I didn’t realise this until I looked at the website statistics, but with Mark’s last post, we have now reached 150 essays posted to The Essence of Water. Given that we’ll celebrate our three year anniversary in about six weeks, that’s pretty impressive – about one essay a week, on topics from money, to provincial French cities, to swimming in Ireland, to breaking free and learning to study philosophy – and all of it of a common theme, of existing as ethical, moral individuals.
This is important, because I sense we’re living through a time which has polarised in a certain terrible fashion. The world has set up a false dichotomy between either (a) engaging in an existential battle between nature (personified by the novel coronavirus) and mankind (exemplified by a PPE-clad “hero” doling out intubation care or testing swabs or groceries or what have you) and (b) a strident anthropocentric survivalist mystique, involving arrogantly ignoring social distancing and mask wearing advisory statements to jut forward into a world where we care nothing for the weak, the poor, the old, the infirm, but – with thanks to Ayn Rand – John Gault seizes the day and the “winners” finally get their due.
Note that both “heroes” and “winners” get air quotes.
We’ve had 150 essays which challenge that false dichotomy. The space for the emergence of a humanist dialogue is much broader than what we find in the hot media of the internet and the cold media of the printed page – we are all McLuhanites, after all, even if we differ on the role of secularism and the nature of the spiritual in a secular age. But those narrow forums dominate our minds because of their broadcast power. We’ve chosen to speak openly about a different way of looking at the world in a time where money has captured the human imagination in a way in which the concept of value has been flattened out of the dialogic. We’ve chosen to speak about aesthetics in a way that tries to understand how value, personality, and beauty may live on different vectors. And we’ve written as carefully as we can about being fathers, about being daughters, about being parents, about being a steward of a canine life, all in the moment, all at once as true to our spirit as possible, and as false as it is to be human in writing about a lived experience.
Most of the early writings came from me, and most of you wisely sloughed them off – but you can find them in the new and much more efficiently organised archive page. The posts in the last year or so have been more balanced, have had more collected wisdom, and know that Mark and Viktoria and I talk often – in fact we have a book club, next Wednesday we’ll be discussing The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir, adding to prior readings of Isaiah Berlin and book five of Plato’s Republic. We try to work together to figure out our own misreadings of life, our own failures of ethical thought, our own mistakes in logic and philosophy. Because that’s the point of this. We don’t talk to reinforce our thinking. We talk, and write, to expose our errors. We talk to reveal our failings.
And that, dear reader, is what we ask of you. Read and think of how you’re wrong. Think and reveal your mistakes. Feel your own misgivings, and in them, discover how to find the path forward. Revel in your humanity, in your joy and in your despair. Find your place in the pathway that teaches all of us – especially Mark, Viktoria, and most especially me, the worst of the bunch – how to be more human beings, how to be better people.
One final thought. One of the best things about this site is that we don’t know who reads it. Our statistics are limited to how many people read a given post, and in aggregate by country, how many people hit our site. So you all are reading anonymously. Which is how it should be – unless you want to join in the conversation. We welcome it and, indeed, crave it. So write us back. And share, and complain, and praise, and think of how we could be better.
But most of all, as always: thanks for reading.