The Mastery of Slaves

As I am fond of doing, with a fondness that finds its grounds in the call of thinking, I have given this post an intentionally ambiguous title. That title can be taken in two very different ways, depending on whether one takes the genitive ‘of’ in the title to be used possessively or objectively.

To give an example of such ambiguity, “the fear of the enemies” can mean, if the ‘of’ functions possessively, the fear that the enemies themselves feel toward their opponents. On the other hand, “the fear of the enemies” can mean the fear felt by those opponents themselves feel towards those enemies. In that case, the ‘of’ functions objectively.

To give another, perhaps even clearer example,  the expression “the love of God” can mean, on the one hand, God’s love for whomever or whatever God loves, in which case it is functioning “possessively,” such that it is God who does the loving. But the same expression, “the love of God,” can also mean, on the other hand, the love someone or something other than God has for God Godself, in which case it is functioning “objectively,” such that it is God who is being loved rather than God doing the loving.

In just the same way, my title, “The Mastery of Slaves,” can mean two very different things. On the one hand, it can mean the mastery, in the degenerate sense of dominion and control — the mastery in short, that those who count as “slave-masters” have over those who count as their “slaves.” On the other hand, it can mean the genuine mastery, in the original and originating sense of knowing how to exercise some skill, that even slaves themselves—and perhaps especially slaves — can and often do acquire, and can then pass on to others when appropriate. That is, slaves can be masters in the sense that someone who gains high skill at carpentry becomes a master carpenter, under the tutelage of whom apprentice carpenters can learn such mastery themselves.[1]   

The original, originating sense of mastery, that which means the acquisition of a skill that can be passed on to others, is mastery in the deepest, most genuine sense. In contrast, the mastery that is no more than the exercise of dominion and control is no genuine mastery at all. It betrays, rather, a lack of all genuine mastery, and a compulsion to disguise and hide that lack behind the sheer use of force. It is mastery only in the sense of coercive power, not in the rich, originating sense of potency, of capacity.[2]                                              

Frederick Douglas, a master even as a slave

Ron DeSantis, nothing but a slave-master

 *     *     * 

The arsonist and the authority who promises to protect the community against arson are probably at bottom of entirely similar essence, but the latter achieves his goal differently than the former: namely, through regular fees he charges the community,  no longer through arson.   

— Nietzsche, Der Wanderer und sein Schatten (The Wanderer and His Shadow)[3]

It is far easier for slaves to become genuine masters than it is for slave-masters to become genuine masters. The chains that bind slave-masters are chains forged by themselves, just as Ebenezer Scrooge himself forged the immensely long chains that bound him in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, forging them “length by length, and yard by yard,” as the ghost of Christopher Marley, Scrooge’s long dead partner, tells him in a famous scene. That is what makes it all but impossible for slave-masters ever to free themselves so that they may attain genuine mastery over anything. They are so caught up in the illusion of their own power, which is really powerlessness — powerlessness of the very same kind that addicts have over their addictions, which they too have forged themselves through their own actions—that only some genuine power outside themselves, one greater than their own power of dominion and control, greater not in mere degree, but in basic kind, could ever possibly free them. Only such a thing as a visit from a ghost can deliver them from bondage.

The larceny committed by arsonists seeking personal gain by means of their acts of arson is far more honest than the larceny committed by those who pretend to be protecting people from such arsonists, but who are actually stealing the same people blind through the taxes and other dues they charge for their supposed “service.” Above all, self-admitted arsonists are far more honest with themselves about themselves: far more honest about being robbers who rob from others to benefit themselves. Their selfishness has nothing hidden about it. What’s more, they have to work at their larceny, acquiring skill at extortion.  

In contrast, the duly constituted “official authorities” who demand fees from those they claim to be protecting, are liars as well as extortionists.  

*     *     *

Note to my readers: I will continue heed the call to follow along this same general path of thinking that I have followed both in this post and in my immediately preceding one — namely, the call to follow the path of thinking about mastery and slavery, and how the two interrelate — in  my next few posts.

[1] For further discussion of this point, see the second section of my preceding post, “On Masters and Mastery,” which went up at this website on September 11 of this year —

[2] On this distinction between coercive and capacitating power, see my book The Irrelevance of Power, available through the link provided in the “Store” at the top of this blogsite.

