Category: Sage Advice

Travel: More Than Ever a Fool’s Paradise

Kim du Toit:

I’m not sure I want to travel internationally again.

Me too. Been there, done that.  One of his reasons:

. . . we all know how the Filth in Britishland regard the matter of self-defense Over There.  Nothing puts a damper on the travel experience like having to explain to some judge why you didn’t want to just let the little choirboy take your property and shake your head sorrowfully at your loss.  That you applied your walking-stick to the little shit’s cranium (in lieu of having the old 1911 at hand) would no doubt land you in Serious Trouble, just as your attitude to the cops being more or less on the criminal’s side rather than on yours might also result in the cop’s uniform being ruined by the flow of blood (his).

To which he adds:

And then there’s this little nugget, from one of my most-favored places on the planet:

Most famous districts in Vienna are in the heart of the city and during summer or at Christmas season they become overcrowded, which can lead to pickpocketing, mugging and even terrorist attacks.  In these areas frequented by tourists, bus and train stations, people around you need to be carefully watched and your possessions should be kept close to you.

WTF?  Now add to that the chance that some “migrant” takes offense that your female companion doesn’t have her head covered to his satisfaction… do you see where I’m going with this?

I suggest that we aging patriots who have done our fair share of international travel add to our MAGA lists homeland travel and blowing our excess bucks here. Can one ever get sick of Route 66?

To the young, however, I say: get out there and take the risks.  See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won't regret your adventures. Then you can gloat, "Been there, done that." Forever after you will enjoy the having done what you now longer would want to do.

I dilate further in Three Reasons to Stay Home at Substack.  The reasons? One's Emersonian, the second's Pascalian, and the third is of my own invention.

Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and the Will to Believe

My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".
 
Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not…." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?
Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote  (and to which I now add bolding):
. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking.  [. . .]  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  
 
Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc.  But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important.  What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.) 
 
You have read Sextus Empiricus and know  something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise.  In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed.  But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus.  One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.)  With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it.  We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.
 
As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it.  (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)
 
Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.
 
I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew.  I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be.  One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.  
 
It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part.  You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days;  if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to  cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc.  You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse.  That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.
 
Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult. 
 
I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this  world is the creation of  an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.'  Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich?  And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil.  You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument'  is one way.
 
This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.
 
Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation. 
 
I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens,  I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas.  In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle.  Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness.  We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision — a cutting off of ratiocination — is will-driven
You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?
 
You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now.  "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.
 
So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is  “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit.  Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.  
 
It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,
. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."

Heaven and Hell: the Looming of the Last Things at the End of the Trail

A friend of mine, nearing the end of the trail, afflicted in body and soul, writes:
 
A question, my friend. Can you imagine someone on his deathbed saying, "Well I never really believed I'd meet Jesus, but the possible reward (eternal salvation) was so great that I was persuaded to be a believer so long as the probability of salvation was not effectively zero. I can't say I really believe in Jesus, but the possible rewards of believing are so great I had to buy the ticket." A decision-theoretic argument for belief that some think can made stronger by also postulating Hell (eternal damnation). If I don't believe, I risk Hell, even if I think the probability of that is very small.
 
Well, the Hell branch of the argument has the problem that eternal damnation is incompatible with a just and benevolent deity. Way too many people are sent to Hell for merely not believing (especially children). So what about Heaven? Can a just and benevolent God reward me with eternal happiness just for believing in (and maybe worshipping) him? Just as the threatened punishment seems totally disproportionate, so the promised reward seems "too good to be true" (in other words, a scam).
 
Not necessarily MY view of Heaven, but one that I hear often.
 
As for hell, I tend to agree with my friend.
 
Suppose God exists and there is an afterlife the quality of which depends on how one behaves here below.  Suppose that the justice which is largely absent here will be meted out there.  And suppose we take as a moral axiom that the punishment must fit the crime.  The question then arises: what crime or series of crimes by any human being could merit everlasting post-mortem punishment?  I would say that no crime or series of crimes would merit such punishment.  Thus it is offensive to my moral sense that a just God would punish everlastingly a human evildoer. 
 
Two qualifications. (1) It is reasonably presumed to be  otherwise with angelic evildoers such as Lucifer, so let's leave them out of the discussion.   (2) It is also reasonably presumed to be otherwise if a human, whether evildoer or not, wanted to maintain himself in a state of rebellion against God, after coming face-to-face with God, in which case my moral sense would have no problem with God's granting the rebel his wish and maintaining him in a state of everlasting exclusion from the divine light and succor.  Candidate rebels: Christopher Hitchens, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Josef Stalin.

Suppose that, after death, Stalin sees the errors of his ways and desires to come into right relation with God.  He must still be punished for his horrendous crimes. Surely justice demands that much.  What I fail to grasp, however, is how justice could demand that Stalin be punished everlastingly or eternally (if you care to distinguish eternity from everlastingness) for a finite series of finite crimes. 

