Maverick Philosopher

Temptation Again

This from a reader:

 

I have been a follower and great admirer of you and your blog writing for some time. I enjoyed reading your most recent post, especially as this topic has been fresh in my mind from preaching a sermon last week from James 1:13-15 on the nature and power of temptation in the Christian life. While of course our conclusions will inevitably differ in many ways on this topic, given our differences of belief concerning Christianity, I wanted to write you to ask for clarification concerning what you distinguish as first-order temptations and meta-temptations (or perhaps second-order temptations?).

 

I believe the heart of your argument is: Meta-temptation is the worst form of temptation because one who succumbs to the temptation to reject the objective validity of the moral point view has removed the context in which dalliance with floozies, paying one's debts, not murdering one's rivals, etc. are morally evaluable.

My question is this: is not your definition of meta temptation true of all temptation? Since I always choose that which is most desirable to my mind’s eye in the moment (to paraphrase Jonathan Edwards on the Freedom of the Will), am I not choosing that which I perceive as the greatest good and desirable, even if in reality it is not good but evil? Of course self-deception is at work where I assent to contradictory propositions in the moment: I should not do [X] because it is evil (i.e. God has forbidden [X]); I should do [X] because it is good (i.e. [X] will satisfy me and thus I determine what is good and evil).

 

The distinction I was making was between being tempted to do what one's moral sense tells one is wrong in a particular situation, and the temptation to discount as illusory the entire moral point of view.  These strike me as different  because one can be tempted in the first way while having no doubts at all about the objective validity of morality. Consider an example.  I am a married man in a distant city attending a convention.  A woman I meet there makes it clear that she is attracted to me and is available for sex. Finding her attractive I am tempted to invite her up to my hotel room. This is a 'first-order' temptation in that it concerns a specific action.  Let us assume that there is no prudential reason why I shouldn't act upon my desire.  But my conscience or moral sense  tells me that the contemplated action, adultery, is wrong because it violates a vow I took.   I do not doubt at all the objective validity of the deliverances of conscience in general or even the validity of the present deliverance; I simply override the present deliverance.  I just block it out.  I don't even have to engage in any rationalization.  I merely suppress the bite of conscience and go ahead with the action.

 

So I don't see that my definition of meta-temptation applies to this sort of case.  I know (or rather believe) that what I am about to do is objectively wrong, but, in the grip of lust, I freely suppress this knowledge (or belief) and freely go ahead with the contemplated action. I am not choosing what appears to me at the moment most desirable (desire-worthy), for I believe I am about to do a morally shabby thing.  But I do it anyway!  I willfully do what I know or believe I ought not do.  And I do it freely.  Lust may have me in its grip but I am not powerless to resist it; I freely consent to going with the flow.

 

Is not the purpose of all temptation to construct on alternate reality/metaphysic of what is good and what is evil, to make the false “look more true than truth itself” (to quote Irenaeus from his Against Heresies), to make something look larger than life in order to tempt me to believe that it will slake and satisfy my vicious lusts? It reminds me of Romans 1:22-23 where the Apostle Paul writes, "Claiming to be wise, they became fools, [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” What is interesting about verse 23 is that Paul lists the order of creation backwards as if to say, “The moment you exchange the glory of the Creator for the creature, all of reality becomes inverted and perverted and thrown completely upside down.”

I think that seems to be the nature of all temptation: an inversion and perversion of reality where the evil becomes the good and the good the evil.

 

I don't see that all temptation amounts to an erection of an alternative metaphysic of good and evil.  The example I gave, which is common enough, involves no transvaluation of any received values.  We value fidelity and disvalue betrayal.

 

Please note that the inversion you speak of where the evil becomes good and the good becomes evil presupposes the moral point of view.  Suppose A agrees with B that there is an objective and absolute moral order.  But they disagree about which actions are good and which evil.  A might hold that it is objectively good to procreate while B, under the influence of Schopenhauer, holds that procreation is objectively evil.  That is a deep disagreement but one that plays out within the context of the shared assumption of an objective moral world order. The meta-temptation I am referring to is far more radical: the 'Nietzschean' temptation to dismiss as illusory the very notion of objective good and evil. 

Temptation and Meta-Temptation

Is it built into the very concept of temptation that if one is tempted to do something or leave something undone that the act or ommission is morally wrong? I should think so.  This is not to say that in ordinary English 'temptation' is not used in looser ways. For example, 'I am tempted to answer my opening question in the affirmative.'  Or, 'I am tempted to take some of my cash and buy precious metals.'  These are loose uses of 'tempt' and cognates.  I am here concerned with the strict use, the moral use.  Accordingly, it is by my lights a conceptual truth, and thus a necessary truth, that if one is tempted to do X or forego doing Y, then the act or the omission is morally wrong. 

So, strictly speaking, to be tempted to do something is to be tempted to do something wrong.  One cannot be tempted to do the right thing, or the good thing, or what one ought to do.  This is nonsense: 'The floozy at the Kitty Kat lounge shook her comely ass in my face thereby tempting me to go home to my wife.'  If there is temptation in this situation, it is the temptation to dally with the floozy.  There is no temptation in the  desire to be faithful to one's spouse or in the even stronger desire to engage in sexual intercourse with her. 

