Maverick Philosopher

Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without at least one substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end  of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.

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The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.

This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. 

See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Addendum (11/5).  Vito Caiati writes,

I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton:  “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes,  when speaking of monks extra muros,  “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place,  They do not support the trip.”

 

Vito,

 

Very good observation.

 

While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all?  Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk? 

 

I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton.  As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.

 

I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)

 

There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post. 

 

But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end?  I don't imagine you have an English trans.

 

It is always good to hear from you.

In the Absence of Knowledge, May one Believe? Critique of Bryan Magee

According to Bryan Magee ("What I Believe," Philosophy 77 (2002), 407- 419), nobody knows the answers to such questions as whether we survive our bodily deaths or whether God exists. Citing Xenophanes and Kant, Magee further suggests that the answers to these questions are not only unknown but impossible for us to know. Assuming that Magee is right on both counts, what follows?

One inference one might draw from our state of irremediable ignorance about ultimates is that it provides us with 'doxastic wiggle-room' (my expression): if one cannot know one way or the other, then one is  permitted either to believe or not believe that we survive and that God exists. After all, if it cannot be proven that ~p, then it is epistemically possible that p, and this epistemic possibility might be taken to allow as reasonable our believing that p. Invoking the Kantian distinction between thinking and knowing (Critique of Pure Reason, B 146 et passim) one could maintain that although we have and can have no knowledge of God and the soul, we can think them without contradiction, and without contradicting anything we know. Does not the denial of knowledge make room for faith, as Kant himself famously remarks? CPR B xxx: Ich musste also das Wissen aufheben, um zum Glauben Platz zu bekommen... "I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith...."  (And given that contact with reality is a great good, would it not be better to venture contact with the unknowable portion of it via faith rather than have no contact with it at all by insisting that only knowable truth is admissible truth?)

This inference, however, the inference from our irremediable ignorance to the rational allowability of belief in the epistemically possible,  is one that Magee resolutely refuses to draw, seeing it as a shabby evasion and an "illegitimate slide."(408) Thus he holds it to be illegitimate to move from the epistemic possibility of post-mortem  survival to belief in it. As he puts it, "What I find myself wanting to drive home is not merely that we do not know but that the only honest way to live and think is in the fullest possible acknowledgment of that fact and its consequences, without ducking out into a faith of some kind, and without evasion or self-indulgence of any other sort."  (417) Near the beginning of his essay, Magee cites  Freud to the effect that no right to believe anything can be derived from ignorance. (408)

The relevance of the Freudian point, however, is unclear. First of all, no one would maintain that ignorance about a matter such as post-mortem survival justifies, in the sense of provides evidence for, the belief that one survives.  In any case, the issue is this: Is it ever rationally permissible to believe where knowledge is unavailable? Magee answers this question in the negative. But I cannot see that he makes anything close to a convincing case for this answer. I will simply present an objection the  force of which will be to neutralize, though perhaps not refute, Magee's view. Thus I play for a  draw, not a win. I doubt that one can expect more from philosophy. 

Probative  Overkill?

One problem with Magee's argument is that it seems to prove too much. If we have no knowledge about such metaphysical/religious matters as God and the soul, and so must suspend belief in them lest we violate  the putative epistemic duty to believe only on sufficient evidence, then we must also suspend belief on a host of other issues in respect of which we certainly cannot claim knowledge. Surely, the very same reasons that lead Magee to say that no one knows anything about God and the soul must also lead us to say that no one knows whether or not there are cases in which justice demands capital punishment, or whether or not a just society is one which provides for redistribution of wealth, or whether or not animals have rights, etc. Indeed, we must say that no one knows what justice is or what rights are. And of course it is not merely about normative issues that we are ignorant.

Do we know what motion, or causation, or time are? Do we know what properties are, or what is is for a thing to have a property, or to exist, or to change, or to be the same thing over time? Note that these questions, unlike the God and soul questions, do not pertain to what is transcendent of experience. I see the tomato; I see that it is red; I see or think I see that it is the same tomato that I bought from the grocer an hour ago; applying a knife to it, I see or think I see that slicing it causes it to split apart.

For that matter, Does Magee know that his preferred ethics of belief is correct?  How does he know that?  How could he know it?  Does he have sufficient evidence? If he knows it, why do philosophers better than him take a different view?  Does he merely believe it?  Does he believe it because his fear of being wrong trumps his desire for the truth?  Does he want truth, but only on his terms?  Does he want only that truth that can satisfy the criteria that he imposes?  Would it not be more self-consistent for Magee to suspend belief as to his preferred ethics of belief?  Why is it better to have no contact with reality than such contact via faith?  Isn't it better to have a true belief that I cannot justify about a life and death matter than no belief about that matter?  Does the man of faith self-indulgently evade reality, or does the philosopher of Magee's stripe self-indulgently and pridefully refuse such reality as he cannot certify by his methods?

No one knows how economies really work; if we had knowledge in this area we would not have wildly divergent paradigms of economic explanation. But this pervasive ignorance does not prevent people from holding very firm beliefs about these non-religious issues, beliefs that translate into action in a variety of ways, both peaceful and violent. It is furthermore clear that people feel quite justified in holding, and acting upon, these beliefs that go beyond what they can claim to know. What is more, I suspect Magee would agree that people are often justified in holding such beliefs.

So if Magee is right that we ought to suspend belief about religious matters, then he must also maintain that we ought to suspend belief about the social and political matters that scarcely anyone ever suspends belief about. That is, unless he can point to a relevant difference between the religious questions and the social-political ones. But it is difficult to discern any relevant difference. In both cases we are dealing with knowledge-transcendent beliefs for which elaborate rational defenses can be constructed, and elaborate rational refutations of competing positions.

In both cases we are dealing with very abstruse and 'metaphysical' issues such as the belief in equal rights, a belief which manifestly has no empirical justification. And in both cases we are dealing with issues of great importance to our welfare and happiness. On the other hand, if Magee thinks that we are justified in holding beliefs about social and political matters, something he does of course hold, then he should also maintain that we are justified in holding beliefs about religious matters. There is no justification for a double standard. In this connection, one should read Peter van Inwagen's Quam Dilecta, in God and the Philosophers, ed. T. V. Morris (Oxford University Press, 1994), 31-60. See especially 41-46 for a penetrating discussion  of the double standard. 

Divine Simplicity and Divine Comprehensibility

From a reader, who is responding to God as Uniquely Unique:

An objection I recently heard to the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) that is novel as far as I can tell. Goes like this:  if DDS is true, God is unlike anything in our human experience, not having parts. We cannot comprehend God on DDS because he has no parts to comprehend apart from the whole; we can't comprehend the whole of God, and he doesn't have parts to comprehend, so we can't comprehend him at all. This is unacceptable at least on the Abrahamic faiths, which state we can comprehend some things about God, just not fully. Thoughts?

Here is the argument as I understand it:

1) If DDS is true, then God has no parts.

2) If God has no parts, then we cannot understand any part of God.

Therefore

3) If DDS is true, then we cannot understand any part of God.(1, 2)

4) We cannot understand the whole of God.

5) We cannot understand God at all unless we can either understand some part of God, or the whole of God.

Therefore

6) If DDS is true, then we cannot understand God at all. (3, 4, 5)

7) On the Abrahamic faiths, we can understand something about God.

Therefore

8) DDS is inconsistent with the Abrahamic faiths.

I would say that the argument fails at line (5). We can understand something about God without understanding God himself in whole or in part.  If we understand God to be the creator of the universe, then we understand something about God without understanding the whole of God or any part of God.  We understand God from his effects as that which satisfies the definite description 'the unique x such that x created the world and sustains it in existence.'  We can presumably understand this much about God without knowing him in propria persona or any of his parts. The question whether God is simple would seem to be irrelevant to question whether we can know anything about him.

Mundane analogy: I can know something about the burglar from the size and shape of the footprints he left without knowing him or his parts.

If God is Uniquely Unique, How could He be Addressed in Prayer?

My entry God as Uniquely Unique ended on an aporetic note. I acknowledged the following sort of objection, but had nothing to say in response to it. How could the ontologically simple God be of any religious use to the suffering creature wandering in the desert of the world?

"Such an utterly transcendent God as you are describing is ineffable!  He is the God of the philosophers, not the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob. I want a God with a face, a God that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."

The problem can be put like this. The exigencies of the intellect drive us toward the simple God, a God so utterly transcendent as to be inconceivable to us.  The exigencies of the heart, however, move us toward a personal God with whom one could enter an I-Thou relation. Is it possible to mediate this opposition? 

Is it possible to stand astride Athens and Jerusalem, with a foot in each, and not topple over or be torn apart?

A letter from Robert Deinhammer, S. J., of Innsbruck, Austria suggests a way.  Here is his letter followed by my translation:

Ich bin gerade wieder einmal nach längerer Zeit auf ihrem Blog gewesen und finde Ihren jüngsten Eintrag über die einzigartige Einzigartikeit Gottes sehr wichtig.

Ich würde mit P. Knauer sagen: Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. Wie kann man dann von ihm reden? Antwort: Wir begreifen von Gott immer nur das von ihm Verschiedene, nämlich die geschaffene Welt, die aber auf ihn hinweist und ohne ihn überhaupt nicht sein kann. Geschaffensein bedeutet im Rahmen einer relationalen Ontologie ein "restloses Bezogensein auf …/ in restloser Verschiedenheit von …". Dies ermöglicht auch "hinweisende" Rede von Gott: Die Welt ist Gott ähnlich und unähnlich zugleich; Gott seinerseits ist der Welt gegenüber aber nur unähnlich. Die Relation der Welt auf Gott ist vollkommen einseitig. In diesem Sinne führt natürliche Theologie nur zur Einsicht, dass Gott in "unzugänglichem Licht wohnt" (1 Tim) und wir als bloße Geschöpfe keinerlei Gemeinschaft mit ihm haben können.

