All virtues worth cultivating can be encompassed by three terms: magnanimity, filotimo, and sprezzatura.
To be magnanimous is to be mature, disciplined, and easy to parody.
Filotimo entails the universal love of particulars.
Sprezzatura is when you make it look easy.
(Interestingly, they appear to be applicable to the Christian idea of the Trinity, in its conventionally listed order.)
My only rule is as follows:
Always be as big-souled as you can.
This means listening carefully and only speaking to edify, praise, or draw life from others. (To teach, encourage, question/joke/goad into feeling – into living).
In action terms, it means ensuring that everything you touch turns to gold.
Being prone to systematisation and excessive personal reflection, I have outlined some further thoughts and opinions below. But those are the important points.
Some brief social observations:
Argumentum ad voluminem: We know that a society which can be understood by one brain is not complex enough to account for the needs of all its citizens. It is then also the case that a god who could be fully understood by an individual could never rule the universe.
Argumentum ad perennis: If time travel could conceivably exist as we imagine it could, it would always have existed. By that same token, if we truly lacked free will, the course of humanity’s whole history would have been mapped long ago. The Lindy effect – the longer something has lasted, the longer it is likely to last – applies to concepts as well as inventions. And so we can take it as gospel that our oldest questions will never be satisfactorily answered.
Argumentum ad exterium: the fact that we have the capacity to study ourselves proves that we are more than matter, for if we were comprised merely of what we could scientifically observe this would be insufficient to prompt self-examination. A prerequisite of metaphysics is the ability to conceive of a space beyond physics, which would be impossible if no part of our natures reached it. We can only recognise – gain cognition of that which we have already seen in ourselves. Miyamoto Musashi – “Everything is within. Seek nothing outside of yourself.” You can only understand something’s nature if you stand partially outside it.
Comedy = news – time.
News = comedy + time.
Time = comedy + tragedy.
Tragedy – news = comedy.
News + time = history.
I am not bored by a cessation of activity. I am bored by the necessity of participating in emptiness.
The casual acceptance of the idea that life is meaningless is a dangerous received idea a la Flaubert. Flaubert knew about NPCs a hundred years before anyone could have known. When a person makes a joke about everything lacking meaning, they’re not thinking about the meaning of what they’ve said – they’re reciting a script. Otherwise they’d be trembling in fear.
Occasionally, when I speak, I receive a canned response and I recognise that my conversant has momentarily disappeared – to be replaced by a memory of something that lives inside them. They do not live in that particular moment.
I frequently quote things. I recall media. However, I try to remember to retain my sense of self as I do, to quote self-consciously, and to quote meaningfully.
Civilisation operates on the principle of external memory. One person knowing a fact is sub-optimal compared to everyone knowing its source, so it can be dredged up by anyone when necessary.
The sheer number and complexity of processes required to run society have metastasised to the extent that we had to adopt external memory and teach our children to be processing machines running according to a script with a series of datasets. This is the structure of the society we have made for ourselves.
When the Internet fails and no-one can remember the birthdate of John Doukas (etc) our history and our sense of self will begin to slip away. (“When we understand the events that have happened to us, those events become history. Otherwise we’re just animals trying to get out of the cold.”) Society will identify us as a set of actions, then we will become them fully.
Now – finally – to virtue.
Magnanimity:
Innocence is absent among adults and the self-aware. Irretrievable in this world. It cannot be cultivated, cannot be touched; its purest form must be considered lost. It can be simulated by the creative experience: tearing oneself apart, locking off part of oneself to discover another part. But this is not true innocence, just as our creations are not real – we are only made in the ‘image’ of God and therefore can create at best images.
Magnanimity means “Greatness of soul.” Literally, the Latin etymology – magnus, large, great; animus, soul = magnanimous. Typically this word denotes generosity or largesse; expressed with reference to its etymology it takes on a more general meaning.
The world is essentially divided (and I use the word ‘essentially’ intentionally, as in, in its purest essence) between the magnanimous and the pusillanimous – those with large and small souls. What distinguishes the soul’s size?
Magnanimity is not necessarily a morally sound quality. One could describe a dictator as magnanimous, using the pure definition. Perhaps – and these are casual throwaway notes – it denotes willingness to extend oneself. Awareness of the world beyond the self. Not knowledge, or even experience – but awareness that the world is greater than one perceives it to be.
