A minor quibble. Your recent post ("Forever Reading . . .") is in error, I'm afraid. After noticing the mistake on more than one occasion throughout several years following your wonderful blog, surely the time has come that I assist a fellow stickler. Schopenahuer did not author the line, "For ever reading, never to be read;" he merely quoted Alexander Pope, who once said,
I only know the verse myself from reading R.J. Hollingdale's translation of the Great Pessimist's essays and aphorisms, so I can see how one might attribute it thus. But alas, I know how much you honor precision, so I'm compelled to help where I can. That's it — the first error I've been able to catch since 2005 or so. Excellent work, I'd say.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam!
Mr. Fitzgerald turns out to be correct. In "On Thinking for Oneself," an essay I had read circa 1980, Schopenhauer does indeed quote Alexander Pope, though only the words "For ever reading, never to be read." And the reference he gives is a little different: Dunciad iii, 194.
I in turn have a quibble with Mr. Fitzgerald's "minor quibble." A quibble is minor by definition, so 'minor quibble' is a pleonasm. Pleonasm, however, is but a peccadillo.
I have been following your blog for years, and continue to enjoy it immensely. [I've also had the opportunity to read several of your printed works in the field, which I found to be excellent – your article on states of affairs was particularly outstanding.]
I've nothing in particular to offer, other than two anecdotes that I think you'll find amusing:
(1) I met a bona fide, genuine Marxist-Trotskyist the other day. Not much more than a boy, alas, though he had drunk the Kool-Aid in toto, e.g., dialectical materialism, Trotsky a genius, all information is propaganda, etc., etc. I engaged him for some time just for shits and giggles, until the point at which he tried to (seriously) compare slavery to the position of "the woman" within the domestic family. His view, of course, was ridiculous, backed by the flimsiest of slogans. When it became apparent that he was making little sense, he backed off by saying something to the following effect: "Well, clearly two WHITE MEN need not even be discussing this issue…" Whereupon, I was pleased to recall the Maverick Philosopher, and replied (to a slackened jaw, no less): "My friend, arguments do not have testicles."
Beautiful. (On a similar note, I took your advice a few months back and read TROTSKY: DOWNFALL OF A REVOLUTIONARY by B. Patenaude – one helluva' read.)
(2) Not so long ago, I turned a very close friend of mine – one who shares my philosophical, political and religious predilections and who teaches in the Philosophy Dept. at a private school – onto your blog. He and I occasionally swap emails concerning the content, but the following comment from him (made in relation to, I believe, the Trayvon Martin debacle) I simply had to share with you:
"If it were possible to baptize the Maverick Philosopher as my uncle, I would pay to do so."
If you are a philosopher or a student of philosophy, how do you respond when someone asks what you do or study? What sorts of misconceptions about philosophy and other disciplines have you encountered? Combox open!
1. When I was a graduate student I would sometimes deflect the question by saying 'mathematics.' But then one day I received the reply, "Why do we still need mathematicians? We now have computers to do their work." The fellow apparently thought that mathematicians spend their time doing computations sitting under green eyeshades, with paper and pencil . . . .
2. When I told an art historian at Cleveland State what I taught, he naively asked, "What's philosophy?" The man had no idea. Here was an intelligent man in the humanities who had no clue, no clue at all.
3. An R. N. in one of my classes was very surprised to hear that there are philosophy journals. "There are journals of this stuff?"
4. At a rest stop off an interstate, some guy asked me what I do. "I teach philosophy." Whereupon the gent regaled me about the interesting philosophy they have up in Nova Scotia.
5. On a flight to Hawaii, I was reading from a copy of The Journal of Philosophy when the lady next to me expressed astonishment that philosophy is a technical subject and that she couldn't make head nor tail of the article I was reading. But at least she wasn't offended that it is a technical subject as some people are. The latter expect it to be comprehensible without any expenditure of effort, an expectation they do not have of physics, say. A curious double standard.
6. When an engineering professor of mine learned that I was abandoning engineering for philosophy, he said, "Whaddya gonna do when you graduate, philosophize?"
7. A relative asked me what I was working on. "At the moment I am reviewing so-and-so's book." "Are you getting paid for that?" The disgusting but all-too-common assumption is that only what one is paid to do is really worth doing. This assumption is discussed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.
8. And then there's the opposite sort of response, "You actually get paid to teach that stuff?" The assumption this time is that philosophy is not worth being paid to do. Curious. If you are not paid, then you are wasting your time, and if you are paid, then you are still wasting your time — and others' time and money to boot.
9. No one asks the dentist whether he is still cleaning teeth or the carpenter whether he is still pounding nails. But it is not uncommon for a philosopher to be asked, "Are you still teaching philosophy?"
10. When my mother died, a great aunt of mine paid us a visit. She asked what I did. "I teach philosophy." "That must make you very serene." The old lady was not wrong about what philosophy ought to be. She was simply uninformed about what it actually is for most of its practitioners.
