Pick one.

The Buddha vs. Albert Camus:

"Schopenhauer was a lifelong bachelor who had few friends and many enemies, who preferred the company of dogs..."

"... to that of his fellow men and women, and whose own mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, broke off ties with him, telling him in a letter, 'I am acquainted with your heart and know that few are better, but you are nevertheless irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.'... [H]e became even more so as he grew older, driven by the belief that solitude was the price of telling the rest of humankind two unbearable truths. First, that it is better never to have been born; second, for those of us unfortunate enough to exist, to expect nothing but suffering and sorrow.... It is curious to think that his beloved standard poodle, Atma, knew what men and women did not know: that his master believed in the care and concern for all living beings...."

Writes Robert Zaretsky, in "Compassionate Curmudgeon/Why we must root ourselves in the real world" (The American Scholar).

Nil admirari.

Nil admirari is today's Word of the Day in the Oxford English Dictionary. I ran across it because, writing the previous post, I looked up the word "sunder," after David Axelrod had accused Donald Trump of "sundering history." It's an odd word, but it's not the most apt word. Sundering has more to do with separating than demolition. And how do you do either to history?

But I was glad to get deflected into the OED, because I'm finding out about Nil admirari: "The attitude of indifference to the distractions of the outside world advocated by the Roman poet Horace. Also: a person adopting this attitude."

Etymology: "classical Latin nīl admīrārī, in nil admirari prope res est una..quae possit facere et servare beatum, ‘to wonder at nothing is just about the only way a man can become contented and remain so’ (Horace Epistles 1. 6. 1).

From the Wikipedia article about the term: "Nietzsche wrote that in this proposition the ancient philosopher 'sees the whole of philosophy,' opposing it to Schopenhauer's 'admirari id est philosophari' (to marvel is to philosophize)."

Here's the Horace:

"You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you. No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself..."

"... least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying."

Wrote Arthur Schopenhauer's mother to her 19-year-old son. Quoted at the beginning of "How Adult Children Affect Their Mother’s Happiness/Plenty of moms feel something less than unmitigated joy around their grown-up kids. Make sure yours feels that she’s getting as much out of her relationship with you as she gives" by Arthur C. Brooks (The Atlantic). 

The two-century-old letter amazes not just for its mix of archaic diction and sick burns, but also because it violates some of humanity’s most basic assumptions about how mothers feel about their children.... Research suggests that plenty of mothers, while perhaps not as up-front as Johanna, feel some resentment toward their adult progeny, especially when the relationship feels unequal....

Researchers studying mothers have also found that almost 54 percent said their relationship with their adult child or children was ‘‘intimate but also restrictive,” that they had “mixed feelings” about the relationship, or some other ambivalent statement.... [T]he biggest predictor of interpersonal stress between adult child and mother was her affirmative answer to the question ‘‘Do you feel that you give more than you receive in this relationship?’’...

The next time you call your mother... ask her about something going on in her life that doesn’t involve you at all but that you know is important to her. Ask for details, listen, and then offer your thoughts.... Don’t take her for granted, and treat her with the attentive love she deserves.

"It is as if a meteor, of the sort that killed off the dinosaurs, has struck — and the hole keeps deepening."

"They’re going down 37 feet, 11 ½ inches, every bit of it through Manhattan’s famously stubborn schist. Recently they hit quartz, which may become the subterranean floors and stairs. The finished mansion will feature an underground theater and a recording studio, a Jacuzzi and a sauna, free-floating elliptical stairs (whatever that might be) and a wall of sculpture depicting trees, animals and birds of the jungle. But to neighbors whose lives have been upended over the past year — by the noise, and vibrations, and fumes, and dust, and traffic, and wires, and Port-a-Potties, and rats — another accouterment captures the spirit of the place.... It’s as if stone that sat intact and undisturbed for millenniums beneath what would eventually become Manhattan is shrieking, 'And all this for … a swimming pool?'... ... Gabrielle Fink, a 36-year-old violinist, reluctantly moved out...  But many others, especially longtime residents like Nick Jordan, a professor of philosophy at Queens College, can’t just up and leave. For one thing, he’s 80 years old. He has lived at No. 51 since 1971...  '"Noise" isn’t strong enough,” he said of the din, by which he must now read exegeses and grade exams. '"Mindless hell and chaos" would be better.' I asked him whether any of the great philosophers had something useful to say on what he’s enduring. 'Schopenhauer argued that the higher your tolerance for noise, the lower your intelligence,' he replied. So was he getting stupider?..."

