What Kills Gods?

Nietzsche declared God dead, and I think it is safe to say that for the most part his declaration was premature but maybe not altogether wrong. Without reference to specific statistics (although you can look to the Pew Forum for confirmation if you're so inclined), it seems safe to say that if God is not dead, he's at least downsizing considerably.

There is an impulse that I often see that attributes the death of God to enlightenment. The story goes that man needed God because man was ignorant and needed explanations for his world, so he wrote God in all of the gaps. The gaps got smaller. There was less room to be occupied by God. So we killed him. Knowledge killed superstition.

This is not altogether wrong, but it misunderstands the complexity of human beings. It supposes that humanity were just sitting around trying to understand things, but in fact humanity has a whole life to live with concerns that have nothing to do with explanations.

In fact I imagine that if we were so inclined we could sit down and map out rough estimates of a number of different impulses that make God-talk appealing. And as each of those impulses is satisfied by some innovation other than God we will be able to watch the ranks of religious drop further and further. Because what kills gods is people ceasing to need them and then redirecting their energies and resources elsewhere.

However, we will also come to a group of impulses that is only satisfied by religious talk, and in these areas no amount of innovation over time will ever replace the need for religion.

Impulses like the need to relate to essential mystery. The need to transcend spacetime. And the need for a sense of cosmic justice. These are needs that will never be satisfied by any increase in knowledge, technology, or prosperity.

So knowing what it is that kills gods also shows that God will never quite die.

The Absence of Love

In the absence of Love, one will do whatever strikes the highest balance of ease and stimulation. Without Will to compel us to chase or seek after something, we will turn to what we already have that is able to keep the boredom at bay.

In short: find something to pursue or settle in for a life of binge eating and masturbation.

Will and the World

Given the conception of the world as one fact, what can we say about the will? The will does indeed still exist as a part of the world, as a part of the one fact, not divorced from it. This is not typically what we conceive of when we talk about free will, for the will in this conception cannot be separated from our situation and our backgrounds.

Our will is free - depending on what you mean it to be free from. Suppose a man asks for a will that is free from the world but not free from himself. In this case he has provided us with the context needed to consider the possibility: it is still his will but he wants it to be free from the world. This, I think, is what most people are really after when they begin speaking in absolutes with regard to free will.

At once we must ask a question: does the man exist on any level apart from the world? If he does not, then it is logically impossible for a will to be free from the world for him. This is not a question that can be investigated; the answer is found in the basic lenses one uses to see the world. If you believe in spirits, then he does indeed. If you are a materialist, then he does not.

What can be investigated is the question of what gaps might a transcendent will fill? We can examine the will that is not free from the world: we can investigate that behavior that is tied to the arrangement of matter in the brain, we can investigate the way different chemicals cause men to pursue different things, we can investigate the way that conditioning can cause a man to perform to some extent on command. Is there room for pursuits and behavior that have mysterious causes where a transcendent will might be responsible?

To some degree, this is a matter of investigation. To a greater degree, this is a matter of lenses.

We have not fully investigated the world of neuroscience, brain chemistry, drug interaction, or behaviorism. If we say that these things can explain all human behavior we are not stating a fact that emerged from following an epistemological method, we are instead stating an assumption or a faith that allows us to use an epistemological method. Even if we do advance to the state where we can say that there is no more progress to be made in these fields, how could we ever know with certainty that there were no background processes working that made the more prominent factors work? Maybe there are all kinds of souls and spirits swirling around every brain, without which no neurological process or drug interaction would ever produce a result? Simply because we are committed to Occam's Razor does not mean that the world shares our enthusiasm. In this way, the question is a question of lenses: are you willing to accept transcendent factors or do you restrict the world to the One Fact?

Let us end on a note of speculation. If there are transcendent wills, what does our experience of life tell us about them? They are not very powerful. Whatever they can do is very simple. Whenever we face a decision we tend to experience that decision as something that came from within us - perhaps the transcendent will is nothing more than a spirit that can choose to say or not say "yes" to an opportunity in the world. Forgive me - this is in large part philosophical fiction. Most significant in this concept, however, is the fact that the One Fact is being shaped by a multitude of transcendent factors. The form that the world takes can not merely be the form of the One Fact, it is the One Fact as tempered by billions of tiny wills making tiny changes.

