Maverick Philosopher

Seize and Squeeze

Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:

 . . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our   actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as  the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")

A Dangerous Property of Worldly Things

Al-Ghazzali, The Alchemy of Happiness, p. 48:

Another dangerous property of worldly things is that they appear at first as mere trifles, but each of these so-called 'trifles' branches out into countless ramifications until they swallow up the whole of a man's time and energy.

In Life as in Chess

Die Fehler sind alle schon da, sie warten nur darauf, gemacht zu werden. (Savielly Tartakower)

The mistakes are already all out there just waiting to be made. (tr. BV)

Snowflakes and 'Liberals' Take Heed

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8 November 1838

Paul Claudel

"The nearer we are to the mountain, the smaller we are. The nearer to eternal Sanctity, the more sinful we seem to ourselves to be." (Claudel-Gide Correspondence, p. 91)

 

 

 

Nisi duae res necessariae

The Truly Philosophical Spirit

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 36, #146):

The truly philosophical spirit is a contemplative spirit. It is not captivated by the things that one can change, but but by those, precisely, which cannot be changed.

 

The Decisive Difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #689, p. 212, written in 1944:

The endless chatter about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is quite hopeless. Outward similarities set up a superficial sphere of comparison that is utterly meaningless, for they are localised and limited by a decisive difference at a deeper level; the one prayed, the other did not. 

 

Nothing too Small for so Small a Creature

I am petty; nothing petty is foreign to me. Or to my journal.

Richard Weaver, "Life Without Prejudice" in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965, p. 11:

Upon one occasion when Boswell confessed to Johnson that he feared some things he was entering in his journal were too small, the latter advised him that nothing is too small for so small a creature as man.

 

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson magnificently and truly. And this from a man who lived in New England where there is no sky to speak of. What would he have written had he been able to bathe his thoughts in the lambent light of the desert Southwest?

Style and Thought

I sing the praises of Joseph Joubert, but here is a very bad aphorism of his:

The style is the thought itself. (Notebooks, p. 44)

This is an exaggeration so absurd that not even a Frenchman should be allowed to get away with it. Much, much better is this brilliancy from the pen of Schopenhauer:

Style is the physiognomy of the mind.

I sing the praises of Joseph Joubert, but here is a very bad aphorism of his:

The style is the thought itself. (Notebooks, p. 44)

This is an exaggeration so absurd that not even a Frenchman should be allowed to get away with it. Much, much better is this brilliancy from the pen of Schopenhauer:

Style is the physiognomy of the mind.

What Makes an Aphorism Good?

Reader RP submits the following aphorisms for evaluation:

A very good thing about not having anyone to talk to is not having to talk to anyone.

A very good thing about not having any place to go to is not having to go anyplace.

The evil of loneliness becomes the good thing of solitude when one makes use of all the time on one's hands by thinking and loving God.

Do they meet your standard for aphorisms?

Brevity and economy of expression are marks of a good aphorism. Hackneyed phrases such as "time on one's hands" ought to be avoided. I would rewrite your first and third like this:

The good of not having anyone to talk to is not having to talk to anyone.

and

The alleviation of loneliness is not in society but in solitude with Him Who Is.

or

Amor dei transmutes the evil of loneliness into the good of solitude.

A good aphorism ought to be brief, true, original,  satisfying in form, and universal in content. Example:

A man sits as many risks as he runs. (Thoreau)

That is a model aphorism. You say it is not true as it stands? But add some such qualification as 'in many cases' and you remove its literary merit. Besides, anyone intelligent enough to understand it will take the qualification as tacitly present. Even better, perhaps, is 

Some men are born posthumously. (Nietzsche)

The proposition this expresses is true without qualification.  Here is one from E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983, translated from the French by Richard Howard):

            Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities. (163)

