A few days ago there was a Biblical flood in Nepal when a glacier collapsed and sent an unstoppable wall of water rushing down a heavily-populated valley.
I saw one video of a border station with China that was obliterated in seconds by the pitiless flow of force taking the form of water.
It’s horror movie stuff. You’re minding your business and then Nature is reaping. I won’t call myself a fan of catastrophe pr0n. I don’t seek it out. But whenever it comes up, I can’t help but feel a healthy terror and respect for the forces at work around us.
We tell ourselves we’ve got all this under control with our gadgets and science, and pretend we can take nature for granted compared to our important world of important human drama and vanity.
Fact is, we don’t control three tenths of jack. Nature commands forces that can erase any work of civilization, she’ll do so on a whim, and there’s nothing we can do about it except get out of the way and hope that the Fates haven’t decided today’s the day to cut our thread.
Our society doesn’t do a good job with accepting fate and tragedy. When I got into reading the ancient Greeks deeply some years ago, this was the part that struck me as most alien and yet most correct about their way of looking at life.
Aristotle didn’t believe that just anyone could live a good life. To the modern mind, that’s a strange and even horrifying way of thinking about good and bad people. For the last few centuries European intellectuals have spilled much ink arguing that the only good in the world springs from within the individual.
If you’re a person of good will aiming at good things, that’s enough to make you good. Whether you succeed at your intentions is a different question. What matters is, did you act for right reasons?
Aristotle meanwhile wrote that nobody can live a good life who is sick, broke, and passed out in the gutter. A virtuous character is necessary to live well, but it isn’t enough. External circumstances matter, and our external circumstances are not entirely up to us. Some folks won’t have the opportunity for a good upbringing. Others might not be born with the temperament or intelligence to pick up the habits of excellence. And then there’s unpredictable walls of water cutting an otherwise good life short.
Not every acorn makes it to a healthy full-grown oak.
In other words, Aristotle accepts tragedy as a real possibility.
As I discovered, this is shockingly offensive to the sensibilities of many modern moral philosophers and academics. I took a lot of arrows when I decided to work on Aristotelian ethics instead of some respectable topic in moral philosophy.
But Aristotle’s way of looking at life and nature as they are attracted me as the correct path. We may be rational animals, for some meaning of rational, but it’s too easy to forget the “animals” part of that formula.
Us human beings can judge things as sad or unfair or tragic or what have you, but nature doesn’t care. Nature just moves.
The kicker is that we experience moral conflict precisely because we have one foot in uncaring nature and the other squarely planted in our ability to understand things as no (few?) other creatures can. We’re not quite animals and not quite disengaged spirits.
This bothers modern thinkers. They don’t like that forces outside of us can determine the goodness or badness of our lives. They see everything as about “I”, my will, my desires, my intentions, my choices. Iris Murdoch wrote that we invent all our art and stories and entertainments to conceal death and chance. Very selfish, almost entirely blind to the reality outside of human vanity.
Sorry pal, but you live in a wild universe overflowing with forces and powers you can’t even perceive, much less understand, and they are as indifferent to your existence as they are capable of snuffing it out.
Harsh stuff for a Sunday afternoon, maybe, but I find it a strangely pleasing and even relaxing topic.
Call it the sublime: the experience of your finite human person running face-first into the vastness of the unbounded infinite and responding with a pleasant mixture of awe and terror.
Contemplating the sublime may not be a popular hobby these days, not when there’s important scrolling and AI prompting to be done, but I find it rewarding.
Violent weather, rough seas, sun-scorched deserts and their frozen ice-covered cousins, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror, and Ridley Scott’s Alien always fascinated me.
Some clever souls even say that living in our technological society causes unsettling and disorienting feelings of the sublime without even going outdoors. I don’t know about that, but it’s fitting somehow that progress in the name of human welfare creates all new forms of madness.
What am I getting at? You wanted to know how to lift weights better and I’m going on about Aristotle and romantic aesthetics.
How about this:
There’s such a thing as good judgment and bad. Even if the world doesn’t make sense, you can do a better or worse job at making your way through the noise of static on every channel.
That’s gonna mean doing more than checking this month’s spreadsheet to see if the line went up and to the right.
You’ve got to take a longer view, a larger view, accept that cause and effect aren’t always obvious, and fate and chance are gonna do what they do, no matter how well you plan.
The greater part of good judgment is learning not just to flow with the currents of fate, but how to feel them without the temptation to control them.
Matt Perryman