Maverick Philosopher

Will We Even Be Forgotten?

Not only will we be forgotten, we will be forgotten by people who never really knew us in the first place.  So we will not even be forgotten.  You can't remember or forget a person you never knew.

Devil or Angel?

That she is strongly attracted to you does not decide the question.

Envy versus Schadenfreude

"Your gain is my pain" versus "Your pain is my gain."

My analyses of envy, jealousy, Schadenfreude, pity, etc.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rodney King and Henry Hill

In Praise of Schadenfreude

Who is a Friend?

A friend is someone with whom one can disagree in the way one diagrees with oneself: gently and without rancour.

A Sign of Aesthetico-Moral Progress

One's coming to see more beauty in buttes and mesas than in butts and mammaries.

The Dogmatist

Craving certainty, but lacking it, he fabricates a substitute, his dogma. 

 

Melanie Phillips on the Anti-Family Left

Melanie Phillips is a former lefty who wised up, illustrating my aphorism  that

                                                The only good leftist is a former leftist.

There is More to Life than Politics

There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way some engagement in it is necessary. 

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Politics is War and Conservatives Need to Learn How to Fight

The Inconclusiveness of Argument

He who can follow an argument will also know how not to be led by it.

A Callable Loan

We who thrive get used to being alive, and forget we have our lives on loan, a loan that can be called  on the spot without advance notice.  Compare James 4:13-17 (NIV):

¹³ Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” ¹⁴ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ¹⁵ Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.

The Made Man

He who is ever on the make will never have it made.  He will never be a 'made man.'  There is a time to strive, and a time to be.  Is the universe trying to get somewhere?  It already is everywhere.  Are you any less cosmic?  If you think you have a Maker, is he not a 'made man'?  And aren't you a chip off the old block?

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Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness

Let It Lapse

If a relationship has a troubled past, no future, and a present that is merely the transition from the one to the other -- let it lapse.

Is the King Ever Captured?

The dignity of the king allows no such thing.  He never leaves the board during the game.  When the game is over, however, he  goes into the same box with the lowly pawns.  Which is to say: all earthly dignity is as naught before the tribunal of the Great Equalizer.

Water Seeks its Level

Complain if you like about the quality of your colleagues, but had they been better they might not have hired you.  It may be that you have a job because of your and their mediocrity.

Possessor Possessed

What I own is mine, but what is mine makes me in some measure theirs.

Appreciate What You Have

Appreciate what you have while you have it.  An actual shack is better than a remembered or merely imagined or expected or merely possible palace.  Do not allow the present and actual good to suffer diminution by comparison to the modally and temporally and spatially elsewhere.

This is it.  This is your life.  Right here and right now.  If it is good, appreciate it.  If it needs improving, act right here and right now to improve it, but without failing to appreciate the good that is here and now yours.

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Compensation for Decline

When the Goddess Caissa Becomes the She-Devil Impecunia

We patzers can sport with Caissa and her charms without too much harm.  It is the very strong players, who yet fall short of the highest level, who run the greatest risk.  Chess sucks them in then leaves them high and dry.  The goddess Caissa becomes the she-devil Impecunia.

Relations With Relatives

Our relations with our relatives are too often like the relations of Arabs and Israelis: too much past, no future.  But with the Arabs and Israelis it is even worse: too much history, not enough geography.

Tweet This

He who tweets is a  twit whose brain will soon be fit only to flit.

Anecdotage

The last stop for the old raconteur.

A Prudent Assumption

It is prudent to assume that what can be taken the wrong way will be.

When to Psychologize

You are free to psychologize your opponent when his position is demonstrably false or incoherent.  If his reasons are worthless, then you are justified in exposing the motives that drive his commitments. 

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Photo ID: Voter Suppression or Liberal Projection?

When Philosophical Questions Grow Up Do They Leave Home? Some Bad Arguments of Lawrence Krauss Exposed

Twitter

A weapon of mass distraction.

Duty

My duty is my duty whether I am inclined to do it or not.  Being inclined does not make it any less my duty; being disinclined does not make it any more.

High-Level Self-Denial

Going to the mat of meditation at the appointed time when the caffeine-induced riot of thoughts clamors for blogic expression.

