It's All Academic

A classical scholar makes the following observation: “Plato emancipated himself from the tyranny of custom.” This is instructive. You have Plato on the one hand, founder of the Academy and inventor of the universal ideal, and you have custom on the other, the morality of time and place. Here is true antithesis. The opposite of Platonism is not sophism, but custom. Note also the innocently assured lack of objectivity in the phraseology. Our enlightened scholar leaves no doubt about the righteouness of one side over the other, that is to say, about his own bias. Does Plato really represent the West’s first great step toward some sort of cosmic freedom, for which it is necessary to reject the local in favor of the universal? Or has the time come to reconsider this moment in our intellectual history as being perhaps the most fateful and fatal of them all? One thing does seem certain to me. After Plato the holy vocation of scholarship, the ministry of universalism, became an historical inevitability.

Universal Worship

Universities are the churches of the universal. It is no coincidence that they are medieval by origin.

Always for the Masses

In response to what he saw as the degradation and emasculation of Europe, Nietzsche advocated the law of nature as defined by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, the self-interested and unconditional dominion of the strong over the weak. However, because the essence of sophistic teaching is actually human sameness, the distinction between strong and weak has no place within it; and even the doctrine of Callicles must eventually reinterpret itself as self-interest for the masses. Nietzsche’s mistake here was critical. Logically he was trapped. In an unwitting attempt to escape he created a man-god of his own, ill-defined, ironically idealistic, and as readily reshaped, appropriated, massified and idolized as the idol he so boldly opposed. Consider Plato and Aristotle. How easily have moralists done away with the aristocratic aspects of their doctrines, while putting the universalizing ideas into the service of such equalizing systems as democracy and communism. Universality by definition embraces the many to the detriment of the few. It insists upon sameness and urges the leveling of mankind to its lowest manifestation. Had Nietzsche realized that Christianity was actually sophism for the masses, his positive teaching might have been as effective as his negative.

An Ideal Idea

The fantasy that the Platonic forms are “ideas” in the mind of God is so seductive that I have come close to opening myself up to it during psychologically dangerous periods of my life. I resist, however, confusing creativity with the truth, even if it promises to preserve my sanity.

Roots and Shoots

If human history seems to be following a certain course, are we obligated to maintain it and not to set a different one if we can? Human nature itself, as it exists in individuals, compels the development of human society. Are there seeds of ethical growth in each of us, that spontaneously take root and push out their shoots and over time entwine with those of others into a mass of supernatural vegetation that speaks to us like the burning bush? We do not even have a working definition of morality. How can we believe in something as presumptuous and supernatural as moral progress? We are making a wager at stakes we are unable to afford, because it is the penalty, not the reward, that is potentially infinite.

Moral Persuasion

Human beings will not believe the truth if to do so conflicts with their will to be well perceived. Moral teaching has always been more effective to the extent that it has persuaded than to the extent that it has been true.

The Minister's Aura

The moral philosopher of today is a scholar and therefore a minister of his institution. He gives himself an aura by developing increasingly complex methods of argumentation, which only he and his colleagues are able to comprehend; but his conclusions are predetermined and predictable.

Eureka!

Discovery and inventiveness have built upon themselves throughout human history. At what moment, however, did man suppose that he had found morality in a universal form? Did he stumble upon it without knowing what it was at first, or did he already know what he was looking for?

To a Greater Degree

A degree from a university gives you the right to question the truth. An advanced degree gives you the credentials to refute it.

Natural Inability

When we as individuals are physically or psychologically incapable of performing a particular act, we are more likely to call it unnatural if others are able to do it than we are if it is something truly beyond the reach of human nature.

Happy Return

The opportunity to tell others about your unhappiness is the compensation for being unhappy.

Recovered Identity

An intelligent man once said to me that early Christians were spectacular because they were willing to die for their faith. I reminded him that they received recognition and renown for their acts and also counted on an enormous reward from their savior. The archaic warrior, by contrast, was willing to die for honor, reputation, and glory without the promise of everlasting life. Odysseus actually refuses the immortality offered to him by the goddess Calypso, preferring to return to his homeland and his wife and thereby to recover his lost identity. He remains mortal, but he is the true custodian of his own nature. For that reason he is more spectacular in my eyes and more worthy of admiration.

The Dawn of Comprehension

Thoreau remarked that the greater part of what his neighbors called good, he believed in his soul to be bad, and that if he repented of anything, it was very likely to be his good behavior. Still today we are far from comprehending his point, but Thoreau was a prophet. He was putting into words his sense of a moral crisis, which we too will sense the day it dawns on us that good is bad.

Conception

It is a fact that men invent gods, but it is also a fact that men invent falsehoods, especially when they want to give life to things they have seen with their imagination but not with their eyes.

Crossroad

If for some reason we come to see through our most significant beliefs, do we harm ourselves by giving them up, especially when they are the foundation of our society and our relation to people absolutely necessary for our well-being? Do we become hypocrites of a different sort if we deceive these people into trusting that we ourselves are still believers? What are our options after all, if it is really a question of fitness and survival? Either we deceive ourselves, deceive others, or go to the cross and hope for posthumous martyrdom.

Sign of the Times

The sign above the gate that opens into this modern world of ours ought to read: Abandon all masculinity, ye who enter here.

Pride of Possession

If we recognize in another person a particular quality that we ourselves also happen to possess, even to a much less degree, we are far more likely to praise the person for it than we would be if we did not possess it at all.

It's Only Temporary

Can we admit to ourselves, even without making a confession to somebody else, that without the promise of salvation we would not find it difficult to give up the New Testament? Where after all would Pascal’s celebrated wager be without the bait of infinite happiness, offered to individuals who desire personal happiness as an end above everything else? Could it be that God made his creature eternally selfish for the purpose of giving it the motivation to become temporarily selfless?

Uncoordinated

We live in a society that expects the impulses and urges of men to age with their bodies. Inconveniently, both for society and for men, they don't.

Fair Vanity

If a conceited person happens to think highly of us as well as himself, his conceit is less likely to offend us.

Measure for Measure

By what measure or gauge is God’s will superior to mine? Is there something outside of God to which we refer, or is the measure God himself? If it is something outside of God, we have to conclude that God is inferior to it and subject to its judgment. Potentially it could determine that God was evil. Moreover, we have to ask by what measure it gains its own authority, and until we can establish goodness per se, goodness indefinable and immeasurable, we are left with an infinite series of measures or gods. The measure then seems to be God himself. But how does God’s goodness establish itself? Is God immeasurably good? Are we able to say yes to that question without giving a reason whose source lies outside of God? Does God himself provide us with the means to judge him and determine that he is good? Is he good because he is supremely creative and makes each of us? Is he good because he is all-powerful and immortal? Are these qualities that define goodness, or do they inspire fright because we are weak by comparison? Does might make right? Couldn’t God have given me qualities identical to his own? If so, by not giving them to me he deliberately made me inferior to himself. Is it for that reason that I ought to subordinate my will to his? Was it according to his own standard of superiority that he made me inferior? What is it about his standards that make them sacred? Who was he in the first place? Was he created, or has he always been here? What makes him anything but an arbitrary being? I need a reason to subordinate my will to his, and I have never heard one that is remotely convincing. We can go around and around and around on this, and unless there is something I am missing, I will continue to prefer my will to his, despite my weakness and my mortality, or even because of them. Is that appalling? Do you damn me? Then I damn you back. An eye for an eye. It is long since time that we rediscovered honest reciprocity anyway.

A Measure of Respect

Those who admire us the most are also those whose opinions we most respect.

You Don't Say

If we consistently acknowledge our minor faults, we earn a reputation for being openhearted and unguarded and give people less reason to suspect that we are concealing faults of a sort that we would never confess.

Unformed Substance

Deceit is easiest to effect where it is least expected. A great many people, for instance, are simpleminded but believe and want us to believe that they are complex. We grow accustomed, through frequent contact with this type of person, to adjusting our perspective of people in general, in order to compensate for the imbalance between form and substance. As an unexpected result, a truly complex person who wants to keep his complexities a secret is rarely recognized behind his disguise of simplicity.

Pay Off

Religion is the securing of rewards from a divine source. A modern mistake in comprehending religion lies in assuming that what we do in order to obtain divine favor is the essence of the relation between us and our deity. We tend to think, for instance, that loving one’s neighbor as oneself is the mark of a religious person. In the context of Christianity, however, one loves one’s neighbor for the sake of one’s own eternal salvation. Without the perceived reward there would be no religion. In many religions of the past, the actions were simple ritual performed according to strict formulae. It hardly even mattered what the actions were, because nobody was under the illusion that the goal was to be virtuous. It was a matter of open bribery, and the goal was to win the favors that the gods could choose to provide or not. We are still engaged in bribery today, except that we try to hide it, both from ourselves and from our god, by calling it “being good.”

Unionized Process

As barriers between peoples collapse, individuals seek a union with the universal; religion, with the help of philosophy, becomes mystical; and mankind begins its process of self-proclaimed progress.

Enviously Eager

Our interest in ourselves makes us envious of others and eager at the same time to conceal our envy from everybody, including ourselves.

It Slices, It Dices, It Makes You Live Forever

When we read the majestic Latin poetry of Lucretius, apostle of Epicurus, and compare it to the inelegant Greek prose of the New Testament, and when we notice the striking similarities between Epicurus and Christ, we might wonder why today there are still worshipers of the latter and not the former -- until we remember the promise of immortality. Like any other product, a doctrine of moral philosophy or religion sells because of its perceived benefits. And the emotional tranquillity or lack of disturbance offered by Epicurus does not do well in direct competition with an offer for eternal life.

To the Victor

Christianity has enjoyed enormous power, but its power has been in a state of mutation as people have stopped seeking immortality through worshipping a god who had become a man and started worshipping mankind, or themselves, directly. Giving up the promise of everlasting life is a price to pay, but taking God’s place is tremendous compensation. Christians today lament their besieged and weakened condition, but their antagonist was their own creation in the first place. Even liberals admit that liberalism is Christianity without Christ. As Victor Frankenstein discovers, playing god is a dangerous occupation. For when your creature ceases to obey you, it becomes a terrible and superhuman opponent.

That One Again?

