Maverick Philosopher

Positive and Privative Constructions and the Case of Causa Sui

God is traditionally described as causa sui, as self-caused. Construed positively, however, the notion appears incoherent. Nothing can function as a cause unless it exists. So if God causes his own existence, then his existence as cause is logically prior to his existence as effect. God must 'already' (logically speaking) exist if he is to cause himself to exist — which teeters on the brink of incoherence if it does not fall over.

So I suggest that causa sui be read privatively rather than positively, as affirming, not that God causes himself, but that God is not caused by another. This reading may gain in credibility if we look at some similar constructions.

Marriage a Long Conversation?

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human (tr. W. Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, p. 59):

Marriage as a long conversation. When marrying, one should ask oneself this question: Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but the most time during the association belongs to conversation.

Fairly good advice, but how would old bachelor Fritz know about this, he who in another place recommends taking a whip along on a date?  (To be accurate, Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Portable Nietzsche, p. 179, puts in the mouth of an old woman the saying, "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip! Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiß die Peitsche nicht!")

In my experience, marriage is not a long conversation so much as it is a long and deep and wordless understanding.

Life's Chess

The opening is hopeful and the middle game absorbing. But then comes a series of checks culminating in mate.

The Superiority of the Pipe

If the cigarette is a one-night stand, the cigar is a brief affair. The typical cigarette smoker is out for a quick fix, not for love. The cigar aficionado is out for love, but without long-term commitment. The pipe, however, is a long and satisfying marriage. But rare is the pipester who is not a polygamist. The practice of the pipe, then, is a long and satisfying marriage to many partners among whom no jealousy reigns.

This completes the first proof of the superiority of the pipe.

Jacques Maritain on Right and Left

Before one is a conservative or a liberal ideologically, or by party affiliation, one is a conservative or a liberal temperamentally, or by disposition. My suspicion is that temperament is a major if not the main determinant of political commitments. First comes the disposition, then come the theoretical articulation, the arguments, and the examination and refutation of the arguments of adversaries. Conservatism and liberalism are bred in the bone before they are born in the brain.

If this is so, it helps explain the bitter and intractable nature of political disagreement, the hatreds that politics excites, the visceral oppositions thinly veiled under a mask of mock civility, the mutual repugnance that goes so deep as to be unlikely to be ascribable to mere differences in thinking. For how does one argue against another's temperament or disposition or sensibility? I can't argue you out of an innate disposition, any more than I can argue you out of being yourself; and if your theoretical framework is little more than a reflection at the level of ideas of an ineradicable temperamental bias, then my arguments cannot be expected to have much influence. A certain skepticism about the role and reach of reason in human affairs may well be the upshot. Pointing to this skepticism I betray my own conservative bias. For surely one of the differences between conservatives and leftists is that conservatives are sober where leftists are sanguine about the power and role of reason in the transforming of society.

I recently found a beautifully pithy formulation of the difference between Left and Right in Jacques Maritain's The Peasant of the Garonne (1968, tr. De Brouwer):

The pure man of the left detests being, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Rousseau, what is not to what is. [footnote by J.M.: "What is not is the only thing that is beautiful," said Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And Jean-Paul Sartre: "The real is never beautiful."] The pure man of the right detests justice and charity, always preferring, in principle, in the words of Goethe (himself an enigma who masked his right with his left), injustice to disorder. Nietzsche is a noble and beautiful example of the man of the right, and Tolstoy, of the man of the left. (pp. 21-22.)

Maritain is of course speaking of ideal types. No sane political philosophy could be purely leftist or purely rightist in the above senses. But it is useful to have the extremes of the spectrum so clearly delineated, especially since political opponents love to paint each other as extremists.

Their Name Says it All

Checkmate Payday Loans. Avail yourself of this 'service' and you are well on your way to financial checkmate.

On the Very Idea of a Cause of Existence: Schopenhauer on the Cosmological Argument

Cosmological arguments for the existence of God rest on several ontological assumptions none of them quite obvious, and all of them reasonable candidates for philosophical examination. Among them, (i) existence is a ‘property’ of contingent individuals; (ii) the existence of individuals is not a brute fact but is susceptible of explanation; (iii) it is coherent to suppose that this explanation is causal: that contingent individuals could have a cause of their existence. It is the third item on this list that I propose to examine here.

A Liberal Asks: What are the Bases of Liberal Opposition to Religion?

