Category: Life of the Mind

The Ability to Write and to Comprehend a Good, Long Sentence . . .

. . . is one mark of an educated mind. You won't learn this in the English Department of Rutgers, however. Example:

If you value the life of the mind, the pursuit of truth, the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, high culture and its transmission, in short, the classical values of the university as set forth in such great works as John Henry Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University,  then you should withdraw all support from the culturally Marxist indoctrination centers that the vast majority of contemporary 'universities' have become.

A good stylist, I will add, varies the length of his sentences.   (And a good upholder of traditional values insists on his right to use standard English.)

The 'universities' of the present day are more an impediment to the development of an educated mind than  a help. You don't need them.  Do your bit to defund them.

Note the difference between 'good, long sentence' and 'good long sentence.'

Machiavelli on the Pleasure of Study

Although he was decidedly of the world and not merely in it, Machiavelli knew how to retreat from its brutality into the serene precincts of the life of the mind and lose himself there, for a time, in conversations with the ancients.

I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable court of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them . . . and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains [it], I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus.

See here.

Related: Studiousness as Prophylaxis against the Debilities of old Age

Should Humanities Departments be Shut Down?

The following is  from a reader who takes issue with  Chad McIntosh's Euthanizing Liberty.  Secondarily, he takes issue with me since I basically endorse McIntosh's contentions. McIntosh maintains that

. . .  the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, [is] a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.

According to my reader:

Chad's article is interesting, but short-sighted. The humanities aren't ever going to close entirely . . . . My issue is that as long as our current culture is converting people and otherwise pushing out [producing?] lefties, it's only a matter of time until they take over the country. Suppose Trump wins. What are you going to do in five years? How is he going to change the culture and stop the country from becoming more and more liberal? He's stopping some of the bleeding and slowing the left down, and that is reason to vote for him over alternatives, but let's not get carried away. I'm reminded of what Peter Hitchens said in his recent interview with Eric Metaxas talking about Christianity disappearing from e.g. political discourse: "Once you've given away that ground, it's hard to see what you can do to fight back." It seems to me that Christianity was needed to renew conservative values with each generation. Without it (or some suitable replacement), unless we fix the superstructure to include it (or a replacement), it's only a matter of time.

My reader appears to be arguing that humanities departments ought not to be shut down because they impede to some slight extent the total leftist takeover of the culture.  But that impedance can happen only if some conservatives manage to get jobs, and eventually tenure, in these departments.  These hardy souls, however, would have to hide their conservative beliefs to get hired in the first place, and then carefully keep them hidden for six or so years until they — if they are lucky — get tenure.  So during that time they would be unable to do anything to impede the spread of leftism.  But once tenured, they would not be safe either, for any espousal of conservative positions would get them branded racists and white supremacists, and, as we all know, tenure affords no absolute protection if the administrators and the faculty really want to get rid of you.

More fundamentally, any conservatives in humanities departments that are allowed to speak and publish and influence students and get tenure would be vastly outnumbered by their leftist 'colleagues.' So the net effect of keeping the humanities departments in operation would be a further poisoning of the culture with 'woke,' i.e., benighted, leftist nonsense.

So isn't McIntosh right to celebrate the closure of humanities departments, even if the closures are motivated by the wrong reasons, e.g. the failure of business types to grasp the value of the humanities (properly understood and properly taught)?

And wouldn't it be better for serious truth-seekers to abandon the present-day pseudo-universities and set up their own competing institutions, both on-line and with brick and mortar?  Back to my reader:

As an aside, it's nice that he [McIntosh] holds you [BV] up as an example of an independent scholar, but I don't think a scholar of equal ability would be taken even fractionally as seriously as you are if he hadn't also held a professorship in the past. I hope I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you having gotten that "stamp of approval" is important.

Getting taken seriously is much more a matter of publishing competent work in well-regarded peer-reviewed journals and presses. That does not require having a Ph.D., or an academic post, or having had a (tenured, full-time) academic post.  My being retired from a tenured, full-time academic post does nothing to enhance my credibility in the eyes of leftists for whom I remain a 'racist,' a 'white supremacist,' and and a 'theocrat.' And to these despicable people, any proof that I might proffer that I am not any of these things is just further proof that I am.

