October 2025

An Eighteenth-Century Traveler Logs On

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies

All this was helped by the enormous development of print culture, which itself benefitted from the huge population growth in the last half of the 1700s, and in turn books and pamphlets and newspapers, together with coffee houses and clubs, helped broadcast a campaigning emphasis on improvement throughout all walks of life, and in all territories of empire. With the opening up of so many public spaces, and so many publications of so many different kinds, there was a lively concern with politeness, polite letters and polite behaviour in particular – the convenient belief that in commercial society we ‘polish’ one another, in a collective attempt at harmony – and with sensibility, an aspect of politeness in which the proper appreciation of complex behavioural and aesthetic matters became of first importance for many people for the first time, given that, to begin with, eighteenth-century Britain was somewhat backward in the visual arts (unlike theatre, which was stronger than ever). Sensibility was widely explored in the continuing development of the novel.

— Peter Watson, The British Imagination: A History of Ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II

The time-traveler arrived with a pocket copy of The Spectator and the serene conviction that posterity would have perfected Addison’s dream: a great coffee-house of mankind. The innkeeper pointed him to a glowing slate and said all conversation now took place “online.” He imagined mahogany tables without dust, quills without blot, a universal Tatler humming with agreeable raillery.

At the door he met a bouncer named CAPTCHA who bade him, “Select all squares that contain oil street lamps (no mere shop-lanterns).” Past this doorman sprawled countless rooms without walls. “Where is the proprietor?” he asked. “The algorithm,” said a passing boy, “keeps order.” It appeared to be an invisible master of ceremonies who pressed the most agitated speakers onto the central dais.

He opened a pamphlet called a “thread.” The first sentence was a trumpet for reform; the second blew it to pieces; the third accused the trumpeter of bigotry; the fourth insisted trumpets were violence. Everyone spoke in the tone reserved, in his time, for duels. “Sir,” he ventured in the comment box, “might we distinguish the thing itself from its abuses?” Twenty notifications arrived to inform him he was history’s villain.

He sought the Letters to the Editor and found instead a bazaar where every stall sold indignation by the yard. In the coffee-houses of his day, a witticism earned a bow and perhaps a corrected fact; here, a witticism was repeated through ten thousand parlors, each adding a crudely-drawn symbol of mirth. He watched a lady compose what looked like a sermon in the language of a street brawl and earn medals called “likes.” A gentleman who published a mild emendation was pelted with turnips conjured from nowhere and everywhere at once.

He asked after moderation. “We have it,” they said, and showed him a scaffold erected in the square. “Do you punish libel?” he said. “No, just ‘cringe’.” Off to one side a thoughtful essayist spoke softly; the algorithm hid him behind a tapestry of shrieks for insufficient performance.

In Bath they had once hired Beau Nash to teach men how to bow; here the instructors, represented by miniature heraldic crests of a sort, advised citizens to “ratio” or “dunk on” their enemies. He remembered the old promise that commerce would polish manners, that repeated dealings would tame the temper. But there was no polishing here; only masks, a million first meetings, and profits wherever tempers frayed, which was often.

He closed the slate and stared at his own pale reflection in it. “Progress,” he murmured, “has abolished the coffee-house by building an infinite Bedlam, where the crowd pays a penny to prod the afflicted and call it conversation.” Before taking his leave, he wrote a short apology to the age for the disturbance his visit had caused. The algorithm locked it in Possible Spam alongside the handbills and crypto-bots.

Mihi Ipsi Scripsi (In the Age of ‘Doing Numbers’)

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche, the geist of the zeit, writing

On the other hand, just as many pronouncements may be found that attested to his disinterest in potential readers. “Mihi ipsi scripsi” — “I wrote it for myself” — was the motto he had selected for himself, perhaps also to prevent disappointments, while working on Zarathustra. The same ambivalence emerged from the fact that he had addressed the book to “everyone and to no one.” “How could I write for readers?…Rather, I make notations for myself,” can be read in a notebook from the late 1880s. The question of Nietzsche’s audience was further complicated by the fact that he was convinced he was ahead of his age by a generation, if not by several.

