2002
● 1-3-2002: Concerning the law of physics that the amount of energy in the universe is constant, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed; does this not imply a finite quantum of energy in the universe, which in turn implies a finite universe? If the universe is infinite, and there’s infinite energy, how can it be said that the amount of energy remains constant? (If ten megawatts of energy were created, so to speak, would there not still be the same—infinite—quantum of energy?)
[Later note (5-30-2024): That might be wrong. Let’s say that, in a certain (infinite) universe, there are infinitely many planets, each one like Earth, each with the same number of people. No planet is removed, no new planets are added, no people die, and no new ones are born. And let’s say that there’s a million megawatts of energy for each person. Hence the number of people is infinite but remains the same; and the amount of energy is infinite, but fixed . . .. (?)]
● 1-8-2002: The mystery of existence. Why should anything exist? Of course, whichever situation obtains in this regard (whether there be something, or not); it seems you would have largely the same sort of mystery. That is, we ask, Why should there be something?, Where did it all come from? But if there were nothing, would it not make just as much sense to inquire (were there someone to ponder it), Why should there be nothing?, Where did it all go?
● 1-15-2002: The urge to pray to God for help in our lives may perhaps be satisfied by a more acceptable equivalent, which is to appeal to our subconscious mind. That might satisfy our desire to appeal to some unseen force that helps us, which works behind the scenes to solve our problems.
● 1-16-2002: Yesterday
● 1-18-2002: I’ve had a cold (the common cold) starting Tuesday, 15 January 2002. Today, rather suddenly, it took a dramatic turn for the better, and I had an interesting sensation in that regard. I was walking in the grocery store, and I felt a certain transformation; I thought to myself something like, “This is what it feels like to have a cold; I am me, and I just have this thing called a cold.” It was as if I was now in control of it . . . as if the cold was a handbag; and, until then, I was within the handbag, which was closed around me, but now I was carrying the bag in my hand . . ..
● 1-21-2002: I had a funny dream in which a rule was promulgated that, in the creation of an opera, neither the libretto nor the music could be written by only one person, so as to avoid a conflict of interest in the same person writing the parts for both opposing parties of the hero and the villain.
● 1-24-2002: It has been said that the Federal Reserve can restrain the economy, slow its growth, by raising interest rates, but cannot stimulate the economy just by reducing interest rates; which proposition has been capsulized by saying that you can pull a string, but you can’t push a string. I think a better way to express this principle would be with an equestrian analogy: that you can restrain or slow a horse by pulling on the reins, but you can’t propel it just by loosening the reins . . ..
● 1-25-2002: I lost my job at Adelson, Testan & Brundo on Tuesday, 15 January 2002, because I was unable to handle a full caseload (150 cases), a ridiculous expectation of me after just three months of training. I have mixed feelings about it. I half expected it, and was not at all surprised. I’m shocked and saddened, but also greatly relieved. I would have burned myself out had I worked long and hard enough to actually handle all those cases. Now I need to find another job, and continue my training in workers’ compensation law.
● Whenever I hear about someone’s death, I think that he should have lived for the quality of his life rather than its length, for the latter pursuit (longevity) in the end availed him naught, amounted to, came to, nothing; better to have a week of intense pleasure than a decade of mild satisfaction (or at least it seems so when you ponder a life that is no more). If not for my valuing my creative productivity, I would live for pleasure. Of course, all values (what we value, what we live for) are ultimately subjective; in a sense, I think my valuing my productivity is perverse, the entertainment of a sort of insane delusion, and that the most natural (even, as it were, logical) pursuit is pleasure. For me, to value my productivity is to value ego over pleasure; I think and write, not because I enjoy it, or even because I’m good at it, but rather because (I believe) I’m better at it than other men, and therefore have a chance at fame, which, for some arbitrary reason, just because of the way I happen to be made, I desire.
. . . On the other hand . . . We contemplate the grotesque shortness of life in order to help us appreciate being alive; and yet life’s brevity is essentially a depressing thought, so we cannot keep it very much in the forefront of our awareness, or life would be miserable (or more miserable). Among our psychological survival mechanisms is a tendency to push that thought out of the foreground of our mental landscape. We must entertain the awareness, but in moderation, else we defeat the purpose. So we allow ourselves the sense that longevity is worthwhile, because that impression lends our trivial existence some sense of solidity, substantiality, significance, and security, and thus enhances the quality of our lives.
● 1-26-2002: I’ve discovered why the wealth gap between the United States and third world countries is growing. It’s because every time someone in this country proclaims, “God bless America!”; God complies and transfers more resources from the poor countries to the United States.
● 1-27-2002: Lower animals not infrequently engage in forms of behavior which, though promoting the survival of the species as a whole, seem unpleasant for, and even detrimental to, the individuals who so behave. Examples are salmon fishes going upriver to lay their eggs, whereupon they die; and dominant males of various other species constantly doing battle with competing males to maintain their dominance in the group and the exclusive right to mate with females, in the process of which the dominant male suffers exhaustion, and risks, and often sustains, serious injury. Sometimes when I contemplate such behavior, I think that the animals in question are foolish or stupid, in acting counter to their own welfare; and I imagine that, if I were in their position, I would buck the instinctual ways and act in my own individual best interest. But it occurs to me that I am really not so different in this regard from those animals; for, objectively, as it were, I, too, act in ways that are inimical to my own selfish well-being (but which, perhaps, are promotive of the species’ welfare). I do so, for instance, when I expressly commit myself to maximizing my artistic output, in explicit distinction to maximizing my happiness (although these two objectives, analytically distinct, could be practically coincident). And this vow on my part is arguably even more perverse, so to speak, than the equivalent propensities of lower animals, because, unlike animals, I am conscious of its conflict with my own welfare, and I pursue it knowingly and volitionally. Perhaps, in a broad sense, the wellspring of my conduct is essentially the same as that of all the other animals. I act as I do, not from some rational, enlightened, transcendent free choice, but, instead, in obedience to my nature (in my case, my human nature); in short, I act as I do simply because that’s how I’m made; that’s how I am . . ..
On second thought, there’s a qualitative difference between a human’s artistic creativity and an animal’s procreation. Whereas a given animal’s breeding makes no difference to the species, human civilization enables an unusually gifted man to do creative work that makes a positive difference to countless future generations of men. Perhaps, though, I flatter myself to hope my work is in that category.
● 1-29-2002: The stars are mine because I have seen them and written about them. . . . We tend to adhere more strongly to those observations, theories, and ideas that we personally originate. . . . Pride of authorship . . ..
● 1-30-2002: A contemplation on the value of money: If you were offered the choice between great, essentially unlimited, wealth and a fifty percent increase in your level of intelligence, which would you choose? If the latter, imagine that your current situation is the result of your having been presented with such a choice and your selecting and being given higher intelligence. If you still feel dissatisfied, consider the possibility that it’s simply part of your nature, a feature of your personality, to be dissatisfied (so that, even if you had whatever it is you feel you lack, you would still feel dissatisfied).
● It seems to me inconsistent that prostitution is illegal, but that pornography is legal, in that, arguably, pornography involves prostitution, since the “actors” who are photographed are essentially being paid to engage in sex.
[Later note (2021): Perhaps it makes a difference that, in pornography, both actors (the ones having sex with each other) are being paid to have sex, so that there’s a situational and psychological equality between them(?)]
● 1-31-2002: A business relationship is to a love relationship as speaking is to singing, or as prose is to poetry.
● President George W. Bush, in his State of the Union speech on 29 January 2002, urged every citizen to volunteer 4,000 hours over a lifetime to public service. That’s a laudable sentiment; one of the most publicly helpful forms of volunteering would be to work to throw Bush out of office.
● If man ever did succeed in making a computer (or any entity) that’s conscious, arguably such entity (perhaps depending in part on the degree of sophistication of its consciousness) would (or should) have certain rights, including a right not to be caused pain (if not a right to experience happiness) and perhaps even a right to continued existence. You would insist on such rights for yourself, which presumably should not depend upon whether your body is made of skin, bone, and blood, or plastic, metal, and silicone.
● 2-3-2002: There was a man who experienced constant and permanent severe physical pain after being in a terrible car wreck. He lived in an extremely rich land where the streets were paved with gold, but the gold surface made the road so slippery that cars got insufficient traction and often crashed.
● If you trust in God, and then it turns out (or you find out) that there is no God; in what would you have trusted? It cannot be God, per se, because there was no God. Would it have been other people?, your own intuition or instincts? And by whom would you feel betrayed? Again, it can’t be God, for there was no God. Perhaps, then, in the people who proselytized you?; the church?; or yourself for having been so gullible?
● 2-10-2002: If you take a good, hard look at the world, the conclusion is inescapable that God is either sadistic, incompetent, or nonexistent.
● Our lives grow shorter by the day.
● 2-11-2002: Last night I watched the movie As Good As It Gets, and found it rather inspiring. The title refers, not, as it usually does, to the best possible state of affairs, or an extremely favorable situation, as you might mean if you exclaim “This is as good as it gets!” in the course of celebrating some wonderful news. It means instead that certain facts of your life may never substantially improve; and the movie’s moral seems to be that our lives’ true betterment may be less likely to result from radically altering our basic circumstances than from finding a way to work around or despite them. For example, a person may be lonesome and feel a strong need for a romantic relationship, and attempt to solve this problem by getting psychotherapy to transform his personality to make him less shy, more self-confident, and more attractive to potential mates. Though in some cases this procedure might work; in many other cases, the person may never really change, or he may change very little, and after years of therapy realize that his time would have been better spent simply accepting himself as he was, dating members of the opposite sex, learning social skills (through practice), and finding people compatible with his personality. Put another way, thorough preparation is generally commendable; but time is short, and, sometimes, at some point, you must just take what you have and get on with it.
That other, less effective, or counterproductive, problem-solving process may be entirely innocent, coming from our most sincere and ardent desire to solve our problems. But it may originate instead from an unconscious attempt to evade work or discomfort. At times we focus on specific elements in us or in our situation and somehow identify them as key to our failure to accomplish our goal, because we like to believe that we can attain our objective in a series of easier, less unpleasant steps, that with less effort we can cure some particular fault (like shyness), and then, with that fault removed, proceed, with less difficulty and less pain, to accomplish our more general purpose (like finding a mate). But possibly at some subconscious level we know this approach won’t work, either, perhaps, because we know we’ll be unable to make the immediate change (becoming less shy, for example), or because we know that in any event we’ll sooner or later have to do what’s very difficult or unpleasant (such as experiencing the awkwardness of dating and the anguish of rejection). Our focusing on the intermediate step, rather than more directly on the fundamental end, may thus become a sort of procrastination and rationalization and fantasy, enabling us to feel that we’re conscientiously working toward our goal, and that we may eventually achieve it, while at the same time eluding, perhaps forever, more difficult and uncomfortable work and/or the painful awareness of ultimate failure.
To avoid this insidious, self-sabotaging procedure, it may help simply to be conscious of it (of our human tendency at times, contrary to what we purport, to choose the easy way over the most effective way); and to bear in mind that, when you’re older, if you have not realized your ambition, as painful as that may be, it will be less painful knowing it was because you tried but failed than knowing it was because you didn’t really try.
● 2-12-2002: Is the ability to articulate a thought the same as the ability to have a thought?
● 2-13-2002: All too often we choose the easy solution rather than the best solution.
● In accordance with President Bush’s accusation that purchasing illegal drugs, including marijuana, supports terrorists, I propose the following message: Fight terrorism: Grow your own cannabis!
● One consequence of having played the violin, is that I can readily tell whether someone in a movie is really playing or just faking. I hate fake violin playing.
● 2-15-2002: What’s the relationship between oneself and one’s life?; between the desire to improve myself and the desire to improve my life? If I wish to improve myself, is it because I wish to improve my life?
● 2-18-2002: Why do people worship God? Do they think that God is vain and wants, or needs, or requires, the beings He creates to worship Him? Do they do it because they think it makes God feel good? Or do they do it because they think they’ll thereby receive better treatment from God, who favors his little sycophants? It seems to me that, if any of these possibilities were actually true, it would be a poor reflection on God’s character. . . .
● 2-25-2002: People tend to use the word coincidence imprecisely. When they say that the connection between several facts or events is coincidental or a coincidence, they usually mean that there’s no special connection, such as a causal one. But because the items have some relationship, even if only an accidental one (they’re coincident—they coincide in some respect: they take place on the same planet, within the same year, or decade); it would be more precise to say that the coincidence is accidental or insignificant; and, if there is a significant connection between a number of items, to say, not that the relationship is not a coincidence, but rather that the coincidence is significant, or that there’s a significant coincidence (or I suppose you could accurately say that the association is more than a mere coincidence). In short, the distinction should be, not between coincidence and no-coincidence, but rather between significant coincidence and insignificant coincidence.
● In late 1930’s and early 1940’s Germany there were three political parties not well remembered today. They were the German Republicans, the German Democrats, and the German Greens. The Republicans favored a plan to kill six million Jews. The Democrats said this was wrong-headed; they insisted that six million was too many, that the appropriate number was five million. The Greens argued that killing people based on their religion, culture, or race was wrong, and opposed the killing of any Jews on that basis. The Republicans and Democrats seized power, forming a sort of coalition government, with the Republicans slightly predominating; and the Greens were entirely shut out and suppressed. My recollection of this historical fact is a bit vague: either I read it somewhere or I dreamt it; I’m not sure which.
● If God was against homosexuality, He would not have made homosexuals, no?
● A mathematical question: Does the (shortest) space between the two reels of tape of a cassette tape cartridge change as the tape winds and one spool enlarges and the other shrinks? Why or why not?
Answer: Yes, the space between the two reels does change. The gap between the two sides is a function of the total or combined radius or thickness of the two reels (the larger the total radius, the smaller the gap), and the total radius is in turn a function of the total or combined number of layers of tape on both reels (the greater the number of layers, the greater the radius). As the tape winds onto the larger spool and off of the smaller one, it takes a longer length of tape (a length of tape equal to that reel’s circumference) to add one layer of material to that side. But it takes a smaller length of tape (again, a length of tape equal to that side’s circumference) to subtract a layer from the smaller side. Hence, as the tape winds onto the larger side, the amount of tape that adds one layer to the larger side will subtract more than one layer from the smaller side, a disparity which progressively increases, thus steadily reducing the total number of layers of tape on the two sides, decreasing their combined radius, and increasing the distance between them. (Because the process is symmetrical, happening in each direction of tape winding, the other extreme of gap width occurs in the middle of the process . . . so that the more nearly equal the amount of tape on the two spools, the shorter the gap between them.)
● 2-27-2002: Perhaps a good answer to the question, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is “Einstein was not a millionaire.” (The question is really a statement, starting from the assumption that all very intelligent people are rich, proceeding to the declaration that if you’re not rich, you’re therefore not very intelligent, and culminating in the speaker’s implicit conclusion that his interlocutor is not very intelligent—because he’s not rich.)
● 2-28-2002: The amount of intentional good or harm done is a function of the intention’s goodness or evil and of the actor’s ability to effect his intention.
● 3-3-2002: We tend to imagine the unknown in terms of the known. Thus, we conceive of God as more or less a grand cosmic human, so similar to us, in fact, that we declare that man was made in God’s image. And we picture intelligent space aliens as bipedal, upright-walking creatures with two arms and hands, who think and communicate verbally, often in English.
● Many of the New York firefighters who died in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 11 September 2001 were not brave, as they’re proclaimed to have been. First of all, a considerable number of them, had they known the buildings were about to collapse, would not have ventured in or near them. Second, many of the firefighters believed that when they die, they go to Heaven and enjoy eternal bliss (albeit not necessarily involving virgins).
● 3-7-2002: Whenever the United States sends soldiers off to war, the government heartily assures us that it’s worth dying to preserve our American way of life and our precious rights and liberties. Now, in the so-called war on terror, the government tells us that we must relinquish our rights and liberties to help preserve our lives. (If we should give our lives to preserve our rights, why should we give our rights to preserve our lives?)
● Bush urges us to return to normal when it comes to spending money, so that corporations can return to making profit; but when it comes to our precious right to speak our minds and criticize the government . . . well, the world has changed, and we must “watch what we say.”
● 3-8-2002: Those who die young remain young throughout their entire lives.
● The difference between having the most luxurious car and having the humblest car is far smaller than the difference between having the humblest car and having no car. . . . In life, it often helps to distinguish between what we want and what we need.
● 3-9-2002: In my piece “Ethics,” the very first word is “Moral” and the very last word is “freedom,” which symbolizes the thesis and the movement of ideas throughout the work. I didn’t consciously plan the composition to begin and end that way; indeed, I didn’t notice this interesting and significant fact until some years after I wrote it.
● 3-12-2002: The introduction of the concept of God creates at least as many intellectual problems as it solves. We may establish the notion of God to explain, for example, the conflict between Good and Evil, that good is the work of God; evil, the work of the Devil. But this concomitantly also creates theoretical difficulties. For example, it’s hard to explain why good things happen to bad people, and bad things to good people, if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all good. Whereas, there is no such difficulty without the concept of God, for the universe and nature are morally neutral. Or, to fix such theoretical difficulties, we may put a sort of patch on the theory, in this instance by instituting the doctrine of Heaven and Hell, to argue that, what happens on Earth notwithstanding, in the long run, the good are rewarded and the bad are punished, though, of course, we can’t observe it. But the patch makes the theory more complicated and even more strained and artificial.
● Why is the existence of man (and of animals) necessary for God’s great plan? . . . What is God’s great plan?
● Does God care about us after we’re dead? What about those who are in Hell? Does God ever change his mind about someone who’s in Hell, and rescind the punishment? What if someone in Hell repents his Earthly sins, and accepts Christ?
[Later note (2021): Oh, Richard, you know the answer to that: then it’s too late.]
● 3-13-2002: Is God infinitely happy? If not, how can He be adequately compensated for, be adequately motivated to do, the infinite work He does? But if so, what incentive would He ever have to make any changes in what He does or how He does it?
● 3-16-2002: A prayer: Please, God, Bless America. Bless America more than You blessed America on 11 September 2001.
● A religious person’s wish: I wish I could go back in time to 11 September 2001, and, early in the morning, I would pray harder than I prayed before, and I would pray to God, “Please bless America. Bless America today!
