Commentaries
Philosophy, or a training in it, allows you to change your definitions so you don’t have to change your life. It is usual to think you are either x, or not x. Either a coward or not a coward, for instance. But the philosophically trained can wiggle out of the dilemma by casting doubt on the meaning of the concept: is it determinate, is it vague, is anything after all truly courageous? And once logic is done with, there is the ‘critical’ perspective: Isn’t the very idea of courage an instrument of a power structure which ought not to exist? And isn’t it only the wealthy who can really afford to be courageous? As a last resort, you can always – combining criticism and logic – directly deny the ‘binary’ logic which forces the choice, which says that everything either is something or is not that thing. And so the philosopher is unfortunate in being able to cast enough dust around that they can hide in it. In this way, they use their philosophical training to rob themself of clear thinking, so producing the opposite of philosophy in themselves.
There are philosophical ideas you want to approach but cannot come near to, perhaps out of fear, or because you have no way of articulating them. Maybe they are just extraordinary feelings or experiences interpreted as philosophical.
Philosophical ideas are always out of range of a given person at a given time. Aristotle, for instance, could not think of despair at the world, or hope in the future of the world, and perhaps had no notion of the world in the way which is required to have such hope or despair at all. For all of these ideas rely, I think, on a monotheism of a particular kind, which had nothing to do with his way of thinking. A way of thinking that wouldn’t, for instance, have been able to understand Bach.
The paranoid world is a world in which everything has a moral character; specifically, everything is against you. In any moral idea of the world, there are forces pitted against you, and in this way, all morality has an element of paranoia (under the guise, for instance, of legitimate punishment). How much paranoia depends, as it were, on the proportion of angels to devils in the world, seen through the eyes of that morality.
Were you to live in such a moral-paranoid world, it would be refreshing to discover an authoritative kind of thought according to which there are no such moral forces in the world, none against you and none for you either. (It would be tempting to read this new kind of thought as also moral, as either for or against you, there to free you or to further entrap you.) According to this line of thought, no one and nothing would be morally good or morally evil. It would be refreshing too if, nonetheless, there was still a structure of action which bears an analogy to morality. In which, for instance, there was a way of bettering oneself, through a non-moral conception of the good.
Aristotle’s ethics is like this. In it there is no God who can see and judge us, no absolute good or evil, nor the possibility of guilt or hope or despair. His ethics existed before humans became ‘interesting animals’, before the great Christian theological drama of life and sin and death could make sense.
He nonetheless has an idea of a good person, but not an idea of an absolutely morally good person. His idea is that being a good person is like being a good carpenter, something you can excel at. However, his ethics is not prefaced by a should. There is no absolute should. Rather it is as if he says: if you wish to be a good person, to lead a happier life, it would look like what I describe in my book.
The morally hygienic person doesn’t want to incorporate that which they morally oppose. (They certainly won’t eat or drink it.) They prevent any of the bad substance outside from them entering into them, and want to see themself as pure and morally uncorrupted, untouched by this bad substance. Being pure, they are always fearful of contamination, and so must stay far from that which is evil.
Their most prized objective is to see themselves as good. And so they edge further and further away from the world – people and things in the world – wanting to disentangle themselves from all evil, which increasingly becomes a matter of disentangling themselves from anything they are not. For they have identified themselves with what they imagine to be their inner goodness, and this idea of themselves is defined through opposition to the outer evil of the world.
They take their idea of a good person to be one who does no harm, forgetting that the other side of this idea is one who does good. For the reason you would want to do no harm is the same reason that you would want to do good; the idea of good, like that of justice, must concern our relations to others, and our relations to others cannot stop at refraining from directly harming them.
The reality is that the morally hygienic person is concerned with a relation but it is the pure reflexive self-relation. And through this, they produce an entirely negative self-centred doctrine of ‘the good’.
What does it mean to see yourself as good? Perhaps it means to think of yourself as doing the right things in the right way at the right time (and similarly, not doing the wrong things in the wrong way at the wrong time). It is similar to thinking of yourself as beautiful: walking and talking with grace etc. Each one is a pose for yourself, a way of looking at yourself which relates to the way you think others might see you.
In both cases, the person walks on a tightrope, and is constantly worried that they might slip. For the good and the beautiful are thin lines, and hard to attain and sustain. (They are lines, whereas what is not good or beautiful are large areas.)
Each more or less thinks of themselves according to this idea, which you can read in their eyes, full of conceit; thinking of themselves as good or beautiful to elevate themselves as somehow special. Or perhaps, they start from the idea that they are special, and therefore latch onto these notions. A dichotomy or hierarchy is constantly before their mind, and they must be on the right side, or rank, or else they have failed, and will unbearably find themselves just one amongst others.
One morality now relies on our doing things for ourselves which are unarguably good: exercise, good food etc. This is now the good person, who faithfully fulfils all of their obligations to their body, as if their body were another person.
Another morality appears to be a show for others, in which the badges they wear, the brand of their bags, their haircut etc. are all part of this morality. We think they are victims of fashion, including certain trends of thought, but all this is subsumed under the desire for the person to think of themself as a good person, and it is in pursuit of this morality that they use others as a mirror.