Vor diesem überaus dunklen Hintergrund erläutert allein der Inhalt der christlichen Botschaft, wie dennoch Gemeinschaft mit Gott ausgesagt werden kann: Wir sind von vornherein aufgenommen in eine göttliche Relation, nämlich in die ewige Liebe des Vaters zum Sohn, die der Heilige Geist ist. So kann Gott auf die Welt real bezogen sein, ohne dadurch von der Welt abhängig zu werden. Aber gerade weil diese göttliche Liebe nicht ihr Maß an der Welt hat und deshalb auch keine Macht der Welt dagegen ankommen kann, kann man sie auch nicht einfach an der Welt "ablesen" oder durch meditative Versenkung erkennen. Sie ist nur erkennbar im Glauben an die Botschaft Jesu: Der Sohn hat eine menschliche Natur angenommen, um uns in einem menschlichen Wort sagen zu können, das wir an seinem Verhältnis zum Vater Anteil haben. In diesem Sinne wird dann auch Gebet erst möglich: Jesus Christus nimmt uns hinein in sein Sprechen zum Vater.

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I have just now visited your blog again after a long while and I find your most recent entry on the unique uniqueness of God to be very important.

I would say, with P. Knauer, that God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable.  But then how can one speak of him? Answer: We conceive of God always only by way of that which is different from him, namely, the created world which points to him and which without him cannot be at all.  In the context of a relational ontology, creaturehood means 'a total relatedness  to . . . / in total difference from . . . .'  This makes possible 'pointing' talk of God: the world is both like and unlike God; God on his side, however, is only unlike the world . The relation of the world to God is completely one-sided or unilateral.  In this sense natural theology leads to the insight that God "dwelleth in inaccessible light" (1 Timothy 6:16) and we mere creatures can have no kind of community with him.

But if God so dwells and is unapproachable by us, and we can enjoy no community with him, how are we to explain the Christian message that we nevertheless can have community with God? As follows. We are from the outset taken up in a divine relation, namely, in the eternal love of the Father for the Son, which relation is the Holy Spirit. In this way God can be really related to the world without thereby becoming dependent on the world.  But precisely because this divine love has no worldly measure and also cannot be opposed by any worldly power, one cannot simply 'read it off' from the world or know it by non-discursive meditation.  Divine love is knowable only by faith in the message of Jesus: The Son has assumed a human nature in order to be able to say to us in human words that we share in his relation to the Father.  In this sense prayer is first possible: Jesus Christ takes us into his speaking with the Father.

How is community with God possible given his absolute transcendence? That is the problem. If I understand the above, the solution requires both Trinity and Incarnation. Within the Godhead, the Son loves the Father and the Father the Son. This eternal relation of love is the Holy Spirit. God, in the person of the Son, becomes man. "And the Word became flesh and dwellt among us."  Fully human and fully divine, Jesus Christ brings the divine into the creaturely realm.  The transcendent becomes immanent without ceasing to be transcendent. God acquires a human face and speaks saving words within the range of human hearing.

The question cannot be suppressed: Is not the solution as problematic as the original problem?   The exigencies of the discursive intellect drive us beyond it to the simple God who lies beyond the discursive intellect and is devoid of human meaning. The restoration of such meaning, however, via Trinity and Incarnation, also involves inconceivabilities, as any good Unitarian will be quick to point out.

Diversity Worth Having

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

Example.  One language only in the public sphere makes possible many voices to be heard and understood by all.  To communicate our differences we need a common language.  

Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other.  Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.

Diversity worth having presupposes a principle of unity that controls the diversity. Diversity must be checked and balanced by the competing value of unity, a value with an equal claim on our respect.

Example.  One language only in the public sphere makes possible many voices to be heard and understood by all.  To communicate our differences we need a common language.  

Talking with one another is preferable to shooting at each other.  Polyglot 'cultures' are more conducive to shooting than to talking.

Why Write?

I write to know my own mind, to actualize my own mind, and to attract a few like-minded and contrary-minded people.  The like-minded lend support, and the contrary-minded – assuming that their criticisms are rationally based – allow me to test my ideas. 

Dialectic is to the philosopher what experiment is to the scientist.

A Reason to Blog

Chary of embalming in printer's ink ideas that may be unworthy of such preservation, due perhaps to underdevelopment, or lack of originality, or some more egregious defect, the blogger satisfies his urge to scribble and publish without burdening referees and editors and typesetters, and without contributing to the devastation of forests. He publishes all right, but in a manner midway between the ephemerality of talk and the finality of print.

Simone Weil on False Gods

Despite her infuriating extremism, Simone Weil may well be the purest incarnation of religious sensibility in the twentieth century. "It's not up to us to believe in God, but only not to grant our love to false gods." As Weil understands, essential to genuine religion, though not exhaustive of it, is the realization that nothing here below can satisfy us, and that the things we zealously pursue as if they could satisfy us are false gods. The following statement of Weil's is exactly right:

First, not to believe that the future is a place capable of fulfilling us. The future is made of the same stuff as the present. We well know that what we have that is good, wealth, power, esteem, knowledge, love of those we love, prosperity of those we love, and so on, does not suffice to satisfy us. But we believe that the day when we will have a little more, we will be satisfied. We believe it because we are lying to ourselves. For if we really think about it for a while we know it's false. Or again if we are suffering affliction, we believe that the day when this suffering will cease, we will be satisfied. There again we know it's untrue; as soon as we have gotten used to the cessation of suffering we want something else.

More here.

Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method: Theocentric or Egocentric?

August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy.  She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.

In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Husserl and Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.

One issue is whether faith gives us access to truth. Stein has Thomas say:

. . . faith is a way to truth. Indeed, in the first place it is a way to truths — plural — which would otherwise be closed to us, and in the second place it is the surest way to truth. For there is no greater certainty than that of faith . . . . (Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, tr. W. Redmond, ICS Publications, Washington, D. C.,  2000, pp. 16-17)

Now comes an important question. What is it that we as philosophers want? We want the ultimate truths about the ultimate matters. If so, it is arguable that we should take these truths from whatever source offers them to us even if the source is not narrowly philosophical. We should not say: I will accept only those truths that can be certified by (natural) reason, but rather all truths whether certified by reason or 'certified' by faith. Thus Stein has Aquinas say:

If faith makes accessible truths unattainable by any other means, philosophy, for one thing, cannot forego them without renouncing its universal claim to truth. [. . .] One consequence, then, is a material dependence of philosophy on faith.

Then too, if faith affords the highest certainty attainable by the human mind, and if philosophy claims to bestow the highest certainty, then philosophy must make the certainty of faith its own. It does so first by absorbing the truths of faith, and further by using them as the final criterion by which to gauge all other truths. Hence, a second consequence is a formal dependence of philosophy on faith. (17-18)

But of course this cannot go unchallenged by Husserl. So Stein has him say:

. . . if faith is the final criterion of all other truth, what is the criterion of faith itself? What guarantees that the certainty of my faith is genuine? (20)

Or in terms of of the distinction between subjective (psychological) and objective (epistemic) certainty: what guarantees that the certainty of faith is objective and not merely subjective? The faiths of Jew, Christian, and Muslim are all different. How can the Christian be sure that the revelation he takes on faith has not been superseded by the revelation the Muslim takes on faith?  And what about contradictory faith-contents? God cannot be both triune (as the normative Christian believes) and not triune (as the normative Muslim believes).  So Christian and Muslim cannot both be objectively certain about their characteristic beliefs; at most they can be subjectively certain. Subjective certainty, however, has no epistemic value.  (This paragraph is my gloss on the preceding quotation.)

Stein's Thomas replies to Husserl as follows:

Probably my best answer is that faith is its own guarantee. I could also say that God, who has given us the revelation, vouches for its truth. But this would only be the other side of the same coin. For if we took the two as separate facts, we would fall into a circulus vitiosus [vicious circle], since God is after all what we become certain about in faith.

[. . .]

All we can do is point out that for the believer such is the certainty of faith that it relativizes all other certainty, and that he can but give up any supposed knowledge which contradicts his faith. The unique certitude of faith is a gift of grace. It is up to the understanding and will to draw the practical consequences therefrom. Constructing a philosophy on faith belongs to the theoretical consequences. (20-22)

For Thomas and Stein, the certainty of faith is a gift of God. As such, it cannot be merely subjective.  It is at once both subjective and objective, subjective as an inner certitude, objective as an effect of divine grace. Husserl, however, will ask how the claim that the certainty of faith is a divine gift can be validated.  It is, after all, a contestable and contested claim.  And not just by sophists and quibblers, but by sincere and brilliant truth seekers such as Husserl. How does one know that it is true? For Husserl, the claims that God exists and that the Christian revelation is divine revelation are but dogmatic presuppositions.  They need validation because of the existence of competing claims such as those made by Jews and Muslims and atheists.

If, as Stein says, "faith is its own guarantee," then, since the faith of the Christian and the faith of the Muslim are contradictory with respect to certain key propositions, it follows that one of these faiths offers a false guarantee.  You can see from this that the Thomas-Stein stance leaves something to be desired.  But Husserl's approach has problems of its own.  Closed up within the sphere of his subjectivity, man cannot reach the truly Transcendent, which must irrupt into this sphere and cannot be constituted (Husserl's term) within it.  The truly Transcendent is not a transcendence-in-immanence.  It cannot be a constituted transcendence.

If man is indeed a creature, there is something absurd about measly man hauling the Creator before the bench of finite reason there to be rudely interrogated about his credentials.  On the other hand, the claim that man is a creature is not objectively self-evident but a claim like any other, and man must satisfy his intellectual conscience with respect to this claim.  It is precisely his freedom, responsibility, and love of truth that drive him to ask: But is it true?  And how do we know?  And isn't it morally shabby to fool oneself and seek consolation in a fairy tale?

Paradoxically, God creates man in his image and likeness, and thus as free, responsible, and truth-loving; it is these characteristics that then motivate man to put God in the dock.