At this moment I find this idea lovely and completely unpersuasive.

In the Beginning Was the Life

In the beginning was the life.

This cannot be emphasized enough. Philosophical types - perhaps scientific types too, for that matter - should have this written on their walls. Tattoo it on the backs of their wrists. Write in on chalkboards one hundred times daily. Scream it out at the moment of sexual climax.

The reason being that once one spends a length of time thinking philosophically about human behavior - that is, thinking deliberately about human behavior - one tends to forget that life was being lived prior to any theorizing or philosophizing. And if mass illiteracy were to suddenly sweep over humanity and if all language was reduced to grunting "food, fuck, bed" with varying tones of urgency, life would continue being lived although any heights of philosophy would have slipped out of reach.

Consider ethical philosophy. Consider Kant's categorical imperative and the system of morals that can be derived from that primary starting point. Now consider the utilitarian calculus used to determine the best possible action. Think to Aristotle's works on ethics and virtue. Now remember that people still found a way to make society work and found a way to behave decently toward one another prior to all of these philosophical projects. In the course of living their lives people had to work out ethical ways of living.

Which came first? A theory of ethics or ethical behaviors? Like most things I imagine that they exist in a kind of loop. One does a little theorizing which leads to a little more behavior which provides more data to be theorized about which leads to more refined behavior and so on. It seems to me that determining which one came first is a bit like finding the starting point in a circle. I mention this only so that there is no confusion that I am offering a theory about which came first - I do not care whether ethical behavior or ethical theory has chronological primacy. What I am saying is that deliberate philosophical systematic theorizing comes about after a way of life already exists.

In this way, I think we can see philosophy as a kind of refinement of natural human living. Perhaps we could say that it is life with art applied to it: an artistic rendering of what we were already doing. So ethics, for example, could be seen as taking the morality and concepts already guiding human behavior and chiseling away what had become useless and providing metaphysical groundings for what remained valuable so as to lend it power in debate and legitimacy in the face of disagreement, most importantly it allowed for the reaching of ethical heights which we never would have touched just living the way that came naturally. Epistemology too is just a matter of creating methods of thought that refine our natural more instinctual behavior pertaining to sorting reliable information, bullshit, error, and irrelevance.

Philosophy, then, is a kind of height, a luxury. We also see a way in which it can be evaluated. If the philosophy provides a method that allows us to live better than our instincts do, then we have encountered a philosophy that we help ourselves by living by. On the other hand if a philosophy provides a method that makes our lives more difficult, then we have found something that does not rise to the level of our instincts and cannot supplant or supplement them. Like someone trying to improve on a cupped hand by baking clay in a rounded shape with several holes in the bottom: we're better off with a cupped hand until you seal the holes.

Air so Thin You Can't Breathe

The difficulty of philosophy is that it consists, at least in part, of chopping the world into tiny atoms and then contemplating very simple relations. It all comes back to the basic sentence: xRy. We may suppose that when we engage in this kind of activity we are putting life under the microscope. We are looking at the world very closely to slip past all the messiness and complexity so that we can see the underlying order and simplicity. The presupposition is the world is simple and orderly and that life only perplexes us because there are so many simple and orderly relations sitting atop one another that it creates the illusion of chaos.

Yet, something has bothered me ever since my failed attempt at studying philosophy in college. In philosophy the air is so thin you can't breathe. The more complexity you strip away in the course of forming a picture of some aspect of the world, the less and less that your picture resembles the world. We philosophical types are the ones who have some defect of the brain that compels us to wrestle with these pictures and try to make them into something that we can live by; talk to someone who is struggling to get through an obligatory Intro to Philosophy class and note the way that the pictures being presented to them are utterly void of content for them. They find philosophy to be like offering someone a photo-realistic sketch and then handing them a stick figure.

Of course, stick figures just consist of lines on paper. Philosophy boasts an incredibly expansive vocabulary, esoteric word usages, mountains of primary texts next to ranges of secondary texts, and people who can sit down and actually speak in philosophy. From this the non-philosopher gets the impression that philosophy is deeply sophisticated, so the non-philosopher devalues himself by saying that he just can't understand it. He treats philosophy as something beyond him and comes to hate it bitterly.

