Maverick Philosopher

Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am Not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that sarvam dukkham?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why?  Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had. 

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected; the problem is desire itself.  The soulution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated). 

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' -- to hazard an oxymoron -- the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent.  Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real and truly important.  But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I reject both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is faulty because incoherent: it presupposes while denying the exstence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be nonexistence.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously --except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

 

Armor Against Superlatives

Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pp.  98-99:

As we circled over Casablanca for landing, I saw below an enormous
swimming pool or reservoir. I turned to the man sitting next to me,
a grizzled old army colonel, and said to him, "That has to be the
biggest swimming pool in the world."

"The second biggest," he said.

"And where's the biggest?"

"Sonny," he said to me, "whatever it is, wherever it is, there's
something bigger or something better."

That stayed with me -- one of several observations that cut into me
and stayed -- and I passed it on to my children as armor against
superlatives.

Time and Tense: A Note on the B-Theory

What is time?  Don't ask me, and I know.  Ask me, and I don't know. (Augustine)  This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time.

On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible  monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming.  My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death  approaching from the future, getting closer and closer.  Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality.  At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality.

Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality.  Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago.  Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say,  lies in the future.  Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period.  And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.

This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.'  He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned.  Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t.  An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.

Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is.  But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.

The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege.  Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter.  This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness.  There just is no irreducible property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  The opposite view is that of the presentist: there is a genuine property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property.  Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent.  If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist.

Why be a B-theorist?  McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction.  We should examine that argument in a separate post.

 

No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale UP, 1989, pp. 48-49):

From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam [submission to Allah] the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular.  The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere of God's absolute claim and limitless compassion and mercy.  And so islam, God-centredness, is not only an inner submission to the sole Lord of the universe but also a pattern of corporate life in accordance with God's will.  It involves both salat, worship, and falah, the good embodied in behaviour.  Through the five appointed moments of prayer each day is linked to God. Indeed almost any activity may be begun with Bismillah ('in the name of Allah'); and plans and hopes for the future are qualified by Inshallah ('if Allah wills').  Thus life is constantly punctuated by the remembrance of God.  It is a symptom of this that almsgiving ranks with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and confession of faith as one of the five 'pillars' of Islam.  Within this holistic conception the 'secular' spheres of politics, government, law, commerce, science and the arts all come within the scope of religious obedience.

What Hick calls a "holistic conception," I would call totalitarian.  Islam is totalitarian in a two-fold sense.  It aims to regulate every aspect and every moment of the individual believer's life. (And if you are not a believer, you must either convert or accept dhimmitude.)   But it is also totalitarian in a corporate sense in that it aims to control every aspect of society in all its spheres, just as Hick points out supra.

Islam, therefore, is profoundly at odds with the values of the West.  For we in the West, whether liberals or conservatives, accept church(mosque)-state separation.  We no doubt argue heatedly over what exactly it entails, but we are agreed on the main principle.  I regularly criticize the shysters of the ACLU for their extremist positions on this question; but I agree with them that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."

This raises a very serious question.  Is Islam --  pure, unEnlightened, un-watered-down, fundamentalist, theocratic Islam -- deserving of First Amendment protection?  We read in the First Amendment that Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion.  Should that be understood to mean that the Federal government shall not prohibit the  establishment and  free exercise of a  totalitarian, fundamentalist  theocratic religion in a particular state, say Michigan? 

The USA is a Christian nation with a secular government.  Suppose there was a religion whose aim was to subvert our secular government.  Does commitment to freedom of religion enjoin toleration of such a religion?

 

Test Your Religious Knowledge

Here.  Your humble correspondent answered 14 out of 15 questions correctly for a score of 93%. 

Jews are at the top, which is no surprise.  As I once said to my Israeli friend Peter, "I have never met a stupid Jew."  He immediately shot back, "Then you've never lived in Israel."  The alacrity of the repartee of course supports  my point about Jewish intelligence.  Atheists come in right after Jews, which again is no surprise: people who identify as atheists are exercised over religion and know a lot about it the better to oppose it. Hispanics and Blacks are at the bottom.  A liberal will infer that the survey is racist.

Joseph Bottum on the Ground Zero Mosque

Here.  Excerpt:

Of course, the first thing that has to be said about the building of an enormous Muslim center so close to the destroyed towers is that it’s wildly offensive. And the second thing to be said is that it’s wildly constitutional.

The offensiveness looks like this: Regardless of how it is intended, it will be perceived by radical Muslims around the world as a giant monument, in the heart of the beast itself, to their success in attacking America. Indeed, it will be perceived by many Americans that way. The funereal and memorial emotion that embraces one on a visit to the Ground Zero site will be weakened—poisoned, just a little—by the presence of this new, grand construction. 
 

Louis Lavelle on the Stoic Wisdom and its Limitations

I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late antiquity, Aurelius Augustinus offered a critique of the Stoics in Book XIX, Chapter 4 of The City of God, a critique worthy of being called classical. We will have to examine that critique one of these days. But today I want to draw your attention to some passages from Chapter 10, Section 4 of Louis Lavelle's The Dilemma of Narcissus (Allen & Unwin, 1973, tr. Gairdner):

The Stoics claimed that happiness depends on accurately distinguishing between the things which depend on us and those which do not. Govern the former by reason, and ignore the latter — this was their principle of supreme wisdom, to the practice of which our will should be unceasingly applied.

But hiding behind this apparent humility there is the spirit of sovereign pride and contempt, contempt for all those things which do not depend on us but of which our life is nevertheless composed, and with which it is inextricably entwined. It is impossible to assert that we can remain indifferent to them . . . . (p. 154)

There are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power. And so on.

The Stoics had a very important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as quite a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. In other words, I am allowing these negative thoughts to arise and I have the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the present perturbatio mentis was entirely my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused it to vanish.

In short, the Stoics discerned the mind's amazing power to regulate itself and master, rather than be mastered by, its thoughts. They saw that, within certain limits, we create our own reality. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves blessed. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed -- assuming that one is willing to practice, rather than merely read about, the Stoic precepts.

What Lavelle sees, however, is that Stoic practices take one only so far along the road to happiness. He sees that Stoicism cannot be a final solution since it rests on a denial of our finitude. In theistic terms, it rests on a denial of our createdness. (A materialist could perhaps agree with my general point by substituting material conditionedness for createdness.)

My creaturely finitude is reflected in the fact that I have no control over either my existence or my essence (nature). Thus it was little more than existentialist braggadocio and romantic posturing when the early Sartre in "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946) claimed that "existence precedes essence" in a sense to deny that there is any pre-given human nature, and that "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself."

The truth is that we have a nature whether created by God or 'created' by material forces, and this nature prescribes limits to our freedom. As prescribing limits to our freedom, our nature is not within the control of our freedom. We cannot lift ourselves into an enduring happiness by our own bootstraps. We are held hostage by a physical world that is not our making and not in our control, except superficially. Tranquillitas animi is a wonderful thing, and partially attainable by Stoic and cognate methods; but it can't be worth that much if a stomach cramp or a buzzing fly can interrupt it. I can to a certain extent identify with the hegemonikon or guiding element within me which stands above the fray, observing it. I am that ruling element, that transcendental witness. But I am also this indigent body, this wholly exposed mass of frailties. And try as I might, I cannot dissociate myself from it. The ideal of the Sage who negotiates with perfect equanimity fortune and misfortune alike is unattainable by us. In the end, the precepts and practices of Stoicism leave us in the lurch.

We cannot save ourselves via the path of political activism as many 20th century Communists learned the hard way. But a wholly self-reliant quietism is also a dead-end. We cannot be lamps unto ourselves. If salvation is to be had, it must come from Elsewhere. Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, "Only a God can save us," as Heidegger said in his Spiegel-interview near the end of his life.

I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late antiquity, Aurelius Augustinus offered a critique of the Stoics in Book XIX, Chapter 4 of The City of God, a critique worthy of being called classical. We will have to examine that critique one of these days. But today I want to draw your attention to some passages from Chapter 10, Section 4 of Louis Lavelle's The Dilemma of Narcissus (Allen & Unwin, 1973, tr. Gairdner):

The Stoics claimed that happiness depends on accurately distinguishing between the things which depend on us and those which do not. Govern the former by reason, and ignore the latter — this was their principle of supreme wisdom, to the practice of which our will should be unceasingly applied.

But hiding behind this apparent humility there is the spirit of sovereign pride and contempt, contempt for all those things which do not depend on us but of which our life is nevertheless composed, and with which it is inextricably entwined. It is impossible to assert that we can remain indifferent to them . . . . (p. 154)

There are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power. And so on.

The Stoics had a very important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as quite a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. In other words, I am allowing these negative thoughts to arise and I have the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the present perturbatio mentis was entirely my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused it to vanish.

