Strip a person down. Take away society, take away religion, take away every voice that isn't already inside him. What's left? Not nothing. What's left is the stuff he can't talk himself out of — what he longs for, runs from, needs to vent. I want to call that the genuine form. The honest layer. Everything else is just paint.
Love is the first one. Before I list anything else about what a person is underneath — it's the thing we long for. Not choose to long for. Long for.
We need the anger. That's the part nobody admits — the anger isn't a malfunction, it's a requirement, it's the thing we vent so we don't burst. Same with fear: it doesn't push us, it halts us. Stops us cold. Funny that the two opposite engines, the hot one and the cold one, are both just sitting there in everybody.
There's a void we comfort and a void we stay away from. Same word, two directions. I don't fully understand that yet — how the empty thing can be both the wound you press and the edge you back off from. But I notice it's there twice.
Desire drives us to do what we wouldn't do without it. That's the whole sentence and the whole problem — "without it" means the real you, the one before the want showed up, wouldn't have done it. So which one is you. The one with the desire or the one before.
And then happiness and sadness, last on the list, leaving us complete or incomplete. I notice I put them at the bottom, not the top. They're not the goal here. They're just two more of the drives. One fills you, one empties you, and that's all — not the point of the whole thing, just one of the pairs.
Here's what I keep circling back to. We're sensitive by nature — we feel everything, we take it all in. But that's exactly why we're cruel by nature too. The same softness that lets the world in is what gets bruised, and the bruise is where the cruelty comes from. You can't have one without the other.
There are no perfectly absolute people. Nobody's all one thing. Which means everybody is sitting somewhere on a line between two extremes — and if there's no one at either end, then a person just *is* a balance. That's not a virtue you achieve. That's just what a person already is.
Try this: perfection is balance. Not the most of something — the even split. And if that's true, then the perfect world isn't the all-good one. It's the one that's equally good and evil. I don't love where that lands but I can't find the hole in it.
If I can control my thoughts, then I can control who I am. Because I *am* my thoughts. That's the chain — and it sounds clean until you ask whether anybody actually controls their thoughts, and then the whole thing wobbles. But for one second it felt like the answer.
Aristotle says the point of a man is happiness, and you get there by choosing the mean — never the extreme. Courage between cowardice and recklessness, pride between vanity and humility. Fine. Sounds wise. Lasted two thousand years. But I've got a problem with it, and it starts with a bully.
Say a bully comes at you. The mean between cowardice and fighting back is — stand up for yourself, sure. But who set the extremes? Make the extremes "cowardice" and "kill him," and suddenly the middle slides way over toward violence. The mean moves when the ends move. So who decides the ends? Aristotle never tells me. And if we can't agree on the extremes, how could we ever agree on the middle?
And here's the one that actually kills it for me. Good and evil. Right and wrong. If every virtue is the mean between two vices — what's the mean between good and evil? There isn't one. There's no virtue sitting in the middle of the biggest question we've got. So the theory goes quiet exactly where I need it loudest.
Even if happiness is the goal — is it the goal for everyone, the same way? A tree's purpose is the same for every tree, and every tree pulls it off. But happiness is something almost nobody manages, and if my happy and your happy are opposites, then me getting there might require you not getting there. So how can a man's whole purpose be a thing he can't all reach at once?
What do I even want from a moral theory? Three things, I think. Help me make the right call when I'm stuck. Lead me to a good life if I follow it. And work for everyone, not just me on a good day. Aristotle limps on the first, maybe wins the second, and I'm honestly not sure on the third. Two out of three on the thing that's supposed to be the answer to everything isn't great.
Would I choose to live by Aristotle? No, probably not. Can I take something from him anyway? Yeah. And maybe that's the actual job of a theory — not to be right, but to push you closer to whatever the real answer is. You probe it, you find the questions it can't answer, and you go looking for the next one. He doesn't have to win for me to use him.
Here's a bridge I didn't expect to find. Aristotle says the perfect life is the one lived without vices, without extremes — hit the mean and you've hit perfect. So his mean and my balance are the same animal. "Perfect" doesn't mean the most of something. It means the even point between the two pulls. I came at it through him, through the world, through God, and it keeps coming out the same shape. Balance is perfect. Perfect is balance. I keep arriving here by different roads.
Why is it that every time a philosopher's got me — really got me, I'm nodding, this is it, he's about to tie it all together — the next page says "because of God." And the whole thing deflates. Not because God's a stupid idea. Because he just took a leap and called it a floor.
