A Substack tale haunting but true.
Category: Autobiographical
Site Stats at Sweet Sixteen
Although Maverick Philosopher has been on-line for over 20 years now, its third incarnation, this Typepad version, first saw the light of day on Halloween, 2008, 16 years ago. I thank you for reading.
Although the heyday of blogging is long gone, the peak having occurred near the end of the aughts, I bump along at a somewhat respectable level especially given the austerity of my offerings.
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I'll be returning to some hard-core philo-content soon, but first things first: every mentally sane and morally decent man Jack and woman Jill of us must do his or her bit to beat back the forces of darkness. No jacking, jilling, or slacking off. Do your part, but with detachment from the outcome. To make a slogan out of it:
Beat back better!
My Grunt Jobs
Furniture mover in Santa Barbara; exterminator in West Los Angeles; grave digger in Culver City; factory worker in Venice, California; letter carrier and mail handler in Los Angeles; logger in Forks, Washington; tree planter in Oregon; taxi driver in Boston; plus assorted day jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Boston. One thing's for sure: blogging beats logging any day of the week, though the pay is not as good.
Five reasons to avoid blue-collar work: (1) The working stiff gets no respect; (2) the pay is often bad; (3) the work is boring; (4) working class types are often crude, ignorant, resentful, envious, and inimical to anyone who tries to improve himself; (5) the worker puts his body on the line, day in and day out, and often bears the marks: missing thumbs, hearing loss, etc.
Being from the working class, and having done my fair share of grunt work, I have been permanently inoculated against that fantasy of Marxist intellectuals, who tend not to be from the working class, the fantasy according to which workers, the poor, the 'downtrodden,' have some special virtue lacking in the rest of us. That is buncombe pure and simple. There is nothing to be expected from any class as a class: it is individuals and individuals alone who are the loci of value and the hope of humanity.
But individuation is a task, not a given. Es ist nicht gegeben sondern aufgegeben. You have to work at it.
There are no true individuals without self-individuation, something impossible to the mass man who identifies himself in terms of class, race, sex, and who is never anything more than a specimen of a species, a token of type, and no true individual.
And then these types have the chutzpah to demand to be treated as individuals. To which I say: if you want me to treat you as an individual, don't identify yourself with a group or a class or a sex or a race.
Tribal identity is pseudo-identity.
Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels
Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto. I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself.
Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon be banging on all eight. As part of the afternoon start-up I am reading back-to-back, and back-and-forth, Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Orthodox Tradition, St. Vladimir's Press, 1985, orig. published in 1980 as Sacrement de L'Amour), and the Blake Bailey biography of Charles Jackson, the alcoholic, married-to-woman, homosexual who achieved minor literary fame as the author of the thinly-veiled autobiographical booze novel, The Lost Weekend (1944). Jackson died at age 65 having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.
I have long been fascinated by the utterly wild diversity of human types. There is nothing like it it the animal world, and yet we too are animals. We are in continuity with the animals but an incomprehensible rupture, saltation, jump, metabasis eis allo genos, occurred at some point in the evolutionary process that gave rise to man who is, paradoxically, both an animal and not an animal. Heidegger is right; there is an abysmal/abyssal (abgruendig) difference between man and animal. An abyss yawns between the two. Heidegger is echoing Genesis but going deeper, and some would say, off the deep end, with his talk of man as Dasein, the Da of Sein/Seyn. More on Heidegger when I dig into Dugin.
And then there is Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970). I have Merton to thank for bringing him to my attention. Here is a passage that struck me:
There is no reason . . . to call one path [the marital state] or the other [the monastic state] the preeminent Christianity, since what is valid for all of Christendom is thereby valid for each of the two states. The East [unlike the RCC] has never made the distinction between the "precepts" and the "evangelical counsels." The Gospel in its totality is addressed to each person; everyone in his own situation is called to the absolute of the Gospel. Trying to prove the superiority of the one state over the other is therefore useless . . . The renunciation at work in both cases is as good as the positive content that the human being brings to it: the intensity of the love of God. (Evdokimov, p. 65)
For the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and counsels of perfection that Evdokimov is rejecting, see here. "It has been denied by heretics in all ages, and especially by many Protestants in the sixteenth and following centuries . . . "
A Platonist at Breakfast
Amazing what one can unearth with the WayBack Machine. This one first saw daylight on 3 March 2005.
