Maverick Philosopher Bill Vallicella concludes a blog post titled “On Hitchens and Death”, by suggesting that “if materialism is true, then I think Nietzsche is right: truth is not a value; life-enhancing illusions are to be preferred. If truth is out of all relation to human flourishing, why should we value it?” [Read more →]
Recently, as I sat in a booth at my favorite luncheonette — Mr. G’s at 12th and Callowhill — waiting for my lunch to arrive, I did something I actually don’t do very often: I read the City Paper.
The big piece seemed to be one written by someone named Jeffrey C. Billman suggesting that we get serious about the national debt. One of the sub-heads caught my eye: “Spending cuts are not the answer.”
To be fair, the article itself does say that “spending cuts may be part of the equation.” That still didn’t strike me as being especially serious. After all, one sure way to cut down on debt is to stop spending so much. It’s not just part of the equation; it’s the essential part. [Read more →]
In the July 14 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, David Wheatley begins his review of Letters of Louis MacNeice by noting that “the Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs.”
I am not sure if I ever knew this, and had long since forgotten it, but I do know that I have often thought this way. It has long seemed to me that when we are born we get in line behind all those who are already here, and those who come after get in line behind those of us who have already arrived.
This is but one of a number of odd ways I have of looking at time. [Read more →]
Many years ago, when I was a senior at what was then St. Joseph’s College, the college drama club mounted a production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.
I have no acting ability. I can only play myself (which means, I suppose, that I am — at least potentially — a star). But the members of the club were a part of the set I hung out with, and I spent a lot of time backstage. In fact, I had a modest role in that production of Much Ado: I was the prompter, standing every night in the little box at the center-front of the stage, reading along as the actors spoke their lines, ready to help them out if their memories faltered.
I don’t recall ever having to prompt anyone, so I ended up just reading the script every night. [Read more →]
I know I am not the only person who, upon being intrigued by an idea encountered in a book or during a conversation, finds himself subsequently running into said idea over and over again.
Earlier this year, in Josef Pieper’s The Silence of St. Thomas, I came upon this: “the reality and character of things consist in their being creatively thought by the Creator.” This prompted me to begin thinking of myself as “being creatively thought by the Creator.” Lo and behold, I began running into like notions in the days and weeks that followed.
My last three columns have had to do with looking at the world minus the labels we attach to its contents. [Read more →]
Patterns are not categories. This thought occurred to me not long after I finished my last column. I was walking along Lombard Street past a parking lot surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. I looked down and noticed that next to the fence some flowers were growing and that there was a shallow pile of yellow leaves around the bottom of each and that the wind had formed each pile into a similar pattern.
My last column had much to do with categories, arrived at by classifying a group of individuals in terms of the features that they share (and ignoring all the ones they don’t share). Categories, it seemed to me, were purely mental constructs, useful to a degree, but also misleading. A pattern, on the other hand, is a real phenomenon. One discerns a pattern. One does not construct it. [Read more →]
I don’t think I’ve ever written a follow-up to any of these columns, but I feel the need to elaborate somewhat further on what I said in my last one. In particular, I have been thinking quite a lot about one sentence in the passage I quoted from one of G. C. Lichtenberg’s Waste Books: “Nature creates, not genera and species, but individua, and our shortsightedness has to seek out similarities so as to be able to retain in mind many things at the same time.”
I think this is precisely right and that we ought to ponder it more deeply. Darwin may have thought he figured out the origin of species, but the fact remains that no species had its origin as a species. [Read more →]
I began this column on May 12, the same date on which in 1895 J. Krishnamurti was born. I had chosen a quote from him for the “Thought for the Day” feature on my blog: “A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.”
I thought I might take that as my point of departure for the column I was planning for last Tuesday. But then I started looking at some other things Krishnamurti had said. I came upon a talk he gave in Bombay in 1948 in which he said that “ideas create only further ideas.” Later in that same talk, he says, “When do you have creative moments, a sense of joy and beauty? Only when the thinker is absent, when the thought process comes to an end. Then, in the interval between two thoughts, is creative joy.”
