Ah, my self-confidence got a huge boost.
I really think there are a number of excellent candidates that post on this site. Does not one of them desire to be moderator? Its such a pointless position really.
I dont know. I suppose I will do it again for a short period of time if no one else steps up. It seems so self-serving though. I really have nothing to prove here. I havent posted a thing, other than this egomanical post in over two months. Surely someone else has a desire? I mean, I barely even listen to metal anymore, and I've become terribly opinionated and disagreeable, and god knows, my opinion of philosophy grows ever more contemptous of anything post-Kant by the day.
Although I still think the current moderators did a fine job, I still disagree with the direction this board was taking towards scholasticism (or the idiocy of so many juvenile threads). My only real desire is to see this change. Below is an excerpt from Montaigne Essays: Of Pedantry
The greatest scholars are not the wisest men." A proverb given
in Rabelais’
Gargantua, i. 39.]
But whence it should come to pass, that a mind enriched
with the knowledge of so many things should not become
more quick and sprightly, and that a gross and vulgar understanding
should lodge within it, without correcting and improving
itself, all the discourses and judgments of the greatest
minds the world ever had, I am yet to seek. To admit so
many foreign conceptions, so great, and so high fancies, it is
necessary (as a young lady, one of the greatest princesses of
the kingdom, said to me once, speaking of a certain person)
that a man’s own brain must be crowded and squeezed together
into a less compass, to make room for the others; should be apt to conclude, that as plants are suffocated and
drowned with too much nourishment, and lamps with too
much oil, so with too much study and matter is the active
part of the understanding which, being embarrassed, and
confounded with a great diversity of things, loses the force
and power to disengage itself, and by the pressure of this
weight, is bowed, subjected, and doubled up. But it is quite
otherwise; for our soul stretches and dilates itself proportionably
as it fills; and in the examples of elder times, we see,
quite contrary, men very proper for public business, great
captains, and great statesmen very learned withal.
And, as to the philosophers, a sort of men remote from all
public affairs, they have been sometimes also despised by the
comic liberty of their times; their opinions and manners
making them appear, to men of another sort, ridiculous.
Would you make them judges of a lawsuit, of the actions of
men? they are ready to take it upon them, and straight begin
to examine if there be life, if there be motion, if man be any
other than an ox—what it is to do
and to suffer? what animals law and justice are? Do they
speak of the magistrates, or to him, ’tis with a rude, irreverent,
and indecent liberty. Do they hear their prince, or a
king commended? they make no more of him, than of a
shepherd, goatherd, or neatherd: a lazy Coridon, occupied
in milking and shearing his herds and flocks, but more rudely
and harshly than the herd or shepherd himself. Do you repute
any man the greater for being lord of two thousand
acres of land? they laugh at such a pitiful pittance, as laying
claim themselves to the whole world for their possession.
Do you boast of your nobility, as being descended from seven
rich successive ancestors? they look upon you with an eye of
contempt, as men who have not a right idea of the universal
image of nature, and that do not consider how many predecessors
every one of us has had, rich, poor, kings, slaves,
Greeks, and barbarians; and though you were the fiftieth
descendant from Hercules, they look upon it as a great vanity, so highly to value this, which is only a gift of fortune. And ’twas so the vulgar sort contemned them, as men ignorant
of the most elementary and ordinary things; as presumptuous
and insolent.
But this Platonic picture is far different from that these
pedants are presented by. Those were envied for raising themselves
above the common sort, for despising the ordinary
actions and offices of life, for having assumed a particular
and inimitable way of living, and for using a certain method
of high-flight and obsolete language, quite different from
the ordinary way of speaking: but these are contemned as
being as much below the usual form, as incapable of public
employment, as leading a life and conforming themselves to
the mean and vile manners of the vulgar:
"Odi ignava opera, philosopha sententia."
["I hate men who jabber about philosophy, but do nothing."
—Pacuvius, ap Gellium, xiii. 8.]
We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience
and the understanding unfurnished and void. Like
birds who fly abroad to forage for grain, and bring it home
in the beak, without tasting it themselves, to feed their young;
so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there, out of
books, and hold it at the tongue’s end, only to spit it out and
distribute it abroad. And here I cannot but smile to think
how I have paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind
of learning, who myself am so manifest an example; for, do I
not the same thing throughout almost this whole composition?
