Self, Morality, Justice, Happiness: All Defined in One Post?

“There is I, then there are the actions of I” Says mainstream philosophy. Surely it is comforting to believe that my unflattering actions will not necessarily yield an equally unflattering self, but let us look for the truth in this matter. Does the proper answer to “What am I?” lie in “I am what I am” or “I am what I do”?

Compare life to a play in which you are an actor. There is no script, but there are circumstances which, like a script, compel your actions. Other characters’ perceptions of you are only practical to the actors playing those characters, and your perception of your character is only relevant if you cannot execute the actions thoroughly enough.

I can tell if you are a lazy actor- you will find a character and play the character throughout the play, probably finding, not through coincidence, a character that you identify with. It may be momentarily entertaining, but ultimately, you are acting dishonestly and cowardly, using the caricature of your role as a safety net (Due to lack of experience, I fell into such a net in my own acting). The audience has much experience with dishonesty and cowardice, and these are the last things they want to see. Provide what the spectator in life lacks, and you will have done your part as a participant in life.

Ironically, you and I play roles every day of our lives- and they are rarely the same from one situation to another. The flawed view of acting lies in thinking that the situation warrants a given character (i.e. The set of emotions or spiritual motivations) rather than a given action. Mainstream philosophy gives us such clichés as “great men are formed by great situations” (in my own words) in an effort to perpetuate this fallacy. Consequently, we fit our character to each situation we confront in life. When babysitting, we are the “authoritative responsible young adult,” When arguing with a parent we are the “iconoclastic young rebel,” Yet even there the roles vary according to the situation. If you’re out with shy friends, you may rise to a leader or loudmouth role. If that role is already filled, you will quiet down a great deal or be a follower. All of this depends on an innate effort for the avoidance of alienation- you must be in a group and will fill the roles necessary to remain in the group or keep the group in tact. This is the general function for which role-playing takes place in life- you play a role in life because, without a role, you cannot participate in the play.

When we view this tendency, it becomes painfully apparent that you can’t even say that you aren’t being “yourself” when playing a role- your self is entirely composed of such characters if you act as I suspect. Even those who rebel against “not being your self” are taking up a character in order that they will fill the role of “rebel” or “truth-teller” in life. Moreover, they are putting “self” on a pedestal as if it were a constant- a Truth of the individual. It is not. “Self” is an illusion. The roles we play are safety nets to help us avoid acting independently, truthfully and difficultly. The more we occupy our finite minds with “how we act,” the more we limit “what we act” thereby saving ourselves from acting thoroughly. Instead, we can act in “Our” way. But if you don’t want to be a compilation of characters, when told that you act badly, know that it is no excuse to assure yourself of “Your” goodness apart from actions, and say “well, at least it’s not Like Me to do so,” That is what makes this way of thinking so comforting, but to be truthful is to say, “I acted badly, therefore I am that much more bad,” The consequence of this way of thinking is Self-Accountability as opposed to Self-Esteem.

In the last play I was in, the script required me to leer as would a womanizing adventurer. After a show, my romantic opposite said that her aunt reported that I was leering at her niece too much. “Well,” I replied, “My character is an a##! Blame the script!” and laughed over it. In that case, I was acting badly according to actions dictated by a script. In life our actions are dictated by situations (which are a sort of script). Actions are not dictated by our selves- our selves are dictated by our actions. That our actions, in similar situations, vary from person to person signifies that the essential difference is one of perception. Our moral sensibilities (sensibility: receptiveness toward something) dictate our perceptions. Sensibility is the degree to which we feel, or perceive, the world around us. If I perceive a situation to warrant lying, it is because my moral sensibility perceives it in that way.

The idea that the self dictates actions is responsible for the contradiction in saying “His self is bad for having him commit murder” while also saying “He was doing what his self thought was right, so his self is right for doing it but wrong for thinking it was right,” Take a break after reading that sentence, then look here: I would say of the murderer, “His self is murderous because his actions were murderous which was because his situation, as altered by a murderous moral sensibility, warranted murder. This moral sensibility makes him bad- that is the elusive element which answers the question of why good intentions make for bad actions,” When two statements contradict one another, there is always an element of disagreement we can pinpoint. That point, in cases of moral contradiction, is perception. If actions are moral or immoral based on their relation to the situation, then it is essentially the perception of the situation that makes two different actions in one situation differ morally, even if the intentions are equally positive. Immorality is a disease of perception, not of action!

