Some are of propinquity, others of affinity. The best are both.
Month: February 2020
Given Anselm’s Insight, How is Empirical Evidence Relevant to the Existence/Nonexistence of God?
ANSELM'S INSIGHT
I take what I call Anselm's Insight to be non-negotiable. St. Anselm appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be non-contingent. If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. For if your god is contingent, and he exists, then his nonexistence is possible, and nothing like that could count as God. God, by definition, is that than which no greater can be conceived, to use use Anselm's signature phrase, and necessity is a greater or higher modal status than contingency. Contingency in an existing thing is an ontological defect. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent. If, on the other hand, your god is contingent and he doesn't exist, then it is worse still: your god is impossible.
Anselm's point, expressed with the help of Leibniz, is that the concept of God is the concept of a being that either exists in every metaphysically possible world, or in no metaphysically possible world. This formulation has the advantage of not presupposing the existence of God by the use of 'God.' For it may be that the concept is not instantiated, as it would not be if God is impossible.
Anselm's Insight rests on the assumption that the necessarily existent is 'better' than the contingently existent, which in turn rests on the Platonic sense that the immutable is higher in value than the mutable. This assumption can be reasonably questioned but also reasonably defended. But I won't go into that now. For present purposes I endorse both the Insight and the Assumption upon which it rests.
ANSELM'S ARGUMENT
But it does not follow from Anselm's Insight that Anselm's Argument is probative. I am referring to the modal ontological argument found in Proslogion III. One cannot validly infer from God's non-contingent status alone that he exists. For it is epistemically possible — possible for all we know — that God is modally impossible. 'Non-contingent' does not mean 'necessary.' It means 'either necessary or impossible.' To arrive at God's existence, one needs a possibility premise to the effect that God is possible. But how would you know that the premise is true? Conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility.
For more on the Argument see here. Today's topic is different.
IS EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE RELEVANT TO THE EXISTENCE/NON-EXISTENCE OF A NON-CONTINGENT GOD?
A question posed to me by a reader requires only Anselm's Insight although he thinks it requires the probativity of Anselm's Argument. I take him to be asking how empirical evidence could be relevant to the existence of a non-contingent God.
Suppose God does not exist. Then, by the Insight, he is impossible. But no amount of empirical evidence could show that what is impossible is actual. So no miraculous event could show that God exists. If God is impossible, any putative empirical evidence to the contrary could be legitimately dismissed a priori. Compare round squares and colored sounds. They are impossible. The claims of anyone who said he had empirical evidence to the contrary would be legitimately dismissed a priori. We know that there cannot be any round squares or colored sounds. We do not know that God is impossible. But we do know (given Anselm's Insight) that either God necessarily exists or God is impossible.
If, on the other hand, God does exist, then he cannot fail to exist and no empirical evidence is needed or could be relevant. Suppose that someone demanded empirical evidence of the truth of 7 is prime or the existence of 7 or the existence of the proposition, 7 is prime. You would show that person the door.
Now either God exists or he does not. Either way, empirical evidence is irrelevant to the existence of God.
What then of natural and moral evil? Are they evidence of the nonexistence of Anselm's God? No, and to think otherwise is to assume that God is a contingent being.
The above is my interpretation of my reader's reasoning. I am inclined to accept it as I interpret it.
Metaphysical Explanation Again
One question I am discussing with Micheal Lacey is whether any sense can be attached to the notion of metaphysical explanation. I answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he can tell me whether he agrees with the following, and if not, then why not.
Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. The predicate 'red' is true of Tom. Equivalently, 'Tom is red' is true. Now the sentence just mentioned is contingently true. (It is obviously not necessarily true in any of the ways a sentence, or the proposition it expresses, could be necessarily true. For example, it is not true ex vi terminorum.)
Now ask: could a contingently true sentence such as 'Tom is red' just be true? "Look man, the sentence is just true; that is all that can be said, what more do you want?" This response is no good. It cannot be a brute fact that our sample sentence is true. By 'brute fact' I mean a fact that neither has nor needs an explanation. So the fact that 'Tom is red' is true needs an explanation. And since the fact is not self-explanatory, the explanation must invoke something external to the sentence.
