Maverick Philosopher – Page 353 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

“No Man is a Hypocrite in His Pleasures”

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 95:

Johnson: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures."

The Johnson in question is Samuel Johnson. Translator Bloom informs us that James Boswell's Vie de Samuel Johnson (Life of Samuel Johnson) was published in France in 1954. So it looks as if Camus was mining it for ideas.

In a second footnote we read:

Camus adapted this quote into [his novel] The Fall: "No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures; have I read that or did I think it, my dear compatriot?"

Camus knew the answer, but that didn't stop him from passing on both the thought and its formulation as his own. Is that unseemly for a novelist? Can one plagiarize in a work of fiction? An interesting question.

What the Johnsonian saying means interests me more. Does it mean that no man preaches a pleasure he does not practice? An example would be a high school teacher who preaches the pleasures of the life of the mind to his students but spends his leisure hours at the racetrack. But on this reading the saying comes out false.

Or does it mean that no man indulges in a pleasure that he does not enjoy? This is true, and so this is what I take Johnson to be saying. Consider the pleasure of smoking a fine cigar, a La Gloria Cubana, say. No one indulges in this pleasure if he does not like cigars.

A hypocrite in his pleasures would then be a man who indulged in pleasures he did not enjoy. But this is much closer to algolagnia than it is to hypocrisy.

Should we say that Johnson's aphorism is flawed? Well, it got me thinking and is insofar forth good.

It got me enjoying the pleasures of the life of the mind which I both preach and indulge in.

Memo to Hillary

Shut up and take a hike!

‘That’ and ‘Who’

Incorrect: There are confirmed worldlings that simply do not understand religion.

Correct: There are confirmed worldlings who simply do not understand religion.

Simple rule: 'that' for things, 'who' for people.

Books or Eternal Life?

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 94:

A priest who regrets having to leave his books when dying? Which proves that the intense pleasure of eternal life does not infinitely exceed the gentle company of books.

Come on, Al, be serious. Eternal life is an object of faith and hope, not of knowledge or sure expectation. The good padre regrets leaving the familiar and reliable pleasures that he knows and loves and is practically certain of, pleasures he need not have faith in or hope for, and is anxious over the wrenching transition that will pitch him headlong into Kingdom Come.

There are confirmed worldlings who simply do not understand religion. Camus is one of them.

Memo to Pope Francis the Foolish

First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.

Modern Liberalism, Original Intent, and Equality

From Thomas G. West, Jaffa versus Mansfield: Does America Have a Constitutional or a "Declaration of Independence" Soul?:

Modern liberalism, as John Dewey and its other originators conceived it, is the enemy of individual rights in the Founders' sense. Dewey goes so far as to say that in the context of the twentieth century, the Founders' understanding of rights is evil. [Reference?] Dewey also disparages the importance of government by consent of the governed. Elections really do not matter for Dewey. Democracy is not about elections and consent, nor is it about securing the right to liberty. It is rather "that form of social organization, extending to all the areas and ways of living, in which the powers of individuals shall . . . be fed, sustained, and directed" by government.⁵⁶ Liberalism therefore prefers government by supposedly neutral, supposedly scientific "experts" largely insulated from the interference of public opinion and elected officials.⁵⁷Liberals have long seen the Constitution, as it was originally understood, as their enemy; thus their indifference or hostility to "original intent."

Believers in the Founders' idea of equality, on the other hand, are the strongest supporters of the Constitution. Clarence Thomas is the Supreme Court justice who is most faithful to the text and spirit of the Constitution. The reason is that Justice Thomas, uniquely among those now on the Court, sees an intimate connection between the principles of the Declaration, which are the principles of individual liberty, and the text of the Constitution. In other words, Thomas respects the Constitution not just because it is a law, not just because it was adopted by the majority, but because it is good. As Thomas explained in a 2001 lecture at James Madison University, "the principles upon which the American Constitutional order is based are universal principles, applicable to all people at all times." He is interested in the constitutional text, he said, precisely for this reason.

Of E-Mail, Doing Nothing, and a Life Worth Living

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce Far Niente

Sweet To Do Nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

And that explains why I arise at 2:00 AM. The morning is a most excellent time to do nothing, and so a huge quantity of morning must be allotted to this 'activity.' All practitioners agree that meditation goes best in the morning. It is also the best time to put into practice Thoreau's admonition to "Read not The Times, but the Eternities." As for traipsing around in the local mountains, you want to be on the trail before sunrise to greet its arrival as it kisses with golden light the peaks and spires, and to avoid the varmints of the two-legged kind whose palaver and very presence often prove an annoyance and a distraction.

