Maverick Philosopher

A Couple of Venice Characters Met Working for Manpower

Bill Keezer e-mails re: my recent Manpower post:

I think it would be good for all young men somewhere in their early years to have to work for Manpower. It might give them more appreciation of what they have. It also might teach them something useful. I remember my various Manpower stints with some pleasure. I worked hard at a variety of jobs, learned a number of things I might not have, and felt like I earned my money. That’s not all bad.

I agree entirely, Bill, though your "with pleasure" I would qualify.  It is not pleasant to be bossed around by inferior specimens of humanity, but that can and does happen when you are at the bottom of the labor pool.  But working Manpower grunt jobs  was well worth it, if not for the money, then for the experiences and the characters I met.

One cat, Larry Setnosky, was a failed academic, known in the seedy bars we'd hit after work as 'The Professor.'  A doctoral student in history, he never finished his Ph. D.  Lived in Venice, California, with a couple other marginal characters, rode a motorcycle, wore a vest with no shirt underneath.  He'd write articles and then file them away. He was just too wild and crazy to submit to the academic discipline necessary to crank out a thesis and get the degree.  Booze and dope didn't help either.  I still recall his "Nary a stem nor a seed, Acapulco Gold is bad ass weed!"

Ernie Fletcher was one of Setnosky's housemates.  A law school dropout, he was convinced that the system was a "rigged wheel."  When I met him he was in his mid-thirties, an ex-boozer, and warmly in praise of sobriety.  He had sworn off what he called 'tune-ups" but was not averse to watching me "dissipate" as he told me once, not that I did much dissipating.  In point of dissipation I was closer to the Buddha than to the Bukowski end of the spectrum.

Fletcher was from the Pacific Northwest and had worked as a logger there.  Observing me during Manpower gigs he thought I was a good worker and not "lame" or "light in the ass" as he put it.  So he suggested we head up to Washington State and get logging jobs.  And so we drove 1200 miles up the beautiful Pacific Coast along Highway 1 from Los Angeles to Forks, Washington in my 1963 Karmann Ghia convertible.  Amazing as it is to my present cautious self, we took off the very next day after Ernie suggested the trip to me.  We probably had little more than a hundred bucks between us, but gas in those days was 25 cents a gallon.  On the way we stopped to see Kerouac's friend John Montgomery, who was also a friend of Ernie.  John Montgomery was the Henry Morley of The Dharma Bums and the Alex Fairbrother of Desolation Angels.  (For more on Montgomery see here.)  Unfortunately, when we located Montgomery's house, he wasn't at home.  I've regretted that non-meeting ever since.  Now I hand off to my Journal, volume 5, p. 32:

Saturday Midday 10 February 1973

Last Monday left L. A. about 12:00 PM.  Saw [brother] Philip in Santa Barbara, made Santa Cruz that night, stayed in motel after checking out [folk/rock venue] "The Catalyst" and local flophouse.  While passing Saratoga, CA  decided to look up John Montgomery, friend of Ernie's who knew Kerouac and the Beats.  We couldn't get in touch with him.  So on to Frisco, entered the city, became involved in intricate traffic tangles, visited [Lawrence Ferlinghetti's] City Lights Bookstore and Caffe Trieste where I had a cup of espresso.  By the way, in Big Sur visited Ernie's friend Gary Koeppel. [He was bemused to hear from Ernie that I was a Kerouac aficionado. In those days, Kerouac was pretty much in eclipse.  The first of the Kerouac biographies, Ann Charters' was not yet out and Kerouac's 'rehabilitation' was still in the future.] 

Spent Tuesday night in Dave Burn's trailer in Arcata, CA.  [Dave was the drummer of a couple of bands I was in back in L. A. 1968-1971]  Gave him the two tabs of acid I had in my attache case.  Wednesday morning fixed the headlight (highbeam) which was malfunctioning and for which I received a citation the night before.  Then went to the nearest CHP office and had the citation cleared.  Breakfast at Ramada Inn and then on to Eugene, Oregon.  Dug Taylor's, The New World Coffee House,and Ernie and Larry's old haunt, Maxie's.  Arrived at Ernie's brother-in-law's house at 11:30 PM.  Thursday spent in Eugene.  I bought Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Habermas' Knowledge and Human Interests.  Friday morning left early for Forks, Washington, arriving around 6:00 PM.  Presently lodged in Woodland Hotel.  Drinks last night with Ernie and legendary logger,  Jim Huntsman.  Arranged to start working Monday morning.  So far, so good.

Philip Larkin Reads "Aubade"

Reading by Larkin.  A reading by another, with text.  This is a great poem!

Is It Rational to Fear Death?

Dying is not the same as being dead.  'Death' is ambiguous as between 'dying' and 'being dead.'  But I will use 'death' to mean 'being dead.'  So the title question comes to this:  Is it rational to fear the 'state' of being dead?  There are ways of dying such that it is rational to fear them.  But that is not my question.

The fear of death torments some.  It appears to have tormented Philip Larkin as witness his poem "Aubade" reproduced here.  The fear of death gets a grip on me sometimes, but then it dissipates in the light of clear analysis.

When I fear death, what am I fearing?  Presumably what I am fearing is self-loss, my losing of my very self and the state of being lost to myself.  My losing, not anyone else's. The loss of my self to me is what I fear, not the loss of my self to others.

But this raises the question whether it is possible that I suffer the loss of myself.  If not, then the fear of death is groundless.

Either death is the annihilation of the self or it isn't.  Either way, the self cannot be lost to itself.

If physical death is the annihilation of the self, then the moment of death is the moment of my utter cessation.  After that moment I cannot lack anything either consciously or unconsciously.  That which does not exist can neither possess anything nor lack anything nor be threatened with dispossession.  The point is quite general: both having and lacking presuppose the existence of a subject of possession/nonpossession.  That which does not exist, therefore, cannot gain or lose anything, have or lack anything.

It follows that if physical death is the annihilation of the self, then after death I cannot be in a state in which I experience the loss or lack of my self -- or the loss or lack of anything.

If, on the other hand, physical death is not the annihilation of the self, and one survives bodily death, then too there can be no experience of self-loss for the self is not lost -- precisely because it survives.

