A THERAPEUTIC POST, AND A WORD ABOUT "REASONABLENESS"

A REFLECTION

I'm really in no emotional condition to write. This is not a confession; I just want to say how I feel now so I can remember it later. It helps me when I express what's going on inside my head. During easier times, I can write almost endlessly because I can focus. These days, however, I can barely concentrate. I mentioned last week that I have been going through hard times because my life partner began suffering from a mental illness. It got so bad that he had to go to the hospital to "rest." I have no idea how long he will stay there.

I have never endured a situation like this. We have lived together for nearly ten years; it is jarring to know he is no longer in the house. Worse, I am tormented by the thought that he is not the person I knew. When I speak to him on the phone, it is clear that his illness has overtaken his mind. It breaks my heart and drains my own energy. In addition, I have no idea what the future holds. It is mentally taxing to deal with uncertainty about important things. I am tired all day long. My mind cannot follow anything for more than a few minutes. I am not doing well.

All this trouble started more than two years ago. My partner's mental illness represents the culmination of pressures that began when he suffered a freak burn accident in 2007. I typically do not talk about personal things like this, but now I see no reason to hold back. It helps me sort out my own difficulties when I put them in a chronology. I still cling to logic when it comes to understanding historical events that have an effect on me. I have a good memory and I put it to use.

Let's start with the injury. My partner suffered a devastating burn on his right arm in a health club steam room. No one really knows how it happened; he went into shock almost immediately after it happened. He always tells the same story: He was walking into the steam room when a burst of steam came from his right side, scalding him. He immediately left the steam room, where an employee saw him and remarked: "Oh my God, your arm!" Soon thereafter, he fainted. An ambulance took him to the emergency room. A few hours later, Chicago's best burn trauma unit admitted him for treatment. To make a long story short, he stayed in the hospital for 35 days, endured several skin graft surgeries, suffered two heart attacks and an induced coma.

Upon his release, he was essentially a broken man. His right arm was permanently disfigured. He could still use it for most things, but he did not dare show it in public. To save his arm, doctors had to shear skin off his legs to patch onto the wound. He bears those scars, too. Within a few months, he began slipping into deep depression. He did not get out of bed all day. And he continued to suffer pain in his arm. He took addictive opiate pain-killers to manage it.

All the while, I cared for him. I did the shopping. I did the errands. I took him to appointments and made phone calls. I managed the medications and dealt with the doctors. I provided comfort and sat by the bed when I had to. I tried to work for the first few months after he left the hospital. But he got so lonely and depressed while I was away that I genuinely feared for his life. So I decided to suspend my career to care for him. During that I time, I started writing this blog. Yet during the same time, I have had the much greater responsibility to care for him. In consequence, I, too, have scarcely known rest since 2007.

We tried to sue the health club that caused the injury. But whenever my partner talked about what happened, he fell deeper into depression. Lawyers think it's easy for injured people to relive the worst day in their lives over and over again; it isn't. Worse, we discovered that the health club did not maintain liability insurance on its land, so it would be extremely difficult to recover any money on his behalf without a knock-down, drag-out fight that likely would have driven him over the emotional edge. Our lawyers refused to continue representing us when they found the club had no insurance. Legally and morally, our lawyers held the high ground: No one deserves to enter a business establishment and walk out with a life-threatening burn injury. Numerous legal theories supported our position, from negligence to strict products liability. From a theoretical perspective, we should have won some compensation for him.

But we didn't. No matter how many legal advantages we had, the lawyers got cold feet as soon as they learned there was no insurance involved. Five other lawyers had the same reaction: "Oooh, no insurance! Sorry, I can't help you."

In personal injury cases, liability insurance companies ensure that defendants do not go bankrupt when accidents happen on their land. The insurance company pays for the defense and pays any judgments against the defendants. This protects the defendants' own assets from seizure. Insurance companies also speed things along relatively fast; and that makes everyone happy, including the injured person's lawyers. An insurance company will settle a case against its client quite readily if there are strong facts from which to imply negligence. The defendant just goes along with the program: After all, it is not his money at stake. By contrast, when a defendant does not have insurance, he will fight to the end because it is his money.

