Virtueless Virtue, Worthless Worth

One’s character (ethos) is one’s destiny (daimon).

                                    — Heraclitus

It has been said since the ancient Greeks that genuine virtue is its own reward.          

What’s more, according to the ancient Greek authority Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics, happiness — in the Greek of Aristotle’s time: eudaemonia, from the prefix eu- “good,” plus daimon “guiding spirit, fate, destiny” — is itself no more and no less than virtuous activity. According to him, if one wants to live a truly happy life, what one needs to do, and all one needs to do, is always to act in accordance with virtue to the best of one’s abilities.

If one only so acts, Aristotle assures us, then regardless of what chance — that is, what hap — may bring our way, we will remain open to it, which is to say happy. Aristotle teaches that virtue itself is of the very highest worth when measured in terms of such true happiness, the greatest of all good gifts, which virtuous action, and it alone, always brings us.

If one is mean-spirited rather than good-spirited, however, then one will be unhappy. The more mean-spirited one is, the more miserable one will become.

As Heraclitus taught centuries before Aristotle, whichever destiny befalls one, whether that of happiness or that  of misery, is all a matter of what habit, to give a variant definition of ethos, one draws about oneself.

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Thus, one does not need to get paid in cash or any equivalent thereof in order to be motivated to act virtuously. Indeed, if one acts in order to receive any such payment, then one is not acting with any true virtue at all. Rather, one is acting from sheer greed, which, so far from being a life-enhancing virtue is nothing but a deadening vice.

It is no accident that greed is listed as one of the traditional “seven deadly sins” in Christian tradition, for example. Greed kills the spirit, reducing one to a spiritless life of unending unhappiness, regardless of whatever lies to the contrary one chooses to believe that one believes.

Greed is without limit. It never has enough. However many possessions greed manages to pile up, it is never satisfied and thus never brings happiness. What it brings, rather, is cash into the pockets of the masters of the contemporary global consumer market system.

That system feeds greed, and feeds upon it. The global consumer market system always fosters that evil spirit.

The old Hank Ketcham cartoon above captures that same spirit perfectly.  

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The one limit of virtue is the absence of a limit.

                                   — Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

The absence of limit Gregory of Nyssa attributes to virtue in that line is of a very different sort from the absence of any limit to the greed fostered by the modern global market system. While no number of products, however large, can ever be enough to satisfy greed, virtue limits itself to seeking nothing external to itself. As I’ve already written above, Aristotle taught — some seven centuries before Gregory of Nyssa composed the above lines — that virtue is its own reward and that a life lived in accordance with virtue is precisely what constitutes happiness itself.

Such virtue — virtue that is its own reward and through the exercise of which comes happiness itself — is of no worth that can be measured by any set of external standards. To put the point colloquially, such virtue has no “cash value,” regardless of the nature of the cash at issue, be it dollars and cents, pounds and pence, or pride in oneself and in one’s accomplishments.

Whatever gets passed off as a virtue but does have any such “cash value” in any such cash of whatever sort, is nothing but a marketing scam, the vicious scam of  marketing something altogether without virtue as though it had some. Such marketed virtues are virtue-less.

Whatever may be their worth in terms of cash value of such  virtue-less virtues — that is, their salability in the contemporary global marketplace for machine-produced goods and their equivalent in digital, ideational, and other sorts of bits — they are without genuine worth of any sort at all to human beings, to any other earthly entities, to the gods in heaven, or to the very earth itself. Their market-worth is utterly worthless for whatever is truly worth anything.   

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Office for Emergency Management, War Production Board (circa 1942–43)

Not to take any wooden nickels is good advice at all times, not just during World War II or other times of emergency, regardless of whether the emergency is national, international, or personal. Under any circumstances, whether emergency or every-day, it is always wise to stick to the real thing whenever it comes to virtue. Such a practice is itself a real virtue, which brings, as do all real virtues, its own reward.

The Myth of Religion

It’s not a matter of reducing religious discourse to the status of myth or fiction.  Rather, it’s a matter of showing that myth and fiction as such are religious. 

A good way to look at it at first might be to think of myth and fiction as degenerate forms of religion:  forms faith would take when it no longer had faith in itself. In effect, myth and fiction would then be seen as forms belief would take when belief had ceased to believe in itself anymore, that is, when believers had ceased to believe that they believed.

