Category: Human Predicament

Some 19th Century Rules for Social Intercourse

The wise man abstains from an excess of socializing as from an excess of whisky; but just as a little whisky at the right time and in the right place is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, so too is a bit of socializing. But he who quits his solitude to sally forth among men must do so with his maxims at the ready if he values his peace of mind.

Herewith, a faithful transcription from a 19th century work, The Corsair: A Gazette of Literature, Art, Dramatic Criticism, Fashion and Novelty, Volume 1, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Timothy O. Porter 1839,  831 pages. (Obviously, not to be confused with the Danish publication that pilloried Kierkegaard):

Never discuss politics or religion with those who hold opinions opposite to yours; they are topics that heat in handling, until they burn your fingers; never talk learnedly on topics you know, it makes people afraid of you; never talk on subjects you don't know, it makes people despise you; never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing, and the better your reasoning the more obstinate people become; never pun on a man's words; it is as bad as spitting in his face. In short, whenever practicable, let others perform and do you look on: a seat in the dress circle is preferable to a part in the play. — This is my rule.

A pretty good rule, one of what Schopenhauer calls Weltweisheit, worldly wisdom. In a fallen world, one needs such maxims. Did you know that Schopenhauer believed in something like Original Sin despite his being an atheist? 

"Never argue, no man is worth the trouble of convincing."  This is sage advice for almost all social situations.

I would add: never in general correct anyone's grammatical, logical, or factual mistakes unless it is your job to do so; the exception of course is serious discourse among serious and well-qualified people. Avoid talk of money if you don't want to be taken to be either poor-mouthing or bragging. Sex-tinged jokes can get you into trouble.  And so on.

Pascal 2Should we go all the way with  Pascal? “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

To paraphrase a line often attributed (rightly or wrongly) to the cowboy wit, Will Rogers:

 

Never miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.

That of course is an exaggeration. But exaggerations are rhetorically useful if they are in the direction of truths.  The truth here is that the damage caused by idle talk is rarely offset by its paltry benefits.

My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains.  She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips.  Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed. 

Related: Safe Speech

Now if you bear all of the above in mind, you may safely sally forth into society as long as your sojourn is brief and your maxims are 'cocked and locked.'

Years Pass, Dates Repeat

You were born only once but every year you have a birthday. Equally, you will die only once but every year you have a death day, the date on which you will die. It is just that you don't know what it is.

Suppose you could know the date of your death but not the year. Suppose that date is 16 October.  Then on that date you would be a little worried and especially careful, both physically and morally. And then on the 17th you could relax for a whole year.

But even this comfort is not granted us.

Could All Paths be Dead Ends?

I wrote:

Reason in the end must confess its own infirmity.  It cannot deliver on its promises. The truth-seeker must explore other avenues.  Religion is one, mysticism is another. 

Vito Caiati responds:

My concern is as follows: While I agree that “reason in the end must confess its own infirmity,” I am troubled by the possibility that religion and mysticism terminate, for many, in their own dead ends. Regarding religious belief, too many sincere seekers, perhaps those not blessed with a religious disposition, the apparent gift of a minority of humanity, end up concluding, to quote Pascal, that  “[J]e suis fait d'une telle sorte que je ne puis croire” (“I am so made that I cannot believe”; Pensées Le livre de Poche, 1991, 464). I realize that there are a variety of theological responses to this declaration, including the debilitating effects of original sin on the human soul and mind, but these attempts merely explain away or rationalize what is for many a painful reality. As for mysticism, its truths, real or supposed, are enjoyed, as you know, by a very tiny fraction of humanity, East and West. 

Given these states of affairs, is it not possible that many (most?) of us are trapped in our ignorance of higher things? That none of the three ways—reason, religion, or mysticism—is a viable alternative? That our fate is tragic and miserable?

I hope that the answer to each of these questions is a negative one, for I continue to search for a way forward.

In The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith, I list the following options, omitting mysticism:

John Bishop (University of Auckland) has a book , Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology and Ethics of Religious Faith (OUP, 2007) which is perhaps the best book that I have read on the subject.  He argues for what he calls a ‘supra-evidential fideism’ in which  one is ‘morally entitled’ to “take as true in one’s practical and theoretical deliberations” a claim that lacks  evidence sufficient for  epistemically-justified acceptance or rejection.

It is a developed Jamesian’ approach to the right to believe. He does not allow for beliefs that go contrary to the weight of evidence, thus he rejects Wittgensteinian fideism. One may believe beyond the evidence, but not against the evidence. He holds that one must always respect the canons of rational inquiry and not dismiss them, even in matters of faith. Yet, by the very nature of the faith-issue, they can be transcended with moral entitlement.

Nor does he allow for ‘induced willings-to believe.’  He holds that one who already has an inclination / disposition to believe is morally entitled to do so if the issue is important, forced, and by the nature of the issue cannot be decided upon the basis of ‘rationalist empiricist’ evidential practice.I came across  the book on a list of important books in philosophy of religion on Prosblogion.

I think that it is a type of fideism that combines your categories B and D – fideism and reasoned faith.

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

(tr. Gerard Manley Hopkins.)

But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less  of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive becomes ossified.  All human institutions are corruptible, and are eventually corrupted.

Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing  of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. When philosophy and religion and mysticism and science are viewed as quests they complement one another. And this despite the tensions among Athens, Jerusalem, Benares, and Alexandria.

