The Greatest Game Ever Played is a true story about an unaccomplished young golfer, Francis Ouimet, at the turn of the century and how he beat the world’s top two golfers in an 18-hole playoff at the 1913 U.S. Open.

Francis’s goal to be a great golfer is juxtaposed against his father’s more mundane ideas. Mr. Ouimet is a hard-working immigrant from the old school. His attitude toward Francis’s ambitions is summed up by his words: “Being a man means knowing one’s place in the world and making peace with it” (quote isn’t exact). Although the movie is somewhat sympathetic to Mr. Ouimet, overall his thinking is portrayed as peasant-like: backward, old world, and as un-American as his foreign accent.

The movie portrays Francis’s struggle and eventual championship at the U.S. Open as the American way. His battle celebrates initiative (trying to be the best), democratic social leveling (crashing through barriers that surrounded the game at the turn of the century), and individualism (doing what he wants, even against his father’s wishes).… Read the rest

Rule Number One: Don’t be a Nominalist

My three-year-old son Jack received a menagerie of thirty-some plastic animals at Christmas to go with the dozen or so he already owned. He played with his “anmuls” constantly, carrying them around in different containers (wagon, bag, box, hat) and setting them up in odd places, like the piano.

One night he came running to me, terribly excited, saying I had to see a surprise in his room. It turns out that he and his big sister, Abbie (5), had put the animals on the dresser. But not in a haphazard fashion. In Jack’s awe-filled words: (the “r” is soft in Jack’s pronunciation): “See, yions, tigus, cheeeetahs! El’phants, then hippos. Dogs. See, yitto (i.e., “little”) anmuls then big anmuls, see!”

In short, Jack, with Abbie’s help, had arranged all the animals close together based on species and roughly in order of size. The elephants and hippos were first, followed by the various big cats, then horses and zebras and similar animals like deer and antelopes, then dogs.

It was riveting stuff for ol’ Jack.

Gilson and the Problem of Universals

By chance, I had just come upstairs after reading from Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience. I had been reading Chapter III, “The Road to Skepticism,” which deals with the problem of universals.… Read the rest

J.D. Salinger hit the jackpot in 1951. At age 32, he published The Catcher in the Rye, a novel about an alienated teenager named “Holden Caulfield,” and it became an immediate bestseller. He was a success.

But the novel met with considerable resistance from parents who thought it was subversive. Perhaps more cutting, the literature establishment didn’t take the work seriously and leveled pointed criticism at it. Salinger grew bitter at the criticism, so bitter that biographers say it drove him into his famed reclusion in Cornish, New Hampshire.

I’ve always found Salinger’s bitterness odd. It’s almost like, through the alienated character of Holden Caulfield, he scorned the offerings of modern culture, but then became disillusioned when success within that modern culture didn’t yield up happiness.

It was an illogical response given Holden Caulfield’s perspective on life. Holden wouldn’t have cared about the haughty literature establishment.

It was also the exact opposite of Albert Camus’ advice in his 1942 book, The Myth of Sisyphus.

Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to roll a huge rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down, for eternity. But Camus said Sisyphus is happy because he understands his fate and understands he can’t avoid it, so he ceases to expect that he’ll ever succeed in getting the rock over the top. In other words, he negates all hope. It’s frustrated hope that makes the punishment hard, Camus says, so if hope is negated, the torture ceases. It might be absurd, Camus said, but it’s our lot in life.

If Salinger was like Sisyphus, or even like Holden, he would have written the novels without regard to what people thought. He would have received the acclaim without self-congratulation. He would have received the criticism without disillusion.

The Anti-Camus

When I was … Read the rest

Getting to know the most popular philosophy of the 20th century

Consider these popular subjects from the twentieth century:

Zen

Jack Kerouac

J.D. Salinger novels

Forrest Gump.

Each of them is soaked in the philosophical school of existentialism. There are many other popular subjects that are either tinged with existentialism or downright soaked in it as well, ranging from Taoism to psychedelics to St. Therese of Lisieux to the postmodern philosophy of Michel Foucault.

