December 2009 – Page 7 – Maverick Philosopher

Kindness

Small acts of kindness have the power to transfigure the bleak face of existence. While gratefully remembering the words and gestures I have been fortunate to receive, I also regret the occasions I let slip where, at no cost to myself, I could have offered a word of encouragement or support to someone in need.

Intellectual Hypertrophy

Weight lifters and body builders in their advanced states of muscular development appear ridiculous to us. All that time and money spent on the grotesque overdevelopment of one's merely physical attributes ^___when in a few short years one will be dust and ashes. But isn't the intellectual equally unbalanced who overdevelops his logical and analytical skills to the neglect of body, emotions, and spirit? Is the intellectual wrestler all that superior to the physical one? Is one kind of hypertrophy better than another? What good is discursive hypertrophy if it is paid for in the coin of mystical and moral and physical atrophy?

Nihilist T-Shirt

On the front: Nothing matters!

On the back: And what if it did?

Mangan’s Blog Has Been Removed

If you try to access Dennis Mangan's weblog you receive the message: Sorry, the blog at mangans.blogspot.com has been removed. (HT: Malcolm Pollack) If you were to ask me to speculate I would say that the forces of political correctness have something to do with this. I quit using the Blogger/Blogspot platform almost six year ago, and I don't understand why people stick with it, apart from the fact that it is free. Note the link to "report abuse" and "objectionable content" at the top of the Blogger homepage. You can bet that idiots in great numbers will abuse this link, idiots who do not appreciate the good old classically liberal values of toleration, open inquiry, and free speech.

For more discussion of the Mangan case, see Malcolm Pollack's post Thoughtcrime, and a post by Laurence Auster.

UPDATE (5:15 PM): Mangan informs me that he is back in the saddle, here, at Typepad.

UPDATE (4 December): I see that Mangan's old blog has been restored by the powers that be. Interestingly, if you Google 'Mangan's' you are shown a link to his Racial Consciousness. It is but speculation on my part, but I should think that it is posts like this that certain people find objectionable, and that got him blacked out, if only temporarily.

Go read the post and ask yourself if there is anything in it that a reasonable person could find 'hateful' or 'racist' or sufficiently objectionable to warrant censure. If you answer in the affirmative, then you brand yourself as hopelessly obtuse, both morally and intellectually.

The Perils of Pleasure

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility. (Emphasis added.)

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

Sophocles on the Root of All Evil

Via Mike Gilleland, we read in Sophocles, Antigone 295-301 (tr. Hugh Lloyd-Jones):

There is no institution so ruinous for men as money; money sacks cities, money drives men from their homes! Money by its teaching perverts men's good minds so that they take to evil actions! Money has shown men how to practise villainy, and taught them impiousness in every action!

Mike has the Greek for you purists and elitists.

The Sophoclean sentiment, however, is quite false. For a view with a much better chance of being true, see Radix Omnium Malorum.

Radix Omnium Malorum

One often hears that money is the root of all evil. But this cannot be true, since money is an abstract form of wealth, wealth is a good thing, and the root of all evil cannot be something good. Perhaps it is the love of money that is supposed to be the root of all evil. But this too is false. Given that money is a good thing, a certain love or desire for its acquisition and preservation is right and proper. To fail to value money would be as foolish as to fail to value physical health. Well then, is it the inordinate love of money that is the root of all evil? Not even this is true. For there are evils whose root is not the inordinate love of money. The most we can truly say is that the inordinate love of money is the root of some evils.

Continue reading “Radix Omnium Malorum“

Visualize Using Your Turn Signals

This is one of my favorite bumper stickers, and not just because there are all too many motorists clogging the roads who seem unacquainted with the function of turn signals. The sticker is a parody of ‘Visualize World Peace’ (‘Visualize Whirled Peas’). Visualizing something as nebulous and utopian as world peace is about as pointless as the sort of visualizing going on in John Lennon’s silly ditty, “Imagine.”

If you want to improve the world, try visualizing some concrete action that it is in your power to perform such as letting a motorist enter your lane. Better, visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed. Then take the next step: visualize an entire day in which you gratuitously offend no one in word or deed, and entertain no negative thoughts to boot. In the end, there is only one person over whose behavior you have any real control, namely, yourself. So if you are serious about improving the world, you can start with that guy. If you desire peace in the world, begin by making war against your lower self.