Pusillanimous people are those with blinkered perspectives. With no tolerance for frameworks and modes of being outside their own. They are quick to laugh and slow to understand. Often they are uneducated – but nowhere near always. Plenty of uneducated people have an extraordinary degree of magnanimity. A lack of education actually assists this quality; self-awareness and humility, which are often bolstered by a relative lack of learning, aid in its acquisition.
Can one become more magnanimous with education? Only fundamental education. You can show Steve Donoghue (a man with an online presence who constantly does nothing but read books) a hundred thousand novels and he will remain as small-souled as he was at the outset. You can give someone who’s never read a book War and Peace and (assuming they’re guided through it) they can learn more about the nature of the world than Steve Donoghue has with his ten million pages.
Children are not great of soul. They are innocent. There would seem to be, then, a dichotomy between innocence and greatness (and this will be deconstructed in a moment). All the processes involved in growing up are the visible signs of innocence being replaced by magnanimity. Of course, this means many adults have not grown up.
Maturity interlude:
On maturity, a quality of magnanimity:
There is a contemporary crisis of adults having difficulty accepting their status as adults for mundane reasons, because they lack a sense of perspective. “I don’t consider myself an adult.” “I find ‘adulting’ [sic] hard.” Etc. Such statements are unfortunately cliches. This purposeful self-infantilisation is a defence mechanism intended to eliminate the need to assume responsibility. The ideal status quo for someone with this perspective is that an individual not be expected to perform a variety of functions. In this view there are no truly fully capable people, only cogs supporting one another.
If something is not their responsibility, the person who is afraid of adulthood will avoid doing it. Maturity is to jump at chances.
(Maturity is to jump at chances – because maturity is to understand the worth of what one has lost).
A society full of people unwilling to act as adults encourages stagnation where movement is necessary; it results in everyone living less interesting and fulfilling lives because they refuse to accept they can grow on a fundamental level. The people responsible for the spread of this attitude are adults, and if they have the luxury of complaining about not having their lives under control, it’s because they’re letting someone else control their lives to ensure their personal comfort, as a reaction to their fear of change.
Frankly it’s not hard to make dinner and take out the rubbish on a Tuesday night. You don’t live in a war zone. You have spare change and food to eat. You don’t work in an abusive environment, you’re not in prison. Etc. You’re capable of growing up.
People complain about being inadequate, not being able to participate in society, and denigrate it as a result.
The attitude developed as an understandable reaction to the prior century’s expectation of emotional stoicism. The unbounded social requirement to be operative and emotionally unaffected enough to continue to work at all times, an early 20th century attitude born of Puritanism in America and Victorianism in Britain and the colonies, collapsed like all the other attitudes of its time after the wars. It was replaced by its opposite. Now one is expected to be incapable, expected to be (overly) reliant on external, impersonal systems. Therapy. Social programs. Etc. The programs promote themselves and we promote them because we condition ourselves to rely on them.
My point is not that I hate therapy, but that our current default attitude is a crippling over-correction and things would be better generally if people were willing to present themselves as being capable.
People have so many cons’ls now. They have Nintendo Switches, Xboxes, Playstations – that’s three for one person. The whole Roman empire only ever needed two at a time.
When an individual reaches the point of post-scarcity, two paths open to them: the path of self-inflicted neurosis and apathy, or a constructive path. If you’re happy in your job and in your life, and you don’t need to think about it or get anywhere in particular, it’s necessary to set yourself puzzles and tasks, and to do something other than allowing others to think for you all day, or you’ll succumb to a mental illness you’ve created for yourself because your brain became bored. When brains become bored they set themselves problems, consciously or not.
Therefore I dab on all normies and on all nerds.
Unrefined addenda:
A politician who ‘admits’ (read: pretends) incapability is lauded as a relatable figure. This is enough to tell you the attitude is astroturfed and encouraged by the systems that want you to rely on them. No rational society – in the sense of true rationality, not mere logic – would elect to be ruled by an incapable person. And yet western leaders strive to be seen as increasingly “relatable” in their self-professed incapacity. Less so in Australia, I think.
