The Virtue of Magnificence (Re-Post)

 This is a re-post, slightly revised, of a post from 2021.

 Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV) distinguishes two virtues concerned with money: liberality and magnificence (megaloprepeia). Liberality covers every aspect of wealth, magnificence covers only expenditure, which makes the latter like just an offshoot of the former, but, Aristotle says, magnificence greatly exceeds liberality in scale. He notes, however, that scale is necessarily relative when we are talking about money, so concludes that 'greatness of scale' is really determined by appropriateness to context: magnificence is spending greatly in doing great things. As he puts it, the magnificent man is like an artisan, seeing what is appropriate and spending on it what is in good taste, focusing on what would be beautiful rather than what it costs. It is between stinginess and vulgarity; the stingy will harm the beauty of the result to save money and the vulgar will harm it by focusing on showing off their wealth rather than the beauty of the result.

He gives a number of  examples of the kind of things he means:

sacred embassy
votive offerings, buildings, and sacrifices
religious services
equipping a chorus
equipping a trireme (which comes up more than once)
wedding
receiving a foreign dignitary
diplomatic gifts and counter-gifts
furnishing of house
beautiful ball or bottle (for a child)

It is famously difficult to make complete sense of Aristotle's comments on the virtue. The distinction between liberality and magnificence is hard to make out, since liberality covers all matters of money already, and Aristotle's few comments about the difference -- essentially that magnificence is concerned with greatness and beauty in a way that liberality is not -- are not particularly helpful. It seems like it's a virtue only rich people could have, and Aristotle in fact flatly says that the poor cannot be magnificent because they do not have the funds for spending a lot appropriately. But he repeatedly says that the greatness involved is relative to circumstances, and the example of the child's ball or bottle raises the question of why the poor could not in fact spend appropriately on 'small greatnesses' like that. 

Aquinas has some difficulty with this; he always wants to give Aristotle the benefit of the doubt, if he can, but being Christian he obviously cannot sign on to the notion that there is a special virtue for rich people. Aquinas handles things by splitting up liberality and magnificence -- instead of being related, as Aristotle, seems to treat them, liberality is associated with justice while magnificence is associated with fortitude. Magnificence involves a certain amount of sacrifice and risk. Since the greatness involved is relative, it is clear that the poor can risk or sacrifice in reasonable and appropriate ways to achieve relatively great things.

This is an ingenious solution (and it has a nice symmetry, since Aquinas does something similar with magnanimity, another troublesome greatness virtue). But, while it's dangerous to try to correct Aquinas on the subject of virtues, I think we have room here for a better solution. There are two things that I think provide the materials for a solution:

(1) With the possible exception of the child's ball and bottle (which doesn't seem to be a typical result of magnificence), every example Aristotle gives clearly relates to the good of the city, and Aristotle at several points emphasizes the public nature of these things, that the magnificent do what is publicly honorable, etc. For instance, he explains that the reason the magnificent man spends lavishly on furnishing his house is that houses are public ornaments.

(2) Aristotle clearly characterizes magnificence as a virtue that is concerned with getting a beautiful or fitting result.

A virtue being concerned with beauty and fitting results is generally a sign of a virtue in the temperance family of virtues. So Aquinas's idea of splitting up liberality and magnificence seems sound; but magnificence would on this proposal be a virtue adjacent to temperance, not fortitude. The key point is not risk or sacrifice but beautifying, doing a beautiful job. But more than this, magnificence is concerned specifically with common good in a way that liberality is not.

In ancient Athens, there were taxes, of course, but for particular important expenditures -- like equipping a trireme, or important civic ceremonies, which in the ancient Greek world were all religious -- what would generally happen is that the Assembly would ask the wealthy to pay for them out of their own pockets. And the wealthy would do it, in part because the Assembly is not something you lightly say no to, but also because it earned them respectability, honors, attention, and, of course, good publicity for business. The magnificent man would be someone who, in providing some good for the city, would spend lavishly so that it was well done, but would not make it about himself or his own wealth. It's in this sense, I think, that Aristotle really means that the poor cannot be magnificent (although it is still a weakness in his account): it's not about the bare quantity, it's that, while the rich will regularly have the duty to pay for celebrations and triremes and the like, the city will never expect the poor to pay for these things, and it would be rather absurd for them to try.

