Maverick Philosopher

New Year's Eve at the Oldies: 'Last' Songs for the Last Night of the Year

Happy New Year, everybody.  

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Happy New Year, everybody.  

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Wokespeak and Wokespoke

Here:

“Equity.” Equity has now replaced the Civil Rights–era goal of “equality” — a word relegated to vestigial Wokespoke. After 60 years, equality apparently was exposed as a retrograde bourgeois synonym for the loaded “equality of opportunity” rather than a necessary, mandated “equality of result.”

And rightly so, since any and every inequality of outcome can only be explained by something nefarious such as racism or sexism.

Related: The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

A Conversion Story

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in her own words.

An important part of what opened me to Catholicism—and to the peerless gift of faith in Christ Jesus—was my growing horror at the pride of too many in the secular academy. The sin is all the more pernicious because it is so rarely experienced as sin. Educated and enjoined to rely upon our reason and cultivate our autonomy, countless perfectly decent and honorable professors devote their best efforts to making sense of thorny intellectual problems, which everything in their environment encourages them to believe they can solve. Postmodernism has challenged the philosophical presuppositions of the modernists’ intellectual hubris, but, with the same stroke, it has pretended to discredit what it calls “logocentrism,” namely, the centrality of the Word. In the postmodernist universe, all claims of universal certainty must be exposed as delusions, leaving the individual as authoritative arbiter of the meaning that pertains to his or her situation. Thus, what originated as a struggle to discredit pretensions to intellectual authority has ended, at least in the American academy, in a validation of personal prejudice and desire.

In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

The 'thin' conception of being or existence entails that there are no modes of being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-being doctrine, the MOB doctrine if you will, is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics, although I won't argue for the stronger claim here.

My task is not to specify what the modes of being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of being. So I plan to look at a range of examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of being they involve.

This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of being, and not merely in their respective natures.

(show)

1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, whitecaps, and carpet bulges are all items that exist, but not on their own. They need — as a matter of metaphysical necessity — faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:

D1. S is a (primary) substance =_df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

D2. A is an accident =_df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.

By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in A. Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.

The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to another. You can't literally catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is an intimate one. But it is an intimacy shy of identity. A substance has accidnet; it cannot therefore be identical to any one of them or even the whole lot of them.

2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A exist and exist in the very same way. Suppose that S and A are the only two items that exist. Then of course there is a sense in which both items exist: each is something and not nothing. Both are there to be quantified over. We can say '(∃x)(x = S)' and '(∃x)(x = A)': 'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.'

3. Now the issue is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' a semantic term; 'mode' an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of being. They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.

4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither could exist without the other. But S can exist without A. Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their mode of being. One cannot make sense of inherence without distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of being.

5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of being entails the unintelligibility of  modes of being, the thin conception ought to be rejected.

But I have never met a more scintillating interlocutor!

Talking to oneself is often idle talk too.

Procedural Liberalism

The law ought to be both protective  of rights and directive of duties. This requirement rules out a purely procedural liberalism.

If You Understood, You'd Agree!

There is a privileging of one's position whereby every objection can only be proof of misunderstanding. I get this privileging impression from Eugen Fink. One example is on p. 47 of The Sixth Cartesian Meditation.

A Mystical Approach to the Incarnation

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

4. A somewhat less mystical but also subjective approach is suggested by an analogy that Josef Pieper offers in Belief and Faith, p. 89. I will explore his analogy in my own way. Suppose I sincerely and thoughtfully say 'I love you' to a person who is open and responsive to my address. Saying this, I do not report an objective fact which subsists independently of my verbal avowal and the beloved's reception of the avowal. There may be objective facts in the vicinity, but the I-Thou relation is not an objective fact antecedent to the address and the response. It is a personal relation of subjectivity to subjectivity. The reality of the I-Thou relation is brought about by the sincere verbal avowal and its sincere reception. The lover's speaking is a self-witnessing and "the witnessed subject matter is given reality solely by having been spoken in such a manner." (Pieper, p. 89) The speaking is a doing, a performance, a self-revelation that first establishes the love relationship.

5. The Incarnation is the primary instance of God's self-revelation to us. God reveals himself to us in the life and words of Jesus -- but only to those who are open to and accept his words and example. That God reveals himself (whether in Jesus' life and words or in the mystic's consciousness here and now) is not an objective fact independent of a free addressing and a free responding. It depends on a free communicating and a free receiving of a communication just as in the case of the lover avowing his love to the beloved. God speaks to man as lover to beloved. In the case of the Incarnation, God speaks to man through the man Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to man, which Word subsists only in the free reception of the divine communication. Thus it is not that a flesh and blood man is identical to a fleshless and bloodless person of the Trinity -- a putative identity that is hard to square with the discernibility of the identity relations' relata -- it is that God's Word to us is embodied in the life and teaching of a man when this life and teaching are apprehended and received as a divine communication. The Incarnation, as the prime instance of divine revelation, is doubly subjective in that subject speaks to subject, and that only in this speaking and hearing is the Incarnation realized.

