Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Wife went, I didn't. She goes every year, I beg off every year. Angel that she is, she doesn't begrudge me my nonattendance. I'd rather think and trance than drink and dance.
Why? Well, we know that drinking and dancing won't get us anywhere. But it is at least possible that thinking and trancing will.
It was 42 years ago today that I first began keeping a regular journal. Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals. Why maintain a journal? When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I
didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is still my thought. The unrecorded life is not worth living. For we have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living, and how examined could an undocumented life be?
The maintenance of a journal aids mightily in the project of self-individuation. Like that prodigious journal writer Søren Kierkegaard, I believe we are here to become actually the individuals we are potentially. Our individuation is not ready-made or given, but a task to be accomplished. The world is a vale of soul-making; we are not here to improve it, but to be improved by it.
Henry David Thoreau, another of the world's great journal writers, said in Walden that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I would only add that without a journal, one's life is one of quiet dissipation. One's life dribbles away, day by day, unreflected on, unexamined, unrecorded, and thus fundamentally unlived. Living, for us, is not just a biological process; it is fundamentally a spiritual unfolding. To mean anything it has to add up to something, and that something cannot be expressed with a dollar sign.
I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence. In my early twenties, I spoke of the supreme desideratum of a focused existence. What bothered me about the people around me, fellow students in particular, was the mere aestheticism of their existence: their aimless drifting hither and yon, their lack of commitment, their unseriousness, their refusal to engage the arduous task of self-definition and self-individuation, their willingness to be guided and mis-guided by social suggestions. In one's journal one collects and re-collects oneself; one makes war against the lower self and the
forces of dispersion.
Another advantage to a journal and its regular maintenance is that one thereby learns how to write, and how to think. An unwritten thought is still a half-baked thought: proper concretion is achieved only by expressing thoughts in writing and developing them. Always write as well as you can, in complete sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors. Develop the sentences into paragraphs, and if the Muse is with you those paragraphs may one day issue in essays, articles, and chapters of books.
Finally, there is the pleasure of re-reading from a substantial temporal distance. Two years ago I began re-reading my journal in order, month by month, at a 40 year distance. So of course now I am up to October 1972. 40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.
. . . I did on this date, October 3, in 1972. I sold my 1969 vintage Gibson ES 335 TD. A forty year regret. I needed money. I parted with it, mint-condition, for $200. Worth about $6000 now. But it's not the money. It was one fine axe.
It was my pleasure to meet science writer and long-time reader and friend of MavPhil, John Farrell, in Flagstaff Friday evening. He was in town for a conference on the origins of the expanding universe, as he reports in Forbes here. Flag is a lovely dorf sitting at 7,000 feet amongst the pines and home to the Lowell Observatory. It is an excellent retreat from the heat of the Valle del Sol where you would never catch me this time of year in long pants, jacket, and beret.
John and I are standing in front of an excellent Mexican eatery on old Route 66. I first heard about this joint on Guy Fieri's Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. As luck would have it, Farrell the Irishman is enthusiastic about Mexican chow. Our tequila-fueled conversation was so good that I failed to clean my plate, a rare occurrence as my companions (literally those with whom one breaks bread, L. panis) know.
Perhaps the best thing about maintaining a weblog is that it attracts like-minded, high-quality people some of whom one then goes on to meet in the flesh.
Here he lies old blogger Bill
Whose thoughts once did the ether fill
But permalinks proved no exception
To the gen'ral rule of imperfection.
I just heard Dennis Prager say on his nationally syndicated radio show that travelling together is a good test for marital compatibility. Sage advice.
Long before I had heard of Prager I subjected my bride-to-be to such a test. I got the idea from the delightful 1982 movie The Diner. One of the guys who hung out at the diner tested for marital suitability by administering a football quiz to his fiance. That gave me the idea of taking my future wife on a cross-country trip from Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California in my Volkswagen bus. This was not a camper bus, but a stripped-down model, so the amenities were meager-to-nonexistent. I threw a mattress in the back, made some curtains, and hit the road. That was in the summer of '82. The soundtrack from The Diner was one of the tapes we listened to on the way. I recall reading the Stephen King novel Cujo about the dog from hell when my inamorata drove.
