day and I have to do all these meetings and meet and help all these people. And, you know, I think you wouldn't be dancing, right? Right.
Nick Riggle: [00:37:52] If you were doing that to dance. Right? You have to be what I call volitionally open, sort of immediately responsive to the values that are present there, the way the music's going, the way other people are dancing and so on. But I think this happens all over the place when we're absorbed in a movie or at a really good dinner party or, you know, just even kind of walking through a cool city and kind of wandering and exploring or in nature, you know, I think nature is a great example. We go on a hike or anything like that. And so these two capacities volitional openness, discretionary valuing, I think aesthetic life calls on us to exercise those capacities individually. But also, you know, together. And aesthetic community is when you find someone else who supports you, where there's this kind of mutual support in the exercise of those capacities. That's my way of explaining what's really going on when we get into aesthetic community. And I think of a lot of esthetic life as oriented around getting into that kind of state, that kind of mutually supportive place where you find these other people. It could be the band you like right there making the music that that you like and, and you're the fan who's, you know, going to the concert and amping them up. And that kind of mutually supportive relationship is kind of the highest good in aesthetic life.
Henry Bair: [00:39:12] So we've been talking about things like finding a community or watching a movie or going on a hike, enjoying a nice sunset. And I think this is where I'll preface this by saying this might be the most difficult question I posit for you. It's easy to think about these things and talk about these things and do these things when you're healthy and well, and you can walk around and you're perfectly functioning and abled, but. That's not how we always are in life. Sometimes we are disabled, sometimes we are very ill, sometimes we are bedridden. Sometimes we have physical pain or psychological pain that renders it more difficult for us to appreciate, you know, the more superficially beautiful things in life. So let's put your philosophical approach to the test. And and I want to posit this question to you, which is what advice do you have for people who are in those moments, who are struggling with, you know, facing death or confronted with existential suffering because they have a life limiting illness? For those people, what would you recommend them do?
Nick Riggle: [00:40:16] Yeah, I mean, you're right. This is a very, very difficult question. And it's I think it's hard to give general advice because pain is so sneaky and shape shifting, and people experience different types of pains and different types of ways. And and then on top of pain, we suffer. And people bring all kinds of things to bear on their pain, the suffering that they endure. And we do that in different ways. And it's, you know, when the pain is really hard, it's really just, you know, there's a lot of mere coping that we have to manage in our lives. And when we're doing that, it can be extremely difficult to be like, let me be volitionally open or let me, you know, exercise my discretionary valuing capacities or, you know, you might not even have time to seek aesthetic community to go to that concert or explore a new cuisine or whatever it is. And I talk about my own experiences with psychological and physical chronic pain in the book. And on the one hand, I want to just acknowledge that, like a premise of the book is that life is extremely challenging. That's the baseline. You know, that's what sets up the question of like, how can we be okay with this? And the answer is to say, well, look, there is this resource, the practice of esthetic valuing, sort of trying to bring beauty into your life in a regular and deep way.
Nick Riggle: [00:41:44] And the promise of the book is that that's going to give you some kind of answer. But it's certainly possible that life is so difficult that you can't call on that resource. It's too hard. And I think that's just, you know, maybe there's another resource you could call on, you know, the love of family and friends, um, the pride of surviving, the pride of coping. Well, you know, not falling apart. Although that's okay, too. But I do want to say, you know, it's offered as a resource. And I do think there are limits to accessibility that are plain when we are suffering that much. Then again, too, I'll say the last thing about this. There's a really extended discussion in the book about how Henri Matisse dealt the great French painter in my book, kind of the best painter, you know, if I if I have to make a hierarchy claim here of the of the 20th century, he spent decades and decades of his life innovating in painting, in fine, fine art, painting in a way that just had a seismic influence on on that art form. But late in his life, he experienced all this pain in his stomach, and he went through this experimental surgery and basically left him unable to use his limbs, his arms, his bedridden. And he was expected to die. But he didn't. He he lived another 12 years or something.
Nick Riggle: [00:43:16] Um, maybe longer. I can't remember exactly the dates, but over that time period he completely changed. As an artist. He completely... this is when he started making the cutouts that everyone knows about because he couldn't paint, really, but he could direct people in. He could kind of cut things out and he could help. He could direct people in where to place them. Um, and he ended up making these giant, you know, cut out pieces that are just, I think, some of the best things he made. And he thought he thought they were the best thing he ever made. I think it's inspiring. Of course, Matisse is a genius painter. I mean, so it's not like we can all just be Matisse, but it's nonetheless inspiring to see a case where someone's entire life, entire body was transformed. He was on all kinds of drugs. He was in total, you know, chronic pain and nonetheless kind of. Found a way to value his life through his through his connection to aesthetic value. He transformed himself in those ways and created beautiful works. You know that he was able to share with us and make our lives better. So, you know, again, not everyone can do that, but I think it's inspiring to see a case where even in dire, dire circumstances, someone was able to call on the practice of aesthetic valuing and make it really worthwhile.
Henry Bair: [00:44:39] Yeah, I've seen those massive wall sized cutout collages at many major art museums, including my local Philadelphia museum of Art. I did not know that that was a context in which he created them. The next time I see them, I'll definitely be having a renewed sense of aesthetic appreciation for what led to their creation. And on that aspirational note, I want to thank you again, Nick, for taking the time to join us for writing this book, not only for your son, but for all of us. I encourage listeners to check it out for themselves.
Nick Riggle: [00:44:54] Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This is really this is really nice.
Henry Bair: [00:45:16] Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at the Doctor's Art.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate and review our show available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [00:45:30] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor or patient, or anyone working in healthcare who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [00:45:32] I'm Henry Bair
Tyler Johnson: [00:45:36] and I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.