Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Art of Life

  • Social Distance and Good Relations

    Social distance aids in the preservation of good relations with people. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, disrespect. In the famiglia, especially. Conventional usages, phony and formulaic as they often are, have their uses. They allow for civil interaction while preserving distance. "Good morning." "After you, sir." We all want respect even while aware of how…

  • Consolations of Late Adulthood

    Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us?  In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.…

  • A Life Goal

    Full self-integration, maximal self-individuation. Aim high. You won't be able to achieve the goal in this life. So believe beyond the sublunary. Live as if your life does not end at death. What harm could it do? No harm at all, and indeed the opposite. We live better here and now when we believe that…

  • Three Reasons to Stay Home

    These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel…

  • Safety is Overrated

  • Nisi duae res necessariae

  • Rely on Conscience

    In matters moral, reason is weak, easily suborned by the passions, given to rationalization, and easily entangled in the threads of its own dialectic. Reason is not  to be despised but not quite reliable. In matters moral, it is better to rely on conscience. This advice rests on two presuppositions. One is that conscience is…

  • Truth and Decision

    One cannot decide what the truth is. But one can and must decide what one will accept and live by as the truth.

  • The Truth of Life and the Art of Life

    We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding.  They sense the difference between the true…

  • How Should We Live? or The Fly Bottle Blues

    Here is a possible attitude for examination. Stick to the measurable, the calculable, and the empirically verifiable. Avoid Big Questions and Long Views. Live here, now, and to human scale. Speculation is idle. No one knows or will ever know the answers to the Big Questions. To bother one's head over the ultimate distracts from…

  • Why I Want to Live Long

    I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond…

  • The Long and the Short of it

    Long views or short? Substack latest.

  • Hard and Soft

    You must become hard to protect what is soft in yourself and in others. Become too hard, however, and you lose the reason for becoming hard. Fail to become hard and you won't be long for this world whose via dolorosa  must be tread a life long to arrive at self-individuation.  Self-individuation is a task, not…

  • Ars vivendi longa, sed vita brevis

    Life is too short to master the art of life. That is surely the case for most. A few old souls are exceptions to the rule. 

  • Self-Deprecation

    A modicum of self-deprecation,  judiciously deployed, will enhance your relations with others. Too much will earn contempt, and the opposite hostility.