● Where was God on 11 September 2001? Was He blessing America on September 11th? Or perhaps God was present, but when the terrorists prayed to God for help in carrying out their mission, He answered their prayers. It’s not that God was absent. God was there; He was just a little confused. . . . But, no. God planned and carried out the September 11th attacks. He did so in order to have the New York firefighters sacrifice themselves, which benefitted both the firefighters and the public at large. It benefitted the firefighters by getting them to Heaven sooner, where they’ll have a far better life than they had on Earth (after all, Heaven is our reward . . . for the younger firefighters, there might even be some virgins). And it benefitted the public by showing people how brave humans can be and thus renewing our faith in humanity. God be praised!
● In the first part of my life I thought my performance was impressive for someone that young; and in the second part of my life I thought I was impressive for someone that old. It seems there should have been a long middle period of my prime; I don’t know where that went.
● 3-18-2002: Religion is an anti-human, anti-democratic institution. It takes the absolute reverence for and power of the king or emperor and, instead of giving it back to the people, simply transfers it to a god, before which man continues to prostrate himself and surrender his dignity and free will.
● I’ve just heard a statement by the U.S. government to the effect that they expect a “one hundred percent effort” on the part of Afghanistan to eliminate terrorism in that country. But such statements about one hundred percent efforts are problematic. The totality of your time (in a day, 24 hours) is one hundred percent. But you have to sleep (during which time you can’t make the effort in question); let’s say you have 16 waking hours. And you must devote some waking time to such mundane but necessary pursuits as eating and earning a living. The real question is what portion of your time should you reasonably be expected to devote to a certain task or effort? Presumably, even a reasonable effort, even a laudable, heroic effort, one which is beyond the call of duty, would not take up all of your time. So even these excellent exertions are not “one hundred percent efforts,” and hence the demand for a “one hundred percent effort” is nonsensical.
● 3-21-2002: A person who does not practice what he preaches is not necessarily a hypocrite, for a hypocrite is one who lies about his beliefs; if he doesn’t practice what he preaches, he may believe what he preaches, but just lack sufficient energy or will-power to act accordingly.
[Later note (2021): A person who believes what he preaches (but fails to act accordingly) may still be a hypocrite, if his belief in his teaching is weaker than the force with which he urges it on others.]
● 3-22-2002: The U.S. and Israeli governments constantly criticize Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not doing enough to stop terrorism committed by Palestinians. But the fact seems to get lost that, whereas the terrorism committed by Palestinians is individual terrorism, the violence committed by Israel against the Palestinians is state terrorism. Thus Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is directly responsible for Israel’s terrorism, but Chairman Arafat is not directly responsible for the terrorism committed by Palestinians. Nor, in fact, is it clear to what extent, if at all, Arafat is indirectly responsible for Palestinian terrorism; how would he prevent it—decree that suicide bombers shall be subject to the death penalty?
While one does not condone violence, it’s easy to understand why Palestinians engage in it. If they did not, Israel would commit her crimes against the Palestinians with impunity. When Palestinians strike back, although it arguably makes their own situation even worse, they no doubt think, “We won’t be the only ones to suffer. If Israel is going to harm us, at least she’ll be harmed as well.” (Plus, if Israel so acted with impunity, what motivation would she have to stop it?) And it’s just as easy to fault Israel’s justification for continued state violence against the Palestinians, which, at best, is probably something like this: “Even though your violence is a reaction to our victimization of you, we disapprove of the way in which you’re reacting; therefore, we’ll continue to victimize you until you stop reacting in this way; to do otherwise would be to permit your tactics against our crimes to work.”
Indeed, the same analysis applies to the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on the United States. While they’re condemnable, they’re at base a reaction to the enormous crimes the United States has perpetrated upon others around the world for decades. As W.H. Auden said, “. . . Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” To paraphrase Auden and George W. Bush, with apologies to Auden for doing so in the same sentence: the September 11th attacks represent, not evil against good, but evil against evil. At least Bush got it half right.
● I used to think prayer does not work and is a waste of time. I was wrong. It seems obvious that the reason the calamity of 11 September 2001 occurred was that not enough people were asking God to bless America. Since that time, however, masses of people have been declaring “God bless America” and there has been not a single major terror attack on the United States. Surely no mere coincidence! If we allowed prayer in the public schools, with so many more people praying to God to protect America, we’d be even safer!
● The notion that the punishment should fit the crime is more often invoked to argue for a less severe punishment than for a more severe one. In addition, the extent of the punishment sought to be urged by the fitting-the-crime concept has an upward limit, but no downward limit. That is, we use the idea to advocate for the maximum possible leniency (no punishment at all, if we believe that the act to be punished was no crime), but we have an absolute upper limit to the harshness of punishment we’re prepared to recommend, regardless of the crime’s magnitude. Specifically, the harshest punishment most civilized, enlightened men would favor is life imprisonment under reasonably humane conditions, or death, even if, for example, extended torture were more commensurate with the enormity of the crime.
● A simple procedure for doing hard and/or unpleasant work:
(1) Identify the task that’s important to you to accomplish but which is hard and/or unpleasant;
(2) Attempt to find a way to do the work which is less difficult and less unpleasant;
(3a) If you can find an easier, less unpleasant way to do the work, use it;
(3b) If you can’t (reasonably soon) find an easier, less unpleasant way to do the work, do it anyway.
● A suggestion (or two) for prioritizing your work. If you’re uncertain about the sequence in which to do various tasks, think for a moment what sequence would be the most efficient. But if you still can’t decide; then, instead of letting indecision immobilize you, pick something to do and work on it in the meantime. And if you become bogged down in the course of doing a hard or unpleasant task, and you need to pause, take a break from it by switching to another productive activity rather than by doing nothing.
● 3-24-2002: When spontaneity and enthusiasm fail, one must rely on discipline.
● 3-25-2002: The notion “Easier said than done” has a corollary, which is that advice is easier to give than to take (at least I have found it so). (Perhaps that’s not a corollary, but merely a paraphrasing.) One reason why advice is easier to give than to take, I think, is that the adviser does not have to do the actual hard work needed to implement the advice. And even relatively specific advice often entails many secondary decisions about ways to implement it, which decisions can be difficult and needful of advice in their own right.
● 3-26-2002: Because religion doesn’t actually explain anything (it creates far more problems in this regard than it solves); religion’s purpose is, not to explain, but rather to provide a myth that enables adherents to feel good by seeing the universe as friendly towards man, instead of (as it is) indifferent. A fundamental error that people who criticize religion often make is to assume that religion’s purpose is to actually explain things, and to argue about its unsoundness as a literal explanation. But this response is perhaps invited by a certain confusion on the part of religious people themselves, who seem divided between the conception of religion as myth, which serves cultural and psychological purposes, and as literal truth. Perhaps a more enlightened approach on the part of atheists would be simply to acknowledge the division within the ranks of the religious themselves, to declare that we agree with those religious people who acknowledge that religion is myth, not literal truth, and to decline to engage in argument with the religious literalists over the literal truth of religion, on the grounds that to do so would only encourage the misguided confusion of religion and science (science is science, religion is religion; they’re fundamentally distinct enterprises, and should not be confused or combined).
In fact, scientists who incorporate the notion of God as an element in their scientific theories (except as a mere metaphor) are guilty of this fallacy, of combining science and religion.
[Later note (1-9-2024): On second thought, I think that most people who believe in God, believe in God literally, not merely metaphorically. “Believe in” means belief literally. It would make no sense to say, “I believe in a metaphor.” Einstein used “God” metaphorically (“God does not play dice with the universe”). He did not believe in God.]
[Later note (9-7-2024): My second paragraph just above, too, is perhaps erroneous. A scientist who uses the idea of God in his scientific theories is not necessarily combining science and religion. The concept of God has two different contexts: religious and philosophical/scientific. In a scientific theory, the concept of God would probably be the philosophical/scientific one . . . though it would likewise be nonsensical.]
● 3-27-2002: All facts are true, but not all truths are fact.
● I think that one reason why recovering drug abusers who adhere to the Twelve-Steps addiction recovery program turn the program into a virtual cult, is out of a desperate attempt to imbue their drug-abstaining life with a sense of excitement and pleasure, which drugs used to provide (or at least promised to provide). It’s as if they’re trying to convince themselves that life without drugs is fun and wonderful. I almost feel as if I should inform them, “Life without drugs is not wonderful. It’s painful, which is why you used drugs in the first place, to escape the pain, though the attempt backfired. We abstain from drugs, not because life without them is glorious, but rather because life with drugs is even more painful. Just accept it, and get on with it.”
● 3-29-2002: People often cite various other people being killed as a problem for the thesis of an all good, all-powerful God. But why does it matter that a person “gets killed”? Why is this so different from dying “naturally,” which happens very soon to everyone? In the end, God kills each of us. Why does He do that? But perhaps I’m falling into the trap I warned about . . . (of arguing with the literal interpretation of religion).
● 3-30-2002: Modern Israel is a vicious, brutal bully; it might be called Little America.
● The semicolon, as the name suggests, has something in common with the colon. But it might more aptly be called a semi-period, since, both typographically and functionally, it’s precisely a combination of a period and a comma.
● 3-31-2002: Just now there was a particularly unpleasant woman at the local coffee shop, who ridiculed me for standing where I was standing in queue, and attempted to bully me into moving to where she somehow wished me to stand (closer to the person ahead of me). Finally, the available waiter summoned me to a different spot than the one to which the unpleasant woman had attempted to steer me. At that point, I should have said this to her: “Rudeness and obnoxiousness are very undesirable traits, especially when combined with stupidity!”
● 4-3-2002: If, in the last U.S. presidential election, Al Gore was the lesser evil (in relation to George W. Bush), that makes President-Select Bush the greater evil.
● A long time ago in a certain European country there was an election in which two noblemen (counts, in particular) were prevented from voting. The election was invalidated and a new one called, on the principle that every count should vote.
● 4-4-2002: As to whether I’m primarily a writer or a philosopher; I’m a philosopher in my writing’s content, and a writer in my writing’s motivation. Some writers write in order to express themselves; I express myself in order to write. And the best material I have to express happens to be philosophical.
● Apropos of Switzerland’s legalization of (human) euthanasia and its proposal to make available to the elderly a suicide pill . . . I believe that, except perhaps when a person is basically healthy and with reasonable medical treatment can have a decent quality of life, the elderly should be given the option of suicide, and, if an old person chooses that option, provision should be made to help facilitate the decision in such a way as to maximize his comfort and dignity. I further believe that an old person, when his discomfort and misery significantly outweigh any positive values in his life, such as other satisfactions or productivity, and when there is little realistic hope for a change in this regard, and in any event when he has very little time left to live; he should be afforded the opportunity to take whatever combination of drugs and in whatever amounts and at whatever frequencies he desires, to help him feel better, regardless of addiction or other negative consequences for him.
We should all have the chance for a little reward of pleasure at the end of life, which people universally wish for, as evidenced by the common religious belief in the eternal bliss of Heaven after death.
● The average person you see walking around in society is more intelligent than the average person born, because the genetically least intelligent people are not walking around in society. Insufficiently intelligent to function independently, they’re institutionalized or cared for at home.
● 4-6-2002: Everyone’s experience of death is identical. After all, the total absence of experience doesn’t leave much room for a variation in experience.
● In their mistrust of others, some paranoids are wrong, others are right. Those who are wrong need psychotherapy; those who are right need protection. A man’s being correctly labeled paranoid is not the end of the inquiry. One must further determine whether the paranoia is justified.
[Later note (2021): That must be rewritten, unfortunately. Unfortunately, because a rewriting will inevitably be wordier and less elegant. But it must be rewritten because it’s inaccurate: I just looked up paranoia in the dictionary, which defines it as an extreme, irrational distrust of others. So if the distrust is justified, it’s not irrational, and so not paranoia. Here’s an attempted rewriting: Extreme distrust of others is paranoid when the distrust is unjustified, but not when the distrust is justified. Paranoids need psychotherapy, the rest need protection. (Well, that’s perhaps more elegant than the original. In any event, truth comes before style.)]
● 4-8-2002: Whether death is good or bad depends on the quality of the life that’s ending; if life is bad, death is good; if life is good, death is bad. It’s good to end something bad, bad to end something good.
● For me, deciding whether to seek a romantic relationship is to decide whether to go through a sure hell for an uncertain heaven.
● 4-12-2002: I had (what I felt was) a very interesting thought, which I was going to write down . . . but I can’t remember what it was. An extraordinarily frustrating feeling!
● . . . I just remembered it! (We’ll see if it lives up to its billing as a “very interesting thought.”) The news story of the day (or the hour) is the latest in a long, frequent series of suicide bombings in Israel by Palestinians. This one is the second in the past week, during which time Israel has been engaged in its widely criticized substantial incursion into the Gaza Strip and other Palestinian territory. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon commented that the suicide bombing proved the need for Israel’s military action against the Palestinians. Of course, if the suicide bombings stopped, or at least became considerably less frequent than they had been before Israel’s incursion, Israel would no doubt use that abatement, too, as support for its military action, arguing that the military attacks had a good effect. And it occurred to me that: If either an increase or a decrease in a certain evil would be used to justify action supposedly justified as a means of fighting that evil, fighting the evil is not the action’s real purpose.
● 4-13-2002: People speak of Judgment Day, when you die and you answer to God for the sins you’ve committed during your life. For me, Judgment Day comes in your later life, when you must answer to yourself for how you’ve lived, whether you lived for immediate pleasure, accomplishing nothing of lasting value, or, instead, worked hard and built something of which you’re proud . . . in short, whether you lived your life in a way that’s a source of regret, or of satisfaction.
● 4-17-2002: I have a follow-up interview today with State Compensation Insurance Fund about employment (as a workers’ compensation lawyer).
● The current government of Israel, because of its outrageous treatment of the Palestinians, will stain Israel’s reputation (and perhaps that of all Jews) as the Nazi government stained Germany’s reputation.
● 4-19-2002:
John likes Jim.
Jim likes George.
Therefore, John likes George.
(This argument is invalid. . . . John’s friend Jim and John’s enemy George may be friends with each other.)
John is like Jim.
Jim is like George.
Therefore, John is like George.
(This argument, too, is invalid. . . . It could be, for example, that John and Jim are alike in that both have blonde hair, and Jim and George are alike in that both have a sister; and yet John does not have a sister, and George does not have blonde hair . . . and so John and George have neither element in common.)
● I wonder if I come to have the opinions I have through some sort of pure process, that they’re what I truly believe, or if, rather, I come to my opinions and attitudes through some considerably less-than-pure process: for example, that I happen to live in a time in which the prevailing opinion on a certain topic is such-and-such, and I happen to have a rebellious intellectual personality, so I take a contrary position . . ..
● 4-21-2002: Crocodiles as a group are known as crocodoodlians, which name derives from the sound the animals make, “crocodoodle-doo.” In the nineteenth century, however, they were known instead as crocodilains, because, due to their fierce predatory nature, many people thought of them as villains.
● About the Arab–Israeli conflict, it’s widely acknowledged that the violence is caused fundamentally by Israel’s illegal, unjust, oppressive occupation of Palestinian territory. But Israel takes the position that, though she ardently desires peace, she won’t begin to discuss or negotiate, let alone act on, ending her occupation until the violence ends. In other words, first end the war, and then we’ll talk about ending our bad conduct that’s causing the war.
It’s as if your physician advised you that your debilitating, painful, life-threatening disease is caused by your consumption of a particular food, and you announced to your physician that you would stop ingesting the toxic substance—but only after the sickness ends. Such position would be crazy. Of course, the Arab–Israeli situation is significantly different, in that, on balance, Israel’s transgressions overwhelmingly harm the Palestinians, but benefit Israel. In which circumstances, Israel’s position is not so much insane as disingenuous and evil. The insanity is on the part, not of Israel, but rather of those who take Israel’s position at face value and find it reasonable.
● According to one theory of reincarnation, you undergo successive reincarnation, each life being a reward or punishment for your good or bad conduct in former lives. But it seems to me that this procedure is unfair (at least about the punishment), in that you don’t know for what past-life actions your current experience is a punishment. An analogy is the argument that it’s unjust to execute a retarded or mentally ill prisoner, for in such deranged state he has no understanding why he’s being punished.
● 4-24-2002: In the phrase “It’s raining”; what is it? What is raining? The clouds?, the sky?, the weather?, the raindrops?, the day?, the planet? . . ..
● 4-25-2002: Of numerous language trends I’ve noticed; several years ago, people started saying (to indicate agreement with certain statements) “Exactly right” instead of simply “Exactly.” I think the change came about in an effort to be precise, but I wonder if “exactly right” is not redundant. Would it make sense to describe an incorrect or inaccurate statement as “exactly wrong”? It may be wrong, but exactly wrong? Would it have been better for the speaker to be wrong in a less exact way? Exactness implies accuracy, and accuracy implies truth.
[Later note (2021): Perhaps the change to “exactly right” was an effort to be, not more precise, but more emphatic.]
● 4-26-2002: Religion aids complacency by denying the finality of death, the finitude and shortness of life.
● 4-27-2002: The American Heritage Dictionary of English defines solipsism thus: n. Philosophy. 1. The theory that the self is the only thing that can be known and verified. 2. The theory or view that the self is the only reality.
I’m an adherent of the first view but not of the second.
● 4-28-2002: I’ve noticed a certain inconsistency or double standard on the part of some Israelis. They feel that they can gain land by conquest but cannot lose land by (others’) conquest. Israelis say that they’re entitled to the Palestinian territory they occupy because they (Israel) conquered the land in the 1967 war. And yet, Israelis insist that they had a right to invade Palestine in the 1940’s and coopt Arab land because that land belonged to Jews several millennia ago, notwithstanding that the Jews had long ago lost that land through conquest by others.
● 4-29-2002: Whether you view someone as a terrorist or a freedom fighter depends on your opinion of his cause’s justness.
● 5-8-2002: People often explain choosing to enter certain professions or engage in certain volunteer activities on the basis that they wish to help other people. But do they value other people being helped or do they merely enjoy the activity? (Of course, it could be both.)
● 5-12-2002: We often think of the decision whether to commit suicide as a decision of yes or no, black and white, life or death; and not a matter of degree. But in one sense it is a matter of degree: the degree of length of life, whether, say, to live thirty years instead of seventy.
● Subjective does not necessarily mean arbitrary.
● 5-16-2002: Is God religious? (Presumably, He’s not an atheist, or, for that matter, even an agnostic.) If God is religious, what’s His religion? Is he Jewish?, Muslim? Does He worship Himself?
