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:
I Know My Limits
I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know. Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible.
(Note how 'I' is used above. It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is being used as a universal quantifier. As above used, 'I' does not have an antecedent; it has substituends (linguistic items) and values (non-linguistic items). The above use of 'I' is a legitimate use, not a misuse.)
Nota Notae Est Nota Rei Ipsius, Kant, and the Ontological Argument
This is a re-post, redacted and re-thought, from 22 July 2011. I dust it off because something caught my eye the other morning in the Translator's Introduction to Kant's Logic. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz tell us that for Kant the principle of all inference or mediate judgment is the rule Nota notae est rei ipsius nota. (p. xlii). I'm guessing that C. S. Peirce got wind of the principle from Kant. As for Hartman, I remember hearing good things about him and his work in axiology from Hector-Neri Castañeda. I also recall Hector saying that Hartman died young. Details of Hartman's eventful life here. He died at age 63, which is young for a philosopher. Hector died at 66.
……………………………………………………………….
"The mark of a mark is a mark of the thing itself." I found this piece of scholasticism in C. S. Peirce. (Justus Buchler, ed., Philosophical Writings of Peirce, p. 133) It is an example of what Peirce calls a 'leading principle.'
Let's say you have an enthymeme:
Enoch was a man
—–
Enoch died.
Invalid as it stands, this argument can be made valid by adding a premise. (Any invalid argument can be made valid by adding a premise.) Add 'All men die' and the argument comes out valid. Peirce writes:
The leading principle of this is nota notae est nota rei ipsius.
Stating this as a premiss, we have the argument,
Nota notae est nota rei ipsius
Mortality is a mark of humanity, which is a mark of Enoch
—–
Mortality is a mark of Enoch.
But is it true that the mark of a mark is a mark of the thing itself? There is no doubt that mortality is a mark of humanity in the following sense: The concept humanity includes within its conceptual content the superordinate concept mortal, which implies that, necessarily, if anything is human, then it is mortal. But mortality is not a mark, but a property, of Enoch. I am invoking Gottlob Frege's distinction between a Merkmal and an Eigenschaft. Frege explains this distinction in various places, one being The Foundations of Arithmetic, sec. 53. But rather than quote Frege, I'll explain the distinction in my own way using a totally original example.
Consider the concept bachelor. This is a first-order or first-level concept in that the items that fall under it are not concepts but objects. The marks of a first-order concept are properties of the objects that fall under the concept. Now the marks of bachelor are unmarried, male, adult, and not a member of a religious order. These marks are themselves concepts, concepts one can extract from bachelor by analysis. Given that Tom falls under bachelor, he has these marks as properties. Thus unmarried, etc. are not marks of Tom, but properties of Tom, while unmarried, etc. are not properties of bachelor but marks of bachelor.
To appreciate the Merkmal (mark)-Eigenschaft (property) distinction, note that the relation between a concept and its marks is entirely different from the relation between a concept and its instances. A first-order concept includes its marks without instantiating them, while an object instantiates its properties without including them.
This is a very plausible line to take. It makes no sense to say of a concept that it is married or unmarried, so unmarried cannot be a property of the concept bachelor. Concepts don't get married or remain single. But it does make sense to say that a concept includes certain other concepts, its marks. On the other hand, it makes no sense to say of Tom that he includes certain concepts since he could do such a thing only if he were a concept, which he isn't. But it does make sense to say of Tom that he has such properties as being a bachelor, being unmarried, being an adult, etc.
Reverting to Peirce's example, mortality is a mark of humanity, but not a mark of Enoch. It is a property of Enoch. For this reason the scholastic formula is false. Nota notae NON est nota rei ipsius. The mark of a mark is not a mark of the thing itself but a property of the thing itself.
No doubt commenter Edward the Nominalist will want to wrangle with me over this slight to his scholastic lore, and I hope he does, since his objections will aid and abet our descent into the labyrinth of this fascinating cluster of problems. But for now, two quick applications.
