Maverick Philosopher

SAHM

Stay-at-home mom

The proliferation of abbreviations is an index of the hyperkineticism of present-day life and communication. This old man is having a hard time keeping up. 

Idolatry without God

"I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me."

If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater.  But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater.  Or so say I. For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God (or some other Absolute such as the Plotinian One) does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship. 

Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.'  Thus they typically say to the Christian,  "You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything without falling into idolatry.  He cannot esteem anything absolutely. If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, the revolution, humanity, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.

A consistent atheism, one that eschews all gods, may prove to be  a difficult row to hoe.  The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the Enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally.  If there is no Absolute, then nothing may be legitimately viewed as absolute. Our atheist must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment or ultimate concern.  Nice work if you can get it.

Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols?  Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative?  I doubt it.  I suspect the atheist must fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or the defeat of superstition or something else obviously unworthy of worship.  Why must he? Because we are all naturally inclined to find life worth living in pursuit of values that transcend us, values that are not transient, contingent, and parasitic on our flickering wishes and desires. Thus I conjecture that atheists and metaphysical naturalists who do not succumb to nihilism live in a state of self-deception in which they attach absolute value to things that their theory tells them cannot have absolute value.  Perhaps they should acquiesce in the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.

Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur.  In  "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," we read:

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Schlick's Scientism: An Antilogism

Remember Moritz Schlick?  He wrote, "All real problems are scientific  questions; there are no others." ("The Future of Philosophy" in The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty).  The Schlickian dictum sires an antilogism.

1) All real problems are scientific.

2) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is real.

3) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is not scientific.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Which member of the trio should we reject?

I reject (1). There are real (genuine) problems that are not scientific  in the way that the natural sciences are scientific.  Scientific problems are amenable in principle to solution by empirical observation and experiment. This is not so for (1). So I must disagree with Schlick the positivist.  

Related: The Death of Moritz Schlick

Exercise for the reader: Is the meaning of the proposition below the method of its verification? If yes, then what method might that be?

Climate Bluster

He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology.

What drives the ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property.  Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda. 

The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis.

They mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth.  It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-immanent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity.  The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.  

Now ask yourself: how plausible is this conjunction of claims?  Bear in mind that a conjunctive proposition is true if and only if each of its conjuncts is true.  

I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.

A 97-Year-Old Philosopher Faces Death

Herbert Fingarette finds that that the Epicurean reasoning that he once endorsed, fails him at the end, offering him no consolation. HT: Vito Caiati.

Agenda Fetishism

You know you're list-obsessive when, having completed a task, you add an entry to your 'to do' list just so you can cross it off.

Clinical Depression and the Moral Permissibility of Suicide

I detect a cri du coeur in the following  question to me from a reader:

Do you believe it is morally permissible for an unmarried person who is now middle-aged (late 40's) and who has no children to care for and who has battled clinical depression and anxiety for many years to commit suicide?

Since this is an 'existential' and not merely a theoretical question, and because I want to treat it with the proper respect, I should say that while I have read about clinical depression, I would not call any of my bouts with anxiety and depression 'clinical.' I  have successfully dealt with all of them on my own through prayer, meditation, Stoic and other spiritual disciplines, journal writing, vigorous physical exercise (running), and just toughing it out.  The classically American virtue of self-reliance, too little practiced these days, can sometimes see you through much better than drugs and hand-holding.  But I have been spared the hell I have read about in William Styron's Darkness Visible, and more recently in the philosopher J. P. Moreland's Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Me Peace.  

I recommend Moreland's book to the reader and this interview as an introduction thereto.

To come directly at the question: any philosopher who proffers a confident answer to the question is either a fool or a blowhard. Being neither, I will say that I don't know.  I further believe that no one knows despite their asseverations to the contrary. I will say that I have never seen a rationally compelling argument against the moral permissibility of suicide when the going gets unbearably tough.  That life is hell for some people is better known than any doctrine that forbids escape.

I now refer the reader to some entries of mine that I hope are of some use to him.

On Suicide

Kant on Suicide

Benatar on Suicide: Is Suicide Murder?

Is it Always Wrong to Take One's Own Life?

Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners 

Addendum (1/28). It seems to me that each of us who has the time and soundness of mind to pursue the question should should decide now what he will do if calamity strikes.  

Roger Kimball on Roger Scruton (1944-2020) on Tradition, Authority and Prejudice

Here:

Sir Roger wrote several times about his political maturation, most fully, perhaps, in “Why I became a conservative,” in The New Criterion in 2003. There were two answers, one negative, one positive. The negative answer was the visceral repudiation of civilization he witnessed in Paris in 1968: slogans defacing walls, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. The positive element was the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Sir Roger reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can be a prime resource in freedom’s armory. “Our most necessary beliefs,” he wrote, “may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and . . . the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.”

A necessary belief, I take it, is one that we need to live well.  And it may be that the beliefs we need the most to flourish are ones that we cannot justify if our standards are exacting.  It is also true that a failure to justify a belief can lead to skepticism and to a loss of belief.   But which prejudices should we live by? The ones that we were brought up to have?  Should we adopt them without examination?  

Here is where the problem lies. Should we live an unexamined life, simply taking for granted what was handed down?  Think of all those who were brought up to believe that slavery is a natural social arrangement, that some races are fit to be slaves and others to be masters.  Others were brought up to believe that a woman's place is in the home and  that any education beyond the elementary was wasted on them.  Punishment by crucifixion, the eating of human flesh, and so on were all traditionally accepted practices and their supporting  beliefs were  accepted uncritically from supposed authorities.  "That's the way it has always been done." "That's the way we do things around here." "Beef: It's what's for dinner." It is not that the longevity of the practices was taken to justify them; it is rather that the question of justification did not arise.  Enclosed within their cultures, and shielded from outside influences, there was no cause for people to doubt their beliefs and practices.  Beliefs and practices functioned well enough as social cement and so the questions about truth and justification did not arise.

The opposite view is that of Socrates as reported by Plato: "The unexamined life is not worth living."  For humans to flourish, they must examine their beliefs and try to separate the true from the false, the justified from the unjustified, the better from the worse.  Supposed authorities must be tested to see if they are genuinely authoritative.  The cosmogonic myths and the holy books contradict each other; hence they cannot all be true. Which is true? Might it be that none are true? Then what is the ultimate truth about how we should live? 

Man come of age is man become aware of the great dualities: true and false, real and unreal, good and evil. Man come of age is man having emerged into the light of spirit, man enlightened, man emergent from the animal and tribal.  Mythos suppressed and Logos ascendent, inquiry is born, inquiry whose engine is doubt. While remaining a miserable animal, man as spirit seeks to know the truth.  To advance in knowledge, however, he must question the handed-down.

