Maverick Philosopher

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

Un bon mot ne prouve rien.
A witty saying proves nothing.
Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien
(Via Wikiquote)

A display of wit that instances its own truth.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Emma Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 77, emphasis added.

Non-violence is no good unless it is effective. Hence the young man's question to Ghandi about his sister. The answer should have been: use force unless you are such that you can defend her with as much chance of success without violence. Unless you possess a radiance of which the energy (that is to say, the possible effectiveness in the most material sense of the word) is equal to that contained in your muscles.

We should strive to become such that we are able to be nonviolent.

This also depends on the adversary.

One of the elements in my personal liturgy is a reading of the following passage every January 1st. I must have begun the practice in the mid-70s. My copy of The Gay Science was purchased in Boston and is dated 15 September 1974. (You mean to tell me that when you buy books, you do not note where you bought them, and when, and in whose presence?)

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book Four, #276, tr. Kaufmann:

For the new year. -- I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought: hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year -- what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.

(Amor fati: love of fate.)

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 38, written in 1940:

155. The worst of poverty — today at any rate — the most galling and the most difficult thing to bear, is that it makes it almost impossible to be alone. Neither at work, nor at rest, neither abroad nor at home, neither waking nor sleeping, neither in health, nor — what a torture — in sickness.

Money cannot buy happiness but in some circumstances it can buy the absence of misery.

Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1929) begins with this paragraph:

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, "It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters."

That few today understand what education is is betrayed by the readiness of all too many to use 'educate' in place of 'inform.' Suppose you tell me about some petty fact. You have not 'educated' me, you have given me a scrap of information. The educated person is not the one whose head is stuffed with information, but the one whose experientially-honed judgment is capable of making sense of information. To become well-informed is not difficult; to become well-educated is a task of self-development for a lifetime.

While researching this morning what A. N. Whitehead has to say about Zeno's Paradoxes, I came across a striking sentence in the chapter 'Religion and Science' in Science and the Modern World (1925):

It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.

That is so good it could stand alone as an aphorism, even though technically it is not an aphorism but a sentence lifted from a wider context. That is a distinction we ought to observe, but is often not observed.

Emile Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. What follows is a striking sentence from the essay "Maladies of the Mind" in Alain on Happiness, F. Unger, 1973, p. 25:

An old man is not a young man who suffers from old age; a man who dies is not a living man who enters into death.

Thanks to open library stacks, I stumbled across the epigrams of Martial a week or so ago. (Therein lies an argument for open stacks.) Marcus Valerius Martialis was so-named because he was born on March 1. He first saw the light of day circa A.D. 40 at Bilbilis in Hispania Tarraconensis. So far to me he seems a scribbler of no great importance, though he is entertaining, and, like Samuel Pepys, another scribbler of no great importance, affords an insight into the times in which he lived and into the invariability of human folly. If I knew more of Martial, and more of Truman Capote, perhaps I would compare them: superficial, sycophantic, but prodigious in their quill-driving. In any case, here for leisurely consumption is one of Martial's more substantial epigrams, addressed to another Martial, his old friend Iulius Martialis:

You ask me what I get
Out of my country place.
The profit, gross or net.
Is never seeing your face.

Quid mihi reddat ager quaeris, Line, Nomentanus?
Hoc mihi reddit ager: te, Line, non video.

From The Epigrams of Martial, tr. Michie, pp. 46-47.

I wrote, she never replied:
That goes on the debit side.
And yet I'm sure she read it:
That I put down as credit.

Scripsi, rescripsit nil Naevia, non dabit ergo.
Sed puto quod scripsi legerat: ergo dabit.

Cui legisse satis non est epigrammata centum,
nil illi satis est, Caediciane, mali.

Caedicianus, if my reader
After a hundred epigrams still
Wants more, then he's a greedy feeder
Whom no amount of swill can fill.

Henry David Thoreau, Journals, 4 September, 1851:

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth. Improve the suggestion of each object however humble, however slight and transient the provocation. What else is there to be improved? Who knows what opportunities he may neglect? It is not in vain that the mind turns aside this way or that: follow its leading; apply it whither it inclines to go. Probe the universe in a myriad points. Be avaricious of these impulses. You must try a thousand themes before you find the right one, as nature makes a thousand acorns to get one oak. He is a wise man and experienced who has taken many views; to whom stones and plants and animals and a myriad objects have each suggested something, contributed something.

Borrowed from here.

