Maverick Philosopher

'Equity'

'Equity' as currently used refers to equality of outcome. It could be achieved in a footrace by attaching weights to runners so as to insure that they all cross the finish line at the same time. One would thereby purchase the benefit of envy-free equality of result at the cost of excellence and high achievement. Would it be worth it?

 

And then there is the question of who would attach the weights and how they would go about doing so. Would they not have to be UNEQUAL in power and authority to those equalized to bring about the latter's equality of result?

 

I suspect that those who support 'equity' imagine themselves as among the equalizers and not the equalized, just as those who are for central planning think of themselves as among the central PLANNERS and not the centrally PLANNED.

 

The means to the achievement of 'equity' are far worse than 'equity' is good. 

Both Weak and Strong

Reason is weak in the discernment of reasons, strong in the crafting of rationalizations. But the strength of rationalizing reason  derives not from reason but from passion and her subornation of reason.

Can One Change One's Race?

No more than one can change one's species, with apologies to the late David Avner, the Cat Man.  Substack latest.

The Near Occasion of Doubt

Acutely aware of our moral weakness, the wise among us do not continually test our virtue: we  avoid the near occasion of vice. Tests will come without our seeking them. But the wise among us  are also keenly aware of our intellectual weakness.  Reason in us we know to be infirm, prone to error, and easily swayed by our passions and especially the suggestions of others. It does not follow what we should refrain from testing our beliefs or entertaining doubts about them.   Doubt is the engine of inquiry. What follows is only that the testing and the entertainment should be kept within limits.

So while we ought to avoid the near occasion of vice, we ought merely to beware of the near occasion of doubt.

Purgation of Memory and Purgatory of Memory

The manuals of mysticism enjoin the purgation of memory. But not all such purgation is good. Vexing memories of folly and excess, of time-wastage and wrong-doing, are an earthly purgatory which the purgation of memory, if it could be achieved, would eliminate.

Prosecute the purgation of memory but not to the detriment of memory's purgatory.

Technical Philosophy, Compartmentalization, and Worldview

For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview.  Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism.  But you would never know it from his technical work which has no direct relevance to the Big Questions. (Possible qualification: the business about the necessity of identity discussed in Naming and Necessity allows for a Cartesian-style argument for mind-body dualism.  See here.)

So I would characterize Kripke as a compartmentalizer.  (My use of this term does not have a pejorative connotation.)   His work in philosophy occupies one of his mental compartments while his religious convictions and practices occupy another with little or no influence of the one on the other.  It is not that his technical work is inconsistent with his religious worldview; my point is that the two are largely irrelevant to each other.  No doubt some of Kripke's examples 'betray' his religious upbringing -- e.g., the fascinating bit about Moloch as a misvocalization of the Hebrew 'melech' in Reference and Existence, p. 70 ff. et passim --  but his technical work, or at least his published technical work, is not a means to either the articulation or the rational justification of his worldview.

You may appreciate my point if you compare Kripke with Alvin Plantinga.  He too is a religious man and a theist, an anti-naturalist, and an anti-materialist.  But all of Plantinga's books that I am aware of contribute directly to the articulation and defense of his theistic worldview.  He is out to explain and justify theistic belief and turn aside such objections to it as the ever-popular arguments from evil.  This is clear from the titles of God and Other Minds, God, Freedom, and Evil, Does God Have a Nature.  But it is also clear from Nature of Necessity the penultimate chapter of which treats of God, evil, and freedom, and the ultimate chapter of which is about God and necessity.  The same is true of  his two volumes on warrant one of which includes a critique of naturalism, not to mention his last book, Where the Conflict Really Lies. 

