Month: July 2019

Reflections on Aphorisms #56

I’m going to do something a little out of the ordinary today and focus on a quote from something that I read that isn’t really an aphorism for one of my reflections. It’s a quote from Clyde W. Ford’s The Hero with an African Face (Amazon affiliate link), and I found it very interesting for its clarity.

Typically I’ve tried to gravitate toward short aphorisms, but I’m beginning to exhaust the ones that I have at my disposal that speak to me, so I’m probably going to wind up going over a greater range.

This is both exactly what I hoped would happen when I started doing this, and something that I feel a certain amount of hesitation over. Ironically, I don’t even keep close track of who reads these, so this may just be me writing for myself anyway. Lest I sound vain, I do this as part of a self-improvement exercise, and I’m not able to work diligently without some accountability, so the publication of my thoughts is a necessity toward a different end than fame or success. Still, I won’t object to any money thrown my way.

Aphorism 90

Across time and throughout the world, the hero strides out of myths and legends as the one who has ventured beyond the security of the present into an uncertain future, there to claim some victory or boon for humanity left behind.

Clyde W. Ford

Interpretation

The Hero, in an archetypal sense, turns chaos into order. That is what they do.

I do not believe that I have ever heard the notion of the hero expressed as a traveler in time before. That is something that is an important concept, because time and space have both unique and parallel expressions in consciousness.

I like the notion of the hero moving into an uncertain future, which speaks to me in a way that I don’t often hear.

We have a tendency to think of stories as something static, something that gets set in stone and never changes.

Of course, there’s also Reader Response Theory, which argues that stories are always what people make of them, but I don’t like holistic approaches to understanding because they’re never as good as what you come to piecemeal.

The truth is somewhere in-between. Stories have the intended meaning of the author (RRT doesn’t deny this, but basically ignores it) and their more immediate purpose and meaning in our lives.

There’s a link here in the form of the archetypal, Jung would say the collective unconscious, elements that are common across all times and places. People can see the archetypes and connect to them, even if they are not aware and conscious of what the archetypes are.

A lot of these archetypes are most clearly expressed in myth–which does not mean that myths are simple and primitive–because ancient myths carry meaning for us only in the sense that we are aware of it. There are things that an American will see that would never occur to an ancient Arabian, or African, or Asian, or Greek mind. There are things that were very important in the original context that have fallen away from our knowledge (and knowing these can allow us to make even more connections which sometimes are obvious in their universal quality only once we awaken to them).

But the real thing here is that the Hero moves from the current unbearable world into the world of chaos and potential. It’s a cosmic force, in the literal sense; it is the sun rising in the east and falling in the west, being brought across the sky on a fiery chariot.

And this is why we have anything good at all. Everyone is a hero when they move the world in a better direction. It is the act of sacrifice for a noble purpose, even if the sacrifice seems insignificance (sacrifice is, loosely defined, merely giving up something in the tangible present for intangible benefit), and this is what builds society.

The Hero is the basic unit of life. We can choose to rise to the call or fall into squalor.

Resolution

Step into the uncertain future.

Sacrifice now, feast later.

Tell the stories that lead to the way of life.

Reflections on Aphorisms #55

Another shorter Sunday reflection, this time on Pascal.

Little bit of trivia: the programming language Pascal (named after, well, Pascal) was the first that I had any experience with. Not sure if that matters to anyone, and I probably couldn’t write a line of Pascal if my life depended on it now, but it’s kinda funny. I heard someone talk about it like it was one of those old “back in the day” languages not too long ago.

Aphorism 89

Desire and force between them are responsible for all actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

Pascal

My biggest gripe here is–and I’m willing to bet that it comes down to this being out of context and maybe not translated well–that Pascal doesn’t explain the difference between desire and force.

For instance, I have a desire and a need to eat. I always eat as a voluntary act, but all the same it is not optional. If I don’t feel like eating, and I have gone days without food (say, for instance, if I am ill), I will eat food out of respect for my needs.

I guess the better distinction here is voluntary and involuntary.

I’ve studied a lot of Carl Jung’s work, and one of the things that goes into Jung’s work is this assumption that the self is made up of a conscious, known, element and an unconscious, unknown, element. This is a simplification, but it’s good enough for a layman like myself when discussing less serious topics.

One of the things about the notion of a voluntary act is that it’s something that we choose, but the degree to which we choose something versus being forced into it is uncertain.

I would posit that there are things which appear voluntary which are actually forced (e.g. by our unconscious urges and desires), and things which appear involuntary which are actually chosen by the same mechanism.

Take, for example, the notion of a Freudian slip (Freud was Jung’s mentor). This is the idea that one can consciously undertake an act, but the execution is dependent upon the unconscious agreeing to the proceedings.