Thomas Aquinas disagrees:

The magnitude of the punishment matches the magnitude of the sin. Now a sin that is against God is infinite; the higher the person against whom it is committed, the graver the sin—it is more criminal to strike a head of state than a private citizen—and God is of infinite greatness. Therefore an infinite punishment is deserved for a sin committed against Him. (Summa Theologica, Ia2ae. 87, 4.)

Some years back, my friend floated the suggestion that we are in hell right now. This can't be right, for reasons I won't go into. But it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978,  see in particular, ch. 10. "Reincarnation as Purgatory.")

As for heaven, my friend asks,

Can a just and benevolent God reward me with eternal happiness just for believing in . . . him? Just as the threatened punishment seems totally disproportionate, so the promised reward seems "too good to be true" . . . .

The question is essentially this:  If justice rules out everlasting, 'infinite,' punishment for finite crimes committed by miserably limited humans, does it also rule out everlasting reward for finite good deeds? If the threatened punishment is totally disproportionate, is the promised reward also totally disproportionate?

To sharpen it a bit further, let's translate the interrogative into a declarative:  If no everlasting punishment is justified, then no everlasting reward is either.  If that is the claim, then I would respond by saying that the Beatific Vision is not a reward  for good things we do here below, but the state intended for us all along.  It is something like a birthright or an inheritance.  One doesn't earn one's inheritance; it is a gift, not a reward.   But one can lose it.  Similarly with the Beatific Vision.  One cannot earn it, and one does not deserve it.  But one can lose it.

It is also worth noting that 'totally disproportionate' and 'too good to be true' differ in sense.  The visio beata is admittedly totally disproportionate as a reward  for the good things that we wretched mortals do, but that is not to say that it is too good to be true.  If it is true that our ultimate felicity is participation in the divine life, and true that this participation is open to us, as a  real possibility and a divine gift, then that is the way things are. How could it be too good to be true?  Whatever good thing exists, precisely because it exists ,cannot be too good to exist.

Concluding Existential-Practical  Postscript

What I really want to say to my friend is that, while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane.  In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it.  The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking. The 'presuppers' are out to lunch, to mention one bunch of those who fabricate a fake certainty for themselves to assuage their overwhelming doxastic security needs. And the same goes for the Biblical inerrantists.  The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.  

In my own case, I have had enough mystical, religious, aesthetic, moral, and paranormal experiences to convince me to take the Unseen Order with utmost seriousness — and I do. And so that's the way I live, devoting most of my time to prayer, meditation-contemplation, lectio divina, study of the great classics of philosophy and theology, moderate ascesis, such good works as befit my means and station, and writing philosophy, which I view as itself a spiritual practice.  I mean: what could be a better use of a life than to try to ascend to the Absolute by all possible routes?  But this won't make any sense to you unless you perceive this world, the Seen Order, to be a vanishing quantity devoid of ultimate reality and value, and our fleeting lives in it unsatisfactory and ultimately meaningless, if they end in annihilation.  

So I say to my friend: you are on your own. Going to a church and participating in external rites and rituals won't do you much if any good, nor will confessing your sins to a pedophile priest. (Ex opere operato is on my list of topics to discuss.) There is no need to go outside yourself; truth dwells in the inner man. Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi. In interiore homine habitat veritas. (Augustine) Review your life and try to recall those moments and those experiences which seemed most revelatory of the Real, and live and then die in accordance with them. 

In the face of temptation, ask yourself: How do I want death to find me? In what state?  The lures of this world are alluring indeed, and it is well-nigh impossible to resist them, as witness the corruption of (some of) the cardinals who voted on the new pope. You have a sense of the Unseen Order if you sense that temptation ought to be resisted.  Whence the bindingness of that Ought? Whence the vocation to a Higher Life?  Are they just illusions of brain chemistry? Could be! You decide!

I myself have decided that The Greatest Temptation must be resisted.

One more point about church-going. It may be necessary for those excessively social animals lacking inner directedness, but I'd say that Matthew 6:6 hits the mark: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)

But I don't want to deny that special places, some of them churches, have an aura that aids and may even induce contemplative repose.  I recall a time in Venice, Italy when I entered an ancient and nondescript little church and spent a few moments there alone. Upon exiting, I was unusually calm and collected.  My girlfriend at the time, noticing the transformation,  remarked, "You ought to go to church more often." The following, though AI-generated, is spot on. 

Aura of Places

An aura of a place can be described as a distinctive atmosphere or feeling that seems to surround and emanate from it. This term is often used metaphorically to convey the unique quality or vibe that a location gives off. For example, a place might have an aura of mystery, tranquility, or invincibility.

In spiritual contexts, auras are thought to be energy fields surrounding all living and non-living things, including places. These fields can be influenced by the emotions, thoughts, and experiences of those who frequent the location.

