The Way Forward

It seems we are condemned helplessly to watch our country be destroyed. The drift of events is ever downward. To turn things around would require something most of don't want to talk about — and for good reason. Angelo Codevilla ends his analysis with talk of "rebuilding the Republic" but he offers no concrete proposals. What he and almost everyone else on our side offers is just more talk, more analysis. Our enemies are impervious to reason and appeals to reason. There can be no reasoned discourse with people who maintain absurdities — e.g., that mathematics  is racist — and subvert language with their Orwellian innovations.  To attempt to engage with them on the plane of reason in search of the truth is to fail to understand that it is power, not truth that they seek.  

So what do you do? You secure your own little space and live the best life you can within it. That's the main thing. Retreat within your physical citadel, but even more importantly, retreat within your inner citadel to cultivate the soil therein. Properly cultivated, it should bring you to the insight that this world is a passing scene, a vanishing quantity, and nothing worthy of the full measure of your love and attention. But we ought not give up on it entirely. We watch and we wait. If there is an opportunity to make a difference, we do so. We may have only one night to spend in this bad inn, but it is a long night, and it is better to be warm than to shiver.

CREDO: Agency and Spectatorship

Whether or not God and the soul are real, and whether or not this life has any final meaning, we are free to live as if they are and as if it does.  And this is how we ought to live. We can go around and around on the Big Questions, and to do so is a way of honoring the seriousness of life and of living at the highest pitch possible; but we will achieve no satisfactory result on the theoretical plane. Reason is weak and its conclusions are inconclusive.  God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. The same goes for the objectivity of morality and every other question on the far side of the quotidian, including the question of the freedom of the will.

The freedom of the will is proven, in the only way it can be proven, by an act of will, by descending from the theoretical to the practical plane. And then the theoretical question becomes moot: to act is to demonstrate practically the freedom to act. To act is to act freely.  The freedom of the will in the pregnant sense as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae is a presupposition of action. So act, and verify, in the sense of make true, the presupposition.

By acts of will we de-cide what to believe and what to do. By de-ciding, we cut off reflection which, left to itself, is interminable. After due consideration, I WILL accept this and I WILL reject that; I WILL live according to my best lights, dim and flickering as they may be, for as long as I can and as best  I can, all the while continuing the search for truth on the theoretical plane.  I WILL NOT allow doubts to undermine decisions arrived at in moments of of high existential clarity.

"But can't one still ask whether the will is really free?" You can, but then you are abandoning the point of view of the agent for the point of view of the  spectator. Mirabile dictu: we are both actors and spectators. We both march in, and observe, life's parade.  How is that possible? How integrate our subjective freedom and our objective determination? A nut that cannot be cracked at the level of theory can only solved at the level of praxis.

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