Can't Build Mud - Can't Break it Either

Imagine a big watery handful of dirt and sludge, and imagine some poor kid trying to build a sand castle with it. He tries to make a tower, but in the end he has a muddy puddle. He tries to shape an arch, but he gets a muddy puddle. This kid is not going to be able to pull off any of his architectural endeavors... unless he decides to aspire to a muddy puddle.

At the same time, that kid's asshole brother is never going to be able to smash his castle.

Throughout the world there are a lot of therapeutic philosophies that boil down to some form of simplification. They tell you to loosen your connection to the world, not to get too tied to the ebbs and flows of life, give up desire and give up your love of this world. These philosophies exist because they work: try to build nothing and you can never have what you built destroyed. Store up treasure in heaven, lest the moth eat your suit and the rust sully your treasure.

This is an opting out of the pain of life by surrendering the pursuits of love and ambition. Despair requires a will that can be denied. Not only this, but the simple man automatically has greater claims to wisdom. He is not failing at anything; he never even bothered to try. He can dispense sage advice because what failed endeavors can you point to as evidence that he does not know what he is talking about.

He opted out of pain and failure. All he had to do was opt out of life first.

For living is repeated failing. Repeated frustration. A wrestling match with God via your struggles with his creation. If a man isn't failing, how much living is he doing?

What then does one do with this option? You might choose to take it and live as some version of a monk; you might start learning not to try. Alternately, knowing full well what you are subjecting yourself to, you might try to live all the same. You may not appear wise, you may lead a life of struggle, but you are choosing to live.

As with most things, I imagine that the best course of action is the essence of one option tempered by the wisdom of the other. Choose life, I say, but know that failure is despair and that life must be made simpler if it is to be managed. Do not just be water, have grit as well.

Like damp sand. Perfect for building a sandcastle... even if your asshole brother decides to come up and smash it later.

An Essential Flavor

I am and I remain an advocate for non-centralized value systems; I do not believe that human beings - in general, anyway - have a hierarchy of values with a summum bonum up top that provides value to everything beneath. We have distinct values - competing values. However, I have also noticed that humans have a tendency toward an essential flavor in their values - something that they feel should be present in all their pursuits and experiences lest a feeling of absence be experienced.

This "essential flavor" does not necessarily give the experience its value, but it is something that is sought and expected, and when it is not present it leaves the perceiver feeling as though there is something inadequate. These "essential flavors" seem to take the form of a profound interest or preoccupation and when experiences do not account for this interest or preoccupation the person may feel as though they are a bit distracting.

To illustrate the concept, imagine a mother who can no longer lose herself in anything that does not in some way better her children. Imagine the devout believer who feels dissatisfied when he cannot tie his moment to God. Imagine the addict who no longer enjoys his activities unless he can enjoy them with his substance of choice.

To understand a person's desired essential flavor is one of the quickest ways to see how that person could be given satisfaction or given despair. Remove it from their life and, though their life remains rich, for a time it will darken and become gray without the aspect that they have come to crave. Add it to their lives, and perhaps even the most mundane of activities can be enriched with that special spark that will keep them content in the midst of it.

Evolution of Will and Reason Applied to Skill Development

Previously I wrote about the way that a primitive stage of will and a primitive stage of reason build off of each other to eventually evolve into Will and Reason. I now think that this particular bit of theorizing can actually have a practical application, seeing as there is no reason to suppose that this is isolated to the development of a human being, but should be able to be adapted to more particular situations. In fact, I think that this model could be used as a guide to acquiring new skills later on in life.

We begin with dissatisfaction(W), which leads to movement, which leads to encounters(R). When encounters are multiplied they become experience(R), and experience filtered through the particulars of our nature becomes preference(W). Preference compels us to act in such a way that we avoid some things and cling to others, necessitating a model of the world to guide us, this model being Reason or Language. Reason and Language give form to our preference allowing us to pursue even that which does not sit in front of us, at last resulting in Will.

This is the picture of I have of the evolution of Will and Reason, now apply this picture to the acquisition of a more particular skill.

