I have taught high school and college-aged kids for many years, and am very often lobbed the relevance question. The logical coherence of the concept of God. Theories of space and time. Classic questions in epistemology and metaphysics. "How is this relevant," they ask. It annoys me. I make an impotent gesture toward the intrinsic value of knowledge, but am always left frustrated by having to defend what is so obvious to me --and to everyone else prior to the mid twentieth century--the indelible importance of these topics. Maybe you can help me out?
I don't know how much help I can be, but here are some thoughts.
1. The philosophy teacher has a problem the calculus instructor, say, does not. The latter does not have to show the relevance of his subject or motivate an interest in it. Perhaps two thirds of the students before him are engineering majors who need no convincing of the relevance of higher mathematics to their career goals. They are interested in mathematics, if not for its own sake, then for the sake of its use. The philosophy teacher, however, has not only to teach his subject but also, unlike the mathematics professor, to argue its relevance and motivate interest.
2. At this point lame justifications of philosophy come thick and fast. It teaches critical thinking; it is good preparation for law school, etc. I knock the crutches out from under these lame justifications in Should One Stoop to a Defense of Philosophy and the Humanities? As I say there:
Philosophy is an end in itself. This is why it is foolish to try to convince philistines that it is good for something. It is not primarily good for something. It is a good in itself. Otherwise you are acquiescing in the philistinism you ought to be combating. [. . .]
To the philistine's "Philosophy bakes no bread" you should not respond "Yes it does," for such responses are patently lame. You should say, "Man does not live by bread alone," or "Not everything is pursued as a means to something else," or "A university is not a trade school." You should not acquiesce in the philistine's values and assumptions, but go on the attack and question his values and assumptions. Put him on the spot. Play the Socratic gadfly. If a philistine wants to know how much you got paid for writing an article for a professional journal, say, "Do you really think that only what one is paid to do is worth doing?"
3. "I make an impotent gesture toward the intrinsic value of knowledge, but am always left frustrated by having to defend what is so obvious to me . . ." Most of the people who need to have this explained to them are not equipped to appreciate any explanation. So we humanists are in a tough spot. One of the conclusions I came too early on was that philosophy simply cannot be a mass consumption item at the college level. Although I didn't mind, and actually enjoyed, teaching logic courses, which can be of some use to the masses, I loathed teaching Intro to Philosophy and other philosophy courses designed to satisfy breadth requirements.
Part of the problem is that college level is so low nowadays that it has become a joke to speak of 'higher education.' People are not there to become educated human beings but to garner credentials that they believe will help them get ahead economically and socially. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but then why waste time on the pursuit of truth for its own sake? The average person has no intellectual eros; what he wants and needs is job training.
4. There is an irony here. People like you and me and thousands of others would never have had the opportunity to make a living from teaching philosophy if the level had not sunk so low, not so much because our level is low, but because there would simply have been no jobs for us if 'higher' education had not metastazised in the 1960s and beyond. So while we complain about the low level of our students, we ought to bear in mind that we have students in the first place and are not selling insurance or writing code because of the democratization of 'higher' ed.
5. I am an elitist, but not in a social or economic or racial sense. Everyone who has what it takes to profit from it ought to have the opportunity to pursue real education -- which is not to be confused with indoctrination in leftist seminaries -- in institutions of higher -- no 'sneer' quotes -- education. Equality of opportunity! But of course there will never be equality of outcome or result because people are not equal.
Philosophy -- the real thing, not some dumbed-down ersatz -- cannot be a mass consumption item. It is for the few. But who those few are cannot be decided by criteria of race or sex or age or religion or national origin. High culture is universal and belongs to all of us, even though we individually and as members of groups are not equal in our ability to contribute to it.
Thanksgiving evening, the post-prandial conversation was very good. Christian Marty K. raised the question of what one would say were one to meet God after death and God asked, "What did you do with your life?"
Atheist Peter L. shot back, "What did you do with your life, God?"
In my judgment, and it is not just mine, the fact of evil is the main stumbling block to theistic belief. While none of the arguments from evil are compelling, some of them render atheism rationally acceptable. This has long been my view. Atheism and theism are both rationally acceptable and intellectually respectable, though of course they cannot both be true.
This puts me at odds with the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20. I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."
Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the manifest truth. There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork. Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism. It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.
But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident. It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact.
I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). But seeing is not seeing as. If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework. But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.
At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you. There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.
If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as may well be the case with such luminaries as Russell and Sartre, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.
By the way, here we have the makings of an argument for hell. If someone, post-mortem, in the divine presence, and now fully cognizant of the ultimate metaphysical 'lay of the land,' were to persist in a pride Luciferian, and refuse to acknowledge and worship the ultimate Source of truth, goodness, beauty, and reality, a Source itself ultimately true, good, beautiful, and real, then the only fitting place for someone who freely chose to assert his miserable ego in defiance of its Source would be hell. It would be deeply unjust and unreasonable to permit such a person the visio beata.
The question was put to atheist A. C. Grayling. His response:
No, my views will not change; I am confident in the rationalist tradition which has evaluated the metaphysical and ethical claims of non-naturalistic theories, and definitively shown them to be vacuous in all respects other than the psychological effect they have on those credulous enough to accept them.
Should we perhaps speak here of the faith of a rationalist? And isn't there something unphilosophical about Grayling's stance? He is sure that his views will not change and confident in the rationalist tradition. He is not open to having his views changed by further thought or argument or evidence. Not very philosophical, not very Socratic. Socrates knew only that he did not know. Grayling knows.
He blusters when he speaks of what has been "definitely shown." Nothing of a substantive nature has ever been definitively shown in philosophy, and certainly not the "vacuousness" of the metaphysical and ethical claims of non-naturalism. Besides, it is simply false to say that these claims are "vacuous." Though they may be false, for all we know, they are quite definite and meaningful claims. 'Vacuous' means 'empty.' In this context it means empty of sense or significance.
What you have to understand about Grayling and his New Atheist ilk is that they are ideologues, no different in this respect from their anti-naturalist, religious counterparts. (Compare the Thomist view that it has been definitely shown that God exists, that the existence of God is knowable with certainty by unaided human reason.) Grayling and Co. are not philosophers who love the truth and seek it because they don't have it; they fancy themselves possessors of the truth and its guardians against the benighted.
So if unshakable confidence in the definitive truth of one's position can lead to violence and oppression, why is this a danger only on the religious side of the ideological divide and not on the anti-religious side? That is a question that ought not be evaded. Don't forget what the communists did to the religious people, instituitions, monuments, and sites in the lands where they gained control.
Grayling postsof mine. They are polemical. He polemicizes; I polemicize right back. Meet polemics with polemics, civil truth-seeking dialog with civil truth-seeking dialog.
As one of my aphorisms has it: Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.
David P. Goldman talks sense about Ferguson and the liberal-left threat to civil society and the rule of law:
The argument of what now might be termed a “criminals’ rights movement” is that the police should not have the right to use force against felons whose crimes do not reach a certain threshold. What that threshold might be seems clear from the repeated characterization of Brown as an “unarmed black teenager.” Unless violent felons use deadly weapons, it appears, the police should not be allowed to use force.
To restate the “civil rights” argument in a clearer way: Young black men are disproportionately imprisoned. One in three black men have gone to prison at some time in their life. According to the ACLU, one in fifteen black men are incarcerated, vs. one in 106 white men. That by itself is proof of racism; the fact that these individuals were individually prosecuted for individual crimes has no bearing on the matter. All that matters is the outcome. Because the behavior of young black men is not likely to change, what must change is the way that society recognizes crime itself. The answer is to remove stigma of crime attached to certain behavior, for example, physical altercations, petty theft, and drug-dealing on a certain scale. The former civil rights movement no longer focuses its attention on supposedly ameliorative social spending, for example, preschool programs for minority children, although these remain somewhere down the list in the litany of demands. What energizes and motivates the movement is the demand that society redefine deviancy to exclude certain classes of violent as well as non-violent felonies.
The logic of the criminals’ rights movement is as clear as it is crazy: Because the outcome of the criminal justice system disproportionately penalizes African-Americans, the solution is to decriminalize behavior that all civilized countries have suppressed and punished since the dawn of history. Because felonious behavior is so widespread and the causes of it so intractable, the criminals’ rights movement insists, society “cannot afford to recognize” criminal behavior below a certain threshold.
If America were to accept this logic, civil society would come to an end. The state would abandon its monopoly of violence to street rule. Large parts of America would come to resemble the gang-ruled, lawless streets of Central America, where violent pathology has overwhelmed the state’s capacity to control it, creating in turn a nightmare for America’s enforcement of its own immigration law.