A great common example would be the act of speaking or writing while one’s mind is on another subject and talking about the real subject rather than the topic of the conversation. I do this from time to time as a writer, and if you’ve read much of my writing you’ve probably seen it in a place or two.

Jung takes it a bit further (though one could argue that most psychoanalysts do) by arguing that it’s not just the surface level stuff but also ties into selective memory, mishearing/misreading things, and so forth.

Kazuo Ishiguro touches on this a lot in his novel The Remains of the Day, where it’s clear that the narrator is intentionally avoiding the memory of certain things that he or members of his household have done in the past.

The Freudian slip in daily life may be overstated because a lot of what often slips out is not truly unconscious but rather suppressed in the conscious (e.g. not wanting to reference something embarrassing or inconvenient), but it’s worth talking about nonetheless.

But I ramble.

I think that what I want to get at here is that I challenge Pascal’s assertions that we can form a neat dichotomy around force and desire. I believe in the concept of free will, but also that it is limited. I believe that people have free will in the sense that they choose available decisions around the circumstances they’re in. It’s possible for people to be in situations where their decisions are made for them by the unconscious, and therefore not technically using their free will, and to this extent a certain portion of all actions are deterministic.

Resolution

Be aware of what I do, and how I came to do it.

Don’t fall victim to the temptation to classify.

Remember that words are markers for concepts, and concepts do not reflect reality.

Reflections on Aphorisms #54

Aphorism 87

When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.

Oscar Wilde

Interpretation

Remember that Wilde is not writing as a religious man. This may have more to do with myth, fable, and literary allusions than religious matters.

There’s a common mythic motif of being careful about what one wishes for.

I think there are two forms that this takes and they’re each distinct:

The first is the folly in the request. This is what happens when someone asks for something that they wouldn’t really want.

For instance, if you ask for a fancy mansion, you’re stuck maintaining it. You might not have the means to do so, so the getting is moot.

We often overlook the steps between our position and our goal when we are filled with desire. This does us no favors.

What we truly long after is not what we desire, but the success and comfort that comes with getting the object of our affections. The best way to cultivate this is self-improvement, not pursuit of wealth.

The second is the folly in the result. Sometimes getting what we want changes us for the worse.

The best example of this can be found in the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, immortalized by T.S. Eliot in Murder in the Cathedral.

King Henry II makes a remark about wanting to be rid “of this turbulent priest” (formerly a close friend), and the knights around him oblige the remark by killing Becket.

Henry finds this to be little recompense, however, and is forced to prostrate himself and turn to penitence. Whether his grief is authentic or false, he still is humbled by the consequences of his desire.

This is a classic tragic arc.

There’s an intersection of both types of wrong desire in the King Midas story: wanting all the gold in the world, he gets the power to turn everything he touches to gold. Quickly Midas realizes that gold is not the thing he truly wants (folly in the request) and that he’s also ruined his appreciation for what he had and created new problems for himself (folly in the result).

The stoics teach that being too close to what we desire is dangerous. It begins to control us. Getting what you want may actually be subordinating yourself to it.

Resolution

Don’t desire things; strive for discipline and all else follows.

Live so that your desires serve you, not vice versa.

Guard your desires carefully: don’t let evil join their midst.

Aphorism 88

We can do noble acts without ruling earth and sea.

Aristotle

Interpretation

One of the common fallacies about goodness is that people have to be great (in stature) to be good (in spirit). Now, I’m as much a believer as anyone that good deeds tend to be rewarded, and a lot of success can come down to making the right decisions consistently enough that they pay off.

However, there are connections to Aristotle’s point to be drawn here.

First, those people whose success is tied to their virtue must practice that virtue before they are successful, and continue to practice that virtue when their fortunes waver.

They do not have rule over their lives, but they still do the right thing precisely because it is right.

Second, there are people who are moral who never receive any tangible reward for their good lives.

The reasons for these are complex. One part of it is that I think that the external signs of success are often not tied to the internal acts of morality. Being highly moral may not lead to having more money, but it does lead to liberation from the want of money.

Another point to be made here is that anyone has the potential to choose the moral path. Even the lowest person by society’s standards has a chance to do something that would help another person. Heck, a smile and a kind word goes a long way to make things better, and that’s practically free.

One of the things that Jordan Peterson once said is that a lot of his work with young people has been to encourage them to try their best, and that a lot of them have never heard an encouraging word in their life.

My own experience confirms this. A lot of people go through life without ever experiencing the mercy of compassion. Surprisingly, they don’t always become bitter, so you can’t look at someone and see clearly whether or not they have the support they need.

