That we are formed and malformed by our environments from birth on is bad enough. It is made worse by those who want to see us as nothing but products of environment. These reductionists of course make an exception in their own cases. It is as if they say to us: "We are able to discern truth, but you are not. What we say expresses our insight, but what you say only expresses your conditioning." That is the injustice of the psychologizer.
Category: Human Predicament
The Past as Burden
The past is a burden one is free to put down — if others will let us. In this regard as in others, the less fame the better. Others like to keep us in the past, safely categorized, pinned to our deeds. To their ossifying gaze, we are what we were, a fixed essence rather than a project. If I rightly recall, Hegel summed up the Aristotelian to ti en einai and the scholastic quod quid erat esse in the phrase, Wesen ist was gewesen ist: essence is what was. But Dasein, said Heidegger, is essentially futural. And that despite all Geworfenheit, thrownness. Sound is the existentialist insight that man is a project.
Each day is new, but we make it old with our thoughts and habits. We drag the past along with us like a penal chain. But every day is a beginning. Some say: "of the rest of your life." But that formulation is too retrospective: it evaluates the present and the future by the standard of the past, as time that remains. Better to say: "Each day begins a new life." Of course, it cannot be all that new, but no matter. Let the continuities take care of themselves, seek the novelty in the moment.
There are possibilities yet unexplored in this present which is not merely a boundary between past and future, but a source of the new.
Serious Conversation
It is best avoided with ordinary folk. Serious conversation about matters beyond the mundane demands effort and people resent being made to work. Besides, ordinary folk do not 'believe in conversation' the way some philosophers do. They don't believe that truth can be attained by dialectical means. They might not believe in truth at all, or in its value. Or they may have the notion that 'truth is relative.' Thoughtlessly, many dismiss all thought with 'It's all relative.' So if you try to engage them on a serious topic, they may interpret your overture as an initial move in an ego game whereby you are trying to dominate them, even if that is the farthest thing from your mind. Not believing in truth, they believe in power, and interpret everything as a power ploy and a power play. And this goes double if, like me, you are intense of mien. For your seriousness will appear either threatening or comical to those for whom nothing matters except life's surfaces.
A good maxim, then: Among regular guys be a regular guy.
Do You Seek Power and Position?
Then consider what Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has to say in his Essays (XI. Of Great Place):
Men in great place are thrice servants — servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame, and servants of business; so as they have no freedom, neither in their persons, nor in their actions, nor in their times. It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty; or to seek power over others and to lose power over a man's self. The rising unto place is laborious, and by pains men come to greater pains; and it is sometimes base, and by indignities men come to indignities. The standing is slippery, and the regress is either a downfall, or at least an eclipse, which is a melancholy thing: Cum non sis qui fueris, non esse cur velis vivere. ["Since you are not what you were, there is no reason why you should wish to live."]
Deformation by Experience
Thought aspires to objectivity and universality, but it must struggle against the brute onesidedness of experience. We are so impressed by our particular experiences that argument against them will usually prove unavailing. Our experiences form us and deform us.
I once knew a white woman who disliked blacks. I inquired why. She explained that she had grown up in a neighborhood with a lot of blacks, and that the black kids routinely harrassed her and her friends on their way to school. My arguments in mitigation of her generalized prejudice were of course unavailing in the teeth of her experiences.
Just as you can't argue against a man's sensibility, you can't argue against his exeriences. He knows what he's seen, what he's felt, what he's suffered. Argumentative abstraction is just so much gossamer by comparison.
This is a general rule admitting of exceptions. The vividness of the experiences is no match for the faint murmurings of sweet reason. We are formed by our experiences but also deformed by them.
We are made of crooked timber, and the warping of experience adds the final rude touch.
‘He’s Only Reading’
This just over the transom from Londiniensis:
Your last post puts me in mind of the hoary old story of the timid student hovering outside his tutor’s door not knowing whether to knock and disturb the great man. At that moment one of the college servants walks past: “Oh, it’s all right dear, you can go in. The professor’s not doing anything, he’s only reading”.
Ambivalence towards reading and other activities in the life of the mind reflects the fact that we are embodied spirits. As spirits, we dream and imagine, think and question, doubt and despair. We ask what is real and what is not. It is no surprise, then, that we question the reality and importance of reading and writing and study when these activities are not geared to what is immediate and utilitarian such as the earning of money. Our doubts are fueled in no small measure by the lethargy and hebetude of the body with its oppressive presence and incessant demands. The spectator of all time and existence, to borrow a beautiful phrase from Plato's Republic, should fully expect to be deemed one who is 'not really doing anything' by the denizens of the Cave.
The bias against the spirit is reflected in the phrase 'gainful employment.' What is intended is pecuniary gain, as if there is no other kind. The bias, however, is not without its justification, as we are embodied beings subject to all the vicissitudes and debilities of material beings generally.
