From Moral Failings Fled

So many of Stalin's victims hoped, against hope, that if only they confessed to their crimes -- even, and perhaps especially, to crimes that they did not commit -- the system and the great leader would spare them.  But we know that there was no such absolution.

From my own moral failings, real moral failings, fled, I adopted a different strategy.  Glimpsing out of the corner of one eye the shadow of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, I decided to hide in his shadow.  And indeed with some difficulty I managed to occupy this space, but as if in an ill-conceived spelunking, with my arms outstretched without recourse into a narrowing funnel.  

Occupying that space itself was, for me, the severest of punishments.

 

Disturbances

A small pebble tossed into a large, still pond.

The philosopher L Wittgenstein might call our attention to the fact that it is impossible to identify the precise time when the pond will return to perfect stillness.  And yet we can still talk coherently about "disturbed" and "undisturbed" waters.  The categories function fine even though there is no fixed boundary between them.

The continental "big boys," people like Sartre and Nietzsche, will say something more "big picture" -- that the ripples that our own lives make in the cosmic pond are quite annihilated when we go.  This is the source of our most profound freedom to act; we should be grateful for it.  (No; I don't get it either.)

A new generation of philosophers -- is it right to call them neo-platonists? -- insists that each of us leaves behind a vibrational signature when we go, one that persists forever in the fabric of an "informational" universe that is beyond vast. 

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi used to refer to "Cosmic Consciousness."  It was, indeed, a brand for him.  It is something like that, but secularized, if you will, by passage through the lens of information technology, transhumanism, ones and zeroes at the end of the day.

Let us all bow down to the Algorithmic Golden Calf.