Sublime Suffering

I often feel I am climbing a heavenly ladder.

People tend to assume that the higher the intelligence, the better, but this is not so. Most high-IQ people spend their whole lives tangled in misunderstanding and pain.

As Ivan Karamazov says in The Brothers Karamazov, people can muster some sympathy for concrete suffering, but the moment suffering becomes abstract, their kindness instantly vanishes.

On the classic question:

Cheap happiness, or sublime suffering?

Some people do choose suffering.

I chose the path of suffering from the very start. The greater your capacity, the more choices you have, and the more clearly you can foresee the consequences of your actions, the more violently the suffering arrives, until it nearly crushes you.

What I want to know is this: granted, I chose the path of suffering, but is it necessary to drink the bitter cup all the way down? Can there not be even a trace of sweetness in this life?

Fuck the Sublime

Sometimes the pain gets so violent you think: fuck the sublime, fuck the ultimate good.

Why do those heartless bastards get to live lavishly, however they please, while we have to chase some sublime suffering and live like miserable saints?

Sometimes you even begin to question the austerity itself.

What is so noble about this? What exactly are you being high-minded about?

Isn’t living out the will to life, living vividly, exactly what nature expects of us?

Why in the world would a person choose to fight against nature?

Why are some people so arrogant as to want to become gods: insisting on this purgatory of self-knowledge, walking the road toward divinity?

Isn’t this a form of hubris? Isn’t it a kind of blasphemy against the sacred?

You have the capacity to fall. Go ahead and fall, if you will.

But I cannot step back.

In the end, I just want to be able to respect myself.

The Blade Turns on Me First

People keep complaining that I sling harsh malice at my compatriots, that I am merciless when I criticize other people and society.

In my own heart I say: what is this, really? My self-criticism is ten times harsher and more violent than anything I aim at others. My polemics are, most of the time, the natural overflow of that inner struggle.

I can’t say I have zero ill will. My resentment is this: why is it that I have to live under this kind of suffering so often, while you people get to live with an easy conscience?

A while back I apologized to a friend, for offending her with harsh words during the Hong Kong events.

But what I apologized for was my lack of respect in how I spoke. I did not take back the position I held at the time.

What pisses me off is this: has it never occurred to anyone else to apologize to me? To say, after reflection, that they had second thoughts about their position or the way they expressed it?

No. Not a single one.

Why, of all people, was it I who had to spend years afterward studying moral philosophy? Who had to figure out what in fact is the ultimate standard of right and wrong? Who had to search out what the highest good is?

Meanwhile, the people who actually stood on the wrong side of history get to live with a clean conscience?

Because you are the majority?

Since when does being the majority exempt you from the lash?

I’m not especially taken with Han Han (the Chinese essayist), but there is one view of his I agree with: the intellectual’s blade should not swing only at the powerful; it must also cut into the common people.

Because you are weak and in the majority, your wrongdoing is suddenly justified? There is no such deal. On my ground, whoever you are: evil falls to the blade.

Good Against Good

But then, who decided what counts as good and evil?

In the world, things are rarely black and white. More often, it is good colliding against good.

If there is an ultimate measure of worldly good, I think it is this:

Maximize the freedom of every individual.

And the paradox of tolerance is that radical tolerance requires, at the deepest moral level, radical intolerance; only then can each person’s freedom be maximally protected at the everyday level.

For example: meta-level principles such as freedom of thought and speech must be defended unconditionally. They must never be confused with, or treated as equivalent to, the ideologies that seek to shackle thought and speech.

The Sublime Is Not Found in Solitude

This took me a long time to work out.

I used to think the sublime was a one-man affair: think alone, endure alone, climb alone, stay sharp in solitude.

I don’t think so anymore. In fact, I now suspect this was a way of building a complex intellectual fortress precisely in order to avoid real contact, like Rick from Rick and Morty.

Of course I don’t think that road was a mistake. The pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful has its order.

Those who don’t fully interrogate the true and the good (unless they have an exceptionally sharp aesthetic intuition) often project beauty onto the wrong places. Things like traditional Chinese medicine and traditional Chinese philosophy.

The next focus of life is probably the pursuit of beauty: finding beauty in the midst of living.

When I meet a view without much depth, rather than rushing to judge it as mediocre, I should give the other person room to unfold. Try to understand their real needs. First see the other person whole; then help where I can.

And real strength isn’t self-sufficiency, sealing yourself off at a safe distance from everyone. Real strength is the capacity to show vulnerability and to show goodwill.

Showing goodwill demands far more wisdom, capability, and courage than showing ill will.

That Trace of Sweetness

Back to the original question:

I chose sublime suffering, but is it necessary to drink the bitter cup all the way down? Can there not be even a trace of sweetness?

There can. But you have to be able to recognize it.

It may not look the way I once imagined. It may not be a soulmate, or some deep collision of minds.

Maybe it is: someone remembering what you said. A word of care or encouragement in an exhausted life. Laughing together at a joke that isn’t funny. Someone who doesn’t understand what you’re saying at all, but still wants to listen.

These look like nothing special. But perhaps this is the true shape of human connection.

If the sublime I used to understand was achieved in solitary climbing, the sublime I now understand is created through ordinary action.

I am still climbing the heavenly ladder. Only it is no longer a celestial rope hanging from the clouds; it is a Tower of Babel built among people.

PS

On the point at the end of the previous essay about elitism and sharpness of thought: yes, we should keep the edge of our thought sharp; we just need to actively seek out intellectual peers, leave specialist problems to specialists, rather than expect to hold deep discussions with everyone.

Opus (the AI) also criticized me, and I thought what it said was right. My mind is not my whole worth. If some thug knocked me out with a brick tomorrow, would I cease to be worth anything at all?

The truly strong have more than a sharp mind; they also have a warm heart. You can keep the edge of your thought, and at the same time love others actively.