Category: Human Predicament

Which is Seeming, which Being?

In the vitality of the moment, in the pride of life, in the grip of surging lust, the trinkets that distract us seem so concrete, so compelling, and so real.  God and the soul seem by contrast like bloodless abstractions, mere thoughts, the impotent projections of weak minds incapable of facing 'reality' and of being satisfied with the only world there is.

Homo Homini Lupus

Top o' the Stack. Opening paragraph:

A 28-year-old Gypsy girl from the Tene Bimbo crime family 'befriends' an 85 year-old single man, marries him, and then poisons him, causing his death, in an attempt to steal his assets.  The two were made for each other, the evil cunning of the woman finding its outlet in the utter foolishness of the man.  What lessons are to be learned from this?

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Joe Odegaard comments:

This is from Dante's Inferno, Canto 26:
 
"Consider your origin: you were not made to live like brutes, but to
follow virtue and knowledge."
 
Considerate la vostra semenza:
  fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
  ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.'
 
Some people don't try.

The Relative Unreality of Social Transactions

An excerpt from  a journal entry dated 21 July 1985 followed by a comment.

There is often little or no personal reality in human relationships. They are often nothing more than formulaic transactions. When I saw C.T.K. on Friday I told him, sincerely, that he looked good, healthy. He felt obliged to return the compliment — he couldn't just graciously accept it; he had to interpret it as the opening move in a social transaction.

I would like to think that it is possible to instantiate social roles, playing them, as we must, but without being played by them, that is, without allowing oneself to succumb to the illusion of being identical to them.

It may be that some people are social-transactional, and thus pure social surface all the way down. In such people there appears to be no person beneath the personae, nothing below the masks, poses, roles, no spiritual substance. Social interaction has lifted them above the merely animalic, and so they count as human in one sense, but they have never glimpsed the possibility of a further step from the merely social to the truly individual.

The project of radical self-individuation is beyond their ken.  I had a colleague like that, a man stuck at the level of ego-games and oneupsmanship.  In a 'conversation' with him I never had the sense that any communication was taking place.  So it came as no surprise when, in one of our 'conversations,' he asserted that a person is just the sum-total of his social roles. Nor was it a surprise  when I learned that he was working toward a second Ph. D. in sociology!  

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."

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

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. 

James and Royce circa 1910

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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 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.

Nietzsche abyss