The Incompatibility of Husserl's Egocentrism and Thomas's Theocentrism

Let's give the last word to Stein's Aquinas:

The course that you have followed has led you to posit the subject as the start and center of philosophical inquiry; all else is subject-related. A world constructed by the acts of the subject remains forever a world for the subject. You could not succeed -- and this was the constant objection that your own students raised against you -- in winning back from the realm of immanence that objectivity from which you had after all set out and insuring which was the point. Once existence is redefined as self-identifying for a consciousness -- such was the outcome of the transcendental investigation -- the intellect will never be set at its ease in its search for truth. (31-32)

A brief comment in explanation of the last sentence. For Thomas and other realists, it is built into the very concept of existence that that which exists exists independently of consciousness. Thus if the tree in the garden exists, it exists whether or not it appears to any conscious being. On transcendental-phenomenological idealism, however, the existence of the tree is "redefined as self-identifying for a consciousness," which is to say that its existence is nothing other than the synthetic unity of the noemata in which it appears to the subject, a unity that derives from the unifying activities of transcendental consciousness. This is a thoroughly modern (and idealist) understanding of existence. Compare Butcharov's theory of existence as the indefinite identifiability of what he calls objects and distinguishes from entities, and Hector-Neri Castaneda's theory of existence as "consubstantiation" of "ontological guises."

Now for the crux of the matter as Thomas replies to Husserl

Moreover, this shift in meaning [of existence], especially by relativizing God himself, contradicts faith. (emphasis added) So here we may well have the sharpest contrast between transcendental phenomenology and my philosophy: mine has a theocentric and yours an egocentric orientation. (32)

So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.

My task, in this and in related posts, is first and foremost to set forth the problems as clearly as I can. Anyone who thinks this problem has an easy solution does not understand it.  It is part of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. 

David Gordon Reviews Michael Anton's America at the Point of No Return

Excerpts:

Anton notes that the founders believed that the American Revolution was grounded in universal truths, “but they did not expect their declaration to revolutionize the world—nor were they under any illusion that it, or they, had the power to do so….America is—in the words of John Quincy Adams—‘the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all’ but also ‘the champion and vindicator only of her own.’”

Those who wish to restore these principles face a challenge of unprecedented severity. Anton argues that an elite based in certain blue states disdains ordinary Americans. “The core message of the meta-Narrative is that America is fundamentally and inherently racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, transphobic, and so on. The flaws and sins of America derive directly from those of its founding stock, who are natural predators, inherently racist, and malevolent.”

Elite policy is at its worst in California, now under the near-total domination of the left wing of the Democratic Party. “In modern California, hypocrisy and double-standardism aren’t merely part of the business climate; they’re endemic to the whole society….Sam Francis dubbed this system ‘anarcho-tyranny’: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions on the disfavored.” Anton fears that if President Trump isn’t reelected, the Democrats will seek actively to suppress whomever in the red states challenges them, and they will prove very difficult to dislodge from power.

Who are the ordinary Americans the elite disdains, and who are the elite? The ordinary Americans are those whom Hillary Clinton called “deplorables,” i.e., white males who value their family, their religion, and their property, including their guns. “Funny thing, too: a core tenet of modern liberalism is supposed to be the sanctity of ‘one man, one vote.’ Except, you know, not really. The barely concealed presupposition of denouncing Republicans as ‘racists’ simply because whites vote for them is that all votes are not created equal. Votes of color are morally superior to white votes, which are inherently tainted. Which is why the left holds any election won by a Republican to be morally if not (yet) politically illegitimate.”

The elite consists at its core of wealthy financiers and business interests allied with government. It is buttressed by professionals who have attended top universities, especially those of the Ivy League. In a way that readers of Hunter Lewis on “crony capitalism” will recognize, Anton writes: “So-called ‘public-private cooperation’ will increase. This benign-sounding phrase—who could object to ‘cooperation,’ to government and business ‘solving problems together’? —masks a darker reality. What it really describes is the use of state power to serve private ends, at private direction. Hence foreign policy…will be further reoriented around securing trade, tax, and labor ‘migration’ patterns and paradigms that benefit finance and big business.”

If elite dominance continues, Anton predicts that those of us who dissent will be rigidly restricted. “Free speech as we have known it—as our founders insisted was the bedrock of political rights, without which self-government is impossible—will not survive coming leftist rule. The playbook is already being expanded to include banking and credit. Getting on the wrong side of elite-woke opinion is increasingly to find oneself locked out of the financial system: no bank account, no credit card, no ability to get a loan or pay a mortgage. Pay cash? The move to a ‘cashless society’…will obviate that option right quick.”

Anton cites an especially chilling instance of the policy of suppression. “A new regulation in the United Kingdom—which we must assume will be proposed here sooner or later—would allow Britain’s National Health Service to deny non-emergency care to those deemed ‘racist, sexist, or homophobic.’ Government bureaucrats, naturally, will be the ones doing the deeming.” Small wonder that Anton has had enough.

The author seems to me misguided in what he says about “industrial policy,” but I’ll pass over that in silence. He criticizes Murray Rothbard who suggested that the principle of secession has no logical stopping point, down to the level of each person. Anton says, “Every-man-a-government-unto himself is literally Hobbes’s ‘state of nature,’ yet Rothbard appears to approve.” This rests on a misunderstanding: it hardly follows that if you have a right to secede that you will in fact do so, and Rothbard did not favor a world of one-person “nations.” Also, Anton doesn’t understand John Rawls very well.

But enough of criticism. Anton’s rhetorical talents are remarkable, and I urge everyone to read his book.

What is Man?

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

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

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

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

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

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

People and Their Works

This from a reader:

Your comment about Husserl's picture on your wall reminded me of a line from my notes: "I try to admire works but never people, as people invariably let you down." It's, I think, a line from Peter Hitchens.

People regularly, though not invariably, let one down. True. But being a person, I need persons to show me what is humanly possible and to serve as examples of how best to live. No book can render that service. While I cannot emulate (equal or excel) Husserl or Socrates in all respects, I can hope to do so in some, in respect of intellectual probity and devotion to the truth. 

Sometimes we are at fault when others disappoint us. We pegged them too high.  To be just in our assessments of others is extremely difficult. No man is worthy of worship and no man of utter contempt. No one is an angel and no one a demon. We regularly go to extremes. 

One way to avoid disappointment in one's heroes is by not meeting them in the flesh.  Distance permits idealization. Propinquity militates against it.

And if you want to avoid inspiring disappointment in those who haven't met you but will, request of your advocates and admirers that they not sing your praises!  Let the former  think that you are just an ordinary schmuck schlepping down the pike. And then surprise them.

Thomism and Husserlian Phenomenology: Combinable?

Over the phone the other night, Steven Nemes told me that his project is to synthesize Thomism and phenomenology. I expressed some skepticism. Here are my reasons.

Part I: Methodological Incompatibility

Essential to Thomism is the belief that the existence of God can be proven a posteriori by human reason unaided by divine revelation.  Thus the Third of Aquinas's Five Ways begins with the premise that there are contingent beings, "things that are possible to be and not to be."  From this starting point, by reasoning we needn't here examine, Aquinas arrives at the conclusion that there exists an absolutely necessary being. "And this all men call God."

The argument moves within what Husserl calls the natural attitude, from contingent beings that are taken to exist in themselves to a causa prima that is taken to exist in itself. Note also that  when the Third Way in enacted by a person who works his way through it, in an attempt to arrive at a justified belief that God exists, the particular judgments and inferences made by the person in question are themselves psychic realities in nature that exist in themselves with the earlier following the later in  objective time. With the suspension of the natural attitude by the phenomenologist, all of this must be eingeklammert, placed within brackets. This includes  the starting point (the existence in themselves of contingent beings), the ending point (the existence in itself of God), and the sequence of judgmental and inferential steps that the person who enacts the argument must run through in order to generate within himself the belief that God exists. No use can be made of any of this by the phenomenologist qua phenomenologist.

It seems we ought to conclude that Thomas's dialectical procedure is unphenomenological both at its starting point and at its ending point.  The dialectical procedure itself, the  arguing with its judgments and inferences, is also unphenomenological in that the judgments are posited as true in themselves, and the inferences as valid in themselves.

To summarize the argument up to this point:

a) Thomists are committed to the proposition that God's existence is provable, equivalently, that there are sound arguments for God's existence, arguments that move from premises that record what to Thomists are obvious facts of sense perception such as that trees and rocks exist in themselves (independently of us and our consciousness of them), that they exist contingently, that they are in motion, etc., arguments that end in a conclusion that records the existence in itself of a divine first cause.

b) Phenomenologists operate under a methodological restriction: the thesis of the natural standpoint is ausgeschaltet, disconnected, and the objects  in the natural attitude are eingeklammert, bracketed. The existence of these objects is not denied, or even doubted; no use is made of their existence. (Cf. Ideas I, secs. 31, 32)  Now if we abstain from affirming the existence of contingent beings, then the question cannot arise within the phenomenological epoche as to whether or not they have a cause of their existence.  But this is a question that Thomists ask and answer by positing the existence of God.

Therefore

c) Thomism and Husserlian phenomenology are incompatible and cannot be synthesized.

Part II: Metaphysical Incompatibility

Things are worse for the proposed synthesis when we consider that Husserlian phenomenology is not just a study of the modes and manners of the appearing of things, but implies transcendental idealism, a theory about the mode of existence of the things themselves. To state the incompatibility bluntly: Husserl is an idealist; Thomas is a realist. 

At its starting point, the argument a contingentia mundi presupposes the existence in themselves of contingent beings.   If these beings existed only for (finite) consciousness, then one could not arrive at an absolutely transcendent divine cause of their existence that exists in itself.  Phenomenology, however,  is committed to transcendental idealism, according to which contingent beings do not exist in themselves but only for transcendental subjectivity.  Here is a characteristic passage from Husserl:

Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen -- des Erkennenden -- Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)

Whatever I can recognize as a genuine being is nothing other than an intentional occurrence of my own -- the knower's -- life . . . .

For Husserl, the very Being of beings is their Being for consciousness, their being constituted in and by consciousness.  Their Sein reduces to Seinsinn, and that Sinn points back to the transcendental ego from which all sense derives. So the Sinn is not Original Sinn, pun intended, but derivative Sinn. Therefore, on transcendental idealism, contingent beings have no need for a divine ground of their existence, their existence being adequately accounted for by transcendental subjectivity. And since they have no need of a divine ground, one cannot prove that they must have such a ground.

