Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Human Predicament

  • No Man is a Beast Merely

    It is natural for a beast to be bestial, but not for a man.  He must degrade and denature himself, and that only a spiritual being can do.  Freely degrading himself, he becomes like a beast thereby proving that he is — more than a beast.

  • Obama the Feckless

    The weak invite attack.  That is a law of nature.  Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other.  Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism.  There is none.  Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state.  The same goes for diplomacy.  There needs be…

  • At the Zoo: The Aspiring Animal

    And here we have an animal who aspires.  Unfortunately, his aspirations arise from a material substratum that mocks them, and whose collapse will soon enough spell their end.  Or so it seems.  If the seeming is so, is not the life of these animals absurd?

  • Looking Beyond for Meaning

    We look beyond the moments of this life for meaning.  And we must look beyond the 'moment' of this life as a whole if this life is to have meaning.

  • Relatives

    Some want to stay in touch, not on the basis of what one actually and presently is, but on the basis of what one was or was imagined by them to be.  And so I rarely visit the homes of my relatives.  For, as Emerson brilliantly quips in a related connection, "I do not want…

  • On Living Too Long

    Old age for some is a sort of afterlife in a foreign country.  One has lived beyond one's own time and now finds oneself among strangers.

  • Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine

    Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.  What follows is a post from 13 June 2009. ……………….. Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962: . . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and…

  • There is Beauty in the World

    I look out my study window, over the Superstition ridgeline, and marvel at the beauty of the roseate stratonimbus of sunrise.  There is beauty in the world and we do well to appreciate it.  There is also beauty and nobility in human nature.  It peeps out now and again.  A young man took a bullet…

  • What is Man?

    Peter Geach quotes Tennyson: "Man is an immortal spirit charged with the control and taming of a beast." (Truth and Hope, p. 18)

  • This Life

    We sometimes speak of this life.  For example, some assert that this life is all there is.  The ability to thematize and question the whole of life may not prove, but it does suggest, that we are more than beings confined to this life.  Even the average schlep, enmired in the mundane, his fledgling metaphysical…

  • Milton Praises the Strenuous Life

    Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice,"  he quotes Milton:      I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and     unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but     slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run     for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we…

  • Self-Effacement and Self-Importance

    To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance?  I am thinking of Simone Weil.   In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself.  "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit…

  • Moral Failure

    Repeated moral failure has at least this salutary effect: it teaches us to be humble.  Moral success can have the opposite effect of conducing toward spiritual pride — which undermines the very success of which it is the upshot.  So, while regretting one's failures, one can derive a little consolation from the realization that they are…

  • Adapted from Pascal

    There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.

  • Vanity Plates

    I reckon most motorists find vanity plates distasteful.   Upon seeing a plate bearing the letters 'Ph.D.' or 'M.D.' or 'J.D.,' the response is likely to be: BFD! In any case, who needs vanity plates when one can have for free one's very own vanity blog? And weblogs have this advantage: they are not in people's…