Civilisation, its cause and cure, and other essays by Carpenter, Edward

Danto's “Ideal Chronicler.”

Almost two centuries ago, Hegel observed that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”, meaning that philosophical understanding of an era is possible only as it is ending. 

Arthur Danto, an analytical philosopher, developed this intuition into a theoretical argument for why the judgement of history is intrinsically unpredictable1 . 

Danto imagined a hypothetical entity—the ideal chronicler—that possesses complete information about the state of the world, along with its entire history up to that point, and unlimited ability to integrate and analyse that information. Danto then argued that the ideal chronicler would still be unable to anticipate the significance that will be assigned to contemporaneous events by future historians because their judgements are inevitably informed by events that have not yet taken place. 

Evaluating the historical significance of a single event would in principle require the ideal chronicler to accurately predict not only its impact on subsequent events, but also how those events would impact broader social structures and practices5 . 

For example, to have anticipated the historical significance of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the ideal chronicler would have had to predict not only the whole sequence of events leading to the French Revolution, but also their transformation of political and philosophical notions of sovereignty—a profound structural shift that has arguably shaped all subsequent revolutionary movements6 . 

Danto’s argument is compelling in theory, but as a practical matter it may still be the case that some, or even most, historically significant events could be identified at the time they are happening or shortly thereafter. For example, while the full significance of the Bastille took many years to develop, contemporaneous accounts show that within days it was perceived as a legitimate act of popular revolution, the implications of which might well have already seemed historic. 

One can also easily think of other events, such as Einstein’s formulation of special relativity, the moon landing, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, that were immediately hailed as historic and continue to be viewed that way decades later. Certainly, in our current era, politicians, journalists and experts alike do not experience any difficulty in deciding what future historians will judge to be important: a simple web search for ‘historic moment’ reveals more than 100 usages per month. 

So, who is right? Conceptually, one way to answer such a question would be with the aid of a hypothetical dataset that satisfies three key properties. First, it would constitute a complete census of events. Second, the events would be well defined and separable, allowing unambiguous evaluation. Third, each event would be labelled with two importance scores (one assigned by contemporary observers and one by future historians). Imagine, for example, a team of experts who develop a codebook for defining events and rating their historical significance. 

These experts would train until they achieved high intercoder reliability, and then set about evaluating all candidate events as they occur, including many that may seem trivial. Decades or even a century or more later, another team would use the same coding criteria and training regimen to evaluate the same data. One could then simply compute the classification accuracy of the contemporaneous experts using standard metrics such as precision and recall. By definition, a dataset of this sort would take at least decades to construct. 

It also presumes that historians treat events as discrete and uniform units of analysis when, in fact, events in the historical literature are extremely heterogeneous. For example, events such as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the negotiations leading to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles occurred on two very different time scales and could even be conjoined into a single event on yet a third time scale. World War I and World War II, in turn, could be described as distinct or as parts of something bigger: a Thirty Years War, a Forty Years War or an even longer “Crisis of the Middle Powers”.7 

Debates about how to categorize and periodize such complex phenomena in fact lie at the very core of historical scholarship and are rarely resolved to universal satisfaction. Confronted with this potentially insoluble conceptual ambiguity, we proceed in much the same way as historians do when attempting to identify and define events: by turning to the written historical record; that is, to collections of documents that have been preserved and curated by archivists. Given limited time and storage capacity, both archivists and historians must continually make judgements about which documents will be most valuable in representing, illuminating and explaining events and trends. In practice, therefore, when historians debate the relative importance of different events, they typically cite different historical documents

Camus Notebooks, 1935-1942

Notebooks, 1935-1942 by Diksha Kumari

Solitude. by Zimmermann, Johann Georg, 1728-1795

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Abuses by Lingis, Alphonso,

Society Must Be Defended

Kevin Kelly - You Are Not Late

Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 1985 when almost any dot com name you wanted was available? All words; short ones, cool ones. All you had to do was ask for the one you wanted. It didn’t even cost anything to claim. This grand opportunity was true for years. In 1994 a Wired writer noticed that mcdonalds.com was still unclaimed, so with our encouragement he registered it, and then tried to give it to McDonalds, but their cluelessness about the internet was so hilarious it became a Wired story. Shortly before that I noticed that abc.com was not claimed so when I gave a consulting presentation to the top-floor ABC executives about the future of digital I told them that they should get their smartest geek down in the basement to register their own domain name. They didn’t.