That was the situation we faced. And our lawyers bailed out the moment they discovered that they would have to fight for years for potentially no reward. Neither justice nor legal principle spurred them to action. Unless a case could quickly pay out, it was not worth taking. For these lawyers, cases were little more than investments. It did not matter that my partner suffered outrageous injustice due to the health club's negligence: There was not a quick, ready profit to be made on his case, so no lawyer pursued it. Ironically, the health club saved itself by acting irresponsibly: It did not have liability insurance.

Naturally, this result only deepened my resentment toward lawyers and their profession. It reaffirmed that justice does not motivate lawyers. Only potential profits interest them. If a case involves justice and profits, that will get them off their seats. But if it involves justice and no profit, forget it.

But I wonder what would have happened even if the case went forward. How could anyone put a dollar value on my partner's injury? How could money compensate him for the agony he suffered? How could any check restore his scorched arm, or make him whole from the misery and pain he endured in the hospital? I saw his pain up close and personal. I saw him scream at night. I saw him unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator. I saw him cry out in fear as they wheeled him off for yet another surgery. I saw him with a trach tube down his throat and unable to speak. I saw him sweat through his clothes and lie helpless in the bed with his bloody arm in a splint. I had to cut off his shirts with a knife and sponge him dry. I saw him fall into depression and now into mania. What money could make all this "disappear?" What does money have to do with all this?

All these experiences made me question the law. From the law's perspective, money "recompenses" negligently-caused injury. Yet I know from experience that money would have done nothing to recompense my partner's plight, nor would have made his life "all better." Worse, I saw that the law condescends when it comes to monetary awards for injury. Suppose, for instance, that a jury evaluated my partner's pain, suffering and emotional turmoil and concluded that the health club's negligence caused it. Let's say it awarded him $5,000,000. That's all well and good. But under a doctrine called "remittitur," the judge could say: "That's unreasonable. He's only getting $500,000."

Think about how insulting that is. It's one thing to put a dollar amount on physical suffering, disfigurement, permanent injury and even death. It's quite another to claim that one amount is "reasonable" over another. My experience with life-altering injuries convinced me that the law is stupid. After all, what does a judge know about what injured people really suffer? And how can he say with any authority what someone's pain is "worth," let alone whether the amount is "reasonable?"

This example illustrates my deep resentment toward all "objective standards" in the law. Judges always speak in "reasonable" terms: "Reasonable time," "reasonable care," "reasonable regard," "reasonable amount," "reasonable certainty." They think they refer to some magical standard when they use the word "reasonable." In fact, they refer only to their own, value-laden judgments concerning particular conduct in particular circumstances. Judges, after all, come from a distinct social class with distinct ideas about money, punctuality, relationships and "responsibility." They probably never suffered life-altering injuries. If they object to a monetary amount as "excessive" from their perspective, they call it "unreasonable." Yet who are they to quantify another human being's suffering?

Let a judge's wife suffer the same agony that my partner suffered. Then he can tell me what amount would "reasonably" compensate her for it.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE IS A PRECIOUS COMMODITY--AND PSYCHIATRISTS SELL IT

A REFLECTION

I know a lot of people in therapy. Pretty soon I might join them. In one way or another, everyone deals with emotional disturbance and unhappiness in our society. Life can be incredibly painful. After all, we live in a competitive world. We basically contend with two types of people: (1) Indifferent people who want to outdo us; and (2) people we love who are biologically bound to die one day. It is stressful to cope with high stakes and loss all the time. We suffer defeats, losses and setbacks every day. Freud said that it is "much easier to experience unhappiness than happiness." Civilization and its Discontents, 26 (Strachey trans. 1961). Sometimes unhappiness grinds us into submission, no matter how optimistic we try to be. In brief, life takes a toll, even if you had a relatively stable childhood. And that's a rarity.

