Autobiographical – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

The Great Blizzard of ’78 Remembered

I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. Got off, hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my old friend and apartment mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78, every single day holidays included.

That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up between 1 and 2 AM. I've become a slacker.

One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it difficult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.

Juvenilia

I pulled out my scribblings from the summer of '66. Puerile stuff from a half-century ago. Painful in places. But earnest and sincere with a good line here and there. The old man honors the adolescent he was.

I wrote for posterity, though I didn't realize it at the time. And I still do. The posterity of self.

Lousy Teachers

They unwittingly gave me the confidence that I could do what they do, and indeed do it better, but they also deprived me of the intellectual formation that I had to spend years developing on my own. They set me forward, and they set me back.

To cheat students is bad enough; to corrupt them is far worse. The latter is happening now in classrooms at all levels throughout the land. To speak of a decline in standards would be an understatement: perversion of standards.

What’s with “Footnotes to Plato” from your Masthead? Are you a Platonist?

Well, all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists in a broad sense if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

So in that general sense I am a Platonist. And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato." Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle. That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists. So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato." Philosophy for me is a spiritual quest as it was for Plato, but less so for Aristotle. And our contemporaries? A sorry lot who, in the main, have lost the thread entirely.

Another Useful Idiot Crosses My Path

I'm the chess guy hereabouts. A year ago I got a call from an 86-year-old retired chemist with an interest in the game. A meeting was arranged, a game was played, and then the talk turned to politics. The old man told us that he had voted for Biden out of revulsion at Trump. He said he had been a Republican all his life but lately became a Democrat. Brian and I were gentle with him, drawing him out to see how deep he'd dig his hole. It was deep enough for us to write him off as an utterly clueless old man living in the past.

Part of the problem with such people is that they live by a code of civility that will get you killed in the present-day political world should you dare to enter it. They don't understand that the Left is at war with us, and leftists no longer hide the fact. Their stealth ideologues of, say, 10-15 years ago are now out in the open and brazen in their plans and proclamations. Leftists see politics as war, and if we don't, we lose.

Brian and I are a couple of patzers, which is not to say that we won't clean your clock at the local coffee house. We are 'B' players (1600-1800) in the USCF hierarchy. The game with the old man turned into a training session. He acquitted himself so poorly we never heard from him again despite our welcoming manner.

That is another fault of old men. Their outsized egos make them impermeable to instruction. They cannot stand to lose. But life is hierarchical and you will lose again and again and again. Wokesters with their promotion of 'equity' (equality of outcome) and their assault on merit rail against life's natural hierarchy, but to no ultimate avail. In the end, reality wins. With apologies to Ron DeSantis, reality is where 'woke' goes to die.

MaverickPhilo@Twitter

Here I am. Pay me a visit. I don't quite know the ropes yet.

Who will be Facebook's Elon Musk? Hats off to the latter. Middle finger to the former. Without free speech, republics collapse. Our republic is collapsing and there may be no stopping the slide into the abyss; but as the saying goes, 'it ain't over 'til it's over.' We fight on.

Wife and Life, Truth and Practice

My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking, gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital.

Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some people. The world is ugly, but there is also beauty in it. Life can seem meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and yet it also at times appears under the aspect of ultimate Sense and Rightness.

You will have to decide which of these seemings to live by. Try both and see which is more conducive to happiness. The one that makes you happier has a solid claim on being the truer. That the truth should in the end thwart us strikes me as implausible. But the question cannot be resolved theoretically. You resolve it by living, thoughtful living, each for himself and by himself.

Titans once bestrode Harvard Yard.** Josiah Royce was one, William James the other. The latter held that truth is "the good in the way of belief." I commend that thought to your delectation, examination, and practical implementation.

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*Time was, when the lion's share of something was the whole of it. Despite my linguistic conservatism, I have acquiesced in the latter-day usage according to which the lion's share of something is most of it. If lions could speak, they would protest the semantic dilution.

**Pygmies now rule.

Willie Horton Revisited

I posted the following on my Facebook page this morning. Go there for my political linkage and 'rantage.'

