Category: Aphorisms and Observations

We Annoy Ourselves

There are not a few situations in life in which we are tempted to say or think of another, 'Your behavior is annoying!' Thinking this, we only make ourselves more annoyed. Saying it is even worse. For then two are annoyed. Instead of saying or thinking of something external to oneself that he, she, or it is annoying, think to oneself: I am annoying myself, or I am allowing myself to become annnoyed.

Just as one enjoys oneself, one annoys oneself. Enjoyment of a thing external to oneself is enjoyment of oneself in relation to the thing. The same goes for annoyance. There is of course an objective stimulus, not in one's power. One's tablemate, for example, is slurping his soup. His slurping is not in one's power, or else not conveniently in one's power. (Shooting him only makes matters worse.) But how one responds to the slurping is within one's power.

Stoicism may not take us very far along the road to happiness, but where it takes us is worth visiting.

It goes without saying that adjusting one's attitude is the appropriate response only in some of life's difficult situations. One does not adjust one's attitude to the 'annoying' behavior of a terrorist: one literally shoots him, thereby inducing a radical attitude adjustment in him. If the shooting adversely affects one's ataraxia, too bad. Better a little less tranquillitas animi than death or submission to the religion of 'peace.' Better his being red than your being dead.

Can You Get Through the Next Hour?

The present can always be borne – if sliced thinly enough – and it is only the present that must be borne.

This aphorism of mine is in the Stoic spirit. It illustrates the Stoic method of division. Any process or procedure or undertaking which seems overwhelming or unbearable when surveyed as a whole can be managed if one breaks it down into its parts. Since it is not all at once, it needn’t be managed and borne all at once. One does not run the marathon all at once, but stride by stride. The wise marathoner at the starting line does not remind himself that he must run the daunting distance of 26.2 miles, he just starts running. Near the end, when he is spent, he thinks only of the next step. One can always take another step, and only one step needs to be taken at each time.

Here is Pierre Hadot (The Inner Citadel, p. 133) quoting from the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (XI, 3):

A seductive melody . . . you can despise it if you divide it into each of its sounds, and if you ask yourself if you are lesser than each one of them taken separately; if you are you would be filled with shame. The same thing will happen if you repeat this procedure in each figure . . . In general, then, and with the exception of virtue and its effects, remember to head as quickly as you can for the parts of a process, in order, by dividing them, to get to the point where you have contempt for them. Transpose this method, moreover, to life in its entirety.

Analysis destroys the seductiveness but also the fearfulness of processual wholes by decomposing them into temporal parts that can be easily negotiated. How will I get through this life of trial and tribulation? How will I bear up under sickness, old age, and dying? I will do it day by day, hour by hour. One can always get throught the next hour, minute, second. As Hadot puts it, “No object can make us lose our mastery over ourselves if we submit it to this method of division.” (133)

There is a comparison worth exploring between the soteriological use to which Stoics put analysis and the use to which Buddhists put it, as in Milinda’s Chariot. But that is a large topic for later.

Fool, Philosopher, Sage

The fool is never satisfied with what he has, but is quite satisfied with what he is. The philosopher is never satisfied with what he is, but is satisfied with what he has. The sage is satisfied with both, with what he is and what he has. Unfortunately, there are no sages, few philosophers, and a world full of fools.

On the Suffering of Animals

Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.

Suffering Pleasure

We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be acted upon, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self. Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:

. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unseasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.

It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities. Tha mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won’t advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.

How Not to Begin the Day

A thoroughly bad way to begin the day is by reading a newspaper. For it is not only the hands that get dirty, and the house cluttered; the mind in its early morning freshness is degraded by useless facts, polluted with badly written opinions, and suborned by seductive advertising. There is plenty of time later in the day to load up on the sort of drivel with which one must deal in order to survive in an imperfect world. The mornings should be kept free and clear under the aegis of Thoreau’s admonition, “Read not The Times, read the The Eternities.”

The morning is to the night as virtue is to vice. It follows that one should so arrange one’s life as to secure the maximum quantity of morning. Arise early, before the birds. The true lover of silence finds even the birds too noisy. In the morning all is cool, clean, and quiet. The worldlings are asleep, the universe is yours. Now read something worth reading, something that inspires, improves, ennobles, challenges. There are the great scriptures to choose from: the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Old and New Testaments. There are great writers such as Shakespeare and Melville. Great philosophers such as Plato and Augustine wait patiently to engage us from across the centuries. If if it is self-help you need, why read the latest New Age hucksters when Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca lie to hand?

A Contradictory Being Who Issues Contradictory Demands

We want a subordinate, a friend, a spouse to do our bidding, to embody in action our intention, but also to show initiative, to anticipate our unstated wants and needs. Not content to command the other’s body, making of it an extension of our will, we want also to command the other’s freedom, making of it an instrument of our freedom.

I say to wifey: “Bring me back a case of Fat Tire Ale.” Upon her return, no ale is in evidence. Inquiring why not, I am told that it was unavailable. “Why then did you not fetch me a case of Sam Adam’s Boston Ale?”

“Because that is not what you asked for, and had I brought back Sam Adam’s you would have complained that it was not Fat Tire.”

The Joy of Teaching and the Case of Santayana

Here are some negative assessments of the worth of teaching from my own experience. There are good things about teaching too. I’ll leave them for the reader to supply if he can.

Teaching is the feeding of people who aren’t hungry.

Teaching philosophy is the feeding of people who neither hunger nor know what food is.

Teaching is like agitating water in a glass with one’s forefinger. As long as the finger is in motion, the water is agitated; but as soon as the finger is removed, the water returns to its quiescent state.

The classroom is a scene of unreality. No one takes it quite seriously. Not the students, from whom little is expected and less demanded. Not the teachers, who waste their time in discipline and remediation.

According to an apocryphal story about George Santayana, one day, while lecturing at Harvard, he suddenly intuited the absurdity of teaching. Stopping in mid-sentence, he walked out of the classroom never to return. The truth is less dramatic: he dutifully finished the semester, turned in his grades, resigned his professorship, and embarked for Rome where he spent the rest of his life in cultured retirement.

See here for a couple more negative views of teaching.

Nature’s Jealousy and Modesty

During almost any solitary hike through the wild there comes a moment of enchantment when the beauty of nature stands forth as if enframed. But the qualifier ‘solitary’ is necessary. Bring along a companion and you bring along society – and drive away nature. She is both jealous and modest: she doesn’t like to share her charms, and she won’t expose them to the merely social animal with his endless yap, yap, yapping about noth, noth, nothing.

The Perversity of the Philosophy Professors

The philosophy professors treat philosophy as a means to an end when it is an end in itself. And they treat it as a means to something, whether money, social status, or whatever, which cannot be an end in itself but only a means to an end. They pursue philosophy for the sake of money when they ought to pursue money for the sake of philosophy. Doubly perverse, they turn an end into a means, and a means into an end. I like the Turkish word for human being, Insan, because it reminds me of ‘insane.’

You will tell me that there are exceptions. No doubt. But they prove the rule.

What It Takes to Appreciate Nature

Those who must wrest a living from nature by hard toil are not likely to see her beauty, let alone appreciate it. But her charms are also lost on the sedentary city-dwellers for whom nature is little more than backdrop and stage-setting for what they take to be the really real, the social tragi-comedy. The same goes for the windshield tourists who, seated in air-conditioned comfort, merely look upon nature as upon a pretty picture. The true acolyte of nature must combine in one person a robust and energetic physique, a contemplative mind, and a healthy measure of contempt for the world of the human-all-too-human. One thinks of Henry David Thoreau. Of the same type, but not on the same lofty plane: Edward Abbey.