I conclude that the fear of death, the fear of being dead, is irrational.  I can reasonably fear being bereft of house and home, wife and friend, but not of being nothing.  The very phrase 'being nothing' signals the irrationality.  Perhaps I can fear the process of becoming nothing -- if nothing is what I become -- but not of being nothing.  For as long as I am merely becoming nothing, then I am something.

If, on the other hand,  I survive my bodily death, then I can fear the state I will find myself in post mortem.  I like to think that we are now in the shadowlands, and that yonder, on the other side, will be clarity and light. We will learn there what we cannot learn here.   But what if the post mortem state is one even more confused and indeterminate and shadowy?  That's an awful thought, and one that makes materialism attractive:  if I can be certain that I won't survive, then I can be sure that there is an ultimate escape from the horror of existence and that I need fear no surprises. (But you are a fool if you think you can be certain of any such thing.)

But although I can reasonably worry about the state I will find myself in post mortem, what I cannot reasonably worry about it is being nothing.  For if I survive then I am not nothing, and if I do not then I lack the primary requisite for experiencing anything, namely, existence.

Epicurus vindicatus est.

Looks like old Larkin was in dire need of some of my logotherapy (to hijack Viktor Frankl's term).  But he's dead and so beyond the reach of my cognitive therapy.  Not to mention that trying to reason with a poet or any literary type is a fool's errand.  They are not equipped for that sort of thing -- which is why they are poets and literary types in the first place. 

Yes, there are exceptions.

Remembering an Old Man on the Skids

I once worked odd jobs out of Manpower Temporary Services in Culver City, California. One day on the job old broken-down Carl Murray delivered himself of a memorable line.

"Bill, there was a time I was limber all over and stiff in one place. But now it's the other around."

Old Carl didn't like Levi jeans. "They ain't got no ball room." Those were the days before the 'Gentlemen's Cut.'

Motorcycles he always referred to as "murdercycles." One day we were digging up sunken tombstones in a local cemetery, a fit job for a  philosopher with his meditatio mori. Carl complained of the others that day who got the "gravy" jobs. But I found that breaking up concrete with a jackhammer was far worse than working with pick and shovel in a graveyard.  And decidedly less meditative.

After work we would knock back a few cans of Brew 102 in his Culver City flophouse room and I would listen to his stories.

"Bill, there are just three things in this life I crave: women,  cigarettes, and beer. In that order."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mose Allison

I used to catch Mose at The Light House in Hermosa Beach, California, late '60s, early 70s.  Allison's in his 80s now, and last I checked, still going strong.  Seems philosopher Tibor Machan likes him too.

Don't Get Around Much Anymore.  Parchman Farm.  Gettin' There.  You're Mind is on Vacation.

Lust

How can something so paltry be such a huge spiritual impediment?

Why Philosophy Matters

Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), p. 229:

The life of the mind, of which rational inquiry is an integral component, is an essential constituent of our conception of the human good.  And rational inquiry leads inexorably to philosophizing.  For we engage in philosophy not (merely) because it is intellectually diverting -- a game one can play for its own sake.  It orients our thought, clarifies our values, guides our actions.  Philosophy matters because it clarifies and systematizes our thought about issues that matter.

Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily

Here again my annual Thanksgiving homily:

We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.

Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of. Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings.

Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Some of you will be at table with relatives today. Experientia docet: Occasions of putative conviviality can easily degenerate into nastiness. A prophylactic to consider is the avoidance of all talk of politics and religion. But to paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, What else is there to talk about? An exaggeration, no doubt, but God and Man in relation to the State does cover a lot of ground.

Attitude, Gratitude, Beatitude

The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude.  Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon?  Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness.  However you say it, it is true.  The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene. 

Broad generalizations, these.  They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying.  He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur cannot think his way out of his misery.  Don't get hung up on the exceptions.  Meditate on the broad practical truth.  On Thanksgiving, and every day.

Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.'  But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical.   Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative.  Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist,  a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.

 

Time To Be Unreasonable

It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone.  Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason.  The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.

Avoid Misanthropy

The timber of humanity, though crooked, is nonetheless mostly sturdy and termite-free. 

A Good Aphorism

A good aphorism should swim suddenly before the mind fully formed.  If you have to piece it together it will show its seams.  Grunts of effort rarely produce good ones.  Bukowski's "Don't try" finds application here.  The good ones are grantings -- from Elsewhere.  Be grateful for them, on Thanksgiving, and every day.

Aphorisms and Poems

Aphorisms and poems have this in common: neither can justify what they say while remaining what they are.

John Deck's Contrast Argument Against the Philosophy of Being

John N. Deck is a highly interesting, if obscure, figure in the neo-Scholasticism of the 20th century. I first took note of him in 1989, ten years after his death, when his article "Metaphysics or Logic?" appeared in New Scholasticism (vol. LXIII, no. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 229-240.) Thanks to the labors of Tony Flood we now have a better picture of the man and his work. The case of Deck may well prove to be a partial confirmation of Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."

What interests me about Deck is that he attacks the neo-Scholastic philosophy of Being from within. Holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto (1960), he cannot be suspected of any lack of acquaintance with the tradition against which he lodges his objections. Yet he arrives at conclusions similar to those of the pragmatist Sidney Hook (see his The Quest for Being) and the empiricist Donald C. Williams (see his "Dispensing with Existence," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LIX, no. 2, 1962, pp. 748-763.)

I myself am neither a Thomist nor a neo-Thomist. My route to the philosophy of Being was via the transcendental philosophy of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. My dissatisfaction with the phenomenological approach to ontology as well as with the logical approach one finds in Frege and Russell led me to re-think in my own way and in my own terms the old Thomist idea of ipsum esse subsistens. I gave my thoughts a rough and provisional form in my 2002 book A Paradigm Theory of Existence to which I attached the perhaps excessively triumphalist subtitle, Onto-Theology Vindicated. The gist of the subtitle can be put in the slogan: Being is neither a phenomenological nor a logical notion, but an onto-theological one.

Not having discussed Deck in my book, I will make good that omission here in one or more posts.

It is a matter of experience that our world is a plural world, one consisting of a manifold of beings or existents. The manifoldness is undoubtedly real, but it is not a pure manyness but a plurality of things that are, that have Being or existence in common, that form a community of being. There are many beings, but each is. It is undeniable that Being is in some sense common to beings. As common, it must be distinct from each of them taken distributively and from all of them taken collectively.

