Maverick Philosopher

The Difference between Left and Right Anti-Trump Rage

The Left's blind rage against Trump is not primarily because of the man and his personal style, but because of his threat to their agenda. If Trump had Hillary's ideas and policies, and Hillary Trump's, the Left would have overlooked Trump's personal behavior and supported him in the same way that they overlooked the bad behavior of Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton.  They would have dismissed the Access Hollywood tape as locker-room talk in the same way they dismissed Bill Clinton's much worse sexually predatory actions as peccadilloes belonging to his personal life.

The Never Trumpers, on the other hand, hate Trump primarily because of the man he is, and not primarily because of his ideas and policies.  They hate him because he is a crude and obnoxious outsider, an interloper, who crashed their party and threatened to upset their cozy world.

Proof of this is that Trump's solid conservative accomplishments mollify the bow-tie brigade not one bit.  Their hatred and mindless opposition is in no way reduced by the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh confirmations, the movement of the U. S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the surging stock market, the replacement of NAFTA by USMCA, the low unemployment numbers, the defense of religious liberty, the beefing-up of border security despite vicious Democrat obstructionism, and so on down the list.

Our leftist pals rage, rage against the dying of the blight.  2020 will give them more to rage about.

American Conservatism

My brand of conservatism could be called American. It aims to preserve and where necessary restore the values and principles codified by the founders. Incorporating as it does elements of classical liberalism and libertarianism, American conservatism is far from throne-and-altar reaction. While anti-theocratic, it is not anti-religious. It stands for individual liberty and its necessary supports, private property, free markets, and limited government. It is liberal in its stress on liberties, but conservative in its sober view of human nature, a nature easily corrupted by power and in need of restraint. It avoids the reactionary and radical extremes. It incorporates the values of the Enlightenment. American conservatism presupposes the existence of “unalienable rights” which come from nature or from “nature's God.” First among the liberties mentioned in the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution is religious liberty which includes the liberty to exercise no religion. It is first in the order of exposition and (arguably) first also in the order of importance. The second liberty mentioned is free speech. Both of these classically American values are under assault from the utopian Left which has taken over the Democrat party in the USA.

As against certain factions of the alternative Right, American conservatism insists that the United States is a proposition nation: the propositions are in the founding documents. I don't see how that could be reasonably denied. These propositions define the American identity and provide a bulwark against the identity politics shared by the cultural Marxists and their alt-right opponents. But I also don't see how it could be reasonably denied that the discovery and articulation of classically American principles and values was achieved by people belonging to a certain tradition and will be preserved, if it is preserved, only by people in that tradition or who can be assimilated into it. This has consequences for immigration policy.

To allude to e pluribus unum, a One cannot be made out of just any Many. Some groups are unassimilable. I take it to be axiomatic that immigration must be to the benefit of the host country, a benefit not to be defined in merely economic terms. And so I ask a politically incorrect but perfectly reasonable question: Is there any net benefit to Muslim immigration? Immigrants bring their culture with them. Muslims, for example, bring with them a Sharia-based, hybrid religious-political ideology that is antithetical to American values. We are under no obligation to allow the immigration of subversive elements. The founding propositions are universally true; they are not the property of whites even though whites discovered them. But such propositions, while true for all humans and in this sense true universally, are not recognized by all humans, and not presently capable of being recognized or put into practice by all humans. The attempt to impart these propositions to some groups will be futile, especially if it involves force, or can be interpreted by the group in question as a cover for an attempt to dominate or control them for ulterior motives. The implication for foreign policy is that the USA must adopt an enlightened nationalism and not attempt to teach the presently unteachable.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Leo Kottke, Embryonic Journey.  As good as it is I still prefer

Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey

Punch Brothers, Rye Whisky

Lonely Heartstring Band, Ramblin' Gamblin' Willy

Bonnie Owens, Philadelphia Lawyer

Cowboy Jack Clement, A Girl I Used to Know

Bobby Bare, Lullabies, Legends, and Lies

Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over the Line

The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona.  A beautiful cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.  

YouTuber comment: "I'd hate to think where we would be without Mr. Zimmerman's songwriting. So many covers done by so many great artists." And I say that if it weren't for Zimmi the Great American Boomer Soundtrack would have a huge, gaping hole in it.

John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You're the Reason

The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles

Dusty Springfield before she was Dusty Springfield.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler.  'Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz' lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name. 

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails

Patsy Cline, She's Got You

More Bad Philosophy of Mind by a Scientist

 Christof Koch:

I was raised to believe in God, the Trinity, and particularly the Resurrection. Unfortunately, I now know four words: “No brain, never mind.” That’s bad news. Once my brain dies, unless I can somehow upload it into the Cloud, I die with it. I wish it were otherwise, but I’m not going to believe something if it’s opposed by all the facts.

Isn’t there still the old “mind-body problem?” How do three pounds of goo in the human brain, with its billions of neurons and synapses, generate our thoughts and feelings? There seems to be an unbridgeable gap between the physical world and the mental world.

No, it’s just how you look at it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell had this idea that physics is really just about external relationships—between a proton and electron, between planets and stars. But consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology. So there aren’t two substances. Of course, a number of mystics throughout the ages have taken this point of view.

It does look strange if you grew up like me, as a Roman Catholic, believing in a body and a soul. But it’s unclear how the body and the soul should interact. After a while, you realize this entire notion of a special substance that can’t be tracked by science—that I have but animals don’t have, which gets inserted during the developmental process and then leaves my body—sounds like wishful thinking and just doesn’t cohere with what we know about the actual world.

Koch is telling us that there is no body-mind dualism, no dualism of substances, but also, presumably, no dualism of properties either. There is no problem about how brain activity gives rise to consciousness. There is no problem because there is no gap that need to be bridged.  "It's just how you look at it."  We can view consciousness from the inside and from the outside.  From the inside  consciousness is experience; from the outside it is synapses, sodium ions, voltage differentials, neurons: the objective items studied by physics, chemistry, electro-chemistry, biology and all cognate disciplines.

So one 'thing' -- consciousness -- can be viewed in two very different ways. Hence a monism of subject-matter, but a dualism of perspectives upon that one subject-matter.  The dualism is epistemic, not ontic.  It may seem that what Koch is urging is a neutral monism according to which consciousness is neither mental nor physical but some third thing or stuff.  But I don't think that that is what Koch is saying. He says,"consciousness is really physics from the inside." That's a sloppy way of saying that consciousness is just physical reality as known from the first-person point of view.  What he is saying, then,  is that consciousness is material in nature, and exhaustively understandable in terms of physics, chemistry, etc.  Thus the view from the inside and the view from the outside access the same reality, and that reality is physical, not mental.  There are no mental substances or properties in reality; mental talk is merely a subjective way of talking about what alone is objectively real, namely matter. 

But here is the problem:  the subjective side of experience is entirely unlike the objective, physical side, and it too is real.  If I kick you in the testicles, the pain you feel is undeniably real; it is no illusion, and it is impossible to be mistaken about it.  What's more, the sensation has phenomenological features it would make no sense to ascribe to brain processes and states, and vice versa: the latter have electro-chemical features that it would make no sense to ascribe to pain sensations.  

