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Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

Continue reading “Welcome to Maverick Philosopher“

“Death to America”

I found the following at Ed Feser’s place.  I wonder what Vito and the rest of you think of it. I myself  have taken “Death to America” as a highly credible threat and the statement of a policy the Iranian regime intends to carry out if we let them acquire nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.

EXE  May 12, 2026 at 12:31 PM

. . .  I figure that I ought to take the time to clear up one particularly stupid talking point that I’ve also seen brought up: the fact that the Iranians say “Death to America” being interpreted as evidence of ruthless savagery or genocidal intent. This requires you to interpret the phrase in a thuddingly literal manner, despite the fact that the Iranians don’t use it that way, and the regime’s officials have repeatedly clarified that that isn’t what it means.

Yes, if you translate “Marg bar Âmrikâ” literally, that’s what it means, but repeated usage has made it clear that it’s intended to be interpreted as opposition to American empire and policy towards Muslim countries. It’s why official Iranian government documents translate it as “Down with America” instead, because that’s more in line with the spirit of what the phrase actually means.

If God Created the World, Who Created the Creator?

Thomas Merton claims that the title question is a good koan. I maintain that it isn’t.  I then give two examples of what I consider to be good Christian koans. Substack latest.

This article is relevant to my ongoing discussion with Tom Carroll. I thank him once again for engaging, as opposed to opposing, my ideas.  Those who think oppositionally in philosophy are not philosophers but ideologues.

Meditation as Reduction to the Root of Ordinary Mind

I said earlier that  one aim of meditation is to “to dis-cover the root of all thinking, that which is transcendentally-ontologically prior to all thinking.”  Tom Carroll asked me about this and what, if anything, it has to to with what Kant and Husserl mean by ‘transcendental.’

1) The basic idea is that, below the surface of ordinary mind, with its chaos of thoughts, images, good and evil feelings, useful and useless memories, and other detritus, there lies a ‘depth dimension’ that some of us have experienced. It is ‘prior’ in some sense to ordinary mind  and its discursive operations. The experience of this depth dimension cannot be brought about by one’s own effort. It occurs on its own initiative.  Phenomenologically, the experience has a gift-character.  It is as if one has been granted this experience by a Power external to oneself.  Whether one has in reality been granted this experience by an external Power is a  metaphysical question that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation.  But it is reasonable to take the experience as evidence of an external power that is prior to and deeper than anything on the phenomenal plane.

One can have this experience, or gain this glimpse,  without any preparatory spiritual exercises whatsoever.  Or one can make preparations.  The preparations at most prepare the soul; they cannot of themselves initiate the growth. If one prepares with discursive prayer, one first touches upon this depth dimension in the transition from what Augustin Poulain calls the “prayer of simplicity” to the non-discursive “prayer of quiet.” If one experiences this transition, then one has reached the initial and lowest level of mystical experience, properly so-called.  See here.

In addition to the planting metaphor, there is a metaphor for this preparation from al-Ghazali that I like very much. A desert-dweller  is more likely to catch a cooling breeze at the top of a minaret than at its base. So he climbs to the top of the minaret. But whether he is granted a cooling breeze is not in his power.  So  the first step into the mystical cannot be achieved by own-power alone.  It is not just that own-power is insufficient; own-power is neither necessary nor sufficient. Other-Power, however,  is both necessary and sufficient. Preparations are merely ancillary or auxiliary.

2) By ‘thinking’ I mean discursive thinking.  So a meditator qua meditator is not a thinker. Discipline thinking is at best a springboard beyond discursion toward the transdiscursive.

3) I said earlier that the root of all thinking is transcendentally-ontologically prior to all thinking. What sort of priority is this?

‘Prior’ has several senses, among them: temporal, logical,  transcendental, ontological.  If one event occurs before another in time, then the first is temporally prior to the second. The priority of the parts of a whole to the whole is in many cases logical but not temporal.  This is especially clear in cases in which neither the whole nor its parts are in time. The numbers 2, 7, and 9 are logically but not temporally prior to the set, {2, 7, 9}.   In this example there cannot be temporal priority because neither the parts (the elements) not the whole (the set) are in time.