— Philipp Felsch, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: A Tale of a Redemption

In 2005, a couple friends and I started a short-lived blog to join the general conversation. I didn’t have a voice yet, so my efforts were mostly derivative. By the time I finally started to write things that didn’t suck, the crowd had drifted to newer platforms and shorter attention spans. It didn’t matter; writing turned out to be intrinsically rewarding. The bargain I made with myself was simple: keep the work addressed to one exacting reader —me— and let others overhear it if they like.

Then came the metricized web. In 2006 I was uploading obscure musical tracks to YouTube and getting DMs like, “love this!! hey subscribe to my channel!!” I’d check their page: a few shaky cam clips and nothing I’d ever want to see again. I kept wondering, like an overly-rational Vulcan, why would I volunteer to be notified every time this dork posts? Eventually I learned that this was just the new etiquette: don’t offer value, collect it. The request wasn’t transactional (“here’s something you’ll love in return”); it was numerical (“help me inflate this meaningless metric so that I can pretend my inner self is something other than a howling wasteland”). Today’s creator programs formalize it: payouts and promotion tied to “engagement,” with replies and outrage acting like adrenaline. If ten thousand people rage-reply and thirty thousand boost it, the algorithm pays out, and discourse tilts toward provocation. It’s not about conversation; it’s a slot machine that rings louder the more you debase yourself to pull the lever. Now, I feel an irrational rage every time I see an ostensible adult boast about achieving a particular round-number follower count, or about a viral post “doing numbers.” How many of these “followers” are real people who actually read each post carefully and comprehend it? How many of these “content creators” even care, though? Numbers are all that matter, like insecure teenagers in a perpetual dick-measuring contest. I want to charge into the Temple of Elon and overturn all the payout tables. “My blogosphere was to be called a house of conversation, but you have turned it into a den of shitposters.”

I’m Gen-X, and the old ethos still feels right: strive for status if you must, but don’t pant for it in public. Obsession over “selling out” could get precious, and of course it was largely hypocritical, but it kept dignity within reach, at least. Even a “too cool for school” stance like ours was still a tribute to an established norm: it would be pathetic and undignified for an adult to chase after mere popularity for its own sake. By the early ’00s, I was belatedly realizing that no such restraint existed anymore. Empty affirmation was all anyone seemed to care about. I’d rather stick with the Nietzschean attitude — a book for all and none — and use outdated measures of value instead: posts reread, saved, passed along from one person to another. If the age needs me later, it will find me; until then, I’ll keep making notations for myself — several generations ahead, naturally.

On the Urology of Style

By in books, jests japes jokes jollies, nietzsche

There are trickling thinkers and flowing ones, just as springs differ from one another. Lichtenberg holds his glass diligently beneath and eventually fills it full; but he did not have the time to pass the full glass to us; his relatives have measured out the drops to us.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

I make time on weekends to read a little more of Leopardi’s Zibaldone. Now there’s a flowing thinker. I’m one of the trickling thinkers. Nietzsche practically diagnoses a condition I call benign prostatic hermeneutics: frequent urges to compose, minimal output per attempt, and the sense that something crucial remains lodged behind the sphincter of style.

My muse is enlarged and pressing on the urethra of expression. There’s pressure, there’s intent, there’s even dignity if you squint — yet what arrives is a dribbling paragraph, two if I’m lucky. Mine is not a river of thought; it’s a late-night bathroom visit: urgent, meager, repeat. Still, the cup fills…eventually.

 

An Emptying

By in alan watts, books, bricolage

To understand emptiness does not mean that “emptiness” becomes a discrete “object” of a “consciousness.” Emptiness is experienced as the letting go of fixed ideas about oneself and the world.