But we can be more generous in these matters than Aristotle. Even the poorest of the poor will often spend well, to the extent they can, on a wedding or on hospitality to important figures or on religious services. And these are contributing to common good in their case as much as it would in the case of the wealthy. The poor widow throwing her two mites into the Temple treasury was giving a magnificent gift, relative to her means, to exactly the sort of thing that the magnificent man would. 

In addition, human beings are social animals, and by pooling our resources can sometimes do impressive things together that none of us could have done individually. Here in Central Texas, there is a set of famous buildings, southeast of Austin near Schulenberg, mostly, called The Painted Churches. In the nineteenth century, there were a lot of Eastern European immigrants pouring into Texas through Galveston. They were tight-knit poor laborer-communities, from Moravia, Poland, eastern Germany, etc. They wanted churches like they had known back home, but were limited by the limits of workmen's wages. So they pooled their funds together and built churches, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant as they happened to be. They were just ordinary wood and brick churches with steeples, like you find everywhere. But for the inside they hired wandering painters who were from Europe (and thus would know themselves what the inside of European churches were like) to paint and stencil them so that they looked like the great basilicas of Europe. The painters painted the inside of the churches on the inspiration of the European church interiors they remembered enjoying. The people couldn't afford the gold and silver, so they had wood painted in metallic paints; they couldn't afford fine marbles, so they had the woods painted in delicate pastels; wood and stone carving in any large quantity was prohibitively expensive, so they had the beams and panels painted to look like they were carved in intricate designs. Much of it is done so well that the eye cannot easily tell what is two-dimensional and what is three-dimensional. And they are magnificent.

(Nativity of Mary Blessed Virgin Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas)

Aristotle notes in a number of places that wealth lies more in the using than the possessing, and it is here that the significance of all of this lies. The existence of the virtue of liberality establishes that part of the rationally necessary use of money is in giving to those in need (which, as it happens, could be our families, friends, and neighbors as well as anyone else). And the existence of the virtue of magnificence also implies something about the rational use of money: part of it concerns what we all have in common. Money well used will meet your own needs, yes, and the needs of others, as these things come up (thus thrift and liberality); but money well used will also lavish what is required on making the whole community more beautiful (thus magnificence). And this is not a 'rich person thing'; it's part of the rational use of all money. This is what money is for: necessities, gifts, and community.

Music on My Mind

 

Jenni Varitainen, "Joku johun nojota". Joku johun nojata means something like 'someone you can lean on'.

Iustinus Martyr

 Today is the feast of one of the patron saints of this blog, St. Justin Martyr. From his Second Apology (ch. 13):

For I myself, when I discovered the wicked disguise which the evil spirits had thrown around the divine doctrines of the Christians, to turn aside others from joining them, laughed both at those who framed these falsehoods, and at the disguise itself and at popular opinion and I confess that I both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, Stoics, and poets, and historians. For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation impacted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.

The word for 'Word' and 'word' here is, of course, logos, which can also be translated as 'reason'. The mention of 'seed' is a reference to the Stoic idea of logos spermatikos, seed-reason, which in this particular case is our own partial rational participation in Reason itself; as he says earlier (ch. 10), "For whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Logos."

Fortnightly Book, May 31

 I recently noted that I had had Gustave Flaubert's Sentimental Education on my shelves for years, intending to read it for a fortnightly book, but just kept forgetting about it. This therefore seems a good time not to forget about it.

Sentimental Education: History of a Young Man is Flaubert's third published novel, and came out in 1869, when Flaubert was forty-eight. It was heavily influential on both French Romanticism and French Naturalism, and is sometimes said to mark the beginning of a new era in novelistic style -- emphasizing scene depiction over commentary, artificially maintaining a neutrality of description in ethical matters, deliberately hiding the author's role in telling the story. At the time of its publication, however, it was a failure, and while it's often hailed today as Flaubert's masterpiece, it seems to be considered less approachable than Flaubert's first novel, Madame Bovary (which I did for the Fortnightly Book fourteen years ago!). 

