2005
● 1-2-2005: Plato’s concept of Forms is merely another way of designating the concept of possibility, a broader and more elegant idea.
● Encouragement of a young person by his peers to try mood-altering drugs is a classic siren song, which truth I wish I had had the wisdom to realize when I was a teenager. (Alas, I did not.)
● Dr. Wayne Dyer’s work strikes me as a grand non sequitur.
● 1-5-2005: On 12-26-2004, I said I had finished my “Response to Ron’s Reply” (Philosophy Club), and that it had taken only about seventy-two hours’ time to complete. Well, almost two weeks later I’m still revising it. I’m especially eager to perfect it, because I’ve developed a plan to post a set of written works online such as to constitute a portfolio of my writing. I must be sure to perfect them before I post them because, in this particular website, it’s impossible to change an item there once published.
● 1-9-2005: Another red-letter day. I posted on the Philosophy in Los Angeles website my second and third pieces, a “Reply to Ron’s Response on Purpose in War,” and “On Egoism: A Rebuttal.” I’m quite proud of them.
● 1-10-2005: A typical difference between a lower-class person’s chemical abuse and that of a middle-class person is that the lower-class person takes drugs in response to a miserable life, whereas the middle-class person has a miserable life in response to the drug abuse (and can regain a decent life simply by stopping the drugs).
● I’m so creative that, no matter how well things are going, I can still find something to complain about.
● In responding to an opponent’s argument, first understand it. Next, acknowledge any areas of agreement, and determine the precise disagreement, if any. Then, and only then, formulate a refutation (to the parts you disagree with). If you find that your opponent’s argument is poor, but his conclusion is true, suggest a better argument for it.
● An unsound argument can have a true conclusion, but a sound argument cannot have a false conclusion.
● When something apparently bad happens to us, we sometimes think, “God works in mysterious ways.” But when something apparently good happens, why do we not think, “The Devil works in mysterious ways”?
[Later note (4-10-2022): Because we want to think that everything that happens to us is good. If it seems good, we take it at face value. If it seems bad, we do mental gymnastics to try to interpret it positively.]
● “God works in mysterious ways” . . . that is, in ways which are entirely consistent with His nonexistence.
[Later note (7-31-2022): . . . in ways that make sense if He doesn’t exist, but that are hard to square with His existence.]
● The master race is man. Within humanity, there are no superior “races,” but only superior individuals, who arise in all “races” of men. Those who believe themselves members of a superior “race” of humans are less likely to be superior individuals.
● When editing my writing, I often say to myself, “I’ll revise this until it’s perfect.” Of course, what I mean is that I’ll revise it until I can think of no further improvements.
● Don’t risk what you can’t afford to lose.
● 1-14-2005: I’ve just seen Ron’s response to my reply to his response in the Philosophy Club website (philosophy-in-LA.tribe.net “When is War Justified?”). I won’t reply again. A weak or mediocre reply is worse than no reply; but to make a strong and adequate argument takes me considerable time, the value of which time I must weigh against the value of an additional response (which I know would only provoke another reply from Ron). Just as an argument must begin somewhere, from premises that cannot themselves be proven with more fundamental premises; likewise, debates must somewhere end. Not every argument warrants a reply; sometimes the most elegant response is none at all.
If I stop now, he’ll have the last word, but I’ll have the better word. If I go on, he may still have the last word (because he takes less care in crafting his comments than I do in mine, and so can produce them far more easily and quickly), but the quality of my pieces, driven less by having something to say than by needing to say something, will diminish; so it’s also a matter of quitting when my advantage is greatest, even if not as great, or at least not as obviously great, as I had hoped it would be. If I reply to Ron’s latest item, argument is liable to turn into squabble, which would show me in a bad light. The most important consideration, though, is the best use of my time, which is clearly not in endlessly arguing with Ron.
Further; obviously, my strong suit is philosophy; Ron’s, politics. He has essentially ceded the field to me on the philosophical issue, which was my main thesis; Iraq was a minor, almost incidental, point. Any further argument on my part would be on the political matter, his stronger area, my weaker one. Which would put me at a disadvantage. Let him prattle on about Iraq. This is a philosophy club, and I’m a philosopher.
As may be apparent, I’m deeply disturbed. I have a strong psychological need to have the last word in written debate, but in this situation my doing so is simply impracticable, and I’ll have to let my opponent have the last word. One way to look at it is that, in effect, he has the last word on the minor (the political) issue, but I have the last word on the major (the philosophical) one. In any event, the time has come to leave it there, and here, and move on.
● 1-15-2005: Philosophical hermeneutics, as I understand it, contends essentially that, when we look around us, we feel as if we’re seeing the “outside world”; but, instead, as if inside a balloon, what we’re really seeing is the inside of our own understanding of the world. And such understanding, at least when it comes to philosophizing, is a function of our language, which simultaneously enables and limits our “understanding.” Thinking is ultimately self-referential; we’re thinking about our thinking, in language. All of which is perhaps just another way to state that (sure, or absolute) knowledge is impossible. At the risk of minimizing some men’s life’s work, many philosophers appear to restrict their scope by preoccupation with this limitation. My own attitude, or procedure, is to admit the theoretical truth of this limitation and then move on to other subjects, which we can explore fruitfully and still acknowledge the hermeneutical truth simply by implicitly qualifying all our conclusions with: “Of course, I cannot know this; but this is what I think” or “this is my thinking.” An everyday-life analogy, we don’t know for certain that if we stayed in bed all day we would lose our job. But we believe that this probably would happen; so we get up and go to work. . . . I’m far less interested in understanding logic and language than I am in creatively and productively using them.
Footnotes. 1. It’s alleged by Dean Pickard, Ph.D., that philosophy seeks truth, but never finds it; the clarity it achieves consists, not in establishing truth, but in establishing the falsehood of previously held positions. But it seems to me that the search for truth presupposes at least the possibility of finding it. Plus, to establish the falsity of a particular proposition is to establish a truth, because it in effect says, “It is true . . . that that proposition is false.”
2. Dr. Pickard further asserts that we don’t live in the world; rather, we live in our constructed meaning of the world. And he also says that thought and feeling are inseparable. But when we’re burned by a hot plate, do we experience pain from our sense of meaning, or directly because of the impingement of the world itself?
3. We see “Two plus two is four” through our “language game”; and yet I think the truth (indeed, the absolute truth) of that proposition is quite clear.
● Just as there are no formulas to determine ethical action, so too there are no formulas to determine well-being. (I say this about well-being practically. Theoretically, it’s not true—see my second and third 1-16-2005 entries, below.) Opinions about what constitutes well-being vary from person to person, and a given person’s opinion on it may change over time. The relevant inquiry is, not so much what is good for us (objective) as what we want (subjective). A man has, or should be given, the right, consistent with the rights of others, to pursue his own conception of well-being. Yet neither should we make this into a formula. Humans have much in common, and we can assume that, by and large, what we value, most others value, or would value. And sometimes we may reasonably intervene in others’ pursuit of what seems to us “objectively” self-destructive, or even unproductive.
● 1-16-2005: Every man is in a continual process of self-creation.
● In my work, I use happiness to mean the pleasing emotional state (feeling good). I use well-being for the concept of how well one’s life is going. Happiness is clear-cut, and objective (there’s a fact of the matter about how happy or unhappy you are at any given time). Well-being is in one way subjective, in another way objective. Objectively, happiness, and only happiness, is necessarily good for us. And yet (subjectively) people tend to see their well-being as consisting in various desiderata, not just happiness. And they should have a right to pursue those other desiderata.