I think that this is one of the best places that anyone can take a simple step toward virtue: find someone who is struggling and speak a benediction into their life. Give them a chance to appreciate themselves. Lift them up.

Resolution

Use words that build up others.

Don’t judge success by the car someone drives.

When in doubt, remember that no good act is too small to be worthy.

Reflections on Aphorisms #53

This will be a short post today because I am trying out a new software for editing. I’m not 100% sold on it because I’ve lost a lot of writing because it doesn’t have any auto-saving functionality. The web plugin didn’t check if the page has refreshed between starting and finishing working, and once I clicked save and it did not.

So it wasn’t the best of days.

Aphorism 86

One often contradicts an opinion when what is uncongenial is really the tone in which it was conveyed.

Nietzsche

Interpretation

This is an interesting truth.

What people don’t realize is that being unpleasant makes everything worse.

If the best project in the world required collaborating with someone truly distasteful, it would not be the best project in the world.

I almost never swear. There are few places where swearing adds proper emphasis, and many where it causes emotions to run ragged.

However, I think it comes down to a lot of things. Other than my tendency to whine (which is something I am better about), I try to be polite and helpful around people. There are limits to this, but I’ve found being pleasant and a little cooperative gets more results than you’d expect from being useful. The sacrifice required for this is minimal. Fifteen minutes a week earns interest.

There’s a connection to politics. I migrated across political affiliations before deciding just not to have any. The reason for this is simple: I cared more about victory than principle. Then I realized that everyone that I was looking up to was flawed. There are very few honest politicians. If you align with any faction, you align with a lot of snakes.

So I don’t. This change made life better.

I’ve found that many abrasive people hide issues. Whether it is emotional, social, or practical, something feeds that attitude. There’s room for lenience–people have bad days–but if there’s a habit, it’s a red flag.

Nice people suck as friends. You want people who are honest. No exaggeration.

Look for people who give productive criticism. They have a good outlook. They don’t flatter and don’t denigrate. 

You may notice that these people are wrong. They will not judge your opinions. Return the favor. Life will get a lot better.

You may notice that you agree with people. See if they’re jerks. If they are, do the kind thing and let them know politely. Everyone wins. If they become hostile, it’s their loss, not yours. You can’t befriend everybody. If they improve, you’ve helped them and yourself.

There is one exception: blunt honesty. Telling the truth should be the priority. Just don’t put a negative spin on it. Sincerity to help, not to harm. Take your frustrations out on paper or canvas, not people. Know when to pull a punch.

My high school Latin teacher had a phrase he loved to repeat:

“What is this to eternity?”

Nothing that bothers you is worth burning other people for.

So don’t.

Resolution

Be kind, not nice.

Don’t tear down what isn’t worthy of destruction.

Master frustration, release it without hurting anyone.

Review of Draft No. 4

Draft No. 4 (Amazon affiliate link) by John McPhee is one of the clearest and best books on writing I have ever read, if not the best book on writing I have ever read. It really helped me break through some of the blocks I’ve had as a writer and move on with my writing in a way that I hadn’t been able to before.

When I started reading, I didn’t know who McPhee was. Over the course of reading, I discovered more about him, but the goal of Draft No. 4 isn’t to provide a biography, it’s to provide guidance.

The best way that I can describe this is as follows: McPhee shows how he earned his place in the writing world by giving an overview of what a writer has to do to get there.

This doesn’t mean the book is perfect; it doesn’t cover a lot of adiaphora and is generally focused on non-fiction writing (including creative non-fiction, a field I don’t have much experience in), and also on the general practice of writing.

Now, maybe I’m just a nerd, but I found McPhee’s constant insights to the writing world to be actually quite fun. Like, even in lieu of the whole “oh hey, I can learn something here” aspect of such a book, you get to have the pleasure of hearing about people and places and how those people and places got turned into a story.

The best example of this comes at the end of the book, where McPhee recounts an encounter with Eisenhower (yes, that Eisenhower). Eisenhower was painting a still-life and had left out some grapes, and McPhee recounted that:

“Ike said, ‘Because they’re too God-damned hard to paint.’”

This is just one example of how McPhee recounts lessons (the lesson here is that sometimes a writer just can’t capture something in words) by combining practical, but theoretically presented, advice with personal anecdotes that go beyond just serving as evidence and instead are used to add some vibrancy to the text.

Draft No. 4 is a book that I often found myself saying “Just one more chapter” to, even though each chapter is rather substantial. The organization of the book is such that each chapter focuses on a particular domain of the writer.

The great thing about the book is that McPhee has actually written some very impressive books and he recounts a lot of his process within Draft No. 4. Not only is it full of personal anecdotes, it also features fairly detailed accounts of the making of a couple of his personal favorite works.