The internet was a wide open frontier then. It was easy to be the first in category X. Consumers had few expectations, and the barriers were extremely low. Start a search engine! An online store! Serve up amateur videos! Of course, that was then. Looking back now it seems as if waves of settlers have since bulldozed and developed every possible venue, leaving only the most difficult and gnarly specks for today’s newcomers. Thirty years later the internet feels saturated, bloated, overstuffed with apps, platforms, devices, and more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years. Even if you could manage to squeeze in another tiny innovation, who would notice it?

Yet if we consider what we have gained online in the last 30 years, this abundance smells almost miraculous. We got: Instant connection with our friends and family anywhere, a customizable stream of news whenever we want it, zoomable 3D maps of most cities of the world, an encyclopedia we can query with spoken words, movies we can watch on a flat slab in our pocket, a virtual everything store that will deliver next day — to name only six out of thousands that could be mentioned.

But, but…here is the thing. In terms of the internet, nothing has happened yet. The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning. If we could climb into a time machine and journey 30 years into the future, and from that vantage look back to today, we’d realize that most of the greatest products running the lives of citizens in 2044 were not invented until after 2014. People in the future will look at their holodecks, and wearable virtual reality contact lenses, and downloadable avatars, and AI interfaces, and say, oh, you didn’t really have the internet (or whatever they’ll call it) back then.

And they’d be right. Because from our perspective now, the greatest online things of the first half of this century are all before us. All these miraculous inventions are waiting for that crazy, no-one-told-me-it-was-impossible visionary to start grabbing the low-hanging fruit — the equivalent of the dot com names of 1984.

Because here is the other thing the greybeards in 2044 will tell you: Can you imagine how awesome it would have been to be an entrepreneur in 2014? It was a wide-open frontier! You could pick almost any category X and add some AI to it, put it on the cloud. Few devices had more than one or two sensors in them, unlike the hundreds now. Expectations and barriers were low. It was easy to be the first. And then they would sigh, “Oh, if only we realized how possible everything was back then!”

So, the truth: Right now, today, in 2014 is the best time to start something on the internet. There has never been a better time in the whole history of the world to invent something. There has never been a better time with more opportunities, more openings, lower barriers, higher benefit/risk ratios, better returns, greater upside, than now. Right now, this minute. This is the time that folks in the future will look back at and say, “Oh to have been alive and well back then!”

The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things. However the coolest stuff has not been invented yet — although this new greatness will not be more of the same-same that exists today. It will not be merely “better,” it will different, beyond, and other. But you knew that.

What you may not have realized is that today truly is a wide open frontier. It is the best time EVER in human history to begin.

You are not late.

The Nine Delights

 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - the noosphere

 

THE FOUR BOOKS CURRICULUM

https://fourbooks.org/





Welcome to a starting place for the traditional Confucian curriculum: the Four Books. Of these, the first chapter of the Analects (Lunyu 論語, “Discourses”) holds the fundamentals (Daoben 道本, “Fundamentals of the Way”), as stated by Zhu Xi in his introduction below. In addition to this in progress translation, I have also assembled a small handbook which clearly explains Confucian terminology (Daoxue ziyi 道學字義, “Learning of the Way: An Explanation of Terms”).

The Gay Science

Bruno Schulz's "Republic of Dreams"

The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis.

On the Strangeness of the Greeks and Other Subjects: Part Two

https://antoniustetrax.substack.com/p/on-the-strangeness-of-the-greeks-c50#footnote-anchor-6-147319408



Jianghu, Mao and the Taiping Rebellion


Antonius: The subaltern world of the jianghu 江湖, inhabited by a class outside the bureaucratic rule of the scholar-gentry, is positively Bacchic. Have you read Water Margin? You can find some incredibly hardcore content in that book, no less gory and twisted like the Bacchae, such as cutting open the head of a four-year-old child in order to carry out a stratagem.1 And unlike the ambivalence in Euripides, this kind of degeneracy is a trait of “heroic” characters whom the readers are supposed to sympathize with.