It is important to realize just how sick and destructive academe has become, and not just in the humanities and social sciences. A prime example at the present time is the tenured fool, Robin DiAngelo.

Euthanizing Liberty

Chad McIntosh sees an upside in the recent closures of philosophy programs.  I agree with him.

In conclusion, I now see the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, as a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.

Since the spirit of true philosophy has fled the leftist seminaries, a New Monasticism is needed to preserve and transmit high culture:

I will end on a (slightly) more hopeful note. In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher says orthodox Christians should think of themselves as a people in exile, and that their best chance of preserving their faith and traditions is to form quasi-monastic communities within this increasingly hostile post-Christian culture. Those of us who still believe in the university, classically understood, would do well to consider adopting a similar strategy. Since we can no longer depend on modern institutions of higher education as places where the great classics of Western thought and tradition can be faithfully taught, learned, and engaged, we will have to do those things on our own. Thankfully, we are not in wholly untrodden territory. Homeschooling parents have been blazing these trails for a long time. As for aspiring academics, William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is a model. True, few people have the means to support themselves as an independent scholar. But those who find a way will be precisely those seek knowledge for its own sake. The independent scholar will not have to continually debase himself by justifying his own field of study to some institutional bureaucrat or even to his colleagues. Furthermore, being unburdened by the duties of managing classes of disinterested students and time-consuming administrative tasks, he is in a position to do his best work.

Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

Here:

Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. The positive element was the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Sir Roger reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can be a prime resource in freedom’s armory. “Our most necessary beliefs,” he wrote, “may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and . . . the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”

A necessary belief, I take it, is one that we need to live well.  And it may be that the beliefs we need the most to flourish are ones that we cannot justify if our standards are exacting.  It is also true that a failure to justify a belief can lead to skepticism and to a loss of belief.   But which prejudices should we live by? The ones that we were brought up to have?  Should we adopt them without examination?  

Here is where the problem lies. Should we live an unexamined life, simply taking for granted what was handed down?  Think of all those who were brought up to believe that slavery is a natural social arrangement, that some races are fit to be slaves and others to be masters.  Others were brought up to believe that a woman's place is in the home and  that any education beyond the elementary was wasted on them.  Punishment by crucifixion, the eating of human flesh, and so on were all traditionally accepted practices and their supporting  beliefs were  accepted uncritically from supposed authorities.  "That's the way it has always been done." "That's the way we do things around here." "Beef: It's what's for dinner." It is not that the longevity of the practices was taken to justify them; it is rather that the question of justification did not arise.  Enclosed within their cultures, and shielded from outside influences, there was no cause for people to doubt their beliefs and practices.  Beliefs and practices functioned well enough as social cement and so the questions about truth and justification did not arise.

The opposite view is that of Socrates as reported by Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living."  For humans to flourish, they must examine their beliefs and try to separate the true from the false, the justified from the unjustified, the better from the worse.  Supposed authorities must be tested to see if they are genuinely authoritative.  The cosmogonic myths and the holy books contradict each other; hence they cannot all be true. Which is true? Might it be that none are true? Then what is the ultimate truth about how we should live? 

Man come of age is man become aware of the great dualities: true and false, real and unreal, good and evil. Man come of age is man having emerged into the light of spirit, man enlightened, man emergent from the animal and tribal.  Mythos suppressed and Logos ascendent, inquiry is born, inquiry whose engine is doubt. While remaining a miserable animal, man as spirit seeks to know the truth.  To advance in knowledge, however, he must question the handed-down.

The problem is the tension between the heteronomous life of tradition, authority, prejudice, and obedience, and the autonomous Socratic, truth-seeking life, a life willing to haul everything and anything before the bench of Reason, including itself, there to be rudely interrogated. In different dress this is the old problem of Athens and Jersualem in its stark Straussian contours.  