6. Incarnation is not an objective fact or process by which one thing, the eternal Logos, becomes identical to a second thing, a certain man. Looked at in this objectivizing way, the logical difficulties become insuperable. Incarnation is perhaps better thought of as the prime instance of revelation, where revelation is, as Aquinas says at Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 154, "accomplished by means of a certain interior and intelligible light, elevating the mind to the perception of things that the understanding cannot reach by its natural light." Revelation, so conceived, is not an objective fact. Incarnation is a mode of revelation. Ergo, the Incarnation is not an objective fact.

7. This is admittedly somewhat murky. More needs to be said about the exact sense of 'subjective' and 'objective.'

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts.  The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question.  The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

4. A somewhat less mystical but also subjective approach is suggested by an analogy that Josef Pieper offers in Belief and Faith, p. 89. I will explore his analogy in my own way. Suppose I sincerely and thoughtfully say 'I love you' to a person who is open and responsive to my address. Saying this, I do not report an objective fact which subsists independently of my verbal avowal and the beloved's reception of the avowal. There may be objective facts in the vicinity, but the I-Thou relation is not an objective fact antecedent to the address and the response. It is a personal relation of subjectivity to subjectivity. The reality of the I-Thou relation is brought about by the sincere verbal avowal and its sincere reception. The lover's speaking is a self-witnessing and "the witnessed subject matter is given reality solely by having been spoken in such a manner." (Pieper, p. 89) The speaking is a doing, a performance, a self-revelation that first establishes the love relationship.

5. The Incarnation is the primary instance of God's self-revelation to us. God reveals himself to us in the life and words of Jesus -- but only to those who are open to and accept his words and example. That God reveals himself (whether in Jesus' life and words or in the mystic's consciousness here and now) is not an objective fact independent of a free addressing and a free responding. It depends on a free communicating and a free receiving of a communication just as in the case of the lover avowing his love to the beloved. God speaks to man as lover to beloved. In the case of the Incarnation, God speaks to man through the man Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to man, which Word subsists only in the free reception of the divine communication. Thus it is not that a flesh and blood man is identical to a fleshless and bloodless person of the Trinity -- a putative identity that is hard to square with the discernibility of the identity relations' relata -- it is that God's Word to us is embodied in the life and teaching of a man when this life and teaching are apprehended and received as a divine communication. The Incarnation, as the prime instance of divine revelation, is doubly subjective in that subject speaks to subject, and that only in this speaking and hearing is the Incarnation realized.

6. Incarnation is not an objective fact or process by which one thing, the eternal Logos, becomes identical to a second thing, a certain man. Looked at in this objectivizing way, the logical difficulties become insuperable. Incarnation is perhaps better thought of as the prime instance of revelation, where revelation is, as Aquinas says at Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 154, "accomplished by means of a certain interior and intelligible light, elevating the mind to the perception of things that the understanding cannot reach by its natural light." Revelation, so conceived, is not an objective fact. Incarnation is a mode of revelation. Ergo, the Incarnation is not an objective fact.

7. This is admittedly somewhat murky. More needs to be said about the exact sense of 'subjective' and 'objective.'

A Conversion Story

The historian Eugene D. Genovese started out Catholic, became a Communist, but then returned to the church of his upbringing. Here he tells the story of his wife's conversion. (HT: Karl White)  I have read parts of one book by Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Culture War (University of Missouri Press, 1995). I recommend it.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a prominent historian, feminist and author of works on the South and women’s history, was a convert to the Catholic faith. In 2003 she received from President Bush the National Humanities Medal, which recognized her as “defender of reason and servant of faith”. She was a member of the editorial board of Voices until her death on January 2, 2007, at age sixty-five. Her husband, Eugene Genovese, equally well-known professor of history at Emory University and author of books on the history of slavery in the South, recently published a personal reminiscence of his beloved wife, titled Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2009.) Chapter 3, “Nature and Grace”, details her conversion to Catholicism. Dr. Genovese has very graciously granted permission to reprint a slightly edited version of this chapter in Voices.

Filed under Conversions.

The Introvert Advantage

Social distancing?  I've been doing it all my life. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!  Happy solitude, the sole beatitude. How sweet it is, and made sweeter still by a little socializing.

Full lockdown?  I could easily take it, and put it to good use.  It provides an excellent excuse to avoid meaningless holiday socializing with its empty and idle talk. 

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing,  talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't  make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests. 

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk?  That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme.  It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy -- especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing,  talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't  make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests. 

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance.  Vouchsafed a hint of what might be a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating.  That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding.

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of  the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously.  And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical.  But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating -- that puzzles me.

So maybe some things human are foreign to me after all.

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance.  Vouchsafed a hint of what might be a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating.  That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding.

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of  the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously.  And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical.  But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating -- that puzzles me.

So maybe some things human are foreign to me after all.

Merry Christmas to All Readers, Old and New . . .

. . . and best wishes for the New Year.  This from a liberal reader:

I've read your blog daily for six years now because I want a rational conservative voice in my life to challenge my own (very opposite) beliefs. You've provided that in spades, and I'm grateful for it.

