Maverick Philosopher

Happy Halloween!

The more I know about Hillary, the gladder I am that Trump sent her packing. The cartoon appeared before the election, but proved to be prophetic. What is truly scary is that if she had won, all her recently-revealed greed-driven dirty dealings would never have come to light.

The Scariest Passage in the Critique of Pure Reason

With Halloween upon us, it is appropriate that I should present to my esteemed readers for their delectation if not horror the scariest passage in Kant's magnum opus:

Unconditioned necessity, which we so indispensably require as the last bearer of all things, is for human reason the veritable abyss. . . . We cannot put aside, and  yet also cannot endure the thought, that a being, which we represent to ourselves as supreme among all possible beings, should, as it were, say to itself: 'I am from eternity to eternity, and outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I? (A613 B641)

Interpretation later.

'Liberals,' Conservatives and Stereotypes

Yesterday I said that an infallible mark of a 'liberal' or 'progressive' is a refusal to distinguish legal and illegal immigration. Another infallible mark is the refusal of 'liberals' or so-called 'progressives' to admit that there is truth in some stereotypes, that some of them have a basis in reality, and are not the product of mindless bigotry.  We conservatives, however, being fundamentally sane, admit the obvious: there are accurate stereotypes and inaccurate stereotypes. An example of an inaccurate stereotype is the black watermelon stereotype according to which black folk are disproportionately fond of watermelon.  Examples of accurate stereotypes below.

It occurs to me that our 'liberal' pals can be taxed with swallowing a negative, inaccurate meta-stereotype: they falsely think that all stereotypes are inaccurate and of course 'racist'! What bigots these 'liberals' be!

Lee Jussim gets to the heart of the matter with the following quiz. I got every answer right. See how you do. Answers below the fold.

1. Which group is most likely to commit murder?
A. Men
B. Women

2. Older people are generally more __________ and less __________ than adolescents. 
A. Conscientious; open to new experiences 
B. Neurotic; agreeable 

3. In which ethnic/racial group in the US are you likely to find the highest proportion of people who supported Democratic presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012?
A. Whites 
B. African Americans

4. People in the US strongly identifying themselves as ___________ are most likely to attend church on Sunday.
A. Conservative
B. Liberal

5. On 24 December 2004, a father and his three kids wandered around New York City around 7pm, looking for a restaurant, but found most places closed or closing. At the same time, his wife performed a slew of chores around the house. This family is most likely:
A. Catholic
B. Baptist
C. Jewish
D. Pagan/Animist

 

October Ends . . .

. . .  and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where

it'll all be like it was in the beginning -- Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad -- the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow -- On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars -- Something good will come out of all things yet -- And it will be golden and eternal just like that - There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)

It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams.  The vanity will give way to vision.  The beat will taste beatitude.  The road will end and the restless will rest.

Related articles

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

On the Reference of Proper Names

London Ed writes and I respond in blue:

Still thinking about how to frame the main argument, so please help me out here. 

               There is a woman called ‘Clinton’. Clinton is a politician. 

I claim there is a semantic connection between the name ‘Clinton’ that is used in the second sentence, but mentioned in the first sentence. It is this connection which licenses the inference to ‘some woman is a politician’.  My central claim is that this exhausts the semantics of the proper name. The function of the name is simply to connect the second sentence to the first.

 My question is, what arguments best support my claim. Some ideas.

(1) It’s just obvious that ‘Clinton’ refers back to the first sentence. The meaning of the two sentences is unchanged whether we write ‘he’ or ‘the man’. But since ‘he’ is just a pronoun, whose only function is to back-refer, it follows that ‘Clinton’ here is no primary reference.

BV: Your second example, then, is this:

There is a man named 'Clinton.' He is a politician.

And so 'Clinton' in the second sentence of the first example is merely a device of back reference.  Is that what you are maintaining?

We agree, of course, that 'he' is a pronoun the antecedent of which is 'Clinton.'  And so 'he' refers back to 'Clinton.'  Back reference is a word-word relation. The antecedent of a pronoun is a word, not the (extralinguistic) thing to which the word refers, assuming it refers to something.  What I deny is that 'he' in this context merely back refers.  I maintain that it also refers to Bill Clinton, a chunk of extralinguistic reality, where 'refers' picks out a word-WORLD relation.

Back reference is an intralinguistic relation; reference is an extralinguistic relation.  The reference of 'he' piggybacks on the reference of 'Clinton.' It picks up the reference of 'Clinton.'

But it is more complicated than this. For there is reference, not back reference, within a language.  For example,

" 'Red' " refers to 'red.'

There is nothing to stop us from naming words. This is a case of intralinguistic reference, not back reference.  Therefore, one cannot identify intralinguistic reference with back reference. All back reference is intralinguistic, but not all intralinguistic reference is back reference. A fortiori, one cannot identify extralinguistic reference with back reference.

It is also worth noting that 'back' in 'back reference' is an alienans adjective.

It is not clear what your thesis is. Are you an eliminativist about extralinguistic reference? That is, do you deny that proper names refer extralinguistically? Or perhaps you are an identitarian. Perhaps you hold that there is extralinguistic reference of proper names but that it reduces to back reference. (Some say that there are mental states all right, but that what they are are brain states. This is an identitarian, not an eliminativist, position. Notionally they are different even if it can be shown that identitarianism collapses of necessity into eliminativism.)

Or perhaps you maintain neither of these theses.  I'd guess you are an eliminativist from your opening statement.  I take it that you accept that there is a real world of concrete things external to language. If language 'hooks on' to these things, then presumably not via proper names. How then? Via bound variables in the Quinean way?  Or do you hold that language does not hook on to language-external things at all?

I suggest that you will never gain a hearing for your ideas unless you can answer convincingly questions such as the foregoing.

For most of us it is a datum that there is extralinguistic reference to existing concrete things in space and time.  We take it as given that in the paradigm cases reference is a word-world relation.  The theoretical problems, then, are to understand how reference is possible and how it is achieved. But you seem to be denying the datum: you seem to be denying that there is extralinguistic reference, or at least, extralinguistic reference via proper names. 

 

A Mark of a 'Liberal'

An infallible mark of a 'liberal' or 'progressive' is a refusal to distinguish legal and illegal immigration. Read their articles and see if I am not right.

One inference to draw is that they neither understand nor value the rule of law.

Dirty Hillary

Hoist by her own Russian petard.

The more we know about her, the better Trump looks by comparison.

Those of us who rolled the dice and voted for him have been vindicated in spades.

Which Side Are You On?

It is an appropriate question to ask in politics, though not in philosophy. Politics is warfare. If you call yourself conservative and don't support Trump, then you are helping the enemy. Which side are you on?

In philosophy we strive for objectivity. We take our time; we consider all points of view. We show respect for our interlocutors. We are civil. But one cannot be objective in a fight for one's life and way of life especially if one's way of life includes free speech, open inquiry, and resistance to the Left's totalitarian politicization and ideologization of everything, including pure mathematics! (More on this later.)  One has to secure, with blood and iron if need be, the space of objective inquiry against the ideologues who, at the present time, are chiefly leftists and Islamists, and who wittingly or unwittingly, work together. 

You don't like the vulgar Trump? Tough shit. He's all we've got. Face reality and its limitations. Don't let the best become the enemy of the good. The milque-toast McCains haven't done jack and won't do jack, except talk and obstruct. David Horowitz:

The movement galvanized by Trump can stop the progressive juggernaut and change the American future, but only if it emulates the strategy of the campaign: Be on the offense; take no prisoners; stay on the attack. To stop the Democrats and their societal transformation, Republicans must adhere to a strategy that begins with a punch in the mouth. That punch must pack an emotional wallop large enough to throw them off balance and neutralize their assaults. It must be framed as a moral indictment that stigmatizes them in the way their attacks stigmatize Republicans. It must expose them for their hypocrisy. It must hold them accountable for the divisions they sow and the suffering they cause. (Big Agenda, Humanix, 2017, p. 142)

Trump alone, an outsider who doesn't need a job, has the civil courage and is in a position to deliver the needed punches. That's why we like him. That's why we overlook his flaws. He punches back. And for other reasons given here. 

Infinity and Mathematics Education

Time for a re-post. This first appeared in these pages on 18 August 2010.