● Roger Crisp writes of the “experience machine” objection to hedonism, whereby a person would choose to live a real life rather than be forever passively connected to a machine, even though the machine would produce considerable pleasure, far greater pleasure than available in real life. It seems to me, however, that this objection confuses evaluative hedonism (or prudential hedonism) with a sort of reverse psychological hedonism. In other words, we may be naturally psychologically programmed—perversely, as it were—to pursue certain goals that do not maximize our well-being or pleasure.
[Later note (2021): I haven’t the faintest idea what that means! Now, I could do any of three things: One, spend a day looking up those terms and thinking it through to check the soundness of my statement; two, delete the entry; or, three, leave it in and just hope I got it right. I opted for the last choice. But then I got so curious about it that I decided instead to take the first option. I’ll report what I find . . . if I understand it. If I don’t, I’ll revert to option two or three. . . . All right; I’ve looked up those terms, and I’m pleased to be able to report that what I wrote makes good sense. Let me explain it. Prudential hedonism holds that just pleasure and pain constitute well-being for a person—pleasure and pain, and only they, make your life better or worse. Psychological (or motivational) hedonism holds that we act exclusively to seek pleasure and avoid pain. If I go to a concert, it’s because I think it will give me greater pleasure than other activities I might do. If I study Latin, it’s because I think it will somehow—perhaps in the long run, if not immediately—give me the greatest pleasure. Roger Crisp is arguing against prudential hedonism. He says that most people, if given a choice to live either in the real world or in an imaginary but far more pleasurable world, would choose real life (I think that’s true), but he says that this invalidates prudential hedonism. My point is that it doesn’t: a person could be better off with greater pleasure, and yet choose (less pleasurable) real life because, for whatever reason, he happens to feel a drive to achieve desiderata besides pleasure, like fame. I describe this—seeking other desiderata besides pleasure—as “reverse psychological hedonism” (it’s not exactly reverse) because it’s a theory about what we seek, but it supposes that we might seek something other than (or at least in addition to) pleasure. (Sound familiar?) Perhaps more to the point, whether a certain desideratum is inherently good for us is objective: it either is or it isn’t; there’s a fact (or a truth) of the matter, which is the same for everyone—and regardless of our opinion or preference. Thus, a poll of people’s preferences is irrelevant to that (to prudential hedonism). It’s relevant, rather, to psychological hedonism. . . . And, to boot, it didn’t take me all day!]
● “Joseph Raz’s ‘humanistic principle’: ‘The explanation and justification of the goodness or badness of anything derives ultimately from its contribution, actual or possible, to human life and its quality’” . . . So, the pleasure and pain of nonhuman sentient beings matters not at all?! If I torture dolphins because I find it mildly entertaining, that’s good (because it entertains me)?!
● How many angels can dance on the head of a pin depends on, among other things, the following:
○ How many angels exist.
○ Whether angels can dance.
○ Whether at least one angel can dance on the head of a pin.
○ How big is the head of the pin.
○ How big are angels.
○ The limit of how small an angel can make itself. And
○ Whether many angels can occupy the same space.
● Not everything a famous writer says makes sense.
[Later note (6-6-2024): It’s possible that a famous writer’s every utterance make sense. It’s more accurate to say: A writer’s being famous does not guarantee that everything he says makes sense.]
● Philosophy Club meeting this evening. An almost ecstatic experience for me.
● 1-18-2005: My per-capita well-being doctrine, which I advocate in “Morality,” could be described as a fusion of egoism and utilitarianism.
● 1-24-2005: I just heard a news report to the effect that, despite the violence in American-occupied Iraq, the U.S.-sponsored elections will proceed, and “most Iraqis will be able to vote safely.” In other words, fewer than half of voters will be killed or wounded. Sounds safe to me.
● The thesis, or a major thesis, of Bush’s Second Inaugural speech was that our freedom depends on the freedom of others. That is, our freedom to gobble the world’s resources depends on our instituting free enterprise (capitalism) around the world. (More generally, when an American politician speaks of freedom, he usually means free enterprise—capitalism.) Even a more benign reading of the speech, however, reveals its message’s essential selfishness: We want others to be free, not for their freedom, but for ours.
● What’s the significance of understanding “how the brain works”? If we knew the brain’s mechanism in writing music, would it enable us to create music equal to Mozart’s? Would it make Mozart’s music any less mysterious or wondrous?
● 1-28-2005: My debate with myself over whether to reply to Ron’s 1-14-2005 Philosophy Club entry (about the Iraq war) has been determined by my subconscious mind, which, despite my conscious decision not to spend time on it, has come up with a good response.
● I disagree with the proposition that there’s no truth. In any event, what’s in dispute is not the possibility of truth, but the possibility of our knowing it.
● 1-30-2005: Should “creationism” be taught in schools on an equal basis with evolution (Darwinism)? No, because, whereas evolution is science, creationism is religion; and in public schools we don’t teach religious dogma as fact.
● 1-31-2005: Had a hearing test today (last one was two years ago); the ear doctor says there has been no change in my hearing, which is a great relief; I was concerned that there had been some deterioration.
● 2-5-2005: It’s better for mankind that both Mozart and Hitler lived than that neither had lived.
● 2-6-2005: Gazingaringadingadangdongit!
● Gazinkarinkapinkatinkashinkatoooo!
● Infinite existence is hard to imagine, but finite existence is even harder to imagine.
● Man’s belief in God stems fundamentally from a desire to see the universe as a place friendly, instead of indifferent, to humankind, and themselves as ultimate, rather than contingent, surpassable beings.
● When it comes to literature, best-selling does not necessarily mean best.
● 2-10-2005: The self, the enduring self, at the most fundamental level, is simply consciousness, the percipient. It’s not identical with thinking, as Descartes would have it. Sometimes I think; at other times I don’t think but instead only feel. And yet I exist at both times, and it’s the same “I.” Likewise, animals don’t think, as such. Yet I have no doubt that an animal has a self, and a self with continuity, because it’s conscious; only the content of its awareness is different than a human’s. Instead of “I think, therefore I am”; the statement should be “I experience, therefore I am.”
[Later note (2021): On the other hand, when you contemplate either version of that statement, you’re thinking.]
● 2-13-2005: In my view, performance-enhancing drugs are unethical in sports competition, but not in intellectual and artistic performance, for this reason. Athletic performance is an essentially relative matter, a comparison among people, a given performance having no intrinsic value, as it were. To allow an athlete an artificial advantage not enjoyed by his competitors effects no intrinsic worth, but serves only to defeat the activity’s purpose, which is competition on an equal basis. It’s no more socially useful than permitting some runners in a sprint to jump the gun. Also, the performance-enhancing drugs are unhealthy. To allow their use would in effect require all the competitors to use them, a situation with no plus (we’d have essentially the same competitive situation as we had originally, with no one taking the drugs), but a minus: harm to the athletes’ health. By contrast, fine artistic performance has intrinsic value (so to speak), and the enhancement of such performance is an intrinsic good. If, for example, a certain otherwise mediocre writer were able to write great novels while under the influence of massive doses of vitamin C (or, for that matter, LSD); would we condemn his using the substance, or think less of his work, on the grounds that he somehow “cheated”? A drug-enhanced record-breaking race time is discarded; a fine work of art, even if drug-induced, is kept.
● 2-15-2005: Am I a great philosopher, or merely a sophomaniac?
● 2-20-2005: Philosophy Club meeting.
● 2-21-2005: I’ll try to focus on and to feel, so to speak, what I do feel, rather than what I think I should feel or what I wish to feel.
