#givenness

[apesoformythoughts]

‘“Individualism” claims G.K. Chesterton, “kills individuality.” While perhaps formulating a subjectivist paradise devoid of “pure” objective rationality, Nietzsche opened the door to a form of individualism that led to a new extreme of impotence and feebleness that the Enlightenment might never have reached. Peterson’s dour temperament, juxtaposed with the well-adjusted temperaments of the jovial Chesterton and the vivacious [Slavoj] Zizek . . . testifies to the death of individuality under the tyranny of individualism.

To base one’s moral compass on lived relationships with real people outside of one’s head, rather than on abstractions of their selfhood or of “humanity” broadly speaking, seems to be both a necessary and perplexing conundrum. The self, for Chesterton, was perpetually caught in a tension whose dynamic was relational. Existence and freedom are not to be harnessed and regulated, nor outsourced and relieved of responsibility. They are gifts…and at times curses, but always given, implying a relationship between a gift-giver and the self as receiver. “Most modern freedom is at root fear,” writes Chesterton, “It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” Responsibility for Chesterton is not so much a matter of lifting oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but a response to the One who gives one his existence. Thus, we are faced with Chesterton’s ability to hold together the paradox of the power of free will, but also its fragility and limitations.’

— Stephen G. Adubato: “Beyond the Cult of Self-Reliant Bootstrapping”

[apesoformythoughts]

‘But the [Jordan] Peterson crying videos mostly make me sad for him because of how seriously he takes himself, and how rarely, one finds the man laughing. These videos also make me think of something even sadder than—as Slavoj Zizek once remarked—how difficult it is to “elicit from [Peterson] a joke”: the life and death of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Self-reliant bootstrapping rhetoric draws heavily on the Nietzschean exaltation of the Ubermensch and the will to power. Yet ironically, Nietzsche’s death was sadly unNietzschean. Lonely, physically ailing, driven to madness, and plagued by an “urge for the truth” (which he “so detested”), he found himself calling into question the worldview he constructed upon the rejection of all external authorities.’

— Stephen G. Adubato: “Beyond the Cult of Self-Reliant Bootstrapping”

[apesoformythoughts]

‘Taking personal responsibility for one’s life is certainly not simple. “Men make their own history,” Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “but they do not make it as they please … but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” So, to grapple with the simplest of facts: my life, my freedom, and existence itself are neither entirely the products of my own making nor the results of systemic forces alone. They emerge, rather, out of the unpredictable interplay of both. Put simply, they are gifts. Such an awareness of the givenness of things has helped me to see past warring ideologies, whose greatest error is perhaps their tendency to make their adherents take themselves too seriously.’

— Stephen G. Adubato: “Beyond the Cult of Self-Reliant Bootstrapping”

[apesoformythoughts]

“The opposite of this mode of being is adventure, a mode I would roughly define as a knock on your door that makes you get off your ass to do something. Adventure is a synthesis of freedom and necessity—a free, creative dealing with what is given. It involves reckoning with what you do not choose.”

— Marc Barnes: “Netflix and the Culture of Choice”

[apesoformythoughts]

“Our culture is plagued (which only ever means I am plagued and I believe it of others) with an aversion to the given—those people, places, and things that are given to us, annihilating the possibility of another person, another place, and another thing.

[…] The myth is that we will be enabled to choose what we really want in this atmosphere. The reality is we are terrified from choosing anything at all, and worse, that even in choosing we don’t choose—we try. What do we call a marriage open to the possibility of divorce? If it works, did it really work? If I die undivorced, did I stay faithful to my vows? Or did I try marriage out, right up to the point of death, a Netflix choice forever haunted by a possibly better option?”

— Marc Barnes: “Netflix and the Culture of Choice”

[apesoformythoughts]

«It would be absurd if the farmer took the same tack of stark dominion, saying: “This land that belongs to me has a life of its own. I will control that life and thereby be the sole master of my property. I will no longer be a slave to its ecology. My power will be the sole source of its fruits.” No. It is obvious that the otherness of the land is precisely what enables the farmer to farm.

The farmer places his seeds in soil he did not create, under the sun he cannot command. He uses what is given, and only because it is “already going on” can he use it at all. He works in cooperation with the land, not by sheer mastery over it. Even the most technological agricultural practices rely, at base, on processes beyond the farmer's control.

Planting crops without rotating them, plowing without regard to the particulars of geography, these efforts abase the unique life of nature, forcing it to comply with the monochrome will of man. They are idiotic efforts that end in dust bowls. It is the unique life of the land that enables us to use it in the first place. Unsustainable use does not respect the otherness of that which is used. It is a phenomenon of hypercontrol, one that denies the life that goes on apart from our power and desire.»

— Marc Barnes: “Life Cycles”

[apesoformythoughts]

«There are certain realities that are so basic in their goodness, beauty, and importance that they are not so much chosen as given. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Swiss Alps, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French language, moral absolutes, and the saints are goods that give themselves to us in all of their complexity and compelling power. We don’t choose them; they choose us. We don’t make demands of them; they impose a demand upon us […] The Word of God, preserved in the Church, is a supreme value of this type. We shouldn’t therefore speak of choosing sections of it that we like and leaving behind those that bother us. Rather, we should let it, in all of its multivalence and complexity, claim us.»

— Robert Barron: To Light a Fire on the Earth