The following was written at the end of 2022, but I never posted! Some things have aged well, and some haven’t. Such is life.
At the dawn of 2022 I woke up at 5-6am every day to watch the wash of orange, green, and blue light wash over the flat LA cityscape before me. Finally back in LA, there was so much to do! Eat good food. See friends. Read philosophy. Write. How quickly a year goes by. In many ways, this year has been about reconnection. Embarrassingly, I've finally started exercising regularly for the first time since the middle of graduate school. With essays, I'm finally reconnecting with this other side of myself that had been dormant since college.
With 2022 now coming to a close, I did not get to take on all the writing projects that I had come up with this year, and it is likely I won't have time to write over everything. Instead, in this post I'll just briefly sketch out some main lines of thought.
This blog started because I had sensed a fragility in the many contradictions and tensions I held within myself. Grief, fear, horror, hope. Would it be possible to reconcile all that I was feeling? How would I go about doing so? As Kierkegaard put it, "What I really need is to get clear about what I must do..."
The namesake of this blog, "no regress" reflects the observation that trying to find the "absolute answer" to Kierkegaard's question whatever that vague phrase might even mean, often leads to an infinite regress of questions (that we want to stop, i.e. "no regress"). And if we let the gnawing of the questions overcome our ability to answer them, we are liable to trick ourselves with premature answers. Whether we like it or not, in this finite life chances are we won't find the absolute, infallible answer, and in practice the operative answer to those gnawing questions is simply to make peace with them, to find some where to lay them to rest. In this sense, the answer is not found in the reified realm of ideas and principles, but in faith.
By faith I don't mean the kind of stereotypical blind religious faith that a secular person might imagine and be wary of. Instead, I am thinking of faith as inspiration, confidence, trust, patience, relaxation, courage. Instead of a blind faith that is driven by fear of the unanswered, and disinterested in facing reality head on, the equivalent of the proverbial ostrich sticking their head in the ground, I am thinking of a brave faith willing to stare down cold, indifferent, even uncomfortable truths. A faith that leaves us feeling rested and energized, and ready to "live the questions," as Rilke might say.1 It is a faith that arises from recognizing that in the end, the questions are all we have.
But where should we rest our faith? To temporarily rest the questions that we have no answers to? I explored some notions like happiness and "forces of the soul," and also looked to some philosophers. But if I really had to summarize, I'd probably say that the foundation of any faith ought to be grounded in and comfortable with the reality of our finitude. Life isn't perfect, and we have to be prepared to work with it rather than deny it. Perhaps that sounds basic. The me of a year or two ago would surely scoff, "duh, that's obvious." But to the me of today, it is clear that knowing this fact cerebrally is different than coming to terms with it and living it.
For one, on a reflexive level I resisted imperfection and finitude. It feels too close to giving up. It feels close to nihilism, or a relativism that justifies nothing and everything. Certainly, I can see it used as an excuse for, "why bother striving for the good?" Worse yet, it might even be an excuse for further propagating imperfection. In the end, what I realized was that truths alone are not enough to answer Kierkegaard's question of "what I must do." Inseparable is our orientation to the truth.2 Sartre acutely observed that we are "condemned to freedom": fickle creatures we are, even freedom can feel oppressive.3 The human project, then, is to orient ourselves such that we may find freedom also in imperfection and finitude. How to reorient ourselves is another discussion altogether, but in brief it takes practice and some skill.4
Now, all of these high level ideas are fine and all, but they are still a far cry from knowing concretely what one should do, broadly known as the domain of ethics. In some sense, values and ideals are the easy bit. The hard part work likes in figuring out the nuances of implementing our values. On this front, I'll close with just a few meta-ethical points that currently guide me.
First, I think it is helpful to analyze ethical systems in terms of their:
completeness - is there an unambiguous method for arriving at a decision for every situation? how are competing values balanced?
implementability - can people reasonably follow the system?
complexity - how well does the ethical system accomodate the varied contexts and situations we find in reality?
related ideas: universality, consistency
Intuitively we would like ethical systems to have all 3 qualities: to be complete, implementable, and accomodating of the complexities of reality. In practice, of course, there is often a tension between them. As a somewhat ludirous example, flipping a coin for every decision is arguably complete and implementable, but clearly of very low complexity. On the other end of the spectrum something very broad like "apply compassion" is a helpful principle but a woefully incomplete ethical system by itself. Any ethical system makes tradeoffs between these three factors, though we don't always acknowledge them. Most commonly, complexity is sacrificed for simplicity.
