If I had time and energy, I would poll Western intellectuals about what is known about philosopher Alan Watts. I dare to speculate that the minority who has heard about Alan would vote for the description found on Wikipedia.

By his own reckoning and also by that of his biographer Monica Furlong, Watts was primarily an autodidact.

Damn it! Alan knew very well that it is not an institution or a professor that pours knowledge into your brain but that one cannot acquire knowledge from outside but by his or her own effort. So he was, with his 26 books published while he was alive and many more afterward, a full-fledged philosopher.

Yet there is a reason he was always considered a rascal of philosophy, a kind of outcast.

Reticulate and wiggled

Alan Watts’s explanation from Just So (Watts, 1950a) is a good one. His whole work rests on the division between catenary and reticulate connections. Catenary connections define an event or an item by its past, a causal chain that returns to the initial cause. The result of catenary reasoning is reductivism, which holds the structure of the universe and, by that, also the structure of a biosphere. For instance, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are explicit reductivists and catenary ideologues.

We must consider that Alan lived and worked in the period when philosophy and science were firmly grounded in reductivism. Analytic philosophy ruled Western philosophy, with Wittgenstein, Austin, and others. Popper, the authority in the philosophy of science, firmly believed that life could be deconstructed into the smallest possible particles and rebuilt. The discovery of the double helix and the gene forced geneticists to believe that they could construct life by deciphering the genetic code. Physicists who discovered new and new particles believed that they could develop a grand unifying theory of everything. All of them were wrong, as we know today and as Alan knew beforehand.

Alan Watts’s most frequently used word was “wiggled.” He was unaware that he preceded another outcast, this time prom physics, Benoit Mandelbrot with his (Mandelbrot, 1982). Fractals are wiggled in the same way as Watts explained.

Down to earth

All of you who read this blog know I’m a fervent critic of flower power movements that emerged in California around Berkeley in ’60 when Alan Watts lectured on Berkeley and a famous radio show at Pacifica Radio station. Alan was a fervent Zen Buddhist practicing drugs for himself and for the therapies he performed. How come I cherish a person like that?

Although he dressed like a flower-power hippie, his ideology was not a hippie but a Zen one. Should you want to understand the difference between flower-power movements then and woke movements now and Zen Buddhism, read Alan Watts. He does not directly condemn hippie culture; his work speaks clearly against it. He is always so very much down to earth, as any Zen master should be. I don’t want to speculate, but he had, at the same time, a master’s degree in theology.

Audio, yes!

Yet the purpose of this post is not to bother with biographic details but to encourage you to listen to Alan Watts. His lectures from 1950 (Watts, 1950b), Out of Your Mind, available on Audible, are pure joy to listen to not only because of his magic voice, tremendous humor, and intelligent wiggles of his thought but also because of background sounds. Pay attention to what you hear beside Alan’s voice. The sound of the class listening and reacting differs significantly from the sound of lecture rooms today. And even the sound that comes from the outside of the room! You will hear cars of that time and planes landing that immerse you into the times when life was so real, so anti-virtual, so intellectually and environmentally sincere that it makes you feel sorry for living today.

Let me give you a quote from these lectures, to get a sense of how stupid it is to think that there is someone but you that can teach you:

I’m not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you. I just want you to play with it, to think about its possibilities… (Watts, 1950b, first lecture, section 2, around 14 minutes into the lecture).

 

Literature:

Mandelbrot, B. B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Henry Holt and Company.

Watts, A. (1950a). Just So: An Odyssey Into the Cosmic Web of Connection, Play, and True Pleasure (Sounds True / Unabridged edition). Sounds True.

Watts, A. (1950b). Out of Your Mind: Tricksters, Interdependence, and the Cosmic Game of Hide and Seek. Sounds True.