● 2-24-2005: It strikes me that a difference between me and many contemporary so-called philosophers is that they write about philosophy; I write philosophy . . . they are authorities on philosophy; I am a philosopher.
● 2-26-2005: Taking Methylprednisolone Tablet 4 mg for increased tinnitus, prescribed by Dr. Di Tirro, M.D.
● 3-4-2005: Does “I love philosophy” make sense?, or does it amount to saying, “I love the love of wisdom”?
● One difference between “Einstein” and “Eisner” is that Einstein has no R and Eisner has no T.
● 3-9-2005: The alleged “failures” of socialism are often cited as support for capitalism. But I think the failures of capitalism are even greater.
● My boss (or my supervisor) is fond of saying, “It is what it is.” He says this to attempt to dampen my enthusiasm for doing creative work on the legal cases. I usually express agreement with his statement. But the next time he utters it, I’ll say: “Yes and no. Yes, because you’re limited by the case’s facts. You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But No, in that what counts ultimately is not what the thing is, but what the lawyer can make it appear to be. Were this not true, the identity of the lawyer would make no difference, nor even whether you have a lawyer at all.”
● Someone posted this message on the Philosophy Club website:
“March 10, 2005 – 07:00 PM
Philosophy & Pot (PP)
Anyone else LOVE this combination??……
I get amazing insights this way. Next meeting we should all get together at my house!! :)~ ”
Richard Eisner’s response: Drug intoxication tends to make commonplace thoughts appear profound, thus blunting self-criticism, and sacrificing accomplishment for euphoria. But perhaps you’re an exception.
● 3-20-2005: As a teenager, I prided myself on my mental illness, and liked to think that I was psychotic (though, in retrospect, I was not psychotic, but merely neurotic, albeit very neurotic). Now, quite the reverse, I pride myself on my ultra sanity, my philosophical wisdom.
I think I somehow associated mental illness with genius (a la Van Gogh, then the chief object of my admiration); and I still occasionally find myself prideful of my neuroses, probably for this reason. But now I realize that it’s the genius alone that’s valuable. Mental illness, which occurs in the untalented as well, is itself worthless, and nothing to be proud of. Its frequent appearance in men of extraordinary abilities means only that one should not necessarily be ashamed of it.
[Later note (2021): Perhaps it seems frequent in men of extraordinary ability just because, since they’re famous, we’re more aware of its occurrence in them. The distribution of mental or emotional problems is probably about the same among them as it is in the rest of the population.]
● I conceive of a legal brief’s persuasive task as twofold: first, to motivate the judge to rule in your favor; and, second, to enable him to do so.
● Philosophers’ attempts to define free will seem to assume its existence. If we deny free will, we need not define it so precisely; we need only identify and disprove one necessary element (and it would be pointless to labor toward a thoroughgoing definition of an impossible or nonexistent entity).
● Philosophy Club meeting tonight; subject: “free will.”
● Does it make sense to ask of that which is impossible “if it existed, what would it look like?” Does it make sense to ask, “If a round square existed, what would it look like?”?
● 3-22-2005: My best writing is a product of a fierce war between my creative and my critical faculties. The creative comes up with an idea and develops it. The critical then finds the flaws in it, whereupon the creative searches for a solution to the problem thus discovered, and so forth until either the creative side can find no solution to the last-found problem, in which case the project is left unfinished; or, following a repair by the creative, the critical side can find no further significant difficulties, in which case I consider the work essentially finished. (Of course, the creative-critical dichotomy is a gross oversimplification. The two are closely interwoven; and criticism can be highly creative. To find a defect in what has long passed as received wisdom, is creative.)
● 3-25-2005: Roosevelt said you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. But Bush proved that you can fool most of the people most of the time.
[Later note (2-11-2022): And if you can fool most of the people most of the time, is it saying much that you can’t fool all of them all of the time?]
● 3-26-2005: God, even if He existed, would no more have free will than do human beings, as He, too, would be subject to causal determination.
● 3-29-2005: Self-honesty, in the form of admitting to yourself your own lack of understanding, is important to truth-seeking, for this reason: Being unable to comprehend a sound concept due to your own deficiency, feels the same, initially, as being unable to understand an unsound concept due to its falsehood or unintelligibility; and, if you deny that you don’t understand, you’ll never get to the point at which you discover that the concept is erroneous, and therefore never reach the position where you can demonstrate its falsehood, or find a creative solution to the problem involved in the fallacious idea.
● But for Albert and William, “Einstein” and “Shakespeare” would be just funny-sounding names.
● There is some correlation between ability and income. For me, unfortunately, the correlation seems to be an inverse one.
[Later note (2021): Well, yes and no. If my ability were greater in the area in which I earn a living (law), I would make more money.]
● 3-30-2005: This was the day of butterflies.
● 4-1-2005: Philosopher Alan Watts has said that it’s not necessary that, in order to be aware of something, there be a knower and that which is known; but, rather, the situation is better described simply as a unitary knowing. But I think awareness is necessarily dichotomous into the knower and the known. There is always a recipient of the consciousness and the content of consciousness. Otherwise, the very notion of personal identity would be nonsensical. It would not matter whether you’re alive or dead, as long as someone is living well. It’s like a movie playing on a television screen. The identity of the person watching is the percipient (the knower); and the particular movie being shown is the content of the awareness (the known). If the person watching dies (even if the movie keeps playing), the viewing—the “knowing”—ends.
● 4-5-2005: Genuine critical thinking necessarily involves criticism of one’s own thinking.
● 4-8-2005: Can a composer write a piece of music in less time than it would take to play it? (That is, all else being equal, would it take longer to write a largo that an allegro?)
[Later note (2021): Yes, a composer can write a piece of music in less time that it would take to play it; for example, he could write a piece consisting of a single note sustained for one minute. The notation would be a single note and perhaps a straight line indicating the sostenuto, which might take far less time than a minute to think up and write.]
● In posing for a photographic portrait, should the subject look at the outside surface of the camera lens, or somewhere behind it?
● If we go to Heaven or Hell when we die, how old will we be while we dwell there?
● 4-10-2005: I’ve often written of the dichotomy of short-term and long-term satisfaction. A more fundamental concept, however, of which this opposition is to a large extent merely a coincident byproduct, is the division between (pleasurable) experience and accomplishment. Accomplishment requires present work, and work is typically opposed to pleasurable activity, or play. But the later fruit of that earlier preparatory work is accomplishment, and the accomplishment is a source of satisfaction, which (during this later stage) is greater than the satisfaction you would then be receiving had you all along spent your time playing instead of working. Thus, in terms of pleasurable experience, you’ve sacrificed early pleasure for later pleasure. Perhaps this touches on the truth that happiness is best achieved, if not only achieved, indirectly, by pursuing other desiderata, rather than by seeking it directly. But to think of it in this way misses the point: the goal of accomplishment is the accomplishment itself; the satisfaction it engenders is merely a byproduct (though a welcome one).
. . . In my view, the quest for so-called enlightenment in eastern religions is a quest for a certain experience, rather than for accomplishment; it’s a quest for a particular feeling state, for a lack of suffering. This is distinguished from writing about such “enlightenment”; which writing constitutes an accomplishment. . . . A considerable source of disingenuousness in writing is the writer’s claim to be writing for a purpose entirely other than to produce a good piece of writing.
● The traditional distinction between talking and doing breaks down in the case of a writer, whose writing may constitute both talking and doing. (You can merely talk of writing a masterpiece, or you can actually do it. Writing a masterpiece is an actual accomplishment, not just talking about a potential accomplishment, even though writing is a kind of talking.)