Nor can one be tempted to do something morally insignificant, i.e., morally neutral.    'Home fries or hash browns'  in normal circumstances is not a morally significant choice.  I cannot be temped either way. 

I am inclined, though not tempted, to say that the worst form of temptation is the temptation to think that it doesn't matter morally what one does or leaves undone, that the moral point of view is illusory, that morality is buncombe, conventional at best, not grounded in rerum natura.  Lacking a better name for this I will call it 'meta-temptation in order distinguish it from such first-order temptations as the temptation to commit adultery or to shoot my neighbor's barking dog.

Meta-temptation is the worst form of temptation because one who succumbs to the temptation to reject the objective validity of the  moral point view has removed the context in which dalliance with floozies, paying one's debts, not murdering one's rivals, etc. are morally evaluable.  Such a person 'beyond morality' may have prudential reasons for doing this and refraining from that, but not strictly moral reasons.

But if meta-temptation is a form of temptation, strictly speaking, then rejecting the moral point of view is itself immoral.  Rejecting it is immoral, however, only if the moral POV is objectively valid and binding.  If it is without validity, then it cannot be immoral to reject it.  And if it is invalid, then what appears to be temptation cannot really be temptation, and the bite of conscience that accompanies the meta-temptation to reject the moral POV is illusory and not revelatory of any moral truth.

Nothing I have said resolves the question of the objective validitiy/invalidity of the moral point of view.  I myself find it impossible to shake off the thought of its objective validity.  Its objective validity is subjectively certain to me.  That inability of mine is, however, arguably consistent with the illusoriness of the moral POV.  And so my subjective certainty is not objective certainty -- even to me!

I suspect that here as elsewhere one must in the end simply decide what one will believe and how one will live.  You are fooling yourself if you think you will come up with a knock-down argument proof against every objection and acceptable to all able and sincere investigators.  Examine the question throughly and then decide.  Once you have decided, don't let your decision be overturned lightly.  What you have resolved upon in your best hours should not be put in jeopardy by passing fears and doubts. 

Dennis Prager, Jealousy, and Envy

Talk-show host Dennis Prager is a fount of wisdom.  I recommend his Happiness Hour to you, and the rest of his show as well. But I just heard him say on the Happiness Hour segment of his show, "jealousy slash envy."  I beg to differ.  I see a distinction between the two.  See my Envy, Jealousy, and <i>Schadenfreude</i>.

Distinctions are good so long as they cut the bird of reality at the joints.  The more the better.

The Ascesis of the Lower

It is useful to suppose oneself composed of a lower and a higher self.  Much good comes from denying the former, good that accrues to the latter.

Companion post: William James on Self-Denial.

Be Hard on Yourself

The better people are hard on themselves.  The exemplify the anti-Bukowski property: they try.  They set themselves difficult tasks and strive to complete them.  They make intellectual, moral, spiritual, and physical demands of themselves.  They are alive to the discrepancy between what they are and what they ought to be.

But they also know how to relax and enjoy life.  Be hard on yourself, but honor yourself and permit yourself a bit of self-congratulation at obstacles overcome and goals attained.  The true conservative knows how to appreciate and enjoy -- and that includes appreciating and enjoying dear old self.

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

One might wonder about recognition especially as it shades off into fame, and beyond that, into empty celebrity. Is it really good? Surely a modicum of recognition by certain of one's fellows is necessary for human happiness. To that extent, recognition is good. But a little suffices, and more is not better.  To be famous would be horrible, after the initial rush wore off.  And it might even get you killed by some crazy, as witness the case of John Lennon.

Consider this quartet of claims:

1. Money is the root of all evil.
2. Love of money is the root of all evil.
3. Inordinate love of money is the root of all evil.
4. Inordinate love of money is the root of some evil.

It is easy to see that each of (1)-(3) is false, and that (4) alone is true. Money is an abstract form of wealth and wealth is obviously good. How can something good be the root of all evil? It is not even the  root of some evil. It makes more sense to say that the love of money is the root of all evil. But this too is plainly mistaken. Since money is good, a certain ‘love’ or desire of it is both wise and morally legitimate. It is the inordinate love of money that bears some connection to evil. But to all evil? Surely some of the evil in the world derives from such other sources as the inordinate love of power, sex, and fame. Therefore, the most we can say with a show of plausibility is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evil.

An inordinate love is an excessive love, a love unhinged and unbalanced. One form of excess consists in taking for an end in itself what can only be viewed as a means. Thus the miser’s mistake is in taking money to be an end in itself when it can only be a means.

Generalizing the opening quartet yields:

A. X is the root of all evil.
B. Love of X is the root of all evil.
C. Inordinate love of X is the root of all evil.
D. Inordinate love of X is the root of some evil.

I claim that whatever one plugs in for ‘X’ — whether it be money, property, progeny, power, influence, sex, fame, knowledge, alcohol, tobacco, firearms — results in a pattern of three falsehoods and one truth. You may verify this for yourself. Or else present me with a counterexample.

One conclusion I draw is that evil has no one root. So one should not speak of the root of evil. Evil has many roots corresponding to our many inordinate loves. Since there is no one root of all evil, the eradication of evil is no simple matter. Or if there is a single root, it lies not in things desired, but in the disordered human heart. Only metanoia, a change of heart/mind, could eradicate evil, assuming evil can be uprooted.

