Maverick Philosopher

Dallas Willard (1935-2013)

I met Dallas Willard only once, at an A. P. A. meeting in San Francisco in the early '90s.  I had sent him a paper on Husserl and Heidegger and we had plans to get together over dinner to discuss it.  Unfortunately, the plans fell through when a son of Willard showed up.  But we did speak briefly and I still recall his kindness and his words, "I'll help you any way I can."  In the few minutes I was with him I became aware of his depth and his goodness.

My only serious engagement with Professor Willard's work was via a long and intricate paper I published in Philosophia Christi, "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," vol. 6, no. 1 (2004), pp. 27-58.

A search of this site turns up only one post on Willard, Knowledge Without Belief: a Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection.

We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used.  I expect Willard would approve of the following lines from St Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:

Let us put away these vain and empty concerns.  Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth.  Life is hard, and death is uncertain.  It may carry us away suddenly.  In what state shall we leave this world?  Where must we learn what we have neglected here?  Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence?  What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself?  This too must be investigated. 

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'Divine Conspirator' Dallas Willard Dies at 77

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Hippo Swallows Man Who Lives to Tell Tale

If a hippopotamus swallows a man, does the man become a part of the hippo's body?  Might this be relevant to the Woman's Body Argument?

A Sign of Aesthetico-Moral Progress

One's coming to see more beauty in buttes and mesas than in butts and mammaries.

Beauty and the Beholder

Asinus asino, et sus sui pulcher.  An ass is beautiful to an ass, and a pig to a pig.

Are Propositions Counterexamples to Brentano's Thesis?

Franz Brentano, for whom intentionality is the mark of the mental, is committed to the thesis that all instances of (intrinsic) intentionality are instances of mentality.  Propositions and dispositions are apparent counterexamples. For they are nonmental yet intrinsically object-directed. Whether they are also real counterexamples is something we should discuss. This post discusses (Fregean) propositions. Later, dispositions — if I am so disposed.

On one approach, propositions are abstract objects. Since abstracta are categorially barred from being mental, it is clear that if intrinsic intentionality is ascribed to abstract propositions, then the thesis that all instances of intentionality are instances of mentality must be rejected. For specificity, we consider Frege's theory of propositions. He called them Gedanken, thoughts, which is a strangely pyschologistic terminological choice for so anti-psychologistic a logician, but so be it.

 A proposition is the sense (Sinn) of a certain sort of sentence in the indicative mood, namely, an indicative sentence from which all indexical elements, if any, such as the tenses of verbs, have been extruded. Consider the following sentence-tokens each of which features a tenseless copula:

1. The sea is blue
2. The sea is blue
3. Die See ist blau
4. Deniz mavidir.

(Since Turkish is an agglutinative language,  the copula in the Turkish sentence is the suffix 'dir.')

The (1)-(4) array depicts four sentence-tokens of three sentence-types expressing exactly one proposition. Intuitively, the four sentences say the same thing, or to be precise, can be used by people to say the same thing. That same thing is the proposition they express, or to be precise, that people express by uttering them. The proposition is one to their many. And unlike the sentence-tokens, it is nonphysical, which has the epistemological consequence that it, unlike the sentence-tokens, cannot be seen with the eyes. It is 'seen' (understood) with the mind. Frege is a sort of latter-day Platonist.

So one reason to introduce propositions is to account for the fact that the same meaning-content can be expressed by different people using different sentences of different languages. Another reason to posit propositions is to have a stable entity to serve as vehicle of the truth-values. The idea is that it is the proposition that is primarily either true or false. Given that a proposition is true, then any sentence expressing it is derivatively true.

There is quite a lot to be said for the view that a sentence-token cannot be a primary truth-bearer. For how could a string of marks on paper, or pixels on a screen, be either true or false? Nothing can be either true or false unless it has meaning, but how could mere physical marks (intrinsically) mean anything? Merely physical marks, as such, are meaningless. You can't get blood from a stone, or meaning from meat, no matter how hard you squeeze, and no matter how wondrously organized the meat.

Fregean propositions are especially useful when it comes to the necessary truths expressed by such sentences as '7 is prime.' A necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, including those worlds in which there is nothing physical and so no means of physically expressing truths. If truth is taken to be a property of physical items or any contingent item, then it might be difficult to account for the existence of necessary truths. The Fregean can handle this problem by saying that propositions, as abstract objects, exist in all possible worlds, and that true ones have the property of being true in all possible worlds.  The Fregean can also explain how there can be necessary truths in worlds in which there is nothing physical and nothing mental either.

 

Propositions also function as the accusatives of the so-called 'propositional attitudes' such as belief. To believe is to believe something. One way to construe this is de dicto: to believe is to stand in a relation to a proposition. Thus if I believe that the river Charles is polluted, then the intentional object of the belief is the proposition expressed by 'The river Charles is polluted.' (Of course, there is also a de re way of construing the belief in question: To believe that the Charles is polluted is to believe, of the river Charles, that is is polluted.)

Well, suppose one endorses a theory of propositions such as the one just sketched. You have these necessarily existent Platonic entities called propositions some of which are true and some of which are false. My believing that p is an intentional state directed upon p; but is it not also the case that p is directed upon the world, or upon a truth-making state of affairs in the world in the case in which p is true?