From "That Noise? The Rich Neighbors Digging a Basement Pool in Their $100 Million Brownstone" (NYT). Excellent photos of the beleaguered neighbors at the link. There's also description of "block organizers" who want to "find a way to make sure this never happens to anybody again," but "napped as the project won approval from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Department of Buildings." I hate these cries for new law from people who don't use the law that's already there.

And, here, you can read Schopenhauer's "On Noise." Excerpt:

The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true — nay, a great many people — who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are also not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people....

"Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see."

Arthur Schopenhauer.

"Slamming doors, banging walls, bellowing strangers and whistling neighbors were the bane of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s existence."

"But it was only in later middle age, after he had moved with his beloved poodle to the commercial hub of Frankfurt, that his sense of being tortured by loud, often superfluous blasts of sound ripened into a philosophical diatribe. Then, around 1850, Schopenhauer pronounced noise to be the supreme archenemy of any serious thinker."

Yeah, that poodle needs to simmer down. 

Eristic.

"Eristic, from the ancient Greek word Eris meaning wrangle or strife, often refers to a type of argument where the participants fight and quarrel without any reasonable goal."

The aim usually is to win the argument and/or to engage into a conflict for the sole purpose of wasting time through arguments, not to potentially discover a true or probable answer to any specific question or topic. Eristic is arguing for the sake of conflict as opposed to the seeking of conflict resolution....

According to Schopenhauer, Eristic Dialectic is mainly concerned to tabulate and analyze dishonest stratagems, so that they may at once be recognized and defeated, in order to continue with a productive dialectic debate. It is for this very reason that Eristic Dialectic must admittedly take victory, and not objective truth, for its selfish aim and purpose.

Have you noticed any good eristic lately?

ADDED: I've discovered that what I like to do is something that's just about the opposite of eristic. I like to have conversations in which I'm looking for the truth and I don't care about whether what I'm saying is working to persuade anyone. It's simply a performance of truth-seeking for its own sake and with the full freedom to say everything without concern for whether it drives the reader/listener even further from what I think is the right answer. What's the Greek word for that?

Why didn't Scott Walker realize he was talking to a prankster who was only pretending to be David Koch?

Because Walker had never spoken to David Koch in his life.

That fact begins a Weekly Standard article called "The Paranoid Style in Liberal Politics." Toward the end:

As the assaults piled up Charles [Koch] couldn’t help thinking of Schopenhauer’s “Art of Controversy.” The German philosopher had noted that people who can’t win an argument through reason attack their opponent’s motivation. “I thought I was cynical enough,” Charles said. “But that was pretty shocking, to see what we’re up against, or what the country’s up against: to have an element like this.”...

To Charles, the call for bigger government was egalitarianism run amok. Liberals, he thought, fetishized equality of condition at the expense of personal liberty. “They cannot stand that some people are better off than others,” Charles said. “I think part of it fits Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: someone that’s miserable because he knows that someone, somewhere, is enjoying himself. He cannot stand that. And I think they all slept through Economics 101.”

"Althouse is probably live-blogging my remarks. I hope so."

Says lawprof Barry Friedman — in the middle of responding to the comments about his book "The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution" here at the symposium.

There's a lot of talk about puppies. Professor Jenna Bednar, a few minutes ago, said, characterizing the message of Barry's big book: "The Court is the People's puppy and the people hold it firmly by the leash." How does the Court feel that leash? That's a question. Can you answer it? The Court doesn't just do its own thing and say whatever the hell the law is. It must interact with public opinion and things evolve accordingly.

Another metaphor is marriage, which Barry quips he's an expert on because he's had 2.

He says: "Any good marriage requires confrontation." This has something to do with the Supreme Court. I'm sure you can extrapolate.

But in a marriage that works — which includes, presumably, his 2d — you derive the unspoken rules about what you can do without having to have a whole fight about it. He recites a list of things you can possibly do and get away with.