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

A reader writes,

Regarding your post about Cantor, Morris Kline, and potentially vs. actually infinite sets: I was a math major in college, so I do know a little about math (unlike philosophy where I'm a rank newbie); on the other hand, I didn't pursue math beyond my bachelor's degree so I don't claim to be an expert. However, I do know that we never used the terms "potentially infinite" vs. "actually infinite".

I am not surprised, but this indicates a problem with the way mathematics is taught: it is often taught in a manner that is both ahistorical and unphilosophical.  If one does not have at least a rough idea of the development of thought about infinity from Aristotle on, one cannot properly appreciate the seminal contribution of Georg Cantor (1845-1918), the creator of transfinite set theory.  Cantor sought to achieve an exact mathematics of the actually infinite.  But one cannot possibly understand the import of this project if one is unfamiliar with the distinction between potential and actual infinity and the controversies surrounding it. As it seems to me, a proper mathematical education at the college level must include:

1. Some serious attention to the history of the subject.

2. Some study of primary texts such as Euclid's Elements, David Hilbert's Foundations of Geometry, Richard Dedekind's Continuity and Irrational Numbers, Cantor's Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers, etc.  Ideally, these would be studied in their original languages!

3. Some serious attention to the philosophical issues and controversies swirling around fundamental concepts such as set, limit, function, continuity, mathematical induction, etc.  Textbooks give the wrong impression: that there is more agreement than there is; that mathematical ideas spring forth ahistorically; that there is only one way of doing things (e.g., only one way of constructing the naturals from sets); that all mathematicians agree.

Not that the foregoing ought to supplant a textbook-driven approach, but that the latter ought to be supplemented by the foregoing.  I am not advocating a 'Great Books' approach to mathematical study.

Given what I know of Cantor's work, is it possible that by "potentially infinite" Kline means "countably infinite", i.e., 1 to 1 with the natural numbers?

No! 

Such sets include the whole numbers and the rational numbers, all of which are "extensible" in the sense that you can put them into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers; and given the Nth member, you can generate the N+1st member. The size of all such sets is the transfinite number "aleph null". The set of all real numbers, which includes the rationals and the irrationals, constitute a larger infinity denoted by the transfinite number C; it cannot be put into a 1 to 1 correspondence with the natural numbers, and hence is not generable in the same way as the rational numbers. This would seem to correspond to what Kline calls "actually infinite".

It is clear that you understand some of the basic ideas of transfinite set theory, but what you don't understand is that the distinction between the countably (denumerably) infinite and the uncountably (nondenumerably) infinite falls on the side of the actual infinite.  The countably infinite has nothing to do with the potentially infinite.  I suspect that you don't know this because your teachers taught you math in an ahistorical manner out of boring textbooks with no presentation of the philosophical issues surrounding the concept of infinity.    In so doing they took a lot of the excitement and wonder out of it. 

So what did you learn?  You learned how to solve problems and pass tests.  But how much actual understanding did you come away with?

A Simple Point of Logic Journalists Ought to be Aware Of

One often encounters sentences like this one:

There are many arenas in which all ideas are not considered equal.

This example is from a recent piece in Vox. I could give further recent examples, but one is enough. To simplify, consider just the core thought:

All ideas are not considered equal.

Unfortunately it is not entirely clear what the core thought is. For the sentence is ambiguous as between 

1) No ideas are considered equal

and

2) Some ideas are not considered equal.

The thoughts (propositions) expressed are distinct since the first can be false while the second is true. Although it is fairly clear that the author intended (2), a good writer avoids ambiguous constructions unless for some reason he intends them. So don't write sentences of the form

3) All Fs are not Gs 

if you intend say something of the form

4) Some Fs are not Gs.

Write instead sentences of the form

5) Not all Fs are Gs

which, by simple quantifier negation, is equivalent to (4). 

Class dismissed.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Midnight and Moonlight

J. J. Cale, After Midnight

Thelonious Monk, 'Round Midnight

Jack Kerouac, Old Angel Midnight

Brother Dege, Old Angel Midnight

Allman Bros., Midnight Rider

Rolling Stones, Midnight Rambler

B. B. King, et al., Midnight Hour

Maria Muldaur, Midnight at the Oasis  (This one goes out to Mary Korzen and the Boston Spring of '74)

Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight

Joey Powers, Midnight Mary.  A one-hit wonder.

Kenny Ball, Midnight in Moscow  One of many memorable instrumentals from the early '60s.

Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile

Doors, Moonlight Drive

Anne Murray, Shadows in the Moonlight (This one goes out to K. P. and the Summer of '79)

Ludwig van Beethoven, Moonlight Sonata.  A part of it anyway with scenes from the great Coen Bros. film, "The Man Who Wasn't There."

Addendum:

A reader comments:

If you are to include Beethoven, It would be perverse to omit Schumann’s Mondnacht (moonlit night), set to a poem by Eichendorff, supposedly the favourite poem of the Germans, when they are not invading other countries.  “The image of death is tenderly and touchingly portrayed as the soul quietly returning home”. The progression at 2:23 is sublime. 

Unusual version by Barbra Streisand here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcGtMEiVx_Y

Es war, als hätt' der Himmel,

Die Erde still geküßt,

Daß sie im Blütenschimmer

Von ihm nur träumen müßt.

 

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,

Die Ähren wogten sacht,

Es rauschten leis die Wälder,

So sternklar war die Nacht.

 

Und meine Seele spannte

Weit ihre Flügel aus,

Flog durch die stillen Lande,

Als flöge sie nach Haus.

Reading Now: Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano

Undoubtedly the most Joycean of the booze novels. This is not what one could call a 'page turner.' Not suitable for beach or bed reading. But it looks to be a deep work that will repay the close attention it demands. Under the Volcano was originally published in 1947. Two other booze novels from the '40s are rather more suited for entertainment: Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, 1944, and Patrick Hamilton's Hangover Square, 1941.

And then there is the grandpappy of them all, Jack London's John Barleycorn. My analysis: Jack London, John Barleycorn, and the Noseless One. (Perhaps an astute literary type will point me to a booze novel in English temporally antecedent to London's.)

It is interesting to note in these waning days of dear October, Kerouac month, that Lowry and Jack both died of drink and at the same age: 47. The difference seems to have have been that Lowry was deliberately out to off himself on the day of his death, his last binge fueled as it was with barbiturates, while Kerouac had not fixed upon 21 October 1969 as Todestag.

The mystery of self-destruction! Is there a natural explanation? Or is the booze monkey a real demon?

There follows an example of of a Lowry sentence that will slow down the serious reader, indeed bring him to a dead stop, as he tries to untangle the syntax. Lowry being a Cambridge man, we assume he knows how to write English. But then we come across this:

His love had brought a peace, for all too short a while, that was strangely like the enchantment, the spell, of Chartres itself, long ago, whose every sidestreet he had come to love and café where he could gaze at the Cathedral eternally sailing against the clouds, the spell not even the fact he was scandalously in debt there could break. (13)

 As I said, this novel is not a 'page turner.' 

Addendum (10/28)

London Ed writes,

If you mean a novel that is almost entirely about drunkenness, i.e. whose subject is just drunkenness, such as Lowry, then you won’t find much in 19^thcentury literature. I recommend Lamb’s Confessions of a Drunkard, if you haven’t come across it already, but that is an essay, not a novel. (It has been questioned whether Lamb actually was a drunkard, but the evidence suggests he was).

In A Tale of Two Cities –  as you surely know – a drunkard is the central character, and drunkenness is one of the themes, but the central theme is an unusual kind of redemption, not drink itself.

See also The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where again drunkenness is a theme, but not central. Bronte may have modelled the drunken character on her alcoholic brother Bramwell, although she may have been influenced by The Anatomy of Drinking (Robert Macnish, 1835), which is worth a visit (‘Men of genius are often unfortunately addicted to drinking’).

For an interesting conspectus of modern ‘feminist’ writers who were no enemies to the bottle, see this Guardian article. ‘Not many writers manage to get sober and those who do often suffer a decline in output’. Is there a relation between the bottle and the writing? Macnish argues that genius is accompanied by ‘melancholy’, i.e. depression. ‘High talent has ever been distinguished for sadness and gloom’. So they drink to relieve the gloom. So the bottle, on his account, is more a property in the Aristotelian sense: it accompanies the phenomenon of genius, but is not essential to it. Or by contrast is it essential? It is hard to imagine Burroughs without junk. (Or Kerouac without the drink?).