In short, the Stoics discerned the mind's amazing power to regulate itself and master, rather than be mastered by, its thoughts. They saw that, within certain limits, we create our own reality. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves blessed. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed -- assuming that one is willing to practice, rather than merely read about, the Stoic precepts.

What Lavelle sees, however, is that Stoic practices take one only so far along the road to happiness. He sees that Stoicism cannot be a final solution since it rests on a denial of our finitude. In theistic terms, it rests on a denial of our createdness. (A materialist could perhaps agree with my general point by substituting material conditionedness for createdness.)

My creaturely finitude is reflected in the fact that I have no control over either my existence or my essence (nature). Thus it was little more than existentialist braggadocio and romantic posturing when the early Sartre in "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946) claimed that "existence precedes essence" in a sense to deny that there is any pre-given human nature, and that "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself."

The truth is that we have a nature whether created by God or 'created' by material forces, and this nature prescribes limits to our freedom. As prescribing limits to our freedom, our nature is not within the control of our freedom. We cannot lift ourselves into an enduring happiness by our own bootstraps. We are held hostage by a physical world that is not our making and not in our control, except superficially. Tranquillitas animi is a wonderful thing, and partially attainable by Stoic and cognate methods; but it can't be worth that much if a stomach cramp or a buzzing fly can interrupt it. I can to a certain extent identify with the hegemonikon or guiding element within me which stands above the fray, observing it. I am that ruling element, that transcendental witness. But I am also this indigent body, this wholly exposed mass of frailties. And try as I might, I cannot dissociate myself from it. The ideal of the Sage who negotiates with perfect equanimity fortune and misfortune alike is unattainable by us. In the end, the precepts and practices of Stoicism leave us in the lurch.

We cannot save ourselves via the path of political activism as many 20th century Communists learned the hard way. But a wholly self-reliant quietism is also a dead-end. We cannot be lamps unto ourselves. If salvation is to be had, it must come from Elsewhere. Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, "Only a God can save us," as Heidegger said in his Spiegel-interview near the end of his life.

The Two Kinds of People and the Manifold Uses of Blogging

I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs and the fuckees, and you gonna have to decide which side you gonna be on." This morning I found the thought expressed with a bit more elegance by Giacomo Leopardi (1798- 1837) in his Pensieri:

The human race, from the individual on up, is split into two camps: the bullies and the bullied. Neither law nor force of any kind, nor advancement in civilization and philosophy, can prevent men now or in the future from belonging to one of these two camps. So, he who can choose, must choose. Although not everyone is able, nor is the choice always available. (Pensieri [Thoughts], tr. Di Piero, Louisiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69)

Am I endorsing the alternative?  No. I am merely presenting it for your consideration.

My posts are not all of the same type. Some are just notes to myself, records of what I am reading and thinking about. Others are meant to draw the reader's attention to this or that for his edification or delectation. Some carefully argue a thesis I believe to be true. Others merely assert a thesis I believe to be true. Some are sloppy and impressionistic. In others, the rigor mentis approaches rigor mortis.

Some posts are aphoristic. But don't assume that an aphorism cannot have deep and rigorous and systematic thought at its origin. Some posts are polemical. There are people who do not occupy the space of reasons so that attempting to engage them in that space is a fool's errand. They are in need of defeat or perhaps therapy, not rational persuasion. The verbal equivalent of a blow to the head or a kick in the ass will do them more good than a patient setting-forth of reasons beyond their comprehension.

The uses of blogging are manifold.

The Politics of Gold

The price of gold has topped $1300 an ounce.  And this while inflation is low.  The upswing is driven mainly by the fear of inflation.  In order to handle otherwise unsustainable levels of debt, the government will resort to 'monetizing' it, i.e., printing money and causing inflation.  By counterfeiting its own currency, a government steals real wealth from its citizens.  Is this acceptable to you?  If not, you may wish to register your disapprobation come November 2nd. 

For more insight, see Thomas Sowell's Politics Versus Gold.

An Argument for Necessary Beings

1. A contingent being is one the nonexistence of which is possible, whereas a necessary being is one the nonexistence of which is impossible. (At play in these definitions is broadly logical possibility which is between narrowly logical and nomological possibility.)

2. Framing a definition is one thing, showing that something answers to it is another. Are there any necessary beings? Since a necessary being could be either abstract or concrete, I can show that there are necessary beings by showing that there is at least one abstract necessary being. To convey the senses of 'concrete' and 'abstract' by example one could say that God and Socrates are concrete while the proposition 7 is prime and Socrates' singleton -- {Socrates} -- are abstract. All and only concreta are causally active/passive whereas abstracta are not. Please avoid the mistake of thinking that x is concrete iff x is physical.

3. Some truths are necessary, others are contingent. 'I am now blogging' is contingently true: it is true, but it might not have been true. I might have been doing something inconsistent with blogging now, sleeping for instance. By contrast, 'If I am blogging, then I am writing' is necessarily true. To see this, negate the sentence in question. The result is a sentence expressing a broadly logical impossibility: 'I am blogging and it is not the case that I am writing.' Consider also, 'If I am blogging, then it is not the case that I am not blogging.' This too is necessarily true, except that the negation expresses a narrowly logical impossibility: 'I am blogging and I am not blogging.'

I don't see how any reasonable person can deny that there are necessary truths. Another example: '7 is a prime number' expresses a necessary truth. This doesn't just happen to be true in the way that it just happens to be true that there are seven cans of Dr. Pepper left in the reefer. It is necessarily true: true in all (BL)-possible worlds.

4. A truth is a true truth-bearer. Now I don't understand how ink on paper, or chalk on a blackboard, or any physical modification of any physical medium, no matter how complex the modification and how complex the medium, could be true or false. I don't understand how anything physical could, qua physical, be a truth-bearer or truth-vehicle, i.e., an item capable of being either true or false. Marks on paper cannot be either true or false. They just exist. But suppose you think they -- or complex modifications of the stuff between your ears -- can be either true or false. Still, the marked-up paper exists contingently. Consequently, the sentence-token '7 is prime' scratched onto the paper exists contingently. Similarly for anything inscribed in your brain. Your brain and its 'inscriptions' are contingent.

5. But then how could any truth be necessarily true? How could any truth be necessarily true if no truth-bearer is necessarily existent?  There is no possible world in which 7 is not prime, but there are worlds in which there are no material things.  Material things are contingent.  How could the proposition in question be true in those worlds if there is nothing in those worlds to serve as truth-bearer? Let's spell this out.

If an item has a property, then, pace Meinong, the item exists: existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.   So if an item such as a truth-bearer has the property of being necessarily true, then that truth-bearer necessarily exists. For if the truth-bearer is true in every world, then it exists in every world.  Therefore, if there are necessary truths, then there are necessary beings. Now there are necessary truths. Therefore, there are necessary beings. Given that everything physical is contingent, these necessary beings are nonphysical. So they are either mental (accusatives of mental acts) or abstract. For present purposes, it doesn't matter which of these they are. The present point is that there is good reason to believe in (i.e., believe that there are) necessary beings.

6. But I hear an objection coming: An item can have a property essentially without having it necessarily. Thus Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human. He is human in every world in which he exists, but he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially but not necessarily human. Why can't the proposition expressed by '7 is prime' be like that? Why can't it be essentially (as opposed to accidentally) true, true in every world in which it exists, but neither true nor false in the worlds in which it does not exist? If this is the way it is, then your argument from necessary truths to necessary beings collapses.

The objector is suggesting that truth-bearers are contingent beings. But this is problematic as Alvin Plantinga argues (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford UP, 1993, p. 119.) Suppose that truth-bearers are brain inscriptions, and consider the proposition

1. There are brain inscriptions.

(1) is such that it could not have been false. For in a possible world in which there are no brain inscriptions, there are no truth-bearers, which implies that (1) in those words is neither true nor false, hence not false. And in every world in which there are brain inscriptions, (1) is of course true. So (1) is true in every world in which it exists, and not false in every world in which it does not exist. So (1) could not have been false. But this bizarre. Surely there might have been no brains and no brain-inscriptions. It is not necessarily true that there are brains. If it is not necessarily true that there are brains, then it is possibly true that there are no brains. Now what is this possibility of there being no brains? It is plausibly identified with the possibly being true of the proposition, There are no brains. But then this proposition must exist in those possible worlds in which it is not true.

Escribitionism

Literary Exhibitionism. 

Advice for the Oversensitive

Baltasar Gracian (1601-1658), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Doubleday, 1992, tr. C. Maurer, # 173):

Don't be made of glass in your dealings with others. Even less so in friendship. Some people break very easily revealing how fragile they are. They fill up with resentment and fill others with annoyance. They are more sensitive than the pupils of the eyes, which cannot be touched, either in jest or in earnest. They take offense at motes: beams aren't even necessary. Those who deal with them must use great caution, and never forget their delicacy. The slightest slight annoys them. They are full of themselves, slaves to their own taste (for the sake of which they trample on everything else), and idolaters of their own silly sense of honor.

