threads
complexity + limitation = ?threads
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responsibility
Moral wounds have this particularity, that they hide, but do not close; always painful, always ready to bleed when one touches them, they remain alive and gaping in the heart.Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo. Chapter 86.
Socrates: [D]oing what's unjust is actually the greatest of all evils.Polus: Really? Is that the greatest? Isn't suffering what's unjust a greater one?Socrates: No, not in the least.Plato. Gorgias, 469. Tr. by Zeyl (1987).
complexity
When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed?Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 452. Mariner (1973).
Defining the aims of moral education in terms of a set of "virtues" is as old as Aristotle. ...Although it may be true that the notion of teaching virtues, such as honesty or integrity, arouses little controversy, it is also true that a vague consensus on the goodness of these virtues conceals a great deal of actual disagreement over their definitions. What is one person's "integrity" is another person's "stubbornness," what is one person's honesty in "expressing your true feelings" is another person's insensitivity to the feelings of others.Kohlberg. Indoctrination Versus Relativity in Value Education (1971).
limitation
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.Kant. Critique of Pure Reason. Preface, A vii. Tr. by Guyer & Wood (1998).
The bliss of man (could pride that blessing find) Is not to act or think beyond mankind; No pow'rs of body or of soul to share, But what his nature and his state can bear. Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly. Pope. An Essay on Man: Epistle I, VI.
humanity
Totalitarianism strives not toward despotic rule over men, but toward a system in which men are superfluous. ...Totalitarian states strive constantly, though never with complete success, to establish the superfluity of man--by the arbitrary selection of various groups for concentration camps, by constant purges of the ruling apparatus, by mass liquidations. Common sense protests desperately that the masses are submissive and that all this gigantic apparatus of terror is therefore superfluous; if they were capable of telling the truth, the totalitarian rulers would reply: The apparatus seems superfluous to you only because it serves to make men superfluous.Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 457. Mariner (1973).
Adults seldom listen to children's moralizing. If children throw back a few adults clichés and behave themselves, most parents--and many anthropologists and psychologists as well--think that the children have adopted or internalized the appropriate parental standards. Actually, as soon as we talk with children about morality we find that they have many ways of making judgments that are not "internalized" from the outside and that do not come in any direct and obvious way from parents, teachers, or even peers.Kohlberg. Indoctrination Versus Relativity in Value Education (1971).
Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. ... Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Andor. Season 1 (2022).
wisdom
As for you, Morrel, here is the entire secret of my conduct towards you: there is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world, there is the comparison of one state to another, that is all. He alone who has experienced extreme misfortune is capable of feeling extreme bliss. One must have wished to die, Maximilien, to know how good it is to live.Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that, until the day when God will deign to unveil the future to man, all human wisdom will be in these two words—"Wait and hope!"Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo. Final chapter.
What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.Ecclesiastes. Chapter 3. ESV.
[T]hough Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it.Lewis. Mere Christianity. Book 3, chapter 12.
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