The problem is the tension between the heteronomous life of tradition, authority, prejudice, and obedience, and the autonomous Socratic, truth-seeking life, a life willing to haul everything and anything before the bench of Reason, including itself, there to be rudely interrogated. In different dress this is the old problem of Athens and Jersualem in its stark Straussian contours.  

The problem is real and it is no solution to appeal to tradition, authority, and prejudice. On the other hand, there is no denying that the spirit of  inquiry, the skeptical spirit, can and in some does lead to a weakening of belief and a consequent loss of the will to act and assert oneself and the interests of one's group. Decadence and nihilism can result from the spirit of inquiry, the skeptical spirit. The West is in danger of perishing due to lack of will and a lack of belief in our values as we let ourselves be replaced by foreign elements.  Europe faces extinction or dhimmitude if it does not affirm its will to live and take measures against the invasion of representatives of an  inferior unenlightened culture.  

Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. “Real freedom,” Sir Roger observed, “concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy.”

Really? So I am truly free when I bend my knee to the sovereign? True freedom is bondage to the lord and master? Sounds Orwellian. Could real freedom, concrete freedom, be a form of obedience? Perhaps, if the one obeyed is God himself. But God is absent. In his place are dubious representatives.

My interim judgment: Scruton's conservatism as presented by Kimball is facile, superficial, and unsatisfying. It is a mere reaction to Enlightenment and classically liberal excesses.

Another typically aporetic (and therefore inconclusive) conclusion by the Aporetic Philosopher. It seems right, fitting, and helpful unto enlightenment that a maverick should be an aporetician.

OTT

Internet abbreviation: over-the-top.

Abbreviations divide into acronyms, initialisms, and truncations. Or so say I.

See Acronyms, Initialisms, and Truncations and Acronyms, Initialisms and Truncations: Another Look

A Bad Argument Against Originalism Refuted

This canard is often repeated: "We need a living constitution to govern a modern society."

In response, Neil Gorsuch distinguishes between MEANING and APPLICATION. The original meaning of the Constitution remains fixed; it is the range of applications that changes. Speech remains protected despite the fact that at the time of the founding electronic means of communication did not exist. (First Amendment). The Fourth Amendment still protects us against "unreasonable searches and seizures" despite the fact that there were no means of electronic surveillance in the early days of the Republic.

An example Gorsuch does not give, but I will, pertains to the Second Amendment. There were no automatic or semi-automatic firearms back then; hell, there weren't any revolvers either. But "the right to keep and bear arms" has the meaning now that it had then. It is just that the application or extension of the term 'arms' has widened.

I hope to refute other bad arguments against originalism later. See Neil Gorsuch, A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT, Crown Forum, 2019, p. 111. An excellent book and an excellent counter to leftist claptrap.

Word of the Day: Oubliette

Merriam-Webster: A dungeon with an opening only at the top.

 

Used in a sentence:

Since [Kamala] Harris is now on her way to the political oubliette, however, Schweizer’s discussion of her depredations is of less exigent interest than his discussion of other figures, especially Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, all, remarkably enough, leading contenders for the Democratic nomination for president. 

French, from Middle French, from oublier to forget, from Old French oblier, from Vulgar Latin *oblitare, frequentative of Latin oblivisci to forget — more at oblivion.

 

Addendum (1/27).  This just over the transom:

I think I've been inside an oubliette, thought I didn't know what it was called at the time. It was quite unsettling. My brother, his son, and I were driving in southern Spain when we saw a ruined castle at the top of a hill. There was no sign or anything, but that's not unusual in Spain, so we hiked to the top of the hill and explored the ruins.

 

The only sign of modern habitation was a fairly recent steel ladder going down into a sort of pit, about twenty feet deep and cylindrical with a diameter of about thirty feet, mostly covered, and with a round opening somewhat larger than a manhole. We couldn't figure out what the pit was, so my nephew climbed down the ladder to look around, then my brother followed.

 

I asked one of them to come back up because it didn't seem safe for all of us to be down there (in case the ladder broke or something). My nephew came back up and I climbed down to look around. It was only moderately creepy until my nephew came back down and all three of us were down there together. No way could we have made a cell phone call from that location, and I had a sudden image of being stuck down in that hole with no way out.

 

For just a moment, I imagine I felt what it would be like to be dropped into such a horrifying prison. It was one of those shocking moments when you really grasp viscerally how evil man can be to man.

Regards,

David Gudeman

http://www.unobtainabol.com

You had a glimpse of the horror of this life, a glimpse that cut right through the optimistic palaver of the secular humanists. You saw the truth of homo homini lupus, and its finality in a godless universe in which the horrors go unredeemed.   If atheists and naturalists weren't such superficial people they would be anti-natalists.

 

We are spiritual beings, and for a spiritual being the ultimate horror is the sense of utter abandonment by God and man. If Christ was fully man, that is what he experienced in his worst moment on the cross.

Avicenna's God and the Queen of England

A re-post from 12 September 2013. Re-posts are the re-runs of the blogosphere. You don't watch a Twilight Zone or Seinfeld episode only once do you?  

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For a long time now I have been wanting to study Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's hard-to-find The Paradoxical Structure of Existence.  Sunday I got lucky at Bookman's and found the obscure treatise for a measly six semolians.  I've read the first five chapters and and they're good.  There is a lack of analytical rigor here and there, but that is par for the course with the old-school scholastic philosophers.  They would have benefited from contact with analytic philosophers.  Unfortunately, most of the analysts of Wilhelmsen's generation were anti-metaphysical, being  logical positivists, or fellow travellers of same, a fact preclusive of mutual respect, mutual understanding, and mutual benefit  Imagine the response of a prickly positivist to one of Jacques Maritain's more effusive tracts.  But I digress.

Wilhelmsen (1923-1996) must have been a successful teacher: he has a knack for witty and graphic comparisons.  To wit:

Avicenna's God might be compared to the Queen of England, to a figurehead monarch.  No law in England has validity unless it bears the Queen's signature.  Until that moment the law is merely "possibly a law."  But Parliament writes the laws and the Queen signs them automatically.  Avicenna's order of pure essence is the Parliament of Being.  Avicenna's God gives the royal signature of existence; but this God, like England's majesty, is stripped of all real power and liberty of action.  (Preserving Christian Publications, 1995, p. 43.  First published in 1970 by U. of Dallas Press.)

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs of Self-Satisfaction and Braggadocio

Frank Sinatra, My Way. A little too self-congratulatory, don't you think? 

Bob Wills, I'm a Ding Dong Daddy from Dumas.  "Purty lil gurl tried to put me on the bum, had to burn her down with a Thompson gun. I'm a ding dong daddy from Dumas babe, ya ought to see me do my stuff."

Chicago, I'm a Man

Youtuber comment: "I'll be 68 in June, but when I hear this song time rockets back in a heartbeat. 'Our' music was absolutely phenomenal. Today's music can't hold a candle to it. But then again, you'd have to have been there to understand."

