Maverick Philosopher

"It Takes One to Know One"

Half of the time.

It takes intelligence to recognize intelligence in others. But the stupid cannot see the stupidity in others -- or in themselves. 

When we have gold we are in fear . . .

. . . when we have none we are in danger.  (English proverb)

A proverb whose pertinence is proven  by  recent  developments. Gold hit 2400 USD/oz. a day or two ago, but has backed off some.   Joe Biden and his shills lie their heads off about everything including the health of the economy, but, with respect to the latter,  the surging price of gold suggests otherwise.

Doing Well by Doing Good

A successful urologist I know told me that he and his colleagues want to do well by doing good.  An excellent formulation, but inapplicable to Joe Biden.  He wants to do well whether or not he does good. He wants such  trappings and results of worldly success as power and position, money and property,  even if he must destroy the country to get them. Good old Traitor Joe, violator of sacred vows, brazen liar, serial plagiarist, slanderer of decent people, threat to the peace and stability of the nation and the world.  If you support him, you are as despicable as he is. You might also consider that a vote for him is a vote for Kamala Harris. 

You say you don't like Donald Trump? I don't like him that much either. But politics is a practical pursuit. It is not about perfect versus imperfect but about better versus worse. I invite you to give some thought to the question whether you and your family and the nation and the world will be better off with another term of Trump or another of Biden. I invite you, for your own good, to inform yourself and exercise whatever critical faculties you possess.

He Who Hesitates is Lost

Sometimes, however, it is better to look before you leap. 

Note this curious philo-lang point: 'he' above, though grammatically classifiable as a pronoun, does not function logically as a pronoun: it has no antecedent. It functions as a sex-neutral universal quantifier, or rather, it functions as an individual variable bound by a universal quantifier.  Thus the maxim translates as 'For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.'

"It Takes One to Know One"

Sometimes it doesn't. I know that Kierkegaard is a genius and that I am not.

First they came for the Saturday people . . .

. . . then they came for the Sunday people.

Carpe Noctem

To make good use of the night, don't load the mind with dreck before drifting off.

Political Action

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration:  Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

Read more at Substack.

Noetic Distance

You kept your distance from him when he was alive, and you did well in so doing. Now that he is dead, when his only proximity is noetic, it is noetic distance that you must maintain.

A Philosopher's Last Words

What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.

Secretum Meum Mihi

On the topic of Latin mottoes, Edith Stein's is from Isaiah 24, 16:

From the ends of the earth we have heard praises, the glory of the just one. And I said: My secret to myself, my secret to myself, woe is me: the prevaricators have prevaricated, and with the prevarication of transgressors they have prevaricated.

A finibus terrae laudes audivimus gloriam iusti et dixi secretum meum mihi secretum meum mihi vae mihi praevaricantes praevaricati sunt et praevaricatione transgressorum praevaricati sunt.

Edith Stein wrote the phrase, Secretum meum mihi ("My secret belongs to me," Mein Geheimnis gehört mir) to her friend, the philosopher Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the morning after Stein's conversion experience in the summer of 1921. Her conversion was occasioned by her reading of the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila a copy of which she found in the library of Theodor Conrad and Hedwig Martius.

One is reminded of the Tolle, Lege passage  in St. Augustine's Confessions.

Nisi duae res necessariae

Maxims and Meta-Maxims

1) Live now: resist the tendency to bring the past into the present.

2) Beware of viewing yourself through the belittling eyes of others.

3) Avoid negative and weakening thoughts.

4) Avoid comparisons with others.

5) Keep socializing to the minimum necessary to maintain one's sanity and humanity.

6) Do not associate with those beneath you except as duty and necessity require.

7) Guard the mind, the tongue, the heart.

8) Abide in the here, the now, the self.

9) Aspire.

10 Strive and persevere.

11) Begin the day with a review of these and other maxims.

12) Maxims ought to be part of one's 'everyday carry.' Don't leave home without them.

13) Age quod agis!

14) Indulgence weakens; resistance strengthens.

15) Coin new maxims.

16) Carpe diem et noctem! 

A Pronoun Puzzle: "He who hesitates is lost"

Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one. 

A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over an abysmal chasm. I say, "He who hesitates is lost!" My hiking partner, a smartass, replies, "You mean Biden?"

My witticism is modelled on a genuine Yogi Berra joke. You are asked what time it is and you reply, "You mean now?"

