Maverick Philosopher

Birth and Death

At birth the curtain lifts.  Or does it fall?  At death the curtain falls.  Or does it lift?

Of Blood and Spirit

Consanguinity is no substitute for spiritual affinity. Blood may be thicker than water, but minds meet in the aether.

Intellectual Maturity

One mark of intellectual maturity  is the ability to tolerate uncertainty, the ability to withhold assent, the ability to withstand contradiction and recognize the merit of opposing views -- all of this without lapsing into skepticism or relativism.  The intellectually immature, by contrast, bristle when their pieties and subjective certainties are called into question.  Their doxastic security needs trump their need to inquire into the truth.

Institutions and Corruption

Every institution is either corrupt or will be. Institutions are like the houses where I live: they either have termites or they will get them.

A More Profitable Question

Do not ask whether there is immortality unless you are prepared to ask whether you are worthy of it.

A Big Ego

An inflated ego may manifest itself in ostentation, self-promotion, and domination of others.  But it is no less manifested by oversensitivity to the slights, real or imagined, of the ostentatious, the self-promoting, and the domineering.

The Company You Keep

You will be judged by the company you keep ^___ and the company you keep away from.

Antagonize Parsimoniously

Do not multiply enemies beyond necessity.

No Pun Intended

Ah, but it had to have been intended because you were aware of it and let it stand. Otherwise you would not have uttered 'no pun intended.'   The difference between 'pun intended' and 'no pun intended'  is merely verbal.

Young Scholar, Old Scholar

The young scholar may pepper his prose with foreign expressions so as to appear erudite. But as the years pass, a different ideal may appear choice-worthy, namely, to write as simply as possible, using only the resources of the mother tongue.

Choose Your Advisors Carefully

The barber is hardly the one to ask whether you need a haircut.

Causes, Causation, the Uncaused

The scientist wants to know what causes what; the philosophical analyst wants to know what causation is; the true philosopher wants to know the Uncaused.

Against Postponing Self-Mastery

Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them. In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

Aff-ability

Success in this world often depends as much on affability as on ability.

A Double Standard

The wrongs done us seem so real, so inexcusable, so unjust. But the wrongs done others by ourselves and by others appear in a less unfavorable light: not that important, excusable, and horribile dictu ^__ entertaining.

Kindness

Small acts of kindness have the power to transfigure the bleak face of existence. While gratefully remembering the words and gestures I have been fortunate to receive, I also regret the occasions I let slip where, at no cost to myself, I could have offered a word of encouragement or support to someone in need.

Intellectual Hypertrophy

Weight lifters and body builders in their advanced states of muscular development appear ridiculous to us. All that time and money spent on the grotesque overdevelopment of one's merely physical attributes ^___ when in a few short years one will be dust and ashes. But isn't the intellectual equally unbalanced who overdevelops his logical and analytical skills to the neglect of body, emotions, and spirit? Is the intellectual wrestler all that superior to the physical one? Is one kind of hypertrophy better than another? What good is discursive hypertrophy if it is paid for in the coin of mystical and moral and physical atrophy?

Gerede

Conversation about trivial matters can be idle and useless, and usually is. But the same is true of conversation about 'deep matters.' In some moods, intellectual and spiritual conversation is more offensive to me than mundane chit-chat. Talk can degenerate into profanation. We need periodic recuperation from it in the form of entry into silence.

Meditation Better Than Travel

It is better to dive below the surface of consciousness than to move around on the surface of the earth.

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Such occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.

Socialism and Ambition

Like a commitment to socialism, worldly ambition is natural and appropriate in the young, but a sign of foolishness in the old.

Ambition and Disillusion

The young, astride their steeds of ambition, should gallop boldly into the fray. But the old should know when to quit the game and dismount into dis-illusion. Homo ludens, when sapient, knows when to become de-luded.

Modesty and Vanity

I hope that this site amounts to more than an exercise in vanity, though modesty demands that vanity be recognized as a motivation!

