Maverick Philosopher

Pet Love as Idolatry?

Problems of attachment and grief.

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Envy, Jealousy, Schadenfreude

Some distinctions.

Top o' the Stack.

Self-Deprecation

A little self-deprecation is good, but more is not better. Nobody likes the boaster. Take self-deprecation too far, however, and people will have contempt for you.

The Fearful are Easy to Control

Is the sheep your totemic animal? A sheep in a mask? A dose of Emerson may help if it is not too late.

"He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear." (Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay "Courage")

(I note that the pronoun as it functions in the quoted line has neither an antecedent nor a gender. So while grammatically it is a masculine pronoun, logically it is neither.) 

On Reverence

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The Tree and the House

A parable about envy.

Substack latest.  Opening:

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small."

Once More on Envy

His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might -- and make the father look small.

Envy Again

How little you must know about me to envy me!

Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target?

Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which, if not a sin is nonetheless ugly -- and deadly.

Envy

How little you must be to envy me!

Can Rigorous Philosophy be Therapeutic?

Is philosophical analysis relevant to life as she is lived? 

Richard Sorabji:

Stoic cognitive therapy consists of a package which is in part a philosophical analysis of what the emotions are and in part a battery of cognitive devices for attacking those aspects of emotion which the philosophical analysis suggests can be attacked. The devices are often not philosophical and are often shared with other schools. But I believe it is wrong to suppose that they are doing all the work. The work is done by the package and the philosophical analysis is an essential part of the package. Admittedly somebody who just wanted to be treated passively as the patient of a Stoic therapist would not have to understand the philosophical analysis. But anyone who wants to be able to deal with the next emotional crisis that comes along and the next needs to learn how to treat themselves and for this the philosophical analysis of emotion is essential. What is under discussion here is the role of philosophical analysis as relevant to life.

I am indebted to Bernard Williams not only for expressing a diametrically opposite view but for discussing it with me both orally and in print.¹ His case demands the most careful consideration. His claim . . . is that rigorous philosophy cannot be therapeutic.

Read more.

Braggadocio, Self-Deprecation, Contempt

Brag and your peers will hate you. A little self-deprecation may win their hearts. Too much will earn their contempt. We learn these things by living. 

Righteous Anger

There is righteous anger. But how much of what is called 'righteous anger' is righteousness and how much anger?  The righteous know; the merely angry fool themselves.

Infatuation

What saves infatuation from being merely that? Its being a love of God that doesn't understand itself.

Morally Obtuse!

Presentism and Regret

I have done things I regret having done.  Regret is a past-directed emotion by its very nature. One cannot regret present or future actions or omissions.  So if I regret action A, A is wholly past.  What's more, I cannot regret a non-existent action.  But on presentism, all items in time are such that they exist at present.  Therefore, presentism is false.  

1) There exist states of regret.

2) Every such state has as its accusative an event that exists.

3) Every such state has as its accusative an event that is wholly past.

Therefore

4) There exist wholly past events.

5) If presentism is true, then there exist no wholly past events.

Therefore

6) Presentism is false.

Doesn't this argument blow presentism clean out of the water?  It is plainly valid in point of logical form. Which premise will you deny?

"You're begging the question! You are using 'exist(s)' tenselessly.  But on presentism, the only legitimate uses of 'exist(s)' are present-tensed."

Reply:  Please note that you too must use 'exist(s)' tenselessly to formulate your presentist thesis on pain of your thesis collapsing into the miserable tautology, 'Whatever in time exists (present-tense) exists (present-tense).'  That's fake news. To advance a substantive claim you must say, 'Whatever in time exists simpliciter exists at present' where 'simpliciter' is cashed out by 'tenselessly.'

Comments enabled, but no comment will be allowed to appear that does not address the above argument.

Metaphysical Joy and Sadness

There is a rare form of joy that some of us have experienced, a joy that suggests that at the back of this life is something marvellous and that one day this life may open out onto it.  It goes together with a kind of sadness, call it metaphysical nostalgia, a sort of longing for a lost homeland, so far back in time that it is outside of time. This is the joy that C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, and that Nietzsche may have had in mind when he had his Zarathustra exclaim, "All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity!"

Sunshine and Mood

When the sun shines bright one is less likely to be depressed by the thought that mood can be affected by something as mundane as the sun's shining bright.  

Six Types of Death Fear

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation.  The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death.  Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.

There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.

2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion.  This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth's long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of  pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors.  For this the Epicurean cure was concocted.  In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.

4. There is the fear of the unknown.  This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment.  Timor domini initium sapientiae.   "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who  believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have
made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

6. Fear of one's own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

Righteous Anger

That one's anger is righteous is rather harder to discern than that it is anger.

What, Me Worry?

The evil event will either occur or it will not.  If it occurs, and one worries beforehand, then one suffers twice, from the event and from the worry.  If the evil event does not occur, and one worries beforehand, one suffers once, but needlessly.  If the event does not occur, and one does not worry beforehand, then one suffers not at all.  Therefore, worry is irrational.  Don't worry, be happy.

Am I saying that that one ought not take reasonable precautions and exercise what is pleonastically called 'due diligence'?  Of course not.  Rational concern is not worry.  I never drive without my seat belt fastened.  Never! But I have never been in an accident and I never worry about it.  And if one day it happens, I will suffer only once:  from the accident.

Worry is a worthless emotion, a wastebasket emotion.  So self-apply some cognitive therapy and send it packing. You say you can't help but worry?  Then I say you are making no attempt to get your mind under control.  It's your mind, control it!  It's within your power.  Suppose what I have just said is false.  No matter: it is useful to believe it.  The proof  is in the pragmatics.

