I am looking right now at the label on a pack of cigarettes. I am looking particularly at the health warning. An ugly hand mimics legs. In between the index and middle fingers is a half burned out stick of cigarette. Its ash, surprisingly intact, is a penile cylinder curved somewhat forlornly against gravity; and then the cautionary words: “Smoking causes IMPOTENCE.”
I cannot help but laugh.
I love looking at labels and love this label best of all for its ironic poetry. It reminds me how every claim to truth can be made to turn against itself, and become its own main argument. True, this particular health warning can move the reader to stop smoking. “Smoking causes IMPOTENCE.” But the argument only works for those who feel the need for and put great value on “POTENCY.” One remembers the Marlboro Man, virile, powerful, macho, dead of cancer. Otherwise, if one presumes it in one’s self from the very beginning just like the Marlboro Man, then the argument does not work. One must wonder though if there are still people like that, people whose faith in their own potency is unassailable.
And yet, the opposite extreme of argument is equally true. If one cares not at all for “POTENCY,” then how could the argument work? And one must presume there are people like that. One presumes they are people who have given up on themselves and the world. But then the question: What if they are the ones who got it right? For them, the health warning carries no “POTENCY” at all; otherwise it has about as much “POTENCY” as — what else but? — a “limp dick.” So light up.
Of course, this whole line of argument is fallacy. And quite simply because it has nothing to do with the truthfulness of the claim — “Smoking causes IMPOTENCE” — the truthfulness of that claim being determined medically instead of along the lines of reception, effect, and consequence; otherwise, the sense of “meaning.”
But leave medicine to doctors. The latter lines of argumentation are always the more attractive and interesting, even if inherently fallacious. And they do have the greater application to the myriad of other questions related to the human condition. Even the most “biblical” assertions of truth are subject to the same vulnerability, that of being turned against itself. Such a claim as, for instance: “Thou shall not KILL.”
Conditions being such as they are, that commandment works the same as the health warning: “Smoking causes IMPOTENCE.” The assertion: “Thou shall not KILL” is true only if one values human life in the first place. The second place is that one values human life as one values human life in general and as one value one’s own life.
And this is why the health warning: “Thou shalt not KILL” works only inside another biblical context contained in another health warning: LOVE YOUR NEIGHBORS as you would LOVE YOURSELF.” Otherwise, If one cares not at all for human life other than one’s own, then how could the argument work? And one must presume there are people like that.
One presumes they are people who have given up on themselves and the world. But then the question: What if they are the ones who got it right? For them, health warnings carry no “POTENCY” at all; otherwise it has about as much “POTENCY” as — what else but? — a “limp dick,” or another picture of another dead body on another one of our streets.