'He' in the folk saying is grammatically a pronoun, but it does not function logically as one. How then does it function?

I say it functions as a universal quantifier. Not like a universal quantifier, but as one. Thus:

For any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

This strikes me as clear as day. Rather less clear is the role of the first-person singular pronoun in 'I think, therefore I am.'  Does 'I' in this context have an antecedent, and if it does, what or who is the antecedent?   Anythng you say will land you in the aporetic frying pan. Or so I could argue.

Later.

Best Friend, Worst Enemy

In your practical life, be your own best friend; in your spiritual and intellectual life, your own worst enemy.

Too Many Memories?

Are you bothered by too many memories? Live more actively and thoughtlessly! Enter the diaspora of mundane dis-traction. Lose yourself in the quotidian. Take the drug of busy-ness.

Not my way, but it could be yours.

Let it Go and Move on

Let the past go and move on. Pack as much life as possible into the few years that remain. Squeeze in as much vital thinking and thoughtful vitality as you can. Move up and away from your vices. Consign your hebetude to history. Break useless contacts. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Mill the grist. Press the grapes of experience  for the wine of wisdom. A philosopher's harvest years come late. The clock is running. The format is sudden death. The time control is unknown. The Reaper waits, he is patient, his scythe aglisten in the dying rays of the setting sun. There is work to be done, and it can only be done here. Get on with it, noble soul!

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Resist Not the Folly of the Fool

Resist not the folly of the fool who is his own undoing. 

Apply this maxim to the leftist whose race- and sex-delusionality increases daily. If you encourage by not resisting the acceleration of his madness, you may hasten the day when common sense reasserts itself. 

Happiness Maxims

Just over the transom:

I do want to thank you again for the 'happiness maxims'. I've been reading them to wifey recently, and over time I've benefited hugely from them.

Here they are again, easier to read, and slight emended.  This is a re-post from 26 May 2013.

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

These maxims work for me; they may work for you.  Experiment.  The art of living can only be learned by living and trying and failing.

0. Make it a goal of your life to be as happy as circumstances permit.  Think of it as a moral obligation: a duty to oneself and to others.

1. Avoid unhappy people. Most of them live in hells of their own devising; you cannot help them, but they can harm you.

2. Avoid negativity. Squelch negative and useless thoughts as they arise. Your mind is your domain and you have (limited) control over it. Don't dwell on the limits; push against them and expand them. Refuse entry to all unwanted guests. With practice, the power of the mind to control itself can be developed.  There is no happiness without mind control.  Don't dwell on the evil and sordid sides of life.  Study them unflinchingly to learn the truths of the human predicament, but know how to look away when study time is over.

3. Set aside one hour per morning for formal meditation and the ruminative reading of high-grade self-help literature, e.g., the Stoics, but not just them. Go ahead, read Seligman, but read Seneca first.

4. Cultivate realistic expectations concerning the world and the people in it. This may require adjusting expectations downward. But this must be done without rancor, resentment, cynicism, or misanthropy. If you are shocked at the low level of your fellow human beings, blame yourself for having failed to cultivate reality-grounded expectations. 

Negative people typically feel well-justified in their negative assessments of the world and its denizens. Therein lie a snare and a delusion. Justified or not, they poison themselves with their negativity and dig their hole deeper. Not wise.

Know and accept your own limitations. Curtail ambition, especially as the years roll on. Don't overreach.  Enjoy what you have here and now.  Don't let hankering after a nonexistent future poison the solely existent present.

5. Blame yourself as far as possible for everything bad that happens to you. This is one of the attitudinal differences between a conservative and a liberal. When a conservative gets up in the morning, he looks into the mirror and says, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. What happens to me today is up to me and in my control." He thereby exaggerates, but in a life-enhancing way. The liberal, by contrast, starts his day with the blame game: "I was bullied, people were mean to me, blah, blah, people suck, I'm a victim, I need a government program to stop me from mainlining heroin, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam. A caricature? Of course. But it lays bare some important home truths like all good caricatures do.

Perhaps we could say that the right-thinking person begins with a defeasible presumption in favor of his ability to rely on himself, to cope, to negotiate life's twists and turns, to get his head together, to be happy, to flourish. He thus places the burden of proof on the people and things outside him to defeat the presumption. Sometimes life defeats our presumption of well-being; but if we start with the presumption of ill-being, then we defeat ourselves.