The question in dispute, however, is whether both Being and beings are real in the "extra-cognitional order" to use a phrase of Deck's, or only beings are. I maintain that both Being and beings are extra-cognitionally real whereas Deck maintains that only beings are. Thus Deck's view is that beings exist outside the mind, but that their unity and commonality is merely that of a concept, and so is imposed by the mind to satisfy its own logical exigencies. Deck's view could be put as follows. When we say of a thing that it exists, what we say is true; but there is no real unity in things that grounds our application of the predicate 'exists' to them. There is no Being in the things that are that makes it true to say of them that they are: Being is a concept we impose. The diversity of beings is real (extramental, extra-cognitional), but their unity is merely conceptual.

One could say that Deck takes a deflationary line: there is no such 'thing' as Being outside the mind. Clearly, this must be opposed by anyone who, like me, sees merit in the notion of ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent existence. For to say that existence is self-subsistent is to say that it itself exists.  But in philosophy it all comes down to the arguments one can adduce for or against. In support of his deflationism, Deck says the following:

There is no alternative to being. Everything is. Thus there is no ultimate intelligibility in the contention that all things that are agree in this, that they are all opposed to, or even equally opposed to, non-being — they would be at one, as it were, in the non-non-being feature. (232)

This passage suggests a Contrast Argument:

1. If a term T denotes something real, then there must be items to which T does not apply.
2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
Ergo
3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not denote anything real.

In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. 'Self-identical' is not rendered either senseless or reference-less by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. I don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.

But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication Deck thinks it has. He seems to think that if everything exists, then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between (actual) existence and possible nonexistence.

It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples of nonexistents. But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is no real unity in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them?

It seems to me that Deck is making a rather obvious mistake. He is assuming that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. He is thinking of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is what he has to say:

The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a distinction between the more general and the less general. This is a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not point to two distinct principles within Rover — dog and animal. Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog — there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a dog. (232-233)

This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus. Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general what-determination. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being or existence is not a summum genus as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22 of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion, Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is.

I'll have more to say about this later. For now, the main point is that Deck's Contrast Argument above is unsound. Not only does it share the defect of every contrast argument, it also confuses Being or existence with a highest what-determination.

Herder on the Dream of Life

Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben
Auf Erden hier.
Wie Schatten auf den Wolken schweben
Und schwinden wir.

Und messen unsre trägen Tritte
Nach Raum und Zeit;
Und sind (und wissen's nicht) in Mitte
Der Ewigkeit . . .

Johann Gottfried Herder

My loose translation:

A dream, a dream is our life
Here upon the earth.
In a sea of shadows we drift and disappear
Like whitecaps on the surf.

Our sluggish steps we measure
By space and temporality;
Moving in the midst (though we know it not)
Of eternity . . .

Lanza del Vasto on Enchainment to Mere Means

Lanza del Vasto, Principles and Precepts of the Return to the Obvious (Schocken 1974, no translator listed), p. 93:

The Pursuit of the Useful raises an endless staircase in front of men.  Whoever climbs it with all his strength and all his thought can but come out of it dead, without even having perceived that he has spent his life fleeing his life.  The difficulty, the satisfactions and the regularity of the pursuit lead him to believe that it is fine, reasonable and good to put himself into it heart and soul.

The idolatry of the Useful is indicated by the fact that 'useless' universally carries a pejorative connotation when the truth is that the Useless Things are the Highest Things.

Kleingeld, Meine Herren, Kleingeld!

Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

As Beer to Bukowski

Coffee is to me as beer to Bukowski.  And morning's to me as night to him.  He brags that he never wrote anything while sober.  Me, while drunk.

Embrace Life

One must embrace life if only to have grist for the analytic mill.

People

People judge falsely, by what we do, and what we have. They ought to judge by what we are.  But they are nothing themselves, so how could they?

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this bizarre predicament from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?"  And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not before.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.  That's true both phylogenetically, as Hegel intended it, but also ontogenetically.  And as I once heard Gadamer say, Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

On Accomplishing Non-Accomplishment

Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by  flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot -- this too is a sort of accomplishment.  You have to work at it a bit.  Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and the larger society's suggestions.  Eradicating one's suggestibility is actually a life-long task, and none too easy.

The world's a vast project of often useless neg-otiation. There is need of those who will 'otiate' it, enjoying "leisure with a good conscience" to cop a phrase from Nietzsche, that untimely saunterer.  Slow down! You'll get to your grave soon enough.  Why rush?  Is the universe in a rush to get somewhere?  Are you any less cosmic, you microcosm?

Affinity

There is the affinity of the blood-related, and what could be called the affinity of propinquity: the affinity of those who grew up together.  But the only true affinity is spiritual.  It has nothing to do with blood or proximity.

The Matter of Memory

Today's deeds are the matter of tomorrow's memories.  So act today that tomorrow's memories won't be regrets.

Don't Touch My Junk!

I wouldn't even let Krauthammer touch my junk.

Compassion

Feeling compassion for the earthquake victims, he was pleased by his sensitivity, but his warm feeling did not motivate him to do anything such as make a monetary contribution to the Red Cross.  His feeling remained mere sentiment and to that extent mere self-indulgence.

Better to feel compassion than to define it. Better still to act upon the feeling.  But now an interesting question arises.  Would it not be even better to act in alleviation of the other's suffering without feeling the negative affect?  This line of thought is explored in Spinoza on Commiseratio.

A Poem by Robert Dodsley (1703-1764)

From The Oxford Book of Short Poems, eds. Kavanagh and Michie, OUP 1985, p. 100:

Song

Man's a poor deluded bubble,
    Wandering in a mist of lies,
Seeing false, or seeing double,
    Who would trust to such weak eyes?
Yet, presuming on his senses,
    On he goes, most wondrous wise:
Doubts of truth, believes pretences,
    Lost in error lives and dies.

 

The Wild Diversity of the Solutions to the Problem of Human Existence

How wildly diverse the concrete solutions to the problem of life that each works out for himself! 

There was Leon Trotsky the professional revolutionary who worshipped life-long at the altar of politics.   Politics was his substitute for religion.  (If religion is the opiate of the masses, revolutionary politics is  the opiate of the intellectuals.) 