If at this point you insist that the felt pain is identical to the brain state/process, then you have said something unintelligible that violates the Indiscernibility of Identicals. You have said something 'theological.' Compare: "this man, born in Bethlehem, who died on Calvary, is identical to the immortal creator of the universe.'  You have said something that beggars understanding.

At this point one could take a mysterian line: "Look, it is just true that the felt pain is a brain state; it is true whether we find it intelligible or not."  Alternatively, one could go eliminativist and deny that there is any felt pain.  Of these two approaches, the eliminativist one is surely absurd in that it denies the very datum that gave rise to the problem in the first place. 

But I rather doubt that a scientist would want to go mysterian. The point of science is to eliminate mysteries, not confess them.  The point of science is to demystify the world, to render it intelligible to us, not to pronounce the ignorabimus.

If we are neither eliminativist nor mysterian, then I think intellectual honesty requires us to admit that the so-called 'hard problem' is both a genuine problem and that it is indeed hard, even if we are unwilling to pronounce it insoluble.

So it is not "just how you look at it."  The subjective side of experience is undeniably real and not identifiable with anything  the objectifying sciences study.  Koch is blind to the depth of the problem, and his 'solution' is bogus.

More later on the interaction business.  

Article here.

"And the Word was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us." (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here.

It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic Church.  What you will hear in the decadent Catholic churches of the present day is all manner of diversionary pablum as if designed to keep one from confronting the Christian narrative in its full strength. The few exceptions will prove the rule.

Trump's Space Force

"I will not weaponize space," said Barack Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.

Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.

The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep lack of understanding of the human condition.  Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can  bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millennium has not brought anything new in this regard.

Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:

     Si vis pacem, para bellum.

     If you want peace, prepare for war.

One must simply face reality and realize that the undoubtedly great good of peace comes at a cost, the cost of a credible defense. A  credible defense is what keeps aggressors at bay.

I mean this to hold at all levels, intrapsychically, interpersonally, intranationally, internationally, and in every other way. Weakness provokes. Strength pacifies. That is just the way it is. Conservatives, being reality-based, understand what eludes leftists who are based in u-topia (nowhere) and who rely on their unsupportable faith in the inherent goodness of human beings.

They should read Kant on the radical evil in human nature.  Then they should go back to Genesis, chapters 2 and 3.

Here we have one of those deep defining differences between conservatives and leftists. Vote for the candidate of your choice, but just understand what set of ideas and values you are voting for.

President Trump can claim a big win with approval of the funding that includes money for the Space Force.  But will he get any credit for it from his political opponents? Of course not. For the Left, politics is war and Trump is an enemy to be removed from office by any means, fair or foul, right or wrong, Constitutional or extra-Constitutional. 

Why the Left Hates Christmas

Dennis Prager (emphasis added):

One is that the left sees in Christianity its primary ideological and political enemy. And it is right to do so. The only large-scale organized opposition to the left comes from the traditional Christian community — evangelical Protestants, traditional Catholics and faithful Mormons — and Orthodox Jews. Leftism is a secular religion, and it deems all other religions immoral and false.

From Karl Marx to Vladimir Lenin to George Soros, the left has regarded religion in general and Christianity in particular as the “opiate of the masses” — a drug that dulls the masses into accepting their oppressed condition and, thereby, keeps them from engaging in revolution.

The left understands that the more people believe in Christianity (and Judaism), the less chance the left has to gain power. The left doesn’t concern itself with Islam, because it perceives Islam as an ally in its war against Western civilization, and because leftists do not have the courage to confront Islam. They know that confronting religious Muslims can be fatal, whereas confronting religious Christians entails no risks.

Second, the left regards Christianity in America as an intrinsic part of American national identity — an identity it wishes to erode in favor of a “world citizen” identity. The left has not only warred against Christmas; it has sought to undermine other national identity holidays. For any number of reasons, not only including the left, Americans no longer celebrate George Washington’s birthday (it has de facto been replaced by the utterly meaningless “Presidents Day”) or Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, as they did when I was a child, my father was a child and his father was a child. The only American celebrated in a national holiday is Martin Luther King Jr., which is acceptable to the left since he is not white. One proof of the left’s desire to undermine specifically American national holidays is its war on the two remaining specifically American holidays: July Fourth and Thanksgiving.

The left deems Thanksgiving a historical fraud and an immoral celebration of “genocide” of the American Indians — which is what American children are now taught in many American public schools. And “happy Thanksgiving” has been replaced by “happy holidays.” As for July Fourth, The New York Times is leading the undermining of the celebration of America’s birthday by declaring that the real founding of America was 1619, the year, The Times asserts, African slaves first arrived on the American continent.

Of course, there is still Veterans Day and Memorial Day, but they are not specifically American national holidays; just about every country has such holidays.

But Christmas is a problem for the left. It celebrates religion, and it does so in quintessentially American ways (take American Christmas music, for example).

The third and final reason is that the left is joyless. Whatever and whomever the left influences has less joy in life. I have met happy and unhappy liberals, and happy and unhappy conservatives, but I’ve never encountered a happy leftist. And the further left you go, the more angry and unhappy the people you will encounter. Happy women and happy blacks, for example, are far more likely to be conservative than on the left.

Christmas is just too happy for the left. “Holly, jolly” is not a left-wing term.

Richard Crashaw (1612-1649)

But Men Loved Darkness rather than Light

By Richard Crashaw

 

The world’s light shines, shine as it will,

The world will love its darkness still.

I doubt though when the world’s in hell,

It will not love its darkness half so well.

 

Source: Poetry Foundation

Communism and Christianity

Communism is a 'religion' refuted by experience. It delivered not paradise, but the gulag and the torture chamber. Its attempted redemption by blood succeeded in spilling oceans of it but achieved no redemption. It is only the spilling of the God-Man's blood that can achieve the redemption of man. Man cannot save himself. That is the teaching of Christianity.  Is Christianity true? Whether or not it is, it remains the case that man cannot save himself. 

Bukowski and Others on Writing

Includes a mess o' good links.

Buk is trash, especially his novels, but in a load of rubbish you may sometimes find a gem.  Bluebird is a pretty good poem.

Subsidiarity as Bulwark against the Left's Assault on Civil Society

David A. Bosnich, The Principle of Subsidiarity:

One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.

The principle of subsidiarity strikes a reasonable balance between statism and collectivism as represented by the manifest left-ward drift of Democrat administrations such as President Obama's, on the one hand,  and the libertarianism of those who would take privatization to an extreme, on the other.  The Left is totalitarian by its very nature, and as the Democrat party drifts ever left-ward, it becomes ever more totalitarian and socialist and ever more a threat to individual liberty and the private property that is its foundation.  

Subsidiarity also fits well with federalism, a return to which is a prime desideratum and one more reason not to vote for Democrat candidates.  'Federalism' is another one of those words that does not wear its meaning on its sleeve, and is likely to mislead.  Federalism is not the view that all powers should be vested in the Federal or central government; it is the principle enshrined in the 10th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Whether or not you are Catholic, if you accept the principle of subsidiarity, then you have yet another reason to oppose the Left.  The argument is this:

1) The Left encroaches upon civil society, weakening it and limiting it, and correspondingly expanding the power and the reach of the state.  (For example, the closure of Catholic Charities in Illinois because of an Obama administration adoption rule.)