Ask “What am I” and I will answer, “You are what you do in every situation you are confronted with,” Just as a worker is worth what he produces, you are worth what you produce. Morality lies in perceiving rightly the situations around you, but justice is completely different. Justice lies in acting as others do not- the Just actor on stage supplies the audience with the bravery and truth that they need but also the tasks needed by those around him required by the situation (this is essentially Socratic justice), and the Just actor in life supplies these same things. As for happiness, whereas the unhappy actor frustratingly falls short of his standard of the character, the happy actor does away with the standard, and only concerns himself with living sensibly (in the moral sense and otherwise) and absorb every situation that he may live justly in accordance with it. The happiness lies in the fact that, in doing so, he falls short of nothing. You are accountable only to the situation, and from there you must do only this: ACT!

Intro: Politeness is one of the most ubiquitous elements in society as it is basically a social structuring device. On one hand we could say on a humanity-wide scope of social networks, “Love” is the ideal glue with which to bond one soul to another, but politeness does not connect souls so much as it creates the illusion of such a connection- it connects a shadow of the soul, which is the “ego,”. Another ideal would be “respect” which is the illusion of importance shared by people, again, dealing with the shadow of the soul, “ego”. The need to have the soul bond with other souls causes us to “look for love” often in the wrong places. The need for importance causes us to seek “Respect” as this makes us feel important, rather than seeking real importance in its more truthful form.

Theory: Politeness is a need for both respect and for love in their most superficial senses, but speaking practically I would characterize it concisely as a need for non-isolation- the nightmare of isolation is in the lack of love and lack of respect. Politeness is a “mutually assured dishonesty”, in which I avoid the truth to maintain your illusion of importance and love in order to maintain my own illusions of non-isolation. Mutually assured dishonesty works to the end of mutually assured non-isolation.

Insofar as humans are social creatures, which to some extent we certainly are, a fear engrained in our primordial survival instinct is that of being alone. God himself said, “It is not good for man to be alone,” and man has avoided loneliness ever since. However, man does not truly know the nature of his own soul. He oversights the soul amid his shallow introspections, satisfied with the substitute we know as ego, or “the self,” As in acting, any idea of a character’s “self” leads to a trite caricature, skimming the surface of the soul. The result of said oversight is a satisfaction with self-indulgence rather than “soul-indulgence,” the latter of which leads to true happiness. Politeness is mutual self-indulgence. I value the avoidance of a family fight not because it will affect love within the family, but because a slur against me will affect my ego or my feeling of the safety-net being torn down. Politeness maintains the status quo, which is tolerable if the status quo is one of togetherness, but often after a fight, the only way to affect a reconciliation is to speak frankly, truthfully and impolitely about your feelings.

Politeness is clinging to illusions as a substitute for truths, all to maintain the illusions of what we need in life. The mutual nature of this leads to an exchange of lies or “skirts around the truth” that only satisfies in the short term. Ultimately, politeness has deprived us of the truth, a deprivation for which only the stupid and deluded will stand satisfied. Still though, a degree of politeness is necessary, but a critique of politeness is necessary to have us reconsider our use and reverence for it. It is a shabby substitute for love and respect.

Example: A director is casting a show, and there will inevitably be those who are not cast. Successful auditioners will be called back, and those who did not get a part will not get a call. He figures that it is more polite to spare them the “You failed” call than to confront them with his decision. This is tempting, but it is actually his cowardice that prevents the phone call from happening. He is afraid of portraying disrespect or a lack of love to people that he would rather have as friends. He is afraid of being alone, essentially, but he has a good word for that which this fear compels: Politeness, a shield from the truth. Ultimately the truth is more useful, moral or necessary, but the selfish will withdraw the truth from others and themselves in shortsightedness, preferring to avoid the truth in deference to satisfying illusions.

As For Me: By the way, this is not about me- I got a satisfying part in Damn Yankees. As late as the call was, however, I assumed otherwise and started thinking about politeness. Hence the post on politeness.