We will see, in any case. I am reading it in the Dover Thrift Edition. I don't know who the translator is. The note on the bibliographical page says:

This Dover edition, first published in 2006, is an unabridged republication of the uncredited translation, edited by Dora Knowlton Ranous, that was published by Brentano's, New York, in 1922. The Introduction by Louise Bogan is reprinted from the edition of Sentimental Education published by New Direction Books, New York, in 1957.

Remembering, Understanding, Loving

 This trinity, then, of the mind is not therefore the image of God, because the mind remembers itself, and understands and loves itself; but because it can also remember, understand, and love Him by whom it was made. And in so doing it is made wise itself. But if it does not do so, even when it remembers, understands, and loves itself, then it is foolish. Let it then remember its God, after whose image it is made, and let it understand and love Him. Or to say the same thing more briefly, let it worship God, who is not made, by whom because itself was made, it is capable and can be partaker of Him; wherefore it is written, Behold, the worship of God, that is wisdom. And then it will be wise, not by its own light, but by participation of that supreme Light; and wherein it is eternal, therein shall reign in blessedness. For this wisdom of man is so called, in that it is also of God. For then it is true wisdom; for if it is human, it is vain. 

[St. Augustine, De Trinitate, Book XIV, Chapter 12]

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

 Introduction

Opening Passage: The book has a frame including a 'General Introduction', and some poems and short stories attributed to Joseph Knecht, but really the beginning of the work is tucked within this frame and begins with the beginning of Joseph Knecht's vocation:

No knowledge has come down to us of Joseph Knecht's origins. Like many other pupils of the elite schools, he either lost his parents early in childhood, or the Board of Education removed him from unfavorable home conditions and took charge of him. In any case, he was spared the conflict between elite school and home which complicates the youth of many other boys of his type, makes entry into the Order more difficult, and in some cases transforms highly gifted young people into problem personalities. (p. 47)

Summary: The feuilleton was a newspaper supplement invented by French newspapers in the nineteenth century in response to censorship laws. There would be line drawn on the page, separating part of it from the main news, usually in smaller print, and this supplementary material would be devoted to art reviews, cultural commentary, gossip, serialized fiction, epigrams, jokes, reports of scientific discoveries, and the like. What newspaper editors discovered is that censors were less interested in this material; you could get away with a lot more 'under the line', including even political commentary if you dressed it up as a review of a play or opera. It is a good example of the ingenuity of human thought. But notice also that one of the things it does is relegate all serious intellectual thought to the same status as gossip columns and horoscopes. The 'serious story' is what avoids all serious comment, which could get you into trouble; the real intellectual life occurs under the line. But putting something under the line also limits how deep it can be; everything in the feuilleton is superficial, which is why the censors don't care so much, and under the line you cannot really discuss anything in the way it deserves.

The events of The Glass Bead Game occur well into the future; the exact is indeterminate in the story, but Hesse says elsewhere that he thought of the story is occuring at the beginning of the 25th century. The people of that time look back on us and call our age the Age of the Feuilleton. From their perspective, real intellectual life in our age is something we barely know how to do; it is an age in which everything of cultural and intellectual value was forced under the line and treated as not the real thing, but a sort of lark in which you are allowed some exception to the way your real life works. This is not to say that there was no intellectual life at all, of course; but it is hard to have any real approach to intellect and culture if your intellectual life consists  entirely of essays on things like Friedrich Nietzsche's relationship to women's fashion, or superficial surveys of historical topics, or crossword puzzles. (The sort of things, in other words, that are found in most newspapers and, for that matter, the internet, today.) Everything is just bits and pieces, nothing handled at depth, and amusement rather than vocation. All of this would likely be fine, if it were part of a larger intellectual and cultural ecosystem that was fundamentally based on system and depth and vocation. But when it began to be treated as the foundation of intellectual and cultural life, the result was world wars and many other terrible things. 