Love Untranslated

Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many cases a mere self-indulgence. One enjoys the warm feeling of benevolence and risks succumbing to the illusion that it suffices.  Benevolent sentiments are no doubt better than malevolent ones, but an affectless helping of a neighbor who needs help, if that is possible, is better than cultivating warm feelings toward him without lifting a finger.  We ought to be detached not only from the outcome of the deed, but also detached from its emotional concomitants.

I occurs to me that what I just wrote has a Kantian flavor: one acts from duty, not inclination. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) held that the moral worth of an action accrues from its being done from duty, whether or not inclination is along for the ride. It is a mistake to read him as saying that only acts done from duty alone, with no admixture of inclination, have moral worth.  Doing from duty what one is disinclined to do has no more moral worth than doing from duty what one is inclined to do.

Carl Schmitt on Compassion

Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical

Is Fear Born of Ignorance? Only Sometimes

William Kilpatrick is the best writer at Crisis Magazine. Because he invariably talks sense, I have linked to his work on numerous occasions. It is important that he remain a writer there given that squishy liberal shallow-pates are 'over-represented' among Catholics and have been for a good 60 years, with the current pope, Bergoglio the Benighted, leading the bunch.  The beauty of blog is that I can be appropriately disrespectful of the leftist knucklehead where Kilpatrick cannot.

Here he makes an important point: 

One of the misleading assumptions of our times is that fear is born of ignorance. Its corollary is the belief that increased education or increased familiarity with the “other” will banish fear. For example, after the Italian election results, Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said that the Church would have to continue its “work of education.”

But, in fact, Italians along with Germans, French, Brits, Dutch, and so on have been drenched for decades in the kind of education that Cardinal Parolin favors. A large part of the curriculum in European schools is devoted to teaching youngsters to respect different races and cultures. Indeed, many European students are given the distinct impression that other cultures are morally superior to their own.

[. . .]

Nice sentiments. But it doesn’t always work that way. For example, the more that Jews in Germany became familiar with the Nazis and their ideology, the more they properly feared them. Likewise, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs were right to fear the communist takeover of Eastern Europe. Unfortunately, many Europeans and Americans were not fearful enough about the twin threats posed by Nazism and communism. Their naiveté and lack of prudent fear was a major factor in enabling first the Nazis and then the communists to enslave half of Europe.

The same might be said of the pope’s almost complete lack of rational, prudential fear. By encouraging people not to be fearful of a real danger, the pope only adds to the danger. For example, attacks on European Jews have risen sharply in recent years. Jews in Europe are fearful once again—not because of some irrational prejudice on their part, but because of the rise of an ideology every bit as anti-Semitic as that fostered by the Nazis.

Now read the whole thing.

I'll say it again. Xenophobia is an irrational fear of foreigners and things foreign. But not all fear is irrational. If you refuse to make these simple distinctions, then you are being willfully stupid and deserve moral condemnation. It is morally wrong to refuse to use your intellect, especially if you consider it to be God-given.  

On Taking Pleasure in the Death of Enemies

Is it Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy? Only if it is bad to be dead. But it is not clear that it is bad to be dead. On the other hand, if it is bad to be dead, it might still not be Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy. 

For I might take satisfaction, not in the fact that my enemy is dead, but that he can no longer cause me trouble.

But you want to know what Schadenfreude is.  This is from an earlier post:

If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another's injuries (Schaden).

The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical. Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not also a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.

Intimacy, Reserve, and Bukowski's Bluebird

We desire intimacy with human others but we must combine it with reserve.

And this for three reasons: out of respect for the Other and her inwardness; from a sober recognition of our fallen tendency to dominate; and out of a need to protect ourselves.

The wise do not wear their hearts on their sleeves, but neither do they suppress Bukowski's bluebird.

Intellect, Emotion, Projection

It takes intellect to discern that people are dominated by their emotions, but the intellectual who is capable of understanding this is often prevented from understanding it by his tendency to project his intellectuality into others. We often have a hard time appreciating that others are not like us and do not value what we value, or if they do, not to the same extent.  My younger self used to make this mistake.

A Righteous Form of Schadenfreude?

I posed the question in the aftermath of the election and because of the pleasure many of us are feeling at the Left's comeuppance:

Is there a righteous form of Schadenfreude or is it in every one of its forms as morally objectionable as I make it out to be here?

Edward Feser supplies an affirmative Thomistic answer.  Ed concludes:

Putting the question of hell to one side, though, we can note that if schadenfreude can be legitimate even in that case, then a fortiori it can be legitimate in the case of lesser instances of someone getting his just deserts, in this life rather than the afterlife.  For example – and to take the case Bill has in mind -- suppose someone’s suffering is a consequence of anti-Catholic bigotry, brazen corruption, unbearable smugness, a sense of entitlement, groupthink, and in general from hubris virtually begging nemesis to pay a visit.  When you’re really asking for it, you can’t blame others for enjoying seeing you get it.

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Human Predicament

It angers us that what angers us does not anger others.

Gratitude is the Memory of the Heart

A masterpiece of the aphorist's art.  Attributed to Jean Massieu (1772-1846).

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Regret Become Denial

There are past actions one disowns to such an extent that one comes to deny having done them.  "I could never have done such a thing!"

Worry and Regret and Time

Worry and regret form a pair in that each involves flight from the present; worry flees the present toward an unknown future, regret toward an unchangeable past.  The door to Reality, however, is hinged on the axis of the Now.  If access is to be had to the nunc stans it is only via the nunc movens. Past and future are but representations in comparison to the reality of the moving now.

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The Absurdity of Envy

You envy me?  What a wretch you must be to feel diminished in your sense of self-worth by comparison with me!  I have something you lack?  Why isn't that compensated for by what you have that I lack?  You feel bad that I have achieved something by my hard work? Don't you realize that you waste time and energy that could be used to improve your own lot?

