A reader who grew up under Czech communism, but who now lives in the US:
Hi Rod,
A thought about comments like this one:
“Creating an equivalence between a poster in an American high school promoting understanding, with imagery that can be misunderstood, and Hungarian terrorism, is a huge disrespect to Hungarian terrorism. There is no equivalence”
and many other similar ones …
What your readers do not understand is that horrors of communism did not start with people planning to murder and torture. They started with “posters in … schools promoting understanding, justice, equality”, with starry-eyed people wanting to address societal ills. It was this social reengineering that eventually and inevitably led to murder and torture.
Keep your eyes wide open. People like the Czech reader are canaries in the coal mine.
On the other hand, I keep having a slightly unnerving experience here, both in Hungary and the Czech Republic. People cannot understand the insanity coming from America, the UK, and the EU on LGBT and gender theory. It is literally incomprehensible to them. Just this morning I was talking to a seminary professor of moral theology who said that his thesis on alternative sexualities was laughed at; his colleagues could not believe that anyone would take this stuff seriously. This professor is no advocate for alternative sexualities, but he had lived and taught in the West, and he knows they are going to have to be dealing with this stuff here sooner or later.
I keep telling the people I talk to about this that they should not simply laugh this stuff off as incomprehensible. Several agreed with me that 40 years of communism served as a vaccination against susceptibility to ideological extremism, and that this might be why even atheists (most Czechs are atheists) find the gender theory types to be crackpots. But then, if you had told a lot of Americans in 1998 what would be mainstream in our country on this front in 2018, they would have laughed like the Czechs and the Hungarians laughed. But now look.
This morning I received the news that my neighbor and fellow hiker Lloyd Glaus had died. What follows is a redacted entry from an earlier pre-Typepad version of this weblog in which I reported on a memorable trans-Superstition hike we took together over ten years ago, on 29 October 2007, when Lloyd was 75 years old and I was 57.
....................
How long can we keep it up?
I mean the running, the biking, the hiking and backpacking? Asking myself this question I look to my elders: how do they fare at their advanced ages? Does the will to remain fit and strong pave a way? For some it does. Having made the acquaintance of a wild and crazy 75-year-old who ran his first marathon recently in the Swiss Alps, uphill all the way, the start being Kleine Scheidegg at the base of the awesome Eiger Nordwand, the North Wall of the Eiger, I invited him to a little stroll in the Superstitions, there to put him under my amateur gerontological microscope. Lloyd's wife Annie dropped us off at the Peralta Trailhead in the dark just before first light and we started up the rocky trail toward Fremont Saddle.
Eight and a half hours later she kindly collected us at First Water, the temperature having risen to 95 degrees. Lloyd acquitted himself well, though the climb from Boulder Basin to Parker Pass left him tuckered. And he got cut up something fierce when we lost the trail and had to bushwack through catclaw and other nasty flora.
But he proved what I wanted proven, namely, that at 75 one can go for a grueling hike though rugged country in high heat and still have a good time and be eager to begin planning the next trip. Some shots follow. Click to enlarge. Weaver's Needle, the most prominent landmark in the Superstition Range and visible from all corners of the wilderness, but especially well from Fremont Saddle, our first rest stop, is featured in several of them.
This is how I will remember Lloyd, and this is how I suspect he would want to be remembered -- with his boots on in the mountains.
You say you've forgotten who Dolezal is is? Too much Twitter! A weapon of mass distraction. Soon you'll be a tweeting twit with a mind fit only to flit.
Related:
Rachel Dolezal, The Black White Woman. I make a mistake at the end of this post that I will now correct. I represent Elizabeth Warren as the author of Pow Wow Chow when in fact she is merely a contributor to that by-now-famous recipe book. Her contribution, however, a recipe for lobster bisque -- Cherokees were into haute cuisine? -- was plagiarized!
This post has a prerequisite: a modicum of rationality and a little bit of good will. The irrational and ill-willed should head for their 'safe spaces' now lest they be 'triggered.'
1) Is anybody against gun control? Not that I am aware of. Everybody wants there to be some laws regulating the manufacture, sale, importation, transportation, use, etc., of guns. So why do liberals routinely characterize conservatives as against gun control? Because they are mendacious. It is for the same reason that they label conservatives as anti-government and anti-immigrant. Conservatives stand for limited government, whence it follows that that are for government. This is a simple inference that even a liberal should be able to process. So why do liberals call conservatives anti-government? Because they are mendacious: they are not interested in civil debate, but in winning at all costs by any means. With respect to both government and gun control, the question is not whether but how much and what kind.
Similarly with immigration. Conservatives do not oppose immigration; they oppose illegal immigration.
2) Terminology matters. 'Magazine' is the correct term for what is popularly called a clip. Don't refer to a round as a bullet. The bullet is the projectile. Don't call a suppressor a 'silencer.' Is your name Hillary? Avoid emotive phraseology if you are interested in serious discussion. 'Assault weapon' has no clear meaning and is emotive to boot. Do you mean semi-automatic long gun? Then say that. Don't confuse 'semi-automatic' with 'fully automatic.' The 'AR' in 'AR-15' is not short for 'assault rifle.' Bone up on the terminology if you want to be taken seriously.
A stupid article in the Washington Post calls what I have just written 'gunsplaining.' To be 'gunsplained' is to be "harangued with the pedantry of the more-credible-than-thou firearms owner, admonished that your inferior knowledge of guns and their nomenclature puts an asterisk next to your opinion on gun control."
