Ideal Germination

What percentage of those people who feel deep devotion to the theory of evolution have read Darwin’s Origin of Species? I suspect it is every bit as small as the fraction of ardent Christians who have actually read the Bible. It is hardly worth asking, moreover, how many of each group have read the textbook of the other, which they are apt to condemn with even more confidence than they glorify their own. Ideology thrives in a culture of mental laziness as prosperously as physical illness does in one of bodily carelessness and neglect.

Common Cause

Today’s philosopher-king is the professor who champions the cause of the common man, using language the common man cannot comprehend. “Aren’t you teaching me that I do not need a patron?” cries the confused common man. The king smiles and pats the poor man’s head. “You are even wiser than I previously believed,” he responds; “I must go and tell my colleagues.” “No, no! Explain it to me! I do not understand.” But the great man is already hastening away.

Moral Intensity

If a man with an enormous amount of money and influence devotes his life to the pleasures of the flesh and is intensely happy up until his final moment, should we moralists, who are concerned with human happiness, not be intensely happy for him? Or do we know him better than he knew himself? Do we know that deep down he was unhappy, and should we therefore strive with our judgments, our laws, and our loftier purpose to keep those like him confined within the limits of true contentment?

The Prescribed Limit

In return for the rewards of status, position, and recognition, scholars and scientists subject themselves to the unwritten command that they are to interpret their findings in a manner consistent with the ethical presuppositions of the academy. A moral philosopher at a university, for instance, will apply his rigorous, complex, and undeniably intelligent logic only up to a prescribed limit, even though in doing so he runs the risk of leaving his argument exposed. By way of compensation he is able to permit himself a premise, such as “ethnic prejudice is wrong,” for which he can rely on the quiet consent of colleagues who know deep down as well as he does that it cannot be rationally substantiated.

Willful Compliance

According to John Locke, I am bound by natural law to preserve myself and not to quit my station willfully. But if my nature compels me to kill myself, I obey natural law by complying. I am not capable of an unnatural act.

Cover Your Mouth

We all yawn uncontrollably at times. Why don’t we create a universal system of morality based on boredom, fatigue, and apathy?

Definite Desperation

When morality became the province of philosophers, theologians, and scholars, it ceased to be morality. Today we have a word with no meaning and a society that desperately needs a definition.

Scholarly Inertia

The scholar’s perspective is that of the observer and interpreter, rather than that of the doer. What are the implications of the massification of this perspective, especially as scholarship becomes more and more its own object of study? It is not insignificant that in our age artists have little subject matter other than themselves as artists and we are knee-deep in novels whose protagonists are professors.

Passing and Merging

I came across this unreferenced quote the other day, scribbled in an old notebook: “The problems of Greek citizenship touch us today because they are ours, and they are ours because the experience of the Greeks has passed into our substance and merged into our being.” After I had read it and thought about it for a minute or so, two questions came to mind. First, which Greeks is this person talking about? They were not a homogenous people, either temporally or spatially speaking. Is our substance stuffed with aristocratic Homeric warriors, Spartan hoplites, Athenian demagogues, Macedonian imperialists? Or is it simply that we are all citizens of Plato's idealistic republic? Second, is it any longer possible for us in the West to purge our substance and release our being?

Impulsive Concealment

The impulse to conceal an underlying impulse must be either a different manifestation of the same impulse or itself a stronger one.

Organic Insensibility

In Plato’s Republic men of their own accord come together into society with one another in order to improve their personal circumstances. Later, however, they inexplicably lose their singularity in the context of the whole; and what were previously living beings, each endowed with a complete set of organs and a will of its own, become themselves insensible organs of another body, away from which they have no function and no life. This is the essence of Platonic justice, but we will look in vain for the bridge back to human nature.

Elementary Revolution

In order to be successful, a universal code of morality must either persuade through individual reward or resort to force; and because no code of morality can possibly be universally beneficial, they all have an element of coercion and therefore contain their own seed of revolt.

Artful Expression

Doesn’t “art for art’s sake” mean “art for the artist’s sake”?

Advance in Scholarship

A good literary scholar is rare and worthy of admiration. He actually takes his object of study more seriously than he takes himself and protects it from colleagues predisposed to promoting intellectual distortion for the sake of personal advancement.

Origin of Rebellion

Does it make sense to search for the origin of morality when we presuppose the code of morality to which it has presumably led? What if we were to discover an origin inconsistent with the presupposed code? If the code were beyond question, as moral codes tend to be, we would have to reject our findings, no matter how persuasive they were. Therefore, the search for the origin of morality could be nothing more than a quest for communal justification, or perhaps just personal intellectual recognition, unless we were engaged in an act of moral rebellion.

