Detaching ourselves…from ourselves

mary — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:13:58 +0000

When all we have to face is the ordinariness of our everyday lives, our discussion often turns inward. We try to figure out our own identity, our own moral character, our own relationships, or the dilemmas that arise between our ideas about religion and the world around us. But sometimes the questions aren’t about us. Maybe that’s another way of thinking about the idea of detachment – reaching a point where our actions and thoughts are fully altruistic, in the utmost sense of the word. Detachment isn’t simply a matter of distancing ourselves from material goods or emotional highs and lows, but also of detaching ourselves from ourselves, from the totally natural instinct to evaluate actions or decisions with ourselves in mind.

This is all speaking very abstractly, though, and I’m not sure that such an idea of detachment is necessarily an ideal. It discredits, for example, the idea of performing good works because you receive an emotional boost, placing yourself at the center of the action. But that emotional boost is a powerful imperative for action. It seems like the effects or benefits of the action should be far more significant than the philosophical underpinnings to your decision, or the thought process you use to arrive at a decision. But maybe this leads back in a circle, arguing that we can detach ourselves from the instinct to always evaluate personal gain by the fact that we don’t actually matter – it’s performing the action itself that counts.

I wanted to bring these ideas out now as we watch tragedy unfold in Haiti. It’s a natural first step to respond by asking “what can I do?” And it also seems natural to then say “oh dear, nothing.” At least, that was definitely my experience. We’re bombarded by images and stories of human tragedy every day, to such a degree that writing that here seems like a huge melodramatic cliche. But the fact that we face events and suffering so much larger than ourselves, types of suffering which can never be fixed, solved, or alleviated by the action of a single person, promotes a much darker kind of detachment. It’s very, very easy to shut the newspaper or turn off the TV because we don’t want to watch anymore or hear anymore. And that’s why it seems so important to be able to sometimes remove ourselves from the discussion. What I’m willing to give or do and why I’m willing to do it has no direct relationship to how those actions affect other people, unless they change the effectiveness of the way I act. What matters is that people are willing, regardless of why, to respond to the needs of others and search for the most effective way to give or act, and most especially in times of crisis.

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Living Morally Without Universal Morality

mary — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:41:46 +0000

A lot of the discussion on Swadharma focuses on how to be sure that we’re doing the right thing: How do we live a moral life? So we decide that we want to live morally for various reasons, but how do we decide that what we do actually is moral? If your definition of moral behavior and mine are different, how can we be sure that what we do is right? Is it actually a question of right and wrong? The questions obviously go on, as they probably will for the next few millennia. Welcome to being human.

I was wondering, though, about other ways that people use to approach the question of “doing the right thing.“ Are there other ways to think about it, beyond finding a universal code of behavior as guide and source of judgment?

Finding a universal code for moral behavior is clearly a huge challenge. There’s no way to ever address every possible scenario, to be sure that what’s right in one situation will always hold true for every other. And as much as we struggle to identify the moral life, do we ever reach the end of the discussion? Do we ever reach a point of being able to comfortably say “Well, if I do that I’ll be a good person. And since he’s not doing that he’s not a good person”? That’s certainly a debatable question, especially when religious texts can provide a basis for making that judgment, if one chooses. But even those texts won’t be able to guide us through every decision that we make in life — at the very least because the world and society have evolved since those texts were written. So I don’t think it’s simply “finding the easy way out” to consider other ways of approaching the question. This was actually an issue that came up in Expos, and it’s something that’s continued to be thought-provoking even after turning in the final paper.

Part of the Contemporary Theater section is reading works by Sarah Kane, a young British playwright writing in the late 1990s, whose works are, hands down, the most violent and disturbing thing I’ve ever read. Torture, rape, mutilation, the absolute breakdown of human dignity. Not things that we encounter in every day life, but things that push our understanding of morality to its absolute limits. The challenge was how to approach the idea that morality and ethics could somehow exist in a universe that seems so detached from our own universal ideals.

The discussion sometimes degenerates into issues of semantics, trying out different ways of defining ethics and morality. Here’s one way to look at it, putting together ideas voiced by different post-modern philosophers: we all live within a system of ethics, because ethics is nothing more than how our actions affect other people. Regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, age, sex, etc. our lives are intricately tied to the lives of those around us. There’s really no choice in that, unless we actively withdraw from society and choose to live without a community. And even then our withdrawal would affect family, friends, everyone that we might have interacted with. Morality, unlike ethics, is a matter of choice. It’s up to each and every individual to decide whether or not he or she is willing to recognize and accept the responsibility that comes with living in an ethical system. If our actions affect other people, than we have a responsibility to consider those repercussions. To live morally is to acknowledge that responsibility, and try to find a way in which action “extends life to its fullest potential.” (A quote from Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, which sounds catchy but is annoyingly vague…)

So that’s one alternative for thinking about how to live morally. It isn’t based on a legalistic code of behavior, but rather on individual judgment, and the willingness to accept ethical responsibility. But clearly it’s hardly a solution. We’re human, and therefore we make mistakes. What if we’re unable to recognize which choice serves or helps the most people? It’s only natural that the person we know best is ourself — how do we figure out what best “improves society” as a whole? What if that’s different from what other people actually want?

My own knowledge of Hinduism is very limited. Do other people have thoughts on this, or how Hindu philosophy relates to/challenges/disagrees with/extends/whatever else these ideas?

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Swadharma » mary

Detaching ourselves…from ourselves

Living Morally Without Universal Morality