We begin by being dissatisfied with our skill set. Maybe we are well accomplished, but we lack, say, a musical skill, or perhaps we are utterly unskilled from years of laziness and we wish to reverse this. So we begin searching for a skill to learn, we watch films, we talk to friends, we surf the internet, and we start having encounters. We see the art of guitar playing from the outside, we hear someone play the piano, we listen to a dear friend explain the exact technique for copulating with an oboe. Preferences begin to emerge - we certainly do not want anything to do with the oboe, but the piano arouses our passions, the prospect of learning it excites us. Perhaps we pursue the piano, and then find that we miss the showmanship associated with actually moving our instrument around with us as one does with a guitar - perhaps we find that we are more interested in an instrument that can be carried around and played at any moment - these things we discover with experience, which in turn refines our preferences and makes them more specific.

Finally, with preference and experience, we can use reason and language to state a goal or objective. We take our preferences and we state that we want to be a part of a band, or we state that we want to play at street fairs or what have you. This is the form that our will takes: Will-to-Bandhood or Will-to-Irritate-Fair-Patrons. Then we can organize our lives and efforts in the context of this will, acting in such a way as to bring about the desired.

At least until we decide that we really should learn a classic game, chess perhaps?

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.

Evolution of Will and Reason

We do not begin with Will or with Reason. When you see a baby crying, can you really say that it is expressing will? Will to what? If you gave a baby a series of buttons that would provide various things that a baby might need (a diaper change, milk, a cuddle, a fork to check out what's going on in that outlet over there), what would a crying baby do? Probably smack them all - does the baby know why it cries? This much is certain: the baby cries.

We will not say that babies are not smart, but are they exercising reason? Experiences they desire, experiences they shy away from. What actions are performed to bring about these experiences. Is this reason? I would not call it that. All of it is experience, encounter, appearance. The baby is bombarded by the world. The baby does not talk, the world is not put into words.

We do not begin with will, we begin with dissatisfaction. We do not begin with reason, we begin with encounters.

How do we distinguish between will and dissatisfaction? Dissatisfaction compels us to move. Will compels us to move somewhere. Will contains an aim, a destination, it is Will-to-Something. Dissatisfaction is just a need to move.

How do we distinguish between reason and encounter? An encounter can not be put into language, it simply is. Reason is judgment and language, a model of the encounter that can be used to relate and predict encounters.

Dissatisfaction and encounters escalate one another. One is dissatisfied so one begins moving nowhere, leading to more and more encounters - Experience. One has more and more encounters and the proliferation of encounters allows Preference to emerge from the interaction of Experience and Nature. Once we have Preference we need to understand the world so as to navigate it and increase that which we prefer and mitigate that which we dislike, we need information for a purpose and that leads to Reason. Once we have Reason we can cast the world into different forms by the use of our words and through the creation of relations, only then do we give form to our Preference and turn it into something that can be pursued: Will.

I do not actually imagine that these things happen all at once, as though Dissatisfaction occurs, Dissatisfaction produces Experience, which produces Preference, which produces Reason, which produces Will. Rather I think there are a multitude of tiny back-and-forth interactions wherein each reinforces and builds one another.

We must wonder, though, is Will and Reason the terminus?

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.

Resisting the System

In the past all I wanted was to weave all my thoughts and theories into one big, coherent system that explained my fundamental views on the world and invited (read: coerced) others to come live in that system. Today I think my thinking is more sophisticated than it has ever been, but I also find that it resists systematization. I think in remarks, I think in isolated games and relations, I oftentimes relate those relations to one another, but they do not have their proportions worked out. I don't have a hierarchy, I don't have a scale for those games in relation to one another.

Sometimes I want to sit down and build that system, but I resist that urge. Why?

To get the baser reason out of the way: because not trying ensures that I won't fail. For the more fundamental reason, though, I have come to distrust systematic thinking.

I find relations to be more personal than nouns. When we observe phenomena we tend to observe them in largely the same way - that is when we talk about them we don't seem to spend much time squabbling over, say, the blueness above us or the greenness beneath us. We don't squabble terribly much when we observe common relations, like the being-on-top spatial relation between a cat and a rug or the prior-to temporal relation of Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama. But we do notice increased squabbling around the point where we discuss relation, like discussing the similarity relation between a given lasagna and a given pizza. We are left in dark and confusing territory when we begin discussing causal relations, like bad parenting, destructive culture, genetic predisposition, and mental disorder in relation to a given committed crime. Then we enter into full-on war when we discuss the proportional relations like the balance of strength and speed in successful martial arts strategies.

We find some relations which rely heavily on common, public appearance and phenomena, like spatial relations. Then we find relations which seem to be based largely on personal intuition and seem to be perceived much differently depending on the one who perceives. Sometimes these latter relations can be cast in a way that can be publicly measured, sometimes they cannot.

