Rational Fool

pg 12 of Alain Caille “The Gift Paradigm”

“You can act rationally, Weber explains, because you do it in the name of the values you cherish, even if it’s not effective from an instrumental point of view, and even if you don’t personally benefit from doing it. One can be a rational fool, as Amrtya Sen puts it, who sacrifices one’s personal utility and well-being to accomplishment of certain ethical or political ends. “

I’m not sure I agree with the notion of ‘sacrifice’. And many of the essays i’m reading on gifting, stress this idea - e.g. Incan sacrifice of men to ‘feed/repay’ the god of sunlight. How might any of us, ever repay, let alone feed the sun so it could help us to continue to grow our crops (I of course love the grandeur and delusion that a human sacrifice was all it took to sustain the sun’s gift)? In this sense, Time and Matter (for us as wee particles in its massive spatial flow) really is a 1-way dead end street until there is another contraction and recapitulation of a re-mattering re-boot of the big bang...

To me, the better word, is ‘return’. still not right and certainly insufficient (everything in my head is so singular, and yet it points only to the whole - I fundamentally make no sense of myself in this wholeness). But in the same way we can ‘backstep’ our own progress (a seeming failure in the bizarre notion that a true accomplishment might ever be a linear forward line - I mean does the sun think it’s daily explosion is a sacrifice, or does the sun ever backstep on different timescales, when what we mean really is a personal-efficiency in achievement rather than equitably considered progress. what i’m trying to say is: if everything about my life is quite-literally-given, how can any of it be sacrifice? Isn’t rational foolishness a choiceful re-negotiation of now, or a re-distribution of the personal now with the collective now.

or like Whitman: “perpetual payment of perpetual loan”

I’m not sure what I’m saying in this blog post - but at least the word FOOL is in the title and you came here at your own peril! I’ll update it when I actually read what Amartya Sen actually wrote. xo