I quoted, last time, a writer I admire, who was in turn quoting a Nobelist in literature on how a certain devotee of Aristotle “had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life.” I don’t admire that comment. A life spent in devotion to the Philosopher may itself be well conducted. I don’t know whether it was, in the case of Mortimer Adler.
The sentence by Saul Bellow was,
Mortimer Adler had much to tell us about Aristotle’s Ethics, but I had only to look at him to see that he had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life.
I don’t know how this is not rank prejudice. It does recall the two exchanges that are all I remember from A Passage to India of E. M. Forster (my father once gave me a copy, but I don’t seem to have kept it):
“You understand me, you know what others feel. Oh, if others resembled you!”
Rather surprised, she replied: “I don’t think I understand people very well. I only know whether I like or dislike them.”
“Then you are an Oriental.”
“Don’t you think me unkind any more?”
“No.”
“How can you tell, you strange fellow?”
“Not difficult, the one thing I always know.”
“Can you always tell whether a stranger is your friend?”
“Yes.”
“Then you are an Oriental.”
In “A Note on This Book” – namely Strunk and White, The Elements of Style (New York: Macmillan, 1959; paperback edition, 1962) – E. B. White says that the final chapter, “An Approach to Style,” written by himself alone,
is addressed particularly those who feel that English prose composition is not only a necessary skill but a sensible pursuit as well – a way to spend one’s days.
I am glad to have lived in a time when this could be believed.
A novel or movie might portray an admirable or sympathetic figure as sacrificing everything else for painting, writing, or music. In Good Will Hunting, the title character does set his art aside for love; however, this “art” is mathematics. I heard a complaint about this from a fellow postdoc at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley in 1998.
Perhaps Carl Friedrich Gauss had nothing useful to offer on the conduct of life, at least to the likes of Saul Bellow, or for that matter William Deresiewicz. Nonetheless, by the age of 24, he had solved a problem that (as far as I know) had stumped mathematicians for two thousand years, even since the time of Aristotle.
Polytropy 