You ought to feel bad, not because I do well, but because you are so foolish as to indulge envy. Vices vitiate, they weaken.  You weaken yourself and make yourself even more of a wretch by succumbing to envy.

Companion post: Two Cures for Envy

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Sadness at the Transience of the World

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things,"  wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter  to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887. (Quoted in R. Hayman,  Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) 

What is the appropriate measure of grief at impermanence?

While we  are saddened by the transience of things, that they are transient shows that their passing is not worthy of the full measure of our sadness.  You are saddened by loss, but what exactly did you lose?  Something that was meant to last forever?  Something that could last forever?  Something that was worth lasting forever? 

Sadness at the passing of what must pass often indicates an inordinate love of the finite, when an ordinate love loves it as finite and no more.   But sadness also bespeaks a sense that there is more than the finite.  For if we had no sense of the Infinite why would we bestow upon the finite a value and reality it cannot bear? 

Sadness thus points down to the relative unreality and unimportance of the world of time and change while pointing up to the absolute reality and importance of its Source.

 

But Nietzsche, of the tribe of Heraclitus, could not bring himself to believe in the Source.  His bladed intellect would not allow it.  But his heart was that of homo religiosus. So he had resort to a desperate and absurd measure in reconciliation of heart and head:  the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, as if the redemption of time could be secured by making it cyclical and endless. 

This is no solution at all.

The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of Being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but  that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity.

To the moment I say, with Faust, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty here below except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillments vouchsafed only to some, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity. 

So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life.

We too weep with Heraclitus, but our weeping is ordinate, adjusted to the grade of reality of that over which we weep.  And our weeping is tempered by joy as we look beyond this scene of flux.  For as Nietzsche says in Zarathustra, "all joy/desire wants eternity, wants deep, deep, eternity."  All Lust will Ewigkeit, will tiefe, tiefe, Ewigkeit!

This longing joy, this joyful longing, is it evidence of the reality of its Object?  Great minds have thought so.   But you won't be able to prove it one way or the other.  So in the end you must decide how you will live and what you will believe.

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Control of the Heart

If you can see the moral necessity of controlling the head, why then can't you see the moral necessity of controlling the heart? With all due respect to 'the King,' you can help falling in love with her.

The Role of Envy in Human Affairs

The older I get, the more two things impress me. One is the suggestibility of human beings, their tendency to imbibe and repeat ideas and attitudes from their social environment with nary an attempt at critical examination. The other is the major role envy plays in human affairs.  Today my topic is envy.

Envy and Jealousy

People commonly confuse envy with jealousy. To feel envy is to feel diminished in one’s sense of self-worth by another’s success or well-being or attributes.  Thus if A feels bad because B won an award, then A envies B his winning of the award. It is a misuse of language to say that A is jealous of B in a situation like this. Jealousy requires three people, whereas envy requires only two. Suppose A and B are married, and C shows an amatory interest in B. A may well come to feel jealous of C. To use ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’ interchangeably is to ride roughshod over a simple distinction, and that is something that clear-headed people will want to avoid.

You say that language is always changing? No doubt, but not all change is progress. Progress is change for the good. The elision of distinctions is not good.  Distinctions are the lifeblood of thought.  Confusing envy with jealousy, inference with implication, lying with making false statements, a dilemma with any old problem, chauvinism with male chauvinism, and so on is not progress, but regress.  

Envy and Schadenfreude

If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another's injuries (Schaden). Arthur Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical. Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not a hateful emotion.  It is and ought to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.  Envy is  bad but Schadenfreude is worse.

Comparison

There can be comparison without envy, but every case of envy involves comparison. So one way to avoid envy is to avoid comparing yourself with others. Just be yourself and do your best, and don’t worry too much about what others are doing. Try to live your own incomparable life from out of your own inner resources. Strive for individuation, not for clone status.

There is the folk wisdom saying that comparisons are odious, to which I add that comparisons are often invidious.

"But isn't it good to compare yourself with your superiors in order to emulate them?"  It is, if one can avoid succumbing to envy.  The best course is not to compare oneself with any individual but with the high standards of which individuals are mere examples whether the standards be intellectual, moral, or physical.  Many exemplify the cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, courage, and temperance)  in greater measure than I do, but I ought not compare myself to these individuals but to the standards they exemplify.  The admirable individuals are merely proof that the ideals are realizable, and the extent to which they are realizable.  As I have argued more than once in these pages, an ideal that is not humanly realizable cannot count as a genine ideal for humans. This is a generalization of the ought implies can principle.

Comparison and Envy in the Islamic World

If the Islamic world avoided comparison and envy,  they wouldn’t waste so much time and energy hating the USA, the 'great Satan' and Israel the 'little Satan.' Surely part of the explanation of the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks is sheer envy. It is also part of the explanation of the Arab hatred of Israel. Arabs, and Muslims generally, need to learn that envy is totally unproductive, besides being evil. One cannot improve one’s lot in life by tearing other people down.  You cannot add one cubit to your stature by cursing me for being taller.

My publishing more articles than you does not reduce the number of your publications, or prevent you from publishing. My increase in net worth is not at your expense. If I become wealthier than you, that is a real change in me, but only a relational change in you, one consistent with your not losing a cent. (The economy is not a zero sum game.) One of my trees is now taller than my house. The tree grew; the house did not shrink. The house became shorter than the tree, but without suffering any real change in respect of height.

The superiority of the superiors over the inferiors redounds to the latter's benefit. The superiority of the tree to the house in respect of height shades the house.  If the house could kill the tree it would eliminate the shade that cools it.  If the Arab states could destroy Israel it would make the entire region more miserable and backward than it already is.  If leftists could could destroy free markets, then we would all be poor.

