He who toes the party line will sometimes be kept from error. It depends on the party.
(Note on usage: one toes the party line; one does not tow it!)
Category: Aphorisms and Observations
Thinking for Oneself
Thinking for oneself, one ought eventually to arrive at the conclusion that so doing can lead one into a ditch as surely as thoughtlessly adhering to the dogmas of a sect.
The Advice of Others
Given how bad the advice of others can be, one is well-advised to keep one's own counsel.
Keeping One’s Own Counsel
Keeping one's own counsel, one realizes that sometimes two heads are better than one.
Intellectual Maturity
A mark of intellectual maturity is the ability to tolerate uncertainty without fleeing to dogmas that make false certainties of objective uncertainties, but also without falling into a self-vitiating relativism. The ideal is a love of truth that does not flag but also accepts no substitutes.
Reminded of the Eternal
We are 'reminded' (Plato) of the eternal both by the most transient and the least transient of things. The most transient teaches the ultimate ephemerality of all things finite. The least transient teaches that it is no substitute for the eternal.
Realpolitik
The weak invite attack. That is a law of nature. Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other. Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism. There is none. Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state. The same goes for diplomacy. There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask. There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.
Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."
Measurement by Regrets
We are measurable by the nature of our regrets. What do you regret? Not having drunk enough good wine? Not having amassed more wealth? Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places? Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?
We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.
Read Old Books
Old books are sovereign antidotes to the idiocies of the age, both the idiocies of style and those of content.
Magnificent yet Miserable
The magnificence and misery of philosophy is but a reflection of the magnificence and misery of its author man, who, neither animal nor angel, is the tension between the two.
The Proper Order of Things
First caffeination, then ratiocination.
The ‘Floaters’ of Memory
We should look past useless memories to present realities in the way we look past the floaters in our visual field. To concentrate on the detritus of memory is only to enliven what ought to be left to slumber.
A Way to Live
Live as if life's chiaroscuro will resolve itself, not one day, but beyond time, into clear light.
Delicious Obscurity
We who are obscure ought to be grateful for it. It is wonderful to be able to walk down the street and be taken, and left, for an average schlep. A little recognition from a few high-quality individuals is all one needs. Fame can be a curse. The unhinged Mark David Chapman, animated by Holden Caulfield's animus against phoniness, decided that John Lennon was a phony, and so had to be shot.
The value of fame may also be inferred from the moral and intellectual quality of those who confer it.
The mad pursuit of empty celebrity by so many in our society shows their and its spiritual vacuity.
UPDATE: By this metric, however, I count as famous. Well, we live in an age of low standards.
Ignorabimus
We are ignorant about ultimates and we will remain ignorant in this life. Perhaps on the Far Side we will learn what we cannot learn here. But whether there is survival of bodily death, and whether it will improve our epistemic position, are again things about which — we will remain ignorant in this life.
It is admittedly strange to suppose that death is the portal to knowledge. But is it stranger than supposing that a being capable of knowledge simply vanishes with the breakdown of his body?
The incapacity of materialists to appreciate the second strangeness I attribute to their invincible body-identification.