Maverick Philosopher

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk. (Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right, T. M. Knox, tr. slightly emended)

The 'grey on grey' is presumably an allusion to these lines in Goethe's Faust:

. . . gray, gray is all theory
And green alone the golden tree of life.

Wisdom and understanding come at the end when it is not dark yet, but getting there, as green gives way to grey. The Hegel passage is also a 'forward allusion' — is there such a thing? — to the famous protest by Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach:

The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it.

But those who attempt to change the world before understanding it are apt to make a bloody mess of it. The Commies broke 100 million eggs, but where's the omelet?

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

What's more, he who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must uncritically assume that those who give a different answer are simply wrong. And that involves a further unexamined assumption, namely, that one's own faculties are immeasurably superior to those of others. It is as if one thinks to oneself, "I am so well-endowed that I just know, without inquiry or self-examination, which ends are choice-worthy." Or one uncritically assumes that one's culture knows, or one's religion.

A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. But Pascal was a thoughtful person, and didn't he dismiss philosophy as a waste of time? "Not worth an hour's trouble," he said with Descartes in his sights.

Pascal wrote a big fat book of Pensees — and a magnificent book it was. But why did he bother if philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble? Because he made an exception in his own case: his philosophy, he felt, was different! Well, all philosophers feel that way. All feel themselves to be questing for the truth as for something precious, even when they, like Nietzsche, perversely deny truth. None feel themselves to be engaged in 'empty speculation' or 'mental masturbation' or 'meaningless abstraction.'

And if Pascal really believed that philosophy was a waste of time, why did he scribble, scribble, scribble? Why didn't he spend all his time in religious observances? One might put the same question to other philosophizing denigrators of reason such as that prodigious literary engine, Kierkegaard.

The consistently thoughtful, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Its questions are inevitable, and one who does not find them so merely betrays his incapacity. But although philosophy raises questions, it is not very good at answering them. And herein lies the rub of our strange predicament.

If we are thoughtful, we see that we cannot live blindly, thoughtlessly, dogmatically, accepting this and rejecting that without ever attempting to give an account of our reasons for and against. But when we set about to give our reasons we find the task daunting and interminable and not particularly generative of consensus. What is to be done? Since there is no going back to doxastic naivete, I have nothing better to say than that we should blunder on in quest of a light that may one day dawn. The quest itself is worthwhile whatever the upshot.

On the same obituary page, a notice even more terse:

Joe “Cowboy Joe” Henson, 77, of Gold Canyon, AZ, passed away May 8, 2006. No services. Apache Junction Mortuary handled arrangements.

Could he have been one of the hands with whom I spoke at the old Donnelly Stables back in the summer of ‘99?

The longest obituary on the page ran fifty-three lines and featured a picture. But short or long, no words can capture a life. Proper names are as common as the commonest common nouns. Thousands have borne the name ‘Joe Henson,’ and the addition of a descriptive nickname merely cuts the field down to hundreds.

No word or phrase can distil the haecceity and ipseity of the individual. The individuality of the individual eludes every net of language and thought. But something so elusive is as good as nonexistent, or so Hegel suggests in the chapter on Sense Certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit. But that is one of several ideas in Hegel I never could swallow. Individuality is real despite its ineffability. So not all the real is rational.

When it comes to terseness, nothing can beat the obituary Schopenhauer inscribed in his journal on the occasion of the passing of a cleaning lady. A foe of noise, he took umbrage one day at her racket outside his rooms. Words were exchanged and push came to shove. The Putzfrau ended up at the base of the stairs and the philosopher was ordered by the court to pay her damages for the rest of her life. Schopenhauer marked her passing with what is arguably the most brilliant Latin aphorism ever coined:

Anus obit, onus abit.

The anus/old lady is dead, the burden is lifted.

You will notice that the Latin line is an anagram: there are two constructions, in this case two independent clauses, each of which represents a transposition of the letters of the other. A second example of an anagram: Democritus docet risum = Democritus teaches laughingly. The second thing to note is that ‘anus’ has two Latin meanings depending on whether the ‘a’ is short or long. Short, it means alte Frau, Greisin, old woman. (My Latin dictionary is Lateinisch-Deutsch.) Long, it means 1) Fussring, 2) (euphem.) After (= anus in the proctological sense).