The late David M. Armstrong is an interesting case.  While he respects religion and is not a militant naturalist or atheist, his technical work articulates and defends his thoroughly naturalist worldview, where naturalism is the thesis that all that exists is the space-time world and its contents.  The naturalist worldview comes first for Armstrong, both temporally and logically, and sets the agenda for the technical investigations of particulars, universals, states of affairs, classes, numbers, causation, laws of nature, dispositions, modality, mind, and so on.  Broadly characterized, Armstrong's agenda is to show how everything, including what appear to be 'abstract objects,' can be accounted for naturalistically using only those resources supplied by the natural world, without recourse to anything non-natural or supernatural.  

For Plantinga, by contrast, it is his theistic worldview that comes first both temporally and logically and sets the agenda for his technical work.

And then there is an acquaintance of mine, a philosopher, who attends Greek Orthodox services on Sunday but during working hours is something close to a logical positivist!

This suggests a three-fold classification.  There are philosophers whose

A. Technical work is consistent with but does not support their worldview;

B. Technical work  is consistent with and does support their worldview;

C. Technical work is inconsistent with and hence does not support their worldview.

I will assume that (C) is an unacceptable form of compartmentalization, and that one should aim to integrate one's beliefs. But I won't comment further on (C) here.  Brevity is the soul of blog.  This leaves (A) and (B).

Now it has always seemed  obvious to me that (B) is to be preferred over (A).  Do I have an argument?  But first I should try to make my thesis more precise.  To that end, a few more distinctions and observations.

Philosophy-as-inquiry versus philosophy-as-worldview

I distinguish philosophy-as-inquiry from philosophy-as-worldview. These are two ideal types of approach to the deepest problems that vex the thoughtful.  Roughly, a worldview is a more or less comprehensive system of more or less precisely articulated action-guiding beliefs and values. Despite the word, a worldview is more than a view; it is a guide to life. It sets goals and prescribes and proscribes courses of action. It provides an overarching context of meaning in which individual actions assume a meaning that transcends their momentary meaning. It is practical rather than merely theoretical.  A worldview is something one lives by, and sometimes dies for. (Transfinite cardinal arithmetic is not a worldview: it has no practical implications. One cannot 'take it to the streets.')

Marxism is a worldview. Its theoretical claims are in the service of action, and are not for the sake of mere understanding.  In the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx tells us us that "The philosophers have variously interpreted he world; the point, however, is to change it." Marxism is worldview philosophy, not philosophy as dispassionate inquiry, and the 11th Thesis would make a fine motto for many, but not all, worldview philosophers. 

The various "therapies of desire" (I allude to the title of a book by M. Nussbaum) are also worldview philosophies: Buddhism, Stoicism, Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and arguably also Christianity. Like Marxism, these therapeutic worldviews advocate  change, but at the personal level: metanoia, ataraxia, nibbana. Their aim is practical: to save the individual from an unsaisfactory predicament, to deliver him from evil, ignorance, sin, suffering.  Such theory as these systems contain is for the sake of the practical end.

Aristotle is perhaps the best example of a philosopher animated by the ideal of philosophy as dispassionate inquiry, much more so than his teacher Plato who combined dispassionate inquiry with soteriology at the level of the individual and political reform at the level of society.

The 'knowledge' embodied in a worldview is not knowledge for its own sake. Obviously, there are many philosophies in this worldview sense, and therefore no such thing as philosophy in this sense.  There is the 'philosophy' of your crazy uncle who has an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the philosophy of Kant, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.  Observe also that a philosophy in the sense of a worldview need not be arrived at by rational inquiry, although it may well be supported and legitimated by rational inquiry.  The worldview of Aquinas is is based on the Judeo-Christian revelation, first and foremost. The most important truths, the salvific truths, are not accessible to man's reason in its current, fallen state.  They are supra-rational, not irrational, and 'knowable' by us only by revelation which must be accepted by faith.  The truths of revelation are cognitiones fidei.  (That there is knowledge by faith sticks in the craw of  post-Cartesians, but it made sense to the medievals.) Reason has it rightful role, however, but it is ancillary: philosophia ancilla theologiae.  

Philosophy-as-inquiry, by contrast is rational inquiry by definition. 

