Author: Bill Vallicella

Spinoza on Commiseratio. Pity as a Wastebasket Emotion

To commiserate, to feel compassion, to pity — these come to the same. Might compassion  be a mistake? Suppose an evil befalls you. If I am in a position to help, then perhaps I ought to. But it is unnecessary that I 'feel your pain' to use a Clintonian expression. Indeed, my allowing myself to be affected might interfere with my rendering of aid. And even if it doesn't, the affect of pity is bad in itself. Why should I feel bad that you feel bad? Of course, I should not feel good that you feel bad; that would be the diabolical emotion of Schadenfreude.  The point is that I should not feel bad that you feel bad.  For it is better if only one of us suffer. Better that I should remain unaffected and unperturbed. That way, at least one of us displays ataraxia.

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Morality Private and Public: On Not Confusing Them

Socrates and Jesus are undoubtedly two of the greatest teachers of humanity. Socrates famously maintained that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it, and Jesus, according to MT 5:39, enjoins us to "Resist not the evildoer" and "Turn the other cheek." No one with any spiritual sensitivity can fail to be deeply impressed by these sayings. It is equally clear that no one with common sense can suppose that they can be applied in the public sphere.

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How Ordinary Language Philosophy Rests on Logical Positivism

A while back I came across Ernest Gellner's Words and Things (unrevised ed., 1963). It is jam-packed with insights. Here is an example:

Linguistic Philosophy [O. L. philosophy] absolutely requires and presupposes [Logical] Positivism, for without it as a tacit premiss, there is nothing to exclude any metaphysical interpretation of the usages that are to be found, and allegedly "taken as they are," in the world. (p. 86)

Exactly right. For if the anti-metaphysics of logical positivism is not presupposed, how can the O.L. philosopher rule out as meaningless metaphysical ways of talking? People talk in all sorts of ways, not all of them mundane. People talk metaphysics for example. I do it all the time, and it certainly seems to me and some of my interlocutors that I am talking sense. For example, I say things like, 'Existence is a necessary condition of property-possession: nothing has properties unless it exists' and there are people who understand me.

On the Misuse of Religious Language

A massage parlor is given the name Nirvana, the implication being that after a well-executed massage one will be in the eponymous state. This betrays a misunderstanding of Nirvana, no doubt, but that is not the main thing, which is the perverse tendency to attach a religious or spiritual significance to a merely sensuous state of relaxation.

Why can’t the hedonist just enjoy his sensory states without glorifying them? Equivalently, why can’t he admit that there is something beyond him without attempting to drag it down to his level? But no! He wants to have it both ways: he wants both sensuous indulgence and spirituality. He wants sensuality to be a spiritual experience and spirituality to be as easy of access as sensuous enjoyment.

What’s in a Name?

Mike Gilleland's erudite disquisition on crappy names (craptronyms?) put me in mind of a chess opponent I once faced in a Las Vegas tournament. The fellow, a German, rejoiced under the name of David Assman. It would really have been a hoot had the tournament's venue been Fucking, Austria, near Salzburg. (If a major tournament can be held at Lone Pine, little more than a wide spot on old U.S. 395, why not there?) Yes, muchachos, there really is such a place. The name is pronounced 'fooking.' Although I lived as a young man in Salzburg for six months, I never got to Fucking.

More Zinsser on Writing

William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed., Chapter 13:

1. "Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around a passive verb." A good rule of thumb.

2. "Passive-voice writers," Zinsser tells us, "prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words — which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences still more glutinous." (111) Here again we see that Zinsser has a hard time following his own advice. 'Glutinous' is from the Latin, glutinosus, and means having the quality of glue. Why didn't Zinsser just write 'gummy'?

My point is not that he should have written 'gummy,' but that he ought to reexamine his animus against words of Latin origin, an animus he shares with Orwell.  Brevity and Anglo-Saxonism are values, but there are competing values.

3. "Most adverbs are unnecessary." Yes. "Most adjectives are also unnecessary." Ditto. I would have preferred the quantifier, 'many,' but let's not quibble.

4. "Prune out the small words that qualify how you feel and how you think and what you saw: 'a bit,' 'a little,' 'sort of,' 'kind of,' 'rather,' 'quite,' 'very,' 'too,' 'pretty much,' 'in a sense,' and dozens more." (114) And while we are at it, prune 'out' from the sentence just quoted.