But now it looks as if we have two sorts of intentionality, call them noetic and noematic, to borrow some terminology from Husserl.   Noetic intentionality connects a mental state (in Frege's Second Reich) to a proposition (in Frege's Third Reich), and noematic intentionality connects, or purports to connect, a proposition to an object in Frege's First Reich. Frege wouldn't think of this object as a state of affairs or concrete fact, of course, but we might. (The peculiarities of Frege's actual views don't matter for this discussion.)

The problem for Brentano's thesis above is that propositions — which are abstract objects — seem to display intrinsic aboutness: they are about the concrete world or states of affairs in the world. Thus the proposition expressed by 'The Charles is polluted' is intrinsically about either the river Charles or else about the state of affairs, The Charles River's being polluted. Intrinsically, because the proposition's being about what it is about does not depend on anyone's interpretation.

If this is right, then some instances of intentionality are not only not conscious but not possibly conscious. Does this refute Brentano's thesis? Brentano himself denied that there were such irrealia as propositions and so he would not take propositions as posing any threat to his thesis. But if there are (Fregean) propositions, then I think they would count as counterexamples to Brentano's thesis about intentionality.

Is there a way to uphold Brentano's thesis that only the mental is intrinsically intentional?  Yes, if there is a way to identify propositions with thoughts or rather content-laden thinkings.  My thinking that 7 is prime is intrinsically intentional.  Unfortunately, my thinking is contingent whereas the content of my thinking is necessarily true and hence necessarily existent. To identify propositions with content-laden thinkings one would have to take the thinkings to inhere in a necessarily existent mind such as the mind of God.

 

So I end on an aporetic note.  Intentionality cannot be the mark of the mental if there are Fregean propositions.  But given that there are necessary truths and that truth-bearers cannot be physical items, then only way to avoid Fregean propositions is by identifying propositions with divine thoughts, in which case they are Gedanken after all.

The Madness of Liberal Moralizing

Heather Mac Donald's piece starts off like this:

The paradoxes of liberal morality were on glaring display last week. The Obama administration OK’d the sale of “Plan B” post-coital emergency contraception over the counter without prescription (or parental consent) to girls as young as 15. At the same time, the City Council moved a step closer to banning anyone under the age of 21 from buying cigarettes (the legal age is now 18).

Holy smoke! (Or as my boyhood pal Joe Odegaard used to say, fumus sanctus!)

The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is 'tobacco.'

For more on the antics of the 'tobacco wackos,' see my Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms category.  There is plenty there to get you libruls 'up in arms.'

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The Dogmatist

Craving certainty, but lacking it, he fabricates a substitute, his dogma. 

 

The Essence of Religion

There is more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  They, however, are informed and guided by certain constitutive beliefs.  So the importance of the latter cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone.  It is not a mere form of life or language game.  It rests, pace Wittgenstein, on claims about the nature of reality, claims which, if false, render bogus the practices resting upon them.  In this post I present some characteristic beliefs/convictions that provide the scaffolding for what I take to be religion.  As scaffolding they are necessarily abstract so as to cover a variety of different religions.

Anything that does not fit this schema I am not inclined  to call a religion in any serious sense.  I may be willing to negotiate on (4) and (6).  (If Buddhism is a religion, it is a religion of self-help, at least in its purest forms.)

1. The belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Exerience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the unseen order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the unseen order.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. 

4. The conviction  that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready access to the unseen order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the unseen order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the unseen order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the unseen order.

Believing on Insufficient Evidence

The notion that we should always and everywhere apportion belief to evidence in such a way that we affirm only that for which we have sufficient evidence ignores the fact that belief for beings like us subserves action. If one acted only on those beliefs for which one had sufficient evidence one  would not act as one must to live well.

When a young person believes that he or she can do such-and-such, it is almost always on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And yet such belief beyond the evidence is a sine qua non of success.  There are two necessary conditions of success in life: one must believe that what one proposes to do is worth doing, and one must believe that one is capable of doing it.  In both cases one believes and acts on evidence that could hardly be called sufficient. 

This strikes me as a good maxim:  Don't let insufficient evidence prevent you from believing what you are better off believing than not believing. 

The related article below provides a more rigorous treatment.

 

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The Pragmatic and the Evidential: Is It Ever Rational to Believe Beyond the Evidence?

The New Atheism is Old Hat

Dawkins has lost.  Hitchens is dead.  And the prognosis is not good for the rest of the strident crew.  But an atheism chastened and temperate will remain with us.  As I have said many times, atheism is intellectually respectable and rationally defensible.  But so is theism.

In the end you must decide for yourself what to believe and how to live.

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Melanie Phillips on the Anti-Family Left

Melanie Phillips is a former lefty who wised up, illustrating my aphorism  that

                                                The only good leftist is a former leftist.

Psychological Projection and its Dangers

I have found that it is dangerous to assume that others are essentially like oneself.

Psychologists speak of projection. As I understand it, it involves projecting into others one's own attitudes, beliefs, motivations, fears, emotions, desires, values, and the like.  It is classified as a defense mechanism.  To avoid confronting an unsavory attitude or trait in oneself, one projects it into another.  Suppose one is stingy, considers stinginess an undesirable trait, but doesn't want to own up to one's stinginess.  As a defense against the admission of one's own stinginess, one projects it into others.  "I'm not stingy; you're stingy!"

I once had a superficial colleague who published a lot.  He was motivated more by a neurotic need to advance himself socially and economically, a need based in low self-esteem, rather than by a drive to get at the truth or make a contribution to his subject.   He was at some level aware that his motives were less than noble.  Once, when he found out that I had published an article, he told me that my motive was to see my name in print. It was a classic case of projection: he could not understand me except as being driven by the same paltry motives that drove him.  By projecting his motives into me, he warded off the awareness of their presence in him, or else excused their presence in him on the spurious ground that everyone has the same paltry motivations.

Most of the definitions of projection I have read imply that it is only undesirable attitudes, beliefs and the like that  are the contents of acts of projection.  But it seems to me that the notion of projection could and perhaps should be widened to include desirable ones as well. 

The desire for peace and social harmony, for example, is obviously good.  But it too can be the content of an act of psychological projection.  A pacifist, for example, may assume that others deep down are really like he is: peace-loving to such an extent as to avoid war at all costs. A pacifist might reason as follows: since everyone deep down wants peace, and abhors war, if I throw down my weapon, my adversary will do likewise. By unilaterally disarming, I show my good will, and he will reciprocate. But if you throw down your weapon before Hitler, he will take that precisely as justification for killing you: since might makes right on his neo-Thrasymachian scheme, you have shown by your pacific deed that you are unfit for the struggle for existence and therefore deserve to die, and indeed must die to keep from polluting the gene pool.

Projection in cases like these can be dangerous.  One oftens hears the sentiment expressed that we human beings are at bottom all the same and  all want the same things.  Not so!  You and I may want

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation

as expressed in that characteristic '60s song, Aquarius, but others have belligerence and bellicosity hard-wired into them.  They like fighting and dominating and they only come alive when they are bashing your skull in either literally or figuratively.  People are not the same and it is a big mistake to think otherwise and project your decency into them.

I'll say it again: people are not the same.  We are not 'equal.'  Or do you consider yourself the moral equal of Chechen Muslim ingrates who come to our shores, exploit our hospitality, go on welfare, rip us off, and then detonate explosives at the finish line of a great American event that celebrates life and self-reliance?

I said that the psychologists classify projection as a defense mechanism.  But how could the projection of good traits count as a defense mechanism?  Well, suppose that by engaging in such projections one defends oneself against the painful realization that the people in the world are much worse than one would have liked to believe.  Many of us have a strong psychological need to see good in other people, and this can give rise to illusions.  There is good and evil in each person, and one must train oneself to accurately discern how much of each is present in each person one encounters.

One mistake I have made, more than once, is to assume that since I value truth above many other things, others do as well. But there are plenty of people who do not value truth at all, or else assign it a rather low priority. There are many, for example, who value human feelings over truth. Truth is nothing to them; feelings everything.  That makes no sense to me; to me it is self-evident that, although both are values (to be precise: things that ought to be valued), truth is a higher value, if not the highest value.  But reality forces me to accept that others hold to the opposite value-prioritization.  It is folly to project one's own values into others.

There are other people for whom truth counts for nothing, but power for everything. They interpret every type of interpersonal transaction as a power struggle. Thus if you calmly try to persuade such a person of the truth of some proposition by appealing to facts and reasoning correctly from them, he will interpret that as nothing but an attempt to dominate him psychologically. Such people are utterly blind to the value of truth and to the fact that truth can sometimes be attained by dialectical means. They project their own lust for power into everyone else interpreting everything that is manifestly not a power-move as latently a power-move.

There are plenty of leftists like this. Taking their cue from Nietzsche, they assume that everything is power at bottom. Die Welt ist der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! "The world is the will to power and nothing besides!" Supported by this assumption, they set out to unmask (deconstruct) phenomena that manifestly are not power-driven, for example, attempts to state what is the case. Power-mad themselves, these leftists project lust for power into everyone and everything. It is a curious pars pro toto fallacy: one takes a phenomenon one finds in oneself, lust for power, and then interprets everything
else in terms of it.   The idea might be worth exploring that Nietzsche's doctrine of the Will to Power arose by projection.  He saw the lust for power within himself and excused its presence there by projecting it outward thus transforming a psychological peculiarity into a fundamental trait of beings qua beings.

You say I'm psychologizing. True enough.  But false views are legitimately psychologized.  It would be the genetic fallacy to dismiss as false a proposition just because it arose from a need or serves a need or results from projection.  But once a proposition has been shown to be false, it is legitimate to inquire into the genesis of the belief.

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Another Example of Awful Science Journalism

My first example is here.  Read it for context and for some necessary distinctions.  Now for a second example.  Adam Frank writes,

For Smolin there is no timeless world and there are no timeless laws. Time, he says, is real and nothing can escape it.

Time, of course, seems real to us. We live in and through time. But to physicists, time's fundamental reality is an illusion.

Ever since Newton, physicists have been developing ever-more exact laws describing the behavior of the world. These laws live outside of time because they don't change.

That means these laws are more real than time.

First of all, it can be true both that time is real and that not everything is in time.

Second, if you want to tell us that time is an illusion, just say that, don't say, oxymoronically, that its fundamental reality is an illusion.  Obviously, if something has reality, let alone fundamental reality, then it cannot be an illusion.

Third, as I argued earlier, it is impossible to maintain both that time is an illusion and that, e.g., the Big Bang occurred 12-13 billion years ago.  If you want to say that temporal becoming or temporal passage is an illusion, then say that; but don't confuse the rejection of temporal becoming with the rejection of time altogether.  For it could well be that time is real, but exhausted by the B-series, as I explained in the earlier post.  And this, I take it, is what most physicists maintain.  They think of time as the fourth dimension of a four-dimensional space-time manifold.  That is not a denial of the reality of time; it is a theory of what time is.

Fourth, it is intolerably sloppy to say that "to physicists," time is an illusion when, as is obvious, Smolin is a physicist who denies this!

Fifth, If the laws of physics don't change, how is it supposed to follow or "mean" (!) that "these laws are more real than time."   What on earth is this guy getting at?  Is he suggesting that time is an illusion because the laws of physics are real?  The laws of physics are real and they 'govern' what happens in the changing physical world which is also real. 

Frank, I take it, is a physicist.  So he must be capable of precise thinking and clear writing.  Why then does he write such slop as the above in his off-hours?  Why can't he write something clear and coherent that is helpful to the interested layman?

I fear that a lot of our contemporary scientists are hopelessly bereft of general culture.  They are brilliant in their specialties but otherwise uneducated.  But that does not stop the likes of Dawkins and Krauss and Coyne and Hawking and Mlodinow from spouting off about God and time and the meaning of life . . . .  They want to play the philosopher without doing any 'homework.'  They think it's easy: you just shoot your mouth off.

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Year Ten Begins: In Praise of Blogosophy

Today I begin my tenth year as a 'blogosopher.'  Traffic is good: rare is the day when the page view count drops below 1200, and there are numerous surge days above 2000. I'm in this game 'for the duration,' as they say: as long as health and eyesight hold out.

In Praise of Blogosophy

Philosophy is primarily an activity, not a body of doctrine. If you were to think of it as a body of doctrine, then you would have to say there is no philosophy, but only philosophies. For there is no one universally recognized body of doctrine called philosophy. The truth of course is one not many. And that is what the philosopher aims at: the one ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, including the ultimate truth about how we ought to live. But aiming at a target and hitting it are two different things. The target is one, but our many arrows have fallen short and in different places. And if you think that your favorite philosopher has hit the target of truth, why can't you convince the rest of us
of that? 

Disagreement does not of course prove the nonexistence of truth, but it does cast reasonable doubt on all claims to its possession. Philosophy aspires to sound, indeed incontrovertible, doctrine. But the quest for it has proven tough indeed. For all we know it may lie beyond our powers. Not that this gives us reason to abandon the quest. But it does give us reason to be modest and undogmatic.

Philosophy, then, is primarily an activity, a search, a quest. Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant remarks that "Philosophy cannot be taught, we can at most learn to philosophize." I agree. It cannot be taught because it does not exist as teachable doctrine. Philosophy is not something we profess, except perhaps secondarily; it is something we do. The best professors of philosophy are doers of philosophy.  A professor, obviously, need not be a paid professor, an academic functionary.

How then should we do philosophy? Conversation face-to-face with the like-minded, intelligent, and sincere is useful but ephemeral and often hard to arrange. Jetting off to conferences can be fun especially if the venue is exotic and the tab is picked up your department. But reading and listening to papers at conferences is pretty much a waste of time when it comes to actually doing productive philosophy. Can you follow a technical paper simply by listening to it? If you can you're smarter than me.

So we ought to consider the idea that philosophy in its purest form, its most productive form, is 'blogosophy,' philosophy pursued by weblog. And there is this in favor of it: blogging takes pressure off the journals. Working out my half-baked ideas here, I am less likely to submit material that is not yet ready for embalming in printer's ink.

Related: Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy or the Humanities?

There is More to Life than Politics

There is more to life than politics, but to keep it that way some engagement in it is necessary. 

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Country to Rock Crossovers

I have been listening this last week to George Jones.  I was pretty much unaware of his work until his dying brought it to my attention.  I linked to a couple of his tunes last week.  Here are a couple more.  A Girl I Used to Know.  Am I That Easy to Forget?  Here is an essay on Jones by Jim Goad. 

In the interests of full disclosure: I am not now, and never have been, a southerner or a redneck.  Worse than the redneck, however, is the librul who mocks him.  Trying mocking him to his face.

As far as I know, Jones never had a crossover hit, but they were the way I learned about country music back in the day.  Here are some of my favorite crossover numbers first heard via KRLA, KHJ, and KFWB, Los Angeles.  My Favorite DJ?  B. Mitchel Reed! (one 'l.')

Jim Reeves, He'll Have to Go, 1959.  Ry Cooder's Tex-Mex version, 1977,  is oddly fetching.

Floyd Cramer, Last Date, 1960

Don Gibson, Sea of a Heartbreak, 1961

Bobby Edwards, You're the Reason, 1961

Patsy Cline, She's Got You, 1962.  A very funny parody.  That such a heart-felt tune invites and receives parody is an illustration of the collision of Nagel's two standpoints.

Bobby Bare, Detroit City, 1963

Roger Miller, Dang Me, 1964

Roger Miller, King of the Road, 1965

Buck Owens, Tiger by the Tail, 1966

Jerry Coyne on Religion as Child Abuse

Coyne writes (emphasis added):

Dawkins has taken flak for characterizing religious indoctrination of children as “child abuse.”  Well, look at this picture and deny it.  [The picture depicts a young child holding a sign that reads: Behead all those who insult the Prophet.] True, it’s not the same as beating or sexually molesting one’s child, but the brain of this boy is being warped and twisted by vicious Muslim ideology.  What hope does he have when he grows up?

This also shows how crazy it is to characterize Islam as “the religion of peace.”

Somehow—and this will never happen, of course—it should be illegal to indoctrinate children with religious belief.

This is pretty feeble stuff for someone who supposedly can think.  First of all, Coyne speaks of religious indoctrination and belief as such and in general, without qualification, making no distinctions among different religions or different beliefs within a given religion.  Suppose a child is made to memorize the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes.  That surely counts as religious indoctrination.  But is it child abuse?  Obviously not.

A second point is that Coyne and his New Atheist ilk  make no distinction between religious ideology and nonreligious ideology.  Radical Islam, if not Islam itself,  is a murderous religious ideology, and Coyne is quite right to protest its characterization as the "religion of peace."  But Nazism and godless communism are also murderous  ideologies whose doctrines justify mass murder.  According to the Black Book of Communism, communists murdered approximately 100 million people in the 20th century. 

Think of all the 'red diaper babies.'  I wonder if Coyne and his ilk would protest their indoctrination as child abuse.  If not, why not? Why is indoctrination in radical Islam worse than indoctrination in Naziism or communism?  Why the selective outrage?  If the genus extremist ideology is the problem, why attack only one of its species? 

I admit that there is something unseemly about criticizing a man like Coyne.  It's uncomfortably like rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. Nasty work, but somebody has to do it.  Here is further evidence of what a fool this man is.

But even worse than Coyne and Dawkins on the topic of religion as child abuse is the noxious A. C. Grayling.

We can be happy that the New Atheism has lost its mojo and is on the way out if not already dead.

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The Absurd Again: Weak and Strong Nagelian Theses

This post is a sequel to The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu.  See it for bibliographical details and for background.

In his essay "The Absurd," Thomas Nagel maintains that "the philosophical sense of absurdity" arises from "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt." (13)  But then, on the next page, Nagel shifts from the sense of the absurd to the absurd itself, telling us that "what makes life absurd" is the collision of "the two inescapable viewpoints," namely, the situated POV from which we live straighforwardly, immersed in our projects and taking them in deadly earnest, and the transcendental POV from which we coolly comtemplate our lives and everything else sub specie aeternitatis.

Nagel's question concerns the 'absurdity-maker.'  What is it that makes our lives absurd if they are absurd?  He begins his essay by dismissing three or so objective grounds of absurdity, among them, life's brevity and the 'size' argument: we are so tiny, the universe so vast.  (I discuss a particularly mephitic variant of this latter argument by Lawrence Krauss here.)  Nagel seeks and finds a purely subjective source of our absurdity: the collision within us of two points of view each of which is essential to our being the embodied consciousnesses we are.

Suppose we grant that our lives must appear absurd when we reflect upon them from on high, 'under the aspect of eternity.'  Does it follow that they are absurd?  What appears to be the case, and what cannot fail to appear to be the case for beings of our (present)constitution, might still not be the case.

It seems we can go two ways.  We can say: the sense of the absurd just is the absurd. (I noted that Nagel shifts from the first to the second between pp. 13-14.)  Or we can say that the sense of the absurd reveals the absurd.  If the latter, then my life is absurd whether or not I reflect on it sub specie aeternitatis. If the former, my life is absurd only when I so reflect.  It seems we ought to distinguish between a weak and a strong thesis:

Weak Absurdity Thesis:  The essential structure of embodied consciousness as we find it in our own case entails that our lives, when we reflect on them, must appear absurd, hence without objective meaning/purpose, whether or not in reality they are bereft of objective meaning/purpose.

Strong Absurdity Thesis: The necessary appearance of absurdity (when and so long as we reflect) just is the absurdity of human existence.  (Analogy: the percipi of felt pain = its esse.)  The sense of the absurd constitutes the absurd.  It does not reveal it.  We generate our absurdity simply by being what we must be and exercising the powers that we have.  Absurdity is essential to our embodied consciousness.  Our lives are objectively absurd, even though this absurdity is grounded in the nature of our subjectivity.

If the Weak Thesis is correct, then the problem of the absurd can be solved by refusing to take long views.  On the Weak Thesis, it is up to us whether life is absurd since the absurd just is the sense of the absurd and the sense of the absurd can be avoided by freely abstaining from occupying the transcendental standpoint.  It would then seem reasonable to take the following line:

For all we know, life has an objective meaning.  Let's leave that to God or the nature of things.  We shall live as if it is true while avoiding the sometimes paralyzing doubts that accrue from taking long views.  We shall focus on foreground concerns, live our lives with zest and committment, taking seriously what does appear serious from our situated perspectives, and view the ultimate solution to the cosmic  riddles as above our paygrade.

We might call this stance 'ostrich anti-absurdism.'  I am pretty sure that this is not what Nagel is advocating. I read him  as pushing the Strong Thesis.

The Weak Thesis, however, is much more plausible.  How does Nagel know that the sense of absurdity is veridical?  How does he exclude the possibility that, while our lives must appear absurd when we reflect, they are not in reality absurd?

Maybe your mother was right when she said, "You think too much.  Put down those books and go outside and play." 

Related articles

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

Should Nagel's Book Be on the Philosophical Index Librorum Prohibitorum?

Ron Radosh on Salman Rushdie and the Left's Moral Equivalentism

I was about to write an entry on Rushdie's recent NYT op-ed, but Radosh has done the job and has done it well.  Excerpt:

A good example of the old moral equivalence was to equate the Gulag in the Soviet Union, in which hundreds of thousands were imprisoned, starved to death and executed in massive frame-ups, with McCarthyism in the United States. During the so-called McCarthy era, relatively few were imprisoned or lost their livelihoods, and many actually guilty of being actual Soviet agents portrayed themselves as innocents accused because of their political views. Yet the Left in America argued both were the same.

That was indeed the position the Left took back in the days before the the USSR collapsed.  It shows as clearly as anything the delusional, reality-denying,  character of liberal-left 'thought.'  The same delusional cast of mind is betrayed by those who will not recognize the unique threat to civilization posed by radical Islam.

What is at the root of moral equivalentism?  Perhaps it is an upshot of the Left's radical utopianism. Utopia, etymologically, is nowhere.  The leftist is a Nowhere Man who adopts the View from Nowhere.  If you ascend high enough in the sky, earthly differences blur and vanish.  When you attain unto Cloud Cuckoo Land (Wolkenskukuheim), all is the same: FDR's America and Hitler's Germany, the USA and the Evil Empire, Christian 'terrorism' and Muslim terrorism.

"He's a real nowhere man, living in his nowhere land, making all his nowhere plans, for nobody."

"He's as blind as he can be, just sees what he wants to see . . . ."

Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

The long views of philosophy are not to everyone's taste.  If not bored, many are depressed by the contemplation of death and pain, God and the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of our lives.  They prefer not to think of such things and consider it best to take short views.  If as Thomas Nagel maintains, the contemplation sub specie aeternitatis of one's daily doings drains them of seriousness, one is under no obligation to take the view from nowhere.

Is it best to take short views? Sometimes it is. When the going gets tough, it is best to pull in one’s horns, hunker down, and just try to get through the next week, the next day, the next hour. One can always meet the challenge of the next hour. Be here now and deal with what is on your plate at the moment. Most likely you will find a way forward.

But, speaking for myself, a life without long views would not be worth living. I thrill at the passage in Plato’s Republic, Book Six (486a), where the philosopher is described as a "spectator of all time and existence." And then there is this beautiful formulation by  William James:

The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man. (Pragmatism, Harvard UP, 1975, p. 56)

I wrote above, "speaking for myself." The expression was not used redundantly inasmuch as it conveys that my philosopher’s preference for the long view is not one that I would want to or try to urge on anyone else. In my experience, one cannot argue with another man’s sensibility. And much of life comes down to precisely that -- sensibility. If people share a sensibility, then argument is useful for its articulation and refinement. But I am none too sanguine about the possibility of arguing someone into, or out of, a sensibility.

How argue the atheist out of his abiding sense that the universe is godless, or the radical out of his conviction of human perfectibility? If the passages I cited from Plato and James leave you cold, how could I change your mind? If you sneer at my being thrilled, what then? Argument comes too late. Or if you prefer, sensibility comes too early.

One might also speak of a person’s sense of life, view of what is important, or ‘feel for the real.’ James’ phrase, "feel seriously," is apt. To the superior mind, ultimate questions "feel real," whereas to the shallow mind they appear pointless, unimportant, silly. It is equally true that the superior mind is made such by its wrestling with these questions.

Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.

Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)

Of course, with his talk of the superior and the shallow, James is making a value judgment. I myself have no problem making value judgments, and in particular this one. Evaluate we must.

Although prospects are dim for arguing the other out of his sensibility, civil discussion is not pointless. One comes to understand one’s own view by contrast with another. One learns to respect the sources and resources of the other’s view. This may lead to toleration, which is good within limits. For someone with a theoretical bent, the sheer diversity of approaches to life is fascinating and provides endless grist for the theoretical mill.  If the theoretician is a blogger, he has blog-fodder for a lifetime.

As for the problem of how to get along with people with wildly different views, I recommend voluntary segregation.

Related articles

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

Why Do We Need Philosophy?

Why do we need philosophy?  There are several reasons, but one is to expose the confusions and absurdities of scientists and science journalists when they encroach ineptly upon philosophical territory.  This from science writer Clara Moskowitz in Controversially, Physicist Argues Time is Real:

NEW YORK — Is time real, or the ultimate illusion?

Most physicists would say the latter, but Lee Smolin challenges this orthodoxy in his new book, "Time Reborn" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2013) . . . .

Time is an illusion?  And this is supposed to be orthodoxy?  But don't the cosmologists tells us that the universe began in a Big Bang some 12-13 billion years ago?  If time is an illusion, then that statement and statements like it cannot be true.  For if time is "the ultimate illusion," , then it is never true that event x is earlier than event y, that y is later than x, or that x and y are simultaneous (whether absolutely or relative to a reference-frame).  But surely the Big Bang is earlier than my birth, and my blogging is later than my having had breakfast.  If time is an illusion, however, then the so-called B-relations (as the philosophers all them) cannot be instantiated.  The B-relations are: earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  Physics cannot do without them.  If time is an illusion, then it cannot be true that the speed of light is finite (in a vacuum, approx. 186, 282 mi/sec).  But it is true, and because of it, sunlight takes time to arrive at Earth (about 8 min 19 sec).  It arrives later (temporal word!) than it started out.  Therefore, time cannot be an illusion.

My first point, then, is that the physicists themselves presuppose that time is not an illusion by the very fact that they employ such phrases as 'earlier than,' 'later than,' 'simultaneous with,' and a host of other temporal words and phrases.  Suppose two cosmologists are discussing whether the universe began 15 billion years ago or 12 billion years ago.  Debating this point, they presuppose that time is precisely not an illusion.  The past-tensed 'began' and the little word 'ago' make it clear why.  Reading on we come to this:

In a conversation with Duke University neuroscientist Warren Meck, theoretical physicist Smolin, who's based at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, argued for the controversial idea that time is real. "Time is paramount," he said, "and the experience we all have of reality being in the present moment is not an illusion, but the deepest clue we have to the fundamental nature of reality." 

Time is paramount?  No doubt! No time, no physics.  All of reality is in the present moment?  So what happened in the past is not part of reality?  When we inquire into what happened, whether as historians or as cosmologists, what then are we inquiring into?  Unreality? Mere possibility? Fiction?  Do you really want to say that all of reality is in the present moment?  There is a deep confusion here (whether it is chargeable to Smolin's account or the science writer's, I don't know):  It  one thing to affirm the doctrine of presentism according to which only the temporal present and its contents are real; it is quite another to affirm, as Smolin seems to be doing, that time is not exhausted by the B-series, the series of events ordered by the above-mentioned B-relations. 

 

Smolin said he hadn't come to this concept lightly. He started out thinking, as most physicists do, that time is subjective and illusory. According to Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity, time is just another dimension in space, traversable in either direction, and our human perception of moments passing steadily and sequentially is all in our heads.

 

We now see what is really going on here.  Smolin is not opposing the claim that time is an illusion, but the claim that time is exhausted by the B-series, where the B-series (this term from McTaggart) is the series of events ordered by the B-relations.  Clearly, there is a difference between saying that time is real, but exhausted by the B-series, and saying that time is unreal.  There is nothing particularly controversial about maintaining that time is real.  What is controversial is to maintain that real time involves not only the instantiation of the B-relations but also the (shifting) instantiation of the irreducible A-properties, pastness, presentness, and futurity. 

As we ordinarily think of it, time passes, flows, indeed 'flies.' Tempus fugit! as the Latin saying goes.  We think of events approaching us from the future, getting closer and closer until they become present, and then receding into the past becoming ever more past.  Thus, as a natural man, I think of my death as approaching, becoming less and less future, and my birth as receding, as becoming more and more past.  This belief in the reality of temporal becoming (as some philosophers call it) is part and parcel of our ordinary view of the world.  But physics, pace Smolin, needn't concern itself with it. 

Now it is not unreasonable to think of temporal passage or temporal becoming as a mind-dependent phenomena such that, in reality, there is no temporal becoming, and no (shifting) exemplification of the A-properties. All there is are events ordered by the B-relations.  But this is not to say that time is an illusion but that real time is exhaustively analyzable in terms of the B-relations.  Note also that if temporal becoming is mind-dependent, it doesn't follow that it is an illusion.  Phenomenal colors are m ind-dependent but not illusory.

There is more, but it doesn't get any better, and I have exposed enough confusions for one day.  To sum up:

1. One ought not confuse the claim that time is an illusion with the claim that time is exhausted by the B-series. 

2. That time is real is presupposed by both common sense and the practice of physicists.

3.  One ought not confuse  presentism, the view that only the temporally present exists,  with the claim that there is more to time than the B-series.

4.  One ought not confuse the claim that temporal becoming is mind-dependent with the claim that temporal becoming is an illusion.

5. One ought not confuse the claim that temporal becoming is an illusion with the claim that time is an illusion, or the claim that time is real with the claim that temporal becoming is real. 

 

Related articles

Bull Meets Shovel: Could Consciousness Be A Conjuring Trick?

Is Time Real?

Not All Muslims are Terrorists. . .

. . . but most terrorists are Muslims.  Everyone on the  FBI's Most Wanted Terrorist list is a Muslim male except for two, a woman and an animal rights extremist.

Is the FBI run by 'Islamophobes'?  Is the NRA run by 'hoplophobes'?

This is why subjecting a Mormon matron from Salt Lake City to the same scrutiny at an airport as a twenty-something Muslim male from Cairo makes no sense.  Profiling, on the other hand, makes perfect sense.  Is that why liberals oppose it?

Anecdote: I have been shown special attention at airports because of my intense and somewhat Middle Eastern mien. This happened most recently at Heathrow in London.  I have no objection to being 'profiled' as long as they stay away from my 'junk.'

Related articles

Islam, Radical Islam, and the the Left's Denial of the Threat

The Lessons of Boston

Radical Islam

Obama's politically correct complacency about the threat is well-argued by Victor Davis Hanson.

Bob Beckel, liberal, shows for once that even a liberal can on occasion display common sense.

On the question of terminology I am pleased to see that Horace Jeffery Hodges and I are in agreement.  It is a pleasure to be so well understood by someone.

The Absurd: Nagel, Camus, Lupu

I have been re-reading Thomas Nagel's seminal paper, "The Absurd," which originally appeared in The Journal of Philosophy, October 1971, and is collected in Nagel's Mortal Questions (Cambridge UP, 1979, 11-23.)  Damn, but it is good.  Nagel is one of our best philosophers.  He's the real thing.

Nagel's central contention is that human existence is essentially absurd.  Thus the absurdity of our predicament is not in any way accidental or contingent or due to some remediable (by God or man) disproportion or 'disconnect' between the demands of the human heart and mind for meaning and intelligibility, on the one hand,  and the world's 'indifference' to our concerns, on the other.  In this regard Nagel's position is far more radical than Camus' as the latter presents it in The Myth of Sisyphus.  For Camus, something is dreadfully wrong:  the world ought to meet our demands for meaning and intelligibility but it doesn't.  For Camus, absurdity is rooted in the discrepancy  between demand and satisfaction, a demand that in some way ought to be satisfied and therefore in some sense could be satisfied.  (The 'ought' in question is non-agential; here is some discussion of such oughts.)

Camus protests that things are not the way they are supposed to be, but they are, alas, the way they are, and so all we can do is shake our fists at the universe in defiance.  Nagel's posture is less heroic and more ironic. 

For Nagel there is no non-agential ought to have been otherwise or could have been otherwise with respect to the meaning of human existence: our lives are necessarily absurd because there is in us a conflict that is unavoidable, a conflict between our limited, perspectival, situated, individual  points of view and the transcendental point of view from which we observe ourselves  and everything else sub specie aeternitatis.  The general and philosophical sense of absurdity arises when these two points of view come into conflict.  Nagel speaks of "the collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpretual possibility of regarding everything about which which we are serious as arbitrary or open to doubt." (13) 

Immersed as I am in in my quotidian toilings and moilings, I take my life and its projects with utmost seriousness.  For example, the other day I went back into my archives to correct a minor mistake I had made in a post from years ago.  But while I was very concerned to make this correction and make it right, I was also aware of the 'absurdity' of being worried about such a bagatelle.  Who cares?   As transcendental spectator even I don't much care.  It is easy to detach oneself in thought from one's projects and purposes and very life and see them as arbitrary, contingent, and without objective meaning or purpose or significance.  What matters greatly from our situated perspectives can seem to matter not at all when we ascend to the transcendental perspective.    But of course I am not just a transcendental spectator of "all time and existence" (Plato, Republic) but also this here measly chunk of animated aging flesh with a very personal history and fate and a reputation to maintain. 

It is most marvellously true that I am a conscious and self-conscious being, projective of plans and purposes, sensitive to reasons as opposed to causes, and alive to the full range of the normative; but I am also an embodied conscious and self-conscious being with all that that entails: I can be crushed, blown apart, invaded by microorganisms, . . . .  Human existence cannot be reduced to the existence of specimens of a highly evolved zoological species, but I am a specimen of such a species.  Thus when we ask about the meaning of life we are really asking about the meaning of embodied consciousness.  I believe this is a very important point.  For it implies that the question cannot be addressed in a a wholly objectifying manner.

As I read him, Nagel is telling us that the root of absurdity is in us as embodied consciousnesses, not in the world or in any disproportion between us and the world.  It is an ineradicable root.  Both POVs are available to us -- and we must avail ourselves of both if we are to live fully human lives -- but they are necessarily in conflict.  Or so it seems.  If I am to live my life with zest and passion and commitment, then I cannot live the detached life of the transcendental ego who merely observes while his physical vehicle negotiates the twists and turns of this gnarly world.  (This is a deep and complicated theme requiring much more discussion.)  Borrowing some Heideggerian jargon we can say that for Nagel the sense of the absurd is constitutive  of human Dasein.  To be a fully awake human being, one who avails himself of both POVs, is to live with the sense of the absurd.  The only way to escape our absurd predicament would be by causing the cessation of embodiment (suicide) or by somehow-- via meditation perhaps-- emptying the 'I' out into something pre- or non-egoic.

I think it is important to point out that for Nagel and in truth the absurd exists only as the sense of the absurd.  This is another way of saying that the absurdity of the human predicament is not a merely objective fact if it is a fact: it involves consciousness/self-consciousness.

Is the absurdity of human existence a problem to be solved?  It cannot be a problem that we can solve since it arises necessarily from the collision of the two POVs both of which are essential to being human.  If the problem arises for a person, then that person cannot both solve the problem and continue to exist.  (This is not to say that the problem must arise for every person since not everyone exercises his capacity to reflect on matters under the aspect of eternity.)  Nor is absurdity a predicament.  To call a state of affairs a predicament is to suggest the possibility of extrication.  But there is no escape from absurdity.  So it is neither a problem nor a predicament. What is called for is not the defiant posturing of an Algerian existentialist but irony:  "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair." (23)

As for Peter Lupu, he seems to be maintaining  the exact opposite of what Nagel maintains.  Peter's thought seems to be that the meaning of an individual life is constituted  by the power to reflect.  Every agent of a life has this power essentially even if not all choose to exercise it.  Meaning is therefore not bestowed by the agent upon himself or by something or someone outside the agent such as God.  Existential meaning inheres in the agent's power to reflect on his life, his values, desires, and purposes.  For Lupu, meaning is not subjective .  Nor is it externally objective, imposed from without.  Every life is meaningful just in virtue of the agent's power to reflect.

I questioned whether existential meaning could be both objective and subjectively appropriable by all.  Lupu thinks he can answer this by saying that meaning is objective albeit internally objective in virtue of every agent's having essentially the power to reflect; but meaning is also subjectively appropriable by each agent if he chooses to actualize his power to reflect.  Here again is my aporetic tetrad:

A. If life has a meaning, then it cannot be subjective.

B. The meaning of life must be subjectively appropriable by all.

C. There is no meaning that is both nonsubjective and subjectively appropriable by all.

D. Life has a meaning.

Lupu solves my tetrad by rejecting (C) while accepting the remaining limbs.  Nagel, I would guess, would solve the tetrad by rejecting (D) while accepting the other limbs.

There are several questions I need to pose to Lupu, but for now let me just pose a Nagelian question/objection.  Nagel is surely on to something when he underscores the power of reflection to undermine the seriousness of our projects and make them appear arbitrary, contingent, and dubious.  When this power is exercised it collides with our tendency toward straighforward unreflective living under the guidance of taken-for-granted norms and values imbibed uncritically from the circumambient culture.  How can Lupu accommodate Nagel's point?  Is it not more plausible to hold that it is absurdity, not meaning, that is the upshot of reflection?