● 4-16-2005: I heard a Judaism scholar state that, according to Judaism, God does not affect human life, but merely knows men’s feelings and concerns. In other words, God is like a man standing next to another person starving to death. The starving person begs the onlooker for help, but the onlooker, though he has access to an unlimited supply of food, simply watches the other die in agony, and says to him, “I won’t give you any food, but, for what it’s worth, I hear your complaint, and, by the way, I love you.”
● Compatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are compatible, is a perfectly good theory, aside from the difficulty that it doesn’t work.
● 4-17-2005: One idea that appeals to me of a man’s ethical duty is that he should make the greatest contribution to humanity of which he’s capable. My own greatest potential contribution, I think, is my writing. Of course, the average person’s greatest contribution is simply to enjoy his own life and to be a good person (to be kind to his fellows).
● 4-18-2005: My position regarding change is this: I’m for good change, and against bad change.
● 4-21-2005: I’ve argued that it’s fallacious to rationally criticize religion, for religion is not irrational, but instead nonrational. Lest one think this consideration lets religion off the hook, however, it merely suggests the question: Which is better: irrationality or mindlessness?
● If a man displayed such conduct toward his fellow humans as is often attributed to God, we would condemn him as a criminal or a villain.
● 4-24-2005: About religion . . . It’s nobler to simply admit that we don’t know than to cover our ignorance with a superficially satisfying but ultimately absurd solution.
● Philosophy Club meeting this afternoon. Topic: “death.”
● The question has been debated, Is death a harm to an individual? The first observation is that death is to life as false is to true. If life is a benefit, then death is a detriment. More precisely, though, death is to life as nil is to a positive or negative finite number. As zero is greater than a negative but less than a positive; so, death is better than bad life, but worse than good life. (But in death, you don’t feel relieved or disappointed.)
● It’s perhaps true that fear of death (as opposed to, say, regret about it) is irrational, in that death is not painful or even uncomfortable. But feelings are not rational; they’re a-rational. And the fear of death is no more irrational than the wish to continue living, even when life is unpleasant. Which is a product of our psychology, our survival instinct.
● There are as many reasons to regret death as there are to wish to live.
● I’ve said that I disbelieve in intrinsic value (including disvalue). So, the benefit of life and the detriment of death are . . ..
● If we go to an afterlife when we die, what was our condition before we were born, in relation to the afterlife? (Was the pre-life experience similar to the afterlife? If the pre-life was nonexistence or oblivion, why should we not return to such a state when we die?)
● “Near-death” and “out-of-body” experiences are not evidence of life after death, for one very simple, logical reason: these are experiences of living persons, not of dead ones. (Remember, it’s not a death experience, but merely a near-death experience.)
● Belief in the afterlife is belied by our fear of and regret about death, and by our assumption that this life is not the afterlife . . . (or perhaps this is the afterlife and those who are miserable are in Hell and those who are enjoying themselves are in Heaven).
● That a belief makes you feel good is not evidence that it’s true. I’m not saying that religion is bad, or that it’s wrong or bad to have faith. That a belief makes you feel good may be a perfectly good reason to hold it (assuming you have a choice about it)—just don’t confuse it with truth.
● To ask the question whether, if given the choice, we would elect immortality suggests that we believe we’re mortal.
● Why do those who believe in reincarnation think that that later life will be a positive experience? It seems to me more likely that we’d come back as a lower organism, such as an insect, or, if we return as human, that we’d return as one of the vast majority who live in squalor and misery. (The answer is probably that to think the afterlife is good is comforting.) The human mind has a great capacity for self-delusion. Sometimes we believe, not what reason or evidence would suggest, but what we want—what we’d like—to believe.
This perhaps at least partly explains why we might seek psychotherapy—but reluctantly: We know that we cannot ourselves detect all of our mental blind spots (those affecting our practical thinking, our thinking connected with how we act); we need someone else to spot them and bring them to our attention. We may hold the false beliefs because they’re somehow comforting. Hence we fear the short-term pain from being disabused of comforting delusions, yet we realize that it will enable us to act more effectively for ourselves, and so we’ll be better off for it in the long run.
● One member (of the Philosophy Club) said that, since he started believing in an afterlife, he’s been less selfish, kinder to other people, because he knows that he can afford to be selfless, since he’ll have so much good after this life. I said that the same consideration would indicate the opposite conduct (selfishness) by giving others a better life hereafter. He replied that what justified the good treatment of others was that “this moment is important.” But the same reasoning would apply, perhaps even more strongly, were there no afterlife.
● The argument that it’s senseless to fear death because it’s merely (painless) nonexistence conceives of life as a matter of pleasurable, or happy, experience. But many persons value their lives, rather, for accomplishment. To such a person, the prospect that his death might prevent his completing his magnum opus could be truly distressing. Not everyone fears or regrets death: many commit suicide.
● What is death? You die. So, what is, or are, you? It’s more than mere consciousness; if you were to “die” in your present form and be reincarnated as an ape or an insect, this would not be much solace to you.
● If we were immortal, the species would not evolve, for evolution involves continual replacement of individuals with new ones. And if any one person were immortal, he would remain the same while the species evolved around him. Life would become miserable for him as he came to be viewed by his fellows as mentally inferior (assuming we would continue to evolve to higher and higher forms).
● 4-26-2005: It’s perhaps true that desire is the source of all suffering. Unfortunately, it’s also the source of all joy. The dead do not desire, or suffer. But neither do they feel joy.
● I’ll accept as much credit as the world gives me, consistent with my own self-evaluation (though I suspect the former to be the more likely limiting factor).
● 4-27-2005: A good philosopher must, among other things, learn to refrain from speaking on matters that he doesn’t understand, or on which he has nothing worthwhile to say.
● 4-30-2005: The Jews maintain a belief about themselves collectively (“the chosen people”) which if held by an individual about himself we would consider insane.
● The statement that God exists and He loves us, is tantamount to the assertion that the universe is good, or human-friendly . . . an amorphous, meaningless declaration designed to comfort the believer. But religion is fantasy. And one does not argue with fantasy.
● 5-5-2005: When “the lion and the lamb lie down together” . . . what will the lion eat?
● 5-13-2005: How small-minded is man, (implicitly) defining universal evil as that which harms human beings.
● 5-14-2005: The contention that it’s unethical to hold unfounded beliefs is flawed, in two ways. First, it assumes (wrongly, I think) that belief is a choice. Second, even if belief were a choice, that a belief brings comfort probably constitutes good cause to entertain it, at least if it harms no one else (in fact, it strikes me that attempting to disabuse a person of a harmless, comforting belief is mean).
[Later note (6-6-2024): So perhaps this Journal, if it’s ever published, should have a warning on the cover that it might cause religious persons distress!]
[Later note (7-24-2024): I may be flattering myself, to imagine that my writing would change religious people’s minds.]
● 5-15-2005: The objection to Pascal’s Wagering for God, his so-called pragmatic argument for belief in God—the objection involving the multiplicity of competing deities, is perhaps not a substantial objection, because, according to many religious theories, there’s just one god, the different religions merely referring to the same entity by different names . . ..
● 5-17-2005: I recently came across an article about pragmatic moral arguments in support of theistic belief (arguments that urge holding a certain belief because it would be useful). Something about them strikes me as exceedingly curious; they seem to be of the following form:
If I believed that the building is burning, I should leave the building or prepare to die. But I should not have to leave the building or prepare to die. Therefore, I should not believe that the building is burning. Or, If I believed that my brother is a serial killer, I should not love and help him. But I should love and help my brother. Therefore, I should not believe that my brother is a serial killer. Or, If I believed that my brother has died, I should not send him money. But I should send him money (it’s the least I can do for him now that he’s too sick to work). Therefore, I should not believe that my brother has died.
