I damaged someone else’s car on my first time driving alone and…
**Busy-time writing rambling warning**
Today, my very first time driving without “adult” supervision, I scraped someone’s car. I was parking my car at the gym, and there it was, an obvious white line through the flank of the beautiful, red, presumably new car resting on my left. In the aftermath of trying to save further damage while lamenting my almost nonexistent parallel parking skills, I moved my car to another spot while thinking about what to do.
Should I think of morality? Maybe I should at least leave a note and pay for the damage, be it ten bucks, a hundred, or a thousand; I don’t know much about car-fixery. In my post-moral, Nietzschean/Foucaultian self, I can’t sincerely bring myself to think about what is the “right” or “wrong” thing to do. This line of thinking is entirely ludicrous. This year, I have been flirting with nihilism. I say “flirting” because I have never intended to marry moral nihilism, but can’t help but be seduced by its ground-shattering truth, even if it just carries a little of it, to such ideas as “justice” and “morality” that people make up to oppress others. Maybe I should explain more, but I’ll save it. Besides the initial panic, I didn’t feel any emotion, except that I want to workout and think this through. So I just left.
On today’s dose of 5k run, I thought about if this was a system that humans treat each other (running = thinking, after all). What would you do? I think a better question is: if morality does not inherently exist, what would be the guiding principles of society? Or forget about society, just for your individual person? If we could generalize any principles from this situation, what would it be? That people can do damage to another, intentional or not, and walk away forgetting that anything has happened. Or more general than that. I don’t find any logical inconsistency with living in this world, but I certainly wouldn’t want to live in this world. As anyone who has read a little bit of ethics can see, this is a pretty Kantian line of thinking (Kant has a pretty vague definition of logical inconsistency anyways). I was never a big fan of Kant, but I do think it is important for people to have some principles while doing things, and I have none.
If there is anything that I do believe in independent of anyone or anything, I say “love, passion, and the capacity to enjoy beauty” — that I have written about extensively elsewhere. I have no appetite for the kind of generosity or kindness or compassion that society preaches. But if I could have any belief about this world at all, the first I would say is the belief that beauty is everywhere — that I find it quite beautiful that people live in this world, sometimes greatly and sometimes mundanely, searching for meaning when there is none, celebrating life when they are tending towards death. That is quite beautiful. I love how Henry David Thoreau says, “I come into this world to live in it, not to change it.” But even so, you could do things according to your beliefs, and here is mine. Given that, I don’t think there is reason to treat people with cynicism and apathy, even though there are some parts of you that also believe this way.
I don’t know. I still don’t think that this is a “moral” issue, but more of a personal issue. So after the run, in my oxygen-deprived state, I walked out of the gym to try to find the car. Downstairs, a gym salesman desperately handed me a gym brochure advertising their membership even though I obviously just walked out of their gym. I took one of them and wrote a note of apology and my contact on it to slide into the car if it is still there. This was an hour before the initial incident happened. The car was just inching out of the driveway, so I knocked on the car window to an initially oblivious but alarmed driver who stared at me like I was going to rob his car. Surprisingly, after hearing about the situation and examining the car, he quickly dismissed it as “no big deal.” I was relieved but insisted on giving him my number, shoving the brochure into his hand. He took it out of nicety, and don’t worry, and drove off.
(It’s a little funny in retrospect to think that after going home and looking at the brochure, he will probably think I insisted on giving it to him to advertise some gym membership.)
It was probably just not a big deal. Maybe the insurance could easily cover it. I thought so much about it because it was my first time driving alone and I already scraped someone’s car seemingly badly (showing why I tend to lose all Mario Kart games); and because I have been contemplating for some time whether the nihilistic apathy has really been helping and harming me. In any case, I think that this is a beginning where I will approach nihilistic thoughts much more critically, not as a matter of truth but how you approach your truth. To treat it as a “building up” rather than “tearing down” project. That it perhaps precludes objective meaning or purpose but not the fact that you could find your personal conviction.
I want to post this to, just to write, and hear about what you think on the issue. I’m not going to run it against spelling or grammar check because I have many, many finals next week. I also did not write about how certain events and readings led me to tempt with the absurdist/nihilist line of thinking because 1) many of you who might read this already know it and 2) it is going to take far more than a few pages.
I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of a kid. But now, I want to treat myself more as an adult, not to believe naïveté morality but to live with conviction. A Kantian freedom.
