the difficulty is not to decide. you will decide no matter what. to sit still, even, is a decision. to do nothing is a decision. the difficulty is deciding rightly. especially because with every decision there are so many options, and if you have not studied, you will only know very few of them, a few which may not contain the most right one.
Category: more-al-ittee
precarious action
i wish to treat
serious matters seriously,
and have the power to do so,
though i was born
into trivial circumstances,
while my understanding
of both “serious” and “trivial”
are relative and perhaps misguided,
so that acting
is a precarious notion
If we knew
Imagine if we did have certainty and knew exactly what to do. How boring life would be. If we knew not only what we wanted but also how to get it. Then it would be like looking at a map and seeing the path drawn out so clearly that you’ve almost already traveled it and see little point in leaving home.
Words for good and bad
We use generally bad and generally good words, sometimes not even knowing the specifics; but we know they’re one or the other. We can feel it.
Good feels good
We arbitrarily choose good because it feels good. We’d choose bad if it felt good; some do. Then we realize our definitions of good and bad are all screwed up.
Problems
I lay awake and suppose there isn’t anything I could have done differently with a day like this one which happened to be full of all the things with which a day is usually filled except for the feeling that anything was really done that hadn’t been done before.
That feeling irks the god in me. I let it go; content to lay here in my bed at night and breathe it all away. Tomorrow is a new day and my memory has gotten so bad recently that I rarely remember what I was worrying about the day before. I was worried about this until I realized that most of my problems aren’t really worth solving. They’ll sort themselves out or come up again slightly more dire further down the road and I’ll have to deal with them then but there are only a few of these that come up again.
Most of my problems don’t need dealing with right away. It’s only that other people don’t have it so good that irks me about this. Not everyone can lay up in their bed and just breathe and be safe and fed. So sometimes I think I’ve worked out a good system for dealing with my own problems but then I think I better get started on everyone else’s.
It gets messy when you consider some people create their own problems. It’s the ones that really had no choice that I want to help first. But then again I consider maybe the people who create their own problems don’t have a choice either.
My metaphysics inform my ethics: an argument for aesthetics
My metaphysics inform my ethics and aesthetics. “What is” informs “what can be.” I’m an artist and a writer because of my beliefs about what is. I treat life like a film or a story or a game. I’m relaxed because I don’t think there’s much we can do. And further, I don’t think much matters.
Defining “matters” becomes interesting philosophy. As most philosophy seems to regress to nomenclature, defining terms is paramount. By “matters,” I do not mean that nothing seems important. Of course, love and hope and friendship seem very important to the human experience.
For a while, I thought it was truth that mattered. If I could only know the truth then everything would take on meaning. Then for another while, I thought it was self-actualization that mattered. In some pseudo-material way, we have a place to fill in existence, and meaning is filling that space by actualizing or making real each of our individual full potentials, so I thought. Truth and self-actualization, these two seemed to “matter.” The only way that I can think to explain why it is they do not matter is with a crude economic example, or rather, a question: how do they spend? In other words, in what market do they have any value?
In our real-world economy, currency is valuable because it can be exchanged for goods and services, which are then used almost exclusively to satisfy our animal need for survival. So we get to a value at the end of economic motivations: survival. But I ask the same question in the same way that continually asking “why” serves the same purpose: how does it spend?
Once we’ve spent enough currency to achieve survival, then how can we spend survival? How can we spend the time we have to live? And there again we uncover another value like we are digging in a mine and finding diamonds. Time is a value. But how does it spend? It spends in terms of changes in space. What else signifies time? If the whole world were to freeze and not a single physical change were to take place, wouldn’t we say that time has stopped? So if we spend time by changing space, how does changing space spend? Maybe the physical world is connected to mental and spiritual planes—then the metaphysical possibilities explode. But the point remains the same: nothing seems to matter. And it doesn’t matter because nothing really spends.
I remain alive because the phenomenology of the human experience is beautiful and artistic and I like to watch and continue experiencing it just like I enjoy films and books. I’m also alive because the universe has order. There are rules to the game. I enjoy the game of life like I enjoy a game of chess or a soccer match.
Overall, I remain alive because I enjoy life. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would remain alive for the possibility of enjoying it in the future. Even if only for one moment of joy, that would be worth a whole life of suffering. And even if all of life were suffering, I think I would still find a way to enjoy it by some sort of detached curiosity. I believe in my experience, and I am so deeply grateful for it, even if it doesn’t matter.