Consider the study of history. Historians’ conclusions don’t matter in the short term at all and yet a David Rohl is one in a million. They’re generally unwilling to extend themselves. In a court of law a decision changes everything immediately. Stakes exist. Lawyers are required to strive and go as far as they can in every case. The effects are both immediate and long lasting. In history no one goes to jail. Everyone involved is dead. Any mistakes are subtler and technically more fundamental – consider the effect on society if everyone believed in Rohl’s new chronology – but those effects take longer to be felt and so it shouldn’t matter to a historian if they’re a little more daring.
To return to the topic:
One can lose their innocence and still not become magnanimous if they let others, and let inanimate things, possess them too much. In practice, this is when they fall prey to consumption of media and to gossip, instead of practicing self-cultivation. To be magnanimous, one must learn to be comfortable alone. Truly alone – not with media or pleasures of the flesh to comfort you.
Expressed as a banal platitude, to become great of soul, one must become the best version of themselves they can be – to understand oneself best one must be educated as to the doings and thinking of others. Generosity and the outward character of magnanimity as it is conventionally understood are a secondary by-product of greatness of soul.
It manifests often as boldness, as in the great heroes we conventionally think of as big-souled.
Magnanimity may be ‘joy’; if someone can be said to be able to experience ‘joy’ (as distinct from mere contentment or happiness; joy is more fundamental) they are ‘great of soul.’ ‘Joy’ is a kind of final answer after all. Simone Weil.
On the dichotomy between magnanimity and innocence:
For comparison’s sake, a brief detour into artistic mastery. Robert Fripp defines this as: “the assumption of innocence within a context of experience.” As I said at the outset in explaining innocence – locking off a part of oneself to discover meaning in the remainder.
To be magnanimous, in its modern sense, is the same. Innocence does not hoard; it lends and gives because it expects nothing.
A brief aside on artistry and magnanimity:
I raised a point about the cult of Orpheus to an acquaintance, specifically the anecdote of Zeus consuming the entire world and regurgitating it in his own image, and that this, too was my task as an artist. This acquaintance then compared artistry to dictatorship. And it is a valid comparison. All great-souled people are dictators in a sense. And all dictators are artists. And all artists are required to eat the world, as much as they can, and spit it out again in their own image.
‘Dictator’ etymology – the one who speaks.
Consider charity. The common debate goes – all is ultimately done in self-interest and thus there is no such thing as charity. Contra – the nature of God, etc. Numerous examples are cited; neuroscience is mentioned, the structure of society is analysed and criticised. Ultimately nothing is achieved because the arguments for and against begin from different fundamental axioms.
But the Christian cannot make a cogent argument in support of charity alone – for charity alone is not the Christian position. See: half of what Jesus actually said. When I assist others, am I working for their sake, or my own? It can be seen both ways. And this is what truly characterises greatness of soul – dual colour. It is not the virtue of an action but its colour; its request that no matter how we view it we note an extension (inherently selfish) of a self into the world, an imposition on reality. Simone Weil’s rising above contradictions applies. Selfishness and selflessness are functionally the same thing.
Our souls are embiggened when we are generous – because we replace what we have lost with the memory of its loss, and we internalise the harmlessness and positive outcome of generosity. Now, rather than one’s ego being spread between multiple external objects, there is an expansion of the data, or sense of self, within the one object (the one self).
All souls are not always great or small, but all have the capacity for greatness, provided we store value in ourselves rather than in externalities by giving that which could store value (and which we can give away) to others. A greatsouled person has a full self and keeps none of his ego in any external thing.
Greatness of soul thus shares this characteristic with innocence despite being its ideal maturation. And, to further confuse matters, they sometimes look the same. Can we conclude, then, that magnanimity is assumed? We have operated thus far on the assumption that magnanimity is learned, that it is not innate, that it needs cultivation.
These assumptions naturally lead to a pressing question. Is it possible for everyone to become magnanimous?
Can we take someone with no individual personality outside of consumption, practically no internal consciousness – a p-zombie – and make them into Alexander the Great, Simone Weil, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Boudicca, George Washington etc, full of unique passions and madness and desire and glory?
Let us attempt to come to some answer through another question.
Is it possible for someone not to possess a great soul, or a soul with the capacity for greatness?
