Sitting in wohnkuche, listening to book The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age, by Gordon Marino, I hear.
If you have ever received the body blow of a “Dear John” letter, you will not need anyone to prove to you that sentences can have a physical signature, .... https://b-ok.cc/book/5651738/ce2c9b
The news about Roe superseded by Dobbs had this effect on many. Many religious types rejoiced. Many, whose values are not defined by selective interpretation of scriptural canonicity, were devastated.
I fall into the absolute middle.
So much philosophical debate and consequent legal thinking is based on highly subjective interpretations of research and diagnosis that does not have the precision, evidence, or verifiable data to say, with significant certainty, that life attains. (in utero), the status of human life, with what is called 'a soul', and with the capability of surviving outside of the host's protective environment.
Still...
A distinct an autonomous human being is a rare and questionable actuality. There is an interweaving corresponding mutual dependence that involves and includes all live on planet earth, particularly the human species in its physical, social, cultural, and nescient contexts.
To be nescient is to not be in possession of all the information, knowledge, and wisdom surrounding and integrating life systems, intellectual vistas, and spiritual unknowns that weave the fabric of existence pervading the known and the unknown world and worlds.
My absolute middle is the pinpoint instant/place where two things can be and are true at the same time.
For example: woman should have choice concerning their bodies, a preferred yes; society should be able to say that stoppage of life and life-coming-to-be is a preferred no.
I'm for the considered choice of life. Deliberation of well-being to prevail.
I'm against the intentional taking of life. State sponsored executions included.
We live within the koan of Roethke's final three lines of his poem "The Manifestation":
What does what it should do needs nothing more.
The body moves, though slowly, toward desire.
We come to something without knowing why.
"Knowing why" is more often than not a rare arrival and a fool's errand.
We, mostly, don't know.
Every tradition, religious and scientific, when honest, admit to not knowing.
In Tolstoy's words, therefore: "What then are we to do?"
I don't know. Not yet.
And yet, and yet, and yet... the willingness to think, to ask, to meditate, and to be at home for a while in aporia*...
a·po·ri.a·| əˈpôrēə |
noun. an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory: the celebrated aporia whereby a Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars.
• Rhetoric the expression of doubt.
ORIGIN
mid 16th century: via late Latin from Greek, from aporos ‘impassable’, from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage’.
For an ongoing tutorial, there's always Tolstoy to help us frame our considerations:
“The doctrine of Christ, which teaches love, humility, and self-denial, had always attracted me. But I found a contrary law, both in the history of the past and in the present organization of our lives – a law repugnant to my heart, my conscience, and my reason, but one that flattered my animal instincts. I knew that if I accepted the doctrine of Christ, I should be forsaken, miserable, persecuted, and sorrowing, as Christ tells us His followers will be. I knew that if I accepted that law of man, I should have the approbation of my fellow-men; I should be at peace and in safety; all possible sophisms would be at hand to quiet my conscience and I should ‘laugh and be merry,’ as Christ says. I felt this, and therefore I avoided a closer examination of the law of Christ, and tried to comprehend it in a way that should not prevent my still leading my animal life. But, finding that impossible, I desisted from all attempts at comprehension.”
― Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe
“And yet our existence is so organized that every personal enjoyment is purchased at the price of human suffering contrary to human nature.”
― Leo Tolstoy, My Religion - What I Believe
“What is the law of nature? Is it to know that my security and that of my family, all my amusements and pleasures, are purchased at the expense of misery, deprivation, and suffering to thousands of human beings—by the terror of the gallows; by the misfortune of thousands stifling within prison walls; by the fear inspired by millions of soldiers and guardians of civilization, torn from their homes and besotted by discipline, to protect our pleasures with loaded revolvers against the possible interference of the famishing? Is it to purchase every fragment of bread that I put in my mouth and the mouths of my children by the numberless privations that are necessary to procure my abundance? Or is it to be certain that my piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that every one else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat?”
― Leo Tolstoy, My Religion - What I Believe
“Our existence is now so entirely in contradiction with the doctrine of Jesus, that only with the greatest difficulty can we understand its meaning. We have been so deaf to the rules of life that he has given us, to his explanations,—not only when he commands us not to kill, but when he warns us against anger, when he commands us not to resist evil, to turn the other cheek, to love our enemies; we are so accustomed to speak of a body of men especially organized for murder, as a Christian army, we are so accustomed to prayers addressed to the Christ for the assurance of victory, we who have made the sword, that symbol of murder, an almost sacred object (so that a man deprived of this symbol, of his sword, is a dishonored man); we are so accustomed, I say, to this, that the words of Jesus seem to us compatible with war. We say, "If he had forbidden it, he would have said so plainly." We forget that Jesus did not foresee that men having faith in his doctrine of humility, love, and fraternity, could ever, with calmness and premeditation, organize themselves for the murder of their brethren.”
― Leo Tolstoy, My Religion