In terms of system building, it seems inevitable that much of the scaffolding will be made of these personal relations. Perhaps to me we have to start with the absurdity of human existence, or perhaps we have to start with the question of what can be known, or we can ask how we follow God in a modern age, or we can ask what is the Good. Perhaps I say that this starting question (whichever one I choose) has a primacy relation to all other questions, my question must be asked first. Of course there is no appearance that we can measure to see if this is true, and there is no shortage of people submitting alternative questions that they claim has a primacy relation. The system becomes deeply personal, less and less available to other people living their lives.

Or, to put it in a another way: perceived abstract relations contain something personal to the speaker. The bigger the relation, the more personal it becomes. The more personal it becomes, the more alien it is to other people. So whereas my little isolated relations and games contain a little that is personal and offers itself to other people as eager, helpful tools, if I were to turn them into a large system it would taste so much like me that only those who happen to like my flavor would be able to thrive living by my system.

From the Point of View of 60-90 Years on a Spinning Rock

Suppose that there is indeed a creator God and suppose that there is no life outside of planet Earth, just an enormous universe that is indifferent to man and arouses indifference in man. For what reason would a creator God create such a universe?

Consider also the lifespan of a human being. Compared with the timeline of the universe a human being who manages to see his one hundredth year still does not rise to even a hair's width on that timeline. Even the timeline of human history makes any individual life seem hopelessly short. Supposing a creator God, why would the world be set up in this way?

Pausing to note that this question can not be answered in any satisfying way, I remind you that the question is asked to shed insight on a facet of life, not to actually try to discern the artistic sensibilities of an incomprehensible deity. That would require a blog post at least twice this length.

I take this arrangement of the universe and this arrangement of lifespans as creating a situation wherein one can not sensibly live while trying to view the world sub specie aeterni. We cannot make sense of our lives by looking at the universe - by trying to see the one fact. Our lives are hopelessly insignificant looked at from that vantage point, we would not be able to rise from our beds in the morning if we felt and valued as people who grasped the universe. Instead the only way to live is to every day see the world from our point of view: from the perspective of a chunk of rock spinning around a star and only about 60-90 years of that point of view to boot. Any other point of view makes life unlivable.

Does this mean that I think that objectively our lives are insignificant? My god, objectivity is not an option! But, no, I do not say that objectively our lives are either significant or insignificant. The significance arises when the world is seen from a certain perspective. If you adopt certain perspectives, the entire human condition becomes a sickly mistake; adopt other perspectives and there is nothing more important than a human life. That is, objectively human life is absurd given certain contexts, and objectively human life is epic given other contexts.

And if there is a God, I think that this arrangement of the universe was a method by which he choked off certain kinds of perspectives.

Will and Reason

I have blogged much about Will and Reason, usually by talking up the role of Will as determining the context in which we reason and downplaying Reason as doing the grunt work once Will determines the axioms and values. It has occurred to me lately, though, that Will without Reason is limp.

Without Reason to provide models and pictures, Will has no form or direction. I want, but the want has no structure. Maybe we could call it dissatisfaction: it does not quite rise to the level of moving us to act, but it does ensure that we sleep poorly. It is only after Reason provides us with Concepts, Relations, and Paths that our Will actually takes on a form and compels us to motion.

Suppose a man is dissatisfied. There is nothing he can do about it. Suppose the man observes that after lifting weights there is muscle growth, and after cardio there is weight loss, and that after eating some foods his muscles are larger and feel better and after eating other foods his gut becomes larger. Reason allows him to define concepts like Hypertrophy, Caloric Deficit, and Nutrition and it allows him to relate proper Nutrition to Caloric Deficit and Hypertrophy, finally showing him the consequences that result from his actions relevant to these concepts.

Only with the model does his dissatisfaction become something like Will-to-Health or Will-to-Strength. Prior to the model, it's just a little groan he gives when he grabs his gut fat.

Science as Communal

Let me cast science in this way: science is a method of developing theories via a consistent approach to phenomena to provide a set of communal theories. By this I mean that we all make observations, we all encounter phenomena, and we all imagine how these phenomena relate to one another. These imagined relations are theories. These theories aim at the truth (how things really are), but the truth can not be determined independently of perception; so we have two criteria that allow us to sort theories: coherence and pragmatism. Scientists take theories and apply pragmatic tests to them to see what works and what does not - and decent scientists and philosophers and lay thinkers can read popular theories and see which ones cohere together and which ones do not.