2) Subsidiarity helps maintain civil society as a buffer zone and intermediate sector between the purely private (the individual and the familial) and the state.

Therefore

3) If you value the autonomy and robustness of civil society, then you ought to oppose Obama and the Left.

The truth of the second premise is self-evident.  If you wonder whether the Left does in fact encroach upon civil society, then see my post Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Tunes of the Season

Merry Christmas everybody.  Pour yourself a drink, and enjoy.  Me, I'm nursing a Boulevardier.  It's a Negroni with cojones: swap out the gin for bourbon.  One ounce bourbon, one ounce sweet vermouth, one ounce Campari, straight up or on the rocks, with a twist of orange.  A serious libation.  It'll melt a snowflake for sure. The vermouth rosso contests the harshness of the bourbon, but then the Campari joins the fight on the side of the bourbon. 

Or you  can think of it as a Manhattan wherein the Campari substitutes for the angostura bitters.  That there are people who don't like Campari shows that there is no hope for humanity.

Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie

Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick.  A rarely heard alternate version.

Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas.  This one goes out to Barack and Michelle as their legacy continues to wither away.

Jeff Dunham,  Jingle Bombs by Achmed the Terrorist.  TRIGGER WARNING! Not for the p.c.-whipped. No day without political incorrectness!

Porky Pig, Blue Christmas

Captain Beefheart, There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evening Stage

Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas

Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells

Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate
Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa

Is this the same guy who sang Desolation Row back in '65? 

Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache. Not Christmasy, but a good tune.  Remember Bob Luman? His version. Luman's signature number.

Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except

Tom Waits, Silent Night.  Give it a chance. 

A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.  

Cheech and Chong, Santa Claus and His Old Lady
Canned Heat, Christmas Boogie

Leon Redbone and Dr. John, Frosty the Snowman
Beach Boys, Little St. Nick.  A rarely heard alternate version.

Ronettes, Sleigh Ride
Elvis Presley, Blue Christmas.  This one goes out to Barack and Michelle as their legacy continues to wither away.

Jeff Dunham,  Jingle Bombs by Achmed the Terrorist.  TRIGGER WARNING! Not for the p.c.-whipped. No day without political incorrectness!

Porky Pig, Blue Christmas

Captain Beefheart, There Ain't No Santa Claus on the Evening Stage

Charles Brown, Please Come Home for Christmas

Wanda Jackson and the Continentals, Merry Christmas Baby
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run

Eric Clapton, Cryin' Christmas Tears
Judy Collins, Silver Bells

Ry Cooder, Christmas in Southgate
Bob Dylan, Must Be Santa

Is this the same guy who sang Desolation Row back in '65? 

Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache. Not Christmasy, but a good tune.  Remember Bob Luman? His version. Luman's signature number.

Who could possibly follow Dylan's growl except

Tom Waits, Silent Night.  Give it a chance. 

A surprising number of Christmas songs were written by Jews.  

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.

Impersonality in the minimalist style may take the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better still is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.

The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.

One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.

"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"

Trotsky's Dream

Here we find:

Socialism, when it comes at long last, will conquer the hideous inequality of capitalism, but the groundwork, as it were, will have been done by capitalism’s destruction of feudalism and slavery.  We may allow ourselves to dream, with Leon Trotsky, that under socialism, “[m]an will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.”  [The great concluding lines of Literature and Revolution.]

Utopian nonsense, dangerous utopian nonsense.

At the Hermitage

Were You a Part of Your Mother?

Here

Elselijn Kingma

Mind, Volume 128, Issue 511, July 2019, 609–646.

Abstract

Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a part of the gestating organism. This paper proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the containment view is the received view; that it is generally assumed without good reason; and that it needs substantial support if it is to be taken seriously. Second, I argue that the parthood view derives considerable support from a range of biological and physiological considerations. I tentatively conclude in favour of the parthood view, and end by identifying some of the interesting questions it raises.

I don't have time now to study the above, but I will have to eventually, and then maybe write an evaluation.

Related: The Woman's Body Argument

After Enough Time Passes . . .

. . . de mortuis nil nisi bonum lapses.

(In justification of  some negative remarks about  Senator John McCain (R-AZ) posted on my Facebook page. I pointed out that while McCain served with great distinction in the Vietnam war, he failed to translate military valor into civil courage, while Donald J. Trump, who did not serve, has it in spades.)

Marx at 200: Classical versus Cultural Marxism

Here

President Trump Delivers a Stinging and Well-Deserved Rebuke to Nancy Pelosi

Here is the six-page letter.

More at my Facebook page.

Practice the 'Step Back'

Keep the obtrusions of memory and perception and anticipation at mental arm's length. Practice the 'step back.' Rather than 'go with the flow' of centrifugal mind, examine whither it tends. To a place worth visiting?  Harder still, well-nigh impossible, is to examine whence it comes. Swimming upstream to the hidden Source of the stream is much harder than impeding the outward flow.  Content yourself for now with mental continence, an analog of, and probably impossible without, sexual continence. The practice of non-attachment is recommended by the major wisdom schools in the East and the West.

What is Cultural Marxism?

Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.'  It is alleged by leftists  to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews, even Adorno.  Adorno's original name was not 'Theodor W. Adorno,' but 'Theodor Adorno Wiesengrund.'  

But what is cultural Marxism?

For Karl Marx, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict. In market societies the two main classes in conflict are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which stand to each other as oppressor and oppressed. This is not a conflict that can be mediated: it can be overcome only by the defeat of the oppressors. Herein lies an important difference between (classical) liberalism and Marxist leftism.ⁱ For the latter, politics is war, not a process of bargaining and accommodation on the basis of mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Cultural Marxism, retaining both the oppressor-oppressed motif and the belief in the intractability of the conflict, moves beyond classical or economic Marxism by widening the class of the oppressed to include blacks and other 'people of color,' women, male and female homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, Muslims, immigrants legal and illegal, and others deemed to be victims of oppression.

Correspondingly, cultural Marxism widens the class of oppressors to include potentially all whites, males, heterosexuals and religionists, Christians mainly, regardless of their economic status. Thus within the ambit of cultural Marxism, a working-class Southern white male heterosexual Christian ends up among the oppressors. Such are Hillary Clinton's deplorables and irredeemables, and those about whom Barack Obama said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”ⁱⁱ

^{___________________________}

i cf. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17.

ii https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008. Read the sentence carefully. It makes no sense.

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no final reckoning, no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One will especially feel this to be  so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford,  1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

Hitchens, Horowitz, Clinton, and Impeachment

Christopher Hitchens died on this date in 2011. The synergistic effects of his excessive consumption of smoke and spirits did him in at the tender age of 62.  By comparison, David Horowitz is still going strong at 81 churning out books, manning the ramparts, and fighting the good fight. May he live to be 100!