The problem is real and it is no solution to appeal to tradition, authority, and prejudice. On the other hand, there is no denying that the spirit of  inquiry, the skeptical spirit, can and in some does lead to a weakening of belief and a consequent loss of the will to act and assert oneself and the interests of one's group. Decadence and nihilism can result from the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit. The West is in danger of perishing due to lack of will and a lack of belief in our values as we let ourselves be replaced by foreign elements.  Europe faces extinction or dhimmitude if it does not affirm its will to live and take measures against the invasion of representatives of an  inferior unenlightened culture.  

Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. “Real freedom,” Sir Roger observed, “concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”

Really? So I am truly free when I bend my knee to the sovereign? True freedom is bondage to the lord and master? Sounds Orwellian. Could real freedom, concrete freedom, be a form of obedience? Perhaps, if the one obeyed is God himself. But God is absent. In his place are dubious representatives.

My interim judgment: Scruton's conservatism as presented by Kimball is facile, superficial, and unsatisfying. It is a mere reaction to Enlightenment and classically liberal excesses.

Another typically aporetic (and therefore inconclusive) conclusion by the Aporetic Philosopher. It seems right, fitting, and helpful unto enlightenment that a maverick should be an aporetician.

We Lesser Lights

The great thinkers think for humanity, and the great writers write for humanity.  The great teachers are teachers of humanity. Buddha was such a one and so were Jesus and Socrates. We lesser lights think and write to clear our heads, and to appropriate what we have inherited. 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
 
What from your fathers you  received as heir,
Acquire if  you would possess it. 
 
(Goethe's Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)

 
We think and write to know our own minds, to form our minds, and attract a few of the like-minded.  As Aristotle says somewhere, we philosophize best with friends. Philosophy does not make progress in us so much as we make progress in philosophy. We are teachers of humanity only at second-hand, and only to a few.  But we too participate in the great tradition and are grateful for the vocation to such participation.
 
Faust im Studierzimmer Kersting

Perfectionism

Some, of modest ability, publish too much; others, of greater ability, are stymied by perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a curse!

Leave perfection to the gods. The most that can be asked of a mortal is that he strive for excellence within the limits of time, talent, and circumstance. Striving is not achieving, and excellence is not perfection.

You will never get to the point where you have read all the literature on a topic, even a well-defined one. Some of the material is out of print or otherwise unavailable, some of it is in foreign languages. Should you hold off on writing something about mereology until you can read Polish?

Too much reading blocks the channels of one's own creativity. Forever reading, never read. 

Writing is the best way of working out your ideas; so if you wait until you know exactly what you want to say before writing, you will miss the best way of determining exactly what you want to say.

On ‘Illegal Alien’ and ‘Illegal Immigrant’

Liberals, whose love of political correctness gets the better of their intellects, typically object to the phrase 'illegal alien.' But why? Are these people not in our country illegally, as the result of breaking laws?  And are they not aliens, people from another country? 

"But you are labeling them!"  Yes, of course.  Label we must if we are not to lose our minds entirely. 'Feral cat' is a label.  Do you propose that we not distinguish between feral and non-feral cats?  Do you distinguish between the positive and the negative terminals on your car battery?  You'd better!  But 'positive terminal' and 'negative terminal' are labels. 

Label we must.  There is no getting around it if we are to think at all.  There is a political outfit that calls itself "No Labels."  But that too is a label.  Those who eschew all labels label themselves 'idiots.'

Related to this is the injunction, 'Never generalize!' which is itself a generalization. Label we must and generalize we must.  Making distinctions and labeling them, and constructing sound generalizations on their basis are activities essential to, thought not exhaustive of, the life of the intellect.

Liberals also object to 'illegal immigrant.'  In fact, the AP has banned the phrase.  But given that there are both legal and illegal immigrants, 'illegal immigrant' is a useful label.  There is nothing derogatory about it.  It is a descriptive term like 'hypertensive' or 'diabetic.' 

One consideration adduced at the AP site is that actions are illegal, not persons. But suppose your doctor tells you that you are diabetic, and you protest, "Doc, not only are you labelling me, you are forgetting that diabetes is a medical condition and that no person is a medical condition." The good doctor would then have to explain that a diabetic is a person who has diabetes.  Similarly, an illegal immigrant is one who is in the country illegally.  There is the act of illegally crossing the border, but there is also the state of being here illegally.

