Category: Sage Advice

Epicurus Has Some Sex Advice for General Petraeus, et al.

Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:

I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb   well-established customs, harm any
one of your neighbors, injure  your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked  by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets  any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not  receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)

Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the  centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise — except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.

Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath  no fury like a woman scorned."

More recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career.  Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.

And let's not forget Eliot Spitzer and now Generals Petraeus and Allen.

This litany of career-ending, family-destroying woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not
Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks. 

Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the  earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman."

And conversely.

A Reader Wants an Introduction to Philosophy

M. T. writes,

I've followed your blog for a few months now.  I feel compelled to say thank you for the content of your posts.  They are usually trenchant, always interesting, and occasionally they lead me to delve into topics and categories that I have never explored previously.

Some background: I'm an Arabic linguist for the Navy.  I currently live in Georgia, but was born and reared in Florida.  I pretty much agree with everything you've said on political topics.

A question for you: I didn't study philosophy, but am extremely well read in history and politics (particularly ancient history).  You obviously were a academician, but if I wanted to get grounded in the current state of philosophy, where do I start?  The field is so vast, so opaque and confusing.  Am I better off just reading Plato and perhaps William James?

Again, thank you for a wonderful blog.  I always try to learn something new every day, and your writing makes it easier for me to accomplish that task.

I of course appreciate the kind words, and the regular arrival of letters like this in my mail box is emolument aplenty for my pro bono efforts.

First of all, I wouldn't worry too much about the current state of philosophy because much that is current is ephemeral and even foolish.  I would concern myself more with an introduction to the perennial problems of philosophy.  To understand the sometimes strange things that philosophers say one  must first understand the questions that perplexed them and the problems they were trying to solve.  With that in mind I recommend two short well-written books, the first from 1912 and the second from 1987:  Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy; Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?  I commend the following advice to you from p. 4 of Nagel's book:

The center of philosophy lies in certain questions which the reflective human mind finds naturally puzzling, and the best way to begin the study of philosophy is to think about them directly.  Once you've done that, you are in a better position to apprecdiate the work of others who have tried to solve the same problems.

Sage advice.  There is no point in studying philosophy unless there are some questions that 'bug' you and to which you want and need answers. Think about them directly, and try to answer them for yourself.  Then test your answers against the answers more experienced thinkers have proposed.

For example, suppose you are interested in the question of the freedom of the will.  Formulated as a problem, it is the problem of reconciling the freedom of the will presupposed by ascriptions of moral responsibility with the apparent determinism of the natural world of which the agent is a part.  So you think about it. You don't get very far on your own, so you seek help.  You turn to Schopenhauer's magisterial On the Freedom of the Will for orientation.  You get that and more: data, distinctions, the history of the problem and the various solutions, and Schopenhauer's own solution.  And so it goes.

The ComBox is open in case anyone wants to suggest titles for my reader. 

Why Keep a Journal?

It was 42 years ago today that I first began keeping a regular journal. 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. 


Thoreau journalHenry 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, 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.  Two 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 1972.  40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.

A Test for Marital Compatibility: Travelling Together

DinerI just heard Dennis Prager say on his nationally syndicated radio show that travelling  together is a good test for marital compatibility. Sage advice.

Long before I had heard of Prager I subjected my bride-to-be to such a test.  I got the idea from the delightful 1982 movie The Diner.  One of the guys who hung out at the diner tested for marital suitability by administering a football quiz to his fiance.  That gave me the idea of taking my future wife on a cross-country trip from Cleveland, Ohio to Los Angeles, California in my Volkswagen bus.  This was not a camper bus, but a stripped-down model, so the amenities were meager-to-nonexistent.  I threw a mattress in the back, made some curtains, and hit the road.  That was in the summer of '82. The soundtrack from The Diner was one of the tapes we listened to on the way. I recall reading the Stephen King novel Cujo about the dog from hell when my inamorata drove.

We slept mainly at rest stops.  I had an old .38 Special with me for protection, which fortunately proved unnecessary.  What did we do for showers?  I don't think we took any.  We cleaned up at the rest stop facilities like true vagabundos and moved on.

One dark and starry night I pulled off Interstate 10 in  some desolate stretch of the Mojave desert. Wifey-to-be was scared but it was a memorable moonless star-studded night.  We made it to L. A., saw family and friends, then headed up old U. S. 395 along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada to Bishop, Cal,  where we visited some more of my people, then north to Reno, Nevada where we hooked up with I-80 and  pointed the old bus East.

Dear one took the rigors of that  trip 30 years ago like a trouper, and passed the test with flying colors.  We got married the following summer and remain happily married 29 summers later.