Podius: Yes, the world of Liangshan, the novel’s eponymous hideout, is gloomy and chaotic indeed, and deeds of extreme villainy are not beneath its protagonists. But on the last point, I believe some ambiguity is allowed because the story also makes clear that these characters are not ideal heroes. They are acknowledged scoundrels, thugs, often mass murders and, in more than one case, recidivist cannibals.2 In this regard, they are somewhat like the heroes of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, or The Godfather. They are bad men the reader roots for—but bad men nonetheless.

Antonius: Ironic you would call them “bad men”, because the word to describe the brotherhood means the exact opposite. They are called haohan 好漢 or “good men”.3 But these guys, and occasional gals, are “good” in a very specific sense. The code of jianghu glorifies people who put the brotherhood above all and defy man-made as well as natural laws. In order to be able to break away from all morality, the people of Liangshan have to be a believer in chaos. When Wu Song 武松 slaughtered an entire household at the Mandarin Duck Pavilion 鴛鴦樓 or when Li Kui 李逵, nicknamed “The Dire Whirlwind”, massacred hundreds of civilian onlookers at the execution grounds4, out of nothing more than a grudge or a sudden desire for catharsis, they become superhuman in a way. They are less men than embodiments of the dark, primordial forces of nature. It is precisely this chaotic impulse that underlies the worship of Bacchus.

Podius: But at least the world of Liangshan has its own set of rules. It is intelligible. Its heroes are not mad, whereas Bacchism glories in total unintelligibility.

Antonius: In a way yes, but the unspoken rule of Liangshan indulges in and glorifies men’s unbounded animalistic instincts. To use a legal term, there is no limiting rule that can be applied, so that a member of the brotherhood’s behaviour lacks an external standard of rationality. Actually, the conventional word for “hero”, yingxiong 英雄, also carries no moral valence but merely suggests “outstanding and masculine”.

Podius: On a tangential note, this idea of “masculine” is interesting here, considering how Dionysus is marked by his femininity.

Antonius: That is a good point, Podius. But the concept of xiong 雄 is not equal to conventional masculinity either. It can take on senses that are odd and sinister. There is this apocryphal story of Cao Cao 曹操, which is almost surely made up but has become immensely well-known through oral storytelling, and eventually canonized in the Romance of Three Kingdoms. In this story Cao Cao murdered the whole family of his benefactor who took him in as a fugitive, because he suspected that the knife in his host’s kitchen was meant to assassinate him; it turns out they were meaning to slaughter a pig to treat him to dinner.5 This is deeply psychopathic behavior, but generations of storytellers apparently found it fitting, and indeed representative, of Cao Cao’s character as a jianxiong 奸雄, or a “treacherous hero”. Alternatively, he is called a xiaoxiong 梟雄. The first character in this phrase xiao means a bird of bad omen, like an owl, a word that is usually reserved for a disreputable sort, the head honchos of a drug cartel for example. And in later sources this type of personality, typical of a founder of a dynasty, is referred to the grandiose phrase xiongcai 雄猜, which can perhaps be translated as “a master of suspicion”. In fact, the trait of jianghu heroes is hardly fictional; in chaotic times of dynastic decline when warlords vie for supremacy this behavior is common. One sees it recur in the interregnums that follow every imperial dynasty. But you were right about the subterranean nature of this culture of jianghu, that gets too often brushed off by grandstanding Confucians, and it persists to this day. It has found a natural modern exemplar in Mao and his comrades.

Podius: Mao’s world seems to have combined both the immorality of Water Margin and the cultishness of the Taiping Rebellion. There is a learned work, Antonius, by twentieth century sinologist Lucian Pye named The Mandarin and the Cadre. It seeks to analyze the political culture of Communist China from a psychological lens. It argues that traditional China hosted two dueling political cultures, irreconcilable, one elite and one popular. The Confucian literati embody the elite culture, but the Communist leaders, who tended to come from much humbler backgrounds, are representatives of this subterranean political culture, embraced by the masses but hidden beneath most of the sources from imperial Chinese history.