What nonsense! Only a fool dismisses essential distinctions as pedantry. And if one is not willing to learn the elementary terminology of a debate, then one should not presume to enter the debate. One who does not understand such terms as abortifacient, embryo, gamete, and viable should not enter the abortion debate, for example.
3) Gun lobbies benefit gun manufacturers. No doubt. But they also defend the Second Amendment rights of citizens, all citizens. Be fair. Don't adduce the first fact while ignoring the second. And don't call the NRA a special interest group. A group that defends free speech defends a right of all citizens, including those who do not invoke the right. Every citizen has an actual or potential interest in self-defense and the means thereto. It's a general interest. A liberal who has no interest in self-defense and the means thereto is simply a liberal who has yet to be mugged or raped or had her home invaded. Such a liberal's interest is yet potential. When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, many foolish liberals thought that a fascist was about to enter the White House. Many of these liberals suddenly began taking the Second Amendment seriously.
4) Question for liberals: what is your plan in case of a home invasion? Call 9-1-1? What is your plan in case of a fire? Call the Fire Department? Not a bad thought. But before they arrive it would help to have a home fire extinguisher at the ready. Ergo, etc.
Can you follow this reasoning? If not, you need help. Please seek it for your own good.
One might think that, given the superior intelligence of Jews and Asians as groups, members of these groups would not support destructive leftists when it is fairly obvious that doing so is not in their long-term best self-interest. We read below that a third of Asian Americans live in California. So they have first-hand experience of the negative consequences of leftist government. So why do they vote Democrat overwhelmingly?
It turns out that Confucius plays a role! Ideas have consequences.
An Asian American documents the fact and then offers an explanation (emphases added):
From Roosevelt’s executive order which sent Japanese Americans to internment camps during the World War II to today’s affirmative action in college admissions, Asian Americans have been hurt again and again by Democrat politicians and liberal policies. Yet Asian Americans consistently vote overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates. In 2016, 79 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters supported Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In the 2012, presidential election, Barack Obama won 73 percent of the Asian American vote, exceeding his support among Hispanics (71 percent) and women (55 percent).
Why do the majority of Asian Americans choose to support Democrats? I identified three factors. First is location. Asians tend to concentrate in urban environments where liberals are dominant. For example, a third of Asians in America live in California. Other top states with significant Asian populations are New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii. Therefore, Asians are bombarded by Democrat propaganda.
Second, the cultural influence of the countries of origin still has an impact on many first generation Asian immigrants: the top six countries that send 80 percent of all Asian immigrants to the U.S. are China, the Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. With the exception of India, the other five countries all have long traditions of being patriarchal societies following Confucian teachings.Confucius, a Chinese philosopher from 551 B.C to 479 B.C., defined the relationship between government and its people, between the ruler and his subject, as a family affair. Confucius believed people should obey and respect their rulers just as they obey and respect their fathers, while a ruler should love and care for his subjects as if they were his children. Under the influence of this philosophy, although many Asians believe self-reliance and hard work are the only paths to prosperity, many of them also believe government has a responsibility to take care of other people, and they are more open to big government as long as there is a virtuous leader to lead it. Like many other ethnic groups, the second generation of East Asians are much less likely to be subject to the influence of Confucius.
Third, the Democrat’s message of embracing diversity, as superficial as it is, still sounds attractive to many Asians, because it gives them a sense of belonging. In the meantime, Republicans have all but given up on winning Asian votes and thus make very little effort. Republicans have been doing a very poor job of “showing up” in Asian communities. To many Republicans candidates, minority outreach means outreach to African Americans and Hispanic Americans only. Outreach to Asians has a lower priority, often merely showing up at a Chinese New Year celebration in an election year is considered to be sufficient. In addition, Republicans do a poor job of recruiting Asian Americans at the grassroots level. Being an Asian and a conservative is a lonely journey. When I show up at a Republican Party event, 9 out of 10 times I am the only Asian in the room.
Should we assume that every people in every land is equally capable of shaping its own destiny? The notion that largely tribal Muslim societies can march to democracy on the same path as Americans who elected their own pastors and collected their own taxes has caused endless mischief. Time and again, Rice’s prescription comes down to “assume a civil society,” where none ever has existed.
[. . .]
Culture doesn’t matter for Condoleezza Rice, who reduces the world to simple ideological categories. Her contribution to misguided American policies has been substantial. America hasn’t begun to pay for the consequences of her mistakes. The Bush Administration and its successor spent over $4 trillion to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nearly 7,000 American dead and more than 50,000 wounded. What do we have to show for it?
Culture matters. This is why a nation has a right to defend and preserve its culture by enforcing its borders and by refusing to allow subversive elements to immigrate.
We are not all the same whether as individuals or as groups. We don't share the same values or want the same things. Not all cultures are equally conducive to human flourishing.
You have a natural right to life. This right to life entails in others a moral obligation not to harm you. Should anyone attempt to do so, you yourself have a right, directly and not via the invocation of the help of a police agency, to defend your life. But if so, then you have a right to the adequate means of self-defense. Having the right entails the right, though not the obligation, to exercise the right. This implies that the law-abiding citizen has a right to keep and bear appropriate arms for personal and home defense.
It follows that no one and no government has the right to infringe your gun rights.
Much more could be said, but as some wit once observed, and then kept repeating, "Brevity is the soul of blog."