We slept mainly at rest stops. I had an old .38 Special with me for protection, which fortunately proved unnecessary. What did we do for showers? I don't think we took any. We cleaned up at the rest stop facilities like true vagabundos and moved on.
One dark and starry night I pulled off Interstate 10 in some desolate stretch of the Mojave desert. Wifey-to-be was scared but it was a memorable moonless star-studded night. We made it to L. A., saw family and friends, then headed up old U. S. 395 along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada to Bishop, Cal, where we visited some more of my people, then north to Reno, Nevada where we hooked up with I-80 and pointed the old bus East.
Dear one took the rigors of that trip 30 years ago like a trouper, and passed the test with flying colors. We got married the following summer and remain happily married 29 summers later.
When I told the story to a feminazi some years back she gave me a hard and disapproving look. She didn't like that I imposed a marital compatibility test upon my lady love. Bitch! So here's another bit of free and friendly advice. Marry an angel, never a bitch. Life's enough of a bitch. You don't need to marry one. Does your belllicosity need an outlet? Fight outside the home. Home should be an oasis of peace and tranquillity.
So once again I agree with Prager. Check her or him out on the road before heading for the altar.
At a gathering of Boston academicians some years back, by way of a conversational opener, I said to Professor X, "I understand you teach at the University of L." The good professor replied, "I conduct classes at the University of L." I found that to be a very good distinction, one borne out by my own experience.
Related post: Can Philosophy be Taught?
I began this weblog eight years ago today in 2004.
The rumors of blogging's demise have been vastly exaggerated. What has happened is that those whose purposes all along were more social and less serious have moved on to the so-called social media, Facebook and Twitter. Read or unread, whether by sages or fools, I shall blog on. A post beats a tweet any day, and no day without a post. Nulla dies sine linea. It is too early to say of blogging what Etienne Gilson said of philosophy, namely, that it always buries its undertakers, but I am hopeful. After all, a weblog is just an online journal, and journal scribbling has flourished most interestingly for centuries.
To put it romantically, blogging is a vehicle for the relentless, quotidian sifting, seeking, and questing for sense and truth and reality without which some of us would find life meaningless.
This, the fourth version of Maverick Philosopher, was begun on 31 October 2008. Traffic is good, with 1.3 million total pageviews for this version alone. That averages out to 1024 page views per day since Halloween 2008. This incarnation sports 3,333 posts. I thank you for your patronage.
Using 'quietist' in a broad sense as opposed to the Molinos-Fenelon-Guyon sense, I would describe myself as a quietist rather than as an activist. The point of life is not action, but contemplation, not doing, but thinking. (I mean 'thinking' in a very broad sense that embraces all forms of intentionality as well as meditative non-thinking.) The vita activa is of course necessary (for some all of the time, and for people like me some of the time), but it is necessary as a means only. Its whole purpose is to subserve the vita contemplativa. To make of action an end in itself is absurd, and demonstrably so, though I will spare you the demonstration. If you are assiduous you can dig it out of Aristotle, Aquinas and Josef Pieper. I recommend his Leisure: The Basis of Culture.
So the dominant note of my personality is quietism in the sense just sketched. The Big Questions turn my crank, not this foreground rubbish about abortion, illegal immigration, social security, misuse of eminent domain, leftist race-baiting, etc. It would be nice to be able to let the world and its violent nonsense go to hell while cultivating my garden in peace.
Unfortunately, my garden and stoa are in the world and exposed to its threats. So politics, which has too little to do with truth and too much to do with power, cannot be ignored. This world is not ultimately real, but it is no illusion either, pace some sophists of the New Age, and so some battling within it, ideological or otherwise, cannot be avoided. Besides, the issues of the day all have roots in the Big Questions. So an assiduous and deep-going application to the issues of the day will lead one to the Big Questions. An excellent example is abortion.
The bolded material below is taken verbatim from Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking (Crown 2012), p. 13. I then give my responses. The more affirmative responses, the more of an introvert you are.
1. I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities. Absolutely! Especially in philosophical discussions. As Roderick Chisholm once said, "In philosophy, three's a crowd."