The first couple chapters in particular do this quite a bit. At first when I started reading, I felt overwhelmed. McPhee starts with technical writing advice, explaining his work using diagrams and terminology that even I, an English major, struggled with at first.

Then he gave an example of how he wrote in process, and it all made sense. It was a showcase of how to tell a story and how to lay out a text, but also how to figure out the methods you want to use for each, and how to move from writing simple things as a novice to more complicated things as a master.

Couple that with more domain-specific overviews of the writing process and you’ve got a great book that can help both someone with relatively little professional writing experience (like myself) and someone like a veteran writer looking for tips and inspiration.

It’s worth noting that while McPhee showcases his own experience, he never does it out of self-indulgence. It’s always part of an object lesson, and sometimes he points out embarrassing or foolish mistakes on his own part to make sure that a lesson learned painfully can be passed on to people who hopefully listen and learn from his mistakes. That’s the mark of a great teacher.

Draft No. 4 is a tremendous book, and I highly recommend it. There is some harsh language, in academic or mimetic context, and a couple more adult moments described in the context of journalism, so it’s not something that I would feel comfortable using in anything lower than a college classroom, but it’s something that I would find invaluable for any student with the maturity to see McPhee’s talent and advice for what it is.

Reflections on Aphorisms #52

In honor of the Fourth of July, I felt it appropriate to look at America’s most famous early aphorist, Benjamin Franklin, and respond to a couple of his sayings.

Aphorism 84

If you were a servant would you not be ashamed that a good master should catch you idle? Then if you are your own master be ashamed to catch yourself idle.

Benjamin Franklin

Interpretation

There are fewer people who are self-employed than there have been historically, but I think that there’s also a trend toward self-management in the workplace that makes this an important idea.

One of the most important things we can do in our life is to find something that we can do that has a meaning outside the service it provides to us. I’ve found that as a teacher and as a writer. What I do isn’t just providing entertainment or occupying people for a time; if it is successful I initiate people into the secrets of the universe that I have discovered and which have been revealed to me by the intersection of my predecessors and my experiences.

I think that there’s something to be said for being ashamed of oneself. Obviously this shouldn’t be the main experience in one’s life: some confidence and self-validation is healthy, and extreme negative self-concept is a risk to both function and health.

The important thing here is to accept that one is capable of folly, and to constantly work away from that folly.

I’ve got a real problem with video games. I love them, and they don’t always reciprocate in a way that’s helpful for me. I like to think that I’m pretty much a self-starter: I’ve gotten to the point where I’m writing between two and three thousand words on a typical day to keep up with my blogging (here and for Loreshaper Games), and then there’s correspondence and work on other projects that I add to that.

If I don’t keep myself busy, I’ll basically work on each thing I do for an hour or two and then be done for the day; I’m something of a “visionary” in a non-boastful sense of the word. My mind works by occasionally having an idea, and then I’m able to bring it into fruition incredibly quickly, but I also have a fairly limited idea-having bandwidth.

This is generally down to individual concepts and ideas, so having a variety of focuses means that I also wind up with a variety of ideas, while having a single focus means stagnation.

I’m getting into the groove of freelancing, personal projects, and networking that means that I’m spending something that more closely approximates an eight-hour workday actually on work without any structure.

Some of that’s coming down to scheduling; I have a fairly solid rotation of waking up in the morning, doing chores, getting a little writing done on whatever the most pressing thing is, giving myself a break, doing my Loreshaper Games writing, doing my mainstream writing here, and then at the end of my day doing these aphorism reflections. I’ve been doing more drawing recently (all technical/diagram stuff for games, so nothing artistically beautiful, but still satisfying in a “I got this done” sense), which also is just immensely time consuming.

I’ve been trying to punctuate that with productive things; business stuff and also reading or listening to audio books, getting some exercise, and so forth.

This lifestyle’s only for now, since adding coursework when I officially start school again will be difficult, and then I’ll go back to my professional life, but I think that being able to master my time when there aren’t as many pressing factors will be something that helps me when things get rough later.

Resolution

Make time work for you, not the other way around.

Push to the limits of industry: make the pushes beyond necessity what you enjoy doing, and make them your duty. This brings fulfillment.

You will regret what you don’t do more than what you do.

Aphorism 85

Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones.

Benjamin Franklin

Interpretation

This is an interpretation, I believe, of the Golden Rule. Franklin doesn’t go into too much detail about how exactly we’re supposed to take this: we could say wink at small faults in others or wink at small faults in yourself, but either way still has the same broad lesson and it’s the specifics that detail.