Peggy Lee, I'm a Woman

Willie Dixon and Robbie Robertson, Seventh Son

Mississippi Sheiks, Sitting on Top of the World

Joan Baez, Satisfied Mind

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

I am presently re-reading The Paradoxical Structure of Existence (University of Dallas Press, 1970) in preparation for the existence chapter of my metaphilosophy book.  Wilhelmsen's book is sloppy in the manner of the 20th century Thomists before the analytic bunch emerged, but rich,  historically informed, and fascinating.  Poking around on the 'Net for Wilhelmsen materials, I found this by one William H. Marshner, and I now file it in my Wilhelmsen category.

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

A re-post from two years ago. Cognate question: Why do leftists keep asking the title question?

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Why did Donald J. Trump receive the support of evangelicals and other religious conservatives?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.*  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in -- wait for it -- Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what doth it profit a man to confess his lust when he supports the destructive Democrats, the abortion party, a party the prominent members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

______________________

*My prediction, made on 19 January 2017, proved correct. In response to Trump's speech at the March for Life the other day, Bernie Sanders tweeted the vicious Orwellianism, "Abortion is health care." Way to go, Bernie, you have further galvanized our opposition to you and what you stand for.

Note that at the present time no House Democrat is pro-life. The Dems have take a hard Left into the mephitic precincts of lunacy and evil. 

Reason Weak and Strong

Reason proves weak in the search for truth, but strong in the rationalizing of behavior.

Word of the Day: Zaftig

Said of a woman. Having a full, shapely figure. Voluptuous. Plump and vigorous. Rubenesque. A Yiddish word. Supposedly from the German saftig, juicy. More here. Trigger Warning! Snowflakes of the distaff persuasion will be offended.

Time was when 'female persuasion' and the like were used figuratively as a kind of joke; after all, one cannot be persuaded to be female or male. Or recruited. One does not join the female club. Nor can one be assigned one's sex at birth. Being female is something biological, not political or social like a party affiliation. But the times they have a'changed. Nowadays everything is a social construction and a matter of arbitrary identification. So, being female is like being a Democrat!

Nowadays there is no sex, only gender. How then can anything be sexist? And if, in reality, there are no races -- race being a mere social construct -- how can there be racism? Inquiring minds want to know.

CTRL-F

Use this command to locate a bit of text in a document.

TL;DR

Too long; didn't read.

The hyperkineticism of present-day communication forces one to be pithy, which is good in many contexts. The downside you already know about.

Is Speech Violence? Culture War 1.0 and Culture War 2.0

Peter Boghossian:

The rules of engagement relate to how we deal with our disagreements. In Culture War 1.0, if an evolutionary biologist gave a public lecture about the age of the Earth based on geological dating techniques, creationist detractors would issue a response, insist that such dating techniques are biased, challenge him to a debate, and ask pointed—if unfairly loaded—questions during the Q&A session.

In Culture War 2.0, disagreements with a speaker are sometimes met with attempts at de-platforming: rowdy campaigns for the invitation to be rescinded before the speech can be delivered. If this is unsuccessful, critics may resort to disrupting the speaker by screaming and shouting, engaging noise makers, pulling the fire alarm, or ripping out the speaker wires. The goal is not to counter the speaker with better arguments or even to insist on an alternative view, but to prevent the speaker from airing her views at all.

Today’s left-wing culture warriors are not roused to action only by speakers whose views run afoul of the new moral orthodoxy. They combat “problematic” ideas anywhere they’re found, including peer-reviewed academic journals. In 2017, Portland State University Political Science Professor Bruce Gilley published a peer-reviewed article titled “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly. Many academicians were enraged, but rather than write a rebuttal or challenge Gilley to a public debate (as they might have done in the era of Culture War 1.0), they circulated a popular petition demanding that Portland State rescind his tenure, fire him, and even take away his Ph.D. “The Case for Colonialism” was eventually withdrawn after the journal editor “received serious and credible threats of personal violence.”

Christian organizations have a long history of censorship, and this has continued to some extent even in recent decades. All the same, such an attempt to suppress an academic article would have been almost unthinkable during Culture War 1.0. There were some analogous attempts on the part of Christians during precursors of this culture war, as for example in the incidents surrounding Tennessee’s Butler Act of 1925 and the subsequent “Scopes Monkey Trial.” And religious would-be censors during Culture War 1.0 did occasionally make attempts on novels and movies interpreted as blasphemous or obscene, such as The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). But for the most part, Creationists in the first Culture War didn’t want evolutionary biologists to lose their tenure and their doctorates. They wanted to debate and prove them wrong.

One common theme running throughout Culture War 2.0 is the idea, endorsed by many well-meaning activists, that speech is violence. And if speech is violence, the thinking goes, then we must combat speech with the same vigor we use to combat physical violence. This entails that we cannot engage supposedly violent speech, sometimes referred to indiscriminately as “hate speech,” merely with words. If someone is being punched in the face, it’s futile to say, “Would you kindly stop?” or “This is not an ethical way to behave.” You need to take action. The rules of engagement change if speech cannot be met with speech—with written rebuttals, debates, and Q&A sessions. If speech is violence, it must either be prevented or stopped with something beyond speech, such as punching Nazis, throwing milkshakes, or using institutional mechanisms to smother unwanted discourse.

Is Speech Violence?

As the nursery rhyme goes,

Sticks and stones may break my bones
But words can never hurt me.

No speech is physically violent, and so the first thing that ought to be said is that unwanted speech, offensive speech, dissenting speech, contrarian speech, polemical speech, and the like including so-called 'hate speech,' ought not be met by physical violence.  There are exceptions, but in general, speech is to be countered, if it is countered and not ignored,  by speech, not physical assaults on persons or property private or public.  The speech may be sweet and reasonable or ugly and combative.

Here is an exception. Some speech is of course psychologically violent and psychologically damaging to some of those who are its recipients. The young, the impressionable, and the sensitive can be harmed, and in instances terribly, by psychologically violent speech.  Suppose one parent is verbally abusing a sensitive child in a psychological damaging way. ("You worthless piece of shit, can't you do anything right? I wish you were never born!") The other parent would be justified in using physical violence to stop the verbal abuse.

A second exception. Blasphemers invade a church service.  It would be morally permissible to force them to leave by physical means.   A third exception. Protestors block a major traffic artery. The police would be justified in using physical force to remove the law breakers.  In this case it is not the speech that is being countered by physical violence but the protestors' illegal action of blocking the artery.

But in general, no speech may be legitimately countered with physical violence to the person or property of the speaker.  Speech is not a form of physical violence and may not be countered by physical violence.

That's one point. A second is that we of the Coalition of the Sane are justified is using physical violence against those who try to shut down our dissent by physical means if the authorities abdicate.  This is why Second Amendment rights are so very important.

