Aphorisms and Observations – Page 29

Of Veils and Visibility

I glance for a brief moment at a trio of women, two facially unveiled, the third thinly veiled. The face of the veiled one attracts my attention. The visibility of her face is helped, not hindered, by its being veiled. I generalize: it is not always and everywhere the case that veils are impediments to visibility. In some circumstances veils reveal by concealing.

This insight, I suspect, can be put to good (analogical) use. Just how, however, presently escapes me. So I file it away for future reference.

Travel

Travel can be good when it is a flight from the familiar that breaks the complacency of the daily round to expose the insecurity ever present but hidden by and behind the quotidian.

The Need for Doxastic Risks

There are truths we are not in a position to know that we need to believe for our own good.

Intellect, Emotion, Projection

It takes intellect to discern that people are dominated by their emotions, but the intellectual who is capable of understanding this is often prevented from understanding it by his tendency to project his intellectuality into others. We often have a hard time appreciating that others are not like us and do not value what we value, or if they do, not to the same extent. My younger self used to make this mistake.

Poverty and Plenty

Material plenty allows the leisure to contemplate one's moral and intellectual and spiritual poverty. So money, far from being the root of all evil, is often conducive, and sometimes necessary, for the uprooting of some evils.

Related: Radix Omnium Malorum. This is one of my best entries. It definitively refutes the widespread notion that money is the root of all evil.

Impotent Transcendence

Awareness of our limits suggests that we are beyond them. But it is an impotent transcendence that leaves us stuck with them.

Are We Sick?

If we are just animals, why aren't we content to be just animals?

Ambition Beyond Ability

He who is ambitious beyond his abilities courts unhappiness.

Practice Refuting Theory

You deny that there is truth, and yet you bitterly resent being lied to?

On Honoring Revolutionaries

To show honor and respect is a conservative practice. There is therefore something paradoxical about leftists erecting icons to iconoclasts. Or is there? Once in power, revolutionaries become conservative.

Marital Compatibility

She looked for her father and found him in me. I looked for the opposite of my mother and found anti-mater in her.

Literary Stride

We adjust our stride to the steepness of the terrain: the steeper the trail, the shorter the steps. A good writer watches his literary stride: the more difficult the subject matter, the shorter the sentences. Back on the flat he leaps and lopes and stretches his legs.

On Teaching Philosophy

It is pointless to supply answers to unasked questions or to promote questioning among those who have all the answers.

Do You Live to Eat?

One who lives to eat is almost as ridiculous as one who drives a car to pump gas into its tank. In both cases a vehicle; in both cases fuel; in both cases means-end confusion.

The Liberal

Concerned as he rightly is with the pollution of the physical environment, the liberal yet cannot seem to muster much moral enthusiasm over the pollution of the cultural environment, if he's even aware of it. Hillary, you will recall, cozied up to Jay Z. If you don't know who he is, good.