Brilliant. Philosophy, as Plato remarks (Theaetetus St. 155) and Aristotle repeats (Metaphysics 982b10), is about wonder, perplexity. Fruitful philosophical conversation, rare as it is and must be given the woeful state of humanity, is therefore a consolidation and appreciation of problems and aporiai, much more than an attempt to convince one’s interlocutor of something. Another from Cioran:

Nothing makes us modest, not even the sight of a corpse. (87)

Outstanding!  But this is bad:

Time, accomplice of exterminators, disposes of morality. Who, today, bears a grudge against Nebuchadnezzar? (178)

This is quite bad, and not become of its literary form, but because the thought is false. If enough time passes, people forget about past injustices. True. But how does it follow that morality is abrogated? Cioran is confusing two distinct propositions. One is that the passage of time disposes of moral memories, memories of acts just and unjust. The other is that the passage of time disposes of morality itself, rightness and wrongness themselves, so that unjust acts eventually become neither just not unjust. The fact that Cioran’s aphorism conflates these two propositions is enough to condemn it, quite apart from the fact that the second proposition is arguably false. A good aphorism cannot merely be clever; it must also express an insight. An insight, of course, is an insight only if it is true. Nor is an aphorism good if it merely betrays a mental quirk of its author. For then it would be of merely psychological or biographical interest.

An aphorism is not a proverb such as 

Aus den Augen, aus den Sinn

Out of sight, out of mind.

or

Neue Besen kehren gut

A new broom sweeps clean.

A proverb is a distillation of folk wisdom; an aphorism is the product of an individual.

An aphorism is not a maxim such as

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Maxims are prescriptive; aphorisms descriptive.  They are grammatically declarative rather than imperative or optative or cohortative.

Must an aphorism be a standalone?  The following makes a good aphorism even though it is part of a wider context:

Life is a business that doesn't cover its costs. (Schopenhauer)

Finally, Karl Kraus on the art of the aphorism:

Beim Wort Genommen, p. 132:

Einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn man es kann, ist oft schwer. Viel leichter ist es, einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn mann es nicht kann.

It is often difficult to write an aphorism, even for those with the ability. It is much easier when one lacks the ability. (tr. BV)

Benjamin Jowett on Grace

A stunning formulation for your delectation from the translator of Plato and the don of Balliol College:

Grace is an energy; not a mere sentiment; not a mere thought of the Almighty; not even a word of the Almighty. It is as real an energy as the energy of electricity. It is a divine energy; it is the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need.

An observation magisterial on all counts, combining as it does truth, economy of expression, and literary beauty: "the energy of the divine affection rolling in plenteousness toward the shores of human need."  Could it do with a bit of paring? How about this:

. . . the energy of God's plenary affection rolling shoreward toward human need.

Companion posts:

Grace

Post-Session Fruits of a Formal Session

Memo to Trump Haters

The way to get things done is not to mind who gets the credit for doing them.

The Deep Thinker

Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fliegenpein: Aufzeichnungen), Noonday 1994, tr. H. F. Broch de Rothermann, bilingual ed., p. 25:

His thoughts have fins instead of wings.

It flows better in German:

Sein Denken hat Flossen statt Flügel.

The title is my creation.

Many of Canetti's notations express insights; others, however striking, are exercises in literary self-indulgence, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Here are some good ones:

No code is secret enough to allow for the expression of complete candor. (5)

He will never be a thinker: he doesn't repeat himself enough. (13)

He desires the existence of the people he loves, but not their presence and their preoccupations. (15)

He wishes for moments that burn as long as match. (15)

I read that as a protest against time's fugacity.

He is as smart as a newspaper; he knows everything and what he knows changes from day to day. (19)

Even the great philosopher benefits from exaggeration, but with him she must wear a tightly woven garment of reason. The poet, on the other hand, exposes her in all her shimmering nudity. (19)

It's easy to be reasonable when you don't love anyone, including yourself. (21)

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life. (23)

That resonates with me.  But it is not an aphorism if an aphorism must present a universal truth.  This is an aphorism: On fair days one feels too sure of one's own life.  But this is the philosopher talking with his zeal to transcend the particular toward the universal. The poet is more at home, or entirely at home,  with the particular. There is an advantage to Canetti's formulation: it cannot be contradicted. He is reporting the feeling of a particular man, presumably himself.  The corresponding aphorism invites counterexamples.

