Category: Impermanence

Nietzsche to his Friend Overbeck

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." So he preached the Eternal Recurrence of the Same,  letting an ersatz Absolute in through the back door. Becoming became enshrined as Being. Thus was an attempt made to fix the flux and assuage the metaphysical need. 

Addendum

After penning the above observation, I stumbled upon the following entry in Theodor Haecker's Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 31, #127):

The most radical denial of need of redemption in this world seems to me to lie in the phrase, 'the eternal recurrence of the same' (Nietzsche). Logically it represents a fantastic confusion  thought, since quite evidently everything points in the very opposite direction. Theologically, it is at an infinite distance from God, and it turns everything upside down. At this point discussion is no longer possible.

Haecker is on the right track, The eternity of Recurrence is a paltry substitute for true eternity and in the end no true redemption.

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

Genesis 3, 19 is true whether or not God exists and whether or not man is spirit.  

Vanitas2The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.  If our secularist is a leftist utopian, then he pins his hopes on developments no reasonable person could believe in, and that he won't be around to enjoy in any case.  His erasure of the historical record allows him to persist in his self-deception. The Left is at war with memory and its lessons.  

I will be coming back to this theme in connection with Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies (Encounter Books, 2018). A quotation to tantalize: "Communism, as a system that started history anew, had to be, in essence, and in practice, against memory." (9)  We saw that play out in our cities last summer, as the Left stood idly by, and in many instances encouraged, the destruction of statues and other monuments for reasons that are no reasons at all but nihilistic ventings from the pit.

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

Is Religion Escapist?

Escapist LadderEscapism is a form of reality-denial.   One seeks to escape from reality into a haven of illusion.  One who flees a burning building we do not call an escapist.  Why not?   Because his escape from the fire is not an escape into unreality, but into a different reality, one decidedly superior to that of being incinerated.  The prisoner in Plato's Cave who ascended to the outer world escaped, but was not an escapist. He was not escaping from, but to, reality.

Is religion escapist?  It is an escape from the 'reality' of time and change, sin and death.  But that does not suffice to make it escapist.  It is escapist only if this life of time and change, sin and death, is all there is.  And that is precisely the question, one not to be begged.

You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether religion is an escape from it. 

You say that you know what reality is? You bluster!

There is a nuance I ought to mention.  In both Platonism and Buddhism, one who has made "the ascent to what is" (Republic 521 b) and sees aright, is enjoined to  return so as to help those who remain below.  This is the return to the Cave mentioned at Republic 519 d.  In Buddhism, the Boddhisattva ideal enjoins a return of the enlightened individual to the samsaric realm to assist in the enlightenment of the sentient beings remaining there.

To return to the image of the burning building.  He who flees a burning building is no escapist: he flees an unsatisfactory predicament, one dripping with dukkha, to a more satisfactory condition.  Once there, if he is granted the courage, he reconnoiters the situation, dons fire-protective gear, and returns to save the trapped.

Both the Cave and the samsaric realm are not wholly unreal, else there would be no point to a return to them.  But they are, shall we say, ontologically and axiologically deficient.

I pity the poor secularist who believes in nothing beyond them.

Image credit. 

No Polity without Comity

No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality.

E pluribus unum is a noble goal. But a durable and vibrant One cannot be made out of just any Many.  Not just any diversity is combinable into unity.

This is why the oft-repeated 'Diversity is our strength' is foolish verbiage that could be spouted only by a liberal-left shallow pate. 

We blew it as a society and now we are in trouble and teetering on the brink of collapse.  No polity without comity, and no comity without commonality. The commonality that insures social harmony requires the stoppage of illegal immigration and reasonable limits on legal immigration together with the demand that potential immigrants be assimilable and willing to assimilate. But we no longer have the will to make that demand. We don't even have the will to protect the borders.

But of course foolishness about immigration and its effects is only one part of the explanation of our decline and eventual dissolution.

Still, we fight on, but only part-time because, being conservatives, we understand that the political is but a limited sphere. So ride the bike, traipse the trails, make music, draw and design, contemplate the constellations, make love to the wife. 

Above all, lift up your eyes, if you can, to a Reality superior to this passing scene, superior to this vain world whose vanity will vanish along with it.

Carpe Diem!

Carpe diem skullSeize the day,  my friends, the hour of death is near for young and old alike.  How would you like death to find you?  In what condition, and immersed in which activity?  Contemplating the eternal or stuck in the mud of the mundane or lost in the diaspora of sensuous indulgence?

The clock is running, and in the game of life it is sudden death with no way of knowing when the flag will fall.

For some of us the harvest years come late and we hope for many such years in which  to reap what we have sown, but we dare not count on them.  For another and greater Reaper is gaining on us and we cannot stay the hand that wields the scythe that will cut us down.

Praeparatio Mortis

Living long is a kind of low-grade preparation for death: the longer one lives, the more obvious the vanity of life becomes. An old soul can discern it at a young age, but even he will see it more clearly as his body ages. Paradoxically, vanity will be better appreciated if one in younger days fancies life full and rich and equal to its promises. For then the disillusionment  will be all the greater.  Or as one of my aphorisms has it:

Live life to the full to perceive that it is empty.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Decoupling Rock and Roll from Sex and Drugs

Five examples:

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.  Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . " 

Life’s Fugacity

Tempus fugit carpe diemAs we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us mid-streamers and late-streamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places in California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to the present I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Ash Wednesday

Vanitas2"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?

The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence.  This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't.  If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist.  That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.

More here.

You Are Going to Die.

Christopher Hitchens has been dead for over eight years now.  In Platonic perspective, what no longer exists never truly existed.  So here we have a man who never truly existed but who denied the existence of the Source of his own ephemeral quasi-existence. Curious.

The Idolatry of the Transient

It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.

The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice  of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.