The only thing God should be used to prove is God. That's my rule. If most people don't believe in your God — or don't believe in your *version* of him — then you can't lean a moral or metaphysical theory on him and call it solid. Until God is a fact, he can't be a step in the argument. He can be the conclusion. He just can't be the load-bearing wall.
Watch what Descartes does. He uses his theory — which he hasn't proven — to prove God. Then he turns around and uses God to prove the theory. That's a circle. It'll fool some people. But here's the funny part: if there's no God, there's also no evil deceiver. So what exactly was Descartes guarding against? Take God out and the threat he needed God to beat disappears too.
Descartes' first God move: I have an idea of a perfect God. But I'm not perfect — so where did a perfect idea come from? Not from me; I can't make something more perfect than myself. So something perfect must have planted it, and that's God. Clever, I'll give him that. But it only works if "I couldn't have made this idea" is true, and I'm not sure it is. We dream up things bigger than ourselves all the time. Why is this idea the one exception?
Fourth meditation, the part I actually like. If God could've made us perfect, why didn't he? Descartes says: individually we're not perfect, but we're a piece of something that's perfect all together. And our judgment is made perfect by God — error only sneaks in when we misuse the tool, not because the tool is broken. So mistakes are on us, not on the maker. Tidy. It just leans the whole time on God not being a deceiver, which we only got by leaning on God in the first place.
Fifth meditation: we know God exists the way we know a triangle — existence is baked into the idea of him, so he has to have it. And here's the payoff Descartes wants. God perceives everything clearly and distinctly, so I don't have to. I'm finite, I can't hold clear ideas of everything at once — but God can, so things I once knew stay true even when I'm not looking. God is the backup drive. Take him out and my knowledge of anything I'm not currently staring at just topples over.
But watch where Descartes is actually strong. "I think, therefore I am" proves his own existence and needs no God at all — it stands by itself. Every place after that where he reaches for God, he didn't have to; the other parts could've held without him. The cogito is the real building. God is scaffolding he bolted on and forgot to take down. Strip the God out and the one thing left standing is the one thing he proved without God. That should tell him something.
Berkeley's worse, or braver, depending. He barely mentions God — maybe eight paragraphs that matter — but pull God out and the whole thing collapses into dust. God is the one perceiving everything we're not looking at, so the sun doesn't blink out when you turn around. Fine. But that consistency could just be "something else out there." Why does the something else have to be Him?
Berkeley says something near the end I keep turning over. Other than ourselves, God is the thing we know *best* — better than we know other people. Because when I see you, I only get sensations: a shape, a sound. I never actually perceive the thinking, perceiving part of you, the part I'm certain of in myself. You could be all surface. But God, he says, we grasp directly, as an idea. So the being I can't see at all, I supposedly know better than the friend sitting across from me. Strange. And I can't fully shake it.
Why do they keep doing it, then? Two reasons, and I think the ugly ones are the true ones. One: in Descartes' day, a theory without God was career suicide. Two: they got stuck, couldn't find the missing piece, and God fit the hole. Weak unfinished work becomes strong finished work — and maybe the church even likes you now. That's not philosophy. That's politics with a halo.
Here's the bind. If God's real and perfect and infinite, and we're finite — then I think we're locked out. He'd have made reality more complicated than we can hold. Our only shot at understanding anything is if the answers are *here*, in ourselves, in this world. The second the answer lives in something infinite, we're finished; we'll only ever know as much as he lets us. So the philosophers worth the most are the ones who try to explain the world without reaching for God. At least they're playing a game we can win.
Want to know what philosophy actually is? Guessing. Educated guessing at what's real. There are proofs and valid arguments, sure, but since we can't prove anything's ultimately right, we're all just guessing well. And here's the part that gets me, the genuinely funny part — someone may have already guessed it. Gotten it exactly right, centuries ago. And we'll never know it was him, because there's no way to check the answer. The right answer might be sitting in a book right now, unmarked, sitting identical to all the wrong ones.
A classmate tried to prove the Christian God can't exist. Goes like this: God is perfectly good, a perfectly good person is modest, but God demands praise — so he's not modest, so he's not perfectly good, so he can't be that God. Tight little argument. And I think it breaks on two words.
The two words are "good" and "perfect." "Good" — whose good? For a believer, good *is* whatever God wills. So God can't fail at good; he defines it. And "perfect" doesn't have to mean the absolute most of something. It can mean balanced — the Aristotle kind, the mean. A God who's balanced between good and evil, and good in the sense that his call is the right call by definition? That actually sounds more like the God they're trying to disprove than the one in the argument.
The whole trick was assuming a word has one meaning. It almost never does. Attack the definition and the proof either survives or it doesn't — and this one didn't, because "perfect" had a back door marked "balance" the whole time.