The fool is never satisfied with what he has, but is quite satisfied with what he is. The philosopher is never satisfied with what he is, but is satisfied with what he has. The sage is satisfied with both, with what he is and what he has. Unfortunately, there are no sages, few philosophers, and a world full of fools.
Author: Bill Vallicella
On the Suffering of Animals
Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.
Suffering Pleasure
We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be acted upon, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self. Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:
. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unseasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.
It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities. Tha mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won’t advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.
How Not to Begin the Day
A thoroughly bad way to begin the day is by reading a newspaper. For it is not only the hands that get dirty, and the house cluttered; the mind in its early morning freshness is degraded by useless facts, polluted with badly written opinions, and suborned by seductive advertising. There is plenty of time later in the day to load up on the sort of drivel with which one must deal in order to survive in an imperfect world. The mornings should be kept free and clear under the aegis of Thoreau’s admonition, “Read not The Times, read the The Eternities.”
The morning is to the night as virtue is to vice. It follows that one should so arrange one’s life as to secure the maximum quantity of morning. Arise early, before the birds. The true lover of silence finds even the birds too noisy. In the morning all is cool, clean, and quiet. The worldlings are asleep, the universe is yours. Now read something worth reading, something that inspires, improves, ennobles, challenges. There are the great scriptures to choose from: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Old and New Testaments. There are great writers such as Shakespeare and Melville. Great philosophers such as Plato and Augustine wait patiently to engage us from across the centuries. If if it is self-help you need, why read the latest New Age hucksters when Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca lie to hand?
A Contradictory Being Who Issues Contradictory Demands
We want a subordinate, a friend, a spouse to do our bidding, to embody in action our intention, but also to show initiative, to anticipate our unstated wants and needs. Not content to command the other’s body, making of it an extension of our will, we want also to command the other’s freedom, making of it an instrument of our freedom.
I say to wifey: “Bring me back a case of Fat Tire Ale.” Upon her return, no ale is in evidence. Inquiring why not, I am told that it was unavailable. “Why then did you not fetch me a case of Sam Adam’s Boston Ale?”
“Because that is not what you asked for, and had I brought back Sam Adam’s you would have complained that it was not Fat Tire.”
The Joy of Teaching and the Case of Santayana
Here are some negative assessments of the worth of teaching from my own experience. There are good things about teaching too. I’ll leave them for the reader to supply if he can.
Teaching is the feeding of people who aren’t hungry.
Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who neither hunger nor know what food is.
Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one’s forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.
The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.
According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.
See here for a couple more negative views of teaching.
Stumbling Block or Stepping Stone?
One man’s stumbling block is another’s stepping stone. The cross for example.
First Live, Then Philosophize
Primum vivere deinde philosophari. But if after and while living one neglects to philosophize, then one is like the vintner who gathers grapes but neglects to press them for their wine. What is the point of gathering the grapes of experience if one fails to press them for the wine of wisdom?
Existence: Some Responses to Pavel Materna
For context see Pavel Tichy on Existence, the posts chained to it, and the comments to these posts.
My view is that existence belongs to individuals in the way it would not belong to them if Frege and Russell and Pavel Tichy were right about existence. These three maintain that existence is exclusively a property of concepts, propositional functions, and offices, respectively. I maintain that there are legitimate first-level uses of ‘exist(s)’ in addition to the legitimate second-level uses. This commits me to saying that, in a suitably broad sense of ‘property,’ existence is a property of individuals. No doubt it is a very peculiar property, indeed a sui generis property, but it is a property nonetheless. Or so I maintain. Sometimes I avoid the potentially misleading term ‘property’ altogether and simply say that existence belongs to individuals in the way it would not belong to them if Frege and Russell were right. If Russell is right, then existence is like numerousness. Plainly, one cannot predicate being numerous of an individual, e.g., ‘Socrates is numerous’ and ‘This pencil is numerous’ are nonsense. I say Russell’s view is mistaken. Although second-level uses of ‘exist(s)’ are like the uses of ‘numerous,’ ‘exist(s)’ has legitimate first-level uses unlike ‘numerous’ which has no legitimate first-level uses.
Continue reading “Existence: Some Responses to Pavel Materna”
The Presumptuousness of Blogging
Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, tr. Gregor (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 177:
To want to entertain others with the inner history of the play of my thoughts, which has subjective importance (for me) but no objective importance (valid for everyone), would be presumptuous, and I could justly be blamed for it.