A Thoreauvian Justification for My Mode of Scribbling

Henry David Thoreau, Journals, 4 September 1851:

It is wise to write on many subjects, to try many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one. Be greedy of occasions to express your thought. Improve the opportunity to draw analogies. There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.

Schall on Belloc: Islam as a Christian Heresy

This is a thought-provoking essay. Excerpts with a bit of commentary:

Belloc’s thesis is that Islam began as a Christian heresy which retained the Jewish side of the faith, the Oneness and Omnipotence of God, but denied all the Christian aspects -- the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, who, as a result, became just a prophet. The denial of the church, the priesthood, and the sacraments followed. Islam succeeded because, in its own terms, it was a simple religion. It was easy to understand and follow its few doctrinal and devotional points.

Question: Given that Islam is much closer to Judaism than is Christianity, what explains the murderous ferocity of the Muslim hatred for Jews? One part of the explanation must be in terms of envy. Muslims feel profoundly diminished in their sense of worth by Jewish success and well-being. The Jews have made outstanding contributions to culture out of all proportion to their sparse numbers, whereas the hordes of Muslims have languished for the last four hundred years in backwardness and negativity. What else but envy could motivate the wild cries for the extermination of Jews and the destruction of Israel? Ahmadinejad, you will have noticed, is not a Palestinian, but an Iranian. When non-Palestinian Muslims call for the elimination of Israel, and prepare for decades of suicidal jihad, their 'beef' cannot be a relatively minor land dispute between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs.

Unlike Stanley Jaki, Belloc did not think that there was something in Islamic theology that militated against Islam’s ever becoming a major industrial or military-technological power by itself. (133). The fact that it never accomplished this transformation was for Belloc merely an accident, whereas for Jaki it was rooted in the relation of an absolute notion of divine will to its consequent denial of stable secondary causes. Jaki sees much of the rage in modern Islam to be due to its failure or inability to modernize itself by its own powers.6 Most of the weapons and equipment found in Muslim states are still foreign made, usually inferior, and paid for with oil money.

Islam apparently takes an occasionalist view of divine omnipotence. God is all-powerful not just in the sense that he has the power to do all, but in the sense that he exercises all the power that gets exercised. Thus secondary causes -- so-called to distinguish them from the causa prima -- are not causes at all, strictly speaking, but mere occasions for the exercise of divine causality, the only causality there is. If so, then everything is up to God, and nothing is up to secondary 'causes' including ourselves. When I lived in Turkey, I was struck by the prevalence of the belief in kismet, or fate. It is reflected in driving habits. Turks are arguably the worst drivers in the world. It is as if they don't believe that what happens on the road is largely up to them: kismet rules. When your number's up, it's up, and it doesn't matter what you do.

The very existence of Christianity is a blasphemy in Muslim terms if we insist on the truth of the Incarnation, that God became man.

In the eyes of Islam, Christianity is a form of idolatry: a mere man is identified with God. Schall quotes Belloc:

Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church: it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine. Its vitality and endurance soon gave it the appearance of a new religion, but those who were contemporary with its rise saw it for what it was -- not a denial, but an adaptation and misuse, of the Christian thing (76-77). Though it is not often attended to, saying Mass itself is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, even in private, and, even when permitted in other lands, it is restricted and constantly hemmed in by various formal and informal practices. Freedom of religion is not a concept that rises naturally in Muslim theory but it is a Western idea, even largely a modern Western idea. In Islam, the very practice of freedom of religion is thought to be a species of not giving submission to Allah, even where some non-Muslim churches are permitted.  Belloc thought that the Mohammedan temper was not tolerant. It was, on the contrary, fanatical and bloodthirsty. It felt no respect for, nor even curiosity about, those from whom it differed. It was absurdly vain of itself, regarding with contempt the high Christian culture about it. It still so regards it even today (90). The practical compromise in this situation was to allow the Christians to remain but within very confined areas and occupations. They had to pay a tribute. Many were gradually absorbed into Islam (91).

More on Whether Atheism is a Religion

Peter Lupu e-mails:

Your post provoked these thoughts:

I agree with you that most religions include as indispensable certain core metaphysical tenets about some kind of transcendental existence that is vital for the understanding of the nature and identity of our own self and that these core tenets distinguish religious ideologies from secular ideologies such as atheism and Marxism. However, it is worth noting that secular ideologies also include certain indispensable core metaphysical tenets: e.g., atheism denies the existence of a transcendental being such as God or denies that the existence of such a God is relevant to understand our nature and identity and Marxism is committed to the existence of deterministic historical laws which will inevitably lead to a certain socio-economic-political arrangement (i.e., communism).

In fact, both religious as well as secular ideologies can be identified in terms of their respective metaphysical core tenets in the sense that giving them up is giving up on the ideology itself. Hence, those who adhere to each ideology must hold on to their defining tenets come what may, for giving up these tenets is giving up the ideology itself. So we can define a religious attitude (in contradistinction to a religion) as a certain epistemic attitude whereby someone holds on to the metaphysical tenets that define their ideology come what may and regardless of the cogency of counterarguments or counter-evidence. Of course, we already have a word for this sort of attitude and it is "dogmatism." So it is not clear to me that we need another word for it, although I think that this is what people mean when they say that secular ideologies such as atheism or Marxism are or can be for some people a "religion."

Peter,  I take your point to be that when we say that militant atheism or Marxism are religions, we are speaking loosely: all we mean is that the commitment of their staunchest adherents is dogmatic and unshakeable.  Thus I take you to be agreeing with me me that militant atheism and Marxism are not, strictly speaking, religions.

Joseph Antolick e-mails:　

I think there's a problem when you worry - not without merit, since it's common in these discussions - that considering militant atheism a religion itself is a debating trick. You go on to say that there's a problem of defining religion (you even entertain the possibility that there's no way to "specify necessary and sufficient conditions") and also that these atheists are anti-religionist. Well, if it's not clear what a religion is, then how is it clear that atheists are anti-religion? I'll grant you that Richard Dawkins hates Catholicism. But so do a number of Muslims.

But I did suggest a criterion for distinguishing religious from non-religious ideologies:  "all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana."  This criterion makes it tolerably clear what counts as a religion and also what it is to be anti-religion.  I can't see what good purpose is served by lumping militant atheism in with the religions, unless one is talking loosely -- see Lupu's comment above.  In a serious discussion one should avoid loose talk.

My claim here is that A) There is reason . . .  to at least suspect that the New Atheists are themselves religious and B) That if this is in fact the case, then the New Atheists are no more "anti-religion" than fanatical muslims for whom there is no room in the world for any religion but Islam.

And what reason would that be?  The fact that one's commitment to one's ideology is is total, dogmatic, and unshakeable by counter-argument is not a good reason to think that the object of one's commitment is a religion.  Countless Communists were committed heart, soul, and mind to their ideology. Some, like Trotsky, sacrificed everything for the cause.  But that didn't make Communism a religion.  An ersatz religion perhaps, something that substitutes for religion in the lives of its staunch adherents, but not a religion strictly speaking.  Faith and hope were major players in Trotsky's life, but they weren't religious faith and hope, though I will grant you that they were quasi-religious.  See my post, Trotsky's Faith.

Obviously, Muslims are not anti-religion because their ideology is a religion by my criterion, albeit a political religion if you will, one that denies church/mosque-state separation.    (Whether Islam is a religion that deserves First Amendment protection is a further question, and a pressing one given the bit after 'albeit.') 

To give an analogous example, Stephen Hawking in his new book claims that "philosophy is dead" - but then, as reviewers have noted, goes on to engage in metaphysics and take explicitly philosophical positions. If that's a fair description of his views, is it right to say Hawking is "anti-philosophy"? Or is it just that he's anti- any philosophy that differs from his? I think the difference between those two descriptions is important.

I'm glad you brought that up.  There is a big difference between being anti-religion and being anti-philosophy.  To oppose philosophy is to do philosophy.  Any attack on philosophy is a philosophical attack.  Anti-philosophy is just more philosophy.  And so I agree with you about Hawking.  He is anti-any philosophy other than his own.  But anti-religion is not just more religion, but precisely the rejection of all religion.  To oppose philosophy is to do philosophy; but to oppose religion is not to do religion, but to do philosophy.

The right way to combat militant atheists is not by arguing that they are serving up religion, but by exposing what they do as bad philosophy, as based on the dubious philosophical doctrine of scientism, for example.  Atheism is a philosophical position with all the rights, privileges, and debilities pertaining thereunto.  Dawkins, Grayling  and the boys may be dogmatic pricks but that does not make them religionists.  It makes them -- dogmatic pricks.  Once you have exposed atheism as just another philosophical position you have already done quite a bit to undermine it: it is just another contender in the arena of Big Ideas;  just another contender that cannot establish hegemony -- except in the minds of its dogmatic adherents.