Harriet E. Baber, professor of philosophy, "unrepentant liberal," and proprietor of The Enlightenment Project writes,

I'm an academic. Most of my friends and colleagues are atheists, have no sympathy for religion of any kind and, in particular, detest Christianity. Being a good liberal I read good liberal sources because I like to read people who agree with me but when it comes to religion they don't agree with me. [. . .] As a Christian, I am exceedingly pissed off about about being characterized as Other, and not only Other but Dangerous Other. What is the problem?

Is it because we hold beliefs you regard as false or flat out stupid? I have some sympathy with that because I don't have any sympathy with stupidity. [. . .]

Is it because you take Christianity to be a moral and, more importantly, political agenda, putting a lid on sexual expression and generally making people miserable?

Which is it? Or is it something completely different? I'm just curious. OK, not just. I want to convert the wor[l]d.

I would certainly not characterize myself as a liberal as this term is popularly understood, but I am deeply sympathetic to religion, though also quite critical of it as readers of this blog know. Like Baber, I am puzzled by the depth of the animus against religion, Christianity in particular, that emanates from the Left.  Why the blind, raging hostility to it?  Why the inability to see anything good in it?  Why the fulminations of people like A. C. "Gasbag" Grayling?  As I see it, the following are some of the main reasons why otherwise intelligent liberals oppose religion.  It is obvious that not every person who self-identifies as 'liberal' is opposed to religion; it is equally obvious that most are.  So when I speak of liberals I mean most contemporary liberals.

Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness

Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. This is one of the reasons why I am interested in the history of Communism. I want to understand PC, and to understand PC one must understand the CP, for the former is child of the latter.

Opposition to Abortion Need Not be Religiously Based

It is commonly assumed that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises. To show that this assumption is false, only one counterexample is needed. What follows is an anti-abortion argument that does not invoke any religious tenet:

(1) Infanticide is morally wrong; (2) There is no morally relevant difference between abortion and infanticide; ergo, (3) Abortion is morally wrong.

Whether one accepts this argument or not, it clearly invokes no religious premise. It is therefore manifestly incorrect to say or imply that all opposition to abortion is religiously-based. Theists and atheists alike can make use of the above argument.

Is it a good argument? Well, it is valid as logicians use this term: if one accepts the premises, then one must accept the conclusion. That is a logical ‘must’: one who accepts the premises but balks at the conclusion embraces a contradiction. But there is nothing to stop the argument from being run in reverse: Deny the conclusion, then deny one or both of the premises. Thus, one might argue from ~(3) and (2) to ~(1). Someone who argues in this way is within his logical rights, but is saddled with having to swallow the moral acceptability of infanticide.

Louis Lavelle on the Need for Enemies

Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, p. 125:

I need the reassurance and the help of friends, but I need men's hatred too. It tests me, forces me to become aware of my limitations, to grow, to perform a work of ceaseless self-purification; it makes me more and more faithful to myself, protects me against all the temptations to take the easy way to 'success'; it compels me to fall back on what is deepest, most secret and most spiritual in me, where those who hate me are powerless to hurt, where they meet no object into which to fix their claws, and nothing they can destroy.

Fugitive Thoughts

Have a good thought? Write it down, don't trust your memory! It is not only time that flies.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dedications

Mike V.: Born to be Wild

Peter L.: Smoke Smoke that Cigarette

Phil F.: Money

Is God in Bad Taste? Some Anti-Searlean Remarks

In Mind, Language and Society, John R. Searle writes:

In earlier generations, books like this one would have had to contain either an atheistic attack on or a theistic defense of traditional religion. [. . .] Nowadays nobody bothers, and it is considered in slightly bad taste to even raise the question of God's existence. Matters of religion are like matters of sexual preference: they are not to be discussed in public, and even the abstract questions are discussed only by bores.

What has happened? [. . .] I believe that something much more radical than a decline in religious belief has taken place. For us, the educated members of society, the world has become demystified. . . . we no longer take the mysteries we see in the world as expressions of supernatural meaning. We no longer think of odd occurrences as cases of God performing speech acts in the language of miracles. Odd occurrences are just occurrences we do not understand. The result of this demystification is that we have gone beyond atheism to the point where the issue no longer matters in the way it did to earlier generations. (pp. 34-35)

On Searle: Irreducibility Without Dualism?