This is a little easier to answer. It would be difficult to find someone truly lacking in a soul. Even the most pliant human being contains a store of unique experience which is irreplaceable etc and which confers upon them some individual qualities. As a general rule-a heuristic, not to be trusted in all cases-the amount of time required to see someone’s individual soul expressed externally is inversely proportional to the amount of time the person has spent in self-cultivation. Those who have spent a long time at the task of building the self cannot help but show it. It takes time to drill beneath the crust of cliches in which most people are habitually clothed.
I do not believe that there really are any small-souled people out there – or at least there are none who cannot be saved by the education of time and by context, which is to say luck.
The answer, I believe, is that magnanimity is a quality which only manifests in certain moments. Nobody is magnanimous all the time. Some are great-souled more often and enter into that state with greater ease than others, but all are capable at the right time (kalo kairos).
To consider magnanimity as an emergent quality is an encouraging step because it allows us to disassociate from the term as a label – it is not a quality of a person, but a quality toward which all may aspire. A person who is called magnanimous is therefore prevented from resting on his laurels and must continually strive to attain the same moment of glory by constant cultivation. Only in hindsight can a person be said to be magnanimous as a whole entity. “Count no man happy until he dies,” Solon said.
On ease of parody, a quality of magnanimity:
One of its manifestations, but a particularly important one. Two points are relevant.
Point one: one becomes easy to parody when they fulfill their purpose. (Which is) to become more like themselves – to become distinct – and therefore an easily defined (and thus easily parodied) figure.
Point two: Proper, good parody is born of affection (Norm Macdonald) and thus of joy – and it brings joy. Therefore, to become easy to parody is to both fulfill your purpose on earth and to bring joy to others.
And on discipline, the third quality:
Only through discipline can one be of any use. That’s it. Why must one be of use? This is virtue (again, inspect the etymology).
It does not necessarily mean one must take cold showers, avoid all sweets, or eat coffee grounds on an empty stomach per Balzac; it does mean that one must remain consistent.
Discipline, along with personal property, is the foundation of freedom.
Filotimo:
There is more that can be said about filotimo than I have written here, but this is what struck me as relevant at the time of writing. I would recommend a Google at this point.
Someone will relate a story, and often the only response will be a counter in the form of a comparative escalation. This is smallness of soul. Listen and react to what’s said. Don’t immediately one-up it. There’s only selfishness in that.
There is no illegitimate reason to listen.
Classic advice for artists – draw what you are looking at, not what you believe you can see. Go by shapes, not by forms – it’s not a ‘tree’, it’s a pair of vertical lines with a lot of little horizontal ones extending from about half-way up…etc.
In the same manner – when people look at each other they don’t see each other, they see an abstraction…this is obvious. But it may assist in our interpretation of life to characterise it as an abstraction so that the same advice can be applied: see no definite objects, only a collection of shapes, and judge the whole from all of its parts once it is fully drawn.
(Of course it can’t be fully drawn.)
Events foreign to me do not make me distant. I am perfectly capable of understanding that there is a great gulf of difference in experience between myself and someone else, and compensating by empathy. I can comprehend personally distant problems because I have no preconceived notions about them. It is when a problem is near my feet that it is most foreign. Many times in my life, others have complained to me of matters which do not trouble me, and never did trouble me while I was in their position; their complaints were often violent and uncompromising.
These types of problems – ones which are only revealed to me to be problems when someone else has to deal with them after me – are difficult for me to process, because I have thought through the experience of solving them in my own style, and often have not noticed their existence. But I am suddenly expected to already have a number of complex thoughts about the problem and to feel about it the same way as the complainant. It can occasionally be difficult not to mentally deride the complainant when this happens.
Work should not be done selflessly, should not be felt to be done selflessly, out of self-hatred. Working for the sake of others out of a belief that one is inferior is a fundamentally dead attitude. It is to love the general, not the particular – not to work positively, for the sake of a specific other, but to work because one hates themselves and has been asked to operate as a tool for an anonymous figure. It is not an expression of love.
Being overly stressed out about small mistakes indicates that you have never made a large mistake. This further demonstrates a warped sense of what is acceptable. If any infraction is too much, this is analogous to a lack of care. Put another way it is not filotimo, but mere angst. Those who have never suffered are incapable of kindness.