Companion post: Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood
The Diplomat
Not an original aphorism, but a good one nonetheless: A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you look forward to the trip.
This illustrates the principle that in human affairs it is less what one says than how one says it that matters. Perverse as people are, they ignore or downplay what is primary, the message, to fixate on the 'packaging.'
Let Sleeping Dogs Lie
When I asked Harry if he uses the Internet to look up old friends, "Let sleeping dogs lie" was his reply. His attitude, qualified, recommends itself. The friendships of old were many of them friendships of propinquity. They were born of time and place and circumstance, and they died the death of distance, whether temporal or spatial or circumstantial. They are relics that can be fingered but not reanimated. They are best left in the boneyard of memory.
Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:
No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]
The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.
Pushing Sixty?
If three-score are at the door, the Laudator Temporis Acti has some Emerson and some Martial for you. Whether or not they help you over the transom, they will provide matter for salutary reflection.
My Favorite Pascal Quotation
Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):
How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.
Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to repy, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."
Our Exigent Predicament
What do we lack? Not much — just knowledge, resolve, goodness, and reality. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul, and we are soon to vanish from the scene entirely.
Competition
You won the race, the tournament, the jackpot, the promotion, the presidency. So now you won't have to die? You beat another miserable mortal for some lousy bauble? Such is all it takes to give your paltry life meaning?
Work, Money, Living and Livelihood
Prevalent attitudes toward work and money are curious. People tend to value work in terms of money: an occupation has value if and only if it makes money, and the measure of its value is how much money it makes. If what you do makes money, then it has value regardless of what it is you do. And if what you do does not make money, then it lacks value regardless of what it is.
A man stands on a street corner, Bible in hand, and preaches the gospel of Jesus Christ. Passersby regard him as of no account, as a loser, a bum, a fanatic. They give him a wide berth and would be embarrassed to be seen associating with him. But let the fellow clean himself up, get himself admitted to a divinity school, earn a degree and become an assistant pastor somewhere, and suddenly he has social status of sorts. For now his preaching is a livelihood, a means of attaining a comfortable living standard, and he is now a serious and productive member of society. He is now of account and is known to be such at the local bank. He amounts to something in the economic and social currency of the realm. As the Danish Socrates might have said, he has learned how to make a living from the fact that another man was crucified. The allusion, of course, is to Kierkegaard.
A novelist sits in her garret and scribbles away day by day. Her relatives and acquaintances think her a failure despite two published novels. You see, they fell stillborn from the press and she barely covered the costs of writing them. When she explains that she lives for her art, some smile indulgently, others display demeanors that run from quizzical to scornful, but all mock her behind her back. For it is clear to them that she is wasting her time on a lot of nonsense. But let the novelist hit paydirt, and all changes. Now she is of account. Scorn turns to envy. She is on her way to becoming a person of substance in one of the more crass senses of this irridescent word. For now she has found a way to turn a buck from her writing, and that confers value upon it.
Suppose there were no way to make a living from philosophy, or that one’s chances of making a living from it were about as good as a chess player’s from chess. Suppose, in other words, that philosophy had no place in university curricula and that there were no teaching jobs. How much philosophy would be published? How many journals and presses would go under? How many introductory texts would see the light of day? What would become of the professional organizations, the conferences and congresses and the rest of all that philosophically marginal busy-ness? How many ‘philosophers’ would abandon philosophy and end up in real estate?
Would it be a bad thing if there were no way to live from philosophy? The answer is not obvious and indeed depends on one’s conception of philosophy. Consider a related question: Would it be a bad thing if no one were able to make a living from religion? In thinking about these questions, you may want to consider the examples of Paul the tentmaker, Spinoza the lensgrinder, and Thoreau the surveyor.
What they lived for, and what they lived from, were kept distinct. An exemplary modus vivendi if you want my opinion.
The Worst Thing About Poverty
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 38, written in 1940:
155. The worst of poverty — today at any rate — the most galling and the most difficult thing to bear, is that it makes it almost impossible to be alone. Neither at work, nor at rest, neither abroad nor at home, neither waking nor sleeping, neither in health, nor — what a torture — in sickness.
Money cannot buy happiness but in many circumstances it can buy the absence of misery. Due diligence in its acquisition and preservation is therefore well recommended. The purpose of money is not to enable indulgence but to make possible a life worth living. Otium liberale in poverty is a hard row to hoe; a modicum of the lean green helps immeasurably. Things being as they are, a life worth living for many of us is more a matter of freedom from than freedom for. Money buys freedom from all sorts of negatives. Money allows one to avoid places destroyed by the criminal element and their liberal enablers, to take but one example. And chiming in with Haecker's main point, money buys freedom from oppressive others so that one can enjoy happy solitude, the sole beatitude. (O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!)