Category: Philosophy
Das Adam Smith Problem
The second set of advocates for the book [Theory of Moral Sentiments] I usually find in media outlets, sophisticated media outlets at that, or I hear it over lunch table conversation. These claims suggest that Wealth of Nations covers the commercial, selfish side of human behavior, while Theory of Moral Sentiments is an account of the caring, empathetic side, or something like that. I wish I had a nickel for every time I read or heard that contrast. Maybe it is harmless enough, but – and I don’t completely understand why — it kind of makes me sick. It is simultaneously an attempt to claim a bland centrist middle ground, to snidely distance oneself from capitalism and selfishness, and reduce Smith to a series of empty clichés. It is trying to be pat rather than insightful. It is trying to give everything its place in a manner that we can then safely ignore.
Just for a start, I view Smith’s portrait of human nature in Wealth of Nations as rich and multi-faceted, a piece of behavioral economics, in modern terminology, rather than narrow, commercial, and purely selfish. And in Theory of Moral Sentiments yes people are empathetic, and show sympathy for others, but they are often caring in…pretty narrow and selfish ways. I just don’t think the “each book carves out its own sphere” understanding of the pair works very well.
My biggest takeaway from TMS is that humans beings make evaluations, including sympathetic evaluations but not only, based on local rather than global information. They put a lot of weight on what is right before their eyes and neglect the bigger picture. The very opening passage of TMS expresses how we can understand the emotions of others only through our own. We cannot look around corners to understand other minds directly, so we make inferences from our own experience. Smith demonstrates and then demonstrates that point again throughout the book.
That is a passage from my generative book, written by me, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does It Matter?
Ross Douthat, telephone!
In the ancient city of Exeter, three women were hanged for practicing witchcraft in the late 17th century, the last of such executions in England. Now, merely a short walk from where the hangings occurred, the University of Exeter will offer a postgraduate degree in magic and occult science, which the school says is the first of its kind at a British university.
Prof. Emily Selove, the head of the new program and an associate professor in medieval Arabic literature, said the idea for the degree, which will be offered starting in September 2024, came out of the recent surge in interest in the history of witchcraft and a desire to create a space where research on magic could be studied across academic fields.
Coursework will include the study of Western dragons in lore, literature and art; archaeology theory; the depiction of women in the Middle Ages; the practice of deception and illusion; and the philosophy of psychedelics. Through the lenses of Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, lecturers will explore how magic has influenced society and science.
Christina Oakley Harrington, a retired academic of medieval history and the founder of Treadwell’s, a London bookstore specializing in literature on magic and spiritualism, said that many witches she knew were talking about the degree program, announced last week, and were thinking about enrolling.
Here is more from the NYT. The school has received hundreds of inquiries in the last few days.
Some observations on universities and recent outrages
1. I feel stupid and unnecessary simply piling on with the usual observations and criticisms. Nonetheless they are mostly deserved, for a varying mix of administrators, faculty, and students.
2. The real black-pill is to realize that the structural equilibria behind the outrages also play a role in more usual affairs. Ultimately these cannot be entirely “segregated” incidents. Through invisible hand mechanisms, there is too much bias and too much groupthink conformity, even in the evaluation of ordinary scientific propositions.
3. This is true for the economics profession as well, though few will tell you this. They won’t tell you because they are the ones doing it, though often unintentionally or with genuine motives. They are laying bricks in the edifice of intellectual conformity, if only through what they do not talk about.
3b. I don’t think GMU economics differs in kind here, so politically speaking the situation is symmetric with respect to bias. Nonetheless mainstream policy views are far more prevalent than GMU-type policy views, so the actual net bias in practice is very much in the [fill in the blank ] direction. (What should I call it? The “Democratic Party direction”? That doesn’t seem quite right, but it is the closest descriptor I have found. Perhaps “the Democratic Party direction but passed through some intellectualizing filters”?) If you really think there are enough checks and balances in place to prevent this bias and conformity and lack of self-awareness from arising, I hope the recent outrages have black-pilled you just a bit.
4. Those who perform the outrageous acts of commission or omission are not usually evil people, just as most Irish-American IRA supporters in America were not evil people. Very often their failings stem from a mix of narcissism, mood affiliation, and fail to think through their professed views (perhaps they are indeed evil from a Randian point of view?). They frame political issues in personal, emotional terms, namely which values ought to be elevated (e.g., “sympathy for victimhood”), and that framing determines their response to daily events. Since their views on the personal and emotional side are held so strongly, it simply feels to them that they are right, even when they are glorifying groups and cultures that currently are failing badly and also performing some very bad and evil acts. They get caught up in such glorifications, including through the medium of apologetics, and through the other twists and turns they need to make to sustain their intellectual positions, even if they are not fundamentally malevolent as human beings.
