Aphorisms and Observations – Maverick Philosopher

What is Left to Do?

Nothing much.

Put my affairs in order, complete my projects as best I can, prepare for death, and die. I have done my best. I have lived the life I wanted to live. I have been my own man. I have succeeded at what I set out to do when I was 20. In the words of my journal from those days: “to live a philosophical life in a tumultuous uncertain world is my goal.” I pulled it off, and am pulling it off. Favored by Fortuna‘s smile, I gratefully acknowledge the role of luck and the role of others in every success. I did it my way, but I got lucky and my way was partially paved by others.

How much time do I have left? Maybe 15 years, maybe 15 hours. The clock is running and the format is sudden death. When the flag falls it falls for the last time. You can’t file for an extension or take an incomplete. I keep in mind an old aphorism of mine:

How should we look at things? As if for the first time — and the last.

Random Jottings on the Day before Thanksgiving

Sehnsucht. The far-off in time or space can arouse our longing for the metaphysical Elsewhere. A lonely saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridge . . . .

When I met him, I was young and he was younger. Now I am old and he is dead. This life is too dream-like to be real, and too real to be a dream.

He died in a hospital bed, not with his boots on. “This is funny,” are said to have been Doc Holliday’s last words.

A race is not run all at once, but step by step. So too in life: it is lived day by day, hour by hour. This is a comforting truth. Can you get through the next hour?

For my kind of life, she’s been the right kind of wife: tamquam alter idem.

It takes a spiritual being to affirm that spirit is nothing but an efflux of brain chemistry and that what is ultimately real is matter alone.

Can there be moral seriousness without some doctrine of immortality? Yes? Are you serious?

Given that we are ineluctably both truth-seekers and moral strivers, could the world in itself be ultimately unintelligible and purposeless? If it is then man is no microcosm but a cosmic joke.

The ultimate joke would a joke without a teller.

If might makes right, then there is no right. To say that might makes right is to say that the notion of right is illusory.

If it won’t matter tomorrow, how much does it matter today? If it won’t exist tomorrow, how much does it exist today? Does existence come in degrees?

Is salvation of individuality or from individuality? Christian versus Hindu views. If the former, it ought to involve a transformation into a higher individuality and not a mere perpetuation of the petty earthly self.

Some friendships ought to be left in the boneyard of memory where they belong. “Let sleeping dogs lie.” But if the friendship was rooted in something deep, fruitful re-awakening may be possible.

Do Great Minds Think Alike?

Sometimes. But it doesn't follow that minds who think alike are great.

Choice of Model

Take no one man as your model; take many in the drafting and crafting of your inimitable self.

‘Pastime’

Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pass time. Our time is to be used and used well. You say it doesn't matter how we spend our time since nothing matters? That may or may not be so. But it matters which. If something does matter and you live as if nothing matters you may end up not only having wasted your time but your eternity as well. So time spent getting to the bottom of this question is time well spent.

The Philosopher

A philosopher is one sensitive to the strangeness of the ordinary, and open to the puzzles hidden in platitudes.

I don’t live by the sword . . .

. . . but I aim not to die by one either; so I need a sword.

The Lion and the Lamb

Perhaps someday the lion will lie down with the lamb. Should that day come, I would still prefer to be the lion. (To repackage a remark I heard Tom Cotton make last night.)

Agapic Love

It is rare are among humans, but common in relation to our pets.

The Moral Horror of Murder

One man takes from another what neither can give: life.

It is passing strange that leftists do not share with us this moral horror, as witness their casual attitude toward even the most vicious modes of criminality.

List and Precision Obsession

You are list-obsessive if you write down an already completed task just so you can cross it off your list. You are precision-obsessive if you point out that a task, completed or not, is not the sort of thing that can be crossed off a list.

An admirable concern for precision can veer off into pedantry, punctiliousness, preciosity.

Sorry Gottlob, Sorry Bertrand

Attributes are at the things to which they are attributed. Existence, then, is in a broad sense an attribute of existing items despite adding nothing to the quiddity of the thing to which it is attributed apart from its capacity to have a quiddity.