Sage Advice – Page 16 – Maverick Philosopher

Pray to Pray Well

And this in two senses. Pray to become good at praying. And pray for assistance in getting good at it.

Advice from Erasmus

Enchiridion, p. 104:

Transfer your love to something permanent, something celestial, something incorruptible, and you will love more coolly this transitory and fleeting form of the body.

Beware ‘Illegal Use of Software’ E-Mail Scam

I just deleted a suspicious looking e-mail that claimed that I had to appear in court in Costa Mesa re: illegal use of software. I of course did not open the zip file that would have invited a trojan horse or some other piece of malware into my motherboard. One dead giveaway was that while Mesa is not far from here, Costa Mesa is in California. I am a native Californian. (Which fact implies, by the way, that I am a native American!)

It is hard to fool a philosopher. We are trained skeptics. It is especially hard to fool a philosopher who knows his Schopenhauer. Homo homini lupus, et cetera.

Never click on any link thoughtlessly. To be on the safe side, delete suspicious looking e-mail from the subject line. Don't even open them.

Another rule of mine is: Never allow your body or soul to be polluted. So if I get an e-mail with a nasty subject line, I delete it straightaway. If the subject line is OK but the first line is hostile or nasty, same thing. Go ahead, punk. Make my day.

More info here.

Companion post: Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

The Wise Live by Probabilities, not by Possibilities

The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the possible. It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry. But it is not probable.

Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out. People don't change. They are what they are. The few exceptions prove the rule. The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities. "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12) It is foolish to gamble with your happiness. We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose. So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that you will change her. You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.

The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.

Of Hurt and Humor

Don't tell a hurtful joke and expect the victim to appreciate the humor while abstracting from the hurtfulness.

Do Think Twice

Think twice about attacking a man who owns a printing press.

(I am alluding to a famous song in the title. Which?)

How Much Time Should be Spent on Philosophy?

Our Czech friend Vlastimil Vohanka writes,

You blogged that doing philosophy has great value in itself; even if philosophy is aporetic. But how often, or how long per day or month, should one devote to it? Doing philosophy seems (to me at least) to have diminishing returns, if philosophy is aporetic. Or has your experience been different?

My approach to philosophy could be called radically aporetic. Thus I hold not only that philosophy is best approached aporetically, via its problems, but also that its central problems are insoluble. Thus I tend, tentatively and on the basis of inductive evidence, to the view that the central problems of philosophy, while genuine and thus not amenable to Wittgensteinian or other dissolution, are true aporiai, impasses. It is clear that one could take a broadly aporetic approach without subscribing to the insolubility thesis. But I go 'whole hog.' Hence radically aporetic.

I won't explain this any further, having done so elsewhere, but proceed to V.'s question.

I take our friend to be asking the following. How much time ought one devote to philosophy if philosophy is its problems and they are insoluble? But there is a deeper and logically prior question lurking in the background: Why do philosophy at all if its problems are insoluble? What good is philosophy aporetically pursued?

1. It is good in that it conduces to intellectual humility, to an appreciation of our actual predicament in this life, which is one of profound ignorance concerning what would be most worth knowing if we could know it. The aporetic philosopher is a Socratic philosopher, one who knows what he knows and knows what he does not know. The aporetic philosopher is a debunker of epistemic pretense. One sort of epistemic pretense is that of the positive scientists who, succumbing to the temptation to wax philosophical, overstep the bounds of their competence, proposing bogus solutions to philosophical problems, and making incoherent assertions. They often philosophize without knowing it, and they do it incompetently, without self-awareness and self-criticism. I have given many examples of this in these pages. Thus philosophy as I conceive it is an important antidote to scientism. Scientism is an enemy of the humanities and I am a defender of the humanities.

There is also the threat emanating from political ideologies such as communism and leftism and Islamism and their various offshoots. The critique of these and other pernicious worldviews is a task for philosophy. And who is better suited for debunking operations than the aporetician?