I think about twenty percent of “the outrageous ones in academia” genuinely have evil, malevolent views, the rest are victims of their narcissistic mood affiliation.
4b. Keep in mind the eighty percent often have a deeper sense than you do of the humanity and vividness of the groups and cultures that currently are failing badly. That makes them all the more convinced that they are right and you are wrong. They can indeed feel that you do not “know what is going on.” In the meantime, you should try to acquire that deeper sense. As it stands, there is a pretty good chance you don’t have it, and that means you are deficient too. That is your own brand of narcissistic mood affiliation.
5. If you hear someone proclaiming a strong distinction between their “scientific views” and their “personal views,” usually they are in effect saying they don’t want their underlying “actual views on net” much challenged. It is fine to proclaim agnosticism about areas you don’t do research in, but then you should actually be agnostic about the areas you don’t do research in. I have never met such a person. Unwillingness to recognize these bad practices is a fundamental problem in academic economics discourse today. It cloaks so many of the current vices under the ostensible mantle of science.
6. The current backlash against academia is likely to remove or dampen the most egregious commissions and omissions on display, as we recently have been witnessing them, but without improving the underlying incentive structure more generally. Academics will more likely put on a better face, but without much reducing their biases on net. It might end up that such biases become more invisible and harder to detect and root out.
Have a nice day!
What should I ask John Gray?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. Here is from Wikipedia:
John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is an atheist.
Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.
John has a new book coming out The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. So what should I ask him?
Blast from the past, SBF edition
AUSA: What did the defendant you about risk?
Ellison: He said it was OK if positive EV, expected value. He said he was willing to take large coin flips – he talked about being willing to flip a coin & destroy the world, as long as a win would make it twice as good— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) October 10, 2023
Context here.
My Conversation with Ada Palmer
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Ada Palmer is a Renaissance historian at the University of Chicago who studies radical free thought and censorship, composes music, consults on anime and manga, and is the author of the acclaimed Terra Ignota sci-fi series, among many other things.
Tyler sat down with Ada to discuss why living in the Renaissance was worse than living during the Middle Ages, how art protected Florence, why she’s reluctant to travel back in time, which method of doing history is currently the most underrated, whose biography she’ll write, how we know what old Norse music was like, why women scholars helped us understand Viking metaphysics, why Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist is an interesting work, what people misunderstand about the inquisition(s), why science fiction doesn’t have higher social and literary status, which hive she would belong to in Terra Ignota, what the new novel she’s writing is about, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: De Sade — where does that come from? What are the influences on de Sade as a writer?
PALMER: Thomas Aquinas. No, lots and lots of things, but he’s very interested in the large philosophical milieu in the period. Remember that the 18th century is a moment when the clandestine bookshop is a major, major thing. And if anyone enjoys and is interested in the history of censorship and clandestine publishing, I can’t recommend enough the work of Robert Darnton, a brilliant, brilliant historian of clandestine literature.
But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.
The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things. So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things. But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements. It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time. They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.
De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality. What are the ethics of hurting each other? Why do we feel that way about hurting each other? What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them? They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being. What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?
I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right? One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.
Interesting throughout.
It is the poor who are lonely (on average)
Lower-income people are more lonely
Jiska Cohen-Mansfield did a literature review with Haim Hazan, Yaffa Lerman, and Vera Shalom of the statistical correlates of loneliness in older adults and found that being low-income is a strong correlate of loneliness. You see the same thing in surveys of middle-aged and elderly Portuguese people, in the Nova Scotia Quality of Life Survey, and in Eastern Europe.
Michelle Lim, Robert Eres, Shradha Vasan have the interesting finding that low income predicts loneliness not only on the individual level but also that “living in poorer neighborhoods” is associated with loneliness.
Sometimes scholarly literatures feature big disputes, or at least nuanced disputes, but in this case there seems to be no dispute at all: loneliness is associated with lower income and thus probably not caused by big houses or lack of huts. I also think it’s notable that at least among rich countries, loneliness seems higher in the poorer (or perhaps “less rich”) ones like Greece and Italy than in the United States and Switzerland.