One is to the ontological argument, or rather to the ontological argument aus lauter Begriffen as Immanuel Kant describes it, the ontological argument "from mere concepts." So we start with the concept God and analyze it. The concept God includes omniscience, etc. But 'surely' existence is also contained in the concept God. For a god who did not exist would lack a perfection, a great-making property; such a god would not be id quo maius cogitari non posse. He would not be that than which no greater can be conceived. To conceive God, then, is to conceive an existing God, whence it follows that God exists! For if you are conceiving a nonexistent God, then you are not conceiving God.
Frege refutes this version of the ontological argument — not the only or best version I hasten to add — in one sentence: Weil Existenz Eigenschaft des Begriffes ist, erreicht der ontologische Beweis von der Existenz Gottes sein Ziel nicht. (Grundlagen der Arithmetik, sec. 53) "Because existence is a property of concepts, the ontological argument for the existence of God fails to attain its goal." What Frege is saying is that the ontological argument "from mere concepts" rests on the mistake of thinking of existence as a mark of concepts as opposed to a property of concepts. No concept for Frege is such that existence is included within it. Existence is rather a property of concepts, the property of having an instance.
The other application of my rejection of the scholastic formula above is to the logical question of the correct interpretation of singular propositions. The scholastics treat singulars as if they are generals. But if Frege is right, this is a grave logical error since it rides roughshod over the mark/property distinction. To drag this all into the full light of day would take many more posts.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Obscure ’60s Psychedelia
The Monterey Pop Festival was 55 years ago, yesterday. Your humble correspondent was in attendance.
How many of these do you remember? If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason. But among the latter are some very beautiful songs from that amazingly creative time.
Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises
Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls
Love, Alone Again Or
Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey
Moby Grape, Omaha
Moby Grape, I am not Willing
H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship
Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man
Related: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman
What Does Kant Mean by ‘Appearance’?
This from the Comments. The numerals are my intercalation.
But the question remains, exactly what does Kant mean by ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung)? [1] Can I speak of this Appearance? [2] Is this Appearance the visible surface of my desk? [3] Is it numerically identical to what F sees when she looks at the desk? (Surely it is, since you claim it is “public, intersubjectively accessible” – and [4] in what passage does Kant say that Appearances are ‘public’ and ‘intersubjectively accessible’? What are the German terms corresponding to the English?)
Ad [1]. Yes, in the same way that you can speak of your desk or this desk.
Ad [2]. No, the appearance or phenomenon is the empirically real desk itself with all its parts (and their parts . . .) and properties. Notice that I wrote 'desk itself,' not 'desk in itself.' The desk itself is a phenomenon, not a noumenon; it is an empirically real object of "possible experience" (moegliche Erfahrung). The visible surface you see is not identical to the desk itself.
Ad [3]. The desk itself is a Kantian phenomenon and therefore intersubjectively accessible via outer perception. So when F is in your study, she sees the same desk that you see. But your mental states are numerically different from hers, and hers from yours. Your epistemic access is via your mental states and her access is via hers. You can introspect yours but not hers and vice versa. If A1 is your act of visual perceiving at time t, and A2 is her act of visual perceiving at time t, then it is obvious that A1 is not identical to A2. It should also be obvious that what A1 presents to you and what A2 presents to her are typically different aspects of the same desk. Suppose you are looking at the desk from above and she is underneath the desk looking up at its underside.
Since 'appearance' is causing you confusion, let's use 'phenomenon.' The Kantian phenomenon is the desk with all its parts and properties. But this one desk appears differently to you and your wife.
Ad [4]. Carefully read section 32 of the Prolegomena. There we learn that appearances = things of sense = phenomena. Phenomena are sensible things such as your desk. They are full-fledged denizens of the mundus sensibilis. Phenomena are the empirically real objects of sensory intuition (Anschauung). They are obviously public in that two or more empirical subjects can have knowledge of one and the same phenomenon such as your desk. The main thing here is that phenomena are not private mental data. It therefore should be obvious that Kant is not promoting a form of subjective idealism. The world of phenomena for Kant is an intersubjectively knowable world.
Study also Prolegomena, section 13, Remark II wherein Kant explains why he is not an idealist.
