Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Virtues and Vices

  • The Odd Man Out Among the Cardinal Virtues

    It is always prudent to be prudent, temperate, and just, but often imprudent to be courageous.

  • Thomas Klingenstein on Trump’s Virtues

    Outstanding! Memorize it and propagate it. I am very happy to have discovered Klingenstein. He is right on target. Here is a short (4:28) explanation of the war we are in. This is the truth. Face it!

  • Courage

    Mut verloren — alles verloren! Da wär es besser, nicht geboren! To lose courage is to lose everything, in which case it would have been better never to have been born.   A few stabs at rhyme-preserving translation: Of courage shorn, of everything shorn! In that case better, never to have been born! Courage lost…

  • Callicles and the Marquis de Sade

    Substack latest.

  • Virtue, Vice, and Mastery

    I lately quoted St. Augustine  to the effect that a bad man has as many masters as he has vices. But to be mastered by one's virtues, though better than to be mastered by one's vices, is arguably shy of the ne plus ultra of mastery. The ultimate in mastery is mastery of both one's…

  • Another Advantage of Old Age

    The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you. The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane.  The old man, unlike the young, has a…

  • Civility

    Civility is no virtue if a cover for cowardice.

  • The Noble and the Base

    If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!" The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be…

  • The Near Occasion of Doubt

    Acutely aware of our moral weakness, the wise among us do not continually test our virtue: we  avoid the near occasion of vice. Tests will come without our seeking them. But the wise among us  are also keenly aware of our intellectual weakness.  Reason in us we know to be infirm, prone to error, and…

  • Courage

    Courage is the hardest and hence the rarest of the four cardinal virtues. A Substack 'sermon.' Leftists hate sermons, which is good reason to give them. The best sermon, however, is one's own existence. (Kierkegaard)

  • Attributed to Robert Frost

    Here: "A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel” is usually credited to American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963). Frost used the quote in January 1961 (discussing John F. Kennedy, who Frost thought was not this type of liberal) and Frost used it again in January 1962. A popular…

  • Moral Progress Report

    Between my abandonment of my vices and their abandonment of me, progress has been made. The weaker the flesh, the stronger the spirit.

  • The End of Moderation

    Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), p. 29: Many a man thinks to satisfy the great virtue of moderation by using all his shrewdness and bringing all his experience to bear upon limiting his pleasure to his capacity for pleasure. But simply by the fact of setting enjoyment as the end,…

  • The Intellectual Chutzpah of David Bentley Hart

    Here (HT: Karl White): Let me, however, add one more observa­tion that will seem insufferably pompous or a little insane: to wit, that the argument I make in my book—that Chris­tianity can be a coherent system of belief if and only if it is understood as involving universal salvation—is irrefutable. Any Christian whom it fails…

  • Superiority and Superbia

    The truly superior do not succumb to superbia.