Is Christ religious? If so, is Christ (now) a Christian?, a Jew? Christ was originally Jewish. Has He since converted to Christianity?
Do God and Christ talk to each other? Do they like each other?
● 5-17-2002: Do God’s will? Rubbish! Let God do His own will! Omnipotent and omniscient, He doesn’t need help! (What could He do with our help, that He couldn’t do without our help?) But we need help! For an omnipotent being (as God supposedly is) to ask human beings for help is like an infinitely wealthy person soliciting the poor for monetary donations. It’s absurd; nay, obscene! If anyone should help anyone, God should help us, not vice versa.
● What is God’s purpose, or mission, in life? John Stuart Mill argued that our ultimate rule of action should be to attempt to effect the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Does God agree with that? Does God attempt to achieve that? If so, how successful has He been? If God does not attempt to accomplish this, why not?; what’s His rule of action, His purpose?
● “God bless America.” . . . Is God’s blessing some person or group a matter simply of bless or not bless, and/or perhaps damn or not damn? Or is God’s blessing or damning a matter of degree?; in which case perhaps we should say, not simply, “God bless America,” but rather something like, “God, thank you for blessing America. But could You please bless us a little more: we’re really hurting.”
● A religious teacher advising you on choosing a religion is like having someone standing next to you at a smorgasbord, pointing to certain dishes and condiments and saying, “Take some of that meat there!; and put a little of that red sauce on it; and take a spoonful of those peas . . . leave the pork . . . oh, you’ve got to get a generous piece of that apple pie . . . which is especially wonderful with that strawberry ice cream! . . .”
[Later note (2021): That’s funny, but wrong. Typically, you don’t pick and choose your own special set of doctrines from various religions: some from Christianity, say; a few from Judaism; two or three from Buddhism. Rather, you pick a religion (more often, it picks you), with its prepackaged set of doctrines.]
● People choose a philosophy or philosophies based on what they think is true; they choose a religion based on what they find emotionally satisfying.
● 5-19-2002: We cannot tell which of two mountains is taller if both are so high as to extend into the clouds.
● I heard a statement on a public television program about evolution that surprised me: namely, that all plants and animals are descended from a single common ancestor. I didn’t know that plants have DNA, or that a plant species could evolve into, or from, an animal species.
[Later note (2021): I’m wondering whether I should keep that entry and display my ignorance. I’ll probably leave it, just because I’m so averse to cutting material.]
● 5-24-2002: In most sane men, rationality erects a sort of firewall or barrier between actual belief and wishful thinking. Sometimes, however, the firewall may develop imperceptible cracks, and we become slightly confused between what we think is true and what we’d like to think is true.
● Looking back on my pattern of writing; sometimes inspiration precedes, and precipitates, writing. But other times, probably most often, inspiration comes in the course of, and grows out of, the act of writing that was more routinely and mundanely occasioned. The lesson for a writer is perhaps that you should not wait for inspiration, to write. To maximize your productivity, you should force yourself to write, even if you don’t feel inspired. To paraphrase Edison, who said that invention is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration; writing is 99 percent discipline and 1 percent inspiration. You create the breeding ground for inspiration by being in the process of working. Sometimes inspiration prompts writing; more often, writing prompts inspiration.
● 6-1-2002: I just got some bad news. I did not get the job at State Compensation Insurance Fund, on which I had pinned all my hopes and expended so much time and effort. Very depressing.
● 6-4-2002: I just got another shock. My urologist, Dr. Isidor Schlossberg, called and said I should not be catheterizing myself more than four times a day. I don’t think I can live with that. I’d be too uncomfortable. Quality of life is insufficient.
● You can’t save time, as you can save money, because, no matter what you do or don’t do, you’re continuously spending it, at a constant rate; the best you can do is to spend it wisely.
● 6-5-2002: The question arises (in my mind): Why is the consumption of coffee and tea (caffeine) not considered drug abuse, since it seems to fit the definition: the non medically-necessary use of a chemical in order to experience its psychological effects? Probably the answer lies in the fact that the drug’s benefits are significant (it has the effect, even if just temporarily, of increasing our energy and helping us to be more productive and sociable), whereas its detriments are relatively minor. And one can, with a little will power, maintain a certain limited dose in the long run.
● 6-6-2002 (Thursday, 11:30 p.m.): Since having the second indwelling catheter in two weeks removed on Tuesday, 5-28-2002; I have until now refrained from self-catheterizing. I finally did so just now, first with a Rusch hydrophilic catheter, which I could not pass, then with the Rochester Medical Personal Catheter, which I was finally able to pass, but with some difficulty. Since 5-28-2002, I have also refrained from consuming any coffee or tea (caffeine), so as to reduce my urine production. I dearly miss it (caffeine).
My basic health is excellent, but I have many minor health problems, including depression, insomnia, depersonalization / derealization, hearing problems, ear discomfort, and urinary incontinence (urine retention), the latter of which now may be aggravated by loss of ability to self-catheterize. My excellent basic health will permit me to live a long time, but the minor health problems make me uncomfortable and reduce my desire to live. Right now, I would like to commit suicide. All that restrains me is the knowledge that, if I did so now, my existing writings would be lost.
● 6-7-2002: Because consensus is unlikely on the question what constitutes a good life, perhaps the sole universal truth on the subject is that one element of the good life is each person’s freedom to pursue the sort of life he wishes; and that one element of a good society is its guaranteeing its members that freedom (consistent with the welfare of others).
● The Israeli government labels Jews who criticize it (the government) as “self-hating Jews.” The accusation is absurd. If you’re acting self-destructively, even just improperly, self-love compels you to attempt to alter your conduct, and to act properly. To knowingly and volitionally continue to do wrong would be self-hating. Indeed, refraining from expressing anger tends to turn it inward, causing it to become, as it were, self-anger, akin to self-hate. Is an American who criticizes the United States government a “self-hating American”?
● 6-9-2002: People who exclaim, “Why me?!” on developing an illness, or suffering some other misfortune, are thinking (or at least speaking) illogically. For, aside from the narrow workings of certain specific human institutions, like law, events or functions of the world, or the universe generally, have causes, but not reasons. (And “Why?” implies reasons.)
● 6-11-2002: I live in a country called Tisofthee. There’s a famous song about it . . . “My country, Tisofthee, Sweet land of liberty . . .” And I live in the town of Radioland.
● An experience may be thought of in either of two ways: one, as consisting in a single element, its content; or, two, as consisting in two elements—the experience’s content and the being experiencing it (the experiencer). When you think, or sense, “I am because I experience,” if you’re focusing on the first—the undifferentiated—sense of experience, as just the experience’s content, you may be concluding simply that something exists, because this experience exists (if nothing else does). Whereas, to conclude from the fact of the experience that, more particularly than that something is, you as an individual exist, you must consider the second—the differentiated—sense of experience: the experience’s content and the experiencer (you).
The same observation pertains to Descartes’s famous adage: “I think, therefore I am.” To infer your existence from the experience of thinking, you must dichotomize the experience into the thought and the thinker. Further, by the way, the adage begs the question with its very first word: “I,” which posits that which he purports to prove: the self. The statement immediately following could be practically anything: “I walk, therefore I am”; “I sit, therefore I am.” In fact, he could eliminate the activity altogether and just say, “I . . . therefore I am” or “I am, therefore I am.” Either way, you’ve assumed the existence of “I.” (On the other hand, the statement is, not about existence, but about knowledge.)
● I’ve noticed a self-defeating, disgusting tendency in myself. I fret about not having enough time in which to do the work I need to do to achieve what I wish to accomplish in life, and I seek some reassurance, some sign, that I’m wrong about that, that enough time does remain to do the necessary work. And when I then receive such a sign, I feel tremendous relief; but, instead of starting the work, for which all I wished was the time in which to do it; I think I now have plenty of time, and so I don’t need to get to work right away, and can afford to take some time off to relax and have some fun, which, after all the agony of worry I’ve just gone through, I feel I need and deserve. But the period of relaxation continues indefinitely until I realize that I’ve squandered yet another large portion of my precious time, with even less time now remaining, and I again feel the angst, and seek reassurance that sufficient time remains. And I continue to repeat the same pattern, perpetually putting off work.
● I can relate to lesbians’ sexual orientation or preference: I, too, prefer women.
● 6-12-2002: An idea for a new product: A fire-retardant house-blanket; a heavy blanket, made of fire-proof material, that completely covers a house, which blanket prevents the house from catching fire during high-risk conditions, such as when a forest fire approaches. Perhaps the blanket would be rolled up in a container on the roof. When a certain button is pushed, the container would open and the blanket would unfurl, down each side of the roof and thence down the walls. A sprinkler system could be included that would wet the blanket once it’s deployed.
● I just saw a bumper sticker (on a car) with the words “United Against Terrorism” printed between the United States flag on one side and the Israeli flag on the other. I left this reply on the car’s windshield:
How ironic! The U.S. and Israel are the two biggest terrorists on the planet—state terrorists. And, as to individual (non-state) terrorism, the U.S. and Israel are the provokers of the great majority of it.
● For the sake of my bladder problem, I’ve refrained from using caffeine since 28 May 2002 . . . until today, when I drank a 12 oz. can of Coca-Cola. I felt I needed some caffeine to break my writer’s block on my letter to AT&T. It worked.
● As a very young man, William Shakespeare went to an astrologer, who told him that, based on his astrological sign, and the particular alignment of the stars and planets . . . he was good at dealing with people, that he was good at both detail and seeing the big picture, that he was generous with but sometimes critical of other people, and that he should go into politics, commerce, trade, medicine, the arts, science, especially a branch of science involving mathematics or calculation, perhaps astronomy, or teaching. Many decades later, after Shakespeare died and he was quite famous, that astrologer, who lived a very long life, was asked to comment on her earlier astrological forecast for Shakespeare, and she said, “I was right!—I said he should go into the arts!”
● 6-14-2002: A man heard a radio program about guidance from dreams. The next night he had a dream in which his car went off a cliff (with him in it). Later, feeling the dream was a message from his subconscious mind, he got into his car and purposely drove off a cliff and was killed. The moral of the story: Sometimes intuition should be tempered by rationality.
● 6-16-2002: Heaven is merely the best days of your life; Hell, the worst days.
● The best, most significant photographic portrait of a famous creative person would be that taken at the age at which he does his greatest work. Thus our old-man popular image of Einstein has always struck me as curious, since he did his greatest work when he was young.
● Sometimes I feel distressed about the lack of photographs of me from my earlier years, thinking that posterity will have difficulty knowing what I looked like at various times in my life. But in more sober moments I think: That should be my problem!
[Later note (2021): A lack of photographs of me from my earlier years? That suggests that I have plenty of photos from later years. I don’t have later photos, either.]
● Why are we (am I) often (unpleasantly) surprised at how old well-known people are when we meet or see them? It’s because there’s a lag time (often a considerable one) between a person’s doing his eventually famous work and the work’s coming to the general public’s awareness and appreciation; and another lag time between our own first awareness of the person’s work and our finally meeting or seeing him.
● Theoretically, everything is predictable. That we cannot predict everything simply means that we happen not to be up to the task.
● God is logically possible. Or, perhaps more accurately, God is logical possibility; He represents the anthropomorphization of cosmic possibility, a thought created by man to make him feel ultimately more comfortable about the universe, to feel that somehow possibility itself is bent in the direction of human welfare. Or it can simply be a way of picturing the abstract concept of logical possibility: to consider whether something or other is logically possible, we sometimes ask ourselves, “Could God have made it so?”
[Later note (2020): On reading back through this Diary in July 2020, I’m pleasantly surprised to see how far I’ve come, having made a breakthrough discovery some years later, my argument for God’s impossibility!]
● 6-20-2002: I wonder what nags think they accomplish by nagging. Do they think that if the people nagged do as the nags wish, the nagged people will suddenly enter Heaven, accomplish their goals, or solve the world’s problems? Obviously, all that the nagging accomplishes is to bring a little (or a little more) misery to the nagging victims’ lives.
● 6-21-2002: “Good things come to those who wait” . . . but not to those who merely wait, who wait passively. Rather, good things come to those who wait—and work hard.
● “Say what you mean and mean what you say.” Is that statement redundant? If you say what you mean, does that not imply that you’ll mean what you say? No. To say what you mean is to speak when you have something true and meaningful to say. But even if you do so, there may be other times, when you have nothing true and meaningful to say, when you’re inclined to speak falsely or insincerely or vacantly. To mean what you say addresses those latter instances (prohibiting them). In short, the first half of the quote says, “Speak when you have something true to say.” The second half says, “Speak only then.”
[Later note (4-3-2022): Alas, I don’t always say what I mean or mean what I say.]
● On the subjectivity or objectivity of morality: Moral obligation, should and should not, and right and wrong (more accurately, moral compulsion and moral prohibition), because they’re essentially feelings, are ultimately subjective. Good and bad are likewise subjective when used synonymously with morally compulsory and prohibited. But good and bad, in the sense of intrinsic value and disvalue, is objective; there’s a fact of the matter: an entity actually is, or is not, intrinsically valuable or dis-valuable (it so happens, I believe, that nothing can be intrinsically valuable or dis-valuable). The idea of intrinsic value may be an element of a moral equation or argument; but even in that case, the moral evaluation of the action, the judgment whether a certain act is compelled or prohibited, or should or should not be done, is still subjective. That these matters are subjective, however, is objectively true.
[Later note (2021): Why do I say that “morally compulsory and morally prohibited” is more accurate than “right and wrong”? It’s the first element of the (second) pair that’s imprecise: Right could mean merely permissible (that is, it could mean merely not wrong). But I think that (strictly speaking) every action is morally permissible, because (strictly speaking) no action is morally compelled or prohibited. So one’s conviction that an action is morally permissible may be objectively true (not subjective).]
[Still later note (2021): Here’s a perhaps clearer explanation: Morally “right” is ambiguous. It could mean either morally compulsory, or merely morally permissible. Compulsory says you must do the act in question (it would be wrong not to do it). Permissible says you may do the act (but you don’t have to do it: it would be all right not to do it). When I use right in the original paragraph, I mean it in the former sense—compulsory, so I use that more specific term (“compulsory”), to clarify my meaning.]
● Morality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
[Later note (2021): Again, I’m referring to, not the philosophical subject of morality, but our feeling that we should or should not do certain actions.]
● 6-25-2002: Moral codes can be divided into two types: passive and active. Passive ones consist simply in avoiding infringing certain rules. Active ones urge affirmatively acting. For example, the Biblical Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt not kill,” etcetera) is basically a passive code; whereas, the utilitarian principle, to bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, is an active code. The Golden Rule, to treat others as you would be treated, may be both. The classification of the directive “to serve God, or do His will” perhaps depends upon the perceived content of God’s will.
● 6-27-2002: Freedom of religious belief and worship rightfully implies freedom of disbelief and non-worship. This country was founded on religious freedom and tolerance; and to link patriotism too strongly with religious belief undermines and offends one of the very liberal ideals of freedom and tolerance for which this country is supposed to stand.
● Today, President-select Bush defended the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance language “one nation under God” on the grounds that “All our rights come from God.” Well, I think the Pledge ought to be amended to read, “one nation under Santa Claus.” Why? Because all our rights come from Santa Claus. I realize that not everyone agrees with me on this. But that’s immaterial. What matters is whether it’s true. And it is. I can’t prove it, but I know it—through faith. I’m a Claustian, and I’ve accepted Santa Claus as my personal savior.
● 6-28-2002: Concern for effective time use would seem to dictate that, before going to the trouble of attempting to rebut an argument, the possibility that the argument is sound should at least be considered (it’s a waste of time to attempt to refute a sound argument).
● There was a young woman who abused drugs, and whose physicians warned her of the dangers of it. But she ignored the warnings and continued to indulge in the habit. One day, she developed a very serious side effect, which greatly distressed her, and she went to her physicians, who confirmed that the symptom was an effect of the drugs. She immediately quit consuming the harmful substances, and she asked her physicians what her chances were of recovering. They conferred among themselves and decided that, though it was virtually certain that the condition would resolve within a few weeks, they would nonetheless, to frighten her into continuing her abstinence, tell her that the likelihood of her healing was only about ten percent, and they so advised her. The woman, greatly worried and distraught, determined that, though she had theretofore been nonreligious, she would for once try prayer; and she prayed every day, saying, “God, if You’ll take away the illness, I’ll believe in You, and become a devout Christian forever.” About a month later the young woman fully recovered from the unpleasant medical condition, and she rejoiced and thanked God, and, true to her prayerful promise, became a Christian, and evermore told people of the miracles that happen through faith in God.
● 7-2-2002: Our condemnation of someone as bad or immoral is, at base, merely our showing of our displeasure with his disobeying our rules of conduct, and our attempt to coerce him to act as we want him to act.
● 7-4-2002: I sometimes think that making obscene gestures in public, such as while driving, is inappropriate. But then it occurs to me that more often than not when another driver blows his horn at me, it’s not a safety warning, or even a legitimate expression of anger over some real traffic offense I’ve committed, but instead merely a gratuitous expression of hostility, for which my driving in a way that’s not to his taste is but an excuse (or, even if he is reacting solely to my driving, his reaction is excessive and abusive). In some such cases, the simplest, most effective, and indeed most, perhaps only, appropriate response is raising the arm, with a particular configuration of fingers.
It’s amazing how flagrantly nastily people treat one another when driving. Most would be shocked at such behavior in any other context.
[Later note (7-24-2022): I think the reason why we behave so badly when we drive is that, inside our cars, in moving traffic, we’re largely anonymous. It’s the same reason why people feel at liberty to make nasty, hateful comments online: they can do so anonymously.]
● Sometimes, when I’m suffering, I wish that I could simply skip over the bad interval and go instantly to the (subsequent) time when I feel all right. But even were that possible, it would probably be unfruitful, because the procedure would merely deposit you at a later time in the same condition you were in, and you’d still need the same amount of time as you would have needed originally to get through the bad feeling. Resolving mental suffering requires processing it, which requires experiencing it . . . and it requires time. And if you avoided all the bad feelings and your processing of them, you’d also avoid the lessons they teach you, and you’d be a shallower person.
Besides which, if all your unhappy time were simply deleted, your life might be extremely short, which means you couldn’t get much work done. You can still be productive when you feel bad.
● At root, we call good what we like, and bad what we dislike.
● 7-7-2002: Sometimes I think that anything I can read quickly isn’t worth reading.
● “Life goes on” . . . for the living . . ..
