The unifying theme of this collection of essays is living a balanced life (and why that might not always be such a good idea). After all, is not an abundance of love, an abundance of pleasure, and an abundance of joy always all for the better? Perhaps not. However, Phillips provocatively posits, “perhaps only the road of excess can teach us when enough is enough.”
In his essay, “Children Behaving Badly” he describes the interactions between parent and child and what happiness means to them both. Simply put, “children get pleasure from things that adults don’t want them to get pleasure from.” On the other hand, parents, unhealthily, try to live vicariously through their children. We push them into the lives we dreamed of, but never could attain. “We don’t, for example, want to burden our children with having to be happy because we can’t be, and because if they are happy we parents…. can feel better about ourselves; which casts our children as anti-depressants.” And this is where balance comes into play. Perhaps it is unreasonable to believe that a goal for life should be happiness anyway. “It is unrealistic- and by ‘unrealistic’ I mean it is a demand that cannot be met- to assume that if all goes well in a child’s life he or she will be happy. Not because life is the kind of thing that doesn’t make you happy; but because happiness is not something one can ask of a child.” A child has to work out their own way through life. And that will be painful, fitful, and sometimes unbalanced. “The adolescent is the person who needs to experiment with self-betrayal; is the person who needs to find out what it is, or what it might be, to betray oneself. Which is not what it means to break the rules, but what it means to break the rules that are of special, of essential, value to oneself. And in order to do this you have to find out what these rules are. So-called delinquent behaviour is the unconscious attempt to find the rules that really matter to the individual.” The most important values are the one’s you believe in because you have once transgressed them. Childhood is not the time for balance. It is the time for experimentation, for trial and error.
In another essay, “Negative Capabilities”, Phillips deals with the issue of helplessness. “Helplessness is more often than not assumed to be a problem (what we are suffering from) rather than a pleasure (a strength or a virtue).” Phillips makes the case that helplessness is the default state of human affairs, especially for a properly functioning social animal. It should not be a state of discomfort (or at least pain). “The experience of helplessness…. can make us sacrifice our lives, can lure us into a nihilistic pact: if you give up on the experience of satisfaction, you can be protected.” Helplessness is not hopelessness. “‘Satisfaction’ is the word, the experience, that links what we have learned to call our desire and our obligation.” Is it also a state of balance? “The only problem with desire is that it involves frustration; and frustration, whatever else it is, is an acknowledgement of incapacity…. Incomplete satisfaction is our fate, but there are individuals for whom the only project is complete satisfaction…. It is not desiring per se that is the problem, it is being able to bear, and bear with, the inevitable repetition of incomplete satisfaction.” What Phillips suggests is that we, as adults, need to get over our feeling of disorientation in the world. “Only children have homes; and an adult who feels at home in the world is out of touch with reality. Growing up means needing a map. Children shouldn’t feel lost; adults should feel lost because that is what they are…. The one thing family can’t prepare you for is life outside the family.” Life’s obligations often lead to life’s biggest regrets. People hardly ever regret fulfilling their true desires. “People suffer from not having been able to take chances; that for reasons of which they were unconscious they couldn’t use what happened to them for the satisfactions they were seeking.” Sometimes, rather than the safe and middling life, one has to put oneself out on the ledge and even fall in order to reach for greatness. “Mistakes can work, that naivety makes extraordinary things possible whereas worldliness, the making of good deals, can secure your survival, but not grant you undreamed-of success.” In the end Phillips suggests, “what we learn from our mistakes is that we shall go on making them.”
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