Roots

I'm sitting here with a rather obvious reminder of how rash it can be to forget that things that appear on the surface to be totally disconnected - for example, a nondescript, seemingly dead piece of vine on one side of the yard and a sprig of poison ivy on the other - often turn out to share a single root.

This image is a fairly obvious metaphor for the kind of connectedness I wrote about a few posts back in terms of family trees and "one life," but it's also a way to start attempting to reconcile what might appear to be a glaring inconsistency in my recent rambling divigations.

On the one hand, I spewed quite a bit of verbiage scorning contemporary atomistic-individualistic models of the person as "illusory" and "a betrayal of our true nature as humans." But in my last two posts, I endorsed the idea that the only real foundation for ethics "is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge." In other words, a truly ethical society exists only when each individual in that society lives ethically.

So it certainly could appear as if I'm condemning social atomism with one breath and promoting it with the next. Obviously, that's not my intention. By way of explanation, I want to reiterate the distinction I made previously between "individualism" and "individuality."

I defined individualism as "the assembling of a personal identity through selective self-identification with a collection of intellectual components such as beliefs, ideas, attitudes, interests or affinities, and physical activities, possessions and displays." I've ranted more than once, in fact, about our seeming acceptance of this externalized model of identity formation.

But I haven't offered a definition yet of what I would allow as "real" individuality or how it's cultivated, mostly because it's harder to define. In fact, I believe the ultimate basis of individuality or "personhood" is a kind of inner core that is the part of us that connects us with the whole stream of life. Ultimately, it's a mysterium, irreducible to a verbal formulation: It's to be lived, not discussed.

So it's easier to talk about the "how" than the "what." And the "how" is of course quite well known, and has been known for millennia. I'll let Plato explain one way of looking at it, and leave it at that for now:

“Now we have also been saying for a long time, have we not, that, when the soul makes use of the body for any inquiry, either through seeing or hearing or any of the other senses — for inquiry through the body means inquiry through the senses — then it is dragged by the body to things which never remain the same, and it wanders about and is confused and dizzy like a drunken man because it lays hold upon such things?”
“Certainly.”
“But when the soul inquires alone by itself, it departs into the realm of the pure, the everlasting, the immortal and the changeless, and being akin to these it dwells always with them whenever it is by itself and is not hindered, and it has rest from its wanderings and remains always the same and unchanging with the changeless, since it is in communion therewith. And this state of the soul is called wisdom.”

Phaedo, 79c-d; trans. by Harold North Fowler. Online at the Perseus Digital Library.

Insanity Defense

I'm not at all confident that yesterday's post ended up saying what I set out to say, so I want to try to clarify it a little, if possible.

Perhaps the main fault of the Sophists' definitions of justice (diakosynē) as "the advantage of the powerful" or "everyone guarding against everyone" is that both suppose that justice (and by extension any ethical imperative) varies according to incidental factors such as social status or political role.

We certainly see this type of thinking in contemporary culture. The very existence of theories of business ethics makes this clear, as it assumes that my ethical imperatives or obligations as a business owner or manager are different from those I must meet purely as a human being. Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer and I all reject this approach, as Gadamer states succinctly in one of the passages I quoted yesterday: "Justice does not exist when each person watches the other and guards against him, but when each watches himself and guards the right and just being of his inner constitution."

To put it as plainly as I can, my ethical obligations don't change just because my social or political status does. But our society widely assumes just the opposite: There are different ethical standards for different kinds or classes of people. If I accumulate great wealth, if I buy or open a business, if I'm elected to political office, if I achieve a position of leadership in a church or other religious or social movement, a whole new set of rules is assumed to apply to my behavior. And these new rules invariably seem to be formulated in terms of how much I can get away with in my new position.

I don't think this is right. I believe Plato is quite right to argue that the real basis of all ethics, and thus the only firm foundation for a society, is each person knowing right from wrong and persistently trying to live in accordance with this knowledge. And I'm convinced that we all know "on some level" what really is right or wrong, even when we're bending over backwards mentally to find some rationalization for doing what's wrong. As I said before, some things are always wrong. Moreover, we know they're wrong: murder, rape, theft, dishonesty, failure to keep promises, cowardice, scapegoating, etc. etc. etc. What's to debate?

We all know from watching "Law and Order" that the legal definition of insanity is the inability to tell right from wrong. Today, there are armies of lawyers, advertisers,political consultants and other clever people - Sophists, in other words - who labor to convince us that up is down, white is black, day is night and, yes, wrong is right. To the extent that our society accepts their arguments and adjusts its laws and social norms to incorporate them, our society is legally insane. No wonder, then, that so many people look at what's going on around us and conclude that the inmates have taken over the asylum.