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I head out early one morning with the wife in tow. I’m going to take her to a really fancy joint this time, the 5 and Diner, a greasy spoon dripping with 1950's Americana. We belly up to the counter and order the $2. 98 special: two eggs any style, hashbrowns, toast and coffee. Meanwhile I punch the buttons for Floyd Cramer’s Last Date on the personal jukebox in front of me after feeding it with a quarter from wifey’s purse.
"How would you like your eggs, sir?" "Over medium, please."
The eggs arrive undercooked. Do I complain? Rhinestone-studded Irene is working her tail off in the early morning rush. I’ve already bugged her for Tabasco sauce, extra butter, and more coffee. The service came with the sweetest of smiles. The place is jumping, the Mexican cooks are sweating, and the philosopher is philosophizing:
"If it won’t matter by tomorrow morning that these eggs are undercooked, why does it matter now?"
With that thought, I liberally douse the undercooked eggs with the fine Louisiana condiment, mix them up with the hashbrowns, and shovel the mess into my mouth with bread and fork, chasing it all with coffee and cream, no sugar.
Who says you can’t do anything with philosophy?
Happiness
I am happy. I am living my kind of life in my kind of way, the life I envisaged and aspired to when I was 20 years old and wrote in my journal, "To live a philosophical life in a tumultuous, uncertain world is my goal." I am pulling it off, and have been for over half a century. But the task of self-individuation is not yet complete. There is work yet to be done in becoming in act and fact what I am in potency and possibility. A human life is a project, a task, not something given but something to be accomplished. Be who you are becoming; become who you are.
Buona fortuna has played her part, but also personal focus and determination and the willingness to renounce what is incompatible with a steady advance along a single line. "A no, a yes, a straight line, a goal." (Nietzsche) I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence, of the lives of companions afloat rudderless, at the mercy of social winds and currents, or else drifting in the horse latitudes of Sargassian despond.
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Dmitri writes, and I respond:
I was glad for you after reading your today's entry on happiness. I needed to look up Sargassian despond and horse latitudes to understand the ending, which was, as always, stimulating and enriching for me. Even if I completely missed your intended meaning, as I suspect I did, this entry was a great find.
The site to which you link is a curious one, and I cannot at the moment comment on it. But I will comment on "the horse latitudes of Sargassian despond." 'Sargassian' is an adjectival reference to the Sargasso Sea. But what does this have to do with horses and latitudes?
The horse latitudes are a region of the North Atlantic Ocean, located between 20° and 35° north latitude, where the winds are often calm and the sea is relatively still. This area is also known as the Sargasso Sea. (A.I. generated.) Further:There is one such place renowned for its disquieting calms – the Sargasso Sea, a shoreless oval of water in the North Atlantic measuring some 2,000 by 700 miles. Bounded by ocean currents on all sides, the water rotates clockwise in an ocean gyre, slowly revolving like the eye of a hurricane. The area has struck terror into the minds of sailors for centuries. It was once known as the Horse Latitudes, after becalmed Spanish ships were forced to throw their horses overboard to save drinking water. Tales of ghost ships abound, their skeleton crews left to starve or go insane while their sails hung listlessly.
I became aware of the Horse Latitudes years ago via Jim Morrison's eponymous song.