Plutarch matter-of-factly writes, “The story was given out that Theseus was the son of Poseidon, not Aegeus.” In the ancient world many people, both in myth and in history, claimed to be the offspring of gods. By the time of Christ it was a trite story.

Swapping Costumes

Conceit frequently disguises itself as modesty, and modesty frequently as conceit.

How Much?

A favor is a service the fee for which is gratitude. When we ourselves provide the service, we are frequently disappointed by the misestimation of its value; when we receive the service, on the other hand, we often refuse to pay the price expected by the provider.

Progressively Prouder

Moral progress is marked by the ascension of human pride.

Opposites Attract

At first the subversive teachings of Jesus seemed at odds with the bureaucratic power of Rome. Upon closer interpretation, however, it was discovered that the marriage between a universal religious ideal and a far-reaching empire was a match made in heaven. And their child, which turned out to be even greater than its parents, was the Church.

Sensational Immortality

A large part of our conception of our existence lies in the perception that we perceive others to have of us. Therefore, we feel a sensation and a thrill of immortality when it comes to mind that we will continue to be perceived after we die.

The Best of Times

Bringing about the end of our race would be a far, far better thing than we have ever done. How saintly would we be if, on behalf of the ideals that we revere above everything else, we should cease to replace ourselves through reproduction and cause our own extinction as a result?

Be Yourself?

When we seek individuality, do we try to be different from everybody else, or do we find a group of people similar to ourselves and achieve our unique identity through communal confirmation?

Naturally Duplicated, Artificially Distinguished

Equality is a sophism. “Differences,” say the sophists, “are artificial. Nature is defined by sameness.”

Expensive Illusions

As individuals we are neither self-sufficient nor indispensable, in spite of the amount of energy we expend trying to become one or the other.

Just a Little Shot

Like an inoculation, virtue is vice taken in small doses. By moderating and calming our cravings, it reduces our susceptibility to the virus of overindulgence.

Measuring the Universe

“Man is the measure of all things.” Is Protagoras here making an argument for moral relativism? Actually, or at least in effect, no. “Man is the measure” directs us toward human universalism. “We should not,” it tells us, “search for the principles of universality in the physical world, but in man himself. What is it about our seemingly varied species that makes us unique and universally identical? There exists our cosmos. Is it simple self-interest and might-makes-right? Or can we find something less aggressive and more benevolent, like love, sympathy, duty, or equal rights?” The fact of the matter is, we we will discover nothing but empty definitions. It is a vain quest, doomed to failure from the start. Today, 2,500 years after Protagoras, we are floating in outer space, still plotting our course through the universe according to a gauge that never worked.

Inconsequentially Innocent

We never fully regret an action unless it results in consequences disadvantageous to us. We may feel guilty about something we’ve done out of fear of the consequences, but if the consequences never arrive, the guilt inevitably subsides.

Cosmic Concerns

The search for universal physical principles began in the Western tradition with philosophers we know as the Pre-Socratics. The Pre-Socratics were looking for what they they called the cosmos, a comprehensive order of things derived from the material substance or substances shared by all matter. From them came the impulse to do the same for the human species as a phenomenon disassociated from the rest of the physical world, to search in this case for the immaterial principle that made us all the same and would therefore serve as the foundation of universal human organization. To this day we continue this strange and presumptous quest, even though our much profounder understanding of the physical and biological world might suggest that the characteristics we share with a limited number of people embody our soundest principles of organization, precisely because of what is the same in all of us.

Who Really Knows?

A constant searching for new acquaintances is symptomatic of self-important mediocrity, because the less worth we have, the more likely we are to receive praise from those who see us superficially than from those who see beneath the surface.

Physically Fit

The justice of archaic and pre-philosophical Greece was physical. It was the uncompromising and courageous acknowledgment of transformation, transference, and mortality.

Theology Type One

Consider two theologies. In the first, you are warned that you are mortal, but within the confines of mortality you have almost no divinely mandated limitations or boundaries. In the second, you are directed to deny your mortality, but while you are alive your conduct is strictly circumscribed and restrained. The former, even if it is symbolized by unreal gods who represent the many manifestations of life in this world, is a realistic perspective. Man does not strive to be something he is not and cannot be, either during life or after, and therefore does not try to alter or limit himself. The second, which is perhaps symbolized by a god who many even today acknowledge as real, is idealistic. Man strives to become immortal and in the meantime attempts to transmute himself into something alien while alive. It is a religion that requires a system of spurious epistemology, because its goals are unrealizable. If we are bound and determined to deny our mortality, falsehood becomes a necessity. It takes over our process of thought and shapes our idea of mankind, in this world as well as the next.

A third theology starts with the second but abandons the symbolic god and the belief in immortality. It does not, however, give up the idealized vision of mankind in this world. Free of its symbol its priests assume divine power themselves.They see the human species as a fresh lump of clay, with no limit to its potential shape. They begin to mold monsters of all kinds and proudly call them the product of knowledge and enlightenment. If their creatures resist and try to resume a realistic shape, they squeeze, knead, and twist until the resistance subsides.

Today there is opposition and hostility between theology type two and theology type three and also between different versions of theology type two. The various disputes, however, are one of a kind, because they are invariably idealistic. That is to say, they rely on an idea, a mental image, of what man ought to be, and they regard what he is as something to be judged and overcome. We are as far away from a realistic discussion of ourselves as we are from Homer, where theology type one reigns supreme, and where people live and die within the full and unapologetic range of what it means to be human.