The low rates of loneliness in egalitarian Sweden and Denmark, in particular, suggest that having more money pretty literally leads to less loneliness. Note as well that while the United States has a somewhat threadbare welfare state, this is data for senior citizens who do enjoy universal health care in the United States and a basic income via Social Security.
It may be, in other words, that being able to afford to do more leisure activities is a significant protector against loneliness. You go do more stuff and you make more friends. Or you have more opportunity to maintain your relationship with friends because you can afford to hang out and do stuff. I don’t think the exact nature of the causal relationship is clear from the studies that I’ve seen, but it bears more examination, especially because a lot of people seem to intuitively spin out to “paradoxical” accounts of loneliness that don’t seem well-supported.
That is from Matt Yglesias ($).
*Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy*
That is the new book by Costin Alamariu, who also has self-identified as the very famous BAP. It is a published version of his Yale doctoral dissertation on political theory. It has been selling very well.
It still comes across as a doctoral thesis, but I feel any reviewer should excuse the unusual modes of presentation. The doctoral thesis of BAP is going to come out, one way or the other, and better something than nothing.
I am more worried that the main claims are a mix of not true and also too bold. Take the opening sentence — “The sexual market is the pinnacle of every other market.”
In contrast, I find it odd how little of contemporary society revolves around sex and breeding, relative to what a reading of Darwin might predict. You might feel, a’la Hanson, that so many of our social proclivities evolved from initially sexual and mating impulses, but how autonomous they have become! People spend so much time not having sex. Fertility rates are plummeting, and that is at best a marginal political topic. Rich CEOs very often utterly fail to create the harems that some might be expecting. If there is a missing figure in this book it is Adam Smith and his TMS, who can explain so much of our social world with only minimal reference to sex.
Or take this sentence, again from early on: “Who wins in the sexual market as it is formed in a particular society, who gets to breed, is closely related, nearly identical to the question of how the next generation in that society is to be constituted.”
That seems obviously false. There is simply a massive influence through socialization, and much of that is quite separate from the roles people may or may not have as “breeders.” For the most talented, breeding in fact might be a highly inefficient way to influence the world’s broader future. Intermediary institutions are systematically missing from the narrative of this book, so already the stage is set for everything to be darker than it needs to be, and for nature to have a stronger role than it ought to.
In any case it is hard to stay on the track of this argument, as the book is sprawling and repeatedly starts over again with new building blocks. Perhaps the actual underlying belief here (see p.45) is that the Western intellectual class is boring and decrepit? (Compared to what? Has the author spent too much time at Yale? It never has been easier to learn real stuff.)
We are led down paths of Nietzsche, Strauss, decaying political regimes, Pindar, and the ancient Greek world. Frazer enters with the Golden Bough. What I like best in the author is his willingness to throw himself into these worlds with convincing abandon. What I like least is how little space is carved out for morality, or for the view that there is still plenty of progress in the world, and that there is a broadly common intersubjective judgment that some states of affairs are better than others. I long for the Masons, and chatter about Hiram the Master Builder — there is a reason why ancient Greek philosophy no longer fits our world. The simple truths of a suburban real estate developer, and the spouse and kids and dog back home, are swept under the rug.
The truly dark move would be to argue that nature must be violent, that man cannot remove himself from nature, and thus to flirt with the fascist view that violence amongst humans must be acceptable as well. And, in this take, all of our moralities are phony adjuncts to the desire to breed. But the exposition is somehow too winding and too replete with fresh turns for those issues to surface in a meaningful way. Maybe some would argue they emerge from the Straussian muck? I would have no objection to seeing them addressed directly, as surely the author at current margins is not afraid of additional cancellation.
Would more adherence to the hypothesis testing methods of the economist have done Alamariu some good?
I do agree with his view that Nietzsche was more sympathetic to Christianity than is usually realized. The expositions and interpretations of Nietzsche probably are the best part of the book.
By the end we are given a new conclusion: “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.” On that I can agree, but a simple libertarianism would have gotten us there more easily. Alamariu can’t quite bring himself to make this conclusion either an empirical claim (too little actual hard evidence), or a logical claim (too many other variables in the model), and so it continues to hover uncomfortably in between, being put on the table with lots of drama but never receiving actual validation.
There is definitely material of interest in here, but it remains a book of its time. Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.
BAP once wrote: “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…” For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.
My excellent Conversation with Lazarus Lake, ultra-marathons
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
Lazarus Lake is a renowned ultramarathon runner and designer. His most famous creation (along with his friend Raw Dog) is the Barkley Marathons, an absurdly difficult 100-mile race through the Tennessee wilderness that only 17 people have ever finished in its nearly 30-year existence.
