is the moment of innocence here? Before the first murder? But sin was always within us, presupposed, and after manifesting itself prompts no reflection—never innocent, neither is guilt admitted. Pure evil is unknowing—Death in The Seventh Seal—and its mortal instrument the antithesis of Antonius Block. A bureaucrat returning from a long campaign in the filing cabinets finds a plague of messiness spread over the land and takes up extreme measures to cure it. The need for justification—the attempt not to explain, but explain away—is fully realized in duty, abyss of the “why.”
For some, duty isn’t enough; they overlay sadism and alcoholism to enhance the demands of expectation: the mind exempts itself from pain via pleasure as the body records all the suffering inflicted on others. In the end the torturer becomes alienated from his consciousness and unable to weather the physical ailments cruelty has imposed on him. The hybrid constitution of the torturer breaks down on both sides: ensnared in a libertine finitude, the will overasserted, sensuality and pride are denied through exhaustion.
After the self, duty is all one has left; by the merciful power of grace, subjectivity is judged in accordance with the law and given the strength to keep going forward, an empty shell injected with larger purpose. The effort to clothe duty only consolidates its solitude—it does not permit a rivalry of motives, above all the temptation to kindness. Whereas selfishness only discounts the significance of others, duty excludes none: all, including oneself, have importance only insofar as they submit to the rule. Matter and spirit alike are surrendered as tools of obedience.
Marketing Stickers
“Child-friendly”: a label containing forgotten meanings and bygone values too dangerous to be recaptured, appreciated only by those unable to understand what they are bound to lose.
“For singles”: the wild public inauguration to domestic life sought out by those who have outgrown their innocence.
“Family-oriented”: seen clearly only by flesh-peddlers, the infertile, and the lonely.
The New You
Advertising rises to an art when it stimulates not a perceived need, but boredom. Generosity sweepstakes, patient repetition, diligent associations, claims of skyrocketing temperance—a cavalry charge of techniques weaseling the tedious virtues into subliminal consciousness to make people fidget in their jiggling bodies, necrohabits, and abusive relationships. This campaign of discontent would implant not a longing for this or that product, but a heartache to jump on the bandwagon of another existence altogether. To lodge ennui in the soul is to commodify life, to make a conspicuous consumption of unfulfillment.
Levels of Senility
We say that age brings individuals wisdom, communities reverence, institutions prestige. But opening a history book shows us that age in a state brings decay and chronic disorders of public character. At this point the prudent among us chide ourselves and apply this macro-principle down the social ladder. Only then will we know future generations better than they know themselves.
Tragic Currency
One can’t write tragedies about important figures today, as tragedians in the past wrote of royalty. The pride of the powerful fails to convince us. They are too transparent, too accidental: in the right circumstances, any person could have held their position—precisely why we envy or resent them. We rightly recognize that the campaign funds of the politician misdirect his charisma and crush his vision. Under monarchy money was a prerequisite of greatness; in democracy it is greatness. Money is the tragic hero of every democratic drama: it, and not individuals, decides the course of history, while the consequences of its flaw—that it runs out—cannot be overcome by any amount of Spartan will or Athenian guile. This is why the lot of money is most movingly expressed on the stage through its empty-handed victims, the scavengers of rare coins who don’t even die clutching air, but linger on past the anticlimax. The modern tragic individual is distinguished by his lack of dramatic significance, his irrelevance in contemporary life. He is a supporting actor playing out the content of his pockets.
Comedy is the proper treatment of the powerful. Where the tragic hero feels guilt, the clown is shameless. Even when a CEO’s buffoonery with his capital is exposed, he does not acknowledge ignominy but pleads innocent. Having become accustomed to these episodes of corporate life, we watch the trial with all the relish of a sitcom. Our cynicism stabilizes the stock exchange; the CEO’s pain mitigates our frustration and, for a moment, we laugh at corruption’s fallen partner. The judge tries to throw the weight of the world on his shoulders and hold him accountable for ruining it—a fact which we accept but can’t bring ourselves to believe: we would not tremble to be his neighbor as we would a trivial rapist or murderer; instead of closing our blinds we would open our doors, hoping to coat ourselves in his hemorrhaging lifestyle.
How to Philosophize with a Screwdriver
“He is a scholar and a gentleman.”—One never hears of such a unity anymore. When social roles specialized they had nothing to balance them, they lost their sociability; each moved in the direction of maximizing its internal logic. Thus gentlemen, to retain their status, have devolved into merchants; while scholars, to regain their lost reputations, have fallen into Nobel laureation. Sycophancy to princes was somehow more dignified than to prizes or dead presidents. One pledged arms, life, and soul, but never lunch meetings or lecture tours.
Scholars of expression, come forth—and show these intellectuals how to be learned. Obliviously we tread over buried treasures, tracking eroded footsteps through windy dunes. Future minds will be digging through the sand for centuries. But we men of experience, unknowing of the world’s depths—we are relegated to the surface. The most we hope for is to find an oasis to wade in and forget our thirst.
The new father of “modern” philosophy—the philosophy culminating in our concerns—is not Descartes, but Russell. “The Right Honorable Earl,” mirroring the ambiguity one cannot help but feel towards empty titles in a period of fluid mobility, started a new trend: the academic first as obscurantist, then as populist. With the journal article, he moved philosophy out of the salon and into an office where philosophers smoke their pipes for stimulation as they read and discuss themselves. With the pop-philosophy book, he crammed the subject into a compact car and drove it into the marketplace. What results is the dumbing down of a mystification. To be told in small words what cannot be understood in big ones does not lead to comprehension. The interested reader, expending much time but little effort, becomes more than ignorant but less than knowledgeable: he becomes “informed.”
Medieval scholasticism that eschews its faith while retaining its terminology, academia is reason taking a sabbatical. Like a reverse-alchemical process that turns gold into base metal, eternal questions are compartmentalized into methods. Philosophy of Brains limits experience to the interior images of eggheads, warring against divergent techniques of analysis; injecting himself with chemicals for a PET scan, the Cerebellicist records the metabolic changes of his thoughts before overdosing on observation. The Alphabet-Reckoners go further, so impudent as to educate the scientists: the tweed shirt waves logical paradoxes at an inattentive lab coat and points him in the direction he was already looking towards.
The master asks after some coffea arabica. The maiden recommends with a curtsy that visiting the public sphere of the coffee house would be more stimulating than drinking alone. The master is disdainful of her contribution, rebuking the maiden for her absentmindedness and rejecting her suppressed premise: if he wanted stimulation, he would not drink arabica. He always has his morning coffee, and arabica is the least bitter form of reliability. He knows she is only pretending to be absentminded out of laziness, and gets up to make the coffee himself. The maiden cannot, after all, be trusted to mill the beans without an electric grinder. In the real world people use their feet to get things done. The master asks