[3] The opening lines of aphorism 22, in my own free translation.

On Masters and Mastery

Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.

                                                             — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

A master, in at least one sense of that term, is a person who has mastered a skill. Such mastery is always a noble accomplishment, one that displays knowledge: “know-how.”

In fact, the very word master comes from the Latin magister, which meant "chief, head, director, teacher," and which itself ultimately derives from the Proto- Indo-European term *mag-yos-, the comparative form of the PIE root *meg, meaning "great." Thought to its roots in that way, to be a “master” is to be someone who has the power — not in the degenerate sense of coercive force, mere strength, but in the root and rooting sense of potency, capacity, ability — potency, capacity, ability to achieve or accomplish some work, task, or endeavor.

Accordingly, masters in the most radical sense are those who also have the power, as capacity, to help or guide others in acquiring mastery themselves. Those who are fortunate enough to become apprentices to such masters, as occurred throughout the medieval period in the various guilds, are allowed, if they but persist in their apprenticeships long enough to learn the trade or craft at issue, to become masters in turn. Thus do such masters — masters in the most genuine sense — reproduce themselves.

Furthermore, as I claim in my second sentence above, all such mastery is indeed noble. That word that comes from an identically spelled French one, which itself comes from the Latin term nobilis. In turn, that Latin word is itself derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *gno-, which means “to know.”  

Those who are ignorant — most especially those who are willfully ignorant: those who do not want to know — never attain mastery. They thereby always remain ignoble, and glory in their very foulness, their stinking to high heaven. They absolutely reek of their willful ignorance, which is to say of their stupidity.

What is more, and even more important, only true masters, those who truly know what they are doing, can ever learn how to teach others to become masters in their turn. When those who have mastered some skill also acquire skill in aiding others to master it, they — and they alone —  become master-teachers.  

Master shoemaker and his apprentice, circa 1914

*     *     *

 Good fun is enjoyable, engaging, and amusing. It can be deeply meaningful by connecting you to others and boosting your mastery.     

— Elaine O’Brien & Andrea Seydel,

                  The Power of Play: Optimize Your Joy Potential

There are also masters in a second, degenerate sense of the term. That is the sense in which a master is  not someone who has mastered some skill and is therefore endowed with the capacity to learn how to help others master it. Rather, a master in this degenerate sense is instead someone who dominates and controls others as though he (the masculine gendering of the pronoun is appropriate here) owned them. That claimed “ownership” may even be recognized by the laws of the nation in which the claim is made, as it was in the United States of America from its foundation up until the end of the Civil War. Such legal recognition is by no means necessary, however, as the persistence of what the whole socialist tradition has long called “wage-slavery” proves.

The sense of mastery at issue here in this second sense of the term is precisely such “dominion and control” as is at issue in enslavement of any form. Those are also — and far from accidentally — exactly the terms Descartes, to give one crucially important example, employs in his Search for a Method. He therein proposes that the very method he eventually discovers through his searching be adopted universally, in order for humanity to establish “dominion and control over nature.” His method, he proclaims, will allow man (again the gendering is appropriate here) to dominate and control nature herself as a whole.

In truth, it is precisely through applying just such a method that all experimental modern natural sciences, and eventually all the so-called “human sciences” as well, do indeed proceed in all their endeavors. The very “mastery” of nature herself for which Descartes called, in just that sense of dominating and controlling, is intrinsically the goal of all modern — which is to say  experimental — science as such.  

Being a master in this second sense of dominating and controlling demonstrates no acquisition of any skill — any skill, at least, other than that dominating and controlling as such. That is, it requires no mastery at all in the original, root sense of the term, the one considered in the preceding, first section of this post. Instead, it requires no more than the “strength” of which Lao Tzu speaks in the quotation at the top of today’s post. (I will leave it up to readers of this post to decide for themselves whether that also applies to the quotation from The Power of Joy with which I prefaced this current section of today’s post. I have no need to dominate and control readers’ interpretation of that quotation. They can play with it themselves.)

Masters of this second sort may be, and indeed typically are, deficient in any mastery of the first sort. Instead of mastering any skills of their own, masters of this second sort simply rely on those they have enslaved to do all the work for them. Thus, it is the slaves of such masters of the second sort who are in the best position to acquire mastery of the first sort—a topic I will address more fully in my next post, “The Mastery of Slaves,” set to go up on the morning October 9 this year.

