A Leak From Another World

You can know it through joy. The best way. Which is somehow connected to love.  The first time I hiked up a mountain to an old grown forest in the Smokies I felt that. The place put me in touch with a reality that I could not perceive or intellectually grasp. Only that magical joy put me in touch with it. Alas, the feeling fades and you're left with the memory. A picture of the place just covers it up altogether. 

. . .

 

   At the core of all the different kinds of love is the judgment that the beloved person or object is intrinsically good, that its existence is good, that it is good that it is in the world. To love someone is the joy that they exist. It can be for some like allowing them to be. To love and to be are deeply connected. (Josef Pieper)  That proves that reality is meaningful, that there is a moral structure to the universe. Beings have emerged from nature that have the potential to know and love others natural beings (in a finite way of course), to know and love a knowable and loveable universe. To be inspired by it. To contemplate its beauty. Let that sink in. 

  If we don't make up what is real and good, then autonomy is a false idea. The task to is conform our hearts and minds to reality. Our autonomy is the capacity to substitute for our highest potentials - perhaps the very reason for Creation for all we know - a merely private fantasy. We can chose to turn away from everything that is real and good. Hell - fantasy generated by a damaged, envious, resentful, fearful ego unhinging itself from reality. (MAGA is a form of Hell, Satanic to the core. Which is not to say that it can be recognized as such from within the fantasy.)

 

. . .

 

I can’t do otherwise. You get closest to goodness when you run up against some absolute limit: it is impossible for me, unthinkable for me to even contemplate doing that. Just as some differences exist as to what is unthinkable from one culture to the next – indeed, these differences being defining of those cultures as different – some things that are unthinkable for me might not be to another. Neither of my first two children were conceived in wisdom under ideal circumstances; not to consent to their lives – unthinkable. And the status of my religious beliefs played no role: I was areligious when Kelly was conceived; apostate when Paul was conceived; in both cases my heart was clear and pure when I consented to their lives. It is unintelligible to me that a person can feel differently (except perhaps in cases where rape or abuse was involved); I can only pity the mortal who cannot say yes to a new life they have brought about.

        In another case, every infantile and primitive emotion in me screamed out for violence against a person I felt had wronged my family. Here in a sense, evil was thinkable. And yet something in me knew with the certainty of a logical truth that should I give in to this lust for violence, I would lose my soul and harm my children irrevocably. In such cases – I cannot imagine an adult human being that does not know what I am talking about and has not known such moments – your whole being runs up against a rock-hard wall of reality, though you cannot see it. I call this, after Plato, the Good. 

   Perhaps a paradigm case of this (cited by Gaita) is Martin Luther’s appearance before the Emperor Charles V, when Luther, faced being burned at the stake should he not recant, said: ‘I stand here. I cannot do otherwise.’ It would have revealed a complete failure to understand Luther had one of his interrogators said – ‘Are you sure? Perhaps if you tried a bit harder, you could?’ Nonsense! 

But that is just one way the Absolute makes itself felt in earthly life. 

. . .

A good man can’t be harmed in this life or the next. Does our hope depend on how things will turn out in this world? Socrates explains to the Athenians while on trial for his life:

 

The difficulty, my friends, is not to escape death, but to avoid unrighteousness. Will life be worth living if that higher part of man, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice, be destroyed?

 

Obviously, something terrible happened to Socrates, and many more terrible things happen to decent people all the time. So this paradoxical idea of Socrates (from the Apology) can’t mean that.

          Again, I think Gaita is the best reader of Plato here: “There can be an ethical perspective on misfortune that enabled one to consent to it rather than be resentful.” What does that mean? Well, Aristotle agreed up to a point but then qualified the claim with the observation that after a certain point, after a certain degree of suffering is reached, the anyone who is honest would admit that it would have been better had the sufferer never been born. Aristotle’s example case was Priam, who lost his beloved sons and city in the Trojan War. I can think of much worse examples. 

     You can understand Plato/Socrates as rejecting this, a rejection which Aristotle could not take seriously, seeing it as an example of wanting to argue for a thesis at any cost (i.e. embracing an other-worldly Idea without any nod towards common sense). Gaita makes sense of this thought that recalling Wittgenstein’s deathbed request to his doctor to tell his friends that ‘it’s been a wonderful life.’ This is reported by Norman Malcolm in his recollections of Wittgenstein and moved him precisely because Wittgenstein’s life had been for all appearances deeply unhappy (he was seriously in danger of committing suicide at many points in his life). Gaita paraphrases this remark in this way: Wittgenstein was not offering an assessment of his life, a judgment on the events and actions of his life, as might happen in a biography. Aristotle, in contrast, was offering an assessment of Priam’s life as supremely miserable, so miserable that anyone would have to say it would have been better had he never been born. But the latter judgment does not and cannot express an assessment of one’s life – that it was full of misfortune, etc. – but an attitude towards life, a light in which to see life, its happiness and miseries.

           Wittgenstein’s and Socrates’ attitudes are expressive of a kind of unconditional allegiance to the world as something good, as a difficult gift, despite what individuals may suffer (mostly due to man’s inhumanity to man). Or Lewis’ thought – adapted from Socrates – that suicide is like abandoning your post during a war in which the world is at stake. They saw whatever suffering in their lives in this light. Often a formative, sublime experience contributes to such an attitude, one that is upheld by conceptual resources within a culture. For the Greeks, it may have entered into their world through Socrates/Plato.