There’s nothing new in such ideas.  It’s become a cliché to say, for example, that the activity of reading fiction (or, more likely today, going to the movies) is the modern/post-modern substitute for what, in less secular cultures, would take the form of communal worship.  It’s as if, when God becomes a mere “stop-gap God,” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran pastor and theologian who was involved in German plots against Hitler, for which the Nazis imprisoned and killed him, put it — that is, when God becomes no more than a sort of last-resort, made-up hero who is supposed to save the day when it’s clear that there’s no saving left from any sources anyone can see: God as a last, illusory straw to grasp at when all the real straws are gone already — then substitutes for God come to abound (sex, drugs, movies, TV, novels, internet “social networking,” wars, politics, etc.).

At any rate, whether in just that way or in some other, when God becomes no more than a stopgap God, then we never get more than stopgaps for God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s study at his home

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On the other hand, what we call fiction may be a stopgap for talk of God once God has died.  If it is, then we need to learn to read fiction in a new way, if we are to restore to it its full dignity—at which point it would no longer be fiction, at least in any derogatory sense involving fictitiousness, and would metamorphose instead into the assertion of God. 

If assertions of God function analogously to metaphors (without thereby simply becoming metaphors themselves), then for religious experience, as the experience articulated in such assertions, the “truth” of such experience, expressed in such assertions, does not lie in any explicit or implicit claims about the origin or source of the given experience.  It lies, rather, in what it lets those communicating the experience, or having it communicated to them — what it lets the communicants of the experience, the co-communicators involved in the communication of it — see, understand, come to know.        

That is, if the truth of religious experiences and of the assertions that articulate them is not analogous to the truth of newspaper accounts and the accounts of science, but is, rather, analogous to the truth of fiction, then the assertions at issue would not consist of claims about objects independent of us, to be assessed dispassionately and “objectively.” Instead, the assertions of religious experience would be just as much about us, the people involved in communicating them and communicating about them, as they would be about any object, even some object called “God.” 

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Seen in that way, talk of God would not be objectifying talk at all, but would be — as various twentieth century theologians, including Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner, each in his own way, have said — an effective or performative speaking that effected or performed the placing, locating, or positioning of the co-communicants in relation to their entire existential field.  Hence, the simple, two-word sentence “God exists,” for example, would turn out by such an analysis not to be the assertion of the supposed “reality” of some entity corresponding to the concept God.  “God exists” would not be the assertion that there is at least one x, such that x has all the attributes entailed by the conceptual sense of the term God (such attributes as omniscience, omnipotence, goodness, eternity, etc.).  Rather, that simple sentence, “God exists,” would assert, posit, locate, or position human life as a whole in relation to everything else, and everything else in relation to human life. 

Thus, the simple sentence “God exits” would express or articulate, in a mere two words, an entire understanding of the nature and meaning of existence as a whole.

NOTE TO READERS: This post is a revised version of section 8 of “Hushed Talk of God,” the 7th chapter of my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, which is available at this blogsite in the “Shop” above this post.

Homeless Human Resources of Peoples and Cultures

Unemployment is the result of a lack of democracy. A democratic society can never have unemployment. The greater the level of unemployment, the lower the level of democracy. 

Abdullah Öcalan speaks the truth in those lines.[1]

After all, people are not tools. That is, human beings are not implements that have been made to be employed in accomplishing some purpose. Persons are not like hammers and nails: they are not products that have been produced to serve as means for achieving ends beyond themselves.

When I began my own career as a professor of philosophy, the faculty and staff of colleges and universities were regarded as and called “personnel.” At a college or university, the department charged with overseeing matters pertaining to faculty and staff was accordingly called the “Personnel Department.”

I remember when that all changed back in the 1980s, and what used to be called personnel departments came instead to be called departments of human resources. That happened no less at the University of Denver, where I was employed, and other universities and colleges across the country than it did at American manufacturing companies and industrial corporations.

As I experienced it then, that change of name actually struck me as a refreshing breath of truth. After all, in modern society nature itself had long before the 1980s been reduced to no more than “natural resources.” Nature had thus become no more than a storehouse of potential power to be exploited by humans, thereby fulfilling Rene Descartes’ intent of developing a foolproof “method”  whereby humanity could establish “dominion and control over nature” (I have added the emphasis to bring out the key notion).

Now, during the 2020s, there is a growing movement to change names once again, and to make Human Resource Departments into Departments of Peoples and Cultures. That just means that management is becoming more aware of the value of disguising itself behind the pretense of being there to serve employees rather than their employers.

Such lies often prove helpful for improving the bottom line.