Moreover, pragmatic arguments for belief seem somehow counter to the spirit of philosophy, which seeks to know the truth, not to justify delusion. . . . I suspect that many people’s (purported) belief in God is indeed pragmatic: that is, they hold it (or try to convince themselves that they hold it), not because it seems true, but because it’s advantageous, probably the most common advantage being comfort.
● 21 May 2005: I have no credentials but my work.
● 5-27-2005: A mystic is one who is enthralled with the mystery and wonder of existence.
● Wittgenstein says: “Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.” I disagree (with the first part). Philosophy, after all, is love of wisdom. And I am passionate about argument . . . in arguing.
● Tonight was my first attendance of the Philosophers’ Forum, a public philosophical discussion group held at a Los Angeles bookstore (Barnes and Noble) and conducted by a moderator. Tonight’s topic was “death.”
● We can get some understanding of death’s significance to our lives by considering how the absence of death would affect our notion of living well. It seems that, if we did not die, the idea of a good life would somehow not be pertinent . . . perhaps because we would have no need—no pressing need, anyway—to make such a determination, as we could experiment endlessly; and the concept of a good life suggests viewing a life as a whole, which necessitates its finitude. (Would it make sense to ask what is living well, or what is a good life, with reference to the afterlife [if we supposed it to exist]?) On the other hand, perhaps the very inquiry about the meaning of death is idle, pointless, in that part of the universal, essential, inescapable nature of life is its finitude (nay, shortness); in other words, that death is a necessary fact of life. . . . But that makes no sense, for it seems to us not pointless to ask about the meaning of life, and if we can ask—not pointlessly—about the meaning of life, we should be able to ask the same question about that which is part of life. Or perhaps I’m not understanding what I meant in my original comment. Which suggests the advantage of making your points more explicitly: if your statement is vague or ambiguous, you may be misinterpreted—and in a way that’s easier to rebut.
● Plato’s comment that philosophy (life?) is preparation for death (the afterlife) was ironically true for him: His philosophy (written in life) made him immortal.
● 5-28-2005: I have the impression that, in much of the philosophy of the ethics of belief, and particularly in pragmatic belief, action (which is a matter of choice) in accordance with various possibilities, is confused with belief itself (which is not a matter of choice). For instance, imagine you’re at the racetrack, where, among the horses racing, horse A pays one-dollar-and-five-cents to a dollar to win; horse B, a hundred dollars to one. Further, you believe that horse A’s chances of winning are seventy percent; horse B’s, ten percent. This perceived situation entails (at least as between those two horses) that you act as if, or on the possibility that, horse B will win, and A lose (by putting your money on B and not on A). But it doesn’t entail that you’ve changed your belief as to the horses’ chances of winning (which you continue to believe are seventy percent for A and ten percent for B).
● A brief comment on the above background article on William James and W. K. Clifford [the article is not included here]. The statement “If Clifford’s rule of morality is correct, then anyone who believes a proposition that she does not take to be more likely than not, is thereby immoral” is problematic, since, by definition, belief involves more-likely-than-not. “I believe that someone is at the door” means “I believe it’s probable (more probable than not) that someone is at the door.” If you think it’s forty-nine percent likely that someone is at the door, the appropriate expression would be “I believe someone may be (not is) at the door” or even “I think it’s forty- nine percent likely that someone is at the door.” Thus, to “believe a proposition you do not take to be more likely than not” is to “believe a proposition you do not believe,” a contradiction in terms.
● 5-30-2005: Much of Plato’s work is brilliantly expressed nonsense.
● 5-31-2005: There is, I think, a striking similarity between the theme of the first movement of Mozart’s twenty-fourth piano concerto and the theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s third piano concerto. (The cause of the similarity is not hard to guess: Beethoven imitated Mozart. It couldn’t have been the other way around [Mozart imitating Beethoven], since Mozart died nine years before Beethoven wrote his third piano concerto.)
● 6-3-2005: My testimonial is my work.
● 6-6-2005: We working people hate Monday morning for the same reason we love Friday night. On Friday evening, the contrast, coming from a situation we dislike (work), and entering one we like (off work), makes the latter all the sweeter. By the same principle, having just come from a state of relative freedom makes us feel the renewed tedium (Monday) all the more keenly; the misery lessens as the memory of the pleasure fades, and we become acclimated to the drudgery. In psychology, as in physics, nothing is free: we pay for Friday bliss with Monday blues.
● 6-10-2005: Educating yourself is like climbing a stairway that goes into the clouds: you can’t tell where or how far the process might take you—but the movement is always upward.
[Later note (1-2-2022): A possible problem with that statement is that, supposedly, education gives you a clearer view of things, but you perhaps don’t have a very clear view if you’re in a cloud. Rewriting it to avoid that problem: Educating yourself is like climbing a potentially unending stairway: you can’t tell where or how far the process might take you—but the movement is always upward.]
● 6-14-2005: I think that for many people a major appeal of religious belief is that it renders life sensible; it banishes regret over your mistakes, missed opportunities, and misfortunes, by positing that all your actions and experiences are somehow right, and for the best, part of God’s great plan.
● 6-19-2005: In support of his conclusion for liberty, John Stuart Mill writes that each man knows best what’s good for him. Best is an important word there, because you don’t know what’s good for you; but you may know better than others do, what’s good for you (one reason being simply that you know what you want). I would supplement that rationale with two more: One, whether or not a man knows best what’s good for him, he has, or should have, within limits, a right to make his own decisions, even a right to make his own mistakes. Two, people would resent being coerced.
● Philosophy Club meeting. Discussion topic: “Toleration.”
● 6-24-2005: That universal agreement is unlikely on a particular issue, means neither that there’s no fact or truth of the matter, nor that we shouldn’t discuss it and argue about it.
● 7-4-2005: Today I finally finished listening to the program of audio-taped lectures on Abraham Lincoln. I listened sporadically, and replayed many of the tapes numerous times. My next audio-tape program is one on Mozart’s chamber music; I’ll interrupt it to listen to a set of recorded lectures on Plato’s Republic, before I publish, or post, my short rebuttal to Plato’s philosopher-king thesis—I want to be sure I understand his argument.
● 7-5-2005: It’s often observed that “Freedom is not free.” This is very true. But the maxim has a meaning far deeper than the superficial patriotic, militaristic gloss it frequently gets. The price of freedom is time-consuming study and thought, and the courage sometimes to take a stand against the government and popular opinion, because the enemies who will harm us are less likely to be open, proclaiming hatred of America, than insidious, wrapped in the American flag, preaching democracy and freedom, and claiming to have our best interests at heart.
● I wonder whether praise of our soldiers’ service to their country and their bravery and sacrifice is not in effect merely an acknowledgment that they’re underpaid. (We try to compensate for the deficient pay with lavish praise.)
● 7-6-2005: I consider myself a world-beater; but I’ll keep that opinion to myself (at least for now). It has been said that all philosophy since Socrates is a footnote to Plato. I would say that all philosophy till now is a preface to Eisner (me).
● 7-10-2005: I’ve just begun the audio-taped lecture series by Professor David Roochnik on Plato’s Republic. It is said, by way of disparaging the art of rhetoric, that rhetoric goes hand in hand with relativism. I disagree. Rhetoric is merely argument. And argument is content-neutral; it subserves sound as well as fallacious doctrines (not that relativism is fallacious). If rhetoric is used to establish a fallacy, it’s also rhetoric that will be used to expose the error and show the truth. Rhetoric, or reasoning, is the intellectual means by which we explore and found the validity or invalidity of any philosophical doctrine, including relativism—and absolutism.