 Enjoy the volcano book. I have it in the attic somewhere, but didn’t get beyond the first chapter or two.

And let's not forget the role that benzedrine played in the composition of On the Road.

Addendum 2 (10/28, 5:08 AM MST)

Ed adds,

Sorry, some more. Macnish rightly says the the most ‘delightful’ state is when sobriety and inebriation briefly become neighbours. That’s right. There is a short episode, usually after the first glass, when the gods come down to the planet, and the world is blessed. Unfortunately the blessedness is so good you want to continue it, and have another, but this never works. For this reason, wise men (and women) never go beyond the third glass. Another alcoholic writer, (Chandler) cleverly said “Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.” Perhaps you meant the same when you spoke (somewhere) about having a couple of Buds but being none the weiser).

I agree entirely. The wise man stops at the third when returns diminish bigly.  But you and I are not alkies.  They achieve some crazy bliss from continuing.

Raymond Chandler?  Funny you should mention him. In the midst of his high-falutin' Joycean prose, Lowry uncorked a Chandleresque line: "Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher." (22-23) Here is my attempt at Chandler-style prose:

The stranger sat down and played his King's pawn to e4. I countered with the French Defense and in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.

I wasn't thinking  about taking any girl's clothes off when I repeated the old redneck line, in a blog post circa 2004, "Ah had me a coupla Buds, but I got none the wiser."  'Wiser' pronounced something like waah-zr.

Addendum 3 (10/28, 11:04)

Ed continues,

“Darkness had fallen like the House of Usher.”

“in a few moves he was all over me like a cheap suit.”

Love them both. I think the second is more Chandleresque. Hard to say why. The first contains a literary illusion. The second is just cheap suits. You have to remember that Chandler was brought up in London, quite near where I live, and he went to an English public school (Dulwich). So he carried an English snobbery with him to the US. When he says ‘Los Angeles has the personality of a paper cup’ you can hear that public school sneer under his voice. His work is almost entirely about the vulgar, but that is the point of it.

I mentioned the London thing to a hard core noir fan, who was astonished. He thought, not without reason, that Chandler was a quintessentially American writer. No more than Joseph Conrad (who did not speak fluent English until his twenties) was quintessentially English.

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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

BEATific October Again

Math is Racist!

Here

There is nothing so stupid, destructive, and inane that a 'liberal' won't embrace it. 

The Paris Statement: A Europe We Can Believe In

Read it, study it, circulate it. Excerpts:

3. The patrons of the false Europe are bewitched by superstitions of inevitable progress. They believe that History is on their side, and this faith makes them haughty and disdainful, unable to acknowledge the defects in the post-national, post-cultural world they are constructing. Moreover, they are ignorant of the true sources of the humane decencies they themselves hold dear—as do we. They ignore, even repudiate the Christian roots of Europe. At the same time they take great care not to offend Muslims, who they imagine will cheerfully adopt their secular, multicultural outlook. Sunk in prejudice, superstition and ignorance, and blinded by vain, self-congratulating visions of a utopian future, the false Europe reflexively stifles dissent. This is done, of course, in the name of freedom and tolerance.

[. . .]

17. The false Europe also boasts of an unprecedented commitment to equality. It claims to promote non-discrimination and the inclusion of all races, religions and identities. Here, genuine progress has been made, but a utopian detachment from reality has taken hold. Over the past generation, Europe has pursued a grand project of multiculturalism. To demand or even promote the assimilation of Muslim newcomers to our manners and mores, much less to our religion, has been thought a gross injustice. A commitment to equality, we have been told, demands that we abjure any hint that we believe our culture superior. Paradoxically, Europe’s multicultural enterprise, which denies the Christian roots of Europe, trades on the Christian ideal of universal charity in an exaggerated and unsustainable form. It requires from the European peoples a saintly degree of self-abnegation. We are to affirm the very colonization of our homelands and the demise of our culture as Europe’s great twenty-first century glory—a collective act of self-sacrifice for the sake of some new global community of peace and prosperity that is being born.

[ . . .]

21. Europe’s intellectual classes are, alas, among the chief ideological partisans of the conceits of the false Europe. Without doubt, our universities are one of the glories of European civilization. But where once they sought to transmit to each new generation the wisdom of past ages, today most within the universities equate critical thinking with a simpleminded repudiation of the past. A lodestar of the European spirit has been the rigorous discipline of intellectual honesty and objectivity. But over the past two generations, this noble ideal has been transformed. The asceticism that once sought to free the mind of the tyranny of dominant opinion has become an often complacent and unreflective animus against everything that is our own. This stance of cultural repudiation functions as a cheap and easy way of being ‘critical.’ Over the last generation, it has been rehearsed in the lecture halls, becoming a doctrine, a dogma. And to join in professing this creed is taken to be the mark of ‘enlightenment,’ and of spiritual election. As a consequence, our universities are now active agents of ongoing cultural destruction.

[. . .]

33. Marriage is the foundation of civil society and the basis for harmony between men and women. It is the intimate bond organized around sustaining a household and raising children. We affirm that our most fundamental roles in society and as human beings are as fathers and mothers. Marriage and children are integral to any vision of human flourishing. Children require sacrifice from those who bring them into the world. This sacrifice is noble and must be honoured. We endorse prudent social policies to encourage and strengthen marriage, childbearing, and childrearing. A society that fails to welcome children has no future.

[. . .]

36. In this moment, we ask all Europeans to join us in rejecting the utopian fantasy of a multicultural world without borders. We rightly love our homelands, and we seek to hand on to our children every noble thing that we have ourselves received as our patrimony. As Europeans, we also share a common heritage, and this heritage asks us to live together in peace as a Europe of nations. Let us renew national sovereignty, and recover the dignity of a shared political responsibility for Europe’s future.

UPDATE:

The Paris Statement is too namby-pamby for Jacques who comments here. He may well be right. PS is a fine theoretical statement, but where are the concrete proposals? 

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Are We Really Talking about Nationalism?

Is Canada Committing Cultural Suicide?

William Kilpatrick is always good on the Islamist threat:

The good news is that ISIS has been defeated in Mosul and Raqqa, and may soon be driven entirely out of Iraq and Syria. The bad news is that Islamists continue to pile up victory after victory on the home front.

The home front war is basically a culture war. Islamists are winning it because they understand the nature of the war. The West is losing because its leaders have only the vaguest awareness that they are under attack. Let’s take Canada as a case in point. 

Read it all.

And please read my anti-Trudeau post, Diversity Can Be Our Weakness.

Why is Canada so hopelessly P. C.? Are their lakes and streams filled with leftist Kool-Aid? 

Filed under: Decline of the West

Reckoning with Communism

John O'Sullivan takes an apologist to task.

More Proof that Liberals are Insane

Don't waste time debating these loons. Just go to Whole Foods, spend money, and speak polite English.

"Thank you, sir, you have been most helpful."

"Excuse me, boys and girls, but politically correct language is deeply offensive to those of us who are sane."  

"We respectfully oppose the tyranny of a tiny minority and will continue to exercise our free speech rights."

"May I suggest that you re-locate to Canada?"

'Never-Trumper'

You are misusing 'never-trumper' if your usage does not comport with this conditional:

If you are a never-trumper, then you are a conservative, real or at least self-proclaimed.

Bill Kristol is a never-trumper; Hillary is not. 

Underlying  principle: do not engage in verbal inflation without a damned good reason. If a word or phrase has a specific meaning use it in that meaning.

The Monastery Sign

The sign reads, 'Peace.' It neglects to say that the desert is a place of unseen warfare. 

The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in il combattimento spirituale. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by opponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone. They prefer deserts to flesh pots when it comes to hunting. Those who luxuriate in the latter have already been captured.

Moderns who enter the desert for spiritual purposes need to be aware that they may get more than they bargained for, phenomenologically, if not really.

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A spiritual guide for a female recluse

Peter Wessel Zappfe's Anti-Natalism

Here, with some critical commentary.

UPDATE:

A reader comments:

That older post on Zapffe and his absurdism is fantastic.  You present the problem with deep sympathy and clarity.  We're kindred spirits.  I've often felt that if people just considered _seriously_ their own commitments, or our shared predicament--just to realize that it really is a predicament--their lives would be different.  It is _not_ just talk and "word games".  But it's so hard to get anyone to that point.  People take comfort in a facile unserious unreflective nihilism or absurdism.  Real philosophical thinking, with serious moral intent, offers a way out--as you argue, a rational freedom, at least, to embrace Meaning and Purpose and Value.  But it's so hard to get people to see this.  Anyway, thanks again for excellent essays like this.