2. Beyond its important debunking use, philosophy aporetically pursued has a spiritual point and purpose. If there are indeed absolutely insoluble problems, they mark the boundary of the discursive intellect and point beyond it. Immersion in philosophical problems brings the discursive mind to an appreciation of its limits and raises the question of what, if anything, lies beyond the limits and how one may gain access to it.

I take the old-fashioned view that the ultimate purpose of human life, a purpose to which all others must be subordinated, is to search for, and if possible, participate in the Absolute. There are several approaches to the Absolute, the main ones being philosophy, religion, and mysticism.

The radical aporetician in philosophy goes as far as he can with philosophy, but hits a dead-end, and is intellectually hnest enough to admit that he is at his wit's end. This motivates him to explore other paths to the Absolute, paths via faith/revelation and mystical intuition. The denigration of the latter by most contemporary philosophers merely shows how spiritually benighted and shallow they are, how historically uniformed, and in some cases, how willfully stupid.

But once a philosopher always a philosopher. So the radical aporetician does not cease philosophizing while exploring the other paths; he uses philosophy to chasten the excess of those other paths. And so he denigrates reason as little as he denigrates faith/revelation and mystical intuition. He merely assigns to reason its proper place.

Now to V.'s actual question. How much time for philosophy? A good chunk of every day. Just how much depending on the particular circumstances of one's particular life. But time must also be set aside for prayer and meditation, the reading of the great scriptures, and other religious/ mystical practices.

For one ought to be a truth-seeker above else. But if one is serious about seeking truth, then one cannot thoughtlessly assume that the only access to ultimate truth is via philosophy. A person who refuses to explore other paths is like the churchmen who refused to look through Galileo's telescope. They 'knew' that Aristotle had 'proven' the 'quintessential' perfection of celestial bodies, a perfection that would disallow any such 'blemishes' as craters. So they refused to look and see.

One of my correspondents is a retired philosophy of professor and a Buddhist. He maintains that one ought to spend as much time meditating as one spends on philosophy. So if one philosophizes for five hours per day, then one ought to meditate for five hours per day! A hard saying indeed!

On Her Deathbed: “I Fear that There is Nothing on the Other Side”

This from a correspondent:

My grandmother is on her deathbed. My mother flew out to Boston to be there with her when she dies. Of course my grandmother is putting up a good fight; however, they expected her to die yesterday. My mother had a conversation with her while she was lucid. She asked her, “Why are you fighting so hard? Do you fear something?”

My grandmother’s reply, “I fear that there is nothing on the other side.” Here is a woman who has spent eighty nine years of her life devoting herself to the [Catholic] church and her family. Now, when it comes down to death she is clinging on because her entire life is behind her and the only thing that she faces in front of her is the uncertainty of whether there is a heaven awaiting her in the coming days.

If you were there at my grandmother’s deathbed and she would convey to you her fears, what would you tell her?

I'm a philosopher, not a pastor, and what a dying nonphilosopher needs is pastoral care, not philosophical dialog. But if I were to play the pastor I would say something along the following lines.

"You have lived your long life faithfully and devotedly in the embrace of Holy Mother the Church. She has presided over central events in your life, your baptism, first communion, confirmation, and your marriage. She has provided guidance, moral instruction, comfort, and community as you have navigated life's difficulties and disappointments. She provided meaning and solace when your parents died, and your husband, and your many friends and relatives. If your faith was a living faith and not a convenience or a matter of social conformity, then from time to time you had your doubts. But through prayer and reflection you have repeatedly reaffirmed your faith. You faith was made deeper and truer by those doubts and their overcoming."

"I ask you now to recall those moments of calm reflection and existential lucidity, those moments when you were at your best physically, mentally, and spiritually. I ask you to recall them, and above all I ask you not to betray them now when you are weak. Do not allow the decisions and resolutions of your finest and and clearest hours to be taken hostage by doubts and fears born of weakness. Your weakness has called forth the most vicious attacks of the Adversary and his agents. You have lived in the faith and now you must remain true to a course of life judged right at the height of your powers. Your doubts are of the devil and they must be put aside. Pray, and remain true to a course judged right."

