M
y brother sent me a clip of a Joe Rogan interview with Louis CK today. The part of the conversation centered around, fundamentally, the good life for human beings. Mr. Rogan was trying to defend the idea that saunas and cold dips were important for health, and Louis was trying, ever so gently, to direct attention toward the vacuity of arguing over whether to include saunas in one's daily routine.
Giving Joe Rogan the most charitable interpretation of his argument, it is certainly true that having good bodily health is an integral part of leading a good life. The conversation that Joe Rogan is attempting to situate himself in is one in which he finds that a good number of problems that people have are subtly downstream of bad physical habits; and that eating better and exercising and so on have a tendency to resolve a lot of things like depression. This is all well and good, as far as it goes. However, Joe lays his cards on the table when he says that "it's all about enjoying life more", and this is where the divide between him and Louis is made apparent.
I don't necessarily think that Louis laid out his side of the argument in the best way that he could have -- but then again, Louis is something of an absurdist regarding life, and doubtless he wouldn't agree with the way that I would frame undermining Joe's position. But basically, I believe that Joe Rogan has fallen into a quintessentially modern mindset in which one treats one's body and essence as basically arbitrary raw materials, that one has been handed by chance -- and that these raw materials have no particularly special meaning or order, and the "consciousness that inhabits them" basically ought to try to pleasure itself with its body for as long as it can, until the void claims it. For Joe Rogan, the question of why the body has the powers that it does is somewhat irrelevant. "I've found myself here, with this piece of meat encasing me, and I might as well enjoy it!"
Louie, though he doesn't come out and say it, exactly, believes that Joe is missing something fundamental about human life. He frames it in terms of struggle, a belief that humans are not meant to have things so easy. This argument gets no purchase on Joe Rogan -- intellectually, he cannot assent to the idea that human life has meaning in the way that Louie thinks. Struggle might serve certain purposes to Joe Rogan, such as cultivating discipline and determination, but he cannot restrict himself to thinking of the human soul and body as having purposes, that might restrict what forms of pleasure he wishes to take from life.
It perhaps comes down to this -- that Joe Rogan doesn't really think that there's anything out there worth dying for. When we think of great human beings, we typically don't immediately leap to body-building hedonists -- we think of people who committed their energy and their lives to causes greater than themselves, gave themselves to their fellow man. I think Louie's point could be made more clearly by asking "What would Gandhi think if you tried to sell him a sauna? Or St. Francis? Or Sitting Bull?" The vacuousness becomes apparent very quickly when confronted with people whose lives seem, inescapably, to have real purpose. The idea that what the Buddha really needed was to lift and eat protein shakes is laughable. The issue here is not that it's bad to be healthy -- it's that it's so much more important to be living well as a human being, with an actual soul, pursuing wisdom and the spiritual life. Physical excellence, and indeed, maybe even mental health, are icing on the cake here. And if your soul is mediocre, you're just putting icing on shit.