God does not like us to draw lessons from recent history. (23)

I surmise that the thought driving the aphorism is that the horrors of the 20th century make theistic belief psychologically impossible. Who can believe in God after Auschwitz?

Related: Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism 

Addendum.  Contrast

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life

with 

He whose days are fair feels too sure of his own life.

'He' in the second sentence functions as a universal quantifier, not as a pronoun.  Pronouns have antecedents: the 'he' in the second sentence has no antecedent.  Nor does it need one. The 'he' in the first sentence, however, could be called a dangling pronoun: its antecedent is tacit, and is presumably 'Canetti.'  If this is right, the two sentences express different thoughts and are not intersubstitutable salva veritate.  

I rather doubt that Canetti would approve of this analysis. Too philosophical.

Never Buy a Book You Haven't Read

Wisdom and wit with a soupçon of paradox.

What is Time?

Si nemo a me querat, scio, si quarenti explicare velim, nescio.

Augustinus (354-430), Confessiones, lib. XI, cap. 14.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Augustinus, Contra Academicos, 1. 2. 6

Time is a tangle of the most elusive and difficult topics in philosophy. For a mere mortal to grapple with any of them may be hubris, given the Augustinian predicament: “If no one asks me, I know [what time is]; if I want to explain it to someone who asks me, I do not know.”

But undaunted we proceed under the aegis of the second quotation above: “Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great.”

Alinsky, Tartakower, and Nimzowitsch: "The Threat is Stronger than the Execution"

Kai Frederik Lorentzen writes,

In your latest blog entry you refer to Alinsky's Rules for Radicals. Being aware that you are a chess player, I want to ask: Do you know that his rule number nine had earlier been formulated by grandmaster Tartakower?

Alinsky: "The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself."

Tartakower: "Die Drohung ist stärker als die Ausführung."

I am well aware of the saying, both in German and in English, but I was under the false impression that it originated with Aron Nimzowitsch, most likely because of the famous 'smoking threat' anecdote.  Edward Winter, the chess historian, provides all the details one could ask for, and more: 

Page 138 of Schach 2000 Jahre Spiel-Geschichte by R. Finkenzeller, W. Ziehr and E. Bührer (Stuttgart, 1989) ascribed to Tartakower a remark quoted as ‘Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung’. In the English-language edition (London, 1990) that came out lumberingly as ‘A threat is more effective than the actual implementation’, whereas the usual rendering is ‘The threat is stronger than the execution’. Moreover, Nimzowitsch, rather than Tartakower, is customarily named as the coiner of the phrase, with everything tied into the famous ‘smoking threat’ anecdote.

On page 191 of the July 1953 CHESS M. Lipton pointed out two contradictory versions of the story of Nimzowitsch complaining that his opponent was threatening to smoke. On pages 31-32 of Chess for Fun & Chess for Blood (Philadelphia, 1942) Edward Lasker asserted that the incident, involving a cigar, had occurred ‘in an offhand game between Nimzowitsch and Emanuel Lasker in Berlin’ (although there was still, according to Edward Lasker’s account, an umpire to whom Nimzowitsch could protest). On page 128 of The World’s Great Chess Games (New York, 1951) Reuben Fine stated that the scene had been New York, 1927, and that Nimzowitsch complained to the tournament director, Maróczy, when Vidmar ‘absent-mindedly took out his cigarette case’.

New York, 1927 was also given as the venue by Irving Chernev (‘This is the way I heard it back in 1927, when it occurred’) on pages 15-16 of The Bright Side of Chess (Philadelphia, 1948). Nimzowitsch, we are told, complained to the tournament committee that Vidmar looked as if he wanted to smoke a cigar, but Chernev mentioned no remark about the threat being stronger than the execution. [. . .]