Finally, as I have said many times, dissent is not hate to those who can think straight and are morally sane.

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

Any reasons one adduces in support of the thesis of  the infirmity of reason will share in the weakness of the faculty whose weakness is being affirmed.  Is this a problem for the proponent of the thesis? Does he contradict himself? Not obviously: he might simply accept the conclusion that the reasoning in support of the thesis is inconclusive.

Suppose I argue that, with respect to all substantive philosophical theses, there there are good arguments  pro and good arguments contra, and that these arguments 'cancel out.'  Now my thesis is substantive, and so my thesis applies to itself, whence it follows that my meta-thesis has both good arguments for it and good arguments against it, and that they cancel out.

Where is the problem? I am simply applying my meta-philosophical skepticism to itself, as I must if I am to be logically consistent.  Now I could make an exception for my meta-thesis, but that, I think, would be intolerably ad hoc.

I am not dogmatically affirming the infirmity of reason; I am merely stating that there are reasons to accept it, reasons that are not conclusive.

Deeper into this topic:

Seriously Philosophical Theses and Argument Cancellation

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

The Deep Thinker

Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations (Die Fliegenpein: Aufzeichnungen), Noonday 1994, tr. H. F. Broch de Rothermann, bilingual ed., p. 25:

His thoughts have fins instead of wings.

It flows better in German:

Sein Denken hat Flossen statt Flügel.

The title is my creation.

Many of Canetti's notations express insights; others, however striking, are exercises in literary self-indulgence, not that there is anything wrong with that.

Here are some good ones:

No code is secret enough to allow for the expression of complete candor. (5)

He will never be a thinker: he doesn't repeat himself enough. (13)

He desires the existence of the people he loves, but not their presence and their preoccupations. (15)

He wishes for moments that burn as long as match. (15)

I read that as a protest against time's fugacity.

He is as smart as a newspaper; he knows everything and what he knows changes from day to day. (19)

Even the great philosopher benefits from exaggeration, but with him she must wear a tightly woven garment of reason. The poet, on the other hand, exposes her in all her shimmering nudity. (19)

It's easy to be reasonable when you don't love anyone, including yourself. (21)

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life. (23)

That resonates with me.  But it is not an aphorism if an aphorism must present a universal truth.  This is an aphorism: On fair days one feels too sure of one's own life.  But this is the philosopher talking with his zeal to transcend the particular toward the universal. The poet is more at home, or entirely at home,  with the particular. There is an advantage to Canetti's formulation: it cannot be contradicted. He is reporting the feeling of a particular man, presumably himself.  The corresponding aphorism invites counterexamples.

God does not like us to draw lessons from recent history. (23)

I surmise that the thought driving the aphorism is that the horrors of the 20th century make theistic belief psychologically impossible. Who can believe in God after Auschwitz?

Related: Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism 

Addendum.  Contrast

On fair days he feels too sure of his own life

with 

He whose days are fair feels too sure of his own life.

'He' in the second sentence functions as a universal quantifier, not as a pronoun.  Pronouns have antecedents: the 'he' in the second sentence has no antecedent.  Nor does it need one. The 'he' in the first sentence, however, could be called a dangling pronoun: its antecedent is tacit, and is presumably 'Canetti.'  If this is right, the two sentences express different thoughts and are not intersubstitutable salva veritate.  

I rather doubt that Canetti would approve of this analysis. Too philosophical.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. When your name is 'Bob Dylan' you have your pick of sidemen. A great band. "The walls of pride, they're high and they're wide. You can't see over, to the other side."

Joe Brown, Sea of  Heartbreak.  Nothing touches Don Gibson's original effort, but this is very satisfying version.

Elvis Presley, Little Sister 

Carole King, You've Got a Friend

Buddy Guy, et al., Sweet Home Chicago. Looks like everyone is playing a Strat except for Johnny Winter.

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go.  A fine, if quirky, cover of the old George Reeves hit from 1959.

Marty Robbins, El Paso. Great guitar work.

A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others

Here, at MavPhil Strictly Philosophical

Why the Right-Left Divide is Unbridgeable: Three Reasons

One reason is that we differ over values.  That's bad. Worse still is that we differ over what is true and what is false.  Disagreements about values and norms are troubling but not surprising, but nowadays we can't even agree on what the facts are. Worst of all is that we differ over what truth is and whether there are any truths.  The point about values is obvious. I won't say more about it on this occasion. Here are some examples of how we differ over what is true and what is false:

The left believes the president colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. The reality is that there was no collusion. This is the conclusion of the Mueller report, but still, the left doesn’t accept it.

The left is certain President Trump said the neo-Nazis are “very fine people” when referring to the protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia. The right is certain the president didn’t say there are good neo-Nazis any more than he said there are good “antifa” members. When he said there were “very fine people on both sides,” he was referring to those demonstrating on behalf of keeping Confederate statues and those opposed. See “The Charlottesville Lie” by CNN analyst Steve Cortes.

The left believes socialism is economically superior to capitalism. But the reality is that only capitalism has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

These examples are from Dennis Prager. I will now go Prager one better: we don't just disagree about what is true and false; we disagree about whether there is truth is the first place.  

The Left is culturally Marxist, and part of that line is that there is no objective truth.  What there are are perspectives and power relations. 'True' is whatever perspective  enhances the power of some tribe. Thus the abominations 'our truth' and 'my truth.' 

We are obviously in deep trouble and it is not clear how to avoid disaster.   Hot civil war would be a disaster. But we conservatives are not about to accept dhimmitude. Secession is unworkable. We need to find the political equivalent of divorce. But how to work this out in detail is above my pay grade.  And yours too.

The consolations of philosophy, and of old age, are many.

'For' and 'Because': A Linguistic Bagatelle

My sense of the English language tells me that (1) below, but not (2), is good English.

1) On presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all. For on presentism, only the present exists.

2) On presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all. Because on presentism, only the present exists.

As I see it, (1) is good English because 'for' in a context like this means 'it is because.'

The Augustinian Meta-Predicament

The Augustinian predicament is that, if you don't ask me what time is; I know. But if you ask me, I don't know.

The meta-predicament is that, if you don't press me too hard, I know what the main issues in dispute are, and what the main theories of time state; but if you press me and demand clear explanations, then I find that I don't know.

Custody of the Eyes

You look at unworthy objects, objects that debase. Or you view worthy things through the distorting lenses of concupiscence and greed.

A Paltry Nobility

A paltry nobility it is that extends only to a recognition of one's baseness. Such is a nobility of thought that cannot implement itself in action.

"Don't Go Out in the Dark," Said I

"It's not dark yet," said she.

"But it's getting there," I replied.

She missed the allusion.