Repulsive Attraction

Was du suchest, es ist nahe, begegnet dir schon.

—Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Heimkunft: An die Verwandten

“What thou seekest, it is near, meets thee already.”

That is my word for word translation of Hölderlin’s line. In so translating it, I have chosen to use the archaic English terms thou and thee to capture the intimacy of the German terms du and dir, which embody the familiar form of address appropriate with someone close and familiar, whereas the German terms Sie and Ihnen are  used to address someone with whom one has not established intimacy. In that regard, current German resembles current French, which also still has one term for familiar personal address (tu) and another for more formal address (vous).

I have chosen to use the archaic English terms at issue in order to capture the intimacy of Hölderlin’s poem,[1]an intimacy indicated clearly by the poem’s subtitle, “an die Verwandten.”   The sense of that subtitle is perhaps best suggested by the English translation, “To the Kindred.”        

The line at the head of this post is the second one in the fourth stanza of Hölderlin’s elegy Homecoming, to give the English equivalent of the German Heimkunft.  Hölderlin wrote that poem in 1801.

That was a few years after he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, which happened in the late 1790s. The year of 1801 when he wrote Homecoming was also some six years before he was confined to what eventually came to be known as “der Hölderlinturm,” “Hölderlin’s Tower,” in Tübingen, Germany. It was in that tower-home that he was given a room to live until his death in 1843. 

Hölderlin’s Tower, Tübingen, Germany

*     *     *

Who is the awe-inspiring guest who knocks at our door portentously? Fear precedes him, showing that ultimate values already flow towards him. Our hitherto believed values decay accordingly and our only certainty is that the new world will be something different from what we were used to.                                                                                                                                       — C. G. Jung (1975-1961)[2]

 Sometimes, we do not realize that we are going home. We often lack the eyes to see that it is so, and we even feel repulsion rather than attraction. When that occurs, we will often project — to employ a notion often used by both Jung and his mentor Freud — our own repulsion outside ourselves, onto that which we are approaching, the very home to which we are at last but unknowingly returning and about to be welcomed back. Or perhaps we will project it, as the lines from Jung above suggest, as the shadowy figure of some un-summoned guest who is importunately knocking at our door.  

Such projections of our repressed, repulsed attraction are typically the case, in fact, in our truly profoundest, most astonishing — indeed world-changing — “homecomings.” Those most unexpected, unrecognized events of shocking homecoming come to strike us so strongly and deeply as to bring water gushing forth from even the very driest of souls, just as Moses, in the Biblical story of his leading the parched Jewish people through the desert to exit Egypt, at one point draws water from a massive rock by  striking it mightily with his staff.

Such events, which, until they truly do strike, appear to be something very different from celebratory homecomings, are like what is described in the following closing stanzas of another famous poem, to go with Hölderlin‘s Homecoming. This time the poem is  Little Gidding, by T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), which ends thus:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

Not known, because not looked for 
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-- 
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded 
Into the crowned knot of fire 
And the fire and the rose are one.

    To borrow another term dear to C. J. Jung, between the two poems I have cited, one by a German poet and one by an American poet who found his lasting home in England, there is a noteworthy synchronicity. To deepen that experience of unexpected serendipity, as it were, I’ll close this post with a stanza from yet a third poet, this time by a native English one. The lines below are from An Essay on Man, a poem by Alexander Pope (1688-1744):

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest.

The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come. 

Alexander Pope, portrait by Michael Dahl

[1] In similar fashion, the great 20th century German-Jewish scholar Martin Buber’s seminal 1923 work Ich und Du was translated into English in 1937 as I and Thou, to capture the personal intimacy that is at issue in that widely read book.

[2] From a letter dated September 2, 1960, as cited in Wolfgang Giegerich, The Historical Emergence of the I: Essays about One Chapter in the History of the Soul (London, Ontario, Canada: Dusk Owl Books, 2020), p. 23. I thank my friend Malgorzata Kalinowska, herself a Jungian analyst in Czeladź, Poland, for calling my attention to Giegerich’s book after she read “Disowning Ownership,” my post of January 9, 2023, available on this blogsite.  

