The emperor, as the story went, received as a gift some wondrous glass dishes. He liked the gifts very much, but smashed them all nonetheless. 'Why? Are they not beautiful?' he was asked. 'Precisely because of that,' he answered. 'They are so beautiful that it would be hard for me to lose them. And with time they would break, one by one. And I would be sorrier than I am now.'
[....]
This thought is cruelly hopeless. We cannot destroy everything we love; there will always be the possibility that others will destroy it for us.
-from M. Selimović
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11 comments:
Can't you use angel food cake to cushion fragile things?
Uh oh. I knew I should have gotten you a book or something.
Snap.
Not to be morbid or anything, but if you follow this logic, it makes sense to commit suicide Right Now because otherwise we're going to get run over by a car or get the bubonic Plague or something. Tomorrow. Or else we'll just die of old age, and that will suck, too.
Hemlock, anyone?
first of all: thank you, lady bonds, for your most recent comment. i was about to wreak the enlightenedly despotic erasure on the previous 2 that i've suppressed on other occasions, solely based on their absolute irrelevance and overwhelming dumbness.
you are correct in noting that the logical outcome of the story is as you've described. however, in calling it like it is ("cruelly hopeless"), the narrator veers away from Aleksandr's petulant, albeit fablesque, reaction. that he does so in an unlikely way (instead of traversing the path you, lady bonds, have outlined and merely saying "this is childish behaviour for an emperor, Alex," Selimović appeals to the very impossibility of accomplishing such an act of destruction), he articulates something less didactic/moralising—such that it, actually, provides ethical alternatives.
the next sentence, which i (perhaps wrongly) omitted: "Why are books considered to be clever if they are bitter?"
I accept that my tone was too light, but pointing out the antiparallelism between Alexander's behavior in Selimović quote and your recent use of angel food cake to cushion a lamp is neither irrelevant nor dumb.
You can protect valuable fragile things with other valuable fragile things, and you blogged about doing so in your previous post.
So what are the ethical alternatives Selimović mentions?
Lady Bonds strives for idiocy in everything she does. Like posting her password on blogsites.
But wait. Mr. Sillymovich makes an extremist assumption, as childish as Alex's: he assumes that we would want to destroy *everything* we love. Alex is just destroying one particular gift--the wondrous glass dishes. Mr. S confuses Alex's very particular act (childish though it may be) with *everything*. Why do philosophers and poets always do that? Do they not realise that, as similar as the particular and the universal are, they (rightly) oppose one another?
Yes, he appeals to the impossibility of destroying eveything, only because he cannot appeal to the possibility of destroying a particular item. Is there anything more powerful than destroying one item *in its particularity*, *because of its particularity*??
*That* is what could be cruelly hopeless, or life-givingly redemptive. The justice of particularity. The cruelty of universal impartiality.
Furthermore, providing an ethical alternative would imply providing an alternative *action*. Is waiting for others to act really an ethical alternative?
And I agree with g's assertion that suggesting angel food cake as luggage insulation is neither irrelevant nor dumb. I would venture to guess that Alex's luggage issues far exceed yours, mine, and g's (perhaps with the excetion of the duct-taped-free-laundry-backpack undone and redone in Frankfurt).
(By the way, how do you do italics in html? Asterisks are dumb.)
I meant, "cannot appeal to the IMpossibility of destroying a particular item."
Because destorying a particular item is possible. As I destroyed the ceramic bowl for my parents during my 7 km sprint through Heathrow as it bounced in shamefully uncushioned luggage.
i was going to title my composite response "the general and the particular" even before lady bonds wrote her 2 most recent posts.
sepoy: yes, you are correct in your contextualisation of the Alexander who gets lost and does not find the water that does al-Khidr. i'd like there also to be a similar story about this Mahmud, but maybe too much to ask? this raises the first issue of generality/particularity: namely, the most basic one involving incidence of similar accounts in different times/places that, though very particular, combine to form an at least de facto generality.
lady bonds/g: that the Alexander anecdote has become a myth lends to it a certain generality, even if only implicatively. and this is the context in which S. pipes up that it is impossible to destroy this "everything" that he attributes to Alexander, through the myth. i'm not quite sure that S. assumes that we would want to destroy everything we love, but he does assume this to be the logical/rhetorical outcome of the story.
