Marriage closes doors. It forces one to destroy other relationships that could have become something great. Sometimes it forces people to "make a choice" which means to destroy a relationship that already is great.

Relationships should develop piecemeal. Marriage (and the courtship preceding it) causes a revolutionary change in one's life. "I do" is final. It's not open to correction should it be mistaken.

Everyone knows this. It's not a secret. They know marriage can be hard or painful. They know it can involve sacrifice. They know it's a big commitment that can "happen so fast" and that sometimes one has to make a big decision, with serious consequences, which he doesn't feel quite ready for.

But they do it anyway. They say that's how life is. They are pessimistic that life can be better. They say the pain can't be avoided. And they say it's worth it. They are pessimistic that alternative ways of life can have equivalent or superior upsides.

That's not how life is.

You can have two hobbies. You can do them both. But you can't have two intimate relationships. No one asks you to choose one hobby and stick with it, and to give up the other.

You can have one kind of fun one day, and another the next. No one asks you to choose one and devote yourself to it permanently. Variety is the spice of life.

You can have lots of friends. And that's important. Knowing different types of people help's one see different perspectives on life. Culture clash is educational.

Intimate relationships are important, they say. Intimate relationships teach you a lot, they say. They change you. Who you marry is very important because each person is different, and your life will be different based on who you choose. There's different things to learn available with each spouse. There is goodness to be derived from many different possible intimate relationships. But most of it will never be yours. They say it is there, and they say it cannot be yours. You can only have a little piece of it.

Relationships are joyful, they say. They make people happy. They also make people sad. Too bad. That's just how life is. You can't do anything about it. Don't even try. Just accept it. Problems are not soluble.

Who is so blind as will not see?

People acknowledge that a "sweet nothing" is a "nothing"; it has no content. So how can it be considered sweet?

I finished reading Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee. I have several comments on the last chapter. One is that replacing the phrase "X is a certain truth" with "X is an almost certain truth" does not make one a serious fallibilist. There have been hints that Magee doesn't really understand fallibilism throughout the book, and it's pretty blatant in the final chapter. On the last page of the book Magee talks about what we can and can't prove as if that's important. A fallibilist would know that we can't prove anything, so "can we prove X?" is not a useful thing to wonder about X.

Here is an example of Magee's disrespect for fallibilism on page 454:

We may not know how to answer [the questions above], but their significance--and, what is more, their fundamental importance--can scarcely be open to doubt.

And another on page 452:

I think I know that our situation is at least roughly as I have described it up to this point.

BTW, what is he so sure of? That realism is false! He's so sure that we have "selves" that are not part of the natural world. He's so sure that looking into a person's eyes is not a physical process. He's so sure that his favorite school of philosophy (German Idealism) is correct. How sad and parochial!

I think the worst passage in the book is this one, on the second to last page (462):

Throughout my life I have believed that I knew when I was doing wrong. The problem in those cases has not been knowing what was right but doing it.

Throughout the book Magee makes one thing especially clear: he loves philosophy. He is curious. He has questions and he wants answers. He loves to learn new things. He cares about creating knowledge.

This passage is a striking exception. It is extremely disrespectful to philosophy. It says that with regard to morality, philosophy has nothing to offer us. It says there are no interesting or important problems or questions to explore about how to live. It says that thinking is not needed. All that is needed is to obey the moral rules his parents taught him, and they are good enough for all of time, and the only problem is how to obey them more faithfully.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 451:

According to the laws of physics nothing comes out of anyone's eyes at all. Light rays go into the eye, and cause all sorts of things to happen inside a person, such as seeing and headaches, but there is nothing at all that comes out of the eye into the surrounding space. According to all the scientific knowledge we have, what I see when I look into someone's eyes is the light from the surrounding air reflected back to me from the surfaces of the person's eyeballs, and that light is outside the person, the light in the air around us coming back at me again. If it is dark I cannot see the person: it is only by the surrounding light that I see the surfaces of his eyeballs, with whatever degree of clarity that allows. And that, according to science, is the whole of the situation. But who actually believes it? Who can believe it? The truth of which most of us have indubitable experience every day is that when I look into another person's eyes I am in what is for the most part a reliable degree of contact with multitudinous things going on inside that person--and he with multitudinous things going on inside me: feelings, moods, thoughts, intentions, hesitations, doubts, fears, hopes, and a host of other highly variegated inner states, together with attempts to conceal or dissemble any or all of those, most of it fleeting and flashing past in flickering instants of time, and the whole of it nuanced and inflected in subtle and sophisticated ways. Is there anyone who believes that this staunchless two-way flow of information is physically encoded on the surfaces of our eyeballs in a way that changes multitudinously instant by instant like a flow of orchestral sound (if so, how is it encoded?) and read off in the surrounding light by observers who instantly and accurately decode it in what is at both ends an essentially computing process? I have yet to hear of such a person.

I am such a person.

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 441:

most people tend either to believe that all reality is in principle knowable or to believe that there is a religious dimension to things. A third alternative--that we can know very little but have equally little ground for religious belief--receives scant consideration, and yet seems to me to be where the truth lies. Simple though it is, people have difficulty getting their minds round it.

This standard plot is found in over 9000 movies:

omfg hi
omfg hi
omfg i lik u
omfg i'm coy
omfg i lik u 2
omfg we happy
omfg i did bad
omfg i hat u
omfg i sry
omfg fuk u
omfg i sry
omfg i sry
omfg i sry
omfg wtf fein
omfg i'm forgiven?
omfg i guess
omfg we're <3
omfg happy ever after

Confessions of a Philosopher by Bryan Magee page 414

[Bertrand Russell] believed that mathematics was a body of knowledge about reality until the young Wittgenstein convinced him that mathematical truths were tautologies.

Here are two unfortunate quotes by Popper:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3476946.html

if there could be such a thing as socialism combined with individual liberty, I would be a socialist still. For nothing could be better than living a modest, simple and free life in an egalitarian society. It took some time before I recognized this as no more than a beautiful dream; that freedom is more important than equality; that the attempt to realize equality endangers freedom; and that, if freedom is lost, there will not even be equality among the unfree.

Myth of the Framework page 125:

Avoidance of war is ... the overriding problem of public policy ... In this context it should be stated very clearly that one of the most disturbing aspects of recent events is the cult of violence. We all know that one of the most horrible aspects of our entertainment industry is the constant propaganda for violence, from allegedly harmless Westerns and crime stories to displays of cruelty pure and simple. It is tragic to see that this propaganda has had its effects even on genuine artists and scientists, and unfortunately also on our students (as the cult of revolutionary violence shows).