Duty
87th installment to my philosophical system.
Duty confronts man at all times. Life itself can be considered a duty: a duty to love, to cherish, to protect, to raise, to care for, to provide for, etc. All our duties are but the expression of what we value. A duty can’t stand on its own. It has to be backed up by action, and that action has to arise from within man’s own nature.
The instincts themselves determine for us what we’re duty-bound to pursue—if we wish to survive, that is. In that sense, the bare necessities for life become the starting point of all duties. And from there, as time progresses, and innovations move likewise, we human beings adopt a new set of duties to be faithful toward. In that comes how we organize our lives, and thus how we live in the world—either in reaction against it or in subservience to it. Though for myself, the situation was never black or white. I neither conform to nor outright reject the times. I live through the times but do not make myself subject to them. The times are generally considered good insofar as they correspond to the passions of the individual experiencing them. On that basis, the whole of it is subjective, but that is how it should be.
To adapt to the times is a necessary exercise if you wish to live comfortably. Some are braver than others in this respect. Comfort has never been a duty of mine. I live dangerously. And actively hope, in fact, that the world becomes more uncertain and frightful by the day—for in that comes the true character of a man. In this panoply of misfortune, I seek to pitch my tent of life up in order that the winds of adversity will not knock it down. I am steadfast in my resolve to remain a part of the world and yet separate from it. I have no enemy but myself and the world at large. Do not misunderstand me, though. I do not mean here that the world itself is my enemy, but rather that aspects of the world become my enemy as I live in it. The world is at all times willing to play you a nasty trick should you open yourself up to it too loosely.
I’ve never been one to make myself subject to the craftiness of another. Why then should I attempt to make myself subject to the world as a whole? No. That’s pure nonsense to me. I know well what lies in my lane and what does not. And in that recognition comes all my peace of mind. I concern myself not with the times but with the eternities. My goal with respect to life has always been to maintain the essence of my person amidst the progress of time. I see no fault in being at odds with every trend and popular notion of the day for the sake of preserving myself from such confusion and decadence. The moral considerations of today have no bearing on my life, for I don’t see my life in any of it. A man lives best if he looks upon this world as a sort of sideshow, something to be gazed at but nothing more.
The duties of life are such that a man must always be at odds with the world if he’s to live honestly in it. Whence comes all this trouble? It is not that this age is itself cursed—though many mistakes were made in the past that led us to where we are now—but rather that most today adapt themselves too readily to the world; affirming values they never had before, and which they don’t really need, but by the grace of social pressure must acquire for the sake of not feeling ostracized by everyone else. Now, this in and of itself wouldn’t be a bad thing if everyone were affirming a set of powerful, creative, life-affirming values.
But when one looks at the state of the world presently, and sees the things people concern themselves with and waste their time on, it only serves to strengthen your desire to be anything but modern—or at least, to not fall into whatever decadent set of moral values everyone is caught up in. It’s as if everyone is under a materialist spell which they can’t break free from. At all times wanting to have something new in their hands, wanting a bigger this or a nicer that. It’s all so tiresome, and I can’t wait, personally, until everyone wakes up from this mass hysteria.
Every duty has its own reason, and reason itself is a kind of duty. If a man wishes to be rational, he must consider his situation as it confronts him, and in doing so make whatever decision is necessary for him to overcome it. Reason will always be a tool used by man for the sake of his duty, even if his duty may not at all times be noble.
Man looks for a reason in everything he does, though he may not be satisfied with the conclusion his reason leads him to. You can guide a logical man through a syllogism, but you can’t make him believe. In truth, what men really want out of reason is the ability to convince others. On the basis of their assumed-to-be-correct conclusions, arrived at through reason, men wish to make others see the truth of their conclusions. And so our logical men hop about, crisscrossing themselves all over the place for the sake of showing to another the veracity of their reason. In trying to map their own thinking onto the mind of another, they string together entire sophistries in order to appear convincing. And by the end of it, everything is so confused, and the strings are so thoroughly tied together, they can no longer distinguish all the interconnecting lemmas, and so fail to prove what they initially set out to prove. But it doesn’t matter, for the person they’re trying to convince is just as ignorant as they are; and on account of presenting everything in that rushed and confused manner, they’re likely to agree with our logical men anyway, perhaps more out of pity than anything else.