A small stock of human resources from various peoples and diverse cultures

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In his own 1956 afterword to Lolita — the book itself originally being published a year earlier by The Olympia Press, after being rejected as pornographic by various major publishing houses — Vladimir Nabokov remarks in a parenthesis that “reality” is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.”  “Reality” is everywhere and always just what passes for, what’s to be counted as, what’s real—what is.  “Reality” is what they, the powers that be at any given time, tell us we have to accept as real, as what truly is.  All else, they tell us, is fantasy, illusion, mere image.

But in the face of such all-encompassing mere “reality,” it is in actually only in our dreams that what truly is can speak to us, and it is only in our art that the truth of what is sets itself into work.  It is in our imaginations, dreams, fictions, and artworks that we truly live, not just “survive” amidst all the wastage of globalized consumer capitalism, with its washing machines and cars, its televisions and mortgage payments, it’s “little poisons for the day, and little poisons for the night,” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra put it long ago.

No wonder that, if that’s all there is, we do indeed want to break out the booze — to allude to an old Peggy Lee song that sums it up well.  In liquor or drugs or sex or romance novels or movies or cutting our flesh or chewing our own skin, we escape “reality.”  When “reality” is where our society stores us all up as no more than human resources or the equivalent, in what other ways can we possibly look for what truly “is”?

Indeed, in such a no-place excuse for a place as our current unreal “reality” proffers us, daydreaming, drug-usage, and other such activations of our imagination’s capacities become  politically subversive acts. What’s more, It takes deep courage to perform such politically subversive acts of imagination.  When all that surrounds us is “reality,” such daydreaming becomes a way of “speaking truth to power,” to borrow a phrase.  To imagine is to make “reality” vanish like smoke, like a dream one wakes from, dismissed as a phantom in and by our very fantasies — those subversive acts of “merely imagining” — to adapt an image from one of the Psalms.

In the contemporary global consumer market that is our “reality” today, it is in fantasy that what truly is must find its place, the place denied to it in such “reality.”  In acts of courage such as daydreaming, it does just that.   

   “Be not afraid,” Jesus tells us in the Christian Gospels.  What a dreamer![2]

[1]  Beyond State, Power, and Violence (Oakland, CA: 2023), pages 304-305. An English  translation by Michael Schiffman and Havin Guneser of Bir Halkı Savunmak, originally published in 2004 in Neuss, Germany, by Mezopotamien Verlag.

 [2] The second, closing section of this post is a reworking of some paragraphs from “Confession of Fear,” the first chapter of my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available for purchase in the “Archive” above this post.

Holy Irreality

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” the Lord says to Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century — a truly “calamitous” century, as Barbara Tuchman calls it in the subtitle to A Distant Mirror (New York, NY: Knopf, 1978), her history of the period.  Julian recounts that experience in Showings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977). 

Most of Julian’s coevals would probably not have seen things that way at all. 

“It’s all right, it’s all right, everything is all right,” parents everywhere for many centuries, in those or other words, have assured their frightened children — sometimes even when to all other eyes everything is far from all right, and it appears that things will never be all right again.  In their viewing of their children, such parents see with the eyes of love, and in what they say they speak that love, as Julian’s messenger did to her.

There may finally be some irreducible element of choice and decision in such seeing and saying, especially in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, so much obvious evidence that everything is anything but all right.  It is surely not unreasonable to consider the whole body of evidence pertinent to determining the truth of the assertoric proposition that all is or at least will someday be well — if such propositional truth is all that interests one. Nevertheless, deciding such issues with full regard to truth is far more a matter of having, or coming to have, “new awareness,” new eyes to see and ears to hear what is given one to see and to hear. 

No amount of further looking will reveal colors to an eye devoid of the capacity to see them, for example — as scientists tell us is true for many animals, including domestic pets. Nor will any further accumulation of data ever convince one without love honestly to assure a frightened or sorrowing child that everything is all right.

Julian of Norwich, statue by David Holgate, Norwich Cathedral (from Wikipedia)

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In a well-known line William Faulkner says: “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” He speaks the truth.

To capture at least some of what is at issue in that same truth, one might say that fiction of the best sort serves as a sort of prosthetic device for awareness, giving readers new organs, in effect, to perceive what no amount of further investigation could possibly show them otherwise.             

What such fiction lets be seen is nothing fictitious.  Such fiction does not consist what might be called “as if” assertions — sentences masquerading as assertions but really asserting nothing. 

