The White Whale

"All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it."
-Moby Dick, Chapter 41

Law School is very demanding. When law school begins we choose to commit significant amounts of time and energy to become a lawyer. The level of competition, the quantity of reading, and the difficulty quickly become apparent. But we affirm our commitment. We reason that, although, challenging the reward of becoming a skilled lawyer with a good job is worth the grueling conditions.

Each week I have noticed that school has become more demanding. People have become more competitive and the difficulty has escalated. Each week people make a decision to commit more time and anguish to compete. They have come this far and might as well go a little farther. Students reason that success will justify the sacrifice. But, one day you wake up and realize that in trying to create this great accomplishment in your life, your sacrifice is destroying the very thing that you are trying to improve, your life.

I am reminded of Melville’s Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, at one point, was presumably normal and rational. Ahab loses a leg in an encounter with Moby Dick. After losing his leg, he becomes obsessed with the whale. Throughout the tale he turns a commercial whaling ship more and more obsessed with the whale. They go on a hunt for Moby Dick instead of whale oil to sell. In trying to catch the white whale, Ahab eventually gives up everything. In seeking his revenge to make his life better, he in turn makes his life inevitably worse. Ahab eventually sacrifices his life in catching Moby Dick.

We all become Ahab from time to time. We become so engrossed at the task at hand that we lose perspective. Law School can be a large white whale and if we don’t watch out, we can lose perspective. In continuously sacrificing more to reach the goal of law school success, people stop living. They no longer do what is important to them and sacrifice their own values. They replace all their fun with studying. Despite the nobility of the sacrifice, it will ultimately destroy them, just like Ahab. The importance is realizing that the sacrifice is not worth goal. When you look around you will learn that Law School is full of Ahabs and we are often under threat of Ahab’s monomaniacal psychosis ourselves.

So look to your lives and make sure not to lose your guiding values because it is very easy to scream, “Death to the White Whale” and become lost ourselves. We must always be seeking to make our lives better. Certain abilities are out of our range at the time. Accepting our limits is more noble than rejecting our humanity. We can always seek to diligently improve, but giving up our values is never worth catching the white whale. Sacrificing our humanity and morals is never worth any goal.

Aristotle and the Sand

One of the most important aspects of my values is a constant quest of self-improvement. Only through self-improvement can you constantly adapt to become the person who you want to be. Everyone makes mistakes, that’s one of the qualities that makes us human. Our great gift is that we can use these mistakes, to learn and continuously better ourselves. We can take the experience with us to always remind us what we did and how we grew. When we learn from our mistakes and make a change, we are most human. That is why I believe that this process must be continuous.

Recently, a friend disagreed with my philosophy of improvement. He responded by telling a tale of a King that would grant a man anything he would wish, for saving the King’s life. The man had an odd request that baffled the King. The man only asked to put one grain of sand on the King’s table. But, each day the King was to put double amount of sand as the previous day. Although, a seemingly meaningless request at first glance, the sand began to add up. Pretty soon the King wasn’t merely putting a few grains of sand, but instead rooms-full, then countries-full, and then the entire world. The moral of the story is by constantly becoming greater, you could bite off more than you can chew.

Although, a nifty story, I think my friend misinterpreted the meaning. I disagree that one should stop improving out of fear of doing too much. Instead, recall Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Means; a doctrine that strove for the middle ground. A popular misinterpretation of Aristotle is that the mean personality trait is always directly in the middle of the two extremes. What Aristotle meant to say, as far as character goes, is having too much or too little of a particular trait is, generally, a bad thing. The sand is having too much of one trait. Constant improvement is when you have multiple options and you continuously choose the option that allows you to become a better person. One cannot become too good of a person, if they are constantly becoming better at balancing their personal traits. One cannot err by picking the best choice. The quest to improve is the same quest as becoming more human. To place limits on ourselves, is to limit the potential of what we can become. But growth can be malignant like the sand, if one is not careful. Growth must always be balanced by reason and seen through the compassion of our ethics. Our growth must make our lives better, not worse. Although, growth has the potential to do both, it seems foolish and inhuman to stop growth out of the fear of a malignant growth. Our humanity demands the courage to face our challenges and grow.