On Postponing Self Mastery

Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them.  In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.  Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon?  Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness.  However you say it, it is true.  The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene. 

Broad generalizations, these.  They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying.  He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur cannot think his way out of his misery.  Don't get hung up on the exceptions.  Meditate on the broad practical truth.  On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.'  But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical.   Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative.  Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist,  a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

 

Compassion

Feeling compassion for the earthquake victims, he was pleased by his sensitivity, but his warm feeling did not motivate him to do anything such as make a monetary contribution to the Red Cross.  His feeling remained mere sentiment and to that extent mere self-indulgence.

Better to feel compassion than to define it. Better still to act upon the feeling.  But now an interesting question arises.  Would it not be even better to act in alleviation of the other's suffering without feeling the negative affect?  This line of thought is explored in Spinoza on Commiseratio.

Kerouac and the Ancient Lures

I told myself that come November I would quit Jackin' off for a while, but October's momentum continues.  I was just now looking in an old journal for something else and found this entry from 10 November 2000:

During the years he wrote Some of the Dharma, Kerouac had a chance.  But then On the Road was published in 1957 (in a sense the opposite of Some of the Dharma), fame came, and he was lost forever. Sex, drugs,  booze, and fame.  Ancient lures.  A lure is an evil that appears good.  The alluring is that which to all appearances is good but is poisonous at its core.  The fish lure se-duces the fish then hooks him.  Women are the chief "fishers of men" to twist a New Testament phrase.  The fish is 'taken in' by the lure and then 'taken out' by it.  "Pretty girls make graves," said Ray Smith the Kerouac character in The Dharma Bums.  The meaning  is that sex leads to birth and birth to another go-round on the "slaving meat wheel" (Mexico City Blues, 211 Chorus) of samsara.

Skeptical and Credulous

By turns we are too much the one or the other. We find it difficult to balance doubting and believing.

Properly deployed, doubt is the engine of inquiry, but it can also become a brake on commitment and thus on living. One cannot live well without belief and trust -- but not when they become gullibility and credulousness.

Whistle blowers such as Harry Markopolos have a hard time getting through to people who want to believe.  Their intellects suborned by greed, otherwise intelligent people who were warned by Markopolos were taken to the cleaners  by the avuncular Bernie Madoff despite the improbability of a legitimate 1% per month return in a market that safely permitted half of that.

They were skeptical of Markopolos while credulous of Madoff.  A clear proof of not only the difficulty of balancing skepticism and credulousness, but also of the weakness of the  intellect in the face of the torrent of the passions.

By the way, Markopolos' book, No One Would Listen, held my interest from the first page to the last.  It lives up to its subtitle, "A Financial Thriller."  A central lesson is that we should be deeply skeptical of federal regulatory agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission.  It failed utterly to uncover the Madoff Ponzi scheme and dismissed the repeatedly-made Markopolos warnings.  Liberals, with their tendency to believe in the salutary effects of an omni-intrusive and purportedly omnicompetent government,  should heed this lesson. 

Soul Food

People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has its foods and its poisons just as the body does. This simple truth, known for centuries, goes unheeded while liberals fall all over each other climbing aboard the various environmental bandwagons.

Why are those so concerned with physical toxins so tolerant of cultural toxins? This is another example of what I call misplaced moral enthusiasm. You worry about global warming when you give no thought to the soul, its foods, and its poisons? You liberals are a strange breed of cat, crouching behind the First Amendment, quick to defend every form of cultural pollution under the rubric 'free speech.'   But honest dissent you label as 'hate speech' and you shout down those who disagree with you.

The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify

Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage & plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Milton Contra Cloistered Virtue Unexercised

Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton:

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.

This fits nicely with Keat's notion of the world as a vale of soul-making.

Courtesy

I suggest that we think of courtesy as a mean between rudeness and obsequiousness. The courteous are neither churls nor courtiers. This despite the etymology of 'courtesy.' (As a separate post could argue, there is no such thing as the true meaning of a word, and even if there were, etymology would not guide us to it.) To put it crudely, so that even a contemporary can get the point: the courteous neither show, nor kiss, ass.

Passion

Passion dies out in the old, but there is no credit in that. If your vices abandon you before you abandon them, you are no candidate for praise. The trick is for the young and the midstreamers to learn to control passion while there is time left to enjoy the passion-free state.

Against Postponing Self-Mastery

Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them. In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

Kindness

Small acts of kindness have the power to transfigure the bleak face of existence. While gratefully remembering the words and gestures I have been fortunate to receive, I also regret the occasions I let slip where, at no cost to myself, I could have offered a word of encouragement or support to someone in need.

Visualize Using Your Turn Signals

This is one of my favorite bumper stickers, and not just because there are all too many motorists clogging the roads who seem unacquainted with the function of turn signals. The sticker is a parody of ‘Visualize World Peace’ (‘Visualize Whirled Peas’). Visualizing something as nebulous and utopian as world peace is about as pointless as the sort of visualizing going on in John Lennon’s silly ditty, “Imagine.”

If you want to improve the world, try visualizing some concrete action that it is in your power to perform such as letting a motorist enter your lane. Better, visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed. Then take the next step: visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed, and entertain no negative thoughts to boot. In the end, there is only one person over whose behavior you have any real control, namely, yourself. So if you are serious about improving the world, you can start with that guy. If you desire peace in the world, begin by making war against your lower self.