At its ending point, too, cosmological arguments such as the Third Way are unphenomenological since they posit an absolutely transcendent cause of existence that is not given as it is in itself, and cannot be so given and whose identity and existence cannot be grounded subjectively. It makes some sense to say that the tree in the garden is a unity of noemata the unity of which is brought about by the synthetic, unifying activity of my transcendental ego.  But it makes no sense to say this of God.  This would be tantamount to saying that the unity and existence of the divine being derives from the synthetic activities of the creature's ego. 

The God of classical theism, the numero uno representative of which is the doctor angelicus, is by definition absolutely transcendent. He is not transcendent in relation to our consciousness like the blooming tree in Husserl's garden.  He cannot be transcendentally constituted. Even in the Beatific Vision God will not be given to us as he is in himself.  His reality infinitely surpasses anything we will ever have evidence for. It should therefore be quite clear that Husserlian phenomenology and classical theism are logically incompatible.

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Addendum 10/22. A reader comments,

I've just read your post on Thomism and phenomenology. Subsuming Husserl to a Weltanschauung philosophy is to deeply and badly miss the point and much of the value of his work.

This is a just criticism of Nemes' proposed synthesis.   Husserl sharply distinguishes between world view philosophy and philosophy as strict science.  Thomism is  a worldview philosophy.  This is another reason why the proposed synthesis is dubious.   The issues here are extremely deep and complicated. But to simplify, the specifically philosophical portions of the Thomistic system are in the service of  a body of beliefs that Thomas will hold to no matter what sober philosophical inquiry establishes.  If unaided human reason can be enlisted in the service of the teachings of the Church, well and good; if not, that is no reason to doubt any of the teachings.  Philosophia ancilla theologiae. Perhaps we can say that philosophy in relation to theology is ancillary but not necessary. 

For details on the whole messy problematic, see my Genuine Inquiry and Two Forms of Pseudo-Inquiry: Sham Reasoning and Fake Reasoning.

God as Uniquely Unique

I hit upon 'uniquely unique' a while back as an apt predicate of God.  But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient.

To be unique is to be one of a kind.  It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique.  So at a bare minimum, God must be the one and only instance of the divine kind.  (This kind could be thought of as the conjunction of the divine attributes.) Beyond that, it will be allowed that whatever counts as God must be essentially unique: nothing that just happens to be uniquely of the divine kind could count as God.  What's more, it will be allowed that nothing counts as God that is not a necessary being. Putting these three allowances together, I say that God is not just essentially, but necessarily unique.  (In the patois of 'possible worlds,' God is unique in every metaphysically possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every such possible world. By contrast, Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human inasmuch as he does not exist in every metaphysically possible world.)

But some of us want to go further still.  We want to say that God is uniquely unique.  His uniqueness extends to his mode of being unique.  He is unique in a way that no other thing is unique.  Suppose there is more than one necessarily unique being.  The necessarily unique God would then be just one of many necessarily unique beings.  In that case he would not be uniquely unique. He would share the property of being necessarily unique with other items.  (Fregean Gedanken and Bolzanian Saetze an sich and other platonica are epistemically possible candidates.)

But then something greater could be conceived, namely, a being that transcends the distinction between kind and instance in terms of which uniqueness is ordinarily defined.  If I asked someone such as Alvin Plantinga wherein resides the divine uniqueness, he would presumably say that it resides in the fact that the there is one and only one possible instance of the divine nature: this nature exists in every world and God instantiates it in every world.  But then God is just another necessarily unique necessary being.  

A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework  applicable to everything other than God.  So he must transcend the distinction between kind and instance.  In a truly transcendent God there cannot be real distinctions of any kind and thus no real distinction between kind and instance, nature and individual having the nature.

Now if God transcends the distinction between instance and kind/nature, and is uniquely unique, unique in a way that no other being is or could be unique, then that is equivalent to maintaining that God is ontologically simple.  (See my SEP entry.)

But why think that God is ontologically simple and uniquely unique?  Here is where the paths diverge.

Some of us feel impelled to say that a God worth his salt cannot be anything other than the absolute reality, the Absolute.  So God cannot be relative to anything or dependent on anything or immanent in anything as he would be if he were just one more being among beings.  For then he would be immanent to what I earlier called the Discursive Framework.  It is rather the case that God transcends this framework.  If God is the Absolute, then he must be simple; otherwise he would depend on properties distinct from himself to be what he is.  

Again, if God is the Absolute, then he cannot be one of many; he must be the ONE that makes possible the one and the many.  As such he transcends the Discursive Framework in which the one opposes the many.  The ONE, however, is the ONE of both the one and many.  It cannot be brought  into opposition to anything.  

"But such a God as you are describing is ineffable!  I want a God that that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God  that is a Thou to my I."

What you want is to stop short at a highest finite object, when the religious-metaphysical quest is animated by dissatisfaction with every finite thing.  The truly religious quester is a nihilist with respect to every finite object.  A God worthy of our highest quest must be absolute, simple, transcendent, and ineffable.

Excerpts from Enzo Paci, Phenomenological Diary

May 30, 1957

        Glory has no meaning, power has no meaning, your personal success has no meaning. Vanity. That vanity which Husserl always fought. And he was sincere. He did indeed love truth and live for truth. Glory is the mundane, and the meaning of life reveals itself only in the negation of the mundane, in operating within the world without being prisoner of the world. I firmly believe it.

BV: Me too. Sic transit gloria mundi.

February 5, 1958

        Today Father Van Breda arrived. Rognoni and I went to pick him up at the station. In our conversations a slow approach to Husserlian problems, especially through the French interpretations. News about the "Archives."  [The reference is to the Husserl Archives in Louvain.]

February 8, 1958

        Father Van Breda's lectures: in Milan on the 6^th and in Pavia on the 7th. The difficulty of understanding the problem of intentionality in its proper sense. Van Breda says that until the end of his life Husserl refused to interpret phenomenology as a metaphysics. Perhaps it is a metaphysics, but not of the ens qua ens, but of the ens qua verum. I like the formula, but without the ens. In other words, I think that in Husserl being resolves itself in the intentional horizon of truth and therefore that phenomenology can be considered neither a metaphysics nor an ontology in the traditional sense of the two terms. It seems to me that the problem is that of the relation between time and the horizon of truth of time.

Enzo Paci is characteristically Continental in his lack of clarity.  It is almost enough to drive one into the camp of the nuts-and-bolts analysts.  The last of Paci's sentences is rather less than pellucid.

But he is on to something important, and deeply problematic in both Husserl and Heidegger: the reduction of ens qua ens to ens qua verum.

See my "Heidegger's Reduction of Being to Truth," The New Scholasticism, vol. LIX, no. 2 (Spring 1985), pp. 156-176.  I wrote it in 1980.

 

Water Analogies for the Trinity

T.O. suggests the following:

‘Divine’ is a mass term, and so when we say “the father the son and the spirit are God”, we are really saying that all three are equally divine or participate in divinity. 

I don't quite know what my reader is driving at, but perhaps he has a water analogy in mind. The following is based partially on H. A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, Volume One: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 359-363.

Hippolytus: The Logos comes from the Father as water from a fountain.

Tertullian: The Father is to the Logos as fountain is to river. One substance assumes two forms.

Lactantius: The Father is an overflowing fountain, the Son a stream flowing from it.

Zeno of Verona: Father and Son are two seas filled with the same water which, though two, are yet one.

Vallicella of Arizona: Water occurs in three distinct states, the gaseous, the liquid, and the solid. One and and the same quantity of water can assume any of these three states. Distinctness of states is compatible with oneness of substance.

Of the water analogies, I like the last one best (!) despite its being as worthless as the others. All four involve an equivocation on ‘substance.’ The sense in which water is a substance is not the sense in which God is a substance. Water is a substance in the sense of a stuff; God is a substance in the sense of a hypostasis (that which stands under) or hypokeimenon (that which is placed under), or as I prefer to say, an individual. Note also that a quantity of H₂O can be in the three states only successively not simultaneously whereas God is 'simultaneously' the three Persons. (I leave open the question whether God is omnitemporal or eternal.)

Of course, there are better physical analogies, light for example, and also nonphysical analogies such as the soul (Augustine). Something on this later. My only point is that these water analogies do nothing to render the Trinity doctrine intelligible, hence no one should be convinced by them.

It is better to accept mystery than to be taken in by pseudo-intelligibility.

How could there be a mundane model for the Absolutely Unique?

Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

A re-post from March 2016.  Was in Georgia 10 pt; now in 12 pt. Slightly emended. Stands up well. Internal hyperlink verified.

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There are those who love to expose and mock the astonishing political ignorance of Americans.  According to a 2006 survey, only 42% of Americans could name the three branches of government.  But here is an interesting question worth exploring: 

Is it not entirely rational to ignore events over which one has no control and withdraw into one's private life where one does exercise control and can do some good?

I can vote, but my thoughtful vote counts for next-to-nothing in most elections, especially when it is cancelled out by the vote of some thoughtless and uninformed person.  I can blog, but on a good day I will reach only a couple thousand readers worldwide and none of them are policy makers.  (I did have some influence once on a Delta airline pilot who made a run for a seat in the House of Representatives.)  I can attend meetings, make monetary contributions, write letters to senators and representatives, but is this a good use of precious time and resources?  It may be that Ilya Somin has it right:

. . . political ignorance is actually rational for most of the public, including most smart people. If your only reason to follow politics is to be a better voter, that turns out not be much of a reason at all. That is because there is very little chance that your vote will actually make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a presidential race, for example). For most of us, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities that are more interesting or more likely to be useful.

Is it rational for me to stay informed?  Yes, because of my intellectual eros, my strong desire to understand the world and what goes on in it. The philosopher is out to understand the world; if he is smart he will have no illusions about changing it, pace Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.

Another reason for people like me to stay informed is to be able to anticipate what is coming down the pike and prepare so as to protect myself and my stoa, my citadel, and the tools of my trade.  For example, my awareness of Obama's fiscal irresponsibility is necessary if I am to make wise decisions as to how much of my money I should invest in precious metals and other hard assets.  Being able to anticipate Obaminations re: 'gun control' will allow me to buy what I need while it is still to be had.   'Lead' can prove to be useful for the protection of gold, not to mention the defense of such sentient beings as oneself and one's family.