What the non-philosopher does not understand is that philosophy is beneath his world. The pictures offered by philosophy are simplifications - that is - fictions. If the pictures bother you, it is probably because you realize you can't live in a world so small.

Even in my own writing this is something I am ever aware of. In my last blog I talked about loving the world deeply. As I re-read it I realized that it was entirely useless information for anyone other than me. My description is small, anyone reading it will picture a small world, no one could breathe that kind of air. Of course the ideas that preceded the blog mean the world to me; they have a deep significance, they are something that I can try to live my life by. The words themselves, though, are a kind of byproduct of a way of life. To someone living differently in a different situation with different values, my words have to be meaningless, it is the only way we forge our own individual lives is by being capable of not feeling the significance of every sincerely held worldview.

If you ever read a worldview that seems so small that you do not see how a person could actually live in that kind of world, one need only remember that someone is, in fact, living their life while espousing it.

A Theistic Answer to Chaos

My response to how we are to love in chaos is that we must love ever deeper. That the answer to the inevitability of despair is more love. That the answer to uncertainty is love. And I call my answer theistic not because one must necessarily believe in God, but because I consider this response to be foundational block to a higher theism that is rooted in love of God first and treats belief as a secondary concern.

To draw out my response, I offer this scenario:

A man loves a sick woman. The woman is fragile; she may live, she may die, she may live well, she may live broken. The man loves her, but he can protect himself from despair by starving his love for her. He can take rational, tactical steps to kill his love by choosing to meditate on certain thoughts, directing his attention on certain areas, and placing himself in certain situations. Likewise he can feed his love and grow ever nearer to her, to the point that her death might leave him a broken man.

If he constrains his focus in this way he will either starve his love and become a living-dead stoic or he will feed his love and invite the world to destroy him. What would I tell this man to do?

I would tell him to love the sick woman. Love her more and more. And love his house as well, the house he can share with her and that will remind him of her if she should die. And love their friends and family who will stand near him but be able to do nothing to console him internally. Love his job, which will become a heavy burden if he has to perform it while grieving. Love the world which is so arranged that his misery is a certainty. And love God to such a degree that he will continue to love if she lives and love if she dies.

This scenario, captures what I mean by adding more and more love. If using the word "God" makes this difficult, I invite you to instead use the word "Other." Make the choice to feed your love of that which is outside of you, that which you can not control. Love what you love and love in such a way that you will love even if love leads to despair.

One may perhaps wonder if we have rendered the word "love" meaningless. What is it to multiply love in this way?

Scream that you want her to live - deepen your commitment to her and do not let yourself pull back to protect yourself. And if she dies, own your despair and defiantly spit out, "your will be done." And then live in that way still, continue loving and knowing that with or without your permission, "his will be done" and react to that with acceptance. Return at all times to a harmony between Self and Other/Perception and Mystery/Man and God, resisting both the urge to remove one or the other.

Life is not Art

When I read The Duty of Genius, I came away feeling as though a real saint had lived in the not-too-distance past. I'm getting mushy and sentimental, but the world seemed better for having had a man like Wittgenstein as an example of the kinds of heights and depths a man could reach. His commitment to improve those around him likewise arouses in me a desire to improve those around me in some way.

In what way is this desire mine?

Why did I not have this desire prior to reading the book? Or if I did have it, why was it so anemic until I read the book (this is not to say that it is not still anemic, only to say that reading the book strengthened something)? How can I say that this is my desire when it was aroused by my environment?

But then, my environment could not produce the desire without me as a factor. So it is not as though I could say that it is the environment's desire and then consign myself to oblivion. I am there. I am a part of this.

However, when I read the book I did not read it for the purpose of arousing this desire. I read it wanting it to work some good on myself, but I did not know what good it would be. Like going to a surgeon and saying, "I've heard good things about you, why don't you knock me out and do what seems right to you!" Yes, I took a step in the process, and yes both the book and surgeon have to work with the material I provide them with, but it is not I that built myself into anything. I simply arranged the interaction.

When I see the world this way, I am more of a theist. Because I do not deny that I am there, but I do deny that I am sufficient for life. I can not view my life as a work of art; there is too much that belongs to the world for me to claim myself as any kind of ordered and intentional work. I hold out hope for a kind of determinism that would allow me to call the world God and would allow me to call life a wrestling with God.