And then there is CPR A45-46/B62-63. Do you have the Akademie Ausgabe in your library? If so, check out Ak. XX, 269. That's a passage from Fortschritte.
The Standard Picture of Kant’s Idealism
This entry draws on Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, Yale University Press, 1983. "According to the standard picture, Kant's transcendental idealism is a metaphysical theory that affirms the unknowability of the 'real' (things in themselves) and relegates knowledge to the purely subjective realm of representations (appearances)." (p. 3) P.F. Strawson and H. A. Prichard are exponents of this reading along with many others in the Anglosphere. The standard picture makes of Kant an inconsistent Berkeley who limits knowledge to appearances, these being understood as "mere representations" (blosse Vorstellungen), while at the same time positing an unknowable realm of things in themselves. Mere representations are assimilated to Berkeleian ideas so that when Kant states that we know only appearances, what he is telling us is that we know only the contents of our minds.
The standard picture opens Kant to the devastating objection that by limiting knowledge to appearances construed as mental contents he makes knowledge impossible when his stated aim was to justify the objective knowledge of nature and oppose Humean skepticism. Allison reports that Prichard "construes Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves in terms of the classic example of perceptual illusion: the straight stick that appears bent to an observer when it is immersed in water." (p. 6) But then knowledge is rendered impossible, and Kant is reduced to absurdity.
Anyone who studies Kant in depth and in context and with an open mind should be able to see that his transcendental idealism is not intended as a subjective idealism. A related mistake is to think that subjective idealism is the only kind of idealism. The "standard picture" is fundamentally mistaken. Appearances (Erscheinungen) for Kant are not the private data of particular minds, and thus not ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense, or any other sort of content of a particular mind. Kant distinguishes crucially between Erscheinung and Schein/Apparenz between appearance and illusion/semblance. Because of this distinction, appearances cannot be assimilated to perceptual illusions in the way Prichard and the "standard picture" try to assimilate them.
For Kant, the world of phenomena or appearances is a world of public, intersubjectively accessible, objects. If you don't understand this you will never understand what Kant is maintaining. So the straight stick lately mentioned is for Kant a phenomenon, a public object, not a private mental item, whereas its seeming bent is an illusory private content of those particular embodied minds who, because of accidental factors, are unable to perceive the stick as it is in empirical reality.
The publicly accessible objects of the outer senses are said to be "empirically real, but transcendentally ideal." To understand this signature Kantian phrase, one needs to understand two distinctions, that between the ideal and the real, and that between the empirical and the transcendental. The ideal is that which is 'inside the mind' and thus mind-dependent whereas the real is that which is 'outside the mind' and thus mind-independent. The inverted commas signal that these phrases are not to be taken spatially.
What is ideal is either empirically ideal or transcendentally ideal. The empirically ideal embraces the "private data of an individual mind." (Allison, p. 6) Included therein are what are normally taken to be mental contents and "ideas in the Cartesian-Lockean sense." The empirically real embraces the totality of public, intersubjectively knowable objects in space and time. In a word, the natural world. Kant's claim that he is an empirical realist, but not an empirical idealist, amounts to the affirmation that that "our experience is not limited to the private domain of our own representations . . . ." (7). It should now be perfectly obvious that Kant is not espousing a subjective idealism.
The planets and indeed everything in nature are empirically real. What then could it mean to say that these objects are transcendentally ideal? It is to say that they are subject to certain "epistemic conditions" — I borrow the phrase from Allison — that make possible our knowledge of them. Kant is clearly committed to there being a set of epistemic conditions without which empirical knowledge of empirically real objects would not be possible. Now in my humble opinion, Kant's theory of these epistemic conditions leaves a lot to be desired and is indeed without one univocal sense. But this is not the issue at present. The issue is solely whether Kant's intent is to affirm a form of subjective idealism. The answer is that he is not. That is not his intent despite the existence of some passages that invite a subjectively-idealist reading. The proof that Kant is not promoting a subjective idealism is that his epistemic conditions, whatever they are, are not psychological or physiological.
