Category: Human Predicament

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.

Just walk away, Rene.

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.)

Know-Your-Limits-1

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. 

Servility Will Cower to Force

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:

For my part, I am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power. The only means to prevent men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the sure method of debasing them. (Quoted in Zbigniew Janowski, Homo Americanus, p. 15)

No man, and no group of men. We need checks and balances all up and down the line.  

And yes the people are ovine and servile and will cower to power. That has been amply demonstrated of late by the masses' mindless donning of useless masks. Don we now our fey apparel! Let us signal our specious virtue and adherence to the party line of Lord Fauci and his minions.  And when the party line shifts, we shift with it!

The other day I espied a lady, driving alone, windows rolled up, wearing a big black mask. But I was in a charitable mood. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe she just left a doctor's office where entrance required the fashion accessory in question, and she forgot to take it off." But then I waxed rather less charitable. "Is she so oblivious to the mechanics of respiration that she would leave that rag around her face when alone?"

As for Dr. Fauci, RFK Jr. has his number. You all should read his The Real Anthony Fauci.  Look it up. Buy it. Study it.  The author's an outlier, a decent Dem, like Tulsi Gabbard.

Omnia Sana Sanis

"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.

For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it.  The good are not the weak, but those capable of  violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.

Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?

Disingenuousness

One politician accuses another of being disingenuous. But isn't such an accusation itself disingenuous inasmuch as disingenuousness is itself necessary for polite, politic, civil, political behavior? Could one have diplomacy and  civility without fakery and phoniness?  Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"

The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know  what 'trust' means.

One root of Trump hatred is his refusal or inability to play the political game in the conventional way. In a world that runs on appearances, social success demands more than a modicum of fakery, dissembling, white lies, and such.  If Trump could learn to play the game in a more conventional way, but without any reduction in the size and efficacy of his political cojones, he would be unstoppable.

But this world in which there is more seeming than being is also a world of severe limitations.  You cannot expect a man of action with a popular appeal to be also sensitive, articulate, refined, and literary. And vice versa. Those who are the latter tend to be of the milquetoast sort.  Someone as précieux, as 'precious,' as Bill Kristol is not cut out to lead.  

Preciosity does not suit the populist.

 

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that  we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

________________

*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.

Such Sweet Sorrow

Part of what makes "parting such sweet sorrow" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) is the realization that one may never see the beloved again alive. Death presides over all of life; in leave-taking he steps out of the shadows. You see the glint of his scythe from the corner of the eye.

In the twilight glow, I see her
Blue eyes crying in the rain;
As we kissed goodbye and parted,
I knew we'd never meet again.

Love is like a dying ember,
Only memories remain;
Through the ages I'll remember,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Now my hair has turned to silver,
All my life I've loved in vain;
I can see her star in heaven,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder,
We'll stroll hand in hand again;
And in a land that knows no parting,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Written by Fred Rose and first recorded by Roy Acuff in 1947. Numerous covers.

A little known version by Ramblin' Jack Elliot.