As for my use of 'despond,' it is an allusion to the Slough of Despond in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress:
The Slough of Despond is a metaphorical place of spiritual despair, first introduced in John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a deep, miry bog where Christian, the protagonist, sinks under the weight of his sins and guilt. The Slough represents the doubts, fears, and discouraging thoughts that can overcome a person, causing them to feel hopeless and trapped. (A.I. generated)
So what I was complaining about were those erstwhile companions of mine who were either without the means of self-direction ("afloat rudderless") or else had the means of self-direction but had drifted into a social environment lacking the right kinds of external stimulation ("drifting in the horse latitudes of Sargassian despond").
Dmitri continues:
Going back to the existence thread — I decided to buy and read your book as I do want to understand the notion of existence you argue for. If not too difficult and time consuming, I'd be grateful to wire the payment directly to you for the book and the shipment. An autograph would be a deeply appreciated bonus. If you don't have the time for this stuff, I get it and will buy my copy from Amazon.
If I had a spare copy, I'd sent it to you gratis. But hold off from paying the outrageous Kluwer asking price. Perhaps someone has a copy they he will part with for a reasonable amount. Another reason to hold off is that I am trying to finish my response to John Cottingham which I will post on the blog and solicit his comments. That may well answer the questions you have.
How to Roast Yourself in Five Different Ways
Substack latest.
On Mixing Politics with Philosophy
I have been asked why I intersperse political entries with narrowly philosophical ones. But in every case the question was put to me by someone who tilts leftward. If my politics were leftist, would anyone complain? Probably not. Academe and academic philosophy are dominated by leftists, and to these types it seems entirely natural that one should be a bien-pensant lefty. Well, I'm here to prove otherwise. Shocking as it will seem to some, leftist views are entirely optional, and a very bad option at that.
I could of course post my political thoughts to a separate weblog. Now a while back I did effect such a segregation, sending my political rants and ruminations to my Facebook page. But given that philosophy attracts more liberals/leftists than conservatives, it is good for them to be exposed to views that they do not encounter within the enclaves they inhabit. Or are contemporary liberals precisely illiberal in their closemindedness to opposing views? One gets that impression.
Posting the political to a separate weblog would also violate my 'theory' of blogging. My blog is micro to my life's macro. It must accordingly mirror my life in all its facets as a sort of coincidentia oppositorum of this situated thinker's existence.
ChatGPT on Me
William F. Vallicella is a contemporary philosopher known for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of language. He has written extensively on topics such as existence, identity, time, free will, and the nature of truth. Vallicella is particularly noted for his clear and rigorous analytical style, and he often engages with both classical and contemporary philosophical positions in his writings. He has contributed to numerous academic journals and has authored several books on these subjects.
Not bad! "Several books' is inaccurate. If you count my dissertation I have authored only two books. Two more are in the works. How might I justify my lack of productivity?
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80:
Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!"
This is how philosophers should greet each other: "Take your time!"
A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this:
Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft.
One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis.
But now I'd better get moving. The clock is running, the time control is sudden death, and the Grim Reaper is my vis-à-vis, his scythe all aglisten and at the ready.
Antonius Block, depicted below and played by Max von Sydow in Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal (1957), resembles Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A Use for Bullet Chess
Bullet is faster than Blitz. I've been playing over at Lichess: two-minutes with a one second increment, sudden death. I die a lot, but like Phoenix rise from my ashes to play again. The fastest bullet games are one minute per side, no increment.
What's the use of it? I count six uses.
1) It wakes me up. I out-monk the monks when it comes to early arisal from the bed of sloth. This morning I got up at 12:20 AM. (Usually I arise at 1:30) So by 4:30 I needed a second cup of java, but even that didn't turn the trick. So I logged on to Lichess and blasted out two bullet games, winning one, losing the other. And now I'm bangin' on all eight.
2) It gets me over a temporary writing hurdle. I hit a sag. Inspiration fails. How do I push this line of thought further? Stymied, I fire up the chess engine, bang out some games, and Seldom Seen Slim is back in the saddle, inspiration restored. I find my way forward.
3) It is good mental exercise. Exercise yourself every which way every day: mentally, physically, spiritually, morally. Mens sana in corpore sano, et cetera.
4) It is a challenge. The strenuous life is best by test.