Would that all liberals were as good-natured and open to challenge. We might then be able to hope for a lessening of tensions in the coming year. But I am no pollyanna: 2021, I predict, will be a year of acrimony to rival the worst years of the '60s.

Some Posts and Ghosts of Christmas Past

'Merry Xmas'

Egyptian Muslims Serve as Human Shields at Coptic Christmas Mass

Socializing as Self-Denial

Merry Scroogemas!

Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Limits of Doxastic Voluntarism

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

Of Christograms and Political Correctness

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia, Asia Minor

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996:

Phaselis is a romantic tangle of Graeco-Roman ruins in a beautiful natural setting. I hiked back into the brush, got scratched up, but was rewarded by ruins and views out to the Mediterranean, and up to snow-capped mountains.

From Phaselis to the resort town of Kemer. I am sitting at the moment facing the sea drinking beer at an 'Italian' bistro. Table set on the lawn. Vegetation like Arizona: prickly pear cactus, rosemary in bloom, a palm or two, oleander, ice plant. Overcast and  a bit cool. The cactus pads have names carved into them: Hasan, Samer, Erkan.

Living life versus thinking and reflecting on it and its 'meaning.' Surely this is a bogus distinction? For a man to  live thoughtlessly is not to live, and to live the thinker's life is to live in a certain way.  So what is the valid content of the distinction?  Thought interferes with the immediacy of experience. Thought distances, and distance is distortion. But total immediacy would be blindness.

Thought without life is empty; life without thought is blind. The true life is a thinking life infused with experience broad and deep.  So travel and suffer and get scratched up by the brambles of experience, but take good notes! Press the grapes of experience for the wine of wisdom. Stomp them for their juice.

Breathe and feel and take a good snort of the sea breeze. Play the fool; better to love and have lost than never to have loved. Take your best shot, put your ass on the line, go deep, pay your dues, sing the blues.

Above all, take risks! Calculated, deep thought risks. You learned long ago in your Thoreauvian adolescence that a man sits as many risks as he runs.  Go to the brink, but with cautious steps. Take it to the limit, but know the limit. Dissolution into the Apeiron can wait for later. Travel and act but don't neglect to meet the mat of  meditation often to quell both action and thought.

Richter on Rationality

Hi, Bill. I love your Maverick blog.

I’m Reed Richter: a 71 yr old ex-academic, retired and living in Chapel Hill, NC. I was an undergrad philosophy major at UNC and did my PhD at UC Irvine. My early work was on decision theory. After teaching at UCI, UNC, and Duke, I moved to Europe. I taught a year in Salzburg, but dropped out of academics to run a family business. Nevertheless I continued to participate in academic philosophy and publish a few more papers. 

 

BV: Small world. I'm a year younger, quit the teaching racket and a tenured position thirty years ago to write philosophy and live an eremitic life in the Sonoran desert; from Southern California, applied for graduate work at U.C. Irvine for the bad reason that a quondam girlfriend had transferred there; was luckily rejected, studied in Salzburg, Boston, and Freiburg; taught at Boston College, University of Dayton, Case Western Reserve University, and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.  I work and publish in German philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. I know little about decision theory, and I don't call myself a political philosopher. So caveat lector.

 

My son is now a philosophy major, but he’s totally into anarchism, Hegel, and continental philosophy. I have little interest in that material and can’t help him much there.  But he’s writing an honors thesis on Wolff and autonomy and, helping him I ran across your excellent commentary. A couple of comments.

 

A comment on this point: [The following is from my November 2009 entry Notes on Anarchism II: Wolff on Authority]

 

According to Robert Paul Wolff, "Every man who possesses both free will and reason has an obligation to take responsibility for his actions . . . ." (In Defense of Anarchism, Harper 1970, 13) Here a question arises: Is it in virtue of my possession of free will and reason that I have the aforementioned obligation? If yes, would Wolff not be inferring an 'ought' from an 'is'? That I am free, and that I possess reason are non-normative facts about me. Taken together they entail that I am capable of taking responsibility for my actions. But how does it follow that I ought to take responsibility of them, that I am morally obliged to? Let's let this query simmer on the back burner for the time being.

 

Richter: It occurs to me that possessing reason implies being rational. And being rational is implicitly normative, implying oughts. So from the brute facts—I possess reason; I’m rational; in fact above all else, I want a cup of water; and there is a cup of perfectly potable water in front of me—it follows that therefore I ought to drink that cup of water. All things equal, rationality requires maximizing expected utility, generating oughts. Well, at the very least, if one doesn’t want to view rationality as implicitly normative, then that’s a great example of is implying ought.  But that’s a trivial point.

 

BV:  I don't follow the above. To possess reason is to possess the capacity to act rationally.  I take it that rationality in the means-end sense is at issue.  The talk of MEU makes that clear. Suppose an agent exercises his  capacity to reason in a given situation: he chooses means conducive to the end he desires to attain.  He wants a drink of water; potable water is in front of him, and so he drinks the water. How does normativity come into this? Well, if you want water, and potable water is available, then you ought to drink it. It would be rational in the means-ends sense to drink the water, and irrational in the same sense not to drink it.

