Category: Sage Advice

Rely on Conscience

In matters moral, reason is weak, easily suborned by the passions, given to rationalization, and easily entangled in the threads of its own dialectic. Reason is not  to be despised but not quite reliable. In matters moral, it is better to rely on conscience.

This advice rests on two presuppositions. One is that conscience is a source of moral knowledge, which itself presupposes that there is moral knowledge. The other is that one's conscience has been well formed. Both presuppositions need examination. But don't make the reliance on conscience contingent on the completion of their examination.

Keep Your Own Counsel

One alone has 'skin in the game' of one's own life. This helps explain why the advice of others, however well-intentioned, is often useless or worse. Listen to the advice of others, but at last keep one's own counsel. And:

Counsel Jackson

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday

Kant Sapere AudeImmanuel Kant was born on this date in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 44 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 44 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So I say to my young friends: finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Finish it before your standards become too exacting. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 298th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

Yes, I Repeat Myself

Leftists constantly repeat their brazen lies in the hope that eventually they will be taken for truths. So we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable need constantly to repeat truths. Not our truths, for there is no such thing as 'our' truth or 'my' truth or 'your' truth.' Truth is not subject to ownership. If you have it, you have it without possessing it.
 
So speak the truth and speak it often. Don't be afraid of repeating yourself. Living well is impossible without repetition. All learning, all teaching, all physical culture, all musicianship require repetition. No mastery of anything, no improvement in anything, is possible without repetition. Can you play that riff the same way every time? If not, keep practicing. 
 
By practicing blows, whether verbal or physical, you learn how to land effective ones.

Between Time and Eternity

Tom O. asks,

How does one reconcile the temporal with the eternal, in a personal/spiritual or experiential manner? The political situation of our time strikes me as dire and incredibly important. Yet such things are transitory and will, ultimately, pass away, and so in another sense are not so important. I am torn between these two extremes on a daily basis. The latter is a source of hope and peace, the former a source of anxiety and unrest. Focusing more on one at the expense of the other seems to only intensify the problem, since doing that seems to downplay the importance of one of the extremes, when what I am after is a reconciliation of the two that does not dismiss or downplay either. But perhaps that goal itself is unattainable.

We are made for eternity, but we find ourselves in time. Both spheres are real and neither can be dismissed or pronounced unreal.  You and I agree on that.  You want a reconciliation of the two "that does not dismiss or downplay either" while suspecting that such a reconciliation is "unattainable."

Here I think lies the germ of an answer. One of the spheres needs to be "downplayed." For if there are these two spheres, they cannot be equally important. 

Why can't they be equally important?

Within time, we rightly value the relatively permanent over the relatively impermanent. We reckon him a fool who sacrifices a lifetime of satisfactions for a moment's pleasure.  John Belushi, for example, threw away his life and career for a ride on the 'Speedball Express.' Elliot Spitzer trashed his career and marriage to a beautiful  woman because he could not resist the siren songs of the high-class hookers. And then there is David Carradine who died of auto-erotic asphyxiation in Bangkok. Examples are easily multiplied beyond necessity. 

Infinitely more foolish is one who sacrifices an eternity of bliss for a lifetime of legitimate mundane satisfactions.  One who believes that both spheres are real, and thinks the matter through, ought to understand that the temporal is inferior to the eternal in point of importance.  That there are these two spheres is a matter of reasoned faith, not of knowledge.  (It is 'metaphysical bluster' to claim to have certain knowledge in this area. One cannot prove God, the soul, or man's eternal destiny. Or so say I; plenty of dogmatists will disagree.)

I therefore make the following suggestion in alleviation of my reader's existential problem. Devote the majority of your time and energy to the quest for the Absolute, but without ignoring the temporal. The quietist must needs be a bit of an activist in a world in which his spiritual life and quest is endangered by the evildoers in the realm of time and change.  

MonkFor spiritual health a daily partial withdrawal from society is advisable.  It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it. 

A partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck.  Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort.  Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles.  No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual and philosophical reading and writing, in silence, and alone.

So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.

Let it Go and Move on

Let the past go and move on. Pack as much life as possible into the few years that remain. Squeeze in as much vital thinking and thoughtful vitality as you can. Move up and away from your vices. Consign your hebetude to history. Break useless contacts. Keep your nose to the grindstone. Mill the grist. Press the grapes of experience  for the wine of wisdom. A philosopher's harvest years come late. The clock is running. The format is sudden death. The time control is unknown. The Reaper waits, he is patient, his scythe aglisten in the dying rays of the setting sun. There is work to be done, and it can only be done here. Get on with it, noble soul!

Are You Hungry?

Don't let the thought of the pleasures of the table persuade you to eat if you are not hungry. Eat only at meal times, but never because it is meal time. An exception is breakfast for those quitting their domiciles for a sally-forth into a mean world.  To leave your house without food in your gut is like driving into the desert without gas in your tank. You don't know what awaits you.