One other reason I'm not on the Internet much these days…

Aristotle, Topics VIII, 14 infra:

"Do not argue with every one, nor practise upon the man in the street: for there are some people with whom any argument is bound to degenerate. For against any one who is ready to try all means in order to seem not to be beaten, it is indeed fair to try all means of bringing about one's conclusion: but it is not good form. Wherefore the best rule is, not lightly to engage with casual acquaintances, or bad argument is sure to result. For you see how in practising together people cannot refrain from contentious argument."

In a related vein, I was reading the Gorgias last night and laughed out loud. The Gorgias begins with an inquiry by Socrates into the nature of the art practiced by Gorgias, a well known and then aged rhetorician. "[N]obody asked what was the quality, but what was the nature, of the art," Socrates explains, "and … I would still beg you [Polus] briefly and clearly … to say what this art is, and what we ought to call Gorgias: Or rather, Gorgias, let me turn to you, and ask the same question what are we to call you, and what is the art which you profess?" Whereupon Gorgias replies (my emphasis):

Gor. Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art.

Soc. Then I am to call you a rhetorician?

Gor. Yes, Socrates, and a good one too, if you would call me that which, in Homeric language, "I boast myself to be."

Soc. I should wish to do so.

Gor. Then pray do.

Soc. And are we to say that you are able to make other men rhetoricians?

Gor. Yes, that is exactly what I profess to make them, not only at Athens, but in all places.

Soc. And will you continue to ask and answer questions, Gorgias, as we are at present doing and reserve for another occasion the longer mode of speech which Polus was attempting? Will you keep your promise, and answer shortly the questions which are asked of you?

Gor. Some answers, Socrates, are of necessity longer; but I will do my best to make them as short as possible; for a part of my profession is that I can be as short as any one.

Soc. That is what is wanted, Gorgias; exhibit the shorter method now, and the longer one at some other time.

Gor. Well, I will; and you will certainly say, that you never heard a man use fewer words.

Soc. Very good then; as you profess to be a rhetorician, and a maker of rhetoricians, let me ask you, with what is rhetoric concerned: I might ask with what is weaving concerned, and you would reply (would you not?), with the making of garments?

Gor. Yes.

Soc. And music is concerned with the composition of melodies?

Gor. It is.

Soc. By Hera, Gorgias, I admire the surpassing brevity of your answers.

Gor. Yes, Socrates, I do think myself good at that.

Whereupon I had a philosopher's guffaw.

I also just noticed how (in more than one way) the paragraph preceding the one I cited in Topics relates to the Gorgias. "You should display your training in inductive reasoning against a young man," Aristotle argues, "in deductive against an expert." Continuing, he says (my emphasis):

You should try, moreover, to secure from those skilled in deduction their premisses, from inductive reasoners their parallel cases; for this is the thing in which they are respectively trained. In general, too, from your exercises in argumentation you should try to carry away either a syllogism on some subject or a refutation or a proposition or an objection, or whether some one put his question properly or improperly (whether it was yourself or some one else) and the point which made it the one or the other. … For it is the skilled propounder and objector who is, speaking generally, a dialectician. To formulate a proposition is to form a number of things into one––for the conclusion to which the argument leads must be taken generally, as a single thing––whereas to formulate an objection is to make one thing into many; for the objector either distinguishes or demolishes, partly granting, partly denying the statements proposed.

We also saw how Socrates insisted on phrasing the question correctly. A friend of mine, one of my philosophical mentors in fact, once said something, in passing, during a discussion with someone on Facebook, which perfectly captured this point. "I see now that we were arguing about different questions, and, for a philosopher, arguing about the wrong question is worse than arguing for the wrong conclusion." That virtually cinched my desire to be a philosopher. It is a habit of mine, in academic and personal discussions, to disentangle what and how many issues are actually being discussed. I see that is a spiritual but also a vocational gift.

Even more tangential, though of interest to my unsleeping hordes of fans, is how much I have been enjoying Michael Sandel's "Justice" lectures, available here. Always interesting to see liberally conditioned younguns crash against their own moral intuitions and the logic of indifferentism. Worth the time to view the series.

It's funny cuz it's true…

Even on the planet G'nunu 12, even under the glare of the triple suns.



(HT to Crude.)