They Taught ME to Think!

“I’ll teach you to think!”

That is — in effect, even if not in those exact words — what almost all of the public-school teachers back in my schooldays said whenever they caught anyone daring to try to think. It’s like the cop back in those same days telling someone who has just called him a “pig” or some other such evaluative name “I’ll teach you to talk to an officer of the law that way!” just before he and his partner slammed that person against the cop car, handcuffed him, and slung him into the back seat of that car to haul him off to jail, as happened to me once.

I’m glad to report that the efforts of the police and the efforts of my schoolroom teachers alike failed to teach me what they were trying to teach me, which was something such as “respect for duly constituted authority.” My contempt for such falsely-called “authority” remains to this day as strong as it ever was — and that is very strong indeed. Such authority figures never teach anyone anything worth learning, They are never genuine teachers at all.

In contrast to all such authoritarian pseudo-teachers, throughout my life my greatest teachers — in the true sense: namely, those individuals who truly helped me learn the most and to whom I owe the most and am the most grateful for what they so helped me learn — were people I never met. At least I never met them in the ordinary sense: I never came into their physical presence, nor did I ever introduce myself to them by letter or any other means.

In fact, the teachers for whom I am most grateful, those who taught me the most, were often dead long before I ever learned anything from them. Nevertheless, I had deep and lasting contacts with them all, and treasure all that they taught me. I will always remain deeply grateful for the many lasting gifts they gave me, even though I never met any of them in person.

                                              *     *     *

By far the most important teachers in my own life were two men, one of whom died more than forty-five years before I was even born, and the other of whom lived far away and died when I was 30. I never met either of them, even in my dreams. Nevertheless — maybe even in part for that very reason — each of them had a profound and lasting impact upon me, upon how I approach and think about everything, most especially my own life and all my involvements with other people.

The first of my two greatest teachers was Nietzsche, my first great love in philosophy (see “My First Love in Philosophy,” the post I put up on this blog last fall, on October 24, 2022). I began reading him just a few months after I’d read John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government when I was still fifteen.

Nietzsche remained the closest companion of my thought from that first time I read any of his work — from that point on not only to the end of high school but also almost to the end of my undergraduate college days. In my last semester as an undergraduate, however, I began really to read Heidegger, my second great teacher and my thought’s closest companion ever since that first real encounter, supplanting even Nietzsche in that role.

*     *     *

I owe primary thanks to my parents for giving me the opportunity to be taught thinking by those two great thinkers.  From my very earliest childhood on, my parents always encouraged me to explore my own interests, and always trusted me when I did. I owe the opportunity to learn from such great teachers as Nietzsche and Heidegger above all to them, my mother and father — and to the sheer chance of being born into a time and economic class and culture that allowed me to find my own way to such teachers, without permission granted from any designated “authority” figure.

Besides being grateful both to my parents and to sheer chance for giving me the opportunity to learn thinking from such master thinkers, I’m also grateful to the coach who taught my 10th grade class on “Western Civilization,” and assigned me Locke’s Second Treatise to read and deliver a lecture on to the whole large class. I learned a valuable lesson from Locke, as I recounted in one of my preceding posts.

I am grateful to that old high-school coach for giving me that assignment. I am even more grateful — though still far less grateful than I am to my parents — to some of my university professors. The first of those to whom I’m thus grateful was a professor with whom I took a couple of undergraduate classes, and who at my request let me do an independent study on Husserl’s Ideas, which he had never read himself. I met weekly with him for an hour or so, and shared what I was getting out of Husserl, from whom I was learning much.

Another professor to whom I am grateful is one I never even met until registration time for my last semester as an undergraduate came around. I needed just one extra hour of credit in addition to the couple of regular courses I was going to take, in order to get just exactly the total number of credit-hours I needed to graduate — seeing no reason at all to pay for more credit-hours than I had to have.

For that lousy single hour of college credit, I decided it was finally time I get around to Heidegger’s Being and Time, which I’d picked up and looked at a few times before, but without being able to work up enough enthusiasm to keep reading more than a few pages. The professor in question was the only one on the faculty of the university I attended who at that time knew much of anything about Heidegger’s work. So I introduced myself to him and asked if he’d be willing to supervise a one-hour independent study on Heidegger for me.