We who live the life of the mind celebrate the longevity of Horowitz while mourning the loss of Hitchens despite the latter's excesses and aberrations.  I will quote  David Horowitz on Hitchens on Bill Clinton. This is relevant to the current impeachment proceedings against Donald J. Trump. The case for impeaching Clinton was much stronger than the case that was actually brought against him.  There is no case at all against Trump.

In his mordantly incisive articles in both Vanity Fair and Salon, Hitchens has demonstrated that the nation's commander in chief cynically and mendaciously deployed the armed forces of the greatest power on earth to strike at three impoverished countries, with no clear military objective in mind. Using the most advanced weaponry the world has ever seen, Clinton launched missiles into the Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq for only one tangible political purpose, to -- as Hitchens puts it -- "distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake."

Hitchens' claim that Clinton's military actions are criminal and impeachable is surely spot-on. Republicans, it seems, were right about the character issue, and failed only to demonstrate how this mattered to the policy issues the public cares deeply about. Instead they got themselves entangled in legalistic disputes about perjury and obstruction, losing the electorate along the way. In making his own powerful case against Clinton, Hitchens has underscored how Republicans botched the process by focusing on criminality that flowed from minor abuses of power -- the sexual harassment of Paula Jones and its Monica Lewinsky subtext -- while ignoring a major abuse that involved corrupting the presidency, damaging the nation's security and killing innocents abroad.

[. . .]

Given the transparent morality of Hitchens' anti-Clinton crusade, it is all the more revealing that so many of his comrades on the left, who ought to share these concerns, have chosen instead to turn on him so viciously. In a brutal display of comradely betrayal, they have publicly shunned him in an attempt to cut him off socially from his own community. One after another, they have rushed into print to tell the world at large how repulsed they are by a man whom only yesterday they called "friend," yet whom they now apparently no
longer even wish to know.

Leading this pack was Hitchens' longtime colleague at the Nation, Alexander Cockburn, who denounced him as a "Judas" and "snitch." Cockburn was followed by a second Nation columnist, Katha Pollitt, who smeared Hitchens as a throwback to McCarthy-era informers ("Let's say the Communist Party was bad and wrong -- Why help the repressive powers of the state? Let the government do its own dirty work."). She was joined by a 30-year political comrade, Todd Gitlin, who warned anyone who cared to listen that Hitchens was a social "poison," in the same toxic league as Ken Starr and Linda Tripp.

Consider the remarkable nature of this spectacle. Could one imagine a similar ritual performed by journalists of the right? Bob Novak, say, flanked by Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, pronouncing an anathema on Bill Safire, because the columnist had called for the jailing of Ollie North during the Iran-contra hearings? Not even North felt the need to announce such a public divorce. When was the last time any conservative figure (let alone a gathering of conservatives) stepped forward to declare they were ending a private friendship over a political disagreement?

The curses rained on Hitchens' head are part of a ritual that has become familiar over generations of the left, in which dissidents are excommunicated and consigned to various Siberias for their political deviance. It is a phenomenon normal to religious cults, where purity of heart is maintained through avoiding contact with the unclean. To have caused the left to invoke so drastic a measure, Hitchens had to have violated some fundamental principles of its faith. So what were they?

Read it all.  An updated and extended version appears as "Defending Christopher," Chapter 23 of Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (Spence 1999), pp. 240-248.

Do We Have Immaterial Souls?

Richard Swinburne versus Luke Janssen.  

Should a Philosopher Care about the Political Situation?

It would seem that a "spectator of all time and existence" (Plato, Republic 486a) ought to care inasmuch as his 'telescope' is located in the world, well within range of the agents of the State, the power of which has rarely been limited, and the malevolence of which has too often swamped the good things some states have done.  (The State is a necessary evil.) In the 20th century alone, communists murdered some 100 million, destroyed countless churches and other religious edifices, and replaced philosophy with communist ideology.

You say you could still do philosophy in the gulag? Who are you, Boethius?  I am no Boethius.

The philosopher here below must needs be  a man of action, a fighter with words and weapons, to some extent at least, to defend the precincts within which alone the free life of the mind and spirit can flourish.

Companion post: The Consolations of Philosophy

 

Butchvarov: Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.

[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]

But now to work.

There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.

Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.

If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.)  Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.

Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:

Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough -- it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)

We begin with an example from Panayot Butchvarov's The Concept of Knowledge, Northwestern University Press, 1970, p. 47.

[CK is the red volume on the topmost visible shelf.  Immediately to its right is Butch's Being Qua Being.  Is Butch showing without saying that epistemology is prior to metaphysics?]

But now to work.

There is a bag containing 99 white marbles and one black marble. I put my hand in the bag and without looking select a marble. Of course, I believe sight unseen that the marble I have selected is white. Suppose it is. Then I have a justified true belief that a white marble has been selected. My belief is justified because of the fact that only one of the 100 marbles is black.  My belief is true because I happened to pick a white marble.  But surely I don't know that I have selected a white marble.  The justification, though very good, is not good enough for knowledge. I have justified true belief but not knowledge.

Knowledge, says Butchvarov, entails the impossibility of mistake. This seems right. The mere fact that people will use the word 'know' in a case like the one described cuts no ice.  Ordinary usage proves nothing.  People say the damndest things.  They are exaggerating, as a subsequent post may show.  'Know' can be used in non-epistemic ways -- think of carnal knowledge for example -- but used epistemically it can be used correctly in only one way: to mean absolute impossibility of mistake.  Or as least that is Butchvarov's view, a view I find attractive.

Admittedly, knowledge as impossibility of mistake is a very stringent concept of knowledge. Why should we care to set the bar so high? Why is knowledge in the strict sense important? It is important because there are life and death situations in which one needs to know in order to decide on a course of action.

Suppose I am calmly and rationally contemplating suicide. I have lived a full life, my spouse has died, I have no dependents, and I have accomplished all that I can accomplish. But I am old and worn out and I have been diagnosed with a painful form of terminal cancer. Should I do away with myself? The money saved on expensive treatments could be donated to a worthy cause, etc.

If I know that I am just a material being with no prospects of post-mortem survival, then I have nothing to fear from God or an afterlife, and no need to factor in the moral progress I could make by bravely enduring the terminal suffering. For if I am nothing but a complex natural organism, then there is nothing to hope for beyond this life, and that moral progress could do me no good. (The little good it would do others is a vanishing quantity in comparison to the suffering I would have to endure.)  Now is it not obvious that knowing whether one will or will not survive is very important? Clearly, what one wants here is genuine knowledge, which implies impossibility of mistake. For one is about to make a very important decision, perhaps the most important decision one can make.

Kant asked four great questions: What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope for? What is man? One makes a joke of the first question if one demands anything less than certain knowledge. And note that what one wants is knowledge with respect to the other questions, not mere conjecture. Butchvarov puts the point as follows:

Where the truths in question are of the greatest importance, as philosophical truths usually are, where what is at issue is the immortality of the soul and the possibility of eternal damnation, the existence of an external world, of other persons, God, or of a real past, mere evidence, however good, is not enough -- it is knowledge, impossibility of error, that we demand. (CK, 271)

Like Islamists, Leftists Hate Apostates

David Horowitz, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey (Spence Publishing, 2003), pp. 274-276:

The radical commitment is less a political than a moral choice. Leaving the faith is a traumatic experience because it involves an involuntary severing of communal ties. That is why "political correctness" is a habit of the progressive mind – it is the line of fear that holds the flock in check.