A Practical Illustration of Layers

Why did you watch the movie?

Hedonist Layer: I wanted to feel excitement.
Escapist Layer: I wanted to forget I exist.
Seeker Layer: I wanted to see the world through the director's eyes.
Philosopher Layer: I wanted to see an argument illustrated.
Sentimental Layer: I wanted to relive the memories associated with this movie.
Critical Layer: I wanted to see whether the film met my criteria for a good film or not.
Commentator Layer: I wanted to be able to talk to people about this film.
Social Layer: I wanted an event to center my evening around.
Sexual Layer: I am attracted to the actors/actresses in the film.


There is one phenomenon: that of watching a movie. I say that these layers wrap around that phenomena in a way. If you ask why you watched it, you can appeal to the layers. If asked why anyone watches movies, you can appeal to the layers. But these Layers co-exist, there is not a proper Layer.

To each Layer exists different value judgments that would be valid or invalid. To each Layer are different things that are reasonable and things that are unreasonable.

A Brief Note on Layers

I have lately been thinking very much over an idea that I would currently like to call "Layers." This is, of course, a terrible name. I need something hard to pronounce to put in front of it, but for the time being, "Layers."

I do not yet entirely know what it is that I mean by Layers, but maybe I can illustrate it with a few examples.

Let us suppose that we observe a man giving away a sizable inheritance from his father, leaving him almost completely impoverished. Suppose that his father worked in one field his entirely life and the father groomed the man to work as he did, then the man goes to work in a different field. Suppose that we saw the man leave his homeland. Now suppose someone comes along and offers the theory that we are observing a man who is compelled to reject paternal authority.

By Layers I mean something like responding 'yes, that is the full and complete explanation. That is the best possible explanation you can give. At least according to certain criteria and certain context. In another context, according to another criteria, not at all.'

Perhaps what I mean is something like this: suppose our primary concern was the relationship between children and parents. In this case, saying that we are observing a man who is compelled to reject paternal authority is the only sensible answer. Any other answer is irrelevant and therefore inappropriate. But if we had a different primary concern, then this answer would likewise be inappropriate.

Why do I call it "Layers" though? This sounds more like what I frequently bring up with epistemic lenses and vantage points. Well, with epistemic lenses, the world is filtered through your axioms and your values. My talk of epistemic lenses has to do with the fact that all we have is perception, no direct apprehension of truth unfiltered, and the fact that the rules that we use to form beliefs are derived from our values. By Layers I mean we should see in all phenomenon multiple Layers at work.

I grow frustrated with my inability to think clearly. Let me give one more illustration.

Suppose a Gentile family gave birth to a boy who was switched with a boy born to a Jewish family at the hospital. The boy was raised by Gentiles lived like a Gentile: he ate pork, he kept his genitals intact, he referred to the first part of the Bible as 'old.' The boy raised by the Jewish family was raised as a Jew, culturally and religiously.

Was the boy raised by the Jewish family Jewish?
Layer 1 (all numbers assigned are arbitrary): No, he has no ethnic reason to be identified as Jewish.
Layer 2: Yes, he holds the propositions that we say constitute Judaism to be true statements.
Layer 3: Yes, he performs the rituals and actions that we say constitute Judaism.
Layer 4: No, he was not born of a Jewish mother.
Layer 5: Yes, he identifies himself as Jewish.
Layer 6: Yes, his behavior most closely resembles those that he grew up around, meaning that he behaves like his Jewish friends and would be grouped culturally with those Jewish friends.

Genetics, dogma, ritual, lineage, self-identity, cultural identity. They contain different answers to the question, and they are all true at the same time. All this is just to say, in some senses it is one way, in other senses it is another.

But this all leads me to a psychological statement. Even if someone has a vast vocabulary, they only say one word at a time. And even if someone has seen the world, they only have one visual field at any instant. That is, even if we exist in different places according to a multitude of different layers, maybe we only have one primary layer that we recognize at a time. We see the world according to one primary concern, perhaps.