Fundamentally, science must be communal. The theories that science declares the best possible theory at any given time may not be the best possible theory in relation to a given individual. Perhaps the individual requires a theory that affirms his image of himself or perhaps he needs theories delivered to him with a taste of anthropomorphism. This science need not do. The individual's genetic make-up and life-experiences may incline him to certain idiosyncrasies when theorizing on phenomena; science restrains itself to pragmatism and coherency because these two criteria are useful for nearly every human trying to make sense of the world (indeed, it is hard to imagine someone who would value a theory for not working even if they happen to value a non-working theory over a working one).

The result is that science allows people from varying backgrounds, with varying wills, to sit down and imagine relations between appearances that can guide and inform anyone. Scientific theories are public theories.

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.

Love in Chaos

Suppose you lived in a world full of treasures that commanded your affection. It was not necessary for you to own them to love them, simply the fact that they existed made you happy. Like any love, however, you could starve or feed your attraction. Then suppose that these treasures just started shattering. You wake up one morning and some lovely statue that you would have happily sold your grandmother for now lies shattered on your feet; that night the most magnificent building ever created just sort of crumbled into a nearby lake. The rubble killed a lot of beautiful fish. The most gorgeous woman in the world let herself go at dinner last night and turned into Bruce Vilanch. The sweetest drink that would ever touch your lips got watered down and added to some Mountain Dew.

Living in such a world, what would you do with your love? Would you feed it? Would you let yourself get attached to all the stuff that was falling apart, opening yourself up to despair? Or would you starve it? Would you continue living due to some accursed Will-to-Live, but stoically trying to live without love or affection as though you were already dead to avoid the pain of loss?

Perhaps the world is not quite so chaotic, but then it is not entirely right to say that we do not live in a world like the one described. The things we love do fade - it is a certainty that any person we love will one day die and it requires the cooperation of a wide network of people in order to preserve any particular object through the ages. And neither option of starving or feeding love is exactly a winner. Indeed, it is very brave and noble and tragic to dare to love despite the inevitability of despair, but, from the point of view of the person who despairs, is it truly an enjoyable life? And a long, drawn out suicide-by-avoidance just sounds exhausting as hell to me. How could you get up in the morning if you viewed each day as an opportunity to try to avoid any attachments in life? So far as I can tell this worldview only really works if you do not acknowledge it - or only acknowledge it with feigned irony; by all means start on the porn at one in the afternoon when you finally wake up and finish up by the time you've exhausted yourself back to sleep, but how will you find the drive to even Google if you say that plan out loud?

Of course there is the Platonic/Jesus option:

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:19-21

Escaping the chaotic world for the sake of another world: a world of forms or a kingdom of heaven. Something general, something essential, something fundamental, something perfect, something incorruptible. Something that isn't falling apart.

Maybe it works for some people, but I find that this leads us to one of two positions, one of which is untenable the other of which I can agree with but do not find especially meaningful. 

Sometimes we create a picture of Heaven by taking our world and stripping out everything we dislike, leaving us with something two-dimensional and unsatisfying since it is, after all, a reduction of our own world. When I see people posturing on the internet by linking to some given immorality and then saying "come quickly Lord Jesus," I do not see someone who is speaking out of love for heaven, but someone who is speaking out of loathing for earth. In fact the desire for an Otherworld seems entirely based on a recognition of the inadequacy of our own world: any attempt to actually describe what would make the Otherworld so lovely tends to reduce to just cutting off the nasty bits of our own world. Those who do try to describe their Otherworld tend to start slashing at their membership roster as one man's utopia tends to be another man's hell.

Other times we acknowledge that if there is an Otherworld, it is a mystery to us. We have no appearances to form a picture of it from. We do not know what appeal it will have for us. I like this approach in that it does not try to say more than it can say, but we must still acknowledge that it does not say much.

What then are we to do?

Breed of Cowardice? Sensible Position?

Regarding my previous post.

Is this a breed of cowardice? It certainly could be called that. For indeed you could say that I am afraid of living in a blind and chaotic world and consequently I cast the world as an act of God to impose the appearance of order, intention, and art on the cold, indifferent universe.

On the other hand, is it a sensible position? I too believe it could certainly be called that. After all, it is no less an imposition to call the universe cold and indifferent. If we can impose that image, why can we not impose this image? It does no good to say do away with all image, without image we could not even use the word "universe" let alone "universe as act of God" or "universe as cold and indifferent."