]Tyler and Laz discuss what running 100 miles tells you about yourself that running 26 miles does not, why so many STEM professionals do ultramarathons, which skill holds people back the most, why his entrance fee is no more or less than $1.60, the importance of the Barkley’s opaque application process, how much each race costs to mount, whether he sees a decline in stoicism and inner strength in America, what accounting taught him about running, which books influenced him the most, who’s going to win the NBA title next year, how he’s coping with increasing fame, the competition he’s most focused on now, and more.
And one excerpt:
COWEN: Of all of those skills, which is the most scarce? Which holds people back the most, apart from just the running and the endurance? What are they most likely to screw up?
LAKE: I think these days, navigation is a bigger problem than it used to be because people have become dependent upon GPS. If you don’t use part of your brain, it withers. If you’re not accustomed to knowing, in your head, where you are and just listening for a little voice to tell you when to turn next, it’s something of a problem because they don’t get to take GPS.
COWEN: They literally end up lost in the woods, some people.
LAKE: It happens.
COWEN: What happens to them then? They stay there for the rest of their lives? They wander slowly back to civilization, or . . . What becomes of them? They send out a call for help?
LAKE: If they don’t find their way out in a couple of days, we’ll go look for them. Usually, they will. So far, they’ve always found their way out.
COWEN: That’s the incentive.
LAKE: Sometimes they wander around for an extended period of time lost, but that’s what they signed up for. They’re on their own. All the electronics and all the conveniences of modern life are gone, and they just rely on themselves.
And:
COWEN: How did carrying bodies to the morgue influence your subsequent life?
LAKE: [laughs] How did you know I did that?
As I’ve said before, CWT guests who do not have a college degree are better on average (in equilibrium).
*How to Know a Person*
The author is David Brooks, and the subtitle is The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. I think of it as a book on how to appreciate others, even if you do not necessarily deeply know them, which is slightly different from David’s subtitle. (Am I too skeptically Freudian when it comes to “knowing people”?) An excellent book, I read it straight through, and I view it as a milestone in David’s career. Does that mean I appreciate him? Know him even? Maybe just the former!
Due out October 24, you can pre-order here.
As I wrote to a friend: “If those who needed it would heed it, it would be one of the most useful books.” The rest is up to you.
The shaming of one-parent families
Matt Yglesias writes:
…(continue to be confused by the widespread claim that the elites won’t tell you about this idea)
Matt is referring to the two-parent family and the notion that elites will (after some point) lead fairly culturally conservative lives, but preach a more outgoing, tolerant, liberal morality at the social level, a morality which “the lower classes” perhaps cannot handle. But do the elites in fact do that? Do the elites fail to tell the “lower classes” about the virtues of their (eventual) culturally conservative lifestyles?
I view the issue in terms of shame. In an earlier America, and indeed in many other societies in world history, there has been a certain amount of shame surrounding single parent families. I don’t view the Left as very willing to shame along this dimension. It does not fit their basic worldview, and furthermore single-parent women are such loyal Democratic voters it would be electorally counterproductive. So the net influence of the Left is to limit the amount of shame surrounding single-parent families.
Now to be fair, I think the Right wing shames on this issue much less than it used to. Some of that may be the Trump thing, some may be the rise of the “post-religious Right,” and some may be a simple recognition that such shaming has become counterproductive. It does not have a critical mass of social support behind it, not any more. But some significant segment of the Right wishes we once again could have a world where such shaming had real effect.
This point is perhaps easiest to see with suicide. Does the Left “refuse to tell people that suicide is bad”? Of course not. But does the Left shame those who commit suicide? If they do, I never see that on Twitter. Instead I see lots of sympathy and sorrow. But in traditional Christianity suicide is seen as a sin. Is that latter approach better? I don’t know! But I see people choosing their stances on this issue using mood affiliation, rather than obsessing over the data. I would in fact like to know whether shaming suicide (or how about bringing the shame upon the entire family?) limits the number of suicides.
The “elite Democrats” of course will shame on a large number of other issues, just not on those ones.
If you ever want to know what is going on with a particular issue, start by looking at who is willing to shame what, or not.
My Conversation with the excellent Jerusalem Demsas
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is the episode summary:
In this special episode, Tyler sat down with Jerusalem Demsas, staff writer at The Atlantic, to discuss three books: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, and Of Boys and Men by Richard V. Reeves.
Spanning centuries and genres and yet provoking similar questions, these books prompted Tyler and Jerusalem to wrestle with enduring questions about human nature, gender dynamics, the purpose of travel, and moral progress, including debating whether Le Guin prefers the anarchist utopia she depicts, dissecting Swift’s stance on science and slavery, questioning if travel makes us happier or helps us understand ourselves, comparing Gulliver and Shevek’s alienation and restlessness, considering Swift’s views on the difficulty of moral progress, reflecting on how feminism links to moral progress and gender equality, contemplating whether imaginative fiction or policy analysis is more likely to spur social change, and more.
An actual conversation! This one is difficult to excerpt, and unlike many I suspect it is better to listen than to read the transcript. Nonetheless here is one short excerpt:
DEMSAS: Yes. The only walls on the anarchist planet [in The Dispossessed] are the ones that surround the space travel, the launching pad or whatever it is. That’s something that’s said very early on, but then you discover throughout the book how much there are all of these other “invisible walls” that he’s discovering. That’s made very explicit at times, sometimes maybe too explicit. [laughs] But I think it’s also a lesson in how much you have to have an other to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself.
He’s alone for a really long time, and when he’s doing his studies at the beginning or in the middle of the book, and he can’t get these scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to — it’s when he starts interacting with other people and rebuilding those bonds with other humans that you do actually get these breakthroughs. I think that’s also another point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is important.
Recommended.
Misandry
John Tierney lets loose in a well-researched piece:
Scholars, journalists, politicians, and activists will lavish attention on a small, badly flawed study if it purports to find bias against women, but they’ll ignore—or work to suppress—the wealth of solid research showing the opposite. Three decades ago, psychologists identified the “women-are-wonderful effect,” based on research showing that both sexes tended to rate women more positively than men. This effect has been confirmed repeatedly—women get higher ratings than men for intelligence as well as competence—and it’s obvious in popular culture.
“Toxic masculinity” and “testosterone poisoning” are widely blamed for many problems, but you don’t hear much about “toxic femininity” or “estrogen poisoning.” Who criticizes “femsplaining” or pretends to “believe all men”? If the patriarchy really did rule our society, the stock father character in television sitcoms would not be a “doofus dad” like Homer Simpson, and commercials wouldn’t keep showing wives outsmarting their husbands. (When’s the last time you saw a TV husband get something right?) Smug misandry has been box-office gold for Barbie, which delights in writing off men as hapless romantic partners, leering jerks, violent buffoons, and dimwitted tyrants who ought to let women run the world.
Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.
The education establishment has obsessed for decades about the shortage of women in some science and tech disciplines, but few worry about males badly trailing by just about every other academic measure from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time boys finish high school (if they do), they’re so far behind that many colleges lower admissions standards for males—a rare instance of pro-male discrimination, though it’s not motivated by a desire to help men. Admissions directors do it because many women are loath to attend a college if the gender ratio is too skewed.
Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.
Read the whole thing.
Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time?
I’ve been reading and rereading biographies of Bach lately (for some podcast prep), and it strikes me he might count as the greatest achiever of all time. That is distinct from say regarding him as your favorite composer or artist of all time. I would include the following metrics as relevant for that designation:
1. Quality of work.
2. How much better he was than his contemporaries.
3. How much he stayed the very best in subsequent centuries.
4. Quantity of work.
5. Peaks.
6. Consistency of work and achievement.
7. How many other problems he had to solve to succeed with his achievement. For Bach, this might include a) finding musical manuscripts, b) finding organs good enough to play and compose on, c) dealing with various local and church authorities, d) migrating so successfully across jurisdictions, e) composing at an impossibly high level during the four years he was widowed (with kids), before remarrying.
8. Ending up so great that he could learn only from himself.
9. Never experiencing true defeat or setback (rules out Napoleon!).
I see Bach as ranking very, very high in all these categories. Who else might even be a contender for greatest achiever of all time? Shakespeare? Maybe, but Bach seems to beat him for relentlessness and quantity (at a very high quality level). Beethoven would be high on the list, but he doesn’t seem to quite match up to Bach in all of these categories. Homer seems relevant, but we are not even sure who or what he was. Archimedes? Plato or Aristotle? Who else?
Addendum: from Lucas, in the comments:
Proudhon: To be Governed
To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, “General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century,” first published in French 1851; translated by John Beverly Robinson (1923), pp. 293-294.
Hat tip: Robert Higgs.