This strikes me as a non-negotiable datum, especially if we confine our attention to present-tensed contingently true sentences.
I hope it is clear that what is wanted is not a causal explanation of why a particular tomato is red as opposed to green. Such an explanation would make mention of such factors as exposure to light, temperature, etc. What is wanted is not a causal explanation of Tom's being ripe and red as opposed to unripe and green, but an explanation of a sentential/propositional representation's being actually true as opposed to possibly true. The question, then, is this: WHAT MAKES A CONTINGENTLY TRUE PRESENT-TENSED SENTENCE/PROPOSITION TRUE?
Our contingently true sentence is about something, something in particular, namely Tom, and not about Tim. And what the sentence is about is not part of the sentence or the (Fregean) proposition it expresses. It is external to both, not internal to either. And it is not an item in the speaker's mind either. Tom, then, is in the extralinguistic and extramental world. Now I will assume, pace Meinong, that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent items. Given that assumption I say: VERITAS SEQUITUR ESSE (VSE). Truth follows being. Truth supervenes on being if we are talking about contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearers.
That is to say: every contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearer has need of at least one thing in the extralinguistic world for its truth. Thus 'Tom is red' cannot be true unless there is at least one thing external to the sentence on which its truth depends. What I have just said lays down a necessary condition for a contingent sentence's being true.
But VSE is not sufficient for an adequate explanation of the truth of 'Tom is red.' If Tom alone was all one needed for the explanation, then we wouldn't be able to account for the difference between the true 'Tom is red' and the false 'Tom is green.' In short, the truth-maker must have a proposition-like structure, but without being a proposition. The truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is not Tom, not is it any proposition; the truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is the state of affairs, Tom's being red. (I am sketching the Armstrong line; there are other ways to go.)
The state of affairs Tom's being red is the ontological ground of the truth of the corresponding sentence/proposition. It is not a logical ground because it is not a proposition. Nor is it a cause.
It seems to me that I have just attached a tolerably clear sense to the notion of a metaphysical explanation. I have explained the truth of the sentence 'Tom is red' by invoking the state of affairs, Tom's being red. The explanation is not causal, nor is it logical. And so we can call it metaphysical or ontological.
Have I convinced you, Micheal?
Medicare for All?
Some of the Democrat candidates for president are calling for Medicare for all, in those terms. The call makes no sense. Medicare is a U. S. government program for American citizens 65 years of age and older. (There are minor exceptions that don't affect my main point.) Now even Democrats know that not every citizen is 65 or older. So the call makes no sense for that reason alone.
If the Dem dogs weren't such lying "pony soldiers" to use Joe Biden's bizarre phrase, if they were intellectually honest, then they would admit to be calling for universal health care, where 'universal' covers citizens and illegal aliens. The mendacious bunch would also own up to wanting a single-payer system, one that outlaws private health insurance. Outlawing private insurers such as Blue Cross/ Blue Shield, Aetna, etc., would do away with the supplemental plans now available to part B Medicare recipients.
Next Lie: "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan." (Barack Obama)
A Cure for Infatuation?
One of the very best is marriage.
Infatuation is a form of idolatry that cannot last long in a marriage. Marriage cures it. That's an argument for marriage. There was no cure for Don Quixote's romantic fantasies because their object, the fair Dulcinea del Toboso, existed only in his imagination.*
But while infatuation lasts, it is blissful. One is made silly, often harmlessly so. One walks on air and can think of nothing but the beloved. The moon hits your eye like a bigga pizza pie. The world starts to shine like you've had too much wine. So smitten was I in the early days of my relationship to the woman I married that I sat in my carrel at the university one day and just thought about her for eight hours straight when I was supposed to be finishing an article on Frege. Life is both love and logic. But sometimes hot love trumps cold logic.
The best marriages begin with the romantic transports of infatuation, but a marriage lasts only if the Rousseauian transports are undergirded by good solid reasons of the big head without interference from the heart or the little head. The love then matures. Real love replaces illusory idealization. The big head ought to be the ruling element in a man.
It takes an Italian to capture the aforementioned romantic transports, and Dean Martin (Dino Crocetti) does the job well in the schmaltzy That's Amore.