In the case of a wall made of stacked stones, both whole (the wall) and the parts (the constituent stones) are in time. Moreover, the wall came to be at a time and will cease to be at a later time. Nonetheless, at any given time t in the wall’s career, the stones at t are logically, not temporally, prior to the wall at t.

A third example. The definitions and axioms in an axiomatic system are logically, not temporally, prior to the theorems that follow from the axioms. And note that ‘follow’ here does not have a temporal sense, despite the fact that the writing of a proof on a blackboard involves a temporally sequential series of steps.

A fourth example.  Trump and the true sentence ‘Trump exists’ uttered or written by someone both exist in time.  Does the man exist because the sentence is true, or is the sentence true because the man exists? The latter. The existing man, as the truth-maker of the true sentence,  is logically prior to the true sentence.

4) Transcendental  priority  is different from both temporal and logical priority. It refers to the priority of consciousness over every object of consciousness, where ‘object’ is taken in a maximally broad way  to cover concrete particulars, abstract particulars (tropes), events, event-sequences, abstracta (ideallia) of all sorts including Fregean propositions, mathematical sets of every cardinality,  functions, series, finite and infinite, relations  of consistency, inconsistency, and entailment, introspectible mental items whether intentional or non-intentional, Meinongian nonentities, concepts in minds, exemplified and unexemplified universals,  all distinctions and differences between and among anything and anything else . . . , in short, everything that can be brought before consciousness  as an object for consciousness.

Transcendental consciousness is thus the ultimate Other to every actual and possible object in the maximally broad sense of the term.  It is the ultimate condition of the  possibility of anything’s appearing.  You can think of it as the transcendental Light of mind without which nothing would appear, including physically illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or physical sources of physical light such as the Sun, or the lambent spaces between them.

5) Ontologically prior to this transcendental Light stands its onto-theological Source.  Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source of Transcendental Light upon entering into his “inmost being.” Entering there, he saw with his soul’s eye, “above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light.” He continues:

It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater
light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but
different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my
mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my
mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made
by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows
it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)

6) I didn’t get around to Kant and Husserl. Tomorrow’s another day.

Against Ostrich Presentism and Problem-Blindness

I agree with the following remark in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettel. 

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems.” (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

I prefer to say that some philosophers are problem-blind. It is not as if they have lost the problems; they never found them. They are like unto the ostrich with his head in the sand.

Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems to me genuine and ‘deep.’  It has to do with the relation of time and existence. Do only temporally present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist?  For this to be a substantive question of metaphysics, ‘exist’ in both of its occurrences in the preceding sentence cannot be in the present tense. If they were, ‘Only present items exist’ would be logically true and ‘Past and present and future items all exist’ would be logically false.  For it is logically true that only present items exist at present, and logically false that past, present, and future items all exist at present, given that ‘past’ and ‘future’ mean wholly non-present. 

Continue reading “Against Ostrich Presentism and Problem-Blindness”

Pope Leo’s A. I. Encyclical

Blather, bromides, and a soupçon of bullshit to spice it up:
Most fanciful is the pope’s claim that the mandarins at the United Nations should be entrusted with overseeing AI. He says they “are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love, for they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts.” This is truly the triumph of hope over experience. (WSJ)
I’m all for love, dialogue, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.  But ask yourself: could the pope, or anyone, by entering into loving dialogue with the members of the IRGC, persuade these thugs to stop murdering fellow Iranian citizens?  They have slaughtered some 42, 000 of them in recent months.
You cannot build a “civilization of love” with the anti-civilizational.
Our dear pope is a fool on several levels, and certainly no improvement over his predecessor, Bergoglio the Benighted.
Addendum (5/29/2026, 9:47 AM).  Michael Liccione, staunch Catholic, on his Facebook page, emphasis added:
In my view it is imperative, for example, to prevent a regime of deranged religious zealots from acquiring nuclear weapons that they would almost certainly use, starting with Israel and ending up with the US. There can be no negotiated “deal” with the Islamic Republic, no genuine “dialogue” with people who sincerely call your country “Satan.” Their twisted theology, a minority view among a minority of Muslims, makes it impossible for them to abandon their nefarious goals. The Israeli-American “self-defense” we’ve been seeing is accordingly pre-emptive. There was little or no room for that sort of thing in just-war doctrine before nuclear weapons and AI. There should be now.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan Turns 85 Tomorrow

Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, or getting to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven’s door.