A psychological condition is
. . . some mechanism or aspect of the human cognitive apparatus that is appealed to in order to provide a genetic account of a belief or an empirical explanation of why we perceive things in a certain way. [. . .] Custom or habit, as used by Hume in his account of causality, is a prime example of such a psychological condition. As is well known, Kant was insistent in claiming that, although the appeal to such factors may be necessary to explain the origin of our beliefs and perceptions, or even of our knowledge "in the order of time" (der Zeit nach), it cannot account for its objective validity. In Kant's terms it can answer the quaestio facti but not the quaestio juris. The latter is the proper concern of the Critique, and this requires an appeal to epistemic conditions. (Allison, p. 11)
It should now be quite clear that Kant is not promoting a subjective or psychological idealism. His project, or rather a large part of it, is to secure the objectivity of our knowledge of nature in the teeth of Humean skepticism, and to do so without a deus ex machina, without bringing God into the picture as both Descartes and Berkeley do. (The other main part of his project is to show that rationalist metaphysics is not a source of objective knowledge.) Whether Kant succeeds in his project is a further question. I don't believe he does.
But if the question is whether Kant is espousing a subjective or psychological idealism, the answer is a resounding No.
And Then Along Came the ‘Sixties
I can easily see
How Merton lost his way
By exposing himself
To events of the day.
The Dialogue Form
Scott Johnson, Learning from Euthydemus:
The dialogue form is conducive to venturing otherwise forbidden thoughts in a time of persecution. The form might usefully be employed to address the shibboleths shoved down the throats of students like Euthydemus in our own day. Let us have our best teachers turn to the dialogue form with students touting “equity” versus equality, “affirmative action” and racial preferences versus equal treatment, the history of the founding of the United States versus the 1619 Project, the quandary of “reparations,” and so on.
On ‘Stuff’ and ‘Ass’
A Substack language rant. Excerpt:
'Ass' is another word gaining a currency that is already excessive. One wonders how far it will go. Will 'ass' become an all-purpose synecdoche? Run your ass off, work your ass to the bone, get your ass out of here . . . ask a girl's father for her ass in marriage? In the expression, 'piece of ass' the reference is not to the buttocks proper, but to an adjoining area. 'Ass' appears subject to a peculiar semantic spread. It can come to mean almost anything, as in 'haul ass,' which means to travel at a high rate of speed. I don't imagine that if one were hauling donkeys one could make very good time. So how on earth did this expression arise? (I had teenage friends who could not refer to a U-Haul trailer except as a U-Haul-Ass trailer.)
I gave it up for Lent. Lent came and went. I debated with myself whether to return. Sugar Mountain and his bots are a scrofulous crew, but FB's a good place to offload interesting links and political animadversions so as not to clutter MavPhil. It also brings people to my Substack articles. If you can keep your FB time down to 30-60 minutes per day, it probably won't do too much damage to your mind and soul. There's some good stuff there. It is not all kitty kat pix and what-I-had-for-dinner. By the way, my use of 'stuff' always carries a slightly pejorative connotation.
Idealism: Subjective, Objective, Transcendental
This from a recent comment thread:
I think we should all agree on what counts as ‘subjective idealism’. I characterise it as the view that the objects we commonly take to be physical objects are in some way, or wholly, mind dependent. This a reasonable interpretation of Kant.
Let's leave the interpretation of Kant for later. The definition on offer raises questions.
1) Does the 'in some way' render the definition vacuous? I see a tree. The tree exists whether or not I am looking at it. But while I am looking at it, the tree has the relational property of being seen by me. This property depends on my seeing which is a mental act of my mind. (An act is not an action, but an intentional, or object-directed, experience.) So there is a way in which the tree is mind-dependent. It is dependent on me for its being-seen. There is a whole range of such properties. The tree is such that: it is deemed beautiful by me; falsely believed by me to be a mesquite; thought by me to have been planted too close to the house, thought by you to have been planted just the right distance from the house, etc.
Or consider money. What makes a piece of paper or a piece of metal money? Obviously, money to be money, i.e., a means of exchange, depends on minded organisms who so treat it.