No greater caution exists for those tempted to leave the faith than the charge of "selling out." Prior to the temptation, leaving the faith is inconceivable, a sign that one is no longer a good person. Only pathological behavior – a lust for money or some other benefit – could explain to a leftist the decision to join the opposition. To the progressive mind, no decent person could ever freely make such a choice. Even in the post-communist world, the most untheoretical progressive remains in this way a vulgar marxist despite all that has historically transpired. The fact that Peter [Collier] and I actually lost opportunities for personal gain as a result of our change of heart made no impression on out former comrades, who labeled us "renegades" and accused us of selling out just the same.

Five Grades of Agnosticism

In David Horowitz's Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America (Humanix, 2018), we read:

My own theological views are those of an agnostic -- one who doesn't know. I do not know whether there is a Divine designer or not. (p. 24)

Well, I don't know either. I agree with Horowitz when he tells us, on the preceding page, that

. . . the question of whether God exists cannot be resolved. Both sides must rely on faith. (p. 23)

So what is the difference between me and Horowitz? We are both agnostics by his definition. But I am a theist whereas he is not. It appears that we need to distinguish different types or grades of agnosticism. It will develop that one can be both a theist and an agnostic.

AG-1: "I don't know, and I don't care. The existence of God is not a (live) issue for me."  This sort of agnostic is a practical atheist. He lives as if there is no God, but without denying or doubting his existence.  

AG-2:  "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question.  But I see no good reason either to affirm or to deny, and so I suspend judgment. Rather than trouble my head over such a question, I content myself with the ordinary life of a mortal man. I do not dream of immortality or hanker after transcendence. While I grant that the question is of some importance, I do not consider the question of enough importance to trouble myself over it." This sort of agnosticism is close to Pyrrhonism.

AG-3:  "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the importance of the question.  And while I see no good reason to affirm or deny,  I don't suspend judgment; I continue to inquire. I sense that my ultimate happiness is at stake, and that it would be imprudent simply to dismiss the question as unanswerable and sink back into everydayness."

AG-4:  "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. What's more, I find nothing epistemically disreputable about believing beyond the evidence, seeing as how we do this regularly in other areas of life; I cannot, however, bring myself to believe."

AG-5: "I don't know, but I care, and I appreciate the great importance of the question. I am inclined to believe, and I do believe, for reasons that are not rationally compelling, but also not epistemically disreputable. My faith is a living faith, not merely intellectual assent to a proposition; it is something I live, and my living as I do attests to the psychological reality of my believing."

The fifth grade of agnosticism is a type of theism. It is not the theism of the one who claims to know that God exists, or who claims to be able to prove that God exists.  But it is theism nonetheless, for it is an affirmation of the existence of God.  It follows that one can be both an agnostic and a theist.  In fact, I would argue further that an agnostic is the only sort of theist one ought to be.  

To conclude, what is the difference between me and Horowitz?  We are both agnostics by his definition.  But whereas I am an AG-5 agnostic, he, as far as I can tell, is an AG-3 agnostic.

Addendum (12/12). Vito Caiati responds:

I found your most recent post “Five Grades of Agnosticism” most valuable in that it succinctly sets out the quite diverse tenors of this philosophic position on the existence of God. Over the years, I have fallen into all of these “five grades,” with the exception of AG-1. As you know, I now, as for much of my life, affirm a much more specific version of AG-5, one that centers my life on Christian dogmas and practices, as taught by the Roman Catholic Church. My most recent return to Catholicism was, if you recall from our correspondence over the last few years, fraught with intellectual conflict, since my faith exists alongside of a powerful skeptical inclination, which is only further reinforced once the already daunting difficulties involved in an assertion of God’s existence are compounded by those involved in matters of dogma and doctrine. I have often thought that it would be best to remain with the embrace of philosophic theism, which is, I assume, what you are affirming in AG-5, that is, the affirmation of the existence of a theistic God and an adherence to those moral precepts that are evident to reason and conscience. Am I right about this?

Not quite.  I am thinking of AG-5 as a type of theism that could be filled out and made more specific in different ways. One could add some or all of the following beliefs: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, triune nature of the one God, divine simplicity, divine incarnation, and so on through a range of even more specific beliefs concerning, e.g., the nature of post-mortem rewards and punishments, the impossibility of gaining merit after death, etc.   None of these are precluded by the AG-5 schema. What the schema excludes is any claim to knowledge with regard to these matters.   I am assuming that knowledge entails objective certainty.  And so AG-5 runs counter to the traditional Roman Catholic claim that its magisterium teaches infallibly with absolute, divinely sanctioned and grounded authority, with respect to faith and morals.  AG-5 rules out that sort of dogmatism.

If so, where does religion fit in, since a commitment to theism, even one that guides one’s mode of life is not a religion but a private philosophic and moral stance? Is it your position that a life-shaping belief, in a theistic God renders the choice of, say, a particular religious tradition not of first importance? So, for example, one might simply be advised to follow the theistic tradition into which one was born, as long as it possesses doctrinal, ethical, and liturgical features that are not inimical to the existence of a deity as classically construed?

AG-5 is not a merely philosophical schema that excludes religion. I am thinking of it as allowing for religious deployment and development.  And if religion is communal, then the schema would permit a development that was not merely private.

I would say that a life-shaping belief in God (which goes beyond the mere belief that God exists) does not require adherence to any extant religious tradition. But that would be a hard row to hoe for most.  They would be well-advised to stick to the tradition in which they were raised -- except perhaps for Islam which is more of a destructive political ideology than a religion, although for peaceful Muslims it is better than no religion. 

So you, Vito, would be well-advised to remain within the Roman Catholic ambit, provided you can find a parish with a Latin mass that is not manned by pedophiles or mere social workers or theological know-nothings and that adheres to and attempts to transmit traditional teachings.

Your post raises many other questions and concerns, such as those touching on revelation, but I will stop here.

Yes it does, and I am willing continue the conversation "until death do us part."  It is my firm belief that there is no better and more noble way to spend the lion's share of one's brief time here below than by addressing, reverentially but critically, the Great Questions.  And that includes the question of the possibility and actuality of divine revelation and all the rest of the theological and philosophical conundra, including Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Ascension, Assumption, and so on, until death which, we hope, will lift the curtain and bring us light.

And if it doesn't? Well then, we have spent our lives in a most excellent way and have lost nothing of value.  

Military Service and 'Skin in the Game'

There is something to be said in favor of an all-voluntary military, but on the debit side there is this: only those with 'skin in the game' -- either their own or that of their loved ones -- properly appreciate the costs of foreign military interventions.  I say that as a conservative, not a libertarian.

