Reflections on Aphorisms #98

Making myself be really disciplined with my morning today so that I can get more than one aphorism in in the day. Still focusing on Rochefoucauld’s Maximes for now, but doing more than one lets me get a little variety in.

Aphorism 137

Cunning and treachery are the offspring of incapacity. (Maxim 126)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

I think there’s a little room to argue that the relationship here is not unilateral, but I generally agree with Rochefoucauld here.

What I have found in my own life is that when I am most honest I push myself to be the best I can be so I can live without shame. Of course I know I have my little faults; I’m not particularly industrious.

I say this after waking up before dawn to go for a run, getting a lengthy morning walk in afterward to get tea (and more exercise), doing a significant amount of reading for coursework, writing two blog posts and change (though I still have to post one), and taking only about an hour and a half of down-time in between these things, but the truth is that today has been shaping up to be a good day compared to average. Being self-employed makes it more important to stay conscious of my faults.

Plus, now that I’m honest about it, I feel more of a need to compensate for my flaws, which is useful.

But one of the things about dishonesty is that it tends to breed other problems.

It’s very easy to become complacent with where you are when you’re not honest with yourself (the theme of the year when I was a freshman in college was “self-deception” thanks to Goethe and Tolstoy), and that makes it easy to let hubris and vanity take over.

And, of course, there’s an importance to valuing yourself. You always have the very basic thing, that you are a being of potential and inherent human value (if you belong to a religious or philosophical movement that doesn’t want everything to just end in chaos and blood), but self-esteem is more than just that. You need to believe that there’s something in particular that you can do, and it’s good to let yourself think that you’re at least passable after it. After all, God looks at his creation and sees that it is good in the Bible, and while we’re pitiable things in comparison to God the Bible also argues that we are made in the same image: the likeness of the creator.

So figure out what you make and be honest with your abilities. If you’re not good at it, get good at it. And let yourself have that confidence. Don’t fool yourself into complacency, but remember that pretty much everyone’s been able to struggle through life to get where they are. Lottery winners and trust fund babies may have had more struggle than they are often made out to have overcome, too, and if nothing else they’ll get theirs later when senescence hits like a truck.

Part of the reason why we resort to vices is that they’re easier than virtue. If you cultivate one or the other it’ll grow, but unless you’re very careful it’s easy to build vice. Only the masters can bring themselves to a state even an imperfect observer can call virtuous.

So figure out what you can do, do it, and learn how to live along the way.

It doesn’t sound easy, but it’s sort of a package deal.

Resolution

Master my craft.

Use honesty as a mirror.

Don’t let doubt destroy potential.

Aphorism 138

The malicious have a dark happiness.
Victor Hugo

Interpretation

One of the things that you observe about the really, truly evil is that they find what they are doing to be not just acceptable, but good.

I’d equate it with the satisfaction of being an artisan. One of the things that I really love about writing is that once in a while I write something and it turns out better than I thought it would be, and it gives me a chance to feel like I have birthed something great.

Evil doesn’t enjoy benign creation, but rather the creation of shrines to the self, the idolatry of the mirror.

I believe that we’re all attuned to the nature of existence. Call it a conscience, as I do, or the collective unconscious, as Jung did, Socrates’ daimonion, or anything you like, but we all have some fundamental realization that the world is greater than us and substantially driven by forces that we are not in control of, and that there is a way that we should behave in response to this.

This is the nature of tragedy that flows throughout our lives, because we are not in tune with the universe and we are not perfect beings. We will eventually face, if nothing else, the fact that we decay.

That’s really a terrifying notion. We may be familiar with the concept of finititude, but we have nothing to use to apply that concept to our own lives, except perhaps sleep. And sleep itself is imperfect, because we know that we will awaken from it. It can also hold its own terrors and mysteries.

Shakespeare got it right when Hamlet remarked that death is “to sleep, perchance to dream” but I don’t think he ever intended to give us an answer to Hamlet’s dilemma.

One of the only ways that we can protect ourselves from death is to make something that lasts beyond our time.

But that’s hard.

Not just in a “you’ll have to sacrifice” hard way, but in a “you’ll have to sacrifice and you’ll never know if it worked” way.

There’s layers of self-doubt to get through, and then one needs to make a big enough mark on reality for it to be reflected forever.

And, if you look at it that way, we’re specks of dust on a larger speck of dust.

How can we leave any legacy worth leaving?

The answer is simple: to set our expectations on what we are.

If you think about it, every human being is made up of cells that can be traced back to one progenitor. We’ve been shaped by our mothers going back for centuries and millennia. One could look at that and say that we’re the product of a biological machine, a sort of cancer that hijacks everything around us and uses it to replicate ourselves. The right (or wrong) sort of person would even go so far as to condemn us for that.

But I like to look at it and see the awe of the cosmos. We are part of something great and massive, so big that we can never hope to be more than a note in a chord in a measure in a song that resonates through time.

I’m religious, so this is something that may not resonate with everyone, but I feel a sense of God’s purpose within us. We’re motivated to live in line with something greater than ourselves.

When someone falls to evil, they replace that prime directive, the goals that God has set, with the desires that they have.