He agreed, and told me to read as much as I could of Being and Time. He said I could get back in touch with him if at any time as I was reading that text I thought I needed his help. Otherwise, he went on to finish, I should just wait till the end of the semester, then schedule an hour or so with him to talk about what I’d read. For a mere one hour’s credit he was, quite reasonably, not very concerned.

So I went off to read Heidegger, but kept putting it off until finally, about a month before semester’s end (and with a hangover from the previous night’s drinking, it behooves me to add), I started to read Being and Time. As I read it, that book then struck me like a bolt of lightning. It was a revelation. It kindled a fire in my thought that has sustained itself ever since.

Thus did Heidegger and Nietzsche, neither of whom I ever met or ever will, teach me to think!   

Whatever the Market Will Bear

— Machine-made products invaded the markets; perfectly identical industrial objects frustrated the eye accustomed to discriminate between similar things. 

Ivan Illich makes that remark, one that concerns what began to develop during the mid-nineteenth century when the railroad began to spread everywhere, in his 1995 essay “The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze: A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perceptions,” which is available online by that title. In my mind, what reading that line by Illich produced — which literally means “led forth,” from Latin pro- “forward, forth” + ducere “to lead” — was the following thought:

“What the market will bear is nothing, and only nothing.”

 I’ll briefly trace the path that thought took in bearing itself to me.

*     *     *

The old adage “whatever the market will bear” is traditionally used to express what is presented as an answer to the question of what determines the price of any marketed product. Used in that way, it means that the price of a given marketed product rises to meet market demand. That is, the price is set by what consumers are willing to pay for whatever is being marketed.

To put what is really the same point just a bit differently: market-prices are always  a function of “supply and demand.” The greater the demand, the higher the price goes; and when demand goes lower, so does the price. Conversely, to flip the same old worn coin over, the greater grows the supply of some product, which means the more competition there is among sellers to produce a given product they wish to sell, the lesser grows what the market will bear as its price, that is, the less consumers are willing to pay for the product. In short, supply and demand vary inversely, according to “the law of supply and demand,” fixing the price that stocks, for example, will bear on the stock-market.

*     *     *

As it true of so many words, the word bear has multiple senses in our language. One sense is that I used in the immediately preceding section of this post, in citing the so-called law of supply and demand as the determining factor of how high a price for mass-produced items — from anvils and zeppelins to stocks and bonds and everything else in between —  can rise before market booms go bust and “Bull Markets” become “Bear Markets.”

In the final locution of the proceeding sentence, the word bear is used in a metaphorically nominative sense to mean a type of animal. That is, of course, another one of that word’s senses.

Yet one more is the sense used in the final sentence of the first section of this post: “I’ll briefly trace the path that thought took in bearing itself to me.” In that case, bear means “to bring, carry, convey, deliver.” It has such a meaning, to give another example, in the ancient adage from the days of the Trojan War:  “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”

My own advice would be to beware of any global marketeer bearing gifts, which prove no less destructive upon being opened than did the great wooden horse the Greeks bore the Trojans.

*     *     *

When those who are pregnant come to term, they bear children — to use that same word in yet another sense. In that sense, to bear does not mean “to tolerate or endure,” as it does when one says that the highest price the consumer market with “bear” is a function of supply and demand, nor does it mean to carry or deliver, nor does it name a fierce sort of beast. Rather, it means “to give birth to” or “to yield,” Just as humans and animals bear young of their kind, so do fruit trees bear fruit, cultivated soils bear crops, and meditation practices bear serenity.  

It is above all in that sense of bear that the global capitalist consumer market bears nothing, absolutely nothing. It never gives birth to anything truly new.

Rather, it always kills.

Thinking Thinly and Tendentiously

A decade or so ago, I was rereading — as I have many times since I first read it while still an undergraduate student at the University of Colorado back in the mid-1960s — Edmund Husserl’s short work The Idea of Phenomenology.  At one point during that particular rereading, the thought entered my mind that Husserl’s phenomenological thinking could suggestively be called tendentious thinking. 

