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The easiest thing to do about anything is to write a book about it. The hard thing is to live it. - José Ortega y Gasset
I seem to read less and less of what's being written these days, whether on the Internet or in contemporary books. So much generalized (and, with or without AI, easily generated) analysis of what ails the modern world. So much breathless, pseudo-scientific advice about grit and atomic habits and the like. So much navel-gazing and self-promotion. So much writing for the sake of writing, not greatness in wisdom and life. Words, words, words.
Of course, I myself am part of the problem by continuing to scribble in this blog 25+ years after I started. Although I strive to craft little gems of insight grounded in my own experience and my encounters with classic thinkers, I shouldn't deceive myself into believing that my contributions are any more valuable than all the other stuff I've stopped reading. Perhaps my mantra should be: write less, live more.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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(Previous: Eudemian Ethics I.3.)
Most of the claims and impasses will be cleared up if we can beautifully trace the boundaries of how fulfillment needs to be conceived - whether it is solely a matter of your personhood having a certain quality (as some of the older sages maintained) or whether indeed you must have a certain quality but especially so must your actions have a certain quality.
We can differentiate among ways of life. Some of them lay no claim to that kind of success, but seriously strive solely after the necessities, such as those which are all about burdensome crafts and making money and handicrafting (by "burdensome" I mean those undertaken solely to maintain a good reputation, by "handicrafting" those which are sedentary and done for wages, by "money-making" petty trading for buying and selling things).
Just as three things are reckoned as contending for fulfillment (the ones that we said earlier are the greatest goods for human beings - excellence and wisdom and enjoyment), we see also that there are three ways of life, to which everyone with the liberty to live as they please makes a commitment: civic involvement, the love of sagacity, and enjoyment.
Of these the love of sagacity tends to be about wisdom and attention to truth, civic involvement about beautiful actions (which arise from excellence), and enjoyment about bodily pleasures. This is why, as we said before, different people differ in who they call fulfilled.
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, when asked what kind of person was the most fulfilled, said "none of those you would suppose, but someone who would seem strange to you". He answered this way because he saw that the person who asked the question couldn't conceive of calling someone fulfilled who wasn't high and mighty and handsome or rich, whereas he perhaps thought that someone living free of pain and purely with regard to doing right, or someone taking part in a divine sort of attention, was as blessed as a human being could be said to be.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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Following up on yesterday's post about José Ortega y Gasset on personal destiny, here are some related thoughts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty on personal freedom (excerpted from his essay "Cézanne's Doubt"):
We can only see what we are by looking ahead of ourselves, through the lens of our aims, and so our life always has the form of a project or of a choice and therefore seems spontaneous. But to say that we are from the start our way of aiming at a particular future would be to say that our project has already stopped with our first ways of being, that the choice has already been made for us with our first breath.... If there is a true liberty, it can only come about in the course of our life by going beyond our original situation and yet not ceasing to be the same: this is the problem. Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet that we never change, since, looking back on what we were, we can always find hints of what we have become.
It seems to me that this tension between looking back and looking ahead is inherent in the human condition; it's also part of what I was getting at in my post a few weeks ago about thinking in six directions. No one perspective - in this context, neither that of the complete spontaneity of one's future nor that of the complete determination of one's past - can do justice to the complex experience of moving along the path of life. And that's a good thing: if life were simple, it'd also be awfully boring, wouldn't it?
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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In previous journal entries, I've explored the lesser-known ideas of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. Here I'd like to extend that series by looking at his insights into what we might call personal destiny, which can be found in his 1949 essay "In Search of Goethe from Within" (printed in the expanded 1968 edition of The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature).