One of the wonderful things about triism is that it allows for both Plato’s and Aristotle’s forms to apply to objects in my interpretation. What this approach is resolving is a conflict I resisted emphasizing in a prior dialectic: The dualistic form may be that which finds thingness in a thing, or that which asserts thingness in a thing. In this approach, the spiritual does the former and the rational does the latter.

Both forms theories separate the thing itself from the form, but they have different ideas of what the form is exactly. Socrates spoke of triism in The Republic to some extent, but his disciples were as far as I understand purely dualistic.

The thing itself is a physical object. It is the material that makes up the thing, but without any other element it ceases to be a thing. Likewise, without the physical or if any single element of three is missing, the thing ceases to be a thing.

Plato’s form indicates ideas behind the things themselves that are the essence of thingness- you could say that this thingness is worth fighting for, as Plato’s Forms defend thingness in whatever object they find thingness in. This is essentially the result of having an ideal celestial thingness. So you see, his form is more spiritual and not at all rational, if you will. It looks not to facts, but to a spiritual force that makes Thing A to be Thing Aish. You might say that force is Love, for love is that which binds separate entities as one- love compels us to defend as well.

Aristotle’s form indicates the structure of material as the form of an object- this is more concrete and coherent. It is my interpretation that whereas Plato’s was a spiritual form, this form is rational. It takes the facts of material and decides how to structure them methodically. This form is a blueprint- far from the celestial Perfects of the preceding forms. Just as the rational element of the state organizes and conducts to make it more state-like, the rational element of the thing conducts and organizes to make it more thing-like.

I devoted a prior dialectic to a dualistic way of thinking. I guess it’s no secret that I am not a monistic thinker mostly because I am not a materialist. My mentality is one of “there’s more than meets the eye,” and that carries through all things.

In the past I have applied triism to the Anatomy of the State (that’s the title), and I stand by the idea that the state falls into three elements: the reasoning, the spirited and the physical. Socrates spoke of these three governing the individual, and I believe that they apply to the state as well.

So looking at the individual model of triism, where does our morality fall in relation to it?

In the Republic, Socrates says that courage is that which is most held by the spirited element of the state (which he called the military, but he spoke in a different sense) and that it is that which compels us to fight for what we hold dear. I interpret him to say that courage is the defense of values (a modern semantical twist). So then, in this model, values of all kinds fall into the spirited element of the human being.

Consider the physical element- can flesh and blood value this or that? You could say that the body values medicines and disvalues poisons, but I see that as a mistake, for isn’t it obvious that the body can only react to this and that- it is something else in us that cares about how it affects us. The physical element does not make choices, it only reacts. Modern medicine reinforces that conclusion, as we know that all bodily workings are a series of chemical reactions.

It seems that the rational element would be that part which cares, but I don’t believe that is the case. By its very nature, reason is the element that concerns itself with “Who, What, When, Where, How” questions. Reason is by my definition non-reactionary. It is the part of us that does not function automatically or by a set of rules. It is obvious then that dogma, which I consider far different from values, would not fall under this element. Nor would values, for reason is by nature non-committal. It is concerned only with facts and decisions- the Joe Friday of triism, if you will.

So then, the spirited element of man is not concerned with facts and decisions, nor is it reactionary as the physical. What is left is love and virtue, which cannot be understated. Notice I am not saying emotion. I suppose modern science leaves emotion to the physical in that it is reactionary to whatever extent. As I am not a scientist I will not insist one way or the other, but I will say that love in a sense wider than eros is not physiological, but spiritual. Many emotions are caused by hormonal/neurological reactions and are therefore physical, but those connected with love are not. This cannot be understated, for isn’t it the love of life, love of others, love of God, love of values, love of dogma, love of state and so forth all that we truly emote over? The rage I feel when you burn my flag is more than physiological, because my valuation of the flag (love) is not physiological, nor is it rational.

Consequently, then, we must separate by principle of triism, values from reason in the process of philosophy, for it is best to let one develop without the threat of the other's restrictions. If we are to do what is natural, we will leave values in its respective place as that which should be defended in the spirited element of the mind. We will then look only to facts and decisions, sort them out rationally, and assert after the fact that which should be defended.

It is interesting to me now that we can apply triism to the soul exclusively upon further reflection.

At the moment I am inconclusive on triism vs. dualism. Perhaps I will always be. I’ll try and elaborate soon.