“But it is perverse to see tragedy in what could not conceivably be otherwise; and that fact that all empirical statements are contingent, that even when true they can be denied without self-contradiction, is itself a matter of necessity. If empirical statements had the formal validity which makes the truth of logic unassailable they could not do the work that we expect of them; they would not be descriptive of anything that happens.”
quotation
Thanks to all the masks, he does not know who he really is /
“Technology has wrought a radical transformation in the day-by-day existence of man in his environment; it has forced his mode of work and his society into entirely new channels: the channels of mass-production, the metamorphosis of his whole existence into a technically perfect piece of machinery and of the planet into a single great factory. In the process man has been and is being deprived of all roots. He is becoming a dweller on the earth with no home. He is losing the continuity of tradition. The spirit is being reduced to the learning of facts and training for utilitarian functions.
In its first effects this age of metamorphosis is disastrous. We are living today in the impossibility of finding a legitimate form of life. Little that is true and trustworthy and that could sustain the individual in his self-consciousness comes to us out of the contemporary world.
Hence the individual is either overcome by a profound dissatisfaction with himself, or he delivers himself up in self-oblivion to become a functional component of the machine, to abandon himself unthinking to his vital existence, which has become impersonal, to lose the horizon of past and future and shrink into a narrow present, untrue to himself, barterable and available for any purpose asked of him, under the evil spell of unquestioned, untested, static, undialectic and easily interchangeable pseudo-certainties.
But whoever retains in himself the troubled mind that comes from dissatisfaction becomes perpetually false to himself. He is compelled to live in masks and to change the masks according to the situation and the people with whom he is dealing. He speaks entirely in terms of the ‘as if’ and does not gain himself, because in the end, thanks to all the masks, he does not know who he really is.”
There was a crack, a kind of canyon /
Call looked out the window at the grasslands, as the plains opened around them. Teresa whispered to him, trying to get him to talk; but he could not bring himself to speak, at least not often. There must have been a lot of rain that winter, for the cover was abundant. It would be a good year for the cattle herds.
The Captain could not imagine what he was going to do, in the years ahead. He would have to live, but without himself. He felt he had left himself far away, back down the weeks, in the spot west of Fort Stockton where he had been wounded. He had saddled up, as he would have on any morning. He had ridden off to check two horses, as he would have on any morning, as he had ridden on thousands of mornings throughout his life. He had been himself; a little stiff maybe, his finger joints swollen; but himself. He scarcely heard the gunshots, or felt the first bullet. That bullet and the others hadn't killed him, but they had removed him. Now there was a crack, a kind of canyon, between the Woodrow Call sitting with Teresa on the train and the Woodrow Call who had made the campfire that morning and saddled his horse. The crack was permanent, the canyon deep. He could not get across it, back to himself. His last moments as himself had been spent casually—making a campfire, drinking coffee, saddling a horse.
Then the wounds split him off from that self, that Call—he could remember the person he had been, but he could not become that person again. He could never be that Call again. Even if he had kept his arm and his leg, he knew it would be much the same.
Of course, having the arm and the leg would have been a great convenience, for he could earn a living if he had them. He could be far less of a burden. But even if he had kept the arm and leg, he could not have returned to being the Call who had made the campfire and saddled the horse. The first bullet had removed him from that person. That person—that Call—was back down the weeks, on the other side of the canyon of time. There was no rejoining him, and there never would be.
— Larry McMurtry in Streets of Laredo (1993)
Till the wreck of body /
“Now shall I make my soul,
Compelling it to study
In a learned school
Till the wreck of body,
Slow decay of blood,
Testy delirium
Or dull decrepitude,
Or what worse evil come—
The death of friends, or death
Of every brilliant eye
That made a catch in the breath—
Seem but the clouds of the sky
When the horizon fades;
Or a bird’s sleepy cry
Among the deepening shades.”
Truth, rational acceptability, values, and dialogue /
The position I have defended is that any choice of a conceptual scheme presupposes values, and the choice of a scheme for describing ordinary interpersonal relations and social facts, not to mention thinking about one's own life plan, involves, among other things, one's moral values. One cannot choose a scheme which simply 'copies' the facts, because no conceptual scheme is a mere 'copy' of the world. The notion of truth itself depends for its content on our standards of rational acceptability, and these in turn rest on and presuppose our values. Put schematically and too briefly, I am saying that theory of truth presupposes theory of rationality which in turn presupposes our theory of the good.
‘Theory of the good', however, is not only programmatic, but is itself dependent upon assumptions about human nature, about society, about the universe (including theological and metaphysical assumptions). We have had to revise our theory of the good (such as it is) again and again as our knowledge has increased and our world-view has changed.
It has become clear that in the conception I am defending there is no such thing as a 'foundation'. And at this point people become worried: are we not close to the view that there is no difference between 'justified' and 'justified by our lights' (relativism) or even 'justified by my lights' (a species of solipsism)?
The position of the solipsist is indeed the one we will land in if we try to stand outside the conceptual system to which the concept of rationality belongs and simultaneously pretend to offer a more 'rational' notion of rationality! (Many thinkers have fallen into Nietzsche's error of telling us they had a 'better' morality than the entire tradition; in each case they only produced a monstrosity, for all they could do was arbitrarily wrench certain values out of their context while ignoring others.) We can only hope to produce a more rational conception of rationality or a better conception of morality if we operate from within our tradition (with its echoes of the Greek agora, of Newton, and so on, in the case of rationality, and with its echoes of scripture, of the philosophers, of the democratic revolutions, and so on, in the case of morality); but this is not at all to say that all is entirely reasonable and well with the conceptions we now have. We are not trapped in individual solipsistic hells, but invited to engage in a truly human dialogue; one which combines collectivity with individual responsibility.
– Hilary Putnam in Reason, Truth, and History (1981)