On / January 5, 2008 CE, at 8:20 PM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
>
> Not at all - I simply do not accept that such a thing as evil exists
> - merely the absence of good.
And yet Epictetus did. ""Where is the good? In the will. Where is the
evil? In the will. Where is neither of them? In those things which are
independent of the will."
>
> None of the nice folk you mention ever considered that they were
> doing wrong - they were doing the right thing in terms of their own
> paradigm.
I did not mention any nice folk or discuss the morality of their
actions. You are making my argument for nihilism, I think.
>
> Chigurh kills a number of people simply because they are irrelevant
> or minor obstacles. He also seems to spare some on the grounds that
> they are innocent bystanders. Thus the importance of the element of
> chance which is fundamental to Stoicism and symbolised by the coin
> which is always 'attached' to the assassin. Neither is he an
> 'avenging angel' on a mission - he has a strong sense of what is
> 'right'.
Well so do the other characters have a sense of what is right.
Motivation alone does not determine morality. And the path talk.
Please. That is such a common movie cliche from the Buddha connection
in Kung Fu movies to wise Indian speech in American westerns, to jump
on stoicism is a great leap of faith. :-)
Another quote that better describes, in my opinion, our serial killer:
in regards to those who lack Stoic virtue; Cleanthes once opined that
the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go
wherever it goes." Chigurh's cart obviously has a bunch of hard
little rules obviously tied to an easily bruised ego that demands
satisfaction and which probably give some temporary stability, but I
hardly think that constitutes a stoic philosophy.
> He believes himself to be in control until the car crash at
> the end when chance intervenes. He expresses the 'rightness' of that
> view to the Harrelson character before killing him ("If your path is
> what brought you to this point, what use was it?") He cannot
> understand why Carla Jean refuses the coin toss.
> The only wholly moral (and stoic) individuals are the Sheriff, his
> deputy and his wife, I think. Moss acts morally and dooms himself
> thereby but still takes the money - but only from those who are both
> undeserving and dead.
> The sheriff was retiring anyway - he does not do it to 'take control'
> - he knows that he has none. The conversations with his uncle (Barry
> Corbin) and his wife establish that, as well as the continuity and
> inevitbility of violence in that environment. He is the stoic and the
> only winner.
>>
I agree that the sheriff is the only character with a strong moral
sense and I could go along that he had a stoic approach to life but he
was not a victor in the stoic way of looking at things. He is greatly
troubled at the end in his retirement. As Mr. Bertrand Russell said, "
A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world
and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril
and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace
and happy." Sheriff's not happy. His philosophy is not enough for the
world and has to retire from it.
I still think it is nihilism, but I realize I am way over my head
here. So whatever you say.
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