Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Questers and Other Oddballs

  • Mysticism with Monica

    St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of…

  • Spiritual Mountebanks

    The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh  is a good…

  • The Lure of the Good

    Some of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience.  The love of truth and the love of…

  • Richard Peck, Seeker of Lost Gold

    (A re-post, with corrections and additions, from 13 January 2010) Living as I do in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains, I am familiar with the legends and lore of the Lost Dutchman Gold Mine. Out on the trails or around town I sometimes run into those characters called Dutchman Hunters. One I came close to…

  • Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

    Thomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire…

  • The Philosopher as Luftmensch

    Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Penguin, 2002), p. 11: Philosophy today gets no respect. Many scientists use the term as a synonym for effete speculation. When my colleague Ned Block told his father that he would major in the subject, his father's reply was "Luft!" — Yiddish for "air." And then there's…

  • If it is all just a tale told by an idiot . . .

    . . .why begrudge ordinary folk their retreat into the warm bosom of  average everydayness (Heidegger's durchschnittliche Alltaeglichkeit) with its vapid socializing?  I do not begrudge them, nor do I try to change them. But there is something base and contemptible about a life without questioning and seeking, a life sunk in divertissement. Here is…

  • A Couple of Venice Characters I Met While Working for Manpower

    Bill Keezer e-mails re: my  Manpower post: I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I…

  • The Beats’ Holy Grail

    The Joan Anderson letter.  Not to be missed by Kerouac aficionados. (HT: the indefatigable and ever-helpful Dave Lull) Related: Who is Dave Lull? Neal Cassady (on the right) as brakeman for Southern Pacific Railroad:  

  • The Young and the Reckless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan

    To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher  McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan: Asked why they had…

  • Spiritual Mountebanks

    The world is full of hustlers and charlatans who prey upon spiritual seekers. One ought to be suspicious of anyone who claims enlightenment or special powers. The acid test, perhaps, is whether they demand money or sex for their services. If they do, run away while holding onto your wallet. 'Bhagwan Shree' Rajneesh , now the…

  • More on Meditation: Worldling and Quester

    The New Zealander to whom I replied in Impediments to Meditation responds: . . . you rightly sense that there was a certain selfish ambition in my turning to meditation. Though following your post Meditation: What and Why, my stated ambition was to achieve what you called "tranquility". To use your terminology from the article, I grew…

  • The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre

    Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list.  The Orgasm book did not.  Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my…

  • Even Misfits Find Their ‘Fit’

    I have a longstanding interest in 'marginal types': the characters, oddballs, misfits, Thoreauvian different-drummers, wildmen, mavericks, weirdos, those who find an adjustment to life, if they find it at all, at the margins, on the fringes of respectability, near the edge of things. Those who were not stamped out as by a cookie cutter, but put…

  • Two George Molnars

    Here: Meet George Molnar. Not the witty cartoonist, but the other one: a thwarted philosopher whose wild life finally found some meaning after his death. Did you think there was only one George Molnar – the witty and urbane Hungarian whose cartoons graced the pages of the Herald for many years? Well, think again. To…