 

Look on the Bright Side!

The world is rife with pathologies of all sorts: spiritual, psychological, moral, and medical. But it's all grist for the thinker's mill. That is the bright side. One can allow oneself to become depressed at how pathetic we all are — in different ways and to different degrees — or one can cultivate wonder at our strange predicament and get to work understanding it, thereby squeezing the joys of theory from practical misery.

Biometric Authentication

I use multifactor authentication for access to many of the sites I visit, but conservatives are cautious by nature. So I am not inclined to spring for biometric authentication, some of the hazards of which are discussed here.  The alacrity with which the young adopt the latest trends is evidence of their inherent excess of trust, lack of critical caution, and in many, out-and-out pollyannishness. "Many companies and organizations are implementing biometric authentication for enhanced security and convenience, with deployment rising to 79% from 27% in just a few years." (AI-generated claim) 

In tech we trust? What, me worry? What could possibly go wrong?

Convenience? Whose?

Future shock is upon us in this brave new world. I allude to the title of two books you should have read by now.

Practice situational awareness across all sectors and in every situation.

It’s Later than You Think

A Substack protreptic. Pithy and pointed. No TLDR excuses accepted.

In rhetoric, protrepsis (Ancient Greek: πρότρεψις) and paraenesis (παραίνεσις) are two closely related styles of exhortation that are employed by moral philosophers. While there is a widely accepted distinction between the two that is employed by modern writers, classical philosophers did not make a clear distinction between the two, and even used them interchangeably. (Wikipedia)

Wrong to Believe on Insufficient Evidence? Contra Clifford

Is it wrong always and everywhere for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence? (W. K. Clifford) If so, the young would never be right to believe in the realization of their potentials. But they are right so to believe. If they didn't, none of them would ever have 'made it.' But many of us did.  We made it, but only  by believing in ourselves well beyond the evidence available. Give it your best shot, but don't piss and moan if it comes to nought.  Take another shot, a different one.

For a development of this theme, see Is it Sometimes Rational to Believe on Insufficient Evidence?

Idle Talk and Idle Thought

If you aim to avoid idle talk, then you ought also aim to avoid idle thought. A maxim to mind:

Avoid the near occasion of useless conversation.

This applies both to conversation with others and with oneself. The latter is avoided by internal situational awareness which is classically enjoined by:

Guard the mind.

Not easy. It is easy to avoid others, but not easy to avoid one's garrulous self.

How Much Bad Behavior Ought We Tolerate from Our ‘Friends’?

The following arrived on Christmas Eve:

Apatheia, Ataraxia, and Holiday Spirit

I was wondering if you had any advice for those struggling to maintain their Stoic calm as Christmas approaches. Alas, I am one of those souls this year. I will not burden you with the details, but it seems the holidays also bring out many of our dear friends’ struggles with booze. To wit, a friend of nearly 20 years began a bender about a week ago that culminated this morning with his saying to me, this morning, some things that no self-respecting man could forgive in one to be labeled a friend, especially when one has had to forgive booze related outbursts several times before.

So, it seems the modifiers, not the nouns, are the functional words in phrases like “old friends” and this friendship will now be over. I have consulted Seneca on friendship and anger, and I recall Cicero’s advice, but I fear the philosophers offer little in the way of immediate comfort as I accept this loss (and also reflect on what the whiskey demons bring out in myself). I expect you must be inundated with mail this time of year, so know that I appreciate your reading this message. If you have any advice, or perhaps a reading suggestion, I’d appreciate the time you took to do so very much. Merry Christmas!

There are two main topics here, interpersonal relationships and the role of alcohol.

How you negotiate interpersonal relations depends on your psychological type.  I'm an inner-directed man in roughly David Riesman's sense, who knows what he is about and what he wants to achieve. So for me, cost-benefit analysis comes into play when I choose whom to associate with and whom to avoid.  Will contact with this person help me achieve my goals or will it hinder me? Any relationship with anyone incurs costs and provides benefits. So I calculate whether the benefits will outweigh the costs,  given my goals. To do this requires self-knowledge. So that is where you must start. Know thyself! But it also requires knowledge of the people you will be associating with.   Some people are trouble. You can't help them, but they can harm you. Why are you associating with them? For literary purposes? Because you foolishly overestimate your healing powers?  Christ hung out with sinners. But he had special powers, to put it mildly.