destroying one beloved object is opposite destroying the sum total of these. and what is futile about destroying the latter holds true for the former: it is governed by necessity rather than choice. destruction or protection, when pursued absolutely, is outside the realm of thought and, in a sense, ethics. it's the age-old problem of dialectics and binaries.
when S posits the possibility of others' destruction, he nods towards this ethical realm which must take into account particularities of destruction and preservation, rather than actions carried out identically in every case. that something (say, another person—although there are other examples) can intervene in the process indicates that the individual who loves does not act in isolation, but in a world that must constantly be adjusted to.
it is this possibility that calls one to make particular ethical decisions: to destroy one thing and not another, to protect only partially, to seek justice for damages externally inflicted. such action calls for one who fully comprehends the state of affairs, vis-a-vis his own actor-hood and selective/evaluative capacity. waiting for others to act is not the ethical alternative in question—but maintaining one's capacity to act based on others is a central tenet of ethical existence.
that said, it was not to some perceived "lightness of tone" that i object—but the fact that the protection in question was a particular event and Alexander's a connotatively general one. to mention them together, using the plural "fragile things" makes "protecting with angel cake" seem general (why is this the lowest common denominator and not the other way 'round?).
html from one dumby to another, necessarily "in words" because (ah! what a superb lesson!) to do so in writing would be, ultimately, to do italics: "em" typed between "<" and ">." then the word/phrase desired italically. concluded with "/em" between "<" and ">."
I would like, as is my usual wont (g, a, you may have noticed this in past conversations) to point out a couple of probably irrelevant, but (I like to think, at any rate) important issues raised (most likely without conscious effort) here:
1) The particular and universal are not opposites. Sorry, Lady Bonds. Rather, they are part of an unfortunately infinite plurality of grouping adjectives; I'm speaking literally, not just mathematically. This said, I would like to think that the closest opposite of universal would be an adjective that signifies application to nothing rather than to everything.
2) There is ample precedent in many fields for seeing an implied progression starting from one act, part, or thing and ending in a series of all similar acts, parts, or things. Mathematics calls it induction. Philosophy has pondered it for centuries. Many authors use it through metaphor, foreshadowing, synecdoche, and other literary devices.
But to the point... Maybe it is I that have forgotten it, but it seems that someone may have forgotten their Kant. As last I recall... it has been some years... Kant tries to put exactly this line of inquiry into ethical parameters--sorry a, if this misinterprets a portion of your last post. Rather than viewing particular and universal as opposites, his categorical imperative takes the particular and makes it universal and also, if you think about it-and he would have you think about it, vice versa. Moreover, given the deontological aspect of Kant's writings, the destruction of the plates by accident is likely to be seen as unimportant, whereas the willful distruction of all--or even one--is almost certainly reprehensible. Additionally and contrarily, protection is not reprehensible, unless it is done for the wrong reasons or incorrectly.
clearly Kant's kitten imp is not about making an individual action universal (even could this be done). its clout pertains to the principle espoused—a principle which heavily rests upon context. if we take the example of smashing something, it is the reason/justification for such an act that matters—not the destruction as actual splintering (which can be mass-produced). of course, that holds for preservation as well.
this brings into play the interaction between Kant, whose emphasis is on action, and Nietzsche, whose is on the one who acts/wills/creates, &tc. thus, the "implied progression" that results in a multiplicity of different actions rests in the particular individual who groups knowledge into categories, who derives ethical principles of action, and who can verbalise coherent reasons for both categorisation and action.
(don't worry, i'm in the process of re-thinking my Enlightenment/Existentialist values.)
perhaps the confusion that is running through these discussions is that of the words "particular" and "general" when applied to different things.
there are particular acts—and there are particular principles, which lend consistency of application (if not actual universality) to these acts. a gathering of acts is ethically meaningless without a structuring dictum and a particular—ahem—dictator.
there are general acts (ones repeated and repeatable in identicality)—but there are no really general principles. what we call such are, really, particulars that, then, apply in many instances.
and that, my friends, is Eternal Recurrence in a nutshell.
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