All cads are Chads but not all Chads are cads.
To love only that which is beautiful is not to love, but merely to exercise instinct. To love is to love that which is not beautiful. The particular over the general; the hands in Yeats’ broken dreams.
People who value animals over other people have a thoughtless attitude that seeks comfort over what is right and over true empathy – which requires an effort of understanding. They project their values on to animals that have none instead of enhancing their understanding of the scope of the soul by interacting with people.
The best experience to draw on is somebody else’s:
I want only to read that which will burn my eyes out. I have plenty of individual thoughts and do not necessarily need someone else to shine a flashlight into this dark cavern (Schopenhauer – to read is to allow someone else to think for you – and I recognise the double-irony of both quoting Schopenhauer myself and asking you to continue reading this); what interests me is that which I cannot help but look at. The existence of choice in a matter invites and thus makes inevitable the reality of a wrong choice.
One must remember what it means to read. To read is to allow someone to possess you; to forget yourself and to become the embodiment of the author. Total absorption is the only kind of true reading – all other kinds are mere scansion, data intake.
I have seen this kind of total absorption only once from the outside, in a young lady reading Gormenghast. I have felt it myself too often to count.
To read is to stand outside time. And having spent so long in so many other times and places I no longer belong in the time or place I factually occupy; the thoughts of others have filled my head to the extent that I feel partially absent wherever I go. I infer this is not a unique quality: the habitual reader is never truly fully present anywhere in particular.
An illogic and a truism – mere credentials are never enough.
Until one has spent a lifetime studying and learning and becoming clever and wise, they do not have the right to refer to themselves as stupid.
To refer to oneself as stupid in the full knowledge of what one is saying is a privilege granted only to the most learned. To call oneself stupid is an act of hubris and humility at the same time.
I do all my reading to rid myself of the urge to interject – to think I know or understand. The purpose of the book is not to imbibe the knowledge necessarily, but to become aware that the knowledge is there – that there is an endless fractalisation of possible knowledge.
The hardest part of being alive is understanding that I don’t understand, because it feels like I do. Gaining knowledge is one possible method of mitigating unwarranted self-assuredness and adopt a reflexive impulse to listen.
The goal of a good life is to be able to declare on one’s deathbed that one is stupid and has made mistakes and have these things be objectively untrue, yet still pronounced with self awareness, and for the statements in this paradoxical way to function as pronouncements of supreme victory.
“Are you great-souled?” I think I am acting in that way, but I know I’m not.
Sprezzatura:
The quality overlaps with filotimo in my mind, in the aspects about which I have chosen to write.
Work ideally should not appear to be difficult. Difficulty in work makes one appear less competent and disincentivises others asking for assistance – weakening the group, and making life more difficult for others.
The best way to appear at work is as though one has done nothing – while all the work lies done. What one does is not what one ought to appear to do.
“What I like about this band is that what it is actually doing is not what it appears to be doing.” – Robert Fripp on the last iteration of King Crimson.
If you’re busy all the time you should be working on something that’s going to change society on the same scale as the invention of the Internet. If you’re not, it’s a sign that you need to optimise your processes or let things go – time is money. The sigma male grindset where someone works constantly and has no free time is the surest way to become a slave – per Taleb, true freedom is to not know (and not need to know) what you are going to do tomorrow. Money is a shorthand for time. Time is the true measure of value.
A liar’s most important quality is empathy, for without empathy he cannot act, and if he cannot act he cannot lie.
A liar’s second-most important quality is indifference, for if he feels differently about the fact and the truth, the difference will be reflected in his speech.
It is a sinful thing to lie, and it is the best thing one can do in many cases.
To have done everything is to appear to be doing nothing. To appear lazy is to be visible on a lower stratum, and to be in fact on the higher stratum. By working hard in secret, one lives on every level of the hierarchy.
Even as you strive to live a life where you can make independent choices, you can choose to relax or to work, you must make everything you do inevitable, unavoidable. It will be done optimally and it will be done as though it were natural (sprezzatura).
Live hidden; pleasantly surprise others (Epicurus). One reason I won’t replace my beaten-up old flute is that I’m not sure how much of my sound is tarnished due to poor playing and how much due to the age of the instrument. In this respect I live hidden even from myself.
verso folio 