Chess Players Commiserate on their Failed Marriages

A: "We were bishops of opposite color." 

B:  "Sorry to hear that.  In our case the union ended when she discovered I had insufficient mating material."

C:  "We just couldn't get it together.  Whenever she wanted to make love, I was busy making Luft."

D: "She blew her stack when I gingerly brought up the topic of back-rank mate."

E. "She got tired of my excuses,  especially 'Sorry, honey, not tonight. After a hard day at the office I'm weaker than f7.'"

F. "The bitch had a way of putting me in psychological Zugzwang: no matter what I said or did, I only dug my hole deeper."

G. "In bed one night she called me a perv when I muttered something about the Lucena position. 

H. "Her frigidity did us in.  She'd allow a check but never a mate."

I.  "She said  I lacked ambition citing my penchant for underpromotion."

J.  "We fought like knights and bishops."

Maverick Philosopher: Various Images

Here

Pap and Smear

'Pap and smear' is part of the explanation why Hillary lost.  If you listen to her speak you soon realize that she has nothing concrete to offer. It is all empty rhetoric, or pap. But she really sealed her fate when she smeared as 'deplorables' the decent Americans who do not subscribe to her (well-hidden) agenda.

Pap and smear.

It is becoming increasingly clear how unfit for the presidency she is. Her complicity in the Uranium One scandal for starters.

Now there is a real Russia story.

A Note on Vox Clamantis in Deserto

This just over the transom from London Ed:

Pedantic, but I think you will secretly enjoy it.

Matt. 3:3 quoting Isaiah 40:3. The Vulgate has Vox clamantis in deserto: parate viam Domini. [Right, I checked both quotations in my Biblia Vulgata.] There has always been a question about the parsing of this. Is it

A voice of one calling in the wilderness, “prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”,

 as your quotation implies. Or is it

A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God”.

Different translations differ. Of course the ancient Hebrew/Greek may be ambiguous, as they were not cursed with the quotation mark. I shall investigate further.

[Time passes]

OK I looked further. I always wondered if Matthew knew his scripture, but checking the Isa 40:3 in the Septuagint (the Jewish Alexandrian translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek), it is identical, i.e. Matthew’s Greek accurately reflects the Greek translation of Isaiah.

However, at least according to Pentiuc, the Septuagint Greek is a mis-translation of the Hebrew. 

According to the reading proposed by the Masoretes, this voice "cries" to the one called "to clear" the way in the wilderness (cf. Mal 3:1). Babylonian texts speak in similar terms of processional ways prepared for a god or a victorious king; this is the road by which Yahweh will lead his people through the desert in a new exodus. Quite contrary to this reading is the Septuagint's rendering, where the "voice is crying in the wilderness." This version indicates that the wilderness is the location of the mysterious voice, rather than the meeting place for God and his people returned from exile.

My emphasis. The Masoretes were the Jewish scribe-scholars who worked on the interpretation of the ancient texts.

BV: I am not competent to comment on the scholarly punctilios, , but I prefer the Septuagint reading for the (non)reason that I live in a desert. And I know Ed Abbey, the author of Vox Clamantis in Deserto, would agree for he too lived in the desert, in fact, in Oracle, Arizona, not far from here.

By the way, the preceding sentence is not good English by the lofty standards of MavPhil. Can you see why? Combox open.

Kerouac at the End of the Road

A week or so and then I'll be through with Jacking off until next October. So bear with me, ragazzi.

Here  is a NYT piece from 1988 by Richard Hill that gets at the truth of Jack. Excerpts:

He seemed uncertain of his friends from the 50's. Ginsberg was lost; he hadn't found the answers Jack had, in the Roman Catholic Church. Burroughs was a brilliant and heroic old devil, but Jack hadn't seen him since his trip to New York for William Buckley's Firing Line. ''I admire Buckley,'' he said. ''He stopped the show and took me into his office to give me hell about being drunk. Then we went back to do the show and I still gave those intellectuals the old raspberry.'' Burroughs was staying in the same hotel at the time, but didn't want to go out. ''Into those streets?'' said the man whose daring and decadence had become a legend, and Jack gave up on him.

But of Neal Cassady, Jack's companion on the road through many of the novels, he was more sure: ''Neal's not dead. He'll show up someday and we'll go someplace.'' Jack loved Cassady, who died on a railroad track in Mexico on one of the last trips of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. ''Turn your mind on,'' Jack said bitterly. ''I've been trying to turn mine off.''

Jack was also trying to get his affairs in order. He knew he was going to die soon; the doctor had told him his liver was nearly gone. He talked about his will, read and reread his genealogy and spoke much of the Kerouac family tradition and his boyhood home in Lowell. He worried that critics would fail to see his novels as he intended them to be read - not only as an ambitious chronicle of America, but also as a loving portrait of his family and his childhood home. In his later writings, he seemed more interested in capturing Lowell than in an America he no longer understood or liked. He asked about funeral homes and embalming: ''Do they treat you with dignity?'' He asserted his faith in the church he had abandoned years ago for Zen Buddhism.

[. . .]

People sometimes wrote or called me to ask what Jack had really been like, hoping I could confirm one romantic thesis or another. One man wanted to believe he died from the scuffle in the black bar. Ironic, but untrue. Nobody wanted to believe he died of drinking.

He did. Drinking was part of his pilgrimage. He was a sensitive soul who'd set his sights on nothing less than enlightenment. When the booze failed to take him there, it at least numbed the disappointment. It is a classic alcoholic pattern, which has produced statements as powerful as Under the Volcano as well as several Kerouac novels - from the sweetness of ''The Dharma Bums'' to the terrifying wine-soaked hallucination of the true cross over ''Big Sur.'' We may know the drinking wasn't necessary, but Jack didn't. And though he gave in to his drinking, he never completely abandoned his search. His record of that search reminds us why we value him so much. It was a sacrifice from which most of us shrink, a gift for which he paid the highest price. We can argue that his life was tragic or his talent misspent, but never doubt the passion that drove it. He showed us America through his innocent eyes, singing to us like the canary old-time coal miners took underground. When the bird died, they knew it as a warning that the air was deadly and that their own lives were no longer safe. 

Should There be University Courses on Beat Generation Authors?

From a longer essay:

I've read my fair share of [William S. ] Burroughs and I concur [with Patrick Kurp] that his stuff is trash: Junkie, Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Exterminator.  All in my library.  But there is a place for literary trash.  It has its uses as do the pathologist's  slides and samples.  But put on your mental gloves before handling the stuff. 

Kerouac alone of the Beat Triumvirate [Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs] moves me, though I surely don't consider him a great writer.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that there really shouldn't be any university courses on Kerouac or Dylan or other culturally influential recent figures since their material is easily accessible and easily understandable.  Universities ought not pander. They should remain -- or rather return to being -- institutions whose sacred task is the preservation and transmission of HIGH culture, great culture, culture which is not easily understood and requires expert guidance to penetrate and appreciate. 

The thought is extended in Inheritance and Appropriation.

I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. You will be forgiven for thinking me a superannuated idealistic sermonizer out of touch with current events and trends. The West may be finished, and my preaching useless.   The barbarians are at the gates and the destructive Left is eager to let them in. The authorities are in abdication. The Pope is a fool: a leftist first, a Catholic second. Leftist termites have rotted out the foundations of the universities.

On the other hand, it ain't over til it's over.  So we battle on.  

What is Man?

He is an animal, but also a spirit -- and thus a riddle to himself. He reasons and speaks, he objectifies, he says 'I' and he means it. He does not parrot the word 'I' in the manner of a parrot or a voice synthesizer; uttering 'I' he expresses self-awareness.  Man has a world (Welt), not merely an environment (Umwelt).  Man envisages a higher life, a higher destiny, whether within history or beyond it.  And then he puzzles himself over whether this envisagement is a mere fancy, a delusion, or whether it presages the genuine possibility of a higher life. 

More than an animal, he can yet sink lower than any animal which fact is a reverse index of his spiritual status.  He can as easily devote himself to scatology as to eschatology.  The antics of a Marquis de Sade are as probative of man's status as the life of a St. Augustine.  It takes a spiritual being both to willingly empty oneself into the flesh and to transcend it. 