When I told the story to a feminazi some years back she gave me a hard and disapproving look.  She didn't like that I imposed a marital compatibility test upon my lady love.  Bitch!  So here's another bit of free and friendly advice. Marry an angel, never a bitch.  Life's enough of a bitch. You don't need to marry one.  Does your belllicosity need an outlet?  Fight outside the home.  Home should be an oasis of peace and tranquillity.

So once again I agree with Prager.  Check her or him out on the road before heading for the altar. 

A Letter to Young Voters

I would quibble with parts of this piece  by Dennis Prager, but it is worth reading.   Excerpt:

Young people believe that when the government gives more money and benefits to more people it helps them. This is naïve. As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy. Every study shows that people who earn money are far happier than people who win many millions of dollars in a lottery. Happiness is earned, not given.

Here’s another: Young people are far more likely to believe that world peace is achieved when nations lay down their arms and talk through their differences. But this has never been the case. Of course, good nations stay peaceful when they talk to other good nations. Bad nations — that is, nations ruled by evil men — are never dissuaded from making war by talk. They are dissuaded only by good nations having more arms than they do. That is why the Marine Corps has done so much more for world peace than the Peace Corps.

If you want to vote Democrat, don’t do so because that is the party that cares more for the poor and the hungry. We older conservatives (and young ones, too) care just as much for the poor. But after living a life of seeing the naïve only make things worse for the poor, we are no longer seduced by caring rhetoric. We are seduced by policies based on the awesome American value of individual initiative combined with liberty to create and retain wealth. It’s now called “conservatism.”

And, finally, you should know this: The “idealists” that many of you find appealing are the ones leaving you with a national debt that will render it very difficult for you to attain the material quality of life that these people have had.

Will millenials be persuaded?  Not likely.

Widely-Read or Well-Read?

This from a reader:

Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book, pointed out that being widely-read does not mean one is well-read. I've enjoyed reading some of your old posts about reading and studying, so I wanted to know your opinion on this matter.

Should I aim to read a lot of books? Or is it better to read and reread a few good books? I know some people say one should read widely but read good books deeply. But I've found that a hard balance to maintain. For example, deeply reading an 800-page selection of Aquinas's writings several times would consume almost all of my reading for the next 1-2 months. Also, it's hard for me to switch gears, you might say. If I'm accustomed to reading most of my books through quickly without pausing much to think, then I easily fall into that mode of reading when I'm trying to read deeply.

I imagine you would have some interesting thoughts on this topic, since you have a few decades of reading behind you. Which type of reading benefited you the most? If you could go back and change what you read and how you read during your decades of scholarship, what would you change?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

I will begin by reproducing a couple of the paragraphs from A Method of Study:

Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan.  Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them.  I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading.  Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a fine cigar . . . .

 If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought
to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.  This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.  The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it.  Here is where blogging can be useful.  Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.                          

To the foregoing, I would add, first of all, the magnificent observation of Schopenhauer: "Forever reading, never read."  If you want to be read, then you must write.  And even if you don't want to be read, you must write — for the reason supplied in the preceding paragraph.

Now on to your questions.  

Widely-read or well-read?  You can be both. And you should be both.  Switching gears can be difficult, but it can be done.

As for time that could have been better spent, I do not regret reading vast quantities of Continental philosophy, but some of the time spent on the more extreme representatives of that tradition, such as Derrida, was time wasted. 

Re-reading these remarks, I realize they are rather trite.  But they may be of some use nonetheless.

On Praise

We do not like to be praised if (a) the praiser is beneath us; (b) what is praised is something insignificant or common; (c) the praise is insincere, perhaps by having an ulterior motive; (d) the praise is mistaken in that we lack the excellence attributed to us.

Particularly annoying is to be praised for something insignificant while one's actual virtues go unappreciated. So be careful in your bestowal of praise: take care that you do not offend the one you hope to flatter.

Seize the Day

Horace advises that we seize the day. "Life ebbs as I speak: so seize each day, and grant the next no credit."  The trouble with this advice is that what we are told to grab is so deficient in entity as to be barely seizable.  The admonition comes almost to this: seize the unseizable, fix the flux, stay the surge, catch the wind. 

I do indeed try to seize the day, and its offerings, day by day, moment by moment.  Walking along the trail I stab my staff into the ground saying "This is it, this is your life, right here, right now, and it is good." Living in tune with this mantram, without wanting to be elsewhere or elsewhen, is obviously better than standing on tiptoes trying to make out the future or looking through memory's rear-view mirror. 

There is no full living  without presence to the present, without mindfulness to the moment.  But mindfulness is ultimately no solution since what one is minding is ultimately empty.

The passing moment is more real than the past and the future, but it is precisely passing and so, ultimately, unreal.  The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time at all.  The alternative, however, is present to us only as this blank sense of time's deficiency.

So, with unseeing eyes, we stand on tiptoes after all.