Joking is serious business…

Thomas Aquinas writes in Summa Theologiae 2-2, 168, s.c.:

In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment. Wherefore Seneca [Martin of Braga, Formula Vitae Honestae: cap. De Continentia] says (De Quat. Virt., cap. De Continentia): "Let your conduct be guided by wisdom so that no one will think you rude, or despise you as a cad." Now a man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude, as the Philosopher states (Ethic. iv, 8).

Since, however, mirth is useful for the sake of the rest and pleasures it affords; and since, in human life, pleasure and rest are not in quest for their own sake, but for the sake of operation, as stated in Ethic. x, 6, it follows that "lack of mirth is less sinful than excess thereof." Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix, 10): "We should make few friends for the sake of pleasure, since but little sweetness suffices to season life, just as little salt suffices for our meat."

I knew a guy in my Bible study group in college who concluded from his reading of the Bible not only that joking and even mild sarcasm were wrong but also that smiling or laughing were wrong since, first, we have no biblical indication Jesus laughed or smiled, and, second, we have no cause for joy as sinners until we get to Heaven. Yeah. I think he eventually came back to sanity, indeed he seems to have bounced back as a business owner and tech guru, though I'm sure he's still a fundamentalist.

Joked, joking, will joke...

• A priest, a rabbi, and a nun will walk into a bar, the bartender will look at them and say, "Is this a joke?"


• A hiker will be walking through the Irish countryside but will not be able to find his way by the map. So he will ask a local cobbler he meets, "How can I get to Glendale from here?" And the cobbler will say, "Well, I certainly wouldn't start from here!"


• What will be black and white and red all over? A penguin in a blender.


• What will go up and down but will not move? Stairs.

I present these futurised jokes based on comments I just read in Michael Frayn's The Human Touch (ca. p. 270). Why are jokes only told in the present and past tenses? Why does telling jokes about the future seem to deflate their comedic value? I suspect it has to do with the indeterminacy we associate with the future, which makes all the punchlines merely tentative. They are not punchlines: they are ideas which we must be prepared to laugh at if they are imagined really to have happened. Hmm...

Is philosophy a waist of time?

Dr. Stephen Hicks provides a regular florilegium of highly amusing "insights" about philosophy from his undergrad students over the years. A choice excerpt:

The existence of God is questionable since evil does have some good points to make. The greatest gift is to be in God’s presents, but when we are in God’s presents we should not think about ourselves. John Hick rebukes the concept that God would not allow suffering if he existed in the third paragraph of his essay. Because of evil there is said to be another force in the universe—a dark force. His name is Satin.

Viel Spaß beim Lesen!

Great minds on golf…

This may be the first of a series, which might get expanded at erratic times in the future… Enjoy! And feel free to add on.

Karl Marx: "Golf is a sport for those unaware of their political position in history."

Adam Smith: "Golf is a sport for those well aware of their economic position in history."

Thomas Malthus: "In so far as the number of golf holes increases in an arithmetic progression, while the number of balls on the green increases in a geometric progression, golfing, left unchecked, inevitably leads to a shortage of whisky at the club while the players wait for the staff to clear the green."

Sigmund Freud: "Balls, holes, drives, handicaps, poking around in the bush––what more do I need to say?"

Ludwig Wittgenstein: "My work may be likened to a golf tee that one must leave behind once one drives the ball of logic beyond the bewitchment of language."

Bertrand Russell: "'He got a hole in one means' that, for some x, where x is 'one golf ball', it is the case that there is a y, where y is 'a hole', which cannot be referred to without referring to x and y in the same location and time. And that is why I am not a Christian!"

Jean-Paul Sartre: "Hell is other players."

David Hume: "It is merely due to the force of habit that we associate in our minds the impressions a swinging club with the flight of a golf ball. 'Tis a claim so far-fetched in notion, and so obscurely founded on empirical records, that golf clubs have the causal power to move balls anywhere outside of Scotland, that it should be committed to the flames."

Thomas Hobbes: "The life of a golfer is solitary, affluent, pallid, impish, and short, golf being green in shoe and glove."

Plato: "The only lasting city is that headed by a Philosopher-Golfer."

Aristotle: "There is an unmoved Driver which is the principle of motion in the sphere of Mobile Golfball."

