The margins of sanity
Credit to Author: FR. RANHILIO CALLANGAN AQUINO| Date: Wed, 03 Apr 2019 20:08:27 +0000
IN the so-called “outer chapters” of The Chuang Tzu (the book attributed to the Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu) there is the parable of a man who fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. On waking up, he started to wonder: Was he a man who dreamt that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was a man? All along, I have assumed to be sui compos, in full possession of my faculties, sane, in other words. But when I woke up one morning to read a very serious post in a reputable online magazine that had one advocate of women’s rights warning against “good morning” greetings as a form of harassment, I started to doubt whether I had wormed my way in the night into some parallel universe, or whether I had fallen into the cuckoo’s nest!
It certainly did nothing to ease my queasiness when I read that some academics clamor for the expulsion of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and the whole caboodle of brooding, morose philosophers because they were “white.” And I think that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin will soon be on the list of outcasts also because of their race. Chuang Tzu’s question became mine: Has the world gone bonkers or have I, no longer able to keep pace with modernity? In the name of gender equality, that long-admired gesture of chivalry — that a gentleman stands and offers his seat to a lady — should now be condemned as sexist and degrading. Such a man is, in the refined language of our egalitarian age, a “chauvinist pig”! And when standard forms that demand that a person identify himself as “male” or “female” are condemned for compelling persons to think (and act) in binary fashion, then I am left wondering what is left of the world with which I was familiar. All of a sudden I am in unfamiliar, indeed forbidding because of its unpredictability and anomy, terrain!
The prisoners in Plato’s cave thought that they were perceiving things as they were. They were not. It was disordered reality. It was shadows of mere images that they had taken to be real. We are adamant at purveyors of what we call “fake news” — although often, what we stamp as “fake” is what we do not want to hear. Why are we not up in arms against those who would have us re-order reality? One reason for things gone awry is our virtual rejection of the category of the “real.” It started when we could make things happen. The crescendo picked up when we could interfere with the beginnings of life: artificial insemination, artificial contraception, in vitro fertilization. It picked up with the advent of virtual reality and a parallel space — “cyberspace.” Holograms can make even the dead appear, and artificial intelligence is taken by many to save us from petty human intelligence!
So “real”, “objective” and “true” lose their compelling and normative force. The costs are tremendous — and we have witnessed repeatedly in history what happens when the powerful reject any notion of “objective norms.” It has become embarrassing to advocate Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt as composers of “good music” because “good” smacks of ethnocentrism, a sick obsession with the products of the West. Aesthetics, like ethics, is very much a matter of taste and of convenience — to the collective bankruptcy of our sensibilities and sensitivities. There is also little point to argument, because arguments should result in the prevalence of the better-grounded, more soundly argued position. But when there is no fixed standard, no determinate reference point, nothing real by which to judge simulacrum, appearance or even distortion, then everything becomes real, acceptable — good.
It shows in the way we use our terms, even on the most serious of concerns. A man condemned to die asked the US Supreme Court not to be spared the death penalty, but to be allowed to die in the gas chamber, because a medical condition from which he suffered made it likely that he would die an agonizing death by lethal injection. The US Supreme Court, that repository to which all law students and law scholars have looked up with reverence and deference, held that the US Constitution that expressly forbids “cruel and unusual punishment” did not guarantee a condemned man the right against a painful death! So it is that “cruel”—which used to mean “the deliberate infliction of pain and misery”—must now have a new meaning in our disordered universe.
This cannot be good for the inhabitants of earth — perhaps, not even for those of Middle Earth.
rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph
rannie_aquino@outlook.com
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