"The threat is stronger than the execution" is undoubtedly the best translation of Die Drohung ist stärker als die Ausführung. Winter, however, cites Eine Drohung ist stärker als eine Ausführung which is not as good in German or in English: "A threat is stronger than an execution."

As for Alinsky, it hadn't occurred to me that he was essentially repeating the Tartakower line.  Very interesting, and I thank for pointing that out.  We pedants derive inordinate but harmless pleasure from such bagatelles.

I don't know whether Alinsky played chess (many Jews do). I learned about this most famous Tartakowerism when I played the game seriously in my early youth. Not only with teenage peers but also with a grown up team in the third national league (Verbandsliga) where I played at board four (of eight) and had positive overall results in all three seasons. The teenage boy I was enjoyed making grown up men -  architects, doctors, lawyers -  sweat in their suits ... I also liked to play Blitzschach a lot, with five or two minutes time for the whole match. I still have a beautiful English chess clock from the late 1970s but hardly ever play today. Other things became more important, and laymen often tend to avoid former club players. And if it doesn't sound too kulturpessimistisch, I may add that I sometimes have the impression that digitalization killed the poetic spirit of the game. Can Goddess Caissa survive the algorithms?         

Chess is Jewish athletics, as the saying goes, and they dominate the game. See Jews in Chess. I would expect that Alinsky had some knowledge of the game.  I conjecture that one of the roots of Jew hatred is envy.  Jews have made contributions to high culture far out of proportion to their numbers. 

If our paths ever cross, Kai, we will have to play. I am a patzer, but on a good day I rise to the level of Grand Patzer. My highest USCF rating was around 1720. So I am a 'B' player.  I am 'strong coffee house' at least in the coffee houses around here. I came to serious play (tournaments) too late in life to to get any good.  But I beat everyone around here and so people think I'm a master.  A big fish in a small pond. I try to explain to them the hierarchical nature of chess and of life herself, but I rarely get through to them. I play a few 3-minute blitz games per day on the Internet Chess Club, the premier site for chess play. 

The poetic spirit of the game will never die as long as there are romantics like me around. Caissa, like Philosophia, will ever evade the algorithms.

Chess is a beautiful thing, a gift of the gods, an oasis of sanity in an insane world. If I met Alinsky at the barricades we'd meet as enemies; over the chess board, however, as friends.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tartakowerismen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rules_for_Radicals
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/03/liberal-immigration-hyper-hypocrisy.html

Karl Kraus, Aphoristically, on the Art of the Aphorism

Beim Wort Genommen, (Muenchen: Koesel Verlag, 1955), p. 132:

Einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn man es kann, ist oft schwer. Viel leichter ist es, einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn mann es nicht kann.

It is often difficult to write an aphorism, even for those with the ability. It is much easier when one lacks the ability. (tr. WFV)

Something Snowflakes and 'Liberals' Need to Understand

"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 8 November 1838

Man as Onion?

Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind and Other Aphorisms (New York: Harper & Bros., 1955), p. 62, Aph. # 96: 

Man's being is neither profound nor sublime. To search for something deep underneath the surface in order to explain human phenomena is to discard the nutritious outer layer for a nonexistent core. Like a bulb man is all skin and no kernel.

I disagree completely. Man is no onion or bulb, surface all the way down, with a nonexistent core. "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (R. W. Emerson, "The Over-Soul") The central task of life is not to write merely clever aphorisms, but to return to the Source.

Or perhaps I should say that what the stevedore says is true -- of extroverts.

Related: Seriousness as Camouflage of Nullity.  (On the topic of death.)

Becoming Old and Being Old: A Paradox

Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.

.....................

That's an old thought, not original with me, but I do not know who deserves the attribution.  

Its literary effect trades on equivocation.

In one sense, an old thing is a thing that has been in existence a long time. Now something can be in existence a long time without getting old in the second sense. Consider a Roman coin in pristine condition, preserved out of circulation by numismatists over the centuries. Very old, but not worn out. 