One of the greatest things that I’ve learned in my life is to overcome my neuroses. With the exception of obsessive cleanliness (which I can overcome when needed) and a couple minor phobias (which have also diminished), I’ve learned not to let my own personal foibles get in the way of my daily life and perception of the world.

This is something that was fairly painful, and a lesson I learned from counter-example. I’m not perfect at it, but I’ve learned to identify when I get more emotional about something than makes sense, and then I sort of work down from there in a process.

The thing that I’ve learned is that everyone has these same tendencies; not necessarily manifest in the same way, but certainly tendencies that possess the same inexorable force for them that my own tendencies have on me. Of course one can try to pull against the trend, but the fact is that there are things that will always to some degree yield influence over me, even if that influence is simply met with a conscious response that counters it.

One of the things to do here also is to just learn what matters in oneself and forget the things that don’t matter. Part of my obsessive cleanliness is that I like to shower before bed and before leaving the house in the morning: I can tolerate skipping an evening shower in rare circumstances, but never skipping a morning shower (even if I showered at 2 AM after getting home from work, then woke up at 7 AM for the next day, a scenario that happened occasionally in my college days).

That’s something you can wink at. It’s not a moral failing (I shower quickly and with military precision, lest I be accused of waste), and it may even have its own virtues, even if it’s a little weird and probably not the best use of time and effort.

However, something like my relationship with video games is not a flaw I can wink at. I need to be cautious and aware of it, and make sure that I am disciplined and keep an eye open for how much time I’ve actually spent on leisure: I find I appreciate luxury more when I measure it, but there’s also an element of just letting time slip by that needs to be avoided here as well.

That’s not the most hideous failing (at least, so long as I can afford to keep the lights on), but it is something that should be worked on.

Of course, every person has deeper things that they have to work on as well, the moral flaws of character that keep us from perfection. All other problems are merely symptoms of some development which we could pursue, if only we knew what virtues we truly lacked.

Resolution

Find the virtues I lack.

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Overlook small flaws in others, and pray they reciprocate.

Review of Craghorn Twighorn’s Discount Spell Emporium

Disclosure: I received a free copy of the PDF of Craghorn Twighorn’s Discount Spell Emporium from Kian Bergstrom for the purposes of writing this review.

Craghorn Twighorn’s Discount Spell Emporium (affiliate link) offers a bunch of spells for 5e that are designed to be deliberately unhelpful (or, at least, carry some extreme caveats). Obviously, there’s a lot of utility for this in the right game; a few of the spells are so situationally useful that they don’t make any sense until a perfect moment comes along, while others are simply comedic.

These are generally intended to be used as scrolls, magic items, or perhaps even effects brought down by an NPC, and no PC spell lists are provided. Some could logically fall into particular spell lists, but I’ll make a note on this later.

I’d broadly divide the spells into four categories: the referential, the situational, the comedic, and the scatalogical. The value of each of these categories differs.

A lot of these are referential, and as such they’re definitely down to taste. “Animal Farm” for instance, is a spell that makes beasts obey other beasts in a nod to Orwell’s classic novel. “Cassandra” gives the power of prophecy, but nobody believes the prophecy. There’s an 7th-level enchantment simply called “The Rock” that makes a creature incredibly charismatic and bold, at the cost of later suffering fatigue and exhaustion.

The referential spells generally feel good, though there are a couple places where the mechanics are a little iffy (e.g. “affleck”, which should really have some removal condition for its effects), which of course comes down to them being a humorous reference. Since, again, these spells are unlikely to feature as the centerpoint of a campaign, I don’t think this would be a giant issue.

Then you have the situational. These are spells that I could actually see a character using as a serious spell. “Mist Hand”, for instance, is an illusory hand similar to Mage Hand, but has some distinct qualities that people might actually use in its own right (e.g. it can go further away, and be used to lure enemies as a result). “Gentle” lets you target another creature and make them only deal nonlethal damage, which is cool.

In some games, especially more humorous games, it makes sense that a character might actually have some of these spells on their spell list (or, of course, that a powerful mage with a sense of humor may possess them in a more serious campaign).

My biggest gripe here is that there’s such a focus on being deliberately useless that many of these spells that are otherwise quite interesting are placed at a higher spell level than they should be and one almost gets the feeling that they’re not being taken seriously. If players have access to buying Twighorn’s scrolls, or at least the particular subset that fits into a particular game, they may actually be able to get some powers that are cool and play into things that other spells for 5e often don’t do.

Then you get into the comedic spells. These are ones like “Goat Friendship” and “Pork Entrail” that just exist to make the game more spontaneously weird. When used in the right context (which may require some setup), these can bring good value to the right game. Heck, I had a DM who would’ve killed for some of these.

