Anger

The value of anger is that it asserts the chasm and the dependency between Self and World. Anger is the difference between the World-as-it-is and the World as I would wish it to be.

I have been angry with my father for the past few days... I passed through grief, the "torrent" I referenced in a previous post. Then settled into exhaustion for a while. But on Monday I visited his gravesite and felt angry. The flowers were gone. The headstone is not yet in place. He had only an index card in a plastic holder: Name, date of death -- April 13, 2007.

And I thought to myself that this man never did speak to me as a peer. He tried to protect me -- a man in his forties. Tried to protect me from his doubts, his dark moments, his fears... But all his "protection" did was to put an insurmountable distance between us. He could have said at some point, "I feel that way, too," or "I felt that way at one point, and then this happened..."

I understand that I am and always will be his child... But would it not have been worth more now to establish that commonality with his grown son?

Or perhaps I never did learn to ask him the right questions.

So I feel anger, and that anger makes the world more real to me. It makes the world matter, just a little bit more. It makes my own efforts at understanding, and my own actions in that world relevant. The shared fabric of humanity must indeed be shared. The alternative is a nuclear model of reality that continues to seek a core, an atom of the ineffably physical, never finds it -- atoms to electrons to quarks, etc. -- and is left with dust dissolving to nothing.

I/not

As I work through questions of ethics and mortality, I believe that the I/not construction is the right place to begin. My previous post lists obstacles in the varied orientations I might attempt to take towards being good in such a way as to conduct myself rightly.

We talked about Self-orientation as being inherently antithetical to our project, enmeshed as it is in narcissism/solipsism and the Ich/es relationshiip.

We looked at the Ich/du relationship as being more promising but ultimately problematic. Losing oneself in a single "other" does not seem broad enough for a variety of reasons.

We looked at orienting ourselves into the world, dissolving self as illusory. But with such a view we lose all notion of accountability and worth beyond the all-worth of the all-world. Why bother to define ethics or right action in such a world view? Why bother to distinguish good from evil?

So we come back to the intuitive "I am not..." I find it apt because it asserts self in the initial "I", then takes it away with the negating "not". It posits a between place, a liminal state between Self and World, neither/and, if you will. World because "not," while negating, also implies a comparison... a comparison to something beyond self. If "I am not X" -- then something else must exist that "is X" because I would not otherwise have any way to conceive or apprehend it.

Let's start from the position of a simple object, a ball: "The ball is red," attempts to capture the ball with language. The noun carries essential qualities with it, "ballness" in this case, the predicate asserts definition. It excludes the many (in this case all elements of the light spectrum that do not fit "red") and includes only the particular. The ball itself is asserted and reaffirmed in the quality assigned to it.

Compare this to "The ball is not green." The noun "ball" is still asserted, but almost immediately erased by the "not" -- the particular is excluded, but the general is left afloat -- vibrant and alive in possibility. We come, upon contemplation, to understand how very little we can say about this ball: its roundness, its condition, and so forth. We can force ourselves to the same line of reasoning via "The ball is red," but "The ball is not green," leads us to it, compels us towards these considerations.

"The ball is not green" requires us to confront our human limitations on epistemological, semiotic, phenomenalogical, and ontological levels. It exposes us to the silence surrounding all the things the ball actually is, might be, or could become. The tie to Job becomes a little clearer to me in this context.

In this context, Brian's position: "I am not all" begins to emerge as a possibility. "I am not infinite." This tack bears much closer examination now.

A second possibility occurs to me, a modification of "I am not good" replaced now with, "I am not worthy..." which doubles the ambiguity, for not only am I asserting that I am *not* X, but this X carries much latency with it. Not worthy of what? It is the statement of a servant or a steward, and such a stance appeals to me as it doubly displaces me from the illusion of a kingly, ruling Self.

Much to consider yet. I hope those tuned in are finding this of some small interest...

Being prepared

As discussion here develops, it becomes increasingly clear to me that our state of being ground ethics. The task is not to catalogue actions (which cannot be catalogued because humanly inexhaustable), nor to try and divine intent behind any given action (which is undivinable -- arguably even for the one who commits the act).

So the question at its essence becomes: "What is (or are) the mode(s) of Being that are conducive to ethical action?"

How do we prepare ourselves to receive the necessary ethical insight, and how do we prepare ourselves to act appropriately with that insight?

The world is unpredictable and vast. Death, still more unpredictable and vast. We are limited, largely (albeit not entirely) predictable, and very small.

I cannot orient towards Self -- which takes me away from the world. Still less, I cannot orient myself towards desire, which is merely Self-ness made manifest. Every want, every perceived need, feeds Self, and commoditizes (and thereby shrinks) World (early commentators referenced Buber and the I/it relationship). One begins to see the wisdom of at least limited fasting...

On the other hand, I cannot fully agree with Levinas, who places the orientation on a quasi-mystical "other" [person]. It's a step in the right direction, because it orients me beyond myself. But while that "other" is certainly humanly inexhaustable, that individual is still only the smallest step towards acknowledging the full scope and scan of the world-in-process. This is the problem of Buber's Ich/du model. As mentioned earlier, I wonder if "I am not all" does not also take us to this place, but I am frankly torn on this issue.

Nor can I resolve it with a Buddhist model of "all is truly one" -- the World is big, and I am small is binary. I merely borrow "the World" to contain my self, conflating the two, treating self as illusory. And yet I act (or choose not to act) in the world, and these actions/non-actions have consequences for my contemporaries and for future generations of humanity. I find it facile and callous to erase the human miseries of War, Oppression, and Corruption; and the "natural" miseries of Aging, Disease, and Death under the rubric of "we are all one."

I admit, I am at an impass here, before argument has really even begun. I will think on this a bit.