That said, I don't claim to have the ultimate answer on this. But I do worry that there's a recognition that defining "religion" is difficult, and then a move is made to try and define religion in such a way that purposefully excludes militant atheists from the outset. I'm reminded of when Paul Davies wrote an op-ed, pointing out that even scientists have faith - and there was a fierce reaction from a number of scientists.

But why would you want to lump militant atheists in with religionists?  That makes little sense unless you are engaged in some sort of rhetorical sleight-of-hand.    Surely the burden is on you to show that they are religionists when it is plain to most of us that they are not.

And you also have to be careful not to equivocate on 'faith' as between religious and non-religious faith. Above I mentioned the faith of Trotsky.  Surely he was a man of faith in a secular, non-religious sense: as a professional revolutionary he believed with all his heart in the coming world-wide proletarian revolution that would usher in a classless society, a worker's paradise, etc. etc.  One could even in his case speak of a secular soteriology and eschatology, of the final salvation from alienation at the eschaton.  But again, a substitute for religion, something that merely resembles religion in certain ways, something the commitment to which is like a religious commitment, is not a religion strictly speaking.  

Are men of science men of faith?  Of course.  They have faith in the intelligibility of nature and in the uniformity of nature, and they hold this faith beyond what they have actually verified.  They have faith that the future will be like the past.  But no good purpose is served by conflating this sort of faith with specifically religious faith.  You cannot effectively defend religion against the attacks of scientistic scientists and their literary (Hitchens) and philosophical (Dennett) fellow travelers by saying that the attackers themselves have various faith commitments.

 

 

On 'Spirituality'

The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my kitchen a while back whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term ‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one.

How typical.  Being a good host, I didn't lay into her as I probably should have for her  'spiritual' good.

Etymologically, ‘religion’ suggests a binding, a God-man ligature, so to speak. But trendy New Age types don’t want to be bound by anything, or submit to anything. I suggest that this is part of the explanation of the favoring of the S word over the R word. Another part of the explanation is political. To those with a Leftward tilt, ‘religion’ reminds them of the Religious Right whose power strikes them as ominous while that of the Religious Left is no cause for concern.

A third part of the explanation may be that religion is closely allied with morality, while spirituality is often portrayed as beyond morality with its dualism of good and evil. One of the worst features of New Age types is their conceit that they are beyond duality when they are firmly enmired in it. Perhaps the truly enlightened are beyond moral dualism and can live free of moral injunctions. But what often happens in practice is that spiritual aspirants and gurus fall into ordinary immorality while pretending to have transcended it. One may recall the famous cases of Rajneesh and Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

With apologies to the shade of Jack Kerouac, you could say that that gives new meaning to 'dharma bum.'

Mollifying Muslims and Muslimfying Mollies

A must-read from the pen of Mark Steyn.  And please do follow the internal links.

Is Atheism a Religion?

From the mail:

Just read your On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance entry, and I have one concern. Is it really right to view the New Atheists, and atheists in general, as "not religious"? I imagine this really depends on how you yourself define religion, and I admit to not knowing that. [. . .]

I don't know it either [grin].

The question as to what religion is is not at all easy to answer.  It is not even clear that the question makes sense.  For when you ask What is religion? you presuppose that it has an essence which can be captured in a definition that specifies necessary and sufficient conditions.  But it might be that the concept religion is a family resemblance concept like the concept game (to invoke Wittgenstein's famous example).  Think of all the different sorts of games there are. Is there any property or set of properties that all games have and that only games have?  Presumably not.  The concept game is a family resemblance concept to which no essence corresponds.  Noted philosophers of religion such as John Hick maintain the same with respect to the concept religion.

If you take this tack, then you can plausibly argue that Marxism and secular humanism and militant atheism are religions.

But it strikes me as decidedly odd to characterize  a militant anti-religionist as having a religion.  Indeed, it smacks of a cheap debating trick:  "How can you criticize religion when you yourself have a religion?" I prefer to think along the following lines. Start with belief-system as your genus and then distinguish two species: belief-systems that are theoretical, though they may have practical applications,  and belief-systems that are by their very nature oriented toward action.  Call the latter ideologies. Then distinguish between religious and non-religious ideologies.  Marxism and militant atheism are non-religious ideologies while the Abrahamic religions and some of the Eastern religions are religious ideologies.

But this leaves me with the problem of specifying what it is that distinguishes religious from non-religious ideologies.  Perhaps this: all and only religions make reference to a transcendent reality, whether of a personal or impersonal nature, contact or community or identification with which is the summum bonum and the ultimate purpose of human existence.  For the Abrahamic faiths, Yahweh, God, Allah  is the transcendent reality.  For Taoism, the Tao.  For Hinduism, Brahman.  For Buddhism, the transcendent state of nirvana.  But I expect the Theravadins to object that nibbana is nothing positive and transcendent, only the extinguishing or dissolution of the (ultimately illusory) self.  I could of course simply deny that Theravada Buddhism is a religion, strictly speaking.  I could lump it together with Stoicism as a sort of psychotherapy, a set of techniques for achieiving equanimity.

There are a number of tricky and unresolved issues here, but I see little point in calling militant atheism a religion, though I concede it is like a religion in some ways.

 

Definitions and Axioms of Classical Mereology

Is a wall or a brick house a whole of its parts?  Obviously -- that's a pre-analytic datum.  But is it a sum of its parts?  I have been arguing, with no particular originality, in the negative.  I have been arguing that it is a big mistake to assume  that, just because y is a whole of the xs, that y is a sum of the xs. But it depends on what exactly is meant by 'sum.'  My point is well-taken if 'sum' is elliptical for 'classical mereological sum.'  But what does that mean?  Since 'classical mereological sum' is a technical term, it has all and only the meaning conferred upon it by the definitions and axioms of classical mereology.  I will now present what I take to be the essentials of classical mereology.  I will use 'sum' as short for 'classical mereological sum.'  Later we will look at neoclassical variants that result from tampering with the classical definitions and axioms.

If anything in what follows is original, it is probably a mistake on my part.  Feel free to correct me -- but only if you know the subject matter.

I will take proper parthood and identity as primitives.  To simplify the exposition I will drop universal quantifiers.  They are there in spirit if not in letter.

D1. x is a PART of y =df x is a proper part of y or x = y.

D2. x OVERLAPS y =df there is a z such that z is part of x and z is part of y.

D3. x is DISJOINT from y =df it is not the case that x overlaps y.

D4. y is a SUM of the xs =df z overlaps y iff z overlaps one of the xs.

A1. Asymmetry of Proper Parthood.  If x is a proper part of y, then y is not a proper part of x.

A2. Transitivity of Proper Parthood.  If x is a proper part of y, and y is a proper part of z, then x is a proper part of z.

A3. Supplementation of Proper Parthood.  If x is a proper part of y, then there is a z such that z is a proper part of y and z is disjoint from x.

A4. Uniqueness of Summation.  If u is a sum of the xs and v is a sum of the xs, then u = v.

A5. Unrestricted Summation.  For any xs, there is a y such that y is a sum of the xs.

When I used the word 'sum' in previous posts, I intended that its meaning be not merely the meaning assigned to it by (D4), but the meaning assigned to it by (D4) in conjunction with the rest of the definitions and the axioms (not to mention the theorems that follow as logical consequences of the definitions and axioms). 

Extensionality is a feature of classical mereology.  I leave it as an exercise for the reader to derive Extensionality of Parthood  -- if x and y are sums with the same proper parts, then x = y -- as a theorem from the above.

 

This is Why You Are Fat

where dreams become heart attacks.

Religions: Problems, Solutions, Techniques

Simplifying a four-part  schema employed by Stephen Prothero in his God Is Not One (Harper, 2010, p. 14), I propose, in agreement with Prothero, that each religion can be usefully seen as addressing itself to a problem; offering a solution to the problem, a solution that also constitutes the religion's goal; and proposing a technique for solving the problem and achieving the goal.

This post will consider five religions and how the simplified Prothero schema applies to them. 

