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.
Live a long life to appreciate that life is short; live a full life to appreciate that it is empty.
Knowing less of a person is often better for good relations than knowing more. The old forms and formalities have their uses. They come from a time when human nature was better understood, and it was understood that civility is better served by reserve than by 'letting it all hang out.' They come from a time when it was taken for granted that there is such a thing as human nature.
One and the same person at one time unjustly mocks, belittles, ridicules, blasphemes, denigrates, scorns, and contemns. At another time he idolizes, unjustly places on a pedestal, engages in inordinate praise, and prostrates himself before a pseudo-god.
Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them. Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours.
Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.
People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony. Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.
The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.
Without institutions, where would we be?
But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.
You should be skeptical of all institutions. Like the houses out here, they either have termites or will get them.
But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. Institutional corruption is the heart's corruption writ large. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror.
Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.
A man is only a man. If he tries to live like an angel, he may end up a hypocrite attempting the impossible. A man ought to live up to his highest possibilities. But what they are and where they lie is unknown until he seeks them out, risking hypocrisy as he does so. There is the hypocrisy of those who make no attempt to practice what they preach. And there is the hypocrisy of those who have the will to practice what they preach but cannot practice it because their ideals are too lofty for them.
Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification. Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the habit wouldn't exist in the first place. Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit.
The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past. The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve any longer as an engine of pleasure.
And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice. "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."
I had known him for years. Our friendship was an acquaintanceship that remained on the surface. Never having gone deep, it never drifted toward the hazards the deep waters hide: the differences that most truly define and distinguish us, but also oppose us to others. And so when he died I could not bring to mind a false word, a sarcastic expression, a competitive tension, or a joke that hid a jab. Not one unpleasant memory sullied my recollection.
Such superficial friendships are perhaps perfect for an imperfect world in which there is more of seeming than of being. We do well to value the surfaces in a world of surfaces. The surfaces are sure; the depths are dubious. On life's surface those who meant little but brighten memory count for more than those who meant more but haunt and disturb from a past their presence makes dark.
The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers. Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws that relate mental states to physical states.
The childless are anthropological danglers. They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendents (effects). Parents are essential: without them we could not have come into fleshly existence. But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.
There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler.
The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children. What does he know about life and its travails that his say should fully count? His counsel may be wise and just, but it won't carry the weight of the one who is wise and just and interested as only those whose pro-creation has pro-longed them into the future and tied them to the flesh are interested. (inter esse)
The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions. In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.
Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions.
Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from being an object of those attitudes of propinquity — to give them a name — such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly.
The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off. Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.
This opinion of mine will strike some as cold and harsh. But some of us experience more of the stifling and oppressive in our blood relations than the opposite. I do however freely admit that the very best human relations conceivable are those that bind people both by ties of blood and ties of spiritual affinity. If you have even one blood relation who is a soul mate, then you ought to be grateful indeed.
Related: SEP entry on Herbert Feigl
The scrupulous examination and correction of minor faults can subserve the evasion of major ones.
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), p. 62, Aph. # 96:
Man's being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a bulb man is all skin and no kernel.
I disagree completely. Man is no onion or bulb, surface all the way down, with a nonexistent core. "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (R. W. Emerson, "The Over-Soul") The central task of life is not to write merely clever aphorisms, but to return to the Source.
Or perhaps I should say that what the stevedore says is true — of extroverts.
Related: Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity. (On the topic of death.)
Years ago an acquaintance wrote me about a book he had published which, he said, had "made quite a splash." The metaphor is unfortunately double-edged. When an object hits the water it makes a splash. But only moments later the water returns to its quiescent state as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps it would have been more in the spirit of self-promotion to say that his book had made quite a dent. A splash is ephemeral and what makes it sinks. A dent, however, lasts and the denting object remains in sight.
On second thought the first is the more apt metaphor given the quality of the book in question. It captures both the immediate significance of an event and its long-term insignificance.
Is it Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy? Only if it is bad to be dead. But it is not clear that it is bad to be dead. On the other hand, if it is bad to be dead, it might still not be Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy.
For I might take satisfaction, not in the fact that my enemy is dead, but that he can no longer cause me trouble.
But you want to know what Schadenfreude is. This is from an earlier post:
If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another's injuries (Schaden).
The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical. Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not also a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.
No one with a spine passes through this world without making enemies. So, while one must not multiply enemies beyond necessity, it is not possible for one with character to avoid them entirely.