The very word “I,” which so poignantly hints at that elusive sense of what is most irreducibly peculiar to a person, only makes sense as part of a language that includes “you,” “him,” “her,” “us,” and “them.” There never has been and never can be an “I” existing in isolation. Emptiness is counterintuitive because it contradicts the deepest sense a person has of being “me.” Yet, as Shantideva makes clear, emptiness does not eliminate this “me,” but transforms it. Contrary to expectation, an empty self turns out to be a relational self.

One might intuitively believe “consciousness,” the most private and enduring feature of one’s self, to be more “real” than the passing phenomena of which it is aware. Consciousness feels like a solitary witness, already there within us, lying in wait for things to appear. For Nagarjuna, this is but a convenient illusion. Consciousness is meaningless unless it is conscious of something; it is inextricable from the sense organs and objects that enable it to take place; it is as contingent and ephemeral as the flickering displays of colors and shapes it beholds.

— Stephen Batchelor, Verses from the Center: A Buddhist Vision of the Sublime

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For Nagarjuna’s method is simply to show that all things are without “self-nature” (svabhava) or independent reality since they exist only in relation to other things. Nothing in the universe can stand by itself — no thing, no fact, no being, no event — and for this reason it is absurd to single anything out as the ideal to be grasped. For what is singled out exists only in relation to its own opposite, since what is is defined by what is not, pleasure is defined by pain, life is defined by death, and motion is defined by stillness. Obviously, the mind can form no idea of what “to be” means without the contrast of “not to be,” since the ideas of being and non-being are abstractions from such simple experiences as that there is a penny in the right hand and no penny in the left.

— Alan Watts, The Way of Zen

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If we do this, we might notice that there seem to be only four possible ways to explain (i.e., conceptualize) our objects of consciousness (i.e., our experience). This is so whether our objects are exotic ones, such as photons, or pure mental objects such as the idea of simplicity, or common physical objects such as cups. These four ways form the four horns of Nagarjuna’s tetralemma, which can be simply stated as follows: either (1) objects are themselves, or (2) they are not themselves, or (3) they are both themselves and not themselves, or (4) they are neither themselves nor are they not themselves.

It would seem to common sense that at least the first statement ought to hold true, and thus offer some explanation of experience. But, as we shall see, none of the four options does. None does — yet experience remains.

— Steve Hagen, How the World Can Be the Way It Is: An Inquiry for the New Millennium into Science, Philosophy, and Perception

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Nagarjuna imagines his opponent saying that the doctrine of emptiness is like someone who shouts the command “silence!” In so doing, he only succeeds in making a noise, thus defeating his own purpose. But Nagarjuna turns the analogy to his own advantage. If there is indeed silence, we cannot announce that there is. The fact that there is silence cannot be said out loud. In the same way, if all the concepts we habitually use to make the world around us intelligible are devoid of meaning and significance, then this is something that cannot be announced using those same empty concepts. But although it cannot be announced, this does not mean it isn’t true, just as there can be silence even though no one can observe that there is silence without falsifying this very observation.

A second analogy invokes the idea of an “artificial person.” The Middle Way philosophy is like the action of one artificial person preventing the actions of another, or of a magician doing magic to counter another magician’s spell. The point of this analogy is perhaps just that, even though the statement that all theses are empty is itself empty and so cannot state anything, it can still show or reveal that this is the true state of affairs… Nagarjuna’s Middle Way is not, then, self-refuting. His words imply something that cannot be stated: that the very words he is using are without foundation. This is not just another move in the game of language, but an ironic intervention within it.

— Peter Adamson, Classical Indian Philosophy: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 5

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Nagarjuna recognized how emptiness is not a sacred or mystical state to be realized by the diligent meditator. For Nagarjuna emptiness is simply a “letting go of views.” As an emptying rather than an emptiness, it has to do with releasing the hold of habitual patterns of belief that keep one stuck and hinder one’s flourishing. Such emptying requires the courage and audacity to drop cherished opinions and be awed again by the mystery of being alive each moment. To turn away from the world to imagine emptiness as a transcendent source of salvation is to miss the point entirely. “Believers in emptiness,” Nagarjuna wryly remarks, “are incurable.”