Truly Evil

Protagoras, the Greek sophist, taught that man was the measure of all things. The Western tradition since Protagoras has taught us that morality is a universal phenomenon. Modern psychology teaches us that a person desires to feel good about himself. Given that he is the measure of all things and is therefore the standard of universal right and wrong, he has the moral right to feel good about himself. Therefore, anything that makes an individual feel bad about himself, including the truth, is evil.

Subconscious, Unconscious, Conscious

There is a big difference between subconscious motivations that we can never really perceive in ourselves and recognizable motivations that we are unwilling to acknowledge. We have a tendency to categorize the latter as the former when in fact, if we are honest and courageous in our self-evaluation, the so-called subconscious will yield to the conscious. And as soon as we begin to uncover the dirty little truths behind our own behavior, other people will unconsciously reveal to us the secrets unperceived by their own dishonest consciousness.

Your Papers, Please

Scholars do not like the obvious, because it belongs to everybody. It is not necessary to have a Ph.D. and tenure in order to recognize it. If you try to point out the obvious to a scholar, you should not be surprised to find him resisting you with great earnestness and seriousness of purpose. For without proper credentials you are trespassing into the highly exclusive club of knowledge.

de te fabula

Beards are in fashion among scholars today. It is amusing that they were also in fashion among the Stoic street-preachers of ancient Rome. According to the poet Horace, Roman boys enjoyed annoying these wise men by pulling on their beards. Imagine now giving a tug to the facial hair that belonged to a tenured professor at Harvard. Do you think, even if he taught the works of Horace in his classes and encouraged his students to laugh at the self-importance of the philsophers being mocked, that he would be capable of seeing himself in the mirror that Horace was holding up for him?

Worldly Differences and Divine Similarities

“There are certain laws which all peoples follow, peoples who have never had any contact whatsoever with one another. They have arrived at the same laws independently and therefore must have received them from a divine source.”

If you already believe in God, this is a persuasive argument; but it is flawed. It assumes as a premise that human beings must be either completely the same or completely different. For some reason it is unacceptable that they be the same in some ways but different in others, by their own nature and without divine intervention. Moreover sameness gets the preferred status. Why not argue that the laws which are different have come from a divine source, that God in his infinite wisdom guaranteed not our unity but our differentiation and separation?

Relatively Speaking

Insight is an unusual instinct, and scholars, who tend to confuse insight with knowledge, rarely have it. All the knowledge in the world will not generate the ability to see relations where others miss them, any more than endless practice alone can produce unique athletic talent.

Practically Monstrous

A theory of morality that is forced into practice will produce a monstrosity if it contains imaginary and unrealizable assumptions about human nature.

Provincial Governors

By now we have captured an enormous expanse of knowledge and have countless specialists who govern their little regions of it. No one knows what it all means, but it is an empire that inspires great faith. The specialists take their provinces, and therefore themselves, very seriously.

Too Dull

In the ethical arena the bare truth is a dull weapon. It consistently loses in the duel against untruth, because its point does not penetrate to the source of decision, which is the instinctive will to believe, not reason. When behavioral norms are at stake, reason is an accessory target.

Periodic Rereading

A great book deserves to be read and reread periodically, not only because as we mature we will see things in it that we missed as younger readers, but also because we will gain a nobler understanding of ourselves and our own process of aging by comparing the effects the book has on us at the various stages of our lives.

Either It's Universal Or It Isn't

The individual in contemplation of a universal that transcends the manifest world is still cultivating worldly universalism. Consider Kierkegaard. As an extreme protestant he advocated the solitary worship of Christ for the sake of individual salvation. Was it something else, however, that led in the first place to the worldly conditions that he detested? What could the purest of Christianity have produced but the all-too-human Church, once it had achieved mass conversion? Would Kierkegaard have preferred that it had been unsuccessful and had remained a local and curious representation of defiance and renunciation? He himself would never have come to know of it. What about the success of his own philosophy? His greatest claim to fame is as the inspiration for secular existentialism, which has given its support to ideals that he himself would have held in abomination.

The Real Unknown

Moralists of this age insist that the human species must be united if it is to surive. Yet our species has never come close to being united, and to date it has survived. In this case do we not have cause to fear the unknown?

Modern Perverts

The words “ethics” and “morality” have their roots in Greek and Latin words, respectively, that mean custom. Does our perversion of the meaning of these words give us any insight into the perversion of our culture?

A Complex of Interpretation

Scholars are poor self-observers, but they are very confident in their interpretations of people far more complex than themselves.

Can We Thicken This a Bit?