For Christianity, the problem is sin, the solution or goal is salvation, and the technique is some combination of faith and good works. (14)  For Buddhism, the problem is suffering, the solution or goal is nirvana, and the technique for achieving nirvana is the Noble Eightfold Path. (14)  Prothero's main purpose in his book is to stress the differences between religions.  That is the point of the silly title, "God is Not One."  Obviously, God is one by definition; it is the conceptions of God that are various.  It is also a bad title because Prothero's topic is religion, not theism.  Buddhism, after all, is not a theistic religion.  But let that pass.  I can't fault the man for wanting to attract buyers with a catchy title, one reminiscent of Hitchens' God Is Not Great.  The schema makes clear the differences between these two great religions:

Are Buddhists trying to achieve salvation?  Of course not, since they do not even believe in sin.  Are Christians trying to achieve nirvana?  No, since for them suffering isn't something that must be overcome. (15)

If salvation is salvation from sin, then of course Prothero is right.  Sin is an offence against God, and in a religion with no God there can be no sin.  Nevertheless, I am a bit uneasy with the starkness of Prothero's contrast.  The Buddhist too aims at a sort of salvation, salvation from all-pervasive suffering.  To use 'salvation' so narrowly that it applies only to the Christian's religious goal obscures the commonality between the two great religions.  I should think that some soteriology or other is essential to every religion.   A religion must show a way out of our unsatisfactory predicament, and one is not religious unless one perceives our life in this world as indeed a predicament, and one that is deeply and fundamentally unsatisfactory, whatever the exact nature of the satisfactoriness.

For Islam, the problem is neither sin nor suffering but self-sufficiency,"the hubris of acting as if you can get along without God, who alone is self-sufficient." (32)  The solution or goal is "a soul at peace" (Koran 89: 27) in submission to Allah.  The technique that takes the believer from self-sufficiency to Paradise is to 'perform the religion." (42: 13)  Orthopraxy counts for more than orthodoxy.  The profession of faith is relatively simple, to the effect that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.  That is the First Pillar of Islam.  The other four concern practice: prayer (salat), charity (zakat), fasting (sawm), and pilgrimage (hajj).

For Hinduism, the problem is samsara, "the vicious cycle of life, death, and rebirth." (136)  The solution (goal) is moksha, liberation from samsara.  The aim is not to escape into an afterlife, but to escape once and for all from the wheel of becoming whether here or beyond.  Moksha is not salvation because the goal is to escape samsara, not sin.  The various yogas are the techniques, whether karma yoga, jnana yoga, or bhakti yoga, whether work yoga, wisdom yoga, or the yoga of devotion.

For Judaism, the problem is exile, "distance from God and where we ought to be."  The solution is return, "to go back to God and our true home." (253)  The techniques are to keep the narrative alive and to obey the law, to remember and obey.  

So much for a quick little sketch of Prothero's new book.  A popular treatment but well worth reading.    

 

The Muslim Cab Driver and the Fundamentalist Christian Pharmacist

Mark Whitten inquires by e-mail re: Alcohol, Dogs, and Muslim Cab Drivers:

What is the difference between a Muslim cab driver who does not wish to transport a person with a dog or [an unopened container of]  alcohol, and a fundamentalist Christian pharmacist who does not want to dispense birth control?

Is there not a similar issue of social (dis)harmony / ‘‘assimilation’’ here?

I will assume arguendo that the arguments  against the moral permissibility of birth control (i.e., techniques that prevent conception as opposed to terminating a conceptus) are no better than the arguments against the moral permissibility of imbibing alcoholic beverages in moderation and keeping (well-behaved) dogs as pets  and transporting them in public.  On this assumption what the Christian pharmacist and the Muslim cab driver are doing is very similar.

If I were the owner of the pharmacy, I would fire the fundamentalist and give him this little speech:  "We live in a tolerant pluralistic society in which people disagree about many things including the morality of contraception.  I grant you that, objectively, the practice is either morally acceptable or it is not.  But we don't know which it is. While I respect your deep conviction, it is cuts no ice.  So we tolerate those who differ.  If in good conscience you cannot dispense birth control pills and devices, then you should resign.  But if you refuse to do your job, then you are fired."

If I were the owner of the cab company, I would fire the Muslim and give him this little speech:  "We live in a tolerant pluralistic society in which people disagree about many things including the morality of drinking.  I grant you that, objectively, the practice is either morally acceptable or it is not.  But we don't know which it is. While I respect your deep conviction, it  cuts no ice.  So we tolerate those who differ.  If in good conscience you cannot pick up uninebriated and otherwise well-behaved fares who are transporting unopened containers of hooch, then you should resign.  But if you refuse to do your job, you are fired.

And similarly for the Muslim supermarket checkout girl who refuses to touch a package of bacon.  She ought to be fired.  Ditto for the Muslim Disneyland hostess who insisted on wearing a hijab.  She should be fired and told to look for a job at ShariaLand.

Suppose a flat-chested lass tries to get a waitress  job at Hooters.  Hooters  is an establishment wherein adolescent males of all ages assemble to gawk at the front-end endowments -- the 'hooters' -- of nubile young ladies. (Some eating and drinking takes place as well.)  Suppose the applicant  is refused on the ground of cup size.  I would say that that is a legitimate form of discrimination  given the puerile purposes of that private enterprise.  It is similar to the Disneyland case.  The average American goes to Disneyland for a dose of pure Americana.  That's what  Disneyland sells.  The rubes from fly-over country don't want to see no Muslims.  Disneyland, as a private enterprise, has the right to demand that its employees project the right image. 

And political correctness be damned.

 

Alcohol, Dogs, and Muslim Cab Drivers

Apparently, significant numbers of Muslim taxi drivers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area are refusing to transport people carrying  dogs or unopened containers of alcoholic beverages. There is a lesson here, but I am quite sure that liberals won't learn it, until they learn it the hard way.  It is a simple lesson really: social harmony is difficult in any event and is made especially difficult when large numbers of people are let into a society who (i) have wildly different values than the rest of us, and (ii) have no intention of assimilating.

On Praying for Christopher Hitchens

There is something strange, and perhaps even incoherent, about praying for Christopher Hitchens if the prayers are not for his recovery or for his courageous acceptance of death, but for conversion or a change of heart.  Let's think about it.

I do not play the lottery; I have good reasons for not playing it; I have no desire to win it, and I believe that I would be worse off if I were to win it.  Suppose you know these facts about me, but say to me nonetheless, "I am praying that you win the lottery," or "I hope you win the lottery."  Surely there is something strange about praying or hoping that I get something that I don't want and that I believe would make me worse off were I to get it. But beyond strange, it may even be incoherent.  Given that I do not play the lottery, there is no way I can win it; so if you hope or pray that I win it, then you are hoping or praying for the impossible.  Of course, you could hope or pray that I start playing.

Hitch does not want salvation of his soul via divine agency, and he has reasons that seem good to him for denying that there is such a thing.  And he presumably believes (though I am speculating here) that survival of bodily death and entry into the divine milieu would not be desirable.    For one thing, his brilliance would be outshone by a greater Brilliance which would be unbearable for someone with the pride of Lucifer, the pride of the light bearer.  It may also be that he believes, as many atheists and mortalists do, that the meaning of life here below, far from requiring a protraction into an afterlife, is positively inconsistent with such an extension.  "How boring and meaningless eternity would be, especially without booze and cigarettes and (sexual intercourse with) women!"

Hitch has lived his life as if God and the soul are childish fictions.  As a result, he has done none of the things that might earn him him immortality and fellowship with God, even assuming he wanted them.  This suggests that it is not just strange, but incoherent to pray for Hitch's metanoia.  For that would be like praying that he win the lottery without playing, without doing the things necessary to win it.

If a merciful God exists, then he should do the merciful thing and simply give Hitch what he wants and expects, namely annihilation.  Either that, or assign him another go-round, or series of go-rounds, on the wheel of samsara until such time as he is ready to accept the divine offer of everlasting life.

As for the prayer day in his honor, Hitch won't be attending.

 

Philosopher Lectures on Cogito at Bordello

My sources tell me he had a hard time putting Descartes before the whores.

Word of the Day: 'Nychthemeron'

You may have noticed that 'day' is ambiguous: it can refer to a 24  hour period or to the non-nocturnal portion of a 24 hour period. The ambiguity spreads to the Latin injunction, Carpe diem! Does it include Carpe noctem! or exclude it? Or perhaps neither: to seize the day is to make good use of the present, whatever its duration, whether it be an hour, a day, a week.

A nychthemeron, from the Greek nyktos (night) and hemera (day) is a  period of 24 hours, a night and a day. Sleep researchers distinguish the nychthemeral from the circadian. According to Michael Quinion, "Circadian refers to daily cycles that are driven by an internal body clock, while nychthemeral rhythms are imposed by the external environment."

The use of the word is illustrated in this magnificent sentence from  "The Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" by the great American philosopher, C. S. Peirce:

The dawn and the gloaming most invite one to Musement; but I have
found no watch of the nychthemeron that has not its own advantages
for the pursuit.

'Gloaming' is another one of those beautiful old poetic words that we conservatives must not allow to fall into desuetude. Use it or lose   it. It means twilight.

Philosophia Perennis

Thanks to Philip Blosser the Pertinacious Papist for reposting one of my old entries.  (Amazing what one finds while on ego surfari!)  And here are some reminiscences of Dietrich von Hildebrand by an undergraduate teacher of mine.  There are plenty of other interesting posts on this site.