 

But if an ought is thereby generated, it is a mere hypothetical, not  a categorical ought.  How do we get to the categorical moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions from  the capacity to reason in the means-end sense plus free will?

Moral Progress Report

Between my abandonment of my vices and their abandonment of me, progress has been made. The weaker the flesh, the stronger the spirit.

On Acquiring a Large Vocabulary

How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays.  The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

But what good is a large vocabulary in a society of semi-literates? Not only is it of little use, it can harm relations with regular guys social intercourse with whom can be useful.  Among the latter, one needs to pass oneself off as one of them. Use 'big words' and you will strike them as putting on airs, whether or not you are -- not that the semi-literates would understand this old phrase.

While alive to and appreciative of the good in people, one should not overlook the prevalence of the mean, the paltry, the envious, and the resentful. In this joyous season, and in every season.

Christmas Cards and Virtue Signalling

The cards are coming in. While I lack the power to peer into souls to discern motivations, I suspect that many who send pictures of themselves in masks are signalling their politically correct virtue. Or maybe it's a fashion statement they are making.

 

In a restaurant a while back I espied a couple of classy gals, mask-less, engaged in a heavy-duty tête-à-tête, leaning in close while eating and talking. Lunch over, they donned their designer masks and strolled out into the open air.

 

It makes sense to a leftist!

Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed

If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

Hugh Hefner's death (27 September 2017) reminds me of a true story from around 1981.  This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of mint-condition Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girlfriend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, stories, interviews, arguments for analysis in my logic classes, etc.  She of course did not believe that I had found them.

What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true.  Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.  Rational acceptability varies with time and place; truth does not.

"But what about rational acceptability at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?" 

Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too. 

_________________

*I am assuming that credibility and rational acceptability are the same property, where 'credibility' is defined as the property, not of being believable by someone, but of being rationally believable by someone. We should also distinguish between the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions.  My quondam girlfriend did not question my credibility but the credibility of what I asserted.  Finding what I said incredible, she concluded that I was lying on that occasion; an occasional lie, however, does not a liar make.  A liar is one who habitually lies just as a drunkard is one who habitually gets drunk. Same with philanderers and gluttons. (But what about murderers?  It sounds distinctly odd to say, "Mack is no murderer; he murdered only one man.")

If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

Hugh Hefner's death (27 September 2017) reminds me of a true story from around 1981.  This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of mint-condition Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girlfriend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, stories, interviews, arguments for analysis in my logic classes, etc.  She of course did not believe that I had found them.

What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true.  Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.  Rational acceptability varies with time and place; truth does not.

"But what about rational acceptability at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?" 

Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too. 

_________________

*I am assuming that credibility and rational acceptability are the same property, where 'credibility' is defined as the property, not of being believable by someone, but of being rationally believable by someone. We should also distinguish between the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions.  My quondam girlfriend did not question my credibility but the credibility of what I asserted.  Finding what I said incredible, she concluded that I was lying on that occasion; an occasional lie, however, does not a liar make.  A liar is one who habitually lies just as a drunkard is one who habitually gets drunk. Same with philanderers and gluttons. (But what about murderers?  It sounds distinctly odd to say, "Mack is no murderer; he murdered only one man.")

Free Speech and the First Amendment

The free speech clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the citizen's right to free expression from infringement by the government, not from infringement by any old entity.  My home is my castle; you have no First Amendment rights here, or at my cyber-castle, my weblog. So it is no violation of your First Amendment rights if I order you off of my property because of your offensive speech or block you from leaving stupid or vile comments at my website. It is impossible in principle for me to violate your First Amendment rights: I am not the government or an agent thereof.  And the same holds at your (private) place of work: you have no First Amendment rights there.

The Right to an Opinion

The right to express an opinion does not absolve one of the obligation to do one's level best to form correct opinions.  Note however that the legal (and moral) right to free speech guaranteed  to the American citizen by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution remains even if one shirks one's moral (but not legal) obligation to do one's best to form correct opinions.  

Walter Morris: Bourgeois Bohemian

Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks.  Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal.

I have already presented his thoughts on solitude.  That post also provided some information on the man and his writings. What follows is part of an entry from 8 February 1947. (Notebook 2: Black River, limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood NJ, 1949. It contains journal entries from 25 June 1942 to 3 August 1947.)

The Bohemian way of living has its points, but I am unable to appreciate Bohemia at full tilt. I have never had it that way and, except for a very youthful period, I have never much wanted it that way. I like cleanliness of body and living quarters, not a fanatical 100% cleanliness, not a sterile and perfect order, but such cleanliness as is compatible with normal comfortable living. I dislike messy emotional relationships and all kinds of exhibitionism. I dislike vomiting drunks, people with the monkey on their backs, flaunting homosexuality, financial dishonesty, irresponsibility, and puerile minds posing as advanced and liberated. This is the measure of my Respectability and middle-classness. Otherwise -- in being devoted to my own pattern, in quietly ignoring some White Cows instead of ostentatiously mounting a rebellion -- I don't mind at all being called Bohemian. Our family dish, as a matter of [f]act, could stand a dash of that kind of sauce. (p. 206)

I recall a quotation from Gustave Flaubert along similar lines: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks.  Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal.

