My Extra Virtues

simplicity, maxims, and jokes

Quillette today has a piece on “The Nine Intellectual Virtues” for our universities including “temperance, carefulness, respect, patience, charity, humility… docility… thoughtfulness… and courage.”

Which is fine, but I believe, as a believer in the Iselin cult of Real Simple, that we also need to keep things simple and fun. There need to be jokes, like the classic punch-line jokes developed by Jewish comics in the Catskills. And there need to be maxims and aphorisms. That’s why I keep a blog post of “Assorted Opinions, Maxims, and Aphorisms.” For instance, I created this one:

Nietzsche: I philosophize with a hammer. Me: No, Fritzi; you philosophize with the one-liner.

I’m reading a book about Nietzsche and the Germans, and I find that everyone from the “radical right” to all kinds of lefties to even traditional conservatives got something from Nietzsche. Why? Because Nietzsche is fun.

If you are a philosopher, you can philsophize forever writing about Kant and appearances and things-in-themselves. But I have made an aphorism:

We cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.

I asked Grok about this and, Yay Elon, it replied:

Yes, that’s a concise and accurate summary of one of the most famous (and controversial) claims in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy[.]

And then got more complicated:

Kant argues that human knowledge is fundamentally limited: we can never know things as they are in themselves (Dinge an sich or “things-in-themselves,” also called noumena), but only things as they appear to us (appearances or phenomena).

Did you know that Albert Einstein was reading Kant at age 13? La Wik:

At thirteen, when his range of enthusiasms had broadened to include music and philosophy,^[30] Talmud introduced Einstein to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant became his favorite philosopher; according to Talmud, "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him."^[27]

I have maintained for a while that Kant leads directly to relativity, do not pass go, but I had No Idea!

I have also started to wonder about the importance of jokes and humor, and I have decided that jokes and humor are really good as aids to memory. We remember better something that’s a little naughty and clever instead of something that is long-drawn-out and boring. Like those Jewish comics in the Catskills.

Plus, humans need fun and laughter. Life may be a Vale of Tears, but humans also like to laugh and have fun.

Maybe I get all this in my jeans. Because one of my Dad’s sayings was that he had a problem with men that had “absolutely no sense of humour.”