● 7-9-2002: The Biblical injunction “Be fruitful and multiply” makes sense when human population and accompanying industrial development are small enough such that increasing the population raises both total happiness (by adding happy people) and per capita happiness. But it becomes problematic—nay, counterproductive—when the population is so large that further growth reduces per capita happiness (even if it raises total happiness).
● 7-10-2002: Whether morality is an art or a science is itself a very interesting question. (Usually, I think, when writers describe a statement or event as interesting, they mean significant, but can’t quite figure out how it’s significant, so they use the next-best term, interesting, which requires less justification.)
[Later note (2021): As to the original question, whether morality is an art or a science, it occurs to me that it’s an art, since it’s subjective, no? On the other hand, the science of sound is an element in the art of music, and the science of light and color and perspective are elements in the art of painting. But the end result of music or painting is art, which is why we call it the art of music or of painting.]
[Later note ([later in] 2021): All right: Sound is a science; music is an art. Light is a science; painting is an art. Intrinsic value is a science (the science of logic and mathematics); morality is an art. . . .]
● 7-12-2002: Sometimes I hear a crime condemned as brutal: a brutal murder, or a brutal massacre. But the question crosses my mind, Is the commentator complaining that it should have been a gentle murder, or a kinder and gentler massacre?
● 7-13-2002: It’s difficult to determine whether and to what extent my depression is clinical or situational. Often, I suspect it’s the latter, in the vein of the old saying, “The less you do, the less you want to do.” Mood and accomplishment can work in a vicious circle; your perceived productivity is a factor in your mood, and your mood in turn affects your productivity. Perhaps it comes down to this: that, as a conscious, intelligent being, observing this situation; you must just determine what’s needed to break the cycle, and muster the determination to act despite your mood, which action will eventually improve your mood as well. You can’t do it the other way round, because, very simply, you generally have greater conscious control of your conduct than of your mood . . . and there’s no guarantee that your mood will soon improve. More generally, if you permit your productivity to be limited by your mood . . . your productivity will be limited . . . (or at least it will be less than it would be if you plowed on despite your moods).
● 7-14-2002: The traffic lanes on public roads are traditionally numbered starting at the center of the road; thus the center lane would be lane one, the adjacent lane (on the same side of the road) number two, et cetera. This numbering scheme (as opposed to the reverse, starting the numbering at the curb lane, the lane farthest from the center) intuitively makes sense; but I have at times wondered exactly what the reason is, though the answer has eluded me. Just now, while driving back from the grocery store, the reason finally occurred to me. The purpose is to maintain continuity over time in lane designation, given that lanes are (usually) added or removed at the outsides of the road rather than at the center. Consider, for example, the four lanes on one side of an eight-lane freeway. If we add a lane to the outside, and we number the lanes starting at the center, the number two lane, for example, will remain the number two lane, the only newly numbered lane being the newly added lane, number five (and that would not be a re-numbering, but merely an initial numbering). If, instead, we numbered lanes starting at the outside, we would have to change the designation of all the other lanes. The center lane would have to be re-designated, from lane “four” to lane “five”; the lane next to the center would go from lane “three” to lane “four,” and so on. Which changes would create intolerable confusion and complication in lane references in the considerable litigation over traffic accidents, with the lane designations often changing even in the course of a given case, as highway construction occurs.
● Sometimes it occurs to me that my desire to maximize my body of creative work (my writing) and to achieve fame for it is fundamentally the same urge as that evinced by even the lowest animals to mate, to procreate: the impulse to leave one’s mark on posterity.
● 7-15-2002: Someday I may write a novel whose central character is a woman named Shlamissa Lapoo. (Accent on the second syllable in both names.)
● 7-16-2002: Today, after almost daily work for many weeks, I’ve finished the major rewrites of two important essays, “On Utilitarianism” and “Morality”; the former I finished yesterday, the latter today (though historically my pronouncements about having finished works have been quite unreliable); and, after a many-weeks’ wait, I was able to (and did) schedule another job interview with S.C.I.F. The two events’ happening together is a mere coincidence, but it feels significant, like an instance of the currently popular notion of synchronicity. (. . . It’s been a good day, a very good day indeed.)
● 7-17-2002: Strange. The ecstacy of yesterday didn’t last long. Today I’m back to feeling depressed.
● An individual organism can be a microcosm of the universe only with respect to our universe (the finite entity that resulted from the Big Bang), not with respect to the universe, the overall (infinite) universe, for a finite entity is analytically distinct, qualitatively different, from an infinite one.
● 7-18-2002: Aristotle said, “All men by nature desire knowledge.” Einstein (so they say) said, “The important thing is to keep questioning.” I wonder if the desire to know is not more fundamentally described as a propensity for curiosity (. . . about abstract and universal matters).
● A good mood (feeling good) is akin to motion; a bad mood, feeling bad (especially sadness or depression), is akin to rest. The continuation of a good mood feels like momentum; the continuation of a bad mood feels like inertia. When you feel good, you tend to want to dance; when you feel bad, you tend to want to lie down, and sleep, or die.
[Later note (7-24-2022): What I meant there by a bad mood is sadness or depression. A bad feeling can involve high energy, such as anger, which feels more like momentum than like inertia.]
● An idea is to a verbal composition (such as an essay) as a melody is to a musical composition (such as a symphony). The idea and the melody are mere elements of composition. A writer is not famous for a mere idea, or a composer for a mere melody. The idea or the melody cannot in itself constitute a masterpiece; to be such, it must be articulated, developed, worked up into and embodied in a structure, a form. (Which I suppose doesn’t bode well for this collection.)
● Philosophy Professor Daniel N. Robinson, in Lecture 5 of The Great Ideas of Philosophy course, as one of his suggested “topics of discussion,” asks: “Antigone is the quintessential exemplar of ‘civil disobedience.’ Conclude whether she was right to oppose the authority of the King or whether her sister was right in recommending the prudent course of compliance.”
My answer would be that the question is meaningless, nonsensical, as right and wrong, should or should not, are subjective, and to conclude that someone is (morally) right or wrong to act in a certain way implies that there could be an objective answer to such questions. The closest we can come to proper questions here is to ask, “If you were in such a situation, what would you do, and why?” To which questions there are no right or wrong answers, but only honest or dishonest, and thoughtful or less thoughtful ones.
● “To thine own self be true.” “Be true to yourself.”
In carrying out the holocaust, Hitler was being true to himself, true to his own (hateful, vicious) nature . . ..
At the end of my life, I’m filled with regret because for most of my life I remained true to my lazy nature and accomplished little . . ..
● 7-21-2002: On the rotten-apple theory of government: When a scandal occurs over abuses by certain public officials or among members of certain professions, the public often responds by demanding that the system be reformed. Those who oppose reforming the system argue that the problem lies, not in the system, but, rather, merely in bad individuals (the ones acting badly—the “rotten apples”); and therefore the solution is, not to change the system, but simply to get rid of the bad people. The trouble with this argument is that it ignores the role of law and, more generally, of circumstances; it assumes that there are good people (the great majority), who would behave well, and bad people (a small minority), who would behave badly, pretty much in any event. But this is wrong. Most people who act badly do so out of selfishness, in order to enhance their own welfare, despite the harm to others. An objective of the social system is to minimize the gain from bad action, as by enforcing penalties against it, and so minimize its incidence. There’s good and bad in all of us, and one purpose of government is to structure the situation so as to reduce the likelihood that the bad elements will manifest in harmful conduct. It’s less a matter of ascertaining people’s character than of influencing their conduct. While there may be a few apples which would spoil no matter what, many have the potential to either stay good or go rotten, and the barrel containing them should be constructed in such a way as to minimize the percentage that go bad. (It’s as if you unplugged the refrigerator and, when a third of the apples rot, you argued against turning the refrigerator back on, pointing to the spoiled fruits and declaring, “It’s just the fault of those rotten apples.” No. We refrigerate apples to minimize the percentage that rot.)
● Monday, 7-22-2002: I had a very pleasant day today.
● 7-23-2002: St. Augustine, referring to Socrates, said that the measure of a philosopher’s greatness is his willingness to die for his beliefs. That’s ridiculous. Imagine a philosopher, or someone who calls himself a philosopher, with a dim, unimaginative intellect, and with a ludicrous philosophy. Further assume that this man proved to be utterly willing to die for his stupid beliefs, and that we somehow learned that Aristotle had been cowardly in this regard and at the end of his life renounced his philosophy on pain of a short prison term. Would we judge the former man a greater philosopher than Aristotle? Of course not! Rather, a philosopher’s greatness is coextensive with the greatness of his philosophical ideas, arguments, and other work.
Besides, this implies that Socrates’s willingness to die meant his willingness to self-sacrifice. But Socrates believed in the transmigration of souls, or life, perhaps a better life, after death, so dying may not have been a sacrifice from his perspective. He may even from a strictly selfish point of view have welcomed the occasion to leave the prison of his body and go gloriously on to a better existence.
● Several weeks ago, in response to the NAACP’s criticism that his administration’s racial policies are unfavorable to Black people, “President” Bush replied simply by noting that two of his most important advisors are Black. He might as well have said, “It’s true that my administration is unjustly executing more Black people than previous administrations have done, but we’ve also hired more Black executioners.”
● Given the huge size of the oceans, it seems amazing that the waves at the shore are not far bigger than they are.
● As to Aristotle’s description of different sorts of friendships, I think there’s much truth in his observations. But I might disagree on one point. He says that, unlike a purely sensual friendship, which will end when either friend ceases to derive sensual pleasure from it; or a utilitarian friendship, which lasts only as long as the friends find it useful; a “perfected friendship” endures beyond the bounds of advantage obtained by its members. I wonder if this is true. Even in the best, deepest friendship, if the friendship was, for instance, fostering one member’s creative productivity, but is now hindering it, then, even if the other person continues to benefit from the relationship, the friend who is feeling stifled has a duty to himself to leave the relationship, which, under those conditions, can no longer be considered a good friendship. It seems to me that, in a broad sense, and in the long term, all friendships, even “perfected” ones, are friendships of “utility,” the only difference being in the level or sort of desiderata the relationship is “useful” in providing the friends.
● It seems the only philosopher with whom I consistently agree is me . . . That’s because I’m always right.
● Professor Daniel Robinson writes: “Topics for Discussion: 1. Given that the eudaimonic life is only for the few, explain what sort of life is right for the many. 2. Aristotle granted that non-human animals could experience pleasure and pain but not eudaimonia, for the latter requires developed rationality. Explain why ‘happiness’ should require developed rationality and infer whether childhood can truly be ‘eudaimonic.’”
These are excellent questions, which, I think, suggest simply that Aristotle is wrong. Aristotle’s position is equivalent to John Stuart Mill’s position in Utilitarianism, to the effect that there are different kinds of happiness, and that only the higher forms, those which employ our higher faculties, are intrinsically desirable. Both Mill and Aristotle are incorrect. Happiness is happiness is happiness. What makes you happy is not necessarily what makes everyone happy. The particular means to happiness should not be taken for happiness itself, which (the happiness itself) is what is intrinsically desirable (if anything is—though it’s not). To value certain means of happiness, or certain forms of happiness, over other ones, is simply to value other desiderata besides (instead of, or at least in addition to) happiness. And it seems no mere coincidence that what Aristotle and Mill identify as the preferred means or form of happiness involves the activity in which they happen to take the greatest personal pride: the exercise of their intellect; and, even more specifically, philosophizing.
[Later note (2021): It seems to me that Professor Robinson errs in translating eudaimonia as happiness. It’s more accurately rendered, I think, as flourishing, what I’ve called artistic or intellectual productivity, and what Nietzsche calls power. If the eudaimonic life is for the few, it’s because only the few have the education needed to learn an art and the leisure needed to develop and pursue it. It’s not because they’re more intelligent or more naturally talented (they’re not), but merely because they’re wealthier. Which is unjust. Everyone should be given the opportunity to flourish. As to whether children can have eudaimonia; they can, but by and large they don’t, because they must first master an art, which usually doesn’t happen as early as childhood. Aristotle is right that (lower) animals cannot have eudaimonia (in the sense of flourishing). This touches on a distinction I made earlier between humans and animals: Both man and animal can experience pleasure and pain, but meaningfulness pertains just to man.]
● 7-30-2002: A practical advantage of habitual honesty is that it’s easier, saves mental effort, because you don’t have to keep track of what lies you’ve told to whom in order to avoid contradiction. In other words, among other advantages, truth automatically guarantees consistency (or at least any inconsistencies are innocent mistakes, rather than lies).
● 8-2-2002: I’m inconsistent in my behavior, if not in my thought. (The concept of inconsistency applies far more clearly to verbal and mathematical formulations than to conduct, as to which the notion is problematic, if not wholly illusory.)
[Later note (2021): I got a good laugh just now rereading my statement, “I’m inconsistent in my behavior, if not in my thought.” What made me laugh is my suggestion that I’m not inconsistent in my thought. Every time I reread this journal (which I do for editing), I find problematic, nonsensical statements (of mine). To think I’ve now caught them all, or, for that matter, that I’ll ever have caught them all, is very funny! . . . Perhaps my perceiving and disclosing my own pretentiousness is a sign of my emotional growth, my greater maturity. Or perhaps it merely reflects my overweening desire to come up with material for my writing: to get it, I’ll even criticize myself!]
● 8-4-2002: In my essay “Morality” I say, “The more open view of the nature of the good enables the democratic inclusion of all people, by validating (in the sense that they’re no less valid) the endless variety of interests which men find make their lives meaningful.” I wish to clarify that I hold that opinion about the nature of the good (that is, the impossibility of intrinsic value) because (I think) it’s true, not because it’s democratic. The democracy is a mere byproduct.
● 8-7-2002: To solve the philosophical problem that, if God is spirit, He could not affect the material world, early Christians(?) instituted the religious concept of an at-least-partly-material emissary of God—Christ—who (being at least partly material) could affect the material world. It seems to me, however, that this does not overcome the difficulty. If God, being only spirit, cannot affect material, how did He create the material elements of Christ? Furthermore, if God creates Christ in order to have a certain effect, and Christ produces that effect, then, in essence, God has produced the effect. Besides, if God creates material things only through Christ, how did God create the (material) world, which He is supposed to have done, and which (the world) existed long before the advent of Christ?
● 8-10-2002: You can announce with fanfare and high pomp, that it’s written in the Great Book, that God created maggots in His image, and that therefore maggots, fallen but perfectible, are essentially good, and magnificent. But they’re still only maggots. You can make the same declaration about dogs, pigs, monkeys, or men. But, at the end of the day, they’re still just dogs, pigs, monkeys, and men. You can put man’s portrait in a gilded frame, but, alas, the picture frame does not change the picture.
● Religion is a gilded frame for man’s portrait.
● Are not certain Christians inconsistent in expressing anger toward Jews for “killing Christ,” in that Christ’s death was really a good thing, because it was essential to saving all men (in which case, how can one regret Christ’s death)?
● 8-13-2002: When we describe the good life as an end and not a means (see my piece “Nine Comments on Plato and Aristotle”), we imply that the desirable aspect (the good) of the good life is the experience. For me, my life is more important as a means than as an end, a means to enhance my body of work, which is more important to me than my experience. (. . . To be rethought.)
[Later note (2020): I don’t know why I felt that needed to be rethought—it seems to make perfect sense.]
[Later note (5-15-2022): Not understanding a statement doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s flawed. I don’t understand everything that’s true and sensical.]
[Later note (7-24-2022): Well, yes and no. That applies more clearly to statements by others. Your not understanding your own statement, is a pretty good sign that it doesn’t make sense, or at least that it’s very problematic.]
● 8-15-2002: The terror attacks on the World Trade Center of 11 September 2001 have been referred to simply as 911 (“Nine-one-one” or “nine-eleven”). I wonder how the reference will change after the one-year anniversary. Will the year designation be added (for example, “nine-eleven-oh-one”)?
● Those who oppose socialism are antisocialists. Capitalism is antisocialism.
● 8-16-2002: To oppose democracy is to deny the proposition that men have a right to determine their own lives.
[Later note (7-24-2022): Religion, with its insistence that we must ascertain and do God’s will—instead of our own—is anti-democratic.]
[Later note (9-28-2023): The original statement is not true. In certain circumstances, men might choose to suspend democracy, which would be to determine that aspect of their lives.]
● 8-17-2002: I believe that our universe is controlled by a series of sea monsters. Each galaxy has a sea monster which controls that particular galaxy. Our own Milky Way, including the Earth and its inhabitants, is governed by such a sea monster who lives on the moon (even though the moon has no sea—or any water), and whose name is Nicholas, who is the chief of all the sea monsters. I believe that when I die Nicholas will fetch me, revive me, and cause me to return to age twenty. Thence, Nicholas will fly me around the galaxy on his back, and we’ll visit planets containing vast fields of cannabis plants, with very potent marijuana, and I’ll harvest the best plants and experience joy, and never be tired. And when this universe expands too far to support life, or to grow good cannabis, Nicholas and I, by special magic, will fly to another universe, where we’ll resume our accustomed life, and I’ll thus live happily ever after. How do I know this? Not through sense experience or rationality. Rather, I believe it through faith.
● 8-18-2002: Life is a placebo. It has no intrinsic value or meaning. It’s just what you make of it.
In haiku (tanka) form:
Life’s a placebo,
With no intrinsic value
Or meaning, having
Just the worth you find in it
And what purpose you create.
● I disbelieve that Francis Bacon actually wrote the essays that are attributed to him. Any number of other people come to mind as possible authors, but I think the most likely candidate is William Shakespeare (the great playwright and poet).
● Long, long ago, before men existed, there were some apes who were fond of declaring, “The ape was made in God’s image.” After the advent of man, these apes, glumly, stopped their declarations in this regard.
● 8-20-2002: I recently heard someone say, “God is on the side of the oppressed.” Where was God when the oppressed became oppressed in the first place?! Was He on their side then?
[Later note (2021): Perhaps more fundamentally, if God is all-powerful, and He’s on the side of the oppressed, why are they still oppressed?! What does it mean—what good does it do you—for God to be on your side?!]
● I agree with Descartes that we can know nothing, because we could possibly be deceived about any proposition. But I disagree that there are any exceptions, including the proposition that we exist. Any given proposition, including that one, could be false or at least meaningless, in ways we simply don’t understand. I also disagree with his proposed method to work around that epistemological vulnerability, which pervades all thought equally (there is no working around it). But, practically, it doesn’t hinder thinking. It doesn’t make what we believe false or unreliable. Rather, it merely makes it unknowable in a very narrow, technical sense. We need simply note the theoretical possibility of error or misunderstanding, and get on with the business of thinking. (No, this needs considerable revision. It makes no sense to say we can know nothing, with some exceptions. Besides, that’s not what Descartes said.)
