Maverick Philosopher

I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, loners, hermits, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie-cutter, but put their own inimitable stamp on themselves. The creatively maladjusted and marginal who do duty as warnings more often than as exemplars.

Joe Gould, Greenwich Village bohemian, is an example, whose story has been told by that master of prose, Joseph Mitchell. More on Gould and Mitchell later. Here you can read Dorothy Day on Max Bodenheim, another luminary in the firmament of early 20th century Greenwich Village bohemia.

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)

Martial, The Epigrams V, tr. Howell, #13, p. 27:

I am poor — I admit it — and I always have been, Callistratus, but I am a knight who is not obscure or of ill repute, and I am much read throughout the whole world, and people say 'It's him!, and what death has given to few, life has given to me. On the other hand, your roofs rest on a hundred columns, and your cash-box whips up the wealth of a freedman, and a great estate in Egyptian Syene is your slave, and Gallic Parma shears innumerable flocks of yours. This is what I and you are, but what I am you cannot be; what you are any person can be.

sed quod sum, non potes esse: tu quod es, e populo quilibet esse potest.

Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.

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.

To read a philosopher for the beauty of his prose alone is like ordering a delicacy in a world-class restaurant for its wonderful aroma — but then not eating it.

***********

I had that thought this morning while re-reading for the fifth time William James' magisterial essay, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life. So rich in thought, and yet so distracting in its beauty the prose in which the thoughts are couched. James and a few other philosophers are great writers — Schopenhauer and Santayana come to mind — but the thought's the thing.

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.

Henry Roth published his first novel, Call It Sleep, in 1934. Sixty years had to pass before his second novel appeared.

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.)

The semi-annual Twilight Zone marathon is under way at the Sci Fi channel and will continue through New Year's Day. Here is your chance to view some of the episodes you may have missed. I just saw The Old Man in the Cave, one of the few I hadn't seen or don't recall. The best of them are phenomenally good and bristling with philosophical content. Here is my analysis of "The Lonely" which aired in November, 1959.

The original series ran from 1959 to 1964. In those days it was not uncommon to hear TV condemned as a vast wasteland. Rod Serling's work was a sterling counterexample.

The hard-driving Serling lived a short but intense life. Born in 1924, he was dead at age 50 in 1975. His four pack a day cigarette habit destroyed his heart. Imagine smoking 80 Lucky Strikes a day! Assuming 16 hours of smoking time per day, that averages to one cigarette every twelve minutes.

But who is to say that a long, healthy life is better than a short, intense one fueled by the stimulants one enjoys? That is a question for the individual, not Hillary, to decide.

George Orwell's humanity is on display in the following passage from "Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943), reprinted in A Collection of Essays (Harvest, 1981), pp. 193-194:

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.

The following is from Theodor Haecker's Tag-und Nachtbücher 1939-1945, translated into English by Alexander Dru as Journal in the Night (Pantheon Books, 1950), pp. 114-115.) I have made a couple of corrections in the translation. The following entry was written in 1940 in Hitler's Germany. The National Socialists seized power in 1933 and their 'one thousand year Reich' collapsed under the Allied assault in 1945. Haecker, a Christian, was bitterly opposed to the Nazi regime. Haecker's Journal provides keen insight into a dark time when an entire society went off the rails.

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.

Czeslaw Milosz, "The Importance of Simone Weil" in Emperor of the Earth: Modes of Eccentric Vision (University of California Press, 1977), p. 91:

Violent in her judgments and uncompromising, Simone Weil was, at least by temperament, an Albigensian, a Cathar; this is the key to her thought. She drew extreme conclusions from the Platonic current in Christianity. Here we touch upon hidden ties between her and Albert Camus. The first work by Camus was his university dissertation on St. Augustine. Camus, in my opinion, was also a Cathar, a pure one, ['Cathar' from Gr. katharos, pure] and if he rejected God it was out of love for God because he was not able to justify Him. The last novel written by Camus, The Fall, is nothing else but a treatise on Grace — absent grace — though it is also a satire: the talkative hero, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who reverses the words of Jesus and instead of "Judge not and ye shall not be judged: gives the advice "Judge, and ye shall not be judged," could be, I have reason to suspect, Jean-Paul Sartre.

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.

Rod Serling's Twilight Zone was an outstanding TV series that ran from 1959-1964. The episode "The Lonely" aired in November, 1959. I have seen it several times, most recently on the 4th of July during a semi-annual Sci Fi channel TZ marathon. One can extract quite a bit of philosophical juice from "The Lonely" as from most of the other TZ episodes. I'll begin with a synopsis.

From Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, 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.

Deep into my fourth year of this obsession we call blogging, it seems like a long time has passed since I made my first blogger friends, Dymphna being one of them. I dropped by her place tonight and found this strikingly beautiful formulation:

Coy youth is gone — gratefully, most days — and I’ve taken to flirting with eternity, which as you know is so much vaster . . . and yet takes up no room at all.

Enjoy the rest.

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.

I fall into it perhaps too often. This morning there flashed across my mind, "Some seem insensitive to the point of being insensate." But I liked it enough to write it down. What's wrong with alliteration in moderation? (There I go again.)