The only one I remember is coming in drunk at 2 a.m. with no explanation. One reason I can't remember anything else on his list was that I got distracted by how similar it was to something Andre Gregory says in "My Dinner With Andre":

You see, that's why I think that people have affairs. Well, I mean, you know, in the theater, if you get good reviews, you feel for a moment that you've got your hands on something. You know what I mean? I mean it's a good feeling. But then that feeling goes quite quickly. And once again you don't know quite what you should do next. What'll happen? Well, have an affair and up to a certain point you can really feel that you're on firm ground. You know, there's a sexual conquest to be made, there are different questions: does she enjoy the ears being nibbled, how intensely can you talk about Schopenhauer in some elegant French restaurant. Whatever nonsense it is. It's all, I think, to give you the semblance that there's firm earth.

But, Althouse, are you live-blogging my remarks?

Yes, yes, because I'm the one who says what blogging is... subject to the leash-tugging of traffic, linkage, and the commentariat.

"'Sometimes funny has a sexual character.' Sometimes? Nearly always, according to Sigmund Freud."

"The whole point of humor, Freud thought, is to get around our inhibitions."

Jim Holt — author "Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes" — reacts to the story of Judge Alex Kozinski, his personal (but on-line) porn, and his wife's defense of it ("Alex is not into porn — he is into funny — and sometimes funny has a sexual character.")

The very ability to enjoy such humor means that you must be investing a good deal of energy in keeping your animal side in check. You are at least trying to be civilized. A dirty joke is an uprising against the bourgeois morality that enslaves most of us most of the time (and a good thing too). We can rejoice in its defeat only because that defeat is brief and inconsequential. In fact, our laughter itself brings the little uprising to an end. As most of us have discovered, laughter's a pretty strong anti-aphrodisiac.

Holt goes on to discuss sex humor in ancient Greece and Rome, the Renaissance, and Shakespeare. (For some reason, there are were no paragraph breaks in his longish column, so you'll have to overcome your resistance to reading a long block of text.)

He quotes George Orwell:

"The modern emphasis on what is called 'clean fun' is really the symptom of a general unwillingness to touch upon any serious or controversial subject."

So should we be suspicious of people who don't laugh at sexual humor?

There are two other classic theories of humor in competition with his. One of them is the "superiority theory," propounded in various forms by Plato, Thomas Hobbes and Henri Bergson, which says that laughter is a way of crowing victoriously over the humiliation of others. This theory works well at explaining the appeal of ethnic and racial jokes, of jokes about gays and drunkards and henpecked husbands and lawyers and women ("Why do women wear perfume and makeup?" goes a classic of this genre. "Because they're smelly and ugly.") The superiority theory sees mockery, hostility and aggression at the root of all humor. Morally speaking, it puts sexual humor in a pretty bad light, making it tantamount to verbal rape.

"Verbal rape" sounds bad, but don't forget that comedians love to say "I killed" when they made people laugh. So that would be verbal murder.

I think some mockery, hostility and (verbal) aggression is a good thing. And it's funny. The real question is who are your targets? In other words, what ideas are you expressing? You deserve to be judged for that, not the mocking aggression per se. Judged... and then, perhaps, let off the hook. Because you were joking.

The other time-honored view of humor has a rather sweeter flavor, and a more intellectual one. It is the "incongruity theory," versions of which were held by Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, which says that we laugh when the decorous suddenly dissolves into the absurd..... One of the images on the Kozinski website that the judge said he planned to delete -- it was "degrading," he said, "and just gross" -- was a depiction of women as cows. That's pure superiority theory, and as obscene as it is banal. But take this joke, reputedly a favorite of George H.W. Bush: "How do you titillate an ocelot? You oscillate its tits a lot." Ostensibly, it falls into the category of raunch, with its use of the not-ready-for-prime-time word for breasts and its winking allusion to bestiality. But it is essentially sheer nonsense, a sonic jeu d'esprit.

That reminds me, nobody supplied the comic answer to the George Carlin question I typed up for you last night (when I was watching hours of the HBO Carlin marathon). Carlin has a nice mix of wordplay and sex, and sometimes it's very funny just because the expected wordplay isn't there at all and it's just flatly sexual. But that the dissolution into the absurd that Blaise, Manny, and Artie were talking about, right?