— Stephen Batchelor, Buddha, Socrates, and Us: Ethical Living in Uncertain Times

The Philosopher of Sensual Pleasure

By in books, bricolage, nietzsche, philosophy

The philosopher of sensual pleasure. — A little garden, figs, little cheeses and in addition three or four good friends — these were the sensual pleasures of Epicurus.

— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

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So we have anger with God, hatred for priests, rejection of transubstantiation, scepticism about life after death. What does it all add up to? Medieval inquisitors, who liked their heresies neatly classified, had a ready label to hand: Epicureanism. The ancient philosopher Epicurus, whose name is now associated with pleasure-seeking, was notorious in the Middle Ages both for his mortalism and for his strictly naturalistic account of the universe. If the gods existed in this worldview, they were little more than a curiosity. Dante put heretics in the sixth circle of hell, but he named only one actual sect: the Epicureans, ‘who with the body make the spirit die’, and who are therefore condemned to lie for ever in opened tombs, unwillingly immortal.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

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From the beginning, detractors misconstrued Epicureanism as unlimited license or philosophical permission to pursue pleasure to any degree and of all kinds. Yet Epicurus clarifies that a pursuit of pleasure is not the same as licentiousness. He advocates “plain fare” in eating,  for example, and offers a clear definition of pleasure as he sees it: “By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul.”

— Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living

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The modern use of the word “epicureanism,” though, is not a good guide to the philosophy of Epicurus. Epicurus would have been nonplussed — though not upset, since he let nothing upset him — to discover his name being associated with the life of a gourmet. In fact he encourages us to be ready to enjoy the simple delights of plain bread and water, and his philosophy certainly did not center around the search for refined pleasure.

Yet it’s true enough that he was a hedonist. This is another word that might confuse us. It comes from the ancient Greek word for pleasure, hedone. Nowadays, we use “hedonist” to refer to someone who is unrestrained in their pursuit of pleasure. Although Epicurus was a hedonist, he certainly did not recommend the unrestrained pursuit of pleasure. Rather, he was a hedonist in the sense of someone who believes that pleasure is the good, the sole criterion we should use in determining the right way to live, the right choices to make, the right actions to perform. As we navigate our way through life, pleasure is the only star we need to steer by. But this doe snot imply lack of restraint, or a thoughtless embrace of every pleasure that comes our way. On the contrary, Epicurus teaches that the most pleasant life is a life of moderation, discipline, and careful planning. In this, Epicureanism makes a contrast with the Cyrenaic teaching of Aristippus the Younger.

— Peter Adamson, Philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds: A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Volume 2

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It might help to put Epicurus in the context of his time, focusing primarily on his chief competitors, the Stoics. Epicurus distinguishes himself from the Stoics by recognizing that we can suffer misfortunes that are harmful, worthy of grief, and non-providential. When a friend dies, we lose something of genuine value that has contributed to our happiness. Epicurus denies a cosmic justification or purpose for suffering such that it could be reconstrued as good. For Epicurus, misfortune is not a divine will at work, a point we will revisit in the chapter on religion. Nor is it a welcome opportunity to gain strength. Instead, misfortunes are harms that happen without design or intention. While we might in some cases gain personal insight from misfortunes, misfortunes never occur for the sake of insight because they do not happen for the sake of anything.

Epicurus, unlike the Stoics, suggests strategies for coping with and counteracting grief rather than encouraging its elimination. The Stoics seek to eliminate grief because they think it arises from a false judgment that something bad has happened. Epicureans, by contrast, manage grief, and they recommend distracting ourselves by replaying pleasant memories, expressing gratitude for past and present pleasures, and engaging with close and caring friends.