5) It's fun. A little fun never hurt anybody.
6) It distracts me from what the filthy Dems and their media enablers are doing to the country. Chess is an oasis of sanity in an insane world. To swap out the metaphor, chess is the perfect drug, especially when enhanced by consumption of those less-than-perfect drugs, caffeine and nicotine.
Twenty Years Into It
Today is my 20th 'blogiversary.' Can you say cacoethes scribendi?
I've missed only a few days in these twenty years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.' Blogging for me is like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and playing the guitar and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to. Some of us are just natural-born scribblers. We were always writing, on loose leaf, in notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, in journals
daily kept. Maintaining a weblog is just an electronic extension of all that.
Except that now I conduct my education in public. This has some disadvantages, but they are vastly outweighed by the advantages. I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, locally and in far-away places, some in person. You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't call forth spirits or at least snag some interesting fish. The occasional scum sucker and bottom feeder are no counterargument.
I thank you all for your patronage, sincerely, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. I have a big fat file of treasured fan mail that more than compensates me for my efforts.
I am proud to have inspired a number of you Internet quill-drivers. Some of you saw my offerings years ago and thought to yourself, "I can do this too, and I can do it better!" And some of you have. I salute you.
I had more to say on an earlier year's anniversary if you care to look.
Blog on!
On Taking Abuse
A re-post from 1 August 2013. Slightly redacted.
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Everyone gets abused verbally in this world and one had better learn how to take it. There are bigots everywhere — leftists and wokesters the most vile, their tendency to project psychologically rendering their bigotry invisible to them — and sooner or later you will encounter your fair share of abusers and bigots. A fellow graduate student called your humble correspondent a 'guinea' in the 1970s. This was in Boston. But I didn't break his nose and do the ground and pound on him. Was it cowardice or good sense? Call it self-control. If Trayvon Martin had control of his emotions on the fateful night of his encounter with George Zimmerman, he would probably be alive today. The downside, of course, is that then we wouldn't be having this delightful 'conversation' about race.
My impression is that there is more anti-Italian prejudice — not that it is any big deal — in the East than in the West where I come from. (And without a doubt, Jim Morrison had it right when he opined that the West is the best, in at least two senses.) I didn't encounter any anti-Italian prejudice until I headed East. I had a Lithuanian girl friend in Boston whose mother used to warn her: "Never bring an Italian home." I never did get to meet Darci's mom. Imagine a Lithuanian feeling superior to an Italian!
But I want to talk about blacks, to add just a bit more to this wonderful 'conversation' about race we are having.
Blacks need to learn from Jews, Italians, the Irish, and others who have faced abuse and discrimination. Don't whine, don't complain, don't seek a government program. Don't try to cash in on your 'victim' status, when the truth is that you are a 'victim' of liberal victimology. Don't waste your energy blaming others for your own failures.
Don't wallow in your real or imagined grievances, especially vicarious grievances. That's the mark of a loser. Winners live and act in the present where alone they can influence the future.
If you want me to judge you as an individual, by the content of your character and not by the color of your skin, then behave like an individual: don't try to secure advantages from membership in a group!
Abandon tribal self-identification. Did you vote for Obama because he is black? Then you have no business in a voting booth.
Bear in mind that the world runs on appearances, and that if you appear to be a thug — from your saggy pants, your 'hoodie,' your sullen and disrespectful attitude — then people will suspect you of being a thug.
Take a leaf out of Condi Rice's book. She's black, she's female, and she became Secretary of State. And her predecessor in the job was a black man, Colin Powell. It sure is a racist society we have here in the USA. And that Justice Thomas on the Supreme Court — isn't he a black dude? And not a mulatto like Obama, but one seriously black man.
Lose the basketball. Get the needle out of your arm, the coke out of your nose, and that soul-killing rap noise out of your ears. Listen to the late Beethoven piano sonatas. May I recommend Opus #s 109, 110, and 111? Mozart is also supposed to be good for improving your mental capacity. We honkies want you to be successful. If you are successful, we won't have to support you. And if you are successful you will be happy. Happy people don't cause trouble.