Antonius: I have skimmed that book, Podius, and while I agree wholehearted with this dichotomy and hail its insights into the character of the current regime’s founding men, I cannot help but feel disappointed by Pye’s strong presentist bias. He draws too much from the days of Mao and too little from the world before him—even when his generalizations are by and large correct and make for enjoyable reading. The result is that he undersells his thesis by passing over historical cases that might strengthen his claim. You may say this divergence of political cultures can be traced all the way back, through Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全 to Li Zicheng 李自成 to An Lushan 安祿山 and the Yellow Turbans 黃巾軍 and all the way to the rebellion of Chen Sheng 陳勝 and Wu Guang 吳廣 in late third century before Christ!

Podius: But I suppose the world of Water Margin still differs from the world of the Taiping Rebellion, doesn’t it? Calling oneself the younger son of God surely takes one’s campaign to a different level.6

Antonius: Are you implying that the latter was, in a sense, a sinicized Christian movement? You know, Podius, in the orthodox historiography of today’s China, the Taiping Rebellion is treated not so different from any other peasant uprising in history; the Christian element is more often than not eclipsed. This is probably because they are supposed to be the good guys, and it is unsavory to have the good guys be followers of a religion of Western imperialists. Of course, it is ironic that Mao’s version of Marxism-Leninism was also a fanatic adaptation of a Western belief system. Many rebels of more distant past mobilized the masses with religion that may have had roots or inspirations outside of China, but like the Taiping army, they manipulated religious doctrines to fit their own political purposes, and their cult-like modus operandi eventually merged with jianghu culture. There is actually much more to be said about this subterranean stream of tradition, perhaps in the form of comparative portraits of peasant leaders throughout history, like a variation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. But that is a topic for another day.
Life of Confucius and Kant’s Ladder of Virtue


Podius: Hence returning to the question of Greek rationality, I think we established that the nature of the Greeks was weird, and the Athenian nature was extra weird. More so than other Hellenic poleis, they were a people that trusted in arms of flesh; they appealed not to the power of the gods for success, but to the power of men. Yet only Athens gave us tragedy. If we want to be sententious, we can say that only after the rise of rationalism is tragedy possible.

Antonius: An excellent aphorism, Podius. I must write it down, along with our entire discussion today, and call it a dialogue on the strangeness of the Greeks.

Podius: That said, there is a kind of rationalism that was present since the beginning of Chinese thought. To wit, almost all major schools of pre-Qin philosophy believed that becoming a sage was the highest telos of human existence. Almost all saw sagehood as a process of social conditioning rather than an epistemological choice. The Confucians are the most adamant on this. Confucius gave an account of his own educational and spiritual journey from the age of fifteen onwards. There is no terrifying battle of the soul, or an awe-inspiring revelation on Saul’s journey to Damascus. In this way they are not unlike the Methodists: virtue comes from learning, and learning means forging habits, through repeated practice, taking one step at a time, in a slow and gradual way. This is what’s meant by the very first sentence in the Analects. Character is thus formed as naturally as eating one’s vegetables every day.

Antonius: This is indeed a deep point on virtue, Podius. Your last analogy to eating vegetables is an apt one; there was actually a Ming dynasty collection of maxims and folk wisdom called the “Vegetable Root Discourse”. Now, speaking of epistemological choices, I happen to have attended a beautiful lecture on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, given by the learned professor Katja Vogt of Morningside Heights. Professor Vogt explains the German philosopher’s view on morality in an ascending scale, a ladder of virtue, if you will.

Podius: What does the ladder consist of? Tell me, Antonius, and how does it relate to epistemology?

Antonius: So I heard from Professor Vogt, that Kant believed there to be four levels of moral attainment, in the ascending order of difficulty. At the bottom rung is knowing what the right thing to do is. In fact, given that Kant apparently believed morality is sufficiently derived from reason, which is innate to the human mind, he held that all men know what the right thing to do, provided that they think correctly and think hard enough. Therefore, knowing what is moral is the easiest thing in the world.

Podius: That does follow from his premise.

Antonius: Then the second rung, one step above the knowledge of morality, is doing the right thing, or the practice of morality. But the third rung, what is more difficult than doing the right thing, is to do the right thing for the right reasons.

Podius: For Kant then, it is easier to do the right thing for the wrong reasons rather than the right reasons?

Antonius: Precisely, Podius. Kant thinks there are infinitely wrong reasons for us to do the right thing, hence there is a multitude of vices hiding behind every virtue—for example, one may do the right thing in order to impress his friends, in order to win fame and glory, and so on. These impure motives would taint one’s practice of morality, and render doing the right thing alone insufficient.