Now what about this right to self-defense? If you were to deny that we possess it, I would pronounce you benighted and not worth ten seconds of a rational man's time. But it is always nice to be able to back up one's assertions by invocation of the views of great philosophers. So we turn to John Locke (1632-1704), a great influence on our Founding Fathers, and The Second Treatise of Government (1690). Chapter III is entitled "Of the State of War." The first paragraph, #16, is as follows:
Sec. 16. THE state of war is a state of enmity and destruction: and therefore declaring by word or action, not a passionate and hasty, but a sedate settled design upon another man’s life, puts him in a state of war with him against whom he has declared such an intention, and so has exposed his life to the other’s power to be taken away by him, or any one that joins with him in his defence, and espouses his quarrel; it being reasonable and just, I should have a right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction: for, by the fundamental law of nature, man being to be preserved as much as possible, when all cannot be preserved, the safety of the innocent is to be preferred: and one may destroy a man who makes war upon him, or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, those dangerous and noxious creatures, that will be sure to destroy him whenever he falls into their power [emphasis added].
I took a welcome break from the cable shout shows and the gun 'conversation' the other night to watch the 1944 film noir Double Indemnity, starring Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson. The Stanwyck character talks an insurance agent played by MacMurray into murdering her husband in order to collect on a double indemnity policy.
The husband is strangled mafia-style, murderer in back seat, victim in front. But the act is not shown. The viewer is shown enough to 'get the picture.' These old films had sex and violence but one's nose wasn't rubbed in them. Sex and violence were part of the story line. If Bogie was shown taking the leading lady into a bedroom, one knew what was about to transpire, but one was spared the raw hydraulics of it.
But thanks to 'progressives' we've made 'progress.' Much of what passes as 'entertainment' today is meant to demean, dehumanize, degrade, and undermine whatever moral sense is left in people. I leave it to you to decide whether Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook . . . Parkland and like atrocities are more appropriately charged to the account of liberal culture rather than to that of gun culture.
You know my answer.
We ought to demand of Hollywood dreckmeisters that they clean up their act and curtail their cultural pollution. Not that these scumbags would ever show any social responsibility.
He is best known for his 1960 crossover hit that made it to the #7 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, Let's Think About Living. How quaint the reference to the fellow with the switchblade knife. It was a tamer time.
The denizens of HollyWeird love the freakish, the 'transgressive,' the grotesque, and the unnatural. And being leftists, they celebrate losers and screw-ups, from the legendary La La Land 'motorist' Rodney King to the shotgun murderer Tookie Williams. A characteristic of libs and lefties is that in their typical knee-jerk (reflexive as opposed to reflective) style, they take the side of losers, criminals, screw-ups and underdogs regardless of what they did to bring on their underdog status. If you don't understand this, you will never understand the Left and how pernicious leftists are.
Don't get me wrong. I believe in equal justice under the law. And I believe in helping those who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times. I practice what I preach. But the attitude of leftists whereby they celebrate transgressives and miscreants is perverse, which is why these destructivos deserve our steadfast opposition and unremitting contempt.
Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you what I really think. For now, I pass the baton to Gilbert T. Sewall:
Hollywood’s A-list is almost all in for transformative social justice, which mixes calculated groupthink and “can I grab the spotlight?” As a result, America’s favorite Hollywood evening has mutated into hours of glossy political hectoring, this year in behalf of female empowerment, support for immigrants, and opposition to the National Rifle Association.
“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” Harvey Weinstein declared in 2009. “We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.” With telethons and global hugs, who needs nature or God?
[. . .]
Hollywood likes freakish [freakishness], and so do its devotees. Criticizing tattoos, hookups, rap music, or trannies — saying the wrong thing on Facebook — might get you into trouble at work or school. Heaven forbid you should offend those who would consider your disapproval “hatred,” which entitles them to destroy your career or good name. Or maybe blow you away.
We’re getting used to that as well. First-person shooter video and computer games allow people to enact murder, not only watch it. That’s part of Hollywood’s multimedia platform too, a franchise worth billions.
Media accountants and publicists raise the specter of censorship and the thought police on their way to the bank. In fact, entertainment capitalists have no illusions what they are stirring up and the thrills they provide. New York- and Los Angeles-based wizards know how to stimulate appetites and points of view, and for a price they can do their magic in Washington, D.C. Privately, they exalt [exult] in their power.
Meanwhile, Hollywood doubles down on identity politics. It insists that depravity and imaginary violence do not lead to sociopathic behavior. It professes the product is mere fiction, that it has no real world effect. If you don’t like it, look the other way. You don’t have to buy it.
Well, it depends on the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem. If you're going from San Francisco to Las Vegas, the rental fee is $2,000. But if you're going to San Francisco from Lost Wages, it will set you back a paltry 100 semolians.
Californication proceeds apace. The once-golden Golden State is bleeding liberals.
As for shitholes, San Francisco has become one, so much so that one now needs a crap map to safely negotiate its streets.
The problem, of course, is the Democrat Party and its leading 'lights,' the benighted Nancy Pelosi and Jerry 'Governor Moonbeam' Brown, that stellar lunar product of Jesuit 'education.'