So that is what I would say to the old Irish Catholic woman on her deathbed. I would exhort her to remain true to a course judged right in the moments of her highest existential lucidity and to bring her life to a successful completion. The hour of death is not the time to grapple with the devil of doubt!

To myself and the others for whom the hora mortis is still a ways off, to those in the sunshine of their strength, physical and mental, I say the following. Now is the time to wrestle with doubts and either defeat them or succumb to them. Now is the time to get serious about The Last Things. It is far better to get serious about them before they get serious about you. Now is the time to face the reality of death without evasion and to prepare for a happy death. Now is the time to realize that you don't have all the time in the world, that as the Zen Master Dogen says, "Impermanence is swift." Now is the time to stop fooling yourself about how you are going to live forever. For "What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." (James 3, 14)

Related: Six Types of Death Fear

Three Possible Death Bed Thoughts

Accept Love, Accept Aversion

We must learn to accept people's love, good wishes, and benevolence as gifts without worrying whether we deserve these things or not, and without worrying whether we will ever be in a position to compensate the donors. Similarly, we must learn to accept people's hate and malevolence as a sort of reverse gratuitous donation whether we deserve them or not.

We are often unjustly loved and admired. So why should it bother us that we are often unjustly hated and contemned? Try to see the latter as balancing the former.

A Reason to Take Care of Oneself

It may be that moral and intellectual progress is possible only here. After death it may be too late, either because one no longer exists, or because one continues to exist but in a state that does not permit further progress.

It is foolish to think that believers in post-mortem survival could have no reason to value their physical health and seek longevity. Even a Platonist who believes that he is his soul and not a composite of soul and body has reason to prolong the discipline of the Cave. For it may be that the best progress or the only progress is possible only in the midst of its speluncar chiaroscuro.

Philosophia longa, vita brevis. It is precisely because philosophy is long that one ought to extend one's earthly tenure for as long as one can make progress intellectually and morally. And this, whether or not one has the hope that Vita mutatur non tollitur.

Two Cures for Envy

To feel envy is to feel diminished in one's sense of self-worth by the positive attributes or success or well-being of another. It is in a certain sense the opposite of Schadenfreude. The envier is pained by another's success or well-being, sometimes to the extent of wanting to destroy what the other has. The 'schadenfreudian,' to coin a word, is pleasured by another's failure or ill-being.

Envy is classified as one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and rightly so. Much of the mindless rage against Jews and Israel is the product of envy. Superiority almost always excites envy in those who, for whatever reason, and in whichever respect, are inferior.

This is why it is inadvisable to flaunt one's superiority and a good idea to keep it hidden in most situations. Don't wear a Rolex in public, wear a Timex. It is better to appear to be an average schmuck than a man of means. In some circumstances it is better to hide one's light under a bushel.

If greed is the vice of the capitalist, envy is the vice of the socialist. This is not to say that greed is a necessary product of capitalism or that envy is a necessary product of socialism. There was greed long before there was capitalism and envy long before there was socialism.

One cure for envy is moderate, the other radical. I recommend the moderate cure.

Consider the entire life of the person you envy, not just the possession or attribute or success that excites your envy. You say you want what he or she has? Well, do you want everything that comes with it and led up to it, the hard work, the trials and tribulations, the doubts and despairs and disappointments and disasters? Unless you are morally corrupt, your envious feelings won't be able to survive a wide-angled view.

The radical cure is to avoid all comparisons. Comparison is a necessary condition of envy. You can't envy me unless you compare yourself to me, noting what I have and am as compared to what you have and are. So if you never compare yourself to anyone, you will never feel envy for anyone.

The radical cure ignores the fact that not all comparisons are odious, that some are salutary. If I am your inferior in this respect or that, and I compare myself to you, I may come to appreciate where I fall short and what I could be if I were to emulate you.

That being said, "Comparisons are odious" remains a useful piece of folk wisdom. You can avoid a lot of unhappiness by appreciating what you have and not comparing yourself to others.

