...but somewhere in between.
I have a feeling that life is lived not on the grand stage of the abstract and the general, not in the micro-details and moment-to-moment, but somewhere in between.
Not the universe or the quark, but somewhere in between.
Not the globe exactly nor the individual entirely, but somewhere in between.
Not by distinct rules or complete singularity, but somewhere in between.
When you consider philosophy, it often strains toward the universal. A metaphysics that explains everything. A way of seeing that offers a lens to create clarity in all scenarios and at all times. Or else it contracts to the one, the existential subject, solitary and unique and self-created. Marxism erases the individual, utilitarianism offers a structure to work out all possible ethical problems, Kant's imperatives are universal, Leibniz wanted to make sense of everything with a mathematical language, structuralism gives precedence to language. On the other hand, Nietszche, Kierkegaard and Sartre put the onus back in the subject, who can rely on nothing except himself, his will or his faith, in a universe emptied of meaning.
But we don't live like that. We live in relationship with the world and with others. We react and engage. We are interconnected and yet also somehow seeing from a single perspective. We are both me and we and somewhere in between. We flicker between the visions. Feeling empathy, acknowledging generalities and universals; then shut in our solipsism when we ruminate and obsess; and then burst into a combined conflagration of experience or conversation of intermingling ideas when the truth seems inside and outside both together.
Likewise, when we make ethical decisions, we are in play between the needs of the widest scope of things - climate and global justice and national needs - and the very specific of what, right now, I want. We are looking at the timeless concepts of right and wrong and the contingencies of the immediate circumstances. After all, can we ever really know what the consequences of our actions will be next week, next year, next century? Maybe all we can truly know is the extent of our goodwill right now. That does matter because it is a surer guide to attempting to find the best course than the brutal drive of duty. It is what makes us human, in between the computerised logic of frameworked utility and the lawless route of unpoliced affect.
It might be a bit messy. But who ever said life wasn't messy?
Consider the alternatives. You follow rules and duty with unwavering discipline and still, due to chance and change and the way things fail to turn out exactly as expected, something bad happens. You can claim that you followed the orders, bear no responsibility, carry no guilt. To a great extent, this may be true and yet it disables you in a way. It removes you from the world of feeling, breathing, sweating, laughing and crying fellow humans. It turns you into a cog in a machine, not a man or a woman who can learn and grow and care.
Or you jostle from whim to whim, claiming at each crisis a different scale and palette of values. Inconsistent and unaccountable, you are chaos in a world seeking some security. If you're unreliable, again, you're irresponsible and unable to stand with your peers in any joint effort. The utterly independent spirit, too, is removed from the flesh and blood, flora and fauna, water, stone, air and fire of the mattering world.
You have to embed yourself between other and self in the space of the communal, with the thinking, reasoning mind and the finite, sensate body that is solely yours.
That is the place where great literature meets us: at the crossroads between the real and the ideal. (See my posts on poems - here, here, here, here and here - on tragedy - here and here - on wonder inspired by art, on Hilary Mantel and on Coriolanus.)
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