Here, by Steven Hayward, with a tip of the hat to an old friend, Ingvar Odegaard. My comment:
Whites who speak of 'white privilege' would do well to reflect as well on 'black privilege.' One of the 'privileges' of blacks these days, apparently, is the right to riot and loot when a decision of the criminal justice system goes against their prejudices.
There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege. I don't believe I have discussed this topic before.
1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege. What is a privilege? This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is. Let's consider some definitions.
D1. A privilege is a special entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.
Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition. It is not a right one has just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen. It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc. Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked. By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government. They can't be revoked. Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government.
Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc. Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.
Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege. Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government? No. But there is black privilege by (D1). It is called affirmative action.
So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege! Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following:
Here again my annual Thanksgiving homily, addressed as much to myself as to my Stateside and worldwide readers:
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of. Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings.
Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
On Tuesday, I was supposed to take part in a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford. I was invited by the Oxford Students for Life to put the pro-choice argument against the journalist Timothy Stanley, who is pro-life. But apparently it is forbidden for men to talk about abortion. A mob of furious feministic Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended, set up a Facebook page littered with expletives and demands for the debate to be called off. They said it was outrageous that two human beings ‘who do not have uteruses’ should get to hold forth on abortion — identity politics at its most basely biological — and claimed the debate would threaten the ‘mental safety’ of Oxford students. Three hundred promised to turn up to the debate with ‘instruments’ — heaven knows what — that would allow them to disrupt proceedings.
Incredibly, Christ Church capitulated, the college’s censors living up to the modern meaning of their name by announcing that they would refuse to host the debate on the basis that it now raised ‘security and welfare issues’. So at one of the highest seats of learning on Earth, the democratic principle of free and open debate, of allowing differing opinions to slog it out in full view of discerning citizens, has been violated, and students have been rebranded as fragile creatures, overgrown children who need to be guarded against any idea that might prick their souls or challenge their prejudices.
Here is the response you must make to these liberal-left shitheads:
Dennis Prager here details recent vicious attacks upon himself and his wife, and then offers an explanation of liberal-left scumbaggery:
First, truth is a not a left-wing value (though, of course, some individuals on the left have great integrity). If you don't know that, you cannot understand the left. Truth is a conservative value (though, of course, some individuals on the right lie). From the Bolsheviks to today's left-wing, lying is normal. Not one left-wing comment or article (except for the HuffingtonPost reference to the MIT report) even dealt with the issue of the truth of the claim that one out of every five female college students is sexually assaulted/raped, or the truth of the charge that our universities are a "culture of rape."
Second, mockery, indeed cruel mockery, is the norm on the left. I urge readers to visit any of the liberal websites cited and read the comments after the articles. No significant American group hates like the left does. If you differ with them -- from global warming, to race relations, to same-sex marriage, to the extent of rape on college campuses -- they will humiliate, defame, libel and try to economically crush you.
Addendum: More liberal-left scumbaggery: New York Times publishes Darren Wilson's Address. Liberals see politics as a form of warfare, and they will do anything to win. "All's fair in love and war." When will conservatives wise up to this and learn how to fight back?
The only mystery about the last six years is how much lasting damage has been done to the American experiment, at home and abroad. Our federal agencies are now an alphabet soup of incompetence and corruption. How does the IRS ever quite recover? Will the Secret Service always be seen as veritable Keystone Cops? Is the GSA now a reckless party-time organization? Is the EPA institutionalized as a rogue appendage of the radical green movement with a director who dabbles in online pseudonyms? Do we accept that the Justice Department dispenses injustice or that the VA can be a lethal institution for our patriots? Is NASA now a Muslim outreach megaphone as we hire Russia, the loser of the space race, to rocket us into orbit?
[. . .]
Every statistic that Obama has produced on Obamacare enrollment, deportation, unemployment and GDP growth is in some ways a lie. Almost everything he has said about granting amnesty was untrue, from his own contradictions to the congressionally sanctioned small amnesties of prior presidents. Almost every time Obama steps to the lectern we expect two things: he will lecture us on our moral failings and what he will say will be abjectly untrue.
At this late date it is beyond clear that no more brazen liar has ever occupied the White House. He is not just a liar; he is a consummate master of the manifold modes of mendacity.
This entry is a further installment in a continuing discussion with Tim Pawl, et al., about the Chalcedonian Christological two-natures-one-person doctrine. Professor Pawl put to me the following question:
You ask: “Now if an accident is not the sort of item that can be crucified and bleed, how is it that an individual substance can be the sort of item that is not its own supposit or support, that is not broadly-logically-possibly independent, but is rather dependent for its existence on another substance?”
You then say: “That is tantamount to saying that here we have a substance that is not a substance.” I don’t see that it is tantamount to . . . . And I don’t see the force of the analogy from accidents to individual substances. Could you spell out the reasoning a bit more, if you are inclined?
With pleasure.
We all agree that the accidentality of the Incarnation cannot be understood as the having by the Logos of an Aristotelian accident. Thus we all agree that
1. The Logos, while existing in every metaphysically possible world, does not have a human nature in every world in which it exists. That is, the Logos is neither essentially nor necessarily human. (X is essentially F =df x is F in every possible world in which x exists; x is necessarily F =df x is F in every world in which it exists and x exists in every world. For example, Socrates is essentially human but not necessarily human; the number 7 is both essentially prime and necessarily prime.)
and
2. The Logos' accidentally had humanity (individual human nature) is not an Aristotelian accident of the Logos as Aristotelian substance.
And we all agree why (2) is true. Briefly, an accident is not the sort of item that can be crucified and bleed.
So if the human nature of the Logos is not an accident of any substance, then it is a substance. We now face an antilogism:
3. The individual human nature of the Logos is a substance. 4. Every substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence. 5. The individual human nature of the Logos is not metaphysically capable of independent existence.
The triad is clearly inconsistent: the conjunction of any two limbs entails the negation of the remaining one.
Limb (4) is a commitment of the Aristotelian framework within which Chalcedonian Christology is articulated, while the other two limbs are commitments of orthodox theology.
So something has to give. One solution is to reject (4) by adding yet another 'epicycle.' One substitutes for (4)
4*. Every self-suppositing substance is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
Under this substitution the triad is consistent. For what (4*) allows are cases in which there are substances with alien supposits. The individual human nature of Christ, though a substance, is not a self-suppositing substance: it is not its own supposit. Its supposit is the Logos. So its being a substance is consistent with its not being capable of independent existence.
If I say to Tim Pawl, "What you are countenancing is a substance that is not a substance," I expect him to reply, "No, I am not countenancing anything self-contradictory; I am countenancing a substance that is not a self-suppositing substance!"
To which my response will be: "You have made an ad hoc modification to the notion of substance for the sole purpose of avoiding a contradiction; but in doing so you have not extended or enriched the notion of substance but have destroyed it. For a substance by definition is an entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence. A substance whose supposit is a different substance is not an accident but it is not a substance either. For it is not metaphysically capable of independent existence."
Recall what my question has been over this series of posts: Is the one-person-two-natures formulation coherently conceivable within an Aristotelian framework?
My interim answer is in the negative. For within the aforementioned ontological framework, the very concept of a primary substance is the concept of an entity that is broadly-logically capable of independent existence. Any modification of that fundamental concept moves one outside of the Aristotelian framework.
Appendix: The Concept of an Accident
What is an accident and how is it related to a substance of which it is the accident? Let A be an accident of substance S. And let's leave out of consideration what the scholastics call propria, 'accidents' that a substance cannot gain or lose. An example of a proprium would be a cat's being warm in virtue of its internal metabolic processes, as opposed to a cat's being warm because it has been sleeping by a fire.
The following propositions circumscribe the concept of Aristotelian accident.
P1. Necessarily, every accident is the accident of some substance or other. (This assumes that there are no accidents of accidents. If there are, then, necessarily, every accident that is not the accident of an accident is the accident of some substance or other.)
P2. No accident of a substance can exist except by existing in (inhering in) a substance. Substances are broadly-logically capable of independent existence; accidents are not. Substances can exist on their own; accidents cannot.
P3. Accidents are particulars, not universals. They are as particular as the substances of which they are accidents. Thus accidents are not 'repeatable.' If Socrates is seated and Plato is seated, and seatedness is an accident, then there are two seatednesses, not one.