Cutting against the Enlightenment grain, Kant delivers a resoundingly negative verdict. Suicide is always and everywhere morally wrong. This entry is part of an effort to understand his position. Unfortunately, Kant's treatment is exceedingly murky and one of his arguments is hard to square with what he says elsewhere. In his Lectures on Ethics (tr. Infield, Hackett Publishing, no date), the great champion of autonomy seems to recommend abject heteronomy:
God is our owner; we are His property; His providence works for our good. A bondsman in the case of a beneficent master deserves punishment if he opposes his master's wishes. (154)
It is hard to see how this coheres with Kant's talk of persons as ends in themselves in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (AA 428). For Kant, rational beings, whether biologically human or not, are persons. Persons, unlike things, are ends in themselves. As such, they may not be used as mere means. I may not treat another person as a mere means nor may I so treat myself. For Kant there are duties to oneself and they take precedence over duties to others since "nothing can be expected from a man who dishonours his own person." (118) The highest duty to oneself is that of self-preservation. Suicide is contrary to this highest duty and is therefore morally impermissible in all circumstances. The prohibition against suicide is exceptionless.
But how can a person be an end in itself if finite persons are created by God for his purposes? How can persons be ends in themselves if God owns us and we are his property? Is suicide wrong because it violates God's property rights? If anyone has property rights in my body, it would have to be me wouldn't it? Is man God's slave? So man is both free and enslaved?
Furthermore, if it is morally permissible for God to use finite persons as mere means to his end, self-glorification, say, then how could it be wrong for a person to treat himself as a mere means when he commits suicide?
We can put the underlying puzzle as a aporetic dyad:
1) My dignity, worth, autonomy, freedom, and irreplaceable uniqueness as a person derive from my having been created in the image and likeness of an absolutely unique free being who is the eminently personal source of all Being, truth, and value. My higher origin and destiny elevate me infinitely far above the rest of creation. I am animal, but also a spirit, and thus not merely an animal. I cannot be understood naturalistically as merely a more highly evolved animal.
2) If I am created by God both as a material being and as a person, then I cannot be an end in myself possessing autonomy and the other attributes mentioned. For if God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being, then also in my being a subject, a self-determining person.
Note that the freedom mentioned in (1) is not the compatibilist "freedom of the turnspit" as Kant derisively calls it, but the freedom of a (noumenal) agent who has the power to initiate a causal chain ex nihilo by performing an act that he could have refrained from performing, and is therefore morally responsible for performing. This rich non-compatibilist notion of freedom implies a god-like power in man that no merely natural (phenomenal) being possesses or could possess. This freedom points to a divine origin and is the respect in which we bear the image of God within us. The freedom of the human creature mirrors the freedom of the creator.
But how is this freedom and dignity and personal uniqueness, which we cannot possess except as God's creatures, logically compatible with our creature status? Presupposed is a robust conception of creation as creatio continuans according to which the entire being of the creature is sustained ongoingly by divine power (Any less robust a conception would injure the divine sovereignty.) How can the inviolable interiority of a person maintain itself in the face of God's creative omniscience?
Some will say that the paradox is a contradiction and both limbs cannot be true. Other will say that the paradox is a mystery: both limbs are true, but we cannot in this life understand how they could both be true.
The paradox is at the root of Kant's uncompromising attitude toward the morality of suicide. He prohibits it without exception despite man's freedom and autonomy because of their derivation from God. We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves.
Kant's Exceptionless Prohibition of Suicide as Essentially Christian and Unjustifiable Otherwise
Christianity too issues a total and exceptionless prohibition against suicide. The classical (philosophical as opposed to theological) arguments of Augustine and Aquinas against suicide are, however, uncompelling, as the Christian Paul Ludwig Landsberg shows. Thus he maintains that
. . . the total prohibition of suicide can only be justified or even understood in relation to the scandal and the paradox of the cross. It is true that we belong to God, as Christ belonged to God. It is true that we should subordinate our will to His, as Christ did. It is true that we should leave the decision as to our life or death to Him. If we wish to die, we have indeed the right to pray to God to let us die. Yet we must always add: Thy will, not mine, be done. But this God is not our master as if we were slaves. He is our Father. He is the Christian God who loves us with infinite love and infinite wisdom. If He makes us suffer, it is for our salvation and purification. We must recall the spirit in which Christ suffered the most horrible death.
Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle. The puzzle, again, is how the Sage of Koenigsberg, the Enlightenment champion of human freedom and autonomy, can maintain that, no matter how horrific the circumstances, one may never justifiably take one's own life. The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.
What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.
Landsberg again:
All that we can say to the suffering man who is tempted to commit suicide, is this “Remember the suffering of Christ and the martyrs. You must carry your cross, as they did. You will not cease to suffer, but the cross of suffering itself will grow sweet by virtue of an unknown strength proceeding from the heart of divine love. You must not kill yourself, because you must not throw away your cross. You need it. And enquire of your conscience if you are really innocent. You will find that if you are perhaps innocent of one thing for which the world reproaches you, you are guilty in a thousand other ways. You are a sinner. If Christ, who was innocent, suffered for others and, as Pascal said, has also shed a drop of blood for you, how shall you, a sinner, be entitled to refuse suffering? Perhaps it is a form of punishment. But divine punishment has this specific and incomparable quality, that it is not revenge and that its very nature is purification. Whoever revolts against it, revolts in fact against the inner meaning of his own life.”
Paul Ludwig Landsberg, geboren 1901 in Bonn, wurde 1927 Ordinarius für Philosophie und emigrierte 1933 zunächst nach Spanien, dann nach Frankreich. Der Schüler von Max Scheler und Edmund Husserl war während der französischen Emigration eng mit dem Collège de Sociologie verbunden und starb 1944 im Konzentrationslager Oranienburg.