[Later note (2020): I don’t see what revision is needed. The comment (before the parenthetical material at the end) made good sense to me when I reread it just now. But perhaps I’m just forgetting what I thought the problem was, and the brief note doesn’t jog my memory.]
[Even later note (2021): I still don’t remember what I originally found questionable. On rereading it again just now, though, I’ve found a problem with it: namely, my statement, “Any given proposition . . . could be false or at least meaningless. . . .” Some propositions are true and meaningful, even absolutely true. Can a meaningful, absolutely true statement be false or meaningless? No. My conclusion that we cannot know any statement, is right. But the proper explanation of it is, not that a statement we believe is true could be false, but that we could believe it’s false. That is, we could theoretically be made to disbelieve any true statement, and to believe any false one, so we have no ultimately infallible way to discern truth.]
● Though I believe that all men should have a right to pursue whatever sort of life they desire, which means the freedom not to fulfill their highest potential, as well as the freedom to fulfill it; I believe we may legitimately compel the education of the young, for this permits their having a true choice when they reach adulthood. To put it crudely, if you’ve been educated in youth; when you reach adulthood, you have a choice whether to be a philosopher or a bum. But if you haven’t received at least a minimal education in youth, your only choice is to be a bum (for the learning while young can’t necessarily be made up for later). An adult should have a right to choose to be a bum, but a child lacks sufficient maturity to do so, and we have a duty to the young to ensure that when they become adults they have a full, or a decent, range of options.
● There’s nothing inherently, philosophically, rationally worthwhile or reasonable about survival. Nonexistence is theoretically as desirable as existence. We seek to survive simply because we’re born with the instinct to do so. And those with a survival instinct are more likely to survive than are those without it.
● 8-25-2002: In the last few weeks there has been some very good news about my health. It appears that my urethra will heal, more or less completely, and that I’ll be able to resume catheterizing as previously, a statement made by my other urologist, Aboseif, M.D., and beginning to be confirmed in practice. Additionally, the ear discomfort/pain I had when my head touched the pillow has for a month or so to a great extent subsided. I minimized it by purchasing a foam orthopedic pillow. When that was insufficient, I cut a hole, or indentation, in the pillow for my ear (the side [of the pillow] I lie on the most). I even stopped using an earplug in that ear at night. But I’ve resumed wearing an earplug (silicone), and the discomfort seems largely to have resolved.
I’ve felt some urge to celebrate this good news by resorting to drug use. This had been my practice for many decades, as if to find any convenient excuse for short-term pleasure (usually by taking chemicals) at the expense of my onward movement, feeling as if now I can “afford” it, almost as if I’m somehow averse to too much advancement, as though, if I take two steps forward, I feel impelled to take two, or at least one, backward. But this time I’m very conscious of my self-defeating tendency in this regard, and am determined to resist it, to instead use this favorable turn of events to compound my progress, such as it is.
● You know you’ve got a piece of writing nearly finished when all the rough notes and drafts look like junk.
● 8-27-2002: When I listen to classical music, I want to hear, not the performer, but the composer, as it were. And, perhaps paradoxically, the better the musician does his job, the less I’ll hear him, and the more I’ll simply hear the composer.
● 8-29-2002: In my essay “Morality,” when I talk about the general origin of morality, I don’t necessarily mean it in a literal sense, but more perhaps in a sort of allegorical sense, to describe, not its origin, per se, but its nature.
● 9-2-2002: I’ve noticed that when the weather suddenly becomes cooler and/or cloudy, my body produces a greater amount of urine. We’re in the midst of a heat wave now; it’s uncomfortable in terms of the heat, but wonderful in terms of bladder emptiness.
● The Anthropic Problem of Human Theorizing: If philosophers and scientists were given a secret reward, such as money, for proposing philosophical and scientific theories that advanced certain sorts of conclusions, surely we’d find this information relevant (or at least interesting) in relation to those theories. But many theories do have a sort of hidden or ulterior reward: namely, the gratification of human vanity, like the religious doctrine that man was, not arbitrarily produced by random evolution, but, rather, specially and uniquely created in the image of a perfect, logically necessary, and ultimately magnificent God. Given several competing theories, should we not accord somewhat less weight to, or at least view with a certain suspicion, those which exalt man?
● 9-3-2002: The United States government, the George W. Bush administration, has a list of three countries that it characterizes as the “axis of evil,” by which it justifies a virtually endless war on the world for (the United States’) ever-expanding global hegemony. It’s ironic, because the United States’ greed and environmental destruction is by far the greatest effective evil in the world, rather like the Pope, who preaches beneficence, but whose doctrine opposing birth control and abortion is responsible for enormous human misery.
● Men should spend less time philosophizing about what’s intrinsically valuable (nothing is), and instead simply decide what we collectively want, and work to bring it about.
[Later note (11-6-2024): So, philosophers should become politicians?]
● A note on failure: The graveyards are filled with very successful people. The successful and the unsuccessful end up the same.
● I’ve just reviewed the lecture material on George Berkeley, who asserts that objects which appear to exist in the outside world exist essentially in, or as a product of, our minds. More specifically, he argues that we perceive physical objects by their attributes, such as extension and hardness. But those attributes are essentially perceptual or experiential phenomena (an object is not hard, per se; the hardness is perceived). And because an object is just a congeries of its attributes, and the attributes are perceptual phenomena, if there’s no perception of the object . . . there’s no object. I agree with Berkeley’s reasoning to the extent that, since we know external, physical objects, not directly, but instead only indirectly by our perception of them, we can’t ultimately know whether there are actual objects corresponding to our mental impressions, or any material objects at all. But I see two flaws in his argument. First, you can discount attributes all you like, but you’re stuck with the fact that they’re attributes of . . . something—something, presumably, other than your perception itself. A second flaw is Berkeley’s contention that either position follows from any of the argument’s prior suppositions. The nonexistence of material objects is no more implied by the fact that we cannot know that they exist than is their existence implied by the fact that they appear to exist. Indeed, if we must make an assumption in the absence of certainty, experience and common sense would suggest that we presume that what appears to be so is so, until we have reason or evidence to the contrary. Just because some truths are counterintuitive does not mean that we ought to routinely adopt positions which intuitively seem wrong. A few further basic considerations enhance the likelihood of our perception’s correctness, over and above simple first-blush intuition, including that we all seem to perceive more or less the same objects, and that all, or most, of our senses concur in our perceptions. If we hear a dog barking, we’ll probably also see a dog, if we look. And some of these sensory confirmations can be dramatic; if, when walking, we see a tree in our path, we disregard the perception at the likely peril of its ultimate validation by a rather nasty bump!
● Needless to Say, A Poem (a haiku):
It’s needless to say . . .
It’s obvious that, well, it
Goes without saying . . .
● The impossibility of absolute knowledge of propositions does not wholesale render our beliefs false or our arguments unsound. Such theoretical impossibility should not alter the main text of our cogitation or philosophizing (except for the topic of knowledge, where it may be the text); it’s more properly understood as an implicit footnote to it all.
● Regarding Thomas Reid’s criticism of skepticism; if I understand him, his error is to assume that skepticism holds that our perceptions are not accurate representations of the external world. But skepticism asserts merely that we cannot absolutely know that our perceptions are true (which is entirely consistent with their being true). More generally, in some of his opinions, I think Reid perhaps fails to appreciate the difference between philosophy and science, and attempts to replace the former with the latter. Philosophy by its nature typically treats of the theoretical and abstract, rather than the everyday. But, of course, good philosophy should be consistent with facts.
On second thought, I wonder if our perceptions are faithful reproductions of the world. We perceive certain aspects of the world, but probably not all aspects of it. While I suppose all humans with normally functioning senses perceive the world similarly; various species of sentient creatures probably see the world vastly differently. I suspect that what an insect visually sees is quite different from what a man sees. The insect sees some elements of the world which we do not see, and vice versa. Why should saying that humans perceive the world as it is, and not a peculiar distillation or picture of it presented to our awareness by our peculiar sense organs and brain, make any more sense than saying the same of an insect? But wait. Different, here, does not mean inconsistent. That each species perceives a different picture of the world, does not mean that some of the perceptions are false. Instead, it probably means that each sees different (but true, existing) aspects of the world, aspects that are important for it to see. If our perceptions of the world were false, we probably wouldn’t survive!
● Reid speaks of humans being guided by rational moral first principles, somewhat as the caterpillar walks over thousands of leaves, eating only when it finds the one right for its diet. According to Professor Daniel N. Robinson, “There must be first principles of morals within us guiding our daily behavior just as the caterpillar is guided to find the right leaf among thousands.” But how does Reid know that the caterpillar is not merely walking until it gets hungry, at which point it chews on the nearest leaf? (I wrote this as a joke; but, having written it, I think there may be something to it, though I’m not quite sure what.)
● Hume’s explanations of various mental phenomena and processes strike me as grossly simplistic, pathetically inadequate, almost to the extent of being a waste of time. I have the impression that, at best, he perhaps describes a tiny edge or corner of the entire picture.
● 9-6-2002: Thomas Reid makes an excellent criticism of Hume’s theory that personal identity is a “bundle of perceptions.” This cannot be right, because each perception, so to speak, even the very first (hence unbundled) one, already has a percipient, and that percipient is the self. Another way of putting this is that a cluster of perceptions presupposes that the individual perceptions which form the collection all have in common that they belong to the same person, or sentient being, so there must already be a perceiver (or a person, or a self) in order to have perception at all, whether a single perception or a group of them.
● How does my moral philosophy relate to that of other philosophers? I think I incorporate some of their elements in my own unique outlook, yet I sometimes disagree. I’m a skeptic; I believe we cannot know any proposition (with absolute certainty); but this view is a mere background, a mere footnote, to my many strong opinions on various topics. According to Professor Daniel Robinson, David Hume attempted to “defeat skepticism by putting philosophy on a firmer footing, grounding morality, science, and politics in the realm of experience.” My response: Yes and no. I believe that there is truth independent of our apperception, or experience. For example, “twice two is four” is objectively true; if our minds were somehow constructed so that we disbelieved it, it would mean, not that the proposition is false, but that we’re wrong. I believe that moral obligations are subjective, but that this is necessarily, objectively true. I agree with Hume that moral duties are naturally and psychologically based, in that our sense of moral obligation is a psychological (rather than, say, a physical or logical) phenomenon, and we acquire our psychology from nature. More specifically, we tend to call good that which furthers our interests, and bad that which contravenes our interests, and our interests are a product of nature. For instance, though not all of us have the same set of interests, there is broad commonality; one desideratum we all wish for is pleasure, or happiness. I’m a moral relativist in that I hold that moral obligations are subjective, and that there is no absolute standard of good or bad. But I’m a moral absolutist in that I think intrinsic good or evil is (objectively and absolutely) impossible. (For this reason, and because my own subjective moral inclination is that I would feel a moral duty if and only if I thought I could affect the net amount of intrinsic good in existence, I never feel strict moral obligations, but only loose or quasi moral obligations.) Finally (finally in terms of what occurs to me just now, not in terms of an exhaustive survey of the subject); even philosophers, like Hume, who propose grounding morality on nature and psychology, negate, or at least dilute or mix, their perspective in this regard by making a moral judgment, concluding that what nature has given us is “good” or “bad.” For example, Hume says “Passion rules reason, as it should [my emphasis].” In my own thinking, I separate the psychological/anthropological aspects from the philosophical. (Nature is not as it should or should not be; it’s simply as it is or is not.)
Another observation on Hume’s moral philosophy: Moral obligations are based more widely than on emotion, natural sentiment, and immediate (or even long-term) considerations of pleasure and pain. They can also be based on transcendental rules. The statement about moral duties which comes closest to Hume’s proposition (and for which he may be confusing his own statement) is that moral obligations are subjective. But our subjective sense of moral duty may include a wide range of groundings, including highly artificial, intellectualized ones.
● 9-7-2002: I dread the thought that I’ll have to begin working full time in the near future, because it will leave me little time to study, think, and write. The notes I make will be extremely rough, ill thought out, and undeveloped.
● 9-8-2002: Hope pertains to the future. If there’s no future, there’s no hope (or if there is hope, it’s false hope).
● Tonight (Sunday, 8 September 2002) I attended my first meeting of the Philosophy Club, which meets informally once a week. Someone asked what our personal reasons for living were. This line of inquiry was not pursued, but I’ll note here what my answer would have been. My own reason for living can be summed up in two words: productivity and pleasure. For the sake of sufficient personal productivity, I would bear considerable pain. If I would not further enlarge my productiveness, a painful life would seem pointless, in fact irrational. Without further productivity, I would wish to continue living for but only for my net pleasure, or happiness.
● A comment was made in the Philosophy Club last night to the effect that all animals seek to survive, but man ought to exist on a higher level and live for reasons over and above the mere instinct to survive. It occurs to me, however, that the situation may be almost the opposite. Whereas the lower animal strives to live, regardless of circumstances; the hallmark of the sophisticated being should be the ability to decide whether to live. What mainly distinguishes this mode from the simple instinct to survive is the ability to decide not to live. If a business’ purpose is to make money, but it’s losing money (and if that situation cannot be reversed), it should be terminated. If one has certain purposes in life, but continued living becomes counterproductive of those purposes, it would seem to make sense to end life. If a person’s exclusive reason for living is pleasure, but he’s in constant pain . . . The survival instinct is nonrational; yet if we obey it even when continuing to live only frustrates our reasons for living, the instinct perhaps becomes irrational. Apropos of which, man is the only animal that commits suicide.
● People ask how God could have allowed the terror attacks of 11 September 2001; but in the larger sense, everyone who is born dies . . . A thousand years hence, everyone who was alive then, and now, will be long dead.
● 9-11-2002: Wealth and Hell-being.
● 9-12-2002: When people mourn the death of someone they loved, do they grieve for the deceased person’s loss, or for their own loss—for the deceased, or for themselves?
● 9-13-2002: Professor Daniel Robinson referred to stars and sunsets as existing things. But while a star is an existing thing, a sunset is not; a sunset is merely a perception: a view of certain phenomena from a particular vantage point.
● 9-14-2002: Roller coasters go through the motions.
● 9-15-2002: The problem with the U.S. government’s taking major controversial action, such as invading Iraq to overthrow its government, is that, although the reason the U.S. administration gives for the action is a good reason, which may to some extent be accomplished by the proposed action; nonetheless, the action is taken for ulterior motives. And the problem with action being taken for ulterior motives is twofold: First, it’s unlikely that an action done for ulterior motives will be the means best suited to accomplishing the stated purpose. For example, if you start a business purportedly to make money, but you really select the business because you enjoy the activity it involves, it’s improbable that the activity you find the most enjoyable will also be the most profitable. Second, more important, the ulterior purpose is evil. Which is why it’s ulterior. If the real purpose were good, the U.S. government would just announce it—they wouldn’t need a pretext for it.
● Whereas Hume naturalizes or psychologizes particular moral duties, Kant transcendentalizes them.
● Although consciousness and thought are analytically distinct from physical material, yet, practically, you are your brain. Our peculiar brain gives rise to our awareness, our thinking, and other mental functions and capacities. Humans can be philosophers, but chipmunks can’t—owing to their different brains.
● One can view utilitarianism (a la Bentham and John Stuart Mill) as a thesis; my argument, developed in “Ethics,” that intrinsic value is impossible, as an antithesis; and my vision for humanity articulated in “Morality” as a synthesis. “Morality” thus complements and completes “Ethics”; “Ethics” presents a negative or selfish thesis; “Morality” offers a positive, society-oriented application of it.
● For whatever interest it may have for posterity, I was originally an adherent of utilitarianism, until my revelation at about age twenty-six of the impossibility of intrinsic value.
● By its nature, it’s difficult to say exactly where a particular non sequitur goes wrong. It’s like being presented with a blank page and asked to identify where the mistake is.
● President Bush: “We must exercise fiscal restraint, and spend less on programs to help the poor, because we need all the money we can get, to give it to the rich.”
● Hegel says that human history is the result of something (“the Absolute”) trying to work itself out or realize itself through this evolutionary struggle. I think not. I believe the process is simply a result of the various forces of human nature: greed, the drive to achieve power, and our individual and collective efforts to live better lives. An element of the force propelling the process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is each new generation’s quest for fame, impelling men to strive for originality, which involves finding flaws in and alternatives to existing ideas; all of which is perfectly natural and legitimate, and an important force for intellectual, cultural progress. But the process is driven by man, not by some transcendent force outside of man. It strikes me that Hegel’s theory in this regard is quasi, if not outright, religious; he might almost as well have substituted God for the Absolute.
The Biblical story of Genesis was the thesis. Darwin’s theory of evolution was the antithesis. And Hegel’s theory of “the Absolute” is the purported synthesis (of Genesis and Evolution): accepting that there’s a certain procession of events along the lines discovered by Darwin, from the simplest life forms to the most complex, but positing a God-like agent as the force propelling the process toward, presumably Hegel means, its culmination in man and civilization. This is simply a slightly altered version of the theory that humanity was created by Divine Volition (in this variant, gradually and by steps rather than instantly). It’s ultimately based on the same argument, that an orderly, complex, intelligent (containing intelligent beings) universe must have had an intelligent maker who created it by conscious design, by analogy with man consciously making certain things. But the reasoning has the same difficulties as any other variation of that argument. The inference is simply unsound. The conclusion is possible, but not necessary; it doesn’t follow. At the microcosmic level, some things are purposely made by intelligent beings, but it’s not true at the macrocosmic level. The universe could have accidentally produced intelligent creatures capable of making discrete things, and I believe this is so. Life need not have begun at all. And it was not inevitable, let alone necessary, that life would eventuate in intelligent creatures, let alone in man. And there remains the troublesome question: if everything has a conscious, deliberate maker, then who made the maker?, with its attendant infinite regress problem.