Yet for all our vulnerability to unhappiness and emotional pain, we strive for love. See generally Civilization and its Discontents, 33-34. We think that love will counteract our unhappiness, or at least make it more bearable. But we seek a very specific kind of love: Love without conditions or qualifications. We want love without first fulfilling others' demands or acceding to others' conceptions about "what we should be." As simple as it sounds, we want people to love us "for who we are," without manipulation or expectation. Generally speaking, expectations result at least in stress and at most in unhappiness. Expectations create a disparity between our conceptions about the future and reality. When reality does not match the expectation, we feel failure or worse. "Love with expectations" results in serious emotional pain. But love without expectations--simple, unconditional love--results in emotional satisfaction, even euphoria. That is what we want from life--strongly positive emotions--because when we feel that good, nothing else can bring us down.

But this is exactly the problem. After all, it is almost impossible to find unconditional love in society. First, our entire social structure does not really value individual happiness. Rather, it merely expects objective economic productivity and "service." Those two basic goals do not require happiness. Quite the contrary, they typically induce unhappiness. Very few people are ever happy about being "objectively economically productive" for someone else, nor are they ever happy about serving some domineering economic master. Yet "success" in our society flows from "productivity" and "service." It does not matter whether a "successful man" feels happy while he productively serves. It does not affect the bottom line. Subjective, individual feelings, in other words, simply do not matter in this objective social scheme.

But what are human beings if not feeling creatures? In the final analysis, every man and woman is a unique entity with emotions and thoughts. Emotions and thoughts are entirely subjective. While they might mean nothing to society or the economy, they mean everything to the individual who thinks and feels. Unconditional love is one of the best feelings a person can experience. Society, however, could care less about it. It is not essential either to productivity or service. This is why unhappiness is so rampant, even among people who appear "successful" and "content." They may reach "objective" standards for social success, but miserably fail to satisfy their own "subjective" emotional needs. In a word, there is much more to life than success.

We should not be surprised that it is hard to find unconditional love in our society. After all, everything has conditions attached in the merciless commercial crucible of life. A condition means something that must be fulfilled before something else is given. It is "bargain-like:" "If you cut my grass, I will give you $100." It channels behavior: You don't get the $100 if you don’t cut the grass. No one does anything for anyone else in our society without imposing some condition on performance. Conditions allow people to induce behavior in others. They allow people to tyrannize and manipulate others for their own gain. This might be perfectly appropriate in cutthroat commerce. But conditions attach not just to contracts and business deals. Rather, they attach just as often to human affections.

We want unconditional love because we are accustomed to conditional love. I read an article in the New York Times last week arguing that modern psychiatry can be explained by reference to "selling unconditional love" in a society that rarely loves, and only conditionally when it does. According to the article, living with conditional love cripples us emotionally. It said that even our parents do not often love us unconditionally. Much to the contrary, they typically want to "control our behavior" by baiting us with love. The article claimed that parents could warp their children not just by scolding and criticizing them, but also by excessively praising them. Each case implicates "conditional love." Praise creates an internal urge for conformity in a child, leading him or her to modify behavior in order to win the praise. Parents only give praise when the child acts "as they wish;" that is conditional love. Without fulfilling the condition, the parent does not praise--and does not love. Praise, then, can be just as damaging as critique.

If parents do not love unconditionally, who will? That is a serious question. If our closest relatives do not love us "for who we are," can we expect commercial actors, bosses and clients to do so? Certainly not. In fact, in commerce we never expect unconditional relationships. We always know that someone wants something from us in return for what they give. As fundamental as that "bargain imperative" may be in commerce, it is anathema to our emotional needs. We might steel ourselves to conditional relationships as we move through life. But in the process we deny ourselves the one thing that might bring us happiness. We will never find unconditional love in commerce; we will never find it in our careers. We never even find it within our own families. People always want us to act in some way that benefits them, or at least matches their sentiments. It is never enough to "be who we are." To fulfill conditions, we must always "be someone else." That leads to emotional ruin in the end.