I have already presented his thoughts on solitude.  That post also provided some information on the man and his writings. What follows is part of an entry from 8 February 1947. (Notebook 2: Black River, limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood NJ, 1949. It contains journal entries from 25 June 1942 to 3 August 1947.)

The Bohemian way of living has its points, but I am unable to appreciate Bohemia at full tilt. I have never had it that way and, except for a very youthful period, I have never much wanted it that way. I like cleanliness of body and living quarters, not a fanatical 100% cleanliness, not a sterile and perfect order, but such cleanliness as is compatible with normal comfortable living. I dislike messy emotional relationships and all kinds of exhibitionism. I dislike vomiting drunks, people with the monkey on their backs, flaunting homosexuality, financial dishonesty, irresponsibility, and puerile minds posing as advanced and liberated. This is the measure of my Respectability and middle-classness. Otherwise -- in being devoted to my own pattern, in quietly ignoring some White Cows instead of ostentatiously mounting a rebellion -- I don't mind at all being called Bohemian. Our family dish, as a matter of [f]act, could stand a dash of that kind of sauce. (p. 206)

I recall a quotation from Gustave Flaubert along similar lines: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

You Want Anti-Government? I'll Give You Anti-Government!

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Of course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain

This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.

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

I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.   I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.

How do I know that Bradley is right?  By doing a little phenomenology.  Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation.  At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree.  Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself -- pick your favorite phraseology.  The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not.  No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.'  At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.'  And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments?  Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.

ADDENDA (11 December 2020)

1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore  every mental state is object-directed.  I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:

Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.

Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.

2) I suggest above that some questions in philosophy can be answered phenomenologically, just by carefully attending to what is qiven, the itch sensation in our example, under bracketing of all questions about causes and effects. One compares the felt itch, precisely as felt, with a clearly object-directed conscious mental state such as desiring to be itch-free.  The act of desiring is obviously a desiring of something, namely, being itch-free.  The act (intentional experience) refers beyond itself to something not contained within it. One cannot just desire; necessarily, to desire is to desire something that is no part of the act of desiring. Having done the comparison, one just 'sees' the difference: it is not intrinsic to sensory qualia that they refer to anything beyond themselves in such a way as to present an object to a subject; but this is intrinsic to intentional states.  As Bradley puts it, sensory qualia,  "have no reference to anything else . . . ."  They have "no meaning whatsoever." That is, they do not mean, signify, intend, or refer.  Qualia have content alright, but not intentional or representative content. (Cf. Husserl's distinction between descriptive and intentional content, Log. Inv. II, 576 ff.)

3) Was I able to make my point above with phenomenology alone thereby avoiding dialectic or argument entirely?  No, I argued in a way that can be explicitly set forth as follows:

a) Some sensory qualia  are not object-directed.
b) All sensory qualia are mental states.
Therefore
c) Some mental states are not object-directed.

I had to reason to my conclusion, but I did so from a premise -- (a) -- the evidence for which is phenomenological.  To be precise, (a) itself is a conclusion of an inference from 'This itch sensation is not object-directed.'  Phenomenology needs dialectic and vice versa.

4) In the comment thread to the linked entry above, Harry Binswanger, the noted Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand ), gives essentially the following argument against that thesis that some mental states are non-intentional:

d) An itch is a bodily sensation.
e) The intentional objects of bodily sensations are states of one's body.
Therefore
f) An itch is an intentional mental state.

But in what sense is an itch a bodily sensation? Only in the sense that its cause is physical. In itself, the itch is not bodily or physical but mental.  It is a mental state with a physical cause. But one ought not confuse cause with intentional object, a mistake that Husserl exposes at Log. Inv. II, 572. Binswanger's argument commits this very mistake. Whatever the cause in the scalp or elsewhere of the itchy sensation, that cause is not presented by the sensory state.  The state has a cause but no intentional object.

This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.

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

I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.   I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.

How do I know that Bradley is right?  By doing a little phenomenology.  Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation.  At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree.  Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself -- pick your favorite phraseology.  The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not.  No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.'  At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.'  And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments?  Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.

ADDENDA (11 December 2020)

1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore  every mental state is object-directed.  I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:

Let's think about Searle's example of an itch, one 'in' the scalp, say. Not every mental item is a conscious item, but this itch I feel right now is a conscious mental item. Attending to this datum, a distinction suggests itself: there is the qualitative character of the itch, its sensory quale or raw feel, and there is its unpleasantness. Since I am attending to the itch, it is the intentional object of a series of acts of phenomenological reflection. At the same time of course, I am 'living' the itch, not just reflecting on it and analyzing it. The itch is an experience, an Erlebnis in something like Husserl's sense; it is something man erlebt, one lives through.