Fine fiction does indeed make “assertions,” but what it “asserts” is more real than what to all merely journalistic eyes passes for “reality” itself. Such journalistic “reality” is itself  asserted by fine fiction to be no more, at the very best, than a paltry portion of what is — a minor part uppity enough to lay pompous claim to being the whole.

Seen through the eyes such fiction gives us, the distinction between the mythical and the logical—between myth and reason, mythos and logos — redraws itself.  Above all, it no longer makes sense to try to make any sharp distinction between the gods of myth (the gods of so-called “pagan” experience) and the gods of religion.  Nor would it be any derogation of any god, or even of God, to call that god/God “mythical.”  It would not mean that there was no such god or God. It would mean, rather, that the god/God was more than real, and never to be found among what is no more than that — found, that is, as just one more thing within what passes by journalistic standards for “reality.”

To put the same thought differently, no investigation of journalistic “reality,” no matter how intensive and extensive, could ever give us enough to decide, one way or another, whether either Mars (the god, not the planet) or Yahweh exists.  That’s because, if either Mars or Yahweh was journalistically “real,” then neither could be Mars or Yahweh anymore. 

We might say that the being of the god Mars would have to be a Martial being, and the being of Yahweh a Yahwist being.  And to say that is not really to tell anyone anything we don’t already know:  that the being of divinity, if there is any divinity, has to be, of course, a divine being. 

So be it!

NOTE TO READERS: This post is a revised version of section 7 of “Hushed Talk of God,” the 7th chapter of my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, which is available at this blogsite in the “Shop” (see above the post).

Disowning Ownership

All things should be the common possession of all, as it is written, so that no one presumes to call anything his own (Acts 4:32). But if anyone is caught indulging in this most evil practice, he should be warned a first and a second time. If he does not amend, let him be subjected to punishment. 

                                    — Rule of Saint Benedict 33:6-8 (RB 1980)

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.

                                                                        — Acts 4:32 (NIV)

 Ownership dis-owns us: it robs us of our very selves, never letting us claim who we truly are, never letting us be our own.

Only when we disown ownership in turn do we at last begin to come into our own. Thus, only if we disown ownership can we heed Nietzsche’s admonition: “Become who you are.”  

What disowns us of what we own en-owns us, as it were, of ourselves. It grants us ownership over ourselves —not as though we held ourselves as some sort of marketable property, some sort of “capital,” but in the sense that it frees us from our delusions of ownership so that we can assume responsibility for who we are, as that itself is revealed to us step by step along the paths of our lives. Thus, disowning us of what we claim as our own property grants us the capacity to return again to who we are, only to know it now for the very first time — to adapt some famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”

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From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.                                                                                                                         

— Karl Marx

As challenging as it may be to those who style themselves “fundamentalist Christians,” how Marx in the nineteenth century in that line describes life in communist communities is just how life in a monastery is to be lived, according to Saint Benedict  in the fifth century. Like Marx, Benedict in his Rule says that each brother or sister is to contribute to the community in accordance with their ability, as each’s ability is acknowledged by the leader of the house, the “Abbot” or “Abbess,” and that all of the goods of the monastery are to be held in common, and to be given to each as each has need of them.

In turn, that Benedictine admonition accords fully — as Benedict himself notes in the passage from his Rule with which I began this post — with the practice of the early Christian communities described in the foundational Book of Acts in the Christian bible. Most self-styled “Christians” would probably wish to deny the Christian roots of Marx’s own admonition, but those roots are there — and they run deep.

The word abbot derives from Old English abbod, from the Latin root abbatem, itself from the Greek abbas, which in turn comes from the Aramaic language, one of the Semitic family of languages. In Aramaic the word abba is a title of honor that literally means "the father, my father." That honorific title was originally given to every member of the monastic community, but in its most emphatic usage was later limited to the leader, or “head,” of the monastery.  The Latin feminine form of the same word, used in the same honoring way, is abbatissa, the root of our English word abbess.

By Saint Benedict’s Rule,  all those who dwell in the monastic community are to address their “elders” as abbas, “fathers”; and all such elders are to address their juniors as fratres, “brothers.”  What is more, by Chapter 72 of the Rule, the next to last chapter, all the members of the community are to “vie in paying obedience to one another — no one following what one considers useful for oneself, but rather what benefits another” (Leonard J. Doyle translation, slightly modified). 

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Sounds awfully Marxist!  

Karl Marx, picture from the Marx House in Trier, Germany