We sometimes speak of this life. For example, some assert that this life is all there is. The ability to thematize and question the whole of life may not prove, but it does suggest, that we are more than beings confined to this life. Even the average schlep, enmired in the mundane, his fledgling metaphysical organs numbed by the the onslaught of quotidiana, will at some point, when the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" pay him a visit, exclaim, "What the hell is this life all about?"
Category: Human Predicament
Milton Praises the Strenuous Life
Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton:
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.
The passage bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's remarks about being in the arena.
I like especially the last sentence of the Milton quotation. We are born corrupt, not innocent. We are not here (mainly) to improve the world, but (mainly) to be improved by it. The world's a vale of soul-making. Since this world is a vanishing quantity, it makes little sense to expend energy trying to improve it: when your house is burning down, you don't spruce up the facade. You don't swab the decks of a sinking ship. It makes more sense to spend time and effort on what has a chance of outlasting the transitory. This world's use is to build something that outlasts it.
But this will, pace Milton, require some flight from the world into the cloister where perhaps alone the virtues can be developed that will need testing later in the world.
Self-Effacement and Self-Importance
To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance? I am thinking of Simone Weil. In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself. "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit my own personal nothingness face to face with Truth?"
The ego, wily 'structure' that it is, usually (always?) finds a way to affirm itself.
Moral Failure
Repeated moral failure has at least this salutary effect: it teaches us to be humble. Moral success can have the opposite effect of conducing toward spiritual pride — which undermines the very success of which it is the upshot. So, while regretting one's failures, one can derive a little consolation from the realization that they are contributing to one's humility.
Adapted from Pascal
There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.
Vanity Plates
I reckon most motorists find vanity plates distasteful. Upon seeing a plate bearing the letters 'Ph.D.' or 'M.D.' or 'J.D.,' the response is likely to be: BFD! In any case, who needs vanity plates when one can have for free one's very own vanity blog? And weblogs have this advantage: they are not in people's faces. You must freely decide to visit a site, and if you don't like what you find there, you bear at least half of the blame.
A Sucker is Born Every Minute
And so is a hustler. Before you rush out and buy Richard Lustig's book about winning the lottery, ask yourself a simple question: why is this guy hawking a book if he has the winning lottery method? Writing a book is a lot more work than buying lottery tickets. His surname smacks of an aptronym: lustig in German means 'merry.' One imagines him laughing all the way to the bank with his book receipts.
The lottery is a fool's 'investment,' a self-imposed fool's tax: you willingly fork over money to the government beyond what they coercively take so that they will have even more wherewithal for all their wise and wonderful projects. And it is regressive: it affects mainly the the poor and innumerate, thereby insuring that they will remain poor and innumerate.
There are moral questions as well. It would be nice if we could agree on the principle primum non nocere, first do no harm, and nicer still if we could agree that that applies to the state as well as to individuals. State-run lotteries harm the populace as I have argued many times over the years. State-run casinos are even worse. But I know I am but a vox clamantis in deserto in a country filled with idiots becoming stupider and cruder by the minute.
Regalia
Regalia, as its etymology suggests (from L. rex, regis), are the king's insignia. By a natural extension, anyone's insignia, colors, banners. We like to fly the colors to the point of identifying with them. We identify with flags and labels and logos and certain words. There is a stupid satisfaction one gets from flaunting logos like 'Trek' and 'Jeep.' See? Me ride Trek bike. Just like Lance Armstrong.
The name of my Bell bicycle helmet model is 'Paradox.' That clinched the purchase for me.
Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox.
Cooperation and Competition
Liberals tend to oppose cooperation to competition, and vice versa, as if they excluded each other. "We need more cooperation and less competition." One frequently hears that from liberals. But competition is a form of cooperation. As such, it cannot be opposed to cooperation. One cannot oppose a species to its genus.
Consider competitive games and sports. The chess player aims to beat his opponent, and he expects his opponent to share this aim: No serious player enjoys beating someone who is not doing his best to beat him. But the competition is predicated upon cooperation and is impossible without it. There are the rules of the game and the various protocols governing behavior at the board. These are agreed upon and respected by the players and they form the cooperative context in which the competition unfolds. We must work together (co-operate) for one of us to emerge the victor. And in this competitive cooperation both of us are benefited.
Is there any competitive game or sport for which this does not hold? At the Boston Marathon in 1980, a meshuggeneh lady by the name of Rosie Ruiz jumped into the race ahead of the female leaders and before the finish line. She seemed to many to have won the race in the female category. But she was soon disqualified. She wasn't competing because she wasn't cooperating. Cooperation is a necessary condition of competition.