Philosophical Vulgarity

Is it not vulgarity in a philosopher to think that he will settle the ultimate questions in short order? One thinks of the Tractarian Wittgenstein and of Ayn Rand. Connected with this is the philistinism of certain forms of clarity such as that of the logical positivist. One recalls Rudolf Carnap's pathetic refutation of Heidegger. And then there is the vulgarity of the later Wittgenstein's speleo-conservatism which, leaving everything in the Cave just as it was, takes the form, not of facile solutions to problems, but of their very denial.

Why Physical Culture?

In part it is about control. I can't control your body, but I can control mine. Control is good. Power is good. Physical culture as the gaining and maintaining of power over that part of the physical world which is one's physical self. Self-mastery, as the highest mastery, must involve mastery of the vehicle of one's subjectivity. Control of one's vehicle is a clear desideratum. So stretch, run, hike, bike, swim, put the shot, lift the weight. In short: rouse your sorry ass from the couch of sloth and attend to your vehicle. 'Ass' here refers to Frate Asino, Brother Jackass, St Francis' name for his body. Keep him in good shape and he will carry you and many a prodigious load over many a pons asinorum.

(Interesting that Ger. Arsch, when it crossed the English Channel became 'arse,' but in the trans-Atlantic trip it transmogrified into the polyvalent 'ass.' Whatever you call it, get it off the couch.)

The Paltry Mentality of the Copy Editor

The copy editor, like a testosterone-crazed male cat, likes to mark his territory. His territory is your manuscript. But like a cat, he is lazy and easily bored, which leads to inconsistency. He starts out changing every occurrence of ‘identical with’ to ‘identical to,’ but then tires of this game so that the end result is a mishmash. He would have spared himself the bother had he appreciated the simple fact that in the English language ‘identical with’ and ‘identical to’ are stylistic variants of each other.

My advice to editors: stick to questions of formatting, and to the correction of obvious spelling and grammatical errors. Keep your political correctness to yourself.  Don't replace the gender neutral 'his' with the abomination 'his/her.'  Keep your stinking leftist politics out of my manuscript.  And don’t try to be what the Germans call a Besserwisser: don’t presume to know better what I want to say and how I want to say it. My writing is an exacting labor of love; your editing is a lousy chore you can’t wait to be done with.

Now, having vented my spleen, I look at the other side of the question. Where would the journals, and we who publish in them, be without editors and their grunt work? May they be adequately compensated! May their teaching loads be reduced! May 72 black-eyed virgins greet them at the portals of paradise!

Travel Disruptive but Good for the Soul

For me travel is disruptive and desolating. A little desolation, however, is good for the soul, whose tendency is to sink into complacency. Daheim, empfindet man nicht so sehr die Unheimlichkeit des Seins. Travel knocks me out of my natural orbit. Even an overnighter can have this effect. And then time is wasted getting back on track. I am not cut out to be a vagabond. I Kant hack it. I do it more from duty than from inclination. But I'm less homebound than the Sage of Koenigsberg.

Adding Insult to Injury

That we are formed and malformed by our environments from birth on is bad enough. It is made worse by those who want to see us as nothing but products of environment. These reductionists of course make an exception in their own cases. It is as if they say to us: "We are able to discern truth, but you are not. What we say expresses our insight, but what you say only expresses your conditioning."  That is the injustice of the psychologizer.

Coraggio

One can always get through one day to the next — except for one day. And one will get through that one too.

First Impressions

You will find it difficult to undo the damage of a bad first impression. One must realize that too many people base lasting judgments on them. This is folly of course, but it may be even worse folly to attempt to disembarrass  them of their folly. The world runs on appearances, a fact made worse by the pseudo-authority of first appearances. One eventually learns that this world of seeming not only really is a world of seeming but is necessarily one. One learns to deal with it and abandons the attempt to find plenary reality where it can exist only fitfully and in fragments.

