Ruminations on the Ontology of Morslity

by Steven Sills

Chapter 17

  Earliest Memories

  So, in a query on whether philosophical perspective is merely an objectification of the summation of personal experience I will now enumerate the myriad me the best that I am able to do. According to the birth certificate, I was born in the city of Chaingrai, Thailand in 1964, a millennium ago, or so it seems, as it is now 2014, although my earliest memories not induced and thus to some degree fabricated by later viewing of black and white photographs would have been of Surat Thani, the grandson of a small rambutan orchard farmer before being reclaimed and ripped from symbiotic lives that once made up a family. I hardly remember my grandparents now with ever more memories and their corresponding nows perennially avalanching onto me, and the earlier mes in their tangles of old neurological decay and sediment pulverized under the weight and strata of it all; but I can still recall that visceral experience, how upset they were upon losing me, and how it exacerbated my own sense of loss at the time. This is engraved onto the walls of my brain, onto me, and has become my being, for the parents had been impostors, juggernauts, arrogating what was no longer theirs in their selfish need to possess a being from their loins and use him for monetary gain.

  According to Boethius it is the copious changes of fate, and sharp vicissitudes, that compel a man to find happiness not in external happenings, but in himself, and that the worst of all fates is to have a life so perfect and yet so dependent on the next success to retain this state of happiness, for with enough age, according to Boethius, misfortune will finally come to those possessing such perfect lives, and when it does they will not be immured to the consequences. 80 But then with house arrest and impending death, he would hardly have argued otherwise as it is man’s tendency to mitigate travail by fictional anodynes of religion and moral justifications. But despite Boethius’ comments, nothing good came of this rupture from these primary caregivers of the first six or seven years of my life, for thereafter I always understood that depredation and abrupt termination were indispensable components of human relationships, an understanding no one should have.

  In Surat Thani, in the deep South, I remember at the age of four getting lost in mannequins in a department store; out of a fear of being scolded, convincing my friend that we should wipe our muddy shoes on a neighbor’s doormat as that was what doormats were meant for, incurring the neighbor lady’s wrath instead of that of our own respective families, or perhaps in addition to them—I am really not sure; playing alone in the street, nearly hit by a motorist screeching to a halt and the driver accosting my grandmother hurling his insults at her, which effected my banishment to her bedroom, crying on the white handmade blanket under the bed’s mantle with its radio playing the mellifluous sounds of traditional music, the legends of Thai story and dance, which even now resonates in the same cognate sympathy and lugubriousness as it had back then; my grandmother exercising to the instructions of a host to a television program; the morning smells of fruit, coffee, and rice and curry; my grandfather’s yellow straw hat and gloves when going to the orchard, and my grandmother kissing him goodbye whenever he was about to go away; hearing the inveigling music of the ice cream truck and running toward it with some coins my grandmother had given to me which I clutched tightly; the smell of tar emanating from roads during the summer heat and of oil on telephone or electrical poles—again, I do not remember the specificity, but only those smells; and the yellow bus that would take my cousin, donned in a raincoat to school—she who was also abandoned by her parents to their care, no doubt also due to the factors of poverty and desperation. Perhaps it rained inordinately during those years as rain and windshield wipers seem to be an ineluctable part of those memories. I remember my grandmother reproaching my cousin and the neighbor children, telling them that capturing lightning bugs and strapping them into grass plaited pinky rings was a vile form of injustice as they too were heavenly creatures—the sentiment rather than the religiosity still seeming eminently truthful and to this date making me wary about exploitation of animals, human or otherwise, and cognizant that to say that religion has only been a destructive force81 is a vast oversimplification when good and bad can come from virtually anything. Plato himself suggested that equity and harmony could only take place if individuals believed a mendacity that despite all appearances to the contrary, they were in fact inherently of a similar valuable substance.82 Although I would be reluctant to call it morality, my grandmother’s admonishment engendered values and sensitivities into an ethical framework that has always made me indebted to her. And one time around sunset my cousin’s friend accidently struck her in the eye with the swing of a golf club, and I remember not only the profuse blood but my acute fear which caused me to cry inconsolably. I suppose it was the first time I felt deep concern for another human being that had little to do with any personal nexus to myself—that which, for lack of a better phrase, should be called true love. Tender, caring, and innocent, I was a receptor of the world around me, and a lover of being alive. The child psychologist Piaget may call this childish inclination to perceive everything as having feeling as animistic thinking,83 and it is definitely true up to a point, but such reductionism is an indignity to the innocence of pure sentience and pathos therein; and St. Augustine is rather inane in imputing a protective defense of crying to original sin (selfish, it may be and has to be, but sinful it is not), and of course when he feels remorse for having once cried as a baby,84 he takes his ideals to entertaining lunacy. Life was burgeoning around me, and I was burgeoning in life. Nothing thereafter is as great as the early years of being an epigone of the creative force of life, the celebrator and celebration of unfamiliar being; and me, not knowing any better, having the idea that my grandparents and I would go on this way forever.

  “I don’t know,” said the Luklawan gecko as her little paws walked between the last two lines. “It seems self-defeating.”

  “How is that?”

  The gecko stopped walking and stared boldly at its repugnant human counterpart, that monstrosity which it did not care to look at. It grimaced. “How can your ontology of morality be trusted if you are now challenging its very foundation, the discipline of philosophy itself—its disinterested stance, its objectified focus on reality. It’s a major contradiction.”

  “Do I contradict myself? I contradict myself. I am many, I am multitude,85” says Sunthorn Phu.”

  “He said nothing of the sort.”

  “Well, he should have said it. The fact that our greatest poet is a plagiarist of Indian tales tells a great deal about us, the people of Siam.”

  “You like stirring up the establishment.”

  “Yes, call me agent provocateur. I get fed up with everything—these colleagues, these professors, professing to be knowledgeable from degrees they bought overseas and never earned, walking around with such airs though they are gods for having come from the families of the haute monde. Such individuals should not teach. Maybe students would be better off without teachers.”

  “Are students supposed to teach themselves?”

  “I think that is a great idea: the next semester of classes should be taught by respective students-- each one becoming a philosopher for the day. Everyone would learn a great deal more, I am sure.”

  “And you would get no respect whatsoever.”

  “I don’t care about respect. Everything needs to be shaken up.”

  “Like in Thai politics now?”

  “Maybe. Maybe democracy needs to be shaken to the core through wars—material force countering material force in, as Marx says, historical materialism.86”

  “And yet you’re the one who complains about your lectures on Western philosophy going in one ear and out the other; and that as universities here only have philosophy programs to appear in accordance with fulfilling the objective of a liberal arts education that you could stand on your head all day every day for what any of them would
care.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean that literally. Appearance of verisimilitude is very important here. Anyhow, don’t get so uptight. I am just whiling away the hours jotting down notes for a book that I never intend to write. It doesn’t mean anything. Nothing ever does.”

  “Where were you the other night?”

  “You know. Your eyes seem to penetrate into everything.”

  “You called to me, and then you went to another.”

  “I needed to rematerialize after all this stationary deterioration in the apartment, feigning the writing a book, sinking into the abyss of myself. Action of flesh to flesh: nothing makes a man more solid as a man than this.”

  “It’s disgraceful. You are a professor of philosophy and ethics. And then you just abandoned her in that hotel room.”

  “She was a prostitute. Was I supposed to take her home with me?”

  “I guess not considering that you have one at home already. How can you write on morality when you commit such acts?”

  “I’m not. The ontology of morality is its antithesis—that which we are and abhor.” The gecko only glowered.