One of the things that has made the USA a successful nation is that Americans are a positive, forward-looking people not as a rule given to envy. We generally do not compare ourselves with others, but do our own thing, thereby setting the standard.  We are builders, not destroyers. 

A perfect illustration of mindless destructiveness is the behavior of the terrorist entity, Hamas.  They acquire cement not to build above ground for life but to tunnel underground so as to undermine Israel and deliver death.  It is more than evil, it is irrational.  It is morally and intellectually insane.  What accounts for this insanity?  A deep nihilism.  Whence the nihilism? That question is above my paygrade, but Goethe in Faust may provide a clue in the passage where he characterizes Mephistopheles as the spirit that always negates, der Geist der stets verneint.

Envy as Partial Explanation of Jew Hatred

I don't know what the whole explanation is, but surely a good part of it is envy.  Muslims in particular, but other groups as well, cannot stand Jewish superiority.  Instead of being rational and appreciating that this superiority redounds to their benefit, they succumb to the basest and most vile forms of envy.  They feel so diminished in their sense of self-worth by Jewish superiority that they would do anything to destroy the Jews even though that would  accomplish precisely nothing by way of raising their status. On the contrary, it would diminish it.  Suppose Hamas destroyed Israel.  Then the whole area would be as backward and impoverished as the Gaza Strip. 

It is Not Good to be an Object of Envy

Some people think that it is good to be an object of envy.  They overlook the fact that envy is a kind of hate directed at what is good and productive and positive in a person.  Envy is not a form of admiration but a perversion of admiration.  Only a fool would want to be envied, for only fools want to be hated.  There is no way to avoid being hated in this life, but to seek the hatred of others is folly.

How to Avoid being Envied

One way is to avoid ostentation.  The ordinary schmuck doesn't excite envy, so try to pass yourself off as one.  Be careful of self-revelation. Stay away from envious people.   In a world of lies and deceit, one must know and practice the arts of dissembling.  Just as civility is for the civil, honesty is for the honest.  Among the evil and mendacious, one must be careful and some dissembling is justified.

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A Philosophy of Boredom

I am never bored.  Tired sometimes, but not bored.  A nap and a double espresso work every time.  These are times that try our souls while stimulating our minds.  Who can be bored?

Regular reader, João Gabriel of Porto, Portugal, writes to thank me for my "great blog" and to recommend Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Boredom.

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Accept Love, Accept Aversion

We must learn to accept people's love, good wishes, and benevolence as gifts without worrying whether we deserve these things or not, and without worrying whether we will ever be in a position to compensate the donors. Similarly, we must learn to accept people's hate and malevolence as a sort of reverse gratuitous donation whether we deserve them or not.

We are often unjustly loved and admired.  So why should it bother us that we are often unjustly hated and contemned?  Try to see the latter as balancing  the former.

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The Parable of the Tree and the House

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small."

The tree replied to the house: "Why, Mr. House, do you begrudge me the natural unfolding of my potentiality, especially when I provide you with cooling shade? I have not made you small. It is not in my power to add or subtract one cubit from your stature. The change you have ‘undergone’ is a mere Cambridge change. You have gone from being taller than me to being shorter; but this implies no real change in you: all the real change is in me. What’s more, the real change in me accrues to your benefit. As I rise and spread my branches, you are sheltered and cooled. The real change in me causes a real change in you in respect of temperature."

Heed well this parable, my brothers and sisters. When your neighbor outstrips you in health and wealth, in virtue and vigor, in blog posts or the length of his curriculum vitae – hate him not. For his successes, which are real changes in him, need induce no real changes in you. His advance diminishes you not one iota. Indeed, his real changes work to your benefit. You will not have to tend him in sickness, nor loan him money; your tax dollars will not be used to subsidize his dissoluteness; the more hits his weblog receives, the more yours will receive; and the longer his CV the better and more helpful a colleague he is likely to be.

Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.

Two Cures for Envy

To feel envy is to feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the positive attributes or success or well-being of another.  It is in a certain sense the opposite of Schadenfreude.  The envier is pained by another's success or well-being, sometimes to the extent of wanting to destroy what the other has.  The 'schadenfreudian,' to coin a word, is pleasured by another's failure or ill-being.

Envy is classified as one of the  Seven Deadly Sins, and rightly so.  Much of the mindless rage against Jews and Israel is the product of envy. Superiority almost always excites envy in those who, for whatever reason, and in whichever respect, are inferior.

This is why it is inadvisable to flaunt one's superiority and a good idea to keep it hidden in most situations.  Don't wear a Rolex in public, wear a Timex.  It is better to appear to be an average schmuck than a man of means. In some circumstances it is better to hide one's light under a bushel.

If greed is the vice of the capitalist, envy is the vice of the socialist.  This is not to say that greed is a necessary product of capitalism or that envy is a necessary product of socialism.  There was greed long before there was capitalism and envy long before there was socialism.

One cure for envy is moderate, the other radical.  I recommend the moderate cure. 

Consider the entire life of the person you envy, not just the possession or attribute or success that excites your envy.  You say you want  what he or she has?  Well, do you want everything that comes with it and led up to it, the hard work, the trials and tribulations, the doubts and despairs and disappointments and disasters?  Unless you are  morally corrupt, your envious feelings won't be able to survive a wide-angled view. 

The radical cure is to avoid all comparisons.  Comparison is a necessary condition of envy.  You can't envy me unless you compare yourself to me, noting what I have and am as compared to what you have and are.  So if you never compare yourself to anyone, you will never feel envy for anyone.

