Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Virtues and Vices

  • Compassion

    Feeling compassion for the earthquake victims, he was pleased by his sensitivity, but his warm feeling did not motivate him to do anything such as make a monetary contribution to the Red Cross.  His feeling remained mere sentiment and to that extent mere self-indulgence. Better to feel compassion than to define it. Better still to…

  • Kerouac and the Ancient Lures

    I told myself that come November I would quit Jackin' off for a while, but October's momentum continues.  I was just now looking in an old journal for something else and found this entry from 10 November 2000: During the years he wrote Some of the Dharma, Kerouac had a chance.  But then On the…

  • Skeptical and Credulous

    By turns we are too much the one or the other. We find it difficult to balance doubting and believing. Properly deployed, doubt is the engine of inquiry, but it can also become a brake on commitment and thus on living. One cannot live well without belief and trust — but not when they become…

  • Soul Food

    People are generally aware of the importance of good nutrition, physical exercise and all things health-related. They understand that what they put into their bodies affects their physical health. Underappreciated is a truth just as, if not more important: that what one puts into one's mind affects one's mental and spiritual health. The soul has…

  • The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify

    Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle. The power I have to…

  • Milton Contra Cloistered Virtue Unexercised

    Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice," he quotes Milton: I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not…

  • Courtesy

    I suggest that we think of courtesy as a mean between rudeness and obsequiousness. The courteous are neither churls nor courtiers. This despite the etymology of 'courtesy.' (As a separate post could argue, there is no such thing as the true meaning of a word, and even if there were, etymology would not guide us…

  • Passion

    Passion dies out in the old, but there is no credit in that. If your vices abandon you before you abandon them, you are no candidate for praise. The trick is for the young and the midstreamers to learn to control passion while there is time left to enjoy the passion-free state.

  • Against Postponing Self-Mastery

    Wait too long to develop self-control and you may find that your vices have abandoned you before you have had a chance to abandon them. In divorces of all kinds it is better to be the one who sends packing rather than the one sent packing.

  • Kindness

    Small acts of kindness have the power to transfigure the bleak face of existence. While gratefully remembering the words and gestures I have been fortunate to receive, I also regret the occasions I let slip where, at no cost to myself, I could have offered a word of encouragement or support to someone in need.

  • Visualize Using Your Turn Signals

    This is one of my favorite bumper stickers, and not just because there are all too many motorists clogging the roads who seem unacquainted with the function of turn signals. The sticker is a parody of ‘Visualize World Peace’ (‘Visualize Whirled Peas’). Visualizing something as nebulous and utopian as world peace is about as pointless…

  • William James on Self-Denial

    No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous…

  • The Value of Modesty

    Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, tr. Paul Auster, p. 37: What good is modesty? — It makes us seem more beautiful when we are beautiful, and less ugly when we are ugly.  

  • Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

    We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are…

  • Bullshitting and Lying

    What is it to bullshit?  Perhaps the best way to understand bullshitting is by comparing it to lying. So what is it to lie? The first thing to understand is that a lie is not the same as a false statement. Suppose I make a statement about something but my statement turns out to be…