A few weeks ago, I wrote a column arguing that the only truth worth acknowledging was the truth that one arrived at on one’s own.

Michael Cade, a fellow contributor to WFTC , posted a comment in which he said, among other things, that “even though I’m a crusty-atheistic-material plane-kind of guy, I recognize that prayer, for example, has quantifiable benefits. And I’ve started to wonder about the ‘placebo effect’ of prayer, and ‘placebo theism’ and if I could access all of that without actually submitting to religion, or God.”

I waited a bit before posting a reply, quite simply because I found Michael’s comments did not admit of a quick and easy response. In fact, I have continued to think about what he said because I was far from entirely satisfied with my reply. [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup constitutes the extent of my acquaintance with the work of the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. But recently I posted on my blog this quote from Cortázar: “And do you accept the idea that there is no explanation?” [Read more →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: money, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: getting older, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: politics & government, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: politics & government, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: science, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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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 →]

Tags: books & writing, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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“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 →]

Tags: religion & philosophy, that's what he said, by Frank Wilson by Frank Wilson
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