Here is part of a poem by Wallace Stevens:

The Latest Freed Man

Tired of the old descriptions of the world,
The latest freed man rose at six and sat
On the edge of his bed. He said,
"I suppose there is
A doctrine to this landscape. Yet, having just
Escaped from the truth, the morning is color and mist,
Which is enough: the moment's rain and sea,
The moment's sun (the strong man vaguely seen),
Overtaking the doctrine of this landscape. Of him
And of his works, I am sure. He bathes in the mist
Like a man without a doctrine. The light he gives --
It is how he gives his light. It is how he shines,
Rising upon the doctors in their beds
And on their beds . . ."
And so the freed man said.
It was how the sun came shining into his room:
To be without a description of to be,
[. . .] (The Palm at the End of the Mind, Knopf, 1971, pp. 165-166)

In January I wrote a series of posts on Metaphilosophy. In the course of those studies I read a book that had been languishing on my shelves unread since 1987, John Lange's The Cognitivity Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Nature of Philosophy (Princeton UP, 1970). Poking around on the Web to see what I could find by or about Lange, I discovered that this philosophy professor is also a novelist who has written a long series of novels under the name 'John Norman.' I haven't read any of these Gor novels as they are called, and indeed had never heard of them until recently.

Have any of you read one or more of them? More on Lange/Norman here and here.

I haven't read any of Andrew Klavan's novels but I have the impression that he is a conservative, just having read Joel Schwartz's The Klavan File, and we can certainly use more conservatives among novelists and screenwriters. Take a look at Klavan's L. A. Times piece, Is Hollywood Too Timid for the War on Terror? Here is Klavan's website.

Has anyone read his novels? Are they any good? I hesitate to waste my time on contemporary stuff, almost all of which will prove to be ephemera, when there are are great novels I haven't read. For example, I read the whole of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, but that time might have been better spent.

UPDATE: Dave Lull informs me that Lars Walker, a conservative novelist, has written reviews of two books by Klavan, one here, the other there.

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?

Franz Kafka, anthropological dangler and creative exception, ruminates in this 1922 diary entry on the problem of procreation and dreams of a bourgeois rootedness that probably would have suffocated him:

The infinite, deep, warm, saving happiness of sitting beside the cradle of one’s child opposite its mother.

There is also in it something of this feeling: matters no longer rest with you, unless you wish it so. In contrast, this feeling of those who have no children: it perpetually rests with you, whether you will or no, every moment to the end, every nerve-racking moment, it perpetually rests with you, and without result. Sisyphus was a bachelor. (The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, New York: Schocken, 1975, p. 401.)

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

Life is a business that does not cover its costs.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, p. 56, 30 September 1939:

Today in a British paper I came across an anecdote which sounds frivolous but contains a profound truth. A literary person was asked in the last war why he was not going to the front to defend civilization. 'Because,' ran the answer, 'I am part of the civilization they are trying to defend.'

That answer seems to me to be a fundamental one and to call attention to something I have not yet considered. How, amidst the monstrous machinery of war, is is to be possible to select talent that is genuine? How is a state able to select justly? Indeed, how can any clear judgement be made as to who really has anything to say? There is nothing for it but to select oneself, and one has that right. Who today would not be grateful to a Franc Marc, a Trakl, or a Stramm for selecting themselves?

This self selection certainly also adds to the responsibility and obligation. But is not that all to the good?

Theodor Haecker, Tag- und Nachtbücher, 1939-1945, hrsg. Hinrich Siefken, Innsbruck: Haymon-Verlag, 1989, S. 212:

Die persönliche und gute Stil eines Schriftstellers ist die — oft durch große Kunst erreichte — natürliche Einheit zweier Naturen — der Nature des Schriftstellers und der Natur der jeweiligen Sprache, in der er schreibt, denn diese beide Naturen sind nicht identisch, und die Einheit ist meist nur durch gegenseitige Kompromisses zu erreichen. Es kann einer einen reizvollen persönlichen Stil schreiben, der nur sprachlich gesehen, schlecht ist, weil er die Natur der Sprache im allgemeinen und im besonderen vergewaltigt, und ein braver Schüler kann einen guten Stil schreiben, ohne etwas Persönliches zu verrraten. Der große Schriftsteller ist aber der, in dessen Stil beide Naturen eins geworden sind, die wieder auseinanderzulegen keinem mehr möglich ist.

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.

My colleague in the Classics Department of the University of the Blogosphere, the estimable Dr. Gilleland, celebrates Horace's birthday this morning. Among other things, he provides the context of the admonition, carpe diem, seize the day:

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

While we're talking, grudging time will already have fled: seize the day, trusting as little as possible in tomorrow.

For more context, see Mike's post.

Mike reports that the temperature in his neck of the woods was two degrees Fahrenheit when he got up yesterday. He needs to move to Arizona. It is 8:50 AM as I scribble, I have both doors wide open, and the temperature inside the house is a pleasant 71 degrees F. Outside it is a little cooler. In an hour or two I'll head out for a nice bike ride dressed in T-shirt and shorts. In that way, among others, I shall seize the day.

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)