metonymy4u

If a person is thirsty we give them water, if a child’s diaper needs changing we change it, if a car stalls we fix it. Why is it then if a person feels emotional pain, we so often respond by withdrawing ? As if ignoring the broken down car would help the engine fix itself…as if leaving on the soiled diaper is good for the child…as if thirst is best satisfied by water deprivation…. What is it about emotions that makes us run straight to retarded-ville? What evolutionary quirk makes us so squeamish about ourselves? We’re mammals. That means: hairy, emotional creatures. Don’t like it? Well, I bet the lizards would love a nice warm-blooded friend to keep them warm nights….

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I truly wish I could solve the world’s problems. If I could, I would. But the reason I can’t solve someone else’s problems is that I don’t go home with them. I go home with my own problems.

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The early existentialists shared a common vision: looking back to a time when the idea of life was inevitably bound up with the idea of good. A time when it would have been difficult to define existence as Hobbes did: merely freedom from violent death. I think Plato would respond to the modern situation by saying he would rather die than live the life we lead – empty of conversation, devoid of dialectic. By looking back to Plato, the existentialsists hope to revitalize this question: what is virtue-living? Without such a question, it is doubtful if anyone will be willing to purchase anything with the coin of the living. Without the question, it’s all bargain basement, 2-for-1 blue light specials. And a year later we give it away. Because we’re bored. Because we were never really interested in the first place.

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Plato’s form of the good has haunted the unregenerate west for centuries. The Platonic idea of the good is the notion that there is a necessary entity that imbues all other entities with just being. Not just mere existence, but an existence that is in some sense better than other existences. Nowadays I think we find such a notion both startling and un-necessary. Either that or it is viewed with suspicion by a politically polarized community more intent on rooting out the deep causes of social injustice. Still the intellectual puzzle remains: How would anyone even begin to explain such an understanding of the world? Well, once upon a time, the purpose of life was described not as a search for apps, likes, friends, or downloads but as a search for flourishing, which meant questioning and thinking. Thinking about such questions as: what is the nature of the good life? What is virtue? Justice? Harmony? Knowledge? Humanity? In the context of this search, which has been called “virtue ethics” the notion of the highest good being the search for the good itself would not have raised any eyebrows. In many ways I believe the rationalist ideal of a God which wills the best of all possible worlds is merely an accident of birth. As Plato’s children we had the full genealogy of virtue ethics infused right into our cellular structure. But forgetting this, we built the engine, the machine, and the idea of a life lived merely for the escape of momentary pain, rather than the search for any lasting benefit.

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Was Plato a rationalist? If so, why did he write poetry? Was it merely to escape state sanctioned murder for espousing, like Socrates, unpopular opinions? I don’t think so. Because there are things he put into his poetry that don’t need to be there to protect him from the revenge of the masses. Consider the following statement from the Meno:

…we ought not to listen to this sophistical argument about the impossibility of enquiry: for it will make us idle; and is sweet only to the sluggard; but the other saying will make us active and inquisitive. In that confiding, I will gladly enquire with you into the nature of virtue.

Plato argues not for the truth of the doctrine of recollection, but for its practical utility. In fact I believe Plato was the first pragmatist, searching out the specific wisdoms of all words that came before him. Trying to find what was useful in the rationalism of the Eleatics, the empiricism of the Ephesians, and the romanticism of the Pythagoreans. And presenting this unified field theory of being to us as a poem, for our delight, our consideration and our critical development.

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… what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and people–each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature–are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.
             -Hesse

Hesse was one of the great critics of modernity. Others included Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger and Rorty. They all, I think, owe a great debt to Rousseau for opposing Hobbesian liberalism on the grounds that it tends to weaken hope. Nietzsche saw the ghastly results of a Hobbesian liberal protectorate and decided that he would rather die than live without the hope of the romantic spirit. Kant spoke of the hope of autonomy, Kierkegaard of inwardness, Heidegger of being, and Rorty of love. What did Marx hope for? A stateless community in which inequality could once again become the source of human prosperity, rather than the thing which most needed to be controlled by the state. The problem was that Marx’s hope was for revolution: an up-by-the-roots replacement of all that we knew and understood. Suddenly, a new earthly Eden. But it never happened. Why? I think because people, real existing flesh and blood people, are far too afraid of losing what little they have. Much more strategic, it seems to me, is John Rawls’ model, in which Hobbesian liberalism is tempered by Marxist idealism. The question is: how do we preserve inequality and make it the basis of true prosperity? (That is, not the cynical, wanton and false inequality-prosperity of the GOP?). Or to put it another way: how do we build a society that capitalizes on natural inequalities, but is at the same time solidly and unequivocally to the advantage of the least equal in the community? I believe that only by following this sort of heuristic will we ever be able to find that balance between private irony and public hope which was Marx’s great legacy to the world.

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I realized yesterday why I am so averse to rationalistic metaphors. It is because they signal to me our sense of superiority over other species. And yet we know now that other animals also exhibit theory of mind, compassion, self-consciousness, a sense of right and wrong, love and grief. Given these data, I believe it is no longer possible to justify the mythical superiority of human idiosyncrasies. I suspect some may label me a misanthrope and summarily dismiss my concerns. To them I would say: look around you and tell me how the planet is globally better off than it was 50,000 years ago? To me rationalism is the antithesis of integrative ecologism. And I think it’s killing us.

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What would the world be like if we all suddenly started agreeing with each other? You don’t have to do anything differently, don’t have to change anything else. Just agree with everyone you meet today. What’s the worst that could happen? And the best?

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Footnotes? Nah. When was the last time you read a poem with footnotes? ¹

¹ “Ich wollte ja nichts als das zu leben versuchen,
was von selber aus mir heraus wollte.
Warum war das so schwer?”
-Hesse

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Sending out love and gratitude to all the women who have been a part of my life. You taught me everything I know.

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