Selfish hedonist
I am a selfish hedonist. I do what feels good and what’s best for me. Justice, religion, even charity—I’ll do whatever as long as it feels good. But most of the times it ends up being the obvious things: sex, drugs, wealth, and fame.
Determinism
In a hotel in Farmington, Missouri, after swimming in the pool outside and having a breath-holding competition with my brothers, we come inside and see a small statue of a Catholic saint. I recognized it because I’d seen statues like it growing up. I recognized the woolen brown robes with the ropes at the waist and the bald head on top with hair on the sides. Only as I describe it now do I recall that the statue must have been a saint of the Franciscan order. But more than that, I write this because I am continually shocked by how people are inevitably products of their time and place.
First, I think of where I grew up. People are conservative and Catholic mostly because they were born in northeastern Kansas in the late twentieth century. I couldn’t have had this thought early in my life, because I myself was a product of the only time and place I’d ever known. When I traveled, I saw different places and cultures and read their histories to imagine different times. And those places have statues too, but instead of Franciscan monks, they are Buddhas or political leaders or animal idols.
The people I met while traveling were, almost without exception, consistent with the presumed effects of their respective times and places. This makes me wonder: who are the people that resist their time and place? And what are they determined by? These people who look for influence outside of what they are born into. Maybe they are born into the wrong environment, so they rebel against it and travel and explore until they find the right time and place. For the people who cannot access the time and place their heart desires, do they travel and search to no avail and then die feeling lost?
Are there some who exist who do not feel comfortable in any time and place, because it is so human, so physical and base? Are these demigods and prophets, or maybe even real and actual gods, or small slices of actual gods. I know I shouldn’t, but I am inclined to think less of people who are determined by their time and place. I think they are lazy and lack agency in their own lives. I think they float along like a piece of driftwood in the river and never really do anything but get pushed along by the current in whatever way. I think some very successful and famous people have even existed this way. And they were applauded and respected for doing nothing but floating along, just the same as other unsuccessful and poor and wretched people who have been punished and thrown out for the same exact spatiotemporal forces that aided the more fortunate.
The great irony is that, as you might have already assumed from my writing, I consider myself to be one who lives free of determinism, or at least rages against it the best I can, when in reality I am mostly likely determined just like everyone else. Even all my raging for freedom is likely determined. So that all my raging that I find so romantic and noble is no different from the determined lazy bum that never does anything in life and always takes the easy way out and even steals and kills. If he is determined by the same forces, he and I are the same, no matter what I achieve.
No different than a tree will grow tall when planted in good soil and watered, and a plant without will not. But is this any fault of the plant without? That it has not grown tall. And a star shooting in dark space at the edge of the galaxy will not light any planet. While our sun brings life and activity to so many creatures. But is this any fault of the distant shooting star? This starts to raise the question: how are we valuing these beings?
How are we determining that one is successful, right, and good while the other is failed, wrong, and bad. For the stars, for example, I’ve arbitrarily valued them based on the light they give to living beings, but is this an objectively true way to value a star? And for the trees, we value them by how tall they’ve grown, but is this an objectively true way to value a tree? And humans, we value based on wealth and fame, but is this an objectively true way to value humans?
This is another argument for why the study of aesthetics is more interesting to me than the study of ethics, because all value judgments reduce to non-truth claims. So not only are living creatures seemingly not responsible for the their choices and values that result from their determined conditions (except for those godlike humans who seem to have gained control of their own will), but even the values that do result from determined conditions, if we were to judge them and ascribe their good or evil to an agent, we have no standards for what is good or evil.
So this is my argument for art, for aesthetics over ethics. Because life is like a film or a game, where we can experience and appreciate and express gratitude and enjoy, but as far as responsibility and justice and morality—these all arise artificially, mostly via social controls, from our base needs for survival.
Action
When things take on a certain simplicity as far as what is important, I can commit to action; but this assumes that that for which we take action must be important, and of course the standard for importance is also in question.
Enlightenment
The Enlightenment advocated reason as a primary value of society; only that reason is an unstable foundation for society, if it reduces to uncertainties, especially in ethics.
Morality
Instinct is the moral code born in us; survival is its supreme value. As society became essential for survival, a new moral code of social law sometimes superseded instinct. And now there is reason and it’s supreme value is truth—only a certain absurdism comes from there being nothing certainly truthful about morality.
Choose
Maybe you don’t have to choose; maybe you just take it as is determined and find beauty and joy and gratitude in it and always chase after more and take in more.