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I have a confession to make. I voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991. But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle, excuse, and now let off scot-free.

Is there one prominent Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this 'woke'-controlled party is bereft of moral sense. Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases.

William Voegli on Willie Horton:

. . . identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate.

Pretty Feeble Stuff

Much of what I post here is pretty feeble stuff. But damned if I don't love this daily scribbling!

So What’s up with the Metaphilosophy Book?

I was happy to find the following item in the mailbag the other morning:

Hi Bill,

I recall (however, I can't find exactly where) that you mentioned in an old blog post your intention to publish a work on metaphilosophy at some point in the future. I am curious, is this still a goal of yours? If so, is it in progress? I would be delighted to read it, but I understand if you've chosen not to pursue that project.

Your grateful reader,

Chandler

Thank you for your inquiry, Chandler. Yes, the metaphilosophy book is in progress, and has been for longer than I care to reveal. Why am I taking so long with it?

I gave the following dissertation advice a few posts ago:

. . . finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Finish it before your standards become too exacting. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish.

My current predicament is the opposite. I am now old and my standards have become as exacting as they ever will be. I'm under time pressure but it's of a different sort than the young person's. The young philosopher needs to 'make it' and secure a space within which he can pursue his vocation. He has to solve 'the problem of the belly.' He may also be driven by worldly ambition. I have secured the space, solved the problem of livelihood, and I have renounced all worldly ambition in line with Wittgenstein's 1948 observation, "Ambition is the death of thought." (Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens, Culture and Value, p. 77)

So now I can afford to set high standards. Trouble is, they slow you down. That's good in one way. I take to heart the advice of Wittgenstein and Brentano. 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."

On the other hand, the clock is running, the flag will fall, and the time control is sudden death. There is no secondary or tertiary control; nor can one take an 'incomplete' when the Grim Reaper comes knocking, his scythe glistening in the rays of the setting sun.

‘Handsome Devil’

I visited a couple of aunts some years back. As I entered her house, Aunt Ada exclaimed, "My, you are a handsome devil!" Aunt Margaret said to Ada, "Don't call him a devil!" But of course Ada did no such thing; Margaret failed to appreciate that 'handsome' in 'handsome devil' in this context and almost all others functions as an alienans adjective.

For more examples and a definition see my adjectives category.

University of Dayton Philosophy Department Circa 1980

Amazing what one can dredge up from the vasty deeps of cyberspace!

Why Am I So Happy?

From my Facebook page, three years ago, pre-COVID-19, pre-Biden, before things really got bad. But I am still happy. For some of us happiness is a basal state, bred-in-the-bone, affected somewhat by external circumstances, but not by much.

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My beloved country looks to be going the way of the Roman empire: overextended abroad and collapsing within under the weight of its own decadence. We can't agree about much of anything anymore and are arguing bitterly about things we ought not be arguing about. The future looks grim. Civil war may be in the offing. Idiots and overgrown children now occupy positions of power in our government. The Speaker of the House regularly spouts nonsense. Deep State operatives deploy fascist techniques against harmless citizens to intimidate and spread fear. People who should know better apologize for speaking the truth. Journalism is pretty much dead and lies are rampant. Delusional race-baiters who retail incoherence are celebrated by white 'liberals' in the pages of once respectable publications. Bootless neocons with no skin in the game advocate spreading 'democracy' among benighted tribalists regardless of the expenditure of American blood and treasure. The rights that are every American's birthright are under assault. Roughly half of our fellow citizens are reasonably viewed as domestic enemies. And the litany continues.

So why am I so happy?

When I was 20 I wrote into my journal, "Philosophy, the joy of my youth and the consolation of my old age." I was prescient, but not prescient enough. Philosophy has proven to be not only the consolation but also the joy of my old age, and a greater joy than ever.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, and this owl is reaping a rich harvest as the shadows grow long and the end of the trail comes into view.

It helps if you can look beyond this life and see it as a passing scene, real enough as far as it goes, and certainly no dream, but a scene of no final reality or importance.

And so I pity the poor secularist who has nothing beyond this hopeless world.

Why We Get Along

I'm reasonable; she's sweet and agreeable.