To the same effect is Matthew Arnold’s reply to the theory of evolution that our hairy quadrupedal evolutionary ancestor must have had something in him which inclined him toward Greek. Why does Arnold feel the need to somehow make romantic or transcendent the process or the simpler creatures that led to man, as if doing so were necessary in order to elevate man? I think it’s unnecessary. Why can’t we admit that we were entirely accidental, that the process which produced us was arbitrary, and that some of our predecessors were utterly ordinary; and yet proclaim that the end (or at least the current) result, man, by whatever lowly process he came to be, is a magnificent creature, with our splendid minds, literature, music, graphic art, and—yes—science. The simple fact is, there was nothing in our hairy quadrupedal ancestor which inclined him to Greek; all there was in him was something which inclined him to grunt, or whatever sound he made . . . any more than there is something in amoeba which inclines them to Greek. Not all aspects of us are, not everything connected with us is, equally sublime. We produce excrement, and we produce symphonies. We need not construe the former as gold to be proud of the latter.
● 9-26-2002: Capitalism is ultimately self-defeating. It’s degrading the environment and the quality of life for the vast majority of people (all but the very wealthy). Eventually the lives of the masses will become so bad that they’ll rise up and force a change. The only question is whether it will then be too late to save humanity. In other words, capitalism will destroy itself; the only question is whether it will destroy man as well. Capitalism being an institution of man, I suppose that what we’re saying more broadly is that man is destroying himself, and the only question is whether man will save himself.
● It strikes me that philosophers who criticize science as being too narrow misunderstand the nature of science. Science does not purport to comprehend all aspects of the world. Science is not philosophy, which is why we have a separate subject called philosophy. Each subject has its purpose. Science helps us to understand the world in certain ways and to physically improve our lives. Philosophy seeks to guide the application of scientific advances to human affairs, to help us answer how and why life is important, and as an activity that makes life worthwhile (at least for philosophers).
And I dare say that, up till now, science has dealt with its subject far more effectively than philosophy has dealt with its subject. Science progresses, building upon general agreement among scientists based on objective testing, verification, and acceptance of what proves valid. Whereas, philosophy is merely a series of random, arbitrary thoughts and feelings men have entertained, about life and the world.
● 9-27-2002: Mathematics is a common link between science, philosophy, and art.
● 9-28-2002: I just awoke from an interesting dream (I thought it was interesting) in which I was betrothed to a beautiful young woman who worked for me about ten years ago, and with whom (at that time) I was infatuated. In the dream, we lived in a land where, by law, if one’s betrothed failed to follow through with the marriage, the disappointed partner had a right to insist that the fiancée have an arm or at least a hand cut off as a penalty. That was the situation in the dream, but I came to feel that I should forgive the young lady and relinquish my right to have the punishment carried out, and spare her losing her beautiful hand; in preparation for which pardon I inquired of relevant authorities how often such remission was given. The answer was that it had never before happened, but I nonetheless planned to relieve her of the punishment. It seemed the whole world’s eyes were on me in this matter, eagerly awaiting my decision. I think part of me hoped to win her renewed love by evincing my own love for her through such forgiveness, and I was in the process of mentally composing a letter of explanation to her when I woke up from the dream. That would be a likely place to awake, since, for me, composing is a long process.
● A writer’s rule of thumb: The more important the content of a given work, the more worthwhile it is to spend time improving its expression, or form. (. . . And we perfectionists must always bear in mind the converse.)
● Reading just the opening paragraph of the summary of Nietzsche’s philosophy, it strikes me that many philosophers’ so-called philosophies are merely their own arbitrary personal preferences and predilections, asserting simply, “I like this.” And they attempt to turn their own private preference into philosophy by generalizing it for everyone. The answer to which is simply, “Speak for yourself.”
● 9-30-2002: Sometimes when I write arguments I feel as if I’m stating the obvious.
[Later note (5-15-2022): Sometimes that feeling discourages me from writing down thoughts I have. Later, it occurs to me that the thought was interesting, and not obvious, and that I should have made a note of it. But often by then it’s too late—I’ve forgotten it.]
● 10-1-2002: In what ways are we made in God’s image? Does God have two arms and two legs? Does He have two eyes? Does He urinate? Does He have a penis (or, for that matter, a vagina)? Does He feel sexual arousal? Does He get sick? Does He feel depressed? Does He feel happy? Does He make mistakes? Does He die?
[Later note (2021): I think the only thing we know for sure that God has in common with humans is that He sometimes gets angry with people and kills them.]
● 10-2-2002: Sentient beings tend to give preference, or priority, to their own interests over the interests of others.
● 10-5-2002: According to Professor Daniel Robinson, John Stuart Mill wrote that matter is merely the permanent possibility of sensation. This strikes me as wrong, reminiscent of Berkeley’s absurd proposition. Matter exists even if no one is there to sense or perceive it. There may be creatures incapable of perceiving matter. There may be entities that humans have no capacity to perceive. Perhaps I misunderstand Mill here. It also occurs to me that reading a summary of a philosopher’s work is a poor substitute for reading the work itself.
[Later note (2-6-2022): Perhaps Mill’s thought is that, of all that is, just consciousness matters (counts).]
● 10-11-2002: Freud speaks of the true human needs as the lower, animal-derived ones; whereas, Aristotle identifies the good life with flourishing: intellectual/artistic productivity. While the more basic needs are no doubt powerful and important in human life, I think the higher needs, like the need for creative expression, are bona fide needs in themselves, not merely poor reflections or sublimations of lower drives. I, myself, would gladly forego considerable pleasure (including sexual gratification), and endure considerable pain, to actualize my creative potential. More generally, living a life of quiet desperation, in Thoreau’s phrase, probably comes from the frustration, not of our sexual drives, but of our dreams. Think of a pianist playing a beautiful composition. Freud is focusing on the guts of the piano; Aristotle, on the music. Freud exalts the lowest parts of our humanity; Aristotle, the highest. And here I side with Aristotle.
● 10-12-2002: In my writing, I specialize in . . . whatever I can come up with.
● If you’re the last man alive, all the money in the world won’t do you much good.
[Later note (2021): I say much good, rather than any good, because money could have some conceivable uses for the last man: he could burn it to keep warm, or paper his wall with it.]
● 10-13-2002: To those who believe in successive human reincarnation, I would ask: What about the first men?—were they reincarnated apes? . . . According to reincarnation, Adolph Hitler and a Jew killed by the Nazis could come back as each other’s spouses.
[Later note (6-2-2024): . . . Or Hitler could come back as a rabbi.]
● 10-14-2002: People’s declarations that certain events were “meant to be” are always directed toward positive (good) events . . . and the observation is always made at a time in the midst of the prime of their lives, or in their youth. Such considerations take on a different character if asked from a point of view after a person’s death. After a person is dead, for what purpose was an event during his life meant to be? . . . We conceive of our lives’ events as “meant to be” in order to glorify them, to help us feel that our lives are important. It indulges our vanity and makes us feel good.
● Was everything that is, meant to be (and everything that isn’t, not meant to be)?
● 10-15-2002: The disadvantage of writing my “Ethics” was that I could never again say, “I’ve outdone myself!” Yet, that effect has never caused me to regret having written it!
● This is the one-year anniversary of my starting the job at Adelson, Testan & Brundo, the workers’s compensation defense law firm. That job lasted for just less than three months.
● 10-16-2002: The best resolution I’ve heard to the so-called Iraq problem came from someone in the Iraqi government, who suggested that President-select George Bush and Saddam Husein settle the supposed conflict with a duel between themselves. I think that could be a perfect solution. Perhaps they’d kill each other.
● 10-17-2002: In drug-abuse recovery, it’s often said that an addict must “hit bottom” in order to change, to decide to stop abusing chemicals. The same process may work at the level of humanity as a whole, in that conditions may have to become bad enough for enough people, to motivate them to change the individual and collective conduct that produces those results. I fear that by then it may be too late.
● “Look before you leap” and “He who hesitates is lost” are both true. The two maxims focus on the benefit of different qualities between which there’s a certain tradeoff. Both accuracy, or quality, and speed are desirable.
● Every philosopher likes to think his own philosophy is somehow the most profound and inclusive. For example, Wittgenstein, if he were alive, might think his theory of linguistic meaning comprehends my theory of the impossibility of intrinsic value in that my theory is a linguistic expression subject to his philosophy. Whereas, I would think that my philosophy comprehends his theory in showing that it, like everything else, is finally of no (intrinsic) value. . . . And I suppose this note purports to subsume them both by describing the motivation for all philosophical theories.
● It seems to me that the “Turing machine,” as a theoretical equivalent to a human being, omits two elements: consciousness and creativity. . . . Is a simple arithmetical calculating device, or a textbook, intelligent in a meaningful sense? If a Turing machine breaks, could another Turing machine fix it? . . . Discussions comparing the human mind to the computer always describe the human mind as a problem-solving entity. But perhaps this description leaves out something important: the human mind not only solves problems, but also discovers problems. Could a Turing machine propose new and interesting questions?
● Another Thought on the Good Life: Some have suggested that the good, or the best, life for a human to lead consists in helping other people. But to help others to do what? Presumably, to help others to have a good life. What, though, is the good life for these other people we wish to help? By what standard would we measure whether we had succeeded in helping them? It won’t do to say helping others, for that leads to a sort of infinite regress, or perhaps the opposite, an infinite progress: an ever-advancing straight line, purporting to seek, but never finding, an end point; an endlessly reiterating question whose answer is perpetually deferred; a continuing series of means to means, never to an end. Consider a world inhabited by a man and his son. The man lives only to benefit his son. The father dies. The son, now a man, has a son of his own, and this man, like his father before him, lives only to help his son. The same pattern repeats generation after generation until the millionth man. That man is dying but is awaiting the birth of his son, for whose future benefit he, too, has lived exclusively. A day before this baby is to be born, it dies. Shortly thereafter, the father, the millionth and last man, also dies, feeling that his life’s purpose has been frustrated. If a good life is defined as helping others, then, among those million lives, there would not be so much as an hour of good life. All million lives would ultimately have been useless, for naught, in vain. The problem arises, not just in a series, but also in a coeval set. Take a couple making love to each other. If each acts just to please the other, neither of them will get much pleasure. (. . . Moreover, if you’re inclined to forego having a good life yourself for the sake of helping others, what about your obligation to those who sacrificed to enable you to have a good life? . . ..)
So what is a good life? What’s the relationship between this and various other concepts? Do we set out, is our overall, ultimate goal, to have a good life? Or is the good life synonymous with achieving one’s goals (assuming one’s goal is not simply “to have a good life”), as, in my own case, the maximization of my creative productivity? Consider this hypothetical example. Say that I wish to be a great composer. But a situation arises in which I must sacrifice my own welfare, even my life itself, to save the world from destruction; I make the sacrifice and succeed in saving the world. Would I judge my life to have been a good one? No. It would not be a good life in itself, for I died without doing what I really wished to do, died without achieving personal fulfillment. Sacrifice for its own sake is nonsensical. If, however, you fulfill all your aspirations, and die happy, feeling that you’ve had a good life; have you lived a good life? But what if you were deceived about your abilities? What if, again, you wished to write great music, believed you had done so, and died so believing, but you were actually, so to speak, only a mediocre composer; would you then have lived a good life? Is the test of having lived a good life whether, at the very end, perhaps on your death bed, you feel good about the life you’ve lived? But is this not just a special case of experiencing some happiness at the end of life, no matter how unhappy the rest of it was? If you live eighty years in agony, but then, in your last hour, are mildly happy; is that a good life? Would you rather live such a life than none at all? If so, what about this: You live forty years in agony, feeling disappointed about your life; then you experience a day of happiness, feeling that your life has been worthwhile. But the next day you realize that your euphoria the day before was based on a false assumption, and you live the rest of your life, another forty years, in misery. Would that be a good life? If not, would your having died during that one pleasant day, before you recognized your assumption’s error, convert that miserable life to a good one?
Aristotle proposed that, to determine what constitutes the good life, select an activity, and ask what its purpose is. Then take the answer to that, ask what its purpose is; and so on until you arrive at something which has no other purpose, but is done solely for its own sake: that’s what the good life consists in. But this implies that there’s one activity or state which is objectively or intrinsically good, for all men, which I think is false. Intrinsic value is metaphysically impossible. Further, to ask what the good life is, as a general proposition, makes no more sense than to ask what hair color, or eye color, or height, or weight, the ideal lover has. Either instance is a matter of personal, subjective, ultimately arbitrary preferences, desires, and incommensurable values. One man might desire fame, another pleasure. And a given person’s values and wishes vary according to the situation. To again use myself as an example; in the context of society, my highest desire is creative productivity and eventual societal recognition for it. But in a world in which I were the sole occupant, I would care, not for creative productivity, but only for pleasure. If we cannot say what constitutes a good life, perhaps we can say what are some good elements of life, or what makes life better. For example, most people would probably agree that, all else being equal, it’s better to be healthy and happy (or at least happy). To accomplish all your goals and be happy is a better life than to accomplish your goals but suffer. Yet, because there can be no final agreement, or answer, as to what is the good life, perhaps all we can definitely say about it is that, minimally, the good life involves the ability and the freedom (consistent with the same freedom for others) to pursue the sort of life one wishes, and a good society is that which maximizes each member’s ability meaningfully to engage in, and by his own lights to realize, that pursuit.
● 10-19-2002: We may think certain events are “meant to be” because they constitute too strange a coincidence to have resulted merely by chance. What we fail to realize is that a universe devoid of occasional strange coincidences would be even stranger. And we fail to consider context, all the times when no such special coincidence occurred. For example, if we flip a coin and it comes up heads one hundred times in a row; to think that this was somehow more than merely coincidental involves our failure to realize that, if we flip a coin enough times, eventually it will come up on the same side one hundred times in a row. And we fail to think of all the times the coin was flipped but didn’t produce a pattern we found particularly interesting. What really would be weird is if it never happened.
● 10-20-2002: The United States’ so-called war on terror is very strange, in the following way, among many others. The terrorists who are striking the United States are essentially retaliating (albeit inappropriately) against real wrongs committed by the United States against countries and people around the world. Under such circumstances, a war against terror is a war against retaliation, or retaliation against retaliation (purportedly on the principle that retaliation is immoral).
● 10-22-2002: It strikes me that “Devil” comes from “evil”; it is “the evil,” or D’ Evil.
● I recently heard a disagreement between two politically progressive people concerning the motives of the rich and powerful, who do so much harm in the world. One said they’re conscious evildoers; the other opined that they actually believe they’re doing good. First, a distinction. With some possible rare exceptions, these people, I think, do not set out explicitly to do harm. Rather, they act to help themselves. The problem is that they help themselves at the expense of the rest the world. The question is their state of mind regarding the harm that their selfish conduct causes. When such people claim that their conduct is motivated by a desire to help the world, or the larger group, we can almost surely rule this out, as false. Instead, their explanations are mere rationalizations for their selfish acts. Perhaps the difference is in the level of consciousness that they’re hurting others. To slightly oversimplify, we might divide the rich and powerful who do so much damage in the world into three broad categories: those who are troubled by their actions’ bad effects, but not enough to change their conduct; those who don’t care; and those who not only don’t care, but have contempt for those they harm (and so are glad about the harm).
● 10-23-2002: I agree with much of what William James has to say . . ..
● 10-24-2002: What exactly is the relationship between the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments? Why is there no one-to-one correspondence between the two sets? Why are there ten commandments, but only seven deadly sins?
● I’m not sure I quite grasp Wittgenstein’s main point about the language game. But my first impression (arguably somewhat unreliable, based as it is on my perhaps incomplete understanding) is that his observation does not so much supersede prior epistemological philosophy (as it purports to do), but merely adds another facet to it. I wonder if his thesis is not captured more simply by the old maxim that we think in and with verbal language, and that our ability to think can be no greater than the language we possess. In other words, Wittgenstein’s assertion is true, but it’s not saying much. It almost sounds like a sort of reverse, or perverse, reductionism. Instead of purporting to explain a complex reality by breaking it into parts which do not truly add up to, or account for, the whole; Wittgenstein breaks consciousness into constituent elements, or he focuses on certain of the elements, and somehow concludes that these parts could not add up to produce the whole that we believe we have. But the approach is no more successful than the standard form of reductionism. Wittgenstein’s thesis fails because it ignores the facts. In which regard it’s a bit like Zeno’s paradox, which argues that an arrow could never reach its target because it must cross an infinite number of (finite) half-distances and thus it would take it an infinitely long time to reach the target, and concluding that therefore motion is impossible. Zeno’s argument flies in the face of the obvious fact that motion does exist. Indeed, the argument assumes motion, in that Zeno supposes that the arrow travels half the distance to the target. (Zeno even implicitly provides a formula for how long it takes an arrow to reach its target: about twice as long as it took to go halfway.) In Wittgenstein’s case, however problematic the process might seem which leads to the final human result, the end product is a language-using being that thinks, and thinks in a way to which many of the traditional modes of inquiry about our minds apply. . . . Professor Robinson writes, about Wittgenstein’s thesis: “Suppose one tried to give meaning to statements in a world with no other occupant. It’s impossible. Meaning is discursive: it arises from conventions that presuppose not only a social world but one in which the meaning-bearers share the interests and aspirations of those whom they would engage. Accordingly, all we can know or express must bear the stamp of culture, context, and a given shared form of life.” Well, a sole person might be unable to give meaning to statements if he did not possess language; to learn a language, he would need society. But if he has a language, and then all other beings vanished, leaving him totally alone, he could still think, speak, read, and write quite meaningfully (if you were alone in a library, reading a book that you were understanding, and, unbeknownst to you, everyone else in the world suddenly died, would you suddenly cease to understand what you were reading?) . . . Our lack of understanding, or of ability to explain, an entity or phenomenon does not contradict or preclude its existence.
But I think Wittgenstein makes an excellent point about the importance of social context to meaning in the sphere of personal identity. Our identity is largely social, relative to other people. To invoke my perennial exemplar, Wolfgang Mozart’s essential identity is the world’s greatest composer. If not for music, if not for civilization, Mozart would be (or, would have been) just another mammal.
. . . In my essay “Knowledge” I argue that knowledge of the truth or falsity of propositions is impossible and that all we can know is our raw experience itself. I wonder if Wittgenstein’s essential thesis is not just another, a more particular, way of saying the same thing.