Enter the Glass Bead Game. Originally, it was precisely that: a game played with glass beads. It was developed in the field of music as a method for improving memory and improvisation. One player would call out some muscial bit -- a bar or a motif or the like -- and the other player would respond with continuation and variation. This call-and-response then began to be tracked on a framework with glass beads (like a very complicated abacus). Eventually this game caught the attention of mathematicians, who worked out the underlying mathematical theory for the game as it worked on the glass-bead frame. This mathematical theory turned out to be remarkably generalizable, and was taken up in philology, visual arts, and so forth, and while the Glass Bead Game continued to be played, the actual glass beads eventually dropped out; instead, people used the symbolic notations developed by applying the mathematics to different fields. And because the same general set of symbolic notations could apply to music, painting, sculpture, literature, and so forth, the game, while still showing in its general structure and some of its content its musicological origins, had long since stopped being played solely in terms of music. It became a game of point and counterpoint, of theme and variation, for all the arts taken together. The Age of the Feuilleton was over. The Glass Bead Game did for art and culture what the experiment had done for science and industry, and the explosion of interest in it was an intellectual revolution on the same scale the Scientific Revolutions and the Industrial Revolutions had been.

But all things come to an end. (One of the themes of the book.) In the case of the Scientific Revolution, experimental science raised field after field with intellectual advances, but at the same time, these things grew more and more remote from the ordinary lives of people. A game that could originally be played by anyone, to great general interest and excitement, became increasingly professionalized and nonprofessionals were pushed out, sometimes just by being outcompeted but sometimes by rather more forceful gatekeeping. Experimental science still retained its centrality in education, but the gatekeeping created a line between the science and the world outside, and the world outside began more and more to see science not as a common possession of humanity but as a thing to use for its own end, as a matter of investment and return, the notion of science for the sake of science being increasingly seen as an egghead quirk of scientists that you had to indulge to the extent -- and only to the extent -- that it went along with getting something useful. Scientists on their end became much less careful about the ways in which the expenses and difficulties and problems associated with their work burdened the outside world, which fed into a vicious cycle in which the world increasingly wondered why it was paying for all of this. At the same time, the success of the experimental sciences repeatedly led people to flatten intellectual life in order to force into the (perceived) mold of this or that scientifice success; all of human intellectual life began to be treated, not scientifically, because the discoveries had never been made for such thing, but scientistically, as if the experimental models were the reality and everything else (including actual human intellectual life) was just details. The result is a sort of decline even as experimental science continued to achieve great successes. 

This is all, of course, a feuilletonistic history. But the point of it is that as Joseph Knecht, the hero of the novel, enters the picture, the same pattern of decline is occurring for the Glass Bead Game, as well. There still are Glass Bead Game enthusiasts who play it as amateurs, but they are diminishing, and they are increasingly poorly regarded by the professionals, and the professionals are mostly found in relative isolation in the elite schools in the Pedagogical Province of Castalia, paid for almost entirely by the world outside, whose attitude has begun to move from enthusiasm to tolerance, and which is increasingly inclined to see the Glass Bead Game as an ivory-tower amusement for eggheads rather than a human activity valuable for all. It is also clear that the Glass Bead Game itself is causing an intellectual stagnation; once an immense field for creativity, it is flattening everyone's view, as they see all of intellectual life, every artistic field, as just what it is in the Glass Bead Game.

Joseph Knecht is a bright boy who does extraordinarily well in school and soon catches the interest of members of the Board of Education as having a promising future in the Glass Bead Game. Because of this he is sent to the top school in Castalia, majoring in music. He first receives fame by a series of debates with a fellow student, Plinio Designori, who is from a wealthy family who send students to the Castalian schools because learning about the Glass Bead Game stuff is what cultured people do; Joseph defends the Castalian way of life in the face of Plinio's more pragmatic and merely utilitarian view. His performance in these debates is a partial contributor to his first assignment when he graduates, to go to a Benedictine monastery and teach the Glass Bead Game to their small group of Glass Bead Game enthusiasts.

