I sing the praises of Joseph Joubert, but here is a very bad aphorism of his:
The style is the thought itself. (Notebooks, p. 44)
This is an exaggeration so absurd that not even a Frenchman can get away with it. Much, much better is this brilliancy from the pen of Schopenhauer:
Style is the physiognomy of the mind.
Joseph Joubert, The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 26:
When a thought gives birth to obscurity, it must be rejected, renounced, abandoned.
Would that contemporary French scribblers would heed this rule penned by a Frenchman in 1796. But they may not be capable of heeding it since
Clarity of mind is not given in all centuries. (28)
And you thought blogging could only be a shameless expression of vanity?
But a quotidian assembling in this newfangled medium of reminders, admonitions, maxims and the like, performed in the right spirit, is no less a spiritual exercise than the daily jottings of a Marcus Aurelius.
1. Research (zetesis)
2. Thorough investigation (skepsis)
3. Reading (anagnosis)
4. Listening (akroasis)
5. Attention (prosoche)
6. Self-mastery (enkrateia)
7. Indifference to indifferent things.
8. Blogging.
List taken, except for #8, from Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Basil Blackwell, 1995), p. 84.
Conversation in the frigidarium one morning drifted onto the weighty topic of extended service warranties. A poolmate explained how a zealous salesman tried to sell her such a warranty on a filing cabinet! It occurred to me that even more absurd would be extended warranties on ball peen hammers and anvils. Or how about coffins?
"If in the first one hundred years of your subterranean repose you should ever experience any moisture or other intrusion due to a failure of the seals, just call our toll-free number conveniently stamped on the underside of the coffin lid, and a repairman will come to your gravesite, exhume your coffin, make necessary repairs, and restore everything to its original condition. All at no additional expense."
What is my life's point and purpose? How silly to say, as many do, that it is wholly up to the individual to give it sense and purpose! If I must give my life meaning, then it has no meaning prior to and independent of my giving it meaning, which is to say that it has no meaning, full stop. Am I my own source? Can I 'recuperate' every aspect of my facticity by acts of goal-positing? If my life depends on me for its meaning, then it has no meaning. To suppose that an otherwise meaningless existence can be made meaningful by subjective acts of meaning-bestowal is like supposing that one can pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps.
If, for whatever reason, one denies that human life possesses objective meaning, then one ought to have the intellectual honesty to maintain that it has no meaning, and not seek refuge in the shabby evasion of subjective meaning.
Unless you live in a cave you will by now have heard of Bernard Madoff and his Ponzi-scheme. Interesting name he bears, quasi-aptronymic: he made off with his investors' money. The wealthy fools who lost everything have in part themselves to blame: they allowed their good sense to be suborned by greed and ill-placed trust. Diversification is such a simple concept. But it is not a matter of the intellectual grasp of a simple concept. It is a moral matter. Appetites unruled will suborn the sharpest head. Our financial and political and social decline is rooted in moral decline.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and it is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.
From Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Frontispiece, p. vii.
George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay all should read. As timely now as it was sixty two years ago, it is available in several anthologies and on-line here. Orwell lays down the following rules for good writing.
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (A Collection of Essays, Harvest, 1981, p. 170)
On balance, this is excellent advice. Orwell's formulation of these rules, however, is excessively schoolmarmish, so much so that he himself cannot abide by them. Take (3) for example. It's a rule violated by its own formulation. Had Orwell followed his own advice, he would have deleted 'always.' Or consider this sentence near the beginning of his essay: "Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse." (p. 156) Surely, 'inevitably' is redundant. Or else 'must' is redundant. The sentence as Orwell wrote it, however, is not a bad sentence. My point is that his rules are too restrictive.
Now look at (5). This rule contradicts what he himself says on the preceding page. There (p. 169) he asks what his defence of the English language does not imply. One of the things it does not imply is "in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one…." This obviously contradicts rule (5).
At the root of the problem is the tendency most of have to reach for such universal quantifiers as 'all,' 'every,' 'no' and 'never' when strict accuracy demands something less ringing. If the great Orwell can fall into the trap, then we lesser mortals need to be especially careful. Good writing cannot be reduced to the application of rules. Rules are at best guidelines.
These quibbles aside, this essay is required reading.
Seneca, Tranquillitate Animi, X, 5 (tr. Basore) counsels the chastening but not the extirpation of desire:
. . . we must not send our desires upon a distant quest, but we should permit them to have access to what is near, since they do not endure to be shut up altogether. Leaving those things that either cannot be done, or can be done only with difficulty, let us pursue what lies near at hand and allures our hope, but let us be aware that they are all equally trivial, diverse outwardly in appearance, within alike vain. And let us not envy those who stand in higher places; where there are heights to be seen, there are precipices. (Emphasis added.)