— Emily A. Austin, Living for Pleasure: An Epicurean Guide to Life

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For the rest Epicurus lived in Stoic simplicity and prudent privacy. His motto was lathe biosas — “live unobtrusively.” He took part dutifully in the religious ritual of the city, but kept his hands clear of politics, and his spirit free from the affairs of the world.

This is a likably honest creed. It is encouraging to find a philosopher who is not afraid of pleasure, and a logician who has a good word to say for the senses. There is no subtlety here, and no warm passion for understanding; on the contrary Epicureanism, despite its transmission of the atomic theory, marks a reaction from the brave curiosity that had created Greek science and philosophy. The profoundest defect of the system is its negativity: it thinks of pleasure as freedom from pain, and of wisdom as an escape from the hazards and fullness of life; it provides an excellent design for bachelorhood, but hardly for a society. Epicurus respected the state as a necessary evil, under whose protection he might live unmolested in his garden, but he appears to have cared little about national independence; indeed, his school seems to have preferred monarchy to democracy, as less inclined to persecute heresy — an arresting inversion of modern beliefs.

— Will Durant, The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization, Volume II

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Praise of Epicurus. — Wisdom has not gotten a single step beyond Epicurus — and often many thousands of steps behind him.

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Human, All Too Human I (Winter 1874/75–Winter 1877/78)

Engagé and Enragé

By in books, conspicuous crusading, extraordinary popular delusions

Sartre entered the fray in the aftermath of World War II, arguing that human beings could escape the contingency of existence by seizing control of their destiny, and that the writer had a duty to speak for those who had no voice. He brought these two notions together in the figure of the intellectuel engagé, of which he became the archetype. Engagement was a vocation that gave the author a responsibility to ‘compose for the whole collectivity’—a function that made him a critical social intermediary: ‘He is writing for everybody and with everybody because the problem which he is trying to solve by means of his own talents is everybody’s problem.’ The Sartrian intellectual’s duties were defined in extensive terms: ‘to interfere in matters that do not directly concern him, to question established truths, and to champion the cause of the oppressed.’ Engagement was thus inseparable from Marxian revolutionary practice: its purpose was ‘to get to know the world in order to change it.’

— Sudhir Hazareesingh, How the French Think: An Affectionate Portrait of an Intellectual People

Sartre’s intellectuel engagé was a Trojan Horse filled with student radicals. Declare that “every problem is everybody’s problem,” and abracadabra, every passing mood becomes a public duty. The job description (“interfere in matters that do not directly concern him”) reads like a mission statement for every half-baked, self-righteous, would-be intellectual with a social media account. Out went the hard disciplines of silence, apprenticeship, and proportion; in came “awareness raising,” the strident activist, and the moral selfie. Sartre didn’t just liberate the writer — he deputized him, then handed him a bullhorn. The result is our era’s most exhausting spectacle: professional activists like Greta Thunberg and her epigones, traipsing from one trendy cause to another like pampered students on a Grand Tour of celebrity protesting, chanting slogans with the bottomless confidence of derivative minds who mistake memes for insight and audience for authority. What Hazareesingh describes as a “vocation” became a performance art: the underemployed creative as town crier, forever “composing for the whole collectivity” because the mirror won’t clap.

The repulsive little toad-man only belatedly hopped away from doctrinaire Stalinism after tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956; a couple years earlier, like many other useful idiots, he had visited the USSR and proclaimed that he had found “complete freedom of criticism” there — an assessment that aged with unusual speed. His later championing of Frantz Fanon’s “revolutionary violence,” his anti-colonial support for the Algerian FLN, his early enthusiasm for Castro, his advocacy on behalf of the literary convict Jean Genet, even his open relationship with Simone de Beauvior — all of this demonstrates how little leftism has changed since. Today’s Zohran Mamdani voters are just going through the Sartrean motions. And while his toadies (pun somewhat intended) in the influential circle around Les Temps modernes spun his feud with Camus as a rhetorical victory for Sartre and revolutionary “history-making,” posterity has had the last word.