As I said earlier, John R. Searle is a great philosophical critic. Armed with muscular prose, common sense, and a surly (Searle-ly?) attitude, he shreds the sophistry of Dennett and Co. But I have never quite understood his own solution to the mind-body problem. Herewith, some notes on one aspect of my difficulties and his.

Searle, Dennett, and Zombies

A zombie is a critter that is physically and behaviorally exactly like a human being (or any being that we consider to be conscious) but lacks consciousness. That is a stipulative definition, so don't argue with me about it. Just accept it. I'll use 'zombie' to refer to human zombies and won't worry about cat zombies, etc.

Zombie Girl: But She's Not There!

The Zombies were a 1960's British Invasion rock group that had a couple of smash singles before vanishing into the oblivion whence they sprang. Out and about one Saturday afternoon, surfing the FM band, I came across one of their hits, "She's Not There." I have heard it countless times, and it is probably playing in your head right now, dear reader. (I apologize for the meme infestation.)

Suddenly, after all these years, the song assumed New Meaning, Deep Meaning. The Zombies were singing about a philosophical zombie! The refrain, "But she's not there" referred to the light (of consciousness) being out in the poor lass.  (And how do you know that said light was not out in them as well?)

A Heideggerian could gloss the situation as follows. To be there is to be a case of Dasein, Da-Sein. The girl was vorhanden all right, and perhaps even zuhanden (as a tool for sexual gratification), aber sie war nicht da, nicht ein Fall vom Dasein. She was a Black Forest zombie.

Can Consciousness Be Explained?

To answer this question we need to know what we mean by 'explain' and how it differs from 'explain away.'

1. An obvious point to start with is that only that which exists, or that which is the case, can be explained. One who explains the phenomenon of the tides in terms of the gravitational effect of the moon presupposes that the phenomenon of the tides is a genuine phenomenon. One cannot explain the nonexistent for the simple reason that it is not there to be explained. One cannot explain why unicorns run faster that gazelles for the simple reason that there is no such explanandum. So if consciousness is to be explained, it must exist.

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant's Birthday

Immanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 31 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 31 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30.  Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 285th birthday. Sapere aude!

Cartoon borrowed from site of Slobodan Bob Zunjic

Anarchism is to Political Philosophy as Skepticism is to Epistemology

In Nicole Hassoun's NDPR review of Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country?, Ashgate, 2008, we read:

Anarchism should be of interest [to social liberals] because it plays the role in political philosophy that skepticism plays in epistemology -- raising the question of what, if anything, could justify a state in the way that brains in vats, etc. raise the question of what, if anything, could justify beliefs. The debate between anarchists and libertarians should be of interest because if the anarchists are right then libertarianism commits one to anarchism. So, social liberals who take libertarianism seriously may have to take anarchism seriously too.

I was struck by the notion that anarchism is as it were political philosophy's skepticism.  A fruitful analogy.  The anarchist is skeptical about the moral justifiability of the state in the way in which the epistemological skeptic is skeptical about whether what we take to be knowledge really is knowledge.  There is a strong temptation, one I feel, to revert to a double insistence: first, that we have knowledge of the external world whether or not we can answer every conceivable objection to the possibility of such knowledge; and second, that some states are morally justified whether or not we we can explain to everyone's statisfaction what it is that confers moral justifiability on them.

Perhaps the right atitude is as follows.  Provisionally, we should just accept that some beliefs about the external world amount to knowledge and that some states are morally justified.  Ultimately, however, this is not a philosophically satisfactory attitude.  One wants rational insight in both cases.  And so we should keep working on the problems.  But lacking as we do proof of the impossibility of knowledge and of the moral unjustifiability of the state, we have no good reason to abandon our commonsense views about the existence of knowledge and the moral justifiability of some states.  You cannot be a philosopher without being a procedural skeptic; but if your skepticism hardens into dogmatic denial of the commonsensical, then the burden of proof is on you.

 

Deus Ex Machina: Leibniz Contra Malebranche

I have been searching the 'Net and various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy.  What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)?  When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging?  How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency?  Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Does anyone have any references for me?  Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.

