On the radio today I heard a story about an 11-year old girl with cancer. An interviewer is asking her questions and finally says, "What are those beads you're holding?"
The girl says, "We get a bead for different things we have to do at the hospital."
And the interviewer asks, "What kinds of things? I see that you have different colors."
And the girl answers, "We get a black bead for each day of chemo. A white bead for radiation treatments. A red bead when they take blood. A yellow bead for each day in the hospital. Stuff like that. When you get enough, you can make them into a necklace."
And the interviewer says, "And do you have enough for a necklace?"
And the girl, "I have five necklaces. They're in this box right here, see?"
She asks, See?
It sounds very simple. Look here... Do you see?
How could any feeling human "see" that? I see... something. Through a glass darkly. The vaguest outline, the faintest contours of this innocent child's life.
Do *you* see? Would you put yourself in the shoes of Job's accusers and dare explain that to me? To her?
What is the mode of being to account for this? Where is an answer that could on the one hand comfort her and those who love her; and on the other value this world, this life, as something precious beyond all riches, beyond all wisdom, beyond all ken.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Mode of Being
What are the modes of being conducive to an ethical life?
1 An awareness of our finitude, of our mortality, of our fragmented and limited nature...
2 A sympathy for the humanly inexhaustable finitude of other conscious things...
3 A grounded understanding that the world is real, and real in a way that transcends us, precedes us, and will continue after we are gone
4 An acknowledgement of our fallibility -- of the inaccessible nature of final Truths
5 An acceptance of our vulnerability -- because the world is big, and we are small, we can be and inevitably will be hurt by the world
6 A willingness to interpret and thereby make contingent judgments (an ethics incapable of judging has made itself impotent; just as a theology incapable of ascribing goodness to god has rendered itself pointless)
The foundational premise is that we can only better ourselves by attempting to better the world around us. The Self is a cage, and a terrible cage at that. Unrelenting, morally neutral, inscrutable, self-referentially contextualized and thereby capable of justifying any action. It makes the best of human ideas terrible and ugly. It turns freedom into oppression. It commoditizes altruism. In its rage for reification, it makes us all the same. It turns every conceivable act into expressions of power.
The only possible ethical action must be grounded in the effort to liberate self from Self, and must at the same time acknowledge that you can never succeed, except in the most peripheral, limited, qualified ways. Saying "I am not all" is one such route, a route that extends due libation to Self in the "I" and then takes it away in the negating "not".
1 An awareness of our finitude, of our mortality, of our fragmented and limited nature...
2 A sympathy for the humanly inexhaustable finitude of other conscious things...
3 A grounded understanding that the world is real, and real in a way that transcends us, precedes us, and will continue after we are gone
4 An acknowledgement of our fallibility -- of the inaccessible nature of final Truths
5 An acceptance of our vulnerability -- because the world is big, and we are small, we can be and inevitably will be hurt by the world
6 A willingness to interpret and thereby make contingent judgments (an ethics incapable of judging has made itself impotent; just as a theology incapable of ascribing goodness to god has rendered itself pointless)
The foundational premise is that we can only better ourselves by attempting to better the world around us. The Self is a cage, and a terrible cage at that. Unrelenting, morally neutral, inscrutable, self-referentially contextualized and thereby capable of justifying any action. It makes the best of human ideas terrible and ugly. It turns freedom into oppression. It commoditizes altruism. In its rage for reification, it makes us all the same. It turns every conceivable act into expressions of power.
The only possible ethical action must be grounded in the effort to liberate self from Self, and must at the same time acknowledge that you can never succeed, except in the most peripheral, limited, qualified ways. Saying "I am not all" is one such route, a route that extends due libation to Self in the "I" and then takes it away in the negating "not".
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