Good for Nothing
There’s an old Taoist story attributed to Chuang Tzu, which we can call The Useless Tree. The tree produced no fruit, was knotted and gnarly. Its limbs and trunk were good for nothing, unusable for things like boats or doors or firewood. And this is why the tree remained standing. None could find a utilitarian use for the tree, so they left it alone, and the tree grew old and large, perfectly imperfect and wonderfully useless.
There is virtue in being useless and there is virtue in useless knowledge, as Bertrand Russell called it. He contrasted what he referred to as useless knowledge with scientific knowledge. The scientific variety is that which is good for something. It is instrumental. It serves some utilitarian purpose beyond the knowledge itself.
When everything is good for something, it cannot be simply good in itself. Like the old tree, I can Be without needing to be good for something, and I can Do without my doing having to be good for something else.
When you’re not
good for something,
what are you?
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