It's an odd assignment. The Catholic Church is very ambiguous about the Glass Bead Game; it has itself contributed some notable players, but also has been very critical of certain aspects of it. The Benedictine monks Joseph is sent to teach are very, very amateur. Nonetheless, a Benedictine monastery always has an intellectual life, and Joseph slowly develops a friendship with Father Jacobus at the monastery; Jacobus is one of the world's foremost historians. He also has a significant influence at the Holy See, and this turns out to be the key to why Joseph has been sent to the middle of nowhere to teach a bunch of amateurs things that are, to him, very basic. The Board that governs Castalia has begun to worry about its position with respect to the outside world, and naturally wants to make allies. The Catholic Church is currently in an upswing in its diplomatic influence and is also in many ways the major institution that has the most in common with Castalia itself. Joseph's handling of the debate with Plinio had shown that he had some skill as a sort of ambassador, and thus Joseph was sent to the monastery in the hope that it would be a first step toward overcoming, or at least getting around, the Holy See's standoffish skepticism about Castalia. This ends up being a wildly successful move on the part of the Castalians, since this is precisely what happens.

The success will lead eventually to Joseph Knecht being chosen Magister Ludi, the chief teacher, so to speak, of the Glass Bead Game. This is a role he will fulfill in exemplary fashion. But he finds himself occasionally uneasy. His colleagues don't really seem to grasp the precarity of Castalia's position with respect to the outside world. He will meet up with Plinio again, and come to the conclusion that Castalia did a disservice to Plinio in many ways. His familiarity with history, learned from the Benedictine historian, leads him to worry that Castalia and the Glass Bead Game are themselves becoming increasingly feuilletonesque. He himself has a creative side, writing poetry and short stories and music, that does not sit easily with the routines of professional intellectual life in Castalia.  As time goes on he finds that what really interests him is teaching the Glass Bead Game to mere beginners. All of this leads him to become the scandal of the age when, first of all the members of the Board of Education in Castalia history, he resigns.

In many ways, the Glass Bead Game itself is a more interesting character than Joseph Knecht himself. (Hesse's descriptions of it are certainly extraordinarily memorable, perfectly balanced to make it not quite clear how it works and yet perpetually intriguing at every point.) Joseph Knecht is just the point at which things come to a head. He is caught up in events over which he has relatively little control, and he becomes of interest mostly because he is both an exemplary Magister Ludi and the first person eccentric enough to understand that something is going wrong with the Game. Things could hardly have ever ended up entirely well for him; he has a personality that tends toward immersion, and failing that, immolation. But in a sense Joseph's life is itself a Glass Bead Game on a grand scale, a correlation of many cultural values across many disciplinary lines, into a unity. And in this Game he comes up with something creative. As his name, Knecht, implies, what the Glass Bead Game has begun to lose, and which needs to be reclaimed, is genuine service, the life and death of service to the world with which the Castalians are increasingly estranged.

Favorite Passage:

"Of course one should bring order into history," Jacobus thundered. "Every science is, among other things, a method of ordering, simplifying, making the indigestible digestible for the mind. We think we have recognized a few laws in history and try to apply them to our investigations of historical truth. Suppose an anatomist is dissecting a body. He does not confront wholly surprising discoveries. Rather, he finds beneath the epidermis a congeries of organs, muscles, tendons, and bones which generally conform to a pattern he has brought to his work. But if the anatomist sees nothing but his pattern, and ignores the unique, individual reality fo his object, then he is a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; he is using mathematics on the least appropriate object. I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our m inds and our methods to order reality; but first and foremost he must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of events. Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one." (pp. 168-169)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, Richard & Clara Winston, trs., Henry Holt & Co. (New York: 1990).

Dashed Off XIV

This ends the notebook that was finished in March 2025.

 

The best known truths are always amenable to metaphor.

Wisdom possesses in stillness what all other cognitive actions and state approximate in motion.

nest, burrows, and hunting territories as proto-institutions
-- they are materially the sorts of things, playing a relevant role in behavior appropriate for institutions, and could thus be institutions if formally recognized as such

Moral advice is obviously real, and its being moral, and thus is moral fact even if we assume falsely that moral counsels are the only moral facts.

The inability to find silver linings is a grave political debility.

It is common for people who have always had something to fail to grasp the significance of it.