Societal Senility

When a society is young, it relies on the wisdom of the old. When it is old, it mistrusts it.

Natural Behavior

It is unnatural for a man to accomplish what he cannot do and to become what he cannot be. But it is natural for him to walk, to talk, to run, to sing, to laugh, to sneer, to cry, to smile, to sleep, to fear, to live, to die, to lust, to despise, to envy, to admire, to accept, to reject, to scruple, to fantasize, to help, to harm, to beat, to caress, to steal, to give, to save, to kill, to symapathize with all of his heart, and to take mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others.

From Point A to Point B

Our human world has freqently been influenced by perceptive and productive people who have recognized the direction in which it was heading and taken it there in a creative way. Rarely, however, has anybody changed the direction itself.

Fateful and Faithful Imitation

The Olympian gods say to mankind, “You are mortal. You will live and die. If you strive to be like us, we will punish you.” The Christian god says, “You are mortal, but if you follow me and take me as your model, you will overcome your mortality and live forever. Otherwise I will punish you.”

Reflexive Praise

Sometimes we exaggerate our praise of others not because we overestimate their merit but because we want to place emphasis on our own good judgment. If we make it known that we admire those who are generally admired, we capture a bit of admiration for ourselves.

Time to Resign

Our temporal perception changes as we age. As children we do not see the passing of time. Life appears sublimely static and eternal. As adults by contrast we see the march of time only too plainly. We grow into our mortality with endurance, patience, and brave resignation. Yet how much effort have we as a species exerted in the search for immortality? Are we ultimately on a quest for naive and shameless immaturity?

Divine Delusion

We are most like gods when we are teenagers, because at that age we are convinced that we will never grow old and never die.

Undignified Immortality

According to the perspective of the archaic Greeks, mortality gave man his dignity. The childish and ridiculous nature of the Homeric gods was an implicit warning, in addition to the many explicit ones, that human beings were not to take the gods as models. “Seek immortality,” it whispered, “only at the cost of your own nobility.” It is unclear why in the end the Greeks adpoted the assumption that the gods were objects of imitation, but Plato bans the poems of Homer from his ideal republic on the grounds that they portray gods who are inappropriate models of human behavior. Apparently he had a different idea of what a god was, or at least what a god ought to be. We are taking an essential step here toward Christianity, one that might contribute to a Christian’s belief that Plato had some sort of prior knowledge of Christ. Was the dignity of man advancing at this point, too, or did the archaic Greeks see something that was out of the scope of Plato’s famous foresight?

What to Wear?

It has been remarked that we sometimes resemble others more than ourselves. This is true, but only with qualification; for it implies that we are capable of an independent perspective and for this reason should take stock of ourselves when we are copying others. Real independence, however, is rare and unachievable for most people. The great majority lives by imitation alone and would be helplessly nude should it cease to wear the costumes currently in fashion.

Unimpassioned Judgment

People with feeble passions pride themselves in their self-restraint and judge that the one who gives in to passion is weak. From lack of experience they do not understand that passions can be too powerful to resist and that the person they are criticizing is likely to have a nature that is hardier, more vigorous, and more potent than their own precisely because its passions are so strong.

Which Galaxy is This?

A universalist, a person who defines morality in universal terms, assumes that human beings are undifferentiated and the human species is uniform. Even a sophist who rejects the existence of morality finds as a guiding principle the self-interest shared by all people. The problem for the sophist is that samenes itself, as an essential premise, makes as great a claim for recognition in the argument as the personal interest contained in the conclusion. If we are searching for a logical refutation of the sophists that isn’t simply a wimper for consensus, let’s consider this: “Back up. You said that morality does not exist because all standards of morality are different and one can commit a particular act in one community with impunity and be jailed for the same act in another. From this you argue that the true universalizing principle of human nature is self-interest, and that it is in the interest of the individual to gain as much power as possible over his fellows. But I cannot get past your assumption that the standard must be universal, for it implies that we are all the same. How then can the manifestation of self-interest be so varied and inequitable? It seems to me that your conclusion proves your premise false, unless you are prepared to say that self-interest promotes parity among individuals.” There is a deep irony here. A belief in universal morality took hold as the Western ethical tradition developed. Neither the sophists nor Plato, however, were champions of equality. Far from it, in fact. Both in their own way envisioned a society of natural rank. Nietzsche, over 2,000 years later, in aggravation over the increasingly triumphant philosophies of equality, gave Christianity the blame for the transformation. He called it Plato for the masses and believed that the antidote was contained in the original argument of the sophists. But this was a grave mistake, because the premise that seeks to destroy morality as a local hoax insists upon a conclusion that ratifies sameness and equity for all human beings.