Podius: It follows, I believe, that one must do the right thing for itself, namely that it is moral per se.

Antonius: Indeed, the only moral motivation to practice morality is doing it as a result of knowing that it is moral. Do you see, Podius, how the third rung actually combines the requirements for the two lower rungs?

Podius: That is right, Antonius. And what is the final and top rung on the ladder?

Antonius: Here is the rub—the top rung, according to Kant, and it is inhumanly difficult to accomplish, is to know that one does the right thing for the right reasons. This is the epistemological aspect of ultimate virtue; it is the secure knowledge of one’s own motivations. Indeed, when I first learned of this articulation of virtue, I thought Professor Vogt, and by extension Kant, was simply describing Confucian sagehood.

Podius: Interesting proposition! But again, Confucius describes the pathway to sagehood as a process, rather than the matter of knowledge in itself. The state of ultimate freedom, and crucially the knowledge of one’s freedom in virtue, only comes about after decades of experience. Unlike the Kantians, this does not treat virtue as something that is deductive. Confucian virtue is innate to the extent that everyone is capable of achieving it, but it is not a state that can be reasoned into being without a lifetime’s practice. I would say this is closer to a Christian, than a rationalist worldview.

Antonius: In other words, Confucianism lacks the a priori aspect of Kantian moral law, although it holds that there is good in human nature. Now that I come to think about it, reason and nature are also an interesting pair of concepts in classical philosophy. The Greeks apparently also believed that justice, which according to Socrates at least is reasonable and capable to be reasoned, stands in contradistinction to the state of nature, where justice is naturally the advantage to the stronger, as eloquently argued by Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic. But Kant took this much further and established a metaphysic of morality that, from an outsider’s perspective, seems completely out of touch with reality or human nature! I suspect the Confucians would never comprehend such a rationalistic approach to human activity: they would appeal to one’s common sense, which is derivative of nature, even if that nature itself has not been examined.
Antigone and Mencius’ Dilemma


Podius: Yes, but the Greeks might not find this so antithetical to human nature. Rationalism in the Greek form was a defining feature and even the foundation of their political order. See how Antigone justifies performing funeral rites for Polynices on the grounds of natural law.

Antonius: Divine law, to be specific.

Podius: She seems to conflate the two. At the very least, she contrasts her version of justice against the version of the tyrant, Creon. Creon is a sort of proto-Schmittian who insists on the distinction between friends and enemies. His method is to deduce authority for the benefit of the city from certain first principles. Not only does he have laws, but he has a rational system behind them. Antigone does not have such complex arguments; she only appeals to the familial bonds being naturally stronger than citizenship. Hers is a much more primal instinct and natural urge. And in many ways was not this the nature of the Greek polis as a whole: a political community whose public demands supersede private—that is, natural and familial—claims?

Antonius: Yes, Antigone says it is in her “nature” to be joined in love, not hate.7 So here we have the contrast of law and nature, or nomos versus phusis, where Creon stands for the former, and Antigone for the latter. Interestingly, Confucianism has something to say about the same dilemma. But before I paraphrase the problem, let us entertain an interesting thought experiment. Let us pretend for a moment that we were Richard Hanania. After reading classical Chinese philosophy, we decided to rank all the philosophers in descending order of IQ.

Podius: Ha ha!

Antonius: I think Mencius would go right to the bottom of the pile. And probably Laozi comes next, then Confucius. Whereas the Legalists, Lord Shang and Han Fei, would rank on top.

Podius: What about Zhuangzi?

Antonius: That is the trickiest one—no one can really be sure where he is. It is like that bell curve midwit meme: he is either a genius or very dumb, and that ambiguity is probably his entire point. Given he does his bit so well, and is such an impressive writer, I tend to give him the benefit of doubt and suppose he is very intelligent. But let us return to Antigone’s problem. The reason I think Mencius is low-IQ is because once he was presented with a dilemma similar to hers. A disciple of Mencius asked him what would the legendary sage king Shun do, if his father was found guilty of murder.8 Should the sage king punish his father, which violates filial piety or phusis, or should he forgive him, which tarnishes the law or nomos. This is a very real and serious dilemma that every ruler has to face to some extent. Yet Mencius gave the most brain-dead answer possible. He says Shun should give up his power, flee the country, take his father along and go live in a hut by the sea and never bother himself with his official affairs again.

