A letter on stagnancy.
S.R.,
You’ve tolerated my recent, superficial interest in the Presocratics, Plato’s Parmenides, my quips that there is no plurality of things, but rather only the One, and, my saying often, and succinctly,
“Motion not real.”
I find myself these days in a perpetual stasis; a lull; a stagnancy. The sun rises, the sun sets, and the world stands to the ages.
Granted, this is all illusory.
“Socrates, before I’d even met you, I heard that you do nothing other than perplex yourself, and put others into a state of perplexity, and even now you seem to bewitch me, to drug me, to subdue me by charms, with the result that I’m deeply perplexed [lit. in the middle of perplexity]. And you seem to me, if we should examine the matter, both with respect to form and in other regards, to be most like a stingray, which numbs anyone who draws near to it, taking hold of them. And you seem to have done something like this to me.”
Plato, Meno 79e5–80a5 (my translation)
Much in the same way, albeit in contrast to Meno’s epistemological aporia (the perplexity he finds himself in when Socrates questions him as to what virtue really is), there is admittedly a kind of practical aporia whereby in weighing the costs and benefits and consequences of our actions we live in the comfort of speculation without any resolution – that is, we merely think and never live. Our time is spent in envisioning and reckoning and never in acting, and so we come to a kind of standstill, where nothing moves, and while circumstances may change, it is never as a result of our agency (though not acting is still a kind of action).
Allow me to diagnose the cause of this: a kind of fear.
What kind of fear, you ask?
“And I myself am afraid, being of such an age, when I remember through what an ocean of words I must swim…”
Plato, Parmenides 137a6–8
If I might play the psychotherapist: we live in fear of acting wrongly, of not making the “right” decision, albeit not right or wrong in the strictly ethical or moral sense (with respect to good or evil), but only conventionally (if the two can be divorced, but that is another thread entirely). Yet, even what this means is itself perplexing. I wouldn’t know, as I’ve never believed myself to be right about anything. Perhaps we mean that we will be unhappy with the consequences, or that we will be unfulfilled, or we will regret what we’ve done in light of new evidence, unknown to us before acting, or some variation or amalgamation of those things.
The fear isn’t entirely baseless.
We might very well find that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, that we are unhappy with our choices, our newfound circumstances – but the question then I suppose is whether the pain of stasis outweighs the pain of newfound unhappiness, but this is itself speculative speculation, and by degrees we become removed from reality, and have removed ourselves from the equation in turn.
And so perhaps we’d be justified in saying that this fear is not a fear of regret per se, but rather of uncertainty. I doubt whether we would be as torn if we knew all of the situation’s variables prior to and after our decision, but this, even to the most vividly imaginative of us, is impossible, and to attempt to go through every possible outco_me_ is as ridiculous as it is tedious. There is the additional factor, of not having, as many of us do not in our contemporary lives, a system of values to which we might make reference in acting, a kind of moral litmus test, if you would. But even this system would not be able to account for the particularity of my situation, as it pertains to me.
Before we know it we’ve wasted ourselves away by the unceasing “What if?,” though there is no final resolution.
“And so we keep asking, until one with a handful of dirt stops up our mouths – but is that really an answer?”
Heinrich Heine, Zum Lazarus (my translation)
We are condemned, then, to a degree of uncertainty; knowledge at best vague, a memory forgetful, a longing insatiable. We are never resolute, never standing on firm ground, or at least ground that cannot be shaken.
“[One must] either learn in whatever way one is able, or find out [how these matters are], or, if these things are impossible, having taken ahold of the best of human arguments, one must run the risk, journeying on it, of sailing through life, using it like a raft, if one isn’t able to make the journey on a safer, steadier vessel, or a divine account…”
Plato, Phaedo 85c7–85d4 (my translation)
There is an extent to which we find comfort in our aporia; we exhaust ourselves in the back-and-forth of self-dialogue in order to distract ourselves from the gravity of our agency; I can never choose wrongly if I never choose, but as I’ve said, as you yourself very well know, to not choose is still itself a choice.
And yet all we can do is live, bearing this uncertainty in mind, living, or attempting to live, undogmatically, with some faith in ourselves, our decisions, all while acknowledging our limitations.
And now, if I might prescribe some remedy for ourselves:
“Don’t argue what it means to be a good man, but be one.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.16 (my translation)
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George