Only happiness matters, or eudaemonia with constraints
Only happiness matters. Not the legacy. When people discover your legacy, you’ll be dead. Like Kafka. Or Bach, or Lovecraft, or Emily Dickinson (in Hades, Achilles didn’t care about his immortal glory). Or you’ll be 60 years old, like Rothko. But in order to live happily, right here and right now, the thought of leaving a legacy brings peace and a sense of fulfillment. It’s not serving others that matters, but the sense of meaning and purpose that brings satisfaction and therefore happiness. If Mahatma Gandhi hadn’t enjoyed what he was doing, he would have quit fast.
In a well-balanced soul, it’s all aligned.
But happiness is a confusing word. The Greeks were more accurate in calling it eudaimonia, which is sometimes translated as flourishing.
Man is happy when he flourishes. What is flourishing? It is becoming everything a man can become.
No wonder the Greeks had only a vague semantic demarcation between words such as virtue, excellence, flourishing, and eudaimonia (happiness). See the Nicomachean confusion: What is virtue? What makes one happy. What is happiness? Living in accordance with virtue, and so on. Man is happy when he becomes what he can become. And since human nature does not differ greatly across most individuals, this means becoming excellent in universal human virtues: being courageous and just, wise and moderate, great-souled, and so on. It also means becoming what a particular individual can become. The latter part differs across individuals.
Those who can’t handle my lows don’t deserve my highs
The whole life is a sinusoid between hypomania and subsyndromal depression. Periods of intense enthusiasm alternate with periods of intense despair. Ecclesiastes 3: ‘There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing’. This captures the sinusoid rhythm of human living really well. Unlike, say, Aristotle who argued we should aim for the golden mean between two extremes.
There’s no such thing as a stable mood. It’s either really bad, like life-shatteringly bad, or really great. And I don’t even have BPD. I’m normal. This is normal. *
I’m kind of a depressive person. I’m prone to depressions. But I’m also effective and prone to prolonged states of productivity and excitement. When things are going well, those productive states prevail, and the depressive phases occupy only a small fraction of time.
Sages, merchants, and warriors
Many societies across the world – and across history – organized themselves into social castes.
Hindus came up with 4 varnas. The caste of priests (Brahmins), the caste of warriors and secular leaders (Kshatriyas), the caste of merchants (Vaishyas), and the caste of labourers (Shudras).
Similarly, Plato in his Republic justified the existence of 3 castes, dividing the ideal city into three classes: philosopher-rulers guided by reason (logos), warriors that embody spirit (thymos), and workers that represent the appetites of the soul.
Even Mencius Moldbug came up with his own goddamn taxonomy of American castes.
I have a friend who, in the best tradition of Julius Evola, René Guénon, and Indo-European traditionalism, entertains himself by classifying everyone around according to the ancient system of castes. On the one hand, it’s sensible. In terms of activities they cover, the four varnas represent pretty much all archetypes (and types of endeavours) available to man: a wiseman (knowledge, wisdom), a warrior (changing the world, political action), a merchant (making money, entrepreneurship), and a dutiful labourer (doing well what ought to be done).
Say, the criterion for classification is not the status assigned by birth but the natural talents and predispositions of every particular man. Disagreeable types are natural-born warriors who can channel their innate passion, flamboyance, and capacity for justified anger toward noble ends. Those who gravitate towards abstract thought and score high on openness to ideas are better off as thinkers and priests. Those who prefer to occupy themselves with practical matters rather than the abstract and theoretical are good merchants. After all, Benjamin Franklin listed industriousness as a virtue in his catalogue of American bourgeois ethics.
The limits of compassion
In antiquity love was mostly understood as love for something good (someone who’s beautiful, courageous, wise, etc). In modernity (in post-Christian world), love is more often understood as something more similar to pity and compassion. The more miserable someone is and the more they suffer, the more love they deserve.
Alasdair McIntyre, in his book After Virtue, notes that there’s never been agreement on a definitive list of moral virtues. Every tradition and every school of thought had its own set of values that were considered most important. For instance, Aristotle listed courage, moderation, proper ambition, and reason, among others.
There’s a big church in the center of Prague called Our Lady of the Snow or Marie Snezné cathedral. Behind its massive wooden altar, there is a Latin inscription carved into dark wood that lists what Christians understand as primary virtues.
Humilitas. Patientia. Obedientia. Charitas. Paupertas. Castitas.
Humility, patience, obedience, charity, poverty, chastity. When I first saw it, I was struck by how different this list is from the list of classical Greek virtues.
80 years of victory in Europe
On the 8th and 9th of May, Russia celebrated the Victory Day in Europe, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II on the continent. I happened to be in Vienna at the time. The celebrations took place at Maria-Theresien-Platz and Schwarzenbergplatz.
It was the year 2025. The Soviet Victory songs on stage were accompanied by the sounds coming from a demonstration on the opposite side of the road, this one younger, louder, more certain of its place on the right side of history. They had slogans instead of songs.
RUSSLAND IST EIN TERRORSTAAT, was one of the slogans.
On the Russian side, the event reeked of resentment, of bitterness, of offence. There was talk of Russian representatives being excluded from a memorial ceremony marking the liberation of an Austrian concentration camp near Linz. A story of some Red Army monument vandalized in Teplice by unspecified ‘enemies’, one more in a growing list of Soviet memorials removed or defaced since 2022.
A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offence, Dostoevsky wrote.
I stood on the side watching, I found it amusing in a sense – a masterful fit of deliberate unwillingness to comprehend the relationship of cause and effect, to connect past and present. The past is no longer something to be linked to the present, only something to be curated – displayed when convenient, discarded when not. And somehow, everyone agrees not to notice.
Next page »