My dictionary tells me that tendentious means “marked by a tendency in favor of a particular point of view: BIASED.”  That surely captures well enough the contemporary common usage of the term, but it is not in that sense that Husserl’s thinking is tendentious.  In fact, in that everyday, pejorative sense of the word, Husserl strove his whole life to think as un-tendentiously as he possibly could, and he largely defined “phenomenology” itself by such striving, including very much so in The Idea of Phenomenology.

Accordingly, what occurred to me, when that idea came into my mind that Husserl’s thinking might well be characterized as “tendentious,” was not at all that he was a biased thinker. He was anything but that.

Rather, the idea that occurred to me was one that itself “tended” in a very different direction, one based on the etymology of tendentious, an etymology buried over and concealed well by what long ago became the customary, pejorative, common usage of that term.

The word tendentious points back to the word tendency, which itself points back to the word tend.  For tend, in turn, dictionaries themselves tend to give two different, numbered entries, from the second of which derives tendency, in its modern usage at least.         

My dictionary goes on to give the two following definitions for that second sense of tend itself:  “1:  to move, direct, or develop one’s course in a particular direction  2:  to exhibit an inclination or tendency: CONDUCE.”  (My dictionary is no doubt to be forgiven for the circularity of that second definition:  to tend is to exhibit a tendency.  Dictionaries tend on occasion to repeat themselves.)

My dictionary tells me, at any rate, that tend comes from the Middle English tenden, which itself, my dictionary also tells me, derived from the Middle French tender, meaning to stretch. That comes in turn, I’m further told, from the Latin tendere, for more on which I am then referred to the word thin.

However, before trying to stretch thought all the way from the tendentious to the thin, let me cite the definition my dictionary gives for the first numbered sense of tend: 

1. tend \’tend\ vb [ME tenden, short for attenden to attend] vi 1 archaic: to give ear:   LISTEN  2: to pay attention: apply oneself  3: to act as an attendant:  SERVE  4 obs :  await

 I’ll pause there for a moment — though my dictionary doesn’t.     

A page from my dictionary

*     *     *

We should, perhaps, think both of the two basic senses of tend at one and the same time, whenever we use that term in our own thought.  If we did that, then whenever we used the word tend we would simultaneously think both of attending to, serving, or waiting upon, on the one hand, and of directing or conducing, on the other.  To do that, thinking would indeed have to stretch itself thin. 

It is just such tendentious thinking we need to stretch thin if our intention is to aid others, most especially if those others are children. In such cases we ourselves need to be very intent — notice the recurrence of tend that we can, if such is our own tendency, hear in that word intent — upon our goal, which is that of clearing the way for the other, especially the child, to tend to her own needs and desires.  Our intention to help the child would go astray if we, perhaps in exasperation at the child’s slowness to understand, were just to take over doing the task for her.

Thereby, even with the best, most loving intentions in the world we would be lacking in the skillful means we need to implement those intentions. Despite our good intentions, we would thus rob the child of an opportunity to learn how to take care of it herself.  What is more, we would thereby also rob ourselves of our own goal, the fulfillment of our own intention really to help the child. 

If we are to avoid such derailing both of the child and of ourselves, then we must keep focused.  We must not let anything distract us from the very purpose of our interaction with the child.  We must, in that sense, be insistent on making our point, tenaciously sticking to it.  In so doing, we not only appear to be, but also truly are, tendentious, in the non-colloquial sense I am trying to articulate, a sense in which there is at least a thin connection not only between the various senses of tend, but also between all of them and the very word thin itself.

Thin and tendentious as that connection may be, it is nevertheless surprisingly strong and bright.  In his book Truth and Method Hans-Georg Gadamer struggles to restore to the term prejudice an original positive sense that our ordinary pejorative way of using that term masks. In the same way, we all should struggle to stretch our own thought so thin that it will cover, at one and the same time, all the varied senses of tend as well as those of thin.

Redeeming tendentious from its plight at the hands of our common usage is just like converting an old, worn coin into a shiny new one at a currency exchange. Thus, too, do we redeem ourselves from the wear and tear of our own thoughtlessness.

NOTE TO READERS: This post is a shortened, reworked version of the first section of “Thinking Thin, or, The Conversion of Philosophy,” Chapter 9 in my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available in the “Shop” above the post.

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.

*     *     *     

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.” 

*     *     *

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.