The moments of connection do bring feelings of belonging, of being at home, though not of “belonging inseparably” to the world. You can still know the surfer feeling of being out of place, in pushing against heavy, unforgiving surf, or of being separated, for being in a funk, never quite getting attuned to the waves that day. The surfer sense of “oneness” is felt as a definite achievement in being, as success in a kind of good relationship, which easily might not have come. The surfer feeling of connection is better described as a relation of harmony, the harmony in adaptive attunement, between a person and a wave and its sea.

  Ordinary Reality

  This isn’t quite oneness, strictly speaking, not if one means “numerical identity,” literally being one and the same thing. The relation of harmony is between different things, the person and the wave, which leaves you still feeling yourself.

  That is to accept the very image of “self” that many Buddhists wish to dispel. Bhikkhu Bodhi, a leading scholar monk, writes of “the delusion of self, the idea that at the core of our being there exists a truly established ‘I’ with which we are essentially identified.”*36 This, he says, is “an error, a mere presupposition lacking a real referent.” Trapped in the “dualities of ‘I’ and ‘not I,’ what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘not mine,’ ” he explains, “we fall victim to the defilements they breed, the urges to grasp and destroy, and finally to the suffering that inevitably follows.” In order to overcome this, “the illusion of selfhood that sustains them has to be dispelled, exploded by the realization of selflessness.”

  The idea is that our most ordinary thoughts of self—that “I am thinking,” that “I feel upset,” that “I would be happier if such and such were to happen”—are all radically false. They come to us readily but carry a heavy factual presupposition: that the pronoun “I” actually refers to something, a uniquely personal center of experience and agency that persists over time, from birth to death, as metaphysically distinct from both other “selves” and impersonal events. But, Bodhi suggests, there is no such fact. Our sense of self is simply an illusion, and nirvana comes when we clearly see this for the illusion it is. Beginning from “one’s” experience, with enough meditation and learning, one can undo the myth from within.

  This view can be hard to completely grasp. Who is supposed to understand it? You, I—meaning the you and the I who aren’t real? Should I believe it? If I accept the picture, don’t I then exist, in which case the picture is false, or somehow self-refuting? Can we ever completely escape Descartes’s cogito, which after all has an element of truth?

  David Hume, the early modern empiricist, suggested how we might escape this dilemma. Only seeing is believing, and there is no directly observing the self. “When I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he writes, “I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”*37 Similarly, am I not the “same person” as the child borne by the woman I call my mother? Well, if we look to the most sophisticated treatment of the metaphysics of personal identity of all time, Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, we wind up at roughly the Buddhist position: there is no metaphysically robust self, no fact of the matter that makes people numerically separable in the way we ordinarily speak of them. All our talk of “me” and “you,” “mine” and “thine,” is simply a useful convention.*38

  I’m sure advanced monks do attain a radically altered state of consciousness, a state of “no mind,” in which they lose all awareness of themselves as distinct from anything else.*39 But surely that is still someone’s awareness (the monk on the mat, who got into this business hoping for self-transcendence, maybe to please his parents, or to disappoint them). Aside from altered states of consciousness, could we obliterate our very concept of self, completely and consistently, and still lead anything like an ordinary existence, which includes ordinary surfing?

  The surfer is full-on, all-out engaged in the world right before her senses, in the salty water she can taste and touch. In the surfer’s easy self-transcendence, she remains herself, desires and all, but becomes attuned to things beyond herself—to each moment of the wave she surfed, and to a whole raft of material conditions that made the act both possible and happen as it did. In this relational sort of self-transcendence, you have to remain your distinct self. The surfer in the flow isn’t absorbed like a drop into a cosmic sea of being, even if she paddled out in profound Zen-like awareness of the gently shifting water and the water droplets of each rolling line of white water. The person is one thing. The wave is a different thing. The two are not identical. The surfer’s ordinary post-work nirvana is achieved in a relationship between the surfer and the wave surfed, which leaves the two dynamically related but distinct.

  Or so we’d ordinarily say. We ordinarily experience the world in our shoes, our particular personal perspective. I see you, and you seem friendly enough. If we had a friendly chat, I must be a separate person, because it takes two to really communicate. Could that really be a dreamlike illusion from which we can detach? Hume denied our ordinary idea of the self, but then disarmingly admitted that he couldn’t keep up his skepticism outside his study. Our sense of self can’t be completely shaken in anything recognizable as an ordinary human life. But in that case, why not say our talk of being different selves is as real as anything else? What odd idea of “reality” would say that it isn’t? Why not go by our ordinary standards for ordinary “reality”?

