Maverick Philosopher

SCOTUS and Benedict

In the wake of recent events, Rod Dreher renews his call for the Benedict Option:

It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.

This is especially the case, as it seems to me, given the Left's relentless and characteristically dishonest assault on Second Amendment rights.  The only real back up to the First Amendment is the exercise of the rights guaranteed by the Second.  You will have noticed that the Left never misses an opportunity to limit law-abiding citizens' access to guns and ammunition. What motivates leftists is the drive to curtail and ultimately eliminate what could be called 'real' liberties such as the liberty to own property, to make money and keep it, to defend one's life, liberty and property, together with the liberty to acquire the means to the defense of life, liberty and property. 

Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

[. . .]

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue, the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.

I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.

Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

There is a potential problem with the Benedict Option, however.  Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!

 

What from your fathers you  received as heir,

Acquire if  you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)

The idea is that what one has been lucky enough to inherit, one must actively appropriate, i.e., make one's own by hard work, if one is really to possess it.  The German infinitive erwerben has not merely the meaning of 'earn' or 'acquire' but also the meaning of aneignen, appropriate, make one's own. 

So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse.  The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists.  You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure.  All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever.  The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth.  You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.

Is this an alarmist scenario?  I hope it is.  But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options. 

It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.  A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal.  One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially.  One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one:  how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?

We are indeed living in very interesting times.  How can one be bored?

Related articles

Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options

Why Not Privatize Marriage?

Why Not Privatize Marriage?

Being a conservative, I advocate limited government.  Big government leads to big trouble as we fight endlessly, acrimoniously, and fruitlessly over all sorts of issues that we really ought not be fighting over.  As one of my slogans has it, "The bigger the government, the more to fight over."  The final clause of the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution enshrines the right "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."  So the more the government does things that grieve us, by intruding into our lives and limiting our liberties, the more we will petition, lobby, and generally raise hell with the government and with our political opponents.  If you try to tell me how much soda I can buy at a pop, or how capacious my ammo mags must be, or how I must speak to assuage the tender sensitivities of the Pee Cee, or if you try to stop me from home-schooling my kids, or force me to buy health insurance, or force me to cater a same-sex 'marriage' ceremony, then you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.  Think of how much time, energy, and money we waste battling our political enemies, working to undo what we take to be their damage, the damage of ObamaCare being a prime example.

So if you want less contention, work for smaller government.  The smaller the government, the less to fight over.

Along these lines, one might think it wise to sidestep the acrimony of the marriage debate by simply privatizing marriage.  But this would be a mistake.  There are certain legitimate functions of government, and regulating marriage is one of them.  Here is an argument from an important paper entitled "What is Marriage?" by Sherif Girgis, Robert P. George, and Ryan T. Anderson.  (I thank Peter Lupu for bringing this article to my attention.)

Although some libertarians propose to “privatize” marriage, treating marriages the way we treat baptisms and bar mitzvahs, supporters of limited government should recognize that marriage privatization would be a catastrophe for limited government.  In the absence of a flourishing marriage culture, families often fail to form, or to achieve and maintain stability. As absentee fathers and out-of‐wedlock births become common, a train of social pathologies follows.  Naturally, the demand for governmental policing and social services grows. According to a Brookings Institute study, $229 billion in welfare expenditures between 1970 and 1996 can be attributed to the breakdown of the marriage culture and the resulting exacerbation of social ills: teen pregnancy, poverty, crime, drug abuse, and health problems. Sociologists David Popenoe and Alan Wolfe have conducted research on Scandinavian countries that supports the conclusion that as marriage culture declines, state spending rises. (270, footnotes omitted.)

A very interesting argument the gist of which is that the cause of limited government is best served by keeping in place government regulation of marriage.  A libertarian hard-ass might say, well, just let the victims and perpetrators  of the social pathologies perish.  But of course we won't let that happen.  The pressure will be on for  more and more government programs to deal with the drug-addicted, the criminally incorrigible, and the terminally unemployable.  So, somewhat paradoxically, if you want a government limited to essential functions, there is one function that the government ought to perform, namely, the regulation of  marriage.

For a different view, see this from Rand Paul.

Related articles

Sexbots and Sublunary Arts

'Structural Racism' and Conservative Cluelessness

Politics and Ridicule in a Post-Consensus Age

Professor Robert George on the Supreme Court and Marriage

Same-Sex Marriage: No Surprise Conservatives Lost

Four reasons off the top of my head.

1. Conservatives don't know how to argue and persuade.  In the main, conservatives are not at home on the plane of ideas and abstractions where one must do battle with leftist obfuscation.   Conservatives are often non-intellectual when they are not anti-intellectual.  I am talking about conservatives 'in the trenches' of ordinary life, politics, and the mass media, the ones with some clout; I am not referring to conservative intellectuals who are intellectual enough but whose influence is limited.

Conservatives, by and large, are doers not thinkers, builders, not scribblers.  They are at home on the terra firma of the concrete particular but at sea in the realm of abstraction.  The know in their dumb inarticulate way that  there is something deeply wrong with same-sex 'marriage,' but they cannot explain what it is in a manner to command the respect of their opponents.  George W. Bush, a well-meaning, earnest fellow whose countenance puts me in mind of that of Alfred E. Neuman, could only get the length of such flat-footed asseverations as: "Marriage is between a man and a woman." 

That's right, but it is a bare assertion. Sometimes bare assertions are justified, but one must know how to counter those who consider them gratuitous assertions.  What is gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied without breach of logical propriety, a maxim long enshrined in the Latin tag Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.  This is why one reasonably demands arguments from those who make assertions.  Arguments are supposed to move us beyond mere assertions and counter-assertions.

Could G. W. Bush present a reasoned defense of traditional marriage, or rather, just plain marriage, against the leftist innovators?  If he could he never to my knowledge supplied any evidence that he could.

2. Conservatives muddy the waters with religion, when the topic ought to be approached in a secular way. After all, we need to convince secularists and that will be impossible if we rely on religious traditions and doctrines.  You may believe that traditional marriage is an institution with divine sanction.  But that will cut no ice with an atheist!  Sorry to say something so bloody obvious, but it needs to be said.

Suppose I want to convince you of something.  I must use premises that you accept to have any  hope of  success.  For if I mount an argument sporting one or more premises that you do not accept, you will point to that premise or those premises and pronounce my argument unsound no matter how rigorous and cogent my reasoning. 

One has to be able to make a secular case for the defense of traditional marriage.  The following is the beginning of a secular argument:

One needs to ask about the justification of the state's involvement in marriage in the first place.  It is obvious, I hope, that the state ought not be involved in every form of human association.  State involvement in any particular type of human association must therefore be justified.  We want as much government as we need, but no more.  The state is coercive by its very nature, as it must be if it is to be able to enforce its mandates and exercise its legitimate functions, and is therefore at odds with the liberty and autonomy of citizens.  It is not obvious that the government should be in the marriage business at all.  The burden is on the state to justify its intervention and regulation.  But there is a reason for the state to be involved.  The state has a legitimate interest in its own perpetuation  and maintenance via the production of children, their socializing, their protection, and their transformation into productive citizens who will contribute to the common good.  (My use of 'the state' needn't involve an illict hypostatization.)  It is this interest that justifies the state's recognition  and regulation of marriage as a union of exactly one man and exactly one woman. 

I have just specified a reason for state involvement in marriage, one that doesn't rest  on any religious premise or assumption. But this justification is absent in the case of same-sex couples since they are not and cannot be productive of children.  So here we have a reason why the state ought not recognize same-sex marriage.   One and the same biological fact both justifies state regulation and recognition of marriage and justifies the restriction of such recognition to opposite-sex couples.  The fact, again, is that only heterosexuals can procreate. 

What I have just sketched, if suitably extended, will persuade at least some secularists. Enough to  make a difference?  I don't know.

3. Liberalism is Emotion-Driven.  Just as one cannot hope to persuade people using premises they adamantly reject, one cannot get through to people whose skulls are full of emotional mush.  To the emotion-driven, the obviously discriminatory exclusion of same-sex couples from marriage ends the discussion.  They won't stay to listen to an explanation as to why some forms of discrimination are justified. 

4. The Conservative Disadvantage.

God, Proof, and Desire

From a reader:

. . . I’m confused by some of your epistemic terms. You reject [in the first article referenced below] the view that we can “rigorously prove” the existence of God, and several times say that theistic arguments are not rationally compelling, by which you mean that there are no arguments “that will force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.“

Okay, so far I’m tracking with you. But then you go on to say that “[t]here are all kinds of evidence” for theism (not just non-naturalism), while the atheist “fails to account for obvious facts (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, intentionality, purposiveness, etc.) if he assumes that all that exists is in the space-time world. I will expose and question all his assumptions.  I will vigorously and rigorously drive him to dogmatism.  Having had all his arguments neutralized, if not refuted, he will be left with nothing better than the dogmatic assertion of his position."

So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments? Perhaps the positive case for theism and the negative case against naturalism don’t count as demonstrations in a mathematical sense, but I’m not sure why they’re not supposed to be compelling according to your gloss on the term.

The term 'mathematical' muddies the waters  since it could lead to a side-wrangle over what mathematicians are doing when they construct proofs.  Let's not muddy the waters.  My claim is that we have no demonstrative knowledge of the truth of theism or of the falsity of naturalism.  Demonstrative knowledge is knowledge produced by a demonstration.  A demonstration in this context is an argument that satisfies all of the following conditions:

1. It is deductive
2. It is valid in point of logical form
3. It is free of such informal fallacies as petitio principii
4. It is such that all its premises are true
5. It is such that all its premises are known to be true
6. It is such that its conclusion is relevant to its premises.

To illustrate (6).  The following argument satisfies all of the conditions except the last and is therefore probatively worthless:

Snow is white
ergo
Either Obama is president or he is not.

On my use of terms, a demonstrative argument = a probative argument = a proof = a rationally compelling argument.  Now clearly there are good arguments (of different sorts) that are not demonstrative, probative, rationally compelling.  One type is the strong inductive argument. By definition, no such argument satisfies (1) or (2).  A second type is the argument that satisfies all the conditions except (5). 

Can one prove the existence of God?  That is, can one produce a proof (as above defined) of the existence of God?   I don't think so.  For how will you satisfy condition (5)?  Suppose you give argument A for the existence of God.  How do you know that the premises of A are true?  By argument?  Suppose A has premises P1, P2, P3.  Will you give arguments for these premises?  Then you need three more arguments, one for each of P1, P2, P3, each of which has its own premises.  A vicious infinite regress is in the offing.  Needless to say, moving in an argumentative circle is no better.

At some point you will have to invoke self-evidence.   You will have to say that, e.g., it is just self-evident that every event has a cause.  And you will have to mean objectively self-evident, not just subjectively self-evident.  But how can you prove, to yourself or anyone else, that what is subjectively self-evident is objectively self-evident?  You can't, at least not with respect to states of affairs transcending your consciousness. 

I conclude that no one can prove the existence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that God exists.  The same holds for the nonexistence of God.  No one can prove the nonexistence of God.  But one can reasonably believe that there is no God.

The same goes for naturalism.  I cannot prove that there is more to reality than the space-time system and its contents.  But I can reasonably believe it.  For I have a battery of arguments each of which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3) and (6) and may even, as far as far as I know, satisfy  (4).

"So how is the atheist not irrational on your view, assuming he is apprised of your arguments?"

He is not irrational because none of my arguments are rationally compelling in the sense I supplied, namely, they are not such as to force every competent philosophical practitioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.  To illustrate, consider the following argument from Peter Kreeft (based on C. S. Lewis), an argument I consider good, but not rationally compelling.  I will argue (though I will not prove!) that one who rejects this argument is not irrational.

The Argument From Desire

• Premise 1: Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy that desire.
• Premise 2: But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no creature can satisfy.
• Conclusion: Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures, which can satisfy this desire.

This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."

This is surely not a compelling argument.  In fact, as it stands, it is not even valid.  But it is easily repaired.  There is need of an additional premise, one to the effect that the desire that nothing in time can satisfy is a natural desire.  This supplementary  premise is needed for validity, but it is not obviously true.  For it might be -- it is epistemically possible that -- this desire that nothing in time can satisfy is artificially induced by one's religious upbringing or some other factor or factors.

Furthermore, is premise (1) true?  Not as it stands.  Suppose I am dying of thirst in the desert.  Does that  desire in me correspond to some real object that can satisfy it?  Does the existence of my token desire entail the existence of a token satisfier?  No!  For it may be that there is no potable water in the vicinity, when  only potable water in the immediate vicinity can satisfy my particular thirst.  At most, what the natural desire for water shows is  that water had to have existed at some time.  It doesn't even show that water exists now.  Suppose all the water on earth is suddenly rendered undrinkable.  That is consistent with the continuing existence of the natural desire/need for water.

But this is not a decisive objection since repairs can be made.  One could reformulate:

1* Every type of natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can satisfy some tokens of that type of desire.

But is (1*) obviously true?  It could be that our spiritual desires are not artificial, like the desire to play chess, but lacking in real objects nonetheless.  It could be that their objects are merely intentional.  Suppose our mental life (sentience, intentionality, self-awareness, the spiritual desires for meaning, for love, for lasting happiness, for an end to ignorance and delusion and enslavement to base desires) is just an evolutionary fluke.  Our spiritual desires would then be natural as opposed to artificial, but lacking in real objects. 

Why do we naturally desire, water, air, sunlight?  Because without them we wouldn't have come into material existence in the first place.  Speaking loosely, Nature implanted these desires in us.  This is what allows us to infer the reality of the object of the desire from the desire.  Now if God created us and implanted in us a desire for fellowship with him, then we could reliably infer the reality of God from the desire.  But we don't know whether God exists; so it may be that the natural desire for God lacks a real object.