His concept of “bad faith” was useful, at least.

A Correspondence Course

By in books, montaigne, writing

In “A Consideration upon Cicero” — which is, in effect, the second part of his essay “On solitude” — he says that he would have preferred letters to essays as the “form to publish my sallies,” if only he had “had someone to talk to.” The sense of the man that comes across in his writing is of someone genial and talkative who relishes company. Despite his retirement from the affairs of the world, it would be a mistake to see him as a recluse recording his thoughts in lonely isolation. Terence Cave is right to stress the conversational mode of the essays. “Although Montaigne often depicts himself thinking and writing in solitude,” says Cave, “he always imagines his writing directed towards others.” The essays aren’t soliloquies. Rather, they’re attempts to reach out and engage others in his ruminations. The sense of conversation, rather than monologue, is enhanced by the frequency with which Montaigne refers to, and quotes from, other writers.

— Chris Arthur, “On Solitude,” After Montaigne: Contemporary Essayists Cover the Essays

That rings true to me. I didn’t learn to write by communing with the Muse; I learned by trying to keep up with a friend who outclassed me — Yale and Hopkins-educated, Harold Bloom for a mentor — the sort of mind that forced you to bring better sentences or go home.

I had never written anything but schoolwork and adolescent poetry/lyrics before, but it turned out that I had a latent aptitude for it. Email was my apprenticeship. Each missive had a face associated with it, a standard to meet, a voice to answer. I chased his references, matched allusions, and tried to craft turns of phrase that wouldn’t sound thin when they hit his inbox. Writing, for me, was never a soliloquy. It was sparring with someone generous enough to make me reach further.

Blogging was only a widening of the circle. I’ve never had the temperament for podium-talk. A topic addressed to someone sharpens judgment, trims digressions, and gives each sentence a target. Even an imagined addressee is still an addressee. Without that pressure of an expectant audience, prose gets gaseous; with it, the point comes into focus. Instead of sending an article with comments appended to one person, I posted them for whoever happened to pass by. But the posture never changed: I still write to someone — an educated, skeptical, good-humored reader who won’t let me bluff. Solitude, yes; but it’s a populated solitude, with a seat kept open across the table.

Still a Loner, Still a Monster, Still a Lone Battleground

By in omnigatherum

In his blood, Greek and Slavic are surely mixed, two irreconcilable elements, which could only give birth to a monster.

— Emil Cioran

In a striking coincidence, I just got an updated 23andMe report, which included this part of my ancestry composition:

  • Species: Homo Chimaera (Balkan–Hellenic strain)

  • Habitat: Between a library and a squat rack.

  • Temperament: Philosophically carnivorous; feeds on contradictions and non-sequiturs.

  • Identifying marks: A 23andMe map that looks like a border dispute.

  • Defense mechanism: Quotes Nietzsche until predators lose the will to engage.

Also, I had ChatGPT make me a crest befitting of my hybrid status:

Generals Fighting the Last War

By in books, conspicuous crusading, the great awokening, tribalism

Another email from Hachette Book Group this morning: “Read Banned Books.” The old standards show up — Catcher in the Rye; The Great Gatsby — along with trendy identitarian propaganda: Stamped From the Beginning; The Hips on the Drag Queen Go Swish, Swish, Swish; So You Want to Talk About Race. Funny what never shows up: Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally, which Amazon actually removed from sale for years and only reinstated in February 2025. That wasn’t a “challenge” in a school library; that was the dominant bookseller in America erasing a title from the market for ideological reasons. If publishers want credibility, they should admit the difference and include examples across the spectrum.