In any case, the following principles/questions guide my affinity to different ethical systems:
What is the ethical system's conception of human flourishing? Does it adequately confront suffering?5 Is it able to recognize the simulatneous existence of suffering and flourishing? What are the system boundaries (i.e. whose flourishing is valued and optimized for)? All things held equal, I'll favor more holistic notions of human flourishing6 and systems that draw larger systems boundaries.7
Does the ethical system appropriately recognize the complexity and fluidity of life? The immediate finitude of people? The inevitable ambiguities and nebulosity that we have to confront? The ongoing process (work in progress) that is life? I see this as maintaining a fidelity, a good faith, and requires a vulnerability that is necessary to embrace emptiness, reason, and love.
In practice, point 2 is translated into some more concrete, practical questions: does the ethical system have a method for self-evaluation (e.g. of its focus on flourishing and the consequences of its actions) and iterative evolution? Does it dedicate appropriate attention and effort to doing so? Does it have a credible notion of sustainability? Is it simple enough (naturally within the constraints of required complexity) to grasp and be implemented by people?8
Of course, these are just meta-ethical guidelines. As tempting as it might be, I do not think of them as positing fundamental ethical truths, just a work in progress, and certainly they do not constitute a complete ethical system. And there are for sure many more challenges and open questions. But I'll leave those discussions for a new year!9
Here's to 2023 and more adventures.10
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” — Rilke
The quote is: "We are condemned to freedom." If we can't even find freedom in freedom, what are we to do with an even bigger truth like confronting our imperfection and finitude? This also happens to be kind of a trope from the time of the existentialists. Merleau Ponty declared, "we are condemned to meaning." While Simone de Beauvoir declared, "we are condemned to ambiguity."
In some sense, Kierkegaard partially hinted at this when he said that the "...knowledge ...must come alive in me." The difference is that there is some agency with respect to how we animate that knowledge within ourselves.
Frameworks borrowed from Buddhism. Instead of the poetic concepts of "right and wrong," in many instances the Buddha decides to frame things in terms of a much more mundane "skillful vs unskillful."
My pet peeve is when people justify their own ethical systems by denying that others' suffering exists. A closely related pet peeve is a lazy collapse to labeling people, policies, things, as inherently good/bad.
I.e. I am skeptical of single-objective optimization.
Note, if an ethical system hasn't given much critical thought to the complexities of system boundaries, this probably counts as a strike in my book, e.g. if it is a careless claim of "no boundary." No matter our ideals, our resources are finite, and boundaries do exist.
I think an underappreciated fact is that even good intentions, when combined, with limitations of resources, of attention, of knowledge, can lead to undesirable outcomes. I.e. a system that depends on everyone being 100% virtuous and all-knowing is probably doomed to failure *today*, even if it is an ideal we can imagine and would like to get to. Any honest implementation of an ethical system must confront this unfortunate reality. Also, this is very very challenging because every generation one has to do the hard work of educating people in ways of being that may not be natural/instinctual (and "natural" leads to a lot of conflict).
In particular, as I probably won't get to the comparative ethics essay, here are some final points. Broadly, there are hints of utilitarianism and deontology and virtue ethics in my meta-ethical questions. The utilitarianism enters via the attention to consequences, but starts from a more epistemologically humble starting point that most likely we need to put a lot more effort into assessing consequences before we can really do utilitarianism correctly. In the mean time then, the virtues of honesty and intellectual rigor figure prominently in my attention to the complexities of life and not prematurely declaring I have an answer. And lastly, the deontology enters in that, with limited thinking bandwidth, we need to implement practices and systems that help us practice the virtues of honesty. The philosopher who I find most kinship with is Simone de Beauvoir, who declared "we are condemned to ambiguity." As she observed, the process of growing up and becoming a complete adult is moving beyond the simplistic narratives that serve us well as children, and confronting the complexities of life that leave us in ambiguity. Lastly, my approach to ethics has strong influences from Buddhism (and epistemically with a scientific-method kind of world view), and has echoes of the idea of implications of emptiness and fluidity, as discussed in the vividness blog's discussion of Will Buckingham's book, "Finding our Sea Legs".
Bonus: some cheesy pithy statements summarizing 2022 to munch on: to facing imperfection fearlessly, loving ardently, striving sustainably.