Any self-respecting Thesaurus of quotations contains 500 pages or more, and hence thousands of catchy phrases and epigrams.
By the looks of it, most of them come from either the Bible or Shakespeare, sources so venerable they are best left alone. Yet even the remaining adages run to thousands, proving that the world has never been short of men with the gift of the gab.
Most of the maxims ring true, as far as they go. But how far is that?
The question isn’t superfluous because aphorisms are often used in lieu of arguments. Defying gravity, an aphorism uses the weight of the author’s authority to fly up to the stratosphere of reason.
A chap says something like “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” and flashes a QED smile. Supposedly his case is made. Well, it isn’t. In most instances it would take but a few sentences to throw that case out of intellectual court.
I could cite many examples proving that, attractive as snappy wit may be, it can only function as an ornament of thought, not a substitute for it. For brevity’s sake, I’ll only cite one such because I use it quite often.
According to Thomas Mann, “all intellectual attitudes are latently political”. That’s a spiffy phrase that definitely contains a grain of truth. But it’s light years away from being the whole truth.
Political afflatus indeed shapes, or rather clouds, most modern attitudes. The qualifier ‘modern’ is justified because this is strictly a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. These days you discern politics behind pronouncements on sex, art, religion, family, cars, migration, style, architecture, education, medicine – well-nigh everything.
Mann’s aphorism is vindicated and stays that way until what I call the ‘next question’ is asked: Yes, but where do political views come from?
A materialist may say they are shaped by the outward circumstances of one’s life. Yet that’s like saying that two people with similar upbringing, education, spouses, jobs, bank accounts, houses and cars will see similar dreams in their sleep.
They may or may not. It all depends on their intuitive predisposition, which comes from a depth unplumbed by any Fraud and Junk (apt names my friend uses for Freud and Jung) – and certainly by no political scientist. That’s the problem with politics: it’s only skin-deep.
Intuition sits at the very bottom of one’s personality, and it can either swim to the surface where politics floats or dig below the bottom, trying to get to the core of reason. Both intuition and the reason it seeks are individual. They are aspects of one’s character, which makes them strictly private property.
Politics, on the other hand, is a mass phenomenon. Someone going in for it has to be prepared to pool his property with millions of others in some megalomaniac whip-round. All those people toss their political possessions into the same hat. But each has come by them in his own way.
I’d suggest that a person is born with his politics the way he is born with aggressiveness, loquacity or priapism. Over a lifetime, he may learn to contain those qualities, but they’ll never disappear. He is a junkie who remains an addict no matter how many years he has been clean.
One’s politics can be surmised from any number of tell-tale signs, none of which seems to have anything to do with politics. For example, tell someone that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion” and ask him if the statement is true or false.
A chap inclined leftwards will say ‘yes’ nine times out of ten. And a conservative will be as likely to say ‘no’, explaining that the statement needs to be qualified to become true. “Everyone is entitled to his feelings and thoughts,” yes, hard to argue with that.
But an opinion is feelings and thoughts enunciated, and the right to do so can’t be a matter of automatic entitlement. It’s contingent on too many circumstances: time, place, audience, the speaker’s qualification and so on.
Show me those two hypothetical protagonists, and I’ll show you how each will vote in the next general election, even though the original question ostensibly had nothing to do with politics.
The first man is given to reckless haste in forming imprudent judgement, which is certainly not a conservative trait. Neither is his readiness to accept easy answers to difficult questions. He is also a congenital egalitarian, for whom equality takes precedence over hierarchy and discernment – and even if it doesn’t, he’ll never admit that in public. In short, he is bound to vote for a socialist party, likely to be Labour in Britain or Democratic in the US.
The second responder thinks before he talks, proverbially looks before he leaps. His strong quality is prudence, which Edmund Burke identified as the uppermost conservative virtue.
He is suspicious of egalitarianism, which he sees as a construct far removed from any reality. Over his lifetime he has observed a hierarchy underpinning every walk of life, and he won’t sacrifice the evidence before his eyes to any contrived notion. Such a man is almost guaranteed to vote Tory in Britain or Republican in the US, although he may well be in for a let-down in both cases.
So, Herr Mann, every intellectual attitude may well be tinged by politics. But politics itself is a matter of intuitive predisposition that has more to do with temperament, character, culture and intelligence than with any conscious bias.
Politics is a way of rallying masses to a cause, whatever it might be. It relates to reality the way car advertising relates to car making. Which is to say practically not at all.
Surprised that such a meticulous and conservative thinker as Thomas Mann should make such a sweeping statement, I scoured the internet, unsuccessfully, for the source of this quotation. I wondered whether one of his characters had said it. That’s the beauty of a philosophical novel, as opposed to a treatise. A character may say something the author suspects may be true without making any supporting argument, to release the idea to see what happens to it.