P4. Accidents are non-transferrable. Some particulars are transferrable: I can transfer my pen to you. But accidents are not transferrable. I can give you my coat but not my cold. So not only is every accident the accident of some substance or other; every accident is the accident of the very substance of which it is an accident.
Thoughts don't like to subside. One leads to another, and another. You would experience the thinker behind the thoughts, but instead you have thoughts about this thinker while knowing full well that the thinker is not just another thought. Or you lovingly elaborate your brilliant thoughts about meditation, its purpose, its methods, and its difficulty, thoughts that you will soon post to your weblog, all the while realizing that mental blogging is not meditation.
"Man is a stream whose source is hidden," said Emerson and you would swim upstream to the Source. So you make an effort, but the effort is too much for you. Perhaps the metaphor is wrong. One from al-Ghazzali might be better.
A cooling evening breeze is more likely to come to the desert dweller if he climb to the top of the minaret than if he stay on the ground. So he makes an effort within his power, the effort of positioning himself to receive, when and if it should come, a gust of the divine favor.
He waits for the grace that may overcome the gravity of the mind and its hebetude.
To meditate is to wait, and therein lies or sits the difficulty.
This morning's session (sitting in plain English) was good and lasted from 3:30 to 4:25. Fueled by chai: coffee is too much the driver of the discursive. But now the coffee is coming in and I'm feeling fabulous and the thoughts are 'percolating' up from who knows where.
Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man. This one goes out to Sally S."Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"
What is wrong with people who don't drink or enjoy coffee? They must not value consciousness and intensity of experience. Poor devils! Perhaps they're zombies (in the philosophers' sense).
UPDATE (11/24): Up from a nap, I pour me a serious cup of serious java (Kirkland Portland Bold), and log onto to email where I find a note from Patrick Kurp who recommends Rick Danko and Paul Butterfield, Java Blues, one hard-driving, adrenalin-enabling number which, in synergy with the nap and the aforesaid java, has this old man banging hard on all synaptic 'cylinders' and ready for some more scribbling.
Chicory is a cheat. It cuts it but doesn't cut it.
"The taste of java is like a volcanic rush/No one is going to stop me from drinking too much . . . ."
I hesitate to call them philosophers. David Gordon serves up for our delectation and instruction the following tidbit of Continental balderdash (I quote the whole of Gordon's entry and then add a comment of my own):
The philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, who died November 19, would ordinarily hold little interest for readers of the Mises Blog. Bhaskar was a Marxist, who in his later years veered off toward a fuzzy spirituality. It is worth taking note of him, though, because he was an extreme example of a besetting sin of the contemporary academic world. His prose style made him unreadable; and one of his sentences was selected by the journal Philosophy and Literature as the winner of its 1996 Bad Writing Contest. This was the winning sentence:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.
To call this 'bad writing' and 'unreadable' is unduly charitable. I am currently studying Erich Pryzwara's Analogia Entis, trs. Betz and Hart, Eerdman's, 2014. It is poorly written and deserves to be called 'unreadable.' I plan to post on it later. But if you really know your stuff and are willing to read and read and re-read and work very hard, you can more less follow what Pryzwara is saying. His book embodies real thought. The above passage, however, reads like a parody of Continental bullshitting. Continentals love to name-drop. But the above is name-dropping on stilts.
Did the Jews of Europe keep a sharp eye on the political from, say, 1923 to 1933 when Hitler acceded to power? Not very well, as the sequel showed. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Their space is narrowly hodological: marked by paths along which merely practical needs are met and merely practical tasks discharged. What lies off these beaten paths is as good as nonexistent to them. As their space, so their lives. The pleasures of meandering the byways are foreign to them.
Regular readers of this blog know that I respect and admire Dennis Prager: he is a font of wisdom and a source of insight. But I just heard him say, "Egalitarians by definition lack wisdom." That is another clear example of the illicit use of 'by definition,' a mistake I pointed out in an earlier entry. Here are some examples of correct uses of 'by definition':
Bachelors are by definition male
Triangles are by definition three-sided
In logic, sound arguments are by definition valid. (A sound argument is defined as one whose form is valid and all of whose premises are true.)
In physics, work is defined as the product of force and distance moved: W= Fx.
In set theory, a power set is defined to be the set of all subsets of a given set.
By definition, no rifle is a shotgun.
Semi-automatic firearms are by definition capable of firing exactly one round per trigger pull until the magazine (and the chamber!) is empty.
In metaphysics, an accident by definition is logically incapable of existing without a substance of which it is the accident.
In astrophysics, a light-year is by definition a measure of distance, not of time: it is the distance light travels in one year.
By definition, the luminiferous either is a medium for the propagation of electromagnetic signals.
By definition, what is true by definition is true.
Incorrect uses of 'by definition':
Joe Nocera: "anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill."
Donald Berwick: "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional."
Illegal aliens are by definition Hispanic.
Bill Maher, et al.: "Taxation is by definition redistributive."
Dennis Prager: "Environmentalists are by definition extremists."
Dennis Prager: "Egalitarians by definition lack wisdom."
Capitalists are by definition greedy.
Socialists are by definition envious.
Alpha Centauri is by definition 4.3 light-years from earth.
The luminiferous ether exists by definition.
By definition, the luminiferous ether cannot exist.
I hope it is clear why the incorrect uses are incorrect. As for the first Prager example, it is certainly true that some environmentalists are extremists. But others are not. So Prager's assertion is not even true. Even if every environmentalist were an extremist, however, it would still not be true by definition that that is so. By definition, what is true by definition is true; but what is true need not be true by definition.
As for the second Prager example, it may or may not be true that egalitarians lack wisdom depending on the definition of 'egalitarian.' But even if true, certainly not by definition.
So what game is Prager playing? Is he using 'by definition' as an intensifier? Is he purporting to make a factual claim to the effect that all environmentalists are extremists and then underlining (as it were) the claim by the use of 'by definition'? Or is he assigning by stipulation his own idiosyncratic meaning to 'environmentalist'? Is he serving notice that 'extremist' is part of the very meaning of 'environmentalist' in his idiolect?
Similar questions ought to be asked of other misusers of the phrase.
It is quite unreasonable to suppose that the appeal to sweet reason is the best way forward in all of life's situations. The reasonable appreciate that the hard fist of unreason applied to the visage of evil intransigence is sometimes the most cogent of 'arguments.'
It is unreasonable to be reasonable in all things.
Soft determinism is still determinism. And it's really not a different type of determinism. It is, rather, drawing different conclusions from determinism, or rather, not drawing the conclusion that we are not free and not morally responsible for our actions.
A track star at the University of Southern California, Louis Zamperini was swept up like so many of his generation into World War II. Story and interview here.
In May 1943, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific. For 47 days, he floated on a raft in the ocean. He was then captured by the Japanese, who held him prisoner until August 1945. These experiences tormented Zamperini’s postwar life, but in 1949 things began to turn around for him. Zamperini forgave the men who held him prisoner, including the sadistic Japanese corporal, Mutsuhiro Watanabe, who was known as the “Bird.”
Zamperini credits a young Billy Graham for bringing him to Christ and forgiveness.
I, or rather this site, experienced a surge yesterday: 4,207 pageviews. Why? Beats me. My traffic is usually in the 1600-2000 pageviews per day range. This, the TypePad version of MavPhil commenced operations on Halloween 2008. This third incarnation of MavPhil is closing in on the 3 million total pageview mark. That's nothing to crow about, I know, but I thought you might be interested.
I thank you for your 'patronage.' And remember: triple your money back if not completely satisfied.
Any complaints? Fill out the form below:
UPDATE. The day ended at 5 pm with 2, 298 pageviews.
A recent argument of mine questioning the coherent conceivability of the one person-two natures doctrine of Chalcedonian Christology begins with the premise
1. If N is a nature of substance s, then s cannot exist without having N. Natures are essential to the things that have them. In possible worlds jargon: If N is a nature of s, then in every possible world in which s exists, s has N. (The modality in play here is broadly logical or metaphysical.)
I pointed out that the argument's conclusion can be best resisted by denying (1). Professor Tim Pawl agrees. He comments:
I think the Aristotelian who wants to maintain Chalcedonian Christology could deny 1 and affirm a nearby proposition:
1’. For any one-natured substance s, if N is a nature of s, then s cannot exist without having N.
Adding the antecedent I’ve added to your 1 here allows for us to say that 1’ remains true in the case of Christ, since the antecedent is false. 1’ does all the work that the Aristotelian would want 1 to do, since every case we think of in mundane (non-christological) situations is a case where the thing in question is single-natured. I wouldn’t think the Aristotelian has any evidence for 1 that would not count as evidence for the revised 1’ as well.
The purpose of this entry is to evaluate Tim's response. But first some preliminaries.
Assumptions. Preliminaries, and Ontological Background
I am not questioning, let alone denying, the fact of the Incarnation. (To insert an autobiographical remark: I am inclined to believe it.) Thus I am not maintaining that there is no sense in which, in a sentence from the Angelus, 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." My question is whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within a broadly Aristotelian ontological framework. A negative answer, should one be forthcoming, does not foreclose on the question whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within some other ontological framework.
By 'coherently conceivable' I mean 'thinkable without broadly-logical contradiction.' Coherent conceivability is a notion weaker than that of (real as opposed to epistemic) possibility. I am not asking whether the Incarnation is possible, but whether it is coherently conceivable (within a broadly Aristotelian framework). Conceivability is tied to our powers of conception; possibility is not.
Whatever is actual is possible. So if the Incarnation is actual, then it is possible whether or not we can coherently conceive how it is possible, whether or not we can render it intelligible to ourselves, whether or not it satisfies the exigencies of the discursive intellect. So if it should turn out that the Incarnation is not coherently conceivable, the defender of the Incarnation has a mysterian move available to him. He can say, look, "It's the case; so its possibly the case; it's just that our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us (in this life) to understand how it could be the case." The present topic, however, is not mysterianism.
My precise question is this: is it coherently conceivable that one person, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, have both an individual divine nature and an individual human nature? I will assume that a person, as per Boethius, is an individual substance of a rational nature. I will also assume the doctrine of the Trinity.
'Substance' is elliptical for 'primary substance' or 'individual substance' or 'first substance' (prote ousia). If abstract entities are entities that are non-spatiotemporal and causally inert, then individual or individualized natures are not abstract entities. Some of them are spatiotemporal, and all of them are causally efficacious. Thus the individual nature of Socrates is in space and time. (The individual nature of the Logos is not in space and time but it is causally efficacious.) What ties an individual substance to its individual nature is not the external asymmetrical nexus of exemplification: substances don't exemplify their natures; a substance is (identical to) its individual(ized) nature. (See Aristotle, Metaphysics, Z.6) Socrates is not a bare particular, and his nature is not a (conjunctive) property that he exemplifies. Of course, there is a sense in which Socrates and Plato are of the same nature in that both are human. This common humanity, however, has no extramental reality: it is not a platonic object exemplified by the two philosophers.
The nature or essence of an individual substance is the what-it-is of the thing or as Aristotle puts it, to ti ên einai, literally “the what it was to be” of a thing, essentia, quod quid erat esse. (Compare Hegel: Wesen ist was gewesen ist.) It follows that the nature or essence of Socrates is not accidental to him. The idea that the nature of an individual thing could be accidental to it is wholly un-Aristotelian, although it would make sense in an ontological scheme according to which Socrates is a bare particular and his nature is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are his non-relational properties. (We find such a scheme in D. Armstrong and R. Grossmann, et al.)
It also seems obvious to me that there is an important difference between the event or fact of the Incarnation and any theological doctrine about it. Theology, I take it, is a type of applied philosophy: it is philosophy applied to the data of revelation. The Incarnation is one such datum since it is God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ. So it seems obvious to me that we ought to distinguish the datum from its doctrinal formulation. To repeat myself, I am concerned with the latter.
Evaluation of Tim Pawl's Response
Tim makes a time-honored move in alleviation of the contradiction that issues from my reductio ad absurdum argument: he makes a distinction. One can always avoid or remove a contradiction by making a distinction. He distinguishes between one-natured substances and substances that have more than one nature. He then restricts my (1) to one-natured substances. The result of the restriction is (1'). Accordingly, it is only one-natured substances that are under the requirement that their natures be had by them essentially. Now if we plug (1') into my argument in lieu of (1), no contradiction results. Although a one-natured substance has its one nature essentially (in every world in which the substance exists), a multi-natured substance may have a nature that it has accidentally (in only some of the worlds in which the substance exists).
Unfortunately, this trades one problem for another. For now the problem is to understand how an Aristotelian substance that has two natures can have one of them accidentally. The Logos exists necessarily. In the patois of possible worlds, it exists in every possible world. And it is divine (has the divine nature) essentially, i.e., in every world in which it exists. Since it exists in every world, it has the divine nature in every world. But it has the human nature only in some worlds. So the Logos has the human nature accidentally.
The problem is: How can any substance have a nature accidentally? Don't forget: we are operating within an Aristotelan framework and our precise question is whether the one person-two natures doctrine is coherently conceivable within that framework. As I said above, the nature or essence of an individual substance cannot be accidental to it. (The connection between a substance and its nature cannot be assayed as the external asymmetrical nexus of exemplification.) The idea that the nature of an individual thing could be accidental to it is wholly un-Aristotelian.
To sum up. Professor Pawl makes a distinction between single-natured substances which stand under the requirement that their natures be had essentially by them and multi-natured substances that are not subject to this requirement. This distinction blocks the contradiction my reductio issued in. But Pawl's distinction does not succeed in rendering the Chalcedonian formulation coherently conceivable within the Aristotelian framework because it requires a notion that makes no sense within that ontological framework, namely, the notion that a substance can have a nature accidentally.
To modify the Aristotelian framework in that way is not to extend it or enrich it in the light of new data, but to destroy it. What the Christologist ought to do is reject the framework. He needn't abandon the Incarnation. There are other approaches to it. I hope to sketch one in a separate post.
The Democrats ought to retire the jackass as their totem and adopt Pinocchio, the better to represent the depths of mendacity into which they have sunk.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 112, Notebook G, Aph. #24:
To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible.
I agree completely with Herr Lichtenberg that the Stoic ideal is an impossible one.
The Stoic sage would be as impassible as God is impassible. But here's something to think about: Jesus on the cross died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.
What is the lesson? Perhaps that to be impassible is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all.
What Lichtenberg overlooks is that while Stoicism is a self-help therapeutic, religion, or at least Christianity, is not: no Christian who understands his doctrine fancies that he is able by his own power to effect genuine, deep-going, and lasting self-improvement.
What Lichtenberg fails to appreciate is that what is impossible for us, both individually and collectively, is not impossible with divine assistance.
If you deny the possibility of divine assistance, then you ought to abandon the project of ameliorating in any truly fundamental way the human condition: just accept it as it is, else you may end up like the Communists who murdered 100 million in the 20th century alone in quest of their u-topia.
The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets. So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.
Here is the final scene of the movie. Ed Crane's last words:
I don't know where I'm being taken. I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky. But I am not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.
That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension, into "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day. It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge. But no more strange than the idea that death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1970 Is That All There is?
I am interested in your logical or linguistic intuitions here. Consider
(*) There is someone called ‘Peter’, and Peter is a musician. There is another person called ‘Peter’, and Peter is not a musician.
Is this a contradiction? Bear in mind that the whole conjunction contains the sentences “Peter is a musician” and “Peter is not a musician”. I am corresponding with a fairly eminent philosopher who insists it is contradictory.
Whether or not (*) is a contradiction depends on its logical form. I say the logical form is as follows, where 'Fx' abbreviates 'x is called 'Peter'' and 'Mx' abbreviates 'x is a musician':
LF1. (∃x)(∃y)[Fx & Mx & Fy & ~My & ~(x =y)]
In 'canonical English':
CE. There is something x and something y such that x is called 'Peter' and x is a musician and y is called 'Peter' and y is not a musician and it is not the case that x is identical to y.
There is no contradiction. It is obviously logically possible -- and not just logically possible -- that there be two men, both named 'Peter,' one of whom is a musician and the other of whom is not.
I would guess that your correspondent takes the logical form to be
LF2. (∃x)(∃y)(Fx & Fy & ~(x = y)) & Mp & ~Mp
where 'p' is an individual constant abbreviating 'Peter.'
(LF2) is plainly a contradiction.
My analysis assumes that in the original sentence(s) the first USE (not mention) of 'Peter' is replaceable salva significatione by 'he,' and that the antecedent of 'he' is the immediately preceding expression 'Peter.' And the same for the second USE (not mention) of 'Peter.'
If I thought burden-of-proof considerations were relevant in philosophy, I'd say the burden of proving otherwise rests on your eminent interlocutor.
But I concede one could go outlandish and construe the original sentences -- which I am also assuming can be conjoined into one sentence -- as having (LF2).
So it all depends on what you take to be the logical form of the original sentence(s). And that depends on what proposition you take the original sentence(s) to be expressing. The original sentences(s) are patient of both readings.
