Category: Life of the Mind

On Taking One’s Time in Philosophy

Both Brentano and Wittgenstein advise philosophers to take their time. 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 one another: "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 how much time does one have? One does not know.  It is later than one thinks. So get on with it!

"Take your time!" does not apply to the jotting of notes or to blogosophy. It applies to what one writes 'for the ages.' 

One's best writing ought to be written 'for the ages' even if one is sure that one will not be read beyond one's time or even in one's time.  The vast majority of us are mediocrities who will be lucky to end up footnotes. Don't let that bother you. Just do your level best and strive for the utmost. Do the best you can, with what you've got, for as long as you can. Then let the cards fall where they may.

Habent sua fata libelli. (Terentianus Maurus.) "Books have their fates."   What their fates are is unknown to their toiling authors.

Who knows whom you will instruct, inspire, engage, enrage?

The Idea of Inevitable Progress versus Archaism

Philosophers and theologians alike should heed a distinction I found in Henri de Lubac's magisterial The Mystery of the Supernatural (Herder and Herder, 2001, originally published in French in 1965, p. 18):

Lastly, returning to the essence of an older position can never be purely and simply a return. Archaism . . . of this kind is always deceptive. It is as illusory, in the reverse sense, as the idea of inevitable progress.  "Those who wrote before us are not our masters, but our leaders" [non domini nostri sed duces fuerunt]. (Guibert de Tournai, "De modo addiscendi," Revue neo-scholastique, 1922 : 226)

 

Generalizations are the Offspring of Wisdom

People foolishly oppose generalization. One often hears, 'Never generalize!' But that itself is a generalization in the imperative mood. The partisan of brute particularity who so opines is hoist by his own petard.

So it was with pleasure that I heard Dennis Prager one day  remark   that "Generalizations are the mother of wisdom." But my man had the cart before the horse. Being a quibbler and a pedant, I cannot forebear to suggest an improvement:

   Generalizations are the offspring of wisdom

Or perhaps: 

   Generalization is wisdom's distillate.

For wisdom does not spring from generalization; it is rather that (true) generalizations spring from wisdom as its expression and codification.  

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.

Political Argumentation and Political Evolution

Top o' the Stack.  Written in May 2016 but still relevant. I defend the cogency of the  'Hillary is worse' defense of Donald Trump against Charles Murray.

In the January 2004 post scriptum I concede that the impressive 'Jacques,' an untenured Canadian philosopher whose name I cannot reveal because of vicious leftists such as Brian Leiter, gets the better of me in the comment thread.

Despite the infirmity of reason and the pointlessness of most discussions of controversial questions, some discussion can be profitable, can lead to mutual clarification, and in some rare cases effect a salutary modification of one's position.

Thomas Mann on Blogging

Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939 (Abrams, 1982, tr. R & C Winston), p. 194:

I love this process by which each passing day is captured, not only in its impressions, but also, at least by suggestion, its intellectual direction and content as well, less for the purpose of rereading and remembering than for taking stock, reviewing, maintaining awareness, achieving perspective . . . .

I agree, although for me rereading and remembering have as much value as the taking stock, etc. There is the pleasure of writing but also that of rereading and rethinking what one has written.

As for remembering a passage such as one above, its notation allows me to pull the book off the shelf and return to the pleasurable semantic penumbra which is the quotation's context. 

To Write Well, Read Well

The example of William James.  Excerpt:

But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct or ‘woke’ ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial interweaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

A Little Learning

by Alexander Pope

A little learning is a dangerous thing ;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring :
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts ;
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
But, more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise !
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky ;
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last ;
But those attained, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthened way ;
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise !