Too many conservative commentators are focusing on the inessential and the peripheral. Yes, Obama is a brazen liar, a bullshitter, and a consummate Orwellian abuser of the English language. He lied when he said that those who like their plans can keep their plans, and it is obvious why he lied: the ACA probably would not have gotten through otherwise. But the important issue is not Obama and his mendacity. It is not about Obama, which is also why it is perfectly lame, besides being slanderous, for the scumbaggers on the Left to accuse opponents of the ACA of racism. The fundamental issue is the assault on individual liberty and the totalitarian expansion of the state. That assault and this expansion don't have a skin color, white, black, or mulatto.
Mark Steyn got it right back in 2009 in an NRO piece that is no longer available. (Damn you, NRO! Links to high-quality content ought to be permalinks.) Excerpts
(emphasis added):
. . . [nationalized] health
care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. That’s
its attraction for an ambitious president: It redefines the relationship between
the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists —
to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs
in every particular. [. . .]
It’s often argued that, as a
proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with
government medical systems. But, as a point of fact, “America” doesn’t
spend anything on health care: Hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of
millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health
care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada
will spend on health care — and that’s that: Health care is a government budget
item. [. . .]
How did the health-care debate
decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government
to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be
spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own
bodies?
Are you willing to
sell your birthright, liberty, for a mess of pottage? That's the issue.
Liberals are a strange breed of cat. They'll puke their guts out in defense of
their 'right' to abortion and their 'right' to violate every norm of decency in
pursuit of the 'artistic' expression of their precious and vacuous selves, but
when it comes to the right to be in control of the sorts of care their bodies
receive they reverse course and surrender their liberties.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of debt, I fear no bankruptcy, for Obama is my shepherd. He prepareth a table of food stamps before me, and maketh me lie down beside waters He hath cleansed and seas He hath made recede, even though the bad Republicans wisheth the earth to be burnt unto a cinder, and will not buy the electric car that is good, for it hath zero emissions, and receiveth its power from a power plant, which hath not zero emissions, but the ways of the President are mysterious.
He hath told the stubborn Israelites, evil builders of apartments, that they know not their own interests and He does, and know not what they do, when they fear the nuclear weapon of the Persians. The ways of the President are mysterious. He alloweth the Persians to get the nuclear weapon (unless He hath something up His sleeve), for He knoweth that when they behold Him they will stay their hand, and not burn the Israelites unto a cinder, as they pronounce.
1. Mark Anderson's Halloween greeting takes the form of a quotation from Moby Dick, the relevance of which escapes me: "The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick?" Wider context here.
5. On this date in 2008, MavPhil moved to Typepad which has proven to be a satisfactory blogging platform with an extremely reliable server. It works best with Mozilla Firefox. Traffic is up: on good days 2000 pageviews and up.
On Halloween I take to class a medical-school skull with a removable skull cap.
Inside are various gloomy or semi-gloomy thoughts on slips of paper. Each
student takes one, and next time we meet students read them aloud one by one,
and when they're done we discuss them. Anyway, I was preparing the skull this
morning and thought you might enjoy Melville's thought.
10. October, sadly, ends once again. How fast she flies. But here in the Sonoran desert she is the harbinger of the loveliest time of the year. Happy Halloween, everyone.
Attached you will find two PDFs: a copyedited version of your manuscript and a version indicating changes to the original file. This is your final opportunity to make any clarifications or stylistic changes to the manuscript.
An honest mistake, no doubt, so I won't reveal the names of the editor or the journal. But it is a little ironic that a copy editor would make such a mistake. It's tough being an editor. It's a lousy job. So I want to thank all of the editors out there without whom those of us who publish would not see our words in print.
Let me end with a bit of praise for the tribe of bloggers. Most people 'massacre' my name and it "pisses me off" in the phraseology of Jeff Dunham's Walter; but bloggers almost universally get it right. No surprise, I suppose: bloggers are an elite group of highly literate natural-born scribblers.
WARNING! Scholastic hairsplitting up ahead! If you are allergic to this sort of thing, head elsewhere. My old post, On Hairsplitting, may be of interest.
My Czech colleague Lukas Novak seems to hold that there is no mode of being that is the mode of being of purely or merely intentional objects:
. . . no problem to say that a merely intentional object O has an esse intentionale; but what is this esse? There are reasons to think that it is nothing within O: for objects have intentional being in virtue of being conceived (known, etc. . . ), and cognition in general is an immanent operation, i.e., its effects remain within its subject. It would be absurd to assume that by conceiving of Obama just now (and so imparting to him an esse intentionale) I cause a change in him! So intentional being seems to be a mere extrinsic denomination from the cognitive act, a merely extrinsic property. Consequently, objects which have only intentional being, are in themselves nothing. They do not represent an item in the complete inventory of what there is. It seems to me that it is an error (yes, I believe there are philosophical errors:-)) to assume that objects must be something in themselves in order to be capable of being conceived (or referred to).
While agreeing with much of what Novak says, I think it is reasonable to maintain that merely intentional objects enjoy intentional being, esse intentionale, a mode of being all their own, despite the obvious fact that merely intentional objects are 'existentially heteronomous,' a phrase to be defined shortly. But to discuss this with any rigor we need to make some distinctions. I will be drawing upon the work of Roman Ingarden, student of Edmund Husserl and a distinguished philosopher in his own right. I will be defending what I take to be something in the vicinity of Ingarden's position.
1. An example of a purely intentional object is a table that does not exist in reality, but is created by me in imagination with all and only the properties I freely ascribe to it. In a series of mental acts (intentional experiences) I imagine a table. The table is the intentional object of the series of acts. It is one to their many, and for this reason alone distinct from them. Act is not object, and object is not act, even though they are correlated necessarily. In virtue of its intentionality, an act is necessarily an act of an object, the italicized phrase to be read as an objective genitive, and the object, being purely or merely intentional, is dependent for its existence on the act. But although the object cannot exist without the act, the object is no part of the act, kein reeller Inhalt as Husserl would say. So, given that the act is a mental or psychic reality, it does not follow that the object, even though purely intentional, is a mental or psychic reality. Indeed, it is fairly obvious that the imagined table is not a mental or psychic reality. The object, not being immanent to the act, is in a certain sense transcendent, enjoying a sort of transcendence-in-immanence, if I remember my Husserl correctly. Of course it is not transcendent in the sense of existing on its own independently of consciousness. Now consider a really existent table. It may or may not become my intentional object. If it does, it is not a purely intentional object. A purely intentional object, then, is one whose entire being is exhausted in being an object or accusative of a conscious intending. For finite minds such as ours, nothing real is such that its being is wholly exhaustible by its being an intentional object.
My merely imagined table does not exist in reality, 'outside' my mind. But it also does not exist 'in' my mind as identical to the act of imagining it or as a proper part of the act of imagining it, or as any sort of mental content, as Twardowski clearly saw. Otherwise, (i) the merely imagined table would have the nature of an experience, which it does not have, and (ii) it would exist in reality, when it doesn't, and (iii) it would have properties that cannot be properties of mental acts or contents such as the property of being spatially extended.
2. The problem posed by purely intentional objects can be framed as the problem of logically reconciling the following propositions:
A. Some mental acts are directed upon nonexistent, purely intentional, objects. B. Anti-Psychologism: These purely intentional objects typically do not exist intramentally, for the Twardowskian reasons above cited. C. These purely intentional objects do not exist extramentally, else they wouldn't be purely intentional. D. These purely intentional objects are not nothing: they have some mode of being. E. Existential Monism: everything that exists or has being exists or has being in the same way or mode.
The pentad is logically inconsistent. One solution is to reject (D): Purely intentional objects do not exist at all, or have any sort of being, but we are nonetheless able to stand in the intentional relation to them. To this Twardowski-Meinong-Grossmann view I have two objections. First, what does not exist at all is nothing, hence no definite object. Second, if intentionality is a relation, then all its relata must exist. A better solution, that of Ingarden, is to reject (E).
3. Ingarden rejects Existential Monism, maintaining that there are different modes of being. (TMB, 48) Here are four modes Ingarden distinguishes:
a. Existential Autonomy. The self-existent is existentially autonomous. It "has its existential foundation in istelf." (Time and Modes of Being, p. 43)
b. Existential Heteronomy. The non-self-existent is the existentially heteronomous. Purely intentional objects are existentially heteronomous: they have their existential foundation not in themselves, but in another. Now if existential heteronomy is a mode of being, and purely intentional objects enjoy this mode of being, then it follows straightaway that purely intentional objects have being, and indeed their own heteronomous being. If Novak denies this, then this is where our disagreement is located.
c. Existential Originality. The existentially original, by its very nature, cannot be produced by anything else. If it exists, it cannot not exist. (52) It is therefore permanent and indestructible. God, if he exists, would be an example of a being that is existentially original. But matter, as conceived by dialectical materialists, would also be an example, if it exists. (79)
d. Existential Derivativeness. The existentially derivative is such that it can exist only as produced by another. The existentially derivative may be either existentially autonomous or existentially heteronomous. Thus purely intentional objects are both existentially derivative and existentially heteronomous.
4. Now let me see if I can focus my rather subtle difference from Novak. I am sure we can agree on this much: purely intentional objects are neither existentially original nor existentially autonomous. They are existentially derivative, though not in the way a divinely created substance is existentially derivative: such substances, though derivative, are autonomous. So I think we can agree that purely intentional objects are existentially heteronomous. The issue that divides us is whether they have their own, albeit heteronomous, being. Or is it rather the case that their being reduces to the being of something else? I say that purely intentional objects have a very weak mode of being, existential heteronomy, in Ingarden's jargon. Novak denies this. Novak cites his master, the doctor subtilis, Duns Scotus:
And if you are looking for some “true being” of this object as such [viz. of the object qua conceived], there is none to be found over and above that “being in a qualified sense”, except that this “being in a qualified sense” can be reduced to some “being in an unqualified sense”, which is the being of the respective intellection. But this being in an unqualified sense does not belong to that which is said to “be in a qualified sense” formally, but only terminatively or principiatively — which means that to this “true being” that “being in a qualified sense” is reduced, so that without the true being of this [intellection] there would be no “being in a qualified sense” of that [object qua conceived]. - Ord. I, dist. 36, q. un., n. 46 (ed. Vat. VI, 289)
The idea seems to be that the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, and that it therefore has no 'true being' of its own. The purely intentional object has being only in a qualified sense. This qualified being, however, reduces to the being of the intellection. I think this reduction opens Scotus and Novak up to the charge of psychologism, against which Ingarden, good student of Husserl that he was, rails on pp. 48-49 of TMB. For if the being of the purely intentional object reduces to the being of the act, then the purely intentional object has mental or psychic being -- which is not the case. The object is not a psychic content. It is not the act or a part of the act; not is it any other sort of psychic reality.
Psychologism is avoided, however, if purely intentional objects are granted their own mode of being, that of existential heteronomy. Although they derive their being from the the being of mental acts, their being is not the being of mental acts, but their own mode of being. Analogy: Though created substance derive their being from God, their mode of being is their own and not the same as God's mode of being.
For all of the Affordable Care Act's technical problems, at least one part is working on schedule. The law is systematically dismantling the individual insurance market, as its architects intended from the start.
The millions of Americans who are receiving termination notices because their current coverage does not conform to Health and Human Services Department rules may not realize this is by design. Maybe they trusted President Obama's repeated falsehood that people who liked their health plans could keep them. But Americans should understand that this month's mass cancellation wave has been the President's political goal since 2008. Liberals believe they must destroy the market in order to save it.
I'm sorry, but I feel no sympathy for the liberals who supported ObamaCare and then were shocked when their premiums skyrocketed. They say things like, "I was all for ObamaCare but I didn't think I'd be paying for it." Well, who did you well-off liberal dumbasses think was going to pay for it? Now that you've been kicked in the balls by reality you might consider getting your heads out of your feel-good asses long enough to start thinking for a change about what this lying left-wing fascist is doing to our country. Most of what he says is bullshit and shuck-and-jive, but he meant it when he spoke of fundamentally transforming America.
Not content to say what is true, people exaggerate thereby turning the true into the false. This post analyzes a particular type of exaggeration which is illustrated by something Dennis Prager said on his radio show one morning: "Happiness is a moral obligation, not a psychological state." Since I agree that we have a moral obligation to try to be happy, I won't say anything more about the first half of Prager's assertion. What I object to is the second half. Why does he say something that is plainly false? What we have here is a form of exaggeration. Prager wants to convey to us something that he, rightly, believes is important, namely, that we ought to strive to be happy, both for our own benefit and for the benefit of others. In order to emphasize the point, to throw it into relief as it were, he follows it up with another assertion whch is false, namely, that happiness is not a psychological state. Obviously, if I am happy, I am in a psychological state. What interests me is the pattern or form of this type of exaggeration which is this:
To emphasize that a is F, say 'a is F but not G' even though a is G.
Three examples from sober philosophers.
Martin Buber, who is certainly no Frenchman, writes that "a melody is not composed of tones, nor a verse of words. . ." (I and Thou, p. 59) His point is that a melody cannot be reduced to its individual notes, nor a verse to its constituent words. But he expresses this truth in a way that makes it absurdly false. A melody without tones would be no melody at all. The litterateur exaggerates for literary effect, but Buber is no mere litterateur. So what is going on?
For a second example, consider Martin Heidegger. Somewhere in Sein und Zeit he writes that Das Dasein ist nie vorhanden. The human being is never present-at-hand. This is obviously false in that the human being has a body which is present-at-hand in nature as surely as any animal or stone. What he is driving at is the truth -- or at least the plausibility -- that the human being enjoys a special mode of Being, Existenz, that is radically unlike the Vorhandenheit of the mere thing in nature and the Zuhandenheit of the tool. So why doesn't he speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, without exaggerating?
And then there is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, according to J. N. Findlay, "took every wrong turn a philosopher can take." (Personal communication) Wittgenstein's fideism involves such absurd exaggerations as that religions imply no theoretical views. But when a Christian, reciting the Apostle's Creed, says "I believe in God the Father, almighty creator of heaven and earth . . ." he commits himself thereby to the metaphysical view that heaven and earth have a certain ontological status, namely, that of being creatures.
Of course, the Christian is doing more than this: his 'I believe' expresses trust in God as a person and not mere belief that certain propositions are true. But to deny that there is any propositional content to his belief would be ludicrous. And yet that appears to be what Wittgenstein is doing.
There are still a lot of posts from the old Powerblogs site that have yet to be uploaded here. What follows is one that even I find pedantic. And I'm a pedant!
Can 'each other' and 'one another' be used interchangeably by good writers, or is there some distinction we need to observe? Compare 'less' and 'fewer.' Good writers know that 'less' is used with mass nouns such as 'food,' 'furniture' and 'snow' whereas 'fewer' is employed with such count nouns as 'meals,' 'tables' and 'snow plows.' Correct: 'If you eat less, you consume fewer calories.' Incorrect: 'If you eat less, you consume less calories.' The second sentence should grate against your linguistic sensibilities.
No doubt there are schoolmarm strictures that good writers may violate with impunity. 'Never split an infinitive' and 'Never begin a sentence with a conjunction' are two examples. But I deny that the fewer/less distinction is in the same grammatical boat: it reflects prima facie logical and ontological distinctions that need to be acknowledged. They are distinctions of the Manifest Image, to borrow a term from Wilfrid Sellars, distinctions that are innocent until proven guilty. Whether these distinctions can survive deeper logical and ontological analysis is a further question.
Now on to my topic.
Bill and Ron are chess players who play each other on Sunday afternoons. But we could just as well say that they play one another on Sunday afternoons. For if each plays the other, then each plays another. And if each one plays another, then each one plays the other given that there are only two players. Now suppose Bill and Ron start a chess club with more than two members. When the members meet they play one another, not each other. Why?
Suppose there are three members. Each one plays one of the others; it is not the case that each one plays the other -- for the simple reason that there are two others. Since each one plays one of the two others, each one plays an other, hence another.
I therefore lay down the following rule. 'Each other' and 'one another' are stylistic variants of each other, and are to that extent intersubstitutable salva significatione, in contexts in which two things stand in some sort of reciprocal relation. In contexts in which more than two things stand in some sort of reciprocal relation, however, 'one another' is correct and 'each other' incorrect.
How did I arrive at this? Well, I gave an argument that appeals to your reason. I did not invoke any authority -- that would be unphilosophical. Nor does actual usage cut any ice with me. Since grammar has a normative component, it cannot merely describe actual usage. For if boneheads prevail, usage degenerates. Describing the details of degeneration may well be a worthwhile linguistic exercise, but conservatives, here as elsewhere, want to impede degeneration rather than merely record it. Grammar must be based in logic, logic in ontology, ontology in -- what? Onto-theology?
Krauthammer became hooked on the game when he was 20 — he is now 60 — and visited a friend in Cambridge, Mass. He found his friend’s roommate sitting with a chess set and an unfamiliar device.
“I said, ‘What is that?’ ” Krauthammer recalled, “And he said, ‘That is a chess clock.’ I had just come in from the plane. It was 10 o’clock at night, and I sat down to play and didn’t get up until 5 in the morning. I had found something that I loved, and I was in deep trouble.”
Krauthammer has chess boards in his office and a “chess room” at home. For a while, he held a small, informal chess club every Monday; members included the liberal scourges Charles Murray (co-author of “The Bell Curve”) and the writer Dinesh D’Souza. Krauthammer said they called it the Pariah Chess Club.
Kerouac's Big Sur opens with a reference to a song:
The church is blowing a sad windblown "Kathleen" on the bells in the skid row slums as I wake up all woebegone and goopy, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I'd ruined my "secret return" to San Francisco by getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums and then marching forth into North Beach to see everybody altho Lorenz Monsanto and I'd exchanged huge letters outlining how I would sneak in quietly, call him on the phone using a code name like Adam Yulch or Lalagy Pulvertaft (also writers) and then he would secretly drive me to his cabin in the Big Sur woods where I would be alone and undisturbed for six weeks just chopping wood, drawing water, writing, sleeping, hiking, etc., etc.
What is this song "Kathleen"? Reading on (emphasis added):
But instead I've bounced drunk into his City Lights bookshop at the height of Saturday night business, everyone recognized me (even tho" I was wearing my disguise-like fisherman's hat and fishermen coat and pants waterproof) and "t'all ends up a roaring drunk in all the famous bars the bloody "King of the Beatniks" is back in town buying drinks for everyone -- Two days of that, including Sunday the day Lorenzo is supposed to pick me up at my "secret" skid row hotel (the Mars on 4th and Howard) but when he calls for me there's no answer, he has the clerk open the door and what does he see but me out on the floor among bottles, Ben Fagan stretched out partly beneath the bed, and Robert Browning the beatnik painter out on the bed, snoring... So says to himself "I'll pick him up next weekend, I guess he wants to drink for a week in the city (like he always does, I guess)" so off he drives to his Big Sur cabin without me thinking he's doing the right thing but my God when I wake up, and Ben and Browning are gone, they've somehow dumped me on the bed, and I hear "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen" being bellroped so sad in the fog winds out there that blow across the rooftops of eerie old hangover Frisco, wow, I've hit the end of the trail and cant even drag my body any more even to a refuge in the woods let alone stay upright in the city a minute --
"I'll Take you Home Again, Kathleen" sounds like an Irish ballad but was actually written by an American, Thomas P. Westendorf, in 1875. Kerouac might have first heard it in the 1940s.
Some object to the popular 'Obamacare' label given that the official title of the law is 'Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act' or, as commonly truncated, 'Affordable Care Act.' But there is a good reason to favor the popular moniker: it is descriptive where the other two labels are evaluative, expressing as they do a pro attitude toward the bill.
Will the law really protect patients? That is an evaluative judgment based on projections many regard as flimsy. Will the law really make health care affordable? And for whom? Will care mandated for all be readily available and of high quality?
Everybody wants affordable and readily available health care of high quality for the greatest number possible. The question is how best to attain this end. The 'Affordable Care Act' label begs the question as to whether or not Obama's bill will achieve the desired end. 'Obamacare' does not. It is, if not all that descriptive, at least evaluatively neutral.
If Obama's proposal were referred to as "Socialized Medicine Health Care Act' or 'Another Step Toward the Nanny State Act,' people would protest the negative evaluations embedded in the titles. Titles of bills ought to be neutral.
Proponents of a consumption tax sometimes refer to it as a fair tax. Same problem. 'Fair' is an evaluative term while 'consumption' is not. 'Consumption tax' conveys the idea that taxes should be collected at the consuming end rather than at the income-producing end. 'Fair tax' fails to convey that idea, but what is worse, it begs the question as to what a fair tax would look like. It is a label that invites the conflation of distinct questions: What is a consumption tax? Is it good? Answer the first and it remains an open question what the answer to the second is.
What is fairness? What is justice? Is justice fairness? These are questions that need to be addressed, not questions answers to which ought to be presupposed.
There is no good reason to object to 'Obamacare' -- the word, not the thing.
The following from Chapter 11 of Big Sur, emphasis added. After three weeks alone in Big Sur in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Bixby canyon cabin, Kerouac, freaked out by the solitude and his metaphysical and religious brooding amidst the starkness of nature, hitch hikes for the last time in his life north on Highway 1 toward Monterey and San Francisco where he receives another 'sign':
The next sign is in Frisco itself where after a night of perfect sleep in an old skid row hotel room I go to see Monsanto [Ferlinghetti] at his City Lights bookstore and he's smiling and glad to see me, says "We were coming out to see you next weekend you should have waited, " but there's something else in his expression -- When we're alone he says "Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead. "
Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men, a lot to fewer men, but to me, and that cat, it was exactly and no lie and sincerely like the death of my little brother -- I loved Tyke with all my heart, he was my baby who as a kitten just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down, or just purring, for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting -- He was like a floppy fur wrap around my wrist, I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred and even when he got big I still held him that way, I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched right over my head and he'd just purr, he had complete confidence in me -- And when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me, 'Attends pour mue kitigingoo" -- But my mother said in the letter he had died the NIGHT AFTER I LEFT! -- But maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter:
"Sunday 20 July 1960, Dear Son, I'm afraid you wont like my letter because I only have sad news for you right now. I really dont know how to tell you this but Brace up Honey. I'm going through hell myself. Little Tyke is gone. Saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength, but late at night I was watching TV a late movie. Just about 1: 30 A. M. when he started belching and throwing up. I went to him and tried to fix him up but to no availe. He was shivering like he was cold so I rapped him up in a Blanket then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him. Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till "day Break" and did all I could to revive him but it was useless. I realized at 4 A. M. he was gone so at six I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket -- and at 7 A. M. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life so heart breaking as to bury my beloved little Tyke who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the Honeysuckle vines, the corner, of the fence. I just cant sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him come through the cellar door calling Ma Wow. I'm just plain sick and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tyke, all the black Birds I fed all Winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest Son this is no lies. There was lots and lots of em flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence, for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest -- that's something I'll never forget -- I wish I had a camera at the time but God and Me knows it and saw it. Now Honey I know this is going to hurt you but I had to tell you somehow... I'm so sick not physically but heart sick... I just cant believe or realize that my Beautiful little Tyke is no more -- and that I wont be seeing him come through his little "Shanty" or Walking through the green grass ... PS. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty, I just cant go out there and see it empty -- as is. Well Honey, write soon again and be kind to yourself. Pray the real "God" -- Your old Mom XXXXXX."
So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there smiling with happiness the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sank, it sank in fact with the same strange idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore -- All the premonitions tying in together.
Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad, he sees my little smile (the smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I'd walked around the streets just bemusedly Mona Lisa'ing at the sight of everything) -- He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mawk of chagrin -- Of course he cant know since I didn't tell him and hardly wanta tell it now, that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little dotty: some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who'd taught me to love cats when I was 3 and 4 and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk -- The death of "little brother" Tyke indeed -- Monsanto seeing me so downcast says "Maybe you oughta go back to the cabin for a few more weeks -- or are you just gonna get drunk again" -- "I'm gonna get drunk yes"
[. . .]
It was the most happy three weeks of my life [the three weeks at Ferlinghetti's cabin in Bixby canyon] dammit and now this has to happen, poor little Tyke -- You should have seen him a big beautiful yellow Persian the kind they call calico" -- "Well you still have my dog Homer, and how was Alf out there? " -- "Alf the Sacred Burro, he ha, he stands in groves of trees in the afternoon suddenly you see him it's almost scarey, but I fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything" (and animals are so sad and patient I thought as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes, ah death, and to think this strange scandalous death comes also to human beings, yea to Smiler [Ferlinghetti] even, poor Smiler, and poor Homer his dog, and all of us) -- I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there three thousand miles (and indeed by Jesus it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the windowpane in the front door trying to get in and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer).
It is also a test whether the infatuation was something more. If the marriage lasts and deepens, then it was; if not, then it wasn't.
To be infatuated is to be rendered fatuous, silly. Not that infatuation is all bad. A love that doesn't begin with it is not much of a love. The silly love song That's Amore well captures the delights of love's incipience. But fools rush in where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/so how are they to know?
This post continues my discussion with Lukas Novak who, so far, as been wiping the floor with me, refuting my arguments for the distinctio realis. Now I take a different tack. I want to see if we have a genuine problem here, but one that is simply insoluble. Such a result would be consistent with my preferred yet provisionally held metaphilosophy according to which the problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but all of them insoluble.
I would like to uphold both of the following propositions, but they appear logically inconsistent (with each other). I will call the first the Metaphysical Primacy of Individual Existence (MPIE), and the second, the Real Distiction between Essence and Existence in Contingent Beings (RD). These are the two limbs of the dyad. I will make a case that they are each exceedingly plausible, but cannot both be true.
1. The Metaphysical Primacy of Individual Existence
MPIE includes a subthesis that I will call the Metaphysical Primacy of Existence (MPE). MPE's slogan is 'No essence without existence.' There are no nonexisting individual essences, no nonexistent items in Meinong's sense, no merely possible individuals. MPE, then, is a rejection of possibililism and an affirmation of actualism, the view that everything (actually) exists. Actualism, however, allows for Plantinga-style haecceity properties capable of unexemplified existence. These abstract and necessary properties actually exist; they are not mere possibilia. But they too must be rejected if we are to affirm the metaphysical primacy of individual existence. The idea is that the individual essence of a concrete individual cannot exist apart from the individual. Individual essences or quiddities there may be, but none of them float free from existence. Peter, for example, is a concrete existing individual. But there is no such haecceity property as identity-with-Peter (Petereity), a property that can exist unexemplified (and does exist unexemplified at times at which Peter does not exist and in possible worlds in which Peter does not exist) . This putative property is an haecceity property of Peter in that, if exemplified, it is exemplified by Peter, by Peter alone, and not possibly by any individual distinct from Peter. If there are such properties, they nail down, or rather are, the nonqualitative thisnesses of concrete individuals. (See here for arguments against haecceity properties.)
MPIE, then, amounts to the rejection of nonexistent and nonsubsistent items, together with Meinongian items having Aussersein status -- whatever exactly that is! -- as well as actually existing haecceity properties. Consider the golden mountain. On MPIE, there exists no golden mountain; there subsists no golden mountain; and it is not the case that some item is a golden mountain. (Each of these clauses makes a different claim, by the way.) Furthermore, on MPIE, nothing's identity or nonqualitative thisness is a property that can exist at times and in worlds when and where the indivdual whose nonqualitative thisness it is does not exist.
But MPIE is not anti-Platonic: it allows for multiply exemplifiable properties (universals). Thus MPIE is not to be confused with nominalism.
2. The Real Distinction between Essence and Existence
In each concrete, contingent individual there is a real distinction between individual essence and existence. To say that the distinction is real is to say that it is not merely conceptual or notional: the distinction subsists independently of us and our mental operations. Thus the distinction is not like the distinction between the morning star and the evening star, which is presumably a distinction between two ways one and the same physical thing, the planet Venus, appears to us. But the reality of the real distinction does not imply that essence and existence are capable of separate existence. Thus the distinction is not real in the way the distinction between Venus and Mars is real, or in the way the distinction between my glasses and my head is real. If Giles of Rome thought otherwise, then he was mistaken. The real distinction is more like the distinction between the convexity and concavity of a lens. Neither can exist without the other, but the distinction is in the lens, and is not a matter of how we view the lens. This analogy, however, limps badly inasmuch as we can empirically detect the difference between the convex and concave surfaces of a lens, but we cannot empirically detect the existence of a thing. But then every analogy limps, else it would not be an analogy.
3. Are the Limbs of the Dyad Logically Consistent?
I'm having doubts. It would be easy to argue for (RD) if (MPIE) is false. Suppose there are merely possible individual essences that subsist necessarily whether or not they exist contingently. Then we can argue as follows. Peter is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human. His existing cannot therefore be reduced to his being the particular human he is. Existence cannot be reduced to essence because Peter's essence subsists in possible worlds in which Peter does not exist. (It also exists at times at which Peter does not exist.) Essence and existence differ extensionally: for every contingent being, there are possible worlds in which the essence of the individual subsists but the individual does not exist. In the case of Plantinga the actualist, abstract and necessary haecceities exist just as robustly as the concrete and contingent individuals whose haecceities they are; so there is no call in his case for a distinction between subsistence and existence.
But if (MPIE) is true, then the extensional difference disappears: in all and only the possible worlds in which Peter exists does his essence subsist/exist. But then we have no good reason to maintain that there is a real difference between essence and existence. This is the brunt of Novak's point against me.
4. Neither Limb is Easily Rejected
Now if the limbs of the dyad are logically inconsistent, we can solve the dyad by rejecting one of the limbs. But which one? I find both to be very plausible.
MPIE is plausible. Something that has no being is nothing at all. So if essences have no being, they are nothing at all. Kein Sosein ohne Dasein. A merely possible individual is one that is not actual, hence nonexistent, hence, in itself, nothing at all. Haecceity properties, though existent, are objectionable for the reasons given here. To put it very simple: the identity of a thing is nothing apart from the thing whose identity it is! In short, there are no individual essences apart from the existing individuals whose essences they are.
Why is RD plausible? When I say that Peter, or any contingent thing, exists, I am saying that he is not nothing, that he is, that he is 'there,' that he is 'outside' his causes and 'outside' my mind and indeed 'outside' any mind. But the dude might not have existed, i.e., there is no logical or metaphysical necessity that he exist. There is nothing in his nature or individual essence to require that he exist, whence it seems to follow that he cannot be identical to his existence. But if Peter is not identical to his existence, then he is distinct from his existence. And if he is distinct from his existence, then that is equivalent to saying that Peter qua individual essence is distinct from Peter qua existing.
But is this distinction real? Or is perhaps merely notional? Is it a distinction we make, or one we find and record? Well, Peter's existence is real, and his essence is real, and his contingency is real, so I say the distinction is real. It is in Peter intrinsically and not supplied by us.
5. Contingency Merely Epistemic?
But wait! How do I know that Peter is really contingent, really possibly such as not to exist though in fact he does exist? Might this contingency be merely epistemic, merely a matter of my ignorance as to why he must exist? His nonexistence is thinkable without contradiction. But does that suffice to show that his nonexistence is really possible? Peter's nonexistence is conceivable, i.e., thinkable without logical contradiction. But there is a logical gap between conceivability and (real) possibility. On the other hand, if conceivability is no guide to possibility, what guide do we have? So I'll set this problem aside for now.
6. Where Does This Leave Us?
I think it is reasonable to hold that the problem is genuine but insoluble. Both limbs are plausibly maintained, but they cannot both be true. It could be that our cognitive architecture is such as to allow us to formulate the problem, but also such as to disallow a solution. This is not to say that there are contradictions in reality. I assume that there are none. It is to suggest that discursive reason is dialectical in roughly Kant's sense: it comes into conflict with itself when it attempts to grasp the Unconditioned. Existence, after all, is the unconditioned or absolute 'aspect' of things. Better: it is the absolute or uncinditioned depth dimension in things. For a thing to exist is for it to exist outside its causes, outside minds, and outside relations to other things (a thing is not constituted by its relations, but must exist apart from them if it is to stand in them).
This goes together with the fact that existence is what confers uniqueness upon a thing. To the conceptualizing mind, nothing is strictly unique. For every concept is repeatable even if not repeated. Existence, however, cannot be conceptualized. As the absoluteness and uniqueness in things, it is perhaps no surprise that the difference between existence and essence cannot show up extensionally.
But this won't convince many. They will insist that there has to be a solution. Well, then, let's hear what it is.
Robert Paul Wolff has an answer for us. Ready? The bolding is Wolff's own and is twice-repeated:
Because Obama is Black.
Is Professor Wolff serious? I'm afraid he is. But given that the man is neither stupid nor the usual sort of left-wing moral scumbag, how could he be serious? What explains a view so plainly delusional? How account for an emotion-driven mere dismissal of the conservative position the arguments for which he will not examine? How is it that a professional philosopher, indeed a very good one, can engage in such puerile ad hominem psychologizing? Wolff himself provides an answer in a later post:
My knowledge of the beliefs and sentiments of those on the right is based entirely on things I have read or have seen on television. I have never had a conversation with a committed right-wing opponent of the Affordable Care Act, nor have I even, to the best of my knowledge, met one. You would be quite correct in inferring that I live in a left-wing bubble [called Chapel Hill -- before that, I lived in a left-wing bubble called Amherst, MA, and before that I lived in the right wing bubbles called Morningside Heights, Hyde Park, and Cambridge.] If this strikes you as disqualifying my from having an opinion, you are free to ignore the rest of this post.
But the sound and fury against the Tea Party is a sideshow. The second aspect of the current partisan divide reveals the real extremism in politics today, and it isn’t to be found among Tea Partiers. The complaint against the supposed “extremism” of the Tea Party is nowadays followed by a much more risible lament: that the very design of our government is to blame for “gridlock” and the increasing conflict between the two parties in Washington. Supposedly serious people have written in the last couple weeks that Tea Partiers should be arrested and charged with treason or sedition for causing the government shutdown. More frequent are the calls for abolishing the Senate because of its equal representation of small states and out of frustration with the filibuster. A couple of liberal pundits, like the usually more sober-minded Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest, have suggested abolishing Congress altogether. And New York Times columnist Thomas “China-Is-Awesome” Friedman periodically recycles his fantasy that we could be “China for a day” so that his favorite authoritarian wish list could be imposed without our democratic consent.
This is not a brand new phenomenon. Starting with Woodrow Wilson, “progressives” (to use a name more accurate than “liberal”) have complained that our various mechanisms of “checks and balances” prevent government from being more “effective.” This is just code for the liberal desire that its opposition should simply shut up, surrender, and submit to their rule unquestioned. It is a liberalism that has grown too lazy to argue with—or even tolerate—opposition, which is what happens when you come to believe that you embody “the side of history.” This display of contempt for the institutions of democratic deliberation reveals today’s progressives to be highly undemocratic—and illiberal, too. With their will to power checked as intended by our founders, the Left is letting out a primal scream.
William J. Bennett and David Wilezol, Is College Worth It? (Thomas Nelson 2013), p. 134:
Knowing that students prefer to spend more time having fun than studying, professors are more comfortable awarding good grades while requiring a minimum amount of work. In return, students give favorable personal evaluations to professors who desire to be well received by students as a condition of preserving their employment status. Indeed, the popularity of the student evaluation, which began in the 1970s, has had a pernicious effect.
I would say so. Here is an anecdote to illustrate the Bennett thesis. In early 1984 I was 'up for tenure.' And so in the '83 fall semester I was more than usually concerned about the quality of my student evaluations. One of my classes that semester was an upper-level seminar conducted in the library over a beautiful oak table. One day one of the students began carving into the beautiful table with his pen.
In an abdication of authority that part of me regrets and a part excuses, I said nothing. The student liked me and I knew it. I expected a glowing recommendation from him and feared losing it. So I held my tongue while the kid defaced university property.
Jeff H. and I had entered into a tacit 'non-aggression pact.' (And I got tenure.)
The problem is not that students are given an opportunity to comment upon and complain about their teachers. The problem is the use to which student evaluations are put for tenure, promotion, and salary 'merit-increase' decisions. My chairman at the time was an officious organization man, who would calculate student evaluation averages to one or two decimal places, and then rank department members as to their teaching effectiveness. Without getting into this too deeply for a blog post, there is something highly dubious about equating teaching effectiveness with whatever the student evaluations measure, and something absurd about the false precision of calculating averages out to one or two decimal places.
Jones is a better teacher than Smith because her average is 3.2 while his is only 3.1? Well, no, but if the chairman is asked to justify his decision, he can point to the numbers. There is mindless quantification, but it takes someone more thoughtful than an administrator to see it.
I strongly recommend the Bennett-Wilezol book to anyone thinking of attending college or thinking of bankrolling someone's attendance. Here is a review.
Sweet gone Jack really did try to be a good boy and give up the booze and dissipation and all the near occasions of sin & temptation that fame brought him once he made it in '57 with the publication of On the Road. Here he is arrived at Lawrence Ferlinghett's (Lorenzo Monsanto's) cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur:
And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) "no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony . . . it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time.. . Yay, for this, more aloneness" -- "Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism -- sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood" (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce's stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, "I dont have to R E H E A R S E for God's sake Steve! " -- "But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I'll let you off the dress rehearsal" and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say, "No I cant do it, " and I go across the street to get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)... So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant movies brought up at will and projected for further study -- And pleasure -- As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us. (Big Sur, ch. 6, pp. 24-25)
As the USA drifts daily farther in the direction of leftist totalitarianism, the words of Solzhenitsyn ought to be considered. Excerpt:
. . . the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.
. . .
from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish:
"The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that
slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead." (Mexico City Blues, 1959,
211th Chorus).
In 1955, The Paris Review paid a struggling Jack Kerouac fifty dollars for an excerpt from a then unpublished manuscript. The excerpt appeared as a short story titled “The Mexican Girl” and, after much acclaim, was picked up a year later by Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories. Due in large part to the success of “The Mexican Girl,” On the Road was soon accepted by Viking Press; the full novel was published in 1957. (reference)
Here is an audio clip of "The Mexican Girl." Meanwhile, the Mexican Girl, Bea Franco, has been found, written up, and assumes her place in the Beat pantheon.
Lest we forget, however, "Pretty girls make graves." (The Dharma Bums)
The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.
This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying. Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes. One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning. Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both.
Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!). And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense. Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.'
Here is another example of the annoying move in question.
The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun
its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my
kitchen a few years ago whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to
Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term
‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one. How typical. Being a good host, I didn't lay into
her as I probably should have for her 'spiritual' good. The opposing of 'religion' to 'spirituality' is bogus, religion being a form of spirituality, and there is no justification for reading a pejorative meaning into the former.
To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself. Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.
I have been defending the real distinction between essence and existence in contingent beings. Lukas Novak, though not rejecting the distinction, finds my arguments wanting. Here is his latest challenge to me:
1) First I will use your own weapons against you. The following triad is
inconsistent, any two propositions entail the negation of the remaining one.
Which limb do you reject?
a) Necessarily, Socrates exists iff Socrates is a man. b) Possibly,
Socrates does not exist. c) Necessarily, Socrates is a man.
Yes, the triad is inconsistent. I am tempted to reject (c). Socrates is essentially a man, but not necessarily a man. In terms of possible worlds: Socrates is a man in every possible world in which he exists, but, being contingent, he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially a man but not necessarily a man. God, by contrast, is both essentially divine and necessarily divine: he is divine in every world in which he exists, and he exists in every world.
But if I reject (c), how can I claim, as I have, that while Socrates is possibly nonexistent, he is not possibly non-human? For if S. is not possibly non-human, that is equivalent to saying that he is necessarily human, which in turn is equivalent to (c).
Novak appears to have refuted my contingency argument for the real distinction.
2) When interpreting the modalities in your two sentences, one can interpret
the implicit quantifications over possible worlds as comprising either all
possible worlds, or just the possible worlds where Socrates exists at all.
Lukas is referring to the following two sentences, the first of which I claimed is true, and the second of which I claimed is false (because Socrates is essentially a man):
A. Socrates exists & Socrates is possibly such that he does not
exist.
B. Socrates is a man & Socrates is possibly such that he is not a
man.
I say that in order that (A) be true, it must be interpreted so that
"possibly" invokes quantification over all possible worlds, not just
those where Socrates exists (because there is no possible world among those in
which Socrates exists such that Socrates does not exist in that world). On the
other hand, in order that (B) be false, the quantification implicit in the
"possibly" must be restricted to those worlds only where Socrates exists.
Because it is not true that Socrates is human in worlds where he does not exist
at all. As you yourself concede, essence without existence is just nothing, so
in a world where Socrates does not have existence, he neither has his essence,
which is humanity. Thus the different modal behaviour of the sentences is merely
apparent, it is a result of your tendency to interpret the quantification
implicit in modal terms differently when speaking about existence and about
essential predicates.
Novak's very powerful objection, in effect, is that the following are both true:
A* There are possible worlds in which Socrates does not exist
B* There are possible worlds in which Socrates is not human
and that these are the same worlds. What's more, the starred sentences are the only possible readings of my (A) and (B). Since the starred sentences are both true, my contingency argument for the distinction between individual essence and existence in Socrates fails. What I had argued is that, since Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human, his existing is not identical to his being an instance of humanity.
Novak's point could also be put as follows. In every possible world in which Socrates exists, he is human, and in every world in which he is human, he exists. Hence there is no world in which he has the one property but not the other. Existing and being human are therefore necessarily equivalent, equivalent across all possible worlds. If so, it is not the case that Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human.
I grant the necessary equivalence, but deny that one can infer the identity of existing and being human from it. Necessary equivalence does not entail identity. Triangularity and trilaterality are necessarily equivalent but non-identical.
But this doesn't settle the matter. Lukas could agree that, in general, necessary equivalence does not entail identity, but still claim that I have not given a compelling reason for thinking that existing and being a concrete instance of humanity are non-identical. After all, he is not rejecting the real distinction, but arguing that I haven't proven it.
Despite the obvious force of Novak's argument, I think there is a way of construing 'Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human' that evades the argument. Here goes.
Suppose we take 'Socrates' to refer to a concrete individual essence, one that, obviously, exists. We can say, with truth, that this essence might not have existed, that its nonexistence is possible in the sense that there is nothing in this essence to insure (entail) that it exist. But it is also true that this existing individual essence, this existing instance of humanity, could not have been anything other than an instance of humanity: it could not have been an instance of any other nature, felinity, say. The Socratic essence could not have been a feline essence. Understood in this way, it seems to me true to say that Socrates (the individual Socratic essence) is possibly nonexistent but not possibly non-human. But if it is not possibly non-human, then it is necessarily human, in which case the individual Socratic essence is to be found in every possible world.
This essence must have some ontological status, and indeed a necessary ontological status. But we have to avoid reifying it. We can say that is has a merely intentional status in those worlds in which Socrates does not exist. That is, it exists only as a divine accusative in such worlds. In such worlds the essence possesses esse intentionale but not esse reale. In those worlds in which Socrates exists, the Socratic essence posseses both esse intentionale and esse reale.
We can remove the contradiction in the original triad without hypostatizing essences by ascending to a higher viewpoint: we bring God into the picture. God is a necessary being, so all the essences that enjoy esse intentionale in his mind are necessary beings. To some of them such as the Socrates essence he superadds existence. Although it is false that, necessarily, Socrates is human, it is true that, necessarily, the Socratic individual essence includes humanity.
But then it seems that the real distinction stands and falls with the doctrine of divine creation.
Because of comments like these, though they are surely not the worst one can find. (I cite them only because my Referral List pointed me to the post to which they are appended.) But they are characteristic. In my experience, to discuss religion with the irreligious and the anti-religious is a sheer waste of time. You may as well discuss logic with the illogical, music with the unmusical, or poetry with the terminally prosaic.
I am regularly surprised by how much garbage Victor Reppert tolerates in his ComBox. He will even allow people to insult him in vile ways. It may be that he is a model of Christian detachment, slow to anger, quick to forgive, tolerant to a fault. It may also be that he doesn't appreciate that to tolerate bad behavior is to invite more of the same. A conservative, I take a harsher line, one more in keeping with the realities of human nature, realities liberals tend to ignore. Conservatism as I espouse and practice it subsumes the classically liberal commitment to toleration. But toleration has limits. In any case, a weblog is private property where no one has free speech rights.
A man's home is his castle, and his blog his cybercastle. Just as I do not tolerate bad behavior in the first, I do not tolerate it in the second. But bloggers are free to run their blogs any way they see fit.
You might think that disallowing comments limits my traffic. Not so. Traffic is better than ever, recently up around 2000 pageviews per diem. Readers I respect tell me that they like my Comments Policy.
To end aphoristically:
The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.
I thought of Carolyn in September and I thought I ought to check the obituaries. She died September 20th at age 90, her longevity as if in counterpoise to the short tenures of her main men, wildman Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's 1957 On the Road, and the brooding Jack Kerouac himself. Carolyn played the stabilizer to the mania of the one and the melancholy of the other. Both quit the sublunary before the '60s had run their course. The tale of Jack's end has been told too many times, though I will tell it again on 21 October, the 44th anniversary of his exit from the "slaving meat wheel." Neal's demise is less frequently recounted.
Neal
died in February of 1968, also of substance abuse, having quaffed a nasty
concotion of pulque and Seconals, while walking the railroad tracks near San Miguel de
Allende, Mexico. Legend has it that Cassady had been counting the ties and that
his last word was "64, 928." (Cf. William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A
Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, pp. 157-158.)
Carolyn kept the beat while the wildmen soloed, seeking ecstasy where it cannot be found.
May all who sincerely seek beatitude find it. Kerouac: "I want to be sincere." May Jack with his visions of Gerard, of Cody, finally enjoy the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata.
This post continues my ruminations on the distinctio realis. If essence and existence are really distinct in a contingent being, should we think of its existence as accidental or essential, or neither?
Max, a cat of my acquintance, exists and exists contingently: there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. His nonexistence is broadly logically possible. So one may be tempted to say that existence is to Max as accident to substance. One may be tempted to say that existence is accidental to Max. In general, the temptation is to say that existence is an accidental property of contingent beings, and that this accidentality is what makes them contingent.
But this can't be right. On a standard definition, if P is an accidental property of x, then x can exist without P. So if existence were an accidental property of Max, then, Max could exist without existing. Contradiction.
Ought we conclude that existence is an essential property of Max? If P is an essential property of x, then x cannot exist without P. So if existence were an essential property of Max, then Max cannot exist without existing. The consequent of the conditional is true, but tautologically so.
From this one can infer either that (i) Max is a necessary being (because her has existence essentially) or that (ii) existence construed as an essential property is not the genuine article. Now Max is surely not a necessary being. It is true that if he exists, then he exists, but from this one cannot validly infer that he exists. Suppose existence is a first-level property. Then it would makes sense to say that existence is an essential property of everything. After all, in every possible world in which Max exists, he exists! But all this shows is that existence construed as an essential property is not gen-u-ine, pound-the-table existence.
We ought to conclude that existence is neither accidental to a contingent thing, nor essential to it. No contingent thing is such that existence follows from its essence. And no contingent thing is such that its contingency can be understood by thinking of its existence as an accidental property of it. The contingency of Max's being sleepy can be understaood in terms of his instantiation of an accidental property; but the contingency of his very existence cannot be so understood.
If every first-level property is either accidental or essential, then existence is not a first-level-property. But, as I have argued many times, it does not follow that existence is a second-level property. The Fregean tradition went off the rails: existence cannot be a second-level property. Instantiation is a second-level property, but not existernce. And of course it cannot be a second-level property if one takes the real distinction seriously, this being a distinction between essence and existence 'in' the thing or 'at' the thing.
Where does this leave us? Max exists. Pace Russell, saying that Max exists is NOT like saying that Max is numerous. 'Exists,' unlike 'numerous,' has a legitimate first-level use. So existence belongs to Max. It belongs to him without being a property of him. One argument has already been sketched. To put it explicitly: Every first-level property is either essential or accidental; Existence is neither an essential nor an accidental first-level property; ergo, Existence is not a first-level property.
Existence belongs to Max without being a property of him. How is existence 'related' to Max if it is not a property of him?
In my existence book I maintained that existence belongs to a contingent being such as Max not as accident to substance, or as essence to primary substance, or as property to possessor, or as proper part to whole, or by identity; but as unity to items unified. In brief, the existence of a contingent thing is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents. The existence of Max is not one of his constituents but the unity of all his constituents.
This approach solves the problem of how existence can belong to a contingent being without being a property of it. But it raises vexing questions of its own, questions to be taken up in subsequent posts in this series.
One question I need to address is whether philosophy would have come up with the real distinction if it were not for the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo.
As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't.
Obama is not just a bullshitter, but an Orwellian bullshitter.
If hell is separation from God, why wouldn't a body held in thrall by sensuous pleasure do as well as a body wracked with pain? Absorbed in sensuous pleasure, one is arguably farther from God than when in pain.
This post defends the real distinction between essence and existence. For some background, see Geach on the Real Distinction I.
In Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002, p. 45), Anthony Kenny writes, "Peter's continuing to exist is the very same thing as Peter's continuing to possess his essence; if he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a human being and vice versa."
What Kenny is doing in this passage and the surrounding text is rejecting the real distinction between essence and (individual) existence. Thus in a cat, a dog, or a man, there is no distinction in reality between its essence or nature and its existence. In general, for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K. Thus for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man; for Socrates to continue to exist is for Socrates to continue to be a man; and for Socrates to cease to exist is for Socrates to cease being a man.
The claim that for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K, is to be understood, not as a logical or metaphysical equivalence, but as an identity that sanctions a reduction: the existence of Ks just is (identically) their K-ness. Individual (as opposed to what Kenny calls specific) existence reduces to nature. But that is just to say that there is no real distinction in a thing between its individual existence and its nature. For example, there is no non-notional or real distinction in Socrates between him and his existence.
I have three objections to this broadly Aristotelian theory of existence according to which individual existence reduces to nature.
An Argument from Contingency
Socrates might never have existed. If so, and if, for Socrates,
who is a man, to exist = to be a man, then Socrates might never have been a man. This
implies that a certain man, Socrates, might never have been a man, which
is absurd. Therefore, it is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist =
to be a man.
The first premise ought to be uncontroversial. Speaking tenselessly,
Socrates exists and Socrates is a man. But there is no logical or
metaphysical necessity that the man Socrates exist. So, Socrates, though he exists, is
possibly such that he does not exist. (This is equivalent to saying that
he is a contingent being.) So, given that to exist = to be a man,
the man Socrates is possibly such that he is not a man. But this
contradicts the fact that Socrates is essentially a man. For if he is essentially a man, then he is necessarily such that he is a man. Therefore, it
is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist = to be a man.
Convinced? Here is another way of looking at it. I point to Socrates and say, 'This might not have existed.' I say something true. But if I point to him and say, 'This might not have been a man,' I say something false. Therefore, for Socrates, to exist is not to be a man. Of course, he cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot BE a man without BEING. But that is not the question. The question is whether Socrates' being or existence is reducible to his being a man. I have just shown that it is not. Therefore, there is a real distinction between essence and existence in Socrates.
What holds for Socrates holds for every man. No man's very existence is reducible to his being a man. And in general, no individual K's individual existence is reducible to its being a K.
An Argument from Reference
If for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man, then, when he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a man. But then the proper name 'Socrates' used after the philosopher's death does not refer to a man. But it does refer. For I can make true statements about Socrates, e.g., 'Socrates taught Plato.' And the name refers to a man. When Socrates ceased to exist, 'Socrates' did not commence referring to some other thing, a jelly fish say, or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy, or more plausibly, a corpse. A man taught Plato, not a corpse, or a pile of ashes. Therefore, it is not the case that for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man.
To understand this argument, please note that it is not being denied that, necessarily, at every time at which Socrates is alive, Socrates exists if and only if he is a man. Socrates cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot be a man without existing. What is being denied, or rather questioned, is the identification of Socrates' existing with his being a man. As I have pointed out many times before, logical equivalences do not sanction reductions.
A Third Argument
We cannot say that to exist = to be a cat, for then only cats could exist. We, or rather the Aristotelian, has to say that, for cats, to exist = to be a cat. In general, for K-items, to exist = to be a K. But why stop here? Can we stop here? There are no cats in general. There are only particular cats, any two of which are numerically distinct, and each of which has its own existence. Consider Max and Manny, two cats of my acquaintance. Each has his own existence, but they share the nature, cat. So if each exists in virtue of being a cat, then each exists in virtue of being the very cat that it is, which is to say: for Max to exist is for Max to be Max, and for Manny to exist is for Manny to be Manny. But then, generalizing, to exist = to be self-identical. The theory we began with collapses into the existence = self-identity theory.
But while each thing is self-identical -- this is just the Law of Identity -- no contingent thing is identical to its own existence. For if Max were identical to his own existence, then Max would necessarily exist. If God exists, then God is identical to his own existence. But Max is not God. Therefore, existence cannot be reduced to self-identity in the case of contingent beings.
Of course, given that contingent things exist, they must be self-identical, and they cannot BE self-identical unless they ARE or exist. But there might not have been any contingent things at all. So the existence of a thing cannot be reduced to the self-identity it could have only if it exists. Get it? If yes, then you understand the real distinction.
First of all, what is doublethink? We turn to George Orwell's 1984 and the following quotation therefrom reproduced in Wikipedia:
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
This official website is an excellent contemporary example of doublethink, from the State of Idaho, of all places. (One expects PeeCee doublethink and newspeak in the People's Republic of Taxachusetts and in the once Golden State of Californication, but in Idaho, with all its Mormons and gun-totin' conservatives? Holy moly, things are worse than I thought.) At the State of Idaho website we read:
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare's Self Reliance Office 6/2010
What is the Self Reliance office?
The Self Reliance office is the portion of Idaho Health and Welfare where people can apply for state funded public assistance.
This is what we call an 'Orwellian' use of language. It is language perverted and destroyed so as to serve leftist ideology and make clear thinking impossible. Accordingly, one who accepts welfare via the State from productive citizens is 'self-reliant,' when in truth he is the exact opposite.
Black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reliance on others is self-reliance.
Limited government is anarchism.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness = ObamaCare. (Idiot Pelosi accurately paraphrased.)
Fiscal responsibility = fiscal irresponsibility.
Semi-automatic rifle = fully- automatic rifle.
Semi-automatic rifle used purely defensively = assault weapon.
Constitutionally-mandated border control = xenophobia.
ID requirement at polling place = disenfranchisement.
Critic of a black person's ideas = racist.
And so on. Continue the list and resolve to do your bit to resist and oppose the liberal-left scumbaggers. It is your life, liberty and happiness that are at stake.
A tip of the beret to Monterey Tom, fellow Kerouac aficionado, Octoberite, native Californian, and fellow lonesome traveller along Highway One for alerting me to the arrival of Big Sur, the movie, based on the eponymous novel by Jack Kerouac. Appropriately enough, it is scheduled to open here in the Valle del Sol on November 1st, All Saints' Day on the Catholic calendar. If you live hereabouts it will debut locally at the Harkins Shea 14 in Scottsdale. I think I'll catch the 11:00 AM performance, then have lunch at an authentic Jewish delicatessen Peter L. introduced me to: Goldman's Deli near the corner of N. Hayden and E. Indian Bend.
I stumbled upon a good brisk read the other day by David Mamet in the genre, How I finally saw the light and stopped being a benighted leftist. The title is The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (Sentinel, 2011). Here is a taste, from a footnote on p. 10:
*The Left and the Right, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals -- the goal of the Left is a government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.
In his second sentence, Mamet makes two extremely important points. The first is that leftists employ a stealth strategy. They are not open about their ultimate goals. The gun-grabbers among them, for example, will rarely state openly that one of their goals is the banning of the private ownership of handguns. They know full well that an open espousal of their totalitarian agenda would incite the opposition of the 'tea-baggers' as they derisively call Tea Party members as well as that of the rest of the rubes of fly-over country. The second point it that leftists, as adherents of a quasi-religion, are committed to its nostrums whether or not they work out in reality. Are the public schools better than they were in '65? Obviously not. So throw more money at them while harrassing homeschoolers and blocking voucher programs.
But I must quibble with Mamet's first sentence. It is simply not the case that the goal of the Right is freedom of the individual from government. That is a goal of anarchists, but conservatism is twice-removed from anarchism. For between anarchism and conservatism lies libertarianism. Conservatives are law and order types. They believe in a strong national defense. They want the nation's borders to be secure. All of this requires local, state, and Federal government.
When leftists say as they repeatedly do that conservatives are anti-government, that is a lie and they know it. It is a mistake for Mamet to give aid and comfort to this lie. Conservatives are for limited government. It takes no great logical acumen to see that if one is for limited government, then one is for government. And even a liberal should be able to understand that it is a false alternative to suppose that the choice is between no government and totalitarian government.
Addendum (10/14)
Christopher Hitchens' NYT review of Mamet begins thusly: "This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason."
And as I read more of it, I am becoming irritated myself. Consider his answers to the questions put to him in an interview. The questions are serious, but he returns frivolous answers, e.g.:
You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most? All of them gall me the most.
Only a lunatic extremist would think every cent paid in taxes was wasted. And surely no conservative would maintain such an absurd position.
We don't need more extremists. Contemporary liberalism is a set of extreme positions. The answer, however, is not some opposite form of extremism. I believe it was Goethe who said that no one is more hostile to a position than one who once espoused it but has come to reject it. I paraphrase.
Given the shenanigans in Washington, D. C., you would naturally expect me to begin with . . . wait for it . . . . Shut Down!
Then I Kissed Her is the Beach Boys' response to the Crystal's Then He Kissed Me. Nice job, boys, but nothing can hold a candle to Phil Spector's wall of sound.
Apparently, Brian Wilson was obsessed with the Ronette's Be My Baby, another Phil Spector production. Wilson's response was Don't Worry Baby.
In an earlier post I commented with some trenchancy on Ronald Dworkin's views about religion in Religion Without God as these views were represented by Peter Berkowitz in a recent article. Although I was careful to point out that my remarks presupposed the accuracy of Berkowitz's representation, I was a bit uneasy about my comments, not having consulted Dworkin's book. I am therefore happy to reproduce the following missive from a Columbia University graduate student, Luke MacInnis, to balance out the picture.
.............
I enjoy your blog, and especially your excellent running commentary on Tom Nagel. I wanted to comment on your recent post on Peter Berkowitz's review of Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God. Berkowitz's comments center exclusively on, and misrepresent, a very short passage toward the start of the book, which you suggest amounts to a "miserable leftist substitute for religion" that "leaves out what is absolutely central to religion, namely, the conviction that there is a transcendent dimension, an "unseen order." But in fact Dworkin does not say that religion "consists in" those two central judgments. Immediately (the next page) after describing these judgments, he adds "For many people religion includes much more than those two values", approvingly quotes William James' view that religion "adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else", and then himself adds that this "enchantment is the discovery of transcendental value in what seems otherwise transient or dead." He provides important, though brief, discussions of Rudolph Otto's views on religion's numinous character, and emphasizes his own rejection of naturalist metaphysics (a long-running theme in all of Dworkin's work, but most explicit and developed in Justice for Hedgehogs).
So he does not deny religion's transcendent, unseen dimension. Nor does he offer any definitions that offend ordinary language (he provides many examples to make this point. Berkowitz mentions none of them). Dworkin describes the "two judgments" as a manifestation of a particular kind of religious attitude (or temperament, to use Nagel's term) that some (though not all) atheists might be said to have, and which does not include a belief in a supreme, intelligent creator. Dworkin's general account of religion is broad because he aims at ecumenism. That hardly makes it a "miserable leftist substitute". It is an attempt to find common ground between atheists and theists in a more basic reverence toward the "unseen" both share but cash out in inconsistent metaphysics.
Regarding your final question ("if it is wrong for the State to impose religion on its citizens, why isn't it also wrong for the State to impose leftist ideology on its citizens as it is now doing here in the USA?), you might be interested in Dworkin's answer in Chapter 3 of RWG, where he concedes the symmetry between theistic and scientific explanations of the origin of conscious life ("if relying on one judgment to mandate a curriculum is an unconstitutional establishment of religious belief, then so is relying on the other." (128)), recognizes that liberalism to this point has no adequate response to this problem, and offers what is indeed a "radical" argument that involves eliminating specific rights to religious freedom altogether.
Berkowitz ignores all of this, and I wish others would not comment so decisively on the book based on such an inadequate review (notwithstanding your brief "if this is what Dworkin maintains" qualification). I find this is particularly common with Dworkin's work, and it is unfortunate because it usually obscures the complexity and value of his contribution.
While listening the other day to Barack Obama shuck and jive about fiscal responsiblity, shamelessly posturing as if he and not his Republican opponents is the fiscally responsible one, when he is in truth the apotheosis or, if you prefer, the Platonic Form of fiscal irresponsibility, I realized just how uncommonly good our POMO Prez is at bullshitting. He is indeed a consummate bullshitter. But what is it to bullshit, exactly? When is a statement bullshit?
According to Harry Frankfurt, a statement is bullshit if it is
. . . grounded neither in a
belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true.
It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this
indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of
bullshit." (emphasis added)
Professor Frankfurt has a fine nose for the essence of bullshit. The bullshitter is one who 'doesn't give a shit' about the truth
value of what he is saying. He doesn't care how things stand with reality. The
liar, by contrast, must care: he must know (or at least attempt to know) how
things are if he is to have any chance of deceiving his audience. Think of it
this way: the bullshitter doesn't care whether he gets things right or gets them
wrong; the liar cares to get them right so he can deceive you about
them.
Now if
the bullshitter does not care about truth, what does he care about? He care
about himself, about making a certain impression. His aim is to (mis)represent
himself as knowing what he does not know or more than he actually knows.
Frankfurt again:
. . . bullshitting involves a
kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely than to telling a lie. But what
is implied concerning its nature by the fact that it is more like the former
than it is like the latter? Just what is the relevant difference here between a
bluff and a lie? Lying and bluffing are both modes of misrepresentation or
deception. Now the concept most central to the distinctive nature of a lie is
that of falsity: the liar is essentially someone who deliberately promulgates a
falsehood. Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false.
Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but
of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the
essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In
order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony
need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real
thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may
be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is
like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of
the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with
the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does
not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. (emphasis
added)
Now what does this have to do with Obama? As Frankfurt points out, the essence of bullshit is a lack of concern for truth. But truth and consistency are closely related notions. Two statements are consistent (inconsistent) just in case they can (cannot) both be true. Now I do not know if there are any cases of Obama contradicting himself synchronically (at a time), but there are plenty of examples of him contradicting himself diachronically. He said things as a senator the opposite of which he says now. Victor Davis Hanson supplies numerous examples in Obama as Chaos:
. . . when the president takes up a line of argument against his opponents, it cannot really be taken seriously — not just because it is usually not factual, but also because it always contradicts positions that Obama himself has taken earlier or things he has previously asserted. Whom to believe — Obama 1.0, Obama 2.0, or Obama 3.0?
When the president derides the idea of shutting down the government over the debt ceiling, we almost automatically assume that he himself tried to do just that when as a senator he voted against the Bush administration request in 2006, when the debt was about $6 trillion less than it is now.
The problem here is not merely logical; it is also ethical: the man is not truthful. Truth, falsity, consistency, inconsistency pertain to propositions, not persons. Truthfulness, deceitfulness, lack of concern for truth and consistency -- these are ethical attributes, properties of persons. Obama the bullshitter is an ethically defective president. When Nixon lied, he could be shamed by calling him on it. That is because he was brought up properly, to value truth and truthfulness. But the POMO Obama, like that "first black president" Bill Clinton, apparently can't be shamed. It's all bullshit and fakery and shuckin' and jivin'. There is no gravitas in these two 'black' presidents, the one wholly white, the other half-white. Everything's a 'narrative' -- good POMO word, that -- and the only question is whether the narrative works in the moment for political advantage. A narrative needn't be true to be a narrative, which is why the POMO types like it. Hanson has Obama's number:
But a third explanation is more likely. Obama simply couldn’t care less about what he says at any given moment, whether it is weighing in on the football name “Redskins” or the Travyon Martin trial. He is detached and unconcerned about the history of an issue, about which he is usually poorly informed. Raising the debt ceiling is an abstraction; all that matters is that when he is president it is a good thing and when he is opposing a president it is a bad one. Let aides sort out the chaos. Obamacare will lower premiums, not affect existing medical plans, and not require increased taxes; that all of the above are untrue matters nothing. Who could sort out the chaos?
[. . .]
The media, of course, accepts that what Obama says on any given day will contradict what he has said or done earlier, or will be an exaggeration or caricature of his opponents’ position, or simply be detached from reality. But in their daily calculus, that resulting chaos is minor in comparison to the symbolic meaning of Obama. He is, after all, both the nation’s first African-American president and our first left-wing progressive since Franklin Roosevelt.
In comparison with those two facts, no others really matter.
Interest in Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos continues unabated. James N. Anderson weighs in here. I thank James for his linkage to my series of Nagel posts.
Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter and lie in the path of the would-be believer. Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question, a normative question. The following taxonomy is merely descriptive. And not in order of stopping power. And perhaps incomplete. This is a blog. This is only a blog.
1. The obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner. The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, TV, portable telephony, the Internet . . . and Twitter, the ultimate weapon of mass distraction. Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:
Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.
If Lewis could only see us now.
2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice. They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false. The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true. For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.
3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents. One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know. For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where. Stalin in hell? How do you know? How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?
The presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can condifently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory. For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.
4. The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively. Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people. To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion.
Related point: the corruption of the churches.
Again, my task here is merely descriptive. I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption.
5. The putative conflict between science and religion. Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life. Thinking people are bothered by this.
6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion).
7. The weight of concupiscence. We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives. The thrust of desire makes most real the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife? It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride -- intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos-- blinded him to spirtual realities.
8. Suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not. In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.
Peter proffered a theory over Sunday breakfast a while back. 'Gangsta' rappers and their imitators are aping the sartorial disarray of prison inductees. When you arrive at the slammer, the Man takes away your belt, so your pants fall down. So 'gangsta' rappers and their imitators are preparing themselves for prison life or else showing their solidarity with their incarcerated brothers.
Thinking that this might just be an urban legend, I headed over to Snopes, where I find Peter's theory confirmed. The droopy drawers dudes in prisons are not advertising their availability for sodomy, as some have surmised, but expose their butts because of over-sized beltless prison garb , the belts having been taken away to keep the miscreants from hanging themselves.
The question remains, however, why the rappers and their acolytes would choose criminals as their role models.
In all my years of blogging, this is only my third sartorial post. The other two are lodged, appropriately enough, in the category, Sartorial Matters. One mentions Montaigne, the other Adorno.
As CBS 2’s Jennifer McLogan reported Monday, officials at Weber Middle School in Port Washington are worried that students are getting hurt during recess. Thus, they have instituted a ban on footballs, baseballs, lacrosse balls, or anything that might hurt someone on school grounds.
If you don't see this absurdity within the context of Right-Left struggle, you won't understand it. It is of a piece with the general wussification and infantilization of the populace promoted by leftists, the active promotion of food stamp dependency being a prime example.
As
you know, they are not called Food Stamps anymore. The program has been given the snappy
new label, at once both a euphemism and an acronym, SNAP: Supplemental
Nutritional Assistance Program. And it is actively promoted.
Liberals will call it part of the social
safety net. That metaphor suggests something to keep one from falling to one's
death. But it is also a net in the sense of a fishing net, a device that
entraps and deprives of liberty. But liberals ignore this aspect of their
favorite programs. For self-reliance and the nanny state don't go
together. Since the nanny state serves the interests of liberals,
self-reliance has to be diminished. Part of the motivation of the liberal is
to help the needy. But another part is the lust for power which, to be
retained, requires plenty of clients, plenty of dependents who can be relied
upon to vote Democrat, thereby voting goodies for themselves in the short term--
and the long-term fiscal and moral solvency of the nation be damned.
Am I
opposed to all social welfare programs? No. There are those who truly need help
and cannot be helped by private charities. But I am opposed to the current,
utterly irresponsible expansion of the welfare state, and for two reasons. One
is economic: the expansion is unsustainable. The other is moral: it diminishes
and degrades and infantilizes people. "The bigger the government, the smaller
the citizen." (D. Prager)
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