Category: Aphorisms and Observations

Life’s Optics Versus Thought’s Synoptics

One cannot live without being onesided, without choosing, preferring, favoring oneself and one's own, without staking out and defending one's bit of ground.  One cannot live without being onesided, but one cannot be much of a philosopher if one is.  The philosopher's optics are a synoptics, but life's optics are perspectival.

And so philosophy is enlivened at the approach of decline, death, and doom.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk. 

‘Experience’

The Mayo Clinic sent me a brochure containing the line, "Most patients begin their experience at the outpatient clinic." Now I don't know about you, but when I seek medical attention it is not an experience I want but treatment. If I could get the treatment without the experience, so much the better. 

Similarly, when I take the old buggy to Jiffy Lube it is not an automotive experience I am after but an oil change.

In both cases one pays for work to be done on a physical thing, not for experiences to be induced in the mind of the owner of the physical thing.

The aestheticism of the '60s and beyond, with its emphasis on doing things for the experience of doing them regardless of any real-world outcome positive or negative, is probably at the root of this overuse of  'experience.'

On Redundancy

Redundancy is a stylistic flaw at worst. A noted chess writer advises, "You need to get psyched up within your own mind." One does indeed need to get psyched up to play well. But is it possible to get psyched   up in someone else's mind, or outside any mind? 

So the admonition is redundant and serves no purpose. Sometimes, however, redundancy serves the purpose of clarity. A noted writer on universals speaks of two particulars sharing a universal in common. This is a redundant formulation: if the universal is shared by the two particulars, then they have it in common. But the redundancy helps explain what 'share' means and thus serves clarity. So I offer this aphorism:

     Pleonasm in pursuit of precision is no logical sin, but at worst a stylistic peccadillo.

Untranslatable? Then Not Worth Translating!

When I hear it said that some text is untranslatable, my stock response is that in that case the text is not worth translating.  If it cannot be translated out of Sanskrit or Turkish or German, then what universal human interest could it have?

The truth is one, universal, and absolute.  If you have something to say that makes a claim to being true, then it better be translatable. Otherwise it has no claim on our attention.

Serious Reading and Bed Reading

There is serious reading and there is bed reading. Serious reading is for stretching the mind and improving the soul. It cannot be well done in bed but requires the alertness and seriousness provided by desk, hard chair, note taking and coffee drinking. It is a pleasure, but one stiffened with an alloy of discipline. Bed reading, however, is pure unalloyed pleasure. The mind is neither taxed nor stretched or much improved, but entertained.