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Judge not, lest you be judged. ~Matthew 7:1-2
I am the punishment of God. ~Khan, G.
A boy is maimed (by a piercing of his foot) and cast out by his parents because prophesy says he will kill his father and marry his mother. A shepherd takes the boy in and raises him in ignorance of his past. As a young man he leaves the ovine pastures in search of a larger life. At a ford he gets into a Theban standoff with a local king, kills him and proceeds to marry the widowed queen. As king he lives and rules successfully for a good while. Charged to resolve the regicide when things eventually go badly in the realm, he seeks the truth and finds that the killer is he, that the king was his father, and that the widowed queen is his mother. Horrified, he blinds himself and goes into exile.
Philosophers – perhaps not all of them, but many – seek criteria for a good life, a life worth living. They think this can be done, that they have the tools to do it. Once norms for a good life are identified, they can (and should) be used to judge people based on their lives. These are norms after all, and norms must be applied. Their force must be felt, lest they be ridiculed. That a norm must be applied is itself a norm, which means this meta-norm must be applied to itself, which is an irrationality reminiscent of Russell’s paradox, but I will let that go.
What about Oedipus's (he with the swollen foot) life? Perhaps the story suggests that you can only evaluate a life when it’s over. Before death, dramatic changes can still happen, putting everything that went before into a different light. By implication, no life in progress can be evaluated definitively. One might ask that no life be evaluated before its conclusion.
This leaves posthumous reputation. Many individuals are concerned with their legacy, how they will be remembered, and that they will be remembered at all, at least for a while. This is all too human, though not rational. You might raise your present happiness by telling yourself that future generations will tell the tales of your heroic deeds. This works in the way that any fantasy works. You psych yourself into happiness with an exercise of imaginary consumption, much like you do when you go to that happy place in your mind or when you visualize a date with your favorite celebrity. It is not real. Its justification lies in its momentary effect on your mood. Certainly, this effect is not to be completely discounted, but it has dark potential. How much are you willing to sacrifice and how much are you willing to hurt others in present-day reality in order to reap the imagined postmortem rewards? It's a dangerous slope.
Philosophers who seek normative standards for the good life must find a way to predict and measure a person’s after-death reputation. This is difficult on a good day and impossible on others. A normative evaluation requires consensus among evaluators and consistency over after-death time. Both are rare. We know for an empirical fact that philosophers are, and always have been, a disputatious bunch. How will they (and they haven’t yet) agree on standards for the good life? And by the way, even if they did, they must face the fact that most dead are soon forgotten, leaving no reputation to be evaluated. The goodness/badness of their lives is not even defined.
Before returning to King Oedipus, consider Genghis Khan. Khan was probably illiterate (a fact that philosophers cannot hold in high regard), but he left the apocryphal observation that the man who drives his enemies before him and “outrages” their wives and daughters is a happy man. Genghis did all these things. In much of the world, and particularly in the parts he despoiled, he is remembered as a ruthless conqueror. In contrast, most present-day Mongols revere him as an ancestor, nation-builder, and heroic warrior. Where is the objective, normative evaluation of his life? There are only social opinions, which are affected by local interests, and they are all contextual. I say ‘only’ without prejudice here.
Now consider Oedipus. Suppose he was a real person whose life story was preserved by the dramatists. Was his life good? We see that this is a poor question. His life was tragic, and that is the point. He himself first thought his life was good and then he thought it was bad, but we can’t take the average. Imagine for a moment you concluded that King Oedipus’s life was a 5 out of of 10 because there were 10s and 0s along the way. The shepherd who raised him also gets a 5 overall. For him, every day was a 5. The tragic life is orthogonal to the good life. It is a story that makes us shudder and seek catharsis. It is a story that teaches us not to judge others. The Oedipus myth thus teaches us not to judge ourselves, that understanding is not a matter of judgment. Why are so many philosophers – the students of wisdom – still so enamored with norms and judgment? They ought to beware what they wish for. This ought is a norm that I can respect.
Let Sophocles's Oedipus have the last word: “Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.”
A false distinction?
When philosophers insist that they can extract the meaning of and a norm for the good life, they also say that the subjective experience of happiness might be small part of it, but that subjective happiness is unsuitable to represent the whole concept of the good life. There are, they say, too many people who are subjectively happy and who think they are living a good life, but whose lives are not good under the penetrating light of philosophical analysis. These philosophers tend to equate the good life with true happiness. When happiness is re-equated (requated?) with goodness it follows that experienced or subjective happiness is false. It is an il- or delusion. The assumed identity of true happiness with the good life is, I believe, a Platonic idea. To Plato, all good things converge behind the veil of phenomena. There, the good is beautiful and the beautiful is good.
See also the post on Normative Happiness.
Come and get it!
I passed a truck on the road that had Molon Labé written on it with large Greek letters. I did not have the time or the courage to stop the truck and ask the driver what he knew about King Leonidas. He lost. Do you get it? He lost. He died. The Persians did come and took his weapons and his life.
This sentence has five words.
My friend Professor R. B.-G. whom I affectionately call Loco, using anglotype diphthongs challenged his Spanish class by writing Esta oración tiene cinco palabras on the board. As a colleague in the teaching industry I admire his chutzpah. Sitting back he submitted his students to a stress test, waiting for them to offer reactions when they could no longer tolerate the ambiguity and tension. My take on his gambit is that he merged the subject and the object. The sentence tells something (has five words) about something (this sentence) while also being that something whose own nature verifies the claim. I take this as a metaphor for self-consciousness. The realization “I am self-aware” is both a claim something (I) makes about about the state (am self-aware) that it can only make if it is in that state. Or something.
