For many years now I’ve been a great admirer of the very practical, real-world focused, philosopher Balthasar Gracian (1601-1658) whose work directly influenced Schopenhauer, Voltaire to some extent, and Nietzsche to an even larger degree.
Gracian is the master of the maxim and needs to be studied and discussed, rather than just read. So, we will discuss all 300 of his ideas and the concepts contained within, and this will be a challenging mental exercise.
Gracian’s focus was to instruct the reader about how they should both live and approach life. The approach recommended is not one of political correctness, but one of artful cunning without malevolence.
So, let’s go forth.
Maxim
Everything is at its peak of perfection.
This is especially true of the art of making one’s way in the world. There is more required nowadays to make a single wise person than formerly to make the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, and more is needed nowadays to make a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.
Your reflections both sublime and ridiculous are welcome.
Incredible!! Only half an hour ago, I was reading Chapter VII of Vol. 2 of “The World as…” and there was a mention of Gracián and his 300 maxims: I had neither heard of him nor his maxims. And now, I come to ILP, and there’s a thread on him! Good timing, Alder =D>
[Comment: I don’t want to peturb this thread from its natural course with this tangential post.]
As much as Maxim 1 was true when BG was writing, at the earliest advent of the modern era, it seems to be even more true now.
What I mean is the investment we make in time, attention, medical and other resources to produce each individual is now immense. Adulthood has been set back to the late twenties, if even then; college degrees are the new high school diplomas.
As much as this inflation has affected individual development, the price of sages has become forbidding: How many people are there worldwide would you say would be described by a majority as wise?
Maybe I’m cynical, but I bet less than a handful. A few at best.
The maxim, while pointing out that huge amounts of effort go into making a wise person, also states that everything is at the peak of perfection.
Gracian, as you will see, frequently points out that one must know when to act. To wait too long is not productive and neither is acting too quickly. So, we might conclude that the maxim instructs us to take things for what they are and not expect them to reach their zenith, because surely that would be asking too much in the modern complex era.
Knowing how to find the best in the materials and people at hand is wise.
if the maxim is simply “everything is at its peak of perfection”, i think i interpret that entirely differently than everyone here has.
i would say it means that when you put the pieces of a thing together, it is going to work exactly the best way that anything ever could work under those circumstances, in that position and configuration. if you want something to work better, its not going to unless you change what the thing actually is. you can do that by moving around its internal gears or teaching it meaningful maxims about life. but you cant expect the same machine to act differently just because you tell it that it isnt working perfectly, or that its wrong.
the part directly below ‘everything is at its peak’ in ad’s first post seems to be more accurately described by “knowledge and technology are always more advanced than they were in the past”, which would have been debunked when the dark ages backtracked to before the level of roman glory, and midievil scholars would have required less real thought and simpler religious indoctrination to create than comparable scholars of roman and greek times.
That certainly is possible and I have to say that I hadn’t thought of that!
I have the feeling though that Gracian might look at a an apple or even a store bought cookie and remark that that thing is at its peak right at that moment. It’s not that a better one could not be found (unlike Pangloss) but that one had better decide what one is going to do with that apple or cookie at that moment. So, the message may be existential.
determinism. no free will. everyone’s thoughts, opinions, decisions are merely the sum of their experiences. the decisions which most often lead to more happiness brain chemicals are the ones that are invariably pursued in whatever appears to be a similar decision.
everybody perfectly pursues exactly those decisions which have caused the most happiness in the past, to the best of their ability to compare slightly different situations. the only difference between people and what causes their decisions is which experiences they have inside them. often, people have experiences that include faulty reasoning, incorrect attribution of the cause of the effect, parental induced biases. the problem isnt that they are bad at making decisions, but that they are perfectly utilizing experiences that include bad reasoning and incorrect conclusions.
Of course, we do like to believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, don’t we ?.. One needn’t have to be Dr Pangloss to stay behind such an assumption, as Future Man neatly outlined its premises. Seeing the world through Gracian’s eyes, it’s thought that the mechanical gears of nature hold no regret for a ‘better’ structure, as that is perfectly outside the sphere of possibility. The top of a pyramid marks the epitome of the structure’s sequential development from the bottom bricks to the upper ones, and that’s exactly how Gracian probably views science and, to wider spectrum, culture.
Although, I would have to slightly disagree on Future man’s determined defence of determinism in his second post.
Gracian most certainly knew that and I’m sure he could be a staunch advocate of if he wanted to. However, he was also a Jesuit, which meant he was fairly familiar with Igantius’s Spiritual Exercises, that take up a lot of concentration and continence. Also, do not forget the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and the fact that he was, after all, a Catholic.
I do believe that it was Gracian who affirmed that “each is as much as he knows, and the wise can do anything”. Wisdom correlated with knowledge give the man that has virtually unlimited power and influence over the world. However, “knowledge without courage is sterile” - which is to say that the burden of decision taking weighs over one’s shoulders inasmuch as the steeming pot of desires tends to carry him up.
Think things over, especially those that are important. All fools come to
grief from lack of thought. They never see even half the things and, as they
do not observe their own loss or gain, still less do they apply any diligence to
them. Some make much of what matters little and little of much, always weighing
on the wrong scale. Many never lose their common sense, because they have non
to lose. There are matters that should be observed with the closest attention,
and thereafter always kept well in mind. The wise person thinks over
everything, but with a difference, most profoundly where there is more in it
than he first thought. Thus his comprehension extends as far as his
apprehension.
“Thus his comprehension extends as far as his apprehension.”
So this means his understanding is sufficient to undo and calm his fear and uncertainty about a specific subject or concept?
There is something of Taoism in your analysis. Wu wei, known popularly to mean “nonaction” is more accurately translated as “not forcing.” So the bow is released at the proper tension, the fruit is eaten when it is ripe, not before or after.
Character and intellect.
These are the two poles of our capacity; one without the other is but halfway to happiness. Intellect is not enough, character is also needed. On the other hand, it is the fool’s misfortune to fail in obtaining the position, employment, neighborhood, and circle of friends of his choice.
This is a short one but perhaps a challenging idea for people living in our times. I bet that we can all define what intellect is, but how many understand the concept of character. What is it and how does it create meaning out of the above aphorism?
call me a one note guy but id say intellect is the structure of your brain that allows you to interpret, record and recall experience. and your character is merely which memories you happened to run into during your life, and the effect that this specific collection of memories has on your behavior, which group of people you think you belong to, and the way in which you interpret future experience.
it is a fools misfortune to behave, pick friends and interpret future experience in a way that does not coincide with what you think your ‘character’ demands. but i think this misfortune is only caused by a radical change in character, a radical change in the summation of experiences that led to the decisions that led the fool into his misfortune. at the time that he got himself into that mess, he ‘was operating at the peak of perfection’ as far as enacting the decisions that his character would have wanted. what changed, causing him to become a misfortunate fool, was the fundamental structure of the components that make up his character. the fool is misfortunate because when he was choosing the external things that would satisfy his character, he was unable to properly determine what his character would change to want at the time when he would call himself misfortunate.