There is also this to consider:  In the bad old days of the draft, people of different stations -- to use a good old word that will not be allowed to fall into desuetude, leastways not on my watch -- were forced to associate with one another -- with some good effects.  It is 'broadening' to mingle  and have to get along with different sorts of people.  And when the veteran of foreign wars returns and takes up a profession in, say, academe, he brings with him precious hard-won experience of all sorts of people in different  lands in trying circumstances.  He is then more likely to exhibit the sense of a Winston Churchill as opposed to the nonsense of a Ward Churchill.

Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

Donald Trump famously referred to MS-13 gangsters as "animals." That's not the way I would put it inasmuch as it is an insult to animals who, unlike the gangbangers, are beneath good and evil. But Trump talks like a working stiff and we all know what he meant. Pelosi, however, took umbrage, protesting that the murderous bunch possesses "the divine spark" (her phrase) along with the rest of us. I don't disagree, but I do have a couple of questions for Madame Speaker.

First, Nancy dear, do you think the pre-natal also have the divine spark? If not, why not? Isn't that what your Catholic religion, bits of which you regularly inject into your speeches, teaches? And if the horrific rapes, murders, beheadings, etc. of the MS-13 do not cause them to forfeit the "divine spark," then how it it that a human fetus' lack of development prevents it from having said spark?

Second, as a leftist committed to driving every vestige of religion, or rather Christianity, from the public square, can't you see that it is inconsistent of you to use themes from your Catholic girlhood when it suits you and your obstructionist purposes?

You come across as a silly goose of a dingbat. Or is that just an act to mask your mendacity and subversiveness and Alinskyite disregard of double standards?

The Spirit of Philosophy

By my lights, 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. 

A Paradox of Plenty

Complain if you like about the low level of your students, but bear in mind that you probably wouldn't have a teaching job if if it weren't for the decline in standards that is both cause and effect of the expansion of 'higher education.' A better term would be 'higher remediation.'

Defending Barry Miller against Herman Philipse: Existence as a First-Level Property, Part III

This is the third in a series.  First installment, second, Philipse's review.

Herman Philipse's strongest argument against Barry Miller's claim that existence is a a first-level property, a property of individuals, is the absurdity objection.

According to this objection, if existence is an accidental real first-order property of individual entities, so must non-existence be, but this would imply an absurdity. For in order to attribute truly a real property to a specific individual, we must be able to refer successfully to that individual by using a proper name, a pronoun, or by pointing to it, etc. However, we can refer successfully to an individual only if that individual exists or at least has existed, so that non-existence cannot be a real property. Hence existence cannot be an accidental real first-level property of individuals either.

The absurdity objection can be put like this:

a) Existence is a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals if and only if nonexistence is also a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals.

b) Non-existence cannot be a property of individuals: if an individual exists, then it cannot have the property of nonexistence. 

Therefore

c) Existence is not a property of individuals.

Miller must accept (b) since he does not countenance nonexistent items in the manner of Meinong. He agrees with Frege, Russell, and Quine that everything exists. If so, then non-existence cannot be a real property of individuals. Otherwise, there could be an individual x such that x both exists and does not exist. That would be absurd, i.e., logically contradictory.

Miller must therefore reject (a).  Now let's hear what Philipse has to say.

Miller replies to this argument [the absurdity objection] by claiming that whereas existence is a real property of individuals, non-existence is merely a Cambridge property. He proposes the following criterion for deciding whether the lack of a real property implies the presence of a real complementary property: "Lack of a real property F would bespeak the presence of a correlative real property non-F only if F and non-F were determinates of . . . one determinable property" (p. 23, quote from Miller). Since there is no determinable of which both existence and non-existence are determinates (like red and not-red may both be determinates of the determinable colour), non-existence is not a real property, but rather a Cambridge property. Hence, Miller rejects the [major] premise of the absurdity objection.

I do not think that this refutation is convincing. Why endorse Miller's criterion? A person could just as well propose a similar criterion for deciding whether we are talking about real properties: all real properties are either determinates of determinables, or determinables of determinates. Since this is not the case for existence, existence cannot be a real property. Furthermore, non-existence cannot be a Cambridge property, contrary to what Miller claims. He defined a Cambridge property as a property the presence or absence of which does not make a real difference to the individual that has it. Is it true, or is it even meaningful to say, that it makes no real difference to the goddess Athena whether she has the property of non-existence or not? Moreover, whereas all Cambridge properties are relational (p. 29), non-existence is not relational.

Philipse makes three counter-arguments in the second of the quoted paragraphs.   

The second is question-begging and is easily dismissed. Miller rejects such Meinongian objects as the goddess Athena. So no question can arise with respect to it as to whether or not it has the property of non-existence.  

The third counter-argument is this: All Cambridge properties are relational; non-existence is not relational; ergo, non-existence is not a Cambridge property.  This begs the question at the major premise. If Miller is right, not all Cambridge properties are relational: non-existence is a Cambridge property that is not relational.

The first-counter-argument is also question-begging. The argument is:  "all real [non-Cambridge] properties are either determinates of determinables, or determinables of determinates"; existence is not  a determinate of a determinable, etc; ergo, existence is not a real property.  Miller will simply run this argument in reverse: because existence is a real property, the major premise is false.

What we have here is (at least) a standoff.  Philipse has failed to refute Miller. Can Miller refute Philipse?  Perhaps not. If so, then we have a standoff. Miller's view is a contender. It is at least as good as the Fregean and Meinongian views. But all three views are open to objections. 

Some Questions about White Privilege

There is a lot of talk these days about white privilege.  The notion cries out for some squinty-eyed scrutiny.

1. White privilege is presumably a type of privilege.  What is a privilege?  This is the logically prior question. To know what white privilege is we must first know what privilege is.  Let's consider some definitions.

D1.  A privilege is a special  entitlement or immunity granted to a particular person or group of persons by the government or some other corporate entity such as a university or a church on a conditional basis.

Driving on public roads is a privilege by this definition.  It is not a right one has  just in virtue of being a human being or a citizen.  It is a privilege the state grants on condition that one satisfy and continue to satisfy certain requirements pertaining to age, eyesight, driving skill, etc.  Being a privilege, the license to drive can be revoked.  By contrast, the right to life and the right to free speech are neither conditional nor granted by the government.  They can't be revoked.  Please don't confuse a constitutionally protected right such as the right to free speech with a right granted by the government. 

Faculty members have various privileges, a franking privilege, a library privilege, along with such perquisites as an office, a carrel, secretarial help, access to an an exclusive dining facility, etc.  Immunities are also privileges, e.g., the immunity to prosecution granted  to a miscreant who agrees to inform on his cohorts.

Now if (D1) captures what we mean by 'privilege,' then it it is hard to see how there could be white privilege.    Are there certain special entitlements and immunities that all and only whites have in virtue of being white, entitlements and immunities granted on a conditional basis by the government and revocable by said government?  No.  But there is black privilege by (D1).  It is called affirmative action. 

So if we adopt (D1) we get the curious result that there is no white privilege, but there is black privilege!  Those who speak of white privilege as of something real and something to be aware of and opposed must therefore have a different definition of privilege in mind, perhaps the following:

D2. A privilege is any unearned benefit or advantage that only some people have in virtue of their identity.  It needn't be granted by any corporate entity, nor need it be conditional.  Aspects of identity that can afford privilege in this sense include race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, wealth, ability, or citizenship status.