● 10-25-2002: According to Professor Daniel Robinson, “William James’s pragmatism is of a different order [than simply ‘If it works, it’s true.’]. The concept of ‘truth’ is attached to propositions insofar as some ultimate or highest interest can be figured into the deliberations. . . . Apart from the tidy abstractions of logic and mathematics, ‘truth’ pertains to the world of possible experience. . . . As the human race finds itself in different contexts, equipped with new and promising thoughts and possibilities, there is always another broad perspective that replaces an earlier one, a perspective that cannot be expected to be the same everywhere. . . . we are warned to be suspicious of those who come to us with final answers.” I will not say I disagree with James here. I would rather say that my approach is different from his. Perhaps we’re saying the same thing in different ways. My own philosophical style or bent is to reach conclusions, truths, at a sufficiently general or abstract level such that they won’t change with time or circumstances, and, when I make a statement that’s not universal, I try to remember to so qualify it. Take, for instance, the statement, “Democracy is the best form of government.” I think James’s point is that we, members of Western civilization at this time in history, consider that statement true, but as conditions change, people could reasonably come to believe that some other form of government is the best, because it better suits their needs and interests. As a philosopher, however, I wouldn’t, or at least I hope I wouldn’t, make such a statement (about democracy being the best form of government) as a part of my formal philosophy. Instead, the statement I’d make on the subject would be more like this: “Our preference as to forms of government is subjective; my own personal preference now is for democracy, for the following reasons . . .”
. . . On second thought, perhaps there is a disagreement. A proposition’s truth or falsity is quite distinct from its usefulness or harmfulness. Furthermore, to define truth in terms of highest interests doesn’t work, because, as art pursues beauty for its own sake, one of civilization’s highest endeavors is philosophy, which pursues truth for its own sake. In other words, it won’t do to define truth in terms of our highest interests, for one of our highest interests may be the discovery of truth.
. . . There are no highest interests, per se. There are only our own individual interests. If most people have interests in common, it’s because we all have similar natures. For example, everyone likes and desires pleasure, though not necessarily exclusively.
. . . Paradoxically, James’s pronouncement that there is no final truth, no last word, is itself motivated by a desire to state a universal truth, and constitutes a sort of reverse means to stating such a proposition (that is, “No statement is true for all time” . . . except this one).
● Professor Robinson writes, “Suppose our ‘highest interests’ are simply features of our merely contingent biology. Summarize whether this implies that our developed knowledge, too, is simply something credible to an organism of a certain kind.” This is a good question. I think the answer is this: The truths we arrive at are universal, objective truths, but we cannot know it.
● Aristotle said that an action is morally good or bad depending on the actor’s intention. More accurately, actions themselves are not morally good or bad; they’re objective events, facts, which, nonetheless, like any events, may be considered to have beneficial or harmful effects. It’s just people’s intentions which may have a moral character . . . A problem with this idea, however, is that, practically, we would seem to need an action to ascribe an intention. Otherwise, we might find ourselves in the strange position of concluding that a person who never did a good deed was morally better than a man who did great good throughout his life, because the former somehow had a better “intention.” Perhaps we praise good conduct, because, ultimately, it’s good conduct that we wish to motivate. We impute intention to action, via our experience and common sense. Perhaps our conclusions in this regard are more reliable if we judge a pattern of conduct rather than an isolated act.
[Later note (3-30-2024): . . . And what’s a good, or a bad, intention?]
● 10-26-2002: When people talk about intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, how intelligent do they mean? If we found life forms similar to chimpanzees or whales, would we consider that intelligent? Probably what most people mean is sufficiently intelligent and otherwise endowed as to be able to communicate, or converse, with us. But we probably would not wish to make contact with beings more intelligent than we are. That would affect our psychology, if not our philosophy. It would hurt our pride, since we would no longer be the top life form. And we might also be thus endangered. Superior beings might wish to take over the Earth and subjugate or kill us, just the way Europeans treated Africans and American Indians. Such domination (by extraterrestrials) would be even easier, both to accomplish and to justify, if those conquered were not merely different-colored others of your own kind, but an actually inferior species. After all, though it’s controversial, humans kill whales (for food and other products).
● Wittgenstein said his goal was to get the fly out of the bottle. (And this is my comment:) We may never be able to escape the bottle; but we may be able to do the next best thing: understand that we’re in a bottle. . . . Whatever that means.
● 10-28-2002: When I was very young, it was understood that children hospitalized for tonsillectomies were rewarded with ice cream. I believe that when a person is terminally ill, he should be allowed to have all the mood-altering drugs he desires, both as a palliative and as a compensation, an earthly form of Heaven at the very end. The basic reason for abstaining from drug use during normal times in one’s life is that the short-term gain is outweighed by the long-term detriment, which benefit-harm calculus of course yields the opposite result when your future is very short.
● 10-30-2002: Doing tedious, unfulfilling work to make a living is a necessary evil (for most of us).
● 10-31-2002: I hope Christ’s second coming does more good for the world than his first coming did.
● To think you are the chosen people of God . . . now, that’s chutzpah! (. . . chosen for what?).
● 11-2-2002: There once was a man who was granted one wish, and he wished that he would live forever, as a young man. He lived for many years as a thirty-year-old. But one day, he had a terrible accident and badly injured his back. From then on, he was in constant agony, which no medical care could relieve. He longed to die, but could not, and was thus doomed to an endless hell.
● 11-5-2002: Getting fat is nature’s way of telling you you’re eating too much.
[Later note (2021): I seem to remember hearing some information that would suggest that it’s not that simple.]
● 11-6-2002: We cannot guarantee people a good life; but we can, and we should, provide the conditions that enable and favor a good life, among which conditions are material well-being, health (or health care), education, leisure time, and freedom.
● I’m extremely agonistic.
● Yesterday’s election, in which the Republicans regained control of the U.S. Senate and increased their majority in the House of Representatives, can, from one aspect, be characterized thus: When a sufficient number of people refuse to vote for the lesser evil . . . you get the greater evil.
● I’ve recently completed the audio-tape course titled, The Great Ideas of Philosophy, and have just begun another audio course, The Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (by Professors Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins). Thus . . .
● According to utilitarianism, if something exists, actually or potentially, that’s intrinsically valuable, we have a moral duty to maximize the net (existent) amount of it. And utilitarianism holds that what’s intrinsically valuable is happiness. Nietzsche disagrees with utilitarianism, at least insofar as he proposes a different desideratum as intrinsically valuable, to wit: power (or self-actualization). Though I believe that intrinsic value is impossible (I won’t rehearse that argument here), happiness is a better candidate for intrinsic value than power, for several reasons, including this one: If something is desirable, there must be something which is undesirable. This is implicit in our cognate notion of good and evil. That which is undesirable or evil consists in negative degrees of the same entity whose positive degrees are desirable or good. Evil is not simply the absence of good, and vice versa (thus Hell is worse than nothing). Happiness/pleasure satisfies this basic structural requirement, for it has negative values—unhappiness/pain. But power does not satisfy it, for the least power possible, as it were, is simply a total absence of power; there’s no negative power.
Utilitarianism holds that happiness is the basis of both motivation and morality. Because feeling good (happiness) is its own reward, we’re naturally motivated to seek it; and, since it’s intrinsically desirable, our sole moral duty is to maximize it. Whereas, for Nietzsche, power provides just motivation. He sees the basis of our morality as, not power, but God, or the belief in God.
I agree with utilitarianism’s conditional proposition that, if something were intrinsically valuable, we would have a moral duty to maximize the net amount of it. My disbelief in intrinsic value occupies the same place in my philosophy as Nietzsche’s atheism does in his, both in function and importance. The doctrines are the centerpiece and engine of our respective philosophies. Those disbeliefs prompt both of us to search for alternative bases of morality, or, in my case, at least of collective action, for (because of my disbelief in intrinsic value) I feel no strict moral obligation, but merely motivation. I think my philosophy is superior to Nietzsche’s, for intrinsic value is a better candidate than God as a basis of morality. And as to the final, big question of life’s meaning, the concept of intrinsic value subsumes that of God, for, if intrinsic value is impossible (which it is), then not even God could be intrinsically valuable, nor could God confer intrinsic value on the world: Whether or not God exists, life is meaningless. Also, my conclusion that intrinsic value is impossible has led me to a more comprehensive and realistic view of human motivation than Nietzsche, or, for that matter, utilitarianism, has: Most people act, not from a single need or want (as for power or happiness) but from a multiplicity of needs and wants: for power, happiness, security, love, and many more.
● Regarding the foregoing three-paragraph entry, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein I suppose might have replaced the entire first paragraph with the cryptic aphoristic note, “Hell is worse than nothing.” As I get older, I, too, find I have a growing tendency to express myself aphoristically. Whether this is good or bad, I don’t know.
● When Nietzsche talks about tragedy, he seems to be defining it as bad things happening to good people. By bad things, he seems to mean suffering. But suffering, equivalent to unhappiness, is the opposite (the negative form) of happiness; so that if that which is bad is suffering, then that which is good is happiness; which seems to conflict with Nietzsche’s assertion elsewhere that personal power, rather than happiness, is the prime desideratum.
● Death is good or bad, depending on what dies. If that which dies is bad, death is good; if that which dies is good, death is bad.
● Good and bad obtain only in life. Death is the total absence of everything, including good and bad. If life is good, death is to be regretted, and the greater the good, the greater the regret; if life is bad (and cannot be made good), death is to be welcomed, and the greater the evil, the greater the welcome.
● I sense a certain inconsistency in Nietzsche. [Later note (2021): Another one?!] He says that all people seek mainly power, and yet he also asserts that we follow moral rules so that others will like and approve of us. The two motives are not diametrically opposed, for being liked may enhance one’s power; yet the two tendencies he postulates seem not entirely in harmony with one another.
[Later note (2021): On rereading this yet again (for editing), I’m at a loss to see how those motives are at all disharmonious. Avoiding antagonizing others takes little effort, and is promotive of one’s art, for it avoids conflict and stress, which would interfere with your pursuing your art. If you do a menial job, you’re not therein doing your art, per se. If you were independently wealthy, and you didn’t need a job, doing that job might conflict with doing your art. But if, like most of us, you need the job to put food on the table, it might be necessary for your survival, and thus necessary for your continuing to do your art. Either I’m misunderstanding what I originally meant, or it’s just one of my many errors, which the passage of time allows me to see. I think the latter is more likely.]
[Later note (11-7-2024): More fundamentally still, that first paragraph seems to suggest that, to be consistent, one must have the same reason for every action? Which is nonsensical. For example, when I study logic, my motivation is to enhance my creative output. But when I eat dinner, I do it, not to enhance my creative output, but to satisfy my hunger and my desire for pleasure—the pleasure of eating tasty food.]
As to the notion that we obey moral rules in order to curry favor with others; here, too, I think Nietzsche has part of the truth, but not all of it. At the moment, three additional motives or explanations (for our obeying moral rules) occur to me. One other basis is perhaps a variation on Nietzsche’s statement, or the negative side of it, which is the fear of, and the wish to avoid, punishment for disobedience. A second further motive, more positive, is altruism, the wish to do good, to help others. Third, and finally, a pervasive underpinning of our tendency to adhere to moral rules is simply our internalization of those rules, so that we adhere to them, not for some secondary reason, but immediately as a sort of instinct. The exact combination of motives varies from person to person and from situation to situation. Nietzsche legitimately emphasizes an aspect that had been neglected. But in the process, he overgeneralizes. Human nature is somewhat more complex than he depicts. More broadly, one often hears people declare that man is basically some certain way: basically selfish, basically evil, or basically good, et cetera. The truth is that human nature is not basically anything. Man’s nature in general is multifaceted. He can at times be selfish, greedy, mean, cruel, and destructive, but at other times genuinely altruistic, beneficent, kind, and loving. Different people are different at different times and in different circumstances, though temperament varies, and some men may be predominantly mean, others kind, and so on.
I find it even more amazing to hear philosophers argue about the characterization of life, as basically good, or bad, et cetera. Life is no particular way at all, neither basically good, nor basically bad, nor anything else. “Life is good” expresses, not a proposition that’s objectively true or false, but instead merely the speaker’s personal attitude toward life, probably in most cases based largely on his feelings about his own life—at the time he speaks. Such pronouncements border on the meaningless.
● The characterization of life is strictly a matter of individual perspective. It’s good for some, bad for some others, and indifferent for still others. It depends on circumstances, outward and inward, and one’s attitude, all of which vary from person to person and from time to time within each man’s life. Plus, man at least in theory has the power collectively to improve his life’s conditions. If a person living in the wilderness can build a house to keep himself protected and warm, but for one reason or another neglects to do so, he’s hardly in a position to claim that life is basically cold and miserable.
● I feel tempted to declare that, when I was younger, I was quick to present my own personal, usually perverse, slant on things; whereas, now that I’m older, I simply seek truth, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. But then I think that perhaps this is still my agonistic nature at work, just that Nietzsche’s own views are so slanted and perverse, the only way I can find to criticize him is to fault his bias and offer a more balanced and comprehensive view, and that probably, as soon as I get to a philosopher who presents a more level-headed perspective, I’ll be right back to my accustomed perversity! (Or perhaps I’m simply attempting to out-Nietzsche Nietzsche? . . . At this moment I’m honestly not sure. Just what is my state of mind and emotion and motivation when I philosophize? Surely there’s the quest for originality, but it’s the quest for original truth, as I see it—not to be outrageous merely for the sake of novelty. To be original but wrong is no accomplishment. To be as good a philosopher as possible, one should continue to critically examine and refine one’s own thought. . . .)
● 11-7-2002: I agree with Nietzsche that the so-called seven deadly sins are mischaracterized as sins, that they’re merely human traits, or weaknesses. I might disagree about greed. In a world of scarce resources, greed, at least if given sway in an economic system like capitalism, unjustly deprives others of needed resources, and so can actually hurt other people. Under the right circumstances, therefore, greed may properly be condemned, even punished. By contrast, the other six traits, like sloth and gluttony, hurt the supposed sinner, but have only a tenuous, remote negative effect on others (they’re victimless crimes, as we might say nowadays). While virtue may not be its own reward, these alleged sins are their own punishment. For example, if you’re slothful, you’re less productive, for which you suffer the consequences in the longer term. Further, I think at least two of the supposed sins, in moderation, are assets: pride and lust. The day I lose all pride and lust, life will cease to be worth living. (But that’s hard to know—perhaps I think so because of my pride . . ..)
● Good and bad news. Listening to the audio tape lectures, I’m overflowing (or at least flowing) with ideas. But I have insufficient time to satisfactorily record them all (my ideas). I must choose between quality and quantity, and I’ve decided to err on the side of quantity. My ability to polish rough notes is more consistent than my ability to come up with raw ideas. If I get down the gist of a thought, I can always, or almost always, polish it later, but I can’t always, or even almost always, come up with new ideas. So I’ll make quick, rough notations, to be revised and polished later, possibly much later.
[Later note (9-28-2023): I’m not sure I actually put that “making only rough notes” idea into effect. My impression, on going through my Diaries (where the material for this Journal comes from) is that the great majority of the entries were already pretty well developed. I don’t recall seeing many cryptic entries.]
● I disagree with Nietzsche that a philosopher’s life should influence our judgment of his philosophy. The philosophy should be judged on its own merits. Its soundness or unsoundness is wholly independent of the philosopher’s motivation. “Twice two is four” is right, and “twice two is three” is wrong, regardless of the speaker’s motives. Mozart’s music is just as great, irrespective of Mozart’s personal character or his motivation for composing. More particularly, Nietzsche’s criticism of Socrates, that his philosophy resulted from his (Socrates’s) hatred of life, seems problematic for a number of reasons. First, if one simply hates life, he commits suicide. Socrates may have hated certain aspects of, or activities in, life, but he surely loved other aspects; specifically, he loved philosophy and philosophizing, which arguably is a more important part of life than casual socializing, or merely having fun—surely so for one with the potential to be a great philosopher. Second, in assiduously honing his philosophy, Socrates, according to Nietzsche’s own more general philosophy, would have been motivated by the quest for personal power and artistic self-realization. And in actually becoming a great philosopher, Socrates satisfied this supposed basic need, or drive, which, at least at some level, must have been quite gratifying for him. To characterize a philosopher’s philosophy as somehow involving or motivated by a hatred of life, unless his doctrine explicitly expresses it, is dubious at best. Moreover, a philosopher, a writer, must find his raw material for his writing where he may. Perhaps this was the best, most creative idea Socrates could come up with—though I suppose we could use the same consideration to explain and mitigate Nietzsche’s comments.
Further in defense of Socrates, and in opposition to Nietzsche’s ad hominem criticism of him; three points. First, a dwelling on the abstract does not suggest a dislike of life. One tends to do what one is good at. If you’re good at abstract, theoretical thought, you’re more likely to make that a substantial element of your writing . . . especially if you’re a philosopher. Second, as to Socrates’s supposed ugliness, I, likewise, have a penchant for abstract thought, but most people consider me very handsome. Third, and finally, it seems to me that if a philosopher engages in personal attacks on other philosophers, he invites personal attacks on himself. Accepting the invitation, it occurs to me that perhaps Nietzsche attacks people because he lacks sufficient intellectual and logical ability to attack arguments. This explanation is further supported by Nietzsche’s rationalizing (and therefore implicitly acknowledging) his own arguments’ lack of logical rigor. He says that many deductively sound arguments lack persuasive power; that philosophy is, not logic, but rhetoric; and that he (Nietzsche) is doing art, not science. But while deductive soundness is not sufficient for a great argument; and while persuasiveness, rhetoric, and art undoubtedly enhance an argument’s quality; nonetheless, the greatest arguments are artistic, rhetorically compelling, and logically sound. Whether logical integrity is strictly necessary to good argumentation (and it may well be), its lack is surely a serious weakness.
A passion for philosophy (which I believe I have) is a kind of passion. It’s inaccurate to say that people who love mostly the world of ideas dislike life. It’s more accurate to say that they like that aspect of life. They enjoy thinking and talking about this particular field of study. It’s essentially no different than the musician who loves to perform, listen to, and talk about, music, or the sports enthusiast who loves to watch and talk about sports. These activities are a part of human life, and these people, far from hating life, have found something in it, something about it, to love. Such persons might regret death intensely, for it will stop them from engaging in the activity they so enjoyed in life. And even if they fantasize about life after death, this also evinces a love of life, in wishing it to continue in some significant form. The one who arguably hates life is the man who is bored, who has no interests, and would just as soon be dead, truly dead, in the sense of having no awareness. From a slightly different aspect, while philosophy is predominantly an intellectual activity, it is for most philosophers motivated by emotion, the emotion of pride.
A related issue is whether a writer’s body of work is enhanced or diminished by material which, though ultimately unsound, is nonetheless colorful, interesting, entertaining, and/or thought-provoking. My own approach to such matter is to write it, and then supply the counterargument myself, thus preserving both material and integrity.
