Humans.
Category: Human Predicament
Forgiveness and Self-Justification
One feels justified in not forgiving. "Why should I forgive the bastard? He wronged me, and not just once!"
"Don't you need forgiveness? You must forgive because you yourself need to be forgiven for what you have done to others!"
"There is a part of me that can appreciate your fine Sunday School sentiment. But to survive in this ugly and brutal world I had to become tough and unfeeling; I had to learn how to be unjust and how to wrong people. And of course I had to practice on the weak and vulnerable if I was to make any progress and not be killed right away."
A Reason for Reserve
The less I know of you, the more highly I can think of you.
A Reason to Live Long
There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here. It may be that at death soul-making stops and one is stuck at the moral, intellectual, and spiritual level one has attained in the precincts of the sublunary. This could prove problematic if one survives one's bodily death. Are you sure that you don't?
With Detachment from the Outcome
There are games and there is life, and life is not a game. But life is like a game, and sufficiently so to warrant application of the same principle: play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.
In chess, and not just in chess, it is 'unsporting' not to try to defeat the opponent by all legal means. It shows a lack of respect for the opponent and for the game to not do one's best.
In life as in chess, play hard, but with detachment from the outcome.
If the above reminds you of the Bhagavad Gita, that's a feather in your cap.
Related: Coitus Reservatus and Beyond
The Optics of Compassion
We make a brave attempt at seeing the best in one another. The attempt is aided by not looking too closely.
Self-Deprecation
A little self-deprecation is good, but more is not better. Nobody likes the boaster. Take self-deprecation too far, however, and people will have contempt for you.
Wife and Life, Truth and Practice
My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking, gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital.
Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some people. The world is ugly, but there is also beauty in it. Life can seem meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and yet it also at times appears under the aspect of ultimate Sense and Rightness.
You will have to decide which of these seemings to live by. Try both and see which is more conducive to happiness. The one that makes you happier has a solid claim on being the truer. That the truth should in the end thwart us strikes me as implausible. But the question cannot be resolved theoretically. You resolve it by living, thoughtful living, each for himself and by himself.
Titans once bestrode Harvard Yard.** Josiah Royce was one, William James the other. The latter held that truth is "the good in the way of belief." I commend that thought to your delectation, examination, and practical implementation.
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*Time was, when the lion's share of something was the whole of it. Despite my linguistic conservatism, I have acquiesced in the latter-day usage according to which the lion's share of something is most of it. If lions could speak, they would protest the semantic dilution.
**Pygmies now rule.
The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates
Substack latest.
The Truth of Life and the Art of Life
We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding. They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.
The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)
The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.
How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues
Here is a possible attitude for examination.
Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from the proximate, and unfits one for the only life that is sure. Accept finitude, for we are not made for anything more.
But even this train of thought is dangerous. To ride it is already to forsake short views and to speculate fruitlessly about views and about which is best. That view alone is truly short which is accepted thoughtlessly and thus not as a view. The truly short view is no view. If you so much as ask whether the life lived in sensuous immediacy is the truest or best, the worm of inquiry — call him Skepsis — has already entered your head. Or perhaps he was there all along and now you are feeding him.
But it is too late. You are on the path of inquiry and there is no turning back. Forward you shall go to points unknown. Will you proceed resolutely or in the desultory way of wishy-washy worldlings?
But is it really too late? Why can't one just stop? The trick is to do so without explanation or justification. The example of Ludwig Wittgenstein suggests that this is impossible. Philosophical Investigations, 309:
Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.
What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.
Why does the bug need to be shown the way out? Pop the cork and he's gone.
Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy? He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all the inconclusiveness and endlessness that that entails. He should have just walked away from philosophy.
If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it. You are free to go, the door is unlocked. This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view. But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy. Just do it, if that's what you want. It is not clear that it can be done, but you can try. I'm not saying it should be done. On the contrary.
What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit. That would be like copulating your way to chastity. For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle. You cannot have it both ways. You either walk away or stay.
On Thinking for Oneself
You must think for yourself while never forgetting that the wild and troubling and contention-stoking diversity of opinions abroad in the world is due to people thinking for themselves. The herd animal may be stampeded into a slot canyon where he drowns; the maverick may end up in the same place and meet the same fate on his own.
If only there were an utterly reliable teaching authority available to us here and now. Some say there is. See my longish entry, Michael Liccione on Private and Collective Judgment.
I Know My Limits
I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know. Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible.
(Note how 'I' is used above. It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)
Why I Want to Live Long
I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions. Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?"
And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic. He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?
Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style. But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode.
Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk. There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below. As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft, "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say. "A scholar's harvest years come late."
Hard and Soft
You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation. Self-individuation is a task, not a given.