I am not saying that this is sufficient for world peace, but it may well be necessary.

William James on Self-Denial

No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.

At James' door we receive bread. At Quine's a stone. How American philosophy has fallen off since the Golden Age of James, Royce, and Peirce.

The Value of Modesty

Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37:

What good is modesty? -- It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

 

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Bullshitting and Lying

What is it to bullshit?  Perhaps the best way to understand bullshitting is by comparing it to lying. So what is it to lie? The first thing to understand is that a lie is not the same as a false statement. Suppose I make a statement about something but my statement turns out to be false. It does not follow that I have lied. Suppose a latter-day Rip van Winkle wakes up from a long nap and, asked about the Dodgers, says, "They are a baseball team from Brooklyn." Has our man lied? Not at all. He simply hasn't kept up with 'recent' developments.

For a statement to count as a lie two conditions must be satisfied: (a) the statement must be false; (b) the statement must be made with the intention to deceive. These conditions are individually necessary and jointly sufficient. But what if someone states what he believes to be false with the intention to deceive, but it turns out that what he states is true? Isn't that also a lie? Not by the definition I just gave. So it looks as if we are in the presence of two concepts of lying. The concept just defined is the narrower and more usual concept. The other, broader concept, results by the deletion of condition (a).

Superman: The Moral of the Story

George Reeves (1914-1959) was the original 'Superman.' You know the character: "Faster than a speeding bullet . . . ." Reeves was murdered (or was it suicide?) in June of 1959. I remember a comment of my Uncle Ray at the time of Reeves' death: "He could stop other people's bullets, but not his own."

I hope Reeves won't mind it too much if I take moral instruction from the mistakes that killed him. It has long been my policy to let others pay my tuition at the School of Hard Knocks.

Reeves succumbed to sex, booze, and career-identification. It is hard enough to get the sex monkey off your back, but if you allow him to form a tag-team with the booze monkey you have double trouble. But of course I would never say that he was 'addicted' to these two 'monkeys': I believe in free will, self-discipline, self-reliance, and in strengthening one's will by exercising it. With respect to temptations, a good maxim is this: Resistance strengthens; indulgence weakens. And if you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal.

After his first wife left him, he became involved with two women, sequentially, both of whom had it in them to kill him because of jealousy vis-à-vis  the other. The Bard hath said it well, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned." Reeves left the first for the second, but near the end was about to return to the first. Both were loose-living, hard-drinking, party animals, especially the second to whom he was drawn like a moth to the flame.

Alcohol fueled the fires of his delusion. Near the end he had become a full-time boozer. Hopelessly type-cast, his career was at an end.

The moral of the story: sex, booze, and worldly ambition are of the devil. But how attractive they are! And how seemingly flat, stale, and boring the life of 'moral virtue.'  And as every leftist 'knows,' morality is but bourgeois ideology and all moral striving but hypocritical posturing.

Evil appears warm and inviting; good, cold and forbidding. Evil seems fascinating and lively; good, boring and dead. Such is the world — in which reality is illusion and illusion reality.

Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm and Mel Gibson

The L. A. Times reports that Mel Gibson's 2006 drunk driving conviction has been expunged.  Here is what I wrote about the case at the time (1 August 2006): 

What's worse: Driving while legally drunk at 87 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone, or making stupid anti-Semitic remarks? The former, obviously. And yet a big stink is being made about Gibson's drunken rant. I call this misplaced moral enthusiasm. Calling a Jew a bad name won't kill him, but running him over in your speeding 2006 Lexus LS 430 will.

On the one hand, offensive words that no reasonable person could take seriously; on the other hand, a deed that could get people killed. Here is what Gibson said: "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world," and, addressing the arresting officer, "Are you a Jew?"

Now compare Gibson with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who repeatedly has called for the destruction of the State of Israel. Ahmadinejad's is speech that incites unspeakable violence, unlike Gibson's drunken rant which is no threat to anyone. So let's forget about Gibson, and concentrate on real threats.

Inappropriate Niceness

Most of us prefer nice people to surly pricks. And no doubt we should all try to be nicer to our world-mates. But there is such a thing as inappropriate niceness.

I am following at a safe distance the motorist in front of me. Then said motorist brakes for a jaywalker, not to avoid hitting him, but to allow him to cross. The jaywalker is violating the law; why aid and abet his lawbreaking? Why be nice to someone who shows no respect for the rules of the road? Why risk causing an accident? These are some questions the inappropriately nice should ask themselves.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

On Reverence

In The Weblog Handbook (Perseus Publishing 2002), Rebecca Blood writes:

If you asked me what the weblog community needs, I would answer, stronger ties among webloggers from various clusters, more independent thinkers, and more irreverence. Much, much more irreverence. Everyone seems to take themselves so seriously. (p. 164)

This passage demonstrates a pretty thorough misunderstanding of the concept of reverence. Blood appears to be confusing reverence with self-importance. Reverence, however, is more like the opposite of self-importance. Reverence is an attitude of honor, respect, devotion, deference toward a sufficiently lofty object distinct from one’s surface self. What Kant calls the moral law is an appropriate object of reverence. Like the starry skies above me, the moral law within me stands apart from, and superordinate to, my lower self. The divine, and anything or anyone sufficiently close to the divine, are also appropriate objects of reverence.