And we don't give a flying enchilada what color you are. It's not about color anyway. It's about behavior. Work hard, practice the ancient virtues, and be successful. If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere. Don't let Brother Jesse or Brother Al tell you otherwise. Those so-called 'reverends' are little more than race-hustlers who make money from the grievance industry. And when they run out of grievances? Then they create 'micro-aggressions.'
Liberals are not your friends either. They want you to stay on the plantation. They think you are too stupid to take care of yourselves.
If you learn to control your emotions, defer gratification, study hard and practice the old-time virtues, will you be 'acting white'? Yes, in a sense. High culture is universal and available to all who want to assimilate it. What makes our culture superior to yours is not that it is white but that it is superior. You have already 'appropriated' our technology. (Or did it come from sub-Saharan Africa?) Why balk at 'appropriating' our virtues? We want you to! For your benefit and ours. 'Cultural appropriation' is a good thing. Here is a fine example of 'cultural appropriation.'
Don't get mad, be like Rudy Giuliani. Can you imagine him making a big deal about being called a greaseball, dago, goombah, wop, guinea . . . ? Do you see him protesting Soprano-style depictions of Italian-Americans as mafiosi?
Why Do We Front Our Ideas?
"Preaching to the choir is unnecessary, and if you were to attain the age of a Methuselah you would still not be near converting your opponents. So what's the use of your arguing and asserting?"
This is a text-book example of a False Alternative. For there is a third reason to argue and assert, namely, to sway the fence-sitters whose number is legion, and to bring them over to our side.
What's more, it is false that preaching to the choir is unnecessary. We do so to reinforce them in their 'faith' and prevent their backsliding. It is also false that it is pointless to engage our opponents. We 'preach' to them for several reasons: (a) to change the minds of some; (b) to get our opponents to appreciate that we have a position that is rationally defensible even if not ultimately acceptable to them; (c) to oppose and demoralize them; (d) to make their arguments look bad to others so that their influence wanes.
Finally, some of us just naturally incline to the life of the mind. Its pleasures are intense and reliable. They extend deep into old age. We love to study and we love to write. We athletes of the mind thrive on the agon of intellectual exertion and struggle. For me to go even one day without studying and writing is 'unthinkable,' as 'unthinkable' as going a day without coffee, meditation, and physical exercise.
Theistic Belief and What Inclines Me to It
Substack post du jour.
Rise and Shine
I quit the bed of sloth at two this morning. I slept in a bit. But I understand that not everyone prefers the monkish life. Kant arose at five. It's now 5:30 or so. Rise and shine with Manny! Or at least with Boston. If this '70s tune doesn't get you bangin' on all eight, you need a brain re-wire.
And if this first post of the day is not yet meaty enough for you, there's more:
"The bed is a nest for a whole flock of illnesses." (Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Gregor, p. 183)
I read Kant and about Kant at an impressionable age, and it really is a pleasure plowing through his texts again as I have been doing recently. I suspect my early rising goes back to my having read, at age 20, that Kant was wont to retire at 10 pm and arise at 5 am.
Soon enough, however, I was out-Kanting Kant with a 4 am arisal from the nocturnal nest. And when I moved out here to the Zone, 4 became 2:30. (A Zone Man must make an early start especially on outdoor activities in the summer before Old Sol gets too uppity.)
2:30 became 2:00, the time the Trappist monks of Tom Merton's day got up. I don't know whether the Trappist regimen is as rigorous today as it was in the '40s and '50s, and I'm not sure I want to know given the ubiquity of decadence these days. But then 2:00 became 1:30 which is now my preferred time of arisal.
I don't use an alarm clock. I have an alarm cat. Max, a husky tuxie, jumps over me as he did this morning, more for his benefit than for mine: he wants his treats. He used to jump on my chest, but I cured him of that with a slap or two.