● Justice is the fair division of rights and responsibilities, benefits and detriments, among men.
● 7-13-2005: Plato’s definition of a philosopher is too narrow, in that it counts as philosophers only those thinkers who agree with Plato on certain philosophical issues. In other words, Plato’s definition is content-specific, but it shouldn’t be.
● According to Plato, ideal forms are the true good, and actual good things are mere shadows of the true good (the forms). Plato encourages us to resist intellectual gravity, the urge to use our knowledge of the intelligible for practical purposes, and to instead maintain our focus on the abstract world. Plato errs, as follows. To the extent that anything is truly good (or intrinsically valuable), it is not abstract things, but actual things, and, in particular, us—our lives, our experience, our consciousness. A further difficulty with Plato’s theory of forms is that, according to it, there should be a form for consciousness, which is impossible, because abstract forms are not conscious: only actual living organisms are conscious. We may legitimately focus on the abstract, but when we do, it’s to affect the actual world, a certain aspect of it: our enjoyment or sense of appreciation. Plato seems implicitly to recognize this truth, or he would not be concerned with human affairs, with governance, or with the good life. And, by the way, because the object of governance is to affect men’s lives, the ideal ruler should know about people and their needs, and not necessarily about the abstract.
● According to Plato, would good have a magnitude? Is there a form for bad, or evil; and what is its relationship to the form for good? What is evil, and how is it related to good? Is the true evil, like the true good, the ideal form, and actual evil things mere shadows of the true evil?
● 7-14-2005: Professor Roochnik speculates about why, in The Republic, Socrates (Plato) is so vague in defining the good. My own hunch is that Plato does not give more detail on the subject simply because he doesn’t know more about it. When you speak beyond your knowledge, your lack of understanding becomes apparent. To paraphrase Lincoln (Twain?), better to remain silent and let your friends think you’re ignorant than to speak and remove all doubt.
● 7-15-2005: In Plato’s Republic, Socrates talks of the perfectly just city. If, as Socrates also asserts, goodness is the highest virtue, why is the concern the just city, rather than the good city? . . . Justice and goodness must be different things, for goodness is a matter of degree, but there can be perfect justice, a perfect division of available social benefits among existing citizens (an exactly equal division of goods among exactly equal and equally deserving persons might be a hypothetical example of perfectly realized justice). Perhaps it’s because he thinks he knows more about justice, or has more to say about it, than he does about goodness. And, of course, justice is a part of goodness: all else being equal, a just city is better (more good) than an unjust city.
● 7-18-2005: I’m an absolute relativist (?)
● Today I finished the audiotape lecture series on Plato’s Republic. I found the lectures very easy to understand.
● 7-30-2005: Some persons, when led to water, refuse to drink, demanding wine instead . . . they’ll probably die of thirst.
● 7-31-2005: Do all great composers have perfect pitch?
● 8-4-2005: I’ve found that a simple but powerful strategy for gaining the advantage in argument is . . . to be right.
● 8-5-2005: My abilities are not modest; and I’m not modest about them. (My lack of modesty is an inward affair—I don’t show it to the world. If and when the world reads this Diary, though, I suppose my secret about that will be out.)
● 8-7-2005: Today I posted on the Los Angeles Philosophy Club website my argument on democracy (under the topic title “Monarchy”). [I later changed the title (of my piece) to “Democracy.”]
● 8-8-2005: Today, exactly four weeks, to the day, after I began, I finally finished(?) the response to Eplsilon’s (Web-posted) comment on my rebuttal to Pascal’s “Wager.” Eplison’s item is itself quite trivial and poorly done, and probably not worth responding to; yet I’m glad I did it, because I’m very pleased with this little piece of writing (which I’ll soon post on the website). (The great bulk of the time and energy was expended on the last—the third—paragraph.)
● Writing is good; thinking and then writing is even better.
[Later note (2-16-2024): That statement is a little problematic. Writing can be part of the process of thinking. A clearer version of the statement would be, “Speaking is good; thinking and then speaking is even better.” And yet, the original statement is true in some circumstances: not all writing is thoughtful.]
● 8-9-2005: The statement that all men are created, or born, equal is shorthand for the statement that it’s improper to judge us by certain characteristics, like skin color.
● Regarding the 8-8-2005 entry, above, on my response to Epsilon . . . today I made yet another change to the third paragraph.
● 8-10-2005: Today I made further changes to the third paragraph of the Epsilon essay.
● 8-12-2005: Blood is thicker than water . . . so is mud. (I’m not questioning the sentiment about the strength of family ties, but the sensibleness of this expression of it.)
● What goes around, comes around . . . however imperfectly.
● In life, as in the law, not everything has a remedy; sometimes you must just let it go.
● 8-13-2005: Proponents of “intelligent design” theory (the religious alternative to the theory of evolution) cite the complexity of life as evidence for their position. But the sort of complexity they cite seems to me suggestive far more of accident than of design. I think that truly intelligent design would be far simpler and more elegant, without all the nasty germs, and guts, and urine and feces . . . unless, of course, the intelligent designer is a sloppy, inept craftsman.
● 8-15-2005: I had a dream last night in which I was murdered at the age of 34. Lingering in the form of a ghost, aware of the world around me but unable to affect it, I felt great agony knowing that I could not continue my creative projects; I kept saying to myself that I hadn’t lived even as long as Mozart. Later in the dream, I learned that I was alive, and I was overjoyed at the prospect of being able to resume creative work.
● 8-16-2005: To what extent is philosophy itself subjective? But is it not wrong to think of philosophy itself as a monolith? We should perhaps take each doctrine or argument on its own terms. Some, objectively, make better sense than others. Not all ideas and arguments are equally good. Or perhaps philosophy is in essence a procedure, the argumentative method, as it were; so that to say that philosophy is subjective is like saying that the scientific method is subjective.
● Someone has described philosophy as an activity of the heart. I think philosophy is more accurately described as a passionately pursued activity of the mind.
● Saturday, 8-20-2005: I finally bought a new television set for the kitchen (I watch TV while I eat). I say “finally” because, for well over a year now, my old one has been malfunctioning, whereby the colors are just green and blue, to remedy which I have to turn on a heater under it, and even then, its good functioning is fitful.
● 8-21-2005: Some questions to the man who endeavors to help others because he thinks it’s God’s will:
(1) For whose benefit do you so act? If for God’s benefit, how does it benefit God?
(2) If we assumed, for the sake of discussion, that God did not exist; would you still do what you now do? If you would not still do what you now do, what would you do instead, and for what reason? If you would still do as you now do; for what reason, and for whose benefit, would you do it?
(3) If we assumed, for the sake of discussion, that God wished you to harm humanity; would you attempt to do so? (If so, why?) Or would you ignore that wish of God’s and continue to try to help other men? (If the latter, would your answer here alter your answer to the first question, above?)
● 8-22-2005: The recruiting appeal to potential Muslim anti-American terrorists to the effect that the United States is against Islam, would be less persuasive if the U.S. were not attacking and dominating Islamic countries.
● 8-25-2005: Even if we disfavor abortion, preventing a woman from getting an abortion is tantamount to forcing her to have a baby; and forcing a woman to have a baby is no less bad than forcing her to have an abortion, which is worse than merely allowing her to have an abortion.
● 8-28-2005: Had Mozart not done something of note, we would care naught about his life or his personality; no one would have written his biography.
● Our natural reluctance to kill men, qualitatively greater than our inhibition to kill other animals, is a product less of our regard for the innate value of human life than of our intuitive awareness that killing other men sets a precedent that poses a unique danger to ourselves, from other men.