It brings its own sort of happiness, in the vein of Milton’s Lucifer, because we can be our own masters. There’s a price for that: we wind up living in hell. But hell is the place that God (or, again, the collective unconscious or daimonion if you favor a secular interpretation; this will have a different conceptual meaning but it is not all so different in execution) does not reign supreme in, so it is the one place that we can possibly hope to master. The wicked have found their paradise in a barren wasteland, because we can lord ourselves only over dust and ash.

Resolution

Always find joy in creation, not destruction.

Listen for God’s voice, and follow that path.

Don’t put myself above my place.

Reflections on Aphorisms #95

Much more productive today, though mostly in the sense that I got a lot of reading and more exercise in. I did get a little bit more writing done, and spent some time on productive extracurriculars as it were, but not a whole lot of finished writing today. I’ve got a few posts written that just need a final layer of polish and a posting, including a review of Bird by Bird and my tablet that I’ve been using to do a lot of my writing recently.

Aphorism 134

The love of justice is simply in the majority of men the fear of suffering injustice. (Maxim 78)

Interpretation

The sincerest convictions are backed up by a willingness to sacrifice the self.

This is one of the greatest forces for progress in the world. Without it, we would not have civilization.

The problem is that our motivations stem not from principle but from desire.

This is something that keeps us from becoming what we could be.

Desire gives us guidance, but it is flawed.

One form of desire is the desire for security.

However, we are not good at evaluating risks and threats. We are wired to be wary of our environments, to see monsters lurking in the dark. Sometimes this is even a pathological element that hides itself within our psyche, a fear of the unknown that cripples us.

This does not need to be restricted to literal darkness, either. Anything that is foreign or alien can produce reactions drawn from fear.

One solution to this is to try to know everything.

This is a flawed path. Our capacities are limited. Our ability to comprehend is limited. Even our use of language to convey information is flawed. The best tool in the repertoire of any living creature malfunctions.

The great problem with trying to overcome fear through acclimation is that there will always be something new to fear. A worse problem is that we assume that knowledge is going to strip away fear. Knowing that the flame burns does not keep it from doing harm. Knowing the proteins that make up an insect do not make it less abhorrent to one with a phobia.

Familiarity breeds contempt, nothing more. We may lose our fear from packaged experiences. We may overcome it through exposure.

Courage is the solution. It requires a willingness to sacrifice. Nihilism is not courage, because the loathing of the self is not the same as the will to improve the world.

Courage is just one of many good and noble guiding principles. Justice is another.

Justice is difficult because even the noblest fall. This is the reason why we recount tragedies. We look at the darkest parts of history and psyche. We tear the veil from our eyes. We remember the dead before we inter their remains. Even if we focus on life, we confront death.

We know that there is a part of us worthy of condemnation.

But we do not live in a world where things can be broken to pieces and survive.

To destroy the worst in us would be to destroy us, even if it is part of a metamorphosis.

In weakness of will, we seek to punish the offenses rather than eradicate their source.

We may not be able to succeed in the nobler agenda.

But we can always look into ourselves and find that which is rotten and wretched.

If we seek justice, we must start with ourselves. We must cut out that which is profane, that which is corrupt, that which is loathsome. Through these sacrifices we prepare ourselves to live in line with our convictions.

Resolution

Do no evil.

Live by principle.

Distinguish between sacrifice and pain. One has meaning. The other does not.

Reflections on Aphorisms #85

Today was kind of a weird day because I got a lot done, but not by my usual metrics.

Tomorrow I really need to get into shape on working on those, because they do tend to reflect how I’m making money currently.

Aphorism 123

We are never so happy or so unhappy as we suppose. (Maxim 49)
François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

There’s a long way down, and there’s a long way up.

I like the notion that there’s a metaphysical heaven and hell that reside below the depths and above the peaks of what the world can hold. Because there is the sacred, we cannot know true hell, and because there is the profane we cannot know true heaven.

The one way to alter this would be if one or the other were to vanish from the world, and neither seems like a likely outcome.

At the same time, we are limited by our history and our context in how we perceive the world around us.

I think that this comes up a lot in modern politics; we see the world around us and think that it’s really awful, but the whole situation is really not all that worse than what people have been used to a long time. In fact, we live in a blessed golden age compared to not just some but probably any of our predecessors.

There are examples I could give here that would be more politically charged than they need to be to make my point, so I’ll focus on the idea of nuclear war bringing an end to humanity.

First, the estimates are apocalyptic in their scope, but overlook the fact that a lot of the dangerous of a nuclear war are centralized in particular zones. We’d possibly see a return to a dark age, but probably not the end of the species.

This is not good, but when you look at it in context it’s immediately obvious that there are far worse things that have happened throughout history. Think of the plagues and wars that spanned continents, famines that took out massive portions of the population.

Humanity has always faced existential threats, and always will. They take on new forms because we’ve been fortunate enough to transcend the old ones, and our means of doing so have been imperfect and driven by base motivations.

We also overestimate our prosperity.

I don’t want to diminish our accomplishments, since they’re almost always a reflection of what happens when virtues are practiced consistently and sacrifices are made to improve our condition over a long period of time, but at the same time it is important to realize that our current state of being is one of a potential multitudes.

If we were serious with ourselves and pursued virtue with the same dogmatic obsession that we tend to pursue the things that we want, we would see outcomes we can only dream of.

Resolution

Never settle.

Don’t obsess over the pain of the day. It is a reminder of imperfection, of virtue unfulfilled. Nothing more.

Don’t presume that there is something fundamentally different between now and the collected past.