In the business world, competition is fierce indeed. But even here it presupposes cooperation. Fed Ex aims to cut into UPS' business – but not by assassinating their drivers. If Fed Ex did this, it would be out of business. It would lose favor with the public, and the police and regulatory agencies would be on its case. The refusal to cooperate would make it uncompetitive. 'Cut throat' competition does not pay in the long run and makes the 'cut throat' uncompetitive.
If you and I are competing for the same job, are we cooperating with each other? Yes, in the sense that our behavior is rule-governed. We agree to accept the rules and we work together so that the better of us gets the appointment. The prosecution and the defense, though in opposition to each other, must cooperate if the trial is to proceed. And similarly in other cases.
Is assassination or war a counterexample to my thesis? Suppose two warring factions are 'competing' for Lebensraum in a no-holds-barred manner. If this counts as a case of competition, then this may be a counterexample to my thesis. But it is not that clear that the Nazis, say, were competing with the Poles for Lebensraum. This needs further thought. Of course, if the counterexample is judged to be genuine, I can simply restrict my thesis to forms of competition short of all-out annihilatory war. Or I could say that rule-governed competition is a species of cooperation.
Competition, then, contrary to liberal dogma, is not opposed to cooperation. Moreover, competition is good in that it breeds excellence, a point unappreciated, or insufficiently appreciated, by liberals. This marvellous technology we bloggers use every day — how do our liberal friends think it arose? Do they have any idea why it is so inexpensive? Competition!
Not only does competition make you better than you would have been without it, it humbles you. It puts you in your place. It assigns you your rightful position in life's hierarchy. And life is hierarchical. The levellers may not like it but hierarchies have a way of reestablishing themselves.
Compensations of Advancing Age
You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.
You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancour or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might be:
Brief light's made briefer
'Neath the leaden vault of care
Better to accept the sinecure
Of untroubled Being-there.
You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauean transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, one is more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.
The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.
What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable. Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.
You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.
The Wild Diversity of Human Types: Zelda Kaplan and Dolores Hart
Zelda lived and died for fashion, collapsing at age 95 in the front row of a fashion show. Dolores, though starting off in the vain precincts of glitz and glamour, gave it up for God and the soul. This life is vain whether or not God and the soul are illusions. Should we conclude that to live for fashion is to throw one's life away for the trinkets of phenomenality, the bagatelles of transience? That to die while worshipping idols at the altar of fashion is a frightful way to die? These mere suggestions will elicit vociferous objection from some, for whom it is self-evident that to retreat to a nunnery is to throw one's life away for an escapist fantasy. But that is but another indication of the wild diversity of human types. The case for the vanity of human existence is well made in Ecclesiastes. See A Philosopher's Notes on Ecclesiastes, Chapters 1-2.
It Passes All the Same
No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and contain the dissipation wrought by time's diaspora and the mind's incontinence — it passes all the same.
Idle Talk
Time was when I felt superior to those who lose themselves for hours in idle talk, the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing. But superior to that superiority is benign indifference to the idlers, an indifference so indifferent that it permits a bit of engagement with them, not condescendingly, but in acknowledgement of our common humanity.
Kennedy, Clinton, and the Sex Business
George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Harvest 1956), p. 102:
This woman business! What a bore it is! What a pity we can't cut it right out, or at least be like the animals — minutes of ferocious lust and months of icy chastity. Take a cock pheasant, for example. He jumps up on the hens' backs without so much as a with your leave or by your leave. And no sooner is it over than the whole subject is out of his mind. He hardly even notices his hens any longer; he ignores them, or simply pecks them if they come near his food. He is not called upon to support his offpsring, either. Lucky pheasant! How different from the lord of creation, always on the hop between his memory and his conscience!
Being like the animals is of course no solution, even if it were possible. A strange fix we're in: it is our spiritual nature that enables both our sinking below, and our rising above, the level of the animal.
The delusive power of the sex drive is made all the more delusive and dangerous when aided and abetted by personal magnetism and great political power. Kennedy and Clinton are two examples of how power corrupts.
The Fragility of Patience
A while back we had to deal with a difficult person. Afterwards, wanting to praise me for my patience, my wife said, "Thank you for trying to be patient." At that I lost my patience. "I wasn't trying to be patient, I was succeeding!" Until that moment.