Unfortunately, here is where you also find some small issues with balance. For example, “Mouthy Ward” has a permanent effect that would enable the detection of any creature in a 15-foot space (without specifying which creatures it can detect, which makes it a 2nd level illusion spell with an unintentional high-level divination effect) and then yell abuse at it. Of course, this is where the DM would come in to make sure that everything flows smoothly. Generally, however, the majority of these do work well, so take the nit-picking with a grain of salt: they’re not the tightest spells in terms of game mechanics, but they’re intended for a narrative effect and if you don’t want them to become prevalent in your game you can just excise them.

Then there’s the scatalogical. This is really the low point of the spells, though they tend not to be excessively vulgar. They’re maybe a half-dozen in total, and don’t deserve further note. It will entirely depend on the age and sense of humor at your particular table as to whether or not these go over well.

There are also a couple spells that are just plain powerful and useful, but they’re all within balance limitations (at least as far as I’m concerned; some of them do things that other spells don’t, so I’m going with my gut on how to balance some of the effects). Especially as spells read from scrolls with limited availability, I don’t see any problem with them.

There’s an additional overview of Twighorn himself, found at the end of the spell list. As a comedy-centered character with access to many of the spells included within, he won’t fit into every campaign (though a DM could play him as more of a tragicomic figure), but his stat block looks good and he could be an interesting adversary or ally.

The feeling I got from the spells overall was a little hard to define, so I’ll resort to a comparison. If you’ve ever played SJG’s Munchkin, this is basically taking the references and jokes from that and transplanting them into 5e. As with Munchkin, there are a lot of great things and some okay things blended together. If you’re running a game, you don’t necessarily want to give players unrestricted access to these spells, but they can be wickedly funny in the right context.

Reflections on Aphorisms #51

It feels weird to think that I’m already more than half-way to a hundred of these. That’s enough time to start making it a habit, but it’s also an example of a little thing done daily that I think is making me a better person.

I don’t know how to quantify the improvement I’ve felt in my happiness and practical ability to work, but it’s there, and it’s enough to matter.

Aphorism 82

Prayer does not change God, but it changes he who prays.

Kierkegaard

Interpretation

It’s worth noting before we get into things that Kierkegaard is not trying to diminish the power of prayer.

Think of it this way: Kierkegaard isn’t necessarily saying that God is deaf to intercession, but rather that intercession is not always acceptable.

The act of prayer, even in the most secular interpretation, has merit in the admission that the object of one’s desire is outside the perceived limit of one’s agency.

Of course, if you’re religious you may believe that prayer is a way to meet an end, and I personally fall in that camp (although I don’t believe that there’s a guarantee that prayer will be answered for faith alone).

But one of the things that would logically follow at least the Christian concept of God is that there should be constant divine intervention against all evils.

I think Jordan Peterson describes this Abrahamic concept best in one of his sections in his book 12 Rules for Life (my analysis of the chapter) where he talks about vulnerability and weakness.

Part of us being free and having value, within the framework of a universe in which there is an omnipotent God, is that God must let us work within our own limitations and limit intervention in our world. Peterson uses the analogy of a child who is made to be perfect and invincible. By transforming the child from a vulnerable living thing to an invulnerable icon, one destroys the child.

I personally believe this is the reason why God permits evil to exist. To remove it entirely would be to remove the spirit of the hero from the world, to annihilate our ability not only for wickedness but also for good, for sacrifice, for transcendence.

Prayer is humbling oneself before God. Praise is also humbling oneself before God. Whether or not you can expect divine intervention, it has a way of grounding one in a mindset that accepts the wicked and the good as parts of being.

Resolution

Pray constantly.

For every evil there is a chance to do good. Do that good.

Never curse, never pass sentence on that which is not of your self. That is the domain of God.

Aphorism 83

Nature hath no goal though she hath law.

John Donne

Interpretation

One of the things that I frequently see people talking about is a particular notion that there’s an end-point to history or the universe.

Often these people talk about teleological reasons for being, or some universal trend of progress that defies what we know the objective rules of progress to be.

I’m also not talking about a defined end here; there may well be an end (some apocalypse, the heat death of the universe, our whole world being a projection of our consciousness that ends with physical death, and so forth: take your pick), but the problem is that it’s treated as something which every process works toward.

I mean, if you look at entropy in a broad sense, I guess you could go that way, though that’s kind of a morbid way to view it, and it’s the opposite of how the people I’m referring to talk.

The world around us is chaotic and disordered by default, at least by any perceptible human qualifier. All the archetypal stories tell us this: that the unknown is going to be unexpected. There would be no reason to fear the dark if it always contained merely the absence of light.