Our contemporary media dreckmeisters apparently think that the purpose of art is to degrade sensibility, impede critical thinking, glorify scumbags, and rub our noses ever deeper into sex and violence. The liberal fetishization of freedom of expression without constraint or sense of responsibility is part of the problem. But I can't let a certain sort of libertarian or economic conservative off the hook. Their lust for profit is also involved.
What is is that characterizes contemporary media dreck? Among other things, the incessant presentation of defective human beings as if there are more of them than there are, and as if there is nothing at all wrong with their ways of life. Deviant behavior is presented as if it is mainstream and acceptable, if not desirable. And then lame justifications are provided for the presentation: 'this is what life is like now; we are simply telling it like it is.' It doesn't occur to the dreckmeisters that art might have an ennobling function.
The tendency of liberals and leftists is to think that any presentation of choice-worthy goals or admirable styles of life could only be hypocritical preaching. And to libs and lefties, nothing is worse than hypocrisy. Indeed, a good indicator of whether someone belongs to this class of the terminally benighted is whether the person obsesses over hypocrisy and thinks it the very worst thing in the world. See my category Hypocrisy for elaboration of this theme.
Leftist scum need to look in the mirror before blaming inanimate objects for violent behavior.
I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression. Have I ever done any of these things? Probably. 'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above. But I try to avoid these 'sins.'
This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin? (Hawthorn Books, 1973). On p. 156, I found this quotation:
Our youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. Children nowadays are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads: "Socrates, circa 425 B. C. Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."
I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.' In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand. So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator.
. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times.
Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit appeared in 1955 two years before Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I never finished Gray Flannel, getting only 80 or so pages into it. It's a book as staid as the '50s, a tad boring, conventional, and forgettable in comparison to the hyper-romantic and heart-felt rush of the unforgettable On the Road. Since how 'beat' one is in part has to do with one's attitude towards money, which is not the same as one's possession or non-possession of it, I'll for now just pull some quotations from Horace and Sloan Wilson. The Horace quotations seem not to comport well with each other, but we can worry that bone on another occasion.
Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 53) Money is to be sought first of all; virtue after wealth. Or, loosely translated, cash before conscience.
Vilius argentum est auro virtutibus aurum. (Horace, Epistles I, 1, 52). Silver is less valuable than gold, gold less valuable than virtue.
The next morning, Tom put on his best suit, a freshly cleaned and pressed gray flannel. On his way to work he stopped in Grand Central Station to buy a clean white handkerchief and to have his shoes shined. During his luncheon hour he set out to visit the United Broadcasting Corporation. As he walked across Rockefeller Plaza, he thought wryly of the days when he and Betsy had assured each other that money didn't matter. They had told each other that when they were married, before the war, and during the war they had repeated it in long letters. "The important thing is to find a kind of work you really like, and something that is useful," Betsy had written him. "The money doesn't matter."
The hell with that, he thought. The real trouble is that up to now we've been kidding ourselves. We might as well admit that what we want is a big house and a new car and trips to Florida in the winter, and plenty of life insurance. When you come right down to it, a man with three children has no damn right to say that money doesn't matter. (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, Simon and Shuster, 1955, pp. 9-10)
I have a little disagreement going with the Dark Ostrich. He asserts, "Relative poverty is all about status." In an earlier entry, I quoted him as maintaining that
We are born with a natural inequality which soon turns into economic inequality. The reason it turns into economic inequality, I believe, is that humans have a natural desire for status.
I replied,
Yes, we are naturally unequal, both as individuals and as groups, and this inequality results in economic inequality. But I wouldn't explain this in terms of the desire for status. Status is relative social standing, and depends on how one appears in the eyes of others. But this is relatively unimportant and has little to do with money and property which are far more important. I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without a modicum of material wealth.
It is not desire for status that [primarily] explains economic inequality but the desire for money and property and the sort of material security they provide.
I would guess that no one who reads this weblog is absolutely poor, i.e., bereft of life's necessities, and that every one who reads it is relatively poor, and significantly so. What do I mean by 'significantly so'? Suppose A has a net worth of four billion USD and B a net worth of 3.9 billion. Then B is poor relative to A. I will call this insignificant relative poverty. But the Ostrich and I, though we have far more than we need, are significantly relatively poor as compared to, say, the late Fidel Castro, that man of the people and hero of the Left.
The Ostrich tells us that relative property is all about status. I take that to mean that it is the drive for social status alone that brings about economic inequality and with it relative poverty. That is empirically false. I am the counterexample: I live wisely and frugally and my net worth keeps going up. But I don't care about status, which is relatively unreal, being mainly a matter of what's going on in the heads of others. I carefully husband my resources because I want to be in a position to take care of myself and others when the inevitable disasters occur and not be a burden on others. What others think of me, though of some importance, is of less importance to me than my material well-being.
But let's be charitable. Perhaps what the Ostrich means to say is that it is the lust for status that mainly brings about economic inequality and relative poverty. I concede that that might be so. It is an empirical question and cannot be answered from the arm chair.
But there are a couple of normative questions in the vicinity and these are what really interest me. One is whether it is morally permissible to pursue loot and lucre, property and pelf, for social standing. The other is whether it is rational to pursue these things for social standing. I will leave the moral question for some other time.
As for rationality, it can be understood in two different ways.