The radical cure ignores the fact that not all comparisons are odious, that some are salutary.  If I am your inferior in this respect or that, and I compare myself to you, I may come to appreciate where I fall short and what I could be if I were to emulate you.

That being said, "Comparisons are odious" remains a useful piece of folk wisdom. You can avoid a lot of unhappiness by appreciating what you have and not comparing yourself to others.

As for the bombshells at the top of the page, the blond is Jayne Mansfield and the other Sophia Loren.  The picture illustrates the fact that, typically, envy involves two persons, one envying the other in respect of some attribute. Jealousy, however involves three persons.  This why you shouldn't confuse envy with  jealousy.  This is jealousy, not envy:

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Can one learn all about human sexuality by studying the human organs of generation?  The very notion is risible.  Can one learn all about human affectivity by studying that most reliable and indefatigable of pumps, the human heart?  Risible again.  It is similarly risible  to think that one can learn all about the mind by studying that marvellously complex hunk of meat, the brain.

 

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Six Types of Death Fear

1. There is the fear of nonbeing, of annihilation.  The best expression of this fear that I am aware of is contained in Philip Larkin's great poem "Aubade" which I reproduce and comment upon in Philip Larkin on Death.  Susan Sontag is another who was gripped by a terrible fear of annihilation.

There is the fear of becoming nothing, but there is also, by my count, five types of fear predicated on not becoming nothing.

2. There is the fear of surviving one's bodily death as a ghost, unable to cut earthly attachments and enter nonbeing and oblivion.  This fear is expressed in the third stanza of D. H. Lawrence's poem "All Souls' Day" which I give together with the fourth and fifth (The Oxford Book of Death, ed. D. J. Enright, Oxford UP, 1987, pp. 48-49).

They linger in the shadow of the earth.
The earth's long conical shadow is full of souls
that cannot find the way across the sea of change.

Be kind, Oh be kind to your dead
and give them a little encouragement
and help them to build their little ship of death.

For the soul has a long, long journey after death
to the sweet home of  pure oblivion.
Each needs a little ship, a little ship
and the proper store of meal for the longest journey.

3. There is the fear of post-mortem horrors.  For this the Epicurean cure was concocted.  In a sentence: When death is, I am not; when I am, death is not. Here too the fear is not of extinction, but of surviving.

4. There is the fear of the unknown.  This is not a fear with a definite object, but an indefinite fear of one-knows-not-what.

5. There is the fear of the Lord and his judgment.  Timor domini initium sapientiae.   "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  (Proverbs 9:10, Psalms 111:10)  A certain fear is ingredient in religious faith.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one who  believed and feared that he would be judged by God.  He took the notion of the Last Judgment with the utmost seriousness as both Paul Engelmann and Norman Malcolm relate in their respective memoirs.  In 1951, near the end of his life, Wittgenstein wrote,

God may say to me: I am judging you out of your own mouth.  Your own actions have
made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them." (Culture and Value, p. 87)

Wittgenstein had trouble with the notion of God as cosmic cause, but had a lively sense of God as final Judge and source of an absolute moral demand.

6. Fear of one's own judgment or the judgment of posterity.

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Envy versus Schadenfreude

"Your gain is my pain" versus "Your pain is my gain."

My analyses of envy, jealousy, Schadenfreude, pity, etc.

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Be Afraid

In this fine piece, Marilyn Penn takes Thomas Friedman to task.  Her article begins thusly (emphasis added):

In Thomas Friedman’s op ed on the Boston marathon massacre (Bring On the Next Marathon, NYT  4/17),  the boldface caption insists “We’re just not afraid anymore.”  Perhaps this is true for a traveling journalist who doesn’t use the subway daily or who isn’t forced to spend all his days in the 9/11 city of New York, but for most thinking people who work and live here, there is a great deal to fear.  We live in a porous society where criminals roam free yet politicians complain about the “discriminatory” stop and frisk policies of the police, even though they have successfully reduced crime precisely in the neighborhoods that most affect the complaining minorities and their liberal champions.  If you ride the subways, you know how many passengers wear enormous back-packs, large enough to conceal an arsenal of weapons.  These are allowed to be carried into movie theaters, playgrounds, parks, sports arenas, shopping centers, department stores and restaurants with no security checks whatsoever.   On the national front, immigration policies are more concerned with politically correct equality than with the reality of which groups are fomenting most of the terror around the world today.  Our northern and southern borders are infiltrated daily by undocumented people slipping in beyond the government’s surveillance or control.

I agree with her entire piece. Read it.

It has been a week since the Boston Marathon bombing.  There was a moment of silence today  in remembrance of the victims.  But let's keep things in perspective.  Only three people were killed.  I know you are supposed to gush over these relatively minor events and the undoubtedly horrendous suffering of the victims, but most of the gushing is the false and foolish response of feel-good liberals who have no intention of doing what is necessary to protect against the threat of radical Islam.  The Patriot's Day event was nothing compared to what could happen.  How about half of Manhattan being rendered uninhabitable  by dirty bombs? 

When that or something similar happens, will you liberals start yammering about how 'unimaginable' it was?  Look, I'm imagining it right now.  Liberals can imagine the utopian nonsense imagined by John Lennon in his asinine "Imagine." Is their imagination 'selective'?  They can imagine the impossible but not the likely. It is worth recalling that Teddy Kennedy's favorite song was Impossible Dream.

Deal with the real. And the likely.  There are no impossible ideals. (See Can What is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for us?)

 

Courage and Content

There are courageous souls who will say publically what others think but are afraid to say.  True.  But the courageousness of the saying does not underwrite the truth of what is said.  Courage does not validate content.

Muhammad Atta and the 9/11 terrorists had the courage of their false and murderous convictions.