Now Ed, why are you vexing yourself over this bagatelle when the barbarians are at the gates of London? And not just at them?
Or if not literally obsess, care deeply? Karl White passes on the following from one of his correspondents:
Why are we all so obsessed with infusing things with meaning anyway? Isn't this craving a mere artifact of being brought up under systems of belief that insist on the fact that life has to serve some purpose? Maybe if we hadn't been presented with such presumptions from the beginning, we wouldn't have such a hard time accepting existence?
These are reasonable questions. Perhaps we cannot be satisfied with finite meanings and relative satisfactions and cannot accept the utter finality of death only because we have have been culturally brainwashed for centuries upon centuries into thinking that there is some Grand Purpose at the back of things that we participate in, and some Final Redemption, when there is none. Perhaps we have been laboring under a God Delusion or a Transcendent Meaning Delusion for lo these many centuries. But now these delusions are losing their grip. One sort of person responds to the loss despairingly and pessimistically. Call it the Woody Allen response. Allen laments the absurdity of life and makes movies to distract himself and others from the dismal reality. Another sort of person digs in his heels and frantically tries to shore up the delusions by concocting ever more subtle metaphysical arguments when he knows deep down, as Allen would insist, that it's all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The cure for both is the same: drop the delusions. Stop measuring reality against a nonexistent standard. To paraphrase Nietzsche, when the supposedly Real World falls, then so does the Apparent World. (See The Twilight of the Idols.) The erasure of the Transcendent abrogates the denigration of the Immanent. The Immanent, now no longer immanent, is the sole reality. Live it, love it, affirm it. The finite suffices. Its finitude is no argument against this life if the only alternative is an Infinity that doesn't exist. Death is no argument against life if this is all there is. Drop the delusion and its hinterworlds and you will neither despair nor hope. You will learn to be true to the earth, your natural and only home.
The above considerations don't sway me.
What explains the origin of the systems of belief whose appropriation makes us hanker after Transcendence? Is the longing an artifact of the belief, or the belief an artifact of the longing?
I would say that the longing explains the belief. The belief cannot explain the longing since the belief had to first be there to explain anything, and what explains it is the longing. From time immemorial, people have experienced a deep dissatisfaction with the here and now and with it a longing for a better, truer, higher life. These experiences are real, though not had by everyone, and not equally by those who have them. Outstanding individuals translated these recurrent and widely-distributed experiences of dissatisfaction and longing into systems of belief and practice of various sorts, Buddhism being one example, with its sarvam dukkham. These systems were developed and passed on. They 'resonated' with people, all sorts of people, from every land, at every time. Why? Because they spoke to some real inchoate longing that people everywhere have. They answer to a real need, the metaphysical need. (Cf. Schopenhauer, "On Man's Need for Metaphysics" in WWR vol. II) So it is not as if people were brainwashed into accepting these symbolic forms; they express and articulate real dissatisfaction with the mundane and ephemeral and real longing for lasting beatitude.
In sum: the experiences of deep dissatisfaction and deep longing are real; they come first phylogenetically, ontogenetically, temporally, logically, and epistemically. They give rise to systems of belief and practice (and not the other way around). Both the experiences and the beliefs are evidence of a sort for the reality of that which could remove the dissatisfaction and assuage the longing. Of course, it takes some careful arguing to get from longing for X to the reality of X.
This leads us to the topic of Arguments from Desire, a topic to be pursued in subsequent posts.
Since I mentioned Nietzsche above, I will end with Zarathustra's Roundelay, which never fails to bring tears to my eyes. It shows that Nietzsche, though possessing the bladed intellect of the skeptic, had the throbbing heart of a homo religiosus. In his own perverse way he testifies to the truth above suggested. "All joy wants eternity, wants deep, wants deep eternity!"
According to Woody Allen, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss. Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. And not only their lives: Communists in the 20th century broke 100 millon 'eggs' in pursuit of an elusive 'omelet.' Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.
Pushing the line of thought further, I note that Allen is deeply bothered, indeed obsessed in his neurotic Manhattanite Jewish intellectual sort of way, by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence. Why does the apparent lack of an ultimate meaning bother him? It bothers him because a deep desire for ultimate sense, for point and purpose, is going unsatisfied. He wants redemptive Meaning, but Meaning is absent. (Note that what is phenomenologically absent may or may not be nonexistent.)
But a deep and natural desire for a meaning that is absent may be evidence of a sort for the possibility of the desire's satisfaction. Why do sensitive souls feel the lack of point and purpose? The felt lack and unsatisfied desire is at least a fact and wants an explanation. What explains the felt lack, the phenomenological absence of a redemptive Meaning that could make all this misery and ignorance and evil bearable? What explains the fact that Allen is bothered by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence?
You could say that nothing explains it; it is just a brute fact that some of us crave meaning. Less drastically, and more plausibly, one could say that the craving for meaning has an explanation in terms of efficient causes, but not one that requires the reality of its intentional object. Let me explain.
Craving is an intentional state: it is an object-directed state of mind. One cannot just crave, desire, want, long for, etc. One craves, desires, wants, longs for something. This something is the intentional object. Every intentional state takes an object; but it doesn't follow that every such state takes an object that exists. If a woman wants a man, it does not follow that there exists a man such that she wants him. She wants Mr. Right, but no one among us satisfies the requisite criteria. So while she wants a man, there is no man she wants. Therefore, the deep desire for Meaning does not guarantee the existence of Meaning. We cannot validily argue, via the intentionality of desiderative consciousness, to the extramental reality of the the object desired.
Nevertheless, if is it a natural (as opposed to an artificially induced) desire we are talking about, then perhaps there is a way to infer the existence of the object desired from the fact of the desiring, that is, from the existence of the desiderative state, not from the content or realitas objectiva of the desiderative state. The inferential move from realitas objectiva to realitas formalis is invalid; but the move from the existence of the state to the reality of its object may be valid.
Suppose I want (to drink) water. The natural desire for water is rooted in a natural need. I don't just desire it, the way I might desire (to smoke) a cigar; I need it. Now it doesn't follow from the existence of my need that there is water hereabouts or water in sufficient quantity to keep me alive, but the need for water is very good evidence for the existence of water somewhere. (Suppose all the water in the universe ceases to exist, but I exist for a little longer. My need for water would still be good evidence for the existence of water at some time.) If there never had been any water, then no critter could desire or need it; indeed no critter could exist at all.
The need for water 'proves' the existence of water. Perhaps the desire/need for Meaning 'proves' the existence of Meaning. The felt lack of meaning -- its phenomenological absence -- is grounded in the natural (not artificial) need for Meaning, and this need would not exist if it were not for the extramental reality of a source of Meaning with which we were once in contact, or the traces of which are buried deep within us. And this all men call God.
Mr. Allen, meet Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange:
Since natural desire can never be in vain, and since all men naturally desire beatitude, there must exist an objective being that is infinitely perfect, a being that man can possess, love, and enjoy. (Beatitude, tr. Cummins, Ex Fontibus 2012, p. 79)
This argument, studied in the context of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, is more impressive than it may seem. If nothing else it ought to undermine the belief of Allen and his like that it is known by all of us today that human existence is ultimately meaningless.
Here is a video with relevant excerpts from G-L's Life Everlasting and the Immensity of the Soul.
Excerpts from an interview of Woody Allen by Robert E. Lauder (bolding added):
RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could you just say something about what you meant by “salvation”?
WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me . . . it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.
RL: Are you saying the humor in your films is a relief for you? Or are you sort of saying to the audience, “Here is an oasis, a couple of laughs”?
WA: I think what I’m saying is that I’m really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.
RL: In Everyone Says I Love You, the character you play gets divorced, and as he and his former wife review their relationship near the end of the film, she says, “You could always make me laugh,” and your character asks very sincerely, “Why is that important?” Do you think what you do is important?
WA: No, not so much. Whenever they ask women what they find appealing in men, a sense of humor is always one of the things they mention. Some women feel power is important, some women feel that looks are important, tenderness, intelligence…but sense of humor seems to permeate all of them. So I’m saying to that character played by Goldie Hawn, “Why is that so important?” But it is important apparently because women have said to us that that is very, very important to them. I also feel that humor, just like Fred Astaire dance numbers or these lightweight musicals, gives you a little oasis. You are in this horrible world and for an hour and a half you duck into a dark room and it’s air-conditioned and the sun is not blinding you and you leave the terror of the universe behind and you are completely transported into an escapist situation. The women are beautiful, the men are witty and heroic, nobody has terrible problems and this is a delightful escapist thing, and you leave the theatre refreshed. It’s like drinking a cool lemonade and then after a while you get worn down again and you need it again. It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don’t touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them—it strengthens them to get through the day. So I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.