The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He’s been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it’s not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.

Our boy’s been covered, and covered some more. Here are some outstanding specimens:

Johnny Rivers, Positively Fourth Street.

Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me. Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Mary Travers interviews Bob Dylan. Not a cover but interesting to the true Dylan aficionado.

Joan Baez, Hard Rain

Gary U.S. Bonds, From a Buick Six

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Too Much of Nothing

Arlo Guthrie, Percy’s Song

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

Stephen Stills, Ballad of Hollis Brown

McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty et al., My Back Pages

Marianne Faithful, Visions of Johanna

But nothing touches the original. This is the bard at his incandescent mid-’60s best. From Blonde on Blonde.

Addendum (5/31/2026).  Scott Johnson of Powerline writes well about Dylan. Here are a couple of his recent columns.  Not Dark Yet. Chimes of Freedom.  There are links galore to Dylan’s music.

Suggestions on How to Meditate

A Substack follow-up to Meditation: What and Why in response to Tom Carroll’s query.  And then we’ll ‘swim the Ganges.’ But I might not get to the Ganges tomorrow since I’ll be heading to the shooting range.

The neo-Kantian German philosopher Eugen Herrigel wrote a book entitled Zen in the Art of Archery.  Tomorrow I will practice Zen and the Art of Handgunnery. Can you trigger an explosion a couple of inches from your face without flinching or moving the gun, with equanimity and detachment from the outcome, hitting a bulls-eye eleven yards off?

Comments on and Questions about a Passage in Vohanka’s “Love or Contemplation?”

Vlastimil Vohánka’s  article Love or Contemplation: Hildebrandian and Aristotelian Ways to High Happiness  is surpassingly excellent,  and smooth-sailing for me until I came to the following passage on pp. 10-11 about which I have some questions.

Following Conway and the Aristotelian Josef Pieper, I say that the contemplation of God’s existence and qualities is not to be understood as the process of inquiring whether God exists and what his qualities are.

BV:  I agree. It would be better, though, to refer to Pieper more specifically as a Thomist.  No Aristotle, no Thomas. But there is more to Thomas than Aristotle.  There is a decided Platonic and neo-Platonic strain in Thomas. Ratzinger, the last pope worth his salt, would back me up on this.

Rather, the contemplation is an attentive beholding or seeing that God exists and what God is like. Aristotelians typically depict the contemplation as monologic rather than dialogic, as argumentative rather than intuitive or even non-discursive, and as propositional rather than non-propositional.

BV: The first sentence is fine, but I struggle with the second. What do you mean by ‘monologic’ and ‘dialogic’?  The first from ‘monologue’ and the second from ‘dialogue’?  Admittedly, one cannot have a dialogue with the Prime Mover whereas one presumably can with the personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. You seem to be saying that in Aristotle contemplation is a form of argument, and therefore discursive, and not intuitive.  You may be right, but some citation of Aristotelian texts would be helpful. That you are right is suggested by the contrast in Aristotle between the vita contemplativa (bios theoretikos) and the vita activa.  Accordingly, both reasoning about God and directly apprehending God by intellectual intuition (visio intellectualis) — assuming that Aristotle while in a Platonic mood would admit such a thing —  would fall on the side of contemplation.

Suppose some person attentively rehearses, step by step, the soundness of an argument that God exists, which she has seen to be sound many times before. She is contemplating in a typical Aristotelian manner. But, following Pieper, we can understand the contemplation more broadly: as possibly non-argumentative, non-discursive, non-propositional, or non-monologic.  Suppose that the person attends to the putative fact that if God exists then he is omnipresent, and finds it, as she has done before, intuitively self-evident or obvious. Even now she is contemplating. Later she dwells non-discursively (i.e., without elaborate thinking, imagining, remembering, or inner or outer talking) and also without any argumentative or self-evident assurance — but with an assent of faith — on the putative fact that God exists and is omnipresent. She is contemplating, too. Later, she dwells non-discursively on a non-propositional idea of God, or of someone omnipresent. Even so she is contemplating. She is also contemplating when she attentively observes whatever obtains in or outside of her in the present moment (her breath, sensations, feelings, thoughts, outer events or objects) as something caused or enabled by God.