2. I often prefer to express myself in writing. Yes.
3. I enjoy solitude. Is the Pope Catholic? Beata solitudo, sola beatitudo. Happy solitude, the sole beatitude.
4. I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status. Seem? Do! Money is a mere means. To pursue it as an end in itself is perverse. And once you have enough, you stop acquiring more and turn to higher pursuits. Obscurity is delicious. To be able to walk down the street and pass as an ordinary schmuck is wonderful. The value of fame and celebrity is directly proportional to the value of the fools and know-nothings who confer it. And doesn't Aristotle say that to be famous you need other people, which fact renders you dependent on them? Similarly with social status. Who confers it? And what is their judgment worth?
5. I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me. More than once in these pages have I ranted about the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.
6. People tell me I'm a good listener. Yes. My mind drifts back to a girl I knew when I was fifteen. She called me her 'analyst' when she wasn't calling me 'Dr. Freud.'
7. I'm not a big risk-taker. That's right. I recently took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license. I had been eyeing the Harley-Davidson 883 Iron. But then I asked myself how riding a motorcycle would further my life tasks and whether it makes sense, having come this far, to risk my life and physical integrity in pursuit of cheap thrills.
8. I enjoy work that allows me to "dive in" with few interruptions. Right. No instant messaging. Only recently acquired a cell phone. I keep it turned off. Call me the uncalled caller. My wife is presently in a faraway land on a Fulbright. That allows me to unplug the land-line. I love e-mail; fast but unintrusive. I'll answer when I feel like it and get around to it. I don't allow mself to be rushed or interrupted.
9. I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members. I don't see the point of celebrating birthdays at all. What's to celebrate? First, birth is not unequivocally good. Second, it is not something you brought about. It befell you. Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen.
10. People describe me as "soft-spoken" or "mellow." I'm too intense to be called 'mellow,' but sotto voce applies.
11. I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it is finished. Pretty much, with the exception of these blog scribblings.
12. I dislike conflict. Can't stand it. Hate onesidedness. I look at a problem from all angles and try to mediate oppositions when possible. I thoroughly hate, reject, and abjure the blood sport approach to philosophy. Polemic has no place in philosophy. This is not to say that it does not have a place elsewhere, in politics for example.
13. I do my best work on my own. Yes. A former colleague, a superficial extrovert, once described me as 'lone wolf.'
14. I tend to think before I speak. Yes.
15. I feel drained after being out and about, even if I've enjoyed myself. Yes. This is a common complaint of introverts. They can take only so much social interaction. It depletes their energy and they need to go off by themselves to 'recharge their batteries.' In my case, it is not just an energy depletion but a draining away of my 'spiritual substance.' It is as if one's interiority has been compromised and one has entered into inauthenticity, Heidegger's Uneigentlichkeit. The best expression of this sense of spiritual depletion is probably Kierkegaard's remark in one of his early journal entries about a party he attended:
I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me — but I came away, indeed that dash should be as along as the radii of the earth's orbit ———————————————————- wanting to shoot myself. (1836)
16. I often let calls go through to e-mail. Yes. See comment to #8 above.
17. If I had to choose, I'd prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things scheduled. I love huge blocks of time, days at a stretch, with no commitments whatsoever. Dolce far niente. Sweet to do nothing.
18. I don't enjoy multitasking. Right. One thing at a time.
19. I can concentrate easily. Obviously, and for long stretches of time.
20. In classroom sitations, I prefer lecture to seminars. Especially if I'm doing the lecturing.
Here is a description of the Myers-Briggs INTP. And here is another.
I was pleased to hear from Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence this morning. He inquired:
About four or five years ago you wrote about an American writer and thinker, perhaps an academic philosopher, who published, I believe, two books and seemed to disappear. You had difficulty finding information about him online. I believe you said he had an interest in East Asian thought. His “career” was eccentric by conventional standards and he seemed to be something of a loner.
Then I remembered a post of mine which begins:
This post examines Richard C. Potter's solution to the problem of reconciling creatio ex nihilo with ex nihilo nihil fit in his valuable article, "How To Create a Physical Universe Ex Nihilo," Faith and Philosophy, vol. 3, no. 1, (January 1986), pp. 16-26. (Potter appears to have dropped out of sight, philosophically speaking, so if anyone knows what became of him, please let me know. The Philosopher's Index shows only three articles by him, the last of which appeared in 1986.)
