Category: Human Predicament

What is Man?

Engel noch tastendHe 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. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; 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 envisagement 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 revelatory of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine.  It takes a spiritual being both to willingly empty oneself into the flesh and to transcend it. 

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 what it is, one can question whether it is. 

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.

People and Their Works

This from a reader:

Your comment about Husserl's picture on your wall reminded me of a line from my notes: "I try to admire works but never people, as people invariably let you down." It's, I think, a line from Peter Hitchens.

Socrates' DeathPeople regularly, though not invariably, let one down. True. But being a person, I need persons to show me what is humanly possible and to serve as examples of how best to live. No book can render that service. While I cannot emulate (equal or excel) Husserl or Socrates in all respects, I can hope to do so in some, in respect of intellectual probity and devotion to the truth. 

Sometimes we are at fault when others disappoint us. We pegged them too high.  To be just in our assessments of others is extremely difficult. No man is worthy of worship and no man of utter contempt. No one is an angel and no one a demon. We regularly go to extremes. 

One way to avoid disappointment in one's heroes is by not meeting them in the flesh.  Distance permits idealization. Propinquity militates against it.

And if you want to avoid inspiring disappointment in those who haven't met you but will, request of your advocates and admirers that they not sing your praises!  Let the former  think that you are just an ordinary schmuck schlepping down the pike. And then surprise them.

The Art of Life: Among ‘Regular Guys’

Among regular guys it is best to play the regular guy — as tiring and boring as that can be. Need relief? Strictly limit your time among regular guys. But mix with them a little lest you be hated for being 'aloof,' or 'unfriendly.'

As long as one is in the world, one must be able to pass as being of the world.

Almost all socializing is levelling and dispiriting.  It drains one's spiritual sap. But a little socializing is good, like a little whisky. In both cases, however, more is not better.

In this fallen world, society is the enemy of solitude, and solitude is to be preferred if the good of the soul is a goal.

But I can imagine a form of sociality superior to solitude. This would be a society of spirits who had passed through the school of solitude and had achieved self-individuation.  But such a society is not to be had here below, if anywhere.

A qualification is needed. There are rare occasions in rare friendships in which one gets a glimpse of what that sodality of spirit would be like.

I'll end on a mundane note.  In my experience, a little socializing is often physically stimulating.  On an early morning ramble, I am doing alright.  I encounter an acquaintance. We chat for a few minutes. When I start up again I feel energized. There's a spring in my step and  glide to my stride. I exult, "I feel better than any old man should be allowed to feel."

RELATED:  Introverts and Inwardness

Time it took to compose this entry: 35 minutes from 4:00 to 4:35.

How did We get to be so Proud?

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?

In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

Pride, result of the Fall, comes before a fall — into the grave.

Is There Anything Good About Moral Failure?

Moral failure  makes us humble and it casts serious doubt on the proposition that we can appreciably improve ourselves by our own efforts whether individual or collective. Taken to heart, moral failure points us beyond the secular sphere for the help we know we need.  Whether there is anything beyond said sphere, and whether help is available there, are further questions.

Something Good from these Politically Trying Times?

One positive upshot of these times that try our souls is that more and more of us will come to appreciate the hopelessness of this world and the people in it. Self-satisfied worldlings will find it difficult to retain their worldliness and self-satisfaction as civil order collapses and the tide of irrationality rises. Their naive faith in humanity will experience a serious rebuke. They will come to realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from our dire predicament by human, all-too-human, means.  Some will despair unto anti-natalism or even suicide.   But others will enter upon the Quest for a saving Reality beyond this passing scene of ignorance and evil.  They will tread the paths of prayer and meditation. Feeling for the first time the pangs of spiritual hunger, they will turn in the right spirit to the great scriptures and the writings and practices of the sages.  Their smug complacency will be a thing of the past.

Trotsky’s Faith in Man

On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

Read the rest.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

There Have Always Been Crises

My wife just now handed me a book from her library, one that I had read in the '70s, but had forgotten, The Pursuit of Loneliness by Philip Slater. It was published in 1970 by the Beacon Press (Boston). It bears the subtitle, "American Culture at the Breaking Point."

Somehow we didn't break: here we are schlepfussing along 50 years later. Things are arguably worse now, but it's a huge topic and not my present one.  I just want to say that there have always been crises. So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.

In February 1945, the university building in which Hartmann used to lecture was destroyed in an aerial bombing and all his classes were suspended. He was then living in Berlin, which had been transformed into a real-life inferno. Without teaching obligations, Hartmann decided to write his aesthetics book, completing the first draft in the period from March to September 1945. Perhaps the most fascinating book in his entire opus [corpus], there is no despair in it over war and violence, maimed bodies, and destroyed buildings. As a boy he learned to measure the movement of the stars against the objects on earth, and now he measured the events of the day against the eternal beauty of Bach's music, the portraits of Rembrandt, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the novels of Dostoevsky. He delivers a remarkable message:wherever we are and whatever events pull us into their currents, we should not lose sight [of] and cease to strive toward the highest and most sublime. (Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 159.)

Hartmann Nicolai

 

Animal and Spirit

Yesterday morning I reviewed our quarterly statements and calculated our net worth. I then turned to Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, and re-read underlined passages as a fitting prelude to a 75-minute session on the black mat.

It is appropriate  for an animal to concern itself with material things; it is also appropriate for a spirit to meditate on the ultimate nullity of all material things.

Foolish it is to ignore either.

A Need of the Flesh?

According to Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Epstein needed three orgasms per day by three different girls.  That need would be ill-described as a need of the flesh.  It would be better described as an artificially induced 'need' of a degraded spirit who freely attempted to extinguish his spirit in the diaspora of sensuousness.  With apologies to St. Paul, it is not so much that the flesh is weak, but that the spirit is perverted.

Mistakes

We have all made mistakes. But if we have learned their lessons, they have served a good purpose. Let us not compound our blunders by dwelling on them. Do not forget them, but do not dwell on them. Retention in memory subserves a salutary humility; to dwell on them impedes the project of one's life and beclouds the road up ahead.

Homo viator is not here to rest, but to get on with it.