Let's take stock of ourselves. What do we now believe in as a society? I perceive a faith in a two-faced god, like Janus. On the one side is individualism, on the other, equality. As principles by which people justify their own actions and critique the actions of their fellows, they have an extra-human existence, regardless of where people claim to have discovered them. Some believe they are following the teachings of Christ, their personal savior. Others credit the enlightenment of science and knowledge, which illuminates the rights of man. Concealed beneath both of these masks, however, are the inevitable features of universalism, the premise that subordinates everything to its dictatorial logic. Whether it's Jesus or John Rawls who is preaching, listen closely, with a filter. Blah, blah, blah, the individual, blah, blah, blah, equality. It's all the same. Shelley remarked that we are all of us Greeks. But why are we all Greek? It's because we are all of us universalists, and it was the Greeks who set us off in that direction. And now as we wander near the edges of the universe, do we have the faintest idea where we are?

Flames in the Basement

A person who flirts aggressively is usually superficial in his intentions and largely indifferent to the outcome of his advances. The person who never says a word beyond conventional courtesy, however, is frequently housing profound passion and is frustrated when he detects no evidence of the same in the object of his affection.

Tell Me Something I Would Rather Hear

We are vulnerable to the person who is able to flatter us without sounding as if he is giving us false compliments.

Bloodless Relationship

Plato’s Republic calls for common wives and common children, but it also instructs the rulers to trick their subjects into believing that everybody is related. What does this deception suggest about our true concern for others beyond the bounds of kinship? In our own age, which to my eyes appears to be the monstrous progeny of Plato’s intellectual seed, the word “family” is frequently used to create a sense of unity in what is otherwise a contrived or forced unification. But the last thing anybody wants is a society explicitly structured according to blood, for that would be hereditary, immoral, and highly unnatural.

Law of Averages

Somebody who is unusually ambitious will seem average and unexceptional if there is no possibility for him to reach his ambition. Lesser goals will look all the same to him, and he will go through life with deflated motivation.

Custom is King

In The Histories of Herodotus, we read of the injuries that Cambyses, king of Persia, inflicted upon the people of Egypt in the 6th century BC. Herodotus himself denounces the king for violating Egyptian custom. Only a madman, he insists, would flout the customs of another people, however contrary and strange they may seem. Both for the sophists and for Plato, on the other hand, Egyptian custom would be an irrelevant consideration. The case for them could only depend upon a universal standard of justice, not local convention. They would each judge Cambyses differently, but only because their conception of the universal standard was different. The standard of the sophists, advocated most famously by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, called for the unrestrained satisfaction of desire in porportion to one’s ability and power, that of Plato the rational restriction of desire in the interests of the health both of the individual himself and of the ideal state. By the former measure, Cambyses is acquitted, by the latter condemned. Now, the moral tradition of the West has followed Plato. His philosophy has been reworked into a variety of systems, both religious and strictly philosophical, idealistic and ostensibly empirical. Regardless of the form, however, if a system would convict the Persian king of criminal immorality according to a universal and invariable structure of right and wrong, its debt to Platonism is direct. Nietzsche agreed with Callicles, but we need to scrutinize Nietzsche more carefully. He certainly broke with the Western ethical tradition by taking up the cause of the sophists, but he accepted the orthodox interpretation that the sophists represented the antithesis of Plato. In fact they did not, in spite of the plain contrast of their final judgements in a case like Cambyses’. Both were universalists, proponents of a new perspective, and so was Nietzsche, when the perspective was no longer new. The real antithesis lies in Herodotus, because custom, which varied from people to people, did not tolerate universal mandate. If it had been customary among Egyptians to offer themselves to a visiting sovereign for unlimited abuse, Herodotus would not have found the actions of Cambyses objectionable. By contrast, regardless of local circumstances, the justice of Callicles would instruct Cambyses to satisfy his will at the expense of the weaker people, that of Plato, to show rational restraint. Which of these three perceptions of morality makes the most sense? Perhaps we are each secretly Nietzschean and take great delight in contemplating the exercise of power as irresistable as that of the king of ancient Persia. Perhaps again not. Would we choose Plato? We would have to, if we wanted to be considered moral according to the standards of our age. What about someone who saw logic only in the argument of Herodotus? Would he be more controversial even than Nietzsche himself? Or would his isolation be so extreme as to render him inconsequential?

To Aristotle

It is one thing to advocate a mean between extremes for everybody else and another to be considered history’s greatest philosopher yourself.

Inversion

In archaic, pre-philosophical Greece, the attempt to rival the gods was the gravest transgression a man could commit. Christianity by contrast was based on the deification of man. How could this have happened? To offer immortality to mortals was the height of philosophical and ideological hubris. In the end we appropriated the right to worship ourselves and to have no other god before us.

Intimate Change

Estranged lovers share an intimate shame. At times it can be so awkwardly intense that it's apt to change itself back into love.

I Wish I Could Be Invisible

If God sees all things, he is the voyeur par excellence. Could it be that this age of reality shows and uncensored internet reveals our deeply religious instinct to imitate our maker?

Selfishly Inevitable

“There is no universal standard of morality other than self-interest.”

I see this assertion as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more it becomes accepted that morality by definition is universally inclusive, the more pressure, both from within and from without, is placed upon local, autonomous codes of conduct. With enough pressure they disintegrate; and into the void comes somebody's vision of world order. But such a vision is ideal, a figment of the imagination. It has no more substance than the emperor's new clothes. What then is really governing the behavior of these people? Nothing in the final analysis but self-interest.

It is a common observation that we live in a selfish age. Is it ironic that the very belief in universally defined morality could have led to no other consequence?