Obviously, one cannot define 'natural desire' as a desire that has a real and not merely intentional object, and then take the non-artificiality of a desire as proof that it is natural.  That would be question-begging.

My point is that  (1) or (1*) is not known to be true and is therefore rationally rejectable.  The argument from desire, then, is not rationally compelling.

 As for premise (2), how do we know that it is true? Granting that it is true hitherto, how do we know that it will be true in the future?  The utopian dream of the progressives is precisely that we can achieve here on earth final satisfaction of our deepest desires.  Now I don't believe this for a second.  But I don't think one can reasonably claim to know that (2) is false.  What supports it is a very reasonable induction.  But inductive arguments don't prove anything.

In sum, the argument from desire, suitably deployed and rigorously articulated, helps render theistic belief rationally acceptable.  But it is not a rationally compelling argument.

Related articles

Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

A Question About God and Existence

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Suicides

Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961.  "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on a prescription dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Following his death, The Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway"." (Wikipedia)

Dalida, O Sole Mio.  I think I'm in love.  "Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), birth name Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages including: French, Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish." [. . .]On Saturday, 2 May 1987, Dalida committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates.^[7][8] She left behind a note which read, "La vie m'est insupportable... Pardonnez-moi." ("Life has become unbearable for me... Forgive me.")" (Wikipedia) 

The Singing Nun, Dominique, 1963.   "Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933 – 29 March 1985) was a Belgian singer-songwriter and initially a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium (as Sister Luc Gabrielle). She acquired world fame in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the her French-language song "Dominique". She is sometimes credited as "The Singing Nun". [. . .]

Citing their financial difficulties in a note, she and her companion of ten years^[8][9][10], Annie Pécher, both committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985.^[11][12] In their suicide note, Decker and Pécher stated they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together after a church funeral.^[7] They were buried together in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Walloon Brabant, the town where they died.^[13] The inscription on their tombstone reads "I saw her soul fly across the clouds", a line from Deckers' song "Sister Smile is dead". (Wikipedia)

Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends. There but for Fortune.   "Philip David Ochs (/ˈoʊks/; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an American protest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime." [. . .] "On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.^{[110]" (Wikipedia)}

My favorite suicide song is Shiver Me Timbers by Tom Waits.  James Taylor offers a beautiful interpretation.  Is it really about suicide at sea?  The reference to Martin Eden suggests to me that it is.  But you might reasonably disagree.

Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself

A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before:  "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?"  This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite.  I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment.  Now if our desire is infinite, then it is arguable that only a truly infinite object could satisfy it, and that such an object cannot be a being among beings, not even a being supreme among beings, but must be an absolute reality, that is, God as Being itself.  To put it another way, the ultimate good for man cannot be a good thing among good things, not even the best of all good things, but must be Goodness itself.  Anything less would be a sort of high-class idol.  So let's start with an analysis of idolatry.

I

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite?

That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never fully satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

For thinkers of this stripe,  all desire is ultimately desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But our deluded desire does not understand this.  Our deluded desire is played for a fool by the trinkets and bagatelles of this fleeting world.  It thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry.

Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of virgin A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for virgin  B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.

So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date):

You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.

There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.

Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not an absolute good exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.

II

Suppose you accept what I just wrote about desire being infinite and ultimately unsatisfiable by any finite object.  Would this show that God cannot be a being among beings?  Not obviously!  The supreme being theists could agree that infinite desire is ultimately satisfiable only by an infinite object, but that the omni-qualified supreme being fills the bill.  Furthermore, they could argue, plausibly, that talk of Goodness itself and Being itself, which imply the divine simplicity, is just incoherent to the discursive intellect.  To which one response is: so much the worse for the discursive intellect.  The ultimate goal is attainable only by transcending it.

Related articles

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation'

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

Modality, Possible Worlds, and the Accidental-Essential Distinction

This from a reader:

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes in its article on Essential vs. Accidental Properties, "A modal characterization of the distinction between essential and accidental properties is taken for granted in nearly all work in analytic metaphysics since the 1950s.”  Personally, I find modal definitions of this type very hand wavy.  Ed Feser states my objection more eloquently than I can: 

 

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, the possible worlds analysis of essence has things backwards: we need to know what the essence of a thing is, before we can know what it would be like in various possible worlds; talk of possible worlds, if legitimate at all, must get explained in terms of essence, not essence in terms of possible worlds ( Aquinas, iBooks edition, page 90).  

 

I think the modal characterization will be a dead end for us.

Response

Two points.  First, I do not understand how one could characterize the essential versus accidental distinction except modally.  Second, a modal characterization need not be in terms of so-called 'possible worlds.'  One should not suppose that a characterization is modal if and only if it is in terms of possible worlds.

First point first.  I am a blogger and a native Californian.  I might not have been either.  So being a blogger and being a native Californian are accidental properties of me.  I could have existed without possessing these properties.  But I could not have existed without being human.  So being human is an essential property of me.  Generalizing, if P is an essential property of x, then x must have P, it cannot not have P.  If P is an accidental property of x, then x need not have P, it could lack P.  And conversely in both cases.

Note that I had to use modal words to characterize the distinction: 'might,' 'could,' 'must,' 'need not,' 'cannot.'  I conclude that the accidental-essential distinction is irreducibly modal: it cannot be made except modally.  It is indeed essentially modal!

To appreciate this, consider the first two accidental properties I mentioned.  I was not always a blogger: speaking tenselessly, there are times at which I am not a blogger.  But I was always and will always be a native Californian.  Speaking tenselessly again, there are no times at which I am not a native Californian.*  It follows that we cannot define an essential (accidental) property of x as a property x has (does not have) at every time at which it exists.  The distinction cannot be made in temporal terms; one needs to employ modal language.

If a thing has a property essentially, then it has the property at every time at which it exists.  But not conversely:  if a thing has a property at every time at which it exists, it does not follow that it has the property essentially.  So again it should be clear that the distinction in question is ineliminably modal.

I should make it clear that the modality in question here is non-epistemic/non-doxastic.  Suppose Tom died an hour ago, unbeknownst to me.  I ask you, "Is Tom teaching now?"  You say, "Could be!"  But of course it can't be that he is teaching now if he is dead now.  You are not saying that it is (really) possible that he be teaching now; you are saying that his teaching now is logically consistent with what you know or believe, that it is not ruled out by what you know/believe. 

Second point second.  From what I have written it should be clear that we don't need the jargon of possible worlds to talk modally.   But it is a very useful and graphic way of talking.  Accordingly,

D1. P is an accidental property of x =_df there are possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

D2. P is an essential property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

We can add a third definition:

D3. P is a necessary property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P, and x exists in every possible world.  Example:  Omniscience is a necessary property of God: he has it in every world in which he exists, and, since he is a necessary being, he exists in every world.  Non-theological example: Being prime is a necessary property of the number 7:  7 has it in every metaphysically possible world in which it exists, and it exists in every such world.

The above definitions do not sanction the reduction of the modal to the non-modal.  For modal terms appear on both sides of the biconditionals.  Nor could we say that the right-hand sides explicates or analyzes the left-hand sides.  So I agree with Feser as quoted above.  What is first in the order of metaphysical explanation is a thing's being essentially thus and so or accidentally thus and so.  We can then go on to represent these states of affairs in possible worlds terms, but we need not do so.

Jenner and Dolezal.  Is Jenner essentially male?  I should think so.  Being male is a biological determination.  It can be spelled out in terms of sex chromosomes.   They are different in males and females.  Jenner as he is today is a sort of super-transvestite: he is not just a male in women's clothing, but a male who has had his body surgically altered to have female anatomical features.  But he is still male.  How could he be a woman?  You can't be a woman without first being a girl, and he was never a girl.

If you deny that Jenner is essentially biologically male, will you also deny that he is essentially biologically human?  If not, why not?  If literal sex change is possible, is species change possible? 

Is Rachel Dolezal essentially Caucasian?  Well, of course.  Race, like sex, is biologically based.  It is not something you choose.  Nor is it a social construct.  Barack Obama thinks that we Americans have racism in our DNA.  That's bullshit, of course.  There is nothing biological about being a racist.  But there is something biological about race.  You can be a traitor to your country, but not to your race.

Biology matters!  And so does clear thinking and honest talk.  Obama take note.

______________________

*Ignoring the fact, if it is a fact, that I existed pre-natally.  If this wrinkle troubles you, I can change my example.

 

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A Question About God and Existence

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?

This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.

 

First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence.  It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.

 

This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple.  In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has.  Thus he has his existence by being his existence.  Why must God be simple?  Because he is the absolute reality.  If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol.  The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute.  It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness. 

 

Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept.  Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common.  If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist.  But this violates the divine aseity.

 

Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.

 

Objection:  "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."

 

Reply:   The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing.  But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.

 

The picture is this.  Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist.  If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist.  So Existence itself exists.  It is identical to God.  God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God.  God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent.  God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.

 

In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates.  (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.)  God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.

 

Objection:  "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress.  If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation.  If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in.  But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."

 

Response:  The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist.  Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.

 

There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity.  This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God.  In every other case, existence is not self-identity.  No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

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More Liberal Insanity: 'Trigger Warning' for Kant's Critiques

A tip of the hat to London Karl for bringing the following to my attention.  Karl writes, "I love your country, but it gets more absurd by the day."

It does indeed.  Contemporary liberals are engaged in a project of "willful enstupidation," to borrow a fine phrase from John Derbyshire.  Every day there are multiple new examples, a tsunami of folderol most deserving of a Critique of POOR Reason.

Here is a little consideration that would of course escape the shallow pate of your typical emotion-driven liberal:  If Kant's great works can be denigrated as products of their time, and as expressive of values different from present day values, then of course the same can be said a fortiori of the drivel and dreck that oozes from the mephitic orifices of contemporary liberals.

For my use of 'contemporary liberals,' see here.

Addendum:  These scumbags have attached the same warning to the U. S. Constitution.  

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Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Keith Burgess-Jackson on the SCOTUS ObamaCare Decision

Professor Burgess-Jackson is better qualified to comment on this topic than I am.

I would now like to thank Keith publicly for all his help, advice, linkage, and support over the years.  Our friendship goes back to the early days of the blogosphere.  He came on line in the fall of 2003; I made my debut in the spring of 2004.

Where Are the Honest Atheists?

Damon Linker:

Does the world really need another "new atheist" manifesto? Another attack on the ludicrousness of religion and the childishness of belief in God? Another paean to the spiritual and intellectual satisfactions of secularism, materialism, and humanism? Do the efforts of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, the late Christopher Hitchens, and their many lesser imitators really require further reinforcement? British philosopher A.C. Grayling must think so, since that is precisely what his latest book (The God Argument, which will be published on March 26) aims to provide.

A. C. Grayling is quite a piece of work.  To get a taste of just what an extremist he is, see my Is Religious Instruction Child Abuse?

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Gasthaus Blut und Boden

Imagine a German restaurant so named. Blood and Soil. My astute readers needn't be reminded of the provenience of this phrase.  "Best blood sausage in the East Valley!"  Or MOM's Diner of Mesa.  "Fine Aryan cuisine served up right by members of the militia of Montana."  Would you be offended?  I just made up those examples.

But this is a real example: La Raza Steak and Ribs, a Mexican joint in Apache Junction, Arizona.  When I mentioned this to a friend, he replied, "That would be like naming a German restaurant Die Rasse, The Race." 

Once again, the double standard.  So once again I ask: what would be left of the Left were leftists disembarrassed of every single one of their double standards?

The use of La Raza in the private sector as part of the name of a business is offensive, but tolerable. But it is a different story when state sponsorship is involved. 

It is arguable that there ought not be any state sponsorship of divisive symbols such as the Confederate flag. But, as Victor Davis Hanson points out in an important column,

There are plenty of other overt racialist symbols that separate Americans. One is the prominent use of La Raza, “The Race” — seen most prominently in the National Council of La Raza, an ethnic lobbying organization that has been and is currently a recipient of federal funds. The National Council of La Raza should be free to use any title it wishes, but it should not expect the federal government to subsidize its separatist nomenclature.

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The Left's Hatred of Conservative Talk Radio

Politics and Ridicule in a Post-Consensus Age

Dennis Prager was complaining one day about how the Left ridicules the Right.  He sounded a bit indignant.  He went on to say that he does not employ ridicule.  But why doesn't he?  He didn't say why, but I will for him:  Because he is a gentleman who exemplifies the good old conservative virtue of civility.  And because he is a bit naive.

Prager's behavior, in one way laudable, in another way is not, resting as it does  on an assumption that I doubt is true at the present time.   Prager assumes that political differences are more like intellectual differences among gentlemanly interlocutors than they are like the differences among warring parties.  He assumes that there is a large measure of common ground and the real possibility of mutually beneficial compromise, the sort of compromise that serves the common good by mitigating the extremism of the differing factions, as opposed to that form of compromise, entered into merely to survive, whereby one side knuckles under to the extremism of the other.

But if we are now in the age of post-consensus politics, if politics is war by another name, then it is just foolish not to use the Left's tactics against them.

And that includes ridicule.  As Saul Alinksy's Rule #5 has it:

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

It is not enough to be right, or have the facts on your side, or to have the better arguments.  That won't cut it in a war.  Did the Allies prevail over the Axis Powers in virtue of having truth and right on their side?  It was might that won the day, and, to be honest, the employing of morally dubious means (e.g., the firebombing of Dresden, the nuking of  Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the same sort of means that the Axis would have employed had they been able to.   One hopes that the current civil war doesn't turn bloody.  But no good purpose is served by failing to understand that what we have here is a war and not minor disagreements about means within the common horizon of agreed-upon assumptions, values, and goals.

Have we entered the age of post-consensus politics?  I think so.  We should catalog our irreconcilable differences. For now a quick incomplete list.  We disagree radically about: the purpose of government; crime and punishment; race; marriage; abortion; drugs; pornography; gun rights; the interpretation of the Constitution; religion; economics. 