Now the question is whether the itch itself is directed to an object or 'takes an accusative.' Please don't confuse this question with the question whether the itch can itself be made the intentional object of acts of reflection. Of course it can, and I just did. But that is not to say that the itch has an intentional object. Attending carefully to the itch as it presents itself to me, I discern no object to which it points. Surely Searle is right: itches and the like are not about anything in the way a desire to drink a cold beer is about drinking a cold beer, or the seeing of a bobcat is about a bobcat and not a tire iron or nothing at all.

2) I suggest above that some questions in philosophy can be answered phenomenologically, just by carefully attending to what is qiven, the itch sensation in our example, under bracketing of all questions about causes and effects. One compares the felt itch, precisely as felt, with a clearly object-directed conscious mental state such as desiring to be itch-free.  The act of desiring is obviously a desiring of something, namely, being itch-free.  The act (intentional experience) refers beyond itself to something not contained within it. One cannot just desire; necessarily, to desire is to desire something that is no part of the act of desiring. Having done the comparison, one just 'sees' the difference: it is not intrinsic to sensory qualia that they refer to anything beyond themselves in such a way as to present an object to a subject; but this is intrinsic to intentional states.  As Bradley puts it, sensory qualia,  "have no reference to anything else . . . ."  They have "no meaning whatsoever." That is, they do not mean, signify, intend, or refer.  Qualia have content alright, but not intentional or representative content. (Cf. Husserl's distinction between descriptive and intentional content, Log. Inv. II, 576 ff.)

3) Was I able to make my point above with phenomenology alone thereby avoiding dialectic or argument entirely?  No, I argued in a way that can be explicitly set forth as follows:

a) Some sensory qualia  are not object-directed.
b) All sensory qualia are mental states.
Therefore
c) Some mental states are not object-directed.

I had to reason to my conclusion, but I did so from a premise -- (a) -- the evidence for which is phenomenological.  To be precise, (a) itself is a conclusion of an inference from 'This itch sensation is not object-directed.'  Phenomenology needs dialectic and vice versa.

4) In the comment thread to the linked entry above, Harry Binswanger, the noted Objectivist (follower of Ayn Rand ), gives essentially the following argument against that thesis that some mental states are non-intentional:

d) An itch is a bodily sensation.
e) The intentional objects of bodily sensations are states of one's body.
Therefore
f) An itch is an intentional mental state.

But in what sense is an itch a bodily sensation? Only in the sense that its cause is physical. In itself, the itch is not bodily or physical but mental.  It is a mental state with a physical cause. But one ought not confuse cause with intentional object, a mistake that Husserl exposes at Log. Inv. II, 572. Binswanger's argument commits this very mistake. Whatever the cause in the scalp or elsewhere of the itchy sensation, that cause is not presented by the sensory state.  The state has a cause but no intentional object.

Inter faeces et urinam nascimur

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? We criticize and condemn one another hurling epithets and anathemas. How did we get to be so harsh and judgmental?

In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? We criticize and condemn one another hurling epithets and anathemas. How did we get to be so harsh and judgmental?

In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

"The sky is the daily bread of the eyes," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson magnificently and truly. And this from a man who lived in New England where there is no sky to speak of. What would he have written had he been able to bathe his thoughts in the lambent light of the desert Southwest?

Compensations of Old Age

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

 

What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

You now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

     Brief light's made briefer
     'Neath the leaden vault of care
     Better to accept the sinecure
     Of untroubled Being-there.

You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

The Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

 

What is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

Hospitals and Torture Chambers

We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.  We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it excel in the theory and practice of hell, to borrow a title from Eugen Kogon's unforgettable book.

Limited government and checks and balances across the board help keep power dispersed, the power that goes to the head and makes of the half-way decent moral monsters. Prospects for limited government, however, are themselves  limited in a high-tech surveillance society in which soft totalitarianism can be expected to give way to the good old-fashioned hard variety.

The Source of the Normativity of the Ought-to-Be

I was working on this four years ago. It might never get finished. So here it is.

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Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?  If so, what is the source of their normativity?  I am led to pose this question by my current study of Philippa Foot's meta-ethical treatise, Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).  If I understand her scheme, all normativity has its source in life, in living things, which would imply that in a lifeless world there are no states of affairs that ought to be or ought not to be.   

The Ought-to-Do and the Ought-to-Be

Let's begin by noting that if I ought to do X (pay my debts, feed my kids, honor my commitments, keep my hands off my neighbor's wife, etc.) then my doing X ought to be. For example, given that I ought to pay my debts, then my paying a certain debt on a certain date is a state of affairs that ought to be, ought to exist, ought to obtain. So it is not as if the ought-to-do and the ought-to-be form disjoint classes. For every act X that an agent A ought to do, there is a state of affairs, A's doing X, that ought to be, and a state of affairs, A's failing to do X, that ought not be. The ought-to-do, therefore, is a  special case of the  ought-to-be.

My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts-to-be? 