So much for the ersatz immortality of being remembered. A hell of a thing to be remembered only as the butt of a pun.

The passing of this or that is not the cause, but merely the occasion, of the welling-up of Weltschmerz from a source deeper than any particular. Or as Nietzsche expressed it in a letter to Franz Overbeck dated 24 March 1887, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things . . . ." The occasion of the missive was an earthquake in Nice where Nietzsche was then residing. But the cause was not a transitory thing, but the transitoriness of things in general.

Perhaps Weltschmerz is like Angst as the latter is described by Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Angst is not Furcht, fear. I fear this or that particular threat: my insecurity is definite, temporary, and local. But in Angst I feel my metaphysical insecurity, my ontological precariousness. Nothing in particular elicits it: it is rather elicited by the possible nothingness of every particular. Weltschmerz is similarly global: elicited not by some local event, but by the world's inherent transiency.

And similarly with romantic love. You meet a silly goose and lose your mind. The girl or the boy is merely the occasion, not the cause of the love-madness. The cause is the underlying metaphysical Lack that you delusively think will be supplied by the finite object that now looms on your horizon. Collateral reading: Plato, Symposium, Phaedrus.

I once ate in a Jewish delicatessen on the east side of Cleveland in which one of the sandwiches on the menu was entitled ‘The Fresser.’ Of course, that is what I ordered. Ein Fresser ist was er frisst.

The English distinction between the nouns ‘food’ and ‘feed’ parallels the distinction between essen and fressen. Feed is what animals, typically farm animals, get; food is for humans and their pets. I heard of a woman who, suspecting her man of engaging in an extramural liaison, remarked that her evidence was that he was "off his feed." The animal!

There is a restaurant in Apache Junction, Arizona called The Feedbag. No restaurant in Scottsdale (or at least the tonier precincts thereof) would ever bear such a name. There is also an eating establishment in AJ called the Dirtwater Café. One morning my wife wanted to go out for breakfast. (I prefer to eat at home where I am master of my domain, fork in one hand, remote control in the other.) Confusing the two establishments, she said, "Let’s go out to the Dirtbag Café."

I’ll end on a serious note. I used the expression ‘pig out’ above. It is philosophically unacceptable because it involves the dubious ascription of gluttony to pigs. It is arguable, however, that only a man, but no animal, can be a glutton. Similarly, a man, but no animal, can be bestial. A man, but no animal, can sink below his nature. This naturally leads us into normative ethics and the concept of perversion. But these are topics too tough to tangle with at the moment.

The last few nights, Venus in its guise as Abendstern has been spectacularly bright. In fact, it is now so bright as to cast shadows.

Last night I witnessed a spectacular conjunction around 5:45 PM in the Southern sky: the crescent moon and a little to its right in my visual field, Venus. It was like the conjunction to be seen on the Turkish flag except that the crescent moon was reversed.

The story I heard from a Turkish girl in Turkey was that the conjunction depicted on the flag was the conjunction visible on the night Ataturk commenced the Kurtulus Savasi, the Turkish War of Independence.

"How would you like your eggs, sir?"

"Over medium, please."

The eggs arrive undercooked. Do I complain? Rhinestone-studded Irene is working her tail off in the early morning rush. I’ve already bugged her for Tabasco sauce, extra butter, and more coffee. The service came with the sweetest of smiles. The place is jumping, the Mexican cooks are sweating, and the philosopher is philosophizing:

If it won’t matter by tomorrow morning that these eggs are undercooked, why does it matter now?

With that thought, I liberally douse the undercooked eggs with the fine Louisiana condiment, mix them up with the hashbrowns, and shovel the mess into my mouth with bread and fork, chasing it all with coffee and cream, no sugar.

Who says you can’t do anything with philosophy?