The Romantic Fool

It has been my experience that the folly of the romantic fool  has an expiration date -- at least with respect to any given object of his folly, if not with respect to his propensity to make a fool of himself in matters amorous.  The wayward heart is fickle. The older and wiser see the need for the custody of the heart, but to attain the insight is one thing, to play the custodian another.  Popular music testifies eloquently to the problem. 

Fools rush in, where wise men never go;
But wise men never fall in love;
So how are they to know?

Wise men say
Only fools rush in;
But I can't help
Falling in love with you.

On a Roll

America is on a roll with Trump in control, and I'm on a roll on my Facebook page beating lefties into the dirt.  All of my posts are public, so you should be able to read them if you have a FB account. To comment, though, you will have to send me a 'Friend ' request.  Hard experience has taught me that discussions with 'liberals' are a waste of time, such is their level of insolent ignorance and willful self-enstupidation; so no 'liberals' need apply.

Some Questions About Divine Simplicity

This recently over the transom:

 

Dear Dr. Vallicella, I'm a reader of your blog, and have really enjoyed much of your work. Since you wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the topic of divine simplicity, I thought I might reach out to you to ask your opinions on some things. I am on an e-mail list with a Christian philosopher who is extremely critical toward the idea and I'd like to know what you think of the following:

 

First, he argues that, while there are some rationally acceptable arguments for divine simplicity, they do not rise to the level of demonstration. Based on some of your recent work, I gather you might agree with this.

 

BV: I do agree.  The doctrine cannot be demonstrated or proven. There are 'good' (rationally acceptable) arguments for the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS), but they are not rationally compelling. To my mind this is but a special case of a general thesis: few if any substantive theses in philosophy are demonstrable or provable.

 

It's the second part I'm curious about. Further to his argument is that divine simplicity rests on questionable metaphysical premises, and that many are far too confident in the position given their familiarity with metaphysics. He is exceptionally critical of James Dolezal, saying that consulting him on the topic "is like going to a bike shop to get your car repaired." He believes that, for one to really understand and engage with the ideas, academic training and great philosophical experience is required (which Dolezal may not possess, not having earned his Ph.D. under recognized philosophers). Since you cite Dolezal multiple times in your article, I assume you would disagree with this at least on some level. While I only have undergraduate philosophical training, I am familiar with the debates on the subject, and the metaphysics involved, to have at least some rational justification for my opinions. (The big exception is questions of simplicity and modal logic—I back off when things go into that territory). So, my actual questions: what level of philosophical training (especially official) is necessary to engage in these debates? And is his evaluation of Dolezal in particular correct?

 

BV: Dolezal is competent, and your friend's 'bike shop' comment does nothing to show otherwise.  You don't really need any 'training' other than what you can provide for yourself by careful study of the literature on the topic, assuming you are above average in intelligence and have a strong desire to penetrate the problem. I don't set much store by training and trappings and academic pedigrees. What matters in philosophy is love of truth, intense devotion to her service, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to follow the arguments whither they lead.

 

Second, he has a criticism of simplicity I haven't seen anywhere else. I'll have to summarize it as the paper has not been published.

 

It goes like this: a key premise in the argument for simplicity is that whatever has parts depends on those parts, and so must be composed by something else. God is not dependent/composed by anything else, therefore he must be simple. He questions this idea and puts forward an "individuals first"  account, suggesting that parts are in some cases only definable by the wholes of which they are parts, thus actually making the parts dependent on the whole. He provides two possible examples: the notions of necessity and possibility, which are dependent on each other for their definitions; and the doctrine of the Trinity, where Father, Son, and Spirit are exclusively defined in terms of relations among them. This suggests, he argues, that we can conceive of wholes that have parts, the parts all being mutually dependent upon one another and thus not composed by anything else. And so, God might have parts while not being composed by anything else.

 

What are your thoughts on this idea?

 

BV: One kind of whole can be called compositely complex, while another can be called incompositely complex. A wall of stacked stones is a complex of the first sort: its parts (the stones) can exist without the whole (the wall) existing, and each stone can exist apart from any other. The parts can exist without the whole, but the whole cannot exist without the parts. Such a whole needs an ontological factor, a 'composer' to ground its unity and to distinguish it from a sheer plurality.  The wall is not a sheer manifold, a mere mereological sum of stones, but a unitary entity. It is one entity with many parts. God cannot be complex in this way. For then he would depend for his existence and nature on the logically/ontologically prior existence of his parts including his attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, etc.) if these are assayed as 'parts' or ontological constituents of God.  

 

Now your friend's suggestion seems to be that God is an incompositely complex whole of parts.  God has parts, but these parts cannot exist apart from the whole of which they are the parts, and no part can exist apart from any other part. The parts are then mutually dependent and inseparable.

 

I don't think this works.  Consider the 'composition' of essence and existence in a contingent being such as Socrates. The 'parts' -- in an extended sense of the term -- are mutually inseparable. The existence of Socrates cannot itself exist apart from his essence  and the essence of Socrates cannot exist apart from his existence.  And neither can exist apart from Socrates, the composite of the two.  But Socrates is a creature and God transcends all creatures. His absolute transcendence cannot be accommodated  by any scheme that allows God to be in any sense partite, not even if the parts are mutually inseparable.  God's absolute transcendence requires that he be absolutely simple.  God belongs at the fourth level in the following schema:

 

Level I.  Pure manyness or sheer plurality without any real (as opposed to mentally supplied) principle of unity.  Mereological sums. The sum just is its members.

 

Level II. Composite complexity.  A whole of parts the unity of which is contingent, as in the case of the stacked stones. There is one wall composed of many parts, but the parts can exist without the whole. The whole, however, cannot exist without the parts.

 

Level III. Incomposite Complexity.  Wholes the parts of which are mutually inseparable, whether weakly inseparable or strongly inseparable.  Suppose a particular cannot exist without having some properties or other, but needn't have the very properties it in fact has, and (first-order) properties cannot exist without being had by some particulars or other, but not necessarily the particulars that in fact have them.  We then say that particulars and properties are  WEAKLY mutually inseparable.  If, however, particulars cannot exist without having the very properties they have, and these properties cannot exist without being instantiated by the very particulars that instantiate them, then particulars and properties are STRONGLY mutually inseparable.

 

Level IV. Absolute Simplicity. The absolutely simple transcends the distinction between whole and parts.  Whereas in Socrates there is a real distinction between essence and existence despite their strong mutual inseparability, in God there is not even this distinction.

 

In sum, God's absolute transcendence requires absolute simplicity. Your friend's suggestion as you have reported it is stuck at Level III and does not reach Level IV.

The 'Progressive'

A typical 'progressive' will insist that the law-abiding citizen exercising his constitutionally protected (not constitutionally conferred) right to keep and bear arms has no need of weapons since it is the job of the police to protect the citizenry against the criminal element. At the same time, this  'progressive' works to undermine the police and empower criminals. Examples are legion, e.g. the recent bail elimination in New York State.