And then there was Trotsky's secretary and bodyguard Jean van Heijenoort who, after finally seeing through the illusions of Communism after years of selfless service to its cause, renounced politics entirely and devoted himself to mathematical logic, becoming a distinguished historian of the subject.  One is struck by the extremity of this turn away from something of great human relevance to something of almost none.  A retreat from messy reality into a realm of bloodless abstractions.  An escape from the bloody horrors of politics into the arcane.  At the same time, a turn from devotion to a great but ill-conceived cause to bourgeois self-indulgence in sex, 'romance,' and love affairs.  Sadly, his fatal attraction to Ana Maria Zamora got him killed in the same place, Mexico City, where Trotsky met his end at the point of an ice axe wielded by a puppet of Stalin.  Zamora shot van Heijenoort with her Colt .38 while he slept .  From revolutionary to bourgeois professor of philosophy at Brandeis University.  But he was never so bourgeois as to respect the bourgeois institution of marriage.

Dr. George Sheehan's escape was into running to which he ascribed a significance it could not bear.  He was an inspiration to a lot of us with his 1975 On Running.  But then came a string of rather more fatuous and portentous titles, starting with Running and Being. As if der Sinn von Sein is poised to disclose itself to the fleet of foot.  All due praise to running, but homo currens qua currens is not on the way to Being.

And then there are those who went from politics to religion.  Unlike van Heijenoort who moved from leftist politcs to mathematical logic, Simone Weil went from leftist politics to religion. "The great error of the Marxists and of all of the nineteenth century was to believe that by walking straight ahead one had mounted into the air."  Exactly right.

Edith Stein, another very bright Jewish philosophy student, went from philosophy to religion.  Seeking total commitment she fled to a Carmelite monastery.  She was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz as Trotsky was murdered by the long arm of Stalin in Mexico City.  When I say that Stein went from philosophy to religion, I do not mean that she abandoned the first for the second: she wrote weighty tomes in the convent, Finite and Eternal Being and Potency and Act, to name two.  But they were written under the banner, philosophia ancilla theologiae.

It is fruitful to compare Weil and Stein.  The former, despite her attraction, kept her distance from the Roman church -- Kenneth Rexroth speaks of her "tortured prowling outside the doors of the Catholic Church" -- while the latter embraced it in the most committed way imaginable.  There is a 'logic' to  such commitment, one that is operative in the lives of many a convert, Thomas Merton being another example:  if it is The Truth that one has found, then surely it demands and deserves total commitment.  Religion really embraced and made existential make a totalitarian claim -- which is why the totalitarians of the Left must make total war on it.

But these days I've been reading the slacker poet, Charles Bukowski, so perhaps he deserves a place in this little incomplete catalog.  His epitaph reads, Don't try."  He avoided bourgeois mediocity, no doubt, but along a path that cannot be recommended: one of piecemeal physical and spiritual suicide.  Whatever you say about Trotksy, van Heijenoort, Sheehan, Weil and Stein, they were strivers.  They understood that a life worth living is a life of relentless effort and exertion and self-overcoming.  It is about subduing the lower self, not wallowing in it. 

When I was a young man I came to the conclusion that I had three choices, three paths: suicide, mediocrity, striving.  A lifetime later I verify that my choice of the third was best.

 

 

My Lately Posted Logic Problem Pondered . . .

. . . and pondered well by David Parker over at Pondering the Preponderance.  I challenged the reader to spot what is wrong in the following argument, an argument I thought was interesting because it is fairly seductive, as compared to the stock examples in logic texts:

The Argument
1. A necessary truth is true.
2. Whatever is true is possibly true.
3. Whatever is possibly true could be false.
Therefore
4. A necessary truth could be false.

(I hope it is clear that 'possibly' and 'could' are not being used epistemically in this argument.)  Since the conclusion is plainly false, the argument is unsound either in virtue of invalidity, or in virtue of one or more false premises, or both.  There is nothing wrong with the formal logic of the argument, so I pointed out, correctly, that while (1) and (2) are each true, (3) is false. 

But there is an alternative analysis which Parker notes (and I didn't just to keep the post short), namely that one can see the argument as trading on an equivocal use of 'possibly true.'  And this alternative analysis helps explain why the argument is seductive.  After all (3) would be true if 'possibly true' meant 'contingently true.'  That is not what it means, but one could be forgiven for thinking so.  One could then say that the argument goes wrong because it commits the informal fallacy of equivovation: 'possibly true' is used with different senses in (2) and (3).  On this alternative analysis one could say that all the premises are true, but the argument commits the informal fallacy of equivocation.

But there is another wrinkle, and one which Parker notes.   Equivocation is standardly classified as an informal fallacy, buy doesn't every case of equivocation in a deductive argeument induce a formal fallacy?  Yes it does.  The form of the above argument could be depicted as follows:

Every F is a G
Every G is an H
Every H is an I
Ergo
Every F is an I

The form just depicted is clearly valid, whence it follow that every argument instantiating this form is valid.  It is of course assumed that the terms are being used univocally.  But if there is an equivocation on 'possibly true,' then the form of the original argument is not the above, but this:

Every F is a G
Every G is an H
Every I is a J
Ergo
Every F is a J

which is plainly invalid.

One moral is that the distinction between formal and informal fallacies is not hard-and-fast. (Composition and Division would also be interesting to discuss in this connection).  One can analyze our original argument as involving an equivocation on  'possibly true' in which case the argument is invalid, or one can take the argument to be valid but reject it because of the falsity of premise (3).

Ah, the pleasures of analysis!

God and the 'No Angry Unicorn' Argument

This from an astute reader commenting on the Hell post:

'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon'

Does this not refer to doxastic uncertainty rather than a fatuous equation of God with something material? This is how I interpreted it when I read it. More in the vein of: why venerate something tenuous in lieu of a Lucretian reality? Not a profound solution by any means, but an almost noble one if lived humbly-- not sensually. Although , I suppose this is an agnostic take on the phrase. ( I've been reading too much of Montaigne!)

Thanks for exposing me to Henryk Gorecki . Do you know of Arvo Part?

I love Arvo Part, and Montaigne too.  But onto the issue you raise. To quote Cactus Ed himself, "Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?"