Filed under: Philosophy in Everyday Life

That got me thinking: what does the second inscription amount to, and is it coherent? Presumably it means that even if something did matter, then its mattering wouldn’t matter. Suppose, with a nod in the direction of Peter Geach, that Logic Matters. Is it coherent to say that logic matters, but that it does not matter that logic matters? Or, to take a more concrete example, given that it matters to me that I eat dinner, is this consistent with this mattering’s not mattering?

I say it isn’t. I say that if p matters, then p’s mattering matters, and the mattering of p’s mattering matters, and so on ad infinitum. Mattering is like truth. If p is true, then it is true that p is true, true that it is true that p is true, and so on ad infinitum. In both cases we have an infinite regress (progress?) and in both cases the regress is benign as opposed to vicious. This is clear in the case of truth. Given T(p), T(Tp) follows. But T(T(p)) is not the ground of T(p)’s being true, but a consequence of it. Similarly, p’s mattering has as a logical consequence its mattering that p matters, but the latter is not the ground of the former. So the regress, if not exactly virtuous, is at least benign.

In this way, the back of the T-shirt refutes itself: if something matters, then an infinity of things matter. As for the front, if it is true that nothing matters, then it follows that this truth doesn’t matter. But now our nihilist appears to be entangled in a form of performative inconsistency: if nothing matters, including the truth that nothing matters, then why inscribe this on a T-shirt, and strut down a street clothed in it? Our nihilist had to find it in some sense important to deliver his revelation to the world in order to marshall the energy to make the T-shirt (or buy it) and wear it.

But analysis of the foregoing sort won’t do our nihilist any good. It won’t matter to him. The cure for his disaffection is not logical analysis but connectedness to the wider society in the form of satisfying work and long-term relationships. In the words’ of a late 1950s hit, the cure is to "Get a job."

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Comedian Jay Leno suggested a motive for the change on The Tonight Show: "Of course he believes in God now. He's 81 years old." It's something many agnostics have said more seriously. However, Flew is not worried about impending death or post-mortem salvation. "I don't want a future life. I have never wanted a future life," he told me. He assured the reporter for The Times: "I want to be dead when I'm dead and that's an end to it." He even ended an interview with the Humanist Network News by stating: "Goodbye. We shall never meet again."

The Genetic Fallacy rests on the failure to appreciate that questions about the truth or falsity, or rational acceptability or unacceptability, of a proposition are logically independent of any role that the believing of said proposition might play in the believer's mental economy. Thus if S's believing that p is comforting to S, it does not follow that p is false, or that S has no good reason for accepting that p. Similarly, if S's believing that p is painful to S, it does not follow that p is true, or that S has a good reason for accepting that p. (Being true and being rationally acceptable are of course distinct properties. I will explain why if anyone is interested.)

One can see that Leno is committing the Genetic Fallacy as follows. Leno is suggesting that Flew's belief that God exists has a motive (a psychological cause) but no good reason: with his earthly tenure drawing to a close, Flew is seeking comfort and this is why he believes that God exists.

But the author of the article, instead of pointing out the fallacy of Leno and the agnostics mentioned, says something quite irrelevant: he points out that Flew is not worried about the hereafter, which he holds to be nonexistent. So the author of the article is ALSO committing the genetic fallacy (in reverse if you will): he is suggesting that because Flew does not believe in a post-mortem state, that his belief that God exists is logically acceptable.

The point, however, is that the broadly logical properties of a proposition (truth, falsity, rational acceptability, meaningfulness, etc.) are logically independent of whether believing the proposition is comforting or the opposite. That Flew derives no mental comfort from his new-found belief counts as little for it as his deriving comfort from it — assuming he did — would count against it.

As the lunch neared its end, the Greek woman lit a cigarette. Unfortunately, a politically correct young Brit was sitting directly to her right. He asked her to put out the cigarette, but she refused. So he doused her and her cigarette with a glass of water. As one might have expected, the Greek woman became quite animated at this turn of events, and an altercation ensued. After things subsided a bit, I looked into her eyes and said one word: ataraxia. She looked back and shouted: ATARAXIA!

