What comes with ease...
I've been thinking lately about the old dictum, "Nothing worth doing is easy." Some part of me agrees, to a certain extent. Another part of me -- a part with a louder voice and a kind of cynical faith in the tendency of all hope to falter -- finds this little aphorism insufficient. For that part of me, the proverb is like a fist-sized jawbreaker with a tiny core of vitamins. It's layer upon layer of candy -- a positively detrimental nutritional vacuum -- surrounding something of value. The upshot is this: by the time one reaches the center, where real worth exists, one's palette has been so beguiled by pleasant but empty flavor, that what truly benefits one is about as seductive to the tongue as styrafoam packing peanuts. And, of course, there's the fact that one is accustomed by the outer shell of the jawbreaker to exclusively register what is immediately stimulating. As a result, like a dog rendered finicky by a diet of table-scrap meat-fat, not only does one find the good uninspiring, one finds it repellant. Eventually, one conflates one's wants with one's needs, and what is truly needful fades into the river of forgetfulness.
Of course, many men much better than I -- great men, in fact -- have described this phenomenon with infinitely more finesse, insight and erudition, i.e. Plato and Aristotle, among others. They've pointed out that the world is full -- and will likely continue to be full -- of men and women who've fallen to ruin, for all intents and purposes, irrevocably. These people have been so thoroughly disoriented that turning their eyes toward the good -- not to mention teaching them to see it -- would be an Herculean effort. They live like gaping orifices, availing themselves of whatever opportunities for sensation present themselves.
This lifestyle -- which, I'm ashamed to admit, I and almost everyone else I know lives, to some degree -- is one of such weakness, that one begins to find pain in any situation relatively deviod of titillation. One forgets that life is largely composed of plains of ambiguity, which stretch out before one in every direction. These, like all plains, reward one's gaze -- one's effort to distinguish features on their faces -- with blind eyes. What a surprise to find that, amongst the grasses that spring unaided from these very plains, we must sow and reap whatever joy and sorrow will constitute our lives. A real world does not exist between even the most masterfully manipulated spikes of pain and pleasure. Meaning is not a eisegetical matter, but an exegetical one. One must, if one is to be happy, learn to look to the given, rather than at it. Value haunts the world and only if we awaken to the fact the we are not merely in its vicinity, but actually a part, a phenomenon of it, will that value appear to us. The good is steward to whomever darkens its doorway.
However, when one comes bearing the kind of mindset emblematic and consequent of sayings like the one invoked at the outset of this essay -- a mindset that regards the good as something that arises out of strenuous, rigorous, artificial augmentation of what in the midst of which we find ourselves -- one cannot expect to have even an inkling of that in which difficulty or ease lies.
"Nothing worth doing is easy," indeed.
Of course, many men much better than I -- great men, in fact -- have described this phenomenon with infinitely more finesse, insight and erudition, i.e. Plato and Aristotle, among others. They've pointed out that the world is full -- and will likely continue to be full -- of men and women who've fallen to ruin, for all intents and purposes, irrevocably. These people have been so thoroughly disoriented that turning their eyes toward the good -- not to mention teaching them to see it -- would be an Herculean effort. They live like gaping orifices, availing themselves of whatever opportunities for sensation present themselves.
This lifestyle -- which, I'm ashamed to admit, I and almost everyone else I know lives, to some degree -- is one of such weakness, that one begins to find pain in any situation relatively deviod of titillation. One forgets that life is largely composed of plains of ambiguity, which stretch out before one in every direction. These, like all plains, reward one's gaze -- one's effort to distinguish features on their faces -- with blind eyes. What a surprise to find that, amongst the grasses that spring unaided from these very plains, we must sow and reap whatever joy and sorrow will constitute our lives. A real world does not exist between even the most masterfully manipulated spikes of pain and pleasure. Meaning is not a eisegetical matter, but an exegetical one. One must, if one is to be happy, learn to look to the given, rather than at it. Value haunts the world and only if we awaken to the fact the we are not merely in its vicinity, but actually a part, a phenomenon of it, will that value appear to us. The good is steward to whomever darkens its doorway.
However, when one comes bearing the kind of mindset emblematic and consequent of sayings like the one invoked at the outset of this essay -- a mindset that regards the good as something that arises out of strenuous, rigorous, artificial augmentation of what in the midst of which we find ourselves -- one cannot expect to have even an inkling of that in which difficulty or ease lies.
"Nothing worth doing is easy," indeed.
posted by fockler at 6:09 PM
1 Comments:
You notice, my "good" is not capitalized, ala Plato. What that means is that I conceive of THE good as Aristotle did, to a certain extent, i.e. for each individual there is a corresponding, individual good. This does not mean the good for any individual will be radically different than the good for any other individual. It also does not mean that there is a single, unchanging good for any individual throughout his/her lifetime. As Aristotle mentions, the accidents that befall one will nuance the propriety and/or effectiveness of various "sub-paths" of one's larger, life-long movement toward the good. But -- to answer your question and elaborate on the last part of the preceding sentence -- for me, any good that acts as a practical or theoretical terminus cannot be the over-arching good of which I speak. It can only be a victory that must also be overcome. Even the empire of victories one may accrue over one's lifetime is meaningless unless that empire eventually takes its place as a mere point in a line, as a progenitor of further overcomings. Also, the good does not precede he/she for whom it is the good. (This is a sort of "existence precedes essence" forumla.) So, for any individual, the good is not like a temple to which one makes his/her way. It is, instead, a potential road to a potential temple that should itself become a destination overcome. This is a sort of borrowed -- I'm not proud enough to steal, yet -- "becoming what one is," itself in many ways a bequest of Aristotle and, obviously, Plato and Socrates. What this means is that -- in answer to another of your questions -- since one can never get to the POINT of the good, the succession of overcomings never terminates -- unless one has the unlucky distinction of being one of Nietzsche's "last men." The "last man" is a man stripped of all distinction, all individuality. The "last man" has renounced everything dangerous in him, has ceased to "tempt gravity." He no longer takes it upon himself to walk the rope, man, which is stretched between ape and overman. (Sorry about all the straight Nietzscheanism. Take someone already passionate about Nietzsche and put him in a special problems class surveying Nietzsche's work and you get a post like this one.) Only in the event that man fails to "make danger [his] vocation" will "the good...run out."
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