If a man commits a crime and you ask him why he did it, he may tell you, and he may speak honestly. This still may not scratch the surface of the reason he did it. Maybe there was a long list of different Layers that he exists in, and in some layers it was rational to commit the crime and in other Layers it was irrational. When you ask him, he will describe the situation in terms of his preferred Layer. But there are, of course, other Layers and those other Layers had their say too.

Where It Lies

We must be able to see where a thing can actually lie, to know what we say can actually be modified by a predicate and what is only modified by a predicate as a kind of metaphor.

Suppose I said, "that is an angry mob." In a way I have spoken plainly. We understand what a mob is and we understand what it means when a mob is angry as opposed to, say, a rushing mob at Christmas time. In another way, though, I have actually used a metaphor. I have assigned an emotional state to a group of people, but there is nothing that it is like to be a group of people (if there is then it is an experience that is forever closed off to us because we only experience what it is like to be a person never any kind of aggregate consciousness). Only individual human beings experience the emotional state of anger, mobs do not experience anything they are just collections of human beings that do. In this sense, using the term "angry mob" is a metaphor.

We must be able to see where things actually lie to avoid falling into confusion. When we speak of aggregates having emotions we may be able to speak very usefully: companies lacking morale, countries in despair, families that are vengeful. We might say that we are speaking on a macro level for handling macro situations. But how does one improve a company's morale? Such a thing is not directly possible. You must improve the morale of the individual employees.

It appears to me that in statistics and sociology it is easy to forget that in a very real sense the whole enterprise is metaphor. You describe on a wide scale a story for a people group. But in the actual world there is not a wide story for a people group, there are stories for individual people and those stories happen to resemble each other.

A Distinction of Note

Divide the joys of life into two camps: joys which are dependent upon the state of the world and joys which are only dependent upon one's own will.

The result of pursuing the first sort of joy is despair and frustration. That is not to say that there will not be happiness as well, but it will almost certainly be intermingled with life refusing to provide what it is that your will is demanding.

The result of pursuing the second sort of joy is numbness. One will be able to please oneself whenever it is wanted and consequently feelings will lose their dimension. Like soaking a canvas in blue or flooding a room with bright light: the details fade away and depth becomes impossible to perceive.

Mythology

Suppose we instead viewed all philosophy, all theory, all theology, and all metaphysics as being creative acts. Indeed in this age we already typically view theology as a creative act, and more and more philosophy and metaphysics seems relegated to that category, but theory endures. Suppose we added theory to the bin as well. Where would that leave humanity?

It would be a return to mythology. We would see a theory not as a potential explanation, but instead as a creative story that allows us to make sense of phenomena. But then, we could not really believe those myths, could we? How could one live in such a world? It seems as though there would be too much irony to even breathe. You would speak, but mutter under your breath, "not that any of this is true."

I suppose the question becomes: how could one live authentically in a world without truth in theory. What is the man prior to the word? What is there prior to the explanation?

At the Crossroads of Dissatisfaction and Sloth

There exists a particular kind of despair in the world: not a very intense one nor (usually) a very long lasting one, but one that crops up from time to time in life. That despair is the feeling of lacking the energy to do anything challenging or requiring ones attention, but also being unable to get any significant stimulation or satisfaction from the old and familiar. Moments of this kind of despair are moments of the most pathetic feeling boredom: you're bored because the old stuff ain't interesting and you can't be bothered digesting any new stuff.

I'd like to offer a reasonable solution to this problem: perhaps the answer is to muscle through the lack of energy and force yourself to learn something new (this has never worked for me); perhaps the answer is to take a deep breath and put on an old movie and force yourself to appreciate what you already know (again, this has never worked for me). Frankly I've never found a solution except to wait until either the jadedness passed or you get some vigor back.

The Dark Knight Rises, Fear, and Humanity

Perusing different blogs and articles written around the time that The Dark Knight Rises came out, I noticed that some writers complained that the movie seemed to turn the progress of the trilogy backward to force Bruce to learn the same lessons all over again. I agree that it would make for a less exciting and less interesting movie if this were the case, but I think that the actual lesson Bruce had to learn in the last movie was not only different from what he learned in Batman Begins, but actually contradicts and - through that contradiction - fulfills the trilogy by marking the true death of Batman and the true rise of Bruce Wayne.