The Ubiquity of Ego

It is because of ego that one man speaks. It is because of ego that another refuses to listen. It is because of ego that a third seeks to overcome his ego. And let's not overlook the ego of the one who makes these observations.

The Past as Burden

The past is a burden one is free to put down -- if others will let us. In this regard as in others, the less fame the better. Others like to keep us in the past, safely categorized, pinned to our deeds. To their ossifying gaze, we are what we were, a fixed essence rather than a project. If I rightly recall, Hegel summed up the Aristotelian to ti en einai and the scholastic quod quid erat esse in the phrase, Wesen ist was gewesen ist: essence is what was. But Dasein, said Heidegger, is essentially futural. And that despite all Geworfenheit, thrownness.  Sound is the existentialist insight that man  is a project.

Each day is new, but we make it old with our thoughts and habits. We drag the past along with us like a penal chain. But every day is a beginning. Some say: "of the rest of your life." But that formulation is too retrospective: it evaluates the present and the future by the standard of the past, as time that remains. Better to say: "Each day begins a new life." Of course, it cannot be all that new, but no matter. Let the continuities take care of themselves, seek the novelty in the moment.

There are possibilities yet unexplored in this present which is not merely a boundary between past and future, but a source of the new. 

Serious Conversation

It is best avoided with ordinary folk. Serious conversation about matters beyond the mundane demands effort and people resent being made to work. Besides, ordinary folk do not 'believe in conversation' the way some philosophers do. They don't believe that truth can be attained by dialectical means. They might not believe in truth at all, or in its value. Or they may have the notion that 'truth is relative.' Thoughtlessly, many dismiss all thought with 'It's all relative.' So if you try to engage them on a serious topic, they may interpret your overture as an initial move in an ego game whereby you are trying to dominate them, even if that is the farthest thing from your mind. Not believing in truth, they believe in power, and interpret everything as a power ploy and a power play. And this goes double if, like me, you are intense of mien. For your seriousness will appear either threatening or comical to those for whom nothing matters except life's surfaces.

A good maxim, then:  Among regular guys be a regular guy.

The Body's Graffiti

Tattoos are the graffiti of the human body. And just as the graffiti 'artist' defaces property public and private, the tattoo 'artist' defaces the human body, torturing the skin with needles and injecting it with ugly dyes. When I see yet another tattooed, pierced, tackle-box head, I wonder what this phenomenon means. Some thoughts of Theodore Dalrymple are worth pondering:

First, it [tattooing] was aesthetically worse than worthless. Tattoos were always kitsch, implying not only the absence of taste but the presence of dishonest emotion.

Second, the vogue represented a desperate (and rather sad) attempt on a mass scale to achieve individuality and character by means of mere adornment, which implied both intellectual vacuity and unhealthy self-absorption.

And third, it represented mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value.

If Everyone Were Like Me . . .

. . . there would be no used bookstores: I keep all my books. So it is a good thing for me that not everyone is like me.

Never Buy a Book You Haven't Read

It's a good maxim. But I hear an objection coming. "If you've already read a book, why do you need to buy it?" Because the only books worth owning are the ones worth reading more than once.

Deformation by Experience

Thought aspires to objectivity and universality, but it must struggle against the brute onesidedness of experience. We are so impressed by our particular experiences that argument against them will usually prove unavailing. Our experiences form us and deform us.

I once knew a white woman who disliked blacks. I inquired why. She explained that she had grown up in a neighborhood with a lot of blacks, and that the black kids routinely harrassed her and her friends on their way to school. My arguments in mitigation of her generalized prejudice were of course unavailing in the teeth of her experiences.

Just as you can't argue against a man's sensibility, you can't argue against his exeriences. He knows what he's seen, what he's felt, what he's suffered. Argumentative abstraction is just so much gossamer by comparison.