 

The truth is an appropriate object of reverence. A necessary condition of being a good journalist, for example, is reverence for the truth. A good journalist aims to establish the facts. Facts, by definition, are what they are regardless of what anyone believes them to be or desires them to be. The reverence appropriate to the competent and honest journalist has nothing to do with self-importance.

It is a commentary on the decadence of our culture that ‘reverence’ and ‘reverent’ have ceased to be terms of praise, and have almost become pejoratives. In tandem with this, ‘irreverence’ and ‘irreverent’ are constantly used nowadays to express approbation. Open up the New York Times Arts Section and read the blurbs on contemporary films and plays. Expressions like ‘witty and irreverent’ abound. The tacit message is that to be irreverent is good, and that there can be no form of reverence that is not either phony or hypocritical, or else devoid of an appropriate object.

In part this is due to the sort of confusion exemplified by Blood, the confusion of reverence with self-importance. Another part of the explanation is that the belief in reverence-worthy objects is on the wane in the upper echelons of our culture. Truth, for example, is no longer believed in by many. To the ears of decadents, all truth-claims ring hollow and are good only as fodder for deconstruction. Nietzsche clearly saw that the death of God is tantamount to the death of truth. (Cf. Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 27.) It may be twilight time for the West as the reverse-Crusaders (as Oriana Fallaci calls them) gather to storm our gates. The owl of Minerva, spreading her wings at dusk, may take flight only to be decapitated by an Islamo-terrorist. But I’m not quite ready to enter into the Splengerian gloom or adopt the scowl of Minerva.

Advertising and the Lure of the Lucre

I received an e-mail from a fellow who offered me $35 to run an ad on the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms page of this site for a alcoholism/drug addiction resource. I declined the offer for the same reason I don't display any money-making gimmicks such as 'tip jars.' The work I do on this site is a labor of love and an end in itself. To commercialize it would be to sully it. Of course, I have no objection to someone else turning a buck from his online work. If you need money, go ahead and try to earn some by any legitimate means and if this involves cluttering your site with advertising and such, it's a free country. But if you have enough of the lean green, then why not be content with what you have and turn your mind to the nonutilitarian?

"But what if he offered you $3,500?" Well, if I don't need $35, why would I need $3,500 or $35,000?

They say every man has his price. Suppose you were offered $1,000 to kill a defenseless old lady who lives by herself in an outlying area. You wouldn't do it, would you? But what if you were offered a million or ten million? Suppose she is near death, of no use to herself or anyone else, and no one cares whether she lives or dies. Suppose not even she cares whether she lives or dies. Upon hearing such an offer, a typical human brain would go into rationalization overdrive. But again, if you don't need a thousand why do you need a million?

Money, like sex, has an astonishing delusive power, a power to corrupt and distort, so much so that many think it the root of all evil. That cannot be right, of course, as a little thought will show: the most one can say is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evils. See Money, Sex, Power, and Fame and Radix Omnium Malorum. Nevertheless, money makes people crazy and they have a hard time thinking clearly about it. They think it will buy them happiness when at the most it will buy them the absence of certain forms of misery. Just as absurd is the notion promoted in the silliest song of all time, John Lennon's Imagine, that the abolition of money is the way to human flourishing:

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

It says something that this asinine exercise in the utopian  is considered one of the greatest songs of all time. I am referring to the lyrics, not the music, which is not bad. 

Is Greed the Engine of Capitalism?

The Financial Times reports on a piece of silliness from the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday condemned the “grave deviations and failures” of capitalism exposed by the financial crisis and issued a strong call for a “true world political authority” to oversee a return to ethics in the global economy.

One mistake the good Pontiff is making is to confuse capitalism and capitalists.  One who cannot see the difference may fallaciously conclude that the greed of some capitalists is rooted in capitalism.  Here is a post from a while back that counters the notion:

Hypocrisy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Left

If, per impossibile, there were such a catalog as the Seven Deadly Sins as seen from the Left, hypocrisy would be in first place. Why?  Although some who identify themselves as liberals or leftists can be counted among the religious, the dominant note of the Left from at least 1789 on has been anti-religious.  Couple this with the fact that perhaps the most egregious forms of hypocrisy are found among religionists, especially the televangelical species thereof, and you have the beginning of an explanation why liberals and leftists find hypocrisy so morally abhorrent.  That men of the cloth and their followers exhibit the worst forms of hypocrisy is captured in standard dictionary definitions of 'hypocrisy.'  My Webster's shows, "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; esp.: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion."  One reads something similar in the OED. 

Defining Lust

Before we can ask whether there is anything morally wrong with lust we have to know what we are talking about. What is lust? Here is a start:

The inordinate craving for, or indulgence in, the carnal pleasure which is experienced in the human organs of generation.