BV:  I am somewhat sympathetic to this broad understanding of ‘contemplation’ which embraces both reasoning, which is discursive, and direct insight/intuition, which is not. Both are epistemic procedures. But faith is not knowledge. So I balk at the notion that an act of faith can be booked under ‘contemplation.’  I would also point out that talk of assent implies assent to a proposition, as opposed to faith in a person. Faith in God is trust in God, and thus non-epistemic.

Later still, she regards herself — attentively and non-discursively — as addressing God from a dialogic, second-person Thou-perspective (although perhaps her message cannot be translated accurately into literal descriptions and can only be described in metaphors or gestures). Or she regards God as addressing her from the same sort of perspective. Or she regards herself and God as aware of each other and also of their mutual awareness. In all these latter cases, the person is praying to God, but contemplating God as well.

BV: If one enters into a person-to-person, I-Thou relation with God, that relation in and of itself is not an act of contemplation, although one could, apart from that relation, also contemplate God.

Suppose my wife and I are sitting in the same room. She is immersed in a book, and I am contemplating her lovingly.  That contemplation is not an I-Thou relation. If I were to initiate an I-Thou relation by addressing her, I would thereby cease to be contemplating her. Contemplation involves a certain objectification which is foreign to the I-Thou relation.  Or so it seems to me.

Meditation: What and Why

Tom Carroll asks,

When you say “meditation,” what do you mean? Is there a specific practice or set of practices you have in mind? I am genuinely curious. I am a 69-year-old Catholic, well-ensconced in Holy Mother Church with absolutely no desire to “swim the Ganges,” as one might say. Still, I have read a bit on Vedanta recently and it’s interesting. That’s part of what prompts my question, I suppose.

Here is part of my answer.  More later on specific practices and ‘swimming the Ganges.’ Feel free to ask me any question about it.

Heaven and Hell: the Looming of the Last Things at the End of the Trail

Top o’ the Stack.

Note to Vlastimil:

This is the newly-redacted full-length version of the text you quote over at Facebook. Look near the top of my current feed.  I toned down the part where you sensed anger on my part at pedophile priests. The Roman way around the problem of the spiritual efficacy of confessing your sins to a corrupt priest is via the doctrine of ex opere operato, which is a topic for a separate occasion, as is the dangerous folly of face-to-face confession, now mindlessly re-named, “Reconciliation.”

Choice-Worthy, Achievable Goals: Responses to Vohanka

Vlastimil Vohanka put three questions to me:
1) Would you agree with the claim, suggested in my “Boredom of the Gods” rant  that we live at times when people (esp.  white men)  find it hard to find overarching, dominant life-goals that would seem to them both (a) (viscerally) attractive and (b) realistically achievable?

(Maybe you know Bolitho’s quite famous book Twelve Against the Gods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bolitho_Ryall, which, among other things, comments on the same problem. )