On Religious Pluralism and Religious Tolerance

If you are an adherent of a given religion, why ought you tolerate other religions?  We must tolerate other religions because we do not know which religion is true, if any is, and this would be something very important to know if it could be known.  So we must inquire, and our inquiry will be aided by the availability of a a number of competing religions and nonreligious belief systems. 

But toleration has limits.  No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration.  And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status.  Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive.  The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.  But equally, we ought not tolerate the ideology of the New Atheists  if and to the extent that they aim to suppress religion.  But is there any such tendency among the New Atheists?  Here is Stephen Prothero (God Is Not One, Harper 2010, p. 321) on Sam Harris, one of the 'Four Horsemen' of the New Atheism:

Harris then attacked the ideal of religious tolerance as "one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss."  "Some propositions are so dangerous," he wrote in a chilling passage, "that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."  For Harris, religious tolerance is almost as dangerous as religion itself.  Belief in God is not an opinion that must be respected; it is an evil that must be confronted.

Like me, Harris believes that toleration has limits.  Of course it does.  But Harris and Co. draw the line in the wrong place, and they do so because they are not merely opposed to fanatical religion, jihadist religion, religion that violates freedom of inquiry and autonomy of thought, but to religion as such.  For them, religion itself is the problem.  But this is a shockingly puerile view that ignores the vast differences among religions, differences that Prothero's book does a good job of setting before us in all their richness.

On an approach more nuanced than that of the New Atheist ideologues, one grasps that some religions are tolerable, some are intolerable, some antireligious ideologies are tolerable, and some are not.  If the fulminations of Harris and friends spill over into actions that involve the suppression of religion, then he and his ilk are intolerable and ought to be opposed with vigor.

My view is not merely that most religions and anti-religious ideologies ought to be tolerated, but that the existence of these competing worldviews is a good and enriching  thing in that it helps us clarify and refine and test our own views and practices and helps us progress toward truer and more life-enhancing systems of thought and practice. 

Beguilement

The Russian prelest means 'beguilement.'  It is indeed a beguiling world.  The four chief beguilers: sex, money, power, fame.  In their grip a man finds this empty and ephemeral world a veritable plenum of reality.

Louis Lavelle on Our Dual Nature

 Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. Gairdner, Allen and  Unwin, 1973, p. 165:

The centaur, the sphinx, and the siren express the idea that man emerges out of an animal, and that he never sheds his hoofs, his claws, his scales. Man is a mixture; his dual nature is what makes him man; it is the essence of his vocation and destiny. It is folly to imagine him a god or reduce him to an animal; he is more like a satyr with two natures, and it would be hard to say whether his deepest desire is to raise the animal within him to the contemplation of the divine light, or to bring the god down into his animal body, and make him feel every impulse coursing through his flesh.

I would only add that it is man's spiritual nature that allows him to make such errors as to think that he is -- nothing but an animal.

The Closing of the Muslim Mind

I recommend this review of Robert R. Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.

Why Philosophical Problems are Important

Philosophical problems are genuine intellectual knots that show us our intellectual exigency.  They humble us, whence their importance.  They rub our noses in the infirmity of reason.  The central problems are genuine and important but humanly insoluble. That is what two millenia of philosophical experience, East and West, teaches.  Their genuineness is wrongly denied by the Ordinary Language crowd; their spiritual importance by most analytic puzzle-solvers; their absolute insolubility by the optimistic pure theory types.

A Closer Look at Material Composition and Modal Discernibility Arguments

(For David Brightly, whom I hope either to convince or argue to a standoff.)

Suppose God creates ex nihilo a bunch of TinkerToy pieces at time t suitable for assembly into various (toy) artifacts such as a house and a fort.  A unique classical mereological sum -- call it 'TTS' -- comes into existence 'automatically' at the instant of the creation ex nihilo of the TT pieces. (God doesn't have to do anything in addition to creating the TT pieces to bring TTS into existence.)   Suppose further that God at t  assembles the TT pieces (adding nothing and subtracting nothing) into a house.  Call this object 'TTH.'  So far we have: the pieces, their sum, and the house.  Now suppose that at t* (later than t) God annihilates all of the TT pieces.  This of course annihilates TTS and TTH.  During the interval from t to t* God maintains TTH in existence.

I set up the problem this way so as to exclude 'historical' and nonmodal considerations and thus to make the challenge tougher for my side.  Note that TTH and TTS are spatially coincident, temporally coincident, and such that every nonmodal property of the one is also a nonmodal property of the other.  Thus they have the same size, the same shape, the same weight, etc.  Surely the pressure is on to say that TTH = TTS?  Surely my opponents will come at me with their battle-cry, 'No difference without a difference-maker!'  There is no constituent of TTH that is not also a constituent of TTS.  So what could distinguish them?

Here is an argument that TTH and TTS are not identical:

1. NecId:  If x = y, then necessarily, x = y. 

2. If it is possible that ~(x = y), then ~(x = y). (From 1 by Contraposition)

3. If it is possible that TTS is not TTH, then TTS is not TTH. (From 2, by Universal Instantiation) 

4. It is possible that TTS is not TTH.  (God might have assembled the parts into a fort instead of a house or might have left them unassembled.)

5. TTS is not TTH. (From 3, 4 by Modus Ponens)

The gist of the argument is that if x = y, then they are identical in every possible world in which both of them exist.  But there are possible worlds in which TTS and TTH both exist but are not identical. (E.g., a world in which the pieces are assembled into a fort instead of a house.)  Therefore, TTS andf TTH are not identical.

If you are inclined to reject the argument, you must tell me which premise you reject.  Will it be (1)? Or will it be (4)? 

Your move, David.

 

Of Haircuts, Amphibolies, and Maxims

I got my quarterly haircut the other day.  A neighbor remarked, "I see you got a haircut," to which I responded with the old joke, "I got 'em all cut."

In this as in so many other cases the humor derives from ambiguity, in this case amphiboly (syntactic ambiguity.)  The spoken 'I see you got a haircut' can be heard as 'I see you got a hair cut.'

The neighbor laughed at the joke, but I spared him the analysis, not to mention my theory of humor, both of which would have bored him.

Two relevant maxims: 'Tailor your discourse to your audience' and 'Among regular guys be a regular guy.'  And a meta-maxim: 'Step out of your house only with maxims at the ready.'

Religions and Languages

Religions are like languages: If you know only your own, then you don't truly know it.

Spirit and Existence

Spirit in us is as elusive as existence in things.

Reason, Passion, and Persuasion

1. The cogency of an argument is neither augmented nor diminished by the passion of the arguer.  Cogency and passion are logically independent.  The same goes for the truth or falsity of an assertion.  The raising of the voice cannot transform a false claim into a true one, nor make a true one truer.

2.  What's more, any display of a passion such as anger is likely to be taken by the interlocutor as a sign  that one's argument is nothing but an expression of passion and thus as no argument at all.  He will think your aim is to impose your will on him rather than appeal to his intellect.  The interlocutor will be wrong to dismiss your argument on this ground, but you have yourself to blame for losing your cool and failing to understand human nature.  If your aim is to convince someone of something, then you must attend  not only to your thesis and its rational support, but also to the limitations of human nature in general and the particular limitations of those you are addressing.  'Tailor your discourse to your audience' is a good maxim.

3.  While bearing in mind points 1 and 2, you must also realize that a failure to show enthusiasm and commitment may also work against your project of convincing the other. 

4.  'Rhetoric' is too often employed pejoratively.  That is unfortunate.  The art of persuasion is important but difficult to master.  It is not enough to know whereof you speak; you must understand human nature if you will impart your truths to an audience.

Logic's Limit

Logic is not to be denigrated, nor is it to be overestimated. It is an excellent vehicle for safe travel among concepts and propositions. It will save us from many an error and perhaps even lead us to a few truths. But it cannot move us beyond the plane of concepts and propositions and arguments. It aids safe passage from thought to thought, but cannot  transport us beyond thought to the source of thoughts, to their thinker, the transcendental condition without which there would not be any thoughts.  It cannot transport us to the Transdiscursive.  For that a different vehicle is needed, meditation.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Favorite Blues Tracks

Jimi Hendrix, Red House. 

Michael Bloomfield, Albert's Shuffle.  Can a Jew play the blues?  Here is definitive proof.

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out.

Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, et al., Sweet Home Chicago.

Tenets

Tenets tend not to be held tentatively, as mostly they should be.

The Gastroenterologist on the Meaning of Life

"It all depends on the liver."

Fregean Propositions, Unmereological Compositions, and Bradley's Regress

Steven Nemes writes and I respond in blue:

I know you're in a bit of a mereology phase at the moment, but I figured I'd shoot this by you.