2) If, on the other hand, physical things are wholly mind-dependent, then that presumably means that trees and such are dependent on one or more minds for all of their properties, whether essential or accidental, whether monadic or relational, and also dependent on minds for their very existence. This leads ineluctably to the question as to who these minds are. Surely the physical universe in all its unspeakable vastness does not depend on my mind or yours or any finite mind or any collection of finite minds.
So the question arises: has there ever been a subjective idealist (as defined above) among the 'name' philosophers? George Berkeley, you say? But the good bishop brought God into the picture to secure the existence of the tree in the quad when no one was about:
Dear Sir, your astonishment’s odd
I am always about in the Quad
And that’s why the tree
continues to be
since observed by, Yours faithfully, God
If the other spirit in question is God, an omnipresent being, then perhaps his perception can be used to guarantee a completely continuous existence to every physical object. In the Three Dialogues, Berkeley very clearly invokes God in this context. Interestingly, whereas in the Principles, as we have seen above, he argued that God must exist in order to cause our ideas of sense, in the Dialogues (212, 214–5) he argues that our ideas must exist in God when not perceived by us.[20] If our ideas exist in God, then they presumably exist continuously. Indeed, they must exist continuously, since standard Christian doctrine dictates that God is unchanging. (SEP Berkeley entry)
Now if the ultimate subject of subjective idealism is God, who exists of absolute metaphysical necessity and who creates and ongoing sustains in existence everything other than himself, then such an idealism is better described as objective.
Kant's brand of idealism is neither subjective nor objective, but transcendental. What this means I will explain later.
When Politics Comes to be Like Philosophy
Trouble is on the way.
Substack latest. Short, incisive, 'on target.' To the range tomorrow!
A Kantian Aporia?
This just in:
I know you like puzzles in aporetic form, so here you are.
1. My perception involves (though is not necessarily limited to) the immediate awareness of mental phenomena.
2. When I look at the visible surface of this desk, all I am immediately aware of is the visible surface of this desk.
3. The visible surface of this desk is not a mental phenomenon.
All three cannot be true. If (1) is true then my perceiving the desk involves the awareness of mental phenomena. Note that this does not assert that the visible surface of this desk is a mental phenomenon, only that, if it is not, then I must be immediately aware of some mental phenomena in addition to my awareness of the desk.
But (2) says that the visible surface of this desk is all I am immediately aware of. Hence (3) cannot be true.
Likewise, if (2) and (3) are true, (1) is false, and if (1) and (3) are true, (2) is false.
Nicely presented. I agree that the three propositions are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. But there is an interesting problem here only if the propositions are, in addition, individually plausible. The more plausible, the tougher the problem.
(3) is plausible to a high degree. (Plausibility, unlike truth, comes in degrees.) A desk is a physical thing. The surface of a desk is a physical part of a physical thing. A mind, its states, and its contents are none of them physical. An occurrent episode of visual perceiving is a mental phenomenon. So, yes, (3) is highly plausible and I would rank it as the most plausible of the three propositions.
(2) is the least plausible of the three. It is true that when I look at my desk I do not see my visual perceiving of the desk or of some part thereof. But it does not follow that I am not aware of my perceiving. Right now, as I stare at my desk, I am not only visually aware of (part of) the desk; I am also aware of being visually aware of it. This is what Franz Brentano calls innere Wahrnehmung, inner perception, which he distinguishes from innere Beobachtung, inner observation. This ongoing inner perception, or rather perceiving, is a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary 'outward' visual awareness of the (surface of) the desk.
This inner awareness of being outwardly aware of something is not the same as full-blown reflection which one could, but need not, express by saying 'I am now seeing the surface of a desk.' It also must be distinguished from the type of awareness in which I am outwardly aware of something without being aware of being aware of it at all. Suppose you have been driving for some time, stopping at the red, going at the green, negotiating turns, etc. when you suddenly realize that you have no memory of doing any of those things. And yet your present physical integrity shows that you must have been aware of all those traffic changes. You were outwardly aware via the five outer senses without being explicitly aware of being aware or implicitly aware via Brentano's inner perception.