An agent is instrumentally rational if he chooses means conducive to the achievement of his ends. A rational agent in Phoenix who intends to travel to Los Angeles by car in eight hours or less will head West on Interstate 10. If he were to head East he would show himself to be irrational, at least in respect of this particular goal or type of goal. This says nothing about the rationality or irrationality of driving to Los Angeles. Indeed, there are those who will say that it makes no sense to speak of ends as either rational or irrational, that such talk is meaningful only in respect of means.
On a second way of thinking about rationality, one can coherently speak of ends themselves as rational or the opposite. Consider social status and material security. Which is a higher value? Which is more choice-worthy? Which would it be more rational for a being of our constitution to pursue? To me the answer is obvious. Material security, which includes wealth well beyond what one needs physically to survive, is a higher value that social status. Modifying slightly what I said above,
I can live very well indeed without name and fame, accolades and awards, high social position and the perquisites that come in its train. But I cannot live well without material wealth in excess of what is needed for necessities.
Given how benighted human beings are, it may well be instrumentally rational to pursue wealth for the sake of status. That's an empirical question. But no reasonable person prefers status to wealth, just as no reasonable person prefers transient sense pleasures to long-term physical health.
So the Ostrich and I may be at cross-purposes. I am making normative claims while he remains at the level of the merely factual.
Now suppose someone asserts that the good is whatever satisfies desire, and that there is no way of ranking desires as objectively higher or lower, and their objects as more or less choice-worthy. Could I refute such a person? I don't think so. Contradict yes, refute no. For it all comes down to whether one has correct value intuitions. Some of us do and some of us don't. Just as some of us are color-blind, some of us are value-blind, wertblind in the terminology of Dietrich von Hildebrand. While color blindness is a defect in the eye of the head, value blindness is a defect in the 'eye' of the soul.
Philosophers have been known to advance extreme theses. David Benatar's signature anti-natalist theses are not only extreme, but extremely unpalatable to almost everyone. This makes him a target of vicious attacks. I don't agree with him, but I admire him and what he exemplifies, the courageous practice of unrestrained philosophical inquiry, inquiry that follows the arguments where they lead, even if they issue in conclusions that make people extremely uncomfortable and are sure to bring obloquy upon the philosopher who proposes them.
I also admire Jordan Peterson. He is doing a world of good for a lot of young people, especially young men, who have been cheated by the liberals who have undermined our educational institutions. He is a voice of sanity in the cacophony of political correctness.
JP [. . .] There’s an anti-natalist you might want to look up. His name is David Benatar. I did a debate with him a while back. He believes that human existence-conscious existence, not just human existence but conscious existence, is so intolerable in its fundamental aspect that we should stop propagating it. We shouldn’t raise animals. We shouldn’t have children. We should just cease to be, because being in itself is a positive evil.
AR: So you think that’s the mentality, the psychology in which these school shooters operate?
JP: Oh, for sure that’s it. Yes, absolutely. But it’s more than that. They take it a step further. Benatar just said, well, we should stop reproducing ourselves. The only possible proper language to describe what’s happening with the school shooter types is that they’re out for revenge against God.
This smacks of a smear. Peterson is suggesting, without plainly stating, that the same "mentality" is operative in deeply disturbed mass murderers and in Benatar. It is just that the school shooters "take it a step further." So the murderous mentality is the same in the philosopher and in the school shooters.
This is rank psychologizing which is not surprising, coming as it does from a psychologist. Why engage in the hard work of evaluating arguments when you can dismiss a man's view as nothing but a product of a diseased mind? Ignored also is the fact that Benatar is against murder and suicide in many instances. He makes very clear that death is no escape from the human predicament. But to know that one has to read his work.
Peterson's slam may be explained by the fact that Benatar got the better of him in their debate.
In a related entry, below, I defend Benatar against a scurrilous New Criterion attack.
POPE FRANCIS HAS EARNED a reputation as a man of the people, making [it] his mission to advocate for the poor, the downtrodden and the persecuted, particularly those of Christian faith. The Vatican's reported deal with China, to effectively abdicate the power of the pope to select bishops to the communist state, has therefore been met with feelings of shock and even betrayal among the faithful, especially those in China itself.
Why shocked? He is just being consistent in his leftism. So I'm beginning to think that defunding the Left involves defunding the Catholic Church until she reforms herself. Something about a pope worthy of the office below.
Of course not. I don't watch garbage like that. Part of my motive, I suspect, is that I do not want to be reminded of how sick we are collectively becoming.
'Liberals' seem to think it is. The rule of law fades as one approaches the southern border, fading out entirely at the border. And then there are those pockets where it holds selectively. These are known as sanctuary jurisdictions. Some are as large as California. But to whom do they provide sanctuary?
I love the high-minded Mona Charen, I applaud the civil courage it took for her to make her CPAC speech, and I condemn any thugs who may have threatened her physically for speaking her mind and heart. (According to reports, she was quickly escorted from the venue.) But people like her have no effect on what actually happens and are useless when it comes to defeating the Left. She doesn't understand the nature of politics. It is war, not gentlewomanly debate. I wish it were the latter, and it could be if we all agreed on fundamentals; but we manifestly don't.
You don't like the vulgar Trump? Too bad. 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, just as the Dems overlook the flaws of their candidates. He punches back. And for other reasons given here.
I predict that in a year or two we will hear no more about or from the Never Trumpers. They all will have changed their tune or slunk away. Kesler:
As for the Right’s reassessments, every conservative publication has been forced to admit, however grudgingly, that President Trump had significant accomplishments in his first year. The Weekly Standard called his record “reasonably impressive.” But this bombshell appears alongside their default position: “Trump’s character and temperament made him unfit for office.” How to reconcile these?