People who speak of white privilege probably have something like (D2) in mind.  The idea is that there are certain unearned advantages that accrue to whites just in virtue of their race, advantages that do not accrue to members of other races.

One question arises right here.  What justifies the broadening of the term 'privilege' to cover any unearned benefit?  If the term is used strictly, there is no white privilege.  To speak of white privilege one has to engage in a semantic stretch.  What justifies this stretch?  Is it a legitimate stretch or a example of linguistic distortion?  And what is the agenda behind it? 

One thing to note about (D2) is that it leads to a proliferation of privileges. There will be as many privileges as there are unearned benefits possessed by some but not all.  For example, there will be the 'privilege' of being right-handed since this is a minor  advantage -- better to be right-handed than either left-handed or ambisinistrous -- and it is unearned and not possessed by everyone.  And the same goes for being ambidexterous.  I lack the  'privilege' of ambidexterity, being right-handed only,  and so I am disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous.  But I am not as disadvantaged relative to the ambidexterous as the ambisinistrous.  They are the worst off when it comes to handedness.  Should they receive something like reparations for nature's niggardliness?

Now clearly all of us enjoy all sorts of unearned benefits. Tall men, of whatever race, have an unearned advantage over short men, as long as they are not too tall.  In the USA at least it is better to be 6'1" rather than 4'11".  (D2) therefore implies that there is a tallness privilege in some cultures.  Is this a problem?  Does justice demand that heights be equalized?  And who will appoint and equalize the Procrustean equalizers?  Or are the equalizers exempt from equalization?  If so, this would be an immunity, hence a  'privilege,' a leftist privilege.

Blacks born in the post-war USA have an unearned advantage over both whites and blacks born in some other parts of the world.  Blacks born into two-parent homes in the USA have an unearned advantage over blacks born into single-parent homes in the USA.  Blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over blacks born with birth defects.  Many blacks born without birth defects have an unearned advantage over some whites born with birth defects.  And so on.

If there is an advantage to being white, is this an advantage enjoyed by all whites?  And if it is not shared by all whites, why should this advantage be called white privilege?  Do 'poor white trash' share in white privilege?  Wouldn't it be better to be born into a solid, middle-class two-parent black or Hispanic family than to be born into a 'poor white trash' family?  Do rednecks and Southerners generally share in white privilege?  It didn't seem to help Paula Deen very much.

What is the relation between white privilege and majority privilege?  I grant that, ceteris paribus, it is better to be white than black in the USA at the present time.  But how much of this advantage is due to whites' being a majority?  When Hispanics become a majority in California, say, will there be talk of Hispanic privilege?  Should Hispanics then start feeling guilty about their unearned advantage?

Here is an important question.  Am I not entitled to my unearned benefits despite the fact that I have done nothing to earn them?  My being tall is not my own doing, and I don't do much of anything besides staying alive to keep myself tall.  I don't work at it in the way I work at improving my mind and work at maintaining my physical and fiscal fitness. 

Suppose you are a black male born in the post-war USA into a middle-class, two-parent, loving home.  You have all sorts of unearned benefits.  Do you feel guilty because you have  unearned benefits that a lot of 'poor white trash' lack?  Should you feel guilty?  Change the example slightly: you were born in London and have the unearned benefit of a British accent.  You come to the States and are hired by CNN or FOX News, beating out white competitors, in large part because of that beautiful and charming accent.  Do you 'check' your privilege or feel guilty about it?  Does it bother you that a Southern accent is a definite disadvantage?

So those are some questions that come to mind when I think about white privilege.  I'll end with a bit of analysis of an interesting quotation from this article:

Those of us who are white and male in the U.S. were born with significantly more chips [with which] to play the poker game of life than were people of color or women. Although our white, male status is a biological reality, the unearned benefits that our race and gender identity provides us are a social construction, that is—they are special perks granted by a white patriarchal society.

The second sentence is gibberish.  Males are on average taller than females.  Being tall is an unearned benefit, but surely it is no social construction.  The very notion of social construction is dubious by itself.  What does the phrase mean? Care to define it?  It smacks of the fallacy of hypostatization.  There is this entity called 'society' that constructs things?  I am not saying the phrase 'social construction' cannot be given a coherent meaning; I'm just saying that I would like to know what that meaning is.  Define it or drop it. 

Perk? Isn't that what the coffee does -- or used to do back in the day?  The word our 'professor' wants is 'perquisite.'  As I suggested above, perquisites are privileges.  So what the 'professor' is doing is conflating privileges with unearned benefits.  That conflation needs to be either justified or dropped. We are told that these 'perks' are granted by a white patriarchal society?  Smells like the fallacy of hypostatization again.  Where can I find the group of people who collectively decide to grant these special 'perks' to white people? 

I could go on, but this is enough 'shoveling' for one day.

Harley-Davidson: Stickin' it to the Man

Check out this H-D promotional video.  A celebration of individuality by people who dress the same, ride the same make of motorcycle, and chant in unison.

"Some of us believe in the Man Upstairs, but all of us believe in stickin' it to the Man Down Here." 

But without the Man Down Here there would be no roads, no gasoline, no science, no technology, no motorcycles, no law and order, no orderly context in which aging lawyers and dentists could play at stickin' it to the Man on the weekends. 

The Man is discipline, self-denial, repression, deferral of gratification, control of the instinctual.   The Man is civilization, discontents and all. Without the Man there would be no one to stick it to, and nothing to stick it to him with.  Adolescents of all ages need the Man to have someone to rebel against.

Still and all, after watching this video, what red-blooded American boomer doesn't want to rush out and buy himself a hog? Get your motor runnin', head out on the highway . . . .

Personal anecdote: A few years back I took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license.  I was about to rush out and buy myself a hog when Good Sense kicked in.  So I rushed out and bought myself a Jeep Wrangler instead.  

Check out this H-D promotional video.  A celebration of individuality by people who dress the same, ride the same make of motorcycle, and chant in unison.

"Some of us believe in the Man Upstairs, but all of us believe in stickin' it to the Man Down Here." 

But without the Man Down Here there would be no roads, no gasoline, no science, no technology, no motorcycles, no law and order, no orderly context in which aging lawyers and dentists could play at stickin' it to the Man on the weekends. 

The Man is discipline, self-denial, repression, deferral of gratification, control of the instinctual.   The Man is civilization, discontents and all. Without the Man there would be no one to stick it to, and nothing to stick it to him with.  Adolescents of all ages need the Man to have someone to rebel against.

Still and all, after watching this video, what red-blooded American boomer doesn't want to rush out and buy himself a hog? Get your motor runnin', head out on the highway . . . .

Personal anecdote: A few years back I took a three-day motorcycle course, passed it, and got my license.  I was about to rush out and buy myself a hog when Good Sense kicked in.  So I rushed out and bought myself a Jeep Wrangler instead.  