In other words, you can’t think your way to truth. [Read more →]
Every day, on my blog, I post a “thought for the day.” Usually, it is something said by someone born on that date. On April 26, for instance, the quote was from Ludwig Wittgenstein, born on April 26, 1889: “For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”
I’ve thought about this a good deal since I posted it, and have come to the provisional conclusion that it demonstrates considerable insight into the nature of the truly religious man but noticeably less into the nature of tragedy. [Read more →]
I have been paging through a book I first read many years ago when I was in college, a collection of poems by Denise Levertov called O Taste and See. It is a New Directions paperback (for I mean the actual book, now nearly half a century old).
I bought it in the long-vanished Arcade Bookstore, which was located in the ground floor of the Commercial Trust Building (also long-gone) on 15th Street between Market and Chestnut. I read it on the El on my way home (I didn’t live on campus; I commuted, which was cheaper).
I can still remember being curled up in one of the corner seats on the way to the Bridge Street Terminal and coming upon one poem in particular that clutched the short hairs of my soul. [Read more →]
Even people who don’t read much poetry tend to be familiar with the lines that conclude Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
I suspect most readers think of this as poetic hyperbole, charming enough in its way, but hardly to be taken seriously as a philosophical proposition. [Read more →]
In March 1894 Jules Renard wrote in his journal that “in order to be truly successful it is necessary, first, that one get there oneself, next, that others do not.” In May, he refined this thought a bit: “It is not enough to be happy: it is also necessary that others not be.”
Both quotes bring to mind one attributed to Gore Vidal: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” [Read more →]
Recently, I was looking at a list of quotations having to do with skepticism. Most were unexceptional platitudes either for or against. One, however, was extraordinary: “In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism and skepticism and humbug and we shall want to live more musically.”
The first thing that is odd about this is the grouping of cynicism, skepticism, and humbug. Then there is the contrast between those and living musically. And of course there is the question as to what “to live more musically” means. [Read more →]
One commonly writes about something because one is interested in it, and one commonly reads about something for the same reason. But the two lines of interest do not necessarily coincide: What I find interesting to write about you may not find interesting to read about. Write a weekly column and you’ll see what I mean.
Judging by the comments, the column I wrote last week garnered more interest than I expected it would. [Read more →]
Even wise and learned people are capable of saying stupid things. I was reminded of this recently when I came upon something once said by Jacques Barzun — who is certainly wise and learned enough: “A man who has both feet planted firmly in the air can be safely called a liberal as opposed to the conservative, who has both feet firmly planted in his mouth.”
It is actually hard to know quite what to think of this. [Read more →]
Some weeks back I mentioned Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Science,” which is a meditation on the development of the atomic bomb. It ends thus:
A little knowledge, a pebble from the shingle,
A drop from the oceans: who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much?
This, of course, is merely a 20th-century gloss on something Alexander Pope said a long time ago: “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” [Read more →]
I have been reading the Journal of Jules Renard, as translated and edited by Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget. Originally published in 1964, it was reprinted a couple of years ago by Tin House Books. The complete journal runs to more than 1,200 pages. The Tin House edition, at 304 pages, provides a representative sampling. [Read more →]
“I mistrust all systematizers and avoid them,” Nietzsche writes in Twilight of the Idols. “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”
Well, no one will ever accuse Nietzsche of thinking systematically. I actually don’t have much regard for him as a thinker at all. He has brilliant insights that he expresses brilliantly, but a good deal of what he says is pretty goofy — though even that is usually entertaining.
But I have no problem with the unsystematic nature of Nietzsche’s thinking. [Read more →]
Much pleasure and enlightenment can be had from desultory reading. I mean the sort when you don’t read a particular book from cover to cover, but just pick up first this one, then that, reading a little here and a little there. The different passages that catch your attention often fit surprisingly well together, like the bits and scraps that go to make up a collage. [Read more →]
There is a poem by that fine, but neglected poet George Barker called “Allegory of the Adolescent and the Adult.” It has long been a favorite of mine. “It was when weather was Arabian,” it begins. “I walked / Like Saint Christopher Columbus through a sea’s welter / Of gaudy ways looking for a wonder.”
But the wonder proves elusive. Our young speaker tells us that “hollyhock here and rock and rose there were,” but “I wound among them knowing they were no wonder.” A bird with a worm and a fox in a wood fail to meet muster as well, for “I was / Wanting a worse wonder, a rarer one.”
