What do you owe to past love? When love first strikes, it demands everything from you – and being unable to resist but not having everything to give you promise it the future. But then through its series of unaccountable disappointments, love withdraws. Then what happens to the promise?
Perhaps in embarrassment you disavow it: you never promised, you never were the one who promised; you begin again.
At sufficient distance from or after too many repetitions of these negotiations, the resulting fragmentation of your life's story becomes a problem. But the only way to recover the whole is to take up the promise. And how can you keep a promise to a dead god?
Freedom seems to take place amidst chance and necessity. Promises do not deserve the name that are not made in freedom; it is unjust to demand delivery on a promise made in chance and it is nonsensical to demand delivery on a promise made in necessity.
ReplyDeleteNecessity is the work of causes that cannot fail; chance is the work of causes unknown. Notice, then, that the intersection is (1) between causality of one kind and knowledge of any kind of causality. It is not (2) between caused events and uncaused events, nor (3) between known causes and unknown causes, nor (4) between flawlessly effective causes and causes with flawed effectiveness.
People tend to subscribe to the assumptions (2-4) because in return the people receive from them a certificate of dispensation from the difficult work of prudential judgement, which, however difficult, is one of the main human virtues.
Perhaps the source of the greatest difficulty is the shifting that takes place in knowledge. One assumes that causes have set effects and it is only that various causes appear and disappear from the site of events; but our knowledge is not entirely set. Not only is there learning and forgetting, but there is also a range of how well something is known.
Furthermore, there is the case of better knowledge hinging on worse knowledge. Let us say, for example, that a friend has applied for a loan, and if the loan is approved, then the friend's plans will very likely come to fruition, but if it is not approved, then fruition is very unlikely--and now, before one has confirmed approval, one must take action on the basis of the fruition taking place or not taking place. Add to the situation the likelihood of approval, the timeliness of disbursement, and the reliability of the friend to notify one about the status of the loan, to spend it according to plan, etc.,--and the confirmation or disconfirmation of these by various signs as time passes, and the difficulty of the matter may increase that much more.
People suppose now and again that the difficulty is not "real." They think that the matter in which they are involved should "really" be a "simple" one. There is indeed legitimate simplification, and reapproaching the matter can be part of that or the cause of it, but as much as one should not seek to overcomplicate matters, neither should one suppose that complication is completely eradicable from human affairs.
It seems to me that a promise is less properly said to be fulfilled the less that its fulfillment owes to the promiser and that it is less properly said to be broken the more that its unfulfilment owes to causes other than the promiser.
You write, "But the only way to recover the whole is to take up the promise." That is an intriguing speech to me, but I do not feel that I can judge it properly without more specific knowledge about the promise and the events around it and after it.
What do you think, then? That a promise made to love is not made in freedom? You do not choose, perhaps to "fall in love" or to be "struck by love's dart," but what you do thereupon you do in freedom. You can rebel against love as against anything divine.
ReplyDeleteBut why is God dead at the end of your piece. the sentence makes me think I did not understand your post.
ReplyDelete