In Batman Begins, Bruce is initiated into the League of Shadows, an order that relies on the killing of fear within themselves so as to better utilize the fears of the citizenry of decadent cultures in the course of dismantling their civilizations. Bruce has to confront his own fear to be inducted as a member of the League; upon leaving the League, Bruce utilizes their tactic of using his enemy's fears to turn the Batman symbol into something larger than life to wage his war on crime.

The key here is that Bruce had to rise above his own fear. We see when he was a child that he was a very fearful child, particularly of bats. When Bruce returns to Gotham we no longer see any fear left in him. As Scarecrow's fear toxin shows, there is still fear within Batman, but Batman rises above Bruce Wayne's fears for the sake of his city.

In The Dark Knight Rises we see a Bruce completely lacking in fear, or anything else for that matter. Bruce's identity as Batman has been retired and his driving desire as Bruce Wayne - Rachel Dawes - was taken from him by the Joker. He wastes away in his mansion, waiting to die. As Bane says, "you don't fear death. You welcome it." Batman no longer rises above Bruce Wayne's fears, rather, Bruce Wayne no longer has fears.

In the prison, Bruce consistently fails to make the climb to the top of the prison. In a move that I'm sure we all saw coming a mile away, we see that it is the rope that is holding Bruce back. The fact that he could always try again kept him from having the inner will to jump the distance. As the exchange between Bruce and the Blind Prisoner shows,

Blind Prisoner: You do not fear death. You think this makes you strong. It makes you weak. 

Bruce Wayne: Why? 

Blind Prisoner: How can you move faster than possible, fight longer than possible without the most powerful impulse of the spirit: the fear of death. 

Bruce Wayne: I do fear death. I fear dying in here, while my city burns, and there's no one there to save it.  

Blind Prisoner: Then make the climb. 

Bruce Wayne: How? 

Blind Prisoner: As the child did. Without the rope. Then fear will find you again.

The lesson Bruce learns in The Dark Knight Rises is the value of fear within oneself. Without fear and without love, Bruce becomes a living corpse wasting away in his mansion. Once he is broken by Bane and left in the pit, he still has love compelling him forward to save Gotham City, but he has no fear. He is not yet human again without repulsion as well as attraction. Once he makes the climb without his rope he rediscovers his fear and thereby once again becomes fully Bruce Wayne and is therefore able to fully become Batman once again.

Whereas the trilogy starts out with Bruce having to escape the power of fear, the trilogy ends with Bruce relying on the power of fear. The ending especially draws this out - Bruce would have been happy to die at the beginning of the movie, but by the end his will to live is strong enough that he allows Batman (who is a symbol and who dies insofar as people recognize him as dead) to die while he moves on to live his life as Bruce Wayne.

Whatever the other faults of the movie, I have to say that rehashing old lessons and arcs is not one of them. Bruce's arc in this movie follows from the arcs of the previous movies, completing and fulfilling them.

The Stoic Impulse

I imagine the impulse that stoicism (a la Marcus Aurelius, anyway) proceeds from is aroused when a man has a desire for one thing for which he is prepared to say that he would devote his entire life. He speaks and says that there is one thing by which he will judge his every virtue and determine his every action and his entire life will be one of servitude to this one thing.

And then he wakes up and prepares to work, but can not focus because of hunger, so he spends an hour cooking and eating breakfast. Then he heads off to resume his work when he starts talking to his wife about their home and what they need to do to maintain it. Then just as he is ready to begin his day of service once again, he realizes that his head is not in the right spot yet, so he resolves to read/watch TV/play videogames/jerk off until he has the peace of mind needed to pursue his goal resolutely.

He speaks and says that there is one thing by which he will live, and then he lives to the contrary.

None of the things he does throughout the day satisfy him in a deep way – that is for the one thing. But when it comes time to pursue the one thing and he finds that his heart has shifted, that there is something else he wants first. His heart is tossed about and does not stay the course, which leads to self-loathing because he is himself what stands in the way of what he loves. So he becomes a stoic, imposing his love on reason and nature by declaring its value to be based in fact rather than based in his will, because he can not trust his will to remain steady.

If he does not pursue the one thing he will remain unsatisfied; but the one thing has only truly captured a fragment of who he is, the real power and drive focuses elsewhere.