Confessions are typically sins of commission – I have sinned, I have acted, forgive me for what I have done. But we are enmeshed with the world through doing and not doing alike, and there is no way out by simply not doing what you take to be wrong. For some of the things you have left undone, are surely just as good or bad as some of the things you have done. You can imagine a perfectly legitimate confession consisting of all thing things that a person has not done.
The morally good person is not the person who doesn’t do evil, or is not complicit in a world in which evil is done. If this were the case, then the dead would be best of all. It must then be the way you handle living in such a world which matters.
When we say the world is full of evil, it is interesting that it always excludes the speaker: the world outside of me is full of evil. And in this moral sense, when I speak as a moral person, I always position myself outside of the world. This position cannot be logically correct: for if all of us do this, who in the world is left to do the evil which the world is claimed to be full of?
‘Complicity’ itself is tricky, and often a trick. For it is often used to mean that by being part of a group who produces some result, you bear some guilt or responsibility for it, or for allowing that it was done ‘in your name’. But we are far too quick to say ‘We have done this’. A ‘we’ doesn’t exist just because a group or a nation is named. And to say that we have done something is even harder to establish. (Think of the case when the ‘we’ is used universally, for instance: ‘We have walked on the moon’. A universal humanity is invoked, but to what end? It doesn’t distribute here, for I haven’t walked on the moon, not even a small amount.) The charge of complicity of a citizen in the apparent crimes of their state requires a lot of theory to support it, explaining what their relation to the state is and their obligations to contribute towards altering its actions.
Whatever the truth about complicity is, it is clear that the idea is used by some to inflame and control. For you may think you have done nothing wrong, but complicity teaches you to think that, without knowing it or doing anything, you have done something wrong; that even a beneficiary of a crime committed long ago is complicit in that crime. In this way, complicity serves to extend responsibility, and to encourage self-accusations of guilt; and your guilt can then be preyed upon to draw you into a certain course of action advocated by those who are determined to convince you that you are complicit. They will claim that we live in a false consciousness of innocence and the truth is that we are guilty – because it is our tendency to think we are guilty, we are easy work for them.
A new form of behaviour exists in which people cease looking at one another in the eye, and I suppose they think that if they do not recognise the other person, they will not have to negotiate with them, and so can do what they like, and get what they want. They must think that they would fail in a negotiation with someone, that they would be the losing party in any actual negotiation or conflict.
But this – thought of as a strategy, which it isn’t – could surely have only limited success for the petty little which can be taken from another by ignoring them. Anything beyond this requires cooperation, and recognition, and so looking at them in the eye. But because we are now unpractised, we won’t be able to do this when call to.
It is an important fact about us that we were born helpless. On occasion we remember or feel this utter helplessness, as if we were falling. In the brief gap between the helplessness of childhood and that of senescence, in which we enjoy voluntary action, for a brief moment, we carry with us at all times this complete experience of helplessness. This memory is the background of our whole life, and religion finds it important to honour it and make it holy. For it is this sense of helplessness which is taken up and given meaning as helplessness before God. Relations to the divine are understood through analogy with infant and parent. According to this idea, pride is when we pretend that we were never were infants, and are not ever helpless; while the possibility of relating to God relies on recalling our helplessness and seeing it as our fundamental, actual and constant state.
It is very convenient for us to say that the root of a person’s failures in the world has medical grounds. In this way, a deterministic – often psychological – answer is given, and everyone is absolved of responsibility. Another response might be that it is because they had not been courageous in the face of great difficulty that they failed in their tasks. We refuse this, in favour of medical determinism, in which we say that due to their fears or desires, or some other factor, they cannot or could not do such and such. This explanation reassures them and everyone connected to them. No one is to blame, or rather, mute nature is to blame for everything. Of course the cost of this innocence is alienation, for if we are not free, then what are we?
This psychological determinism is now so woven into our explanations of ourselves that we can hardly see it. We say that people do what they do because of their bad experiences or their traumas or etc. In this way we remove any autonomy from them and from ourselves. Of course, different lives will produce different desires and fears, and these are an element in understanding a life. But it is how you, the free individual, handle yourself that matters. And that element is denied when you think you are being charitable to someone by citing their past to explain their present. If this is how we are treated and come to see ourselves – as victims of the past, as unable to control ourselves – we could end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy, looking at ourselves as without responsibility, as slaves to our desires and fears manufactured in childhood, which fully determine our actions. We know too much Freud, and not enough Aristotle.
In violence, all attention is on the fist coming your way, and you forget about the person who throws the punch; that is, who they are, what is in their mind, who they think you are etc. Violence and war mean we no longer try to understand or relate to or think of why, but we defend, avoid, strike back. It is said that things are invented in war, but in war no real thinking occurs, only calculations, tactics, strategies. After the war, I suppose it is hard to remember what thinking was, and easy to mistake what was successful in the war – calculation, tactics, strategy – for thinking.