It may not be possible to prove definitively that there are non-agential oughts, but their postulation is in line with ordinary ways of thinking and talking and there seem to be no decisive arguments against their postulation.

Consider a possible world W in which there are no moral agents, but there are sentient beings who are in a constant state of pain from which they cannot free themselves. It seems both meaningful and reasonable to say that W ought not exist, that its nonexistence is an axiological requirement. And this quite apart from the power of any agent to actualize or prevent such a world. One simply intuits the disvalue of such a world. One might express the intuition in the words, ‘Such a world ought not be.’ Non-agential oughts are axiologically required, while non-agential oughts-not are axiologically prohibited.

Or consider our world, the actual world, with its nature red in tooth and claw, a world in which life lives at the expense of life. It is filled with vast quantities of natural and moral evil. Assume that naturalism is true, that there is no God or afterlife, and that the evils of this world will forever go unredeemed. If may be false, but it is meaningful to say that it would be better if this world did not exist, that it ought never to have existed. The metaphysical pessimist may be wrong, but he is not talking nonsense when he exclaims, "Better some other world or even nothing at all rather than this sorry state of things!" On the other hand, there are those who are struck by the sheer existence of things and are moved to exclaim, "It is good that there is something rather than nothing!" Such optimists are not talking nonsense when they say that things are as they ought to be even in the absence of any agent or agents who are responsible for things being as they are.

The sense of these exclamations does not seem to depend on the existence of moral agents with power sufficient to bring about or prevent the mentioned states of affairs. That something rather than nothing exists could be good even if it is no one's duty to bring it about and no one's responsibility if it obtains. That a world of uncompensated and unalleviated misery is bad does not depend on some free agent's moral failure. 

Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'?

Perhaps the following examples are clearer.  Imagine a pessimist who makes the following two-fold declaration: "In a possible world in which there are no sentient beings, things are as they ought to be, and in the actual world in which there are sentient beings, things are not as they ought to be."  He might also say, "A lifeless world is better than one containing living things."  The pessimist Schopenhauer declares that "Human life must be some sort of mistake."  That implies that a world without human beings is better than one with them.

On the optimist side, there are those who exclaim that it is good to be alive, that living as such is a good thing, or even that existence as such, whether living or nonliving, is good.  (For Thomas Aquinas, 'a being' and 'a good thing' are necessarily equivalent or 'convertible' terms: ens et bonum convertuntur.)

Suppose it it good that things exist. It would seem to follow  that the existence of thing is as it ought to be.  What makes this state of affairs good or such that it ought to be.  That things exist is a fact.  That things ought exist goes beyond the fact.

Facebook

That's where the MavPhil political punch-back is these days until such time as I am de-platformed for my quotidian violation of 'community standards.'

I will consider your 'friend' request if I can see from your page that you have the Right stuff.

Conspiracy Theories?

The Language Nazi doesn't much cotton to the loose lingo that leftists love.

Hillary spoke of a "vast right wing conspiracy" directed against her husband.  Maybe that's where the linguistic mischief started. How can a conspiracy be vast and composed of half the population?

A conspiracy is a clandestine agreement among a small group of people to achieve a nefarious end, typically by means of treason or treachery. The members of a conspiracy are called conspirators. They meet in secret and in small numbers.   Hillary's abuse of English is plain: conservatives do not form a secret organization; they are not few in number; and their opposition to Bill Clinton and his policies was not nefarious, treasonous, or treacherous. 

A conspiracy theory alleges that a conspiracy is under way or has occurred to bring about some event. An example is the theory that 9/11 was an 'inside job.' Some conspiracy theories  are true, and some false; some are well-supported by evidence, others are not.  None of the 9/11 conspiracy theories are well- supported in my opinion. But that in not the present point. The present point is that it is a mistake to assume that every conspiracy theory is false or baseless.

It is also a mistake to refer to any theory or any  bit of groundless speculation as a conspiracy theory.   Not every theory is a conspiracy theory.  A conspiracy theory alleges a conspiracy where 'conspiracy' is  defined as above.

Finally, it is a mistake to oppose theories to facts, as if no theory can be true. 

Kant on Capital Punishment

Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):

[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members--as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world--the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.

Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')

Here is an interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.

Memo to self: bone up on this!  See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. 

Identity Politics as a Deformation of Christianity

This First Things article by Joshua Mitchell is well worth reading. Excerpts:

Marxism could never take hold in America because Americans believed in private property. Because property is the cornerstone of our republic, and cannot be removed, Marxism failed. Postmodernism could never really take hold in America because Americans believe that history has a meaning—and even that America has a special place in history. The reason identity politics has taken hold is because Americans suffer deep and abiding guilt, from two main sources: Christianity itself, and the legacy of slavery in this country. What the left could not do through Marxism or postmodernism, it now is doing through identity politics—namely, undermining every institution and every venerable historical memory in America.

[. . .]