  I lay my hand on a table. Physics tells me that the “touch” of my hand on the table is a repulsion of forces in which my skin never quite lies flat against the smooth surface, in the ordinary sense. It’s tempting to say ordinary life makes some kind of error. Physics shows that my hand and the table never really touch! Here Sartre seems right: this is a bad use of the word “really.” Of course my hand can touch a table! It really can, in the perfectly good and ordinary sense, which physics just isn’t characterizing, and perhaps can’t. The physicist’s talk of repulsive forces sounds in a different register.

  Like a hand touching a table, a self comes along with the deep structure of human experience. Our concepts of touch and reality are after all human concepts; they are for us ordinary humans, made from and for our ordinary experience. We of course shape them by convention and culture, which varies from age to age, from East and West, in ways that surprise us. And yet, I can be myself, and you yourself, really and truly, in a perfectly good and ordinary sense.

  If the Buddhist has found some new dimension of reality, that would be impressive. It wouldn’t, however, be the discovery of the one true (and different) reality, about which ordinary life is completely mistaken. The concept of reality is itself rather fluid, with different meanings for different domains of discourse. The relevant standard of “reality,” for selfhood and surfing, is not whatever paradoxical thing physics is saying at the moment. It’s the warm sunlight of ordinary sense.

  The Surfer Metaphysic

  What is real? What is the nature of reality? What is there and what is it like very generally speaking, especially as discerned by means other than the empirical sciences, such as physics? These, roughly, are the questions of metaphysics. In these last chapters, we’ve arrived at something of a surfer’s metaphysical picture.

  A key question about reality is whether or how radically it diverges from its appearance to us. Is it indeed as we experience it? Or are we in error or ignorance of its true nature?

  At one level, Kant settled for ignorance. He explained how ordinary objects, like the cup on the table, could have a kind of reality for us, and he made sense of the sciences. But he confusingly still spoke of “things in themselves,” of which we know not (except that they somehow are). Sartre, in taking up phenomenology, proceeded on the assumption that there is no relevant difference between reality and reality for us. We should just see how things show up for us in our general experience, and maybe in the end there’s no interesting question of an independent reality.

  Our phenomenology of surfing suggests a further wrinkle, an explanation why there is no further gap between appearance and reality to account for. In chapter 4, we said that doing well in a skillful activity is by its very nature a way of being related to the world beyond one’s head. For all the fun of a virtual reality surfing machine, one would not in fact be surfing, the skilled activity. As we elaborated in chapter 5, this is the know-how of adaptive attunement, which is akin to successful perception. To perceive the world is already to know how to engage what lies beyond one’s head in the first instance, already to understand how to adapt one’s body to one’s environment in action. So surfing is a kind of genuine knowledge. There’s no deep difference between “in here, in my head,” and “out there, out in the world,” no great gap between our experience and reality.

  One way to transcend ourselves, then, is simply to be attuned to that sublime reality. We need only do the philosophy of surfing, which attunes us to our attunement, revealing the deep way we are often harmoniously related to what lies beyond.

  —

  So we can transcend ourselves on a regular basis in everyday life, especially while surfing, work permitting at least. Having considered the human’s being, this book will now turn to political philosophy: What follows for society, our relation to nature, and the future of work?

  * * *

  *1 The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), p. 48.

  *2 Ibid., p. 97.

  *3 This is Arthur Danto’s reconstruction of Sartre’s own tortured reasoning in Being and Nothingness. Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 67.

  *4 I figure in to such “positional” consciousness, as Sartre calls it, because I’m aware of my relation to the apple (“I see the apple”). I can also just see the apple without being aware of my position in respect to it (“non-positional consciousness”). On the present reading, the latter is easier to come by.

  *5 But must I constantly ask myself who to be? I cannot refuse to own my choice if I ask, but perhaps the question often won’t come up. The philosopher Bill Bracken tells me he reads Sartre’s discussion of one’s “original project” as allowing one not to deliberately, explicitly choose a plan of life (see Being and Nothingness, pp. 581 and 596). Sartre is also clear, he adds, that the will is not the privileged manifestation of freedom; passion counts as well (ibid., pp. 571 and 573). So while I could conform to a chosen plan, I could also authentically let passion rule and allow my life to take whatever shape it takes as a result. Willing a life plan even carries additional risks of bad faith, in not fully acknowledging one’s embodied, situated “facticity.” This brings Sartre closer to Merleau-Ponty and the surfer position, though perhaps still without a clearly stated theory of adaptive attunement.

  *6 Ibid., p. 568.

  *7 Zen in the Art of Archery (New York: Vintage, 1989) (for the other passages quoted in the text, see pp. 29–32, 39, 48, 53–55).