As a corollary, passion is not probative.  The passion with which a proposition is propounded is no proof of it.  It is scant praise of a person, and perhaps no praise at all, to say, as is often nowadays said, that so-and-so is passionate about his beliefs.  So what?  Hitler was passionate.

We have need of dispassion these days, not passion. William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, first stanza:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

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Can One Forgive Oneself? An Aporetic Triad

I pointed out earlier that forgiving is triadic: x forgives y for z.  There is the forgiver, the one to whom forgiveness is proffered, and that which is forgiven.   Nominative, dative, accusative.   It is of course correct English to say 'I forgive you,' but this fact about usage cuts no ice since 'I forgive you'  is elliptical for 'I forgive you for what you did or what you failed to do.'  'I forgive you' is not evidence that forgiving is in some cases dyadic any more than 'Tom is married' is evidence that marriage is monadic. Forgiving is then at least triadic: it is a three-place relation.  'X forgives y for z' has three argument-places.  But it doesn't follow that forgiving is in every case a three-term or three-relata relation.    For if one one can forgive oneself, then  x and y are the same person.  Compare identity, which is a two-place, but one-term relation.

Why did I write "at least triadic"?  Because we need to think about such examples as 'I forgive you both for conspiring against me.'   That appears to involve three persons and one action.  I set this issue aside for later discussion.

At the moment, the following aporetic triad is at the cynosure of my interest:

1. There are cases of self-forgiveness and they are instances of genuine forgiveness.

2. If a person forgives himself at time t for doing or failing to do z , then he cannot help but be aware of and admit his own guilt at t for doing or failing to do z.

3. Genuine forgiveness is unconditional: it is consistent with a non-admission of guilt on the part of the one who is forgiven.

Each limb of the triad is plausible.  But the limbs cannot all be true: the conjunction of ( 1) and (2) entails the negation of (3).  Indeed, the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining limb.

To solve the problem, we must reject one of the limbs. 

(1)-Rejection.  One might maintain that cases of self-forgiveness are not instances of genuine forgiveness.  One might hold that 'forgiveness' in 'self-forgiveness' and 'other-forgiveness'  is being used in different ways, and that the difference between the two phenomena is papered over by the sameness of word.

(2)-Rejection.  I would say that (2) is self-evident and cannot be reasonably rejected.

(3)-Rejection.  One might maintain that genuine forgiveness need not be unconditional, that there are cases when it depends on the satisfaction of the condition that the one forgiven admit his guilt.

I would solve the problem by rejecting both (1) and (3).  As I see it at the moment, genuine forgiveness is an interpersonal transaction: it involves at least two distinct persons.  Self-forgiveness, however, remains intra-personal. What is called self-forgiveness is therefore a distinct, albeit related, phenomenon.  It is not genuine forgiveness the paradigm case of which is one person forgiving another for an action or omission that is in some sense wrong, that injures the first person,  and that the second person admits is wrong.

I also maintain that forgveness cannot be unconditional. For forgiveness to transpire as between A and B, B must accept the forgiveness that A offers.  But B cannot do this unless he admits that he has done something (or left something undone) that is morally or legally or in some other way (e.g., etiquette-wise) censurable.  Thus B must admit  guilt.  That is a condition that must be met if forgiveness is to occur.

One who accepts both (1) and (3) will, via (2), land himself in a contradiction.

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An Analysis of the Concept of Forgiveness

In my last post on this topic I advanced a double-barreled thesis to the effect that (i) unconditional forgiveness is in most cases morally objectionable, and (ii) in most cases conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.  But now we need to back up and focus on the very concept of forgiveness since deciding whether (i) and (ii) are correct depends on what exactly we take forgiveness to be.  So here is my preliminary stab at an analysis.  After this task is completed, it may be necessary to back up once more and ask how I arrived at my analysis.  Ain't philosophy fun?

1. Forgiveness has a triadic structure: to forgive is for someone to forgive someone for something.  X forgives y for z, where x and y are persons (usually but not necessarily human) and z is typically an action or an action-omission.  We typically forgive deeds and misdeeds, but perhaps states can be forgiven, for example, the state of being insufferably arrogant.  An interesting side-question is whether x and y could be the same person.  Is it possible to forgive oneself for something?  I mention this question only to set it aside.

2. Only those we perceive to be guilty can be forgiven.  Necessarily, if x forgives y for z, then x perceive, whether rightly or wrongly, y to be guilty of doing or having done z, or guilty of failing or having failed to do z.  The necessity of this necessary truth is grounded in the very concept of forgiveness.

3. It follows from (2) that only what one rightly or wrongly takes to be a moral agent can be forgiven or not forgiven.  For anything one takes to be morally guilty one must take to be a moral agent.  I can neither forgive nor not forgive my cat for sampling my lasagne.  Not being a moral agent, my cat cannot incur guilt.

4. It also follows from (2) that what I forgive a person for must be a wrongful act or act-omission.  Tom, unlike my cat, is a moral agent; but it is not possible to forgive Tom for feeding his kids.

5. Forgiving works a salutary change in the forgiver: it alters his mental attitude toward the one forgiven.  True forgiveness is not merely verbal but involves a genuine change of heart/mind (a metanoia if you will) that is good for the forgiver. 

6. Forgiving cannot remove the guilt of the one forgiven if he is indeed guilty.  Suppose you steal my money.  You don't admit guilt or make restitution.  But I forgive you anyway.  Clearly, my forgiving you does not remove your moral guilt.  You remain objectively guilty of theft.  The demands of justice have not been satisfied. 

7. Forgiving cannot retroactively make a person innocent of a crime he has committed.  Suppose again that you steal my money.  You admit guilt and you make restitution.  My forgiving you does not and cannot change the fact that you wrongfully took my money.  Forgiveness does not retroactively confer innocence.  It follows that you remain guilty of having committed the crime even if you do admit guilt and satisfy the objectve demands of justice by making restitution, etc.