As for the bombshells at the top of the page, the blond is Jayne Mansfield and the other Sophia Loren. The picture illustrates the fact that, typically, envy involves two persons, one envying the other in respect of some attribute. Jealousy, however involves three persons. This why you shouldn't confuse envy with jealousy. This is jealousy, not envy:

Automotive Profiling

'Profiling' drives liberals crazy, which is a good reason to do more of it. No day without political incorrectness. Here is a form of profiling I engage in, and you should too.

You are on the freeway exercising due diligence. You are not drunk or stoned or yapping on a cell phone. You espy an automotively dubious vehicle up ahead, muddied, dented, with muffler about to fall off, and a mattress 'secured' to the roof.

Do you keep your distance? If you are smart, you do. But then you a profiling. You are making a judgment as to the relative likelihood of that vehicle's being the cause of an accident. You are inferring something about the sort of person that would be on the road in such a piece of junk. Tail light out? Then maybe brakes bad.

I don't need to tell you motorcyclists how important automotive profiling is.

You are doing right. You are engaging in automotive profiling. You are pissing off liberals. Keep it up and stay alive. We need more of your kind.

A Question About Marriage

For many years now I have been an occasional reader of your blog, and I greatly appreciate your insight on many subjects, particularly your criticism of the Left. I am, I hate to admit, an aspiring academic who is taking on enormous debt to finish a Ph.D. in sociology of religion, and am immersed in the poisonous Higher Ed world of the SIXHIRB musical litany, but that is another story for another time.

My question concerns choosing a wife: Can the marriage between a non-religious person and a religious person be successful and a happy state of affairs?

I am an incorrigible INFP, and I thought your logical precision and holistic perception as an INTP would aid my thinking process, which is mostly intuition/feeling. You have been married quite awhile, and I respect that greatly. You say that your wife is religious, a practicing Catholic, and that you believe that to be a good thing. I agree, and thus I am in this dilemma.

My Romance Story:

I come from a devout Mexican Catholic family from Texas, with a very religiously devout mother who is never found without a rosary, and I consider myself 'religious' and Catholic, i.e. I go to Mass every Sunday, I pray, I believe, I read the Bible, and so forth. Now, I am certainly not a saint, as the rest of my story will show.

I met, during a study abroad this year, a stunning young woman who works for the United Nations. One night, our date over red wine at a cafe quickly escalated into dozens of nights of passionate, indulgent sex, and then into several trips throughout Europe in which we brought our negligent sexual passion into the creaky beds of many hotels. Sex crazed, we were.

Now that I am back in the States for the holidays, free from the physical presence and temptations of the Woman, the big question of our future is at hand. Should we continue or not?

We have been dating now for five months, and she is wonderful in all things, successful, an excellent conversationalist, and best of all, not a feminist! But, she has no faith, does not go to church, and largely thinks religion is oppressive, and most painfully for me, she does not believe in Christianity. I would also add she is more of an agnostic than a militant atheist, since she believes in some vague afterlife, and respects my religious beliefs.

'Listen to your heart' is what they say, but my heart is confused at the moment, and the damned sex monkey does not help. The Woman is wonderful, but long term speaking, once the infatuation is over through the sobering, cold water of marriage, will religion be the stone upon which we stumble? Will I be happier instead with a practicing Catholic woman? What will my Mexican-Catholic mom say when I bring home a non-believer? She won't like it, that's for sure.

In my opinion, I am skeptical that it will work long term, but she thinks there is no problem. What do you say?

Your question is: Can the marriage between a non-religious person and a religious person be successful and a happy state of affairs? My answer is: Yes it can, but it is not likely. And in a matter as important to one's happiness as marriage, and in a social climate as conducive to marital break-up as ours is, it is foolish to take unnecessary risks. I would say that career and marriage, in that order, are the two most important factors in a person's happiness. You are on track for happiness if you can find some occupation that is personally satisfying and modestly remunerative and a partner with whom you can enjoy an ever-deepening long-term relationship. Religion lies deep in the religious person; for such a person to have a deep relationship with an irrreligious person is unlikely. A wise man gambles only with what he can afford to lose; he does not gamble with matters pertaining to his long-term happiness.