Scruton Quits the Sublunary

Sir Roger's earthy tenure lasted a mere 75 years.  Philosophy is an old man's game, as I heard it said in my youth; Sir Roger fell short of the Russellian by 22 years.   Steven Hayward of Powerline:

In the introduction to his book The Meaning of Conservatism, Scruton writes that “Conservatism may rarely announce itself in maxims, formulae, or aims. Its essence is inarticulate, and its expression, when compelled, skeptical.”

Why “inarticulate”? Because, as he explains elsewhere, the liberal has the easy job in the modern world. The liberal points at the imperfections and defects of existing institutions or the existing social order, strikes a pose of indignation, and huffs that surely something better is required, usually with the attitude that the something better is simply a matter of will. The conservative faces the tougher challenge of understanding and explaining the often subtle reasons why existing institutions, no matter how imperfect, work better than speculative alternatives.

Well, an essence cannot be inarticulate, only a person or his literary production.  It would be better to say that the essence of conservatism is not wholly articulable. It cannot be made into a system, and the conservative is indeed skeptical of comprehensive theories. He stands on the terra firma of a gnarly reality which, though intrinsically intelligible, is only partially intelligible to him; a reality independent of human dreams, wishes, and wants.

Hayward goes too easy on the contemporary liberal or 'progressive.'  He should have pointed out that the 'liberal' will tear down what provably works without assurance that anything better can be put in its place. 'Progressives' have shown their willingness to break millions of eggs for an omelet the  possibility of which they have no good reason to believe in. The Left is pointlessly destructive and ever on the slouch toward the big Nihil.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ambulo ergo Sum

Dionne Warwick, Walk On By

Leroy Van Dyke, Walk On By.  Same title, different song.

Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight

Gus Cannon, Walk Right In, 1929.  Is that a kazoo I hear? Rooftop Singers' 1962 version.

Rufus Thomas, Walking the Dog, 1965

Ventures, Walk Don't Run. The boys are aging nicely.  A big hit back in 1960.

Everly Brothers, Walk Right Back

Four Seasons, Walk Like a Man. Sing like a castrato.  Walk or wop?

Bangles, Walk Like an Egyptian.  Cultural appropriation! We need more of it. No day without political incorrectness. Walk like an Egyptian and smoke a cigar.

Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line

Ronnettes, Walkin' in the Rain

Left Banke, Walk Away Renee

Robert Johnson, Walkin' Blues.  

Jimmy Rogers, Walkin' By Myself.  Butterfield and Bloomfield with the latter's solo at 3:42 ff.

James Soriano sends this:

You may have seen this, but there is sonic evidence of the voice of a  late 19th century castrato on YouTube.  Alessandro Moreschi (1858 –1922) sings the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria" in a 1904 recording.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjvfqnD0ws

 

Whatever the circumstances of his castration, Moreschi was the soprano at St. John Lateran by the time he was 13 years old.  

Elias Canetti and Greta Thunberg

The former has the latter's 'number.'

Zwei Tendenzen, die sich nur scheinbar widersprechen, kennzeichnen die Zeit: die Anbetung der Jugend and das Absterben der Erfahrung.

Two trends, which only apparently contradict each other, epitomize this era: the worship of youth and the extinction of experience. (The Agony of Flies, Noonday, 1994, p. 168/169, emphasis in original.)

On the Loquacity of the Distaff Contingent

I had the experience yet again yesterday.   It is easy to get a woman talking; hard to get her to stop.

"Not always!" I didn't say 'always.' It's a generic statement.

"Men too!" Not as many.

"You're a misogynist!" So I hate women because I say something true about them?

"You're a fool to say that to a woman!" Now I agree.

Is Meaningful Dialog Possible with Leftists?

I rather doubt it. Suppose a bunch of leftists such as the editors of Commonweal say the following:

We reject the xenophobia and racism of many forms of ethno-nationalism, explicit and implicit, as grave sins against God the Creator. Violence done against the bodies of marginalized people is violence done against the body of Christ. Indifference to the suffering of orphans, refugees, and prisoners is indifference to Jesus Christ and his cross. White supremacist ideology is the work of the anti-Christ.

First of all, insistence on a nation's right to control its borders is not xenophobic. To suggest that conservatives have no good arguments for border control and that their insistence on it is based on irrational fear of foreigners is SLANDER. How Christian is that?

Second, illegal aliens do not constitute a race of people. So where is the racism in border control?  And where is the white supremacism?

Third, every nation has the right to decide whom to allow to immigrate.  There is, after all, no right to immigrate.

Reasons for opposing illegal immigration 

There are several sound specific reasons for demanding that the Federal government exercise its legitimate, constitutionally grounded (see Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution) function of securing the national borders, and none of these reasons has anything to do with racism or xenophobia or nativism or any other derogatory epithet that slanderous leftists and libertarians want to attach to those of us who can think clearly about this issue.

There are reasons having to do with national security in an age of terrorism. There are reasons having to do with assimilation, national identity, and comity. How likely is it that illegals will assimilate if allowed to come in in great numbers, and how likely is social harmony among citizens and unassimmilated illegals?  There are considerations of fairness in respect of those who have entered the country legally by satisfying the requirements of so doing. Is it fair that they should be put through a lengthy process when others are allowed in illegally? 

There are reasons having to do with the importation of contraband substances into the country. There are reasons having to to do with the sex trade and human trafficking generally. There are reasons having to do with increased crime. Last but not least, there are reasons pertaining to public health. With the concern over avian influenza, tuberculosis, ebola, and all sorts of tropical diseases, we have all the more reason to demand border control.

Borders are a body politic's immune system. Unregulated borders are deficient immune systems. Diseases that were once thought to have been eradicated have made a comeback north of the Rio Grande due to the unregulated influx of population. These diseases include tuberculosis, Chagas disease, leprosy, Dengue fever, polio, and malaria.

You will have noticed how liberals want to transform into public health issues problems that are manifestly not public but matters of private concern, obesity for example. But here we have an issue that is clearly a public health issue, one concerning which Federal involvement is justified, and what do our dear liberals do? They ignore it. Of course, the problem cannot be blamed solely on the Democrat Party. Republicans like G. W. Bush and John McCain were just as guilty. On immigration, Bush was clearly no conservative; he was a libertarian on this issue. A libertarian on some issues, a liberal on others, and a conservative on far too few.

Reading Now: Lev Kopelev on the Horrors of Communism

While completing an invited essay for a collection of essays by dissident philosophers, I pulled down from the shelf many a volume on Marx and Marxism, including Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford UP, 1987). In the front matter of that very good book I found the following quotation from the hitherto unknown to me Lev Kopelev (emphases added):

With the rest of my generation I firmly believed that the ends justified the means. Our great goal was the universal triumph of Communism, and for the sake of that goal everything was permissible—to lie, to steal, to destroy hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, all those who were hindering our work or could hinder it, everyone who stood in the way. And to hesitate or doubt about all this was to give in to “intellectual squeamishness” and “stupid liberalism,” the attributes of people who “could not see the forest for the trees.”