But this won't do as it stands since it mixes desire and satisfaction in the same definition. It also fails to distinguish between lust as an occurrent state and lust as a disposition or propensity. Suppose we distinguish:

Hypocrisy and Other Vices of Self-Presentation

My exposure of the Dictionary Fallacy was not intended to cast doubt on the utility of dictionaries. Far from it.  Some of their entries are excellent starting points for philosophical inquiry. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hypocrisy is "assuming a false appearance of virtue or goodness, with dissimulation of real character or inclination, especially in respect of religious life or belief."  As a lexical definition, that is hard to beat.  Having been handed the OED ball, however, I now run with it.  What the philosopher wants is a theory of hypocrisy.  That will almost certainly involve a precisification of the lexical concept along with an adjustment of the concept so that it coheres with the concepts of other moral phenomena in the vicinity such as lying, self-deception, 'bullshitting,' bad faith, insincerity, and what all else.

The Color of Envy

There was a time when I thought that the expression, 'He/She turned green with envy,' was just an expression with no fundamentum in re. But one day in graduate school, at a dissertation defense, I observed a particularly vain professor's face acquire a decidedly greenish tinge as he watched a somewhat pompous but very bright doctoral candidate hold forth in defense of his thesis. The vain professor literally became green with envy as his vanity was outshone by the student's brilliance.

I then knew that the expression had a basis in reality. But I have never seen the phenomenon since.  The facial color change, that is.  If only the emotion were as rare.

Idle Talk

From Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

Accusations of Hypocrisy as Themselves Hypocritical

The English 'hypocrite' derives from the Greek hypokrites, actor.  Although one cannot use etymology to show what a word means or even what it ought to mean, let alone its 'true and inherent meaning' (there is no such thing), in the present case the etymology provides a valuable suggestion as to how the word is used and how it ought to be used in an adequate and comprehensive theory of moral phenomena.  The suggestion is that the hypocrite plays a part in public that is at variance with what he is in private.  (This formulation may need refinement in light of the possibility of a man's playing a role before himself alone.  I once wrote in my journal: "Am I a poseur in the pages of my own journal?"  The question makes sense and suggests that a person could be a hypocrite in private.)

Hypocrisy in Reverse

Hypocrites are those who will not practice what they preach. They espouse high standards of behavior -- which is of course good -- but they make little or no attempt to live in accordance with them. Hypocrisy is rightly considered to be a moral defect. But what are we to say about those people who will not preach what they practice? For want of a better term, I will call them hypocrites in reverse.

Suppose a person manifests in his behavior such virtues as honesty, frugality, willingness to take responsibility for his actions, ability to defer gratification, respect for others, self-control, and the like, but refuses to advocate or promote these virtues even though their practice has led to the person's success and well-being. Such a person is perhaps not as bad, morally speaking, as a hypocrite but evinces nonetheless a low-level moral defect akin to a lack of gratitude to the conditions of his own success.

These hypocrites-in-reverse owe much to the old virtues and to having been brought up in a climate where they were honored and instilled; but they won't do their share in promoting them. They will not preach what they themselves practice. And in some cases, they will preach against, or otherwise undermine, what they themselves practice.

The hypocrite will not honor in deeds what he honors in words. The reverse hypocrite will not honor in words what he honors in deeds.

I am thinking of certain liberals who have gotten where they are in life by the practice of the old-time virtues, some of which I just mentioned, but who never, or infrequently, promote the very virtues whose practice is responsible for their success. It is almost as if they are embarrassed by them. What's worse, of course, is the advocacy by some of these liberals of policies that positively undermine the practice of the traditional virtues. Think of welfare programs that militate against self-reliance or reward bad behavior or of tax policies that penalize such virtuous activities as saving and investing.

Other posts on this topic are filed under Hypocrisy.

Two Ways to Avoid Being a Hypocrite

There are two ways to avoid being a hypocrite.  So as to have handy labels, I'll call them the liberal way and the conservative way.

Liberal Way:  Adjust your standards downwards to the point where there is no discrepancy between what you do and what you espouse. Take what you do and are inclined to do as your benchmark, and then make sure you never espouse any course of action inconsistent with it.  Espouse only what you live, and live all that you espouse. This approach guarantees that you will never be a hypocrite.

Deflect moral criticism of what you do and leave undone by pointing out the utter consistency of what you do and what you espouse, and by insisting that such consistency is the acme of moral accomplishment.

Conservative Way:  Espouse and defend lofty and choice-worthy standards of behavior and make a serious effort to live in accordance with them.  You will fall short from time to time.  But if you persevere in your striving with a sincere intention of realizing to the best of your ability high standards, you will never be a hypocrite. 

Obviously, only one of these ways can be recommended, and you don't need me to tell you which one it is.

Gore a Hypocrite, So No Global Warming?

This is another in a series on hypocrisy.  To understand this concept one must appreciate that the credibility of a person is not to be confused with the credibility of a proposition.

On Hannity and Colmes on the evening of 19 March 2007,  Al Gore was castigated for having an environmentally unfriendly zinc mine on some land he owns, the implication being that this makes him a hypocrite and undermines — pun intended — his credibility. Well, to some extent it does lessen his credibility. Why should we take seriously the bloviations of a rich liberal who consumes prodigious quantities of jet fuel and other resources in order to impose on others an environmental austerity from which he exempts himself?

But the credibility (in plain English, believability) of a person ought to be distinguished from the credibility of a proposition. The issue is whether or not there is global warming; the isssue is not Gore's hypocrisy, if hypocrite he be. He is not someone I wish to defend, and on the issue of global warming I take no stand at the moment.