Now it would be foolish to try to discern in the scribblings of Ed Abbey anything very clear or precise or carefully thought-through.  But it seems clear to me that Abbey is likening God to an intramundane object much as Bertrand Russell likened him to a celestial teapot.  In so doing, both demonstrate a profound ignorance of what sophisticated theists mean by 'God.'  They are not talking about a being among beings, let alone a material being among beings. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, et cetera.)  But you focus on the epistemic side, with justification, as the quotation shows. 

Accordingly, Abbey is suggesting that, regardless of the nature of God, the evidence of his existence is no better than the evidence of the existence of an irate lunar unicorn, a lunicorn if you will.   

But please note that questions about the evidence for something are connected to questions about the nature of that something.  The existence of a lunicorn would be strongly disconfirmed were a a bunch of lunar modules to fail to detect the presence of any such critter.  But no number of space probes could disconfirm the existence of God.  Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was surely talking nonsense when he reported that he saw no God during his famous suborbital flight.  The empirical undetectability of God no more tells against his existence than the empirical undetectability of the square root of pi tells against its existence. 

So while Abbey's remarks do have an epistemological flavor, they cannot be divorced from their metaphysical import.

But there is also an axiological side to it, which may be even more important.  Abbey is implying that it doesn't much matter whether God exists or not.  He could have added 'Who cares?' after 'Who knows?' to his list of questions.  After all, it is of no great moment whether there are any lunicorns or celestial teapots out there.  My happiness cannot hang on that.  The meaning of life does not stand or fall with the existence or nonexistence of such things. 

Abbey's aphorism sums up the atheist attitude quite well.  Does God exist?  Who cares? Who cares whether there is some weird extra object in the ontological inventory?  And how would you know anyway?  "Bartender, another round!"

A Vision of Hell

The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the Sky. This will lead either to a childish form of theism (God as Big Daddy, supplier of material needs, wish-fulfiller) or to a form of atheism of the Edward Abbey 'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon' variety.

Something similar is true of conceptions of heaven and hell. The materially minded will develop crass conceptions. Popular Islam's notion of paradise as an endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins, as a doing there all the carnal things one is forbidden here, is as theologically hopeless as is a Christian fundamentalist's notion of hell as fire and brimstone.

I suggest the following as closer to the theological reality of hell where hell is permanent separation, recognized as such, from one's absolute good, recognized as such.

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell not as a state of pain but of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise --  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas -- in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. The fire of desire endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists.

An Argument Against Bukowski

He had no appreciation of nature.  That says something about a man. And what it says ain't good.  I'll have to dig up one of his anti-nature poems for documentation.  I recall one in which he has good things to say about smog, the atmosphere of LaLaLand, the oxygen of (fallen) Angelenos.  Those last cute phrases are mine not his.

There is a Bukowski category now, for more on this dude.

The Lure of the Trail

It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around. But I can easily understand how many would feel differently about this.

I once proposed to a woman that she and her husband accompany me and my wife on a little hike. She reacted as if I had proposed that she have all her teeth extracted without benefit of anaesthetic. She   seemed shocked that anyone would suggest such a thing. Finally she said, "Well, maybe, if there's a destination."

A destination? Each footfall, each handhold, each bracing breath of cold mountain air is the destination. Did John Muir have a destination when he roamed the Range of Light? Was Henry Thoreau trying to get somewhere during his crosscountry rambles?

Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live. Surrounded by beauty, he is yet oblivious to it, rushing to his destination. If one does not have the time to meditate on the moonset, celebrate the sunrise, or marvel at a stately Saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridgeline, it is a serious question whether one is alive in any human sense at all.

You may end up at your destination all right -- in a box, never having lived.

Pseudo-Intellectual Tripe from William Sloane Coffin

William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says:

     Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the
     uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was
     mistaken; "Cogito ergo sum" --"I think therefore I am"? Nonsense.
     "Amo ergo sum" -- "I love therefore I am."

This is pseudo-intellectual tripe of the worst sort. It is an asinine form of cleverness in which one drops names without understanding the doctrines behind the names. It is the sort of thing that can impress only the half-educated, while eliciting scorn from those who drink deep from the Pierian spring.

Socrates' point is that self-examination is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. Coffin's point is that commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. These two points are obviously consistent: they can both be true. (And I should think they are both true.) But by saying that Socrates had it wrong, Coffin implies that his view entails the negation of Socrates' view -- which is silly. Suppose A says that G. W. Bush was once governor of Texas, and B says, 'No you've got it wrong, he was once in the National Guard.' It is the same kind of silliness.

It should also be pointed out that even if commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived, it doesn't follow that it is a sufficient condition thereof. The committed but unexamined lives of a Nazi, Communist, or Islamo-totalitarian are not examples of lives well-lived.

As for Descartes, Coffin doesn't understand him at all. Else he would have realized that loving is a species of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of the term. Thinking in this sense covers all mental   acts, including remembering, anticipating, perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, loving, hoping, and thinking in the narrow sense of conceiving. All mental states having the property Brentano called   intentionality (object directedness) fall under the cogito, the 'I think.' Thus Coffin commits an obvious ignoratio elenchi when he takes Descartes to be using cogito in the narrow sense that excludes amo.

Alexander Pope  penned the following lines:

     A little learning is a dangerous thing
     Drink deep or taste not  the Pierian spring
     There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
     But drinking largely  sobers us again.

I learned these lines in high school, and they have stood me in good stead ever since. 'Pierian' from Pieria, a region of ancient Macedonia  where the Muses lived. Not to be confused with Peoria.

Thoughts on Marriage

Dennis Prager and Michael Medved are my favorite AM band talk jocks. Both intelligent and wise, they raise the level of the general culture unlike toxin-merchants such as Howard Stern who lower it. He's no star in my firmament. Prager and Medved know that they have a moral obligation not to add to the cultural pollution. And they have the intellect and good sense to make a positive contribution. Intellect is important, but wisdom and good judgment are even more important.  Rare commodities these, not to be found on the Left with its adolescent querulousness, snarkiness, and the mindless incantation of the SIXHIRB litany:  sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted. (That particular list from Prager.)

But my topic is marriage.

Prager a while back cited respect and liking as two of the factors most important for a successful marriage. He placed love much lower on the list. Prager's remark struck me as astute. Do you like this person? Can you put up with her morning and night through good times and bad? Do you respect this person? These are important questions to ask before doing something rash. The nature of her endowments fore and aft will no doubt come into consideration, and ought to. But leave that for later in the logical, if not the temporal, order of considerations. A wise man knows which of his heads is for thinking, and which for linking. He thinks with the big one.

