Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Aphorisms and Observations

  • Seeds of Hypocrisy

    One who strives for the ideal but falls short is no hypocrite, but at a certain point the quantity and the quality of his fallings short must plant in his mind a seed of doubt as to whether he really avoids hypocrisy.  He preaches continence, say, but finds it hard to contain his thoughts, which are not…

  • More Than an Animal

    Both the realization that one is an animal and the realization that one is more than an animal show that one is — more than an animal.

  • One Root of Leftist Intolerance of Religion

    Religions make a totalitarian claim, and the Left, being totalitarian, cannot abide competitors.

  • A Divine Activity

    Philosophy is a divine activity because only a god has the time and the peace of mind for it. The full-time mortal, embroiled in the flux and shove of material life, is too much in need of guiding convictions to be much of a pursuer of the impersonal truth. In auspicious circumstances, with the right…

  • Dreaming and Waking

    When I wake up from a dream I realize I was dreaming; but when I go to sleep and dream there is no parallel recognition that I was awake. Serious philosophical juice can be squeezed from this observation.  Some other time.

  • Anarchism and Eliminativism

    Anarchism is to political philosophy  as  eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind.  But untenable positions have their uses.  They serve as foils for the development of sensible theories.

  • Charity Before Obituary

    If we were as charitable to our fellows when they were alive as we are when we write their obituaries — what a different world it would be!

  • Partiality

    All partiality is philosophically suspect.   Das Wahre ist das Ganze. (Hegel)  But how live without it?

  • The Solid Bourgeois

    The solid bourgeois may dismiss as so much nonsense philosophy, poetry, and other products of questers and romantics — all the while subscribing to the socially sanctioned nonsense of some respectable established church. Be neither bourgeois nor bohemian, the one to the exclusion of the other. The true maverick is that dialectical blend, the sublatedness (Aufgehobensein)…

  • Life is Hard

    Even if your life is easy physically, economically, psychologically, and socially, it is bound to be difficult ethically, religiously, and  philosophically. Having solved the lower problems, the higher problems loom. Two misfortunes.  One is to be so burdened with the lower problems that one is never in a position to tackle the higher.  Think of those…

  • Pole or Soul?

    Peary and Cook fought over who got to the North Pole first — as if the goal were worth attaining. What doth it profit a man to attain the Pole if in the process he lose his soul?

  • Grateful for Gratitude

    Be grateful for whatever gratitude you can muster.  It is the sovereign antidote to resentment.  Why, among the preponderance of so much that is positive in your life do you focus on the little that is negative?

  • On Postponing Self Mastery

    Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them.  In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

  • Truth and Consolation

    Nothing is true because it is consoling, but that does not preclude certain truths from being consoling.  So one cannot refute a position by showing that some derive consolation from it.  Equally, no support for a position is forthcoming from the fact that it thwarts our interests or dashes our hopes.

  • Against Best Play

    It may be that in philosophy it is as in chess:  against best play one can only hope for a draw.