Kierkegaard writes that "every higher conception of life . . . takes the view that the task for men is to strive after kinship with the Deity . . . ."  (Attack Upon Christendom, p. 265)  We face the danger of "minimizing our own significance" as S. K. puts it, of selling ourselves short.  And yet how difficult it is to believe in one's own significance!  The problem is compounded by not knowing what one's significance is assuming that one has significance.  Not knowing what it is, one can question whether it is. 

Kierkegaard solves the problem by way of his dogmatic and fideistic adherence to Christian anthropology and soteriology.  Undiluted Christianity is his answer.  My answer:   live so as to deserve immortality.  Live as if you have a higher destiny.  It cannot be proven, but the arguments against it can all be neutralized.  Man's whence and whither are shrouded in darkness and will remain so in this life.  Ignorabimus. In the final analysis you must decide what to believe and how to live.

You could be wrong, no doubt.  But if you are wrong, what have you lost?  Some baubles and trinkets.  If you say that truth will have been lost, I will ask you how you know that and why you think truth is a value in a meaningless universe.  I will further press you on the nature of truth and undermine your smug conceit that truth could exist in a meaningless wholly material universe.

The image is by Paul Klee, Engel noch tastend, angel still groping.   We perhaps are fallen angels, desolation angels, in the dark, but knowing that we are, and ever groping.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kerouac Goes Home in October

Jack Kerouac quit the mortal coil 48 years ago today, securing his release from the samsaric wheel of the quivering meat conception, and the granting of his wish:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead.  (Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus).

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1) Here's the whole paragraph:

At dawn my bus was zooming across the Arizona desert -- Indio, Blythe, Salome (where she danced); the great dry stretches leading to Mexican mountains in the south. Then we swung north to the Arizona mountains, Flagstaff, clifftowns. I had a book with me I stole from a Hollywood stall, "Le Grand Meaulnes" by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing. In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.

 "Pretty girls make graves." (Dharma Bums) 

 Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult -- and praise be You for showing me how You did it -- Lord now I'm ready for more -- And this time I won't whine -- This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

Alela Diane, We Are Nothing  

Jack Kerouac, Tristessa (written 1955-56, first published in 1960), p. 59:

Since beginningless time and into the never-ending future, men have loved women without telling them, and the Lord has loved them without telling, and the void is not the void because there's nothing to be empty of.

Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard, California Zephyr

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Tom Waits, Jack Kerouac on the Road

Aztec Two-Step, The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty

Some readings:

Jack Kerouac, Mexico City Blues, 228th Chorus

Jack Kerouac, Safe in Heaven, Dead.  Good sound quality.  "I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel, safe in heaven, dead."

Jack Kerouac, Charlie Parker.  "Charlie, Parker, lay the bane off me, and everybody."

Mindless Hostility to David Benatar

A scurrilous attack piece in The American Spectator actually provides a bit of support for pessimism about the human condition.  One ought to be disturbed by the inability of so many journalists to control their emotions and assess arguments in a calm and rational manner. The attack piece in question is beneath refutation and so I won't waste my time rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. My astute readers will be able to spot the mistakes and misrepresentations.

Here is what I would like you to do. First carefully read Benatar's succinct summary of his anti-natalism and think about his arguments. Then read the attack piece.  Ask yourself whether Benatar's position has been fairly presented.  If you think it has, then I pronounce you an idiot.

For the record, I am not now and never have been an anti-natalist.  I am speaking out against mindless ideologizing and for open inquiry which is under threat not only from the Left and militant Islam, but also from some on the Right.

UPDATE (10/23)

Jordan Peterson joins those who dismiss without examining.

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: Is Life a Predicament?

Can Belief in Man Substitute for Belief in God?

A slightly redacted re-post from 26 September 2009. 

.................................... 

The fact and extent of natural and moral evil make belief in a providential power difficult. But they also make belief in man and human progress difficult. There is the opium of religion, but also the opium of the intellectuals, the opium of future-oriented utopian naturalisms such as Marxism. Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?

And isn’t it more difficult to believe in man than in God? We know man and his wretchedness and that nothing much can be expected of him, but we don’t know God and his powers.  Man is  impotent to ameliorate his condition in any fundamental way.

We have had centuries to experience this truth, have we not? Advances in science and technology have brought undeniable benefits but also unprecedented dangers. The proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, their possession by rogue states and their terrorist surrogates, bodes ill for the future of humanity. As I write these lines, the prime minister of a Middle Eastern state calls brazenly and repeatedly for the destruction of another Middle Eastern state while the state of which he is the prime minister prepares the nuclear weapons to carry out the unspeakably evil deed.  Meanwhile the rest of the world is complacent and appeasing.  We know our ilk and what he is capable of, and the bases of rational optimism seem slim indeed.

There is also the scarcely insignificant point that there is no such thing as Man, there are only individual men, men  at war with one another and with themselves.  We are divided, divisive, and duplicitous creatures.  But God is one. You say God does not exist? That may be so.

But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Cosmic Meaninglessness and the Theistic Gambit

This is the third in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 35-45 of Chapter 3.

The good news from Chapter 2 was that there is meaning at the terrestrial level. The bad news from Chapter 3 is that there is none at the cosmic level, or from the cosmic perspective. Cosmic meaning is meaning from the perspective of the universe.  Of course, the universe does not literally have a perspective or point of view: it is not an experiencing subject. But one can usefully speak as if it did. (35)

I object, though, to Benatar's calling the cosmic view the view sub specie aeternitatis.  From the point of view of eternity, the cosmos, as unimaginably vast as it is, is not ultimate or absolute. For one thing, it is modally contingent: it exists but might not have. It is also finite in the past direction as per current cosmology.  It is certainly not eternal or necessary. Given that the cosmos is not eternal, its point of view cannot be the point of view of eternity. The cosmos is not causa sui or the ground of its own being. Its point of view is not the widest of all wide-angle points of view. From the point of view of eternity, there might not have been any cosmos, any physical universe, at all. Thus there is a wider point of view than the cosmic point of view, namely God's point of view. It alone is the view sub specie aeternitatis.   The point of view of eternity is the eternal God's point of view and he alone views things under the aspect of eternity.  

It is obvious that one can speak of God's point of view without assuming the existence of God: it is the point of view that God would have if God existed.  We can avoid all reference to God by saying that the view sub specie aeternitatis is the ultimate point of view, the view of Being or of truth. The truth is the ultimate way things are. I tap into the ultimate point of view when I think the thought: there might have been no physical universe at all. I am able to do this despite my being a measly bit of the world's fauna.

In any case, Benatar's claim is that human life has no meaning when viewed cosmically, from what he thinks is the ultimate point of view, that of the universe, but which I claim is not the ultimate point of view.

Why does human life (both at the individual and species levels) have no cosmic meaning? His main point is that we humans "have no significant impact on the broader universe." (36) He means the universe beyond the Earth. "Nothing we do on earth has any effect beyond it." (36) This is true, apart from some minor counterexamples, but trivial. Or so it seems to me. Why should the lack of causal impact of the earthlings on the wider universe argue the ultimate meaninglessness of their existence?  It strikes me as very strange to tie existential meaning to causal impact. 

Suppose earthlings were everywhere in the universe and could have an impact everywhere. That would not show that their lives have meaning. The earthlings might ask: "We are everywhere but why are we anywhere? Why do we exist?" Our lack of cosmic impact cannot show that our lives lack meaning if maximal causal impact is consistent with meaninglessness.   It is worth noting that size does not matter either. If we human animals were many times larger than we are and had the causal impact of elephants or dinosaurs, how would that augment our meaning?  Suppose I am the biggest, baddest hombre in the entire universe. Suppose I am omni-located within it, able to affect every part of it.  I could still ask: But why do I exist?  For what purpose?

Benatar points out that we won't exist for long and that this is true for the species and for individuals. (36) True, but again how is this relevant to the question of existential meaning?  Suppose humans always existed. This would not add one cubit of meaning to the meaning of the individual or the species. So the fact that we do not last long either as individuals or as a species does not argue lack of meaning. Duration matters as little as size.

One of the puzzles here is why Benatar should tie existential meaning to causal impact. But he also speaks of our lack of purpose.