I go here and there, culling out of several books the
sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have
no memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into
this; where, to say the truth, they are no more mine than in
their first places. We are, I conceive, knowing only in present
knowledge, and not at all in what is past, or more than is
that which is to come. But the worst on’t is, their scholars
and pupils are no better nourished by this kind of inspiration;
and it makes no deeper impression upon them, but
passes from hand to hand, only to make a show to be tolerable
company, and to tell pretty stories, like a counterfeit
coin in counters, of no other use or value, but to reckon
with, or to set up at cards:
"Apud alios loqui didicerunt non ipsi secum."
["They have learned to speak from others, not from themselves."
—Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, v. 36.]
"Non est loquendum, sed gubernandum."
["Speaking is not so necessary as governing."—Seneca, Ep., 108.]
Nature, to shew that there is nothing barbarous where she
has the sole conduct, oftentimes, in nations where art has
the least to do, causes productions of wit, such as may rival
the greatest effect of art whatever. In relation to what I am
now speaking of, the Gascon proverb, derived from a
cornpipe, is very quaint and subtle:
"Bouha prou bouha, mas a remuda lous dits quem."
["You may blow till your eyes start out; but if once you offer
to stir your fingers, it is all over."]
We can say, Cicero says thus; these were the manners of Plato;
these are the very words of Aristotle: but what do we say ourselves?
What do we judge? A parrot would say as much as that.
And this puts me in mind of that rich gentleman of
Rome,—[Calvisius Sabinus. Seneca, Ep., 27.]—who had
been solicitous, with very great expense, to procure men that
were excellent in all sorts of science, whom he had always
attending his person, to the end, that when amongst his
friends any occasion fell out of speaking of any subject whatsoever,
they might supply his place, and be ready to prompt
him, one with a sentence of Seneca, another with a verse of
Homer, and so forth, every one according to his talent; and
he fancied this knowledge to be his own, because it was in
the heads of those who lived upon his bounty; as they also
do, whose learning consists in having noble libraries. I know
one, who, when I question him what he knows, he presently
calls for a book to shew me, and dares not venture to tell me
so much, as that he has piles in his posteriors, till first he has
consulted his dictionary, what piles and what posteriors are.
We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust;
which is an idle and superficial learning. We must make it
our own. We are in this very like him, who having need of
fire, went to a neighbour’s house to fetch it, and finding a
very good one there, sat down to warm himself without remembering
to carry any with him home.—[Plutarch, How
a Man should Listen.]—What good does it do us to have
the stomach full of meat, if it do not digest, if it be not incorporated
with us, if it does not nourish and support us?
Can we imagine that Lucullus, whom letters, without any
manner of experience, made so great a captain, learned to be
so after this perfunctory manner?—[Cicero, Acad., ii. I.]—
We suffer ourselves to lean and rely so strongly upon the
arm of another, that we destroy our own strength and vigour.
Would I fortify myself against the fear of death, it must be at
the expense of Seneca: would I extract consolation for myself
or my friend, I borrow it from Cicero. I might have found
it in myself, had I been trained to make use of my own reason.
I do not like this relative and mendicant understanding;
for though we could become learned by other men’s
learning, a man can never be wise but by his own wisdom:
["I hate the wise man, who in his own concern is not wise."
—Euripides, ap. Cicero, Ep. Fam., xiii. 15.]
Whence Ennius:
"Nequidquam sapere sapientem, qui ipse sibi prodesse non
quiret."
["That wise man knows nothing, who cannot profit himself
by his wisdom."—Cicero, De Offic., iii. 15.]
"Si cupidus, si
Vanus, et Euganea quantumvis mollior agna."
["If he be grasping, or a boaster, and something softer than
an Euganean lamb."—Juvenal, Sat., viii. 14.]
"Non enim paranda nobis solum, sed fruenda sapientia est."
[" For wisdom is not only to be acquired, but to be utilised."
—Cicero, De Finib., i. I.]