Take religion.  I have no common ground with you if you think every vestige of the Judeo-Christian heritage should be removed from the public square, or take the sort of extremist line represented by people like Dawkins and A. C. Grayling.  If, however, you are an atheist who gives the Establishment Clause a reasonable interpretation, then we have some common ground.

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Malcolm Pollack laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation. 

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or perhaps jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up.  And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the  older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack.  So if you owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties.  As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it.  Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list.

But is the Enlightenment the problem?  Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed.  Now science brings enlightenment and the  enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia.  Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought.  (Ernst Cassirer is worth reading on this.)  Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down.  The cosmogonic myths were called into question.  Doubt, as I like to say, is the engine of inquiry.  Doubt is a driver, a motor.  Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden.  Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious.  But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and whatnot that had been handed down, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense.  In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment.  Doubt, its motor, is therefore good.

Skepsis need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus.  But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt.  If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle.  I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise."  (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.)  I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment  involved a faith in Reason and in the power of Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot.*

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical.  (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses.) Doubt is good.  But good things can be taken too far.  So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable.  Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the self-evidence or objective certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right.  But it is one-sided.  The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically.  It is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following:  is it real as people say?  Is it truly valuable?  Is it true?  Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense?  Is the explanation truly explanatory?  Is a certain hypthesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)?  Is there evidence for it?  Does the earth really rest on a turtle?  Is it turtles all the way down?  Does it function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor?  Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving it by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing?  Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power.  But is is also diabolical.  Lucifer the light-bearer becomes drunk on his own power and blinded by his own light. He will not obey.  He will not recognize any authority other than his own will.  His mind is not for minding any antecedent reality.  He will not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself.  He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another.  In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates."   I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) -- not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.)  Zwei --> zwo --> two --> duplicity.  Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity. 

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition.  How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests? 

I don't know.  I do know that Islam is not the answer.  And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment. 

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas.  What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry.  It needs skepticism.  It needs philosophy.  What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world.  This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess.  Perhaps Kant's "Copernican revolution" 'paved the way for' conceptual relativism despite Kant's  not being a conceptual relativist.  That's one example.

_____________________________

*The greatest figure in the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).  He famously remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787, first ed. 1781), "I have found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith."  Now how does that jive with what I wrote in the preceding paragraph?  I can't explain this now; it is just too complicated!  This is  what i call the invocation of blogospheric privilege. Brevity is the soul of blog.  This being so, I am justified in this venue of just stopping.

 

In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

The following entry, first posted on February 20, 2011, is relevant to the question whether God is a being among beings.  My rejection of this claim requires that there be modes of Being.  If talk of modes of Being is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake, then the claim that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself, is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake.  Herewith, something in defense of the MOB doctrine.

To ward off misunderstanding, I am  not saying that the 'relation' of God to the world of creatures is the 'relation' of a substance to its accidents or modes.  Creatures do not inhere in God.   They are not accidents. They are derivative substances in their own right, difficult as it may be to make sense of this.  Christian metaphysics must somehow navigate between the Scylla of Spinozism and Charybdis of the sort of radical ontological pluralism to which my friend Dale Tuggy 'succumbs' (to put it tendentiously).

On second thought, since Spinozism sucks everything into itself, I should have written 'Charybdis of Spinozism.'  Charybdis was a sea nymph transmogrified by Zeus into a whirlpool.

In his History of Philosophy Hegel jokes that due to the all-consumptiveness of the Spinozistic Absolute, it is in some sense fitting that Spinoza should die of consumption.  As the story goes, Spinoza the lens-grinder died of what used to be called consumption (tuberculosis) from breathing in the glass dust. 

...................

The 'thin' conception of Being or existence, lately explained, entails that there are no modes of Being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of Being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-Being doctrine is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics.
 
My task in this series of posts is not to specify what the modes of Being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of Being. So I plan to look at a range of   examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of Being they  involve.  Against van Inwagen (see post linked above), I maintain that no mistake is made by partisans of the thick conception.  They do not, pace van Inwagen, illicitly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of a thing to its existence.

This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of Being, and not merely in their respective natures.

1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, white caps, and carpet bulges are items that exist, but not on their own. They need -- as a matter of metaphysical necessity -- faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:

D1. S is a (primary) substance =_df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

D2. A is an accident =_df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.

By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.

The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to   another. You can't catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from   Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is a peculiarly intimate one.

2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A  exist.  There is a sense -- the quantificational sense -- in which both items exist and exist univocally: each is something and not nothing.  Both are there to be talked about and referred to.  We can write '(∃x)(x = S)' and '(∃x)(x = A)':  'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.'  The symbol for the particular quantifier -- '(∃x)(. . . x . . .)' -- has exactly the same sense in both occurrences.

3. The issue, however, is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the Being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' is a semantic term; 'mode' is an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of Being.  They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.

4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. The whiteness of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates.  On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither  could exist without the other. But S can exist without A.  Socrates' needn't be white.  Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially  dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A  exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their  modes of Being. One cannot make sense of inherence without  distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of Being.

5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of Being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of Being entails that there cannot be modes of Being, because the very idea is unintelligible, the thin conception ought to be rejected.

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Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation'

Again on 'God + World = God'

The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position?  Let's consider both sides of the question.

A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.

Consider two possible scenarios.  In the first, God alone exists.  In the second, God exists and creates a world.  On a classical view of God, according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible.  There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  Clearly, the scenarios are different.  But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios.  For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios.  Therefore,it is not the case that God + World = God.

To extend the argument:

If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else?   If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else?  How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself?  Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?

After all, it is evident to the senses (though not self-evident, cf. Descartes' Dream Argument) that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing.  Nor it is a dream or an illusion.  Clearly, it is 'better known' that this material world of multiplicity exists than that God exists.  But suppose God does exist.  Then both the world (creatures) and God exist.  Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone?

B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.

Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being.  For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct,  then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this  totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.

So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence.  To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy.  I am standing before a mirror looking at my image.  How many men?  One, not two.  I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man.  An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man.  And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists.  I exist and my image exists.  Both exist, but in different ways.  I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist.  Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture.  (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.) 

It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image.  (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.)  Now we cannot say that the seen man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not.  But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man.   There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an an objective genitive.

Man and image both exist.  Yet there is an important difference.  I say it is a difference in mode of existence.  The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property.  This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.

So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence. 

Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man.  This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it.  If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image  = Man.

Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it. 

C. Aporetic Conclusion

The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling.  But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling.  If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong.  One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being.  But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong.  In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.

I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.

My interim conclusion is aporetic:  both positions on our question are reasonably maintained.  They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.

I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.

Related articles

World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation'

Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

R. C. writes,

I hadn't heard of the Dolezal case until reading your blog post. It occurred to me that this case might serve as a counterexample to the standard epistemological position that belief is necessary for knowledge.

I don't know Dolezal's psychological/epistemic state. But suppose she knows that she isn't African-American by race, but she has convinced herself to believe she is so. Would she have knowledge without belief?

Perhaps yes. Or perhaps she doesn't really believe she is African-American by race. Or, perhaps she is double minded: one mind knows and thus believes she isn't, and the other lacks knowledge on the matter but believes she is.

Anyway, I'd be interested in your take.

As I construe his example, the loyal reader is offering a case in which a subject knows that p without believing that p.  Thus he is supposing that Dolezal knows that she is Caucasian, but does not believe that she is.  If so, we have a counterexample to the standard view that, necessarily, if S knows that p, then S believes that p.  On the standard analysis, believing that p is necessary for knowing that p.  What the example suggests is that believing that p is not necessary for knowing that p.

We should distinguish between a weaker and a stronger thesis:

1. It is not the case that knowledge entails belief. (Some cases of knowledge are not cases of belief.)

2. Knowledge entails disbelief. (No cases of knowledge are cases of belief.)

I read the following passage from Dallas Willard as supporting (1):

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

Whether or not one believes what one represents truly and has an appropriate basis for so representing, depends on factors that are irrelevant to truth, understanding and evidence. It depends, one might simply say, on how rational one is. Now I do not think that this point about belief in relation to knowledge is essential to the rest of this paper, but I mention it to indicate that the absence of any reference to belief in my general description of knowledge is not an oversight. Belief is not, I think, a necessary component of knowledge, though one would like to believe that knowledge would have some influence upon belief, and no doubt it often does.

Now we can't get into Dolezal's (crazy) head, but the following is plausibly ascribed to her.  She knows who her biological parents are; she knows that they are both Caucasian; she knows that Caucasian parents have Caucasian children; hence she knows that she is biologically Caucasian.  Could she nonetheless really believe that she is not Caucasian?

Perhaps.  Belief is tied to action.  It is tied to what one does and leaves undone and what one is disposed to do and leave undone.  Dolezal's NAACP activities and her verbal avowals among other behaviors suggest that she really believes that she is racially black.

But if Dolezal really believes that she is racially black, when she knows that she is racially white, then she is irrational.  Why not say the following by way of breaking the link between belief and knowledge:

D1. S knows that p =_df S justifiably accepts that p, and p is true.

D2. S  believes that p =_df S accepts that p and S either acts as if p is true or is prepared to act as if p is true.

These definitions allow that there are cases of knowledge that are not cases of belief without excluding cases of knowledge that are cases of belief.  What is common to knowledge and belief is not belief, but acceptance.

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The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Jerking Toward Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

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Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam (Revised and Expanded)

Micro-Totalitarianism

Thomas Sowell on 'micro-aggression.'  Two examples of 'micro-aggression':

If you just sit in a room where all the people are white, you are considered to be guilty of "micro-aggression" against people who are not white, who will supposedly feel uncomfortable when they enter such a room.

At UCLA, a professor who changed the capitalization of the word "indigenous" to lower case in a student's dissertation was accused of "micro-aggression," apparently because he preferred to follow the University of Chicago Manual of Style, rather than the student's attempt to enhance the importance of being indigenous.

Next stop:  The Twilight Zone.  Sowell's analysis:

The concept of "micro-aggression" is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be "hate speech," instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.

This tactic reaches far beyond academia and far beyond the United States. France's Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited -- if that is the word -- with calling social conditions he didn't like "violence," as a prelude to justifying real violence as a response to those conditions. Sartre's American imitators have used the same verbal tactic to justify ghetto riots.

Word games are just one of the ways of silencing politically incorrect ideas, instead of debating them. Demands that various conservative organizations be forced to reveal the names of their donors are another way of silencing ideas by intimidating people who facilitate the spread of those ideas. Whatever the rationale for wanting those names, the implicit threat is retaliation.

This same tactic was used, decades ago, by Southern segregationists who tried to force black civil rights organizations to reveal the names of their donors, in a situation where retaliation might have included violence as well as economic losses.

In a sense, the political left's attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. But this is just one of the left's ever-increasing restrictions on other people's freedom to live their lives as they see fit, rather than as their betters tell them.

Current attempts by the Obama administration to force low-income housing to be built in middle class and upscale communities are on a par with forcing people to buy the kind of health insurance the government wants them to buy -- ObamaCare -- rather than leaving them free to buy whatever suits their own situation and preferences.

The left is not necessarily aiming at totalitarianism. But their know-it-all mindset leads repeatedly and pervasively in that direction, even if by small steps, each of which might be called "micro-totalitarianism."

Sexbots and Sublunary Arts

This just in from D. B.:

Apropos of fairly recent usage of the word 'sublunary' on the MavPhil  blog,
and the entry on sexbots, I offer you C.S. Lewis' take on both in this
paragraph from That Hideous Strength. 

"On this side (of the moon, facing the earth - DB), the womb is barren
and the marriages are cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. 
There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each 
lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by 
devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in 
their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
(First Scribners Classics ed., 1996, p. 271) 

The Dawn of the Sexbots

'Dawn' in the title above is curiously inapt in these times of twilight as the light goes out in the West. Indications of decline: fascination with the grotesque and the abnormal; the mainstreaming of deviant behavior; the cultural ubiquity of pornography; the loss of any sense that we are spiritual beings with a destiny that transcends the merely physical; the loss of the belief that there is anything worth living for beyond the gratification of our basest desires; the abdication of those in positions of authority, together with their denial of reality and their routine lying, as witness the brazen mendacity of Obama and Hillary.  Vanity Fair, May 2015:

At 55, he [David Mills] is tired of atheism activism, which he’s been doing since the late 1970s, and ready for a career reboot. Recently he became the owner of a RealDoll—the Rolls-Royce of sex dolls, created two decades ago by artist and entrepreneur Matt McMullen. Mills, who learned about them from an episode of the sitcom Family Guy, visited the company’s Web site and was convinced the photos were of models, not dolls, because they all looked so realistic. More research proved otherwise.

“I thought, Well, gee, I would enjoy something like that!” he recalls. “I mean, I love women. God, I absolutely love women.” And especially their legs. “That’s what attracts me to a woman as much as a face, if not more.” Big problem, though: “My fundamental personality conflict is that I really like women but I don’t like to be around people.”

Mills is morally sick with a sickness that  eventually comes to seem normal to its victim.  For Mills, a woman is just a female animal body.  But such bodies have their manifold physical imperfections. So he wants a perfect body, one that maximally excites his lust, whether or not the body embodies a person.  To relate to a person is too much of a bother when the gratification of lust is the supreme desideratum.  Enter the sexbot, a body that embodies nothing.

What’s an average day like for him [Mills] now?

“Well, somebody will send me an e-mail: Oh, it’s just so sadddd. I know you’re such a sad person with this doll and I feel sooo sorry for you,” he says, mocking this individual. “Well, here’s how sorry you should feel for me: I sleep till 11, and if I want, maybe later. I get up. I sit around a couple hours, watch TV, maybe have lunch with my daughter if she comes. You know, go out to a restaurant and have a good dinner, come back, maybe watch some porn or TV. Maybe have a late-night snack, a beer or two, and go to bed. So don’t feel sorry for me, for Christ’s sake.”

