Category: Philosophy

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Ethics Philosophy

The Futile Quest for Happiness.

The suffering of man has many faces. The silent genocides of Christians in the Middle East. African tribes murdering each other. North Koreans being tortured by their own government in re-education camps. Emaciated Indians dying from starvation. Prisoners in all countries harboring bitter remorse for their crimes. Even the privileged of this world do not escape suffering. Children, born with a disability. Victims of car accidents, living limbless in a wheelchair. Elders, facing loneliness. Rich or poor, young or old, white or black – everyone suffers, and even those who have never experienced traumatic events will one day be confronted with the loss of loved ones and notice the ravages of time on their bodies. The flower does not realise that it is withering, but the human being does.

Ludwig Van Beethoven, arguably the greatest musical revolutionary of all time, saw the initial tinnitus he struggled with gradually degenerate into absolute deafness and realised that one day, he would no longer hear his own compositions. His frustration made him flirt with suicide. The Post-Impressionist master Vincent Van Gogh dreamed of founding an artistic brotherhood that would transform the art world but died unappreciated, poor and depressed. As her excruciating nerve pain worsened, the paintings of Frieda Kahlo expressed more sadness and grief. Everyone goes through their personal hell.

Hell is not some secret, far-away Kingdom of Darkness where sinners burn in eternal flames. It is right here on Earth, and it is called war, sorrow, agony, disease, wrath, malice, chaos. To the existentialist thinker Jean-Paul Sartre, hell means ‘the others’: “L’enfer, c’est les autres”. Interaction with others is inevitable, but others do not always behave the way we want them to. Their tongues lisp harsh words that linger in our minds for years to come, and they do things that we rather bury in the catacombs of our subconscious. And the more intelligent we are, the more aware we become of the dark side of human nature. It is not a big surprise that geniuses often become misanthropic.

However, labeling others as the sole source of our own suffering insinuates that we ourselves are perfect, which is proof of a great lack of self-reflection. Our words and actions have hurt others as well. Sometimes, we would pay a fortune to turn back the clock, to undo the actions we took, to unspeak the words we spoke. One thing is certain: man suffers and makes his fellow man suffer.

“Homo homini lupus est”, said the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus. The Romans did not shy away from some cruelty towards their fellowmen. Prisoners of war served as slaves or gladiators who had to fight their family members in collossea. Millenia later, Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, confirmed Plautus’ statement in his book ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’: “Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”

Man is not only a wolf with men, but also, and above all, with his fellow earthlings, the animals. We are the greatest cause of their indescribable suffering, a suffering of a magnitude that most people do not understand. We put them in tiny cages, stuff them with hormones, stomp them to the slaughterhouse, brutally slaughter them, and eat them, every single day. 60 billion (!) innocent farm animals per year have a miserable existence from the day of their birth, unaware that the day of their death has already been set. Elephants, sharks, monkeys, bears, crocodiles, and numerous other species are massively massacred for their teeth, flesh, skin, fins, and legs. In the Hell of the animals, we are the Devil. We call our victims ‘beasts’, but the real beasts are us. Man’s suffering does not make him more empathetic towards creatures he considers inferior.

Thus, the greatest source of suffering in the world is man’s conscious cruelty. The cruelty of wild carnivores is unconscious and instinctive, aimed at survival; however, homo sapiens sapiens is the only creature on Earth that makes deadly weapons, dumps toxic filth into rivers, cuts down forests, invents virus-creating food systems, builds expensive spacecrafts to reach Mars while millions of people have no fresh drinking water, and tells lies… because he can, and because he deliberately wants to. The existence of Evil is the price man pays for his free will.

Man suffers, and yet he is cruel – we feel passion but no compassion. As long as we are unable to recognise our own suffering in the suffering of others, be it humans, animals, or the planet, as long as we lack compassion, suffering will be an absolute certainty, a premise of life, an axiom of the human condition. Feeling another’s pain without experiencing it yourself is the prerequisite to reducing our pain. Compassion is the antithesis of egoism and the conditio sine qua non for our spiritual and moral growth. It is the golden key to the door to inner peace. But he who does not find the key cannot open the door.