11. Philosophy courses, even if well-taught, don't seem to do much to ward of misconceptions. An Art Educator, with a doctorate in the field, thought philosophy a lot of rubbish because of her intro course in which she learned that some dead white guy said that everything is water, another that it is all fire, a third air . . . .
12. I overhead two girls talking about a colleague's logic class. "How do you like Dr. Richards' logic class?" "It's all a bunch of word games."
13. Philosophers are in part to blame for the PR problems of the discipline. Nationally syndicated talk show host Dennis Prager's low opinion of philosophy traces back to his freshman year. He began an intro course but dropped it when the professor opened by saying that they would be discussing whether or not people exist.
The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, Plato, Augustine, and Pascal: "There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God." (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110) One wonders how much of the atheism of a Russell or a Sartre or an A. J. Ayer is the theoretical reflex of an inordinate love of this world and its flesh pots.
Frequent the flesh pots and it may turn out the best you can do by way of a conception of God is that of a celestial teapot.
For a long time now I have been wanting to study Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's hard-to-find The Paradoxical Structure of Existence. Sunday I got lucky at Bookman's and found the obscure treatise for a measly six semolians. I've read the first five chapters and and they're good. There is a lack of analytical rigor here and there, but that is par for the course with the old-school scholastic philosophers. They would have benefited from contact with analytic philosophers. Unfortunately, most of the analysts of Wilhelmsen's generation were anti-metaphysical, being logical positivists, or fellow travellers of same, a fact preclusive of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual benefit Imagine the response of a prickly positivist to one of Jacques Maritain's more effusive tracts. But I digress.
Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) must have been a successful teacher: he has a knack for witty and graphic comparisons. To wit:
Avicenna's God might be compared to the Queen of England, to a figurehead monarch. No law in England has validity unless it bears the Queen's signature. Until that moment the law is merely "possibly a law." But Parliament writes the laws and the Queen signs them automatically. Avicenna's order of pure essence is the Parliament of Being. Avicenna's God gives the royal signature of existence; but this God, like England's majesty, is stripped of all real power and liberty of action. (Preserving Christian Publications, 1995, p. 43. First published in 1970 by U. of Dallas Press.)
October is Kerouac month hereabouts, but aficionados will want to read the recent Football and the Fall of Jack Kerouac, a New Yorker piece that raises the question of the contribution of football-induced brain trauma to Kerouac's decline and early death.
In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer lays into Kerouac's poetry with some justification:
Grimly reconciled though one may be to the annual flood of books by and about the Beat Generation, it’s particularly depressing to see Jack Kerouac’s poetry, of all things, enshrined in the Library of America, that magnificent series designed to preserve for posterity the treasures of our national literature. To read through these seven hundred–odd pages of Kerouac’s staggeringly slapdash effusions set in elegant Galliard, outfitted with the usual meticulous editorial apparatus, and bound—like Twain’s novels and Lincoln’s speeches—in a beautiful Library of America volume is enough to trigger a serious attack of cognitive dissonance.
I am astonished at my poor ability to spot typographical errors despite my assiduous exercise of what is pleonastically referred to as 'due diligence.' I see what I bloody well want to see. I read the following a good dozen times and failed to see the mistake:
Astinence is no mark of a rounder
which I just now corrected to
Abstinence is no mark of a rounder
which is my response to Jeff Hodges'
Absinthe makes the heart go founder.
But I can't hold a candle to my old friend Monterey Tom, the undisputed master of the typo, as he demonstrates here.
Prepared lines come in handy in many of life's situations. They are useful for getting points across in a memorable way and they make for effective on-the-spot rebuttals.
A mind well-stocked with prepared lines is a mind less likely to suffer l'esprit d'escalier.
Suppose a feminist argues that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion. Without a moment's hesitation, retort: Arguments don't have testicles!
Other applications are easily imagined.
We ought to be able to extend the idea to race. Suppose a left-wing black takes umbrage at a Bill O'Reilly-type pointing out of the causes of the problems in the black 'community.' Say: In my neck of the 'hood, arguments they ain't got no skin color. Hell, they ain't got no skin!
It is good to see that Podhoretz the elder is still writing.
Is Obama an incompetent, way out beyond his depth? Or is he very skillfully executing the plan he had all along? N-Pod argues the latter.
The key to understanding what Mr. Obama has pulled off is the astonishing statement he made in the week before being elected president: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." To those of us who took this declaration seriously, it meant that Mr. Obama really was the left-wing radical he seemed to be, given his associations with the likes of the anti-American preacher Jeremiah Wright and the unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, not to mention the intellectual influence over him of Saul Alinsky, the original "community organizer."
[. . .]
But foreign policy was another matter. As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country's power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic "isolationist" label abroad.