This is the psychiatrist's niche. The psychiatrist, unlike the boss, the parent, the admirer or even the sometime friend, staunchly empathizes with his patient no matter what. He listens attentively. He does not impose his own moral or family-based judgments on the patient's choices or lifestyle. He offers the love that the patient's own parents refused to give without conditions. This is modern therapy. It is a dose of unconditional love in a world without unconditional love. Perplexingly, however, it is also a commercial relationship. Therapists do not support their patients because they genuinely want to give unconditional love; they do it because they are on the clock. In this sense, they offer "unconditional love conditional upon payment," but even that is better than purely conditional love.

Unconditional love is a precious commodity. The fact that so many people turn to therapy testifies to its pricelessness in our emotional lives. No matter how much we cynically harden ourselves to commercial realities and its myriad conditions, we always must attend to our own emotional health. Unconditional love makes us feel really good. It makes us feel better than any hard-won, competitive victory. Nothing can match it because it affirms our own personality without any effort on our part. It feels good to be loved "simply for who we are" without having first performed a song and dance to placate some demanding taskmaster.

Taskmasters surround us in life. They come in many guises. Even our own spouses and parents might force us to act in unappealing ways to win their love. When it comes to love, no one wants to compete. If we compete for love, it is not really love. We want others to love us because we are who we are, not because we do things for them. But this is a hard thing to do in a world that consistently heaps us with conditions and expectations. This society does not make individual happiness a primary goal. So it leaves us to struggle--often vainly--to obtain it.

REUNITED WITH AN OLD FRIEND : FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

A REFLECTION

I was waiting for a friend in an office two days ago. Unlike most waiting rooms, this one actually had a bookcase with some good books, not just a table stacked with magazines about celebrity sightings. I looked over the titles. I saw familiar names: Kafka, Orwell, Dostoevsky, Bronte, Tolstoy, Woolf.

When I was younger, I loved literature. I dove into books, even did not fully understand them. I really thought literature would make me a better person; I thought it was good to read books. I even took pride in it. I went to school at Columbia in New York. They force you to read “classic literature” there. It’s called the “Core Curriculum.” Many of my classmates resented the compulsion to read so much. I actually enjoyed it; I disregarded the compulsion. I read for myself. I didn’t care what my teachers said; most of them were just graduate students anyway who had to teach the course to get their own degrees. I just conversed with the authors. I even read more over the summer because I liked the themes and ideas I encountered. I wanted to develop them in my head. I didn’t turn off my brain when the school year ended.

All these old impressions came back to me as I looked at that bookcase. A comforting feeling came over me, especially when I saw the name Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was my favorite author from my first year at Columbia. I dedicated the rest of my college days to reading just about everything he wrote. I read all his classic novels: Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Demons, The Idiot. I also read most of his short stories, like Notes from Underground, The Double and The Gambler. Taken together, these books profoundly influenced me. I even used Dostoevsky’s ideas to measure every other philosopher and writer I encountered. Not surprisingly, I liked philosophers and writers who echoed Dostoevsky, like Nietzsche, Kafka and Foucault. By contrast, I reviled philosophers and writers whose ideas stood in contrast to Dostoevsky, like Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Dante and St. Augustine.

Dostoevsky was my heroic standard. But then I graduated from college and he faded from my mind. Forced to contend with commerce, I had no time to read Dostoevsky, or anyone else for that matter. My concerns simplified: Work, make money, go home, try to make more money next year. There was no need to think or to be creative. You just needed to put in time. I went to law school in an effort to boost my earning potential and finally get over the commercial hump. Of course, that didn’t happen; twentysomethings dream big but do not have life experience to know that nothing ever pans out as anticipated. True, I might know more now than I did when I was 22. I’m just knee-deep in debt for it.