Brain, heart, penis/vagina, in that (logical) order. I trust my meaning is clear.

It helps if one can admire one's partner for attributes and skills one does not possess oneself. Marriage is a quest for completion, for the other half with which to make a whole, to cop a riff from Plato's Symposium. In a good marriage, the partners do not compete with one another, they complete one another. One does well to consider whether it is wise to marry someone in the same line of work. Would I want to be married to a female equivalent of myself? I need completion, not duplication.  One of me is enough.

Nietzsche somewhere says that marriage is a long conversation.  But how would he know?  Marriage is better described as a long wordless understanding.  It's deeper than words.  In any case you will be talked out soon enough.  So there had better be something deeper for the relation to rest upon.

There must be both sameness and difference. Sameness for compatibility, difference for complementarity. But here is the hard part: the ways in which the partners are similar must be conducive to their getting along, and the ways in which they are different must also be conducive to their getting along.

Example. Don't marry someone with different views about money. If you are frugal, you would be insane to marry a person who thinks of Nirvana as a charge card with an unlimited line of credit. But if you are sharp about money, you may want to think twice about marrying someone who is also sharp about it, for you may come into conflict on how best to save and invest, spend and lend. The sameness and the difference must be balanced. The partners need to have the same general view about money, but one of the partners should keep the books, leaving the other to perform tasks more suitable for him or her. There will of course be exceptions to this rule of thumb.

A Logic Problem

Consider this argument:

   1. A necessary truth is true.
   2. Whatever is true is possibly true.
   3. Whatever is possibly true could be false.
   Therefore
   4. A necessary truth could be false.
   
A sound argument is one that satisfies two conditions: its premises are all true, and the reasoning it embodies is correct. Is the above argument sound?

If not, what has gone wrong in the argument? Answer below the fold.

The Fly and the Fly Bottle

Why does the bug need to be shown the way out?  Pop the cork and he's gone.

Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy?  He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . .  He should have just walked away from it.

If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it.  You are free to go, the door is unlocked.  This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view.  But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy.  Just do it, if that's what you want.  It can be done.

What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit.  (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.)  For any justification proffered, perforce & willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy.  You cannot have it both ways.  You either walk away or stay.

(Exercise for the reader: Cite chapter and verse of the Epictetus and Wittgenstein passages to which I allude above.)

To Brandeis Girl

I gave you my love
You handed it back
A letter unread.

You said,
"It was wrongly addressed
To being-in-love
And not to me."

You were wrong about that.
I loved love, but you too.
You should have handed it back
Without explanation.

Better a brute refusal
Than a refusal rationalized
Badly.

With that I began to take a hard-eyed look at you
The cataracts of love lasered to bits
Your faults swam into view
And our love was soon a dead letter.

 

Whence the Poignancy of Farewell?

Death presides over all of life, but in leave-takings, while remaining in the background he steps out of the shadows just enough so that the glint of his scythe strikes the eye.  A harbinger of the brunt's striking of the neck and the ending of this, our ambiguous sojourn.

Avis Rara

Man is a strange bird, a rare bird, divided against himself.  He is one and two, two and one.  Witness to his antics, he listens to himself singing and then bepuzzles himself with thoughts about the Witness (Is it one or many?) and its relation to the feathered biped perched on the branch (identity or difference?).

A touch of class would be added to this observation were I to dig up the implied Upanishad verse.  But that would cost too much effort and time.  Old Sol is set shortly to rise over the magnificent Superstitions and I must go for my  long Sunday run now if I am to make my Mesa breakfast date with Peter and Mikey at Cindy's Greasy Spoon.

Henryk Mikolaj Górecki

Górecki is dead at 76.  Beatus Vir.

Lower and Higher Ways of Wasting Time

A Bukowski binge appears to be in the offing, following hard on the heels of Beat October, all part of ongoing ruminations on styles of life  and modes of muddling along the via dolorosa of this vale of samsara enroute to points unknown.  Here is something that came out of my pen early in the predawn:

Barfly and gambler, flâneur and floozy fritter away their time.  And they are condemned for so doing by the solid bourgeois.  But the latter thinks, though he may not say, that the pursuits of the monastery and the ivory tower, though opposite to the low life's  dissipation, are equally time-wasting.  Prayer, meditation, study for its own sake, translation and transmission of culture, the vita contemplativa, Pieperian leisure, otium liberale, moral scrupulosity, mindfulness, the various disciplines of palate and penis, heart and memory, working out one's salvation with diligence  -- all will evoke a smile from the worldly  bourgeois fellow, the man of substance solidly planted in the self-satisfied somnolence of middle-class mediocrity.   He's tolerant of course, and superficially respectful, but the respect becomes real only after the time-waster has managed to turn a buck or secure a livelihood from his time-wasting by becoming a teacher in a college, say, or a pastor of a church.

For further exfoliation, see Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.

The Problem of Evil and the Argument from Evil

(A reader found the following post, from the old PowerBlogs site, useful.  So I repost it here with minor modifications and additions.)

It is important to distinguish between the problem of evil and the argument from evil. The first is the problem of reconciling the existence of God, as traditionally understood, with the existence of natural and moral evils.  As J. L. Mackie points out, this "is essentially a logical problem: it sets the theist the task of clarifying and if possible reconciling the several beliefs which he holds." (The Miracle of Theism, Oxford 1982, p. 150) Mackie goes on to point out that "the problem in this sense signally does not arise for those whose views of the world are markedly different from traditional theism." Thus the theist's problem of evil does not arise for an atheist. It might, however, be the case that some other problem of evil arises for the atheist, say, the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with life's being worth living.   But that is a separate matter.

The argument from evil, on the other hand, is an attempt to show the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, where 'fact of evil' is elliptical for 'the existence of natural and moral evils.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND THE ARGUMENT FROM EVIL

The main difference between the problem of evil and the argument from evil is that the former is an ad hominem argument whereas the second is not. I am using ad hominem in the way Peter Geach uses it on pp. 26-27 of his Reason and Argument (Basil Blackwell 1976):

This Latin term indicates that these are arguments addressed to a particular man -- in fact, the other fellow you are disputing with. You start from something he believes as a premise, and infer a conclusion he won't admit to be true. If you have not been cheating in your reasoning, you will have shown that your opponent's present body of beliefs is inconsistent and it's up to him to modify it somewhere.