I extract three morals from this true story.

The first is that the activities of professional philosophers are at best only loosely connected to the acquisition of wisdom. One can read a thousand books in three languages, publish a hundred articles in two, become ever so skilled in logic and dialectic — and at the end of the day be scarcely distinguishable, morally speaking, from the average schlep. This is not so much an argument against professional philosophy as it is an argument against human nature. Religion, too, seems to lead to little improvement in its practitioners.

The second moral is the arrogance of the British. This charge is not an inference from this particular case – which would be a hasty generalization – but an illustration of a point antecedently known.(People often confuse hasty generalization with illustration or exemplification: if I give an example of a general truth, that is not to say that I have arrived at the truth by generalization from that example.)

Consider the situation. The Brit was a guest in a foreign country, a country whose ways diverge markedly from those of Mother England. There are different attitudes toward work, play, relaxation, food, entertainment – and smoking. Greeks, like Turks, are fond of the noble weed. They savor, they enjoy, they take their time: I once watched a Turk smoke a cigarette as if he were making love to it. We were sitting in the open air. Oblivious to all this, the arrogant Brit sought to impose his will on one of his hosts. The Brits are right up there with the French. Their arrogance seems to vary inversely with their worldly power and stature.

The third moral has to do with the tobacco wacko phenomenon in general. I subsume it under the rubric, misplaced moral enthusiasm. This is a big topic, one to which I shall no doubt return, time and again. At the moment, I will just say that tobacco wackism is a form of social insanity right up there with the anorexia-inducing conceit that one cannot be too skinny. The idiot Brit was willing to destroy a perfect social occasion because of an ideologically grounded hostility to a bit of sidestream smoke that he could easily have moved away from.

There was a law in Mesa, Arizona a while ago – it may have been since repealed – that forbade smoking in all commercial establishments including bars and tobacco shops. That’s just crazy. People go to bars to pollute their bodies with alcohol and their souls with idle talk. That is their right. Surely these forms of pollution are worse than nicotine pollution.

There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler.

The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children.

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.

Consider a second example. An optimist says, “This is the best of all possible worlds.” A pessimist replies, “I fear you are right.” I suggest that this is funny because of an underlying incoherence in the pessimist’s response, an incoherence that one who laughs at the joke senses. The pessimist’s response is incoherent in that it implies that there could be a world better than the best of all possible worlds – which is impossible. For if the pessimist fears that this world is the best of all possible worlds, then he envisages, and would prefer, a world W better than the best of all possible worlds. Now W is either possible or impossible. Clearly, W is not possible: there cannot be a world better than the best of all possible worlds. So W is impossible.
But if W is impossible, then W cannot be actualized. But a world that cannot be actualized is a world that cannot be reasonably preferred over any other world. Therefore, by fearing that the optimist is right in his claim that this world is the best of all possible worlds, the pessimist incoherently desires the impossible. Whether or not one can explain the incoherence as clearly as I have just done, one laughs at the joke because one senses the underlying incoherence. Or at least that is my theory.

A third example, borrowed from Will Rogers. “To make money in the stock market, you buy a stock when it is low, wait for it to go up, then sell when it is high. If it doesn’t go up, you don’t buy it.” I suggest that the joke is funny because the directionality of time makes it impossible to do something in the present (refrain from buying a stock that has failed to appreciate) that alters the past (one’s having bought that very stock).

Now suppose I have succeeded in showing that the humorousness of these three jokes is traceable to an underlying incoherence. This still leaves us with the question of why incoherence should be funny. My father once said something I took to be just plain stupid: “If I knew I’d get this old, I would have taken care of myself.” But he meant it as a joke. Thus on this occasion I failed to display a sense of humor. But what does one sense when one senses humor? I sensed the incoherence all right, which is why I took my father’s statement to express stupidity. But I didn’t sense the humor. So humorousness must be something in addition to incoherence. There is a missing conceptual ingredient X, which, when added to incoherence, gives us humorousness. But what is X? I have no idea. Being stymied, I stop.