During law school, I read more than I have ever read in my life. But I did not read any Dostoevsky. In fact, I read books that Dostoevsky would have detested. I read books and judicial opinions that posited “truth” and “objective standards,” two things Dostoevsky routinely criticized in his works. At the time, I did not reflect on the dissonance between the doctrines I was learning and the ideas I absorbed earlier in my life. Not until recently did I uncover that dissonance. It took heartbreak, suffering, reversal, humiliation, rediscovery and self-evaluation to recognize the foolishness in seeking “truth,” “objective standards” and “commercial success.” In short, it took life experience to bring my intellectual focus full circle. Law school doesn’t teach that. And in college, you are too young to amass it. Yet after law school, I contended with personal trauma after personal trauma. The ideas I absorbed in college started to make a lot more sense than they did before I had experience. By the same token, life experience made me deeply question the law and its orderly, well-polished claims to truth. Contrary to every statute, case and order, there really were no objective standards in life. Life was mysterious and unpredictable, not codified and discernable. No legal test could measure it or even judge it. Right and wrong were not juridical concepts; they were nebulous power judgments.

I slowly recognized that my “radical” college ideas were not so far-fetched. Satire became my stock in trade. Satire helped me reconcile my old learning with the absurdity I saw all around me. Satire helped me dethrone the law simply by referring to life. In short, satire helped me “get back to Dostoevsky.”

All these things swarmed my mind as I looked at that bookcase. I picked up a book: “Dostoevsky’s Short Works.” For the first time in almost ten years, I was opening a Dostoevsky book. I perused the contents: Notes from Underground and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. I had always wanted to read The Dream of a Ridiculous Man when I was in college. I never got around to it. I was 21 then. Now, at 31, here was my chance. I began reading. Within seconds, I was transported to another world, a familiar one.

I was ready to read Dostoevsky again. At first, I was somewhat embarrassed when I noticed how much he had influenced my own writing over the years. I recognized at once that I had unwittingly become a Dostoevsky imitator. His sentence structures and ruthlessly satirical attacks on “powerful people” obviously made a deep impression on me. His style won me over when I was young and I internalized it over many years. It has become so engrained that I can’t avoid sounding like Dostoevsky, at least in some ways. I can think of many things I have written in this blog that directly appropriate Dostoevsky’s style. For that reason, as I read The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, I eerily felt as if I was reading something I had written. After that passed, I simply felt content. I was just reading my mentor’s words. I felt as if I had been reunited with a dear friend. It was a wonderful feeling after such a long absence. On the other hand, it made me feel good to know that I had been carrying Dostoevsky’s banner on my blog all along, even if I hadn’t known it.

What is it exactly about Dostoevsky that influenced me so much? There are several key ways. For one, he is darkly satirical. He exaggerates details to mock “powerful people”—especially those with ranks and “high standing” in society. At the same time, he calls his heroes “ridiculous” when in fact they are quite noble. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, for instance, Dostoevsky calls the protagonist “ridiculous,” “absurd,” “a madman,” "laughable" and “reclusive.” He is poor, lives in a one-room, partitioned apartment and has hundred-year-old furniture. Everyone laughs at him. But later on, we learn that this “ridiculous man” simply wants to treat others as he would like to be treated. For that, society calls him a blathering fool. That is dark satire—this is a man who has noble sentiments. He is not really ridiculous at all; he is only “ridiculous” in the judgment of a broken society. Society is ridiculous, not the good man it calls ridiculous. Dostoevsky knows irony. His sarcastic misanthropy definitely left a solid mark on me.