Ortega proposes that every person represents a certain design for living: there is no such thing as human life in the abstract, but only the particular lives of particular human beings. This design for living - a vital program, a destiny, a vocation, a task, a calling, an ergon, an entelechy, a potential, a plan of being (etc.) - is not something you freely choose, he says, but instead is a pre-ordained potential that you can choose to realize or not. If you choose to realize it, then you live authentically; if not (e.g., because you substitute some other vital program for the one to which you are destined), then you live inauthentically. A human life is something that has to make itself - it is not a thing that fits a general pattern, but is inherently a task of self-discovery. There is no pre-existing solution to life, because at root your life consists in the problem of itself ("life is preoccupation with itself"). The essential question for each individual person is not "what am I?" but "who am I?" Thus "living is precisely the inexorable necessity to make oneself determinate, to enter into an exclusive destiny, to accept it - that is, to resolve to be it."
I admit that I'm not sure what to make of Ortega's proposal. On the one hand, I tend to recoil from any form of essentialism and I'm skeptical about the notion of the true self; on the other hand, we're all familiar with the reality of people living second-hand lives in which they succumb to external pressure instead of living by their own lights (e.g., by giving up their true love to marry someone their parents prefer, or by pursuing a conventional career instead of working at something they really love to do). Furthermore, what seems destined in one phase of life might not seem destined later on. And then there are all the practicalities of life: "do what you love and the money will follow" has always struck me as pure folly.
And yet, I do feel there are things I was born for. I even feel a kind of destiny about the people I care for most. To be sure, there's a great deal of contingency involved in who you meet in life, but with certain special people things feel so deeply right that the feelings I have for them seem to be a matter of destiny.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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(Previous: Eudemian Ethics I.2.)
It would be a waste of effort to look into every opinion that anyone has seen fit to have about it, because many opinions occur to children or to those who are ill or out of their minds that no one with any sense would puzzle over. What they need is not reasoning but on the one hand the changes that come with maturity or on the other hand correction, whether medical or social, since medication is no less a corrective than punishment.
Likewise with the opinions of the multitude, for they speak in an offhand way about everything, and especially about this. Indeed on this topic it is only the opinions of the wise that must be considered (for it would be strange to bring reason to bear on those who look not to reason but to experience). Since there are impasses in each field of study, clearly they exist also in relation to living best and the greatest way of life. Thus it is a beautiful thing to put these opinions to the test, for by cross-examining a claimant we spell out the opposing account.
Moreover it is worth the effort to not let such things escape our notice, especially those to which every inquiry must direct itself: the things that make it possible to share in living well and living beautifully (if it is too brazen to say "living blessedly") and that give humane people hope of attaining it. For if living beautifully consists in things which come about by chance or by nature then most people could not hope for it (since in that case they couldn't acquire it by taking care of things that are up to them or their own affairs). On the other hand, if it consists in a certain quality in oneself and one's actions, then what's good will be more common and more divine: more common because it will be possible for more people to share in it, more divine because fulfillment could be attained by those who impart a certain quality to themselves and their actions.
(Next: Eudemian Ethics I.4.)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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(Previous: Eudemian Ethics I.1.)
Focusing now on these things, everyone capable of living as guided by their own commitments must set up some target of living beautifully - whether honor or reputation or wealth or culture - toward which they will look in doing all of these actions, because not organizing one's way of life around something that makes it complete is a sign of much foolishness. First and foremost, then, one should determine for oneself, neither hastily nor sluggishly, what of ours living well consists in, and the thing without which human beings cannot attain it. For that without which it is impossible to be healthy is not the same thing as being healthy, and something similar holds in many other cases; thus living beautifully is not the same as that without which it is impossible to live beautifully. Some of these things are not specific to health or to living but are common to everything, as it were, both traits and actions (for instance, without our share of breathing or being awake or movement nothing either good or bad would exist for us); whereas others are more in the nature of each thing, and these must not escape our notice (for the aforementioned things are not inherent to vigor in the same way as eating meat or taking a walk after dinner). These are the grounds for disagreement about fulfillment, both what it is and what brings it into being; for some consider things without which one cannot be fulfilled to be part of fulfillment.
(Next: Eudemian Ethics I.3.)
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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