The Mechanics of Virtue #323: Iago's Gambit

323

Iago’s Gambit: Plain dealing does not appear intelligent.  It is simple arithmetic.  But this fact does not necessarily make intrigue the more intelligent option.  The man who is always scheming suffers from the delusion that he knows all when he only knows much.  He is quite different from that wiser sort which accepts a limit to the intellect.  The evil and the good, the schemer and the provident – in the day-to-day, these are two chess masters who play within a life sized board, and the one counts the pieces and the squares and proceeds shrewdly, confident in his arithmetic, while the other counts the pieces and the squares and trusts that beyond the horizon of his view exist other pieces and other squares: an ignorance for which no additional arithmetic can compensate.  He refuses confidence in calculating the next few moves with the same emphasis that he rejects astrology.  He now appears as simplistic as the simpleton who knows no arithmetic – he appears inferior to the shrewd as well, but his strategy is sound – and precisely where the shrewd has sacrificed probability with his smug belief in the certainty of the next few moves.

Iago plays this sort of chess game with the immediate world against the totality of the prevailing conditions.  He believes in an equation of mechanics which does not include accumulating repetition nor one’s necessary ignorance of the complex forces bearing down on every event.  Thus, he has a certainty ... a materialism which is really a complacency: he has a line of reasoning and a description of mechanical effects laid out as if the matter were as simple as a game of billiards. 

Time is not on the side of the Iagos and the Macbeths of the world.  Ultimately their method disperses that force which would otherwise have been accumulating in their favor.  They grab hold of a single “key” instance and believe they can then pull a preconceived chain of consequences out of their future, but in doing so they forfeit the advantage of that tendency which overcomes even the best of intentions, which is also to say that it can even overwhelm the hell of one's necessary ignorance.  A genuine but intelligent good accumulates its force from the tendency of instances; evil believes it can steal an instance out of its own tendency.

Popular posts from this blog

A valuable book, A Human Strategy, aphorism 387

387 A valuable book may be torn to pieces without diminishing the human spirit, just so long as the words have already been read and understood.  To feel the loss of the book — at its material destruction, even though one had already digested its contents fully and had aligned oneself toward its overall direction — is evidence that one values the non-human being over human becoming , the static thing over the dynamic process .  In response to the fear of our unknowable future we would rather freeze ourselves into a single stage of growth at the expense of the entire metamorphosis. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism
Read more
A benefactor's Moral Guide: what do you want that will not result in your ultimate dishonor?      ****    Meditation: "How do I get back to where I want to be?"
Read more

A theory of art

Interest is not in what you see. It’s in what you don’t see. It is sensed incompleteness completed reflexively by the spectator. It is a conflict in the otherwise imperceptible feeling that a sensory organ is “inadequate” … a mastery of scratching irritations, an “I” … “the” I. We love art the most when we scratch ourselves with what we view.  Art is valued at the interest that the passion from the incompletes in the work is instantly and successful satisfied by what the lover needs to sense … every time it senses the art.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism
Read more