Cops: A Necessary Evil

I don't much like law enforcement agents (qua law enforcement agents) and I try to avoid contact with them, not because I violate laws or have something to hide, but because I understand human nature, and I understand how power corrupts people, not inevitably, but predictably. Cops and sheriffs are too often arrogant, disrespectful, and willing to overstep their lawful authority.

But there is a species of varmint that I like even less than law enforcement agents: criminals and scofflaws. They are the scum of the earth. To clean up scum you need people who are willing to get dirty and who share some of the attributes of those they must apprehend and incarcerate. I mean such attributes as courage, cunning, some recklessness, with a dash of ruthlessness thrown in for good measure. Government and its law enforcement agencies are a necessary evil. That is not pessimism, but realism.

There are anarchists and others who dream of a world in which good order arises spontaneously and coercive structures are unnecessary. I want these anarchists and others to be able to dream on in peace. For that very reason, I reject their dangerous utopianism.

Grateful to Live in Arizona

I've lived in Hawaii, Santa Barbara, Boston, and the Midwest, not to mention other places in the USA and abroad: Salzburg, Austria, Freiburg, Germany, and Ankara, Turkey.   No place beats Arizona, all things considered. That is a mighty subjective judgment, to be sure, but if a blogger cannot vent his subjectivity, who can?

For one thing, Arizona is in the West and we all know that the West is the best, far, far away from the effete and epicene East, lousy with liberals, and the high taxes they love; but not so far West as to be on the Left Coast where there was once and is no more a great and golden state, California. Geographical chauvinism aside, there is beauty everywhere, even in California, when you abstract from the political and economic and social malaise wrought by destructive leftists, the majestic Sierra Nevada, for example, the Range of Light (John Muir). Herewith, an amateur  shot of the the Sedona red rock country:

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Defending Barry Miller against Herman Philipse: Existence as a First-Level Property, Part II

This is the second in a series. Here is the first installment. Read it for context and references. We are still examining only the first premise of Barry Miller's cosmological argument, as sketched by Philipse:

1) Existence is a real first-level accidental property of contingent individuals.

Philipse gave two arguments contra. In my first entry I refuted the weaker of the two. Philipse argued that Kant in 1781 had already put paid to the proposition that existence is a "real predicate," i.e., a real property of individuals.  I showed that Philipse confuses two different senses of 'real.'  When the Sage of Koenigsberg tells us that Offenbar, Sein ist kein reales Praedikat, he is telling us that it is obvious that being or existence is not a first-level quidditative determination.  This is true, whether or not it is obvious.  But when Miller tells us that existence is a real property of individuals, he is telling us that it is a non-Cambridge property of individuals.  Philipse confuses 'real' in the sense of 'quidditative' with 'real' in the sense of 'non-Cambridge,' and on the basis of this confusion takes Kant to have refuted Miller.  The ineptitude of Philipse's 'argument' takes the breath away.

The other argument Philipse gives is not so easily blown out of the water, if it can be so blown at all. He writes:

It is not necessary to discuss here all the attempted refutations Miller puts forward, for the simple reason that if he fails to refute convincingly only one plausible argument to the effect that existence is not a real predicate, his negative strategy is shipwrecked.

Let me take the so-called absurdity objection as an example (pp. 21-23). According to this objection, if existence is an accidental real first-order property of individual entities, so must non-existence be, but this would imply an absurdity. For in order to attribute truly a real property to a specific individual, we must be able to refer successfully to that individual by using a proper name, a pronoun, or by pointing to it, etc. However, we can refer successfully to an individual only if that individual exists or at least has existed, so that non-existence cannot be a real property. Hence existence cannot be an accidental real first-level property of individuals either.

The absurdity objection can be put like this:

a) Existence is a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals if and only if nonexistence is also a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals.

b) Non-existence cannot be a property of individuals: if an individual exists, then it cannot have the property of nonexistence. 

Therefore

c) Existence is not a property of individuals.

This is an argument that cannot be dismissed as resting on an elementary confusion. But let's take a step back and formulate the problem as an aporetic triad or antilogism the better to reconnoiter the conceptual terrain.

a) Existence is a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals if and only if nonexistence is also a (real, non-Cambridge) property of individuals.

b) Non-existence cannot be a property of individuals: if an individual exists, then it cannot have the property of nonexistence. 

c*) Existence is a property of individuals.

Each of these three propositions is individually plausible. And yet they cannot all be true on pain of logical contradiction. Individually plausible, but collectively inconsistent. So, if we adhere to the law of non-contradiction,  one of the propositions must be rejected.  Which will it be?

A. The Fregean will reject (c*).  A Fregean or Fressellian for present purposes is someone who, first, holds that 'exist(s)' is univocal in sense and second, has only one admissible sense: as a second-level predicate.  Thus the general existential 'Cats exist' is logically kosher because it can be read as predicating of the first-level property of being a cat the second-level property of being instantiated.  But the singular existential 'Max exists' is not logically kosher and is indeed meaningless in roughly the way 'Max is numerous' is meaningless.  For if 'exists' is univocal and means 'is instantiated,' then one cannot meaningfully say of Max that he exists for the simple reason that it is meaningless to say of an individual that it is instantiated.  Max could conceivably have an indiscernible twin, but that would not be an instance of him. By definition, the only instantiable items are properties, concepts, and the like.  Some will say that the Fregean analysis can be made to work for singular existentials if there are such haecceity properties as identity-with-Max, 'Maxity' to give it a name.   Suppose that there are.  Then 'Max exists' is analyzable as 'Maxity is instantiated.'  But this does not alter the fact that 'exist(s)' is a second-level predicate, and existence a second-level property.

B. The Meinongian will reject (b).  A Meinongian for present purposes is someone who denies that everything exists, and holds instead that some items exist and some do not.  For the Meinongian, existence is a classificatory principle: it partitions a logically prior domain of items into those that exist and those that do not.  For the Meinongian, both existence and non-existence are first-level properties. Existence cannot be classificatory for the Fregean because, for the Fregean, everything exists.  And so for the Fregean, there cannot be a property of non-existence.

C. The Millerian -- to give him a name -- rejects (a).  A Millerian for present purposes is one who holds, against the Meinongian, that there are no nonexistent items, and against the Fregean that existence is a genuine, non-relational  property predicable of individuals.  Holding that everything exists, the Millerian cannot admit that non-existence is a real (i.e., non-Cambridge) property of individuals.  

In Part III of this series, I will examine Philipse's atempted rebuttal of Miller's rejection of (a).  For now I will merely point out that the Meinongian and Fregean positions are open to powerful objections and therefore cannot be used to refute the Millerian view.  They merely oppose it. To oppose a theory T with a questionable theory T* is not to refute T.  'Refute' is a verb of success. To refute a theory is to prove that it is untenable. Note also that the Fregean and the Meinongian are at profound loggerheads, which fact undermines both positions. After all, deep thinkers have supported each.  

My point, then, is that Philipse hasn't refuted Miller; he has merely opposed him from the point of view of the Fregean theory which is fraught with difficulties.  One cannot refute a theory with a theory that is itself open to powerful objections as the Fregean theory is.