True Mistreatment

The truth can no longer do as much good for our species as the pretense of truth has mistreated it.

I Have Something to Tell You

It is often the case that the more someone opens his heart to you and exposes his inmost thoughts, the more daring he is at trying to gain your trust for the sake of his own advantage.

Fame and Fortune

The less recognition a talented person gets, the more he will come to blame fortune and uncontrollable circumstance for his obscurity. If ever he wakes up to find himself famous, however, he will immediately infer that ability, hard work, and patience win the day for the deserving.

Having Our Cake

It is inevitable that scientists will break the code of the human genome, letter by letter, and will learn how to make any and every genetic alteration. I wonder, however, whether we will be better or worse for the knowledge, for I have no doubt that we will put it to active use. In order to change the flavor of a cake, you have to change the recipe. The problem in our case is that we are the cake, not the chef. Even if the chef was a blind process called natural selection, it was creative enough to make us suit the taste of nature, that is to make us survivors, without any moral forethought at all. When we ourselves put on the hat and try our hand, we will not be able to resist flavoring ourselves to our own taste by adding a few extra dashes of goodness and a couple more teaspoons of virtue. And when nature takes one bite and spits us back out, then what? Well, that just might be the day that we finally die for our sins.

Critical Evidence

We are addicted to criticizing others, because pointing out faults gives evidence that we ourselves do not have them.

Lower Math

The more energy one gives to an insignificant vocation, the less capable he becomes of a memorable one. Seconds add into minutes, minutes add into hours, hours add into days, days add into weeks, weeks add into months, months add into years, and years add into a life. The mathematics of wasted time are merciless.

The First Premise

Based on the observation that the norms of human behavior were varied and contradictory, the Greek sophists argued that a true standard of justice did not exist above the dictates of individual will. Essential to this argument is the unstated premise that a sanctioned standard of justice must be universal, or applicable to all people. Once we grant this premise, consciously or not, we are left with a limited number of valid conclusions. In order to understand Plato’s reply to the sophists, and the subsequent development of Western ethics, it is vital to recognize that Plato granted the sophists the premise of universalism, the first premise of Western ethics, and that to this extent he himself was sophistic. The disagreement comes in his conclusion. The sensible world disturbed Plato. He certainly did not deny the lack of uniformity in human behavior. He saw fickleness, inconstancy, and change. He perceived a tendency in people to deceive themselves. He witnessed the execution of the very man that he himself admired above all others. Face to face with a logic that insisted the world was governed by conflicting self-interests and that Socrates was merely a loser in the contest, he reasoned that universal justice was not something of this world. It was an idea or form visible only to the eye of the mind. It was ideal, in the original sense of the word. Let us think this through. We establish that a standard of justice does exist and that it must be universal. We have observed the incoherent multiformity of existing human laws and conventions. What conclusions are left to us? Plato’s is obvious, at least in hindsight. We imagine another world where perfect forms reside, and we give to an enlightened few, called philosophers, the vision to see into this world. To what extent it is possible to imitate the forms in this imperfect world of ours is unclear in the writings of Plato, but the forms themselves are other-worldly. Is this the only conclusion open to us? No, we could deny the existence of a separate world and insist that perfection is discoverable in this world. We could study all existing manifestations of justice, for example, and piece together a perfect amalgamation from the best qualities we find in each. This is Aristotle’s method. Or, like Cicero, we could promote one particular manifestation in this world, in his case the constitution of Rome, that we believed was better than all the rest. We would be obliged to justify our own insights, however, and we might find ourselves flirting in the end with the other-worldly. If we consider the violent political disagreements of our own age, we can see that combinations of special divine insight and practical application are common. We can look back to the tradition of philosophical solutions as an explanation for our present state as a cultured species, but it is perhaps more instructive just to recognize the logical bottleneck that the premise of universalism presses us into. Attempts have also been made to define a universal standard of justice, or morality, using empirical justification. Self-evident, inalienable rights would fall under this category, but “self-evident” suggests an inexplicable insight again. Academic liberalism, perhaps the most powerful theoretical force in the Western world right now, is a rights-based system of universal ethics that cannot get past this appeal to self-evidency, even though it claims knowledge as its justifying scripture. All I need to say in response is that the evidence is invisible to me. Arguments ad hominem and ad populum follow, of course, but these do not make the theory itself sound. They only serve to defend it by humiliating and ostracizing anyone who dares to attack it where it’s vulnerable.

Let us look back again. Do we accept the premise that a real and legitimate standard of justice must be universal? If so, does the apparent lack of one in this world mean that such a thing doesn’t exist and that self-interest is the true universal? Nietzsche’s answer to that question was a powerful yes, but if our answer to it is no, then where do we look for it? Was Plato right to say that it is an idea, and do we take the next step and say that the idea is ideal and unrealizable? Is every conception of universal morality an unrealistic figment of our creative imagination? If not, why are so many people involved in persuading and forcing others to adopt their own vision of it, or trying to eliminate, whether subtly or not, those whom they cannot convert? We can see when universalism entered the consciousness of the West. We can see its logical consequence. We can see the struggles that have taken place and continue to take place over the problem of definition that it produces. What if we were to say no to that first question? I almost suspect that we would rather continue to say yes to it, even if our very affirmation were a pied piper leading our species into inevitable extinction. We would rather perish than give up our most cherished premise.

