This is a project I’ve promised to start for a long time. Promised whom? No one more nor less than myself. Promised what? To do my utmost to conform the world to my own ideas of The Good. In other words, the project I’ve laid out for myself is to do everything I possibly can to create the conditions which will allow me to live the life I want, perpetually and in peace.
It’s a project that’s grown in fits and starts. Mostly fits. I’ve spent far more time than I care to admit descending through never-ending preludes to action. I’ve agonized and obsessed over so much, yet I’ve done it quietly, privately, internally, hesitantly. I have never actually realized a thing. For all I’ve seen and done, for all the things I’ve read and conversations I’ve had, for all the thinking I’ve done, I have yet to produce anything tangible.
But now in retrospect I can say with some surety that these delays have served a purpose. In large part, it’s taken me so long to start because I simply wasn’t sure of myself, or the world. I needed to gain a handle on the moving ratio of self-to-cosmos.
It’s only now I say that my project is to shape the world to match my idea of The Good. At one point, my desire (desire, not project) was to simply do whatever I wanted – to satisfy whatever urges happened to occur to me, with very little regard for others. At another point, my goal (goal, not desire) was to be left alone, to live the lifestyle I wanted – to find some private space apart from the world where I could be happy. At yet another point, my efforts (efforts, not goal) were directed towards understanding what actually makes me happy. Many other points have been defined by struggles to reconcile desires, goals, and efforts which have often been, or at least seemed, fundamentally opposed. To be clear, these are not serial events. I don’t mean to present this as a progression towards maturity. Really, these are poles – only a few, in a nearly infinite spectrum of existential meditations about what it means to be alive and to live, and how to manage myself with and within dynamic and complex networks of relationships (human and non-human) which occasionally take on the appearance of being a comprehensive totality (what we might call a “world”, or a “cosmos”, or sometimes a “society”).
So, among other things, I needed time to hem and haw my way closer to a personal understanding of what is The Good. And in that process I came to see that ideal forms are nothing more than speculative representations of the real. That is, The Good is not a fixed thing, but is only created and recreated in the moments when lived experience (individual, or communal) is inflected through a negative image, to produce an artificial picture of completeness.
Thus, when I say my project is to “conform the world to my own ideas of The Good”, it might seem that I’m describing a frenetic process of constantly holding reality up to the light, to see at any given moment, what is missing, and then striving to change the world accordingly. In fact, what I mean to say is that I needed time to change my personal conception of The Good – to reject the premise of completeness, to rid myself of the delusion that there is a perfect state of affairs which can be achieved.
Instead, I needed to arrive at an understanding that The Good is any situation in which today is better than yesterday in terms of achieving mutually beneficial relationships between all things, humans and non-humans. To borrow from Kant (that is, to deploy my own understanding of Kant), I needed time to appreciate that the only good thing is a Good Will. Thus my project is to create a world in which all treat all with Good Will.
What do I mean by that? I’m not entirely sure. But, that’s ok. In large part, my reason for finally starting this website is to finally make my thinking public – to think out loud, so that others may think with me. That was something else I needed time to get over. The anxieties of sharing, the anxieties of being open – both of which entail creating vulnerabilities. I certainly fear being misunderstood, or co-opted, or plagiarized. I fear being unoriginal, or overlooked, or being considered maladroit. I wish to engage with others, but I am still a creature of ego. But, all of these sentiments have particular etiologies, and I will address them elsewhere.
The hard things is simply to open myself, and let things progress from there. That’s what I’m doing right now, in writing this. I’m doing my best to put aside ego, and to open myself. To this end, I have been aided by a Turkish idiom I learned this past year: Kervan yolda düzülür.
As best I understand it: The caravan levels out on the road. This is a sentiment I think many of us implicitly understand. ‘If only I could get started (if only I had the proper help and resources!), then my project would certainly take shape in the process of doing it.’
There are always reasons not to start, with some being perhaps more valid than others. But now, I’m going to put aside my aesthetic concerns and my obsession with precise language. Today I’m just going to start deploying my Good Will, and I’m not going to stop, and I will make a world.
