Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:
Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.
This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.
Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.
To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.' It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself. The very fact of preaching shows one to be a hypocrite. Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy. When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.
And therein lies the contradiction. They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical. But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.
We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.' But if you have read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.
You are correct that this quotation, in the form that seems to be all over the Internet now, is not a quotation from Aristotle: it's not even a loose translation of Nicomachean Ethics 1094b23-25. The English translation from which it has descended is as follows (I'm not sure whose this is):
"It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible."
In fact, this isn't a great translation, but at least it gets the sense right. Notice that the first eight words match the beginning of the spurious quote exactly (actually, the corresponding Greek is just two words, (pepaideumenou esti), one of which (esti) means "it is" and the other one of which (pepaideumenou) is translated "the mark of an educated mind". Since it's distinctive of this translation to supply "mind" instead of "man" or "person", I'm sure that's the source. In bouncing about the Internet, Aristotle's own quote has been transmogrified into something quite different that evidently resonates with many people. Just for the record, I am an academic in a philosophy department, I specialize in Aristotle, and I've published translations of some of Aristotle's works. –Robin Smith
I believe this is the Robin Smith I met at a Plato conference back in 1980. I am indeed blessed with, and grateful for, a good memory. You would expect that of a Platonist, right?
No day without a line. Should it be nullus dies sine linea? I don't know. The maxim in the form nulla dies sine linea entered my vocabulary circa 1970 from my study of Kierkegaard. The Dane had taken it as the motto for his prodigious journals in the sense of 'No day without a written line.' I made the maxim my own, and long has she presided over my rather less distinguished scribbling.
Edward the Nominalist, whose Latin is better than mine, writes,
I spotted your post today, and wondered about the gender of ‘dies’. It is one of the only fourth declension nouns to have masculine gender, at least in the singular, which has caused misery to generations of Latin students. Technically it should be ‘nullus dies’, e.g. Nullus dies omnino malus / no day is altogether evil, unus dies apud Dominum sicut mille anni et mille anni sicut dies unus / one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day etc.
But the formulation is quite common, so I did some digging. It originates with a story by Pliny (Plin. Nat. 35.36) about the Greek painter Apelles, who apparently was steadfast in practicing his art. Pliny writes ‘It was a custom with Apelles, to which he most tenaciously adhered, never to let any day pass, however busy he might be, without exercising himself by tracing some outline or other; a practice which has now passed into a proverb’. Note that this is not about writing, but painting!
Although Pliny mentions the proverb, he never formulates it. The modern formulation seems to originate with the Latin of Erasmus and other late medieval writers, e.g. ‘Nulla dies abeat, quin linea ducta supersit.’ ‘Let no day pass by, without an outline being drawn, and left to remain.’ So the formulation may just be bad medieval Latin. Nikitinski (‘Zum Ursprung des Spruches nulla dies sine linea’,Rheinisches Museum 142: 430-431, 1999) has argued that if Pliny had formulated it, he would have written ‘nullus dies sine linea’
Very interesting: the maxim pertained to painting before its use in connection with writing. Other extensions are possible. One can imagine an erudite cokehead abusing the phrase along with his nostrils.
Dr. Michael Gilleland is a bona fide classicist besides being an "antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon." He offers a wealth of details and variant maxims here, but unless I missed it, finds no fault with the grammar of the nulla dies sine linea formulation.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:
Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."
The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas.
In a second footnote we read:
Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"
Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.
What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more. Does it mean that no man preaches a pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack. But on this reading the saying comes out false.
Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.
A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy. But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.
Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.
It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.
Krystal was a protégé of Jacques Barzun, editing the late polymath’s The Culture We Deserve. Like Barzun, Krystal has resisted specialization. His approach to books is not academic: “There’s nothing wrong with admiring Elmore Leonard without likening him to Proust or Henry James.” To this he adds: “One can be a fan of Agatha Christie, but one can’t really be a fan of George Eliot.” Tell that to the Janeites and Trollopians, and to the devotees of Lee Child and Dean Koontz. Strictly speaking, Krystal isn’t a critic at all, and he certainly has no theories to peddle. We might think of him as an enthusiastic reader who happens to write. He reminds us of the respect once shown to Dr. Johnson’s notion of the common reader, “uncorrupted with literary prejudices.”
Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.
Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.
Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives. Am I being fair?
In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.
The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”
One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.
'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it? 'Believe' would work better, no?
More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."
We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.
But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case. Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.
As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in. It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.
Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion.
Then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation' unless you are English.
Addendum 4/12:
A philosophy professor comments:
The claim in your post today, strikes me as clearly false.
Just because someone speaks a language (even as a primary language) doesn't mean they are cultural appropriators guilty of something. Imagine the English colonize your land and people and force English upon you. Then this conditional, which is what I think you are claiming, is false: "If you speak English and you are not English, then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation'.
The good professor has found a counterexample to my conditional claim. But he misses the point of my pithy little poke. My intention was to ridicule the politically correct silliness of those who see something reprehensible in, say, donning a sombrero when one is not a Mexican. Aphorisms, maxims, and other sayings derive their punch from their pith. You have heard it said, briefly, and with wit, that "Brevity is the soul of wit."
