Un-Christmassy thoughts

What does it say that a tradition founded on the stone the builders rejected continues apace in rejecting others and sees itself all to often as a small minority against not just the world but its people?

There are days when I understand all to well why Kierkegaard allied himself with Denmark's atheists and not its Christians.

Philosophical query: to be ignored by almost all

Let X be an action, such that to X is morally forbidden, but not because Xing is intrinsically evil but rather because there is a high probability of harm to others and/or to self were one to X. In fact, let us assume that there is nothing evil per se at all in Xing. There might even be near possible worlds in which Xing would not be evil at all. That is, X is extrinsically, but not intrinsically evil. In addition, Xing is enjoyable.

Is it morally wrong to revel in thoughts of Xing? If so, why? Is it merely because one could not morally X? 

Music?

So, Kanye West has a song yclept "Runaway". It is a song that he has performed on Saturday Night Live and on the VMAs, both times wearing a red suit, numerous gold chains and backed by women in tutus who act less like backing dancers than those annoying "statues" that have become ubiquitous at every street festival since 1995. Of course, since it is a sung piece and not a rap, he is autotuned in a way that can only make one think of Cher or the very worst musical number on television. And, as should be obvious, he always seems quite satisfied with himself during his performances.

My question is simple: When he sings, in this song, "toast for the douchebags, toast for the assholes, toast for the scumbags" is he smart enough or self-aware enough to be ironic, or does he really not know he's singing about himself?

Passions

In the last couple of weeks, a friend of mine did something objectively irrational—one might say stupid—something that put his life at risk. But, as we discussed it briefly, it became apparent that he did what he did not in a drug- or alcohol-induced haze but in another sort of haze, that sort of place in which one loses oneself in passion. 

In our society, we value passion, we value devotion, we value going all in. And, although we do not put it quite this way, there is a long tradition in many of the cultures that feed into our own, of valuing losing oneself, whether in meditation in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, in a mystical union with or experience of the Godhead in mystical traditions in all the Abrahamic religions, becoming one with ones actions in varieties of Zen and Taoist thought, losing oneself in action in literary figures (e.g., Hans Castorp at the end of The Magic Mountain) and so on. 

And, while I am cautious—probably overcautious—and was raised to mistrust this kind of loss of control and rationality, there is something admirable about diving so deeply, even when risks are involved, about embracing the Dionysian and letting Apollo be damned.

Of course, I'll remain on the Apollonian side, but I can see the appeal of the other way.

Relationships

This morning, I woke up to one of those emails telling me that a couple that we both know is having problems and one of them has moved out of the house they bought about a year ago. Whenever something like this happens, I have an initial thought: I'm not sure how they ever worked together as a couple. It's important to say that this is always my reaction. And, because I know that this is always the way that I react, I immediately remember that, from the outside, our relationship has to be pretty inexplicable. 

I think that this is usually the case with any relationship. We've been together for just over fourteen years now—and that's a lot in gay years, still—but for more than a decade, I have heard people say to my partner that he could do better and tell me that I'm too good for him and, occasionally, the same sort of thing to me. Of course, some of those have been cases where people were interested in one or the other of us or people were just being generally destructive. But, many of them were saying what they thought: that our relationship just didn't make sense. And, while I am scrupulous not to do the same sort of thing, it is definitely the case that while I can tell that people do work well together and that they make each other happy and even care about one another, I often am unable to make sense of the mechanics, given what I know about the people involved.

Hell, sometimes I don't understand how the two of us work together. So, maybe it just is a mystery how any two people ever enter into any sort of relationship. Forster wanted us only to connect; how do we do that?

The worst thing about getting older

Besides approaching average life expectancy for the beginning of the twentieth century or finally being old enough to be the father to many of my students, the worst part of getting older is having multiple friends and colleagues with serious illness and seeing people I think of as being part of my cohort—and younger—die. I lost my father-in-law just shy of two years ago, two friends of mine—both younger—that I met when I used to bartend in the last year and a half, a friend from high school recently went into remission, a colleague is battling a mysterious case of wasting, a colleague of my partner's just had a lumpectomy with the removal of twenty-five lymph nodes, another colleague of his lost his wife, the women who takes our dog once a week has breast and ovarian cancer and the list continues.

I'm barely middle-aged and, yet, I realize every day more and more just how close death is to us all the time.

Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris.

Good moments

So, in many ways this week's classes, because I am longing for break and haven't had a real one in a pretty long time, have been a hard slog. But, today, a student saw a connection between Kant's distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds and Hindu metaphysics, a connection that I had never directly mentioned in class—is it one that I had noticed in those terms?—in the middle of a review section. That's some kind of achievement.