There is no doubt about it: we bloggers are a presumptuous and vain lot. We report daily on the twists and turns of our paltry minds. In mitigation, a couple of points. First, I don’t force my posts on anyone. If you are here, it is of your own free will. Second, there is something fascinating to me about the origin of my own and others’ ideas and how they in their abtractness percolate up out of the concretion of their authors’ Existenz. The blogs of most interest to me combine the existential with the theoretical, the autobiographical with the impersonal. The question of the origin of ideas must not be confused with the question of their validity or lack thereof. (Got that, Fritz?) But both questions are fascinating, and how exactly they connect is even more so. Now if I find the intertwinement of the existential and the theoretical interesting, then perhaps you do as well; herein may reside some justification for reports on “the inner history of the play of my thoughts.”
I oppose the nomenclature whereby individual weblogs (as opposed to group weblogs) are referred to as ‘personal’ weblogs. This blog is more impersonal than personal and I fret over the ratio. Objektive Wichtigkeit should predominate over subjektive. But by how much?
By the way, Streit der Fakultäten is a fascinating book. I’m an old Kant man; I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. But it is only recently that I cracked The Conflict of the Faculties. This is a nice edition: German Fraktur on the left, good English translation on the right.
Nature’s Jealousy and Modesty
During almost any solitary hike through the wild there comes a moment of enchantment when the beauty of nature stands forth as if enframed. But the qualifier ‘solitary’ is necessary. Bring along a companion and you bring along society – and drive away nature. She is both jealous and modest: she doesn’t like to share her charms, and she won’t expose them to the merely social animal with his endless yap, yap, yapping about noth, noth, nothing.
The Perversity of the Philosophy Professors
The philosophy professors treat philosophy as a means to an end when it is an end in itself. And they treat it as a means to something, whether money, social status, or whatever, which cannot be an end in itself but only a means to an end. They pursue philosophy for the sake of money when they ought to pursue money for the sake of philosophy. Doubly perverse, they turn an end into a means, and a means into an end. I like the Turkish word for human being, Insan, because it reminds me of ‘insane.’
You will tell me that there are exceptions. No doubt. But they prove the rule.
What It Takes to Appreciate Nature
Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city-dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage-setting for what they take to be the really real, the social tragi-comedy. The same goes for the windshield tourists who, seated in air-conditioned comfort, merely look upon nature as upon a pretty picture. The true acolyte of nature must combine in one person a robust and energetic physique, a contemplative mind, and a healthy measure of contempt for the world of the human-all-too-human. One thinks of Henry David Thoreau. Of the same type, but not on the same lofty plane: Edward Abbey.
Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley’s Regress Part I
I was invited to attend a workshop on Bradley’s Regress at the University of Geneva this December. Francesco Orilia will also be in attendance. He and I corresponded about Bradley and facts four or so years ago. He has read some of my work and I have read some of his. This series of posts is a new attempt at understanding his position and differentiating it from mine. It is based on his “States of Affairs: Bradley vs. Meinong” in Venanzio Raspa, ed., Meinongian Issues in Contemporary Italian Philosophy, Ontos Verlag, 2006, pp. 213-238.
1. The Problem in a First Rough Formulation
A fact or state of affairs (STOA) is a contingent unity of certain ontological constituents, for example, a (thin) particular and a universal. It is this unity that is responsible for a fact’s being a truth-maker, as opposed to a mere collection of entities. Obviously, it is Al’s being fat, rather than the mere collection of Al and fatness, that makes true the proposition that Al is fat. We take as given the difference between a fact and its constituents, between a’s being F, on the one hand, and the set or sum consisting of a and F-ness, on the other. The difference is clear if one notes that, for example, Al and fatness can exist without it being the case that Al is fat. (The converse of course does not hold.) There is more to Al’s being fat than Al and fatness. The problem is to give an account of this ‘more.’ What is it that makes a fact more than its constituents?
Continue reading “Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley’s Regress Part I”
Louis Lavelle on the Stoic Wisdom
I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late antiquity, Aurelius Augustinus offered a critique of the Stoics in Book XIX, Chapter 4 of The City of God, a critique worthy of being called classical. We will have to examine that critique one of these days. But today I want to draw your attention to some passages from Chapter 10, Section 4 of Louis Lavelle’s The Dilemma of Narcissus (Allen & Unwin, 1973, tr. Gairdner):