Donald Trump was someone who, literally, could not exist in the world identity politics constructs. That is why the left needed “Russian collusion” to explain his election in 2016. Russian collusion was the deus ex machina that made it possible for Trump to infiltrate their world. The left had to destroy Trump if identity politics was to continue its reign of perverted righteousness. Many of us saw that clearly. That is why we voted for him. We wanted to contribute to the end of its reign.

[. . .]

Identity politics is a profound deformation of Christianity, a ghastly and crippled derivative that seeks the redemption of the world through the scapegoating of one group by another. For the moment, it has in its sights heterosexual white males. It will not stop there. White women will be next; followed, I suggest, by “heteronormative” black men. Like all revolutionary movements, it will eventually come for its early proponents, in a final reign of terror.

How does the current terror end? The identity politics reign of righteousness will end when we return to the orthodox Christian understanding that only the divine scapegoat, Christ, can take away the sins of the world. That insight once transformed the world. It can do so again.

There is a competing view of how we got into the present identity-political mess, and what the solution is. On this alternative Right view, to which I do not subscribe, it is not a deformation of Christianity that lead us to the present pass, but Christianity itself. I now hand off to Matthew Rose:

There is no better introduction to alt-right theory than his [Alain de Benoist's] 1981 work On Being a Pagan. Its tone is serene, but its message is militant. Benoist argues that the West must choose between two warring visions of human life: biblical monotheism and paganism. Benoist is a modern-day Celsus. Like his second-century predecessor, he writes to reawaken Europeans to their ancient faith. Paganism’s central claim is simple: that the world is holy and eternal. “Far from desacralizing the world,” Benoist tells us, paganism “sacralizes it in the literal sense of the word, since it regards the world as sacred.” Paganism is also a humanism. It recognizes man, the highest expression of nature, as the sole measure of the divine. God does not therefore create men; men make gods, which “exist” as ideal models that their creators strive to equal. “Man shares in the divine every time he surpasses himself,” Benoist writes, “every time he attains the boundaries of his best and strongest aspects.”

Benoist’s case against Christianity is that it forbids the expression of this “Faustian” vitality. It does so by placing the ultimate source of truth outside of humanity, in an otherworldly realm to which we must be subservient. In his Church Dogmatics, Karl Barth notoriously described Christian revelation as the “abolition” of natural religion. Benoist is a Barthian, if selectively. He accuses Christianity of crippling our most noble impulses. Christianity makes us strangers in our own skin, conning us into distrusting our strongest intuitions. We naturally respect beauty, health, and power, Benoist observes, but Christianity teaches us to revere the deformed, sick, and weak instead. “Paganism does not reproach Christianity for defending the weak,” he explains. “It reproaches [Christianity] for exalting them in their weakness and viewing it as a sign of their election and their title to glory.”

Benoist’s theology is in the service of a political warning, and it is this, more than his Nietzschean posturing, that attracts the alt-right. Christianity is unable to protect European peoples and their cultures. Under Christianity, the West lives under a kind of double imprisonment. It exists under the power of a foreign religion and an alien deity. Christianity is not our religion. It thereby foments “nihilism.” The allegation is explosive. Benoist means that Christianity renders Western culture morally lethargic and culturally defenseless. Most perniciously, its universalism poisons our attachments to particular loyalties and ties. “If all men are brothers,” Benoist claims, “then no one can truly be a brother.” Politics depends on the recognition of both outsiders and enemies, yet the Christian Church sees all people as potential members, indeed potential saints.

And here we reach Benoist’s remarkable conclusion. The decadent West has never been more Christian. Christianity imparted to our culture an ethics that has mutated into what the alt-right calls “pathological altruism.” Its self-distrust, concern for victims, and fear of excluding outsiders—such values swindle Western peoples out of a preferential love for their own. Benoist’s ideas have reached the margins of American conservatism, perhaps no more noticeably than in the writings of the late Sam Francis. A former contributor to leading conservative publications, his thinking took a late turn toward what we would now call the alt-right. “Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it,” he announced in an influential 2001 article. Francis’s essay was a lament as much as a protest (he was received into the Church on his deathbed), but his work is receiving a new hearing.

 

Divine Simplicity and Incarnation

This from a reader:

Jordan Daniel Wood . . . affirms that God does not have possibilities within himself to actualize and thus the Incarnation—God becoming a human being—must in some way [be] actual prior to its historical event; God does not become a human being but in some way already is a human being . . . .

Very interesting.

The simple God is actus purus. Purely actual, he embodies no unrealized powers or unactualized potentialities.  He is, eternally, all that he can be.  We think of the Incarnation, however, as a contingent event.  In the patois of 'possible worlds':  The triune God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds, but the Second Person of the Trinity becomes human in only some of them. The following argument suggests itself:

1) The Word became flesh and dwellt among us.

2) The Word's becoming flesh is a contingent event.

3) There is no contingency and no becoming in any of the three divine persons: the Word cannot become flesh, that is, assume human nature.

Therefore

4) The Word (Logos, Second Person) had a divine and human nature from all eternity.

How could a classical Christian trinitarian theist rebut this argument? (Part of being a classical Christian theist is accepting the divine simplicity.)