Last thoughts for 2023.

Every mood implies a different version of the world. Few people can translate a particular mood into a more or less permanent disposition – e.g. the mood or joy, of Sehnsucht (longing for a metaphysical home always out of reach such that the desiring itself is preferable to anything else the world has to offer); or the mood of despair, the loss of meaning, the inability to love. I can’t. My convictions about the world are disclosed in moods that on a normal day do not visit me, though rarely does a day go by that I do not remember and long for their return. 

    Like Scrooge, in my normal set of moods, I fear the world too much. Unlike him, my response is to flee from it into imaginary literature or history books that let me travel to another time and place. This is the response of the romantic, which is one side of a coin, the other side of which features Scrooge and other assorted reductionists and utilitarians. Both share a fear of the world, a conviction (as long as the mood lasts) that the world (and nature) is cruel, indifferent, without intrinsic meaning, the enemy of the Good, of love. Scrooge embraces that “reality”; I flee from it - especially from those parts of myself that are part of it. But in a mood I know all-too-well, I am not too far from Scrooge. Indeed, Scrooge as a child also escaped the hostile and lonely reality of the boarding school by fleeing to imaginative books. He is overjoyed to meet Ali Baba again when the Ghost of Christmas Past takes him back to his old school. 

   What makes me different from Scrooge is that I judge this mood and this set of convictions by a higher standard of goodness and reality, the one that reveals itself when I actively love or when I am in the grip of Sehnsucht or – more rarely – when joy overcomes me. Such moods do not, unfortunately, rule my life. I lack the virtue to make love the permanent mood. I am too damaged to escape my escapist romantic side completely. But reality as it reveals itself in joy, longing, and love feels the most real. 

    The convictions about the world that originate in longing, joy, and love make the most sense of my life and the world. So even if I am cut off from them much of the time, I see them as a geometric circle against which all the physical circles I may try to draw are measured. Of course, I could judge that the convictions about the world that reveal themselves in longing, joy, and love are unreal, wishful delusions of a romantic mind. Should I do so, then my life and the world would be measured by convictions that originate in the various moods of despair – would be judged meaningless by those standards. 

   This is not an intellectual puzzle for me or a difficult intellectual struggle. Intellectually, a draw obtains: both basic positions can bring serious evidence to support them; both have been explored in depth by philosophers of genius. Both can be authentically held and lived. But when I see or remember the faces of my children, the force of such despairing philosophies dissipates in an instant. I can't take Schopenhauer or Nietzsche seriously while reading a story to my children, for example, though I do love both men in a way and have taken their work very seriously over the course of my adult life.