Our eyes on the distant, we become far-sighted; our fingers clutching the petty, petty.
***
The pain you felt, and still feel, from the insult you received is far in excess of the pleasure felt, and forgotten, by the one who insulted you. You keep it alive; you can let it die. Let go, move on, live now!
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If you endlessly post pictures of yourself, you take the ‘face’ in Facebook too seriously.
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My wife of 43 years is easy to live with. Just as important, but rather more surprising, is that she finds me easy to live with.
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There is a sense in which we inhabit our bodies, and there is a sense in which our bodies are our vehicles. Habitat or vehicle? Combining the comparisons, I’ll suggest that our bodies are mobile homes. ‘Mobile’ captures our viatory status. ‘Home’ our rootedness. But don’t expect either to last long.
***
Henry David Thoreau tells us in Walden that as a youth he “inhabited his body with inexpressible satisfaction.” Perhaps he was lucky to die young as people did in the 19th century.
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Warring metaphors. Plato has Socrates say that the body is the prison house of the soul. Here if anywhere is a clear case of a house that is not a home. Thoreauvian satisfaction does not characterize such residency in such a domicile. But as I said, Henry David’s “inexpressible satisfaction” would not have lasted into dotage. But to conclude on a Platonic note, no home in this world is a true home.
***
My overall life strategy is mainly avoidant, thus neither confrontational nor self-effacing. Independent, quietly self-assertive, conciliatory, pan-optic and syn-optic. More a seer than a doer.
***
It is so easy to love oneself! Why then is it so difficult to love others? Because I am myself? No doubt I am. Who else would I be? But I am also not myself in that I observe myself, judge myself, and within limits make myself. I am object to myself as subject. I am an object of self-observation and also an object of self-evaluation. Of scrutiny and of approbation and disapprobation. I am also the raw material of my self-improvement projects. My selfhood is a unity of these dualities. Still, my otherness to myself is more intimately mine and thus more easy to love than my otherness to you — which I also need to be me. This may be part of the explanation why self-love is easier than other-love.
***
Self-esteem sans phrase is axiologically neutral. It is a value only when it is a result of achievement. Empty self-esteem, grounded in nothing, is a disvalue and ought not be promoted in children or in adults. Barack Hussein Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come to mind as examples of individuals whose self-esteem is far in excess of accomplishment. But I rank the community organizer and adjunct professor above the bar tender.
Lack of self-esteem is likewise axiologically neutral; a certain amount of it is valuable if it reflects self-knowledge of real defects and limitations. It is a disvalue if it debilitates and prevents accomplishment.
Know thyself to esteem thyself in the measure appropriate.
***
Disagreement runs deep. Not only do the philosophers disagree about the world, their disciples and commentators disagree about what each has said about the world. And the anti-philosophers? They too disagree, but about what is wrong with philosophy, besides failing to note that they themselves philosophize.
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If the philosophy room is too smoky, the door is unlocked. You are free to go. But the door is very special: if you proffer a justification of your egress, it will automatically lock you in. Just walk away, Renee.
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“If you didn’t eat so much, you wouldn’t be so hungry.” In one sense, hunger signals the real need for nutrition. In another, it signals the artificial need to fill a stomach distended by inordinate eating. Do we eat because we are hungry, or are we hungry because we eat? Primarily the first, secondarily the second.
***
First and foremost, food is fuel. When you gas up your rig, do you inject the gasoline under pressure so as to distend the tank and increase its capacity?
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You say philosophy bakes no bread? I say: Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. There’s more to life than food, sleep, and sex.
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“He pretends to be what he is not.” But how much of genuine aspiration is contained in this pretension? He who fakes it until he makes it is no mere pretender. On the other hand, much of what passes itself off as aspiration is mere pretension.
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A modicum of phoniness is fitting in a world phenomenal. Seeming is not being, but if there were no being in seeming it would be nothing at all. It is unseemly in a world of seeming to take everything at face value or to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve.
***
How generous are you if you can easily afford to be generous? How generous is my ‘generous donation’ if it is but one per cent of my monetary surplus? A donation is a giving, but I don’t give of self, but only of pelf, and of pelf a portion with which I can easily part.
***
Philosophy is as dubious a vocation as is the vocation to the priesthood or indeed the calling to anything ‘higher.’ Aspiration or pretension? Hubris? An Icarian reaching for the unattainable that justifiably elicits the scorn of the earth-bound and the ‘practical’? I say No, but opinions differ.
***
Some say the Bible is inerrant in every particular. Is this type of inerrantism a form of presuppositionalism? You would be hard-pressed to make a rational case for the claim, let alone prove it. But what you cannot prove you can always presuppose. And you are free to do so. What you must not do is to think that to argue in a circle is to proffer a proof.
***
We are all affected by the “climate of opinion” as by the actual weather. People believe what others believe because the others believe it. Conformity in belief and behavior is conducive to social success. We go along to get along. The rebel too is subject to the weather. Tied to what he rejects, reacting against it, he is defined by it. He ineptly and unwittingly defines himself by opposing that which he opposes. But rebels too seek the like-minded so as to form a comforting conformist cohort. The beatnik in black has his beret and his bible. In the late’50s, Kerouac’s On the Road was touted as the “bible of the beat generation.”