Maverick Philosopher

Some are eager to be done with this life and get on to the next. Others deny that there is a next, while still others admit a next but are in no hurry to make its acquaintance. In the following remarkable passage Freya Stark, whose books I read in '95-'96 while sojourning in Asia Minor, explains her loss of interest in Rudolf Steiner:

There is little leisure to discover what lies around us, and so much — presumably — for what is beyond, and it has long seemed to me to be the behaviour of a rather ill-mannered guest on this planet to wolf down his earlier courses and ask for port and coffee straightaway." (Beyond Euphrates, p. 9)

In a similar vein, Henry David Thoreau on his death-bed was supposedly asked by a preacher if he had any intimations of the world to come. Thoreau replied, "One world at a time."

Unrequited love is a duet played solo.

Years ago an acquaintance wrote me about a book he had published which, he said, "had made quite splash." It is a metaphor worth developing. When a stone hits the water it makes a splash. But only moments later the water returns to its quiescent state as if nothing had happened. So it is an apt metaphor: it captures both the immediate significance of an event and its long-term insignificance.

If we were as charitable to our fellows when they are alive as we are when we write their obituaries — what a different world it would be!

Companion posts: Obituaries, If Obituaries Were Objective . . .

While we are on the topic of Latin mottos, Edith Stein's motto 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 (Mein Geheimnis gehoert mir, My secret belongs to me) to her friend, the philosopher Hedwig Martius, the morning after Stein's conversion experience in the summer of 1921. Her conversion was occasioned by her reading of the autobiography of Theresa of Avila a copy of which she found in the library of Theodor Conrad and Hedwig Martius.

So live in the present that the future's memories won't be regrets.

Some people do little more with their lives than kill time — until such time as time kills them.

One way people kill time is by reading The Times.

"As if you could kill time without injuring eternity." (Thoreau)

"Read not The Times, read the eternities." (Thoreau)

If the sky is the daily bread of the eyes (Emerson), then hiking, running, and cycling are the daily bread of the legs and lungs. And what better way to appreciate the sky, and the lambent light of the desert Southwest, than by running over mountain trails at sunrise? Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie.

There are too many good blogs to keep up with. Here is a very nice aphorism from The Joy of Curmudgeonry:

Those who deplore the stance of us-and-them adopt it towards those who laud it.

But one good aphorism deserves another:

Those who preach inclusivity exclude those who don't.

One thing Phil(osophy) is good for is to show you that you don't know Jack; you just think you do.

During the Spanish Civil War, a 'fascist' was finishing up at the latrine when George Orwell got him in his sights. But Orwell couldn't bring himself to squeeze the trigger. A man in the throes of evacuation or expiration is in propinquity to the humus that is his origin, an origin reflected in the word 'human' and an origin which will claim him again: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris (Gen 3:19). Orwell's humanity was to the fore as he recognized in his enemy a fellow mortal, a fellow animal who must shit every day and die one day.

The word homo is Latin for "man", in the original sense of "human being", or "person". The word "human" itself is from Latin humanus, an adjective cognate to homo, both derived from Proto-Indo-European language dhǵhem-"earth"[1]. Cf. Hebrew adam, meaning "human", cognate to adamah, meaning "ground". (And cf. Latin humus, meaning "soil".) Both homo/humanus/humus and adam/adamah share a conjectured Nostratic superroot, ad-ham-. Vide.

In the schools I attended we were given neither condoms nor lunch. We were given a good education.

A man is known not only by the company he keeps, but also by the company he keeps away from. We are formed and deformed by our associations.

Society takes us from the brutish to the human. It socializes us, and its tutelage and regimentation, though painful, are necessary. Society cannot, however, individuate us. Thus the Higher Life is beyond the social, beyond the human. What was a help in the first transition becomes a hindrance in the second.

We need people to march in the parade, but we also need those who merely observe and ask where it is going.

The highest mastery is self-mastery, and the highest self-mastery is thought-mastery. He who controls his thoughts controls the seeds of words and deeds.