Partly through wishful counterfactuals. “[S]imilar ends,” the editors assure us, “would have come from almost any Republican president given a Republican Congress.” Really? That seems far from inevitable.
Here is the counterfactual conditional I accept:
If anyone other than Trump had received the Republican nomination, he would not have beaten Hillary.
I have functioning smoke detectors in my house and two, count 'em, two well-maintained fire extinguishers in my kitchen. One's a backup in case the other fails. But of course I don't need any of this stuff since if a fire broke out in the middle of the night I would certainly wake up in time to call the fire department.
a. Socrates is mortal. b. Socrates is dead. c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. d. A man cannot die twice.
If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But Socrates is dead. Now a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. But a man cannot die twice, and so there is no future time at which Socrates dies.
The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true, yet each seems true.
Should we conclude that the dead are not mortal?
First question: Is the tetrad a genuine aporia, or is it soluble?
Second question: If soluble, what is the most plausible solution?
Innumeracy is the mathematical counterpart of illiteracy. Here is an example that caught my eye this morning:
Curiously, there is little attempt by the GHSA to grapple with the very obvious and long-term problem—the conflict that occurs when one attempts to combine pedestrian accessibility with roads that support highway speeds. Even with smartphones locked away and all drivers drug free, there are bound to be incidents in which the operator of a two-ton object barrelling down the road does incredible damage to a defenseless human being of one-tenth the weight.
A U. S. ton = 2,000 lbs. So a two-ton vehicle weighs 2 x 2,000 = 4,000 lbs. One-tenth of 4,000 lbs = 400 lbs. Now while Americans are among the fattest hombres on the planet, weighing in at around 181 lbs on average, that's a far cry from 400 lbs.
It is always a good idea to be skeptical and run the numbers.
Ideologues love to engage in numerical inflation. A good recent example is the bogus claim that there have been 18 school shootings so far this year.
Do you remember Mitch Snyder the homeless advocate? He would make wild claims about the number of homeless in the U.S. One day he spouted some figure, I divided it into the population of the U. S. and 'learned' that something like 20% of the U. S. was homeless. Then I knew he was a bullshitter.
Innumerate people are suckers for fake statistics.
"Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled." Did you know that? It is just as well if you did not, because it is not true.
It takes no research to prove that it is not true. If there had been just two children in America gunned down in 1950, then doubling that number every year would have meant that, by 1980, there would have been one billion American children gunned down -- more than four times the total population of the United States at that time.
Yet the claim that was quoted did not come from some supermarket tabloid. It appeared in a reputable academic journal. It is one of innumerable erroneous statistical claims generated by advocates of one cause or another. Too often, those in the media who are sympathetic to these causes repeat such claims uncritically until they become "well-known facts" by sheer repetition.
I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.
As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.
Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?
Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.
One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:
Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated.
To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:
Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation.
It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.
Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.
I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career. The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.
How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.
The following two propositions are collectively logically inconsistent and yet each is very plausible:
1. Being dead is not an evil for any dead person at any time.
2. Being dead at a young age is an evil for some dead persons.
Obviously, the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true. Each entails the negation of the other. And yet each limb lays serious claim to our acceptance. If you have been following the recent Epicurean discussions in these pages, you know that very plausible arguments can be given for both members of this pair of contradictories.
If philosopher A urges (1) and philosopher B urges (2), and neither can convince the other, then I say that A and B are in a standoff.
On the other hand, there cannot be sound arguments for both limbs. This is because there are no true contradictions. A plausible argument needn't be sound. And a sound argument needn't be plausible. A sound argument, by commonly accepted definition, is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true. It is easy to see that every such argument must have a true conclusion.
So I say that the above standoff is dialectical, not logical.
This means that what generates the standoff or impasse are not logical norms and notions taken in abstracto and applied to propositions taken in abstracto, but logic embedded and applied in a concrete dialogue situation playing out between two or more finite and fallible agents who are trying to arrive at a rational resolution of a difficult question. I will assume that the interlocutors are sincere truth seekers possessing the intellectual virtues. There is thus nothing polemical about their conflict. Of course, some standoffs are polemical, most political ones for example, but at the moment I am not worrying about polemical standoffs. Nor am I concerned with physical standoffs or the sort of standoff that occurs in a game of chess when neither side has sufficient mating material.
A second example.
3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.
4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.
By 'concrete' I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true. And yet one can argue plausibly for each.
This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is "that than which no greater can be conceived"; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.
In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being. (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility -- if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility -- is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us. (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive intellects. It is God's nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God's existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God's nature entails his existence; God's nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.
If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being. If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary.
Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be. Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum. Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).
So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.
Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won't).
Philosophy is its problems and these are in canonical form when cast in the mold of aporetic polyads. The typical outcome, however, is not a solution but a standoff.
The Inquirer, the Dogmatist, the Theoretical and the Practical
I have so far characterized in a preliminary way what a standoff in philosophy is, and I have given a couple of examples in support of the claim that there are standoffs in philosophy. But there are those who are loathe to accept that there are such standoffs. These are people with overpowering doxastic security needs: they have an irresistible need to be secure in their beliefs. They don't cotton to the idea that many of the deepest problems are insoluble by us. These are people in whom the dogmatic tendency wins out over the inquiring/skeptical tendency. Among these are people who think one can PROVE the existence of God, or prove the opposite. Among them are those who are CERTAIN that there are substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. It would be easy to multiply examples.
As I see it, the spirit of genuine philosophy is anti-dogmatic. A real philosopher does not bluster. He does not claim to know what he does not know, and in some cases, cannot know. A real philosopher does not confuse subjective conviction with objective certainty. He has time and he takes time. He can tolerate suspense and open questions. But his suspension is not a Pyrrhonian abandonment of inquiry, but is in the service of it. His happiness is not a porcine ataraxia, but the happiness of the hunt. Unlike the dogmatist, however, he has high standards with the result that is hunt is long and perhaps endless as long as he remains in statu viae wandering among the charms and horrors of the sublunary.
And yet we are participants in life's parade and not mere spectators of it. Curiously, we are both part of the passing scene and observers of it. To us as participants in the flux and shove of the real order a certain amount of bluster has proven to be life-enhancing and practically necessary. To live is to maneuver, to position oneself, to take a position, to adopt a stance, to grab one's piece of the action and defend it, and in the clinch to shoot first and philosophize later.
As so we are torn. It is a broken world and we are broken on its samsaric wheel. To put it grandly, the human condition is a tragic predicament. We must act in conditions of poor lighting, maintaining ourselves in the Cave's chiaroscuro, with little more than faith and hope to keep us going. At the same time we seek light, light, more light and the transformation of faith into knowledge and hope into having.
John Gray's review of Pinker's latest book starts like this:
"Opposing reason is, by definition, unreasonable.” Steven Pinker is fond of definitions. Early on in this monumental apologia for a currently fashionable version of Enlightenment thinking, he writes: “To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason.”
Why are scientists so silly when they stray from their specialties?
Let's think about the second quotation. The first independent clause is plainly false. Suppose my belief that Jones shot Smith is based solely on the testimony of a number of reliable witnesses all of whom agree. My belief is reasonable despite its being based on faith in the veracity of the witnesses.
Most of us have a justified true belief about our birth dates. How did we acquire these beliefs? Did we glance at a calendar as we emerged from the birth canal? No. I reasonably believe that I was born on such and such a date because I remember my mother telling me so, a telling never contradicted by anyone, and because I have an official-looking birth certificate in my possession. My belief is reasonable despite being based on the testimony of others.
There are reliable authorities in all fields. What I believe on the basis of their testimony and what they have recorded in books I believe reasonably.
I could go on, but this is boring, so enough. Pinker has done very good work, but when he tries to play the philosopher he makes a fool of himself. Another example: Pinker on Scientism.
Mirabile dictu, not everything The Atlantic publishes these days is left-wing crap. Never-Trumper David French explains why he carries. (HT: Bill Keezer)
It is rather curious, though. Here is a guy who not only supports Second Amendment rights, but also exercises them by keeping firearms in his home and bearing them on his person. And yet he either voted for Hillary the gun-grabber or refused to vote for Trump whose conservative accomplishments have been stellar in just one year. What bloody sense does that make? You support the person who opposes your values?
Another thing that angers me about French is that before the election he published an anti-Trump piece in which he referred to the Wall of Trump as a "pipe dream." That is the kind of disgusting, supine defeatism that you would expect from a pseudo-conservative like Jeb! Bush.
'Liberals' need to understand what they are up against in their crusade to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights.
You 'liberals' are profoundly stupid and lazy. If you want fewer guns in civilian hands, stop your screeching and emoting. Study the issues. Learn the terminology. Take a course in logic. Read the Constitution. Open your minds. Shut your lying mouths. The more you lie and slander, the more you galvanize the opposition.
1. Proper names have a (context dependent) sense. Context dependent, because ‘Mars’ can mean the god, or the planet, depending on context.
BV: Agreed.
2. The object itself cannot be part of the sense, although the mainstream view is that it is.
BV: What is being called the mainstream view, I take it, is the direct reference view according to which the semantics of a proper name is exhausted by its reference. That is, there is nothing more to the meaning of a proper name than its referent. There is not, in addition to the referent, a (reference-mediating) sense that the name has whether or not it has a referent. This implies that an empty (vacuous) name has no meaning.
The formulation of (2) leaves something to be desired. If we distinguish sense from reference/referent, as we must, then it is trivially true that the object, the planet Mars say, cannot be part of the sense. What's more, (2) misrepresents the mainstream view. No direct reference theorist holds that proper names have reference-mediating senses. No such theorist can be maintaining that the object itself is part of a reference-mediating sense. So (2) might be read like this:
2*. The object itself cannot be part of the MEANING of the name, although the mainstream view is that it is.
The trouble with (2*) is that it is false. Surely Mars is part of the MEANING of 'Mars' inasmuch as Mars is the referent of 'Mars.'
The Ostrich's argument seems to perish at this point of an equivocation on 'sense' as between 'sense' in the sense of Frege's Sinn and MEANING where the latter embraces both Sinn und Bedeutung, both sense and reference in Fregean jargon.
3. Nor can the sense signify some property, or collection of properties. Not a collection, for the reasons Kripke has cogently argued. Not a single ‘haecceity’, for the reasons you have argued.
BV: Right, if you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent.
4. The only remaining candidate (in my view) is that a proper name acquires its meaning via anaphora (i.e. ‘back reference’). In all cases.
BV: What do you mean by 'meaning'? Do you mean sense as opposed to reference/referent? My verdict is that your argument is still too murky to be evaluated.
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