The unbearableness in the unbearable lightness is that we do not find it unbearable.
On the other hand, I find all the hand wringing over our alienation or 'atomisation' just a bit odd-as if there was some originary community, tribal unity, that in the beginning there was an order of being, an order of the soul. And yet, the poet and the metaphysician in us cannot ignore that nostalgia either. The shadow of the Garden falls across our face. The desire for something absolute, not fragmentary. And yet, in the beginning wasn't there a fundamental openness to the world, to other people, to all that was strange? As if that was what beginning meant? The Fall is also our freedom. So we live our unreconciled, amphibious lives-neither here nor there, like so many broken circles...
Nussbaum on commensurability
There's some strong motive to reduce things to a system, to see a coherent pattern, to intuit unity. As if we could reduce everything to our own terms of self-understanding. Which is really our lack of negative capability, our lack of grace: to keep things open, to accept mystery. So, we want to see Beauty, Truth, not this particular instance of beauty, this specific truth. As if what we could love is only Love itself. The economist and the fanatic alike think in this way: there is only one source of value, there are no discontinuities. The strong poet, however, wanders amongst ruins, lives with disruptions-not with the cold eye of reason but with sorrow and regret and fear. But if we live in the flatlands, as children of God, then what of our specificity, our panache.
Adam Smith
We see ourselves through the eyes of the others and our mirrors to each other.
If you've been reared on the libertarian caricature of Smith you're not going to like this. All I can suggest is that you go back to bed and dream it all away. Isn't that what you've been doing anyway?
Without the mediation of the other, we have no determinate moral selves.. we do not have a moral self outside of the human community. Spectatorship is the condition for the possibility of agency since we are aware of ourselves through being aware that others are aware of us. What does it mean to be truly aware of another human being? What is this ability to take a step outside of ourselves, our capacity for second thoughts?
The chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved...We are incomplete-not relative to a higher being-but relative to each other
Of course, if you're of a religious persuasion you might think that that 'horizontality' is itself a reflection of the dependence of the 'I' on a higher being ( 'height' is a height beyond height, like the darkness beyond darkness, the silence before the word). But this 'dependence' is based on an absence, a sacrifice. Without that second space, without God saying 'I want you to be', there would be no awareness of it. If we are an 'image' of God then part of us is an image of radical otherness. There is another Adam Smith, just as there is another b, another you. Black suns.
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re: "There's some strong motive to reduce things to a system, to see a coherent pattern, to intuit unity. As if we could reduce everything to our own terms of self-understanding. Which is really our lack of negative capability, our lack of grace: to keep things open, to accept mystery" I offer this amplification: http://lloydmintern.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/29-spatula/
"So long as man is still pure, it is understood, not coarse nature, he acts as an undivided sensuous unity and as an harmonizing whole. Sense and reason, receptive and self-acting capacity, have not yet been separated in their operations, much less do they stand in contradiction with one another. His feelings are not the formless play of chance, his thoughts not the contentless play of conceptual power; from the law of necessity emerges the former, from reality emerges the latter. Be man encountered in the state of culture, and has art laid its hand upon him, so is this sensuous harmony annulled in him, and he can only express himself still as moral unity, i.e., as striving toward unity. The agreement between his feeling and thinking, which actually took place in the former state, exists now merely ideally; it is no longer in him, but rather outside of him, as a thought, which should first be realized, no longer as a fact of life. Should one now apply the concept of poetry, which is nothing other than to give humanity its most complete expression possible, to both of these states, so it ensues, that there in the state of natural simplicity, where man still acts with all his powers at one time, as an harmonious unity, where therefore all his nature expresses itself completely in reality, the poet must imitate the real as completely as possible—that, on the contrary, here in the state of culture, where that harmonious cooperation of its entire nature is merely an idea, the poet must elevate reality to the ideal or, what amounts to the same, represent the ideal."
Schiller, On naive and sentimental poetry
An essay towards an analysis of the principles by which men naturally judge concerning the conduct and character, first of their neighbours, and afterwards of themselves....
really like the other Smith....
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just happened to be reading some Merwin and its tone somehow struck me to adress somewhat similar things you here and there write about.
MERWIN
I don’t think it was an urge to improve the world. It was an
urge to love and revere something in the world that seemed to me
more beautiful and rare and magnificent than I could say, and at
the time in danger of being ignored and destroyed. I think I felt
that as a very small child. Though how much of it I owe to my
father or his family, I can’t say. The world around me did not seem
to me to be satisfactory. There was something incomplete about
the world of streets and sidewalks and cement—and I did have a
very strong sense of growing plants and trees and so forth, and still
do. I remember walking in the streets of New York and New Jer-
sey and telling myself, as a kind of reassurance, that the ground
was really under there. I’ve talked and tried to write about that,
but I feel that I haven’t even begun to say it. But that hunger, that
tropism, is something that I don’t believe we can live without, even
if we aren’t aware of what we’re missing and by now many of us
aren’t aware of it. We’re missing it just the same. We’re deprived
of something essential.
INTERVIEWER
Is it some profound connection to the natural world?
MERWIN
The connection is there—our blood is connected with the sea.
It’s the recognition of that connection. It’s the sense that we are
absolutely, intimately connected with every living thing. We don’t
have to be sentimental and pious about it, but we can’t turn our
backs on that fact and survive. When we destroy the so-called nat-
ural world around us we’re simply destroying ourselves. And I
think it’s irreversible.
Thanks Roxana. Haven't read it but I do like Berlin's wonderful essay on the naive. But part of me still thinks that there is an approach that does NOT strive for unity-or that is at least aware of the dangers (politcally speaking, say) of doing so. Or, to paraphrase Simone Weil: beware of false unities.
Hello anton. Thanks. This quote reminded me of Iris Murdoch for some reason. The need for reverence. Not so easy in an irreverent age.
Lloyd, I couldn't read what you had to say on this. Is that the right link?
Billoo
I guess that link didn't copy right. Better way is just to go to BLACK MIRRORS by the live link that is my name, and Search: 29)SPATULA. The piece is on the insatiable appetite for finding the origins of everything.
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