I am not saying that this is sufficient for world peace, but it may well be necessary.

From the Journal of a Discarded Man

I love reading journals, both of the famous and of the obscure. Among the latter, I find my own especially intriguing for some reason. Here is an excerpt from Journal of a Discarded Man by one Walter Morris. He was in his mid-fifties at the time of this entry and has recently lost his job:

29 December 1962, Saturday. Five more makes sixty. This thing is moving right along. At twenty-one I thought I was going to be twenty-one forever.("The feeling of immortality in youth," as old Hazlitt put it.) At thirty, one is taken aback; at forty, startled; at fifty, incredulous and depressed. Midway between fifty and sixty, time’s fleet foot seems fully revealed and I see no logical reason for being taken by surprise from now on out – but who’s logical? Today is a day for homilies and platitudes, old saws and bitter-sweet droppings. "If I had to do it all over again. . ." "If I knew then what I know now. . ." These pious exercises are all right, though. They take us away from our close work and present a vista, and in this focus Everyman is a philosopher.

All right. If I had to do it over again, I’d learn a trade (for bread and butter) and for the high, orbital shot I’d concentrate on painting. The pip-squeak world of the white-collar employee I’d avoid like the plague. This is hindsight, pure, fatuous and futile. . . (From Michael Rubin, Men Without Masks: Writings from the Journals of Modern Men, Addison-Wesley, 1980, p. 194.)

Walter Morris on Solitude

Walter Morris is an exceedingly obscure author whom the Maverick Philosopher has decided to take under his wing and rescue from total oblivion. When I get through with him at least some excerpts from his journals will be in range of the search engines. Please contact me if you know anything about this fellow. He is the author of American in Search of a Way (Macmillan, 1942) and The Journal of a Discarded Man (Englewood, N.J.: Knabe-North Publishers, 1965). I have found nothing on the World Wide Web pertaining to either of these books apart from what I myself have posted. Luckily, the Arizona State University library contains a copy of his Notebook 2: Black River (limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood, NJ, 1949). It has been languishing in the ASU collection since 19 March 1956 on which date it was cataloged by one F. B. Morgan. I'd put money on the proposition that I am the only one ever to have read it.

All right Walter, with the MP as master of ceremonies, you are about to enter the 'sphere.

Continue reading “Walter Morris on Solitude”

With Whom Would You Rather Run?

No contest, right? And she's faster than me! She claims a sub-4 marathon (26.2 miles in under four hours). On Thanksgiving 2009 it took me over an hour (1:07:37) to crank through a 10 K (6.2 miles). My excuses? It was unseasonably hot and I was 10 lbs overweight. Plus I have no athletic talent. I am powered by will alone

Like her, I favor ASICS gel running shoes: anima sana in corpore sano.

The Climate Science Isn’t Settled

Three questions: Is global warming occurring? Is is anthropogenic? Is it sufficiently serious to warrant massive action? There is no good reason to think that all three questions have an affirmative answer. Here is an article by Richard S. Lindzen, professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

What is truly disturbing in all this is the extent of leftist ideological infiltration of science. But this is nothing new. See Stalin on Philology.

To put it polemically, the gas bags of global warming are CO₂mmies. The point of this bit of invective is to highlight the anti-free market, totalitarian, and politically correct ideological nature of this so-called 'science.'

Seize and Squeeze

Seize the day and squeeze it for all the juice it's worth. Repeat tomorrow. And no day without a little Emerson:

. . . we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious, as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us. (From "Experience")

Now that is good writing.

Most Common Thoreau Misquotation?

It rankles this curmudgeon when the following beautiful line of Henry David Thoreau is butchered:

In wildness is the preservation of the world.

Again and again, people who cannot read what is on the page substitute 'wilderness' for 'wildness.' People see what they want to see, or expect to see. Here is an example of double butchery I found recently:

In wilderness is the preservation of Mankind.

(Warren Macdonald, A Test of Will, Greystone Books, 2004, p. 145.)