Something analogous is true of humans. There are 90-year-olds who are hale and hearty and compete creditably in foot races. And there are 40-year-olds whose bodies are shot. 

A man who gets old calendrically cannot help but age physiologically.  But the rates of physiological ageing are different for different people.  

It is conceivable that one  get old without getting old. It is even conceivable  that one get old while getting younger. Those are paradoxical sentences that express the following non-paradoxical propositions:  It is conceivable that one get old calendrically without getting old physiologically.  It is conceivable that one get old calendrically whle getting younger physiologically. The conceivability and indeed imaginability of the latter is the theme of the Twilight Zone episode, A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain. I should adde for the aficionados of  modality that conceivability does not entail possibility.

Now return to the opening aphorism: Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.

The expression is paradoxical, but the thought is non-contradictory.  The thought, expressed non-paradoxically is: Most if not all want to live a long time, but few if any want to suffer the decrepitude attendant upon living a long time.

One logic lesson to be drawn is that a paradox is not the same as a contradiction.

It is therefore a mistake to refer to Russell's Antinomy as 'Russell's Paradox.' 

Wonder Lost

I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli uomini il nulla nel tutto.

The child finds everything in nothing; the man nothing in everything.

And knocking back a couple or three Fanciulli cocktails won't help matters.

The Relativity of Lived Time

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. 

A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.  It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,

And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman -- any woman -- becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man -- any man -- should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)

Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive. 

Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.

Related: Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners

Wonder and Nonentity

George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis, Macmillan 1960, #169:

We must not wonder things away into nonentity.

An occupational hazard of a certain sort of philosopher. My haiku commentary on MacDonald's epigram:

Beginning in wonder
Wisdom runs the risk
Of ending in das Nichts.

Bondage

George MacDonald: An Anthology, ed. C. S. Lewis, Macmillan 1960, p. 41, #57:

A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.

True Whether or Not Aristotle (or Camus) Said It

Be skeptical of all unsourced quotations. Where did the Stagirite say this?

Jumping ahead a couple of millennia, one finds the following bogus Camus quotation on several of those wretched unsourced quotation websites:

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die to find out there is." ~Albert Camus

Having read and taught Camus, I can assure you that the above is not something he could have said in his own voice.  Did he put these words into the mouth of a character in one his novels or plays?

Paging Dave Lull.

 

UPDATE (5/6)

I had forgotten that I had already asked Dave about this and that he had already replied, in April of 2013:

I find no evidence that a statement of Camus' is translated thusly.  I won't bore you with the things that I did (buoyed by my high tolerance of boring activity) before I finally went to Google Books and did inauthor: "Albert Camus" searches using combinations of various keywords and short phrases from this so-called quotation and got no statement even close.  I even tried using Google Translate to translate it into French and then used combinations of various French keywords and short phrases and also got no statement even close.  I'm not surprised.  How about you?

Our hard-working researcher now provides us with the following:

 

From Giovanni Gaetani, “The noble art of misquoting Camus -- from its origins to the Internet era,” Journal of Camus Studies 2015:

2) Camus a wise gambler after Pascal's example?

‘I would rather live my life as if there is a God, and die to

find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't, and die

to find out there is’. 

Dozens of disoriented readers doubted at first glance of the reliability of this quote, but none of them was capable of solving the enigma: someone assumed that ‘maybe Camus wrote it on some private letters’, few others noticed the similarity with Pascal's wager on the existence of God. Unfortunately, the author of this quote is for sure neither Camus nor Pascal. According to Google, the actual spreading of this quote dates back to the early 2000s, when it firstly appeared in some American Christian sites25. In 2006, the Bishop T. D. Jakes even invented a ‘8 seconds prayer’ chain letter using this quote26. Anyway, I did not manage to understand how and why Camus is considered the author of this quote.

"No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures"

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:

Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas. 

In a second footnote we read:

Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"

Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.