In brief, a reason to stay apprised of current events is not so that I can influence or change them, but to be in a position so that they don't influence or change me.

A third reason to keep an eye on the passing scene, and one mentioned by Somin, is that one might follow politics the way some follow sports. Getting hot and bothered over the minutiae of baseball and the performance of your favorite team won't affect the outcome of any games, but it is a source of great pleasure to the sports enthusiast.  I myself don't give a damn about spectator sports.  Politics are my sports.  So that is a third reason for me to stay on top of what's happening.  It's intellectually stimulating and a source of conversational matter and blog fodder. 

All this having been said and properly appreciated, one must nevertheless keep things in perspective by bearing  in mind  Henry David Thoreau's beautiful admonition:

Read not The Times; read the eternities!

For this world is a vanishing quantity whose pomps, inanities, Obaminations and what-not will soon pass into the bosom of non-being.

And you with it.

BLEG: An Impecunious Reader Needs a Copy of Husserl's The Paris Lectures

Got one to give away or sell for a few bucks? Let me know in the ComBox below.

Ruminations on the Dative of Disclosure

Steven Nemes comments on my long Husserl entry:

[Robert] Sokolowski’s reflections in his Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge University Press, 2000) are also helpful. He maintains that the transcendental ego is not substantially different than the empirical ego. In other words, the transcendental ego is not some different substance from the empirical ego, i.e. the [animated] human body. It is simply this empirical ego considered from the point of view of its being a dative of disclosure, a mihi to whom the world is disclosed.

I don't consider this helpful. To be blunt, I consider it confused.

The claim seems to be that the transcendental ego is just the empirical ego when the latter is considered as that to which the world and the objects in it appear, including that very special object which  is one's animated body.  This gives rise to the question: Who is doing the considering?  That is, who is it by whose consideration the empirical ego acquires the property of being the dative of disclosure?

It has to be me.  But it cannot be me qua object, since qua object I am not the dative, but the accusative of disclosure.  I am one of the objects that appears. So it has to be me qua subject, qua dative but not accusative of disclosure.  And let us be clear that there cannot be a dative without a nominative. There cannot be an appearing-to that is not an appearing-to something.  There could, however, be an appearing that is wholly non-relational: things just appear, are revealed, manifest themselves, but not to a subject.* But if there is an appearing-to, then there must be that to which the appearance appears. No dative without a nominative.  Either non-relational appearing or we go 'whole hog' with Husserl: ego-cogito-cogitata qua cogitata.

From this is follows that the duality self as subject-self as object is (a) inexpungeable, and (b) located within the ego.  The duality cannot be collapsed into an abstract unity, nor can the subjectivity of the subject be referred to someone or something external to the ego. I am a subject intrinsically, not relationally, not in virtue of being considered to be a subject. That is to say: the transcendentality of the ego cannot accrue to it ab extra by the the empirical ego's consideration of itself as transcendental.  Hysteron proteron! This puts the cart before the horse:**  it is because I am a transcendental ego that I can apperceive myself as a human being in nature.  As a human being, I simply lack the power to function transcendentally, to execute acts including acts of apperception. 

Of course, there cannot be two egos. The empirical ego is an ego only by analogy (equivocation?)  The true ego is the transcendental ego.  I am being faithful to Husserl here.

So I don't see that Sokolowski, or rather Sokolowski as presented by Nemes, contributes anything to the solution of the problem I posed in my long post.

________________

*This, I take it, is Heidegger's  notion of phenomenon which differs markedly from Husserl's.

**Joke: A philosopher took up residence in a bordello, thinking to enlighten the 'sex workers.' He soon left disillusioned after he found that he could not put Descartes before the whores.

Why We Should Read Boethius

Here.

The Devil Woman lures Boethius a posteriori onto the wheel of fortune while the Eternal Feminine leads him upward a priori.

Related: Boethius contra Nietzsche on Time and Transition

Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? Part I

I met with Steven Nemes recently for a productive and intense discussion of people, politics, religion, and in particular the metaphysics of individuality and possibility.  I think of Nemes as my 'philosophical grandson.' Although never formally my student, he discovered my A Paradigm Theory of Existence when he was a freshman at Arizona State University, read it, understood it, and initiated a relationship which has proven profitable and enjoyable for both of us. And while I have had some (good) influence on Nemes, he is independently minded and in no way my 'disciple.'

When we last met, he mentioned his move from analytic philosophy to phenomenology and asked why I had gone in the other direction.  Herewith, the first  in a series of posts  in explanation of my move, which was less of a move away from phenomenology and more of a move into analytic philosophy.  I will also take the occasion to revisit my life-long fascination with Husserl.

As an undergraduate I was introduced to phenomenology by John Maraldo, a freshly-minted Ph.D. from the University of Munich. John was in his late twenties and just starting his teaching career.  (He is now an emeritus at the University of North Florida.) As I recall, in that Winter quarter of 1971 Maraldo assigned difficult readings from Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. It was Husserl who became the cynosure of my interest, although, curiously enough, I have published only one article on Husserl but half-dozen or so on Heidegger.  I was particularly fascinated by Husserl's Ideas I (1913) and his project of founding philosophy as strict science (strenge Wissenschaft) by means of a method that was not argumentative or dialectical or aporetic, but descriptive.

I was an electrical engineering major in love with philosophy. I saw it as a high calling worthy of a life's devotion, and I still do, but I was troubled by the notorious fact that philosophers have never been able to agree on anything despite centuries of intense effort by the best and the brightest.  My youthful question to my youthful self was: Can philosophy be taken seriously as a vocation by one who takes life seriously? So I turned to Husserl for an answer. He became my hero, his picture on my wall, his Persönliche Aufzeichnungen practically memorized.  (His picture is still on my wall, a different picture on a different wall.) For a time, in the '70s, I thought of establishing myself as a Husserl scholar.  Husserl's autobiographical Wie kann ich ein ehrlich Philosoph sein? and his Ohne Gewissheit kann ich eben nicht leben! struck a chord in me.  They still do.  "How can I be an honest philosopher?" "Without certainty, I just can't live!"  (See A Meditation on Certainty on Husserl's Birthday.)

But I came to realize that Husserl failed like the great Kant and others before him despite the intensity of his efforts protracted over a lifetime. Like Kant, Husserl failed to set philosophy on "the sure path of science." (CPR Bvii)  He wanted to lay the foundations upon which others would cooperatively set brick by brick.  Nothing like that came to pass. He was blessed with many brilliant students, among them, Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein, but each trod his own path.  Stein's path led her to Aquinas and onto-theology. She penned a remarkable piece on faith and reason in which she imagines a dialog between her two masters, Husserl and Thomas.  Ingarden broke with the master over the question of idealism and the mode of existence of the real world. Heidegger's "hermeneutic of facticity," among other things, involves a rejection of Husserl's quest for a presuppositionless starting point.  And now my mind drifts back to a remark Maraldo, glossing Heidegger, made in class one day, something along the lines of: presuppositionlessness (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) is the biggest presupposition of them all.  (Maraldo wrote his dissertation on the hermeneutical circle in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and Heidegger.)

Few ever practiced Husserlian phenomenology; the creative minds went their own way while the lesser lights occupied themselves with endless exegeses of the master's texts and endless controversies over what he meant or ought to have meant. Husserl himself spent most of his energies on laying the foundations for his would-be strenge Wissenschaft rather than doing phenomenology.  (This is not to discount the wealth of concrete analyses to be found in his Nachlass.) There is a nasty little quip to the effect that Husserl spent so much time sharpening his pencil that he never got around to writing anything.

The Question of Idealism

Alles, was ich je als wahrhaft Seiendes einsehen kann, ist gar nichts anderes als ein intentionales Vorkommnis meines eigenen -- des Erkenneden -- Lebens . . . . (Erste Philosophie (1923/24), Zweiter Teil, Theorie der Phaenomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana Band VIII, S. 184 f.)

A central issue that grabbed my attention early on was the problem of idealism, and the related problem of the status of transcendental subjectivity. Clearly, the status of the object and the status of the subject 'go together' to put it schematically. Maraldo had assigned Husserl's Ideas I (1913). I recall puzzling over the notorious section 49  wherein we read:  "Thus no real thing, none that consciously presents and manifests itself though appearances is necessary for the Being of consciousness . . . ." (Boyce Gibson tr., 137)  Husserl goes on to tell us that consciousness, immanent Being, is absolute in the sense that it needs no real thing in order to exist: nulla res indiget ad existendum.  "The transcendent res," by contrast, "is unreservedly related to consciousness."  Thus the transcendent thing, the tree in the garden, for example, in its perceived "bodily presence" (Leibhaftigkeit) is transcendent, but only in relation to consciousness. Its mode of Being (Seinsweise) is transcendence-in-immanence. The Being of the tree is thus relative to consciousness. The tree does not exist in itself, in the manner of a Kantian thing in itself (Ding an sich) but neither is it a content of consciousness.  A content is something contained in something else, and the tree in the garden is not contained in my consciousness of it. Specifically, it is not a real content (ein reeller Inhalt) of any act or intentional experience (Erlebnis) trained upon it. One 'lives through' (er-lebt) the act, but one does not live through the accusative of the act, the tree as presented to the act in just the way it is presented to the act.  So in that sense the tree, precisely as presented from this angle, in this lighting, with these and these perceived features etc., is transcendent of the act (intentional Erlebnis, cogitatio) and also transcendent of the subject of the act, the ego of the cogitatio. But again, it is a transcendence-in-immanence.  It is not absolutely transcendent, but transcendent in relation to consciousness. 

In sum, we have two modes of Being, absolute and relative.  Absolute Being is immanent Being; relative Being is transcendent Being.  The ego and its cogitationes are on the side of immanent Being and they exist absolutely. They can be brought to adequate and indubitable givenness unlike physical items such as the tree in our example which are given presumptively and inadequately.  The cogitata qua cogitata are on the side of transcendent Being and they exist only for consciousness, although not in consciousness. 