Second, Dostoevsky deeply understood that “truth” is an elusive—and judgmental—concept. He was one of the first authors to dig deeply into his characters’ conscious thought patterns. His narration, too, recurrently suggests that “things are not what they seem.” He stresses subjective impression and individual reaction to sense, not objective truth. He uses phrases such as “as if,” “even,” “somehow,” “in a way” and “some kind of” when describing people, events, feelings and recollections. This creates an overall impression that there is no “truth,” but rather only fleeting impressions in the minds of those who “were there” to sense something. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man abounds with these “uncertain recollections.” In fact, the reader consciously feels that everything is dark, muddled and indeterminate. When the protagonist recounts his dream, for instance, we have no idea what “actually happened.” In short, Dostoevsky understood that “truth” is in “the eye of the beholder.” Nietzsche picked up on this, too, when he argued that “there are no facts or truths, only interpretations.” In Dostoevsky’s works, every detail is an interpretation. Dostoevsky leaves it to the reader to put the pieces together—and that, too, is an “interpretation.”

Finally, Dostoevsky always tempered his sarcasm and satire with hope. This, too, influenced my writing. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, for example, the protagonist—who once gave up on life because “nothing mattered to him anymore”—ultimately declares: “I will not and cannot believe that evil is the natural condition of people.” He goes on to say: “’Knowledge is higher than feelings…[t]he consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness’—that is what must be fought!” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans., Bantam 2008) at pp. 338, 342. In short, Dostoevsky takes a stand against “juridical, rule-based” approaches to existence. “Feelings” are better than “knowledge,” and “happiness” is better than “the rules of happiness” because “feelings” and “happiness” intuitively flow from within the individual. By contrast, “knowledge” and “rules” must be “learned according to an extrinsic system.” They are “objective standards.” Yet the protagonist is “ridiculous” for making these discoveries. He is “ridiculous” for daring to oppose “the rules of happiness” and deciding simply to be happy. This is the ultimate satire: It is “ridiculous” to be happy and to savor individual intuitions.

These last ideas struck a familiar chord with me. They seem to mirror my entire opposition to juridical thinking and the objective standards that the law attempts to foist on human beings. How true that we live our lives attempting to mold our behavior to “the rules of happiness” rather than allowing ourselves to simply feel happiness in our own way. Rather than “feeling,” we seek always to “know” some extrinsic rule. In so doing, we forget our own emotions and subject ourselves to an “objective standard.” Someone else laid down the “rules of happiness;” we struggle to learn them. When we fail to reach them, we feel bad. In conforming to those rules, we steadily lose our capacity to form our own impressions about happiness. That is tragic.

Yet Dostoevsky’s message is not entirely pessimistic. After all, the “ridiculous man” does not mind being called “ridiculous.” He resolves to fight the “rules of happiness.” In essence, Dostoevsky holds out hope for those strong enough to fight against objective thinking. He offers support to all the “ridiculous people” who think and feel for themselves in a world that discourages individual approaches to happiness and meaning.

That is a beautiful message. After all, I am a “ridiculous man,” too. I actually consider it a compliment, not an insult. Ridiculous people survive though the ages, not those who merely follow the “rules of happiness.” In fact, ridiculous people might even find their own happiness somewhere along life’s way. The important thing is not to mind being labeled ridiculous. Ridiculous people are special, even if they are not “successful.” Dostoevsky knew that, and that’s one big reason he influenced me so much.

WE OWN OUR TASTES; WE ARE WHAT WE WANT

OESTERHOUDT STRIKES

Earlier this week, I wrote that art appeals to subjective taste. It is impossible to measure “good art” because no objective standards apply to it. A person either likes a painting or he does not. There is no magical checklist that automatically transforms a scribbling into a masterpiece. Greatness depends on publicity—and enough people who like you.

What appeals to one man will not appeal to another. For a lawyer, these are difficult concepts to grasp. After all, in law school, students learn that there are objective standards to measure everything. This is complete bullshit, of course, but the law adopts “objective standards” for administrative convenience. For example, the law judges “reasonable conduct,” “reasonable belief” and “reasonable reliance.” It does not look to the individual actor to determine what is “reasonable.” It looks to a fanciful “average, prudent person” to determine what is reasonable, then compares this nonexistent person’s assumed behavior to the poor sap under review. This is a totally unrealistic intellectual enterprise. But without it, there would be no standards at all for human behavior in society. People could get hurt and defrauded. Thus, while objective standards for human behavior may be unrealistic and philosophically untenable, they are vaguely necessary in order to maintain relative decorum in society.