A person who did find this key is Mr. Eddie Jakubowicz, who shared his touching biography with the world on his 100th birthday and won the “Happiest Man on Earth” award for it. Eddie knows what suffering means. As a German of Jewish descent, he always felt “German first, German second, and Jewish at home”. In 1938, Eddie, his parents, and his little sister were arrested by the Gestapo and taken to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Months later they were put on a train to Auschwitz, the largest extermination camp of occupied Europe. During this ride, they managed to escape through the train floor. They fled to Belgium, where they lived in hiding in a cellar. In 1943 they were arrested again and taken back to Auschwitz. His entire family was gassed in what he calls his “Hell on Earth,” but Eddie survived.

Every day of the two subsequent years, Eddie witnessed the ultimate embodiment of Evil. Every moment, he saw and feared death. What the nazis did to the prisoners was so atrocious that some still don’t believe him when he describes it. In 1945, in anticipation of the advancing Allies, the camp guards staged a death march to clear the camp and destroy evidence. During this march, Eddie miraculously managed to escape into the wilderness.

After the end of the war, he struggled with intense grief, despair, and anger. One day, however, he made the heroic decision not to wallow in misery, but to be the kindest man he could possibly be, with every person he encountered. Then he met Flore, the love of his life, and proposed. Today they have been married for more than 70 years. When he talks about their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with his disarming smile, I see gratitude in his eyes. And that gratitude is a choice that makes him happy.

Today, Eddie calls himself the happiest man on Earth. He did what Aleksander Solszenycin and Elie Wiesel talked about: everything can be taken from us, except for one thing: the freedom to choose our attitude in any situation, to choose our response to any event. Do not let the evil of others corrupt your soul. Only then are you a victim! Eddie has turned the tables: his love for the world has conquered the hatred of the nazis.

The world is not divided into those who oppress and those who are oppressed. This simplistic view, imposed by cultural Marxist academics, might be politically correct but is not correct, as it de-emphasises the infathomable complexity of the human psyche. We are all aggressors and victims of each other, we all have a nazi and a camp inmate in us. Victor Frankl, a psychologist who also survived Auschwitz, wrote in his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ that he could discern evil in some prisoners – some capos displayed more sadism than the nazis themselves – and goodness in some guards.

Yes, others hurt us, but to accuse ‘les autres’ as the sole cause of our malheur is to ignore the nazi in ourselves! According to clinical psychologist and intellectual giant Jordan B. Peterson, there is only one lesson the Holocaust should have taught us: The nazi is you. If you had lived at that time as a German under Hitler, you would have been an active participant in the horror, or at least a silent spectator, because everyone was. That you would have been a hero risking his life to save Jews is statistically highly unlikely. A statement that makes you rather uncomfortable – you know he is right, but you hate to admit that you probably would have been as cowardly as the rest, and you wouldn’t have done anything. Inaction is also a sin, and millions of Europeans were collectively guilty of it, less than a century ago.

Carl Jung, student of Sigmund Freud, called the dark side in each of us our “shadow,” and Adolf Hitler the embodiment of the shadow of the German people. The Shoah is then the symbol of the collective shadow of humanity, of the demons that hide in everyone. “I’m not a devil!”, many would cry out – but the dead animal on their plate thought otherwise.

A shadow is something that is cast behind you and that you are not aware of. But it is there, and it follows you everywhere. The awareness of the existence of our shadow is the catalyst of the moral and spiritual metamorphosis that our soul desires and can only be brought about through profound introspection. Don’t waste time trying to change others. Find your own darkness, acknowledge it, and then change yourself: thát is the real purpose of existence. It is the most arduous challenge in the world, but if you succeed, your surroundings will be blinded by your brilliant light and cannot do otherwise than evolve with you.

Do not chase happiness but instead, strive to transform and improve the self. The pursuit of happiness is senseless. Happiness is not the goal of life, but a by-product of the search for meaning and virtue and goodness. Because only a life that signified something, to us and to others, was worth living.

I end my reflection on suffering and happiness with a quote from a letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers some time before his death: “It is my wish that your life will be better and more carefree than the one I have had. Recommend virtue to your children, only that brings happiness, not money, I speak from experience. It was virtue that kept me going in misery, besides my art I owe it that I did not end my life with suicide. Farewell, and love each other”.

Categories
Ethics Fine Arts Philosophy

The Truth about Beauty.