Matt McMullen, above, of the appropriately named Abyss Creations.  Look at his eyes.  If the eyes are the windows of the soul . . . . Look at his arms, plastered with ugly tattoos, the graffiti  of the human body whereby a spiritual animal defaces the temple of the spirit . . . .

Rachel Dolezal, the Black White Woman

Malcolm Pollack offers some astute analysis:

Centuries ago Voltaire said that “to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” I now offer you Pollack’s Principle of Privilege:

To learn where privilege lies, simply see how people choose to identify themselves.

Once upon a time, people of mixed race did everything they could to “pass” as white. No longer. The mulatto Barack Obama ostentatiously identifies himself as black, while pallid Elizabeth Warren listed herself in the legal and academic community as a “Native American”.

Another sign of this inversion of privilege is that membership in groups considering themselves ‘oppressed’ is as tightly restricted as an exclusive country-club, and for the same reasons. No sooner had the news about Ms. Dolezal came out than she was denounced as a scurrilous pretender to victimhood. But people only defend what has value. In a right-side-up world, no sane person would ever bother fighting to keep others from seeking low status — but they will do whatever it takes to wall off their privileges against unqualified pretenders.

J. Christian Adams ends his piece on the Dolezal caper as follows:

Race is the fuel that runs the modern progressive agenda.  It’s 24-7 race.  Race is the weapon for the great transformation, for plunking Section 8 housing in wealthy residential areas, for undermining law enforcement and for transforming election laws.

It’s time that Americans start shaming those who would divide us.

Unfortunately, the race baiters who would divide us are shameless and thus impervious to shaming.  Nixon could be shamed. But Hillary Milhous Clinton?

Is Dolezal perhaps a trans-racial mulatto?  White in reality, black in her mind?  Or white in the actual world, but black in some merely possible world?  Another example might be George Zimmerman: Hispanic in reality, white in the febrile, race-obsessed, politically correct imagination of the NYT.

And let's not forget the case of Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, Cherokee maiden, diversity queen of the Harvard Lore Law School, and author of the cookbook Pow Wow Chow.

 

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sleep, Dreams, Insomnia

These tunes go out to Sally S. and Jean H.

Bobby Lewis, Tossin' and Turnin (1961). 

Santo and Johnny, Sleepwalk (1959).  Joe Satriani's cover blows the original and every other cover clean out of the water. Masterful guitar work. But wait a minute! What about old man Les Paul's version? 

Bobby Edwards, You're the Reason I Don't Sleep at Night.  A country crossover hit from 1961. 

Johnny Tillotson, Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On, 1957.

Leadbelly, Where Did You Sleep Last Night (1944). 

Here's hoping your Dream Lover doesn't leave you with Tears on Your Pillow.

Old Age and Study as Pleasure and Prophylactic

The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:

No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]

The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.  I must now quit the scriptorium and the 'sphere to sally forth in quest of vittles for the evening's repast.

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The Several-Storied Thomas Merton: Contemplative, Writer, Bohemian, Activist

An outstanding essay by Robert Royal on the many Mertons and their uneasy unity in one fleshly vehicle. There is of course Merton the Contemplative, the convert to Catholicism who, with the typical zeal of the convert, took it all the way to the austerities of Trappist monasticism, and that at a time (1941) when it was a more demanding and rigorous affair than today.  In serious tension with the Contemplative, the Scribbler:

It did not help that Merton the Contemplative confronted Merton the Writer. Even for a man not vowed to silence, Merton's several dozen books would have been an extraordinary output. But adding the journals -- four volumes have now appeared and the whole will run to seven volumes totaling about 3,500 large pages -- we begin to glimpse a serious conflict. Can a man committed to the wordless apophatic way and a forgetting of self be preoccupied with recording-and publishing-every thought and act?

I live that tension myself very morning.  For me it takes the form of a conflict between Athens and Benares, as I like to call it. Denk, denk, denk, scribble scribble, scribble from 2 AM on.  But then at 4 AM, no later! I must tear myself away from the discursive desk and mount the black mat of meditation, going into reverse, as it were, moving from disciplined thinking to disciplined non-thinking.

Also in tension with the Contemplative, the Bohemian:

There were also other Mertons, among the more troublesome: the Bohemian. This Merton felt a constant need to be an outsider. When Merton lived in the world, it took the usual forms. He had aspirations to being an experimental writer and poet (his Collected Poems, which show real innovation but great unevenness, run to almost 1,000 pages). He listened to jazz, dabbled in leftist politics, hit the bottle pretty hard, smoked heavily, had his share of girlfriends, and did a bit of drawing. All relatively harmless, but some incongruous holdover bedeviled Merton the monk. Should a Trappist be interested in Henry Miller? Or follow Joan Baez? Or Bob Dylan? As late as 1959 (after eighteen years in the abbey), Merton was reading books like James Thurber's The Years with Ross, an account of life under Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker. The New Yorker of the fifties was more staid than its current incarnation, and Merton often claimed the chic ads reminded him of everything in the world he had fled. But there was something odd in a monk even being interested in a magazine like the New Yorker.

Also battling with the Contemplative and Quietist (in a broad sense of this term), a fourth Merton, the Social Activist who aligned easily with the Writer and the Bohemian:

In the 1960s that world [the world outside the monastic enclosure, the 'real'  world in the parlance of the worldly] came to the fore in his work. The Contemplative who fled the world, however, was not always a good advisor for the Activist. The Contemplative had not fared well in European or American society, and had taken this as proof that those societies were not doing well either. This led him to a number of mistaken or exaggerated judgments. During the fifties he accepted a theory of the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. The Vietnam War abroad and the civil rights struggle at home, he came to believe, revealed a totalitarian impulse in America and he wrote of the possible emergence of a Nazi-like racial regime in the United States. (Emphasis added)

Royal has it exactly right.

The frequent tendency of Merton the Activist to overstatement is telling. Merton was by background mostly a European. And lacking any experience of the moral realism and decency of most Americans, he tended to judge all of American society through the lens of heated political controversies and the usual intellectual complaints about the bourgeoisie. His essays on civil rights, for example, are heartfelt and penetrating, but are not even a very good description of the predicament of the American liberal. The kind of moderation Merton showed in spiritual and moral questions rarely appears in his social commentary. He was angry about political issues in the early 1960s. (Emphasis added)

Spot on, once again.  Merton was in many ways a typical leftist intellectual alienated from and unappreciative of the country that allowed him to live his kind of life in his kind of way, as opposed to, say, being forced into a concentration camp and then put to death.  The Commies were not all that kind to religion and religionists.  You may recall that Edith Stein, another Catholic convert, became a Carmelite nun, but  was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz.  She was, by the way, a much better thinker than Merton. 

Merton the Man is the uneasy unity of these four personae.  His edifice is four-storied rather than seven, and I suppose 'story' could also be read as 'narrative' or 'script,' the Contemplative, the Writer, the Bohemian, and the Activist being as much multiply exemplifiable life-scripts  as  the competing personae of one particular man. 

Intimately interwoven with these four Mertons is someone we are forced to call Merton the Man. This Fifth Business never entirely settled down. The Contemplative, as may be seen in painful detail in the journals, is constantly vacillating, though in his public work Merton displays spiritual mastery. The Writer is gifted, but so much so that he has a tendency toward glibness. The Bohemian Merton got the others into any number of scrapes, and the Activist Merton often got carried away by currents in the sixties that-in retrospect-were not entirely fair to American society. Yet when all is said and done, Merton remains one of the great contemplative spirits of the century.

Merton died young in Bangkok in 1968, at the age of 53.  He was there for a conference.  Those of us who have attended and contributed to academic conferences know how dubious they are, and how destabilizing to a centered life.  I tend to think that it was the Writer, The Bohemian, and the Activist who, in the synergy of an unholy trinity, swamped the Contemplative and caused him to be lured away from his circumscribed but true monastic orbit. 

If he had lived on into the '70s would Merton have remained a monk?  Who knows?  So many men and women of the cloth abandoned their vocations and vows at that time.*  In his Asian journal he writes that he intended to return to Gethsemani.  It is nevertheless reasonable to speculate that he would not have lasted as a monk much longer.  The Zeitgeist would have got to him, and the synergy of the unholy trinity just mentioned.  Not to mention the transports of earthly love:

The mid-1960s brought him to the brink of disaster. Merton had a back problem requiring an operation at a Catholic hospital in Louisville. When he recovered from the anesthesia, he was anxious that he had missed daily communion. He began making notes on Meister Eckhart. His long- desired hermitage awaited him back at Gethsemani. To the eye, it was business as usual.

But a pretty young student nurse came in. A Catholic, she knew of Merton from a book her father had given her. Something erupted between them- even though she had a fiance in Chicago. On leaving the hospital, he wrote her about needing friendship. She wrote back, instructed by him to mark the envelope "conscience matter" (lest the superiors read the correspondence). Under "conscience matter," Merton sent a declaration of love. Thus began a series of deceptions, and Merton only narrowly avoided the shipwreck of his monastic vows because of the impossibility of the whole situation.

 ______________

*I think of the Jesuits and others who had jobs in philosophy because they were assigned to teach it at Catholic colleges back in the day when such colleges were more than nominally Catholic, and how they left their religious orders -- but kept their jobs!  Nice work if you can get it.

Quirky Spam Filter Warning

A commenter  asked me to check if a comment of his had been sent to the spam corral there to languish in cyber-obscurity for all eternity or until the demise of this site, whichever comes first.  Sure enough, there it was cheek-by-jowl with other good comments some of them from commenters whose other comments got through.  So I sent them to their rightful places.

I'll have to check the spam file more often.  I apologize for not doing so.  If you submit a good comment and it doesn't appear, you can always shoot me an e-mail about it.

More Liberal-Left Insanity

I have been saying it for years and every day supplies more evidence that I was and am right: there is nothing so ridiculous, devoid of common sense, bereft of wisdom, insane, or morally obnoxious that some contemporary liberal (leftist) won't jump to embrace. 

• University of California professors instructed not to say "America is the land of opportunity.'  A list of 'microaggressions' is supplied.
• Another 'liberal' assault on free speech:  Principal loses job for defending McKinney cop.
• Hillary's Unlawful Plan to Overrule Voter-ID Laws. 
• Student given zeros for refusing to condemn Christianity.
• This one takes the cake:  We should stop putting women in prison for anything.

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World + God = God: A Mathematical Analogy

 The Big Henry offers the following comment on my post, World + God = God?

"World + God = God" is (mathematically) analogous to "number + infinity = infinity", where "number" is finite. If God embodies all existence, then God is "existential infinity", and, therefore, no amount of existence can be added to or subtracted from God's totality.

 

The numerical concept of infinity does not comply with the rules of arithmetic addition or subtraction. Similarly, if God is presumed to be the embodiment of all existence, He does not comply with the rules of arithmetic addition or subtraction.

To supply an example that supports Big Henry's point, 8 + = .  (aleph-nought, aleph-zero, aleph-null) is the first transfinite cardinal.  A cardinal number answers the How many? question.  Thus the cardinal number of the set {Manny, Moe, Jack} is 3, and the cardinal number of {1, 3, 5, 7} is 4.  Cardinality is a measure of a set's size. What about the infinite set of natural numbers {0, 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . n, n + 1, . . .}?  How many?  .  And as was known long before Georg Cantor, it is possible to have two infinite sets, call them E and N such that E is a proper subset of N, but both E and N have the same size or cardinality.  Thus the evens are a proper subset of the naturals, but there are just as many of the former as there are of the latter, namely, .  How can this be?  Well, EACH element of the evens can be put into 1-1 correspondence with an element of the naturals.

 

So far the analogy holds.  But I think Big Henry has overlooked the transfinite ordinals.  The first transfinite ordinal, denoted , is the order type of the set of nonnegative integers.  (See here.)  You could think of as the successor of the natural numbers.  It is the first number following the entire infinite sequence of natural numbers. (Dauben, 97)  The successor of    is  + 1.  These two numbers are therefore different.  Here the analogy breaks down.  God + Socrates = God.  + 1 is not equal to .

 

Moreover, it is not true to say that "The numerical concept of infinity does not comply with the rules of arithmetic addition or subtraction."  This ignores the rules of transfinite cardinal arithmetic and those of transfinite ordinal arithmetic.  Big Henry seems to be operating with a pre-Cantorian notion of infinity.  Since Cantor we have an exact mathematics of infinity.

 

In any case,  I rather doubt that mathematical infinity provides a good analogy for the divine infinity.  God is not a set!

On 'Disenfranchise' and Hillary's Will to Power

According to the WSJ, Hillary Clinton thinks that Republican-controlled states have “systematically and deliberately” tried to “disempower and disenfranchise” voters. 

Here is another clear example of how leftists distort language for their political advantage.

To disenfranchise is to deprive of a right, in particular, the right to vote.  But only some people have the right to vote.  Felons and children do not have the right to vote, nor do non-citizens.  Not yet, anyway.  You do not have the right to vote in a certain geographical area simply because you are a sentient being residing in that area.  Otherwise, my cats would have the right to vote. Now a requirement that one prove that one has the right to vote is not to be confused with a denial of the right to vote.

My right to vote is one thing, my ability to prove I have the right another.  If, on a given occasion, I cannot prove that I am who I claim to be, then I won't be able to exercise my right to vote on that occasion; but that is not to say that I have been 'disenfranchised.'  For I haven't be deprived of my right to vote; I have merely been prevented from exercising my right on that occasion due to my inability do prove my identity.

But for a leftist, the end justifies the means; all's fair in love and war; and politics is war.  This explains why they have no scruples about hijacking the English language.

