Category: Human Predicament
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Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. So I had the thought: we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin…
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Self-Love and Self-Respect
Self-love can extend to love of the smell of one's own excrement, at which point self-respect raises an eyebrow. But are we not just clever land mammals? How is self-respect possible for such critters? It is actual, so it is possible.
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The Peninsular Man
No man is an island. He can't be. Ought he be a continent? No. The healthy man is a peninsula. He is connected to the mainland, and nourished by that connection, but he doesn't allow himself to be influenced from all sides. A part of him juts into the oceanic. The peninsular life is best.…
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Socializing and Idle Talk
Some good comes from socializing if only as a concession to our ineluctable social nature. Only a beast or a god could live without it. But even I do too much of it. In society one is apt to talk too much about too little. Review the previous day's unnecessary conversations. On balance, did they…
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Welcome to Finitude
You are largely stuck with the guy you are and you have to make the most of it. There are things you don't like about him, but some of them just can't be helped. Change what can be changed; accept what can't. Neither god nor beast, a man is a being in-between. Our predicament is…
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The Human Predicament
Part of what makes the human condition a predicament is dispute over whether it is a predicament and whether, if it is, it has a solution, and if it does, what it is. This is just what one would expect if our condition is indeed a predicament.
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In the Dark
They dispute whether we are in the dark and whether, if we are, there is away to the light, and if there is, what it is. All of which goes to show that we are — in the dark.
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Why Are People So Easy to Swindle?
People are so easy to swindle because the swindler has as accomplices the victim's own moral defects. When good judgment and moral sense are suborned by lust or greed or sloth or vanity or anger, the one swindled participates willingly in his own undoing. In the end he swindles himself. How is it, for example, that…
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Acting with Others versus Talking with Others
An excellent insight from Alain's essay, "The Ills of Others": To act with others is always good; to talk with others for the sake of talking, complaining, and recriminating, is one of the greatest scourges on earth . . . . (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, p. 160) I once built a small dock…
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Some 19th Century Rules for Social Intercourse
The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among…
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Years Pass, Dates Repeat
You were born only once but every year you have a birthday. Equally, you will die only once but every year you have a death day, the date on which you will die. It is just that you don't know what it is. Suppose you could know the date of your death but not the…
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Could All Paths be Dead Ends?
I wrote: Reason in the end must confess its own infirmity. It cannot deliver on its promises. The truth-seeker must explore other avenues. Religion is one, mysticism is another. Vito Caiati responds: My concern is as follows: While I agree that “reason in the end must confess its own infirmity,” I am troubled by the…
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The Ambiguity of Death
Death is ineluctable and irrevocable, but still equivocal this side of the divide. It presents itself, by turns, as the worst of calamities and as a welcome release from an untenable predicament.
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A Death Paradox
The prospect of death, especially one's own, puts paid to frivolity. It makes us serious. The paradox, however, is that death, ineluctable and final, 'proves' the absurdity of human existence. Death imparts seriousness to a life that it also suggests is a joke.
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What It Takes to Appreciate the Brevity and Vanity of Life
Live a long life to appreciate that life is short; live a full life to appreciate that it is empty.