On the basis of the slim facts presented, I say that my reader ought to break off contact with his drunkard 'friend.' Break off a 20-year friendship? Well, was it a friendship of affinity or a friendship of propinquity?  I won't pause to explain what I mean; you should be able to catch my meaning.  If there was a deep bond, and the guy hit hard times and sought solace in the bottle, then that puts a different complexion on things. Maybe my reader should try to help his friend.  There is a difference between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic: every (unreformed) alky is a heavy drinker but not conversely.  If the friend is an alky, it would probably be best to deep-six him, even if he is 'on the wagon.' It's a good bet he will fall off.  As a general rule, people do not change. WYSIWYG! And will continue to get.  Schopenhauer spoke of the immutability of character, with only slight exaggeration. The italicized rule is a very important bit of life wisdom. For example, don't marry someone with the thought that you will change him or her. That way lies misery. To my reader, I say: There is no point in wasting time with some guy whose whole life is dominated by the project of climbing out of a hole he  himself freely dug with a cocktail glass. The same goes for those who dig their holes and graves with fork and spoon or syringe.

But again, it all depends.  Suppose the guy is not an alky. Is my reader single or married? If married, does he have children? Would you want your wife and children to come into contact with a drunkard? Presumably not.

And if you associate with drunks, are you not giving tacit moral approval to their immoral behavior? It is not morally wrong to to have a drink, but it is morally wrong to get drunk, even if you harm no one but yourself. I'll spare you the argument, but invite you think about it.  

My reader mentions Stoicism. Here is a brief summary of the Stoic attitude:

There are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president on down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power.

The Stoics had an important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. I saw that I was allowing the negative thoughts to arise and that I had the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the mental disturbance was my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused the disturbance to vanish.

The Stoics discerned the mind's power to regulate itself and master its thoughts, rather than be mastered by them. They saw that, within certain limits, we create our own reality. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves happy. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed — assuming that one is willing to practice the Stoic precepts rather than merely read about them.

Stoic calm is not that hard to maintain as long as one avoids the near occasion of unnecessary vexation.  Here then is a further reason for my reader to break with his 'friend.'

Coming back to the question of self-knowledge, I recommend that my reader consult Karen Horney (pronounced like horn-eye, not like whore-knee). I don't know if she is much read these days but her books are well-written and full of insight. Here is a taste:

Interpersonal Strategies of Defense

According to Horney, people try to cope with their basic anxiety by adopting a compliant or self-effacing solution and moving toward people, by adopting an aggressive or expansive solution and moving against people, or by becoming detached or resigned and moving away from people. Healthy people move appropriately and flexibly in all three directions, but in neurotic development these moves become compulsive and indiscriminate. Each solution involves a constellation of behavior patterns and personality traits, a conception of justice, and a set of beliefs about human nature, human values, and the human condition. Each also involves a "deal" or bargain with fate in which obedience to the dictates of that solution is supposed to be rewarded.

I would only add that while healthy people are able to behave in all three ways (compliant, expansive, detached) as circumstances require, one can be psychologically healthy and favor one of the interpersonal strategies over the other two. Those of us who resonate to the Stoic teaching are most likely to favor the detachment strategy and move away from people when their bad behavior erupts, by either minimizing one's contact with them, or cutting them off entirely.  I have done both. Pre-emptive measures are also to be considered. We were invited to Christmas dinner and to a New Year's Eve party, get-togethers in both cases organized by my wife's friends. I told the wife  I would attend one event but not both.  I thereby limited the threat to my apatheia and ataraxia.

Finally, having just revealed myself as an introvert and an advocate of detachment (better: non-attachment), I now say to my reader that he should consider who is now giving him advice and factor that in when considering how much of it he should take.

Post-finally, here is a short video clip from Tombstone in which the bad behavior of Johnny Ringo is excused by Curly Bill on the ground that it is the booze in Johnny that is talking.  The relevance to my reader's problem is obvious.

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?

Worldly Success and Spiritual Growth

Worldly success can easily ensnare, and most will fall into the trap. But for some, worldly success has the opposite effect: it reveals the vanity, the emptiness, of worldly success, and thus subserves spiritual advance.  One is therefore well-advised to strive for a modicum of success as defined in the worldly terms of property and pelf, name and fame, status and standing, love and sex, the pleasures of the flesh. 

The successful are in a position to see through the goods of this life, having tasted them; the failures are denied this advantage, and may persist in the belief that if only they could get their hands on some property and pelf, etc. then they would achieve the ultimate in happiness.

A corollary is that a young person should not be too quick to renounce the world. Experience it first to appreciate the reasons for renunciation.  Contemptus mundi is best acquired by mundane experience, not by reading books about it  or following the examples of others. Better a taste of the tender trap before joining the Trappists. (Have I spoiled this little homily with the concluding cleverness?)

A Salutary Spiritual Exercise for the Month of Gratitude

November is gratitude month around here. One way to start the day right is by finding five things to be grateful for. Example:

  • I slept well.
  • All household systems are fully operational.
  • The cats are happy and healthy.
  • And so is the wife. ("Happy wife, happy life.")
  • Nature is regular and reliable: coffee goes down, thoughts percolate up, this day, every day. The sun also rises.