● 9-5-2005: The philosopher is committed to the truth; the religionist is committed to his beliefs.
● Tuesday, 9-6-2005: My father just had a minor stroke; he’s in the hospital. I’m very frightened.
● I have a mild case of trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder).
● Wednesday, 9-14-2005: I drove my father “home” (to his girlfriend, Florence McKenna’s condominium) from the rehabilitation center. He seems to be making a good recovery.
● Friday, 9-16-2005: It has been a turbulent fortnight. My father had a minor stroke; I visited him in the hospital and then in the rehabilitation center, and then brought him home. I met the real estate department commissioner about my license application, and filled out and sent him another form. I’ve finished another (my fourteenth) piece, a response to Ron’s rejoinder to an earlier essay of mine (on Theology and Falsification), which I’ll soon post on the philosophy club website. I struggled with two of the paragraphs, especially the last one. I’m exhausted. But I feel it was worth the effort.
● Sunday, 9-18-2005: . . . Well, throughout the day yesterday, I continued to revise my aforesaid response, so it took fifteen days, not fourteen.
● To state the time it took a man to produce a piece of art, by reference to the time he actually began his efforts on the particular work, rather than from his birth, is like marking the time it takes to produce a piece of fruit from the appearance of the fruit bud, instead of from the planting of the tree.
● L.A. Philosophy Club meeting; topic: “Utopia.”
● Utopia is a social, not an individual, concept; but what is the minimum size group to which it might pertain?
● To envision Utopia, consider what general living conditions you’d want for yourself; then imagine a world in which they’d be available to the multitude to the greatest possible extent. Of course, there must be some limitations, because, for example, you may want to be the world’s richest man, or the world’s greatest poet, which not everyone can be.
● 9-19-2005: He who never admits making a mistake is either perfect, dishonest, or stupid.
● 9-21-2005: Mood is like weather. It’s ever-changing, though each person has his own climate. Our ability to affect it is limited; you can’t always wait for sunshine; sometimes you must just get about your life regardless of it.
● 9-23-2005: On the relationship between religion and spirituality: Religion requires words; spirituality doesn’t. Religion involves the idea of God or Gods, but spirituality doesn’t. Animals surely don’t have religion. But can they have spirituality?
● 9-28-2005: One reason I’m opposed to capital punishment is that life in prison is a greater punishment than death: it’s better to be dead than to be alive wishing you were dead.
● 10-5-2005: Helping “one person at a time” is fine if just a few persons need help; otherwise, it’s not very helpful . . . because very few people are helped.
● 10-6-2005: Concerning Schwarzeneggar as governor (of California), it’s like having the state run by a cartoon character. It would be funny if it weren’t so disastrous.
● 10-7-2005: Bush says he receives guidance from the Lord. Did Christ instruct Bush to bomb Iraq?
● 10-8-2005: “Cleanliness is next to Godliness.” . . . Is that the best reason for cleanliness? What is Godliness next to?
● I’ve indulged my desire to complete the second revision of my essay “Thoughts on the Big Bang Theory.” The typed manuscript gives June 2005 as the completion date, but that’s when I began this revision. Around that time, after making some changes, I put it aside, and resumed it just last week. This edition is now finished and represents a considerable improvement over the first revision. I’m quite proud of it. It’s one of my finest works.
● The Bush administration keeps telling us that the U.S. military can leave Iraq when, but only when, Iraqi troops are sufficiently well trained to defend the country against the “insurgency.” Of course, this argument makes no sense if (as I think is the case) the “insurgency” (or, more accurately, the Resistance) are fighting essentially to eject the United States. (More broadly stated, the Bush Administration says the United States must remain in Iraq to quell the violence; but the violence is just that which is caused by the United States’ presence there—violence by which Iraqis are attempting to eject the United States).
● Machiavelli’s Advice on Invading and Occupying Another Country: Pick an undemocratic country and find a pretext on which to invade it and overthrow its existing government. Install a friendly government (friendly to your own government), and then hold “elections.” Identify the installed government as “the country”; and those who violently resist the installed government and your occupation as “the country’s enemies,” “the terrorists,” the “insurgents,” and “anti-democrats.” Claim that you cannot leave until the violence is ended, or at least until the “country” is strong enough to defend itself against its “enemies” and to “maintain security” (even though the violence is mainly a reaction to your occupation). Further, characterize remaining as “finishing the mission”; withdrawing, as “running”; and your own citizens who oppose the occupation, as “not supporting the troops.” And justify your invasion in the first instance on grounds that the country’s people are now better off, in having “democracy.”
● There seems to be an at least implicit assumption on the part of many scholars that monotheism was an advance over polytheism. But I don’t see why either one is in any respect superior to the other; it would make no less sense, if we imagine the sequence reversed, to speak of polytheism as an advance over monotheism. (Of course, if one were true, it would be the better for that reason. But I think both are false.) Perhaps the real question here is, what is the religion’s purpose, and why does one form of religion satisfy that purpose more effectively than another.
● 10-13-2005: Religio-demagogy.
● 10-15-2005: The fundamental incongruity in the concept of Heaven and Hell lies in the notion of eternal consequences for temporal deeds. Heaven or Hell does not fit—it’s grossly disproportionate to—the good deed or crime that it rewards or punishes.
● Sunday, 10-16-2005: Philosophy Club meeting; topic: “Knowledge/Rationality.” (I didn’t attend . . ..)
● 10-18-2005: It’s all well and good to speak romantically of beating the odds. But, practically, statistically . . . the odds are against it.
● I plan one day to write a Platonic-style dialogue in which Socrates and his various interlocutors debate the question, “What is shit?”
● 10-21-2005: [Later note (2020): I wrote the following comment potentially to reply to a remark posted by a Philosophy Club member in effect complaining that no one had any really new philosophical ideas; I can’t find that original remark:]
If no new philosophical ideas had arisen beyond a certain time, the history of philosophy would have ended; but it goes on. (I suspect, incidentally, that, if only relatively few persons are interested in philosophy, even fewer are sufficiently knowledgeable about it to be able to recognize an original philosophical idea if they saw one.)
● If a person succeeded against million-to-one odds, would we be interested to read his book about it? What if one hundred million men make the attempt, one hundred of them succeed; and everyone who succeeds writes a book about the experience. Would we want to read one of those books?
● Sunday, 10-23-2005: One way to avoid having your argument challenged is to couch it in jargon, so as to render it incomprehensible to those (otherwise) most likely to reply to it.
● Tuesday, 10-25-2005: The tock is clicking. . . . a clicking tock.
● 10-29-2005: At the Philosophers’ Forum yesterday, 28 October 2005, the subject came up of the poor performance of students at inner city elementary schools, compared with such students in more affluent neighborhoods. A number of attendees talked about factors like personal attitude and initiative, but I maintained that the effect of resources is fundamental; otherwise, one would have to conclude that the consistently worse performance of ghetto students vis-a-vis better-off ones is due merely to a difference in their mental bent. Near the end of the meeting, after considerable further discussion on the issue, I suggested this metaphor: You have a bag of seeds, and you broadcast a handful onto fertile ground, another handful onto an adjacent stony plot. On the barren patch arises a smattering of spindly plants; on the fertile soil, a profusion of lush growth. You can focus on individual plants and talk about differences between them; and yet, you can’t ignore the pattern . . ..
● 10-30-2005: Often, in the aftermath of a ravaging war or natural disaster, persons, especially those in the media, ask whether the people of the area in question are better off now following the event. The discussion may concern the economy having gotten back to normal and the houses rebuilt. But I never hear mention of the dead or badly wounded. Those who were killed or badly wounded are not better off!