This is a general rule admitting of exceptions. The vividness of the experiences is no match for the faint murmurings of sweet reason. We are formed by our experiences but also deformed by them.

We are made of crooked timber, and the warping of experience adds the final rude touch.

Marriage and 'Settling'

In the end you settle for so-and-so, or else remain single.  It is worth remembering that she is also settling for you.

Success and Luck

A proper humility demands a frank admission of the role of luck in every success.

Liberals and Tolerance

A liberal will tolerate anything -- except a conservative.

The Confused Have Their Uses

Just as I learn how not to live by observing how some do live, I learn how not to think by observing how some do think. Their confusion is fodder for my clarity.

On Grades

Life is hierarchical. It is therefore unjust not to give grades. A school in which all are equal is no preparation for a life in which all are not.

Silence and Wholeness

Perusing an old file of juvenilia for blog-fodder, I decided that the contents are mostly too juvenile for reproduction here. But then I came across an aphorism penned in December, 1971 when I was living in the shadow of the medieval Festung or fastness in Salzburg, Austria:

Silence is a grating clangor to the unwhole man.

The Use of the Body

There is such a thing as excessive concern with the body's health and excessive fear of its destruction. The body is to be used -- and used up. It is your vehicle here below; it is not you.  It is an experience mill, so grind away.  If thinking raises blood pressure, am I going to give up thinking? If reading weakens eyesight, will I give up reading? Physical health is a means, not an ultimate end. A healthy body aids the working out of my intellectual and spiritual salvation. But the point is to work out my intellectual and spiritual salvation.

Analogy. One takes good care of one's writing implements. But the point is to write something. The pencil achieves its end -- in both senses of the term -- by being used and used up. Similarly with the body and its organs.

So use the body, and use it up. You can't take it with you. But don't misuse it. Use it or lose it, but don't abuse it!

A Boomer and His Experiences

Do you help your neighbor to help your neighbor, or to add the experience of helping your neighbor to your collection of experiences?

From an advertisement: "Ever since we invented the first personal shredder, Fellowes has been dedicated to improving every aspect of the shredding experience."  The shredding experience?  Now we boomers have done all manner of wild and crazy things in quest of experience, but does anyone shred for the experience of it?

A culture of narcissism in which the focus is on the self and his experiences as opposed to the world and its objects.

Inappropriate Niceness

Most of us prefer nice people to surly pricks. And no doubt we should all try to be nicer to our world-mates. But there is such a thing as inappropriate niceness.

I am following at a safe distance the motorist in front of me. Then said motorist brakes for a jaywalker, not to avoid hitting him, but to allow him to cross. The jaywalker is violating the law; why aid and abet his lawbreaking? Why be nice to someone who shows no respect for the rules of the road? Why risk causing an accident? These are some questions the inappropriately nice should ask themselves.

The Aristotelian and the Old Man

For the one, potency is reduced to act; for the other, potency is just reduced.

Slow Thoughts in a Fast Medium

There is a bit of a paradox in my project, the blogging of philosophy. Sauntering along life's byways, cooling his heels at the margins of society, the philosopher bids us slow down! Whither the headlong mad rush? Quo vadis? Take thought, he suggests, take heed. Socrates knew how to stand stock still in the scene of strife and consult with his daimon. Wittgenstein, denounced in these pages as a Cave philosopher, yet had the good sense to recommend as salutation among philosophers, "Take your time!" (Der Gruß der Philosophen untereinander sollte sein: Laß dir Zeit! Vermischte Bemerkungen.) And in a place unknown to me, Franz Brentano, once a Catholic priest and no stranger to the contemplative disciplines, observes that "He who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis." (Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft.)

So in the belly of the blogospheric beast I too do my bit to slow things down.

Anti-Commie Haiku

Utopic heads in fog,
They broke real eggs
For an unreal omelet.

How to Judge a Blog

A weblog should be judged, not by the color of its 'skin,' but by the character of its content.