Nescit Vox Missa Reverti

The once hooked ever lives in lack,
And the once said never finds its way back.

(The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1971, p. 104)

The Self-Murder of Academic Philosophy?

Rod Dreher here exposes the latest lunacy in the precincts of mad-dog feminism. I have no objection to the main body of his post, but his opening sentence, written by a philosophy outsider, will give philosophy outsiders the wrong impression. Dreher asks, "Can somebody please tell me why anybody would choose to go into academic philosophy?"

Short answer: philosophy is a magnificent subject and one of the supports of high culture; it cannot be done well, however, without attention to the work of 'academic' philosophers from Plato on down.

Dreher seems to be assuming that the garbage he uncovers is representative of academic philosophy. Not so. Pee-Cee Unsinn is on the rise, and leftist termites have a lot to answer for in the undermining of the universities, but good work is being done in contemporary academic philosophy, not to mention the work done in decades past.

That being said, the short-term trends are not encouraging. But one cannot live without hope. One reason for hope is that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers" as Etienne Gilson famously wrote. That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) The undertakers are winning at the moment, but they will taken under in their turn.

Religion Always Buries its Undertakers

The Main Internal Threat: The Left

If radical Islam is the main external threat to the republic, the main internal threat is the contemporary Left. Excerpts from Ben Stein:

The nation’s universities have become no-go zones for people who do not hew to the one-party, anti-American, anti-police, anti-business attitudes of the violent brownshirts. Quiet, scholarly geniuses like Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald — who dare to suggest that Americans should work for a living, who speak out in defense of the police — are shouted down, shoved, sometimes assaulted, and chased from campuses under guard. Ann Coulter — a long-time friend, staggeringly intelligent and amusing — is not permitted to speak at a University of California, Berkeley, campus, because she makes such witty, shining defenses of our great nation. This is a taxpayer-funded campus.

There’s an atmosphere of terror on campuses across the country. My beloved law school alma mater, mighty Yale, shamed itself recently by blackballing faculty who wanted to keep a sense of humor on the campus.

The formula is simple. Get a few nonwhite students to label a potential speaker a racist, whether or not there is the slightest evidence he or she is. Then bring in the looney left faculty, then bring in the women with fake charges of sexism, and soon you have a mighty avalanche against the speaker. The fascists call themselves anti-fascists, of course. But anyone with eyes and ears can see and hear who’s burning the books.

As far as I know, neither Hitler nor the Japanese ever planned to invade America. Certainly Vietnam didn’t. North Korea is a menace, but a poverty-stricken nation of 22 million is not going to subjugate us and take away our freedom.

They don’t have to. We’ve done it to ourselves on our campuses. Via our imbecile young people and their pawns and masters in the faculties, we have incinerated the First Amendment. We’ve made sure that our young learn only lies and subversive propaganda against America. Hitler had his storm troopers to silence the opposition. We have Black Lives Matter, which aims to emasculate the main force guarding black lives — the police — and which is always in the vanguard at closing down free speech. It’s a catastrophe for this country. It’s not what our young men and their parents fought for, died for, and wept for in The War. Look quick. We’re losing this war for freedom — and fast.

The Sentence Fragment Fully Fragmented

I was taught to avoid sentence fragments. And that is what I taught my students. But being as flexible and reasonable as you all know me to be, I would allow the occasional exception. Suppose you have just crafted a paragraph summarizing Kant's views on space and time. I would allow you a 'Thus Kant' as coda. There is no call to be as hidebound as a schoolmarm.

But recently we have been witnessing the fragmentation of the sentence fragment. Example:

Mr. Trump, meantime, is breaking all the china in Washington as he works to reinvent the wheel. Every. Single. Day.

'Every single day' is a sentence fragment. 'Every. Single. Day.' is a sentence fragment fully fragmented.

I am assuming, hopefully, that no one will take the further step of breaking words into their constituent syllables.

Full-on fragmentation cannot be fairly laid at the doorstep of Hemingway any more than conceptual relativism can be fairly laid at the doorstep of Kant. But these gentlemen unwittingly played a role. Or it might be better to say that they set the stage.