Reciprocal Consumption

Most teachers waste their students' time, and most students waste their teachers'.

Making It Up

Jealousy is the desire to maintain one’s own possession. Envy is the desire to acquire the possession of another. They are distinct and in fact hostile emotions, evolved one to overcome the other. And in the race to gain an advantage, they have given each other such potently positive feedback and grown to such an inflamed state that they stand out like blemishes among our subtler and sightlier motivations. The make-up with which we hide them is therefore some of our best and most expensive. The complexity, for instance, of the laws regarding property on the one hand and taxation on the other, and the number of people involved in creating, enforcing, and interpreting these laws give the impression that we are serving a far, far better cause than our jealous and envious nature.

Creatively Full of It

History is full of people made foolish by other people’s creative wisdom.

The Habit of Ideal

The only body beneath ideal is desire, but even the barest of desires is habitually veiled in pretexted interpretation.

Turning the Tables

Why grant Plato the assumption that there is a single universal definition for a term that is itself only an abstraction of an infinite number of acts or sensations. “What is courage?” We are able to point to an act and call it courageous, very often without great dispute. But this type of answer does not satisfy the Socrates of Platonic dialogue. “I did not ask you to give me examples of courageous acts," he says, "but to define courage, the essential aspect by which all courageous acts are courageous.” What if one of his interlocutors had said something like this to him in response? “Socrates, you ask a deceptive question, because courage is not a single material entity. You have made a noun out of an adjective, a substance out of a quality. Courage exists only in our minds as an abstract universal, as a mental bundling of all those acts. You cannot turn the tables and say that Courage with a capital C makes the acts courageous. You are forcing the intellectually innocent to look at it from the wrong direction. Do not now exploit this contrived confusion to convince us that we view only shadows while you gaze into the light of truth. A few of us actually see through you. You may therefore give up your project to pervert and manipulate human perception through your qualitative, insubstantial, and unreal abstractions.”

What is the Subject?

A thought that is not directed by an accepted paradigm of thinking, if committed to an accepted vocabulary and syntax, will make as much sense to its readers as a sentence written in a language that they do not know.

Blind Attraction

We are more passionate about those things we believe irrationally than those things we believe rationally.

A Question of Education

Those who are taught to question everything that others are trying to teach them will never, at least in theory, be led into false belief, but they will never learn anything either. They will turn to Uncertainty as the justification for their ignorance, and they will worship it as a god with an unshaken confidence that they will deny to anyone who claims a definable and instructive knowledge.

Making Copies

We are evolved to satisfy an elemental will, which is to make copies of our genetic information. Therefore, we should not wonder why our passions make us foolish when we are usually wise or wise when we are usually foolish.

Casanova

However educated and clever we become, we continue to be subject to the seduction of self-love. It whispers, whispers, whispers into our ear with a steady stream of flattery and never strays elsewhere in its affection. It is a master of erotic disguise and likes to dress as virtue and to point out the vices of others. It is as constant and unvarying as the very genetic material, 46 chromosomes, 23 from our father, 23 from our mother, that inhabits cell after cell after cell in our body. It achieves its most exquisite mastery over us when we believe we have thrown it over for another lover, for a god or a science, for a family, community, nation, or the whole human race. It prefers to make love in the dark, for it does not like to be seen without its clothes and is happiest when we imagine we are in the arms of someone else.

Ensemble

The ability to talk a lot and the ability to say nothing are gifts that typically go as a pair.

Unrelated Bravery

The courage to perform a dangerous act without a single witness and the courage to perform the exact same act in front of an audience are hardly even related as behavioral traits.

Foolish Judgment

It would be senseless to wish to be wiser than all others. If you were, there would be nobody capable of recognizing your wisdom, and you would likely be judged a fool.

Fit for Life

If we claim that without natural law standards of behavior would be arbitrary and therefore potentially evil, we presuppose goodness, which we then force upon nature for our own purposes. All human behavior is natural however. We are the only ones who make any distinctions about it. Nothing beyond our species itself, for instance, has ever insisted that human beings by nature should not simply drive themselves into extinction. It is only up to us to decide whether or not we desire such a thing, and whether or not we can stop ourselves even if we want to. The human will to be well perceived is stronger than the will to survive. Let us bear in mind how many of our number have committed suicide over the course of our history, before we convince ourselves that every day we are more fit to live.

It's Under This One

Morality is a shell game. Now you see it, now you don't.