The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist — he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil — to mention one line of attack.  What he 'knows,' of course, is only the concept he himself has fabricated and projected.  Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature — which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.

The (immature) religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder — or worse. 

Knowing Less

Knowing less of a person is often better for good relations than knowing more. The old forms and formalities have their uses. They come from a time when human nature was better understood, and it was understood that civility is better served by reserve than by 'letting it all hang out.' They come from a time when it was taken for granted that there is such a thing as human nature.

The Cautionary Tale of Pippa Bacca

Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them.  Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours. 

Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.

People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony.  Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.

The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.

Institutional Corruption

Without institutions, where would we be?

But they are all corrupt, potentially if not actually, in part if not in whole, and constantly in need of reform. The Roman Catholic Church is no exception despite its claim to divine sanction and guidance.

You should be skeptical of all institutions.  Like the houses out here, they either have termites or will get them.

But institutional corruption reflects personal corruption. Institutional corruption is the heart's corruption writ large. So you should be skeptical of all persons, including the one in the mirror.

Especially him, since he is the one you have direct control over.

The Higher Hypocrisy

A man is only a man. If he tries to live like an angel, he may end up a hypocrite attempting the impossible.  A man ought to live up to his highest possibilities. But what they are and where they lie is unknown until he seeks them out, risking hypocrisy as he does so. There is the hypocrisy of those who make no attempt to practice what they preach. And there is the hypocrisy of those who have the will to practice what they preach but cannot practice it because their ideals are too lofty for them. 

The Afterlife of Habit Upon the Death of Desire

Desire leads to the gratification of desire, which in turn leads to the repetition of the gratification.  Repeated gratification in turn leads to the formation of an intensely pleasurable habit, one that persists even after the desire wanes and  disappears, the very desire without whose gratification the  habit wouldn't exist in the first place.  Memories of pleasure conspire in the maintenance of habit. 

The ancient rake, exhausted and infirm, is not up for another round of debauchery, but the memories haunt him, of pleasures past.  The memories keep alive the habit after the desire has fled the decrepit body that refuses to serve any longer as an engine of pleasure.

And that puts me in mind of Schopenhauer's advice.  "Abandon your vices before they abandon you."

Friendships Superficially Satisfying

I had known him for years. Our friendship was an acquaintanceship that remained on the surface. Never having gone deep, it never drifted toward the hazards the deep waters hide: the differences that most truly define and distinguish us, but also oppose us to others. And so when he died I could not bring to mind a false word, a sarcastic expression, a competitive tension, or a joke that hid a jab. Not one unpleasant memory sullied my recollection.

Such superficial friendships are perhaps perfect for an imperfect world in which there is more of seeming than of being. We do well to value the surfaces in a world of surfaces.  The surfaces are sure; the depths are dubious. On life's surface those who meant little but brighten memory count for more than those who meant more but haunt and disturb from a past their presence makes dark.

The Childless as Anthropological Danglers

The Austrian philosopher and Vienna Circle member Herbert Feigl wrote about nomological danglers.  Mental states as the epiphenomenalist conceives them have causes, but no effects. They are caused by physical states of the body and brain, but dangle nomologically in that there are no laws  that relate mental states  to physical states.

The childless are anthropological danglers.  They are life's epiphenomena. They have ancestors (causes) but no descendents (effects). Parents are essential: without  them we could not have come into fleshly existence.  But offspring are wholly inessential: one can exist quite well without them.

There is a downside and an upside to being an anthropological dangler. 

The downside is that it unfits one for full participation in the life of the community, removing as it does weight and credibility from one’s opinions about pressing community concerns. As Nietzsche writes somewhere in his Nachlass, the man without Haus und Hof, Weib und Kind is like a ship with insufficient ballast: he rides too high on the seas of life and does not pass through life with the steadiness of the solid bourgeois weighted down with property and reputation, wife and children.  What does he know about life and its travails that his say should fully count?  His counsel may be wise and just, but it won't carry the weight of the one who is wise and just and interested as only those whose pro-creation has pro-longed them into the future and tied them to the flesh are interested.  (inter esse)

The upside to being an anthropological dangler is that it enables one’s participation in a higher life by freeing one from mundane burdens and distractions. In another Nachlass passage, Nietzsche compares the philosopher having Weib und Kind, Haus und Hof with an astronomer who interposes a piece of filthy glass between eye and telescope. The philosopher's vocation charges him with the answering of the ultimate questions; his pressing foreground concerns, however, make it difficult for him to take these questions with the seriousness they deserve, let alone answer them.

Someone who would be "a spectator of all time and existence" ought to think twice about binding himself too closely to the earth and its distractions.

Another advantage to being childless is that one is free from  being an object of those attitudes of propinquity — to give them a name — such as embarrassment and disappointment, disgust and dismissal that ungrateful children sometimes train upon their parents, not always unjustly.

The childless can look forward to a time when all of their blood-relatives have died off.  Then they will finally be free of the judgments of those to whom one is tied by consanguinity but not by spiritual affinity.

This opinion of mine will strike some as cold and harsh.  But some of us experience more of the stifling and oppressive in our blood relations than the opposite.   I do however freely admit that the very best human relations conceivable are those that bind people both by ties of blood and ties of spiritual affinity.  If you have even one blood relation who is a soul mate, then you ought to be grateful indeed. 

Related: SEP entry on Herbert Feigl