It is not that Hillary does not know what 'disenfranchise' means; it is that she will do anything to win, including destroying what ought to be a neutral framework within which to conduct our debates.

Language matters because he who controls the language controls the debate.

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A Leftish Defense of the Objectivity of Truth

Here in The Chronicle of Higher Education.  You know you are dealing with a lefty when he gets off the phrase, "climate-change denial."  Memo to Peter Lupu: I would like to hear your opinion of this article.  You might subject it to a Facebook fisking.  It should turn your crank, especially the benighted comments.  I read a few of them and they reinforce me in my view that, to put it with aphoristic exaggeration,

The only good combox is a closed combox.

 

Obama and Pigeon Chess

I've said it before: beware of unsourced 'quotations.' An über-conservative correspondent forwarded me the following:

"Negotiating with Obama is like playing chess with a pigeon." "The pigeon knocks over all the pieces, shits on the board and then struts around like it won the game."
~Vladimir Putin   

Now Obama is indeed a feckless fool, and a disaster for the country and the world.  It is a blot upon the American electorate that this mendacious incompetent was elected and then, horribile dictu, re-elected.  I hope we can all agree on that.  Mockery and derision are appropriate weapons to deploy against him and his supporters.  But we who stand up for truth ought to  be especially scrupulous about getting things right.  So I ran the 'quotation' past Snopes.com whereat it is plausibly maintained that Putin said no such thing.  There I snagged this nifty graphic:

                       

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World + God = God? The Aporetics of the God-World 'Relation'

Fr. Aidan Kimel in a recent comment:

I just started reading Philosophy for Understanding Theology by Diogenes Allen. The first chapter is devoted to the doctrine of creation.  These two sentences jumped out at me: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Do you agree? How would you unpack them?

These are hard sayings indeed.  Herewith, some rough notes on the aporetics of the situation.

By 'world' here is meant the totality of creatures, the totality of beings brought into existence by God from nothing.  Now if  God is a being among beings, it would make no sense at all to say that "The world plus God is not more than God alone."  For if we add the uncreated being (God) to the created beings, then we have more beings.  We have a totality T that is larger than T minus God.  If God is a being among beings, then there is a totality of beings that all exist in the same way and in the same sense, and this totality includes both God and creatures such that subtracting God or subtracting creatures would affect the 'cardinality' of this totality.

But if God is not a being among beings, but Being itself in its absolute fullness, as per the metaphysics of Exodus 3:14 (Ego sum qui sum, "I am who am") then there is no totality of beings all existing  in the same way having both God and creatures as members.  When we speak of God and creatures,

. . . we are dealing with two orders of being not to be added together or subtracted; they are, in all rigour, incommensurable, and that is also why they are compossible.  God added nothing to Himself by the creation of the world, nor would anything be taken away from Him by its annihilation -- events which would be of capital importance for the created things concerned, but null for Being Who would be in no wise concerned qua being. (Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Scribners 1936, p. 96.  Gilson's Gifford lectures, 1931-1932.)

Here, I am afraid, I will end up supplying some 'ammo' to Tuggy, Rhoda, and Anderson. For the Gilson passage teeters on the brink of incoherence.  We are told that there are two orders of being but that they are incommensurable. This can't be right, at least not without qualification.   If there are two orders of being, then they are commensurable in respect of being.  There has to be some sense in which God and Socrates both are.  Otherwise, God and creatures are totally disconnected, with the consequence that creatures fall away into nothingness.  For if God is Being itself, and there is no common measure, no commensurability whatsoever, between God and creatures, then creatures are nothing.  God is all in all. God alone is.  Gilson is well aware of the dialectical pressure in this monistic direction: "As soon as we identify God with Being it becomes clear that there is a sense in which God alone is." (65)  If we emphasize the plenitude and transcendence of God, then this sensible world of matter and change is "banished at one stroke into the penumbra of mere appearance, relegated to the inferior status of a quasi-unreality." (64)  But of course Christian metaphysics is not a strict monism; so a way must be found to assign the proper degree of reality to the plural world.

Here is the problem in a nutshell.  God cannot be a being among beings.  "But if God is Being, how can there be anything other than Himself?" (84)  We need to find a way to avoid both radical ontological pluralism and radical ontological monism.

It's a variation on the old problem of the One and the Many.

A. If Being itself alone is, then beings are not.  But then  the One lacks the many.  Not good: the manifold is evident to the senses and the intellect.

B. If beings alone are, then Being is not.  But then the many lacks the One.  Not good: the many is the many of the One.  A sheer manifold with no real unity would not a cosmos make.  The world is one, really one.

C. If Being and beings both are in the same way and and the same sense, then either Being is itself just another being among beings and we are back with radical pluralism, or Being alone is and we are back with radical monism.

Gilson's Thomist solution  invokes the notions of participation and analogy.  God is Being itself in its purity and plenitude and infinity.  Creatures exist by participation in the divine Being: they are limited participators in unlimited Being. So both God and creatures exist, but in different ways.  God exists simply and 'unparticipatedly.'  Creatures exist by participation.  God and creatures do not form a totality in which each member exists in the same way.  We can thus avoid each of (A), (B), and (C).

But the notion of participation is a difficult one as Gilson realizes.  It appears "repugnant to logical thought" (96):  ". . . every participation supposes that the participator  both is, and is not, that in which it participates." (96)  How so?

I exist, but contingently.  My Being is not my own, but received from another, from God, who is Being itself.  So my Being is God's Being.  But I am not God or anything else.  So I have my own Being that distinguishes me numerically from everything else.  So I am and am not that in which I participate.

Gilson does not show a convincing way around this contradiction.

The One of the many is not one of the many: as the source of the many, the One cannot be just one more member of the many.  Nor can the One of the many be the same as the many: it cannot divide without remainder into the many.  The One is transcendent of the many.  But while transcendent, it cannot be wholly other than the many. For, as Plotinus says, "It is by the One that all beings are beings."  The One, as the principle by which each member of the many exists, cannot be something indifferent to the many or external to the many, or other than the many, or merely related to the many. The One is immanent to the many.  The One is immanent to the many without being the same as the many.  The One is neither the same as the many nor other than the many.  The One is both transcendent of the many and immanent in the many. Theologically, God is said to be both transcendent and omnipresent.

What should we conclude from these affronts to the discursive intellect?  That there is just nothing to talk about here, or that there is but it is beyond the grasp of our paltry intellects?  If what I have written above is logical nonsense, yet it seems to be important, well-motivated, rigorously articulated nonsense.

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On Seinfeld

I confess to being a fan of this TV series many of whose episodes are now over 20 years old.  I have seen every episode numerous times.  I am not a student of the series as I am a student of the great Twilight Zone series, but then numerous episodes of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, belonging as it does to the  Golden Age of television, really are worthy of study.

What do I like about Seinfeld?  Perhaps it is the utterly zany quality of the Jewish humor.  Here is some of it in Yiddish (with subtitles).

And the political incorrectness I like.  But things have changed in America, so much so that Jerry Seinfeld nowadays refuses to perform before college audiences.

Indeed, it must be jarring for a boomer like Seinfeld, who went to college in the early 70s, when students were debating real issues freely, to confront today’s college campuses, where students often invent issues about which to be aggrieved, many times on behalf of other parties, and then have to find "free speech zones" in which to discuss them.

Consider the uproar over a statue of a man talking to a woman at a Texas college, which some decided was a depiction of "mansplaining," or a man patronizingly explaining something to a woman. Paul Tadlock, the 79-year-old sculptor, said the piece — done for 20 years before its offense was "discovered" — merely depicted his daughter, a student at the time, talking to a friend.

Then there were the students at UC-Berkeley, who called for "an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities," which sounds serious. Rodrigo Kazuo and Meg Perret felt aggrieved that a classical philosophy course had the audacity to cover actual thought leaders from classical philosophy, including Plato and Aristotle — because they all happened to be white men.

And earlier this year a male student at Portland, Oregon’s Reed College was removed from the discussion portion of his freshman humanities class for questioning the statistics on college sexual assaults and challenging whether or not there is such a thing as a "rape culture."

Why on earth would a comedian like Seinfeld, whose career has focused on humorously pointing out absurdities bring his act to such an utterly humorless and incorrigibly politically correct setting?

By the way, ever notice the similarity between these two guys?

Building the New Dark-Age Mind

While I am on the topic of doom, gloom, and decline, I may as well draw your attention to another fine jeremiad by Victor Davis Hanson.  Excerpt:

A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility. Forensic evidence, testimony, and logic have shown that “hands up, don’t shoot” is a complete myth. Michael Brown, fresh from committing a robbery, walking down the middle of the street, apparently under the influence, lunged at a policeman, grabbed for his weapon, fled, turned around and charged, before being shot and killed. He was not shot in the back. Nor did he halt and put his hands up, begging the policeman not to shoot him. Yet the president of the United States often invokes generically “Ferguson,” as if it were proof of police brutality. “Hands up, don’t shoot” is analogous to “the earth is flat” or “the sun revolves around the earth.”

“Mattress Girl” is a Columbia University co-ed who had post facto regrets about once sexually hooking up with a young male student. She then recalibrated their pairing as a forcible rape, and yet was not able to demonstrate to either the university or the police that her allegations were valid. Yet she became a cult-hero. The progressive world embraced her as a feminist icon, as she lugged around a mattress and made an explicit sex tape ^[2], to further a narrative that could not be proven true. If one assumed that 2,500 years ago Socrates destroyed for good the notion of moral relativism in his take down of the Sophists, think again. The subtext of Mattress Girl’s whine is that even if she is lying, her cause still furthers progressive agendas and thus is not really a lie after all.

Current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. Imagine if Mattress Girl’s male sexual partner had alleged that, in fact, he was coerced into sex, and then he carried his own 50-pound mattress around campus to draw public attention to her coercion. Certainly, he would be ignored or laughed at. Science, logic, probability, evidence — all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment — now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.

Eric Holder called the nation  “cowards” for not holding a national conversation on race. But Holder did not wish a freewheeling discussion about the break-up of the black family, the epidemic of violence and drug use, the cult of the macho male, the baleful role of anti-police rhetoric and rap music — in addition to current racism, a sluggish economy, and the wages of past apartheid.  Instead, the ground rules of racial discussion were again to be anti-Enlightenment to the core. One must not cite the extraordinary disproportionate crime rate of inner-city black males, or the lack of inspired black leadership at the national level. One most certainly does not suggest that other minority groups either do not promote leaders like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or do not seem to have a need for national collective spokespeople at all.

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The Decline of the Universities

Roger Kimball:

Really, is there any more pertinent sign for most colleges and universities?  Cigarettes manufacturers are required to ornament their wares with all manner of alarming advisories, why shouldn’t institutions of higher education face similar requirements?  After all, the noxious atmosphere they diffuse is perhaps even more dangerous than cigarette smoke, which harms only the body.  A college education threatens to eat away at a student’s soul and capacity for a healthy, robust, adult emotional life.  “You Are Leaving the American Sector.”  For many, perhaps most colleges and universities today, that about sums it up.

 

Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options

Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.  Nonetheless certain parallels there are.  A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.  What they set themselves to achieve instead –- often not recognizing fully what they were doing –- was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.  If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.  What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.  And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another -- doubtless very different -- St. Benedict. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 244-245.)

This was written 34 years ago, 20 years before 9/11.  It is the charter for Rod Dreher's recent talk of a Benedict Option.  Excerpts from an eponymous article of his:

Why are medieval monks relevant to our time? Because, says the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, they show that it is possible to construct “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” in a Dark Age—including, perhaps, an age like our own.

For MacIntyre, we too are living through a Fall of Rome-like catastrophe, one that is concealed by our liberty and prosperity. In his influential 1981 book After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment’s failure to replace an expiring Christianity caused Western civilization to lose its moral coherence. Like the early medievals, we too have been cut off from our roots, and a shadow of cultural amnesia is falling across the land.

The Great Forgetting is taking a particular toll on American Christianity, which is losing its young in dramatic numbers. Those who remain within churches often succumb to a potent form of feel-good relativism that sociologists have called “moralistic therapeutic deism,” which is dissolving historic Christian moral and theological orthodoxy.

A recent Pew survey found that Jews in America are in an even more advanced state of assimilation to secular modernity. The only Jews successfully resisting are the Orthodox, many of whom live in communities meaningfully separate and by traditions distinct from the world.

Is there a lesson here for Christians? Should they take what might be called the “Benedict Option”: communal withdrawal from the mainstream, for the sake of sheltering one’s faith and family from corrosive modernity and cultivating a more traditional way of life?

The broader topic here is that of voluntary withdrawal from a morally corrupt society and its morally corrupt institutions.  There are various options. One could join a monastic order and live in community.  This is the monastic cenobitic option.  There is also the monastic eremitic option: one lives as a hermit within a religious context subject to its rules and having taken vows. Both the cenobitic and the eremitic options can be made less rigorous in various ways.  One could attach oneself as an oblate to a monastery visiting it from time to time and participating in its  communal prayers and other activities (Ora, labora, et lectio are the three 'legs' of the Benedictine 'stool.').  This could also be done in an eremitic way.  (From the Greek eremos, desert.)

Spiritual withdrawal is of course greatly aided by physical withdrawal from cities into deserts and other remote locales; but one could voluntarily withdraw from a morally corrupt society while living in the midst of it in, say, Manhattan.  (I cannot, however, advise setting up as the resident monk in a bordello in Pahrump, Nevada.)