A fundamental insight of Husserl, already in his Fifth Logical Investigation, is that outer perception, the seeing of a tree for example, cannot be assimilated to image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein).   There is consciousness of things via images, pictures, and the like, as when, looking up now at my framed photograph of Husserl at his writing table, I am put in mind of Husserl himself.  But this pictorial 'presentification' (Vergegenwaertigung) presupposes and is impossible without direct perceptual presentation of the photograph.  We cannot, therefore, understand outer perception in terms of image-consciousness. Perception (Warhnehmung)  is not a species of Bildbewusstsein. Thus there is nothing in the mind or in the brain that mediates the ego's perceptual commerce with the thing.  I explain this rather more clearly in Husserl's Critique of the Image Theory of Consciousness. The theme is repeated by Heidegger and other phenomenologists. I recall a passage in Sein und Zeit (1927) wherein Heidegger remarks that we don't hear sensations; we hear the motorcycle roaring through the alley.  No epistemic deputies need apply.

It was clear to me then and is clear to me now that Husserl is espousing a form of idealism, as he himself states in passage after passage. What was not clear to me then but is clearer to me now is the nature and (un)tenability of Husserl's idealism.  My young self was  confronted with two sets of problems with respect to Husserl's idealism.   The first concerned the status of the subject and the second the status of the intentional object.  In this entry I will discuss only the first set.

The Status of  Subjectivity

What is the nature of the ego to which the world is relative?  Evidently, this ego cannot be another mundane item.  The world whole cannot depend for its appearing/Being on some measly part of the world. But neither can the ego to which the world is relative be extra-mundane: the intentionality of consciousness refers consciousness and its I-pole to the world as to its object, and it does so necessarily.  So the ego to which the world is relative must be pre-mundane or transcendental in roughly the Kantian as opposed to the Scholastic sense of the term.  

On the other hand, this ego must be accessible to the philosopher seeking an absolute foundation for knowledge in intuitive givenness.  (Husserl's overriding, life-long goal was to discover an absolutely indubitable foundation for all knowledge. He viewed the fate of the West as bound up with the attainment of this goal.)  If it is to be directly accessible, the knowing I and its acts cannot be the terminus of an inferential process, a transcendental argument as on a Kantian or neo-Kantian approach. The pure ego cannot be an inferred entity or theoretical posit. The ego and its cogitationes (this latter term taken in its broad Cartesian sense to embrace every type of intentional experience) must be immediately accessible in adequate evidence to the meditating philosopher who is not an eidos-ego but a factical ego.

The problem is one of reconciling  the transcendentality of the ultimate or pure ego with its facticity. How do they 'fit together' if they do?  Once the ego of the natural attitude has been purified of everything mundane, how could there be anything left over that is factical and individual? The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not eo ipso an eidetic reduction, a reduction to the eidos-ego.  The trans-phen reduction is a reduction to the ego that is je meines, in every case my transcendental ego.  This ego somehow survives the bracketing of existence as an individual ego. The problem of reconciling transcendentality and facticity arises because Husserl tries to erect transcendental philosophy on a Cartesian-Brentanian foundation. He is motivated to attempt this by his quest for certainty, for an absolute and indubitable epistemic foundation.

I now proceed to formulate more precisely this problem that exercised me and still does. I will assume, with Husserl, the distinctions articulated in the schema: ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum.   (This assumption is hardly self-evident and was hotly contest by later phenomenologists such as the early Sartre. One can question both phenomenologically and dialectically whether there is an I or ego as the terminus a quo of mental acts, and also whether there are mental acts. Note the irony here. It may be that Husserl the phenomenologist is coming at the phenomena with conceptuality that is not phenomenologically verifiable. If so, he has not gone all the way with the philosophical epoche that he mentions in section 18 of Ideas I.)

In any case, having made the above schematic assumption, I then asked about the existence and nature of the ultimate thinker of my thoughts, the ultimate ego of my cogitationes.  The cogitationes are of the ego (subjective genitive) in that they belong to the latter; the cogitationes are of the cogitata (objective genitive) in that they are directed to the latter.  The problem, precisely put, is to explain what the transcendental ego is if it is none of the items mentioned in the following, (a)-(d).

a) The ego is not an abstraction or mere concept or ideal object or eidos or principle or explanatory posit as in neo-Kantianism. As Husserl says somewhere in Ideas I, it is not something "logically thought up."  Husserl has no truck with the neo-Kantian concept of consciousness-in-general.  Consciousness is not the form, Bewusst-heit, common to all objects of consciousness. Consciousness is in every case my consciousness.  It is in every case something individual, not universal; concrete, not abstract; somehow factical though not mundane.  What's more, consciousness has a 'participial' and thus 'verbal' nature: it is a thinking, a constituting, a giving of sense, a unifying, a synthesizing.  This is another reason why Bewusstsein for Husserl is not Natorp's Bewusstheit, that is, why it is not a form or property of objects. The transcendental ego is a unifying unity, not a merely unified unity.  It is self-unifying, not unified by another. The subjectivity of the ultimate subject is inseparable from this transcendental unifying which is not found on the side of the object.  As we will see in a later entry, the tree in the garden is a unity of noematic senses the unity of which derives from the unifying activity of the transcendental ego: it is a unity of sense, a Sinneseinheit.  The tree's Sein (Being) is nothing other than its Seinsinn (Being-sense), with the latter derivative from the constitutive activities of transcendental consciousness. (Ideas I, sec. 55)

b) My ego is not my empirical psyche in nature. That which thinks in me when BV thinks is not a psychic part of the natural world.  My psyche and its contents are objects of inner perception -- Franz Brentano's innere Wahrnehmung -- and not the I or subject that performs this inner perceiving.  All objects of consciousness succumb to the phenomenological reduction.  The ultimate subject is pre-mundane or transcendental. And the same goes for its acts or cogitationes. Husserl's is a transcendental idealism, not a psychological idealism. The latter is absurd: the constitutive source of all objectivity cannot be that measly object that is my psyche (anima, Seele).

c) My ego is not anything physical such as the brain of an organism in nature.  That which thinks in me when BV thinks is not BV's (embodied) brain. And of course it is not JM's or SN's brain either.  That in me which sees the tree is not my visual cortex.  The brain and all its parts (and their parts, axons, dendrites, synapses, etc.) and the brain's physical adjuncts (lungs, heart, CNS, sensory transducers, e.g., eyes and ears, etc.) are objects of natural-scientific study which of course presupposes ultimate or transcendental subjectivity.  Gehirnidealismus (brain idealism) is obviously absurd.

d) My ego is not a meta-physical thing, a Cartesian res cogitans (thinking thing) or substantia cogitans, (thinking substance). It is not a spiritual substance inhabiting a realm of positive noumena in Kant's sense. In Cartesian Meditations, sec. 10, Husserl alleges that the Frenchman fails to complete the transcendental turn (die transzendentale Wendung).  He stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt), from which he then argues to get back what he had earlier doubted, including the external world of bodies. Despite his radical doubt, Cartesius remains within the world thinking he has found the sole unquestionable part of it.  He is not radical enough. He does not realize that a phenomenological reduction applies to the psychic being who is meditating as much as to anything else. The meditator, when reduced to his pure ego  is no part of the world of objects, whether these be physical, mental, or ideal, and is therefore pre-mundane. (Cf. The Paris Lectures, p. 8 ff. The two lectures were delivered in February 1929.)

Descartes' mistake, according to Husserl, is to conflate the pure or transcendental ego with substantia cogitans, mens sive animus.  This mistake gives rise to what Husserl calls the absurdity of transcendental realism.  (Paris Lectures, p. 9) Husserl's thought seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, thereby regressing to the pure ego, one is left with no entity existing in itself on which one can base inferences such as a cosmological argument to the existence of God from the world or from anything in it.  For if the existence of every object is bracketed, then the existence of the psychophysical ego is bracketed as well, it being an object in the world, and what is left over is the pure ego, which as pure does not exist in itself. How then does it exist if it doesn't exist in itself?  (Apparently, it exists by constituting itself. The questions that this involves will have to wait.)

Consequently, one cannot argue: if anything exists, then an absolutely necessary being exists; I exist; ergo, an absolutely necessary being exists. (See Kant, CPR A604 B632 ) I exist cannot be used as premise in such an argument since after the reduction, 'I' cannot refer to any physical, psychophysical, psychic, or metaphysical  (spiritual) object.  The true or ultimate or transcendental I is other than every object, even unembodied/disembodied spirits (if there are any).  Everything objective acquires its entire Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) from the transcendental ego, including any thinking substances there are.  It follows that if there are thinking substances in Descartes' sense, they are not transcendental. To repeat, the transcendental ego is other than every object. To put it in the flowery way of the Continental philosopher, transcendental subjectivity 'expels' every object. 

This is of course perplexing. Just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all Seinsgeltung?  Is it at all?  If it is or exists at all, then it is in the world, even if not in the physical world.  It is in the world as the totality of entities. But it can't be inasmuch as the transcendental ego as the constitutive source of all ontic validity is pre-mundane, and thus other than every entity.

The puzzle could be put like this. Either the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung is pre-mundane or it is not. If the former, then it would appear to be nothing at all. If the latter, then it is not the constitutive source of all Seinsgeltung.  I will come back to this in connection with some remarks by Hans Wagner.

What bugged me was the question of what the transcendental I could be if it is none of items mentioned in (a)-(d). Husserl never came clean on this, although he was aware of the problem as is clear from sec. 53 of Ideas I.

I pause to note that the problem does not arise for a neo-Kantian such as Hans Wagner.  He approves of the reduction to the transcendental:

The reduction leads beyond the entire world to a pure subjectivity which is no longer part of the world. For this also Husserl cannot be sufficiently praised. [. . .] It [the subjectum veritatis, the absolute ground of all truth] can be absolute only if it does not itself belong to the world. ("Husserl's Posthumous Writings," in R. O. Elveton, The Phenomenology of Husserl, Quadrangle 1970, p. 222.)