My point is a logical one and a very simple one at that. If Gore's views have merit they have merit independently of any connection to his febrile psyche. And the same holds in the more likely case of their demerit. They cannot be refuted by tracing their origin from said psyche. If a hypocrite affirms that p, it may still be the case that p.

And if a hypocrite prescribes a course of action, it does not follow that the course prescribed is not well prescribed. Suppose a fat slob of an M.D. advises a couch potato to stop smoking, cut back on fatty foods, and exercise regularly.  The advice is excellent, and its quality is logically independent of whether or not its purveyor follows it.  Is that not self-evident?  The point extends, mutatis mutandis, to all manner of teachers and preachers.

Is the Scamp Worse Than the Hypocrite? Right and Left Perspectives

Distinguishing among saints, strivers, hypocrites, and scamps, I implied that the hypocrite is morally superior to the scamp:

Hypocrites espouse high and choice-worthy ideals, but make little or no attempt to live up to them. Scamps, being bereft of moral sense, do not even recognize high and choice-worthy ideals, let alone make an effort to live up to them. 

An astute correspondent writes:

 Are we sure that we find scamps worse than hypocrites?  Suppose a public figure, a man of the cloth, openly extols and professes the virtue of martial [marital] fidelity, but on his out-of-town junkets arranges for high-priced call girls to provide some “companionship”.  Remember Jimmy Swaggart?  Isn’t he a more offensive character than a husband who admits that he does as he pleases? Doesn’t Swaggart both commit adultery but also maintain a lying pretense of not doing so and being virtuous? I think Swaggart deserves a much lower Circle in Hell than the mere adulterer.

Remember Sartre’s bio of the thief and pimp Genet? In “defense” of Genet, Sartre notes that Genet is at least is no hypocrite. He’s a bad man, but a man who pretended to no virtues and owned his (many) vices. “I am a thief.” Certainly he’s a reprehensible character, but aren’t we even more offended by public figures who embezzle and steal, all the while making pious speeches about maintaining honesty in public office?

 

Addendum on Hypocrisy

I once heard a radio advertisement by a group promoting a "drug-free America." A male voice announces that he is a hypocrite because he demands that his children not do what he once did, namely, use illegal drugs. The idea behind the ad is that it is sometimes good to be a hypocrite.

Surely this ad demonstrates a misunderstanding of the concept of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a moral defect. But one who preaches abstinence and is abstinent is morally praiseworthy regardless of what he did in his youth. Indeed, his change of behavior redounds to his moral credit.

A hypocrite is not someone who fails to live up to the ideals he espouses, but one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he espouses. An adequate definition of hypocrisy must allow for moral failure. An adequate definition must also allow for moral change. One who did not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses cannot be called a hypocrite; the term applies to one who does not attempt to live up to the ideals he now espouses.

Companion post: Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy

People like to accuse each other of hypocrisy, but I find that few bother to ask themselves what they mean by the word. The main point that needs to be made is that a hypocrite cannot be defined as a person who espouses high moral standards but fails to live up to them. For on that definition, all who espouse high moral standards would be hypocrites. Since to fall short is human, defining a hypocrite as one who fails to live up to the high standards he espouses implies that the only way to avoid hypocrisy is to renounce high moral standards, a course of action seemingly pursued by many nowadays. No one can call you a hypocrite if you have no standards, or standards that are easily satisfied.

No, a hypocrite is not one who espouses high standards and falls short of them: your humble correspondent espouses high standards, falls short of them on a daily basis, but is no hypocrite. A hypocrite is one who espouses high moral standards, but makes little or no attempt to live in accordance with them. He is one who pays ‘lip service’ to high ideals, by ‘talking the talk,’ but without ‘walking the walk.’ Someone who talks the talk, walks the walk, but stumbles a lot cannot be justly accused of hypocrisy. That’s my main point.

A second point is that there is something worse that hypocrisy, namely, having no choice-worthy ideals. One who pays ‘lip service’ to ideals is at least recognizing their legitimacy, their oughtness-to-be-realized. Such a person is morally superior to the one who avoids the accusation of hypocrisy by having no ideals.

Notice, I said 'choice-worthy ideals.'  Better to have no ideals than the wrong ones.  It is a mistake to think that it is good to be idealistic sans phrase. 

Perhaps we need four categories. Saints espouse high and choice-worthy ideals and never fail to live in accordance with them. Strivers espouse high and choice-worthy ideals, make an honest effort to live up to them, but are subject to lapses. Hypocrites espouse high and choice-worthy ideals, but make little or no attempt to live up to them. Scamps, being bereft of moral sense, do not even recognize high and choice-worthy ideals, let alone make an effort to live up to them. 

The End of Moderation

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29:

Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end, he has radically violated the virtue.

A penetrating observation.  What is the end or goal of moderation? Haecker is rejecting the notion that the purpose of moderation, conceived as a virtue, is to maximize the intensity and duration of pleasure. Of course, moderation can be used for that end -- but then it ceases to be a virtue. For example, if I am immoderate in my use of alcohol and drugs, I will destroy my body, and with it my capacity for pleasure. So I must limit my pleasure to my capacity for pleasure. And the same holds for immoderation in eating and sexual indulgence. The sex monkey can kill you if you let him run loose. And even if one's immoderation does not lead to an early death, it can eventuate in a jadedness at odds with enjoyment. So moderation can be recommended merely on hedonistic grounds. The true hedonist must of necessity be a man of moderation. If so, then the ill-starred John Belushi, who took the 'speedball' (heroin + cocaine) express to Kingdom Come, did not even succeed at being a very good hedonist.