People often confuse artifice-based (constructed) realism with anti-realism.

games as soluble-problem creation

All real persons are also possible fictional persons.

Pretty much everyone is sometimes better and often worse than they think.

"It is crazy to want what is impossible, and impossible for the wicked not to do so." Marcus Aurelius

"I am a rational creature, so I must sing hymns to the God." Epictetus

To be fully understood, arguments often have to be tried out in various ways.

We are not made sick by the presence of a virus but by what the virus does that impedes our bodily functions, directly or indirectly.

You need to develop and maintain minor skills in order to develop and maintain in major skills.

quasi-concordia, quasi-benevolentia, quasi-beneficentia as elements of relationship with a favorite book

All genuine benevolence requires a prior concord.

(concord -> benevolence) -> beneficence

The simpler the field, the easier it is to be an anti-realist about it.

French National Domain in the Holy Land: Church of the Paternoster (Eleona), St. Mary of the Resurrection Abbey, Tombs of the Kings, Church of Saint Anne

practical advisability as an indirectly moral concept

Sovereignty is a form of moral & juridical personality involving a right to legislate that is supreme in its jurisdiction-associated order.

All sovereignty is over people qua some X (as citizen, as tribal member, as creature, as resident, as territorial user, as subject, etc.), where X fixes order and jurisdiction.

A common problem empires have is that they end up training their own military opponents.

Law is a practical matter and heavily dependent on classifications, so it tends to fall out of a structure based on possible classifications of aspects of action:
(1) classification of sources of action: (a) individual statuses, (b) group statuses
(2) classification of circumstantial components of action
(3) classification of norms relevant to action
(4) classification of effects of action.

Document presupposes archive.

Practical inquiries impose standards of admissibility on evidence in light of the practical ends of inquiry.

To do justice to the true, the good, and the beautiful, one must sometimes reflect on the one, the something, and the other.

ens commenticium : ens rationis :: ens artificiale : ens reale

ens rationis: ens logicum, ens commenticium, ends ideale, ens palliolatum

"If I premise that my experience is not merely the production of the mental activity of my own nature; in other words, not merely a dream, in which you are my vision as I am yours, but in which the external as well as the internal has its share in my experience, then everything that is alike in our experience must bear a corresponding similitude in external circumstances." Oersted

No account of scientific discovery is adequate that ignores the joy of it.

"Light is the great proclaiming power of the world." Oersted

Evolutionary explanations often fail to grasp that many things are always happening at once.

weld, woad, and madder

The more intellectual a cause is, the harder it is to fit into a concrete/abstarct dichotomy, because its causal activity suggests both.

the integrity, substantiveness, and distinctiveness of discourse (e.g., of a fictional work)

Lv 19:33-34 and the Christian treatment of non-Christians who live in peace with Christians
-- much of Lv 19 can be seen as identifying specific forms, sometimes symbolic, of general conditions for being the People of God.
-- note that Ex 24:48-49 (cp. Nm 9:14) foresees the possibility of the stranger as participating directly through circumcision and PAssover, but only in becoming in some sense no longer a foreigner (cf. vv. 43-45). [Nm 15:14-16, 29, extends this to sacrifice.] Thus the 'resident non-Christian' may pray with us (sacrifice of sweet aroma), and shall not be barred from Eucharist (Passover) if he is also willing first to be baptized (circumcision), but must follow the laws on all of the these things. Nm 15:25-29 indicates that prayers for the whole congregation extend, at least sometimes, even to the non-Christian residing in the midst of the Christian assembly.
-- this certainly inclues the catechumenate; are there other categories (e.g., non-Christian spouses?)

to consider: bishops exercising divine authority per suffragium

the papal power of suppletio defectuum (power to provide remedies where the need arises from mere lack
-- related to the authority to confirm the brethren

Most of the good anyone does is in exchange for other good.

All explanation ultimately traces back to infinity.

Pleasure and pain are quite loosely correlated with survival and reproduction; they are relevant to them but also don't track them very tightly.

Every society has a mythological (imaginative), an aspirational, and an actual structure.