What of the Maverick Option?  As  I have been living it since 1991 it does not involve drastic physical isolation: I live on the edge of a major metropolitan area which is also the edge of a rugged wilderness area.  Ready access to raw nature (as opposed to, say, Manhattan's Central Park) may not be absolutely essential for spiritual development, but it is extremely conducive to it (in tandem with other things of course).  Nature, experienced alone, removes one from the levelling effects of the social.  (Henry David Thoreau: "I have no walks to throw away on company."  That sounds misanthropic and perhaps from Henry David's mouth it was; but it can be given a positive reading.)  It would be the height of folly to suppose that man's sociality is wholly negative; but its corrupting side cannot be denied.  Encounter with nature in solitude pulls one out of one's social comfort zone in such a way that the ultimate questions obtrude themselves with full force.  In society, they can strike one like jokes from a Woody Allen movie; in solitude, in the desert, they are serious.  Nature is not God; but the solitary encounter with it, by breaking the spell of the social, can orient us toward Nature's God. 

I will have more to say of the Maverick Option, its nature and pitfalls, in a later post.

There is also the Jeremiah Option:

Where Jeremiah counsels engagement without assimilation, Benedict represents the possibility of withdrawal. The former goal is to be achieved by the pursuit of ordinary life: the establishment of homes, the foundation of families, all amid the wider culture. The latter is to be achieved by the establishment of special communities governed by a heightened standard of holiness.

Although it can be interpreted as a prophecy of doom, the Jeremiah Option is fundamentally optimistic. It suggests that the captives can and should lead fulfilling lives even in exile. The Benedict Option is more pessimistic. It suggests that mainstream society is basically intolerable, and that those who yearn for decent lives should have as little to do with it as possible. MacIntyre is careful to point out that the new St. Benedict would have to be very different from the original and might not demand rigorous separation. Even so, his outlook remains bleak.

We need to catalog and examine all the options.  A man once said that the unexamined life is not worth living.  He was the wisest of mortals.

A Checkered Past

Having recently compared two lunch companions to each other in point of having checkered pasts, but aware of recent shifts in the meaning of the phrase, and not wishing to give offense, I quizzed one of them on the meaning of 'has a checkered past' as applied to a woman and to a man. He replied that it suggests that the woman was a prostitute and the man a crook.

That answer is not wrong and accords with current usage. If you listen carefully to how 'checkered past,' 'checkered career,' and similar expressions are now used, I think you will find that they are often used with a pejorative connotation.   But the phrase originally had no such negative connotation as far as I can tell. My old Webster's defines checker, v.t., as to vary with contrasting elements or situations and gives the example of a checkered career as a racer. Nothing pejorative about that: the racer's career had its ups and downs. Or one might describe a man whose 20s were spent in the Jesuits, his 30s teaching philosophy, his 40s as a soldier of fortune, and his 50's as an exterminator of insects as having had a checkered past. Nothing pejorative about that either.

Only a liberal or an idiot thinks that change qua change is good.  And so I hold to the old way of using 'checkered past.'  But I can do so only if my language mates let me.  Like it or not, meaning is tied to use.  If the phrase comes to be used in an exclusively pejorative way, then I must conform to the change if I want to communicate with the vulgar as opposed to display my erudition among the learned.

It is too bad that we are at the mercy of the masses in so many things, though not in all things. I have no objection to the phrase 'male chauvinism.'  But if enough come to substitute 'chauvinism' for it, then the former has been rendered redundant and the latter destroyed.  And that would be a change for the worse.  I suppose this makes me a limited prescriptivist in matters linguistic.

For more on this particular example, see Chauvinism and Male Chauvinism.

Addendum.  And then there's 'hook up.'  To members of my generation it does not imply an exchange of bodily fluids when used in a sentence like 'I hooked up with Sally again after years and years.'  Peter Geach, an English philosopher of my father's generation, in one of his books uses 'make love'  to mean something like 'woo' or 'make a romantic approach,' a quaint usage that had fallen into desuetude by the time my generation came of age, a usage  to be replaced in the main by  one rather more raw and 'hydraulic.'

Realism, Idealism, and Classical Theism

Dr. James Barham writes,

 

I have just finished reading your most instructive and thought-provoking book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

 

On p. 257, you write: "(We will have to consider whether our view also undercuts realism.)" However, I did not see any discussion of this issue in the rest of the book.

 

On its face, the Paradigm Theory of Existence (PTE) seems to be close to Berkeley's position---the being of existents is grounded in the voluntary action/perception of a transcendent Mind (God/Paradigm Existent)---and yet if I understand you correctly, you wish to maintain that your theory is a version of "realism."

 

I realize, of course, that these are crude characterizations, and that the problem of what constitutes "realism" is a difficult one. Still, there is an apparent tension in your book---indicated by the passage I quoted above, which constitutes an unredeemed promissory note.

 

So, I was wondering:

 

1. What I am missing?;

 

2. Have you published anything else directly addressing how the PTE manages to avoid the charge of "idealism"?

 

Any help you could give me in understanding your thoughts about the PTE and "realism" would be most appreciated.

 

These questions are reasonable ones and one of them is easy to answer: No, I haven't published anything about PTE and idealism.   I probably should.  What follows are some rough thoughts.

 

1. Is the position of PTE realistic or idealistic? The short answer is that it is realistic with respect to most of the objects of finite minds, but idealistic with respect to all of the objects of Infinite Mind. 

 

First something in defense of the second conjunct of my short answer.

 

If God creates ex nihilo, and everything concrete other than God is created by God, and God is a pure spirit, then one type of metaphysical realism can be excluded at the outset, namely, a realism that asserts that there are radically transcendent uncreated concrete things in themselves.  'Radically transcendent' means 'transcendent of any mind, finite or infinite.' Radically transcendent items exist and have most of their properties independently of any mind.  Call this realism-1.  No classical theist could be a realist-1.  Corresponding to realism-1, as its opposite, is idealism-1.  This is the view that everything other than God is created ex nihilo by God, who is a pure spirit, and who therefore creates in a purely spiritual way.  (To simplify the discussion, let us leave to one side the problem of so-called 'abstract objects.')  It seems to me, therefore, that there is a very clear sense in which classical theism is a type of idealism.   For on classical theism God brings into existence and keeps in existence every concretum other than himself and he does so by his  purely mental/spiritual activity.  We could call this type of idealism onto-theological absolute idealism. This is not to say that the entire physical cosmos is a content of the divine mind; it is rather an accusative or intentional object of the divine mind.  Though not radically transcendent, it is a transcendence-in-immanence, to borrow some Husserlian phraseology.  So if the universe is expanding, that is not to say that the divine mind or any part thereof is expanding.  If an intentional object has a property P it does not follow that a mind trained upon this object, or an act of this mind or a content in this mind has P.  Perceiving a blue coffee cup, I have as intentional object something blue; but my mind is not blue, nor is the perceiving blue, nor any mental content.  If I perceive or imagine or in any way think of an extended sticky surface, neither my mind nor any part of it becomes extended or sticky.  Same with God.  He retains his difference from the physical cosmos even while said cosmos is nothing more than his merely intentional object incapable of existing on its own.

 

Actually, what I just wrote is only an approximation to what I really want to say.  For just as God is sui generis, I think the relation between God and the world is sui generis, and as such not an instance of the intentional relation with which we are familiar in our own mental lives.  The former is only analogous to the latter.  If one takes the divine transcendence seriously, then God cannot be a being among beings; equally, God's relation to the world cannot be a relation among relations.  If we achieve any understanding in these lofty precincts, it is not the sort of understanding one achieves by subsuming a new case under an old pattern; God does not fit any pre-existing pattern, nor does his 'relation' to the world fit any pre-existing pattern.  If we achieve any understanding here it will be via various groping analogies.  These analogies can only take us so far.  In the end we must confess the infirmity of finite reason in respect of the Absolute that is the Paradigm Existent.

 

There is also the well known problem that the intentional 'relation' is not, strictly speaking, a relation.  It is at best analogous to a relation.  So it looks as if we have a double analogy going here.  The God-world relation is analogous to something analogous to a relation in the strict sense.  Let me explain.

 

If x stands in relation R to y, then both x, y exist.  But x can stand in the intentional 'relation' to y even if y does not exist in reality.  It is a plain fact that we sometimes have very definite thoughts about objects that do not exist, the planet Vulcan, for example.  What about the creating/sustaining 'relation'? The holding of this 'relation' as between God and Socrates cannot presuppose the existence in reality of both relata.  It presupposes the existence of God no doubt, but if it presupposed the existence of Socrates then there would be no need for the creating/sustaining ex nihilo of Socrates.  Creating is a producing, a causing to exist, and indeed moment by moment.

 

For this reason, creation/sustaining cannot be a relation, strictly speaking.  It follows that the createdness of a creature cannot be a relational property, strictly speaking.   Now the createdness of a creature is its existence or Being.  So the existence of a creature cannot be a relational property thereof; but it is like a relational property thereof.

 

What I have done so far is argue that classical theism is a form of idealism, a form of idealism that is the opposite of an extreme from of metaphysical realism, the form I referred to as 'realism-1.'  If you say that no one has ever held such a form of realism, I will point to Ayn Rand. 

 

2. According to the first conjunct of my short answer, realism holds with respect to some of the objects of finite minds.  Not for purely intentional objects, of course, but for things like trees and mountains and cats and chairs.  They exist and have most of their properties independently of the mental activity of finite minds such as ours.

 

3.  Kant held that empirical realism and transcendental idealism are logically compatible and he subscribed to both.  Now the idealism I urge is not a mere transcendental idealism, but a full-throated onto-theological absolute idealism; but it too is compatible, as far as I can see, with the empirical reality of most of the objects of ectypal intellects such as ours.  The divine spontaneity makes them exist and renders them available to the receptivity of ectypal intellects.

 

Sorry, Manny!

 

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Being Itself: Continuing the Discussion with Dale Tuggy

Maimonides on Existence as an Accident and on Divine Simplicity

Divine Simplicity and God's Contingent Knowledge: An Aporetic Tetrad

What We Talk About When We Talk About God

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Brian Wilson

The Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy opened yesterday and I saw it.  I grew up in Southern California in the '60s with all those songs, and so I had to see it.  I'm glad I did.  Trailer here.  But not for the music of which there is little, but for the biography and backstory.  The two heroes of the story are Brian Wilson and the woman who saved him, Melinda Ledbetter.  The two villains are the abusive father, Murry Wilson, and the crazy shrink, Dr. Landy.  It is probably true, though, that were it not for the hard-charging Murry there would have been no Beach Boys.  He pushed them and negotiated their contract with Capitol Records.

Please Let Me Wonder

God Only Knows

Good Vibrations

California Girls

Then I Kissed Her. The BBs' answer to The Crystals, Then He Kissed Me.  Doesn't come close, but in general Brian Wilson and Phil Spector are in the same league.

Don't Worry Baby

Help Me Rhonda

Wouldn't It Be Nice

Surf's Up (Punch Bros. cover.)

Heroes and Villains

Love and Mercy

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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms? Reply to a Comment

Dr. James Anderson writes,

I appreciated your recent post with the above title. However, I note that you didn't connect your comments there with your ongoing discussion with Dale Tuggy. From point 3 of your post:

Ryan seems to think that to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in addition to the objects we normally take to exist. But this is not what a sophisticated theist maintains.

 

And:

People like Ryan, Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. [...] (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings.

Yet Tuggy apparently affirms [the negation of] (iii) and thus agrees with Ryan et al. on that point at least. So should we conclude that Tuggy isn't really a theist? Or that he isn't a sophisticated theist? Neither seems fair! But then if Tuggy (and his fellow non-classical theists) can be appropriately categorized as theists, it seems your analysis of "theist-atheist debates" needs some qualification.

Just some more grist for the mill!

REPLY

Thanks, James.  The entry in question is an old post from six or seven years ago. That explains the lack of reference to my present conversation with Dale Tuggy.  So let me now bring Tuggy into the picture.

Let us first note that 'God is a being among beings' does not imply the existence of God.  It is a claim about how God exists should he exist.  It is like the claim 'Chairs are not (subjective) concepts.'  That is true whether or not there are any chairs.  It says something about how chairs exist should any exist, namely, extramentally.  The same goes for 'God is not a concept,' which is true whether or not God exists. 

A second point to note is that  'God is a being among beings' is not equivalent to 'God is a physical thing among physical things.'  Maybe Yuri Gagarin believed in that equivalence, and maybe Dawkins does, but surely it would be uncharitable in the extreme to impute such a belief to Russell despite his comparison of God to a teapot.  That wasn't the point of the comparison.  And of course Tuggy does not hold to the equivalence.

Is Dale a sophisticated theist?  Well, he is sophisticated, holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University, and he is a theist.  So he is a sophisticated theist. But it doesn't follow that his theism is sophisticated.  I say it isn't.  A sophisticated X-ist can hold to an unsophisticated X-ism.

God, if he exists, is not just one more thing that exists having properties that distinguish him from everything else that exists.  God is the ultimate source, the absolute ground, of the existence, properties, intelligibility, and value  of everything distinct from himself.  As such, he cannot be just one more thing that exists, one more item in the ontological inventory.  Why not?  Here is one argument.

God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, everything (or at least every contingent thing) distinct from himself.  So everything distinct from God depends on God for its existence, while God does not depend on anything for his existence.  The Being of creatures is their Being-created-by-God while the Being of God is not his Being-created-by-God.  Therefore, there are two very different modes of Being in play here, one pertaining to God, the other to creatures.  Since God and creatures exist in different ways (modes), God is not a being among beings.  For when we say that God is a being among beings part of what we mean is that God exists or is in the very same way that everything else is or exists.

Is this not a good argument?  It is not a compelling argument, but then no argument for any substantive claim in philosophy is compelling.

Rather than say more in defense of the above sketch of an argument, I will enable Comments and let my esteemed and astute readers poke holes in the argument if they can.

Islamic Supremacism as Source of Muslim 'Grievances'

Here.

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

A correspondent writes:

British (Catholic) historian Paul Johnson in his wonderful Modern Times attributes relativism's rise to Einstein! So does Einstein's latest biographer.