5. ". . . let's retire the pompous 'arguably.' Unarguably we don't need it." (114)

Here I must register my disapprobation. One man's pomposity is another's urbanity. I use 'arguably' to mean it is arguable that or it can be plausibly argued that. Employing this phrase, I signal my awareness that the issue in question is difficult and that intelligent people may well disagree. I indicate that I am a civilized fellow and not a rude dogmatist. Example: 'David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds is arguably the best work of analytic metaphysics to appear in English in the 1980s.' 'Arguably' softens an assertion in need of softening: there are no established criteria of good, better, best in philosophy. There is no call for dogmatism. But if I were engaged in polemic with a leftie, and needed to appear firm before an audience, then more bluntness and less urbanity would be in order.

The same goes for 'register my disapprobation.' I could have written, ' Here I must disagree.' If I were an engineer writing a technical report, I would cut to the chase and elide the ornate. But I'm not. Why should I not make use of my vocabulary? Should dancers execute only the simplest steps? Ought all buildings be Bauhaus?

"Style," said Schopenhauer, "is the physiognomy of the mind." I would add that we don't all have the minds of simpletons.

Zinsser on Writing

I found William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, 5th ed., in a discard bin  a while back for a quarter. A nice find and a good read. His politics are leftish, are they not? But I won't hold that against him. From what I have read, his advice is good. Like Orwell before him, he urges a style spare and stripped-down: "the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components." (p.7) But, like Orwell, he has trouble taking his own advice:

Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that's already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence.(p.7)

Suppose we rewrite the sentence in accordance with Zinsser's advice:

Every useless word, every word that could be shortened, every adverb whose meaning is already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what — these are the adulterants that weaken a sentence.

Without changing the thought at all, I took a sentence of 54 words and rewrote it in 39 words, saving 15 words. "Thousand and one" is useless filler and false precision, and "weaken the strength of" is pleonasm.

But the deeper issue is whether a lean style is always best. Why should every long word be traded in for a short one? It is a bit like demanding that one always dress in a purely functional way, stripping from one's apparel all ornamentation. That would get rid of all ties, especially those most precious of ties, the bow tie. Think of all the 'fashion accessories' the ladies would have to renounce.

I'm a sartorial functionalist myself, and wouldn't be caught dead in a bow tie or in suspenders. Formal attire for me is anything in excess of my 'loincloth.' But in my writing I compensate: I allow myself a modicum of elegance, a bit of leisurely strut and glide. I thumb my nose at editors and schoolmarms who think all prose must fit the same crabbed mold. I won't apologize for 'modicum' or 'sartorial' or for an allusion to Sartor Resartus; if the reader doesn't get it, that is his problem. Are we writing only for the culturally retarded?

And is it always wrong to use an adverb whose meaning is already in the verb? Mocking Al Franken, I may describe him as a 'lying liar' thus rubbing his nose in his own idiotic redundancy.

These quibbles notwithstanding, Zinsser's book promises both pleasure and instruction.

On Light

Today I preach on a text from Joseph Joubert:

Light. It is a fire that does not burn. (Notebooks, 21)

Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive. This light does not consume, like fire, but allows things to appear. It licks, like flames, but does not incinerate. ('Lambent' from Latin lambere, to lick.)

Extended Service Warranties

Conversation in the frigidarium one morning drifted onto the weighty topic of extended service warranties. A poolmate explained how a zealous salesman tried to sell her such a warranty on a filing cabinet! It occurred to me that even more absurd would be extended warranties on ball peen hammers and anvils. Or how about coffins?

"If in the first one hundred years of your subterranean repose you should ever experience any moisture or other intrusion due to a failure of the seals, just call our toll-free number conveniently stamped on the underside of the coffin lid, and a repairman will come to your gravesite, exhume your coffin, make necessary repairs, and restore everything to its original condition. All at no additional expense."

Against Subjective Existential Meaning

What is my life's point and purpose?  How silly to say, as many do, that it is wholly up to the individual to give it sense and purpose!  If I must give my life meaning, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning, which is to say that it has no meaning, full stop.  Am I my own source?  Can I 'recuperate' every aspect of my facticity by acts of goal-positing?  If my life depends on me for its meaning, then it has no meaning.  To suppose that an otherwise meaningless existence can be made meaningful by subjective acts of meaning-bestowal is like supposing that one can pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps.

If, for whatever reason, one denies that human life possesses objective meaning, then one ought to have the intellectual honesty to maintain that it has no meaning, and not seek refuge in the shabby evasion of subjective meaning.

‘Madoff’ as Quasi-Aptronym

Unless you live in a cave you will by now have heard of Bernard Madoff and his Ponzi-scheme.  Interesting name he bears, quasi-aptronymic: he made off with his investors' money. The wealthy fools who lost everything have in part themselves to blame: they allowed their good sense to be suborned by greed and ill-placed trust.  Diversification is such a simple concept.  But it is not a matter of the intellectual grasp of a simple concept.  It is a moral matter. Appetites unruled will suborn the sharpest head.  Our financial and political and social decline is rooted in moral decline.