Yet lawyers tend to forget that objective standards for human behavior are unrealistic and philosophically untenable. Instead, they start believing that objective standards actually exist. Legal education and legal practice have a perplexing, smugness-inducing effect. After all, lawyers wield very tangible power in our commercial world. Their words and writings have the power to impact property and even bodily security. By applying unrealistic and philosophically untenable legal formulae in particular cases, they can send people to prison or take away their homes. This naturally will make a lawyer feel quite powerful in his craft. But smugness in an unrealistic and philosophically flawed analytical methodology does not change the fact that it is unrealistic and philosophically flawed. Lawyers actually believe that there are objective standards in every life pursuit. This is just wrong. As Nietzsche said, there are no absolute “facts, only interpretations.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments 7(60) (Summer 1887)(my translation). Lawyers cannot fathom this. If they did, the pillars supporting their fanciful castle would collapse.

Yet how can we really debate the fact that objective standards and “truths” depend on interpretation? They do; moreover, they reflect the perspective of those with sufficient power to press home their interpretations. Still, everyone has a unique perspective. Everyone interprets differently. No matter what the law says or attributes to a person, that person still sees things and feels things in his own way. According to the law, he may “deviate from the reasonable standard,” but that is not because the person is intrinsically flawed. It is because the law—by sheer power—judges the person according to a standard that derives from its own perspective.

In this way, the law—and juridical thinking in the abstract—wields considerable influence in our lives. It does not just constrain our behavior by threatening punishment for certain “negative acts.” It also convinces us to think that objective standards exist in life as “absolute facts.” It convinces us that there is such a thing as “reasonable behavior,” even though that is merely a figment of some jurist’s imagination. They forget that everyone has a valid perspective and actually believe that there are universal standards governing everyone. This is unfortunate. On the other hand, it is administratively convenient. What kind of society would we have if every socially unpalatable person simply claimed he “did what he thought was correct” in particular circumstances? It would be a terrible mess. Nonetheless, every individual—in a strict, philosophical sense—is entitled to his own truth, perspective and interpretation. The law is not more right because it has the power to condemn men’s bodies or property. In this sense, the law sacrifices philosophical cohesion for administrative convenience. Legal thinking does not really care whether it represents “true truth.” It is content to merely keep things working without turmoil. Practicality wins over theory.

But there are realms in which subjective taste reigns and the law has no influence at all. Even people who believe strongly in the law nonetheless relish their own, personal tastes. Taste reflects individuality, not obedience to an artificial standard. When we say what we like and what we want, we express our own desires and thoughts. No objective standard applies to these things. They come from within, not from without. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote: “Wanting liberates: that is the true lesson of will and freedom.” Also Sprach Zarathustra, Teil II (Auf den Glückseligen Inseln)(my translation). In other words, expressing our own wants and desires from within frees us from the objective standards imposed upon us from without. Wanting feels good because it originates in us, not outside us. Nothing controls our wants; they bespeak us. They define us. The law might say we have “unreasonable desires,” but they remain ours. And nothing in the law makes its judgments intrinsically “right.” It is “right” only to the extent that power supports it.

Taste is crucially important in our lives even though the law has no authority to influence it. What do we consider “beautiful?” Do we refer to a statute book listing the objective factors that constitute “what is beautiful?” Certainly not. We consider things “beautiful” that move us and appeal to our intuition. We define ourselves by judging people or things “beautiful.” After all, certain people find certain things beautiful, while others do not. It has nothing to do with law or objectivity. Rather, it has only to do with individual desire and taste. From an individual perspective, we think about these things all the time because our tastes reflect our deepest core. We pursue things that we like in life. We want to appease our tastes. We want beauty. Why do we want things that appeal to us? Because only we have control over them. We decide what we like, not an external standard. Psychologically, we live for our wants. We make ourselves happy when we satisfy them. We descend into unhappiness when life’s circumstances prevent us from doing so. Wanting is everything because we are our wants.

