To die is to pass into fiction
Hilary Mantel:
As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted (Quoted in TLS review of Mantel’s book, Nov 24, 2023).
A Memoir of My Former Self
Emerging mysteries with aging
Aldous Huxley:
… do you feel, as I do, that the older one gets, the more unutterably mysterious, unlikely and totally implausible one’s own life and the universe at large steadily become? For practical purposes, one tries to make a little scientific technical sense of it all; for non-practical purposes – aesthetic and ‘spiritual’ – one cultivates Wordsworth’s ‘wise passiveness’ and opens oneself up receptively to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans within and without. (in a letter to Juliette Huxley, 1963).
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Parts of a whole
Marcus Aurelius:
No matter whether the universe is a confusion of atoms or a natural growth, let my first conviction be that I am part of a Whole which is under Nature’s governance; and my second, that a bond of kinship exists between myself and all other similar parts. If I bear these two thoughts in mind, then in the first place, being a part, I shall not feel aggrieved by any dispensation assigned to me from the Whole; since nothing which is beneficial for any whole can ever be harmful to a part, and in this case there is nothing contained in this Whole which is not beneficial to itself. … In the second place, inasmuch as there is this bond of kinship between myself and my fellow-parts, I shall do nothing that might injure their common welfare, but keep those kindred parts always purposefully in view, directing every impulse towards their good and away from anything that runs counter to it.
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Stop with the procrastinating, already!
Marcus Aurelius:
Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of the controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.
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Witticism as Criticism
Charles Hartshorne:
As my first teacher in the subject (Rufus Jones of Haverford College) put it, “Every system has an impasse in it somewhere.” There are, however, degrees of such deficiencies. Once when Herbert Feigl of the Vienna Circle, talking to some admirers, had just said, “A philosophical system is like a blanket that’s too short; you pull it up to keep your shoulders warm and expose your feet to the cold,” the late lamented logician C. H. Langford whispered to me, “He must be a centipede.”
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The risks of freedom
Charles Hartshorne:
Before humanity there were far fewer terrible risks for life on this planet. It is the price of our escape from the relative tyranny of instinct that we are uniquely exposed to the perils of being able to fall into drastic conflict with our fellows and with the nonhuman animal life around us. And every new achievement of science and technology magnifies both the opportunities and the dangers of our situation.
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Remembering Joe Stamey
(If you’re here to read about Joe Stamey, and don’t care much about how I came to know him, skip ahead to the horizontal rule.)
I’m embarrassed to say that I’m a bit proud of the fact that I was one of Richard Nixon’s mistakes. Not a very significant mistake among other mistakes (and misdeeds). In 1971 I received a Presidential Appointment to the US Military Academy at West Point. I came to see accepting that appointment as a mistake pretty quickly – I was there only for 8 weeks, so I’m convinced that Nixon would have agreed – but my being there changed my life. In fact, when people who’ve met me since then tell me that they can’t imagine me going to West Point, I tell them that one reason for that is the fact that I went to West Point. (Though, to be fair, there were those who knew me before I went who have said they thought it would never work out.) One decision I made during my time at West Point stands as a good indicator of how my experience changed me: I decided that I wanted to major in philosophy rather than physics, math, or engineering.
Read moreOn (not) reading Kant
Joe Stamey:
The many readers – rather nonreaders – of Kant who have claimed that the categorical imperative might allow the (moral) willing of a maxim that would subordinate everyone’s interests to mine, or to some concrete or particular group’s or individual’s, show that they are nonreaders.
Unpublished writing (from personal files)
A 'Good Society' supports dutiful action
Mary Midgley:
Claire Mac Cumhaill and Rachel Wiseman, presenting (with quotes from) Mary Midgley’s thesis outline: “Without a good society, ‘the sequence of events becomes entirely irregular’ and when an individual acts ‘the traditional result does not necessarily follow.’ When the relation between means and ends breaks down, the questions of how to be a good person, and how to do one’s duty, become pressing. I want to help my friend by sending her a food parcel, but if the postal service is run by crooks and gangsters, all I can do is deliver parcel to the post office and hope for the best. A judge who does her duty in a corrupt society will find no connection between doing what is right and doing good. ‘In such situations the coincidence of varying moral motives, on which optimistic systems rely, vanishes.’”
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Stories make a life
Rebecca Solnit:
“… stories are your life. We are our stories, stories that can be both prison and the crowbar to break open the door of that prison; we make stories to save ourselves or to trap ourselves or others, stories that lift us up or smash us against the stone wall of our own limits and fears. Liberation is always in part a storytelling process: breaking stories, breaking silences, making new stories. A free person tells her own story. A valued person lives in a society in which her story has a place.”
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