Category: Human Predicament

Spiritual Complacency

The world's transiency is sufficiently stable to be soothingly seductive. One dies, no doubt, but one is still here and has been for a long time. One exploits the gap between 'one dies' and 'I die.'  A feeling of pseudo-security establishes itself. The hard and intransient truth of transiency is kept at arm's length. Hence one does not seek truth, or does so without fervor. One is lulled into complacency by pseudo-stability. The complacency comes to extend to complacency itself. One no longer cares that one no longer cares to wake up from the dream of life. The very idea, if entertained at all, is entertained for the sake of entertainment: the Quest becomes joke-fodder.

What is Man?

Angel still groping He is an animal, but also a spirit — and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. Thus he does not parrot the word 'I'; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness.  Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt).  Man envisages a Higher Life, a higher destiny, whether within history or beyond it.  And then he puzzles himself over whether this is a mere fancy, a delusion, or whether it presages the genuine possibility of a higher life. 

More than an animal, he can yet sink lower than any animal which fact is a reverse index of his spiritual status.  He can as easily devote himself to scatology as to eschatology.  The antics of a Marquis de Sade are as probative of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine.

Kierkegaard writes that "every higher conception of life . . . takes the view that the task for men is to strive after kinship with the Deity . . . ."  (Attack Upon Christendom, p. 265)  We face the danger of "minimizing our own significance" as S. K. puts it, of selling ourselves short.  And yet how difficult it is to believe in one's own significance!  The problem is compounded by not knowing what one's significance is assuming that one has significance.  Not knowing  that it is or what it is, one cannot minimize it.

Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology.  Undiluted Christianity is his answer.  My answer:   live so as to deserve immortality.  Live as if you have a higher destiny.  It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized.  Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life.  Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.

You could be wrong, no doubt.  But if you are wrong, what have you lost?  Some baubles and trinkets.  If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe.  I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.

The image is by Paul Klee, Engel noch tastend, angel still groping.   We perhaps are fallen angels, desolation angels, in the dark, but knowing that we are, and ever groping.

Eric Hoffer, Contentment, and the Paradox of Plenty

Eric Hoffer as quoted in James D. Koerner, Hoffer's America (Open Court, 1973), p. 25:

I need little to be contented. Two meals a day, tobacco, books that hold my interest, and a little writing each day. This to me is a full life.

And this after a full day at the San Francisco waterfront unloading ships.  And we're talking cheap tobacco smoked after a meal of Lipton soup and Vienna sausage in a humble apartment in a marginal part of town.  Hoffer, who had it tough indeed, had the wisdom to be satisfied with what he had. 

Call it the paradox of plenty: those who had to struggle in the face of adversity developed character and worth, while those with opportunities galore and an easy path became slackers and malcontents and 'revolutionaries.'   Adding to the paradox is that those who battled adversity learned gratitude while those who had it handed to them became ingrates.

The Difference Between Me and You

I'm sensitive, you're touchy.  I'm firm,  you are pigheaded.  Frugality in me is cheapness in you.  I am open-minded, you are empty-headed.  I am careful, you are obsessive.  I am courageous while you are as reckless as a Kennedy.  I am polite while you are obsequious.  My speech is soothing, yours is unctuous.  I am earthy and brimming with vitality while you are crude and bestial.  I'm alive to necessary distinctions; you are a bloody hairsplitter.  I'm conservative, you're reactionary.  I know the human heart, but you are a misanthrope.  I love and honor my wife while you are uxorious.  I am focused; you are monomaniacal.

In me there is commitment, in you fanaticism.  I'm a peacemaker, you're an appeaser.  I'm spontaneous, you're just undisciplined.  I'm neat and clean; you are fastidious.  In me there is wit and style, in you mere preciosity.  I know the value of a dollar while you are just a miser.  I cross the Rubicons of life with resoluteness while you are a fool who burns his bridges behind him.  I do not hide my masculinity, but you flaunt yours.  I save, you hoard.  I am reserved, you are shy.

I have a hearty appetite; you are a glutton.  A civilized man, I enjoy an occasional drink; you, however, must teetotal to avoid becoming a drunkard.  I'm witty and urbane, you are precious.  I am bucolic, you are rustic.  I'm original, you are idiosyncratic.

And those are just some of the differences between me and you. 

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

One might wonder about recognition especially as it shades off into fame, and beyond that, into empty celebrity. Is it really good? Surely a modicum of recognition by certain of one's fellows is necessary for human happiness. To that extent, recognition is good. But a little suffices, and more is not better.  To be famous would be horrible, after the initial rush wore off.  And it might even get you killed by some crazy, as witness the case of John Lennon.

Not Brute Enough

There is the fear that one is not brute enough, not animal enough for this brutal world, a world in which nobility, refinement, kindness, objectivity, reasonableness, impersonal pursuit of truth and justice are perceived as weakness, and brute force, tribalism, onesidedness, and blind loyalty to one's own are admired.

Life is Hard

Even if your life is easy physically, economically, psychologically, and socially, it is bound to be difficult ethically, religiously, and  philosophically. Having solved the lower problems, the higher problems loom.

Two misfortunes.  One is to be so burdened with the lower problems that one is never in a position to tackle the higher.  Think of those whose energies are spent battling debt or obesity or substance abuse.  The other misfortune, or rather mistake, is to have solved the lower problems but to remain at their level without advancing.  Think of those who pile up loot far in excess of their needs while ignoring the condition of their souls, or the jocks who worship at the shrine of physical hypertrophy while allowing their minds to atrophy.

The higher his problems, the higher the man.

There is no escaping problems here below.  Life is a riddle and a predicament.