You can tell me that this image, this interpretation, this worldview, this construct, smacks of weakness and cowardice. I will not say that you are wrong. I will however say that it is more than weakness and cowardice, and that there is more to be considered than the degree to which a soul is willing to force itself to breathe thin air.

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?

Art and Life

If we say that art is a reflection of life, how can we avoid saying that life lived is superior, more substantial, than art appreciated?

Here I do not advance anything factual or ask for an intellectual judgment. Instead I ask, don't you feel that the living of a life to be a more momentous thing than the appreciation of works of art?

In practice perhaps we see the greatest works of art and our participation in them to be a reason for continuing to live; there may be times when we see in art a kind of a salvation and a kind of purpose around which we can organize our lives. I too sometimes feel this way. But when I cut down to the central notion, I always find that I can not place art above the genuine article. 

Something to Consider on an Individual Meaning of Life

My worldview involves the belief that there is no absolute objective meaning to human existence that human beings will encounter and recognize as such. My worldview also states that we should be hesitant about creating meanings of life for ourselves because creating our own summum bonum creates a model of life that does not reflect the variety in both ourselves and the world.

However, I wonder if we might not conceive of an individual meaning of life differently. Rather than a highest good to aspire to, or a best activity to be engaged in, or the best character to model ourselves after, what if we simply conceived of the meaning of life as being whatever infuses our every act and every contemplation with a sense of worthiness. That is, the meaning of life is whatever makes you say 'this is worth doing' whenever you reflect on the various games and activities you happen to be a part of.

This is something to perhaps contemplate further.

Political Reasoning and Cultural Conflict

All political reasoning is of this general form:

Given that we agree that X,Y, and/or Z are valuable and worth pursuing, the evidence suggests that policy A is the best attainable policy for promoting X, Y, and/or Z. This is my evidence. Now join me in supporting policy A.

True political reasoning is, truly, reasoning. It is a job solely of seeing how elements relate to one another. Reasoning in an of itself can not dictate a course of action, that reasoning requires value judgments to be made as well. Only once people are on the same page with regard to what is desirable can policy questions become mere questions of science and the relation of elements.

Culture conflict is what occurs when one party considers X valuable and the other party considers Z valuable. Or more likely, when one party values X and Z but holds X in higher regard whereas the other party places Z before X in their own hierarchy of values. Science and reason have their place in such a conflict, but they are secondary to the primary difficulty of getting the two parties to agree to which values they are going to pursue in what proportion.

The way to deal with this situation is a little reasoning, a little negotiation, a little compromise, but at its essence, through sheer conflict. Both sides must try to force their way via the mechanisms of the political system and amassing the collective wills of their power bases. To expect unity and understanding between the two parties is to misunderstand the nature of the divide between them.

Consequently, to produce converts, one must not target the mind of his mark, but rather the heart. Steer his will in another direction, arouse a new desire in him. You can fine tune his efforts with reason, but the efforts gain their general direction and their force from his will.

We can complain about the absence of rational discussion in national, political discourse, but that betrays a misunderstanding of what is most fundamental to agreement.  

P or O

GF: Okay, I have a blog for you to write, it's gonna be a good one....

Which letter is superior P or O? I think my entire approach to ethics and aesthetics can be illustrated by this question, not that I really need to illustrate it again, but it is a joy for me to do so and it's my blog so I can illustrate it as many times as I want, damnit!

At first blush someone is likely to ask 'what does it matter?' This is not as frivolous a response as it sounds, we'll come back to it shortly. Secondly someone will probably shrug and say 'which one do you like better?' This response sets up a criteria for superiority, implying that whichever letter fulfills the criteria is the superior letter. If you happen to like P more than O then P is better than O and vice versa. You could then apply this criteria in passing judgment on the entire alphabet if you so chose.

The question that can here be asked is, why should be use that criteria? Or, more properly, what is it about that criteria that makes it the criteria for absolute superiority? Because the question was not 'which letter is superior, relative to your personal feelings,' but rather, 'which letter is superior' – question mark, full stop. The question does not provide us with a criteria or a schema in the context of which we can measure the two letters superiority to some goal or desired virtue.

Perhaps instead of saying, 'which one do you like better?' we could instead ask 'which letter is simpler?' In this case O is clearly superior to P because O consists of a single rounded shape whereas P is a rounded shape attached to a vertical mark. Now perhaps we ask, 'which letter most clearly makes itself known,' in this case P is superior to O because an O can easily be mistaken for a 0 whereas a P is pretty clearly a P.