Meanwhile, the real crisis isn’t 1958’s fight to keep Catcher on a shelf; it’s that Americans just don’t read for pleasure anymore. Federal time-use data show leisure reading has cratered — down roughly 40% since the early 2000s; only about 16% of Americans read for fun on a given day in 2023. Among nine-year-olds, “almost every day” reading fell from 53% (2012) to 39% (2022). That’s the house fire; the “banned books” spectacle is a smoke machine.

Which is why “Banned Books Week” feels like Civil War reenactment: a safe, performative replay of yesterday’s battles. Even sympathetic histories admit most headline cases are “challenges,” not outright bans, yet the marketing rolls on because the ritual is familiar and fun, and it flatters our tribal prejudices. If publishers want to help, stop signaling to more than half the country that libraries and bookstores are part of the Blue Tribe’s territory. Otherwise, it’s just more useless partisan pageantry.

A Man of Lower-Case Letters

By in aphorisms, books, philosophy

The pensée-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things in detail, but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him. He handles his instrument agreeably, but he does not possess it, still less does he create it. He is a gardener and not a geologist; he cultivates the earth only so much as is necessary to make it produce for him flowers and fruits; he does not dig deep enough into it to understand it. In a word, the pensée-writer deals with what is superficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, the oratorical, the talking or writing philosopher; whereas the philosopher is the scientific pensée-writer. The pensée-writers serve to stimulate or to popularize the philosophers. They have thus a double use, besides their charm. They are the pioneers of the army of readers, the doctors of the crowd, the money-changers of thought, which they convert into current coin. The writer of pensée is a man of letters, though of a serious type, and therefore he is popular.

— Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Journal Intime

Quite the backhanded compliment. He assumes depth lives only in systems. But systems age like monuments; they weather into curiosities.
Think of the grand designs: Freud’s psychic Rome, Marx’s scientific history. Their constructions still loom, but most of us visit them like ruins — impressive, and no longer habitable. Now they’re ideological heritage sites with tour guides and gift shops. Systems aspire to total custody of experience, which is exactly why they date so fast: the world keeps sprouting annexes they never planned for. Call the aphorist a gardener if you must; gardens outlast architecture because they’re tended, seasonal, and endlessly replanted.

Fragments are built for weather. A strong pensée is a pocket instrument — caliper, compass, flint. You test it against experience; if it works, you keep it. That’s why La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, Nietzsche, Joubert, Lichtenberg linger: not because they explained everything once and for all, but because they left us tools we can use again and again in unfriendly climates. When the intellectual environment changes, the first to go are the enormous lizards of Theory. They lie where they fell, ribcages exposed like the staves of shipwrecks. The small, warm sentences scurry between the bones, quick-breathing, adaptable, living off whatever truth is in season.

Obiter Scripta, no. 146

By in books, montaigne, obiter scripta

Montaigne, a sage, has had no posterity. Rousseau, an hysteric, still stirs nations. I like only the thinkers who have inspired no tribune of the people.

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

Montaigne, no posterity? Only the quiet kind: a private republic of readers who grow up a little. How many authors would kill to be in both print and discussion 400 years later? That’s not failure; it’s proof that wisdom can outlive fashion without ever staging a parade. Rousseau, by contrast, scales. His pages are Molotov cocktails — ideas that combust best in crowds. He makes movements; Montaigne makes adults. One feeds the appetite for righteousness; the other tames it. Best to judge a thinker by whether his descendants are regiments or readers. I’ll take the writer whose influence is measured in diaries rather than slogans.

Bloody Shirt Campaign

By in tribalism

I read Williams’s article and didn’t think much of it. Read charitably, his claim is narrow: both camps leveraged the martyr aura around Floyd and Kirk for speech-policing and policy theater. True as far as it goes — just not very far. It ignores the asymmetries that actually matter (scale, methods, remedies), so as analysis, it’s thin and not especially useful. If you want to be polemical, you could claim that Williams is more interested in burnishing his brand as a beacon of principled integrity than in saying anything perceptive. If you want to be generous, you could say that the takeaway is simply: don’t sacralize politics. I would agree; I just think it’s a moot point. That ship not only sailed long ago, it struck an iceberg and sank. This idiotic generation will have to learn the hard way what happens when you make politics your religion.