All these things have proven popular to the western mind over the past 100 years. The question is, why?

I believe it’s because existentialism might be the best individual response to our cultural condition.

What is It?

Experts often disagree about the definition of existentialism, but in general, the term refers to a type of thought that emphasizes existence rather than essence. Here’s how Will Herberg put it in Four Existentialist Theologians: “[G]enerally we can describe thinking as existentialist if it makes existence rather than essence the starting point of its ontological reflections.”

From ancient Greece through modern philosophy, it was widely accepted that essence took priority over existence. The general idea: in order to know something exists, you need to know its essence. Therefore, essence is prior to existence.

Essences are those things that define a class of things. If you find that thing that distinguishes one class from another, you’ve found its essence. For the class “elephant,” that thing might be its trunk. For humans, that thing is the rational faculty. Once you discern a trunk or a creature with a rational faculty, you identify the existence of an elephant or a human.

Essences, in other words, are fundamentally definitional. They define classes of things.

They can also bleed into, and become confused with, attributes that … Read the rest

In this threatening age of The Great Reset and leftist rage at four years of Trump, the debate between conservatives and libertarians seems almost quaint. It would be like Great Britain and Ireland fighting over Belfast as a huge armada of Muslim Vikings starts to land.

Still, the debate is real. The two sides have so much in common (channel F.A. Hayek) and yet stand so far apart (channel Ayn Rand).

It’s a debate (more of a discussion, I think) that has long fascinated me, in part because I consider myself conservative and libertarian, which I’ve been assured is like thinking Belfast ought to be Catholic and Protestant. I’m not even sure how different the two sides are anymore. In a better world, the differences are real, but in today’s world of the most powerful western governments ever?

I’m just not sure the differences are significant.

But the differences are still worth exploring, just like I spend hours exploring the lines between anarchism and libertarianism, even though neither is going to exist any time soon (barring a nuclear war).

If you’re interested in the subject, I recommend an upcoming debate:

• Prof. Nathan Schlueter, Hillsdale College
• Prof. Nikolai Wenzel, Fayetteville State University
• Mediator: Hon. Elizabeth L. Branch, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit

My friend Nathan Schlueter will be taking the conservative side. His friend, Nikolai Wenzel, will be taking the libertarian side.

It’s this coming Friday at 8:00 PM.

Odd day and time, that, but I plan on settling in with a large gin and tonic to enjoy the exchange.

Reference: Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives?: The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate… Read the rest

Josef Pieper (with a G.K. Chesterton kicker) teaches us the importance of leisure

It’s commonplace knowledge that many of our best ideas hit us in the middle of the night or in our first waking moments. While we are completely at rest, not obsessed with ourselves or our work, ideas come to us like a gift.

The twentieth-century Thomistic philosopher Josef Pieper explains this phenomenon in his work, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

Like most of Pieper’s books, Leisure is short but thick (don’t be deceived and think you’ll finish it in two sittings). True to Pieper’s approach, Leisure tends to be filled with sweeping statements that compress ten pages of truth into one sentence. This makes his books short, but also makes it necessary to read them slowly and deliberately, with many pauses and breaks.

Two parts

Leisure consists of two essays: “Leisure, the Basis of Culture,” and “The Philosophical Act.”

The first essay pushes the main thrust of his argument: Leisure, properly understood, is stillness — absence of pre-occupation and an ability to let things go. Leisure is also the end of all effort: We should work to leave time for leisure, not engage in leisure to refresh us for work.

As we cultivate leisure, we increasingly hear the rustling of reality (“only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still, cannot hear”). This ability to hear produces a sense of wonder, and this then leads us to engage in the act of philosophy, which is the thrust of the second essay.

As he proceeds with his analysis, he makes startling observations about leisure, the type of observations that tend to affect your thinking for the rest of your life.

For instance, in response to the notion that all knowledge results exclusively from work, … Read the rest