René Descartes: "I think I golf, therefore I am."

Georg Friedrich Hegel: "The Absolute Spirit manifests itself in a dual motion throughout history, thus giving shape to the Dialectical principles of Mediated Consciousness, namely, from a first Thesis in the highlands of Scotland, voiced as 'Fore!', which, by its own inner, Notional Immanence, generates an Antithesis of Saturated Commodification, and thus returns at a higher, Sublimated level to a Synthesis in which a black American is the king of the green in England."

Immanuel Kant: "The synthetic unity of apperception is a necessary postulate of reason, otherwise how on earth could anyone hit such a small ball so far with such a long club?"

Friends of humanity?

Recently I have reason to comment on George Carlin in a couple posts, one about "rights" and another about environmentalism. I would now like to point out that, although Carlin is often taken for a hero among freethinkers, rationalists, and secularists, it is immensely ironic to consider Carlin a "humanist." In the previous post, about environmentalism, I discussed a clip of Carlin ridiculing eco-friendly worries, a clip in which he also rather gleefully ponders how planet Earth would rid itself of the human species. As his "poetic" AIDS-scenario indicates, as well as many other nihilist reflections, Carlin is profoundly misanthropic, perhaps even zealously anti-human. In his Life Is Worth Losing set, for example,––the set he headlined in Las Vegas until his abuse of the audience got him fired in 2005––, Carlin pontificates, "[W]hen nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse." If that's the case, on what grounds, I wonder, does Carlin fault God for not making life get better? This is Carlin the moralist wagging his finger at a fallen humanity and praying for a kind of hell on earth as cosmic retribution, a point not circumstantial to Carlin's biography. It is also another instance of the point I made in a post about "environmental eschatology", namely that all 'deep' humanist views of the world inevitably generate an eschatology, a final judgment, a kind of hubris allegedly unique to "religion."

But I digress.

The fundamental misanthropy of humanism is evident, albeit in a similarly anecdotal fashion, in a post by Volker the Fiddler arguing for an end to human reproduction. Precisely in order to ensure a happier future for humanity, Volker urges mankind to stop bearing children, a moratorium he himself endorses as far as the idea of having children repulses and fatigues him. The good of humanity, thus, lies in the suppression of the good making of humans.

A double irony lies in the alleged humanism of transhumanism, à la Ray Kurzweil's dreams of a better future for mankind by way of technological hybridization: "humanity as we now know it" is ridiculed and, indeed, scorned, rather like the bourgeoisie is loathed in Marxism, precisely because it is such a meager detriment to True Human Potential (there's that insidious ultimate finality again!). Anyone who would defend "traditional human values"––little things, like eating food, raising crops by hand, having sex with the genitals, aging well, growing through pain, dying with dignity––is not only laughably atavistic but also a threat, a threat to "the greater good" of "future generations." Humanity must be saved from itself by being "phased out" and "upgraded." Those, of course, who do not comply, will both be weeded out by natural selection and will be punished as dissidents against The Rise Of A Superior Race. Living for the birth of the Master Race hasn't sounded so noble since, well––let's not go there!

At least Christianity, and traditional moral religions, have the consistent audacity to say, not that people must be saved from "human existence," but from sin. The structures of "being human" are not inherently wrong––things like cities, courts, families, property, sports, nations, etc.––but they are mangled by being wielded without a proper relation to God, their source and judge. A Carlinist or a transhumanist says the human world as we know it is a sham and a disgrace and an outrage, which much be overcome (Hegel! Marx! Nietzsche!) either by sneering mockery or sleek technological "progress." Unfortunately, though, an atheist like Carlin––as well as a transhumanist, who by definition regards all human conditions and values as totally historicized, relative, and malleable––has no grounds on which to say any of the all-too-human foibles he lambastes are wrong or sinful; he can only say he finds such foibles stupid. Well, I learned as long ago as kindergarten that if all someone has against you is that they think you're stupid, just ignore them and keep doing what you're doing. I doubt I'm the only person who realizes that accusing something or someone of "rank stupidity" is a sign of ignorance on the part of the accuser. We fear what we don't know and we loathe what we don't understand, so I am most inclined to see the bulk of George Carlin's comedy as one long screed of ill-informed loathing for normal human existence which he, from his godlike position of moral superiority, finds both incomprehensible and despicably human. I have little to no doubt George Carlin spend much of his loathing the fact that he was a human just like the rest of the idiots he made a career of belittling. According to a Wikientry on Carlin, "Carlin openly communicated in his shows and in his interviews that his purpose for existence was entertainment, that he was "here for the show." As he himself said in his You Are All Diseased set, he pronounced, "I have always been willing to put myself at great personal risk for the sake of entertainment. And I've always been willing to put you at great personal risk, for the same reason!" Carlin sure sounds like a "funny" man. I imagine camping trips with him would have been heaven on earth. I don't know enough psychiatric jargon, but I'm pretty sure that compulsive obsession with the faults of anything and everything is its own kind of mental illness. Would it be too much to say that Carlin was a comedic sadist? Did he make a living out of having social Tourette's syndrome?