But if enjoyment is the end of moderation, then moderation as a virtue is at an end. Haecker, however, does not tell us what the end of moderation as a virtue is. He would presumably not disagree with the claim that the goal of moderation as a virtue is a freedom from pleasure and pain that allows one to pursue higher goods. He who is enslaved to his lusts his simply not free to pursue a truer and higher life.

Envy, Jealousy, Schadenfreude

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. Suggestibility is best left for another occasion as part of an analysis of political correctness.

Schadenfreude with a Twist

To feel envy is to feel diminished by another's success or well-being. Schadenfreude is in a certain sense the opposite: it is to take pleasure or satisfaction in another's misfortune. An interesting case of Schadenfreude is pleasure in having incited envy in another.

Envy is a vice of propinquity. Envy erupts only among people who compare themselves with one another, and for comparison there must be propinquity or social proximity whether it be that of friends, relatives, neighbors, co-workers. Suppose A and B work in the same office, and A gets a promotion. That is a situation in which envy may arise. Suppose it does: B comes to feel diminished by A's success. Even though the change in B is 'merely Cambridge,' as the philosophers say, merely relational, and thus no real change at all, the real change occurring in A, B nonetheless and quite perversely feels bad that A has done well even though B's feeling bad does nothing to improve his lot, and indeed harms him by befouling his mind and predisposing him to acts worse than envy.

A, noting B's envy, takes umbrage at being the object of B's hateful attitude. Realizing that B has befouled himself -- has shat his own mental pants as it were -- A takes pleasure in this fact. A's pleasure, I want to say, is schadenfreudlich. A takes satisfaction in the harm B has inflicted upon himself by succumbing to envy.

If A were a better man he would feel pity for B's self-harm. If he were better still, he would not even feel pity. See Spinoza on Commiseratio.

Spinoza on Commiseratio. Pity as a Wastebasket Emotion

To commiserate, to feel compassion, to pity — these come to the same. Might compassion  be a mistake? Suppose an evil befalls you. If I am in a position to help, then perhaps I ought to. But it is unnecessary that I 'feel your pain' to use a Clintonian expression. Indeed, my allowing myself to be affected might interfere with my rendering of aid. And even if it doesn't, the affect of pity is bad in itself. Why should I feel bad that you feel bad? Of course, I should not feel good that you feel bad; that would be the diabolical emotion of Schadenfreude.  The point is that I should not feel bad that you feel bad.  For it is better if only one of us suffer. Better that I should remain unaffected and unperturbed. That way, at least one of us displays ataraxia.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.

Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.

Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

Carl Schmitt on Compassion

Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, p. 284, entry of 20 December 1949:

Mitleid beruht auf Identifikation; daraus machen die Mystiker des Mitleids, Rousseau und Schopenhauer, eine magische Identität. Aber das Mitleid, dessen man sich bewußt ist, kann nur Selbstmitleid sein und ist deshalb nur Selbstbetrug.

Compassion rests upon identification; the mystics of compassion make of it a magical identity. The compassion of which one is conscious, however, can only be self-compassion and is therefore only self-deception. (tr BV)

 

The old Nazi's cynical thought is that one deceives oneself when one thinks one is feeling compassion for another. What one is feeling, in truth, is compassion for oneself.

I wonder if Schmitt's thought is coherent. Compassion requires both identification and differentiation. On the one hand, I must identify with you in some manner and in some measure if I am to feel compassion for you. There must be some recognition of common humanity. If I have completely dehumanized you, like the Nazi the Jew, or the Commie the bourgeois class enemy, then there is no question of compassion. On the other hand, compassion as a conscious state is a state of me as distinct from you. So Schmitt is only half right. Compassion is at once self-compassion and other-compassion.

Example. A schoolmate of mine, Lee Didier, was killed at the age of 19 in a motorcycle accident. Ten years later, his mother Mabel was at my mother's funeral. Our eyes met and she gave me a look of compassion such as I have never experienced before or since. She had lost her only child; I had lost my only mother. It is not that Mabel felt my grief, which is impossible; she felt something analogous to my grief. She felt her own grief at the loss of a loved one and at the same time co-suffered (mit-leidet) my grief as an affect analogous to hers. Thus Mabel identified with me, but without any mystical or magical becoming identical with me. It was an identification presupposing differentiation, as opposed to an identification issuing in identity.

So I say Schmitt is wrong. He mistakenly thinks that identification entails identity. He does not see how there can be compassion along with differentiation. Failing to see this, he falls into the cynical view that compassion is at bottom compassion for oneself. If that were true, there would be no compassion.

The Glutton and the Lecher

The glutton’s belly betrays his vice: the bigger the belly, the more entrenched the vice. It is a good thing for the lecher that there is no similar correlation between the depth of his vice and the size of the offending organ. A good thing for his body, if not for his soul.

Lust

Lust is both evil and paltry. The lecher makes himself contemptible in the manner of the glutton and the drunkard. The paltriness of lust may support the illusion that it does not matter if one falls into it. Thus the paltriness hides the evil. This makes it even more insidious.