Fragmenta Philosophica

Goat Song - and other songs

Men of Thebes: look upon Oedipus
This is the king who solved the famous riddle
And towered up, most powerful of men.
No mortal eyes but looked on him with envy,
Yet in the end ruin swept over him.

Let every man in mankind's frailty
Consider his last day: and let none
Presume on his good fortune until he find
Life, at his death, a memory without pain.
(Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, "Exodos," trans. Fitts/Fitzgerald)

The pride not to be warred with, fought with, not to be beaten
down
of old, sounded in all men's
ears, in all hearts sounded,
has shrunk away. A man
goes in fear. High fortune,
this in man's eyes is god and more than god is this.
But, as a beam balances, so
sudden disasters wait, to strike
some in the brightness, some in gloom
of half dark in their elder time.
Desperate night holds others
(Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, 60, trans. Richard Lattimore)

In the last chapter of his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, after examining and criticising the numerous theories, political, economic and biological, by which men have sought to explain the decline of the Empire, Rostovtzeff finally turned to psychological explanation. He expressed the view that a change in people's outlook on the world 'was one of the most potent factors'; he added that further investigation of this change is 'one of the most urgent tasks in the field of ancient history' ... I have therefore judged it best to concentrate my attention on the crucial period between the accession of Marcus Aurelius and the conversion of Constantine, the period when the material decline was steepest and the ferment of new religious feelings most intense. In calling it 'an Age of Anxiety' I have in mind both its material and its moral insecurity ... When Marcus Aurelius came to the throne no bell rang to warn the world that the pax Romana was about to end and be succeeded by an age of barbarian invasions, bloody civil wars, recurrent epidemics, galloping inflation and extreme personal insecurity. For a long time the majority of individuals must have continued to think and feel as they had always thought and felt ... More surprisingly, a time-lag of the opposite kind also occurs: moral and intellectual insecurity can anticipate its material counterpart. [emphasis added]
(E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 1-4).

This was the answer Job gave to Yahweh:
I know that you are all powerful:
what you conceive, you can perform
I am the man who obscured your designs
with my empty-headed words.
I have been holding forth on matters I cannot understand,
on marvels beyond me and my knowledge.
(Jerusalem Bible, Job, 42).

But even if the future gave us no cause for hope - the fact of our existing at all in this here-and-now must be the strongest incentive to us to live according to our own laws and standards: the inexplicable fact that we live precisely today, when we had all infinite time in which to come into existence, that we possess only a shortlived today in which to  to demonstrate why and to what end we came into existence now and at no other time. We are responsible to ourselves for our own existence; consequently we want to be the true helmsman of this existence and refuse to allow our existence to resemble a mindless act of chance. One has to take a somewhat bold and dangerous line with this existence: especially as, whatever happens, we are bound to lose it. Why go on clinging to this clod of earth, this way life, why pay heed to what your neighbour says? It is so parochial to bind oneself to views which are no longer binding even a couple of hundred miles away. Orient and Occident are chalk-lines drawn before us to fool our timidity ... There are to be sure countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would bear you thorugh this stream; but only at the cost of yourself; you would put yourself in pawn and lose yourself. There exists in this world a single path along which no one can go except you: wither does it lead? Do not ask, go along it. Who was it who said: 'a man never rises higher than when he does not know wither his path can still lead him'?
(Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, trans. R.J. Hollingdale)

Ethical Individualism

I know I'm not alone in having some long-term "projects" of thought - preoccupations and concerns which are at once bedevilling and edifying, and  persist over decades. They'll probably never be resolved to one's satisfaction; perhaps, though, it's not asking too much to grasp their essential terms more deeply over time.

The character and exigencies of arete - human excellence - are facets of just such a longstanding "enthusiasm." To me, the matter is fascinating for its own sake, as well as needful instrumentally (making the practical practicable). In such cases it's always a happy day to find an author who articulates views which were, at best, inchoate in your own mind - but who manages to say things just as you'd like them to be said. Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism, by David L. Norton, has been a good companion of late; it abounds in assertions that could be profitably cited, repeatedly. Norton is a master of philosophical prose - not the arid stuff of academia - and excels at pithy, insightful formulations. The basic thrust of the book is that ancient eudaimonism is still a live option, philosophically - and that in fact some of the more considered strains in modern psychology (Maslow especially) extend and strengthen the key insights of the ancient teaching.  Along the way the reader is led to consider critically the quasi-eudaimonistic strains in thinkers as diverse as the British Idealists (Bradley, Green), Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre - and see how their attacks on core elements of the ethical tradition inaugurated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle fail. Anyone who reads me regularly will understand that this is music to my auricles.

Of especial interest is the fact that Norton understands his account to ground a kind of individualism - an "ism" in disrepute with both Left (collectivism) and Right (communitarianism). Those two poles are often likeminded in taking individualism necessarily to be of the "atomistic" (Hobbesian; sc., merely numerical) variety. Norton's eudaimonism claims to establish "qualitative" individualism: each person, ex hypothesi, is obliged to actualize an excellence uniquely his own; to live in truth to his daimon. The social entailment of this doctrine is the "complementarity of excellences," implying the need for counterparts. Hence an individualism is possible which at once celebrates independence and affirms interdependence and sociality of a kind.

What follow are a few citations that strike me as worthy of underscoring - though there's really no common thread beyond that.

"In pre-Hellenic Greece, sculptors made busts of the semi-deity Silenus that had a trick to them. Inside the hollow clay likeness was hidden a golden figurine, to be revealed when the bust was broken open ...Each person is a bust of Silenus containing a golden figurine, his daimon. The person's daimon is an ideal of perfection - unique, individual, and self-identical. It is neither the actual person nor a product of the actual person, yet it is fully real, affording to the actual person his supreme aim and establishing the principle by which the actual person can grow in identity, worth, and being. Prior to the appearance of the person in the world this ideal of perfection is not nothing, for his appearance in the world cannot be a presentation ex nihilo. Instead, its aboriginal status is pure, unactualized possibility. The appearance of the person in the world then constitutes the actualization of that possibility ..."

"... For the locus classicus of the duplicity in human being our source must once again be Plato - this time the famous image in the Phaedrus of the human soul as charioteer with two horses, a white one, which struggles to rise aloft, and a black one, which tries to plunge below. Here the souls of man is represented as a radical equiovcation in being, a relentless argument with itself. Here, too, appears the true form of the much misunderstood priority ascribed to man by classical humanism. Under humanism man appears, not as the supreme being metaphysically or morally, but rather as his own first problem, upon his solution to which rests all hope of his success with other problems."

"Ordinary experience teaches that many people are largely unreliable at doing what they ought; a few are generally reliable; and there are some truly worthy individuals who are unfailingly scrupulous both at doing what they believe they ought and at seeing to it that the ought that appears to them is the true ought. Here is intractable integrity."