Reading is itself a kind of fine art.

We anticipate the wills even of people we don't know -- often badly, but inevitably.

Natural history fundamentally depends on the notion of goodness for a population of living things.

Mysticism is the hardest road to truth; it is the challenge of the climb and the triumph of overcoming it that is the attraction.

We trust most those whom we trust both from a recognition of their trustworthiness and from a recognition of the need to trust.

Every person projects a sake/behalf/cause qua person and bearer of value.

"Just as we would never see our face were it not for a mirror, so, too, we would never see our own inner life opposite us -- were it not for the mirror of art." Landmann-Kalischer

beauty as the value that reflects all other values

"The world is a collection of mutable things that are next to each other, follow upon one anotther, but which are overall connected with one another." Wolff
"The knowledge of the reason of things that are or occur is called philosophy."
"Philosophy is the science of the possibles insofar as they can be."
"If the reason of that which belongs to a species is contained in the notion of the genus, then things which we know philosophically are applied to more problems of human life than things which we know only historically."

To know many things, the human mind must first be wrong about many things.

Every liberty has a teleology.

"By *example* we mean a representation of something more determined which is supplied to clarify the representation of soemthing less determined." Baumgarten

Allegiance is not something human beings can deserve.

To the mission of the Church, we are all expendable; for the substance of the Church, we are each of infinite and everlasting value.

The very living of a human life posits some goodness to cosmos.

Comfort is an insatiably devouring god.

We should strive for what would be pleasing in a virtuous version of our society.

It is because we do not merely cognize but conceive that we can shape our judgments and reasonings.

Names are given by special fixation; it does not follow that they then only refer, nor even that there is anything special about their reference in itself.

'A new gunslinger comes to town; he's smooth-shaven, so we call him The Kid. The Kid is staying at The Royal Flush, having arrived by a riverboat, the *Far Horizon*. The Royal Flush is at the intersection of Pine and Red Oak Farm, which is where Red Oak Farm used to be. The Kid's actual name is Elwin, which means 'elf-friend'. He shouldn't be confused with the other Elwin in town.'
-- Any theory of names that cannot make sense of every sentence and proper name here is already wrong.

Theories of names often involve confusion of properties and predicates.

(1) Some beings are not real beings but rational beings.
(2) A being has properties in the way it has being.
(3) Quantifiers can be ampliated beyon the domain of real beings.
(4) We can reer to any being that can be an object of thought.

The aesthetics of sexuality can only connect to real sex by way of secrecies and privacies; this is one reason why pornographic cultures and subcultures so often seem weirdly sexless.

Never trust the feeling of empowerment.

'One person, one vote' obviously cannot apply to every person (people are not advocating that babies or juridical persons be given votes), nor can it apply to every vote. For it to apply, we must first coordiante the kind of person with the kind of vote. When we are talking about different kinds of vote (e.g., votes in Norway, votes in California), we change the persons to be consdiered; when we are talking about different kinds of person (e.g., citizen of Canada, citizen of Mexico), we change the votes to be considered.

People generally amp up public displays of sexuality to compensate for feelings of disorer, confusion, or even lack in actual sex.

The recognition of some sense of being 'self-made' is essential to the existence of a free society; and one notices whenever people attack the notion, that they are always trying to justify forcing people to do something.

Every instrumentalism is a realism about something else.

In ethics as in other things, unusual outliers can throw off our reasoning.

You will never find a democracy without fools.

patience as the maintenance of reserve forces

the integral, the real, the richly diverse

Genius by its nature makes use of lesser skills, and is limited or expanded by the lesser skills it has available.

Most politicsdoes not occur by persuasion, and most persuasion does not occur by rational justification.

"It is reciprocal action governed by proportion that keeps the city together." Aristotle

the prudent as that which tends to reasonable friendship in a way appropriate to friendship

All the evils of utilitarianism are tied to its obliteration of all consideration of the kind, mode, and order of means.

Jer 33:20-21 and the parallelbetween creation (physical nature) and covenant (social nature)

You get out of an educational institution what you put into it.

"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." Aristotle

Friendship is the foundation for shared good.