Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Well it was a noble ideal, the hope to post daily. I really don’t think that is going to happen now that I have had a chance to assess the situation. To write daily a number of prerequisites that must fall into place. For me it requires peace among my children and their interactions with each other and the education system. Can I say as likely as a camel through the eye of needle? The second thing is new fodder for my thoughts. This requires that I have time to read something new and cogitate on it. Or it could require conversation, challenging and unfettered. Again this requires a space free of the constraints of day to day living. An hour of talk, that does not touch on bills, or the government or popular entertainment, is another substance rare and elusive.
I did however get a chance to read a little bit of Being Good, a short introduction to ethics on my bus ride in. Simon Blackburn (http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/~swb24/) is a great write and I admire really solid writing. His life’s work is philosophy but his approach to life is balanced. In a passage addressing some of the core ethical issues, in this case desire and the meaning of life he offers this slightly abridged conclusion.
Perhaps we put ourselves in the position of the judge: each of us can ask whether life has meaning to me, here and now. The answer then depends. Life is a stream of lived events within which there is often plenty of meaning-for ourselves and for those around us. The architect Miles Van der Rohe said that God is in the details, and the same is true for the meaning of life to us, here and now….Meaning comes with absorption and enjoyment, the flow of details that matter to us. In other moods everything goes leaden. Like Hamlet we are determined to skulk around the edge of the carnival, seeing nothing but the skull beneath the skin. It is sad when we become like that, and once more we need a tonic more than an argument. The only good argument is, in a famous phrase of David Hume’s, that it is no way to make yourself useful agreeable to yourself or others. Id. P80
I like Blackburn’s attitude. It is so easy to get lost on the way to living with meaning. I will try to get another post up this week.
1 comment:
Jay,
I have to disagree not so much with the gist of the arguement but with the details. I think that most of us get so involved in the details of living the here and now. e.g. getting little johnny dressed and to school, or what the boss said yesterday. We miss meaning in life trying to plow thru these details and seeking a place where we can feel safe to close our eyes and sleep at night.
I would argue that the meaning comes from the patterns, or the consistent things that give us the strength to get up and charge out into the world again the next morning. Or the pattern of how you react across the collections of here and now, as opposed to the details of where we stop at any particular juncture.
It is the fear of losing those touchstones that create much of the anxiety in the day to day. Whether they be family, church, a career path they give us a bearing to guide us in the sea of the everyday details that threatens to swallow us up.
I would argue that meaning comes with being able to shed the anxiety and fear that drives most people, and to live life focused on a goal (whatever it is)... Perhaps I confuse meaning and purpose here...or to have built a strong enough base of what matters to you, that those same currents of the the every day details do not move you from that base.
Having lived with depression most of my life, it is sad to say that many times the skulls appear without any preference or impetus on your part. It takes true determination to look past them, and much more effort to just crawl from your bed when you know the world of skulls is waiting. And once you've mustered the effort to stand naked in the cold morning air, then if you have any energy left you try to move through the day. There is no chosing to live this way, it finds and haunts you. It is an anchor that you drag with you through life. Occasional bouts of lightness end when the chain pulls taint if you change direction. No the skulls are always there. It is through the sheer magnanimity of the human spirit that we melancholy danes paint skin on the bones of those we pass everyday.
As for being agreeable to others, this is something I often find perplexing. Useful is easy if you or they know what they want. Agreeable often illudes me, so I have tried to settle for consistent. I tried being agreeable through humor, but found it is a minefield of peccidillos and personal tastes.
If you read much in the area of perception it becomes clear that humans are pattern seeking beings. We seek for patterns in everything, and use these constructs to make sense of our lives. Once we can take a mass of data, and simplify it into a pattern, then we can take in more data without overstimulation. I would agrue that rather than finding meaning in the details, that we find meaning in reducing detail to patterns that we can then recognize and react to as a whole. The establishment of this structure of patterns into catalogues helps to simplify our world and our lives.
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