Every recipe for universal morality is idealistic and unrealizable, no matter what ingredients from the material or empirical world are added to give it content and substance.

Beyond Words

If ever I use obscure and incomprehensible language, please understand that I have had a vision into a previously unseen realm of reality and need to create new units of meaning in order to describe it.

Prior Matter

Any institution, such as the church or a system of secular education, that seeks to instill uniform moral principles into peoples of different localities necessarily presupposes universalism as a material concept and assumes its priority to localism of any form.

State of Agreement

Questions of morality arise because people disagree about what constitutes correct, proper, virtuous, decorous, pleasurable, or beneficial behavior. If everyone were disposed by nature to agree, there would be no morality as we, through the context of disagreement, have come to understand it. I wonder, if a system of ethics became universally accepted, would we be in a state of total morality or total amorality?

Intelligent Promotion

What are all those scholarly publications doing out there other than serving as advertisements for the institutions that pay the people who produce them?

Holy Control

Why do we search in amazement for the source of morality and not the source of immorality? If we presuppose the existence of the first, we presuppose the existence of the second. Why do we not marvel over immorality and call ourselves wonderful because of it? Why morality? Is it because morality coerces, and we worship our sources of control over others?

The Accepted Exception

How much has modern philosophy been directed by the fact that so many modern philosophers have been or are professors at colleges and universities? Are all those men really philosophers? Does exceptional insight come with tenure? Doesn't it bother anybody that the work of these philosophers has to be accepted by their peers before it is considered exceptional?

Looks So, Sounds So, Feels So, Smells So, Tastes So -- Is It So?

Is it possible to observe the truth in terms so simple that the observation does not require a scholar’s interpretation?

He Says Green, but We Know He Means Yellow

The metaphysician who professes to cure man’s mistaken perception of reality is like the literary scholar who claims that an author is saying the exact opposite of what he is obviously saying.

Forbidden Fruit

The one thing that our universities' scholars do not have the license to learn is that universalism is undesirable.

Deadly Insight

Someday the few great powers that be will have an epistemological court of professors who will produce and maintain an approved list of methods for arriving at the truth, and the expression of any belief found otherwise, especially through rare and unusual insight, will be punishable by death and the confiscation and redistribution of property.

Binary Bliss

Plato’s vision of mathematics as the paradigm of universal ethics will become a reality when everybody ceases to be a human being and becomes an appendage to a computer.

Can't Take it With You

The only way we can at last force our species to conform to our universal ideal of equality is to kill it.

Inconspicuous Censorship

Literary scholars have the job of purifying through benign interpretation what is potentially harmful to the progressing perspective of Western man, and the educational system in general works to guarantee that nobody be predisposed in the first place to assent to the wrong message. Given the many many years that we all spend in the hands of these people, an independent reader is the rarest creature we know.

Intellectual Evangelists

The universal ideals of academia are well protected and well evangelized, because a scholar’s dignity depends on the preeminent position of the academy. Unless he is unusually rebellious, his work will tacitly or explicitly support its code, and he will be compensated with a life of enviable prestige. There was a time when intellectuals depended on the church and backed it therefore with the full weight and force of their intelligence. A change in name, but strikingly similar otherwise.

Cui Bono?

In our age we have forgotten that exceptional writers do not write for the sake of scholars but for the sake of themselves and therefore those predisposed by nature to be influenced by their insight.

A Master and His Flatterers

To the proportion that someone puts his time and energy into the total mastery of a single craft, he remains more completely a novice in other things. Society, however, has a tendency to believe that one exceptional skill is a mark of wisdom in every regard and is capable of flattering the master into believing it himself. When this happens, he begins to play the fool, and society adoringly follows his lead.

The Level of Law

Stephen Hawking says this: “. . . suppose one starts with two boxes, one containing oxygen molecules and the other containing nitrogen molecules. If one joins the boxes together and removes the intervening wall, the oxygen and nitrogen molecules will start to mix. At a later time the most probable state would be a fairly uniform mixture of oxygen and nitrogen molecules throughout the two boxes. This state would be less ordered, and hence have more entropy, than the initial state of two separate boxes.”

Let’s move from the molecular level to the societal. Suppose one starts with two peoples kept distinct by their discrete customs. If one removes the customs in favor of a universal morality, the peoples, like the molecules, will start to mix and in time will become fairly uniform. Fortunately, however, the human world has its own laws. This later state would not be less ordered and would not have more entropy than the intial state. It would be culturally evolved and morally advanced.

No In-Between

We learn from Aristotle that any man who is wholly self-sufficient must be either a beast or a god, which is to say that he does not exist.

Fatal Oversight

All the knowledge in the world will be of no use to us if we forget to reproduce.

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.