And to think, by the end of it our logical men claim this display of ignorance as their justification. Justification for what, and for whom? Who are you trying to convince, and why are you going about it using so obviously flawed a method as reason? Don’t these people know reason only works on the reasonable? A man who already agrees with you doesn’t need your justifications. He’s already developed his own. And good on him for that, for that’s the true spirit of reason as I see it: a tool not to convince others, but to assure yourself. And when this fails, you have the most vexing of all intellectual dilemmas: doubt!
Again, a man is scarcely satisfied with whatever justification he comes up with. Doubt ensues, and our logical fellow quickly turns spiritual. It’s not that reason itself is bad, but rather that it doesn’t provide most with what they actually want: certainty. All rationality is without ground, and so must always be circular in some way—but this circularity is precisely the thing they want to avoid. They can’t, however, for logic proves nothing that isn’t already known to be the case; it dresses up propositions in regal garb, and encircles itself endlessly to the point of actually appearing convincing to those less inclined, but anyone actually privy to the trick being played is not impressed.
Logic reveals nothing but the inner workings of our own prejudices. It’s easy to be fooled by it, too, for it presents everything very orderly and simply; but question the reasons behind the assumptions made, and you quickly find yourself in a circle from which you cannot escape, and must remain in so long as you seek to objectify and categorize reality into discrete, self-consistent boxes—as if that alone were what comprised reality. Logic is a system with its own rules, but the fact that people treat it as something objective and not to be questioned shows you the extent to which our intellectual horizons have diminished.
A justification is useful only for those who don’t already think the same. It is a way of providing someone an intuition, or, at least, that’s what it’s intended to do. As already explained, however, logic in the hands of most becomes eristics—debate with the aim of being right rather than finding truth; in other words, deliberate obfuscation for the sake of appearing smart, nothing more. As beautifully explained by Arthur Schopenhauer in his satirical work The Art of Being Right, it often happens that a man takes his own conclusion to be the final one, and on that account defends to the death that which he “knows” to be the case.
Man, in reality, knows nothing, and only believes himself to be right insofar as he is in line with the consensus sapientium (agreement of the wise). You can do your best to convince yourself of your own genius, but if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll quickly find that all you hold to is really without ground, and affirmed for no other reason than that it corresponds with your prejudices—that is, what you already assume to be correct.
Intuition is implicit within man (born in the instincts), but it only adopts the false label of truth when it is confirmed by experience, and hardened through years of reinforcement—exposure to the same false lines of reasoning again and again. That’s the true historical background to man which the lovers of reason ignore completely. They still believe in a perfect world—where truth is objective, and all subjective experiences overlap perfectly with reality. I honestly admire these fighters for the truth: those who proclaim that the truth is out there, and is real, and does exist, and can be known—it almost sounds religious at times. I regret to inform these stalwart warriors, however, that their intellectual games are at an end.
Truth is dead, and philosophers have killed it. I do not say “we” but “philosophers,” because the average person considers truth pragmatically, not objectively, as so many sham philosophers do today. This is a case where the ignorant are actually right, and the supposed lovers of wisdom completely wrong. Let us bury truth already, and overcome doubt through action, not reason. So long as we cling to reason, we’ll always feel the need to justify our instincts to ourselves, rather than acting on them and letting the consequences of our actions determine their appropriateness.
If there were no sense of duty, there would be no responsibility. We would act without punctuality, and so would fail at fulfilling any of our proposed plans. A man without duty is like a ship without a rudder, left adrift, subject to the chance and occasion of nature. Some adopt this kind of attitude with respect to life in order to avoid the trouble of thinking about it deliberately, but I am not such a person. My duties are my own to fulfill. I make them, and I can either fulfill them or fail them. Either way, I’m in control, and I do what I see fit with respect to my situation.
The more pragmatic men become with respect to life, the less their troubles suddenly feel. There’s nothing to trouble you in your life if you know how to manage it. That is, after all, one of the main duties of life: the management and regulation of it.
Duty is a value which we hold to in order that we may fulfill it. It is, in short, a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is the one thing which comes from without and yet develops from within. Only from within can a man find that which is valuable to him. Indeed, it may be argued that the greatest duty a man has is to himself—to be himself, to live after his own fashion, in a manner that he sees fit. It is the task of life to live it in such a manner that you can leave it at any moment without regret. Regrets are formed when we fulfill a duty that is not to ourselves. This must be avoided at all costs. The end of life is death, and so we ought to live it in a way that allows us to stare at the end of it without the slightest hint of fear.
We must only seek to become ourselves. That is the duty of life.