What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more.  Does it mean that no man preaches a  pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack.  But on this reading the saying comes out false.

Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.

A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy.  But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.

Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.

It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.

Dolce far Niente

It is sweet to do nothing, but only if if the inactivity comes like the caesura in a line of poetry or the punctuation in a sentence of prose or the rest in a piece of music. Inactivity extended stultifies. At least this is true here below. Genesis 3:19 may be read as 'sentencing' us to activity. Enduring contemplative repose comes later. 

Or does the 'sentence' end with a 'full stop'?

Gratitude is the Memory of the Heart

A masterpiece of the aphorist's art.  Attributed to Jean Massieu (1772-1846).

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Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, p. 73:

Too much security for the child's heart, and the adult will spend his life demanding this security from people -- even though people are only opportunities for risk and freedom.

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Of Socialism, Violets, and Asphalt

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 61:

Socialism, according to Zochtchenko, will be when violets grow on asphalt.

Bernie Sanders take note.

Translator's footnote: Mikhail Zochtchenko (1895-1962), Soviet writer and humorist persecuted by Stalin.

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Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101:

Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.

That puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where there are no laws there are no criminals.  That is not much better than saying that where there are no chemists there are no chemicals. 

Just as there are chemicals whether or not there are any chemists, there are moral wrongs whether or not there are any positive laws prohibiting them.  What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong.  And it is precisely the moral wrongness of murder that justifies having laws against it.

And yet there is a sense in which criminals are legislated into existence:  one cannot be a criminal in the eyes of the law unless there is the law.  And it is certainly true that to be a criminal in the eyes of the law does not entail being  guilty of any moral wrong-doing.  But the anarchist goes off the deep end if he thinks that there is no moral justification for any legal prohibitions, or that the wrongness of every act is but an artifact of the law's prohibiting it.

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If You Understood Me, You Would Agree with Me!

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Still Perfect After All These Years

People, Guns, and Reference

I had the pleasure of Dale Tuggy's presence here for a couple of days.  He got off a neat comparison that hadn't occurred to me, but one I fully endorse:

Just as guns don't kill people, but people kill people using guns, so too words don't refer to things, but people refer to things using words.

Self-Control and Self-Esteem

"Self-control is infinitely more important that self-esteem."  (Dennis Prager)

Delete 'infinitely' and you have an important truth pithily and accurately expressed.  With self-control one can develop attributes that justify one's self-esteem.  Without it one may come to an untimely end as did Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, who brought about his own death through a lack of self-control.

Liberals, of course, preach an empty self-esteem. 

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Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral. (Bertolt Brecht) 

Loosely translated, "First feed, then scruple."

Something similar in Horace.  Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.

Hard Childhood, Strong Man

Emmanuel Lasker, Die Philosophie des Unvollendbar, 1919, p. x:

Aber eine harte Kindheit macht einen starken Mann.

But a hard childhood makes a strong man.

In the '80s I read a chunk of Lasker's Philosophy of the Incompletable and concluded that the grandmaster of chess was not one of philosophy. But I didn't read much of it and it was a long time ago.  Now available in a paperback reprint via Amazon.com.  I am tempted to take another look.

Too many in philosophy and other fields confine themselves to the horizon of the contemporary. Explore, get lost, discover.

A marvellous sublunary trinity: chess, philosophy, and a cigar.

If You Understood Me, You Would Agree with Me!

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 204, Notebook K, Aph. #84:

To call a proposition into question all that is needed is very often merely to fail to understand it.  Certain gentlemen have been all too ready to reverse this maxim, and to assert that we fail to understand their propositions if we call them into question.

Sehr gut, Herr Lichtenberg!  Sehr treffend!

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Still Perfect After All These Years

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 223, Notebook L, Aph. #67:

If we did not remember our youth, we should [would] not be aware of old age:  the malady of age consists solely in our no longer being able to do what we could do formerly. For the old man is certainly as perfect a creature in his own way as is the young.