So he goes on, “expecting miraculous catastrophe,” though a bit anxious as well: “How shall I know my marvel when it comes?” [Read more →]
One usually hears Judaism, Christianity, and Islam referred to as “the three great monotheistic religions.” Apparently, however, that noted deity Yahweh would disagree: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20, 2-3).
That second verse is a simple imperative; there really is no way of reading it other than literally. Yahweh acknowledges the existence of other gods besides himself. [Read more →]
I have been paging through Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings, which happens to be the first book I reviewed professionally. I don’t know how many people remember Hammarskjöld. He was the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and by far its most effective. Indeed, I would argue that, for all practical purposes, the UN died the day Hammarskjöld was killed in an air crash in what is now Zaire.
Markings was published posthumously. It is a kind of journal. Hammarskjöld himself described it — I am relying on memory — as a white paper concerning his negotiations with himself and God. [Read more →]
“Death is the mother of beauty,” Wallace Stevens declares in “Sunday Morning.” Put that together with Keats’s dictum that ” ‘Beauty is truth, truth Beauty’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” and it all adds up to a pretty grim poetic assessment of life.
Stevens’s point, of course, is that a satisfying cadence is an aesthetic necessity:
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging …
“To philosophize is to learn how to die,” said the redoubtable Montaigne, and I’m sure he was right. [Read more →]
I recently posted on my blog a quote from William Lyon Phelps:
The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
Bill Peschel sent along in response a quote from Dorothy Parker: [Read more →]
“The universe,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “is made of stories, not of atoms.” This seems eminently sound to me. After all, what exactly do atoms amount to?
In The Nature of the Physical World, Sir Arthur Eddington notes that if you imagine the nucleus of an atom to be a grain of sand suspended halfway between the floor and the apex of the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the orbit of the electrons would be circumscribed by the curve of the dome itself. In other words, the distance between the nucleus and the electrons is astronomical. A creature standing on the nucleus would likely be unable to see the electrons spinning about. [Read more →]
Every morning, the first post on my blog is titled “Thought for the day.” It is simply a quote I find interesting from a writer (usually, it’s a writer) born on that date. Recently, the one I chose was by Italo Svevo, author of The Confessions of Zeno: “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
This struck me as a magical turn of phrase. [Read more →]
Live long enough and you will start to grow old. As someone who has crossed that threshold I can say that, so far, it isn’t exactly turning out as expected. Not that I expected much, mind you, just what I took to be the usual. I figured I’d put on a bit of weight, get a little paunchy, and have some more aches to put up with. That’s all come to pass, but what I didn’t expect is how, at some point, it all seems to come together into some sort of critical mass, and it’s no longer something that’s happening, but something that has happened. It’s a bit like when you notice that all the leaves are off the trees and realize it’s not really autumn anymore. [Read more →]
St. Nicholas has become indelibly associated with Christmas, but his actual feast day is celebrated a few weeks earlier, on Dec 6, a date that is also notable for something extraordinary that happened in the history of philosophy. The year was 1274. A Dominican monk known to history as Thomas Aquinas said Mass that morning, as priests do every morning. What happened next, as recounted in the records of the process that led to Thomas’s canonization, is nicely summarized by Josef Pieper in his book The Silence of St. Thomas: [Read more →]
In my last column, I remarked in passing that while great music is always original, originality alone doesn’t account for its greatness. The same is true of all art, of course, not just music
As for why this so, something C.S. Lewis had to say on the subject, which I came upon just the other day, is especially insightful: [Read more →]
Recently, my wife and I attended a Philadelphia Orchestra concert that featured, as the concluding work, the Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s fifth symphony, which is perhaps best-known — even notorious — for its first movement duel between snare drum and orchestra (a note in the score instructs the drummer to improvise “as if at all costs to stop the progress of the orchestra”).
At its premiere in 1922, the symphony was pretty well-received by both critics and the public. But a couple of years later, when performed in Stockholm, about a quarter of the audience is said to have fled the hall. Those who remained in their seats were none too pleased, either. My wife, more than 80 years later, felt their pain. [Read more →]
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