The Theistic Gambit

For Benatar, "The evolution of life, including human life, is a product of blind forces and serves no apparent purpose." (36) To which a theist might respond with a Baltimore catechism type of answer, "God made us to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next."  Our ultimate purpose, on this scheme, is to share in the divine life and achieve final felicity. 

Benatar gives a strange argument against the coherence of the theistic scheme:

Even in the best-case scenario, it is hard to understand why God would create a being in order to prepare it for an afterlife given that no afterlife would be needed or desired if the being had not been created in the first place. [. . .] The sort of meaning that the afterlife provides cannot explain why God would have created us at all. (39)

While it is true that only beings who already exist could want or need an afterlife, it is a non sequitur to conclude that it is no explanation of why we exist in the first place to say that we exist in order to share in the divine life.  God wants to share his super-effulgent being, consciousness, and bliss and so he creates free beings with the capacity to participate in the divine life.  If that is true, then it explains why we exist in the first place.

Of course, we don't know that it is true, and we cannot prove that God exists or that we have a destiny beyond this brief animal life. But the naturalist is in the same boat: he cannot prove that God does not exist and that human life is a product of blind forces. Benatar movingly describes animal pain and the horror of nature red in tooth and claw (42-44). Considerations such as these should put paid to any pollyanish conceit that life is beautiful.  And yet they are not compelling or conclusive. While it is reasonable to be a naturalist, it is also reasonable to be a theist.  Neither side can refute the other, and one's subjective certainty counts for nothing.

One of the things I like about Benatar is that he draws the pessimistic consequences of naturalism.  Most naturalists compartmentalize: in their studies and offices they are naturalists who reject God and the soul and ultimate meaning; at home, however, with their families and bourgeois diversions they are happy and optimistic.  But given their theoretical views, what entitles them to their happiness and optimism? Nothing that I can see. They are living in a state of self-deception.

Benatar lives his atheism: he has existentially appropriated his theoretical convictions and drawn the consequences. (Not that atheism by itself entails anti-natalism.) But is it practically possible to live as an atheist?  W. L. Craig thinks not. See his The Absurdity of Life Without God. Benatar, needless to say, is not impressed by Craig's reasoning. (44).

Speaking for myself, if I KNEW that I was nothing but a complex physical system slated for anihilation in a few years, I would be sorely tempted to walk out into the deseert and blow my brains out, my devotion to my wife being the only thing holding me back.  Why hang around for sickness, old age and a death out of one's control? And it is not because my life isn't good; it is very good. I have achieved the happiness that eluded me in younger years. But if one appreciates what naturalism entails, then all the mundane goodness and middle-sized happiness in the world is ultimately meaningless.

It is my reasonable belief that I am not a mere complex physical system slated for annihilation that adds zest and ultimate purpose to my life.  I keep on because there is reason to hope, not only within this life, but beyond it as well.  

Related articles

Maverick Philosopher: Is Life a Predicament?

David Benatar, <i>The Human Predicament</i>, Chapter 2, Meaning

Maverick Philosopher: David Benatar, The Human Predicament, Introduction

The Question of the Meaning of Life: Distinctions and Assumptions (2017)

Friday Cat Blogging! Black Cats Matter

On 'Devout'

One reads that so-and-so is a 'devout Catholic' or a 'devout Muslim.'

How would the writer know?  Devotion is an interior state inaccessible to observation from without. The practicing Catholic or observant Muslim, by contrast, can be seen to be such by others. So if what you mean to convey is that so-and-so is a practicing or observant Christian, Muslim, or Jew, then you should write that. It is obvious that the practitioner of a religion need not be particularly devout or devout at all.  And that includes priests, rabbis, and imams.

I grant that external practices are evidence of inner attitude. So, by the dictionary definition, you would not be wrong to call a regular practitioner of a religion 'devout.' But here at Maverick Philosopher our standards are a cut above those of a mere dictionary. We aim at precision in thought and speech. And sometimes we miss the mark.

So rather than bandy about, lemming-like, an oft-heard phrase, journalists should ask themselves whether the alternatives suggested above are more appropriate.

Language matters.

Speaking of dictionaries, The Dictionary Fallacy is a very good article in my biased opinion. It will cost you some effort, but a little hard work never hurt anybody.

How a Leftist Gains Perspective

Here:

Yet even as [Lisa] Bloom was still coming to terms with the [Weinsteinian] events of the past month — she attended the post-Burning Man gathering L.A. Decompression over the weekend in an attempt to gain perspective— she seemed focused on some of the smaller details of what went wrong.

Be careful not to bust your gut laughing.

Lefties are risible in both senses of the word: like all human beings, they have the ability to laugh, but unlike most human beings, they are appropriately laughed at.

Related articles

Burning Man attendee dies after rushing into festival flames

Are Bourgeois Values an Offense against Authentic Black Culture?

Here

Ten Political-Economic Theses

Here are ten theses to which I subscribe in the critical way of the philosopher, not the dogmatic way of the ideologue.

1.  There is nothing wrong with money.  It is absolutely not the root of all evil.  The most we can say is that the inordinate desire for money is at the root of some evils.  I develop this theme in Radix Omnium Malorum.

 

2. There is nothing wrong with making money or having money.  There is for example nothing wrong with making a profit from buying, refurbishing, paying propery taxes on, and then selling a house.

 

3. There is nothing wrong with material (socio-economic) inequality as such.  For example, there is nothing wrong with Bill Gates' having a vastly higher net worth than your humble correspondent.  And there is nothing wrong with the latter's having a considerably higher net worth than some of his acquaintances. (When they were out pursuing wine, women, and song, he was engaging in virtuous, forward-looking activities thereby benefiting not only himself but also people who come in contact with him.)   Of course, when I say that there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, I am assuming that the inequalities have not come about through force or fraud. 

 

4. Equality of outcome or result is not to be confused with equality of opportunity or formal equality in general, including equality under the law.  It is an egregious fallacy of liberals and leftists to infer a denial of equality of opportunity -- via  'racism' or 'sexism' or whatever -- from the premise that a certain group has failed to achieve equality of outcome.  There will never be equality of outcome due to the deep differences between individuals and groups.  We must do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity and then let the chips fall where they may. This is consistent with support for government-run programs to help the truly needy who are in dire straits through no fault of their own.

 

5. We the people do not need to justify our keeping of what is ours; the State has to justify its taking.  We are citizens of a republic, not subjects of a king or dictator or of the apparatchiks who have managed to get their hands on the levers of State power.

 

6. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.   Socialism and communism spell the death of individual liberty.  The more socialism, the less liberty.  "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." (D. Prager)

 

7.  The individual is the locus of value, not any collectivity, whether family, tribe, race, nation, or State.  We do not exist for the State; the State exists for us as individuals.

 

8.  Property rights, contra certain libertarians, are not absolute: there are conditions under which an 'eminent domain' State seizure (with appropriate compensation) of property can be justified.  This proposition tempers the individualism of the preceding one.

 

9.  Governments can and do imprison and murder.  No corporation does.  Liberals and leftists and 'progressives' have a naive faith in the benevolence of government, a faith that is belied by that facts of history: Communist governments in the 20th century murdered over 100 million people. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Libs and lefties and progs are well-advised to adopt a more balanced view, tranfering some of their skepticism about corporations -- which is in part justified -- to Big Government, especially the omni-intrusive and omni-competent (omni-incompetent?)sort of governments they champion.

 

10.  Our social and political troubles are rooted in our moral malaise, in particular, in inordinate and disordered  desire.  It is a pernicious illusion of the Left to suppose that our troubles have an economic origin solely and can be alleviated by socialist schemes of redistribution of wealth.

Franz Brentano on the Charge of Excessive Rigorism

On his Facebook Page, Vlastimil V. quotes Franz Brentano, approvingly, I think:

It is certain that no man can entirely avoid error. Nevertheless, avoidable or not, every erroneous judgement is a judgement that ought not to have been made, a judgement in conflict with the requirements of logic, and these cannot be modified. The rules of logic are not to be given up merely because of the weakness of our powers of reasoning. Similarly, the rules of ethics are not to be given up because of weakness of will. If a man is weak willed, ethics cannot cease to demand from him that he love what is known to be good, prefer what is known to be better, and place the highest good above all else. Even if one could show (and one cannot) that there are circumstances under which no one could remain true to the highest good, there would not be the slightest justification for setting aside the requirements of ethics. The one and only correct rule would remain evident and unalterably true: Give preference in every case to that which is better. (emphasis added)

Brentano is out to rebut the charge of excessive rigorism laid at his door step; his rebuttal, however, I find unconvincing.

Let's examine the passage sentence by sentence.

It is certain that no man can entirely avoid error. 

True! So far, so good.

Nevertheless, avoidable or not, every erroneous judgement is a judgement that ought not to have been made, a judgement in conflict with the requirements of logic, and these cannot be modified.  

Ambiguous. What is the force of the 'ought not' here? Is it agential or non-agential?  I agree with Brentano if he is speaking of non-agential oughts. Permit me to explain.

It seems to me there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, there are non-agential oughts. Here are some examples of non-agential ought statements, statements that express an ought to be or an ought not to be as opposed to an ought to do or an ought not to do.

There ought to be fewer diseases than there are.

There ought never to have been any natural disasters.

There ought to be morally perfect people.

There ought to be perfectly logical people.

Human life ought never to have arisen.  

One can imagine someone like David Benatar making the last claim. He would be saying that it would have been better had human life never arisen. And this despite the fact that no agent on his naturalist scheme could have prevented human life from arising. It even makes sense to say that it would have been better had nothing ever existed at all. Perhaps this view can be laid at Schopenhauer's door step: Ens et malum convertuntur. To be is bad.  Being itself is bad to the bone. Nothingness would have been preferable.

There is a sense in which I ought to be morally perfect whether or not it is in my power to become morally perfect.  And the same holds for my being logically perfect.  This  sense is axiological but not deontic. My being morally perfect is a better state of affairs than my being morally imperfect as I am. And this despite the fact that it is not in my power to perfect myself.

Similarly, the rules of ethics are not to be given up because of weakness of will. 

True, as long as the strong-willed have the ability to abide by the rules. 

If a man is weak willed, ethics cannot cease to demand from him that he love what is known to be good, prefer what is known to be better, and place the highest good above all else.

True, but see preceding comment. 

Even if one could show (and one cannot) that there are circumstances under which no one could remain true to the highest good, there would not be the slightest justification for setting aside the requirements of ethics.

Here is where I disagree.  Consider 'One ought to be morally perfect.' This sentence expresses an axiological requirement but (arguably) not a moral obligation because it is simply not in any human's power to perfect himself, nor is it in any finite person's power or any group of finite person's power to perfect him.

The bolded sentence conflicts with the principle that Ought implies Can. I cannot stand under a moral obligation to do what which I do not have the power to do. Now I do not have the power to perfect myself morally. Therefore, contra Brentano, one is justified, not in setting aside the requirements of ethics, but in so amending them that that reflect what is concretely possible for humans to achieve. 

A Use for Ageing

Can I come to see myself as others see me? One way is by ageing: I become other than myself. The old man truly bent on self-knowledge can become as objective about his younger selves as he is about his contemporaries if he so desires. But he had better have an honest journal or diary at his disposal to verify his memories. 

Memory is notoriously deceptive and forgetful.

Grace

Is it possible to take grace seriously these days?

Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat.  For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by someone, then I go beyond the given: I move from phenomenology to theology. No philosopher worth his salt can escape the question whether such a move is or is not an illicit slide. An experience describable as having a gift-character needn't be a gift.

Still, the experience was what it was, and could not be doubted a few moments ago, nor now in its afterglow. It is in such experiences that we find the phenomenological roots of the theology of grace which, growing from such roots, cannot be dismissed as empty speculation or projection or wish-fulfillment or anything else the naturalist may urge for its dismissal.

There cannot be a phenomenology of the Absolute but only a phenomenology of the glimpses, gleanings, vouchsafings, and intimations of the Absolute.  To put the point with full philosophical  precision: there can only be a phenomenology of the glimpses, etc. as of the Absolute. That curious phrase from the philosopher's lexicon expresses the latter's professional caution inasmuch as no experience that purports to take us beyond the sphere of immanence proves the veridicality of its intentional object.

On the other hand, the fact of the experience, its occurrence within the sphere of immanence, needs accounting.  However matters may stand with respect to the realitas objectiva of the experience, its realitas formalis needs to be explained. I would venture to say that the best explanation of the widespread occurrence of mystical experiences is that some of them are indeed veridical.

Aspiration Date

We each have an expiration date on which we will draw and expel our last breath. And there was a day on which we first drew breath. But more significant than either is one's spiritual aspiration date, the date, if it comes at all, on which one awakens to the Quest.

Why Do Leftists Blame the Weapon Over the Wielder?

I spoke of 

. . . the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

What explains this displacement?  A reader proffers an explanation:

Maybe they displace responsibility here because, if we blame the person shooting the gun, next we have to notice just how often that person is black, and how rarely he is white.  And noticing that, for liberals, would be racist.  Nothing that makes blacks look bad, or worse than others in any way, can be noticed.  It must be a gun problem because otherwise it would be a black problem.  (Largely, on the whole -- given what a small proportion of the population is black and what a huge proportion of the 'gun problem' consists of black people shooting people for no good reason.)

Right. It is politically incorrect to take note of differences between blacks and other groups when these differences show blacks to be worse in some respects than these other groups.  

On the other hand, when once in a while the person shooting the gun is a white person--and, best of all, a white person who just might conceivably be associated with conservatism or even some kind of white consciousness --liberals will find that the problem is, for once, not just a gun problem but also the problem of 'angry white men', 'racists', 'white supremacists' or even just 'white people'...  And then we learn that it's those people -- those bad white people--who are responsible for this awful gun culture and gun problem.  So once again, the liberals are really engaged in race hatred and race baiting and maybe, some day, open race war.  So as with so many other things, it seems they don't really believe their own supposed principles, e.g., that the problem is guns not people shooting guns . . . .

My reader's point seems to be that leftists try  to have it both ways at once. By blaming the weapons rather than the wielders, leftists can uphold their cherished but plainly false conviction that blacks are no more criminally prone than whites: there is nothing about blacks that makes them more criminally prone; it is the availability of guns! But their real agenda as destructive leftists is to foment racial division. So when a white man goes on a rampage, then they drop the notion that the availability of guns is the problem and play the race card.

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On the Supposed Political Equivalence of the Two Tribes

As I  read Andrew Sullivan's recent tribalism essay, he is bravely attempting to maintain an equivalency thesis: roughly, the two tribes, the Left tribe and the Right tribe, are equally tribal and equally in the wrong. But in some places in his long essay he does a pretty lame job of it. Here is one:

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes. Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

Let's start with the first sentence. That different outcomes for men and women are entirely a function of sexism is a preposterous claim that anyone with common sense and knowledge of the world should immediately see to be false. It implies that biological differences between the sexes have no bearing whatsoever on behavioral outcomes. But there is good reason to be skeptical of the claim that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet.  

Suppose we grant that there is global warming, and suppose we grant that human activity plays a role in its etiology. There still remain questions as to the extent to which global warming is anthropogenic and what exactly the various causal factors are. The claim that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet is an extremely strong claim.  Compare that to the trivially obvious claim that there is more to the explanation of differential outcomes for the sexes than sexism.

Similarly with the other examples. One cannot, unless one is insane or else a truth-disregarding leftist ideologue, deny the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. But that Bush authorized torture presupposes that waterboarding is torture which is far from obvious and is a reasonably contested assertion. See Is Waterboarding Torture?

So while I respect Sully's attempt at being "fair and balanced," I reject his equivalency thesis. The Left is far more mindlessly and destructively tribal than the Right.  

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Andrew Sullivan on Tribalism

This is a very good article. There is plenty to disagree with, but I agree entirely with this excerpt:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters. But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority. It’s a term that implies there is no difference in race relations between America today and America in, say, the 1830s or the 1930s. This rhetoric is not just untrue, it is dangerous. It wins no converts, and when actual white supremacists march in the streets, you have no language left to describe them as any different from, say, all Trump supporters, including the 13 percent of black men who voted for him.

Compare my Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?

