Things have been in something of an upheaval since leaving the military. My identity was enmeshed with my role, and I no longer play that role. Life is palpably indeterminate without a command-structure, or mission-driven orientation. You just sort of…drift, unless, of course, you choose not to. I tell myself, you are not part of anything bigger than yourself right now so nothing is setting the current for you. You are.

Things have slowed to a still.

Indecision is the dizziness of freedom, and I am swaying, quietly, in vertigo.

So it was fortuitous timing that I read Lloyd Gerson’s Plato’s Moral Realism–which I will be rereading for years to come.

His portrait of a Platonic moral realism came to me as exactly what I needed to hear at that exact moment in time: a call to action, and a roadmap to self-discovery.

I had in so many ways become a many-headed monster, reductively identifying myself with the subjects of fleeting desires. But these are only ephemeral images of my ideal self, who longs for the Good. I ought to be striving to be an integrated unity, rather than succumbing to the gravity of embodiment that tends all of us toward dispersal.

I needed to hear Plato’s plea to wake up:

“There is an evil, great above all others, which most men have, implanted in their souls, and which each one of them excuses in himself and makes no effort to avoid. It is the evil indicated in the saying that every man is by nature a lover of self, and that it is right that he should be such. But the truth is that the cause of all sins in every case lies in the person’s excessive love of self. For the lover is blind in his view of the object loved, so that he is a bad judge of things just and good and noble, in that he deems himself bound always to value what is his own more than what is true,” (Laws, V 731d-732a).

In some ways, I act like something of a scientist, filling papers with formulae, trying to uncover what lies beneath. But I need to be more present in the textured moments of flesh from which I look out. I need to be more human.

How does one live more conscientiously, integrating all their experiences through singular presence, rather than resigning to autopilot in various areas out of lopsidedly indulged interests and attention?

Practice. By starting to notice certain events as opportunities to deliberately say yes or no, you can resist being reduced to knee-jerk reactions.

But this sort of ‘moral’ training of the person isn’t easy. The inertia of embodiment is toward the dispersal of self into its images. Is there an efficient motivator to overcome that?

Perhaps.

You know, for all its advances and progress, there is one thing modern logic will never beat classical logic at, and that is the psychological force of a syllogism. Its way of organizing and presenting reasons effortlessly commands the mind.

So, in this month or so that I have taken off from social media, I have devoted myself to returning to the old logic, in order to rediscover the syllogism. And I am convinced it is a tool of enormous relevance to the moral life.

Unlike modern logic, classical logic is not so much concerned with the formal relations between abstract structures, but with the real relations between things. It tells us to train our minds to see the nature of things first, so that we may label them correctly, and reason about them without error. Hence, in the process of constructing a syllogism for or against a course of action, one is forced to give the reason in nature for the conclusion: she must search for the middle term actually responsible for linking the major and minor terms.

By seeing for oneself what it is about the nature of things that makes the conclusion hold, a powerful impetus to act and believe is born.

I recently put this to the test in my dispersed condition when confronted by a very uncomfortable situation. By peering into the nature of ‘speaking one’s mind’, I saw that it was an extension of being authentic, and that being authentic is Good.

I hope you all had a blessed holiday season.

Consider reading Gerson’s work, and maybe giving the old syllogism a try.

The moral force of logic might just surprise you.