Mereology is the theory of parts and wholes.  Now propositions, whether Fregean or Russellian, are wholes of parts.  So mereology is not irrelevant to questions about the nature and existence of propositions.  The relevance, though, appears to be negative:  propositions are unmereological compositions, unmereological wholes.  That is to say, wholes that cannot be understood in terms of classical mereology.  They cannot be understood in these terms because of the problem of the unity of the proposition.  The problem is to specify what it is about a proposition that distinguishes it from a mere aggregate of its constituents and enables it to be either true or false.  No constituent of an atomic proposition is either true or false, and neither the mathematical set, nor the mereological sum, of the constituents of any such proposition is true or false; so what is it that makes a proposition a truth-bearer?  If you say that a special unifying constituent within propositions does the job,then you ignite Bradley's regress.  Whether or not it is vicious is a further question.  Richard Gaskin maintains the surprising view that Bradley's regress is "the metaphysical ground of the unity of  the proposition."  Far from being vicious, Bradley's regress is precisely that which "guarantees our ability to say anything at all."

For more on this topic, see my "Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition," Dialectica vol. 64, no. 2 (June 2010), 265-277.  It is part of a five article symposium on the topic.

I am not sure if you believe in Fregean propositions or not. As for myself, I don't look favorably upon the idea of Fregean propositions because of the problem of Bradley's regress. (I am assuming propositions would be composite structured entities, built out of ontologically more basic parts, maybe the senses of the individual terms of the sentences that expresses it, so that the proposition expressed by "Minerva is irate" is a structured entity composed of the senses of "Minvera", "irate", etc.)

I provisionally accept, but ultimately reject, Fregean propositions.  What the devil does that mean?  It means that I think the arguments for them are quite powerful, but that if our system contains an absolute mind, then we can and must reduce Fregean propositions to contents or accuusatives of said mind.  Doing so allows us to solve the problem of the unity of the proposition.

By the way, what you say in parentheses is accurate and lucid. 

In your book, you offer a theistic strategy for solving the problem of Bradley's regress as applied to facts. I don't know that a theistic solution to the problem as applied to propositions works as smoothly because of the queer sort of things senses of individual terms of sentences are supposed to be. The building blocks of facts are universals, which are somewhat familiar entities; but the building blocks of propositions are senses like "Minerva" which are murky and mysterious things indeed. What the hell kind of a thing is a sense anyway?

A sense is a semantic intermediary, an abstract 'third-world' object neither in the mind nor in the realm of concreta, posited to explain certain linguistic phenomena.  One is the phenomenon of informative identity statements.  How are they possible?  'George Orwell is Eric Blair'  is an informative identity statement, unlike 'George Orwell is George Orwell.' How can the first be informative, how can it have what Frege calls cognitive value (Erkenntniswert), when it appears to be of the form a = b, a form all of the substitution-instances of which are false?  Long story short, Frege distinguishes between the sense and the referent of expressions. Accordingly, 'George Orwell' and 'Eric Blair' differ in sense but have the same referent.  The difference in sense explains the informativeness of the identity statement while the sameness of referent explains its truth.

Further, propositions are supposed to be necessarily existent; hence the individual building blocks of the propositions must also exist necessarily. But how could the senses expressed by "Minerva" or "Heidegger's wife", for instance, exist when those individuals do not? (This is the same sort of argument you give against haecceity properties conceived of as non-qualitative thisnesses.)

If proper names such as 'Heidegger' have irreducibly singular Fregean senses, then, as you well appreciate, my arguments against haecceity properties (nonqualitative thisnesses) kick in.  It is particularly difficult to understand how a proper name could express an irreducibly singular Fregean sense when the name in question lacks a referent.  For if irreducibly singular, then the sense is not constructible from general senses by an analog of propositional conjunction.  So one is forced to say that the sense of 'Minerva' is the property of being identical to Minerva.  But since there is no such individual, there is no such property.  Identity-with-Minerva collapses into Identity-with- . . . nothing!  Pace Plantinga, of course.

In the case of identity-with-Heidegger, surely this property, if it exists at all, exists iff Heidegger does.  Given that Heidegger is a contingent being, his haecceity is as well.  And that conflicts with the notion that propositions are necessary beings.  Well, I suppose one could try the idea the some propositions are contingent beings.

Are there any solutions to the former problem (which you've blogged and written about before!) you think are promising? Further, what do you think of the second problem?

Perhaps you think the second problem can be sidestepped by saying that "Heidegger's wife" is just shorthand for some longer description, e.g. "the woman who was married to the man who wrote a book that began with the sentence '...'". I don't know that it is so easy, because that sentence itself makes reference to things that are contingently existent (women, men, books, sentences, marriage...).

Yes,all those things are contingent.  But that by itself does not cause a problem.  The problem is with the notion that proper names are definite descriptions in disguise.  If the very sense of 'Ben Franklin' is supplied by 'the inventor of bifocals' (to use Kripke's example), then the true 'Ben Franklin might not have invented bifocals' boils down to the necessarily false 'The inventor of bifocals might not have invented bifocals.'  (But note the ambiguity of the preceding sentence; I mean the definite description to be taken attributively not referentially.)

Hitchens on Mother Teresa's Dark Night of the Soul

In some measure one must admire that professional contrarian, Christopher Hitchens, whose mind is incandescent in its brilliance, and whose speech is preternatural in its articulateness, and who has the audacity to go after anyone, including Mother Teresa. In a  piece in Newsweek he comments on her Dark Night of the Soul.

But what are his qualifications for such commentary?

Hitchens, like the other members of the 'Dawkins Gang' as I like to call them, does not have a religious bone in his body. He simply does not understand religion, and has no sympathy for it, so much so that he must dismiss it as nonsense.

Lack of religious sensibility is like lack of aesthetic sensibility.  There are people who lack entirely any feel for poetry and music. They lack the 'spiritual organ' to appreciate them, and so their comments on them are of little interest except as indicative of the critics' own limitations. Others are bereft of philosophical sensibility.  I have met mathematicians and scientists who have zero philosophical aptitude and sense and for whom philosophy cannot be anything other than empty verbiage. These people do not lack intelligence, they lack a certain 'spiritual organ,' a certain depth of personality. And of course there are those with no inkling of the austere beauty of mathematics and logic and (let's not leave out) chess. To speak of their beauty to such people would be a waste of time. They lack the requisite appreciative organs.

Hitchens, who remains a man of the Left in his total lack of understanding of religion, doesn't seem to appreciate that Teresa was a mystic and that her dark night of the soul was not a crisis of faith, where faith is construed as intellectual assent to certain dogmas, but an experiencing of the divine withdrawal, an experiencing of God as deus absconditus. A believing non-mystic might lose his faith after applying his reason to his religion's dogmatic content and then finding it impossible rationally to accept. Although I haven't read Teresa's letters, I suspect that this is not what happened in her case. After the fullness of her mystical experience, she experienced desolation when the mystical experiences subsided. So, contra   Hitchens, it was not a realization of the "crushing unreasonableness"  of Roman Catholic dogma that triggered Teresa's dark night, but her experience of the divine absence, an absence that is an expression of the divine transcendence.

I suggest that an atheist like Hitchens, for whom theism is simply not a live existential option, cannot understand the spititual life of a person like Mother Teresa. He can understand it only by caricaturing
it.

And the same goes for the whole gang (Dawkins,Dennett, Hitchens, Harris.)

Matt and Madeleine Flannagan

M and M.  These two have been good to me over the years.  They credit me with inspiring them to enter the blogosphere.

Varzi, Sums, and Wholes

Achille C. Varzi, "The Extensionality of Parthood and Composition," The Philosophical Quarterly 58 (2008), p. 109:

Suppose we have a house made of Tinkertoy pieces.  Then the house qualifies as a sum of those pieces: each piece is part of the house and each part of the house overlaps at least one of the pieces . . . . Are there other things that qualify as the sums of those pieces?  UC says there aren't; the house is the only candidate: it is the sum of those pieces.

UC is Uniqueness of Composition: 

UC  If x and y are sums of the same things, then x = y,

where

(1) x is a sum of the zs =_df The zs are all parts of x and every part of x has a part in common with at least one ofthe zs. 

Perhaps commenter John, who knows some mereology and the relevant literature on material composition, can help me understand this.  What I don't understand is what entitles Varzi to assume that the Tinkertoy house -- 'TTH' to give it a name -- is identical to a classical mereological sum.  I do not deny that there is a sum of the parts of TTH.  And I do not doubt that this sum is unique.  Let us name this sum 'TTS.'  (I assume that names are Kripkean rigid designators.)  What I do not understand is the justification of the assumption, made near the beginning of his paper, of the identity of TTH and TTS.  TTH is of course a whole of parts.  But it doesn't straightaway follow that TTH is a sum of parts.

Please note that 'sum' is a technical term, one whose meaning is exactly the meaning it derives from the definitions and axioms of classical mereology.  'Whole' is a term of ordinary language whose meaning depends on context.  It seems to me that one cannot just assume that a given whole of parts is identical to a mereological sum of those same parts.