And so I solve the above problem by rejecting (2). (2) is the least plausible of the three and a very strong case can be made for its being false.
(1) leaves something to be desired as well. Later on this.
So we don't have an aporia in the strict sense, an intellectual impasse, or insoluble problem. And even if we did, it is not clear what this has to do with Kant.
From Hagiography to Pathography: Yates and Kerouac
I'll admit to being more fascinated by Richard Yates' life as reported in the 671 pages of Blake Bailey's biography than in Yates' writing. So this struck a nerve:
I’m no fan of hagiographers, obviously, but I’m only a bit less distrustful of literary biographers. Too often their books slide toward what Joyce Carol Oates has dubbed “pathography,” which she defined as “hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.” Its motifs are “dysfunction and disaster, illnesses and pratfalls, failed marriages and failed careers, alcoholism and breakdowns and outrageous conduct.”
Since we live in an age that’s obsessed with personalities and celebrities, it’s not surprising that so few readers are satisfied with loving a book and so many insist on knowing as much as possible about the person who wrote it. While this appetite has inspired literary biographers to produce a long shelf of pathographies and other monstrosities – does the world really need Norman Sherry’s three-volume biography of Graham Greene? – it has also resulted in some well researched and finely written literary biographies that did what such exercises do at their best: they led readers back to the subject’s books. Among these I would include Blake Bailey’s recent biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever and, strangely enough, Ann Charters’s thorough and balanced 1973 bio of Kerouac. In her introduction, Charters wrote insightfully, if a bit clunkily: “The value of Kerouac’s life is what he did, how he acted. And what he did, was that he wrote. I tried to arrange the incidents of his life to show that he was a writer first, and a mythologized figure afterward. Kerouac’s writing counts as much as his life.”
I would argue that his writing counts more than his life, much more. Eventually Charters seemed to come around to my way of thinking. In 1995, after she’d edited two fat volumes, Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956 and The Portable Jack Kerouac, I interviewed her for a newspaper article. “I wanted (the book of letters) to be a biography in Jack’s own words,” she told me. “His life is in his books, but on the other hand the most essential thing is missing from those novels. What he tells you in the letters is that the most important thing in his life is writing.”
Why did Kerouac's writing give rise to an outpouring of biographies, commentaries, dissertations, articles, not to mention new editions and the publication of the shoddiest of his literary efforts, when Yates' novels and short stories had no similar effect? One thought is this. Kerouac was a sort of unwitting pied piper. His 1957 On the Road gave rise to the 'rucksack revolution' of the 'sixties. Yates' 1961 Revolutionary Road, his best novel, was backward-looking, in large part social criticism of the Zeitgeist of the fading 'fifties.
But my one thought is one-sided and wants augmentation and qualification. Later perhaps.
While I admire Yates' superb craftsmanship, his writing does not move me. Kerouac moves me. Literary slop, hyper-romantic gush, and all. So far I have found nothing in three of Yates' novels and a couple of his short stories like this:
Here is Jack Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus with his mother:
Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.
Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:
The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.
Why I Want to Live Long
I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this predicament of ours from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions. Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?"
And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not possible before. The young man's dong is a magic wand that conjures and weaves the web of maya the better to ensnare him and keep him tied to the transient. The old man who makes good use of his old age sloughs off the illusions of earthly love that were always more hydraulic in provenance than pneumatic. He now has a good shot at moral and spiritual improvement. But will he take it?
Or will he essay to prolong his dong and with it the web of lies it weaves? Nothing is more pitiful than the decrepit oldster who keeps himself jacked up Hefner-style. But despite the Viagra and the nubile nymphs cavorting for his delectation, poor Hef could not rise to the occasion and was reduced to manual mode.
Live long for the end of life's day in wait for the the owl of Minerva who spreads her wings at dusk. There are still things to be learned and things to be done that can only be learned and done here below. As for you workers in the vineyards of Wissenschaft, "Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät," as I once heard Hans-Georg Gadamer say. "A scholar's harvest years come late."