As Geach points out, there is nothing fallacious about such an argumentative  procedure. If A succeeds in showing B that his doxastic system harbors a contradiction, then not everything that B believes can be true. Now can an atheist prove the nonexistence of God in this way? No he cannot: at the very most he can prove (with the aid of various auxiliary premises that he and his interlocutor both accept) that God exists and Evil exists cannot both be true. But it does not follow therefrom that God exists is not true. For the atheist to transform the ad hominem problem of evil into a non-ad hominem argument from evil, he would have to establish, or at least assert, that evil exists, and not merely that the theist believes that evil exists. To see my point consider the following conditional, where P is the conjunction of auxiliary premises:

C. If evil exists & P, then God does not exist.

The atheist who raises the problem of evil for the theist asserts (C), or rather a proposition of that form. But to assert a conditional is not to assert its antecedent, or its consequent for that matter; it is to assert a entailment connection between the two. Now although it is the case that for each argument there is a corresponding conditional, and vice versa, arguments must not be confused with conditionals.

Transforming (C) into an argument from evil yields:

Evil Exists

P

Therefore

God does not exist.

Clearly, an atheist who gives this argument, or rather an argument of this form, must assert both premises. Doing so, he ceases his ad hominem examination of the consistency of another person's beliefs, beliefs he either rejects or takes no stand on, and 'comes clean' with his own beliefs.

THE ARGUER FROM EVIL NEEDS TO AFFIRM OBJECTIVE EVIL

If the atheist's aim is merely to poke holes in the logical consistency of the theist's belief-set, then it doesn't matter whether he thinks of evil as objective or subjective. Indeed, he needn't believe in evil in any sense. He could hold that it is an illusion. But if the atheist's goal is to support his own belief that God does not exist with an argument from evil, then he needs to maintain that evil is objective or objectively real.

Consider all the enslavement of humans by humans that has taken place in the history of the world. Suppose it is agreed that slavery is morally wrong. What makes this true? Define a moral subjectivist as one who agrees that the claim in question is true, but holds that the truth-maker of this moral truth, and of others like it, is an individual's being in a psychological state, say, the state of being repulsed by slavery. For the moral subjectivist, then, sentences like 'Slavery is wrong' are elliptical for sentences like 'Slavery is wrong-for-X,' where X is a person or any being capable of being in psychological states. Furthermore, the moral subjectivist grants that moral claims have truth-makers, indeed objective truth-makers; it is just that these truth-makers involve psychological states that vary from person to person.

Now if our atheist subscribes to a theory of evil along those lines, then, although there will be objective facts of the matter regarding what various individuals feel about the practice or the institution of slavery, there will be no objective fact of the matter regarding the wrongness or moral evil of slavery.

If so, the fact of evil subjectively construed will have no bearing on the existence of God, a fact, if it a fact, that is objective.

Suppose a torturer tortures his victim to death solely for the satisfaction it gives him. And suppose that moral subjectivism is true. Then the torturing, though evil for the tortured, is good for the torturer, with the upshot that the torturing is neither good nor evil objectively. Now if I were on the scene and had the power to stop the torturing, but did not, would my noninterference detract from my moral goodness? Not at all. (The same goes a fortiori for God.) For nothing objectively evil is transpiring: all that is going on is that one person is securing his pleasure at the expense of another's pain. If you insist that something evil is going on, then that shows that you reject moral subjectivism. But if you accept moral subjectivism, then nothing evil is going on; the torturing is evil only in the mind of the victim and in the minds of any others who sympathize with him. If you accept moral subjectivism and continue to insist that the torturing is evil, then you would also have to insist that it is good, since it is good from the perspective of the torturer. But if it is both good and evil, then it is (objectively) neither.

What I am claiming, then, is that the atheist arguer from evil must construe evil objectively. This will result in trouble for the atheist if it can be shown that objective evil cannot exist unless God exists. For then the atheist arguer from evil will end up presupposing the very being whose existence he is out to deny. No doubt this is a big 'if.' But it is worth exploring.  The problem for the atheist is to explain how there can be objective good and evil in a Godless universe. 

And another line worth exploring is a theistic argument to God from the fact of objective good and evil.  No such argument could PROVE the existence of God, but it could very well have the power of cancelling out the argument from evil.

Charles Bukowski Meets Simone Weil

Both refused to live conventionally.  The Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin.  Both said No to the bourgeois life.  But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed.  Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent.  For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church and state and family values, is the low life:  drinking, gambling, fornicating, drug-taking, petty crime like busting up a room and skipping out on the rent, barroom brawling.  Not armed robbery, rape, and murder, but two-bit thievery, whoring and picking fights in dingy dives.  Nothing that gets you sent to San Quentin or Sing-Sing. 

For the other the true life is not so readily accessible: it is the life in pursuit of the Higher, the existence and nature of which is only glimpsed now and again.  (GG 11)  The succor of the Glimpse -- this is indeed the perfect word -- is unreliable, a matter of grace.  One is granted a glimpse.  A matter of grace, not gravity.  It is hard to rise, easy to fall -- into the the bed of sloth, the whore's arms, the bottle.  The pleasures of the flesh are as reliable as anything in this world.  In that reliability lies their addictive power.  Satisfaction of crass desire breeds a  bad infinity of crass desires.  Desire is endlessly reborn in each satisfaction.  One is not granted the rush of the lush-kick by a power transcendent of the natural nexus; it is a matter of determinism once you take the plunge.  Drink, snort, shoot and the effect follows, which is not to say that one does not freely decide to drink, snort, shoot.  The point is that the free agent's input sets in motion a process utterly predictable in its effect.  Not so with the "lightning flashes" (GG 11) that reveal the Higher.

At best, one positions oneself so as to enjoy the gusts of divine favor should any come along.  Like al-Ghazzali in search of a cooling breeze, you climb the minaret.  There you are more likely to catch the breeze than on the ground, though there is no guarantee.  One cannot bring it about by one's own efforts, and the positioning and preparing cannot be said to be even a necessary condition of receipt of the divine favor; but the creaturely efforts make it more likely.