● How can you tell if a person has bird flu? Answer: If you hear “A-chew; cock-a-doodle-do. A-chew; cock-a-doodle-do” . . ..
● 11-11-2005: “With God’s help, our plan will succeed.” . . . With God’s help, any plan will succeed . . ..
● 11-14-2005: The concept of God, far from explaining anything, is difficult to reconcile with the world as we know it, which is far more harmonious with God’s nonexistence than with His existence. Similarly, the notion of God does not explain things, but, on the contrary, posits a more complex configuration (the natural world together with the supernatural), which would be even harder, or at least no less hard, to explain than the natural world alone.
● 11-17-2005: I heard one physicist describe “string theory” as a candidate for “the theory of everything,” which would allow us to “read the mind of God.” But wouldn’t a theory of everything be a theory of God as well? . . ..
● Friday, 18 November 2005 – 7:20 p.m.
Re: the nature of Evil
Hannah Arendt famously characterizes Adolph Eichmann’s acting as the architect of Hitler’s mass murder of Jews, and, by extension, most villains’ commission of grand atrocities, as “the banality of evil.” By which she means that Eichmann’s actions resulted from, not hatred or malice, but a failure of imagination, which would have allowed him to see the human and moral dimensions of his acts; a failure of internal dialog with himself, which would have made him aware of his deeds’ effects on his victims.
My response is this. I agree with Hannah Arendt that atrocious behavior usually results from something more “banal” than malice. But I disagree with her that such atrocious conduct results from the actor’s failure to imagine the suffering of his victims. That view involves too sanguine a conception of human nature, in supposing that he would care about it. It seems to me that men’s egregious conduct is far less often a product of ignorance than of selfishness, the willingness to advance one’s own interests at the (understood) expense of others.
[Later note (2020): Just as a matter of curiosity, I wonder what would have happened to Eichmann, in the Nazi regime, had he refused, or declined, to do Hitler’s bidding in this regard.]
● 11-20-2005: Philosophy Club meeting; topic: “Evil”
Saint Augustine defines evil as the absence of good (“For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?”) But refutation of this doctrine is very simple: If there were nothing, there would be no good . . . or evil . . .
. . . Alas, this argument is not original with me. I have now seen it on the Internet, wherein a distinction is made between the absence of good as a privation, as in a (sighted) man being deprived of sight, versus the negative sense (as in his being born blind). The argument is that only the former sort of absence of good can be considered evil; for if the latter counted as evil, then that which did not exist could be considered evil. . . . Good point! . . . That seemed just a little too easy . . .
. . . My expression of the argument is perhaps more elegant. But, by itself, it’s too small a matter to make into its own comment on the Philosophy Club website.
● Only that which exists can be good or evil (if there were nothing, then, by definition, there would be no good or evil . . .). . . . And only that which exists contingently (which could exist or not exist) can be good or evil. For when we say that only what exists can be good or evil, we mentally probe this by imagining the proposed good or evil thing not existing. Those (abstract) entities that necessarily exist, which cannot not exist, like mathematical truths (“twice two is four,” for example), are not the kinds of things we consider good or evil.
● 11-24-2005: Philosophers’ Forum; topic: “The relationship between Is and Ought.”
● Ought cannot be derived from Is because the two are entirely different sorts of entities, in distinctly different spheres. It’s as if you tried to derive a preference from the laws of logic: twice two is four does not indicate whether you prefer Beethoven or Brahms.
● Ought is not derivable from is, but it’s conditioned on it. For instance, the not unreasonable utilitarian doctrine (the ought) of advancing happiness is based on the fact (the is) that humans universally feel and appreciate happiness.
● The contention that our having innate moral urges means that there are universal moral principles, involves a confusion. The innate moral urge that we should act in certain ways is a feeling, a Gestalt, which we all have (the sensation of moral obligation—we each have the capacity and the tendency to have that feeling); but this is distinct from the content, or object, of that feeling (and the content is the moral principle). The content of that universal category of feeling can vary; it’s theoretically possible for persons to sincerely disagree about the proper course of action in a given situation. Thus, that content (moral principle) is not a metaphysical absolute, but a merely relative preference or agreement. Practically, however, there is some basis for universal principles in our common human nature, which includes broadly common desires and needs. But these common wishes are a double-edged sword. While they provide the basis for a common vision of a desirable world, which we might cooperate to bring about, they also stimulate competition for possession of scarce, jointly coveted goods.
● 12-6-2005: I have two books that outwardly appear the same. One is the complete works of Shakespeare; the other is the scribbling of a monkey. I put a red cover on the Shakespeare, and a blue cover on the monkey volume. I leave the house and return two months later. I’ve forgotten which book I placed where, but I remember that the red book is the literature; the blue one, the rubbish. Have I not (properly) judged the book by its cover?
● 12-8-2005: The universe does not care about your pain.
● 12-16-2005: In many ways I’m my own worst enemy. My life situation is extremely precarious. The rare times I face up to it are when I experience paralyzing anxiety. The rest of the time, I seem to focus on feeling good, or avoiding feeling bad; and so I remain complacent, and continue to do what I like to do, instead of what I need to do, as my life remains miserable, drifting toward calamity.
● 12-19-2005: When you feel blue, sometimes the feeling feeds on itself because you subconsciously conclude that the bad feeling is a reasonable reaction, or a concomitant, to a bad situation (and the pessimism about your situation in turn reinforces and worsens your feeling bad). At such times it may be helpful to remind yourself that the supposed connection may not be true (after all, when you feel especially good, it’s not necessarily because your situation has improved), that, rather, this is just a feeling, which will pass. Also, consider such instances as opportunities to demonstrate to yourself your strength of character in taking the actions you need to take to improve your life despite your mood. By thus observing both your own strength and foresight, and the actual improvement it effects in your life, you’ve hastened the demise of your funk and lain the foundation for an even more intense good feeling to come.
[Later note (2021): Fortitude is to (bad) mood, as bravery is to fear.]
[Later note (Saturday, 11-19-2022): That fallacious and counterproductive tendency to think that your mood is a reaction to your situation can cause unnecessary animosity between people. If other people are part of your immediate environment when that mental dynamic proceeds, you may associate some of those people with your bad feeling. Then it’s only a small mental step to conclude that those people are deliberately causing you to feel bad. To which conclusion you respond by attacking them. They retaliate, and now you’re right that they’re deliberately hurting you. Thus a perpetual conflict is created that could have been avoided.]
● 12-22-2005: Plato’s maxim that a man always does what he thinks good, is absurd. It’s true only in the sense that we generally try to rationalize, or excuse, our actions to ourselves. But commonly we do not attempt to do what we think is good. For example, just now I ate some candy, though I knew it would contravene my diet and hurt me in the long run. I simply lacked the strength to do what I knew was best. It was a failure, an error. I don’t pretend that it was “good.” I knew it was “bad,” but did it anyway. Besides, if it were true that everyone always did what he thought good, we could never legitimately find people morally blameworthy. Nor, indeed, could we ever find them legally culpable. According to the M’Naughen Test, a criminal defendant is legally insane (and so not guilty of the crime he’s accused of) if he did not know the nature of the crime or did not understand right from wrong at the time it was committed. And if a man always does what he thinks is good, or right, he would never, at the time he commits an illegal act, understand it to be wrong.
● 12-28-2005: I think perhaps one reason why Stanley Tookie Williams was not given clemency is that sparing his life would have focused attention on the death penalty’s rationale and made it difficult to justify executing anyone.