Assuming that the above analysis is correct, albeit not complete, does it allow for the possibility of unconditional forgiveness?  It does.  Suppose again that you steal my money, but don't admit guilt let alone make restitution.  If I forgive you nonetheless, then I do so unconditionally, as opposed to on condition that you admit guilt, make restitution, etc.

Note that unconditional forgiveness is not an inter-personal transaction between the forgiver and the person forgiven, but something that transpires intrapsychically in the forgiver.  This is because unconditional forgiveness doesn't require the one forgiven to acknowledge anything or even to be aware that he is the recipient of forgiveness.   One can unconditionally forgive dead persons and persons with whom one has no contact.  Since unconditional forgiveness is merely intra-personal as opposed to inter-personal, one may question whether it is forgiveness in the strict sense at all. Accordingly, one might add to the list of the concept's features:

8.  Necessarily, if x forgives y, then y perceives himself as having done something wrong and admits his wrongdoing to x.

Now I don't think that features 1-7 are controversial, but #8 is.  For it rules out unconditional forgiveness.  The underlying issue is whether forgiveness is an inter-personal transaction or merely an attitude change within the mind/heart of the forgiver.  If forgiveness is inter-personal, the one forgiven must accept forgiveness.  But he can do that only if he acknowledges guilt.

But if unconditional forgiveness is possible, and not ruled out by the very concept of forgiveness, it doesn't follow that it is morally acceptable.  I say it is not.  To forgive unconditionally is to refuse to take a stand against it.  But I will leave the elaboration of this point for later.

The other main question is whether conditional forgiveness is genuine forgiveness.  I say it is.

One might think that there is nothing left to forgive after the offender has admitted guilt, made reparations, etc.  But there is something left to forgive, namely, his having committed the offense in the first place.

A second consideration.  If unconditional forgiveness is possible, then what makes forgiveness forgiveness has nothing to do with the the one forgiven:  it does not require his admission of guilt, his doing penance, or even his being guilty.  If I forgive a person, I must take him to be guilty, but he needn't be in fact.  Unconditional forgiveness is merely an alteration of the forgiver's mental state.  Now if forgiveness is what it is whether or not there is any non-relational change in the one forgiven, then it doesn't matter whether or not the conditions are satisfied.  So conditional forgiveness will be just as much forgiveness as unconditional forgiveness is.

So for these two reasons conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness.

 

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This just over the transom: 

Finally, a post on forgiveness. :-) But my spirit within me won't permit me to forgo responding to what you've written. You characterize the paradox this way: It is morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, show no remorse, make no amends, do not pay restitution, etc.  But if forgiveness is made conditional upon the doing of these things, then what is to forgive?  Conditional forgiveness is not forgiveness.  That is the gist of the putative paradox, assuming I have understood it.

 

That is not quite right.

The problem is this. Forgiving unconditionally -- forgiving someone without their apology, repentance, penance, etc. -- seems to amount to little more than condoning what they've done; it's hardly forgiveness but more of an acceptance of the wrong. On the other hand, forgiving on the condition that the wrong has been atoned -- the wrongdoer has apologized, repented, made reparations, performed penances, etc -- seems to be superfluous, insofar as after atonement has been made, the wrongdoer is not guilty of anything any longer and thus there is nothing to forgive, nor would continued resentment be appropriate. 

BV:  That's exactly what I said, though in a lapidary manner.  So I think we agree as to what the putative paradox is.  I call it 'putative' because I don't see it as a genuine paradox.

 

You write that, The first limb strikes me as self-evident: it is indeed morally objectionable to forgive those who will not admit wrongdoing, etc. But this is contentious; not everyone sees this the way you do. For instance, Jesus seems to forgive wrongdoers unconditionally on two occasions, once in the pericope adulterae (at John 7.53-8.11) and again at Luke 23.34 when he is being crucified. A significant number of contemporary philosophers (e.g., David Garrard, Eve McNaughton, Leo Zaibert, Christopher McCowley, Cheshire Calhoun, Glen Pettigrove) defend the practice of unconditional forgiveness, as well. So it's unacceptable simply to accept the first horn of the paradox as is; there is the argumentation of all these philosophers to deal with!

 

 

BV: Yes, my assertion is debatable, but then so is almost everything in philosophy and plenty of what is outside of philosophy.  I don't think bringing Jesus in advances your argument.  Either Jesus is God or he is not.  If he is not, then he lacks the authority to contravene the existing law and forgive the adulteress.  If he is God, then two problems.  First, your argument then rests on a highly contentious theological presupposition.  (I will remind you that in conversation you said that you were not trying to work out the Christian concept of forgiveness, but the concept of forgiveness in general.) Second, granting that God has the authority to forgive and forgive unconditionally, that has no relevance to the human condition, to forgiveness as it plays out among mere mortals such as us. For one thing, God can afford to forgive unconditionally; nothing can touch him.  But for us to adopt a policy of forgiving unconditionally would be disastrous.

At Luke 23:34, Jesus is reported to have said, "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."  Note that Jesus is not forgiving his tormenters; he is asking God the Father to forgive them.  So this passage is not relevant to our discussion.  Besides, there is nothing here about unconditional forgiveness.  Jesus could have been requesting his Father to forgive the killers after punishing them appropriately.