Podius: So, Mencius would be firmly on Antigone’s side, which makes sense. And we all know whose side the Legalists would be on.

Antonius: Indeed, Podius. The Legalists probably would not even need a decree from Creon to support his policy.
Another Oddity of the Greeks


Podius: However, I don’t think Mencius’ answer is brain-dead. He is essentially arguing that family is more important than politics, even when that means giving up a kingdom. And again, the Greeks are perhaps the weird one here, relative not only to the Chinese, but also the Hebrews. For them, family is the source of trouble. Family seems to symbolize disorder, whereas for Confucians, and practically everybody else, family is the source of order.

Antonius: I think you are onto something, Podius. Many Greek poleis have autochthonic origin myths, where they are said to spring from the earth, being all transformed from dragon's teeth or whatnot. In reality, they were probably all related in some way or other, but the city-states insisted on their independence from one another. I think this is symbolic of their detachment from familial or clan relationships: the creation of the polis as a new object of allegiance, a new entity that gives birth to politics. At an abstract level, we could even argue that this is the theme of Aeschylus’ Oresteia: family problems find their solution in the polis.9

Podius: This is unsettling, Antonius. How ill-natured is Western civilization, if, at its very roots, it opposes something as natural as the family!

Antonius: The Daoists are famously agnostic when it comes to family too. They don’t value it per se and can even be rather hostile to it.

Podius: Right, but there is something peculiar about Daoist belief. They call their version of detachment and abandonment a return to nature. But why would they call this isolation and frankly, pessimistic outlook to life “natural”? Isn’t it natural to have families instead?

Antonius: You are basically describing the Confucian justification of ritual in the Li Ji—as an appeal to natural human relationships.10 Perhaps this antagonism against human relationship can help to explain why Daoism evolved into Legalism, which seeks to dismantle family as the fundamental unit of society, and replace it with an strong-arm state instead.11 But the relationship between family and state is the subject worthy of many tomes; let us leave it for another day. It has been a great pleasure as always to discourse with you, Podius.






Podius: Likewise, Antonius my friend.

Rousseau Reveries

Platform for change; a message from Stafford Beer

The Meditations By Marcus Aurelius

Book Seven

What is badness? It is that which thou hast often seen. And on the occasion of everything which happens keep this in mind, that it is that which thou hast often seen. Everywhere up and down thou wilt find the same things, with which the old histories are filled, those of the middle ages and those of our own day; with which cities and houses are filled now. There is nothing new: all things are both familiar and short-lived.

How can our principles become dead, unless the impressions (thoughts) which correspond to them are extinguished? But it is in thy power continuously to fan these thoughts into a flame. I can have that opinion about anything, which I ought to have. If I can, why am I disturbed? The things which are external to my mind have no relation at all to my mind.- Let this be the state of thy affects, and thou standest erect. To recover thy life is in thy power. Look at things again as thou didst use to look at them; for in this consists the recovery of thy life.

The idle business of show, plays on the stage, flocks of sheep, herds, exercises with spears, a bone cast to little dogs, a bit of bread into fish-ponds, labourings of ants and burden-carrying, runnings about of frightened little mice, puppets pulled by strings- all alike. It is thy duty then in the midst of such things to show good humour and not a proud air; to understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.

In discourse thou must attend to what is said, and in every movement thou must observe what is doing. And in the one thou shouldst see immediately to what end it refers, but in the other watch carefully what is the thing signified.

Is my understanding sufficient for this or not? If it is sufficient, I use it for the work as an instrument given by the universal nature. But if it is not sufficient, then either I retire from the work and give way to him who is able to do it better, unless there be some reason why I ought not to do so; or I do it as well as I can, taking to help me the man who with the aid of my ruling principle can do what is now fit and useful for the general good. For whatsoever either by myself or with another I can do, ought to be directed to this only, to that which is useful and well suited to society.

So many, after being eminently glorious, have been chucked into oblivion. So many, after glorifying others, have been dead a long, long time..

The Myth of Sisyphus

The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Taoism by James Legge