But much of the right isn’t engaging that narrow claim; they’re impugning his motives. Twitter heavyweights like Stephen L. Miller and Christopher Rufo were particularly incensed. The fury is aimed at what they take to be Williams’s posture —milquetoast centrist floating above the fray — and at The Atlantic as purveyor of establishment conventional wisdom. So instead of rebutting his thin comparison, or just ignoring it as a waste of time, they prosecute his presumed intent and his outlet’s priors. That may be emotionally satisfying, but it leaves the core argument — such as it is — unaddressed. He wasn’t making a direct comparison between Floyd and Kirk as individuals, nor was he comparing the manner of their respective deaths; he was saying that they’ve been put to similar posthumous uses by their respective sides in order to achieve policy goals and rout their enemies. You can feel however you want about that — our side’s canonization is righteous and just, unlike theirs; they started it, we’re going to finish it — and you can fairly claim that this is a facile comparison for various reasons, but the assertion itself seems too banal to deserve much reaction. People are just spoiling for a fight, as usual.

I’m tired of the incentive to talk past each other just to stay riled up. If we want a cooler politics, start small: no saints, no straw men, grant charitable readings. That’s how you inch toward a Westphalia of the everyday — by refusing the thrill of assumed motives and settling for the slower satisfactions of arguing what was actually said.

The Trouble With Being Supercilious

By in books, foolosophy, nietzsche

A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.

— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born

I’ve sometimes fancied myself a courageous lone freethinker — but then again, who doesn’t? Everyone’s a hero in his own story. No one considers himself part of the bovine, slack-jawed masses. Cioran’s supercilious stance flatters that vanity a little too neatly. It’s rebellion as mood lighting. I too say many bold things, provided they scandalize only people I don’t know. If the pose requires only attitude and no losses, it’s just adolescence with better prose.

By contrast, there’s Nietzsche the considerate: in Sils he asked his friend, the devout Emily Fynn — reportedly with tears in his eyes — not to read his books because he feared the anti-Christian parts would hurt her feelings (Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin, 134–35; corroborated in Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 195). And years earlier he told Peter Gast that being “right” is a poor trade if it costs love: “It seems to me so foolish to insist on being in the right at the expense of love…”. That is not the voice of a man preening in opposition; that’s someone counting the cost of speaking forthrightly.

The point isn’t to be “out of step with one’s times,” much less to chase the cheap high of looking down on the herd. The point is to keep truth and tenderness in the same orbit, and to accept that real independence sometimes loses you applause from your own “side.” If your nonconformity never risks friendship, it’s just fashion; if it never revises itself after “one hour’s sympathetic intercourse,” it’s just pride. Better, then, to be occasionally right, frequently kind, and suspicious of any heroism that comes with universal approval.

In Search of Lost Nuance

By in language, the geist of the zeit

Sometimes you have to take an expression out of the language, to send it for cleaning, and then you can put it back into circulation.

— Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Sometimes (and Wittgenstein was right to say so) a word must be withdrawn from circulation and quietly laundered, because when, over these last weeks, “slop” — that syllable of tepid contempt — has been ladled with equal indifference over AI paste and party boilerplate, it has begun to cling, like the rubbery skin on lukewarm Cream of Wheat, or the congealed brown gloss that pooled around a Swanson salisbury steak in its little foil corral, or that Franco-American canned macaroni that slid from the tin with a hooork-schlurrp and a wan yellow sheen, to every conversation and column and comment thread, until, hearing the mynahs croak it again (and again, and again), I felt the old child’s disgust return and wished the term sent at once to the linguistic washing machine.

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