Let us note en passant and in defiance of the content of the witticism that it can be found in William Shakespeare in Hamlet, Act II wherein the Bard has Polonius say:
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad.
Was this beautiful coinage first put into circulation by Shakespeare? I have no idea. But I digress.
Consider the following piece of folk wisdom,
He who hesitates is lost.
Counterexamples abound. And the same goes for the competing maxim,
Look before you leap.
If one were to rewrite them to make them proof against the punctilios of philosophers and logicians, the result would be something clunky and not particularly memorable. For example,
It is often, but not always, the case that one who hesitates before acting misses his opportunity and in consequence of such hesitancy either loses his life or suffers some lesser, but nonetheless regrettable, loss.
But then one has traded the lawyerly for the literary.
I brought Cioran into my latest Pyrrhonian post to lay bare the contrast between the Christian's pursuit of a "peace that surpasses all understanding" (Philippians 4:7) and the Pyrrhonian's peace which is beneath understanding inasmuch as it is predicated upon not understanding — and not caring any more about understanding. I then asked whether this could be a peace worth wanting.
I ended my Pyrrhonian post with the quip: "To Emil Cioran I would say: safety is overrated." My point, in contemporary jargon, is that really fruitful living requires frequent and extended forays from one's 'comfort zone' into regions of stress and challenge and doxastic risk.
Kai Frederik Lorentzen comments:
I think you do Cioran wrong insofar as he seems to be ambivalent about Skepticism. In Histoire et Utopie (1960), he writes: "Skepticism is the sadism of embittered souls."
Cioran's spiritual yearning appears real to me.
I have read quite a bit of Cioran but not enough to venture a definitive judgment. So I don't know whether his spiritual yearning is genuine or just a literary posture. My impression is that he is a mere litterateur. But even if he is sincere, his scepticism seems distinct from Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Acolytes of the latter try not to dogmatize whereas it is not clear to me that Cioran avoids or tries to avoid a dogmatic scepticism/nihilism. A bit of (inconclusive) evidence:
X, who instead of looking at things directly has spent his life juggling with concepts and abusing abstract terms, now that he must envisage his own death, is in desperate straits. Fortunately for him, he flings himself, as is his custom, into abstractions, into commonplaces illustrated by jargon. A glamorous hocus-pocus, such is philosophy. But ultimately, everything is hocus-pocus, except for this very assertion that participates in an order of propositions one dares not question because they emanate from an unverifiable certitude, one somehow anterior to the brain’s career. (E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered (New York: Seaver Books, 1983), translated from the French by Richard Howard, p.153)
A statement of Cioran’s scepticism. But his scepticism is half-hearted and dognatic since he insulates his central claim from sceptical corrosion. To asseverate that his central claim issues from “an unverifiable certitude” is sheer dogmatism since there is no way that this certitude can become a self-certitude luminous to itself. Compare the Cartesian cogito. In the cogito situation, a self’s indubitability is revealed to itself, and thus grounds itself. But Cioran invokes something anterior to the mind, something which, precisely because of it anteriority, cannot be known by any mind. Why then should we not consider his central claim – according to which everything is a vain and empty posturing – to be itself a vain and empty posturing?
Indeed, is this not the way we must interpret it given Cioran’s two statements of nihilism cited above? If everything is nothing, then surely there cannot be “an unverifiable certitude” anterior to the mind that is impervious to sceptical assault.
Again, one may protest that I am applying logic in that I am comparing different aphorisms with an eye towards evaluating their mutual consistency. It might be suggested that our man is simply not trying to be consistent. But then I say that he is an unserious literary scribbler with no claim on our attention. But the truth of the matter lies a bit deeper: he is trying have it both ways at once. He is trying to say something true but without satisfying the canons satisfaction of which is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of anything’s being true.
My interim judgment, then, is this. What we have before us is a form of cognitive malfunction brought about by hypertrophy of the sceptical faculty. Doubt is the engine of inquiry. Thus there is a healthy form of scepticism. But Cioran’s extreme scepticism is a disease of cognition rather than a means to it. The writing, though, is brilliant.
We adjust our stride to the steepness of the terrain: the steeper the trail, the shorter the steps. A good writer watches his literary stride: the more difficult the subject matter, the shorter the sentences. Back on the flat he leaps and lopes and stretches his legs.
I am now on p. 118 of Andrew Klavan's memoir, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ. Thomas Nelson, 2016, 269 pp. As I reported a few days ago when I was on p. 18,
If you are a tough-minded American Boomer like me on a religious/spiritual quest you will probably be able to 'relate' very well to this book. A fortiori, if you are Jewish.
The book gets better and better especially for those of us who are (i) 'true' Boomers and (ii) were influenced by the Zeitgeist of the '60s. I divide the Boomer cohort (1946-1964) into the 'true' Boomers and the 'shadow' Boomers. You are one of the former if and only if you remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. Otherwise you are a 'shadow' boomer. Klavan, born in 1954, is a 'true' Boomer.