Then consider what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has to say in his Essays (XI. Of Great Place):

Men in great place are thrice servants -- servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to indignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing: Cum non sis qui fueris, non esse cur velis vivere. ["Since you are not what you were, there is no reason why you should wish to live."]

The centaur, the sphinx, and the siren express the idea that man emerges out of an animal, and that he never sheds his hoofs, his claws, his scales. Man is a mixture; his dual nature is what makes him man; it is the essence of his vocation and destiny. It is folly to imagine him a god or reduce him to an animal; he is more like a satyr with two natures, and it would be hard to say whether his deepest desire is to raise the animal within him to the contemplation of the divine light, or to bring the god down into his animal body, and make him feel every impulse coursing through his flesh.

From The Joy of Curmudgeonry:

The sight of people competing to be victims seems to be odd and against the order of things until one considers that they are in fact competing to be victors.

This is a fine example of the art of the aphorism. It is a happy blend of terseness and truth.

We have so little respect for civilisation these days that we decry as uncivilised the discipline necessary to instil it.

Well and truly said. There is more where that came from, at The Joy of Curmudgeonry.

John Kekes writes,

That is a wonderful Turkish proverb you cite. I give you fair notice: I am going to steal it. I send you another proverb, probably Arabic, in exchange: the dogs bark but the caravan ambles on. Best wishes, John

Glad you like it, John. Since you are going to 'steal' it, I thought I'd better make a correction. In Turkish there is a dotted 'i' and an undotted 'i.' The proverb should read:

Yol bilen kervana katılmaz.

He who knows the road does not join the caravan.

I would put the other saying more tersely as follows:

The dog barks, the caravan passes.

For those of you who ask me what conservatism is, I refer you to Professor Kekes' essay, What is Conservatism?

Das Leben ist ein Geschäft das seine Kosten nicht deckt. (Schopenhauer)

Life is a business that does not cover its costs.

Cogitations, p. 73:

One marvels continually at man's ingenuity in devising means of communication, and at the utter futility of the uses to which he habitually puts them.

Albert J. Nock (Cogitations, ed. Thornton, Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, 1970, p. 73:

Newspaper reading is a pure habit: it argues nothing for the extension of either our interest or our sympathies. My belief is, too, that it is as bad and debilitating a habit as one can form. Either one is or is not taken in by what one reads. In the first case, one is debauched; in the second, one is outraged. (Journal, 27)

See also: How Not to Begin the Day and Baudelaire on Newspapers

Not an original aphorism, but a good one nonetheless: A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.

This illustrates the principle that in human affairs it is less what one says than how one says it that matters. Perverse as people are, they ignore or downplay what is primary, the message, to fixate on the 'packaging.'

"Religions are, for the most part, bad — but religion is not." (From Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy, p. 316. Click on the link to read a comment on Wang's book by P. F. Strawson.)

"We should love both: those whose opinion we follow, and those whose opinion we reject. For both have applied themselves to the quest for the truth, and both have helped us in it."

St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book XII, Lecture 9.

Do not denigrate the art of the aphorism. Good ones are hard to write. The following are from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert:

A thought is as real as a cannon ball. (74)

We are all old children, more or less serious, more or less filled with ourselves. (77)

What will you think of pleasures when you no longer enjoy them? (78)

All beings come from little, and little is needed for them to come to nothing. (79)

Search this site for other gems from Joubert's pen.

Moriatur anima mea morte philosophorum. May my soul die the death of philosophers. Attributed to Averroes.

The illustrious Dr. Ockham of the Commenter Corps, whose attainments in Latin surpass my own, offers us the witticism, Esse est esse, to eat is to be, or is it to be is to eat?

This parallels Feuerbach's Man ist was man isst, which I explain in Of Eating and Being.

. . . everybody would be dead. (Schopenhauer)

Morris R. Cohen, A Preface to Logic (Dover, 1977, originally published in 1944), p. 186, emphasis added:

It would certainly be absurd to suppose that the appreciation of art should justify itself by practical applications. If the vision of beauty is its own excuse for being, why should not the vision of truth be so regarded? Indeed is it not true that all useful things acquire their value because they minister to things which are not useful, but are ends in themselves? Utility is not the end of life but a means to good living, of which the exercise of our diverse energies is the substance.

Or as I like to say, the worldly hustle is for the sake of contemplative repose, it being well understood that such repose can be quite active, an "exercise of our diverse energies," but for non-utilitarian ends.

Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing:

It is a general observation that people write as they read. As a rule, careful writers are careful readers and vice versa. A careful writer wants to be read carefully. He cannot know what it means to be read carefully but by having done careful reading himself. Reading precedes writing. We read before we write. We learn to write by reading. A man learns to write well by reading well good books, by reading most carefully books which are most carefully written. (Quoted from Edwin Curley, Behind the Geometrical Method: A Reading of Spinoza's Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1988), p. ii.)

"We learn to write by reading." This is why reading good books is essential to becoming a good writer.

Yet again from Joseph Joubert:

Properly speaking, man inhabits only his head and his heart. All other places are vainly before his eyes, at his sides, and under his feet: he himself is not there at all. (Notebooks, p. 126)

What about Bill Clinton?

Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37:

What good is modesty? -- It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.

Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 26:
When a thought gives birth to obscurity, it must be rejected, renounced, abandoned.

Would that contemporary French scribblers would heed this rule penned by a Frenchman in 1796. But they may not be capable of heeding it since
Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries. (28)

I stumbled upon The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert the other day in a used book store. A felicitous find. A small sample of his aphorisms follows in boldface for your delectation. I have added comments on some, and (arrogantly?) suggested an improvement on one. Here is a brief biography of Joubert.

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

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

When I feel the itch, I recall Pascal:

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. (Pensees #113, Krailsheimer tr., p. 59, emphasis added)

Indeed, what good will owning acres and acres of land do me? In the end a man needs only -- six feet.

From Mann's journal entry of August 5, 1934:

A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.

Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Doubleday, 1992, tr. C. Maurer, # 173):

Don't be made of glass in your dealings with others. Even less so in friendship. Some people break very easily revealing how fragile they are. They fill up with resentment and fill others with annoyance. The are more sensitive than the pupils of the eyes, which cannot be touched, either in jest or in earnest. They take offense at motes: beams aren't even necessary. Those who deal with them must use great caution, and never forget their delicacy. The slightest slight annoys them. They are full of themselves, slaves to theitr own taste (for the sake of which they trample on everything else), and idolaters of their own silly sense of honor.

. . . before they abandon you. (HT: Arthur Schopenhauer)

People foolishly oppose generalization. One often hears, 'Never generalize!' But of course that itself is a generalization in the imperative mood. The partisan of brute particularity who so opines is hoist by his own petard.

So it was with pleasure that I heard Dennis Prager today remark that "Generalizations are the mother of wisdom." But being a quibbler and a pedant, I cannot forebear to suggest an improvement:

Generalizations are the offspring of wisdom

or

Generalization is wisdom's distillate.

For wisdom does not spring from generalization; it is rather that generalizations spring from wisdom as its expression and codification.

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 123:

The beard is the oppositionist costume of juveniles acting like cavemen who refuse to play along with the cultural swindle, while in fact they merely don the old-fashioned emblem of the patriarchal dignity of their grandfathers.

I learned this saying from an old German neighbor. "He who writes, remains."

Write on!

My man Phil made a comment to the effect that art is something worth devoting oneself to, but not philosophy. Them's fightin' words, in my book. A long campaign is in the offing, with many a skirmish and perhaps even a retreat or two, though my ultimate victory is assured despite the inevitable loss of blood & bandwidth. Herewith, comments on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens from Adagia,aphorisms that sum up much of the aesthetic attitude that I am concerned to oppose. (To be precise: I am out to oppose it in its imperialistic ambitions; I have nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia.) I have bolded Wallace's lines.

These, by Nicolas Gomez Davila, tr. Michael Gilleland, are good:

I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs and the fuckees, and you gon’ have to decide which side you gon’ be on."

This morning I found the thought expressed with a bit more elegance by Giacomo Leopardi (1798- 1837) in his Pensieri:

Paul Brunton, Notebooks 15, II, 22:

A great mind is not distressed by a little matter.

Compare St. Augustine, Contra Academicos, 1. 2. 6:

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great.
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, p. 125:

I need the reassurance and the help of friends, but I need men's hatred too. It tests me, forces me to become aware of my limitations, to grow, to perform a work of ceaseless self-purification; it makes me more and more faithful to myself, protects me against all the temptations to take the easy way to 'success'; it compels me to fall back on what is deepest, most secret and most spiritual in me, where those who hate me are powerless to hurt, where they meet no object into which to fix their claws, and nothing they can destroy.