Category: Human Predicament

The Tendency to Exaggerate

Not content to say what is true, people exaggerate thereby turning the true into the false. Three examples from sober philosophers.

Martin Buber, who is certainly no Frenchman, writes that “a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words…” (I and Thou, p. 59) His point is that a melody cannot be reduced to its individual notes, nor a verse to its constituent words. But he expresses this truth in a way that makes it absurdly false. A melody without tones would be no melody at all. The litterateur exaggerates for literary effect, but Buber is no mere litterateur. So what is going on?

On Forming Societies at Faint Provocation

Paul Brunton, Notebooks II, 154, #56:

I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A man's own problem stares him alone in the face, and it is not to be solved by any association of men. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste time.

Well said. Would Thoreau have joined the Thoreau Society? Merton the Merton Society? Would Groucho Marx have joined a club that would have him as a member?

Dubious Consolation for the Bald

Paul Brunton, who was bald, writes,

I take comfort in the continental proverb,"A hundred years hence we shall all be bald." (Notebooks, VIII, 202.)

I am not bald and the genetics of my lineage suggest the unlikelihood of my becoming bald. But the occasional dream reveals a subconscious anxiety. In one, I caught a glimpse via an array of mirrors of the beginning of a bald spot on the back of my head. But why should the thought of balding induce anxiety if not because the bald spot is a harbinger of the meatless skull each head is headed for?

Hair today, bone tomorrow.

Ambition and Age

Lack of ambition in the young is rightly seen as a defect. But here is an old man still driven by his old ambitions, none of which were of too lofty a nature. Is he not a fool? For his old ambitions, appropriate as they were in youth, have become absurd in old age.

His upbringing was hard and his circumstances straitened. He early resolved to better himself economically, and he succeeded. Hard work and the old-time virtues brought him wealth. But having 'arrived,' he did not know what to do with his arrival except to keep on piling up loot. Loot, however, is but a means to end, and our old man's ends are, like he himself, coming to an end.

It is time for him to abandon ambition and fly into the arms of fair Philosophia, there to meditate on such truths as: One cannot tow a U-Haul with a hearse. But death, the muse of philosophy, will catch him long before it a-muses him. The Reaper's scythe will cut him down before it moves him to thought.

Ambition and Happiness

Viewed in one way, ambition is a good thing, and its absence in people, especially in the young, we consider to be a defect. Without ambition, there can be no realization of one's potential. Happiness is connected with the latter. We are happy when we are active in pursuit of choice-worthy goals that we in some measure attain. On the other hand, there is no happiness without contentment, which requires the curtailing of ambition. There is thus a tension between two components of happiness. It is a tension between happiness as self-actualization and happiness as contentment.

To actualize oneself one must strive. One strives for what one doesn't have. Striving is predicated upon felt lack. But one who lacks what he desires is not content, not at peace, and so is unhappy in one sense of the term. One who longs for what is permanently out of reach will be permanently unhappy, always striving, never arriving. Not only will he not get what he wants, he will fail to appreciate what he has.

To be happy one must strive for, and in some measure attain, choice-worthy ends. That requires ambition. But the attaining is not enough; one must rest in and enjoy what one has attained. That requires the curtailing of ambition. 

Why Do We Judge People By Their Attire?

In Chapter 42 of his Essays, Montaigne remarks that

We praise a horse for its strength and speed, not on account of its harness; a greyhound for its swiftness and not its collar; a hawk for its wing and not for its jesses and bells. Why then do we not value a man for what is his? . . . If you bargain over a horse, you remove its trappings, you see it bare and uncovered . . . . Why, when estimating a man, do you estimate him all wrapped and muffled up? . . . We must judge him by himself, not by his attire. (Tr. E. J. Trechmann)

I am tempted to agree by saying what I once said to my mother when she told me that clothes make the man, namely, that if clothes make the man, then the kind of man that clothes make is not the kind of man I want to be. (Women are undeniably more sensitive than men to the fact that the world runs on appearances. They have a deep intuitive understanding of the truth that the Germans express when they say, Der Schein regiert die Welt.)

But there is another side to the problem, one that the excellent Montaigne ignores. A horse does not choose its bit and harness, but has them imposed on it. A man, however, chooses how he will appear to his fellows, and so choosing makes a statement as to his values and disvalues. It follows that there is some justification in judging by externals. For the externals we choose, unlike the externals imposed on a horse, are defeasible indicators of what is internal. In the case of human beings, the external is not merely external: the external is also an expression of the internal. Our outer trappings express our attitudes and beliefs, our allegiances and alignments.

Proud To Be a Human Being

It’s a hell of a thing to be a consciousness encased in flesh and riding on a rickety skeleton. A precarious predicament, exposed as we are to the rude impacts of a physical universe that cannot even be called indifferent. A mere reed, but a thinking reed, an engineering reed. A reed who risks his hide to explore and to know.

In the westbound lane of U. S. 60 a huge tractor rig appears, escorted by police cars and hauling a long flat-bed trailer atop of which sits a monstrous turbine or reactor core. A surge of pride energizes me, a pride in belonging to a species of animal that envisages and implements great projects. I am reminded of the exhiliration I felt as a man of twenty two returning from a six month European sojourn. As we took off from London’s Heathrow, I glanced out at the wings and the jet engines and contemplated the audacity of essaying to ride through the air on a controlled explosion.