I am not denying that it might be useful for some purposes  to think of material objects like TTH as sums, but by the same token it might be useful to think of material objects as (mathematical)  sets of their parts.  But surely it would be a mistake to identify TTH with a set of its parts.  For one thing, sets are abstract while material objects are concrete.  For another, proper parthood is transitive while set-theoretic elementhood is not transitive. 

Of course, sums are not sets.  A sum of concreta is itself concrete whereas a set of concreta is itself abstract.  My point is that, just as we cannot assume that that TTH is identical to a set, we cannot assume that TTH is identical to a sum.

What is the 'dialectical situation' when it comes to the dispute between those who maintain that TTH = TTS and those who deny this identity?

It seems to me that the burden of proof rests on those who, like Varzi, identify material objects like TTH with sums especially given the arguments against the identity.  Here is one argument. (a) Taking TTH apart would destroy it, (b) but would not destroy TTS.  Therefore, (c) TTH is not identical to TTS.  This argument relies on the wholly unproblematic Indiscernibility of Identicals as a tacit premise:  If x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.  Because something is true of TTH -- namely, that taking it apart would destroy it -- that is not true of TTS, TTH cannot be identical to TTS.

The simplicity and clarity of modal discernibility arguments like this one cast grave doubt on the opening assumption that TTH is a sum.  I am not saying that Varzi and Co. have no response to the argument; they do.  My point is that their response comes too late dialectically speaking.  If you know what a sum is, you know that the identity is dubious from the outset: the discernibility arguments merely make the dubiousness explicit. Responding to these arguments strikes me as too little too late; what the identity theorist needs to do is justify his intitial assumption as soon as he makes it.

My main question, then, is this.  What justifies the initial assumption that material particulars such as Tinkertoy houses are mereological sums?  It cannot be that they are wholes of parts, for a whole needn't be a sum.  TTH is a whole but it is not a sum.  It is not a sum because a sum is a collection that is neutral with respect to the arrangement or interrelation of its parts, whereas it is essential to TTH that its parts be arranged house-wise.

 

Cartoonist Molly Norris Driven into Hiding by Muslim Extremism

Story here. 

Among the great religions of the world, where 'great' is to be taken descriptively not normatively, Islam appears uniquely intolerant and violent.  Or are there contemporary examples of Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, or Christians who, basing themselves on their doctrines, publically  issue and carry out credible death threats against those who mock the exemplars of their faiths?  For example, has any Christian, speaking as a Christian, publically  put out a credible murder contract on Andres Serrano for his "Piss-Christ"?  By 'credible,' I mean one that would force its target, if he were rational, to go into  hiding and erase his identity?

UPDATE 9/19.   Commentary by James Taranto here.  Why doesn't Obama speak up for First Amendment rights in this case?

On Budgets

I have never made a budget in my life. Never having made one, I have never had to adhere to one. The budgeter is involved in a negative enterprise: he essays to control and curtail spending. He allocates so much money for this, and so much for that, and strives to stick to his limits. But positive methods are often superior to negative ones. If you want to lose weight, for example, it is better to exercise and burn more calories, while holding your caloric intake constant, than to eat less while holding steady on caloric expenditure. (Aside from the optimal course which is to do both at the same time.) Part of the reason for this is that it is harder to break an old habit than to begin a new one.

Similarly with budgeting. To budget is to approach your personal finances negatively when a positive approach is superior. Instead of setting limits to spending in various categories, specify target savings and investing amounts, and aim high. The Wealthy Barber has a chapter entitled "The Ten Percent Solution." As I recall, the author recommends investing 10% of gross income for long-term growth. That's chickenfeed to my conservative mind. We save and invest far more than this.  The best way to do this, of course, is by automatic payroll deduction. You arrange for your employer to direct deposit some percentage of your income into the account of your choice. You then live on what is left over. 

Why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and of course you will never ever use a credit card for its credit feature. You will use it only for its float, record-keeping, rebate, and convenience features. Allow me to brag so as to make a point that is very important for everyone. I have never paid a cent of credit card interest in my life, and in the last several years, each year I have received $300- $400  cash in rebates for the use of a couple of cards which charge me no fee for their use. The credit lines are huge but I go nowhere near them, and the interest rates I could not care less about. Not only that, but the 'float' makes me even more money. Let's say I have the use of $2,000 for six weeks. During that period the goods are in my possession but the money is at my disposal in a cash reserve account earning interest.

Suppose you are a leftie who hates 'corporate America.' What better way to stick it to the credit card companies than by becoming a free-rider?

So I ask again, why do you need a budget? If you are self-disciplined you will naturally watch your spending, and if you are not self-disciplined then you will lack the discipline to adhere to your budget.  Or is this a false alternative?

When I was a graduate student, 'back in the day,' I lived on 2-3 K per annum. And then I got a job which paid for starters the princely sum of 12 K per annum. I said to myself: "Surely, I can save and invest half of that!" But attitude is everthing. Attitude and will and good judgment. For example, if you are inclined to become financially independent, then you would be a fool to marry someone whose idea of Nirvana is a wallet full of charge cards with unlimited credit lines.

The moral side of the economic problem is paramount to a conservative like me. Those who can deny themselves and defer gratification can become financially well-off in a stable political and economic
environment such as we enjoy in these United States. But of course people will not deny themselves and defer gratification. So they must suffer the consequences. The problem is akrasia, weakness of the will. The fundamental problem is not predatory credit card companies, subprime mortgage scammers, and the payday loan sharks. For if you are self-disciplined, cautious, and diligent, they will not be able to get a handle on you.

Apologies to E-Mailers

If you have e-mailed me and haven't received a response, I apologize.  During the last three days I have been revamping my 'work station,' including configuring and getting used to a new computer.  It may be a day or two before I figure out how to access my e-mail account.  There are some old e-mails that it looks as if I will not be able to answer.  I don't have the time or energy to answer everything, and I do have a life away from the computer.

Time was when I couldn't understand how people could fail to respond to e-mail.  "It's so easy; just click on reply and type something.  The least the guy could do is acknowledge receipt." Now I understand, having become what I criticized -- there is just too much of it and too many other self- and other-imposed tasks to contend with. 

The Infirmity of Reason

It is indicative of the infirmity of reason that one cannot prove the infirmity of reason.  A faculty so weak that it must remain in doubt about its own strength and weakness.

If the Universe Can Arise out of Nothing, then so can Mind

Over breakfast yesterday morning, Peter Lupu uncorked a penetrating observation.  The gist of it I took to be as follows.  If a naturalist maintains that the physical universe can arise out of nothing without divine or other supernatural agency, then the naturalist cannot rule out the possibility that other things so arise, minds for example -- a result that appears curiously inconsistent with both the spirit and the letter of naturalism.  Here is how I would spell out the Lupine thought.

The central thrust of naturalism as an ontological thesis is that the whole of reality is exhausted by the space-time system and what it contains.  (To catalog what exactly it contains is a job for the physicist.)  But this bald thesis can be weakened in ways consistent with the spirit of naturalism.  The weakening makes naturalism more defensible.  And so I will irenically assume that it is consistent with the spirit of a latitudinarian naturalism to admit abstracta of various sorts such as Fregean propositions and mathmatical sets.  We may also irenically allow the naturalist various emergent/supervenient properties so long as it is understood that emergence/supervenience presupposes an emergence/supervenience base, and that this base is material in nature.  I will even go so far as to allow the naturalist emergent/supervenient substances such as individual minds.  But again, if this is to count as naturalism, then (i) their arisal must be from matter, and (ii) they cannot, after arising, exist in complete independence of matter.

What every naturalism rules out, including the latitudinarian version just sketched, is the existence of God, classically conceived, or any sort of Absolute Mind, as well as the existence of unembodied and disembodied finite minds. 

The naturalist, then, takes as ontologically basic the physical universe, the system of space-time-matter, and denies the existence of non-emergent/supervenient concreta distinct from this system.  Well now, what explains the existence of the physical universe, especially if it is only finitely old?  One answer, and perhaps the only answer available to the naturalist, is that it came into existence ex nihilo without cause, and thus without divine cause.  Hence

1. The physical universe came into existence from nothing without cause.

Applying Existential Generalization and the modal rule ab esse ad posse we get

2. It is possible that something come into existence  from nothing without cause.

If so, how can the naturalist exclude the possibility of minds coming into existence but not emerging from a material base?  If he thinks it possible that the universe came into existence ex nihilo, then he must allow that it is possible that divine and finite minds also have come into existence ex nihilo.  But this is a possibility he cannot countenance given his commitment to saying that everything that exists is either physical or determined by the physical.

This seems to put the naturalist in an embarrassing position.  If the universe is finitely old, then it came into existence.  You could say it 'emerged.'  But on naturalism, there cannot be emergence except from a material base.  So either the universe did not emerge or it did, in which case (2) is true and the principle that everything either is or is determined by the physical is violated.