Il Mio Mondo is a good expression of the idolatry of infatuation. Cilla Black's 1964 rendition of the Italian song is You're My World.
But whence the idealization, the infatuation, the idolatry? And why the perennial popularity of silly love songs? What we really want in the deepest depths of the heart no man or woman can provide. That is known to all who know their own hearts and have seen through the idols. What we want is an infinite and eternal love. This infinite desire may have no object in reality. Arguments from desire are not rationally compelling.
But given the fact of the desire, a fact that does not entail the reality of its object, we have what we need to explain the idealization, the infatuation, and the idolatry of the sexual other. We substitute an immanent object for Transcendence inaccessible.
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*The great novel of Miguel Cervantes is a work of fiction. And so both Don Quixote/Quijote and Dulcinea are fictional characters. But the first is posited as real within the fiction while the other is posited as imaginary, as Don Quixote's fiction, even if based upon the posited-in-the-fiction real Aldonza Lorenzo. Herewith a bit of grist for the mill of the philosophy of fiction. The real-imaginary distinction operates within an imaginary construct.
Lie or Exaggeration or Bullshit? Politics in an Age of Bullshit
A redacted re-post from 30 November 2016
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Over the weekend, Donald Trump bragged in signature style that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Lefties are calling the statement a lie. But it is no such thing. In the typical case, a lie is a false statement made with the intention to deceive. In the typical case, one who lies knows the truth, but misrepresents it to his audience out of a desire to deceive them. But no one knows the truth-value of Trump's braggadocious conditional. It could be true, but neither Trump nor anyone else has any evidence of its truth. Although verifiable in principle, it is not practically verifiable.
When lefties call a statement a lie which is not a lie should we say that they are lying about what it is?
Was Trump exaggerating when he made his remark? That's not right either.
I think what we have here is a species of bullshit in the sense pinned down by a noted philosopher. According to Harry Frankfurt, a statement is bullshit if it is
. . . grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit." (emphasis added)
Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit. The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth value of what he is saying. He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about them.
Now if the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He cares about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows. Frankfurt again:
. . . bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis added)
When did the Age of Bullshit begin in American politics? Perhaps with the inauguration of Bill Clinton. But it really gets underway with Barack Obama. Obama is the shuck-and-jive precursor of Trump. So let's recall some of his antics.
As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:
. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?
When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.
The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency — these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' — good POMO word, that — and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:
But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?
[. . .]
The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.
In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Rock and Roll Apologetics
A curious sub-genre of meta-rock devoted to the defense of the devil's music.
The Showmen, It Will Stand, 1961
Bob Seger, Old-Time Rock and Roll
But does it really "soothe the soul"? Is it supposed to? For soul-soothing, I recommend the Adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Adagio molto e cantabile.
Rolling Stones, It's Only Rock and Roll (but I Like It)
Electric Light Orchestra, Roll Over, Beethoven. Amazingly good. Roll over, Chuck Berry!
Danny and the Juniors, Rock and Roll is Here to Stay
Chuck Berry and Friends, Rock and Roll Music
Off-topic bonus cut: The Chantels, Look in My Eyes, 1961. YouTuber comment: "Emanating from the Heart Chakra. Something pop songs rarely do anymore. Feel it?" The popular music of this period had human meaning, coming from the heart and speaking to the heart, even when it passed over into schmaltz and sentimentality.
Are Fascist Antifa Thugs Blind to their Contradictory Behavior?
A re-titled and redacted version of an entry originally posted 1 September 2017.
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Yes, says Jonathan Turley:
At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F–k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”
If there is a 'contradiction' involved here it is not logical but practical/pragmatic. In the terminology of the preceding entry, it is not an instance of logical inconsistency, but of inconsistency in the application of a principle or standard. If the principle is "It is wrong to employ fascist tactics," then the practical contradiction consists in the Antifa thugs' application of the principle to their enemies but not to themselves.
But then it dawned on me (thanks to some comments by Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' who cannot go by his real name because of the leftist thugs in the academic world) that there is no practical/pragmatic contradiction or double standard here. The Antifa thugs and their ilk operate with a single standard: do whatever it takes to win.
