#givenness

‘“Individualism” claims G.K. Chesterton, “kills individuality.” While perhaps formulating a subjectivist paradise devoid of “pure” objective rationality, Nietzsche opened the door to a form of individualism that led to a new extreme of impotence and feebleness that the Enlightenment might never have reached. Peterson’s dour temperament, juxtaposed with the well-adjusted temperaments of the jovial Chesterton and the vivacious [Slavoj] Zizek . . . testifies to the death of individuality under the tyranny of individualism.

‘But the [Jordan] Peterson crying videos mostly make me sad for him because of how seriously he takes himself, and how rarely, one finds the man laughing. These videos also make me think of something even sadder than—as Slavoj Zizek once remarked—how difficult it is to “elicit from [Peterson] a joke”: the life and death of Friedrich Nietzsche.

‘Taking personal responsibility for one’s life is certainly not simple. “Men make their own history,” Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, “but they do not make it as they please … but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” So, to grapple with the simplest of facts: my life, my freedom, and existence itself are neither entirely the products of my own making nor the results of systemic forces alone. They emerge, rather, out of the unpredictable interplay of both. Put simply, they are gifts. Such an awareness of the givenness of things has helped me to see past warring ideologies, whose greatest error is perhaps their tendency to make their adherents take themselves too seriously.’

“The opposite of this mode of being is adventure, a mode I would roughly define as a knock on your door that makes you get off your ass to do something. Adventure is a synthesis of freedom and necessity—a free, creative dealing with what is given. It involves reckoning with what you do not choose.”

“Our culture is plagued (which only ever means I am plagued and I believe it of others) with an aversion to the given—those people, places, and things that are given to us, annihilating the possibility of another person, another place, and another thing.

«It would be absurd if the farmer took the same tack of stark dominion, saying: “This land that belongs to me has a life of its own. I will control that life and thereby be the sole master of my property. I will no longer be a slave to its ecology. My power will be the sole source of its fruits.” No. It is obvious that the otherness of the land is precisely what enables the farmer to farm.

«There are certain realities that are so basic in their goodness, beauty, and importance that they are not so much chosen as given. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Swiss Alps, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French language, moral absolutes, and the saints are goods that give themselves to us in all of their complexity and compelling power. We don’t choose them; they choose us. We don’t make demands of them; they impose a demand upon us […] The Word of God, preserved in the Church, is a supreme value of this type. We shouldn’t therefore speak of choosing sections of it that we like and leaving behind those that bother us. Rather, we should let it, in all of its multivalence and complexity, claim us.»