Sullivan also deserves praise for pointing out the excesses of Ta-Nehisi Coates:

He remains a vital voice, but in more recent years, a somewhat different one. His mood has become much gloomier. He calls the Obama presidency a “tragedy,” and describes many Trump supporters as “not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos.” He’s written about how watching cops and firefighters enter the smoldering World Trade Center instantly reminded him of cops mistreating blacks: They “were not human to me.” In his latest essay in the Atlantic, analyzing why Donald Trump won the last election, he dismisses any notion that economic distress might have played a role as “empty” and ignores other factors, such as Hillary Clinton’s terrible candidacy, the populist revolt against immigration that had become a potent force across the West, and the possibility that the pace of social change might have triggered a backlash among traditionalists. No, there was one meaningful explanation only: white supremacism. And those who accept, as I do, that racism was indeed a big part of the equation but also saw other factors at work were simply luxuriating in our own white privilege because we are never under “racism’s boot.”

Jewish Humor

Here:

Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew ?”

“On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know – it makes me feel a whole lot better!”

What Do Gun Violence and Systemic Racism Have in Common?

Neither exist.

(William Tingley calls me "the pithy Maverick." How are you doing these days, Bill?)

Why Maintain a Journal?

It was 47 years ago today that I first began keeping a regular journal under the motto, nulla dies sine linea, no day without a line.  Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals.

When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is still my thought. The unrecorded life is not worth living. For we have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living, and how examined could an undocumented life be?

The maintenance of a journal aids mightily in the project of self-individuation. Like that prodigious journal writer Søren Kierkegaard, I believe we are here to become actually the individuals we are potentially. Our individuation is not ready-made or given, but a task to be accomplished. The world is a vale of soul-making; we are not here to improve it, but to be improved by it.  

Henry David Thoreau, another of the world's great journal writers,  said in Walden that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I  would only add that without a journal, one's life is one of quiet dissipation. One's life dribbles away, day by day, unreflected on, unexamined, unrecorded, and thus fundamentally unlived. Living, for us humans, is not just a biological process; it is fundamentally a spiritual unfolding. To mean anything it has to add up to something, and that something cannot be expressed with a dollar sign.

I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence. In my early twenties, I spoke of the supreme desideratum of a focused existence.  What bothered me about the people around me, fellow students in particular, was the mere aestheticism of their existence: their aimless drifting hither and yon, their lack of commitment, their unseriousness, their refusal to engage the arduous task of   self-definition and self-individuation, their willingness to be guided and mis-guided by social suggestions. In one's journal one collects and re-collects oneself; one makes war against the lower self and the forces of dispersion.

Another advantage to a journal and its regular maintenance is that one thereby learns how to write, and how to think. An unwritten thought is still a half-baked thought: proper concretion is achieved only by  expressing thoughts in writing and developing them. Always write as well as you can, in complete sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors. Develop the sentences into paragraphs, and if the Muse is with you those paragraphs may one day issue in essays, articles, and chapters of books.

Finally, there is the pleasure of re-reading from a substantial temporal distance.  Six years ago I began re-reading my journal in order, month by month, at a 40 year distance.  So of course  now I am up to October 1977.  40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.

On this Date in 1844

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844.  He died on 25 August 1900.  You must attend to him if you would understand our current spiritual/cultural situation. His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself.

What makes it a great aphorism? Economy of expression; penetrating insight; literary quality.  An aphorism must be short, but not merely clever: it has to set a truth before us. And it has to do that in an arresting and memorable way. 

My

Some men die before they are dead

is good but does not achieve quite the same level.  For one thing, it is derivative as the converse of the Nietzschean saying. 

Aphoristic discourse is not argumentative discourse. Like a thunderbolt that does not bring in its train any explanation, a good aphorism is an assertion bare of reasons. It is fitting that Nietzsche should aphorize given his aversion to dialectics:

With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad manners, they were compromising. The young were warned against them. Furthermore, all such presentations of one's reasons were distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. One must have to enforce one's right: until one reaches that point, one makes no use of it. The Jews were dialecticians for that reason; Reynard the Fox was one -- and Socrates too? (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates.") 

Mark Anderson kindly sent me his book, Zarathustra Stone.

I am impressed by how sympathetically he has entered into Nietzsche's mind and spirit. 

The Suicide of American Liberalism

Robert Tracinski:

The far left, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, is protesting a campus speaker again. Who is it this time? Some neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer? An unscrupulous provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos? Just a garden-variety scary conservative like Ben Shapiro? Nope, it’s the American Civil Liberties Union as represented by Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.

Read it all.

I have never hid my contempt for the ACLU. But at least we share some sliver of ground with that bunch of shysters. For they have at least some, albeit highly selective, respect for portions of the Constitution.  The absurdly self-appellated Antifa thugs, however, will not abide the Constitution at all and absurdly opine that liberalism is white supremacy.

Here is one of my fulminations against the ACLU together with links to two other rather more measured pieces. 

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Here.

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Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race

Dennis Prager insists on a distinction between leftism and liberalism. "The two have almost nothing in common," he tells us.  He points to a number of differences. I will comment on just one:

Race: This is perhaps the most obvious of the many moral differences between liberalism and leftism. The essence of the liberal position on race was that the color of one’s skin is insignificant. To liberals of a generation ago, only racists believed that race is intrinsically significant. However, to the left, the notion that race is insignificant is itself racist. Thus, the University of California officially regards the statement “There is only one race, the human race” as racist. For that reason, liberals were passionately committed to racial integration. Liberals should be sickened by the existence of black dormitories and separate black graduations on university campuses.

a) A minor point: while color of skin is a phenotypical manifestation of race, race is not the same as skin color. Otherwise, how do you explain the differences in attitudes towards blacks and people from India, many of whom are very dark in color?   It is their behavior, not skin color, that determines attitudes toward blacks, and behavior is a better indicator of race than skin color.  Most white liberals would not think of buying a house in a predominantly black area. Is that because of skin color or typical behavior patterns? The question answers itself.

On second thought, my "minor point" is not so minor. To speak of race in terms of something as superficial as skin color is to assume that race is of no significance.  But this is a question that ought not be begged. Is sex also of no significance? I say No and Prager says the same.

How can Prager hold that race is of no significance when he also holds, rightly, that sex is of great significance and that the behavioral differences of men and women are rooted in biological differences and are not just a matter of socialization? Is it at all plausible to think that gender differences are rooted in biological differences while racial differences are not so rooted?  No, it is not.

b) What is it for race to be significant or insignificant? Is the idea that race has no explanatory connection to any behavioral attributes?  But that cannot be right. How explain the 'over-representation' of blacks in the NBA and NFL?  Why are blacks, as a group, so much better than other groups at basketball and football?  Even if part of the explanation is social and cultural, surely part of its has to do with the biological realities of race.

Consider parallel questions about sex. Are men and women equally capable of being competent fire fighters? Of course not. That fact cannot be explained by differential socialization such as a lack of toy fire trucks in the nurseries of little girls. The explanation must invoke biological realities having to so with muscle mass, upper body strength, etc.  

Race, like sex, does matter.  Why is it 'racist' to point this out?  It can't be racist since it is true. Is it 'ageist' to point out that there is a good reason why one cannot enlist in the U. S. Army if one is over 40 years of age? 

Is it 'discriminatory' in a pejorative sense to require that enlistees be in good health, be fluent in English, and have a high school diploma or equivalent?  Of course not. Only a liberal knucklehead could think otherwise.

Is age a mere social construct? Of course not. Age, as it relates to activities like schlepping heavy packs and climbing over obstacles is related to ageing, the latter being a biological process.

c) Since Prager is a sex realist he ought to be a race realist as well. Just as it would be absurd for him to say that there is only one sex, the human sex, it is absurd for him to say that there is only one race, the human race.

But surely it is not racist to say this as crazed leftists think. On the contrary, it expresses the salutary desire to get beyond racial differences and find common ground in our common humanity. That can't be bad!  So why do leftists think that it is racist to to say that there is only one race, the human race?

It is because they think it implies a denial of black identity.  

I suggest that the correct view lies between Prager's race irrealism according to which race is just skin color and to that extent insignificant,  and the identitarian view, found both on the Left and on the Alt-Right, that race is constitutive of who one is at a very deep level.

The correct view is that racial differences are real and significant just as sexual and age differences are real and significant, but that for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity. And what might these be? 

Some candidates: fellow citizen, rational animal, American (for Americans), child of God.  

I will leave it to the reader to explain why each of these candidates has become in recent decades highly problematic.  For example, if you believe in the nonsense of a 'living constitution' which is in reality no constitution at all, then you are not an American in the sense required to secure some common ground.

So I end with a dark thought: in the end tribalism wins.