They don't give a rat's ass about consistency of any kind or the related 'bourgeois' values that we conservatives cherish such as truth. These values are nothing but bourgeois ideology the function of which is to legitimate the 'oppressive' institutional structures that the Marxist punks battle against.
When Turley says that the thugs "seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction" he assumes that they accept the principle but have somehow failed to realize that they are applying it inconsistently. But that is not what is going on here. They don't accept the principle! They have nothing against fascist tactics if they can be employed as means to their destructive ends. But if the political authorities arrest them and punish them, as they must to maintain civil order, then they scream Fascism! and dishonestly invoke the principle.
Besides, they don't accept the meta-principle that one ought to be consistent in the application of principles.
It is a mistake to think that one can reach these people by appealing to some values we all supposedly share. "Don't you see, you are doing the very thing you protest against!" You can't reach these evil-doers in this way. You reach them by enforcing the law. At some point you have to start breaking heads. But that is not 'fascism,' it is law enforcement.
If the authorities abdicate, if the police stand idly by while crimes against persons and property are committed, then they invite a vigilante response. Is that what you want?
The "Fuck Free Speech" signs make it clear that the Antifa thugs do not value what we value. And because they do not share this classically liberal value, it is a mistake to say that they operate with a double standard: Free speech for me, but not for thee. They don't value free speech at all; what they value is winning by any means. If there are times and places where upholding free speech is a means to their ends, then they uphold it. But at times and in places where shutting down free speech is instrumentally useful, then they will shut it down.
It is right out of the Commie playbook. And just as a Nazi is not the cure for a Commie, a Commie is not the cure for a Nazi. The cure for both is an American steeped in American values.
Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold
(A re-post, with corrections and additions, from 13 January 2010)
Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to meeting was Richard Peck, but by the time I found out about his passion from his wife, Joan, he had passed away. Sadly enough, Joan unexpectedly died recently.
Joan had me and my wife over for dinner on Easter Sunday a few years ago, and my journal (vol. XXI, pp. 34-35, 28 March 2005) reports the following:
Joan's dead husband Rick was a true believer in the Dutchman mine, and thought he knew where it was: in the vicinity of Weaver's Needle, and accessible via the Terrapin trail. A few days before he died he wanted Joan to accompany his pal Bruce, an unbeliever, to a digging operation which Bruce, a man who knows something about mining, did not perform. Rick to Joan, "I want you to be there when he digs up the gold."
Via the wonders of the Internet I found a Time Magazine article, Adventure and the American Individualist dated 19 November 1965. On p. 4 we read about Richard Peck:
Richard Peck, 44, is a Princeton graduate, the father of three children and the owner of a Cincinnati advertising agency. He has spent the past 16 months trying to find the famed Lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona's barren Superstition Mountain range. "The more I read about the Lost Dutchman," he recalls, "the more I kept coming back to it. Finally, I was sure I knew where the Lost Dutchman was. I was going to tear this thing open. I thought I was going to have it wrapped up in two weeks." So far his search has cost him $80,000. "I had to try something like this because it was so impossible. But if this mine is ever found it's still going to hurt in a lot of ways. Something is going to be lost out of this world."
What a story! A successful, educated, 44-year-old man, possibly in the grip of a midlife crisis, spends 16 months and $80,000 grubbing around in wild and unforgiving (but not "barren"!) country searching for an almost certainly nonexistent mine. Unlike Adolph Ruth, another white-collar type who sought adventure in them thar hills, Peck came out of the mountains alive. And that was back in the '60s. Peck, whose name was shortened from 'Peckstein' according to Joan, lived on for another 40 years or so. It thus appears that the quest for the lost gold was the main passion of his life. He believed in its existence until the end of his life.
As I write this, I look out my window at Superstition mountain wreathed mysteriously in low-lying clouds and reflect that to live well, a man needs a quest. Without a quest, a life lacks the invigorating "strenuosity" that William James preached.
But if he quests for something paltry such as lost treasure, it is perhaps best that he never find it. For on a finite quest, the 'gold' is in the seeking, not in the finding. A quest worthy of us, however, cannot be for gold or silver or anything finite and transitory. A quest worthy of us must aim beyond the ephemeral, towards something whose finding would complete rather than debilitate us.
