I just finished one of those "books." You know the type; the kind that makes you look at the world a little wonky and think about what it means to exist. I don't know why I do this to myself either. Oddly enough, I've simultaneously discovered young adult fiction and so have started to raid bookstores for teen sci-fi/fantasy/horror/love stories that read quick and easy. Welcome to the many facets of me.

On the one hand I wish to discuss The Book (that's actually it's title, I'm not being facetious). On the other hand I'm not entirely sure I have thought through what I just read enough to share those thoughts in any sort of meaningful manner. Compile that with my continued readings of Aristotle and Cicero and you see my current philosophical dilemma.

I think I've settled on the topic of mistakes for this particular musing. I, like most everyone else I would imagine, do my best to never mess up. Sometimes my best is tremendous and sometimes my best seems more like a specific effort to mess up, but none-the-less I try my best to never mess up. Recently, though, I've had a thought about that. I have to mess up. I don't mean have to in the sense that nobody's perfect and thus all will mess up at some point to differing degrees, but that if I don't mess up, then I never have a comparison against which to judge my behavior.

There are other people certainly, and for many mistakes I am more than happy to look at someone else and see that I need never experience a particular mistake or moral/ethical error, but if I am the person I imagine I should be everyday in every way I imagine I should be then I will forget why I should be that person, what it means to be that person, or the value in being that person.

Here now it sounds like I am excusing my mistakes--I'm not. I was recently involved in a spectacular debate over The Philadelphia Story because I felt the father never accepted responsibility for his actions and the movie forgave that. My point is more that I cannot be good if I am not, in some capacity, bad. That statement too is loaded, and it simply reeks of perversion into rationalization for any number of heinous behaviors, but I feel it is worth the risk to examine the necessity of my own failings. Not the morality or immorality, but necessity. The trick is keeping the two separate and not confusing the one for the other.

A couple of years ago while discussing V for Vendetta my friend came up with the question, "can something be necessary and unethical?" This, along with four other questions, we put to our classes and I reasoned for myself that if something were necessary it must be ethical and if it were unethical that there must be another way. It seemed to me that ethics, being the more malleable of the two, must be the category to shift. I can say it is unethical to kill another person, but if that person is going to kill me then I must kill them to survive. My actions of self-defense there become ethical because they were necessary and so the ethics of killing are more malleable than the necessity of self-defense. All of that is to explain that I think, perhaps, I have shifted my stance. I think, perhaps, that something can be necessary but still unethical. And that's very, very tricky.

This is dangerous, much like saying I need my mistakes, because every time I engage in an unethical or immoral behavior I can claim it is necessary. As in The Philadelphia Story, a husband who cheats on his wife and absolves himself of guilt by saying it was necessary he seek comfort elsewhere so that he can stay with her in the long run. His philandering then, to quote the movie, has nothing to do with her and he is, therefore, absolved. But accepting/recognizing necessity is separate from guilt and I think guilt might be key. If you can see the necessity of your actions and simultaneously recognize their immorality or ethicality then guilt becomes a key signifier of your honesty. How can I not feel bad that I am forced to take an action that isn't right? But there is another dimension there of actual awareness of actions, and justification of actions. To put it simply, how do I know it was actually necessary versus someone arguing it was necessary to absolve him/herself? This is all entirely too circular for a blog.

My point is simply this: in an ongoing awareness of how things relate to each other, I see a necessity for my mistakes that I had previously missed. I am not, however, justifying, rationalizing, or arguing for their rightness in any sort of moral or ethical sense. No doubt someone will only read the first part of that statement and yell at me for justifying my bad behavior. Finally, while I recognize the necessity for my mistakes, I am not at a place yet where I can recognize which mistakes individually are necessary, and which happen through lack of awareness on my part. Sometimes we break our personal moral/ethical code because we must, and sometimes we break it because we can. I cannot state with any assurance (as I'm sure no one else can) that I am at a point where I can tell the difference. But I do, after two years, feel I have a better understanding on necessity and ethicality. At least where V is concerned.

Of course that leaves me with the question, should our ethical and moral codes be reexamined? I'll take that one on after a bottle of wine and let you know how it goes.