That was how I had reasoned, and everyone like me, even when I did have my doubts, when I believed what Trotsky and Bukharin were saying. I saw what “total collectivization” meant—how they 'kulakized' and 'dekulakized', how mercilessly they stripped the peasants in the winter of 1932–33. I took part in this myself, scouring the countryside, searching for hidden grain, testing the earth with an iron rod for loose spots that might lead to buried grain. With the others, I emptied out the old folks’ storage chests, stopping my ears to the children’s crying and the women’s wails. For I was convinced that I was accomplishing the great and necessary transformation of the countryside; that in the days to come the people who lived there would be better off for it; that their distress and suffering were a result of their own ignorance or the machinations of the class enemy; that those who sent me—and I myself—knew better than the peasants how they should live, what they should sow and when they should plow.

In the terrible spring of 1933 I saw people dying from hunger. I saw women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses— corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts, in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov....I saw all this and did not go out of my mind or commit suicide. Nor did I curse those who had sent me to take away the peasants’ grain in the winter, and in the spring to persuade the barely walking, skeleton-thin or sickly-swollen people to go into the fields in order to “fulfill the Bolshevik sowing plan in shock-worker style.”

Nor did I lose my faith. As before, I believed because I wanted to believe. Thus from time immemorial men have believed when possessed by a desire to serve powers and values above and beyond humanity: gods, emperors, states; ideals of virtue, freedom, nation, race, class, party. . . .

Any single-minded attempt to realize these ideals exacts its toll of human sacrifice. In the name of the noblest visions promising eternal happiness to their descendants, such men bring merciless ruin on their contemporaries. Bestowing paradise on the dead, they maim and destroy the living. They become unprincipled liars and unrelenting executioners, all the while seeing themselves as virtuous and honorable militants—convinced that if they are forced into villainy, it is for the sake of future good, and that if they have to lie, it is in the name of eternal truths.

Und willst du nicht mein Bruder  sein
So schlag ich dir dein Schaedel ein.
[And if you won't be my brother
I'll crack your skull open.]

they sing in a Landsknecht song.

That was how we thought and acted—we, the fanatical disciples of the all-saving ideals of Communism. When we saw the base and cruel acts that were committed in the name of our exalted notions of good, and when we ourselves took part in those actions, what we feared most was to lose our heads, fall into doubt or heresy and forfeit our unbounded faith.

I was appalled by what I saw in the 1930s and was overcome by depression. But I would still my doubts the way I had learned to: 'we made a mistake,' 'we went too far,' 'we didn't take into consideration,' 'the logic of the class struggle,' 'objective historical need,' 'using barbaric means to combat barbarism' . . . .

Good and evil, humanity and inhumanity -- these seemed empty abstractions. I did not trouble myself with why 'humanity' should be abstract but 'historical necessity' and 'class consicousness' should be concrete.  The concepts of conscience, honor, humaneness we dismissed as idealistic prejudices, “intellectual” or “bourgeois,” and hence, perverse.

Lukes mistakenly refers to Lev Kopelev, No Jail for Thought (London: Secker and Warburg, 1977, tr. Anthony Austin from the 1975 Russian original), pp. 32-34.  The passage is not to be found there, and where it is from, I do not know. Paging Dave Lull! But the main thing is that I got introduced to Kopelev.  It is essential to study communism because that is now the pronounced drift of the Democrat Party in the USA as the battle for the soul of America rages on.  

Anyone with eyes to see can spot the ominous parallels between the Soviet horror and what the contemporary Left in the USA has in store for us.

I mentioned Kopelev to Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence, and he promptly wrote a post about him which I reproduce in full (to save it for my files):

'And They Served Out of Fear'

Bill Vallicella, dba The Maverick Philosopher, tells me he is reading No Jail for Thought (trans. Anthony Austin, Secker & Warburg, 1977; Penguin, 1979), which I have not read, by Lev Kopalev (1912-1997). I know of the Soviet dissident from Anne Applebaum’s Gulag Voices: An Anthology (2011).

Kopalev was born in Kiev and as a young man was an enthusiastic communist. His first arrest came in 1929, for fraternizing with Bukharinists and Trotskyists, and he spent ten days in jail. He worked as a journalist and witnessed the confiscation of grain from Ukrainian peasants and the subsequent genocide-famine, Holomodor. He became a major in the Red Army’s Political Department, charged with maintaining the ideological purity of the troops. Kopalev’s disillusionment with communism started only at the end of World War II, when he witnessed mass murders and rapes committed by Red Army troops in East Prussia. He wrote a letter of complaint to his superiors and in 1945 was arrested. He spent nine years in a camp in the Volga region and in a Moscow prison for scientists, was “rehabilitated” in 1954 and became a writer and literary critic. He helped Solzhenitsyn publish A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962).

For twelve years Kopalev taught in the Moscow Institute of Polygraphy and the Institute of History of Arts. He was fired in 1968 and expelled from the Communist Party and the Writers’ Union for publicly supporting Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, denouncing the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and protesting Solzhenitsyn's expulsion from the Writers’ Union. In 1980, while on a visit to West Germany, Soviet authorities revoked his citizenship, which was restored by Gorbachev in 1990.

In her anthology, Applebaum includes an excerpt, “Informers,” from Kopalev’s memoir To Be Preserved Forever (trans. Anthony Austin, Ardis Publishers, 1975). The subject is a rich one. Applebaum refers to informers as “an intrinsic part of the Soviet system.” An informer was responsible for Osip Mandelstam’s second arrest and eventual death in a Siberian transit camp. A network of informers forming a web of mutually enforced anxiety and fear is essential to the ongoing existence of any totalitarian regime. One scholar estimates that 11 million informers, or one out of every eighteen adults, were formally employed in the Soviet Union when Yuri Andropov headed the KGB (1967-82). We shouldn’t congratulate ourselves too quickly. Twitter suggests a certain enthusiastic ripeness in the U.S. for trading in rumors and slander, and denouncing one’s fellow citizens. Kopalev writes:

“In prison we used to be afraid of informers and talked about them in whispers. Here in the camp we spoke of them out loud. The lowest of all the minions of the mighty state, as helpless and humiliated as the rest of us, and often as falsely accused and as unfairly sentenced, they were nevertheless the indispensable cogs of the cruel punitive machine. They served for the little handouts the machine threw their way, and they served out of fear.”

Vain but Serious

There is a paradoxical tension between the vanity of life and its moral seriousness.

Related: Amiel on Duty

Another Note on Buddhism and Christianity

We feel intensely and care deeply. We are immersed in life and its passions and projects, its loves and its hates. But wisdom counsels detachment and withdrawal, mentally if not physically: one does not have to haul off to a monastery to cultivate detachment. Retreat into the serene and ataraxic can however be  protracted unto nirvanic oblivion, and it is in Buddhism. That might be taking it too far.