We should presume ourselves to be successful in our pursuit of happiness until proven wrong.

6. Rely on yourself for your well-being as far as possible. Don't look to others.  You have no right to happiness and others have no obligation to provide it for you.  Your right is to the pursuit of happiness.  Learn to cultivate the soil of solitude. Happy solitude is the sole beatitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo.  An exaggeration to be sure, but justified by the truth it contains. In the end, the individual is responsible for his happiness.

7. Practice mental self-control as difficult as it is.  Master desire and aversion. Our thoughts are the seeds of words and deeds.

8. Practice being grateful. Find ten things to be grateful for each morning.  Gratitude drives out resentment. The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.

9. Limit comparisons with others. Comparisons often breed envy. The envious do not achieve well-being. Be yourself.

10. Fight the good fight against ignorance, evil, thoughtlessness, and tyranny, but don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism.  We are not here to improve the world so much as to be improved by it.  It cannot be changed in any truly ameliorative and fundamental ways by our own efforts whether individual or collective.  If you fancy it can be, then go ahead and learn the hard way, assuming you don't make things worse.

11. Hope beyond this life.  One cannot live well in this life without hope.  Life is enhanced if you can bring yourself to believe beyond it as well.  No one knows whether we have a higher destiny.  If you are so inclined, investigate the matter.  But better than inquiry into the immortality of the soul is living in such a way as to deserve it.

Companion post:  Middle-sized Happiness

These maxims work for me; they may work for you.  Experiment.  The art of living can only be learned by living and trying and failing.

0. Make it a goal of your life to be as happy as circumstances permit.  Think of it as a moral obligation: a duty to oneself and to others.

1. Avoid unhappy people. Most of them live in hells of their own devising; you cannot help them, but they can harm you.

2. Avoid negativity. Squelch negative and useless thoughts as they arise. Your mind is your domain and you have (limited) control over it. Don't dwell on the limits; push against them and expand them. Refuse entry to all unwanted guests. With practice, the power of the mind to control itself can be developed.  There is no happiness without mind control.  Don't dwell on the evil and sordid sides of life.  Study them unflinchingly to learn the truths of the human predicament, but know how to look away when study time is over.

3. Set aside one hour per morning for formal meditation and the ruminative reading of high-grade self-help literature, e.g., the Stoics, but not just them. Go ahead, read Seligman, but read Seneca first.

4. Cultivate realistic expectations concerning the world and the people in it. This may require adjusting expectations downward. But this must be done without rancor, resentment, cynicism, or misanthropy. If you are shocked at the low level of your fellow human beings, blame yourself for having failed to cultivate reality-grounded expectations. 

Negative people typically feel well-justified in their negative assessments of the world and its denizens. Therein lie a snare and a delusion. Justified or not, they poison themselves with their negativity and dig their hole deeper. Not wise.

Know and accept your own limitations. Curtail ambition, especially as the years roll on. Don't overreach.  Enjoy what you have here and now.  Don't let hankering after a nonexistent future poison the solely existent present.

5. Blame yourself as far as possible for everything bad that happens to you. This is one of the attitudinal differences between a conservative and a liberal. When a conservative gets up in the morning, he looks into the mirror and says, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul. What happens to me today is up to me and in my control." He thereby exaggerates, but in a life-enhancing way. The liberal, by contrast, starts his day with the blame game: "I was bullied, people were mean to me, blah, blah, people suck, I'm a victim, I need a government program to stop me from mainlining heroin, blah, blah, et cetera ad nauseam. A caricature? Of course. But it lays bare some important home truths like all good caricatures do.

Perhaps we could say that the right-thinking person begins with a defeasible presumption in favor of his ability to rely on himself, to cope, to negotiate life's twists and turns, to get his head together, to be happy, to flourish. He thus places the burden of proof on the people and things outside him to defeat the presumption. Sometimes life defeats our presumption of well-being; but if we start with the presumption of ill-being, then we defeat ourselves.

We should presume ourselves to be successful in our pursuit of happiness until proven wrong.

6. Rely on yourself for your well-being as far as possible. Don't look to others.  You have no right to happiness and others have no obligation to provide it for you.  Your right is to the pursuit of happiness.  Learn to cultivate the soil of solitude. Happy solitude is the sole beatitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo.  An exaggeration to be sure, but justified by the truth it contains. In the end, the individual is responsible for his happiness.

7. Practice mental self-control as difficult as it is.  Master desire and aversion. Our thoughts are the seeds of words and deeds.

8. Practice being grateful. Find ten things to be grateful for each morning.  Gratitude drives out resentment. The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.

9. Limit comparisons with others. Comparisons often breed envy. The envious do not achieve well-being. Be yourself.

10. Fight the good fight against ignorance, evil, thoughtlessness, and tyranny, but don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism.  We are not here to improve the world so much as to be improved by it.  It cannot be changed in any truly ameliorative and fundamental ways by our own efforts whether individual or collective.  If you fancy it can be, then go ahead and learn the hard way, assuming you don't make things worse.

11. Hope beyond this life.  One cannot live well in this life without hope.  Life is enhanced if you can bring yourself to believe beyond it as well.  No one knows whether we have a higher destiny.  If you are so inclined, investigate the matter.  But better than inquiry into the immortality of the soul is living in such a way as to deserve it.

Companion post:  Middle-sized Happiness

Epitaph

Let it be said
When I am dead
That I became in deed
What I was in seed.

Grievance and Gratitude

Do not indulge your sense of grievance without compensatory attention to the many good things that have come your way in the form of opportunities, unearned advantages, narrow escapes, strokes of luck, and the like.  Make a list and see whether the occasions for gratitude don't outnumber the occasions for grievance.

Self-Admonition

Aspire to think justly of yourself whether or not that results in your thinking highly of yourself.

The Philosopher and the Gunslinger

First live, then philosophize!

Shoot first, ask questions later!

Weakening Thoughts

Thoughts of past weakness are weakening thoughts. Don't entertain them.

Believing on Insufficient Evidence

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

For a detailed discussion of what is behind the above remarks, see The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is it Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

The Harder I Work . . .

. . . the more 'privileged' I become.

Contention Got You Down?

Two observations to buck you up:

No abrasion, no pearl.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Study Everything, Join Nothing

What does my masthead motto mean?  I have been asked. One correspondent opined that it is "inhuman."

Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy?

It depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort of thing. And what if I join you for lunch, or join in a discussion?

Human life is obviously a cooperative venture, and the good life involves a certain amount of free association. You will improve your chess if you join the local chess club. Examples are easily multiplied.

Note also that to convey an important truth in four words is not easy.  The punch comes from the pith, but the latter excludes qualification. 

I borrow the motto from a man little read these days. In the context of Paul Brunton's thought, "Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic Church is a good recent example, and not just a recent one.)

"Join nothing" means avoid group-think; avoid associations which will limit one's ability to think critically and independently; be your own man or woman; draw your identity from your own resources, and not from group membership. Be an individual, and not in the manner of those who want to be treated as individuals but expect to gain special privileges from membership in certain 'oppressed' or 'victimized' or 'disadvantaged' groups.  Most despicable are those who fake membership in, say, the Cherokee tribe, to gain an undeserved benefit.  

"Join nothing" is quintessentially American. Be Emersonian, as Brunton was Emersonian:

"Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one one of its members."

"We must go alone."

"But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation."

(All from Emerson's great essay, "Self-Reliance.")

In Brunton's mouth, the injunction means: study all the religions and political parties, but don't join any of them, on pain of losing one's independence.

Note finally, that the motto is mine by acceptance, not by origin; it does not follow that it ought to be yours.

Two Measures of Personal Success

One measure of success is how far you've gotten, and the other is how far you've come. 

The second is the better measure.

On the occasions when you feel you haven't gotten very far in life, tell yourself, "But look where you started from, and what you had to work with, and the obstacles you had to overcome."

Age Quod Agis

Age quod agis is a well-known saying which is a sort of Latin call to mindfulness: do what you are doing. Be here now in the activity at hand.

Legend has it that Johnny Ringo was an educated man.  (Not so: a story for later.) But so he is depicted over and over. In this scene from Tombstone, the best of the movies about Doc Holliday and the shoot-out at the O. K. Corral, Ringo trades Latinisms with the gun-totin' dentist, who was indeed an educated man and a fearless and deadly gunslinger to boot, his fearlessness a function of his 'consumption.'

I don't mean his consumption of spirits, but his tuberculosis. His was the courage of an embittered man, close to death.

The translations in the video clip leave something to be desired. Age quod agis gets translated as 'do what you do best'; the literal meaning, however, is do what you are doing. Age is in the imperative mood; quod is 'what'; agis is the second person singular present tense of agere and means: 'you do' or 'you are doing.'

Curiously, Doc Holliday did not die with his boots on. He died in bed.

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: Latin Versus Italian: Differences

Every Day . . .

. . . throw something away.  That is one of my self-admonitions.  A truly radical approach to de-cluttering, however, is Swedish Death Cleaning.

Curiously, I came across the just embedded hyperlink while doing a search on the question whether Swedes have a death wish, given their foolishly warm embrace of Muslim immigrants.

This embrace makes Swedish Death Cleaning all the more advisable for Swedes, especially for Jewish Swedes who are having a hard time of it, especially given the invasion of Muslims who for some strange reason are not instantly accepting the ultra-liberal attitudes of their hosts.

The Near Occasion of Annoyance

If you want to be annoyed, life supplies the materials. But if you value peace of mind, you are free to sweep the irritant dust right out of your mind. Even better is to not let it in. A good maxim:

Avoid the near occasion of annoyance.

And that implies:

Avoid unnecessary socializing.

Meglio l'uovo oggi . . .

. . . che la gallina domani.

Better the egg today than the chicken tomorrow.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Epitaph

Too obscure
To be forgot
Here lies one real
Enough to rot.

Epitaph on a Pessimist

I'm Smith of Stoke, aged sixty-odd,

    I've lived without a dame

From youth-time on: and would to God

    My dad had done the same.

Thomas Hardy, 1840-1928. The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs, ed. Grigson, 1977, p. 186.

Nulla Dies Sine Linea: Bad Medieval Latin?

No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea?  I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it  as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written line.' I made the maxim my own, and long has she presided over my rather less distinguished scribbling.

Edward the Nominalist, whose Latin is better than mine, writes,

I spotted your post today, and wondered about the gender of ‘dies’. It is one of the only fourth declension nouns to have masculine gender, at least in the singular, which has caused misery to generations of Latin students. Technically it should be ‘nullus dies’, e.g. Nullus dies omnino malus / no day is altogether evil, unus dies apud Dominum sicut mille anni et mille anni sicut dies unus / one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day etc. 

But the formulation is quite common, so I did some digging. It originates with a story by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 35.36) about the Greek painter Apelles, who apparently was steadfast in practicing his art. Pliny writes ‘It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other; a practice which has now passed into a proverb’. Note that this is not about writing, but painting! 

Although Pliny mentions the proverb, he never formulates it. The modern formulation seems to originate with the Latin of Erasmus and other late medieval writers, e.g. ‘Nulla dies abeat, quin linea ducta supersit.’ ‘Let no day pass by, without an outline being drawn, and left to remain.’  So the formulation may just be bad medieval Latin. Nikitinski (‘Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea’,Rheinisches Museum 142: 430-431, 1999) has argued that if Pliny had formulated it, he would have written ‘nullus dies sine linea’

Very interesting: the maxim pertained to painting before its use in connection with writing. Other extensions are possible. One can imagine an erudite cokehead abusing the phrase along with his nostrils.

Dr. Michael Gilleland is a bona fide classicist besides being an "antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon."  He offers a wealth of details and variant maxims here, but unless I missed it, finds no fault with the grammar of the nulla dies sine linea formulation.

Memo to Pope Francis the Foolish

First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.

Nescit Vox Missa Reverti

The once hooked ever lives in lack,
And the once said never finds its way back.

(The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1971, p. 104)

Ambition Beyond Ability

He who is ambitious beyond his abilities courts unhappiness.

The 'Liberal' Speaks

If it ain't totalitarian, then it ain't government!

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark MavPhil alliteration:  Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Barack Obama, who has proven to be  a disaster for the country and for the world, was elected in 2008 in part because of conservatives who could not abide John McCain.  And he was re-elected in 2012 in part because of disgusted conservatives who fail to heed Voltaire's principle and refused to vote for the milquetoast conservative, Mitt Romney.  But surely it is obvious in hindsight that the milquetoast would have been preferable to the radical?

And now we face another ugly choice, this time between the vulgarian Trump and the hard-leftist Hillary.  Some will vote for neither or throw away their vote on a third-party candidate.  If you are a liberal, I warmly recommend that you vote for Jill Stein.

But if you are a conservative, you must vote for Trump.  What is the force of the 'must'? It is at least prudential, if not moral.  It is surely not legal.  You are not legally obliged to vote in these United States.  This is the way it should be.  

Politics is a practical business conducted in a far from perfect world.  While it is not always  about the lesser of evils, in most situations it is, including the one before us.  But perhaps we should avoid the word 'evil,' which I have found confuses people.  Let's just say that in the real world political choices are not between the good and the bad, but between the better and the worse.  Real-world politics  is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses nolens volens, willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Now maybe that is too strong a way of putting it if precision is at a premium.  After all, if you refuse to vote for Trump, that is not a vote for Hillary since you may vote for neither.  But by not voting for Trump, you aid Hillary inasmuch as you fail to do something that you can very easily do that will have the admittedly tiny effect of impeding  her in her Obaminable quest to "fundamentally transform America."

I am of course assuming that Trump is better than Hillary.  That is easily shown by the SCOTUS argument which has been elaborated by any number of distiguished commentators including William J. Bennett, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt, not to mention your humble correspondent. The responses to the SCOTUS argument that I have seen are breathtakingly lame. I am not in the mood to go over this ground again.    In any case it is time for lunch.

Don't be a fool. Don't let the best or the better become the enemy of the good.  Try to achieve something achievable.  Don't pine after the unattainable.  Impossible dreams are for liberals, not reality-anchored conservatives.  It did not surprise me when I learned that Ted Kennedy's favorite song was The Impossible Dream.  Figures!

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Unsuccessful in Love

The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.

Epigram 57

Here lies my wife. Eternal peace
Be to us both with her decease.

Epigram 59

I married in my youth a wife.
She was my own, my very first.
She gave the best years of her life.
I hope nobody gets the worst.

J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel  Stoner.  An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is.  Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.

In Five Books of Professors, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:

(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.

"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget.  For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.

My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives."  Yes.

Companion post:  A is A: Monism Refuted

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Stoner

A is A: Monism Refuted

'Traditional Marriage' or 'Natural Marriage'?

A Fool and His Coat

A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him.  (anon. via Sowell)

Neologism: A Merton

A merton is a person who doesn't distinguish between studying a subject and writing a book about it.

 

Cf. The Journals of Thomas Merton, vol. III, 136:  "Thought of writing a book on Columbia under Spain . . ..")  In his short life Merton published some 60 books, some of them good, some of them but attempts to work his way into a subject.

Happy Wife, Happy Life

I borrow this fine line from Dennis Prager.  (I just now heard him say something that I would put as follows:  a Jew can no more  lose his Jewishness by the assimilation consequent upon  bearing  a name such as 'Dennis' than a Chomsky can preserve his Jewishness by bearing the name 'Noam.')

But I digress.  The MavPhil obverse of 'Happy wife, happy life' is  Wife's a bitch, life's a bitch.

The Useless Rehearsal of the Useful

Avoid not only useless thoughts, but also the useless rehearsing of useful thoughts.

Heute Rot, Morgen Tot

Archaic variant: Heute roth, morgen todt.

Poetically translated by your humble correspondent:

Today ruddy, tomorrow rotting.

Or is it better like this?

Ruddy today, rotting tomorrow.

Literally:

Red today, dead tomorrow.

Better red than dead? Or better dead than red?

Docendo Discimus

Teaching, we learn. 

As it stands, a maxim, and true as far as it goes.  But in need of qualification which, when added, makes it a maxim no longer.  Brevity is essential to the maxim as it is to the aphorism and the epigram.

Closer to the truth is the following.  Teaching, we learn; but only up to a point beyond which studying without having to teach is much to be preferred if the goal is an advance in understanding and erudition.

I never knew logic so well as after having taught it for a couple of years. But then the maxim lost its truth.

A is A: Monism Refuted

This from The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Swallow Press, 1971, p. 118, epigram #47:

This Monist who reduced the swarm
Of being to a single form,
Emptying the universe for fun,
Required two A's to think them one.

Notes

1. The title is Cunningham's own.

2. Poetic license extends to use-mention confusion.

3. It was over at Patrick Kurp's place that I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Cunningham.

4. Note the poetically pleasing addition by the author of his name to the title of his collection.

5. My copy of Cunningham's collection, a well-made hard bound, acquired via Amazon, is a Mount Mary College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) library discard.  There is no evidence that it is a second copy.  How naive of me to think that libraries ought to be permanent repositories of high culture.  But the folly of reliably liberal librarians redounds to the benefit of the bookman.