So he beats his body and accuses all the parts of himself that have real drive and focus of being carnal or base and elevate the part of himself that loves the one thing and makes it into a reason, a mind, or a soul. He allows the flesh to be stronger in force so long as whatever loves the one thing is qualitatively better. Then he turns on his own flesh, demanding that it live according to reason and cut the world into ribbons to ensure that it is not charmed or enchanted by anything that is contrary to nature (contrary, that is, to the one thing).

This I say is the impulse that stoicism proceeds from: desire to ascend to a height tempered by the self-doubt that arises when one regularly disappoints oneself.

Digestion of Media

I have noticed as of late that whenever I cycle through my phone to choose music to listen to, I invariably tap the "Recently Added" button and choose from among the first ten or so songs. I have also noticed that whenever the player moves beyond my most recent additions, my finger starts pressing the skip button.

I remember being in early High School and getting excited whenever Sublime's Wrong Way or Date Rape came on the radio. Then I remember later in High School listening to Nirvana songs over and over again. Then I entered college and began listening to Rammstein's singles. Rarely will my music player land on a Sublime, Nirvana, or even Rammstein song without my ears itching to hear something else.

I wonder if my interest in a song, or more properly my boredom with a song, has nothing to do with the traits of the songs themselves and more to do with the novelty of the song. Perhaps what keeps my attention is the extent to which the song lies outside what I am used to, the extent to which the song has not been already digested.

Imagine it in this way. You encounter a new sound, a new arrangement of instruments, a new combination of tone, accent, and emotion in a voice, and if it has an initial appeal to you, you begin playing it in your head if not playing it through speakers. You begin wrapping your mind around it, you begin making it more and more familiar to yourself. This may take a long time, it may only take a few weeks, but in time you find that whatever it was in the song that fascinated you begins to fade.

I submit that the fascination arose because there were characteristics in the song that stood outside of you. The song left impressions that were unfamiliar, perhaps only a few unfamiliar impressions in otherwise well-traveled territory. If those impressions struck you as lovely, then you are driven to consume them. Paradoxically you want to end what makes those elements interesting: the fact that you have not already made them a part of yourself.

Fascination, in this conception, is the feeling one gets when they find something outside themselves that they want to add to themselves. Contempt, then, in the usage of "familiarity breeds contempt" is the feeling one has when one encounters something with nothing new to chew on.

Adoption, Lineage, and Self from the Armchair

GTW: Hey, baby, you know I really want to get back into my blog. I was doing pretty good for a while there, but, like always, meatspace came between me and my internet time. The problem is, I don't have any inspiration yet, can you think of a good question for me to write about?

GF: Well, I can think of a few. How about this one: Is there a deep need for people who are adopted to find their biological parents and if so, what are they hoping to fulfill?

GTW: That's empirical.

GF: What?

GTW: That question can be measured, studied, and answered through the use of empirical data. You could interview adopted people, you could observe their behavior, and then definitively answer to what extent adopted people need to find their biological parents. 

GF: Oh, I see. Well I guess if your penis isn't big enough to answer that-

GTW: I'll do it!

Is there a deep need for people who are adopted to find their biological parents and if so, what are they hoping to fulfill?

On the one hand, this is a question that can be investigated empirically, on the other hand I don't do very much of that here. Instead I like to use questions like these as springboards into investigating staples of human experience - even if sometimes those experiences only come to a handful of people. It is my hope that my speculations, investigations, and explanations are accurate and illuminating, but if you are an adopted person and upon reading this you just shake your head and say, 'this guy has no idea what he's talking about,' well, yeah, no argument here. The value in this particular blog, if there is any value, is that hopefully someone can relate to the desires and needs described or will find the desires and needs described interesting and worth contemplating.

A few months back I wrote a kind of pretentious little number about the Self and the Other. The point of it being that something we see as Self in one comparative scheme could be Other in another. Self can be seen as a kind of gamut or gradient (more-Self; less-Self) instead of a binary (Self; not-Self). In that blog I was looking at the individual in relation to sensation and environment, but we can play out another scenario when we compare the individual to other members of society.

I am a man, so, I am mankind rather than, say, animals, rocks, and trees. I am an American, rather than European, African, or Asian, which are Other to me. I am a member of my family, which means I am a Wise and whatever you are is Other. 