I sometimes think we must view writers’ work charitably, considering that they had very limited time, and that there’s a tradeoff between getting down material as it comes to mind and sifting, polishing, and revising it. It may simply be that many writers died before they had a chance to eliminate or neutralize the unsound elements in their work.
● 11-9-2002: Professors Solomon and Higgins write: “Against the grain of philosophy since the Greeks, Nietzsche rejects the primacy of reason in human life.” Reason may not be primary in human life, but it’s primary in philosophy . . . That is, philosophers do not so much emote as think.
● Also, according to Professors Solomon and Higgins, “Socrates ‘turns reason into a tyrant,’ by treating reason as the royal road to truth . . . He [Socrates] argues for an absolute set of standards that are comprehensible by reason alone.” . . . I have used reason to demonstrate the lack of absolute standards.
● “The truth will make you free.” . . . So, do we desire truth, or freedom?
● I think that, when Nietzsche says there is no truth, he means only that we cannot know the truth. That’s the charitable interpretation, for Nietzsche’s proposition, taken literally, is self-contradictory: Let’s say it’s true. That would mean that that proposition, too, is not true. (So it’s both true and not true.)
● Nietzsche criticizes people’s adherence to morality as motivated by the herd instinct, the wish to maintain others’ acceptance, favor, and friendship. But it seems that moral codes are designed to maintain the welfare of the group, to discourage individuals’ pursuing selfish motives that would benefit themselves at the group’s expense. The group enforces its moral codes by rewarding obedience and punishing disobedience, the essence of which reward or punishment is social expression of positive or negative feelings, respectively, by the group toward individuals depending in part on the individuals’ moral conduct toward the group. For the most part, this enforcement of societal ethics is beneficial in that it fosters the commonweal. So, our following moral rules motivated by positive feedback and/or avoidance of negative feedback from others represents the fundamental structure and dynamic of social ethics, which—in general—is beneficial and healthy. By and large, this is even consistent with the will to power in the form of self-actualization, for truly great artists and other great contributors to culture are rewarded by society’s admiration, recognition, and praise for their productions. I’m at a loss to grasp where Nietzsche finds fault here.
● As I proceed through the lecture material on Nietzsche, I’m waiting to find his proposal for a positive moral code, or for collective social action.
● The Republicans assert that their big victory in last week’s election gave them a mandate to pursue their “conservative” policies. Nonsense! That election was decided, not by the voters, but by the incredible two thirds of eligible voters who did not vote (the nonvoters)—hardly a mandate!
● 11-10-2002: When I say I value maximizing my creative productivity, there’s another value element in the equation, which element is ego, or pride. If I didn’t think my work was of literary quality and importance, I wouldn’t bother to do it, but would simply live for pleasure, and commit suicide if life was painful. I suppose that sounds pretty miserable. But that’s how I feel.
● Nietzsche says God is dead (and by “God,” he means belief in God . . . not that God actually existed, but then died), that the God-myth, which supplied the basis for morality, is defunct, and he urges that a new myth be created to fulfill the positive functions performed by the old myth. But Nietzsche’s urging us to create a new myth to motivate morality, implies that morality is advantageous. So why can’t we be motivated to adopt morality simply by its own advantages? And if morality’s own advantages are insufficient, why should we engage in mental contortions to come up with some extraneous, phony myth to somehow try to manipulate people into taking it up? At the risk of stating the obvious, my own suggestion for a new morality, is one whose explicit object and rationale is the welfare of man.
[Later note (2020): Besides, if, as Nietzsche also posits (see the 1-8-2003 entry, below), the right thing to do is simply what one wants to do (whereas morality is our duty to others), is Nietzsche, in saying that we should find a way to induce morality, not contradicting himself?]
[Later note (4-4-2022): And Nietzsche also denigrates morality as an expression of the herd instinct. So, which is it?!]
● Birds do not fear heights.
● 11-12-2002: Death is the ultimate cure for insomnia.
● To say, as I take it Nietzsche does, that ultimately we are all one, is rubbish. We are as we exist. To exist, in the sole relevant sense, is to be conscious. And consciousness occurs on the individual level. Just individuals—no larger or smaller units—are aware. And each person is isolated within his own awareness. So we’re not “all one.” Nor do we feel as if we are. If we did, we might feel consoled about dying, in the prospect of continuing on in the lives of those who live after us. But I think that, to whatever extent people sense that they live on after their individual deaths, they feel so, not in being one with other people, but rather in actually contributing to society, such as through (their own) children. Moreover, the idea that we are “all one” seems to conflict with Nietzsche’s other idea, of a will to power. It seems to me that, if we felt we were all one, we would have no strong urge to do our own art; rather, we’d be satisfied with the art already produced. If you took a sort of collective species-credit for the works of Mozart and Shakespeare, why would you feel a need to do your own art? Similarly, if we felt we were all one, we wouldn’t need to be prodded to adhere to morality, since we’d have no great inclination to be immoral—essentially, selfish.
● Life is neither rational nor irrational. It’s nonrational.
● 11-14-2002: People are fond of saying that the terror attacks in the United States on 9-11-2001 were immoral because they were directed against innocent people. I, too, think the attacks were morally wrong, but I question whether the victims were innocent. Are they not as guilty for the country’s actions as the members of the U.S. government themselves, in that the people, collectively, elect the government, and the government acts at least in theory on the people’s behalf? The U.S.-imposed economic sanctions against Iraq are supposed to make the Iraqi people suffer and thus induce them to overthrow the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Husein. Critics of that policy argue that the people cannot be expected to overthrow Husein, because they lack the ability to do so: he maintains himself in office by force and coercion—it’s not as if they can simply vote him out of office. By contrast, in the United States, we can simply vote the government officials out of office. If it’s permissible to, in effect, punish a people for their government’s conduct in a non-democracy, is it not permissible to punish the people for their government’s conduct in a democracy?
● 11-17-2002: As president, George W. Bush did much that needed a pretext, little that was needed.
● I’ve made a distinction between strict and loose senses of several concepts, including knowledge and free will, arguing that, though, strictly, theoretically, we cannot know anything, and we have no volition, yet, loosely, practically, we probably have many true perceptions, and we have some control of our actions. It occurs to me that perhaps I should make the same distinction concerning intrinsic value. That is, I’ve argued that intrinsic value, in the strict sense, is impossible. But perhaps I should allow that, loosely speaking, something is desirable, which is happiness. For, no matter what our conception of the good life, greater happiness/less unhappiness makes life better. Happiness, while not intrinsically desirable, is nonetheless something we all desire, even if not necessarily exclusively.
● 11-19-2002: “Affirmative action,” the legal principle by which people of color are given certain preferences, is a form of reparations for Black slavery and subsequent racism.
● 11-20-2002: If there’s a good life, then presumably there’s a bad life; and once when we’ve defined the former, we’ll be able to describe the latter, since it would be the opposite.
● Why is there a concept of the good life, but not of the bad life?
● I believe that a good deal of philosophy is a product of philosophers’ desire to present original outlooks. Had, say, Schopenhauer’s, Kant’s, or Nietzsche’s philosophy occurred to me originally, I might have been perfectly content to espouse it my whole life. But those ideas were already taken (by Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche, et alii). So subconsciously I sought other ideas, the most interesting and substantial one original to me being the impossibility of intrinsic value, which perspective I have, ever since, adhered to, developed, and preached, at bottom just because it’s mine.
[Later note (7-20-2023): Well, not just because it’s mine: rather, because it’s mine and because it’s a damn good idea!]
[Later note (1-19-2024): Does this imply that, if so motivated, I could have reached conclusions inconsistent with ones I’ve reached, or merely that I might have focused on different philosophical subjects? (I would hope it’s the latter!)]
[Later note (7-15-2024): I said that the reason I did not take up ideas expressed by earlier philosophers was that those ideas were already taken. I think that’s wrong. Like my knowledge in general, my knowledge of the history of philosophy is very limited. If I didn’t take up an already-expressed idea, it’s merely because it didn’t occur to me. I guess it was just a matter of luck that some of my best ideas were also original . . . my good luck.]
● 12-2-2002: Freud says the baby sucks at its mother’s breast for sexual pleasure; but I wonder if the drive isn’t rather hunger than sex . . ..
[Later note (2021): Perhaps the mother gets a sensual pleasure from it.]
● 12-5-2002: I’ve just awoken from a nightmare. I dreamed that I was in a house, with the door locked. There was a knock at the door, I opened it, and present were two women, with knives, who thereupon tried to kill me. I managed to get outside of the house, where a man, who apparently was with the two women, shot at me, and I awoke. The dream, I think, was stimulated by the situation with the family residence in West Hills, California; this weekend I rewrote a letter my father wrote to his lawyer, Robert Baker III, responding to my mother, Clarisse’s rejection of the earlier plan to put the house in trust for me to live in after her death, and her offer instead to buy my father’s half interest in the house. Rewriting my father’s letter suddenly struck me with the acute awareness of the direness of my situation. I have nothing, no property to speak of, no savings, no pension, no social security, hardly even a decent job, no friends. If my father died tomorrow, I might literally be out on the street, homeless. And he’s old and in precarious health. How did I make such a mess of my life?! What was I thinking all these years?! Almost a total lack of planning. In my dream, the house is the family home; the women are my mother and sister, and the man is either my father or me. The women’s attempt to drive me out of the house, and my father’s and (especially) my own failure over the years to effectively plan for the future, threaten to kill me. And my own failure is the deadliest element. I’m in considerable distress.
[Later note (2021): Though I’m loath to joke about a nightmare, or about my distress at that time in my life, I can’t resist pointing out another bit of dream illogic: the people who are trying to kill me are outside of the house, and yet I “managed to get outside of the house”?!]
● 12-8-2002: It has been argued that, if we can hold the thought of an infinite being (God), then an infinite being actually exists. But if you can conceive of this universe with God, I can conceive of this universe without God. Because not both can be, one of us is conceiving of what doesn’t exist (the universe with God, or the universe without God). Therefore, it’s not true that mere conceivability implies existence.
● If everyone is special, is anyone special?
[Later note (2021): Possibly yes: If just three composers existed—Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven—each of them would be special.]
● 12-10-2002: It strikes me that people often have good reason for suicide. They feel there’s no other satisfactory way out of a desperate situation. I’m once again feeling that way myself. I feel overwhelmed, trapped. I have no money, no real way to support myself. I’m almost completely financially dependent on my father, who is very old. If he were to die now, I would literally be out on the street, with no physical place to keep my writings, which would all be lost. I have no other family I can turn to, no friends. I’m all alone. I’m desperate. I want to leave my writings with someone who may safeguard them, and then end my life. I’m doomed to failure. I oscillate between despair and complacency, never taking constructive practical action to solve my problem.
● 12-11-2002: Sometimes I think that, for most religious people, God is not so much a literal, actually existing entity, as merely a metaphor.
● 12-18-2002: Perspectivism validly pertains to certain matters, but not to others. An example of the former are the contrary propositions that “we are all one” versus that “we are separate.” Both are true in a certain way; it depends on “how you look at it”; it’s a matter of perspective. Propositions to which perspectivism does not pertain are ones which are logically inconsistent, such as the statement that God exists versus the statement that God does not exist.
● Nietzsche says that the philosopher’s goal should be to come to know as many perspectives as possible and to understand how they all interrelate; yet he also criticizes certain philosophers for having philosophical systems, their own integrated, self-consistent perspective on the world. But it seems to me that both Nietzsche’s urge to understand numerous perspectives and a philosopher’s tendency to develop his own system spring from the same impulse: to achieve the most comprehensive possible view of things. Hence Nietzsche’s criticism of philosophical systems is sound just to the extent that such systems sacrifice truth in the particulars for the sake of breadth. Truth and breadth are both desirable, and if a philosopher can accomplish both, so much the better; he’s due more credit. Besides, what is a philosophical system? It’s merely the set of all of a philosopher’s views, so long as they’re mutually coherent.
Further, is not philosophy all about arriving at, developing, and expressing one’s own perspective on things? And any view, no matter how comprehensive, even if understanding and encompassing numerous perspectives, is inevitably a perspective . . ..
● Nietzsche’s famous aphorism “A thought comes when it will, not when I will” is a profoundly true observation. But there’s another side to it as well, which is that, in some respects, in some situations, we have some volitional control over our thoughts coming. For instance, when you sit an examination in school, and you’re presented with a question on which you must write a short essay, you manage to collect and muster your thoughts and come up with an essay on the topic on the spot. Unless we could thus at least to some extent bring about thoughts by force of will; if we simply had to passively depend on thoughts coming to us spontaneously, most of us could never graduate from university (but we do graduate).
● I disagree with Sartre that we’re absolutely responsible for what and who we are. At the highest theoretical level, I believe in determinism, and therefore in the nonexistence of free will. Even if we can act in accordance with our desires, our desires themselves are given to us. More practically, though, am I responsible for not being a great composer—if I have little musical talent, or if I lack the resources to develop my talent? Is everyone (except one person) responsible for not becoming president of the United States—when just one person can be president? If everyone has a burning desire to be fabulously wealthy, is everyone who’s not wealthy responsible for not being wealthy—when not enough money exists for that? (Besides, if everyone were independently wealthy, who would do all the work that needs to get done?)
I agree with Nietzsche here, that at best we can become who we are; we can make choices that will lead to greater or lesser development or realization of our inborn potential, in line with our natural preferences and inclinations.
I agree with Nietzsche also about freedom within limits. Freedom without limits leads to vast inequality of wealth and resources, overpopulation, and environmental devastation, which threatens the planet’s (or at least man’s) very survival. Freedom without limits is capitalism, cancer, anarchy, and chaos.
● 12-22-2002: I don’t believe in God. I believe in man.
● God is playing God . . . What gives Him the right to wreak havoc in the world?! What gives Him the right to do that which, if done by a man, would be denounced as a crime against humanity?! Is it sufficient excuse to say that God acts in mysterious ways? (Human) serial killers, too, act in mysterious ways!
[Later note (2020): Question: What is one thing God and human serial killers have in common? Answer: They work in mysterious ways.]
● 12-24-2002: There’s a certain logical fallacy wherein the least good is assumed to be bad, or unreasonably deficient. For example, a country may be criticized as having the worst human rights record in the world. But that’s execrable only because so many countries in fact have terrible human rights records. Being ranked the lowest in some respect should not in itself be condemnable. In any group or set, however fine its members, there will be some sort of ranking among them, and one, or certain ones, will be at the bottom. Though both Mozart and Beethoven were very great composers; many people consider Mozart the greatest of all. If no other composers besides these two had ever existed, Beethoven might then arguably be considered the world’s worst composer.
● 12-25-2002: Was I fortunate today? It’s hard to know. If you got hit by a truck and suffered only a broken arm, you’d probably consider yourself lucky. If you completely but narrowly missed being hit by the truck, perhaps you’d be even luckier. How do you know what disasters (or, for that matter, what benefits) you’ve narrowly missed?
● The longer you wait to find something you enjoy doing, the less time you’ll have left to enjoy it or to develop your skill at it. And if you wait long enough, you’ll be dead.
● 12-26-2002: A physical or emotional batterer is not excused by intermittently showing his victim kindness, for the kindness does not erase, or compensate for, the damage done by the battery. Broken bones are not repaired by kisses.
● I started the year (2002) working, and I’m ending it working. Of course, most of the time in between I enjoyed a sort of sabbatical, which, I think, turned out to have been quite productive creatively. I did considerable good work, of which I’m very proud. All in all, it’s been a good year.
● 12-28-2002: Is saying “Yes” to Life (as Nietzsche urges) equivalent to saying “No” to Death? Is saying No to Life equivalent to saying Yes to Death? (Possibly so. But perhaps there’s a difference between the character of the yes and the no in the former case, and the yes and the no in the latter case. To say yes to life and no to death suggests a certain energy; whereas, saying no to life may in some instances involve a certain lethargy or depression, such that the yes to death is likewise an unenthusiastic affirmation.)
● Positive and negative freedom go hand in hand. The positive freedom to become who you are, per Nietzsche, and Pindar before him (the positive freedom to actualize your highest creative potential, a personal value I happen to share with Nietzsche), can be exercised only if you enjoy the negative freedom from arbitrary interference by others. It’s hard, for example, to pursue your education and development as a writer if you’re imprisoned and prevented from reading and writing.
● 12-29-2002: Modern Israel is a stain on Jewish history.
● Philosophy Professor Robert Solomon proposes that basic human mental functions developed through evolution. For example, with respect to induction, those organisms that were less likely to predict, based on past experience, say, where lightning would strike, were killed by lightning more often than were induction-using beings, and thus deselected for procreation. Professor Solomon concludes this point by saying that to ask what connection all this has with the real world, however, makes no sense. But it seems to me that it has everything to do with the real world: supposedly, the poorer predictors are being actually killed by real lightning, not fancifully killed by imaginary lightning . . ..
[Later note (2020): Perhaps I misunderstood Professor Solomon’s point. Perhaps he meant that this process determined the kind of organism we’ve become, but for those of us here now, it doesn’t much affect our lives . . . perhaps because evolution affects, not individuals, but the species as a whole, and only very gradually, over eons.]
● Kant distinguishes our experience versus the world as it is. Other philosophers have asserted that there is no world in itself other than our experience, or that at least it makes no sense to speak of such a world. But there is the world as it is, whatever its nature may be. The world is whatever exists, including our perception, our experience. If just our perception exists, then that is what the world itself is, what it consists in. The rest of the subject, the issue of what, if anything, exists in addition to our perception, is subsumed within the traditional question of knowledge . . . my own answer being that there probably is a world beyond our perception, but that we cannot know that there is. (. . . Just because things may not be as they seem, does not mean that things are not as they seem. . . . In fact, common sense would suggest that, until we have evidence or reason to believe otherwise, we should assume that things are as they seem . . . it seems.)
[Later note (2021): Here’s a consideration in favor of there being a world beyond our experience. Every day, you drive to work, and back home again (or at least you seem to). And on every trip, coming and going, you drive on the same roads and see the same views, the same landscapes, the same road signs, the same buildings, more or less the same trees. If it were all a figment of your mind, wouldn’t the experience be a little more varied?: the colors would change; the buildings would change shape; sometimes you would fly instead of drive. At very least you’d be driving a better car. In fact, if you were merely imagining it all, why would you keep going to the same lousy job every day?!]