Nevertheless, every quest has something in it of the ultimate quest, and can be respected in some measure for that reason.
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See also:
SOTU #3: President Trump in Fine Form
Donald J. Trump did a great job with his third State of the Union address last night. He took the high ground and demonstrated that he can rise to the occasion when necessary. He made no mention of his impeachment by the House or his expected acquittal by the Senate which will be fait accompli by the end of today. There was also no mention of the Democrats, their witch hunts, or their obstructionism. He cleaved to the positive the whole time, listing his many accomplishments, both domestic and foreign. Promises made; promises kept; Nancy wept. Or rather grimaced.
45 sounded all the right notes on the rule of law, sanctuary jurisdictions, illegal immigration, socialism, abortion, religious liberty, and Second Amendment rights. He said the things that need saying, the very things that Milque-Toast Mitt and the rest of the go-along-to-get-along Republican pseudo-cons are afraid to say. He offended all the right people, including Speaker Pelosi behind him and, to his right, the pouting and sullen girly-girl House Democrats all in white as they were last year, putting their female tribalism on display.
The Orange Man continued in the tradition inaugurated by the great Ronald Reagan in 1982 by honoring ordinary citizens. (Do you remember Lenny Skutnick, who plunged into the icy Potomac to rescue an Air Florida flight victim, and was honored in 1982 by Reagan?)
But the high point of the accolades was President Trump's bestowal of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Rush Limbaugh who was recently diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Limbaugh is the prime mover behind conservative talk radio which intellectually obtuse and morally defective 'liberals' insist on calling 'hate radio' thereby demonstrating their failure to grasp the distinction between hate and dissent and the important role dissent plays in a healthy republic.
This blogger enjoyed the 70 or so minute speech immensely. His enjoyment was marred only by his having to look at Nancy Pelosi making faces, chewing her dentures, and looking like the dingbat she is.
And did you notice how, at the end of the speech, Pelosi tore her copy of the speech transcript in half in front of the whole country? What a nasty, passive-aggressive joke she is! She will end her career on a very sad note. And it will be quite a moral struggle for this blogger to contain his Schadenfreude.
Over at My Facebook Page . . .
. . . a discussion rages over whether women should be denied the right to vote. I defend universal suffrage against certain alt-Right reactionaries. You may send me a 'Friend' request but only if you are broadly conservative or libertarian. No 'progressives' need apply. Life is too short to be wasted on discussions with the terminally benighted and willfully self-enstupidated. Such destructive fools need either therapy or defeat. Let's hope we can achieve the latter by political as opposed to extrapolitical means.
The Idolatry of the Transient
It is because we want more than the transient that we cling to it, as if it could substitute for the More that eludes us. And so in some we find an inordinate love of life, a mad clinging to what cannot last and which, from the point of view of eternity, ought not last. I have Susan Sontag and Elias Canetti in mind.
The mature man, at the end of a long life, having drunk to the lees the chalice of mortal existence, ought to be prepared bravely to shed the mortal coil like a worn-out coat and sally forth into the bosom of nonbeing, or into regions of reality glimpsed but not known from the vista points of the sublunary trail the end of which is in sight.
‘Facially’
'Facially' is seeing a lot of use recently. I take it to be an English equivalent of prima facie. Some say that we should avoid Latinisms. I say instead: use them sparingly.
Slow Thought: A Manifesto
A little squishy and Continental, but worth reading.
Slow Down and Accomplish Non-Accomplishment
Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, Thoreauvian stewardship of the moment, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot — this too is a sort of accomplishment. You have to work at it a bit. Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and the larger society's suggestions. Eradicating one's suggestibility is actually a life-long task, and none too easy.
The world's a vast project of often useless neg-otiation. It is the enemy of otium, leisure, that basis of culture. (Josef Pieper) There is need of those who will 'otiate' it, enjoying "leisure with a good conscience" to cop a phrase from Nietzsche, that untimely saunterer.
Slow down! You'll get to your grave soon enough. Why rush? Is the universe in a rush to get somewhere? It already is everywhere. Are you any less cosmic, you microcosm?