How pusillanimous and shortsighted, therefore, those who balk at space exploration. Have they stopped to consider what ‘satellite TV’ means? Are they aware of how those communication satellites were placed in their geosynchronous orbits? Do they think that money spent on a Mars expedition would be wasted and better spent on terrestrial needs? That’s an illusory way of thinking.

Had all the time and money spent on pure research and exploration over the centuries been spent on alleviating immediate needs we would have none of the technological wherewithal with which we most marvelously and most efficiently — alleviate our immediate needs.

The Human Predicament: Not to be Taken Too Seriously

I've been loved, hated, feared, loathed, respected, scorned, unjustly maligned, praised for what I should not have been praised for, lionized, demonized, put on a pedestal, dragged through the mud, understood, misunderstood, ill-understood, well-understood, ignored, fawned upon, admired, envied, tolerated, and found intolerable. And the same most likely goes for you.

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Superman: The Moral of the Story

200px-Reevessuperman George Reeves (1914-1959) was the original 'Superman.' You know the character: "Faster than a speeding bullet . . . ." Reeves was murdered (or was it suicide?) in June of 1959. I remember a comment of my Uncle Ray at the time of Reeves' death: "He could stop other people's bullets, but not his own."

I hope Reeves won't mind it too much if I take moral instruction from the mistakes that killed him. It has long been my policy to let others pay my tuition at the School of Hard Knocks.

Reeves succumbed to sex, booze, and career-identification. It is hard enough to get the sex monkey off your back, but if you allow him to form a tag-team with the booze monkey you have double trouble. But of course I would never say that he was 'addicted' to these two 'monkeys': I believe in free will, self-discipline, self-reliance, and in strengthening one's will by exercising it. With respect to temptations, a good maxim is this: Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens. And if you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.

Adding Insult to Injury

That we are formed and malformed by our environments from birth on is bad enough. It is made worse by those who want to see us as nothing but products of environment. These reductionists of course make an exception in their own cases. It is as if they say to us: "We are able to discern truth, but you are not. What we say expresses our insight, but what you say only expresses your conditioning."  That is the injustice of the psychologizer.

The Past as Burden

The past is a burden one is free to put down — if others will let us. In this regard as in others, the less fame the better. Others like to keep us in the past, safely categorized, pinned to our deeds. To their ossifying gaze, we are what we were, a fixed essence rather than a project. If I rightly recall, Hegel summed up the Aristotelian to ti en einai and the scholastic quod quid erat esse in the phrase, Wesen ist was gewesen ist: essence is what was. But Dasein, said Heidegger, is essentially futural. And that despite all Geworfenheit, thrownness.  Sound is the existentialist insight that man  is a project.

Each day is new, but we make it old with our thoughts and habits. We drag the past along with us like a penal chain. But every day is a beginning. Some say: "of the rest of your life." But that formulation is too retrospective: it evaluates the present and the future by the standard of the past, as time that remains. Better to say: "Each day begins a new life." Of course, it cannot be all that new, but no matter. Let the continuities take care of themselves, seek the novelty in the moment.

There are possibilities yet unexplored in this present which is not merely a boundary between past and future, but a source of the new. 

Serious Conversation

It is best avoided with ordinary folk. Serious conversation about matters beyond the mundane demands effort and people resent being made to work. Besides, ordinary folk do not 'believe in conversation' the way some philosophers do. They don't believe that truth can be attained by dialectical means. They might not believe in truth at all, or in its value. Or they may have the notion that 'truth is relative.' Thoughtlessly, many dismiss all thought with 'It's all relative.' So if you try to engage them on a serious topic, they may interpret your overture as an initial move in an ego game whereby you are trying to dominate them, even if that is the farthest thing from your mind. Not believing in truth, they believe in power, and interpret everything as a power ploy and a power play. And this goes double if, like me, you are intense of mien. For your seriousness will appear either threatening or comical to those for whom nothing matters except life's surfaces.

A good maxim, then:  Among regular guys be a regular guy.

Do You Seek Power and Position?

Then consider what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has to say in his Essays (XI. Of Great Place):

Men in great place are thrice servants — servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to indignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing: Cum non sis qui fueris, non esse cur velis vivere. ["Since you are not what you were, there is no reason why you should wish to live."]

Deformation by Experience

Thought aspires to objectivity and universality, but it must struggle against the brute onesidedness of experience. We are so impressed by our particular experiences that argument against them will usually prove unavailing. Our experiences form us and deform us.

I once knew a white woman who disliked blacks. I inquired why. She explained that she had grown up in a neighborhood with a lot of blacks, and that the black kids routinely harrassed her and her friends on their way to school. My arguments in mitigation of her generalized prejudice were of course unavailing in the teeth of her experiences.

Just as you can't argue against a man's sensibility, you can't argue against his exeriences. He knows what he's seen, what he's felt, what he's suffered. Argumentative abstraction is just so much gossamer by comparison.

This is a general rule admitting of exceptions. The vividness of the experiences is no match for the faint murmurings of sweet reason. We are formed by our experiences but also deformed by them.

We are made of crooked timber, and the warping of experience adds the final rude touch.