People set goals. The rest of reality generally doesn’t (a possible exception being animals, though their goals are not as complicated as ours), and that’s one of the key things that makes people different. We can contemplate a future endpoint which is more desirable than the current state, and we can do so in quite an abstract capacity. We know, for instance, that we can plan for the future by saving money.

Of course, such things are always flawed by the complexity of the system we’re in and our own limitations, but it’s possible to pin things down relatively close to reality. Precision is where things get tricky, but broad generalizations are often correct (see what I did there?).

Nature, on the other hand, is not a conscious entity. It is not even an entity, though we’ve created an abstraction that looks like one because we have a problem with conceptual null spaces.

If nature is anything, it’s a network of independent agents.

All of these, of course, have laws that are in operation around them. The discovery of Newton’s natural laws marked a shift from alchemical and mystical notions of the world and natural philosophy to modern science, and part of the reason for that is that it marked a shift from goals to laws.

Previously, people thought that nature worked in predictable ways because it wanted to.

Now, we know that it moves in predictable ways because the very nature of the motion of the universe is patterned in those ways.

That’s a very important, even revolutionary, idea.

Resolution

Don’t attribute to design what belongs to chance.

Remember: Brains make patterns, often incorrectly.

Don’t forget: Newton didn’t find what he found on purpose.

Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections

I listened to Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Amazon affiliate link) on audiobook. It’s a large book, and it was of interest to me largely because I’ve studied a lot of Jung’s ideas (and their derivatives as presented by Campbell. Pearson, and Peterson) and I wanted to get a more intimate picture of Jung’s views and life so that I could put his work in context.

As a memoir, it’s interesting. It’s definitely one of the more difficult memoirs out there, but it’s still got the sort of personal interest that you’re going to see in most memoirs. Because Jung is something of a revolutionary thinker, it’s often a little difficult to follow what he talks about, and I was glad to have read Man and His Symbols (my review) and Modern Man in Search of a Soul prior to tackling Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Those hoping for an intimate picture will be perplexed. Jung is entirely open about his outer life, and most of his inner life, but there are things which he withholds from his memoir that would be of particular interest given that they would have peculiar interest in a psychoanalytic context. This is a vague description, but it’s the best I can do, because the withholdings are themselves eclectic: seemingly minute but yet significant enough that Jung mentions them in their exclusion.

At the same time, one gets a picture of who Jung is; albeit one that is scattered between significant points in his life. His adult life is largely unmentioned, sometimes explicitly out of respect for those who are living and who might be impacted, but at other times one has to wonder why Jung chose to skip over so much of his own personal life and whether it is that he considered some things self-evident, if they escaped his notice, if they were intentionally withheld, or if they simply weren’t able to be worked into the book.

Jung’s early life and religious experiences get an intensive focus at the start of the book, and his father plays a particularly interesting role as a sort of anti-Jung: someone who has stifled his visions and stuck comfortably with the role of a conforming member of society. Jung’s first symbolic dreams and impulses are recorded here, and one can get a picture of him as a unique individual very early on.

As someone who had to read some Freud in college, I find Jung’s recounting of his professional and personal relationships with Freud as particularly interesting (not to mention the letters published in the appendices which Freud wrote to Jung). While going into depth about their relationship would require either a crash course in the teachings of both men or an assumption that the reader is familiar with both, it’s worth noting that Jung’s perspective on his time spent both as heir apparent and then disgraced pariah in Freud’s eyes is covered, albeit not in great detail when compared to Jung’s early life.

Letters from Freud were included in the appendix, which give Freud’s perspective (at least as he communicated it to Jung), and Jung has interesting thoughts on Freud that are not necessarily unique to Jung but benefit from the personal relationship they shared.

Jung’s travels make up another section of the book. While some of the language he uses is outdated, and he is not an anthropologist, he has a great deal of insight and respect for what he calls “primitive” people, and particularly respects their beliefs as being no less sophisticated, though perhaps less well communicated and developed by exposure to other ideas, than those of the modern West.

On one hand, he goes into much less detail here than he does in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, but he also adds the personal element of his experiences into the mix, giving some context that is otherwise missing, and he also recounts particular events in greater detail, like his experiences with Native American solar faiths.

As is usual, one gets the impression of Jung that he is so brilliant that people have a hard time telling where he is right and wrong: sometimes giving him too much credit and at others discounting everything that he has discovered. As a visionary, he presents a view of the world that has a sort of mystical magnificence to it, where dream and reality blur.

Of course, dream and reality are perceived through the same faculties, and there’s an element of truth to Jung’s ideas, but one also gets he sense that he lets himself descend into revelry. He espouses strong support for metaphysical persistence of the psyche (I mean, as a devout Christian I do as well, but my own approach is to accept on faith, not to have intuited it myself), but does so almost entirely based on the notion of logic driven from experiences of the unconscious, intuition, and precedent in cultural and religious phenomena.