I want to add, as biographical proviso, that, despite how critical I seem to be of Carlin, I think he is a brilliant performer and sometimes dead-on in his social satire. His shakedown of the self-esteem ideology and the decreasing value of "being special" in a world where everyone is declared to be special is a wonderful thing to see! As with so many sharp minds, though, I think Carlin's Achilles' heel is that he was not profound enough, not critical enough. He was raised a Roman Catholic in "White Harlem," but he sloughed off his piety and sense of divine mercy without ever losing his Catholic sense of moral outrage. Sadly, this makes him a very funny American Pharisee. Had he pursued the obvious learning he enjoyed, I think he would not have been as satisfied with his "critical" outlook as his fans seem to be. As Francis Bacon said in "Of Atheism", "[A] little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion. For while the mind of man looketh upon second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." At the end of the day, and, sadly, at the end of his life, it was easier for George Carlin to grumble and whine than it was for him to say anything positive or really salvific about a world he only tolerated with scornful amusement.

Note to self…

Do not watch Ricky Gervais–– especially this clip!–– while drinking anything.

Blessed are the humble…

...for they can be funny.

Dr. Liccione recently posted about Comedy Central's new project to depict Jesus as getting lost (from the video-game-playing Father) in New York. He leads by citing a post by Jody Bottum at First Things:

There is much that could be said about all this, but here are two quick predictions:

1) It will be far more blasphemous about Christianity than the Danish cartoons were about Islam.

2) There won’t be any riots over it.

Liccione then comments:

…it's not just that Christianity is safer to mock, for reasons the mockers don't seem to appreciate. To the worldly mind, the claims of Christianity make it more mockable than its competitors. I am reminded of an Alanis Morissette song that came out some years ago: "What if God was One of Us?. Despite her Catholic upbringing, she had not got the message that he has long been one of us in the only way that matters. …

They say that the essence of humor is a sense of the discrepant. Comedy Central could live up to its title if they mocked the media elite, including themselves, for the very discrepancy they're all generating. But first they'd have to realize there is one. Apparently that requires a subtler sense of humor than they have.

I commented:

It's only borderline humor since trivializing the divine life is as old as sin. I know I sound curmudgeonly (I am the Codgitator) but these days so much outright blasphemy and simple folly is given an endless pass in the name of "humor." The paradox is that we are told not to mock any viewpoint and to accept all truth as "truth claims" but also we are trained to mock anything we want to with freedom as long as we disclaim, "But I'm only joking."

The world ages as it ages whereas the Church is ever made younger by the Ancient of Days and I can't help but detect a sprawling very nasty cynicism underneath most contemporary comedy. Why is Bill Maher even considered funny? Call it Carlinism. At some point people got bluffed into thinking that anyone grouchy and vulgar enough must be funny cuz it's, like, cutting edge and, you know, edgy.

The seed of humor is actually humility, for how silly it is for the lower to comment on the higher. Any joke is a case of the lowly (we ourselves) trying to bottle the higher for its own amusement. And that kind of humor I don't disdain at all. Call it Woodyism. As irreverent as Woody Allen was, he was always humble (at least in persona), which is what gave such a kick to his jester-like insights. But most comics these days are pompous and just faceful eddies in the viral pool of media generativity. Comedy Central is yukking it up since instinctively it feels it is part of something eternal–– broadcast media–– and therefore its wrist-flicking mockery of the Lord comes from arrogance, not humility.