I may from now on use Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' puppet to signal language rants. Don't get too excited over my rants. After all, a rant, by definition, involves a certain exaggeration of umbrage.

Nullification Crisis

How long can we last? Not long without some serious political cleansing of our institutions of the leftist scum that years of conservative inaction have allowed to accumulate.

Myron Magnet at City Journal:

Wait: let me get this straight. It’s legally binding for two underlings in the civil rights divisions of the Departments of Education and Justice to send out a “Dear Colleague” letter declaring that, as these bureaucrats interpret Title IX of Congress’s Education Amendments of 1972, colleges and universities can’t get any federal funding if they don’t make special accommodations for transgendered students, however defined; but it is not legal for the president of the United States, pursuant to the Constitution’s injunction that he ensure that the laws “be faithfully executed,” to deny some federal funding to cities that declare themselves “sanctuaries” from federal immigration laws, and that accordingly forbid their officials from cooperating with federal authorities in implementing them, as Congress has demanded?

Old Mountaineers and Bold Mountaineers

I'm no climber, but I love walking in the mountains. On a solo backpacking adventure in the magnificent Sierra Nevada some years back I overheard a snatch of conversation:

There are old mountaineers, and there are bold mountaineers, but there are no old bold mountaineers.

Ueli Steck, the great Swiss climber, is dead at 40, having fallen near Everest.

I have repeatedly asked myself, why I do this. The answer is pretty simple: because I want to do it and because I like it. I don’t like being restricted. When I climb, I feel free and unrestricted; away from any social commitments. This is what I am looking for.

I have a better answer. Steck climbed because he was very, very good at it, and we humans love doing what we are good at. Freedom from social commitments can be had in far less perilous ways.

I am reminded of something the great marathoner Bill Rodgers once said when asked why he ran and won 26.2 mile races at a blistering sub-five-minute-per-mile pace. "I like to be be fit." (I quote from memory) But of course one can be very fit indeed without running such a punishing distance at such a punishing pace.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions

Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions.

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.

Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Allman Bros., Blue Sky

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Eric Clapton, Let It Rain

Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds (Both Sides Now). This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal street" goes out to luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music? Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark.

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall

Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.

Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night

Rolling Stones, She's A Rainbow

Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain

UPDATE (4/30)

Kai Frederik Lorentzen points us to Weather in My Head by Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. Good tune!

Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."

Is There a Place for Polemics in Philosophy?

Our friend Vlastimil writes,

I've just read you saying, "In philosophy it is very important that we be as civil and charitable as possible. There is no place for polemics in philosophy."

Intriguing. No place, really? Can't a philosophy be wicked or obtuse?

Yes, a philosophy can be wicked or obtuse. But what I said is that there is no place for polemics in philosophy. I distinguish among (a) philosophy as a body of knowledge, (b) philosophy as a type of inquiry, and (c) philosophies as worldviews or belief systems.

My short answer is that a philosophy or worldview can be wicked or obtuse and thus an appropriate target of polemics, but that philosophy as inquiry cannot be wicked or obtuse. Hence it cannot be an appropriate target of polemical attack. It is, on the contrary, a noble and normatively human enterprise that ought to be conducted without personal animus and without the grinding of ideological axes. As I say in Can Philosophy be Debated?

Philosophy is fundamentally inquiry. It is inquiry by those who don't know (and know that they don't know) with the sincere intention of increasing their insight and understanding. Philosophy is motivated by the love of truth, not the love of verbal battle or the need to defeat an opponent or shore up and promote a preconceived opinion about which one has no real doubt.

When philosophy is done with others it takes the form of dialog, not debate. It is conversation between friends, not opponents, who are friends of the truth before they are friends of each other. Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

There is nothing adversarial in a genuine philosophical conversation. The person I am addressing and responding to is not my adversary but a co-inquirer. In the ideal case there is between us a bond of friendship, a philiatic bond. But this philia subserves the eros of inquiry. The philosopher's love of truth is erotic, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. It is not the agapic love of one who knows and bestows his pearls of wisdom.

This of course is an ideal. But it is one that is attained from time to time among certain interlocutors and so can be attained. By contrast, philosophy as a body of knowledge, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft in Husserl's sense, is an 'ideal' that has never been attained. I suspect that it is an ideal that cannot be attained by us and so is not an ideal, but a mere dream.