There are two questions that must be distinguished. The first is whether Einstein's Theory of Relativity entails either moral or cognitive (alethic) relativism. The second question is whether Einstein's revolutionary contributions to physics, via their misinterpretation by journalists and other shallow people (am I being unfair?), contributed to an atmosphere in which people would be more likely to embrace moral and cognitive relativism. The first question belongs to the philosophy of science, the second to the sociology of belief. The questions are plainly distinct.

The answer to the first question is a resounding No. Since physics has nothing to do with moral questions — which is not to say that moral questions do not arise in the technological application of physical knowledge or in its dissemination or in the construction of experiments, etc. — it is quite clear that neither STR nor GTR nor any physical theory has any logical consequences in respect of meta-ethical doctrines such as moral relativism. And as for cognitive or alethic relativism, far from its being entailed by the Theory of Relativity, I should think that the latter presupposes the absoluteness of truth.

Take the Galilean principle of the additivity of velocities. Suppose I'm on a train moving with velocity v1. I fire my gun in the direction of the train's travel.  The projectile's muzzle velocity is v2.   The projectile's total velocity is v1 + v2. But STR implies that the additivity of velocities breaks down at relativistic speeds, speeds approaching the speed of light. Now the proposition that the principle of the additivity of velocities fails at relativistic speeds is not merely true relative to STR, but true absolutely. And the same goes for any number of other propositions of STR and GTR such as the one bearing upon the conversion of mass and energy, E=mc^2, or that the speed of light remains a constant 186, 282 mi/sec. Or consider the proposition that motion and rest are relative to reference-frames. That proposition's truth is not relative to any reference-frame or to any conceptual framework either.

In short, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, far from entailing relativism about truth, presupposes, and thus entails the absoluteness of truth.   But I don't need to make that strong a claim to refute the thesis that the Theory of Relativity entails the relativity of truth.  It suffices to point out that the theory is logically consistent with the absoluteness of truth.

As for the sociological question, I suppose one would have to grant that misinterpretations and shallow expositions of the Theory of Relativity did contribute to the spread of moral and cognitive relativism. But of course that is not the responsibility of Einstein or modern physics but the responsibility of those shallow-pates we call journalists. (Am I being unfair a second time?)

Grievance

A life well-lived cannot have grievance as its organizing principle.

The Age of Feeling or the Age of Pussies?

Both.  Here is a liberal professor, writing (not very well) under a pseudonym (of course!) who says he or she is terrified of his or her liberal students. But he or she does make a good point when he or she points to the consumerist mentality that prevails among students.   That's been in place for a long time now and is one of the reasons I gave up a tenured position in 1991.

Charles Cooke comments on the above piece here.

One of the phrases one increasingly hears these days is 'comfort zone.'  I humbly suggest that if you are not prepared to leave said zone on a regular basis you will never really live. 

One needs stress to grow, mentally, physically, and in every way.  Stress is not to be had in a 'safe space.' 

Glaubt es mir! – das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heißt: gefährlich leben! For believe me! — the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, sec. 283, tr. Walter Kaufmann)

There is a website by the name of The Philosophers' Cocoon.  You read that right: cocoon.  On the masthead: "A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers."

Years ago I answered a reader's e-mail on line, providing his full name.  The topic was technical and non-political.  A while back he contacted me because he wanted his name removed from an arcane post buried deep in my archives.  I did so.  But then he started worrying about his name's occurrence in the ComBox . . . . 

Now I sympathize with the young and unestablished.  We live in nasty, illiberal times.  I've made mine, so it requires no great courage to speak the truth under my real name. But it requires some, and more need to 'man up' and 'woman up' to confront the fascist scum on the Left.  There is such a thing as civil courage without the exercise of which by large numbers we are done for as a free republic.  Click on the link for another example of a reader who requested that his name be removed from my weblog.

And if you are unfamiliar with the disgusting Laura Kipnis affair, bang on this.  Dreher's piece ends ominously.

 

UPDATE: A nationally known conservative college professor, a man who is well into his career, and protected by tenure, just wrote to say “it’s worse than you think,” then sent evidence. He said this has definitely had a chilling effect on the lectures he gives, for fear of triggering a Little Empress or Emperor, who will set out to ruin his academic life. I’m not going to quote his post, because I want to protect him and his position on his campus. But he adds:

 

If I had to do it over again, I would have never, ever entered academia. I cringe when I think of the few young, ambitious, and bright conservatives who are entering the academy now who have no idea of how even uttering their viewpoints will be turned against them to destroy them.

 

A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. - See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf

A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. - See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf

A safe and supportive forum for early-career philosophers. - See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/#sthash.d68YIgKt.dpuf

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The Decline of the Culture of Free Discussion and Debate

Professor of Government Charles Kesler in the Spring 2015 Claremont Review of Books laments that "The culture of free discussion and debate is declining, and with it liberty, on and off the campus."  He is right to be offended by the new culture of 'trigger warnings' and 'microaggressions,' but I wonder if his analysis is quite right.

What’s behind the decline? There are many factors, but among the most influential is that dead-end of modern philosophy called postmodernism, which has had two baneful effects. By teaching that reason is impotent—that it can’t arrive at any objective knowledge of truth, beauty, and justice because there is nothing “out there” to be known—postmodernism turns the university into an arena for will to power. All values are relative, so there is no point in discussing whether the most powerful values are true, just, or good. The crucial thing is that they are the most powerful, and can be played as trumps: do not offend me, or you will be in trouble. If we say it’s racist, then it’s racist. Don’t waste our time trying to ask, But what is racism?

Second, postmodernism devotes itself to what Richard Rorty called “language games.” For professors, especially, this is the most exquisite form of will to power, “a royal road to social change,” as Todd Gitlin (the rare lefty professor at Columbia who defends free speech) observes. So freshman girls became “women,” slaves turned into “enslaved persons,” “marriage” had to be opened to “same-sex” spouses, and so forth. Naming or renaming bespeaks power, and for decades we have seen this power rippling through American society. Now even sexual assault and rape are whatever the dogmatic leftists on and off campus say they are.

No truth, then no way things are; power decides

Kesler's analysis is largely correct, but it could use a bit of nuancing and as I like to say exfoliation (unwrapping).  First of all, if there is no truth, then there is nothing to be known.  And if there is neither knowledge nor truth, then there is no one 'way things are.'  There is no cosmos in the Greek sense.  Nothing (e.g., marriage) has a nature or essence.  That paves the way for the Nietzschean view that, at ontological bottom, "The world is the Will to Power and nothing besides!"  We too, as parts of the world, are then nothing more than competing centers of power-acquisition and power-maintenance.  Power rules! 

This is incoherent of course, but it won't stop it from being believed by leftists.  It should be obvious that logical consistency cannot be a value for someone for whom truth is not a value.  This is because logical consistency is defined in terms of truth: a set of propositions is consistent if and only if its members can all be true, and inconsistent otherwise.

Don't confuse the epistemological and the ontological

To think clearly about this, however, one must not confuse the epistemological and the ontological.  If Nietzsche is right in his ontological claim, and there is no determinate and knowable reality, then there is nothing for us, or anyone, to know.  But if we are incapable of knowing anything, or limited in what we can know, it does not follow that there is no determinate and knowable reality.  Of course, we are capable of knowing some things, and not just such 'Cartesian' deliverances as that I seem to see a coyote now; we know that there are coyotes and that we sometimes see them and that they will eat damn near anything, etc.  (These are evident truths, albeit not self-evident in the manner of a 'Cartesian' deliverance.)  Although we know some things, we are fallible and reason in us is weak and limited.  We make mistakes, become confused, and to make it worse our cognitive faculties are regularly suborned by base desires, wishful thinking, and what-not.

Fallibilism and objectivism

It is important not to confuse the question of the fallibility of our cognitive faculties, including reason in us, with the question whether there is truth.  A fallibilist is not a truth-denier.  One can be -- it is logically consistent to be -- both a fallibilist and an upholder of (objective) truth.  What's more, one ought to be both a fallibilist about some (not all) classes of propositions, and an upholder of the existence of (objective) truth. Indeed, if one is a fallibilist, one who admits that we  sometimes go wrong in matters of knowledge and belief, then then one must also admit that we sometimes go right, which is to say that fallibilism presupposes the objectivity of truth.

Just as a fallibilist is not a truth-denier, a truth-affirmer is not an infallibilist or 'dogmatist' in one sense of this word.  To maintain that there is objective truth is not to maintain that one is in possession of it.  One of the sources of the view that truth is subjective or relative is aversion to dogmatic people and dogmatic claims. 

One cannot be a liberal (in the good old sense!) without being tolerant, and thus a fallibilist, and if the latter, then an absolutist about truth, and hence not a PC-whipped leftist!

And now we notice a very interesting and important point.  To be a liberal in the old sense (a paleo-liberal) is, first and foremost, to value toleration.  Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism.  (Morris Raphael Cohen)  But why should we be tolerant of (some of) the beliefs and (some of) the behaviors of others?  Because we cannot responsibly claim to know, with respect to certain topics, what is true and what ought to be done/left undone.   Liberalism (in the good old sense!) requires toleration, and toleration requires fallibilism.  But if we can go wrong, we can go right, and so fallibilism presupposes and thus entails the existence of objective truth.  A good old liberal must be an absolutist about truth and hence cannot be a PC-whipped lefty.

Examples.  Why tolerate atheists?  Because we don't know that God exists.  Why tolerate theists?  Because we don't know that God does not exist.  And so on through the entire range of Big Questions. But toleration has limits.  Should we tolerate Muslim fanatics such as the Taliban or ISIS terrorists?  Of course not.  For they reject the very principle of toleration.  That's an easy case. More difficult:  should we tolerate public Holocaust denial via speeches and publications?  Why should we?  Why should we tolerate people who lie, blatantly, about matters of known fact and in so doing contribute to a climate in which Jews are more likely to be oppressed and murdered?  Isn't the whole purpose of free speech to help us discover and disseminate the truth?  How can the right to free speech be twisted into a right to lie?  But there is a counter-argument to this, which is why this is not an easy case. I haven't the space to make the case.

Getting back to the radical Muslims who reject the very principle of toleration, they have a reason to reject it: they think they know the answers to the Big Questions that we in the West usually have the intellectual honesty to admit we do not know the answers to.  Suppose Islam, or their interpretation thereof, really does provide all the correct answers to the Big Questions.  They would then  be justified in imposing their doctrine and way of life on us, and for our own eternal good.  But they are epistemological primitives who are unaware of their own fallibility and the fallibility of their prophet and their Book and all the rest.  The dogmatic and fanatical tendencies of religion in the West were chastened by the Greek philosophers and later by the philosophers of the Enlightenment.  First Athens took Jerusalem to task, and then Koenigsberg did the same.  Unfortunately, there has never been anything like an Enlightenment in the Islamic world; hence they know no check on their dogmatism and fanaticism.

Defending the university against leftists and Islamists

The university rests on two main pillars.  One has inscribed on it these propositions: There is truth; we can know some of it; knowing truth contributes to human flourishing and is thus a value.  The other pillar bears witness to the truth that we are fallible in our judgements.  Two pillars, then: Absolute truth and Fallibilism.  No liberal (good sense!) education without both.

The commitment to the existence of absolute truth is common to both pillars, and it is this common commitment that is attacked by both leftists and Islamists.  It is clear how leftists attack it by trying to eliminate truth in favor of power.  That this eliminativism is utterly incoherent and self-refuting doesn't bother these power freaks because they do not believe in or value truth, which is implied by any commitment to logical consistency, as argued above. (Of course, some are just unaware that they are inconsistent, and others are just evil.)

But how is it that Islamists attack objective truth? Aren't they theists? Don't they believe in an absolute source and ground of being and truth?  Yes indeed.  But their God is unlimited Power.  Their God is all-powerful to the max: there are no truths of logic, nor any necessary truths, that limit his power.  The Muslim God is pure, omnipotent will.  (See Pope Benedict's Regensurg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity.)

The subterranean link

Here is perhaps the deepest connection between the decidedly strange bedfellows, leftism and Islamism: both deny the absoluteness of truth and both make it subservient to power.

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Nietzsche, Truth, and Power

Nietzsche is culturally important, but philosophically dubious in the extreme. Some of our current cultural woes can be ascribed to the influence of his ideas. Suppose we take a look at Will to Power #534:

Das Kriterium der Wahrheit liegt in der Steigerung des Machtgefühls.

The criterion of truth resides in the heightening of the feeling of power.

A criterion of X is (i) a property or feature that all and only Xs possess which (ii) allows us to identify, detect, pick out, Xs. 'Criterion' is a term of epistemology. So one could read Nietzsche as saying that the test whereby we know that a belief is true is that it increases or enhances the feeling of power of the person who holds the belief. To employ some politically correct jargon that arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche, if a belief is 'empowering,' then it is true; and if a belief is true, then it is 'empowering.'

A second way to read the Nietzschean dictum is to take it not as offering a criterion (in the epistemological sense) of truth, but as stating what the nature of truth is. Accordingly, truth just is the property of increasing the feeling of power: to say that a belief (statement, representation, etc.) is true is just to say that it increases the feeling of power in the one who holds the belief.

Now suppose we ask a simple question. Is it true that the criterion of truth is the heightening of the feeling of power? If it is, then every truth empowers, and every belief that empowers is true. But surely not every truth empowers. You find out that you have some medical condition, hypertension, say. The truth that you have hypertension does not increase your sense of power; if anything it diminishes it. Or the report comes in that you have pancreatic cancer and will be dead in six months. I should think such news would have a depressing effect on one's vitality. And yet it is true. So some truths do not enhance the feeling of power. Nor do they enhance one's power if you care to distinguish power from the feeling of power.