Being surrounded by beauty in my habitat is indispensable to me. The sunlit room I wake up in, the antique art books that fill my shelves, the pearly white amaryllis that blooms near the window, the view of the neo-Roman church I see when sipping my morning macchiato, the wing piano on which I practice arpeggios and the arpeggios I practice on my wing piano, up until the golden pen I sign letters with – all these expressions of beauty contribute to my happiness. Beauty is important to me, and therefore abundant in my world. Even the sleek design of my toilet brush receives compliments from visitors. Life is just too short for unappealing toilet brushes, and if you must engage in activities as primitive as discharging your excrements, you might as well have an aesthetical experience.

My love for beautiful things stems not from materialism, but rather from a profound appreciation of the aesthetical. I do not buy beautiful things for the sake of possessing them but for contemplating and appreciating them, which gives me serenity and joy. The opposite is true, as well: spending time in an environment that lacks beauty makes me feel miserable. And as befits an aesthete worthy of her name, I detest ugliness, in all its forms.

And so does Immanuel Kant, the first philosopher to have written a systematic work about aesthetics, the philosophy of beauty and art, man’s ultimate expression of beauty. He and other great thinkers like Baumgarten, Locke, and the contemporary Sir Roger Scruton, have reflected upon what beauty means, why we are the only creatures on the planet consciously craving and creating it, and how it can be meaningful in the human existence. They all seemed to agree on the fact that the perception of beauty triggers emotions that are a prerequisite to our mental wellbeing.

So, in trying to define beauty, one could say it is something we perceive to be harmonious and well juxtaposed, whether it is colours and lines in photography, shapes in abstract paintings, notes in music, phrases in poems, or bricks in architecture. But most of all, beauty is something we feel – the Greek word αἰσθητικός (aesthetikos) means sentient, feeling. Try listening to Mendelssohn’s Spring Song played by Daniel Barenboim and not feel overwhelmingly joyous. Or listening to David Fray play Franz Schubert’s third moment musicale for piano, which triggers a variety of emotions in me: careful joy impregnated with a sense of patience and a slight melancholy. It is so beautiful that I hold my breath not to miss one single note, composed by the man who called himself the saddest man on earth. Schubert is proof that not only joy, but also sadness can be the creator of a beauty so great, words become insufficient to describe it. Nothing concrete happens to make us feel that joy or sadness, and yet those abstract, ephemerous notes make us feel real emotions in all their intensity. The beauty of art lies in its capacity to frame human emotions, and in identifying with them, we get a deep insight in the human condition and recognise ourselves.

Beauty is indeed a metaphysical trait of a physical object, a feeling. But not everyone feels the same when looking at or listening to the same thing. Our eyes and ears indeed all judge differently – I might think Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia is a horrendous building, while others perceive it as the epitome of architectural beauty. We westerners tend to find slender people attractive, while inhabitants of other continents admire curvier figures. And quite incomprehensibly, not everyone appreciates the genius of Mozart, some find more excitement in jumping up and down to the frightening screeches of heavy metal singers. Beauty is clearly a relative concept, dependent on the preferences of the individual who is molded by his époque, environment, and culture. Beauty, we have been taught, is to be found in the eye of the beholder.

Cultural relativists go even further in this line of thinking, and say that everything humans create is equally beautiful, that the naïve, chaotic scribbles of a child are as beautiful as the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, or that Ludwig van Beethoven’s sublime oeuvre is on the same level as the tastelessness and vulgarity of twerking strippers on MTV, rapping with two-syllable words about sex and money, blasphemously identifying as artists. In as much as this modernist definition of beauty might be popular and politically correct, it certainly is not satisfactory. If anything can be judged beautiful by anyone, nothing is ugly, and the word beauty becomes void and meaningless.

The vision that all beauty is taste-dependent, is also disputed by the observation that some features are judged as beautiful by everyone, regardless of their surroundings. Several academic studies indicate that all the infants involved in the research had a strong visual attraction to certain facial characteristics, like big eyes, a small nose, full female cheeks, a square male jawline, and facial symmetry. Infants have not yet been programmed by societal influence, suggesting that the role biology plays in our response to beauty might be bigger than we think. If certain facial features are universally appraised as attractive, perhaps there is a beauty that transcends subjective perception, and that is undeniably, intuitively beautiful to everyone it confronts. Like a symmetrical face, but also a peach golden afternoon sky, a majestic waterfall, or a tree, this wonderfully complex, fruit-bearing, oxygen-producing structure with an abundance of leaves in a billion shades of green, growing from earth to heaven in Fibonacci sequences. This is the Absolute Beauty discussed by the aesthetes: the beauty that contains absolute, mathematical truth.

