Shakespeare and a memory

Shakespeare gets it right:

The Tempest. Ariel sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.

Ferdinand answers:

The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.

***
"Something rich and strange..."

I have become increasingly tired of late. I think my grief condenses. Where before it was a mist all around, tonight I feel a torrent.

This is the second time he died for me. I haven't mentioned it before. He had a grave heart attack some 30 years ago; we were together -- just him and me -- at the YMCA. He had been playing racquetball or handball. He left in an ambulance, and his last words to me at the time were, "Oh son, you'll have to take care of them all."

I never had to, I should mention before this gets too maudlin. He recovered, or actually, someone else recovered in his body. Because he was never again the man he had been up to the time he entered that ambulance. Not a bad man. In many ways, he became a better man. Gentler, more tolerant, more loving and patient. But not the man I'd thought of as a god.

This is no mortal business. I might say the same of this very strange endeavor I've begun here. Why am I unable to extricate my examination of ethics from the loss of my father, yet at the same time find myself so unable to fuse and bind those disparate themes?

Late night thoughts -- regret

Experience is so inadequate to our ending. We talk about living a life of no regrets, but I think to myself that the person who dies without regret is one who must be lacking all imagination. I consider the paths I have chosen in my own life, and I am for the most part happy with the track of it to this point in time. But without regret? There were a thousand lives I could have lived, and a thousand more I could start living from this moment.

Here and now, enmeshed in my present life, the feeling must be so muted in comparison to the last distilled instant of consciousness. But even now, enmeshed in my present life, there are many, often incompatible, routes I wish I could have pursued. And I would have wanted to pursue all of them, were that scenario at even the vaguest, most distant horizon of the possible.

If I were to finish the books that are half done in manuscript, and the fragments of a novel my father left, and novels friends and family members have periodically said they wish I would write for them, there would still be another novel, shelves of novels unwritten, novels impossible to write were I to want only that for the remainder of my time.

Without regret. I suspect that regret is the closest thing we have to counterbalance our delusions of immortality. I do not mean "immortality" on a grand scale -- "I am a god" or somesuch nonsense -- but rather in the sense that we all fill our days with many trite and silly things. The way we waste time, doing things that are unimportant to us. Those actions are the living flesh of deluded immortality -- the actuality, perhaps even the necessity of our assumption that we will take care of the important things at another time, on another day.

Or perhaps, in that last droplet of consciousness, our perception changes radically enough to erase all regret. I do not know which ending would be worse, or if the answer is the same for every person, or if there is anything one can do to ward it away or invite it -- depending on what one might wish for. Regret or no regret.

Legality and Ethics

There's a lot more ground to cover on the issues of will, intention and desire. But tonight I do want to complete and make explicit a thread of thought I began a few posts back.

Legality and ethics are in opposition. In the example of Abraham, our inability to gauge intent may (I say *may*) render us unable to render an ethical judgment. But where ethics fail, legality steps in and prosecutes. Were Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, a court of law would and should prosecute the act.

Attempts to divine intent would impact the severity of charges faced and the type and length of sentence. Our fictional Abraham (fictional because in this alternative universe, we posit that he actually completes the act of sacrificing his son), acts under a divine imperative, and so might well be performing an ethical act, but acceptance of the legal consequences would be part and parcel of his ethical conviction. In this, he woul be no different from Socrates accepting the legal punishment assigned him.

From parking tickets to charges of murder, the legal system is there as a prosthetic to substitute for ethics when our ethics fail. Over time, I believe, the tendency is for legality to assert larger and larger domains for itself -- moving into contract law, when a handshake once served; arbitration law, when debate once served; and so forth. The scope of ethics shrinks until our culture behaves as if "good/bad" were irrelevant, and "legal/illegal" is the only meaningful distinction.

In this time of legal dominance, this entry appears to be an unmediated criticism of Law because I overlook the obvious advantages that accrue to law. Law at least attempts to apply objective standards towards adjudication of societal rules and values. As such it carries with it a strong democratizing tendency. It asserts that legality should and (because objective) can apply equally to all people.

The world of ethics, on the other hand, carries strong potential for elitism and abuse -- precisely because to some extent in must eschew objectivity. Intent is not tacked onto ethics, it is integral to ethics. And as we've already begun to establish, intent is precisely where the difficulty arises in living the good life or being a good person.

I confess, though, on the whole, I would prefer to live in an era with an excess of ethics, as opposed to the hyper-legalistic era of today.

Doing and Being

A few entries ago, I entered into a meditation on intent and the problems that come with it. I cannot ever know with full confidence the intent of another, and this has the potential of barring me from ethical judgment. An ethics incapable of judging is an ineffectual ethics.

Our individual lives are threads in the tapestry of humanity. We are dependent upon one another. One version of this notion: Aristotle asserts that one cannot be good, cannot live the good life, in a bad community.

Because of this dependence, it is not adequate to develop an ethics that applies only to one's self in isolation. If an ethical system denies us the authority to criticize unethical actions of others, or to praise the ethical acts, it is not an ethical system at all. It fails the first test of ethics, that it be applicable and true to human experience.

And yet, thus far, I have worked on this issue solely from the perspective of ethics as action. Charles Taylor, in his excellent book "Sources of the Self," concisely points out the problem: "This moral philosophy has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of the good as the object of our love or allegiance or, as Iris Murdoch portrayed it in her work,, as the privileged focus of attention or will." (3)

Perhaps focusing on right action is too late in the sequence of cause-and-effect relations to pinpoint ethics. If Taylor is right, the essence of doing right is existing within rightness; doing right is the healthy emanation that results from the proper ontological orientation.

I need to think more on this, but at least on the surface such an approach would explain my earlier questions around why so many who live ethically seem to begin from the premise of "I am not good." Such a statement is rooted in a set of ontological assumptions from which right action might best emanate...