Inquiry -- Conclusion

In time ideas would begin to cross boundaries. Rebellious thinkers, unheeded in their own groups, would look anywhere for allies whom they could persuade to believe the latest transfigurations of the solution. They would set tradition or progress itself as a premise, hoping that minds primed by initial agreement would be willing to follow the rest of their argument. But of the two, progress would prove the more successful, because those attached to tradition would be less willing by definition to abandon their idolized explanations. The followers of progress, by obvious contrast, would be on the lookout always for the change that would represent a validating improvement. In this environment a clever notion would take seed. It would say that all perspectives on the question were equally sound, and that the strife and suffering caused by the competition among them ought to cease. The word “tolerance” would come to epitomize this, the final solution. All other solutions, though equal to one another, would be subordinated to it. Institutions of learning would raise this new idea as their standard and would grant to their researchers and teachers the license to pursue their respective disciplines enthusiastically, in the name of the progress of knowledge, provided they did not threaten the standard itself. The young would be educated to become believers, and believers would be numbered among the informed and enlightened. They would tolerate and forgive the intellectually simple who persisted in holding one of the other solutions above theirs, but they would insist upon laws that would keep these others in check. As their confidence grew, they would get more aggressive in their legislation, and the ever-widening circles of their influence and coercion would lead them to imagine that the universal agreement, which once seemed impossibly out of reach, was now on the horizon.

And then one fine morning, a pure fool would come along and say, “Has anybody noticed that the original search was for something that didn’t exist?”

Contested Order

The preferred state of entropy is its maximum. It can be decreased in one location only at the cost of an increase in another. Physical laws insist upon a contest for order.

Pure Distortion

Human opinion will never change what is true. Plato built a doctrine upon that fact, but the doctrine was falser even than human opinion. The truth does not need, because of people, to exist separately in a realm of its own, accessible only to the purest of minds. It is contained in everything that lies before our eyes. What does the distorted nature of human observation have to do with it, except insofar as it is made hazy by the desire to be the source of truth?

Inquiry -- Part Two

As the associations that had formed around the various solutions to the great question continued to contend with each other, quarrels would begin to take place as well between individual members within the leagues. Some would attempt to reinterpret and recreate their solutions to make them stand up better to the competition or even to raise their own personal standing in relation to the others of their own group. Over time the solutions would go through an evolution, mutations being selected or rejected based on their persuasiveness or ability to coerce. Some would be so successful that they would form the foundations for new associations entirely, and these would be as likely to become the enemies as to become the allies of their own parental groups. As mutations and reinterpretations asserted themselves more and more aggressively, people across groups would find themselves, depending upon the perspective and direction of their own loyalties, attached to a notion of tradition or of progress. And the belief in one or the other as an idea would become as strong as the belief in the very principle, which the idea of tradition or progress was defending. The two beliefs in fact would probably mix into a new solution. As an odd but logical result, leagues in conflict with each other would now share an article of faith.

(To be continued.)

Ultimate Indifference

Claiming indifference to worldly things and swallowing swords are both done to win applause from an audience. There are levels of status in a monastery after all. Truly seeking indifference, however, is arguably another matter, if the intent is only to relieve the distress and torment caused by the friction between oneself and one’s surroundings. Those of us who have ever endured severe psychological dislocation would be in a position to make the honest assertion that our detachment from a defective world gave us an inner calm otherwise unachievable. And a few at least would not face the charge of hypocricy that would be warranted against those who registered the adulation of others and felt an even greater spiritual thrill as a result. Is there one of us, though, who is not left with himself as a spectator? To be inwardly indifferent toward something is in fact to lower its value covertly in our own eyes. As long as we care about it, we have to deal with its significance in regard to our own worth. Remove it, and the downward pressure it puts upon us is removed along with it. As far as we are concerned, our standing in the world improves, without our having to acquire confirmation and substantiation from a single other source.

Inquiry -- Part One

If you were involved in an inquiry, together with many others, into something that did not exist, but you had all accepted as a premise that it did, universal accord over what this thing was would be next to impossible. More than likely, varied insight would take you down various paths. You would form associations and leagues of agreement and begin to contest one group against another. Politeness would give way to insult and ultimately to physical violence. Each member of each group would see himself as the champion of his group’s solution to the question, and the solution itself would take on an essence and being of its own. For those who believed in it, it would become materially real and would subordinate all other reality. Perhaps at times one association would be more powerful than the rest and would dictate to a large extent the course of events. But then it would lose its grip and another would take its place, or there would be a precarious balancing of authority among a number of them, with the inevitable threat of widespread war. Unless one group were to eliminate the others completely, malice, animosity, malignity, and spite would go on for a very long time, even indefinitely.

(To be continued.)

Uniform Chaos

A physical system as it ages becomes less changeable, less varied, more blended, and more uniform. These are symptoms of growing disorder, increasing degeneration, advancing deterioration, and blossoming chaos.

The Greater Reward

Why did Epicurus want to convince his disciples that the gods did not care about them and therefore were irrelevant to human life? Perhaps he believed it himself, and perhaps the belief gave him a tranquility that he wanted to share. But the Greek gods, right down to Hades, were abstractions of a multiform reality that Epicurus was asking others to relinquish. From there he was only a short step away from unifying their perspective and making himself their one and only god.

Truly Trapped

What makes philosophy fascinating to me is not so much in what way each philosopher was right, as it is in what way he was misleading, especially when his traps are now generally accepted as truths.

A Particular Expression

Customs and laws are an expression and definition of the people who create them and live by them. To violate them is not to transgress an abstract principle but to mock the people defined by them, in a particular location at a particular point in time. It makes no difference what the customs and laws are, and therefore it is not inconsistent or contradictory for something to be permitted in one place and forbidden in another. It is the assumed requirement of universality that lacks justification.

Cloak and Dagger

The most effective way to cloak deceit is with the truth.