We did not invent mathematical laws, but discovered them in nature, the cradle of beauty and truth, and therefore our greatest source of inspiration, creatively and scientifically. The fairness and wisdom are there, waiting to be unraveled by humanity. Ugliness and ignorance, on the other hand, are an anomaly, a deviation from the natural standard, a work in progress. In distinguishing the beauty from the ugliness, we recognise the truths among the falsehoods, and in understanding that the truth is superior to the falsehoods, we can extend our judgments of the rational to the moral sphere, and determine what is right and what is wrong. To be good, we must first know what is good. This, then, must be the most complete definition of beauty:

Beauty contains Truth that leads to Goodness.

Aristotle understood this link and underlined the importance of teaching children to play an instrument, as that would also educate them ethically, and virtuosity would lead to greater virtue.The interconnection of those three elements makes me believe that Earth and humans are supposed to be beautiful, wise, and good, and that they are the ultimate ideals man should strive to attain in his eternal, bittersweet pursuit of happiness.

Categories
Philosophy

Millennial Absurdism.

When the French thinker Jean-Paul Sartre spoke of absurdism, he was referring to the absurdity of man’s pursuit of meaning in an irrational, meaningless universe. He, Michel Foucault, Albert Camus and other contemporaries wrote entire libraries about this conflict.

Today this school of thought no longer exists – philosophising about existential matters is exhausting, and since the invention of the brain debilitating phenomenon that are social media, our species’ attention span has dropped to 1.3 seconds per post.

We have evolved from thinking about the absurd to being absurd. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the absurdity of the American left has reached a new low: it has now become wildly inappropriate for a cook of a certain culture to borrow recipes from people of other cultures.

Gordon Ramsey preparing burritos now risks being accused of ‘cultural theft’ of Mexican gastronomic culture, and eating it in his restaurant would be regarded as racist. Stick to fish and chips Gordon, tacos are taboo for crackers like you.

In that line of thinking, Americans should ban croissants from all Starbucks branches. Last time I checked, no French boulangers were involved in the production of their croissants. And what about their African-American employees crushing Brazilian coffee beans to make Italian latte macchiatos? As Douglas Murray would remark: one has to be educated into that level of stupidity.

While humanity is faced with so many pressing issues, such as climate change, religious fanaticism, water scarcity, and the rising threat of nuclear warfare, the woke left engages in the usual nonsense concocted by their narrow-minded little cerebrums, thereby only contributing to the further antagonisation of people.

Absurdity has now become a juxtaposition of the pointlessness of creating problems where there aren’t any and the bagatellisation of what truly destroys us.

It’s sad and amusing at the same time. Like so many aspects of man’s existence. Maybe millennials are philosophers after all.

Categories
Philosophy

Unmasked Love.

Yesterday N. managed to summarise his philosophy of life in one concise sentence: “chicks and money, that’s what life is all about”. “What about love?” I sputtered indignantly. “Love,” he continued dryly, “is nothing else than a physiological phenomenon that seeks maximum reproduction and thus guarantees the survival of the human race.”

I shudder at hearing such theories, which N. did not work out on his own, but copied from Nietzsche. Nietzsche, father of Western doomsday thinking, who portrays man as a naturally power-hungry being incapable of performing a purely altruistic act. Hearing this makes me unwell.

Is love then a cunning trick of Mother Nature, a functional fake emotion that lures man to bed, horniness in a romantic wrapping? Can love be described merely as a chemical substance that activates the reproductive part of the brain? My whole being protests – love is more than the banality of instinctual copulation! If love could be defined like this, so much love would be spread in the red light district every day.

Nietzsche and N. overlook a number of crucial issues. The wrinkled widower’s love for his four-legged friend. The love of a grateful mother for her adopted Ethiopian orphan. The skier’s love for the power of snow-capped peaks. The violinist’s love for the vibrations emerging from the strings. The fallen officer’s love for his homeland. The mathematician’s love for the rationality of things, the believer’s love for their irrationality. The narcissist’s love for the reflection that stares back at him.

You see, love has many faces and does not always aim for procreation. It is something that transcends physical reality, yet is in the middle of it. It’s a feeling in the soul, a voice in the head. It’s something that can make you tremble with happiness or crunch with bitterness. It’s all-encompassing, but cannot be truly understood. It’s something everyone is looking for and will eventually find. Now, or ever.