The title I supplied alludes to Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years. (What a great song!)

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Why Lichtenberg is not on Facebook

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 162, Notebook J, Aph. #168, hyperlink added!

As soon as he receives a little applause many a writer believes that the world is interested in everything about him.  The play-scribbler Kotzebue even thinks himself justified in telling the public that he administered a clister [an enema] to his dying wife.

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The Art of the Aphorism

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollindale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 156:

He despises me because he does not know me, and I despise his accusations because I know myself.

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My Kind of Guy

Desiderius Erasmus is often quoted as saying, "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes."

The closest I have come to verifying this attribution or misattribution is here:

• Ad Graecas literas totum animum applicui; statimque, ut pecuniam acceptero, Graecos primum autores, deinde vestes emam.
  • I have turned my entire attention to Greek. The first thing I shall do, as soon as the money arrives, is to buy some Greek authors; after that, I shall buy clothes.
  • Letter to Jacob Batt (12 April 1500); Collected Works of Erasmus Vol 1 (1974)
  • Variant translation: When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

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Two Pipe Quotations

My referrers' list points me to this post whence I snagged these two delightful quotations:

The pipe draws wisdom from the lips of the philosopher, and shuts up the mouth of the foolish; it generates a style of conversation, contemplative, thoughtful, benevolent, and unaffected.

William Makepeace Thackeray 

A pipe is the fountain of contemplation, the source of pleasure, the companion of the wise; and the man who smokes, thinks like a philosopher and acts like a Samaritan.”

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

The name 'Bulwer-Lytton' rings a bell doesn't it?  You guessed right: it's the same Bulwer-Lytton who penned, in prose of purple, the opening sentence,

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

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Bogus Camus Quotation

De Fato

 Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.

The fates lead the willing; they drag the unwilling.

Seneca's Latin version of a saying by Cleanthes preserved by Epictetus. 

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On Duty: Commentary on an Aphorism by Henri-Frederic Amiel

"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it." (From Journal Intime)

This is a penetrating observation, and a  perfect specimen of the aphorist's art. It is terse, true, but not trite. The tip of an iceberg of thought, it invites exploration below the water line.

If the world were literally a dream, there would be no need to act in it or take it seriously. One could treat it as one who dreams lucidly can treat a dream: one lies back and enjoys the show in the knowledge that it is only a dream. But to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do this or refrain from that, I take the world to be real, to be more than maya or illusion. Feeling duty-bound, I help realize the world.  It is an "unfinished universe" in a Jamesian phrase and  I cannot play within it the role of mere spectator.  I must play the agent as well; I must participate whether I like it or not, non-participation being but  a definicient  mode of participation.  In a Sartrean phrase, I am "condemned to be free": I am free to do and leave undone, but my being free does not fall within the ambit of my freedom.

And to the extent that I feel duty-bound to do something, to make real what merely ought to be, I am referred to this positive world as to the locus of realization.

But just how real is the world of our ordinary waking experience? Is it the ne plus ultra of reality? Its manifest deficiency gives the lie to this supposition, which is why great philosophers from Plato to Bradley have denied ultimate reality to the sense world. Things are not the way they ought to be, and things are the way they ought not be, and everyone with moral sense feels this to be true. The Real falls short of the Ideal, and, falling short demonstrates its lack of plenary reality. So while the perception of duty realizes the world, it also and by the same stroke de-realizes it by measuring it against a standard from elsewhere.

The moral sense discloses a world poised between the unreality of the dream and the plenary reality of the Absolute.  Plato had it right: the human condition is speleological and the true philosopher is a transcendental speleologist.

The sense of duty detaches us from the world of what is by referring us to what ought to be. What ought to be, however, in many cases is not; hence we are referred back to the world of what is as the scene wherein alone ideals can be realized.

It is a curious dialectic. The Real falls short of the Ideal and is what is is in virtue of this falling short. The Ideal, however, is only imperfectly realized here below.  Much of the ideal lacks reality just as much of the Real lacks ideality. Each is what it is by not being what it is not. And we moral agents are caught in this interplay. We are citizens of two worlds and must play the ambassador between them.