There was a fairly long section of Memories, Dreams, and Reflections which could be described as positively New Age, but if one considers that Jung expresses the totality of his beliefs without reservation, there’s probably not so much airy dreaming as actual thought in most of his claims. It’s also worth noting that a lot of Jung’s terminology has come to mean something else than it originally had (e.g. psychic meaning “to have a relationship with the psyche” rather than charlatan fortune-telling), so what sounds like quackery may have a firmer empirical foundation than otherwise expected.

Near the end, there are very interesting questions about the role that individualism, spirituality, and social progress will play in the coming era, and I actually found it to be one of the most well-reasoned discussions of what has become an in vogue topic. Jung’s assertion that individuals have to accept the unknown and the unconscious to pursue individuation within the pattern of complete being (I simplify at the risk of causing confusion) as an antidote to the totalitarianism of the 20th century is something that I think is incredibly valuable, and echoes my own personal experiences of self-development in recent years.

Jung also gives a great breakdown of his concept of archetypes, though he doesn’t go into depth about particular archetypes.

The audiobook is read by James Cameron Stewart, who does a good job of it. I don’t have any complaints with the audiobook, and Stewart sounds like one would expect Jung to sound (though not necessarily a match for Jung). There weren’t any issues that I found as I listened on Audible.

Basically, if you want an introductory overview of the work of Jung, this probably isn’t what you’re looking for. As a memoir it frustrates its purpose by being so deeply tied to Jung’s theories and work that I would have a hard time recommending it to anyone who is not already familiar with Jung’s ideas.

However, as a companion to Jung’s other work it is illuminating.

Reflections on Aphorisms #50

Got a lot of stuff done today at the cost of putting off writing this until almost my bedtime. So, with my apologies, there will be only one aphorism today. I’ll try to make it count.

Aphorism 81

The impassioned man hasn’t time to be witty.

Stendhal

This cuts two ways.

On one hand, it’s an injunction to pardon the passionate.

Belief is often derided as a product of biases and unconscious assumptions, but the reason why we believe so strongly is because the cost of not doing so is confusion and chaos.

Beliefs orient us and guide us.

When something violates your beliefs, it tends to trigger your passions, and this also makes people “stupid” in the modern mindset.

Of course, it needn’t matter that many people who have beliefs have actually considered and contemplated them, since the important thing about a belief is that it overrides the current stimuli.

If something is currently ongoing that suggests a certain course of action, but your belief structure suggests something else, it’s probably better to go with your beliefs.

If deeply held tenets can be faulty, it is all the more true that seat-of-the-pants judgments are even more likely to be flawed.

So when someone makes an emotional argument, it’s not necessarily a sign of weakness. It certainly can be wrong, the same as any other argument, and it’s able to be wrong even if the facts and realities support it. The quality of an argument is found in both the ends and the means.

The counterpart to the argument that Stendhal is supporting the passionate (which I pursued first because as a Romantic Stendhal almost certainly aims for that) is the stoic argument that one should always strive to be dispassionate.

While values guide us, it is reason that allows these values to be given their full meaning. Without at least a little independent reasoning, belief becomes legalism.

Legalism works only when it is not exploited by others, and in the vast histories of humanity it is almost always brought to bear as a yoke on those who practice it.

The term “wit” has an interesting connotation.

On one hand, it’s often used in a derisive manner. A “witty” remark may really just be a clever dodge and a deflection from the real point. Wit is also used more generally as cleverness of the tongue, which is probably what Stendhal gets at here.

However, wit is also the ability to associate things with each other, the ability to reason.

Wit’s an animal in its own right, as much its own being as a part of the human mind.

It’s that eureka moment of realization, the time when things just click.

Passion gets in the way of that. Maybe not the sublime rapturous passion, but certainly the angry defensive emotional passion that seems to be what most people get into more often than they should.

It’s not an antithesis thing. You can be emotional and reasonable. I’ve seen this a lot with my own parents, and I associate it with wisdom and experience. You don’t numb feeling for the sake of reason.

You just make sure that you let each voice have its say.

If you’ve got one side of you that’s looking for a quick fix to a problem because it’s emotionally troubling, but the other side is pointing out that you’ll put yourself in the same situation again by doing the expedient thing, you really want to hear out both voices.

You also don’t want to get too clever, but that’s a topic for another day. Remember that your wit works for itself, not for you. It merely chooses to help you because it’s trapped in your gray matter.

Resolution

Slow down and listen to emotion and reason.

Conviction builds empire.

Don’t take credit for your own wit. If anything, it should take credit for you.