I modified the last sentence of Basore's translation, substituting 'where there are heights to be seen' for 'where there appeared heights' which is bad English and appears to be a mistranslation from the Latin.
The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:
No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]
The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.
1. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism, and there is no denying its value. Our doxastic predicament requires it of us. We have beliefs galore but precious little knowledge, especially as regards the large and enduring questions. Lacking knowledge, we must inquire. For that we need freedom of inquiry, and a social and political environment in which inquiry is, if not encouraged, at least allowed. But people who are convinced that they have the truth would stop us. "Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies." (Human All-Too-Human #483) This is typical Nietzschean exaggeration, but there is a sound point at its core: People who are convinced that they have the truth will not inquire whether it really is the truth. Worse, they will tend to impose their 'truth' on us and prevent our inquiry into truth. Many of them will not hesitate to suppress and murder their opponents.
My first point, then, is that toleration is a good because truth is a good. We must tolerate a diversity of views, and the people who maintain them, because we lack the truth and must find it, and to do so we must search. But we cannot search if we are under threat from fanatics and the intolerant. Freedom of inquiry and freedom of expression are important because truth is important.
This implies that we must tolerate many views and actions and people who are deeply offensive to us. The 'artist' Serrano of "Piss-Christ" notoriety is a good example. He has a right to express himself as he does, just as we have a right to protest against him. He has no right to taxpayer money, however, and any liberal who thinks that a refusal of government sponsorship amounts to censorship is an idiot pure and simple.
Continue reading “On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski”
Having recently returned from the Geneva conference on Bradley's regress, I have much to ruminate upon and digest. I'll start my ruminations with some comments on Richard Gaskin's work.
In an earlier post I suggested that we ought to make a tripartite distinction among vicious, benign (harmless), and virtuous (helpful) infinite regresses. To put it crudely, a vicious regress prevents an explanatory job from getting done; a benign regress does not prevent an explanatory job from getting done; and a virtuous regress makes a positive contribution to an explanatory job's getting done. I gave an example of a putative virtuous regress in the earlier post which example I will not repeat here. In this post I draw your attention to a second putative example from the work of Richard Gaskin, whom I was happy to meet at the Geneva conference on Bradley's Regress. Gaskin's proposal is that "Bradley's regress is, contrary to to the tradition, so far from being harmful that it is even the availability of the regress which guarantees our ability to say anything at all. Bradley's regress is the metaphysical ground of the unity of the proposition." ("Bradley's Regress, the Copula, and the Unity of the Proposition," The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 179, April 1995, p. 176) In terms of my schema above, Gaskin is claiming that Bradley's regress is positively virtuous (not merely benign) in that it plays a positive explanatory role: it explains (metaphysically grounds) the unity of the proposition.
I will now attempt to summarize and evaluate Gaskin's position on the basis of two papers of his that I have read, and on the basis of his presentation in Geneva. (I should say that he has just published a book, The Unity of the Proposition, which I have not yet secured, so the following remarks may need revision in light of his later work.)
Often it is like this. He is not admirable; it is your unadmirable propensity to admire that confers upon him a quality he does not possess. She is not contemptible; it is your contemptible tendency to contemn that makes of her what she is not.
One ideal is to so apportion admiration and contempt that it is only the intrinsically admirable and contemptible that become the objects of these attitudes. An ideal Stoic and stricter is to regard nothing as admirable or the opposite, not even the propensities to admire and contemn. Is this what Horace meant by nil admirari?
How far should we take the mortification of desire and aversion? You could take it all the way into a world-denying asceticism. But I suspect the Sage is a man of balance. Able to control desire and aversion, he has no need to extirpate them. Why uproot a tree that you can trim and manage? You say it is messy when its blossoms fall. But before they fell were they not beautiful and fragrant? The leaves are a bother to rake, but is not the shade they afford agreeable?
The Sage can enjoy the transient in its transiency without clinging and without hankering after the absent transient. He can oppose the bad and the disagreeable without losing his equanimity or exaggerating their negativity. He neither idolizes nor demonizes.
My attempts to lessen his negativity are not meeting with much success. It's as if he cannot see that it would be desirable should he learn to control his mind. Part of the problem is that people feel so justified in their hatreds. Their feeling of justification makes it impossible for them to appreciate the folly of allowing negative thoughts rent-free lodging in their heads.