The Boston Marathon and the Return of "Boston Billy"

Today is Patriot's Day in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the  occasion of the 113th running of the Boston Marathon, the grandpappy of them all.  My mind drifts back to my own attempt 30 years ago in 1979.  Like Bill Rodgers in 1999, I dropped out at Heartbreak Hill, 21.3 miles into it.  I was running with a knee injury, chondromalacia patellae, having foolishly overtrained.  Not only did I mess up my knee training for Boston, I trashed my immune system: the following summer I got three infections which developed with no visible external cause.  One day, upon returning from a long hard training run, I urinated blood: a sure sign of working too hard.  Akrasia in reverse, one might call it: I got caught up in the flush of burgeoning running prowess and I failed to discipline my discipline.  Just as it sometimes takes courage to be a 'chicken,' it sometimes takes discipline to cut yourself slack.  The spirit is famously willing where the flesh is weak.  The theory of training can be summed up in one sentence: you tear yourself down in order to build yourself back up at a slightly higher level of fitness.  But plenty of rest is essential to the equation.  A little common sense and cross-training can't hurt either.

Age and prostate cancer have taken their toll on Rodgers, who is now 61.  He completed today's 26.2 mile race but it took him 3:59.  That averages to a bit more than 9 minutes per mile.  A far cry from the sub-5 minute miles of the glory days.  He is no longer competitive even in his age group.  But every finisher is a hero so long as he does his best.  And perhaps those whose pace is slower, because they suffer longer, are more heroic than the elite competitors.  As George Sheehan wrote when he was seventy-something,

. . . every finisher warrants applause, especially those farthest back.  How does their 95 percent effort differ from the winners'?  It doesn't -- not in pain, not in fatigue, not in shortness of breath.  In every respect, I race at the very edge of what I can handle, and I do it longer.  Those of us who ran along with the leaders in years past and are now in the bottom third of the finishers know this firsthand . . . . When I finish, I will stand at the end of the chute and watch as those who ran behind me come through.  And I'll see that all are spent, some near collapse.  No one has done less than their best.  And their best, in a real sense, is better than everyone who finished ahead of them.  They are winners and heroes all. (On Running to Win, Rodale 1992, p. 147.)

Running as Equalizer?

Kirk Johnson, To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance, Warner 2001, p. 179:

Runners, I believe, are the last great Calvinists.  We all believe, on some level, that success or failure in a race -- and thus in life -- is a measure of our moral fiber.  Part of that feeling is driven by the psychology of training, which says that success only comes from the hardest possible work output, and that failure is delivered unto those who didn't sweat that extra mile or that extra hour.  The basic core of truth in that harsh equation is also one of the more  appealing things about recreational racing: It really does equalize everyone out.  A rich man's wallet only weighs him down when he's running, and a poor man can beat him.  Hard work matters.

In one way running equalizes, in another it doesn't. 

It levels the disparities of class and status and income.  You may be a neurosurgeon or a shipping clerk.  You won't be asked and no one cares.  The road to Boston or Mt Whitney is no cocktail party; masks fall away.  One does not run to shmooze.  This is not golf.  Indigent half-naked animal meets indigent half-naked animal in common pursuit of a common goal: to complete the self-assigned task with honor, to battle the hebetude of the flesh, to find the best that is in one, the 'personal best.'  

But in quest of one's 'personal best' the hierarchy of nature reasserts herself.  We are not equal in empirical fact and the road race makes this plain.  In running as in chess there is no bullshit: result and rank are clear for all to see.  Patzer and plodder cannot hide who they are and where they stand -- or fall.

So although running flattens the socioeconomic distinctions, it does so only to throw into relief the differences of animal prowess and the differences in spiritual commitment to its development.

Hocking on the Anarchist and the Criminal

William Ernest Hocking explains the anarchist’s attitude toward the criminal as follows:

As for the criminal, his existence is not forgotten; but it is thought that he is either such by definition only, as one who has disobeyed what we have commanded; or he is such by response to the unnatural environment of the state and the inequalities which it fosters; or else he is the unusual individual of determined ill-will who is best dealt with by near and private hands, since the life of the will, whether for good or for evil, is always intimate, individual, and unique. ("The Philosophical Anarchist," in Hoffman ed., Anarchism, Lieber-Atherton, 1973, pp. 116-117)

Suppose we consider Hocking's three points seriatim.

Taxation: A Liberty Issue

Despite their name, liberals seem uninterested or insufficiently interested in the 'real' liberties, those pertaining to property, money, and guns, as opposed to the 'ideal' liberties, those pertaining to freedom of expression. A liberal will go to any extreme when it comes to defending the right to express his precious self no matter how inane or obnoxious or socially deleterious the results of his self-expression; but he cannot muster anything like this level of energy when it comes to defending the right to keep what he earns or the right to defend himself and his family from the criminal element from which liberal government fails to protect him. He would do well to reflect that his right to express his vacuous self needs concrete back-up in the form of economic and physical clout. Scribbler that I am, I prize freedom of expression; but I understand what makes possible its retention.