Mike Gilleland, who is my age and few years older than Klavan, told me some years back that the '60s passed him by. I would put it this way: many of those who came of age in the '60s were not of the '60s. It is like a Christian's being in the world but not of it. My point is that if you a 'true' Boomer of and not merely in the '60s, then Klavan's book is one you will want to read.
We were experience-hungry. We were in quest of the Real and thought that it could be found by a close grappling with the seedier and seamier sides of life. We took drugs, consorted with dead-end women, got drunk in flophouses with bums, worked dirty and dangerous jobs, left on 1200 mile trips with five dollars in the pocket returning with ten. This is what got a lot of us into a lot of trouble. Klavan:
Experience! That's what made a writer great, I thought. Harsh, brutal, savage Experience — I would have done anything to get my hands on some. But where? There were nothing but lawns and homes and normal families around me as far as the eye could see.
I didn't want to go to war. Those in the know had declared the Vietnam conflict corrupt and evil. [. . .]
Instead I took jobs whenever I could — not jobs that would teach me something or contribute to my future or career. No, I took jobs that I hoped would get me nearer to the grit of things: Experience. I was a gas jockey, a warehouseman, a truck driver, a construction worker, a delivery boy to some of the dodgier areas of New York City. After seventeen years in grassy peace and comfort, I was hungry for anything that looked like cruel reality.
What I wanted most, though, was to wander. Not to travel — to drift. [. . .] My romantic fantasies often involved a girl in some other town, not this town. A brief affair. A tearful goodbye. Then, babe, I've got to travel down that lonesome, dusty road. (116-117)
At this point Klavan might have referenced Dylan's Don't Think Twice with its talk of long, lonesome roads and the lines:
So long honey babe Where I'm bound, I cain't [sic] tell But goodbye is too good a word, babe So I'll just say fare thee well.
Robert Zimmerman, too, the middle-class Jewish son of a Hibbing, Minnesota appliance salesman. recoiled from the unreality of suburbia and hit the road, more or less.
Summing this up: reading Klavan's book I am reading about myself.
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) died 47 years ago yesterday, at the age of 47, his years dead now equaling his years alive. Here are some songs that refer to him and his work.
Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:
Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.
It was 46 years ago yesterday that I first began keeping a regular journal under the motto, nulla dies sine linea. Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals.
Why maintain a journal?
When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is still my thought. The unrecorded life is not worth living. For we have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living, and how examined could an undocumented life be?
The maintenance of a journal aids mightily in the project of self-individuation. Like that prodigious journal writer Søren Kierkegaard, I believe we are here to become actually the individuals we are potentially. Our individuation is not ready-made or given, but a task to be accomplished. The world is a vale of soul-making; we are not here to improve it, but to be improved by it.
Henry David Thoreau, another of the world's great journal writers, said in Walden that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I would only add that without a journal, one's life is one of quiet dissipation. One's life dribbles away, day by day, unreflected on, unexamined, unrecorded, and thus fundamentally unlived. Living, for us humans, is not just a biological process; it is fundamentally a spiritual unfolding. To mean anything it has to add up to something, and that something cannot be expressed with a dollar sign.
I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence. In my early twenties, I spoke of the supreme desideratum of a focused existence. What bothered me about the people around me, fellow students in particular, was the mere aestheticism of their existence: their aimless drifting hither and yon, their lack of commitment, their unseriousness, their refusal to engage the arduous task of self-definition and self-individuation, their willingness to be guided and mis-guided by social suggestions. In one's journal one collects and re-collects oneself; one makes war against the lower self and the forces of dispersion.
Another advantage to a journal and its regular maintenance is that one thereby learns how to write, and how to think. An unwritten thought is still a half-baked thought: proper concretion is achieved only by expressing thoughts in writing and developing them. Always write as well as you can, in complete sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors. Develop the sentences into paragraphs, and if the Muse is with you those paragraphs may one day issue in essays, articles, and chapters of books.
Finally, there is the pleasure of re-reading from a substantial temporal distance. Six years ago I began re-reading my journal in order, month by month, at a 40 year distance. So of course now I am up to October 1976. 40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.
I have been reading Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009. I gather that Pavese was obsessed life-long with the thought of suicide. Entry of 8 January 1938:
There is nothing ridiculous or absurd about a man who is thinking of killing himself being afraid of falling under a car or catching a fatal disease. Quite apart from the degree of suffering involved, the fact remains that to want to kill oneself is to want one's death to be significant, a supreme choice, a deed that cannot be misunderstood. So it is natural that no would-be suicide can endure the thought of anything so meaningless as being run over or dying of pneumonia. So beware of draughts and street corners. (71)
From the entry of 16 January 1938:
Here's the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition. (73)
The last line of his journal, 18 August 1950:
Not words. An act. I won't write any more. (350)
Nine days later Pavese killed himself in a Turin hotel room with an overdose of sleeping pills. Apparently because of the ending of his relationship with the American actress, Constance Dowling.
Who among us has not been played for a fool by the illusions of romantic love?
Our restless hearts seek from the finite what the finite cannot provide.