Lack of ambition in the young is rightly seen as a defect. But here is an old man still driven by his old ambitions, none of which were of too lofty a nature. Is he not a fool? For his old ambitions, appropriate as they were in youth, have become absurd in old age.

His upbringing was hard and his circumstances straitened. He early resolved to better himself economically, and he succeeded. Hard work and the old-time virtues brought him to wealth. But having 'arrived,' he did not know what to do with his arrival except to keep on piling up loot. Loot, however, is but a means to end, and our old man's ends are, like he himself, coming to an end.

It is time for him to abandon ambition and fly into the arms of fair Philosophia, there to meditate on such truths as: One cannot tow a U-Haul with a hearse. But death, the muse of philosophy, will catch him long before it a-muses him. The Reaper's scythe will cut him down before it moves him to thought.

I may not be able to convince you, but I should be able to clarify our differences — at least from my point of view and to my own satisfaction.

By oneself one can be oneself.

Philosophy doesn't answer questions, it questions answers.

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 fine rude touch.

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other. You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancour or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit. Your poem might become:

Brief light's made briefer
'Neath the leaden vault of care
Better to accept the sinecure
Of untroubled Being-there.

Too many people are dead, dead in the head if not in the body.

If someone tells you that philosophy is an escape from reality, reply, "You tell me what reality is, and I'll tell you whether philosophy is an escape from it."

The point, of course, is that all assertions about reality and its evasions are philosophical assertions that embroil the objector in the very thing from which he seeks to distance himself.

Every man has two heads. The big one is for thinking, the little one for linking. Understand their offices and respective spheres of operation. To cerebrate with the organ of copulation is Clintonian and can mightily harm one's legacy.

With one foot in a past from which he will not learn, and the other in a future that will never be, the leftist stands astride the present — to piss on it.

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.

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.

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

It is unbelievable what people will believe.

One sojourns for a time in a faraway land. Upon returning home one repeats an observation tried and true: 'It was a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.'

And so it is with our adventures in anamnesis. After a pleasant session lost along the byways of memory, one returns to the present to observe: 'It was a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to re-live there.'

There is no living without courage, and just as we summoned it in the past, we will summon it in the present and future. We will tap its well as needed. Trust that it is there, and take the next step.

Wealth and poverty are both overrated. Money cannot buy happiness. And non-possession is not the same as non-attachment. The poor are just as attached as the rich, the only difference being that they are attached to what they do not possess.

Academic tenure is sometimes described as 'up or out.' You either gain tenure, within a limited probationary period, or you must leave. I tend to think of life like that: either promotion to a Higher Life or annihilation. I wouldn't want an indefinitely prolonged stay in this vale of probation. In plain English: I wouldn't want to live forever in this world. Thus for metaphysical reasons alone I have no interest in cryogenic or cryonic life extension. Up or out!

It would be interesting to delve into some of the issues surrounding cryonics. But for now I will merely note that Alcor is located in Scottsdale, Arizona. The infernal Valle del Sol would not be my first choice for such an operation. One hopes that they have good backup in case of a power outage.

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.

Two dangerous extremes: thinking there is no truth; being sure one is in possession of it. The second is the core of sense in Nietzsche's intemperate observation, "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." Why intemperate? See Nietzsche on Conviction and More on Nietzsche on Conviction.

Some people do little more with their lives than kill time — until such time as time kills them.

We should give our own petty misfortunes the same attention we give those of others, which is to say, not much.

It may be epitomized as the task of navigating the via media between two pieces of folk wisdom: Look before you leap! and He who hesitates is lost!

Life's a crapshoot no matter how you slice it.

One day afloat on the seas of life, shortly thereafter dust in the wind.

What is a man that he may belittle others? Measured against God or nature, there is little to him: a bit of organized dust housing a spark of consciousness. Belittling is proof of littleness. The great-souled, the magnanimous, are far beyond it. They understand that one cannot add a cubit to one's stature by reducing the stature of another.

People think they know what the good life is. Do they really know? I know one thing about the good life: the inquiry into what it is is essential to it.

Some are praised for having the courage of their convictions. But if one has the wrong convictions, then it might be better were one to have the cowardice of one's convictions.

Distinguo ergo sum.