Oregon Liberals Impose Regressive Tax on Joe Sixpack

Yet another example of the misuse of government's coercive power by liberals is documented by the WSJ in This Tax Is for You.   And you voted for these irresponsible scum?  Then you will get what you deserve for being stupid. 

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

A criterion of X is (i) a property or feature that all and only Xs possess which (ii) allows us to identify, detect, pick out, Xs. 'Criterion' is a term of epistemology. So one could read Nietzsche as saying that the test whereby we know that a belief is true is that it increases or enhances the feeling of power of the person who holds the belief. To employ some politically correct jargon that arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche, if a belief is 'empowering,' then it is true; and if a belief is true, then it is 'empowering.'

Nietzsche on Revolution

Since I tend to beat up on Nietzsche quite a bit, and in consideration of my being one fair and balanced hombre, I thought I would quote a passage in which old Fritz is 'spot on':

A delusion in the theory of revolution. -- There are political and social fantasists who with fiery eloquence invite a revolutionary overturning of all social orders in the belief that the proudest temple of fair humanity will then rise up at once as though of its own accord. In these perilous dreams there is still an echo of Rousseau's superstition, which believes in a miraculous primeval but as it were buried goodness of human nature and ascribes all the blame for this burying to the institutions of culture in the form of society, state and education. The experiences of history have taught us, unfortunately, that every such revolution brings about the resurrection of the most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages: that a revolution can thus be a source of energy in a mankind grown feeble but never a regulator, architect, artist, perfector of human nature....(Human, All Too Human, vol. I, sec. 463, tr. Hollingdale)

This unambiguous take-down of Rousseau's conceit according to which man is by nature good but corrupted by society and the state is something the Nietzsche-lovers on the Left should carefully consider.

A Tax Day Observation

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. In Good Societies and Good Lives, I discuss one such feature, state lotteries. Another impediment is a tax code that punishes productive behavior and rewards behavior that is imprudent.

Nietzsche and National Socialism

Was Nietzsche a proto-Nazi? Did he lay the philosophical foundations for Nazi ideology? That would be a hard case to make given the elements in Nietzsche's thinking that are antithetical to National Socialism. To mention one such element, there is Nietzsche's oft-expressed hostility to socialism. There are, however, passages in Nietzsche which aid and abet the Nazi mindset. They ought not be ignored. A good example is Gay Science #325 (Kaufmann tr. emphasis in original):

Taxman

I settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue 'Service' a few days ago.  How about you?  I had to pony up, but that's better than a 'refund.' If you let them take too much and hold your money without paying you for the use of it, then you are, shall we say, ordering your temporal affairs suboptimally.   Time now to kick back with this live version of Taxman featuring George Harrison and Eric Clapton. 

The Urge to Scribble

You got out of bed to write down another of your wretched aphorisms?  Thereby compromising your rest?  Is not sleep's oblivion superior to the pseudo-reality reachable by words?  And will you make of that an aphorism?  Well, now that you're up you may as well relieve the pressure on your bladder too.

Carpe Noctem

Would that we could seize and record the fugitive thoughts that patrol the strange no-man's-land between sleeping and waking. We have learned to seize the day, and the children of the day, but night's offspring elude us.

Why Forgive?

Because we ourselves need to be forgiven. "But I have never done anything that requires forgiveness." Really? Then please forgive me for considering you either a liar, or an amnesiac, or self-deceived, or morally obtuse.

Easter Morn

The magic came at 6:25 AM.  I was 50 minutes into the run when conditions turned auspicious.  The fleshly vehicle, now properly stoked, rose to the occasion of some serious striding under the sign of a celestial conjunction:  the Moon, on the wane but still nearly full, was setting over Dinosaur Mountain just as  Old Sol began his ascent over the Superstitions.  The heavy rains of the day before had released the subtle scents of the desert.  Their dominant note was supplied by the tiny oily dark green leaves of the creosote bush.  The palo verdes were in bloom.  The body rose, but receded, to enable that peculiar awareness in which one is Emerson's "transparent eyeball" witnessing Santayana's realm of essence.  There seemed in that moment nothing better to be than a transparent transcendental eyeball running down a road.

Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis

In a comment to Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? I wrote:

There is nothing wrong with the mere occurrence of a thought, any thought, even the thought of killing someone just to get his wallet. For the thought might arise without my willing it to arise. My point is that once it has arisen, once it is present to my mind, it becomes a legitimate object of moral evaluation, whether or not that particular thought is followed by a corresponding action.

Peter Lupu responded:

Unless I misunderstand what he intends to say here, Bill appears to endorse thesis (A); i.e., that even a single mere-thought with a certain content is “a legitimate object of moral evaluation” and the verdict of immorality. Notice that moral scrutiny applies to the thought, not the person (I suppose because, under the conditions specified, the person is shielded by the principle “ought implies can”). 

I can see that I haven't stated my thesis clearly enough.  We need to make some distinctions.

F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain

 I have argued

at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.  The agreement of Peter Lupu, however, fortified me in my adherence to it.  I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Are You a Natural-Born Scribbler? Take the Gide Test

Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.

It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? . . . And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.

Questions About Religion and Superstition. Superstitious Materialism

1. Is there a difference between religion and superstition, or is religion by its very nature superstitious? There seem to be two main views. One is that of skeptics and naturalists. For them, religion, apart perhaps from its ethical teaching, is superstitious in nature so that there could not be a religion free of superstition. Religion just is a tissue of superstitious beliefs and practices and has been exposed as such by the advance of natural science. The other view is that of those who take religion seriously as having a basis in reality. They do not deny that there are superstitious beliefs, practices, and people. Nor do they deny that religions are often interlarded with superstition. What they deny is that religion is in its essence superstitious.

Hypocrisy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Left

If, per impossibile, there were such a catalog as the Seven Deadly Sins as seen from the Left, hypocrisy would be in first place. Why?  Although some who identify themselves as liberals or leftists can be counted among the religious, the dominant note of the Left from at least 1789 on has been anti-religious.  Couple this with the fact that perhaps the most egregious forms of hypocrisy are found among religionists, especially the televangelical species thereof, and you have the beginning of an explanation why liberals and leftists find hypocrisy so morally abhorrent.  That men of the cloth and their followers exhibit the worst forms of hypocrisy is captured in standard dictionary definitions of 'hypocrisy.'  My Webster's shows, "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; esp.: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion."  One reads something similar in the OED. 

"He Sank Beneath Your Wisdom Like a Stone"

Leonard Cohen, Suzanne.

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

Advice for the Disputatious

Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. W. T. Gairdner (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 156:

We must refrain from every dispute in which the victory counts for more than what one wins by it. If the defeat of our enemy is also the defeat of the truth, it is our defeat too. It follows that battles over ideas are more to be feared than any other, for they stimulate men's amour-propre [self-love, high opinion of oneself] in the very domain where it is our especial duty to subdue it. Every dispute darkens the inner light: the wise man perceives this light precisely because he preserves his soul in peace. And if he is wrong, he finds more happiness in giving way than he would have found in a triumph; for in the latter case he merely keeps what he already had, in the former he gains something new.

This passage approaches perfection in both content and style. To comment on it would be to sully it — or invite disputation.

Life's Fugacity

Here the point is very cleverly made:

I turned 52 yesterday. The first decade of my life took 20 years. The second decade took 15 years. The third decade took a decade. The fourth decade took five years. The past dozen years took 12 minutes. At this rate, I'll be dead in less than half an hour.

As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate.  This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate.  When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us.  But to us midstreamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.

Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on?  Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade.  Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life.  You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth.  Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world.  In the third decade, biological growth over with,  one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career.  But there are still plenty of changes.  From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places In California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor.  But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places,  and from ages 49 to 59 I have had exactly one permanent address.  And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.

Tempus?  Fugit!

Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn't Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists

One of the arguments against religion in the contemporary atheist arsenal is the argument that religious beliefs fuel war and terrorism. Rather than pull quotations from such well-known authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I will quote a couple of passages from one of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. His piece is entitled "Overcoming Christianity." After describing his movement from his evangelical Christian upbringing to a quietistic rejection of Christianity, Sinnott-Armstrong tells us how he became an evangelical atheist:

Tax Advice for Philosophers

Philosophers should be sure to avail themselves of the Transcendental Deduction this year as it has been increased.  But to take it they will need the Platonic Form.  Be advised that attempts to copy the Platonic Form have been known to cause the glitch commonly referred to as the Third (Tax) Man.