On the other hand, there are empowering beliefs that are not true. Hitler's belief in his invincibility was surely empowering, but it was false as events showed. Believing that he was invincible, he undertook to do what Napoleon failed to do, subjugate the Russians. Like Napoleon, he failed, and it was all down hill from there.

One can multiply such counterexamples ad libitum. Of course, in constructing such counterexamples, I am relying on the ordinary notion of truth, as old as Aristotle, that truth implies correspondence with reality, correspondence with the way things are independently of our beliefs, desires, and feelings.

Do I beg the question against Nietzsche by recurring to the old understanding of truth? If I do, then so does Nietzsche. For what is he doing with his dictum if not telling us how it is with truth? Is he not purporting to tell us the truth (in the old sense) about truth?

What Nietzsche wants to say is that there is no truth 'in itself'; there are only various interpretations from the varying perspectives of power-hungry individuals, interpretations that serve to enhance the power of these individuals. At bottom, the world is a vast constellation of ever-changing power-centers vying with each other for dominance, and what a particular power-center calls 'true' are merely those interpretations that enhance and preserve its power.  For the essence of the world is not reason or order, but blind will, will to power.

But if that is the way it is, then there is an absolute truth after all. Nietzsche never extricates himself from this contradiction. And where he fails, his followers do not succeed.  We are now, as a culture, living and dying in the shadow of this contradiction, reaping the consequences of the death of God and the death of truth.

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Diplomad on Drawing Mohammed

Here:

My view on holding "Draw Mohammed" contests?

Sure. Why not?

If you can have a Broadway play that mocks Mormons, an "artistic" exhibition called "Piss Christ," and any number of other art, including paintings, literature, and movies criticizing or mocking Judeo-Christian symbols and values (Monty Python, anybody?) why should Muslims be exempt from criticism or mockery? Is Islam not a religion like the others as its followers claim? If we can't have depictions of Mohammed, do we need to destroy ancient Mughal art which, of course, has depictions of Mohammed? ISIS would respond, yes, but this is America; ISIS doesn't rule here, not yet anyways.

I thought the organizers of the Phoenix contest hit exactly the right themes. As I have written before,

For liberals, the second amendment is a big embarrassment. They cannot accept that private ownership of firearms is in there with the rights to assembly, speech, religion, etc., as a crucial limit on the power of the government over the individual.

The first and second amendments to the Constitution are the crown jewels of the Bill of Rights. The organizers of the Phoenix contest were spot on linking the two, and highlighting the role of the second amendment in protecting all our freedoms.

I look forward to more "Draw Mohammed" events.

A big well done to the folks in Phoenix.

My view in a few words.  Other things being equal, one should not mock, deride, or engage in any sort of unprovoked verbal or pictorial assault on people or the beliefs they cherish.  So if Muslims were as benign as Christians or Buddhists, I would object on moral grounds to the depiction and mockery of the man Muslims call the Prophet despite the legality of so doing.  But things are not equal.  Radical Islam is the main threat to civilized values in the world today.  Deny that, and you are delusional as Sam Harris says.  The radicals are testing us and provoking us.  We must respond with mockery and derision at a bare minimum.  The 'Use it or lose it' principle applies not only to one's body, but to one's rights as well.  For the defense of liberty, the enemies of rights must be in our sights, figuratively at least, and this includes radical Islam's leftist enablers. 

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Does the Atheist Deny What the Theist Affirms?

It seems to me that there is a sort of 'disconnect' in theist-atheist debates. It is as if the parties to the dispute are not talking about the same thing. Jim Ryan writes,

The reason I'm an atheist is straightforward. The proposition that there is a god is as unlikely as ghosts, Martians amongst us, and reincarnation. There isn't the slightest evidence for these hypotheses which fly in the face of so much else that we know to be true. So I believe all of them to be false.

This is a fairly standard atheist response. Since I picked up the use of 'boilerplate' in philosophical contexts from Jim, I hope he won't be offended if I refer to the quoted passage as atheist boilerplate. It puts me in mind of Russell's Teapot, part of the drift of which is that there is no more reason to believe in God than there is to believe that "between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit . . . ."

There are three points that strike me in the above statement by Ryan. First, to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in addition to the objects we normally take to exist. Second, there is no evidence for the God hypothesis. Third, the God hypothesis contradicts what we know to be true. I will take these in reverse order.

1. I would be interested in hearing from Jim which propositions he thinks we know to be true that entail the nonexistence of God. Could it be the proposition that everything that exists is a material thing? This proposition does entail the nonexistence of God, but we don't know it to be true. And if one simply assumes it to be true, then one quite blatantly begs the question against the theist.

To explain this a bit further, let us adopt a definition of naturalism. I submit that D. M. Armstrong's definition is quite serviceable and captures what many nowadays mean by the term:

It is the contention that the world, the totality of entities, is nothing more than the spacetime system. . . . The positive part of the thesis, that the spacetime system exists, is perhaps not very controversial . . . . The negative thesis, that the spacetime system is all there is, is more controversial. (A World of States of Affairs, p. 5)

If we accept Armstrong's definition — and I see no reason not to accept it — and if naturalism so defined is true, then the following do not, and presumably cannot, exist: God as classically conceived, disembodied minds/souls, unexemplified universals, and a whole range of objects variously characterizable as ideal, Platonic, or abstract, including Fregean propositions, Fregean senses in general, numbers, irreducible mathematical sets, and the like. In sum, naturalism is the thesis that reality is exhausted by the space-time system.

Now I hope it is obvious that naturalism as lately defined is not a proposition of natural science. Nor is it a presupposition of natural science. Natural science studies the space-time system and what it contains. It does not and cannot study anything outside this system, if there is anything outside it. Nor can natural science pronounce upon the question of whether or not the whole of reality is exhausted by the space-time system. Of course, there is nothing to stop a physicist or a chemist or a biologist in his off hours from waxing philosophical and declaring his allegiance to the metaphysical doctrine of naturalism. But he makes a grotesque mistake if he thinks that the results of natural-scientific work entail the truth of naturalism. They neither entail it nor entail its negation.

So I am quite puzzled by Ryan's claim that the existence of God is contradicted by much of what we know to be true. I would like him to produce just one proposition that we know to be true that entails the nonexistence of God. The plain truth of the matter, as it seems to me, is that nothing we know to be true rules out the existence of God. I cheerfully concede that nothing we know to be true rules it in either. Pace the doctor angelicus, one cannot rigorously prove the existence of God. One can argue for the existence of God, but not prove the existence of God.  By 'argue for the existence of God,' I mean give good arguments, plausibly-premised arguments free of formal and informal fallacy, arguments that render theistic belief reasonable.  What I claim cannot be done, however, is provide rationally compelling arguments, arguments that will force every competent philosophical practioner to accept their conclusions on pain of being irrational if he does not.

2. Ryan also claims that there is no evidence for the God hypothesis. This strikes me as just plain false. There are all kinds of evidence. That it is not the sort of evidence Ryan and fellow atheists would accept does not show that it is not evidence. People have religious and mystical experiences of many different kinds. There is the 'bite of conscience' that intimates a Reality transcendent of the space-time world. Some experiences of beauty intimate the same. There are the dozens and dozens of arguments for the existence of God.  Add it up and you have a cumulative case for theism.

The atheist will of course discount all of this. But so what? I will patiently discount all his discountings and show in great detail how none of them are rationally compelling. I will show how he fails to account for obvious facts (consciousness, self-consciouness, conscience, intentionality, purposiveness, etc.) if he assumes that all that exists is in the space-time world. I will expose and question all his assumptions.  I will vigorously and rigorously drive him to dogmatism.  Having had all his arguments neutralized, if not refuted, he will be left with nothing better than the dogmatic assertion of his position.

3. Ryan seems to think that to believe in God is to believe that there is a special object in addition to the objects we normally take to exist. But this is not what a sophisticated theist maintains. God is not at all like Ed Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, the planet Vulcan, or Russell's celestial teapot.

One problem with the teapot and similar analogies is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns (lunicorns?) and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being. Such a paradigmatic being is, as Aquinas appreciated, not just another being among beings, but Being itself, not one more ens but ipsum esse subsistens.

This is connected with the fact that one can argue from very general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. At least I am not aware of any argument from contingent beings to a celestial teapot.  What explanatory job would such a piece of space junk do?  There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.

The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.  (If you disagree with this metaphilosophical assertion, please send me an argument for a substantive philosophical conclusion that you believe is rationally compelling.)

People like Ryan, Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not ruled out by anything we know; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.

To pursue the teapot analogy just one step further:  it leaks like a sieve.

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Elizabeth Anscombe, "Contraception and Chastity"

An untimely meditation by a brilliant mind.  A powerful antidote to the confused suggestions of the age.

Excerpt:

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here - not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behaviour in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition.

'Structural Racism' and Conservative Cluelessness

I caught a segment of Sean Hannity's show the other night during which a 'conversation' transpired over the recent spike in violence in Baltimore in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. At 2:06, Adam Jackson, activist and CEO of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, begins a rap replete with the usual leftist jargon: systemic inequality, structural racism, etc.

What struck me was Hannity's failure to deal with ideas at the level of ideas, in this instance, his failure to question the very idea of structural racism. That is what he should have done.  He should have cut off the leftist rap with some pointed questions:  Just what is this structural or systemic or institutional racism you leftists are always talking about?  Care to define these phrases?   Can you provide a nice clear example for the audience?   Is it evidence of 'structural racism' that the enforcement of the law has a 'disparate impact' on blacks?  And while you are at it, tell us what exactly racism is supposed to be.  Is it racist for a white cop  to enforce the law in a black community?  How can you speak of institutional racism when the institutions of our society have been reformed so as to help blacks and other minorities in all sorts of ways via Affirmative Action, federally-mandated desegregation, and the like?

But Hannity posed none of these questions.  Typical conservative that he is, he is not at home on the plane of ideas and abstractions where one must do battle with leftist obfuscation.   Conservatives are often non-intellectual when they are not anti-intellectual.  I am talking about conservatives 'in the trenches' of ordinary life and the mass media, not about conservative intellectuals who are intellectual enough but whose influence is limited.  The ordinary conservative, uncomfortable with ideas,  gravitates toward particulars, the actual facts of the Freddie Gray case, the Michael Brown case, the Trayvon Martin case.  That is all to the good of course.  When one considers what actually happened the night Michael Brown lost his life one sees that there was nothing racist, let alone structurally racist, about Officer Darren Wilson's behavior.

But it is not enough to bring the leftist back to the hard ground of actual fact; one must also puncture his ideological balloons. When the leftist starts gassing off about 'disparate impact,' you must rudely point out that blacks are disproportionately incarcerated because they disproportionately commit crimes.  The 'disparate impact' of law enforcement is not evidence of racism 'structural' or otherwise; it is evidence of disproportionate criminality among blacks.  Why won't leftists admit what is obvious?  Because they labor under the conceit that we are all equal.  Now here is a another Big Idea that your typical conservative is not equipped to discuss.

Another example of conservative cluelessness is Bill O'Reilly.  He often points out that we live in a capitalist country.  It's true, more or less.  But citing a fact does not amount to a justification of the fact.  What O'Reilly appears to be  incapable of doing is providing arguments, including moral arguments, in favor of capitalism.  That is what is needed in the face of libs and lefties who, when told that we live in a capitalist country, will respond, "Well then, let's change it!" 

But having a nasty streak of anti-intellectualism in him, O'Reilly would probably dismiss such arguments as mere 'theory' in his Joe Sixpack sense of the term.

Conservatives, by and large, are doers not thinkers, builders, not scribblers.  They are at home on the terra firma of the concrete particular but at sea in the realm of abstraction.  The know in their dumb inarticulate way that killing infants is a moral outrage but they cannot argue it out with sophistication and nuance in a manner to command the respect of their opponents.  And that's a serious problem.

They know that there is something deeply wrong with same-sex 'marriage,' but they cannot explain what it is.  George W. Bush, a well-meaning, earnest fellow whose countenance puts me in mind of that of Alfred E. Neuman, could only get the length of: "Marriage is between a man and a woman."

That's right, but it is a bare assertion. Sometimes bare assertions are justified, but one must know how to counter those who consider them gratuitous assertions.  What is gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied without breach of logical propriety, a maxim long enshrined in the Latin tag Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.  So one reasonably demands arguments from those who make assertions.  Arguments are supposed to move us beyond mere assertions and counter-assertions.

Could G. W. Bush present a reasoned defense of traditional marriage, or rather, just plain marriage, against the leftist innovators?  If he could he never to my knowledge supplied any evidence that he could.

And then there is Romney.  He lost to Obama in part because he could not articulate a compelling vision while Obama could.  Obama, a feckless fool with no understanding of reality, and no desire to understand it, is a great bullshitter & blather-mouth who was able to sell his destructive leftist vision.  Romney had nothing to counter him with.  It it not enough to be in  close contact with the hard particulars of gnarly reality; you have to be able to operate in the aether of ideas.

For a conservative there is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, behaviors, and institutions.  The conservative is of course right in holding to this presumption.  But if he is to prevail, he must know how to defend it against its enemies.

To beat the Left we must out-argue them in the ivory towers and out-slug them in the trenches.  Since by Converse Clausewitz  politics is war conducted by other means, the trench-fighters need to employ the same tactics that lefties do: slanders, lies, smears, name-calling, shout-downs, pie-throwing, mockery, derision.  The good old Alinsky tactics.  And now I hand off to Robert Spencer commenting on Andrew Breitbart. 

Politics is war and war is ugly.  We could avoid a lot of this nastiness if we adopted federalism and voluntary Balkanization.  But that is not likely to happen: the totalitarian Left won't allow it.  So I predict things are going to get hot in the coming years.  The summer of 2015 should prove to be positively 'toasty' in major urban centers as the destructive ideas of the Left lead to ever more violence.

But liberal fools such as the aptronymically appellated Charles Blow will be safe in their upper-class enclaves.

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