RL: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?
WA: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.
RL: That brings us to the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Your character and an ophthalmologist named Judah are having a conversation, and Judah pretends he’s talking about a screenplay but he’s really talking about his own life. He says people do commit crimes, they get away with it, and they don’t even have guilt feelings. And your character says this is horrible, this is terrible, and then you cut to a blind rabbi dancing with his daughter at her wedding, and we hear a voiceover from a philosopher your character admires. He says something like, “There is no ultimate meaning but somehow people have found that they can cope.” The philosopher didn’t really cope; he committed suicide. When I first saw the film I thought you were offering the audience several views of life and leaving it to them to decide which is closest to the truth—Judah’s, Cliff’s, the philosopher’s, or the rabbi’s. (He’s the one who seems to be the happiest and most fulfilled character in the film, despite his blindness.) But in an interview you said that really the ophthalmologist is basically right: there is no benevolent God watching over us at all, and we embrace whatever gets us through the night. Is that right?
WA: I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope…. Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.
RL: Seven or eight years ago the New York Times asked you to name a favorite film and you picked Shane. It seems to me that the character of Shane is a Christ figure. At one point, Chris Callaway, the guy Shane has beaten in a fistfight in the saloon, changes sides. He leaves the villains and joins Shane and the good guys. When Shane asks him why, he says something has come over him. Shane has had some mysterious impact on him. Shane does not ride off into the sunset as heroes usually do in old Westerns. He rides off into the sunrise, and as he does so the director does this strange thing: he holds a dissolve of a cross from the cemetery, and he keeps it on the screen for about five seconds. Do you remember that at all?
WA: I do remember it. Yes, now that you bring it up, I do.
RL: So the film seems to end with resurrection imagery.
WA: I didn’t see him as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.
Comment. I think things are actually worse than Woody Allen makes them out to be. According to him, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss. Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.
But it is worse than Woody Allen makes it out to be because we don't know that human existence is meaningless and that salvation from it is an illusion. We suspect that this is the case and we fear that it is the case, but surely we don't know that it is the case. And so our predicament is an uneasy and anxiety-ridden one. Maybe it does ultimately matter how I live. Perhaps something really is at stake in life beyond the petty, mundane, and ephemeral. If we knew that it is all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," then we would enjoy a measure of peace and doxastic security. We could rest in this knowledge and commit suicide fearlessly and with a good conscience when and if it becomes necessary or desirable.
But as things are, we are left with the anxiety of Hamlet:
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.–Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.
For Shaun Deegan, who 'inspired' a sloppy prototype of the following argument hashed out over Sunday breakfast at a Mesa, Arizona hash house.
................
The Question
More precisely: is it coherently conceivable that one person, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, have both an individual divine nature and an individual human nature? (A person, as per Boethius, is an individual substance of a rational nature.)
This is not the same as the question: Is the Incarnation coherently conceivable? For my concern is whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within a broadly Aristotelian ontological framework. My answer: I don't think so. My answer leaves open the question whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within some other ontological framework.
The Argument
1. If N is a nature of substance s, then s cannot exist without having N. Natures are essential to the things that have them. In possible worlds jargon: If N is a nature of s, then in every possible world in which s exists, s has N. (The modality in play here is broadly logical or metaphysical.)
2. The Logos L is a necessary being: L exists in every possible world.
3. The Logos has the individual divine nature DN.
4. The Logos has the individual divine nature in every possible world. (from 1, 2, 3)
5. The Logos has the individual human nature HN.
6. The Logos has the individual human nature HN in every possible world. (from 1, 2, 5)
7. The individual human nature HN exists in every possible world. (from 6)
8. No individual human nature exists in every possible world.
9. (7) and (8) are logical contradictories.
Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum,
10. One of the premises is false.
But which one? Let's examine the premises. No classical Trinitarian theist could reject (2) or (3). And no believer in the Incarnation could reject (5). No classical theist could reject (8) given that God might have refrained from creating a natural universe with human beings. So it seems that someone who adheres to each of these theological commitments must reject (1), which is a plank in the Aristotelian platform.
Or, if you adhere to Aristotelian principles, it seems you must abandon the orthodox Chalcedonian line on the Incarnation.
Mainstream media accounts of Michael Brown of Ferguson fame repeatedly refer to him as an "unarmed teenager." You may recall Rodney King and the repeated press references to him as a "motorist." Trayvon Martin, we were often told, was a "child." Was Brown an unarmed teenager, King a motorist, and Martin a child? Yes, but by the same token Hitler was a head of state and in that one respect no different from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
Here then is one of the more interesting modes of mendacity. One implements one's intention to deceive, not by stating a falsehood as is typical with lying, but by stating a truth, one that diverts attention from more important contextualizing truths. One exploits the belief that unarmed teenagers, motorists, and children are typically harmless in order to distract one's audience from such uncomfortable realities as that Brown attacked a police officer and tried to wrest his weapon away from him; King violated intersections at a high rate of speed, endangered his passenger, tried to outrun the police, and resisted a lawful arrest; Martin launched a vicious deadly attack on a man he believed to be unarmed after threatening him with death.
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to hold journalists to that standard.
In this entry I will attempt to explain the difference between a bare particular and an Aristotelian primary substance. A subsequent post will consider whether this difference is theologically relevant, in particular, whether it is relevant to the theology of the Incarnation.
What is a Particular?
Particulars in the sense relevant to understanding 'bare particular' may be understood in terms of impredicability. Some things can be predicated of other things. Thus being black can be predicated of my cat, and being a property can be predicated of being black; but my cat cannot be predicated of anything. My cat is in this sense 'impredicable.' Particulars are subjects of predication but cannot themselves be predicated. Particulars, then, are ultimate subjects of predication. Thus my cat is an ultimate subject of predication unlike being black which is a subject of predication, but not an ultimate subject of predication. Particulars have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties may be characterized as predicable entities.
Three Senses of 'Bare Particular'
1. The first sense I mention only to set aside. It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that philosophers who speak of bare or thin particulars, philosophers as otherwise different in their views as Gustav Bergmann, David Armstrong, and J. P. Moreland, mean to suggest that there are particulars that have no properties and stand in no relations. There is no such montrosity as a bare particular in this sense.
In order to explain the two legitimate senses of 'bare particular' I will first provide a general characterization that covers them both. A bare particular is a particular that lacks a nature or (real) essence. It is therefore quite unlike an Aristotelian primary substance. Every such substance has or rather is an individual nature. But while lacking a nature, a bare particular has properties. This 'having' is understood in terms of the asymmetrical external nexus of exemplification. A bare particular is thus tied to its properties by the external nexus of exemplification. To say that the nexus that ties a to F-ness is external is to say that there is nothing in the nature of a, and nothing in the nature of F-ness to require that a exemplify F-ness. After all, a, as bare, lacks a nature, and F-ness, while it has a nature, is not such that there is anything in it to necessitate its being exemplified by a. In this sense a bare particular and its properties are external to each other.
This mutual externality of property to bearer entails what I call promiscuous combinability: any bare particular can exemplify any property, and any property can be exemplified by any bare particular. (A restriction has to be placed on 'property' but we needn't worry about this in the present entry.)
David Armstrong holds that (i) there are conjunctive properties and that (ii) for each bare or thin particular there is the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of all of the particular's non-relational properties. He calls this the particular's nature. But I will avoid this broad use of 'nature.' What I mean by 'nature' is essence. Bare particulars lack essences, but not properties. Therefore, no property or conjunction of properties on a bare-particularist scheme is an essence. Note that it is given or at least not controversial that particulars have properties; it is neither given nor uncontroversial that particulars have essences.
I should also point out that talk of Aristotelian natures or essences would seem to make sense only within a constituent ontology such as Aristotle's.
From the foregoing it should be clear that to speak of a particular as bare is not to deny that it has properties but to speak of the manner in which it has properties. It is to say that it exemplifies them, where exemplification is an asymmetrical external tie. To speak of a particular as an Aristotelian substance is also to speak of the manner in which it has properties.
Consider the dog Fido. Could Fido have been a jellyfish? If Fido is a bare particular, then this is broadly logically possible. Why not, given promiscuous combinability? Any particular can 'hook up' with any property. But if Fido is an Aristotelian substance this is not broadly logically possible. For if Fido is a substance, then he is essentially canine. In 'possible worlds' jargon, Fido, if a substance, is canine in every possible world in which he exists. What's more, his accidental properties are not such as to be exemplified by Fido -- where exemplification is an external tie -- but are rather "rooted in" and "caused" by the substance which is Fido. (See J. P. Moreland who quotes Richard Connell in Moreland's Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, p. 93) The idea is that if Fido is an Aristotelian substance, then he has ingredient in his nature various potentialities which, when realized, are manifestations of that nature. The dog's accidental properties are "expressions" of his "inner nature." They flow from that nature. Thus being angry, an accident of Fido as substance, flows from his irascibility which is a capacity ingredient in his nature. If Fido is a bare particular, however, he would be externally tied to the property of being angry. And he would also be externally tied to the property of being a dog.
It follows that if particulars are bare, then all of their properties are had accidentally, and none essentially.
We now come to the two legitimate senses of 'bare particular.'
2. The second sense of 'bare particular' and the first legitimate sense is the constituent-ontological sense. We find this in Bergmann and Armstrong. Accordingly, a bare particular is not an ordinary particular such as a cat or the tail of a cat or a hair or hairball of cat, but is an ontological factor, ingredient, or constituent of an ordinary particular. Let A and B be round red spots that share all qualitative features. For Bergmann there must be something in the spots that grounds their numerical difference. They are two, not one, but nothing qualitative distinguishes them. This ground of numerical difference is the bare particular in each, a in A, and b in B. Thus the numerical difference of A and B is grounded in the numerical (bare) difference of a and b. In one passage, Bergmann states that the sole job of a bare particular is to individuate, i.e., to serve as the ontological ground of numerical difference.
Particulars, unlike universals, are unrepeatable. If F-ness is a universal, F-ness is repeated in each F. But if a is F, a is unrepeatable: it is the very particular it is and no other. One of the jobs of a Bergmannian bare particular is to serve as the ontological ground of an ordinary particular's particularity or thisness. A Bergmannian bare particular is that ontological constituent in an ordinary particular that accounts for its particularity. But note the ambiguity of 'particularity.' We are not now talking about the categorial feature common to all particulars as particulars. We are talking about the 'incommunicable' thisness of any given particular.
3. The third sense of 'bare particular' and the second legitimate sense is the nonconstituent-ontological sense. Summing up the above general characterization, we can say that
A bare particular is a particular that (i) lacks a nature (in the narrow sense lately explained); (ii) has all of its properties by exemplification where exemplification is an asymmetrical external nexus; and as a consequence (iii) has all of its properties accidentally, where P is an accidental property of x iff x exemplifies P but can exist without exemplifying P.
Note that this characterization is neutral as between constituent and nonconstituent ontology. If one is a C-ontologist, then bare particulars are constituents of ordinary particulars. If one is an NC ontologist who rejects the very notion of an ontological constituent, then bare particulars are ordinary particulars.
Conclusion
I have explained the difference between a bare particular and an Aristotelian substance. In a subsequent post I will address the question of how this deep ontological difference bears upon the possibility of a coherent formulation of the Incarnation doctrine.
Bob Dylan, She Belongs to Me. Bootleg version, 5/7/65. YouTuber comment:
Hazy, warm memories of listening to this on the Bringing It All Back Home album . . . with my sweet girl at an after-party in some guy's pad following a night at the Sink on the Hill in Boulder, 1965 . . . filtered, rosy light . . . youthful bliss before Vietnam . . .
I need to answer three questions. This post addresses only the first.
1. What is the difference between an Aristotelian primary substance and a supposit (hypostasis, suppositum)?
2. Is there any non-theological basis for this distinction?
3. If the answer to (2) is negative, is the addition of suppposita to one's Aristotelian ontology a case of legitimate metaphysical revision or a case of an ad hoc theoretical patch job? According to Marilyn McCord Adams, "Metaphysical revision differs from ad hoc theoretical patching insofar as it attempts to make the new data systematically unsurprising in a wider theoretical context." ("Substance and Supposits," p. 40)
The First Question
By 'substance' I mean an Aristotelian primary substance, an individual or singular complete concrete entity. Among the characteristics of substances are the following: substances, unlike universal properties, cannot be exemplified or instantiated; substances, unlike accidents, cannot inhere in anything; substances, unlike heaps and aggregates, are per se unities. Thus Socrates and his donkey are each a substance, but the classical mereological sum of the two is not a substance.
Now what is a supposit? Experts in medieval philosophy -- and I am not one of them, nota bene -- sometimes write as if there is no distinction between a substance and a supposit. Thus Richard Cross: "Basically a supposit is a complete being that is neither instantiated or exemplified, nor inherent in another." ("Relations, Universals, and the Abuse of Tropes," PAS 79, 2005, p. 53.) And Marilyn McCord Adams speaks of Socrates and Plato as "substance individuals" and then puts "hypostases or supposits" in apposition to the first phrase. (PAS 79, 2005, p. 15)
My first question, then, is: Is there any more-than-verbal difference between a substance and a supposit, and if so, what is it?
One answer that suggests itself is that, while every substance has a supposit, some substances have alien supposits. That is, some substances are their own supposits, while others are not their own supposits, but have alien supposits. (I take the phrase 'alien supposit' from Adams, p. 31 et passim.) A substance has an alien supposit if and only if it is not its own supposit. I understand Aristotle to maintain or at least be committed to the proposition that every (primary) substance is essentially its own supposit. (I rather doubt that the Stagirite ever raised the question of alien supposition.) If so, then no substance is possibly such as to have an alien supposit. If alien supposition is metaphysically or broadly logically possible, however, then we have a ground for a more-than-terminological distinction between substances and supposits. Whether the converse of this conditional holds is a further question. For it may be that there is a ground for the distinction even if alien supposition is not possible.
Incarnation, Trinity, and the separated soul's survival between death and resurrection are theological examples of alien supposition. Whether there are non-theological examples is a further, and very important question, one the answer to which has consequences for questions (2) and (3) above.
The Incarnation is an example of alien supposition as I will now try to explain.
The orthodox view is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the NT, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized human nature, body and soul. The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual soul and and animal body. But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)
c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b). For if there are two primary substances of a rational nature, the Word and Christ, then there are two persons each with his own individualized nature, contra Chalcedonian orthodoxy, according to whch there is exactly one person in two natures. The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d), the very natural Aristotelian assumption that every substance is its own supposit. One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity.
If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible. If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit. The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not itself a supposit.
Let me now say a bit about the Trinity. Here too a problem looms that can be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad.
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
e. There are exactly three divine persons, Father, Son, Holy Ghost . (Rejection of 'Quaternity')
f. The individualized nature of God is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
Again, the tetrad is inconsistent, and again the solution is to reject (d) by saying that, while the individualized divine nature is a primary substance, it is not one that supposits itself: it has three alien supposits, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The Son is thus the alien supposit of both God's divine nature and Christ's human nature.
My first question concerned the difference between a substance and supposit. My tentative answer is that while only substances can be supposits, there are substances that are not their own supposits nor are they supposits for anything else, an example being the individualized human nature of Christ.
Is there a non-theological basis for the distinction? if not, then the suspicion arises that the distinction is purely ad hoc, crafted to save tenets of orthodox Christian theology. But this is a question for another occasion.
I am sometimes tempted by the following line of thought. But I am also deeply suspicious of it.
Are the 'laws of thought' 'laws of reality' as well? Since such laws are necessities of thought, the question can also be put by asking whether or not the necessities of thought are also necessities of being. It is surely not self-evident that principles that govern how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and to others must also apply to mind-independent reality. One cannot invoke self-evidence since such philosophers as Nagarjuna and Hegel and Nietzsche have denied (in different ways) that the laws of thought apply to the real.
Consider, for example, the Law of Identity:
Id. Necessarily, for any x, x = x.
(Id) seems harmless enough and indisputable. Everything, absolutely everything, is identical to itself, and this doesn't just happen to be the case. But what does 'x' range over? Thought-accusatives? Or reals? Or both? What I single out in an act of mind, as so singled out, cannot be thought of as self-diverse. No object of thought, qua object of thought, is self-diverse. And no object of thought, as such, is both F and not F at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense. So there is no question but that Identity and Non-Contradiction apply to objects of thought, and are aptly described as laws of thought. (Excluded Middle is trickier and so I leave it to one side.) What's more, these laws of thought hold for all possible finite, discursive, ectypal intellects. Thus what we have here is a transcendental principle, at least, not one grounded in the contingent empirical psychology or physiology of the type of animals we happen to be. Transcendentalism maybe, but no psychologism or physiologism!
But do Identity and Non-Contradiction apply to 'reals,' i.e., to entities whose existence is independent of their being objects of thought? Are these transcendental principles also ontological principles? Is the necessity of such principles as (Id) grounded in the transcendental structure of the finite intellect, or in being itself? Are the principles merely transcendental or are they also transcendent? (It goes without saying that I am using these 't' words in the Kantian way.)
The answer is not obvious.
Consider a pile of leaves. If I refer to something using the phrase, 'that pile of leaves,' I thereby refer to one self-identical pile; as so referred to, the pile cannot be self-diverse. But is the pile self-identical in itself (apart from my referring to it, whether in thought or in overt speech)?
In itself, in its full concrete extramental reality, the pile is not self-identical in that it is composed of many numerically different leaves, and has many different properties. In itself, the pile is both one and many. As both one and many, it is both self-identical and self-diverse. It is self-identical in that it is one pile; it is self-diverse in that this one pile is composed of many numerically different parts and has many different properties. Since the parts and properties are diverse from each other, and these parts and properties make up the pile, the pile is just as much self-diverse as it is self-identical. The pile is of course not a pure diversity; it is a diversity that constitutes one thing. So, in concrete reality, the pile of leaves is both self-identical and self-diverse.
If you insist that the pile's being self-identical excludes its being self-diverse, then you are abstracting from its having many parts and properties. So abstracting, you are no longer viewing the pile as itis in concrete mind-independent reality, but considering it as an object of thought merely. You are simply leaving out of consideration its plurality of parts and of properties. For the pile to be self-identical in a manner to exclude self-diversity, the pile would have to be simple as opposed to complex. But it is not simple in that it has many parts and many properties.
The upshot is that the pile of leaves, in concrete reality, is both one and many and therefore both self-identical and self-diverse. But this is a contradiction. Or is the contradiction merely apparent? Now the time-honored way to defuse a contradiction is by making a distinction.
One will be tempted to say that the respect in which the pile is self-identical is distinct from the respect in which it is self-diverse. The pile is self-identical in that it is one pile; the pile is self-diverse in that it has many parts and properties. No doubt.
But 'it has many parts and properties' already contains a contradiction. For what does 'it' refer to? 'It' refers to the pile which does not have parts and properties, but is its parts and properties. The pile is not something distinct from its parts and properties. The pile is a unity in and through a diversity of parts and properties. As such, the pile is both self-identical and self-diverse.
What the above reasoning suggests is that such 'laws of thought' as Identity and Non-Contradiction do not apply to extramental reality. No partite thing, such as a pile of leaves, is self-identical in a mannerto exclude self-diversity. Such things are as self-diverse as they are self-identical. So partite things are self-contradictory.
From here we can proceed in two ways.
The contradictoriness of partite entities can be taken to argue their relative unreality. For nothing that truly exists can be self-contradictory. This is the way of F. H. Bradley. One takes the laws of thought as criterial for what is ultimately real, shows that partite entities are not up to this exacting standard, and concludes that partite entities belong to Appearance.
The other way takes the lack of fit between logic and reality as reflecting poorly on logic: partite entities are taken to be fully real, and logic as a falsification. One can find this theme in Nietzsche and in Hegel.
For Dave Bagwill, who is trying to understand the Chalcedonian definition.
................
Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:
1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity. 2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily. 3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.
Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept.But how can they all be true? In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, according to which, roughly, if two things are identical, then they share all properties, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?
Reduplicatives to the rescue. Say this:
4. Jesus qua 2nd Person exists necessarily while Jesus qua man does not exist necessarily.
(The stylistically elegant ‘while’ may be replaced for truth-functional purposes with the logician's ampersand.) Now one might object that reduplicative formulations are not helpful unto salvation from inconsistency since in the crucial cases they entail outright contradictions. They merely hide and postpone the difficulty. Thus, given that being a Person of the Trinity entails existing necessarily, and being a human animal entails existing contingently, (4) entails
5. Jesus exists necessarily & Jesus does not exist necessarily.
And that is a plain contradiction. But this assumes that reduplicative constructions need not be taken with full ontological seriousness as requiring reduplicative truth-makers. It assumes that what we say with reduplicatives can be said without them, and that, out in the world, there is nothing that corresponds to them, or at least that we have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to reduplicative entities, qua-entities, one might call them. That assumption now needs to be examined. Suppose we parse (4) as
6. Jesus-qua-2nd Person exists necessarily & Jesus-qua-man does not exist necessarily
where the hyphenated expressions function as nouns, qua-nouns (to give them a name) that denote qua-entities. It is easy to see that (6) avoids contradiction for the simple reason that the two qua-entities are non-identical. But what is non-identical may nonetheless be the same if we have a principled way of distinguishing between identity and sameness. (Hector-Neri Castaneda is one philosopher who distinguishes between identity and a number of sameness relations.) Essentially what I have just done is made a distinction in respects while taking respects with full ontological seriousness. This sort of move is nothing new. Consider a cognate case.
Suppose I have a red boat that I paint blue. Then we can say that there are distinct times, t1 and t2, such that b is red at t1 and blue at t2. That can be formulated as a reduplicative: b qua existing at t1 is red and b qua existing at t2 is blue. One could take that as just a funny way of talking, or one could take it as a perspicuous representation of the ontological structure of the world. Suppose the latter. Then, adding hyphens, one could take oneself to be ontologically committed to temporal parts, which are a species of qua-entity. Thus b-at-t1 is a temporal part that is distinct from b-at-t2. These temporal parts are distinct since they differ property-wise: one is red the other blue. Nevertheless, they are the same in that they are parts of the same whole, the temporally extended boat.
The conceptual move we are making here is analogous to the move we make when we say that a ball is green in its northern hemisphere and red in its southern hemisphere in order to defuse the apparent contradiction of saying that it is red and green at the same time. Here different spatial parts have different properties, whereas in the boat example, different temporal parts have different properties.
Can we apply this to the Incarnation and say that Jesus-qua-God is F (immortal, impassible, necessarily existent, etc.) while Jesus-qua-man is not F? That would avoid the contradiction while upholding such obvious truths as that divinity entails immortality while humanity entails mortality. We could then say, borrowing a term from the late Hector-Neri Castaneda (1924-1991), that Jesus-qua-God is consubstantiated with Jesus-qua-man. (Hector the atheist is now rolling around in his grave.) The two are the same, contingently the same. They are ontological parts of the same substance, and are, in that sense, consubstantiated. Jesus is God the Son where ‘is’ expresses a contingent sameness relation, rather than strict identity (which is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Necessity of Identity).
The idea is that God the Son and Jesus are, or are analogous to, ontological parts of one and the same whole. This is an admittedly bizarre idea, and probably cannot be made to work. But it is useful to canvass all theoretical possibilities.
The latest NRO column from Spencer Case, our man 'on the ground' in Boulder. Excerpt:
A voter, no less than a judge or a juror, has the ability and obligation to transcend personal desires and to think in terms of the general good when he votes. There is thus a distinction between the private citizens who are voting and the public office of voter which each individual voter briefly occupies on Election Day. The distinction between the two is psychologically reinforced when citizens are expected to cast their ballots in a public space as opposed to from their living-room sofa.
One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.
Upon leaving the polling place this morning I joked that there ought to be two receptacles for ballots, the usual one for Republican and Libertarian ballots, and a second one for Democrat ballots -- a shredder. This elicited a hearty laugh. That would be real vote suppression.
But be careful with the jokes in these politically correct times. What you can get away with depends on your precinct. Mine, though populated with plenty of geezers who cherish an irrational and wholly sentimental attachment to the Dems, as if the year is still 1960, is essentially conservative and right-thinking. Besides, I was in full hiking regalia and armed with a big stick.
Here’s why. Whatever party takes over the Senate will not only be able to appoint the body’s Majority Leader, it will control the committee chairmanships, which in turn will determine what types of legislation will be entertained by the Senate. Because the Senate has the power of advise and consent when the president appoints judges and justices to the federal bench, the partisan composition of the Senate will shape the development of the courts’ jurisprudence for many decades to come. Thus, it is of little consequence what one or two dissenting Senators may have said on the campaign trail.
Those who utter the “vote for the man, not the party” slogan, though undoubtedly offering it as a sincere call to “rise above” partisan politics, do not really understand that partisanship is embedded in the very nature of our political institutions. To lament partisanship is to lament one of the consequences of being a free people. So, if you don’t like partisanship, you should move to Cuba.
Recent Comments