On Comments

There are different blogging styles.  Some of my friends in the blogosphere allow all manner of trash to be dumped into their Comment Boxes sight unseen.  At the other end of the spectrum, one of my oldest blogging acquaintances, Keith Burgess-Jackson, allows only prescreened comments to appear.  My approach is a bit less draconian but still rather choosy.  At present my configuration is 'wide open' but I delete the substandard and block the offender.  Why should I tolerate rubbish?  If a man's home is his castle, his blog is his cybercastle.  And just as I don't allow any riff raff through my physical door, I don't allow any through my cyberdoor.

Your first comment is your letter of introduction.  On the basis of that I decide whether you are worth interacting with.  I am not interested in increasing my traffic as I get enough.  And I don't want a lot of comments.  I want a few good comments from people who are sincere and intelligent and basically agree with me on fundamentals.  Fruitful discussion and fruitful disagreement is possible only on the basis of broad agreement.  All the rest is polemics -- and philosophy is not polemics.

Let's say you are a PoMo idiot who denies the existence of truth.  What then could be the point of any discussion?  To get closer to (nonexistent) truth?  You say it's all power at bottom?  Then I will exercise my blocking power with respect to you and your idiocy.  Or perhaps you are a stupid leftist who thinks that 'religion is the problem' while making an exception for radical Islam.  Then you are not only stupid but contemptible and cowardly to boot. Discussion is not what you need; you need therapy.  Or perhaps you are an eliminativist in the philosophy of mind: you deny the existence of beliefs and desires.  Then I believe you are beneath refutation and I desire that you go away.  Or maybe you a sophistical qualia-denier like Daniel Dennett.  Pinch yourself and then report back.  Or adopt the 'intentional stance' with respect to yourself and self-ascribe some intelligent thoughts.

Can Mere Thoughts Be Morally Wrong?

We begin by provisionally distinguishing  among thoughts, words, and deeds.  I will assume that most deeds and some words are justifiably morally evaluable, justifiably evaluable as either morally right or morally wrong.  The question I want to raise is whether mere thoughts (thoughts that do not actually spill over into words or actions, though they possess the potential to do so) are justifiably morally evaluable.  In a comment, I wrote:

With respect to MT 5.27-28, a married man who has a sexual outlet, but who yet entertains (with hospitality) the thought of having sex with another woman is lustful in a morally objectionable way even though he does not act on his desire and is no lecher.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Passing Through

Enjoy.  In order of  appearance: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Baez impersonating Bob Dylan, Ramblin' Jack Elliot.

Kant's Paean to Sincerity

As a prelude to forthcoming posts on hypocrisy  as seen by Kant and Hegel, here is a Kantian hymn of praise to sincerity.  From Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (trs. Greene & Hudson), p. 178, n. 2:

 O sincerity! Thou Astraea, that hast fled from earth to heaven, how mayst thou (the basis of conscience, and hence of all inner religion) be drawn down thence to us again? I can admit, though it is much to be deplored, that candor (in speaking the whole truth which one knows) is not to be found in human nature. But we must be able to demand sincerity (that all that one says be said with truthfulness), and indeed if there were in our nature no predisposition to sincerity, whose cultivation merely is neglected, the human race must needs be, in its own eyes, an object of the deepest contempt. Yet this sought for quality of mind is such that it is exposed to many temptations and entails many a sacrifice, and hence calls for moral strength, or virtue (which must be won); moreover it must be guarded and cultivated earlier than any other, because the opposed propensity is the hardest to extirpate if it has been allowed firmly to root itself. And if now we compare with the kind of instruction here recommended our usual mode of upbringing, especially in the matter of religion, or better, in doctrines of faith, where fidelity of memory in answering questions relating to these doctrines, without regard to the fidelity of the confession itself (which is never put to the test) is accepted as sufficient to make a believer of him who does not even understand what he declares to be holy, no longer shall we wonder at the lack of sincerity which produces nothing but inward hypocrites.

Defining Lust

Before we can ask whether there is anything morally wrong with lust we have to know what we are talking about. What is lust? Here is a start:

The inordinate craving for, or indulgence in, the carnal pleasure which is experienced in the human organs of generation.

But this won't do as it stands since it mixes desire and satisfaction in the same definition. It also fails to distinguish between lust as an occurrent state and lust as a disposition or propensity. Suppose we distinguish: