To "act" is to live!

One purpose of a retreat is to awaken us to the truth that the truth is to be lived, acted out, not only thought. Unless I live the truth I think, my truth is not incarnated. But thinking is needed too because our emotions and passions must be informed and trained by reason. And reason tells me that parts must be understood together with their wholes in order to be really understood, so they can really be lived.

In order to see a whole one must see "ends." An end is that for which a thing exists. As an example, the end of the art of medicine is the restoration and maintenance of the condition called health. I can have many "purposes" in practicing medicine -- to gain wealth, for prestige, to help people -- but unless I conform my art of medicine to its "end" -- securing health -- I am not respecting the nature of medicine, its true end, in my actions. The morality of our actions is determined by the ends of the material of our actions, not by our purposes. As Aristotle said in the Poetics, "all human happiness or misery takes the form of action." (Poetics 5.1450a17-19). In other words, our actions will make us miserable or happy, depending on whether we respect the ends inherent in our actions.

Another topical example of ends is sex. A "part" of sex, of course, is pleasure, but its "end" is the unity open to procreation (the birthing and rearing of children). To restrict our focus to pleasure, to use technology to eliminate the end, in effect, to make the part the whole, is to misunderstand the nature of the sexual, its proper end, and to warp it, by human purpose, away from what it is by nature. That is living a fiction, a similitude, a "sin."

Francis Slade* mentions the films of Quentin Tarentino (Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers) as depicting a world in which there are only the purposes of human beings, a "world without ends." Such a world is a world of purposes and cross purposes, a world of violence, "the definition of fiasco." "A world of fiasco is a world in which guilt is impossible, because guilt requires responsibility for actions, and there are actions only if purposes are measured by ends." In a world without proper actions, the world degenerates into a despairing meaninglessness. Another term is nihilism.

To restate, living requires reasoned actions, which in turn require an understanding of the "whole" of things, including things' proper "ends." Our calling is to act, to incarnate our "holistic" reason into action, respecting things' ends. That is to live!

*Francis Slade, "On the Ontological Priority of Ends And Its Relevance to the Narrative Arts."