Renunciation and world-flight in Christianity, by contrast, are for the sake of a higher life in which finite personhood is, in an Hegelian trope, aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. "I came that you may have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) Jesus did not preach extinction. He preached personal transformation. Buddhism is radical: the renunciation is total. This aligns it with metaphysical pessimism and indeed nihilism, whereas Christianity is full of hope and promise.

One thing is clear: to seek the final fulfillment of desire in this life is a mistake. But could desire itself be a mistake, as the Second Noble Truth has it?  If desire itself is a mistake, then life is a mistake.

But you and I have been through that
And this is not our fate;
Let us not talk falsely now
The hour is getting late.

Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

Analysis here.

Trump's Inauguration

Journal entry of 21 January 2017:

A drizzly day yesterday, but memorable. A strong speech by the man. I was moved by it. Ah, but the depth of disagreement!

One acquaintance of mine is in mourning, wearing a black arm band, while another speaks of Inauguration Day as the happiest day of his life.  Both men are decent and intelligent. And both are philosophers.

I see Trump as a needed corrective. So I am not much bothered that he is blunt, rude, and unconcerned about the usual pieties and protocols and the niceties of language.  What he lacks in gravitas he makes up for in guts.  The man displays civil courage.

A corrective to what?  To many things.  Defeatism for one.  "A wall won't keep 'em out; they'll tunnel under it." 

A second thing is the overemphasis on feelings.

What is the Opposite of 'Desuetude'?

Consuetude. Disuse versus usages and customs.  

Conseuetudines Camaldulenses: Customs of the Camaldolese. Cf. Thomas Merton, Journal, vol. 5, p. 349.

It takes all kinds to make a world . . .

. . . the mess that it is.

The Philosopher and the Gunslinger

First live, then philosophize!

Shoot first, ask questions later!

The Keeper of a Journal

He who keeps a journal is a conservationist of the inner landscape, a steward and secretary of the interior.

When I Recall My Moral Failures . . .

. . . I find it hard to doubt 

a) My strict numerical identity over time.  When I regret what I did, I regret what I did, not what some other person did, and not what some earlier temporal part of me did.  The fact that the passage of time does not lessen my sense of guilt is evidence that I am strictly the same person as the one who did the regrettable deed, and also that I am not a whole of temporal parts, but a substance, an endurant in contemporary jargon, wholly present at every time at which it exists.

b) The freedom of the will in the 'could have done otherwise' sense.  My sense of moral failure entails a sense of moral responsibility for what I have done or left undone.  Now moral responsibility entails freedom of the will. 

c) The absoluteness of moral demands.  

There are arguments against all three points. And there are arguments that neutralize those arguments. The philosophers disagree, and it is a good bet that they always will.  So in the end you must decide which beliefs you will take as guideposts for the living of your life.  My advice is that you won't be far off if you accept the above trio and such of their consequences as you can bring yourself to accept.

The first two, for example, support the immaterial and thus spiritual nature of the self. The third points us to God.

What if you are wrong?  Well, you have lived well!  For example, if you treat your neighbor as if he is not just a bag of chemicals but an immortal soul with a higher origin and and an eternal destiny, then the consequences that accrue for him and you will be life-enhancing in the here and now, even if the underlying belief turns out to be false.

Understand what I am saying. I am not saying that one should believe what one knows to be false because the believing of it is life-enhancing. I am saying that you are entitled to believe, and well-advised to believe, that which is life-enhancing if it is rationally acceptable or doxastically permissible.

The Quietist on the Delights of Escapism

There are the undeniable and readily accessible delights of escapism into scholarship, and science, and research and inquiry of all sorts.  When 'reality' becomes too much to bear, what is wrong with retreating into an ivory tower?  Who can rightfully begrudge us our right to peace and quiet and happiness?

You say that there are more pressing concerns than the nature and extent of the influence of Avicenna on Aquinas' De Ente et Essentia?  No doubt.  But do you really believe that your becoming hot and bothered over these 'pressing concerns' will lead to any improvement?  Are you sure about that?  And isn't your political activism your mode of escape from something or other?  I like peace and quiet; you like 'drama' and contention.  To each his own.

Thus spoke the quietist.

"I Will Pray for You"

In many but not all contexts, to say "I will pray for you" to a person manifests the following passive-aggressive attitude on the part of the speaker: (a) I have strongly negative feelings toward you but I will not directly express them, either because I fear a confrontation, or fancy myself above such negative feelings, or because it would not be expedient for me to express them; (b) I consider myself morally superior to you, and you so inferior to me as to need divine assistance; (c) in truth, I have no real concern for the state of your soul, but by saying that I will pray for you, I posture as if I really do care.

What inspired this observation was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's repeated  talk of praying for Donald Trump. I call this passive-aggression via the misuse in the political sphere of religious language. The sanctimonious insincerity of the dingbat is galling. 

What Trump should tweet to Nancy: Let's make a deal, Nancy. You pray for the state of my soul, and I'll pray for the state of your intellect!

Related: Nancy Pelosi and the Divine Spark

UPDATE (1/2/2020)  Dave Gudeman comments:

At first I thought you were being overly critical, but on further thought it's hard to imagine saying "I will pray for you" as a rebuke to a casual acquaintance. The only time I can think of where it would be appropriate is when said by a fellow church member, a close friend, or a family member to someone engaging in behavior or expressing opinions that they themselves would have considered immoral very recently. In this context, it can be a heartfelt and genuine expression of concern over their move away from a morality that you both shared, but if you don't have a relationship where the other person can reasonably be expected to listen to your rebuke or if what you are rebuking the person for is a long-standing difference, then it becomes what you described, nothing but a passive-aggressive criticism.

I'll add that claiming you love someone after you have attacked them as viciously as Nancy Pelosi has attacked Trump is shockingly hypocritical.

BV: When Pelosi says  "I will pray for you," or "I pray for him all the time," she is not rebuking Trump in so many words.  Her overt speech acts do not express her inner attitude, but mask it, or attempt to mask it. To any astute observer, however, she fails to hide her inner attitude which is as I have described it above.  This passive-aggressive mendacity is what I am objecting to.  

There is also the misuse of religious language in a political context, a Pelosian trademark.  I'll write more about that later.

As Gudeman suggests above, there are uses of 'I will pray for you' that are unobjectionable.  A thorough discussion would sort out different cases.   There were people we genuinely loved the 'evangelical' atheist Christopher Hitchens and who told him that they would pray for him.  That is an entirely different type of case, and it needs a different analysis.  This sort of case, even if mildly objectionable, does not come close to the Pelosian level of self-deceptive hostility that cannot discharge itself in an overt way.