So careful thought is needed. Now the organ of thought is the head, not the heart. And you have heard me say that every man has two heads, a big one and a little one, one for thinking and one for linking. The wise man thinks with his big head. Of course, it would be folly to marry a woman to whom one was not strongly sexually attracted, or a woman for whom one did not feel deep affection. But a worse folly would be allow sex organs and heart to suborn intellect. By all means listen to your heart, but listen to your (big) head first. Given how difficult successful marriage is, one ought to put as much as possible on one's side. Here are some guidelines that you violate at your own risk:

Don't marry outside your race
Don't marry outside your religion
Don't marry outside your social class
Don't marry outside your generational cohort
Don't marry outside your educational level
Don't marry someone whose basic attitudes and values are different about, e.g., money
Don't marry someone with no prospects
Don't marry a needy person or if you are needy. A good marriage is an alliance of strengths
Don't marry to escape your parents
Don't marry young
Don't imagine that you will be able to change your partner in any significant way.

The last point is very important. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out. People don't change. They are what they are. The few exceptions prove the rule. The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities. "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12) As I said, it is foolish to gamble with your happiness. We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose. So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that you will change her. You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.

There is also the business about right and wrong order. Right Order: Finish your schooling; find a job that promises to be satisfying over the long haul and stick with it; eliminate debts and save money; get married after due consultation with both heads, especially the big one; have children.

Wrong Order: Have children; get married; take any job to stay alive; get some schooling to avoid working in a car wash for the rest of your life.

I think it is also important to realize that romantic love, as blissful and intoxicating as it is, is mostly illusory. I wouldn't want to marry a woman I wasn't madly (just the right word) in love with, but I also wouldn't want to marry a woman that I couldn't treasure and admire and value after the romantic transports had worn off, as they most assuredly will. Since you are a Catholic you may be open to the Platonic-Augustinian-Weilian thought that what we really want no woman or man can provide. Our hearts cannot be satisfied by any of our our earthly loves which are but sorry substitutes for the love of the Good.

Related: Al-Ghazzali on Choosing a Wife

It Pays to Publish, but Don’t Pay to Publish

I am regularly solicited by Open Journal of Philosophy for article submissions. The e-mails never reveal the dirty little secret behind publishing scams ventures like this, namely, the charges levied against authors. Poke around a bit, however, and you will find this page:

Article Processing Charges

Open Journal of Philosophy is an Open Access journal accessible for free on the Internet. At Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP), we guarantee that no university library or individual reader will ever have to buy a subscription or pay any pay-per-view fees to access articles in the electronic version of journal. There is hence no income at SCIRP that comes from selling any forms of subscriptions to this electronic version of journal or from pay-per-view fees. In order to cover the costs induced by editorial procedures, routine operation of the journals, processing of manuscripts through peer-reviews, and the provision and maintenance of a publication infrastructure, the journal charges article processing fee that can normally be defrayed by the author's institution or research funds.

Manuscript Page (as per the typeset proof)	Article Processing Charges
Paper within ten printed pages	$600
Additional page charge above ten	$50 for each additional page

So it would cost you a grand to publish an 18 page paper, and a minumum of $600 to publish anything. And who reads this journal anyway? If you need to publish for tenure or promotion, then you need to publish in a decent journal. And if you publish to be read by people worth interacting with, ditto.

Besides, it is not that difficult to publish for free in good outlets. If I can do it, so can you. Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications. My passion for philosophy far outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places. When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work. But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals.

Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head.

1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it. Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 70-90 % that get rejected.

2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic.

3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.

4. Advance a well-defined thesis.

5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for. Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a popular philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referrees.

6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal. Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.

7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof. Never protest editorial decisions. You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink. You have no right to have your paper accepted. You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys network. In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.

Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.