Your mention of contemporary philosophers who support your position is just name-dropping.  To drop a name is not to give an argument.  I would have to see their arguments.  Is it unacceptable for me to hold to my understanding of forgiveness according to which it is morally objectionable to forgive the unrepentant in advance of studying the arguments of those you mention?  No more unacceptable than holding to the view that motion is possible in advance of studying the arguments of Zeno and his school, or holding to the reality of time despite my inability decisively to refute McTaggart.  I might just stand my Moorean ground: "Look, I just ate lunch; therefore time is real!"  Similarly with forgiveness: "Look, it is a wonderful thing to forgive, but only on condition that the offender own up to his wrongdoing, make amends, etc."

You also write, I admit that once the miscreant has paid his debt, he is morally in the clear.  His guilt has been removed.  But I can still forgive him because forgiveness does not take away guilt, it merely alters the attitude of the one violated to the one who violated him. You are forgetting another important aspect of forgiveness beyond the change in attitude, however, namely that it is a way of responding to wrongdoers as wrongdoers. Another way of putting this is that forgiveness is only possible when someone stands before us as guilty for some wrong done and is thus an appropriate candidate for resentment, anger, etc. If someone has atoned for their wrong and is no longer guilty, then there's no ground for resentment and thus there's nothing more to forgive! So the change in attitude after atonement has been made may resemble forgiveness, but it's hardly genuine forgiveness since there's no wrong to forgive any longer.

BV:  This is an interesting and weighty point, but I disagree nonetheless.  You may be conflating two separate claims.  I would say that it is a conceptual truth that if X forgives Y, then X perceives Y as having done wrong, whether or not Y has in fact done wrong.  This truth is analytic in that it merely unpacks our ordinary understanding of 'forgiveness.'  But it doesn't follow from this conceptual truth that there is nothing left to forgive with respect to a person who has atoned for his misdeed.   I say there is:  the mere fact that he has done me wrong in the first place.  Suppose he stole my money, but then apologized and made restitution.  In that case the demands of justice have been met.  But there is still something left to forgive, namely, his having stolen my money in the first place.  The apology and restitution do not eliminate the whole of the guilt, for the offender remains guilty of the misdeed.  After all, his apology and restitution do not retroactively make him innocent.  He remains guilty as charged.  The fact of his having committed the misdeed  can in no way be altered.  Though contingent at the time, it now has the modal status of necessitas per accidens.

There is obviously a difference between one who is guilty of an offence and one who is innocent of it.  That distinction remains in place even after the guilty party pays for his crime.  Your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent -- which is absurd.

Consider this. Forgiveness is commonly thought of as gracious; it is a generous way of responding to wrongdoers that goes beyond strictly what they deserve. How is it at all generous to change one's attitude towards a wrongdoer only once atonement has been made and she is effectively no longer a wrongdoer?

BV:  I agree that forgiveness is gracious and not strictly a matter of desert.  It is nevertheless generous to forgive even after atonement has been made.  For one is forgiving the offender of having committed the misdeed in he first place.  I deny that the offender is no longer a wrongdoer after the penalty has been paid.  Again, your position seems to imply that punishment retroactively renders the criminal innocent.

Remember the Derrida quote I cited:

Imagine, then, that I forgive on the condition that the guilty one repents, mends his ways, asks forgiveness, and thus would be changed by a new obligation, and that from then on he would no longer be exactly the same as the one who was found to be culpable. In this case, can one still speak of forgiveness? This would be too simple on both sides: one forgives someone other than the guilty one. In order for there to be forgiveness, must one not on the contrary forgive both the fault and the guilty as such, where the one and the other remain as irreversible as the evil, as evil itself, and being capable of repeating itself, unforgivably, without transformation, without amelioration, without repentance or promise? Must one not maintain that an act of forgiveness worthy of its name, if there ever is such a thing, must forgive the unforgivable, and without condition? (On cosmopolitanism and forgiveness, pp. 38-9)

BV:  John Searle once said of Derrida that he gives bullshit a bad name.  So an appeal to the authority of Derrida will have as little effect on me as an appeal the supposed authority of Paul Krugman in an economic connection.  The Derrida passage smacks of sophistry what with the rhetorical questions and the typically French amorphousness.  He seems to be advancing the following sophism.  If one forgives the one who has atoned, then "one forgives someone other than the guilty one."  But that is to confuse numerical identity with qualitative identity.

 

Thus I have to hold, pace tua, that genuine forgiveness must be unconditional, and conditionalized forgiveness is less than true.

BV: And I continue to maintain, pace tua, that only conditional forgiveness is morally unobjectionable and that conditional forgiveness counts as genuine forgiveness. 

 

 

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What makes for a good marriage?  It is not enough to like your spouse.  It is not enough to love her.  The partners must also admire one another.  There has to be some attribute  in your spouse that you don't find in yourself (or not in the same measure) and that you aspire to possess or possess more fully.  Must I add that we are not talking mainly about physical attributes?

What is admiration?

To love is not to admire.  If God exists, he loves us.  But he certainly doesn't admire us.  For what does he lack?  He doesn't aspire to possess any attribute that we have and that he lacks.  Closer to the ground, one can easily love a sentient being, whether animal or human, without admiration. 

To value is not to admire.  Prudence is a valuable attribute; so if you are prudent, I will value you in respect of your prudence; but if I am as prudent as you, then I don't admire you in respect of your prudence.  Admiration is for attributes the admirer does not possess, or does not possess in the measure the admired possesses them.

To respect is not to admire.  I can and ethically must respect the rights of those who are inferior to me in respect of admirable attributes.

My suggestion, then, is that a necessary though not sufficient condition of a good marriage is that it be a two-membered mutual admiration society.

Admiration and Contempt

Your first mistake was to admire him inordinately, your second, after he proved less than wholly admirable, was to swing over to contempt.  No one is worthy of unqualified admiration, and no one is wholly contemptible.

Self-Deprecation

There is usually more of self than of deprecation in self-deprecation.