In the light of both of these criteria the question of which letter is better is not subjective and it is not arbitrary. The matter can be studied and the conclusion can be demonstrated with rigorous proof. It is not my opinion that O is simpler than P, it is a fact; it is also not my opinion that O is more ambiguous than P, this too is a fact given the existence of the number 0 as a feature of human communication. What is my opinion is the fact that we should utilize the criteria of maximized simplicity or minimized ambiguity to determine superiority. That we should use this criteria can not be shown with any kind of proof and likewise can not be critiqued by any kind of counter-proof.

Now suppose that someone comes along and says, 'language does not simply exist – it exists for a reason. And upon recognizing the reason for language's existence we will also recognize what makes for excellent language and what makes for poor language. In addition we will see which signs within the language excel as signs and which signs serve their purpose poorly. The extent to which P and O fulfill their role in language's purpose will show their absolute quality.' Perhaps the person saying this will appeal to God's intention in creation, or he will appeal to humanity's collective intention in creation, or perhaps he will point to the workings of the universe that necessitated the creation of language. It does not matter, what matters is that he identifies absolute quality as being bound up with purpose and intention.

As a brief aside, one could say the same thing about human lives relative to the meaning of life.

So now the question is simply what purpose does language serve? Language serves to communicate. This is why we make speeches and write books, to communicate with others. Therefore the absolute superior between O and P is whichever most aids in communication, in this case, P, because P is a consonant and its usage needs to be made clear whereas O is a vowel and situations wherein it is used can be roughly inferred from the consonants surrounding it, so P is absolutely superior to O.

Perhaps a neuroscientist, an anthropologist, a linguist, or an analytical philosopher might critique my statement on language's purpose, but on the whole I think most would get on with the idea that language originated as a method of communication. However, just because it originated as a method of communication does not mean that it can not be used for other purposes. Suppose a man comes along and says that he uses language to build a reflection of the world and he does not give even a wedge of a rat's ass if anyone, himself included, can understand the reflection he can created. Then suppose another man comes scatting along and says that he just pours nonsense into a microphone to make people feel things, he doesn't really communicate any ideas with his use of words.

Communication loses its claim as the sole use of language and along with it goes the claim that aiding in communication is the absolute quality distinction of signs. It becomes another available criteria to be chosen or disregarded.

To be chosen or disregarded – on what basis? I imagined earlier that someone's first response to the P or O question would be 'what does it matter?' Now I have imagined up some possible criteria that people could propose to judge between P and O, but the choice of criteria has always been arbitrary. That remains the case, but even if we allow for that arbitrariness, what in practice determines what a person would choose as his criteria? The answer is, of course, what matters to him?

What is his mission? What does he care about? What is he pursuing? Now, which criteria helps him attain the object of his game? So poets will say O, because O is symmetrical and can be used in their poetry to indicate wholeness or, in some cases, vaginas, and their criteria is whatever allows them to enrich their works with meaning. And pub owners can say P because they own pubs and they want to use alliteration in naming it, such as Patty's Pub or Pete's Pub; their criteria is whatever is most likely to stick in people's minds. Political memorabilia manufacturers can say O because our president, whose support and detraction among the populace is their meal ticket, is named Obama; their criteria is whatever allows them to develop quick ways for people to tell the person driving behind them who they voted for in 2012. People racing to the restroom while texting would surely say P because it's just that much easier to type “i have 2 P” than “I have to pee” and their criteria is whatever allows them to remain connected to their circle of friends without creating a warm wet spot on the front of their pants.

In situations where people are largely indifferent, then a judgment on the two is impossible. But oftentimes a person who is nearly always indifferent to the question will on occasion find himself in a game where the difference between O and P actually matters to him. The question does not contain the criteria for determining superiority, which may lead one to believe that it is asking for absolute superiority. It may ask that question, naturally, but it shall get no adequate response because human beings do not have a means of determining absolute superiority. In actually the criteria for determining superiority is found in the recipient of the question in his present situation with his present needs.

So when a person responds with, 'what does it matter?,' you know that he does not have a criteria according to which he can think about the question. But if you ask and the man thinks for a moment and then gives you an answer, you know that he may have real genuine reasons for answering the way that he did.

So we return to the question: which is better, P or O?

O.

Because P looks kind of phallic and I don't want to carry the connotations of choosing a phallic letter over a vaginal one.