BV: I wasn’t aware of Bolitho, but the following excerpt from the Wikipedia article is relevant, especially inasmuch as I am now an old man who will no longer take the risks he took as an adventurous young man.
He [Bolitho] sees human endeavour as a duality between conformity and non-conformity. “We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quite die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.”[9] He points out that their lives [the lives of adventurers] show the difficulties involved, and the scant reward to be expected from such adventuring.[9]
Before I try to answer your question, one better put to a sociologist, I will ask you why the extensive quotation from that morally obtuse Andrew Tate? Your title suggests that you consider him a god. Do you really want to imply that? He better resembles a demon. He says, “Fucking women sucks cuz women are bad people.” False twice-over.  The second half is on a par with Rosie O’Donnell’s recent claim that “Men suck.” Why quote this defective specimen?
This Tate guys seems to be the very poster boy for toxic masculinity. My line on this, which you may be aware of,  is the only reasonable one. Neither masculinity as such, nor femininity as such are toxic; but there are cases that are well-described as cases of toxic masculinity.  See my Substack article, Masculinity. I give examples of toxic and non-toxic masculinity. There are specifically male virtues and specifically female virtues, a difference based in biology and perhaps also in metaphysics.  Men and women need each other’s virtues.  Related: Decent Man, Manly Man, Otherworldly Man.
As for V’s question #1, I disagree with his presupposition that the problem of finding a life-goal that is both attractive and achievable is a recent one. It’s age-old. It is not just V’s and younger generations that face it.  “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Thoreau in the 19th century.  Ever since Adam was kicked out of the Garden, life for the majority has been drudgery and servitude.  The great affluence we enjoy in the West makes things easier than they used to be. But this affluence has also had the opposite effect by fueling the dissatisfaction of many of the young.  The affluence makes possible the leisure that breeds  dissatisfaction. The self-esteem movement plays a role. People brought up to have an excessively high opinion of themselves despite actual accomplishments will naturally kvetch when they find that it is hard to live large and heroically.
Despite what I said, the problem remains of finding a life-goal that is noble and inspiring but also  achievable.
What’s my advice? First off, you need to make a list of choice-worthy goals. Empty celebrity and the adulation of know-nothings ought not be on the list.  Nor should food and sex. Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. To live is to live in a way befitting a human being.  There is nothing wrong with doing well so long as you do well by doing good.
Once you have your list of choice-worthy goals, you need to determine which are achievable by you . This requires self-knowledge.  Do you have what it takes to be a Navy SEAL, a firefighter, a medical doctor, an astronaut, an engineer?
You then must sacrifice to attain your goals. “You have to pay your dues if you want play the blues.”
2) In https://otherlife.co/every-angel-is-terrifying-by-riva-tez-and-praxis-society, philosopher Riva Tez says:

“Nietzsche’s concept of the last man is a prophetic description of the world as it is today. You are basking in a fake glory. You are entertained and satiated. You are seemingly productive, but you are not great. If you feel this and aren’t bothered by it, look away. If you feel this and it bothers you, listen on.”
BV: Nietzsches Last Man “who has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night” is no role model. But then Nietzsche himself has nothing better to offer.
3) I am an elitist: most people can’t be great. And, relatedly, most people can’t do philosophy well. See https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/the-abyss-and-the-soy-latte

Q: Would you agree with both?
BV: Yes, I would agree to both, as long as you mean by ‘elitism’ the elitism of spirit and not that of social privilege and position.  Life is hierarchical.  Indeed, life is many hierarchies, the hierarchy of the spirit being one of them. Few are great. There are only a few great philosophers. The vast majority of philosophers, even if they are sincere truth-seekers,  have a much more humble role, that of striving upwards to the level of the greats.
We should all aspire to be great, but few will make the cut. And when we
write our more serious writing we should write for the ages even though we know we will be lucky to end up footnotes in forgotten books and journals.

Seven Ways of Life

The following is the meat of a Substack post by our friend Vlastimil Vohanka.  He is the man in the middle. To his left is Lukas Novak, and to his right an American philosopher whose name I have forgotten. I took the picture in  a tea house in Prague in June of 2018.  Since then V’s views seem to have changed considerably.  I don’t know the whole story; he can add whatever details he likes.   He strikes me as in the grip of a midlife crisis.  If so, that may help explain the dark jag he is now on.  He converted to Catholicism around the time I met him, if I rightly recall, but has since, as it seems to me, performed a sort of theological epoché  with respect to the teachings of Rome.

To anyone in a midlife crisis my advice is to hunker down and ride it out. A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis adds some details and tells my story.  When you come out on the other end you may ask yourself as I asked myself after a crisis that took about eight years fully to recover from: What was that all about?

Here is what V has to say in the post in question. Feel free to comment.

Claim: ordinary life is (a) okayish but (b) not worth living. Even Socrates and Schopenhauer agree on (b). So do many religious people. The strategies vary but go in several and at times compatible types: (1) martyr yourself or do something else heroic (the way of optimistic hazards of saints, missionaries, Don Quijote, Nietzsche, Juenger, Camus, conquerors, explorers, revolutionaries, guerrilas, adrenaline sportsmen, and psychopaths), (2) kill yourself (the way of desperates), (3) wait for death and have hope beyond it (the way of believers; most common, often most tame and inconspicuous, recall Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith), (4) stop thinking (the way of Schopenhauer and some Eastern people), (5) think real deep (the way of Socrates and Einstein), (6) go intense raw hedonic (the way of rock stars and addicts), (7) go intense subtle hedonic (the way of dedicated artists, psychonauts, occultists, and some Eastern people). I respect most some variations on the 1st way.

I can relate to this. V and I agree that the unexamined life of the ordinary schlep is not worth living.  And yes, Socrates and Schopenhauer agree on this point despite their differences.  V and I both seek Something More than what is envisaged from the vantage point of bourgeois mediocrity.  We are both existentialists in a sense I won’t pause to define except to say that philosophy, the real thing, is not an arcane academic game from which  some manage to fill their bellies, but the  pursuit and appropriation of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.

As a young man, it was for me either suicide, mediocrity, or striving. And so I gave up electrical engineering and an assured path for the risks of the philosophical quest.  It was the ’60s, a time of great ferment socially, politically, religiously.  The Vietnam war had become a quagmire. Who was I to believe about it? I didn’t want to end up in the military-industrial complex working for Raytheon, say, designing  guidance systems for missiles.  I needed Perspective, the Big Picture, and you can’t get that from material science, fluid mechanics, or by struggling to solve ‘diffy q’s.’ (differential equations).

V  wants to live heroically, epically; he wants a great life.  Of the three people he mentions under (1) above,  my impression is that he is most attracted by the life-path of  Ernst Jünger.  V can tell us whether he has read Jünger’s recently translated and released Approaches: Drugs and Altered States (Telos Press, 2022).

(2) is out for both of us. Nothing is stupider than to kill yourself when life itself will perform that service soon enough.  Your girl friend dumped you? Give it six months and you will wonder what you ever saw in her in the first place.  I have elsewhere expressed my lack of sympathy for that gastro-tourist Anthony Bourdain who hanged himself. (By the way, this pedant reminds you that a man is hanged; his coat is hung.) You will call me ‘insensitive’ re: Bourdain, but I grant that suicide make sense and is forgivable  and even morally justifiable in some cases, extreme clinical depression being one of them.  A contemporary locus classicus on this topic is William Styron’s Darkness Visible.  I was mercifully spared clinical depression. My depressions were amenable to my own self-brewed logotherapy.  The worst year of my life was my 21st when I experienced what I called my Existential Malaise Crisis. Good old Emersonian self-reliance pulled me through. If you really need help that you cannot self-provide, however, don’t be afraid to ask for it!

And if you are tempted by suicide, are you quite sure what’s on The Other Side?  The link will take you to a book  by a well-known theological ‘quantity’ in the ’60s, Bishop James A. Pike, about his son who killed himself, and supposedly reports back.

The raw hedonism of (6) is out for me.  The search for the Real in intensity of experience was trademark ’60s  and many of us were beguiled by it to the point of dying from it. I dabbled with it and came close but pulled back in time.

I was never tempted by the subtle hedonism of (7).  An early familiarity with Kierkegaard and his Stages on Life’s Way (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious)  anesthetized me to  aestheticism. But it wouldn’t have had that effect had I not been antecedently predisposed, by my training in pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, to take seriously the moral and the related religious points of view.  That training and teaching fell, not on stones, but on fertile soil that was there innately.

I suppose the difference between me and Vlastimil is that, while he is drawn to some of the life-styles of (1), I am drawn to an amalgam of (3), (4), and (5) in that I hope beyond this life in the conviction that, if this is it, the game ain’t worth the candle; that the ability to silence at will the discursive mind (“stop thinking” as V puts it) is an ability that one ought to cultivate and practice; that the rational mind must be celebrated within its limits and taken as deep as one can take it.