  *8 The psychiatrist Roger Walsh offered that sympathetic suggestion for squaring Zen with Aristotle in conversation. His suggestion is in the spirit of his edited volume The World’s Great Wisdom: Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).

  *9 His own answer is A Theory of Justice or Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, ed. Erin Kelly (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

  *10 Oddly, surfers seem to take to jujitsu, much in the way they seem prone to take up golf. Perhaps it’s that each activity is individualistic, focused on bodily technique, and requires focused progression to get very far.

  *11 The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia, 3rd ed. (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2014), p. 43 (my italics).

  *12 Body boarding, however, is persistently devalued by stand-up surfers, except insofar as radical wave conditions make stand-up surfing impossible or plainly inferior. Surfing is in this regard marred by prejudice and elitism.

  *13 Could a benighted soul find himself just going through the wave-riding motions, competing only for wins and money? This is an interesting theoretical possibility. “Professional surfing” would have become a performative contradiction—just work, and not true surfing. I doubt such a surfer could remain competitive for long; staying attuned depends on the sheer love of surfing.

  *14 In this connection, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze compares sports such as golf with a newer class of sports that includes surfing. In golf or running, “there’s a point of contact” and “we are the source of movement” as we make an effort to overcome the resistance created at a “point of leverage” (for example, the green, the golf club). By contrast, “All the new sports—surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding—take the form of entering into an existing wave.” I take it he means skillful adaptation is required in order to be moved by an independent propulsive flow. As he elaborates, “The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to ‘get into something’ instead of being the origin of an effort.” “There’s no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit.” The passage appears in “Mediators,” in Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 121.

  *15 Joseph Parent, Zen Golf: Mastering the Mental Game (New York: Doubleday, 2002), pp. xvii–xviii.

  *16 The philosopher Barbara Montero explains why seemingly effortless dancing is in fact effortful, drawing on her own experience as a ballerina: “Often I would be thinking about how to capture, accentuate, or play with the music in my movement, thinking, perhaps, ‘let me extend that note beyond the end’ or some such loosely formulated idea….[T]his…involved deliberation (should I do this here, or wait)…and concerted concentration. Sometimes my thoughts would be…[about] aspects of my performance quality, presenting a movement with more attack, or making some other movement flow.” “A Dancer Reflects,” in Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate, ed. Joseph K. Schear (New York: Routledge, 2013) (draft at https://barbaramontero.wordpress.com/​category/​publications/​page/​2/). For her general account of why focusing on what you are doing does not interfere with performance, and often enhances it, see her Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

  *17 Myth of Sisyphus, p. 4.

  *18 They glide along just beneath the surface of a wave, with occasional breaks or jumps. They are carried along by the wave’s natural momentum, but under rather than in the tube, or on the wave face, in the sporting human surfer way.

  *19 As for how, see Ian Bogost, Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

  *20 Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 19.

  *21 Thus the benefits of being older. The young risk having stumbled into surfing and then losing it after only a few years. The middle-aged and aged surfers are the especially fortunate ones.

  *22 Grasshopper, pp. 182–95.

  *23 “On the Suffering of the World,” in Studies in Pessimism, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), p. 6.

  *24 In the film Traffic, the Benicio Del Toro character, a Tijuana police officer, hopes to convince U.S. drug enforcement officers of their common cause in the “war on drugs.” Drawing them into a swimming pool, he asks, “Do you like baseball?” and the scene flashes to a pleasant Little League game.

  *25 Critique of Judgment, p. 246.

  *26 Ibid., p. 120.

  *27 The Prelude, in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Late Poet Laureate, ed. Henry Reed (Philadelphia: Porter and Coates, 1851), p. 545, or at http://www.bartleby.com/​145/​ww300.html.

  *28 Autobiography (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), chap. 5.

  *29 Your various “relativisms,” “subjectivisms,” truth-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-isms, and so forth, all deny objectivity by letting the truth about beauty vary with our subjective reactions. Objectivity is thus “invariance.” I argue for this in my “Objectivity of Values: Invariance Without Explanation,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006).

  *30 The seminal paper here is John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in Morality and Objectivity, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985). The approach I prefer is “constructivism,” for reasons I explain in “Constructivism About Practical Reasons,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74, no. 2 (2007); and “Constructing Protagorean Objectivity,” in Constructivism in Practical Philosophy, ed. James Lenman and Yonatan Shemmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  *31 Civilization and Its Discontents (1930; New York: Norton, 2005), p. 47.

  *32 Ibid.

  *33 Or “Deus, sive Natura,” as in the Latin version of his Ethics, which Spinoza omitted from the Dutch version in order to avoid appearing less heterodox than he was.