Face it, you can take most things at face value| MARK HUGHES COBB
Aristotle did not say or write that poster/meme line about an educated mind being one that can entertain an idea without accepting it.
It's probably derived, loosely, from something Aristotle wrote in his Niomachean Ethics, translated to English as: "... for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs."
What Vizzini said: "Have you ever heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? .... Morons."
Much like the mad Sicilian from "The Princess Bride," folks may have taken the Greek philosopher's words out of context.
The former seems pithy. Take in a concept. Give it a drink, show it around the joint. Maybe engage in light discourse, intended to plumb depths. By the second or third cocktail, you probably have ascertained whether you wish to take this further, or not.
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The latter is a bit more complex, as complexity so often can be, darn it. Much like faux-Twain quotes that circle 'round the online world, despite many — me among them — whining "Actually go READ Twain and you'll see that sounds nothing like him," these bumper-stickers will go 'round, in part because they sound almost correct.
What Aristotle seemed to be getting at — unlike Vizzini, I will not pretend to know more, unless it's funny — was to take things at face value. Don't ask a buffalo to do your taxes. Don't take a stepstool to a sword fight. Don't ask a taco to solve your woes.
Love a thing as it is, for what it is, for what it can bestow.
Maybe we're driving closer to bumper-sticker meme concision. As Shakespeare wrote in "Hamlet (abridged)": "Brevity is ... wit."
OK, yes, I stole that joke, again, from third-season "Simpsons" episode "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington," on a banner hanging outside an essay contest sponsored by Reader's Digest. Younger folks, ask a silver-hair what Reader's Digest did to literature.
Full credit to George Meyer, former Harvard Lampoon editor, who's also written for "The New Show," "Not Necessarily the News," "Saturday Night Live" and others. He's been credited with honing the long-running series' wit to its razor-like edge.
Speaking of essays, F. Scott Fitzgerald did pen about entertaining thoughts in his 1936 collection "The Crack-Up." Though what he said has been Internetly abbreviated and misquoted, it goes "... the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
For my friends who ask — at some later point in life, usually, when whatever courses they've set have turned into quicksand, lava, or just blank, featureless plain — how to come up with writing ideas, I shrug and look around.
Mime skills notwithstanding, I think they get the point. The trick is not finding things to write; it's learning what to leave out. Which parts are not the statue? Cut those away and what's left might become truth, aka beauty, aka truth.
Fitzgerald's lines went on: "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the 'impossible,' come true."
That's a bit more sunny, and closer to my own philosophy, though after name-checking Aristotle, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, Vizzini and Meyer I'm reluctant to place such a high value on what's as easily dubbed "coping mechanisms." Whatever you might call it, it's the awareness to accept life's dualities and contradictions, its flaws, limitations and disappointments, and still wake up ready to gift something to the day.
It's kin to the Superman question: If you were truly all-powerful, how could you rest? Seems to me that higher intelligence, which would as a function of biologically-based brains also be super-powered, must lead to empathy, if not derived directly from emotional attachment, then at least logically following from the reciprocity principle. What's good for one is to insure everyone in your family, your monkeysphere, your community, your society, benefits.
Brutus, from "Julius Caesar":
"There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."
So don't get skunked. Ride the tide. Go with the flow? Do unto others as you would have them ... unless you're a masochist. Or sociopath.
None of us are super, and few can stand as nobly as Brutus, so we fidget, adapt and adjust on a near-constant basis to what things actually are, not what we wish them to be. The world doesn't care about us.
Sol makes life possible. It warms our world, urges vegetation to grow, helps us cook up the vitamin D that boosts our immune systems and thus gives us more days on Earth to ponder this kinda junk. But the sun will sure as shootin' burn your butt, too.
If humans vanished tomorrow — pick your catastrophe: wildly varying climate; plague; nuclear acceleration — the Earth would go on.
It's as difficult for us to conceive a world without a Me — or a You — as it is to understand that four billion years preceded us here, and an entire universe.
So we look outward and inward, to science-fiction and fantasy, to science-science and its growing understandings of just how small and insignificant Earth is (unless of course it turns out we ARE the only intelligent lifeforms, in which case, good luck, Existence!), to philosophy and religion and mindless mindfulness and music and mind-altering substances and ghost stories and the like.
Since I was a kid, I've gobbled up all manner of things I knew most likely weren't true, and that never seemed to damage my ability to function.
Though the jury's still out.
For years, I yearned to travel to Loch Ness, journey to the American Northwest to tease out shy Sasquatch, clamber into the Himalayas and encounter a Yeti. While I may not actually have wanted to encounter one directly, the ideas of vampires and werewolves sent a thrill down my spine. Mostly werewolves, really, because let's face it, I'm more bestial than sophisticated, more Hyde than Jekyll, and just don't look that sharp in evening wear. My name spelled backward just sounds like a belch, and wouldn't fool any naive villagers in any sense.
Though I early on read Edgar Allan Poe, Harlan Ellison, Kurt Vonnegut, and even earlier fell under Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" spell, my feelings trended for a time toward the more misty sentimental hopefulness of Ray Bradbury. In his "Toynbee Convector," a man claiming to have traveled 100 years into the future grants an interview. The traveler shows evidence of a century-away Utopia, a looming upward "Star Trek" future, not the drab "Star Wars" slog of continual dueling over dust and religion.
Stiles, the traveler, lives to be 130, to see his idyllic visions come to pass. Instead of simply sitting back and waiting for the world to care, believers took to building, and re-building, exploring strange ideas about liberty, justice, and pursuit of happiness for all.
Stiles later admits: "I lied." The reporter with whom he shares decides to burn evidence of the deception.
We all might look upward, someday, if only we had leaders with vision, instead of knee-jerk regression to primitive in-fighting, waving cheap and dangerous weapons around in lieu of ideas, discussing opposition to a person or movement, rather than their positive, forward suggestions to address betterment for all.
We need a Stiles. We've got monsters.
Reach Tusk Editor Mark Hughes Cobb at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com, or call 205-722-0201.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Face it, you can take most things at face value| MARK HUGHES COBB
