At the end of our first session Samir had asked that I consider whether the values that my actions have expressed over the years are the same as those which I take myself to hold. I don’t think we picked this back up meaningfully in our second session, but I think it’s an interesting exercise.
I think the rationalists call these values one’s revealed preferences. What has time revealed my preferences to be, then? I suspect a useful answer to this question will not take the form of a list of desires, repackaged as preferences, but of a record of how I tend to respond under specific sets of circumstances. For instance, it will not be satisfying (or even informative and interesting) to have recognised that I prefer (or desire) comfort. But the revelation that on occasions when I have stood at the edge of an intimidating freedom I have sought and heeded the first call to turn back towards a relative mundanity? There is more to interrogate here.
This edge of freedom: one finds oneself here once the fabric of norms that have heretofore suffocated our being, that we are thrown into and tread for reasons we are ourselves blind to, is revealed to us as loosely woven and draped across a vast (something — metaphors in the spatial register fail me here, for we are confronted with a full emptiness, a nothingness that is pregnant with everything). Here the normative superstructure that constitutes the cosmos recedes somewhat, just enough to allow us to trace the contours of our local area — the culture(s) that we are raised in, most familiar with. This distance leaves us unmoored, adrift in the nothing that is everything, alienated from the motivations and desires and beliefs of even those whom we love. Here we are presented with the threat of sliding into a cold nihilism.
But the ur-question has been answered: it is life, not death, and thus our course is determined. Our wills are the instruments with which we forge, out of incoherence, world-affirming meaning.
It’s from this edge, faced with the opportunity to deploy my will on acts of world- and self-creation, that I’ve asked Samir: how does one find enough confidence in one’s judgements and values and autonomy to begin? Without this my will is weak, devoid of substance!
His answer was Aristotelian; the virtuous man is he who acts virtuously. He who is habituated into perceiving as good virtuous ways of thinking and acting. Do you see as good the act of self- and world-creation?