Recently, I thought about all these questions when reflecting on my own tastes. I thought about people I find beautiful. What turns me on? What makes me say: “That is a beautiful man” or “That is a beautiful woman”? For the longest time, I thought that everyone could agree that certain people are beautiful, at least from a sexual or aesthetic perspective. But then I realized that I was imposing my own tastes on everyone else. This revealed to me just how pernicious objective thinking can be; it leads us to substitute our judgment for others in areas in which we have no authority. After all, we live in a society in which we learn that we can objectify things and rate them according to “reasonable criteria.” This modality works in some areas, but it definitely does not work in others. When it comes to beauty, everyone has a different view. And we have absolutely no right to judge another person’s view about “what is beautiful.” Some people find Tiger Woods beautiful. I don’t. By contrast, I think that Fernando Torres (the Spanish soccer star) is extremely good looking. Yet I’m certain that many people find Tiger Woods more beautiful than Fernando Torres.

Objective standards play no role at all here. Taste is subjective and individual. No one can take it from us. Only we know whether something appeals to us, no matter what anyone says in a book or manual. There are no “universal principles of taste or beauty.” If anyone dares to lay down such principles, he does nothing but memorialize his own subjective desires. True, many people have similar tastes. But tastes remain subjective. We cannot control the myriad details in life that excite our interests or lusts. At the same time, the same details that excite me may not excite my neighbor.

We should never be ashamed of our desires and tastes. In fact, they define us as much—if not more—than our DNA. Nothing truly expresses our individual uniqueness more than the judgments we make about beauty. Taste and desire live within us, beyond all juridical control. We need not conform our tastes and desires to some external standard; we are always free to like and desire whatever appeals to us. We may never get a chance to enjoy or relish the things we want and desire, but that does not deprive our power to want. That power always remains in us.

“Wanting liberates.” It liberates us from external strictures and gives us free rein in a uniquely individual realm beyond all external controls. I think it is important to remember this in a world that mercilessly seeks to hold us to objective standards. Worse, our world even attempts to change our wants. Why do advertisers try to foist a certain image of beauty upon us? Are we not free to make our own judgments based on our own tastes? Skinny, tan white chicks may appeal to many, but not all. Abercrombie boys may appeal to many, but not all. I find it presumptuous when mass media attempts to displace our own desires with “better ones.” When mass media does this, it encroaches on sacred ground—our ground. Wants and desires belong to us and no others. There is nothing “better” about one person’s ideal of beauty as against another’s. All are valid. Powerful people may ridicule less powerful people for having “strange wants and desires.” But those judgments carry no real force. We should be most vigilant when defending ourselves against attempts to “change our wants.” Our wants are us. If we allow others to displace our wants—or even to doubt or regret our wants—they displace us completely. When we no longer want, we no longer are.

For better or worse, our tastes reflect our individual humanity. They might be “weird,” “off-color,” “unconventional” or even “deviant” in some eyes, but they remain uniquely ours. No matter what the law says, objectivity is a fantasy, and subjectivity really does matter. It matters because our whole existence is subjective. No one will ever experience life the way we do. No one will ever see, feel, hear, touch, taste and smell the world in precisely the same way we do at this very moment in time. Our unique experiences and senses lead to unique emotions that no one can duplicate or even really understand. Our existence is subjective. We can only look through our own eyes; we have only our feelings. We have only one consciousness—our own. Within that consciousness, we want, we desire, we think; we even dream and fantasize. No one else does it the same way we do. And that is a wonderful thing if you stop to think about it. That is why our tastes, desires and wants really do matter, even if they mean nothing to the law.