Plain talk is an excellent antidote to liberal nonsense. When a liberal or a leftist misuses a word in an intellectually dishonest attempt at forwarding his agenda, a right-thinking person ought to protest.  Whether you protest or not, you must not acquiesce  in their pernicious misuse of language.  Or, as I have said more than once in these pages,

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!

Bear in mind that many of the battles of the culture war are fought, won, and lost on linguistic ground. If we let  our opponents destroy the common language in which alone reasonable  debate can be conducted, then much more is lost than these particular  debates.  The liberal-left misuse of language is fueled by their determination to win politically at all costs and by any means, including linguistic hijacking.

Language matters!

Is the Philosophical Life the Best?

This from a reader:
I have a concern about the philosophical life. While I do think philosophy is intrinsically valuable, and while I do deny that one is obligated to "do the most good" with one's life (I'm not a consequentialist), I wonder if there are better ways to live than to devote one's life to philosophy. Prima facie, devoting one's life to solving global poverty or curing cancer seems better than focusing on philosophy. If so, then even if one isn't obligated to solve global poverty or cure cancer, why not devote one's life to these causes instead?
 
Perhaps the philosophical life is better than these other options, but that isn't clear to me. It seems more plausible that, all things being equal, a life that saves countless lives is better lived than a life that doesn't save a single life. Again, I'm not saying we're obligated to save lives, I'm just making a comparative judgment.
I can't refute what you say, but I can offer an alternative point of view.  If you consider it, it may help you better understand your own point of view even if it does not motivate any modification of it.
 
One question concerns the best life humanly possible.  Aristotle discussed it in his Nicomachean Ethics. He considered lives devoted to pleasure, material acquisition, politics, and philosophy. I set forth his answer here.
 
But the best life possible for humans might not be the best life  for a particular human.  Whether or not the best life is the philosophical life, not everyone is 'philosophy material.'
 
Philosophy is a vocation, and only some are called to it. (I am speaking in ideal terms here: what passes for 'philosophy' in the 'universities' falls far short of the ideal.)
 
The best life for you will depend on your aptitudes, values, and worldview.   Everyone has a worldview of sorts even if unexamined and unarticulated.  Suppose your outlook is broadly secular.   And suppose you find secularism obvious.  Then you will not be inclined to question it and will have no need for philosophy.  You have 'your truth,' a worldview you believe is true, and therefore feel no need to investigate whether it is true in whole or in part.  Doubt is the engine of inquiry, but you have no doubts. For you philosophical inquiry would be idle.  You would be left cold by the Socratic, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
 
And if the people you associate with share your tacit worldview, then you will have no need to articulate and defend it.  The existence of competing worldviews might trouble you or then again it might not. You might be the sort of person who is not disturbed or given pause by the disagreement of others.
 
For me, disagreement is a goad to inquiry. I have a consuming need to know. And a life lived without examination is definitely worth little or nothing. Such a life remains on the animal level. A human life, speaking normatively, is a transcending life, a life of self-transcendence and aspiration.
 
Primum vivere deinde philosophari.  I agree. We must live and live fully to gather the grapes of experience from which to press the wine of wisdom.  We don't gather grapes to gather grapes, but for the wine. The vita activa subserves the vita contemplativa.
 
You say it is not clear to you that the philosophical life is superior to, say, cancer research.  Then I say you should leave philosophy alone.  The quest for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters is the highest calling and it demands total commitment.  I can argue for this conviction, but I can't prove it, and I will persuade only those who already sense its truth.
 
In the early '80s I heard a speech by the American politician, Mario Cuomo, in which he touted the political life as the highest life. I thought to myself: "He can't really believe that!"  But I soon concluded  that he did believe it.  I can give my reasons why Cuomo is wrong, but these reasons, which suffice for me, will make no impression on those who think the political life the highest. (To me, politics is like taking out the garbage or unplugging the toilet: it's a dirty job and it has to be done and done properly; in an ideal world, however, there would be no State and no need for politicians. As things are, our fallen predicament makes the State  practically necessary, a necessary evil, along with its agents.)
 
My advice is, first of all, know thyself.  Having honestly assessed your abilities, do with your life what you think is the best, and what you are fit to do.
 
I realize that this advice is of very little practical value.  Listen to others, but keep your own counsel, and follow the urgings vouchsafed to you in the highest moments of existential clarity and discernment.

Is the Unexamined Life Worth Living?

Written in October of 2004.

Norman PodhoretzI recently read Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (The Free Press, 1999). It is an enjoyable and stimulating analysis of the breakdown of friendship in the crucible of political disagreement. I recommend it.

But an early passage inspired me to fire up the old Pentium II. Describing "most people," Podhoretz says that "The ideas that underlie their way of life are mostly taken for granted and remain unexamined – luckily for them, since the biggest lie ever propagated by a philosopher was Socrates’ self-aggrandizing assertion that the unexamined life is not worth living." (p. 4)

Can a philosopher let this passage pass unexamined? The first thing that raised my critical hackles is the irresponsible use of the word ‘lie,’ a use that is unfortunately widespread these days. Does Podhoretz really mean to suggest that Socrates was lying when he made his famous statement at his trial? Does he mean to imply that the great Athenian knew the truth, but was bent on deceiving us? Of course not. Podhoretz knows that one can utter a falsehood without lying, as when one says what one believes to be true but is not true, and I am sure that he appreciates that Socrates was sincere in his belief that the unexamined life is not worth living. Charitably interpreted, Podhoretz is opining that Socrates was wrong in his belief, not that he was lying.

A second thing to question is whether the Socratic assertion is "self-aggrandizing." If I praise a certain way of life that happens to be my way of life, it does not follow that I praise this way of life simply because it happens to be mine. For there is also the possibility that I praise this way of life because I have objective reasons to believe that it is a good way of life, and that I have chosen it for these objective reasons. In the second case, the life is mine because I have objective grounds for praising it, not praised because it is mine. Only in the first case would we speak of Socrates’ assertion as self-aggrandizing. Given that Podhoretz has provided no evaluation of the Socratic reasons for the Socratic assertion, he is not justified in describing the latter as "self-aggrandizing."

But the main issue is this: Is an unexamined life worth living? If my way of life happens to be good, then one might argue that it is good whether I examine it or not, whether I can give objective reasons for its goodness or not. (Compare: if my roof is in good condition, it is so whether I examine it or not. It is no part of my roof’s being in good condition that it, or someone, know that it is in good condition or that it, or someone, raise the question of its condition.) In this sense, an unexamined life could very well be worth living. But a human life is not merely a biological process, but essentially involves the exercise of (not merely the capacity for) emotion, will, and reason. Thus no ‘fully human life’ (an unabashedly normative phrase used unabashedly!) is possible without the exercise of reason upon the ultimate objects, among which is one’s own life, its whence, whither, and wherefore. A fully human life, as a life necessarily involving the exercise of reason, requires the examination of such questions as how we should live. To live thoughtlessly, uncritically, without consideration of ultimates and without consideration of alternative ways of living – there is indeed something  contemptible about this,assuming that the person is in a position to conduct the examination. To that extent, Socrates was surely right, and Podhoretz is surely wrong.

But Socratic self-examination implies no rejection of traditional ways of life. Perhaps lurking in the background of Podhoretz’s mind is some such argument as this: (1) Socratic self-examination leads to the rejection of traditional mores; (2) traditional mores are sound; ergo, (3) Socratic self-examination is a mistake. I hope this is not the way Podhoretz is thinking, given the falsity of (1). Socratic examination may lead to the rejection of traditional mores, but it might also lead to their rational defense.

Word of the Day: Demesne

Merriam-Webster:

1: legal possession of land as one's own

2: manorial land actually possessed by the lord and not held by tenants

3a: the land attached to a mansion

b: landed property : ESTATE

c: REGION sense 2, TERRITORY

4: REALM sense 2, DOMAIN

How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays.  The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

If you think you know the meaning of a word, you are well-advised to check your understanding. Even if you really do know the meaning of a word, you probably don't know all of its shades and variants.

If you work steadily at this, then perhaps someday you will have a vocabulary half as extensive as that of your humble correspondent.