[begin transmission]It's always a curious thing to have a track--
long since forgotten--not just make itself known, but
assert itself in your ~2,300 item everyday playlist. The type of track that might elicit an unreasonably strong emotional response--a deep, enduring longing for past memories, a haughty, boisterous shift into unassailable confidence, or a slow decay into the darkest, thickest of despairs through which absolutely no light can shine through. All accompanied by the wonderfully intense bodily symptoms of frisson: goose bumps, chills, endogenous opioid release. Experiences like these are THE reason why I fully subscribe to the idea that music is the closest earthly approximate to the transcendent. It is in these experiences that our attention is yanked away from everyday banalities and forced to contend w/ whatever thoughts and emotions the melody and rhythm enjoin. There couldn't be a stronger case against the thesis that you are your own master. The interplay between consciousness and that Platonic realm of Forms is so mysteriously opaque that to suggest you are the sole proprietor of your own ideas and thoughts becomes a patently naive proposition if contemplated seriously for more than a minute.
In similarly mysterious fashion, the track cited above opens w/ a delicate arpeggiated piano chord that continues w/ sparse, ethereal, high-register notes, all against a backdrop of low-howling ambient wind and just-beyond-comprehension
whispers of a forbidden nature. Low-register
violin notes cut through the abstractions, giving the listener something to ground themselves on, something that feels very hometown-ish and familiar, even if only vaguely. Signaling the conclusion of the introduction, that very same violin engages in a
short, ascending melodic run that is perfectly punctuated by a heavy piano chord; that final diminished chord informs you that this track is going to be fairly somber in tone, and that one had better be prepared to deal w/ weighty subject matter.
(As an aside,
there's this neat little piano part where the chords solidly establish the dreamy 6/8 time signature in an ascending pattern. But again, that last diminished chord makes it feel unresolved--like climbing to the top only to falter at the final step)
And is it ever weighty subject matter...the lyrics in question weigh heavily on me to this very day b/c of their supremely ontological nature. They occur early in the track, in the first verse:
どうして罪があるのだろう
Why is there sin?
どうして罰があるのだろう
Why is there punishment?
It isn't a simple meditation on the existence of evil, although it is certainly part of the broader theme. No, this is an outright lamentation of a fundamental fact of existence. Why
is there sin? Why
is there punishment? I've elaborated on these questions in an earlier post, Post #
20190709. However, there is more to this theme than I had ever realized. It is only in the rejoinder, found later in the track in the final chorus, that this becomes apparent:
罪があるのは諦めているから
Sin exists because I'm giving up.
罰があるのは求めすぎるから
Punishment exists because I want things too much.
What does this mean? None of this makes sense. Is this some error in translation? What does sin have to do w/ giving up, or punishment from wanting things? Why invoke the personal when contemplating fundamental aspects of Being? Maybe I've forgotten my phenomenologist roots, but there is no such thing as the exclusion of the personal self from Being. Necessarily, when contemplating existence, you have to invoke a subjectivity; the concept of existence becomes unintelligible w/o it. This profound philosophical fact is implicit when considering morality; if you accept that there is indeed a moral dimension to reality--that it is metaphysical fact--and that there is no such thing as morality w/o personal agency, then at the very least part of reality, specifically the moral, is contingent on subjectivity.
This moral, phenomenological stance is best embodied by the tradition of virtue ethics, and it is within this tradition that these lyrics begin to take on their perfectly sublime and coherent form. In order to address the answers offered in the rejoinder, first let us address the questions of 'what is sin?' and 'what is punishment?'. Immediately this invokes thoughts of a religious nature; a turn-off to some readers, I'm sure. However, we needn't invoke religion to explain sin: the roots of the term 'sin' lie in Greek thought, w/ the concept of
hamartia. Hamartia, according to Aristotle, means to commit error, to fall short of one's objective, to miss the mark. If this notion of sin is acceptable, then the follow-up question of 'what is punishment?' is easily answerable. If punishment is thought to be the consequence of sin--and I believe this to be a reasonable, common assertion--then in the virtue ethical framework that very same punishment is the consequence of committing an error.
Okay. So now we have established that sin and punishment are equivalent to error and consequence. The more secular of readers may find themselves to be on simultaneously comfortable/uncertain footing here, as we have safely moved away from invoking appeals to religion, but we're now conceptualizing sin in a novel manner (those well-read in Christian theology will chuckle quietly to themselves, I'm sure). Substituting our conception of sin as error into the rejoinder, we obtain something like 'Error exists because I'm giving up'. This is fairly coherent: if you give up on your objectives, you will fall short of achieving your objectives. Recontextualizing this statement to further reflect the virtue ethical framework we've adopted, we must specify what exactly this 'objective' is. The objective, the
telos of human life, according to Aristotle, is to live a good life--a life of flourishing and happiness. In order to live a good life, one must practice virtue, the cardinal four being those of Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice. To give up on this objective of living a good life means to effectively fail at exercising virtue.
Keeping this conceptualization in mind, the following lyrics re: punishment makes sense if taken in the reverse. Wanting things too much is an indication of
intemperance--the outright failure to practice the virtue of Temperance. To be more exact, this 'I want things too much' is the very embodiment of
pleonexia: wanting more than one's share. And so, to embody pleonexia is to fail to exercise virtue, resulting in reaping the appropriate consequence of that error. That consequence is, in turn, conceptually the same as punishment.
Why must something as neutral and mechanistic as consequence be described w/ such colorful and dramatic language as 'punishment'? I've wondered the same question myself from time-to-time, and the more I learn, the more I've come to the conclusion that life is not as neutral or sterile as I may have originally thought. Every thought, action, and judgment that we make includes a tinge of morality to it. Everything we do presupposes some belief about others, ourselves, and reality: a sociology, an ontology, and a metaphysics, respectively. Each of these items carry with them either implicitly or explicitly a set of values that we behave in accordance to, whether we are fully aware of them or not. With regards to thought, action, and judgment we've only gotten used to believing that these things are divorced of moral value b/c that is the default mode of modern thinking that pervades everywhere. That there is such thing as an 'objective' view that we can exercise. It is codified in Hume's Ought/Is distinction, and is taken for granted as the basis for nearly everything we do and everything that we think. Why is consequence so dramatically embellished w/ language such as punishment? It isn't. It is punishment that is so sterilized w/ language such as consequence; the Greek dramatists and storytellers that came before them were not writing for entertainment's sake much as we do now. No, they were offering a description of Being, and the nature of Being is that it is necessarily
dramatic. That is a large reason why NieR: Re[in]carnation was so resonant w/ me, b/c it expresses this fact so clearly and explicitly. Why, even
neuropsychological research points that we are wired to interpret reality as a narrative.
Perhaps that is why literature, music, and art is so attractive to us as modernists yet it remains so personally elusive to us as to why. They point to truths that we have a vague recollection of, but have long since forgotten the words to bring them into the foreground of coherent, conscious thought and speech. Nevertheless, we feel it so deeply and unmistakably whenever it inspires frisson, render us wistfully nostalgic for the past, or encourage us to puff out our chests and march boldly into an uncertain future.
Everyone messes up at some point, everyone sins, everyone commits error, everyone falls short of virtue, and so everyone feels it when they're not living up to that telos Aristotle likes to talk so much about. Everyone has a personal stake in ethical behavior, and ethical behavior is not an optional proposition if one is concerned w/ living a good life. I've been intimately reminded of that fact fairly recently. It's what lead to this meditation on lyrics in the first place. I've been subject of pleonexia, I've been covetous of more than what is rightfully mine. I've demanded far too much from others in the way of my critical and judgmental nature. I've claimed to know more about others than I rightfully should. In short,
my punishment exists because I want things too much.[end transmission]