Restlessness

  LIfe is a basically restless thing. Its a series of unexamined letdowns and over romanticized hopes, or unexamined consequences, and over romanticized fears, but it is rarely what it seems. We have all experienced good times and bad times, only to come out of the bad times entering the good times amazed that we could have such a gloomy perspective on life, only to come out of the good times entering the bad time amazed that we ever thought life was so good. We may even do this same kind of juggling in our opinions of ourselves. And perhaps the problem with us is that we think of ourselves way to often, perhaps the basic cause of our restlessness. 

 Still, it has yet to be examined whether or not life ought to be restless, if there is anything we can do about it. If we cannot do anything about it, there is no sense worrying about it, there is much sense in contentedness in restlessness. Certainly this is contradictory. Therefore there must be something that we can do, or somebody can do for us to make us content. The question is asked: Can there be restlessness in a person without self-conscience? If a person were unaware of themselves as a distinguishable self, could they be restless? Assuming this kind of person has desires, what kind of desires would they have? And ah, perhaps it is, no, indubitably, it is desires from whence springs restlessness, so that it would not matter whether or not the person has self-conscience, he would still be restless since there is no reason to think that he would not have desires apart from self-conscience. His desires would simply be desires for others, and therefore he might have hope, he might have fear, he might have joy, he might have sorrow, but all of these outside of himself. Does he now truly live? 

  It is the recognition that restlessness is a product of desire that the Stoics resolved to think that desire was overrated, if not needless. But perhaps the idea that desire is dissolvable in a human being is an overestimation. Could not one propose that indeed, the distinctive quality of humanity is found in its ability to desire? 

  It has been long assumed that animals operate on instinct and not on desire, only what appears to be desire to creatures like us who operate on desire. Whence is the distinction between man and beast? Psychological research has demonstrated that at least to some degree human beings operate on instinct. Is the soul just a product of unparalleled intellect? The key to the question is found in the human sense of right and wrong. Even human beings who participate in war find it to be a necessary evil. But some members of the animal kingdom, have zero qualms about killing their own race in the name of survival. Animals care nothing about marital faithfulness, which partly explains why they are no such things as ceremonies in the animal kingdom, not to mention illiteracy. Thievery is an everyday errand for many animals. Why are some things wrong? Could it be that thousands of years of human civilization was built on an unscientific, ignorant, artificial morality? If this sounds preposterous, it may be because it is. It is safer to believe that a sense of morality is derivative of an innate sense of the an ideal than to believe that the ideal is the problem. What arbitrary code do wrong acts or thoughts break?  The code is not arbitrary. It is instilled. 

  Persons made in the image of God have desires for the world, and as such can be disappointed when they are not fulfilled, and joyous when they are, fearful that they will not, hopeful that they will. But persons confused about what right and wrong is are restless. Persons who have taken a bite from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, have chosen to doubt the innate sense, and have created in their own image the concept of an ideal. That is not to say that the ideal is not ideal. It is to say, that without the knowledge of good and evil, no comparison to bad can be made, and therefore the concept "ideal" would not a part of the human vocabulary. The great ethical dilemma is that ethics has to exist. We are restless, not  simply because we have desires, but because our desires are confused, because we have lost any ground aside from human reason to be able to determine what is right and what is wrong. In a world of confused desires and gratuitous trust in our ability to reason there will exist a scary ability to rationalize our wrongs. Faith is the only acceptable return ticket to contentedness.