I don't know whether Potter is the man Kurp had in mind, but the former does satisfy part of Kurp's description. In any event, the Richard Potter story is an interesting one.
I recall talking to him, briefly, in the summer of 1981 at Brown University. I was a participant in Roderick Chisholm's National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, and Potter, who I believe had recently completed his Ph.D. at Brown, sat in on a few sessions. My impression was he that he was unable to secure a teaching position. I also recall a slightly derogatory comment I made about the Midwest and how one might have to go there to find employment. Potter's mild-mannered reply was to the effect that he preferred the Midwest over other geographical regions. His name stuck in my mind probably because of a paper on the paradox of analysis he co-authored with Chisholm and because of the F & P article mentioned above. See here. But then he dropped out of philosophical sight.
A few years back, I did a search and he turned up again as a George Reeves and Superman aficionado. So here is part of the rest of the Potter story. Here is Potter's George Reeves site.
A checkered career, his.
I too enjoyed the Superman series while growing up in the '50s. Some thoughts of mine on George Reeves are in Superman: The Moral of the Story.
He was one serious man. I have always had contempt for unserious people, unserious people in philosophy being the very worst. You know the type: the bland and blasé whose civility is not born of wisdom and detachment but is a mere urbanity sired by a jocose superficiality. I have always had the sense that something is stake in life, that it matters what we believe and how we live. What exactly is at stake, why our lives matter, and how best to respond to nihilists and Nietzsche's Last Men are profoundly baffling problems. But that life is serious is a given.
Perhaps unfortunately, Wittgenstein seemed unable to 'punch the clock' and play the regular guy among regular guys for even a short time. Wittgenstein died in the house of Dr and Mrs Bevan, a house that bore the auspicious name, 'Storeys End.' Ray Monk relates the following anecdote:
Before Wittgenstein moved into their house, Dr Bevan had invited him for supper to introduce him to his wife. She had been warned that Wittgenstein was not one for small talk and that she should be careful not to say anything thoughtless. Playing it safe, she remained silent throughout the evening. But when Wittgenstein mentioned his visit to Ithaca, she chipped in cheerfully, 'How lucky for you to go to America!' She realized at once that she had said the the wrong thing. Wittgenstein fixed her with an intent stare: 'What do you mean, lucky?' (Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 576.)
Poor Mrs Bevan! The first shot depicts LW in 1925, the second on his death bed in 1951.
The Guardian obituary has him born on 16 April 1947 and dead on 4 January 2011. I recall his smash Baker Street from the far-off and fabulous summer of 1978. It came over the car radio in my quondam girl friend's Toyota many times as we drove from Boston, Mass to Dayton, O to secure me an apartment there. I hated leaving the Athens of America for the dreary Midwest, but I had landed a tenure-track job and one goes where the jobs are. In retrospect, I was extremely lucky to get that job. Was I the best of the 100 people who applied for it? Not even I believe that.
One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.
I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bicultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages. My mother was both bilingual and bicultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.
And that doesn’t make a difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn't your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.
If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.' The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.
So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values. Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African? Does he enjoy dual citzenship?
If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead. There is no 'institutional racism.' There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals. Man up and move forward. Don't blame others for your problems. That's the mark of a loser. Take responsibility. We honkies want you to do well. The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.
But here is an encouraging development: many blacks according to yesterday's WSJ are rejecting the 'African-American' label.
An aptronym is a name that "suits the nature or occupation of its bearer," as the erudite Dr. Gilleland explains. Some examples from my experience:
1. During part of my tenure at the University of Dayton, the secretary of the Philosophy Department was Mrs. Betty Hume.
2. While a graduate student in Boston in the 1970s, I heard tell of a knee specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, one Dr. Patella.
3. A number of philosophers bear aptronymic names: John Wisdom, Gerald Vision, J.J.C. Smart, and others that escape me at the moment.
4. Wasn't Jimmy Carter's main spokesman a man by the name of Larry Speakes?
5. Joe Bastardi, Fox News meterologist, is not an aptronym because he is not a name, and his demeanor and delivery suggest that his name isn't either.