Bukowski versus Weil.  The Dean of Dissipation versus the Categorical Imperative in skirts.  Self-indulgence versus self-denial as opposed paths to the truer and realer life.  Dissipation versus concentration, versus Weil's attention.  "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." (Gravity and Grace, p. 106)

The low life (Buk) will not renounce but dives head first into the most accessible goods of this world, the lowest and basest and commonest.  The angel in him celebrates the animal in man thereby degrading himself and 'gravitating' towards food and drink, sex and drugs.  You just let yourself go and gravity does the rest.  The fall is assured.  No self-discipline in matters of money either.  Our man worships at the shrine of Lady Luck, betting on the horses at Santa Anita, Del Mar, and Hollywood Park, all within striking distance of his beloved Los Angeles.

The spiritual aspirant who aims high and beyond this life, though tempted by booze and broads and the whole gamut of the palpable and paltry, seeks the Good beyond all finite goods.  Pursuit of the Good demands detachment from all finite goods (GG 12 ff.).

The Aporia.  Positivistic dissipationism versus a concentrationism that is hard to tell from nihilism.  Self-loss via dissipation, the dive into the diaspora of the sensory manifold versus self-loss by absorption into a Transcendence that cancels individuality.  Salvation of the self by annihilation of the self.  ". . . the object of all our efforts is to become nothing." (GG 30)

The Religion of Peace Strikes Again

Horace Jeffery Hodges on American Al-Awlaki's call for the killing of Americans.  Is he calling for his own killing?

All religions are the same, right?  So there must be Confucian, Daoist, B'hai, . . . , calls for mass murder.  If not, am I permitted the thought that just maybe Islam is uniquely violent?

Aptronym of the Day

According to this morning's Arizona Republic,  Rudy Bustamante of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement helped bust a major human-smuggling ring.

Nomen est omen.

When We Have Gold We are in Fear . . .

. . . when we have none we are in danger.  (English proverb)

A proverb whose pertinence is proven  by  recent  developments.

 

Pelosi's Theme Song

Not Fade Away.  The dingbat won't slink off into the sidelines.  Pretty face, though.  Too bad there's nothing behind it.

The late Ted Kennedy's favorite song actually was The Impossible Dream.  Figures.  It sums up the Left so well: the pursuit by any means of impossible mirage-ideals without regard for consequences.  "To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause."  To be willing to break 100 million eggs for omelet-in-the-future.

So conservatives don't have ideals?  Not at all. Ours are reality-based, grounded in genuine potentials of human action, and respectful of hard facts about man and nature. 

Companion post: Standing on the Terra Firma of Antecedent Reality

Relativism About Values and About Axiological Justification

Spencer Case e-mails:

I am as big an enemy of relativism in all its manifestations as you are. However, I think you were a bit too quick in your recent post on the supposed difficulties of standing resolutely for things you value only relatively. For instance, consider the following passage:

Now here's the question. Given that the two [the conservative and the libertarian]maintain contradictory value-prioritization theses [with respect to the prioritizaqtion of liberty and security] , how can either "stand unflinchingly" for his thesis given that each recognizes that each thesis is true only from his orientation, an orientation which rests crucially on his value-prioritization, a value-prioritization that he has no objective reason to prefer over that of his opponent?

You seem here and throughout your piece, to be operating on the assumption that there is a foundation of absolute values upon which our relative values are grounded, so that we should be troubled to find our deepest, sincerest values are not "any better than" contradictory values in ultimate terms. Maybe that's fine in the context of a discussion of Berlin's thought (with which I am not familiar). However, if the discussion is supposed to be a general discussion about absolute versus relative values, than it betrays the fact that you have insufficiently internalized the mindset of a truly radical subjectivist like Simon Blackburn.

Suppose, like Blackburn, you hold that all values are relative, that values simply are non-cognitive expressions of subjective yays! and boos! In that case, what's wrong with standing unflinchingly for what is only subjectively valued? What else could we possibly stand unflinchingly in favor of than those things to which we are most deeply committed, albeit with commitment understood in a non-cognitive way? Your mistake, Blackburn would say, is that you seem to think your deepest subjective commitments require absolute grounding, and in so doing sell your own commitments short. To misquote Wittgenstein, just as nothing holds up the world, nothing holds up your deepest subjective values.

On one point I think we are in agreement.  If one adopts a noncognitivist theory according to which values are nothing more than purely subjective expressions of preferences and aversions, then there cannot be any  reason of an axiological sort not to stand unflinchingly in favor of one's commitments.  This is a point that is often not appreciated.  If values are subjective and relative in this way, and it is one of the values of our group to dominate and subjugate other groups, then there cannot be any reason of an axiological sort to prevent us from doing so.  So relativists fool themselves if they think that relativism necessarily breeds tolerance.  It is a non sequitur to reason, "Because all values are relative, one must respect the values of other cultures."  After all, if all values are relative, then the value of respecting the values of other cultures cannot be absolute but must itself be relative.  A commitment to the relativity of values is logically consistent with obliterating  other value-systems and their proponents.

So far, then, agreement!

But I am not assuming that values are relative; indeed I am presupposing that they are not.  For example, I was in earlier posts presupposing that liberty, equality, and security are nonrelative values, and that the propositions which express their ordering (e.g., 'Liberty is a higher value than security')  are objectively true if true.

The point I was making was about justification.  Even if liberty and security are objective values, and it is objectively the case that one trumps the other, it can still be the case that one will not be able to show that one is right and one's opponent wrong.  I claim that this is the predicament we are in with respect to some value conflicts.  Now suppose that is the case.  Then, contra Berlin-quoting-Schumpeter,  I ought to be bothered by the fact that my opponent -- who, we are assuming, is a sincere truth-seeker, possessing  all the moral and intellectual virtues, well-informed of all the relevant empirical facts, etc. -- disagrees with me.  I ought to flinch!  Otherwise I am privileging my own point of view simply because it is mine -- which is irrational.   

Right now I'm Manas, Kyrgyzstan about to fly back to Fort Lewis, Washington for stateside outprocessing, so this will be the last email you get from me on this deployment (in a non-sinister way). Take care and thanks for all the correspondence over the months!

You're welcome.  Have a safe trip back, and thank you for your service to our country.