Wagner goes on to say that subjectivity "is not any kind of being (Seiendes)," and that from the point of view of the world of beings, "it is nothing (and Nothingness)." Shades of Heidegger and Sartre!  This makes sense. Once you regress to a subjectivity purified of everything mundane, such a transcendental subjectivity cannot be a being, ein Seiendes, but must be other than every being, in which case it is Sein/Nichts which for Heidegger are "the same" (das Selbe aber nicht das Gleiche) .  Wagner continues:

. . . subjectivity, as this indispensable absolute ground, is Being and Idea. Being and Idea "are" not but they are the absolute ground for all "that is," that is, for the beingness of beings and the truth of what is true. (222)

Husserl's problem cannot arise for the neo-Kantians.  For Wagner, Husserl's problem of  explaining how transcendental subjectivity can be factical, though not empirical or intra-mundane, is a pseudo-problem predicated on a mistake (though Wagner doesn't put the point as bluntly as I have):

What true subjectivity is, is that I am not, and what I am not is what true subjectivity is.  Husserl understands that these terms . . . are to be connected in a positive way: in the reduction, I, on my own ground, disclose myself as true, pure subjectivity . . . . (223)

This is is a mistake for Wagner since it implies the identity of the rule and what it regulates, the norm and what it 'normatizes,' and the absolute ground of truth and what it makes true.

The Paradox of Human Subjectivity

What I had stumbled upon was the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Husserl in his  last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation.  It was published in 1936, a couple of years before Husserl's death in 1938. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:

How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?

The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ?    (179-180)

We are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world.  This by itself is not paradoxical.  For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process.  Problematic, to be sure, and in my view false, but not paradoxical. Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world.  For then the entire vast cosmos depends for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof.  And surely that would be absurd.

Dehumanizing Subjectivity

In order to avoid absurd forms of idealism, such as psychological idealism, Husserl must in a sense 'dehumanize' subjectivity. Here is a another crucial passage from The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, sec. 54, p. 183:

But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings?  After all, the epoche has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoche  has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries.  Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoche, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .

[. . .]

But in the epoche and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.

Aporetic Conclusion

Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable.  On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature.  For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual  thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans.  As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung).  As already noted, the Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world  (ein kleines Endchen der Welt)  from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question. 

For Husserl, everything objective succumbs to the epoche.  No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence.  Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself.  If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche.  He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something ontically absolute and indubitable.  For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoche." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.")  In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."

One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung?  Does it exist?   And in what sense of 'exist'?  It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen).  But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.

Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that thing was himself as thinking thing.  He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein.  Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well.  But then nothing is left over.  We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating.  To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction.  It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos. 

Here is another approach to the problem.  The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective.  This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature.  But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'?  How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum?  In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'?  How does he know that it is anything like a person?

Another related but distinct problem could be put like this. The transcendental subject is OF (genitivus objectivus)  the world but not IN the world.  It is OF the world in virtue of its intentionality. The animal wearing my clothes, however, is IN the world but not OF the world.  ('World' here refers to the totality of constituted entities.)  My body is a thing in nature, a tiny bit of its fauna.  It is not aware OF anything; I am aware of things, some but not all of them via my body and its organs.  For example, my visual perception of the tree in the garden  is via my eyes which are constituted bits of the natural world. I see the tree; my eyes no more see the tree that my eyeglasses do.

I am not (identical to) my body, and yet I am in some sense  'incarnated' in it.  (My body is not my body's body; it is my body.  This mineness -- compare Heidegger's Jemeinigkeit in Sein und Zeit -- is not a objective property of an object in nature.) The relation of me and my body is exceedingly intimate, but it is not identity.  My body is the mundane vehicle of my subjectivity, but quite unlike my car or bicycle.  The problem, briefly, is to make sense of the relation of my factical transcendental ego and the body it constitutes.

Guest Post: Vito Caiati on David Brooks

I asked long-time reader Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, to comment on David Brook's Atlantic article, America is Having a Moral Convulsion.  Vito responded with alacrity and acerbity, and I have thrown in my two cents. Comments enabled.

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1.  The essay is entirely descriptive rather than analytical in that it presents various economic and sociological findings and trends, but nowhere does it offer an explanation for them. Like [Rod] Dreher, Brooks is content to offer merely the symptoms of a deep crisis rather than to explore its causes, which to me seemed inexorably bound up with the nature and motions of contemporary American capitalism.  Thus, he rattles on about the decline in social trust, linking this phenomenon to the upsurge in financial, emotional, identity, and social insecurity among broad sectors of the American population, especially the young and the lower middle class and working class poor; however, all these trends, destructive of social unity and trust, float on thin air, their emergence requiring [Brooks thinks] no elucidation.

To analyze them would require him to delve into the corrosive force that contemporary capitalism, which by its very nature is deleterious to the survival of traditional forms of the family, community, and polity in America.  One has merely, for example, to reflect on the acceleration of social time (technological and social, including rapid social change and the dizzying pace of life), the contraction and distortion of social space (the former expressed in the gutting of small and medium commerce and the export of entire industrial sectors, with the accompanying hollowing out of established modes of life and the latter expressed in the hyper development in privileged geographical enclaves and underdevelopment elsewhere), and the hyper-commodification of sexuality (disastrous for traditional familial and conjugal relations and Judaeo-Christian moral precepts) that are generated by the process of capitalist accumulation today.

In other words, one cannot shy away from a critical examination of what American capital, global in its reach and interests, has done and is doing to our national civic and political institutions.  I have to do a lot more reading in this area, but I am convinced that it is crucial that conservatives abandon their nostalgic romance with capitalism, since the object of their affection, an earlier moment in the history of capital, competitive or at least largely national, has long since passed and has been replaced with something far different in kind and inimical to their interests and values.

BV: This is a very important point: global, 'woke' capitalism is a very different animal from the capitalism celebrated by old-time economic conservatives and libertarians.

I follow your lead and read everything; if some Western Marxists, such as David Harvey or Hartmut Rosa, have something to say on this question that is of value, I take what is valuable and discard the rest.  I admit a critical examination of capitalism today involves all sorts of philosophical and ideological conundrums for us on the Right, but if we wish to defend certain modes of life and thought, I do not see how we can avoid it. The big global corporations and the Leftist elites that own and control them are not our friends, nor are the host of apologists that cover for them.

2.  Brooks implicitly denies the conscious role of human agency in the acute crisis of the last half year, that is, he covers up for the Left, which has purposely pursued the assault on the Constitution, our history, and our basic rights. All his spleen is saved for the usual target of these bien pensant types, Trump, while he nowhere denounces the lies, plots, and violence of the Left, which exploited the health emergency and the isolated death of one man to destabilize the nation. I cannot take seriously a man who writes,

Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation.

I sure that you noticed that here Brooks takes all the evident nefarious intentions and acts of the Left and projects them onto the President. Here, we see him happily paying the price to remain among those with respectable opinions.

BV:  I too cannot take Brooks and his political projection seriously. He seems to have degenerated badly. But he always was a pseudo-conservative, a member of the yap-and-scribble bow-tie brigade, along with Bill Kristol, George Will, Mona Charen, Max Boot, and the rest. These types love to write and talk, but when it comes time to act and support a man who has already done so much in the face of vicious opposition to implement conservative policies, they clutch their pearls, straighten their ties, and chicken out.  Like Vito, I get the distinct impression that their main political goal is to remain among the respectable so as to preserve their privileges, perquisites, and invitations to the high-toned soirees of the bien pensant.  They seem to fear nothing more than becoming a persona non grata in the manner of Alan Dershowitz. Accepting something like political dhimmitude, Brooks and the cruise-ship conservative cohort are content to play the role assigned to them by the Left, talk quietly about taxes and such, and allow the Left's culturally Marxist juggernaut to roll on.

Brooks goes on about norms. But he will give either his direct or indirect support to a party that is hell-bent on destroying the norms and institutions of the Republic. The Left has become brazen about what they stand for: packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, eliminating the Electoral College, removing the Second Amendment to the Constitution, tolerating and expanding 'sanctuary' jurisdictions, eliding the distinction between citizen and non-citizen -- and I am just warming up.

Like Rod Dreher, Brooks apparently believes that civility and good manners trump every other consideration: better that race-delusional Marxist thugs destroy our cities than that an alpha male punch back against the chaos and defend the American Way.  Trump is boorish, but there is nothing radical about him unlike the Orwellian 'moderate' Joe Biden who is a driverless vehicle or rudderless vessel soon to be piloted by Kamala Harris and the squadristi to hard-Left destinations.

Anyway those are my thoughts on the essay, whatever they are worth. These are really bad times; we must win in November, if only to buy some time, but I am not at all optimistic that we will be able to control either the “soft” or the more and more evident “hard” (for example, the framing of General Flynn and Cardinal Pell and the indictment of the McCloskeys) totalitarianism of the Left.

BV: The indictment of the McCloskey's is particularly troubling.  Can you believe that this is happening in the USA? Violent Marxist thugs, who pay no taxes, break down a gate and threaten the life, liberty, and property of productive, tax-paying citizens. The political authorities, supported by these taxes, take the side of the thugs, bringing no charges against them, but indict the McCloskeys. Don't forget: some of the BLMers were armed, and the McCloskeys were within the law and the Constitution.  And don't fool yourselves: BLM is an avowed Marxist outfit dedicated to the destruction of America as she was founded to be.  The BLMers 'peaceful' protests are nothing but race-baiting means to their nefarious ends.

These are dangerous times. The upcoming election will be a battle for the soul of America.  Curiously, both Trump and Biden say this, and both are right.  The Coalition of the Sane must win in November.  Do your bit -- and prepare for the aftermath.  Ignore the polls. Remember 2016?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. 'Fesche' means something like smart, snazzy.

Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
Ich hab' ein Pianola zu Haus' in mein' Salon
Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!

Kinks, Lola. From the days when 'tranny' meant transmission.  

Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn

Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart 

Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama

Doors, Roadhouse Blues

Tom Petty, Lost Highway. The old Hank Williams tune. "And now I am lost, too late to pray. Lord, I've paid the cost on the lost highway."  This goes out to all you 'deplorables' out there.

Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano.  Video of Sophia Loren.

Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. 'Fesche' means something like smart, snazzy.

Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
Ich hab' ein Pianola zu Haus' in mein' Salon
Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!

Kinks, Lola. From the days when 'tranny' meant transmission.  

Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn

Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart 

Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama

Doors, Roadhouse Blues

Tom Petty, Lost Highway. The old Hank Williams tune. "And now I am lost, too late to pray. Lord, I've paid the cost on the lost highway."  This goes out to all you 'deplorables' out there.

Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano.  Video of Sophia Loren.

A Mistake Many Make

They think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.

The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate.  He is a trenchant polemicist in some of his writing, so I am simply responding in kind.

I need to find that passage.

But let me say something good about old Stove: he was one formidable opponent of the scourge of political correctness.

There are some interesting materials for and against the curmudgeon in my Stove category.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum? De mortuis bonum et malum.

Among the Riddles of Existence

Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. F. H. Bradley got his problems from the world. G. E. Moore got his problems from what  F. H. Bradley said about the world.

In a Philosophical Discussion . . .

. . . three's a crowd and four's a cross-conversation. 

One-on-one, back-and-forth, defining and refining, pursuing the point, focusing like a laser, driven by eros for truth but free of polemos under the aegis of philia.  But also under the aegis of 

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

And with no illusions about achieving agreement. An attainable goal here below is clarity about differences. "I will teach you differences." (Shakespeare, King Lear, Wittgenstein.)

On 'Peaceful' Protests

Two points.

The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion.

Worse than condoning evil-doing is denying its very existence.

A 'Woke' Paradox

Is it objectively true that objectivity is a white-supremacist value?

Assert that it is, and you presuppose it.

But if you say that it isn't, then why should we listen to you?

Policy and Personality

The first trumps the second.

Happiness and Contentment

He who is content with his lot, is happy a lot, much more than those who are not.  (A sorry sing-song stab at a saying?)

Pearls before Swine

Beware of casting them. Beware also of the conceit that one has them to cast.

Prayer

Because we are spiritual beings, we pray. Because we cannot be lamps unto ourselves, we need to. 

Moving from Religion to Philosophy: A Typology of Motives

People come to philosophy from various 'places.'  Some come from religion, others from mathematics and the natural sciences, still others from literature and the arts.  There are other termini a quis as well.  In this post I am concerned only with the move from religion to philosophy.  What are the main types of reasons for those who are concerned with religion to take up the serious study of philosophy?  I count five main types of motive.

1. The Apologetic Motive.  Some look to philosophy for apologetic tools.  Their concern is to clarify and defend the tenets of their religious faith, tenets they do not question, or do not question in the main, against those who do question them, or even attack them.  For someone whose central motive is apologetic, the aim is not to seek a truth they do not possess, but to articulate and defend a truth, the "deposit of faith," that they already possess, if not in fullness, at least in outline.

2. The Critical Motive.  Someone who is animated by the Critical Motive seeks to understand religion and evaluate its claim to truth, while taking it seriously.  To criticize is not to oppose, but to sift, evaluate, assay, separate the true from the false, the reasonable from the unreasonable.  The critic is not out to defend or attack but to understand and evaluate.  Open to the claims of religion, his question is: But is it true?

3. The Debunking Motive.  If the apologist presupposes the truth of his religion, or some religion, the debunker presupposes the falsehood of a particular religion or of every religion.  He takes the doctrines and institutions of religion seriously as things worth attacking, exposing, debunking, unmasking, refuting.

The apologist, the critic, and the debunker all take religion seriously as something worth defending, worth evaluating, or worth attacking using the tools of philosophy.  For all three, philosophy is a tool, not an end in itself. 

The apologist moves to philosophy without leaving religion. If he succeeds in defending his faith with the weapons of philosophy, well and good; if he fails, it doesn't really matter.  He has all the essential truth he needs from his religion.  His inability to mount an intellectually respectable defense of it is a secondary matter.  He might take the following view. "My religion is true. So there must be an intellectually respectable defense of it, whether or not I or anyone can mount that defense."

The critic moves to philosophy with the live option of leaving religion behind.  Whether or not he leaves it behind depends on the outcome of his critique.  Neither staying nor leaving is a foregone conclusion.

The debunker either never had a living faith, or else he had one but lost it.  As a debunker, his decision has been made and his Rubicon crossed: religion is buncombe from start to finish, dangerous buncombe that needs to be unmasked and opposed. Strictly speaking, only the debunker who once had a living faith moves from it to philosophy.  You cannot move away from a place where you never were.

4. The Transcensive Motive.  The transcender aims to find in philosophy something that completes and transcends religion while preserving its truth.  One way to flesh this out would be in Hegelian terms: religion and philosophy both aim to express the Absolute, but only philosophy does so adequately.  Religion is an inadequate 'pictorial' (vortstellende) representation of the Absolute.  On this sort of approach all that is good in religion is aufgehoben in philosophy, simultaneously cancelled and preserved, roughly in the way the bud is both cancelled and preserved in the flower.

5. The Substitutional Motive.  The substitutionalist aims to find in philosophy a substitute for religion.  Religion, when taken seriously, makes a total claim on its adherents' higher energies.  A person who, for any reason, becomes disenchanted with religion, but is not prepared to allow himself to degenerate to the level of the worldling, may look to invest his energies elsewhere in some other lofty pursuit.  Some will turn to social or political activism.  And of course there are other termini ad quos on the road from religion. The substitutionalist abandons religion for philosophy.  In  a sense, philosophy becomes his religion.  It is in her precincts that he seeks his highest meaning and an outlet for his noblest impulses.

Some Questions

A. What is my motive?  (2).  Certainly not (1):  I seem to be constitutionally incapable of taking the religion of my upbringing, or any religion, as simply true without examination.  I can't suppress the questions that naturally arise.  We have it on high authority that "The unexamined life is not worth living."  That examination, of course, extends to everything, including religion, and indeed also to this very examining.  Note  that I am not appealing to the authority of Socrates/Plato since their authority can be validated rationally and autonomously.

Certainly not (3): I am not a debunker.  Not (4) or (5) either.  Hegel is right: both religion and philosophy treat of the Absolute.  Hegel is wrong, however, in thinking that religion is somehow completed by or culminates in philosophy.  I incline to the view that Athens and Jersualem are at odds with each other, that there is a tension between them, indeed a fruitful, productive tension, one that accounts in part for the vitality of the West as over against the inanition of the Islamic world.  To put it starkly, it it is the tension between the autonomy of reason and the heteronomy of obedient faith (cf. Leo Strauss).  Jerusalem is not a suburb of Athens.

Nor do I aim to substitute philosophy for religion.  Philosophy, with its "bloodless ballet of categories," is not my religion.  Man does not live by the discursive intellect alone.

My view is that there are four main paths to the Absolute, philosophy, religion, mysticism, and morality.  They are separate and somehow all must be trod.  No one of them has proprietary rights in the Absolute.  How integrate them?  Integration may not be possible here below.  The best we can do is tack back and forth among them.  So we think, we pray, we meditate and we live under the aegis of moral demands taken as absolute.

This theme is developed in Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom. 

B. Have I left any types of motive out?   

The Art of Life: Among 'Regular Guys'

Among regular guys it is best to play the regular guy -- as tiring and boring as that can be. Need relief? Strictly limit your time among regular guys. But mix with them a little lest you be hated for being 'aloof,' or 'unfriendly.'

As long as one is in the world, one must be able to pass as being of the world.

Almost all socializing is levelling and dispiriting.  It drains one's spiritual sap. But a little socializing is good, like a little whisky. In both cases, however, more is not better.

In this fallen world, society is the enemy of solitude, and solitude is to be preferred if the good of the soul is a goal.

But I can imagine a form of sociality superior to solitude. This would be a society of spirits who had passed through the school of solitude and had achieved self-individuation.  But such a society is not to be had here below, if anywhere.

A qualification is needed. There are rare occasions in rare friendships in which one gets a glimpse of what that sodality of spirit would be like.

I'll end on a mundane note.  In my experience, a little socializing is often physically stimulating.  On an early morning ramble, I am doing alright.  I encounter an acquaintance. We chat for a few minutes. When I start up again I feel energized. There's a spring in my step and  glide to my stride. I exult, "I feel better than any old man should be allowed to feel."

RELATED:  Introverts and Inwardness

Time it took to compose this entry: 35 minutes from 4:00 to 4:35.

Today's Facebook Shorts

The comment threads are healthy but you have to go the Land of Zuck to read them.

 

HOW MANY WHITE SUPREMACISTS DO YOU KNOW?

 

I don't know any. A white supremacist is someone who denies that whites and non-whites are equal in respect of rights (life, liberty, property, etc.) and are therefore legitimately enslaved or otherwise made subservient to whites for the benefit of whites. If you have a different definition of 'white supremacist,' please tell me what it is and how many of them you know.

 

CASHLESSNESS AND SOFT TOTALITARIANISM

 

Some restaurants no longer accept cash payments. Reason? Health concerns. A route to soft totalitarianism. Exaggerate some health threat. Inspire fear in a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists. Ban cash in the name of public health. Result? Everyone making payments leaves a paper trail. People can be monitored as to where they go, where they shop, what they eat and drink., what they read. Too many visits to Joe's Real BBQ for paleolithic vittles and your social credit score goes down. You get the picture . Alarmist?

 

BV Comment 1:  Cede control of health care delivery to the gov't and they can tell you how to live, what to eat, drink, ride. Ride a motorcycle? Dangerous activity! Gov't has a reason to ban them if they are picking up the tab for health care.

 

BV Comment 2: Are we a gullible populace of highly suggestible conformists? Well, look at all the people walking around in the open air wearing masks. Or people driving alone in their cars wearing masks. Etc. Where is the independence of mind? Are we Americans or obedient Germans?

 

JOEY B.: OUT OF TOUCH AND BEING USED

 

Joe Biden has been spending too much time with his record player if he thinks that Critical Race Theory is merely a plea that we be sensitive to the feelings of people of other races. I am being charitable, perhaps excessively so. I am suggesting that he is an old man out of touch with current events.