Most people can’t be reached, of course, because you can’t reason someone out of a belief that he wasn’t reasoned into.
Apparently this venerable saying originates with Jonathan Swift. Is it true, though? How many of us form our bedrock beliefs through reason? None, I’d say. And yet how many of us change our minds later, whether grudgingly or willingly, upon being presented with alternatives? I’ve certainly reasoned myself out of ideas and behaviors that were impressed upon me early in life, and I’m sure I’m not unique in that. I think this is a case of the neatness of the rhetorical technique tricking us into accepting the truth of the assertion.
When affairs get into a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says “All right,” and goes to sleep in his arm-chair.
The Lady of the House will be quite amused to learn that she is the avatar of philosophy, the word of wu wei made flesh. Though I have grown in that direction myself, I still have a competitive spirit which bristles at being forced to alter my plans. I have a tendency to take setbacks as a personal insult, a slap with a glove. I am ready to duel with Reality itself to satisfy my honor, or at least to pummel it into submission. How many times do I emerge victorious? Not the point. What’s important is to fight well.
A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity–and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.
— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
I suppose mountain climbing would indeed work, especially in the Swiss Alps, but I can vouch for the fact that unloading nearly a thousand boxes by hand off of two shipping containers also serves in a pinch, especially if you add in a two-hour time limit before the truck driver needs to get moving. By around box 935, one has achieved, if not Zen-like calm detachment, a single-minded focus on endurance. Beyond good and evil lies…exhaustion, it turns out.
Yes! among books that charm, and give wings to the mind, will my days be spent. I shall be ever absorbing the things great men have written; with such experience will I charge my mind to the full.
— Max Beerbohm, “Diminuendo”
The year in reading has felt a bit subdued. Maybe it’s just the general malaise of 2020 coloring my sense of things, but it feels like there haven’t been many titles to happily anticipate. However, November has brought forth new books from Kevin Williamson, John Gray, and Rolf Dobelli, all of which I’m looking forward to. And best of all, the first library sale since last December is happening this week! Nature is healing.
It would be a good idea if at the end of each year a tribunal was held on the conduct of the newspapers: perhaps it would make the people who write in them more circumspect…Two or more opposing papers would be compared with one another, and all of them with the actual course of events. Thus some assessment of political journals in general would in the end be arrived at…
Truly, it was a more genteel time back then. Nowadays, thanks to the ambassadorial efforts of English football fans in particular, residents of that noble island are known by a different term, at least among the French. From Geoffrey Hughes’s An Encyclopedia of Swearing:
I wish that were so, but Kristian Niemietz has been making the counterargument for some time that “Twitter is the real world,” and I’m afraid he may well be right. To paraphrase Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of monomaniacal fanatics can change the world.”
Among those whose reputation is exhausted in a short time by its own luxuriance, are the writers who take advantage of present incidents or characters which strongly interest the passions, and engage universal attention. It is not difficult to obtain readers, when we discuss a question which every one is desirous to understand, which is debated in every assembly, and has divided the nation into parties; or when we display the faults or virtues of him whose publick conduct has made almost every man his enemy or his friend. To the quick circulation of such productions all the motives of interest and vanity concur; the disputant enlarges his knowledge, the zealot animates his passion, and every man is desirous to inform himself concerning affairs so vehemently agitated and variously represented.
Anyone else just feel… bad… after this debate? Not talking about an outcome, which I can’t even make sense of. I just feel down about how much Americans seemingly hate each other based on politics.
An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more and more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous anger to the next.
Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring.
The Lady of the House knows a married couple. Each of them has a personal therapist, and then they have a marriage therapist for them both to see together. (I wonder if, when they have kids, each child will have his or her own therapist, as well as a whole-family therapist…) These are what we would call, in the idiotic parlance of our times, “privileged” people. The lack of any obvious problems is apparently itself a problem requiring professional consultation. It reminds me of pets who start chewing holes in the furniture or their own fur just to have something to do with their bored energy. If I may offer a rejoinder to Socrates, perhaps the examined life can be powerless to halt its own momentum. As for John Stuart Mill, how would he know what it’s like to be a satisfied pig?