One Thing You Won't Blog About

Nothing is not fodder for the omniloquacious blogger. Nothing but one thing: his being dead.

The Grim Majority Maker

Whatever minorities we belong to in life, in death we join the greatest of all majorities, ever swelling, never diminishing, unconquerable,  affiliation with which, once begun, never ends.

Dogmatism as Willfulness

What willfulness is in the sphere of action dogmatism is in the realm of belief.

Vices Vitiated

It can happen that as a man becomes weaker, he is better able to weaken the grip of his weaknesses.  Having less energy for their implementation, he now masters what mastered him.  Vices vitiate until the body they have vitiated vitiates them in turn.

Toeing the Party Line

He who toes the party line will sometimes be kept from error.  It depends on the party.

(Note on usage: one toes the party line; one does not tow it!)

Thinking for Oneself

Thinking for oneself, one ought eventually to arrive at the conclusion that so doing can lead one into a ditch as surely as thoughtlessly adhering to the dogmas of a sect.

The Advice of Others

Given how bad the advice of others can be, one is well-advised to keep one's own counsel.

Keeping One's Own Counsel

Keeping one's own counsel, one realizes that sometimes two heads are better than one.

Intellectual Maturity

A mark of intellectual maturity is the ability to tolerate uncertainty without fleeing to dogmas that make false certainties of objective uncertainties, but also without falling into a self-vitiating relativism.  The ideal is a love of truth that does not flag but also accepts no substitutes.

Reminded of the Eternal

We are 'reminded' (Plato) of the eternal both by the most transient and the least transient of things.  The most transient teaches the ultimate ephemerality of all things finite.  The least transient teaches that it is no substitute for the eternal.

Realpolitik

The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask.  There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.

Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."

Measurement by Regrets

We are measurable by the nature of our regrets.  What do you regret?  Not having drunk enough good wine?  Not having amassed more wealth?  Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places?  Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?

We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.

Read Old Books

Old books are sovereign antidotes to the idiocies of the age, both the idiocies of style and those of content.

Magnificent yet Miserable

The magnificence and misery of philosophy is but a reflection of the magnificence and misery of its author man, who, neither animal nor angel, is the tension between the two.

The Proper Order of Things

First caffeination, then ratiocination.

The 'Floaters' of Memory

We should look past useless memories to present realities in the way we look past the floaters in our visual field.  To concentrate on the detritus of memory is only to enliven what ought to be left to slumber.

A Way to Live

Live as if life's chiaroscuro will resolve itself, not one day, but beyond time, into clear light.

Delicious Obscurity

We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it.  It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken, and left, for an average schlep.  A little recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs.  Fame can be a curse.   The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.

The value of fame may also be inferred from the moral and intellectual quality of those who confer it.

The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.

UPDATE:  By this metric, however, I count as famous.  Well, we live in an age of low standards.

Ignorabimus

We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant  in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here.  But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which -- we will remain ignorant in this life.

It is admittedly strange to suppose that death is the portal to knowledge.  But is it stranger than supposing that a being capable of knowledge simply vanishes with the breakdown of his body?

The incapacity of materialists to appreciate the second strangeness I attribute to their invincible body-identification.

Related articles

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

Eben Alexander: "We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains"

All Roads Lead to Rome

If so, it is equally true that all lead away from it as well.

Useless Rehearsals

Rehearsals are for a future performance.  Why then are you 'rehearsing' that altercation with so-and-so from twenty years ago? Do you plan to bring it back to the stage?

The Sea Battle Tomorrow

The soldier's operations in the field are often encumbered by the presence of civilians and considerations of 'collateral damage.'  The seaman's is a purer form of combat.  Ships far out at sea.  All hands combatants. No civilians to get in the way.  Less worry over environmental degradation.  The 'purity' of naval over land warfare.  Bellicosity in the realm of Neptune must breed a  brand of brotherhood among the adversaries not encountered on terra firma.

There is More to Life than Politics

There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way, some engagement in it is necessary.

Extremists

And then there are the conservatives (liberals) for whom a refusal to demonize liberals (conservatives) makes you one.

Here is the first stanza of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939):

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

They Come Too Late

As privacy dies our mailboxes fill  -- with privacy policies.