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Nicolás Gómez Dávila on the Vatican II Church

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994) is an outstanding aphorist of a decidedly conservative, indeed reactionary, bent. What follows are some of his observations on the Catholic Church of the Second Vatican Council.  I found them here thanks to Karl White.  I've added a couple of comments in blue.

The phenomena of the decay of Catholicism are entertaining; those of Protestantism dull. (p. 191)

Tongues of fire didn’t descend upon the Second Vatican Council, as they did upon the first assembly of the apostles, but a stream of fire – a Feuerbach. (p. 245)

If one were to translate Ludwig Feuerbach's name into English it would come out as Firebrook.  (Of course, one does not translate proper names; at most one transliterates them.)  Feuerbach was an important influence on Karl Marx.  He is famous or notorious for the notion that God is an unconscious anthropomorphic projection.  Man alienates himself from his best attributes by unconsciously projecting them, in maximized forms, upon a nonexistent transcendent being. 

A single council is nothing more than a single voice in the real ecumenical council of the Church: her complete history. (p. 265)

Popular Catholicism is the target of all progressive anger. Popular faith, popular hope, popular charity exasperate a clergy of petit bourgeois origin. (p. 266)

For the left-wing Catholic Catholicism is the great sin of the Catholic. (p. 248)

Catholics have lost that sympathetic capacity of sinning without arguing that sin doesn’t exist. (p. 274)

The problems of man can be neither exactly defined nor even remotely solved. Whoever hopes that Christianity can solve them ceases to be a Christian. (p. 285)

Add 'here below' at the end of the first sentence, and then the aphorism is true.

The progressive Catholic is only active in zealously seeking for whatever he can still hand over to the world.

Better a small church with Catholics than a numerous one with Rotarians. (p. 334)

Today’s Church is so nice as to exclude everything from the revealed traditions which public opinion condemns. (p. 319)

The current pope prays for that progress which Bury – its historian – called the “substitute for Providence.” (p. 319)

The thing that exasperates today’s Christian about the Middle Ages is Christianity. (p. 319)

The new liturgists have abolished the sacred pulpits in order that no scoundrel can assert that the Church intends to compete with the secular ones. (p. 319)

Catholics don’t have the slightest idea that the world feels betrayed by the concessions made to it by Catholicism. (p. 325)

The progressive clergy crowns the towers of the church of today not with a cross but with a weathervane. (p. 325)

Only the Catholic on the brink of losing his faith is outraged by the Church’s dazed state, sent by Providence.

St. Thomas Aquinas: an Orleaniste of theology? (p. 350)

Aggiornamento is the sellout of the Church. (p. 363)

The progressive Catholic collects his theology from the garbage can of Protestant theology. (p. 363)

Intending to open her arms to the world the Church instead opened her legs. (p. 363)

Instead of a theology of the mystical body the theologians of today teach a theology of the mystical masses. (p. 363)

Today it is impossible to respect the Christians.  Out of respect for Christianity. (p. 379)

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Forever Reading . . .

. . . never read.  (Schopenhauer)

Correction (16 September):  Schopenhauer is not the source; he is quoting Alexander Pope.

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Temptation

A striking one or two sentence formulation taken from a wider context is not an aphorism, strictly speaking.  But I'm in a loose and liberal mood.  So I present for your consideration and delectation the following sentence from Paul Ludwig Landsberg (1901-1944).  It is from his essay "The Moral Problem of Suicide," translated from the French by Cynthia Rowland and bound together with "The Experience of Death" in a volume entitled The Experience of Death (Arno Press, New York, 1977).  The sentence occurs on p. 69.

Temptation is an experience of the difference between the vertigo of power and the decision of duty.

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Nulla Dies Sine Linea

"No day without a line."

No day without a line even if the line is that no day should be without one.