For an adopted person, however, it is not clear which is Self and which is Other. You are raised according to the values, traditions, desires, and idiosyncrasies of one family, but your genetic material comes from another. So which one is Self? 

In fact, the one which is Self will depend on the particulars of your own nature. Maybe you do not care about genetics (although, that certainly will not stop genetics from having its say over your life), and consequently it does not matter to you who you birth parents are. Alternately, maybe you believe that your life is written in your DNA, so no matter how your new family raised you, you are not really theirs but rather belong with the people who put you up for adoption. In all likelihood, though, you will find that neither of these viewpoints encompass the whole picture.

The essence of the need to find ones biological parents is the need for a complete picture of oneself. This goes back to my gamut of the Self - in fact there is a great deal of what we consider to be in some way our selves that we are ignorant of. The need to find biological parents is about acquiring more information, finding out things about oneself that may have been previously overlooked.

It could be silly things like discovering that all members of one's adoptive family have to pee as soon as they wake up; it could be deeper matters like discovering a predisposition to addictive behavior in the biological family or finding inordinate bravery among the members of one's biological heritage. It could mean finding sources for known idiosyncrasies (say, finding out that everyone in your family has to unmix the mixed nuts before they can eat them), it could be finding out that you are a part of people groups that you never previously thought to identify with.

So, let me tell you about my birth family... the Goldbergs....

 We can argue about the exact proportions, but it is safe to say that both upbringing and genetics play significant roles in who we are and how we behave. For this reason, the adopted have a desire to know who supplied the genetics. Further, we (even those who are not adopted) desire to trace our ancestry, we feel pride when we find out about the heroic or monumental roles our ancestors played - pride like we somehow found out that we are in some way greater than we were previously. It is all about discovering Self.

And maybe there's just a twinge of hope that we'll find out that there is something awesome in us that we never knew about. Maybe we hope that we'll find some discovery that will give us a brand new vantage point from which to judge ourselves. Maybe we are better than we ever thought possible. We might have that hope, but then, discovering your heritage does not in any way alter your heritage. You still are who you always were, in all your glory and shame, all that would change is your perception of it. 

But then, maybe that perception makes all the difference.

So Much Repetition

Sometimes you'll find a thought, a fantasy, or a project large enough to capture every free thought that you have. Your mind will seem to be constantly playing thoughts with the same flavor; you can savor the productivity and the love that's involved in that kind of single-minded pursuit, but at the same time it is easy to begin wanting change for change's own sake.

Especially because at some point the thought will creep into your head whether or not the thing you are focused on actually deserves that much attention. It is here that you have to be cautious - there's going to be an impulse that says it's best to cut your losses and find new mental territory to dwell in for awhile. As with most impulses, there's no clear correct response. Shifting up focus keeps you well-rounded, but staying the course allows for the possibility of reaching an emotional height.

Self vs. Other

I imagine my body and I imagine the surrounding landscape. I observe the sensations of the body, but the landscape I observe only through the impressions it leaves on my senses. The body I call Self - the landscape I call Other.

Go back further. I imagine my mind and I imagine my body. I apprehend the thoughts of the mind directly, but the sensations of the body must be made conscious for me to apprehend them. The mind I call Self - the body I call Other.

Deeper still, the thoughts come when they want. The mind works, what is conscious becomes conscious without any input of mine, and the thoughts pop up. The mind I call Other - what then is the Self? Only the perception.

A Conception of Despair

If we conceive of human beings as lacking unity, of having a divided nature that may or may not be united in its ends, if we conceive of value as consisting of whatever individual humans happen to love and desire, and if we conceive of happiness as a kind of satisfaction or indulgence of our loves and desires, then I propose a conception of despair.

Despair is the state one gets into where one or more deep fragments of one's nature desires what conflicts with one or more deep fragments of one's nature. The result is that harmony and satisfaction becomes impossible: every indulgence is simultaneously a wound and every satisfaction simultaneously a poisoning. Happiness eludes a person in such a state because their loves and desires cannot be altogether taken care of.

What hope would there be in such a situation? So far as I can see, only a self-recreation could save such a person. They would require a new nature so that they would love differently.