Philosophy as strict science

Edmund Husserl, following in the footsteps of Descartes and Kant,  is perhaps the main modern example of someone who aimed to put philosophy on the sure path of science.  He too wanted a worldview, but believed that a worldview worth wanting had to be one that could be established by a strictly scientific manner. He was willing to suspend his worldview needs until such time as he could achieve a rationally grounded worldview.  He was so willing because he believed that intellectual integrity demanded it.  

Note too that philosophy-as-inquiry need not result in a worldview.  It can end aporetically, at an impasse, the way a number of the Platonic dialogs do, in Socratic nescience, even if the intention was to arrive at a worldview.  And sometimes even the intention is lacking: there are philosophers who are content to devote their professional hours to  some such narrow topic as counterfactual conditionals  or epistemic closure principles, or anaphora.  They are simply fascinated by narrowly-defined problems regardless of their wider theoretical relevance, let alone any practical upshot. They can be said to engage in hyperspecialization.  There are also those less extreme specialists who are concerned with ethics or epistemology but give no thought to the metaphysical presuppositions of either.

We should also distinguish between engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to arrive at a worldview versus engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to shore up or defend a worldview that one antecedently accepts.  This is the difference between one who seeks the truth by philosophical means, a truth he does not possess, and one who possesses or thinks he possesses the truth or most of the truth and employs philosophical means to the end of defending and securing and promoting the truth that he already has and has received from some extraphilosophical source such as revelation or religious/mystical experience.  The latter could be called philosophy-as-inquiry in the service of apologetics, 'apologetics' broadly construed. 

It should now be evident that (B) conflates two ideas that need to be split apart.  There are philosophers whose

B1.  Technical work is consistent with and supports an antecedently held worldview whose source is extraphilosophical and whose source is not philosophy-as-inquiry;

B2.  Technical work is consistent with and supports a worldview the source of which is philosophy-as-inquiry.

My main thesis is that (B2) is superior to (A), but I also incline to the view that (B1) is  superior to (A).  But for now I set aside (B1).

But why is (B2) superior to (A)?   I am not saying that there is anything wrong with satisfying  a purely theoretical interest either by (i) hyper-specializing and concentrating on one or a few narrow topics, or (ii) specializing as in the case of Kripke by working on a fairly wide range of topics.  What I want to say is that there is something better than either of (i) or (ii).

My thesis:  Since philosophy is a search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, one is not true to the spirit of philosophy in the full and normative sense of the word if one is content to theorize about minutiae that in the end have no 'existential' relevance where 'existential' is to be taken in the sense of Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, et. al, and their distinguished predecessors, Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, et al.  One's own existence, fate, moral responsibility, and existential meaning are surely part of the ultimate matters; so to abstract from these matters  by pursuing a purely theoretical interest is, if not logically absurd, then existentially absurd.  In philosophy one cannot leave oneself out and be objective in the way the sciences must leave out the subject and  be objective.  Philosophy must concern itself with the whole of reality, and therefore not merely with the world as it is in itself. It must also concern itself with the world as it is in itself for us, in its involvement with subjectivity. Subjectivity, however, is in every case my individual subjectivity.  In this way, one's personal Existenz comes into the picture.

Of course I am not a narrow existentialist who rejects technical philosophy.

What I am maintaining is that one ought not compartmentalize:  one's technical work ought to subserve a higher end, the articulation and defense of a comprehensive view of things.  As Wilfrid Sellars says, "It is . . . the 'eye on the whole' which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise." (Science, Perception, and Reality, 3)  "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." (SPR 1)  But I am saying more than this, and words like 'view' and 'worldview' don't quite convey it since philosophy as I 'view' it ought not be purely theoretical.  Somehow, one's theory and one's Existenz need to achieve unity.

I still haven't made my thesis all that clear, but it is perhaps clear enough. 

One argument for my thesis is that specialization gets us nowhere.  It is notorious that philosophers have not convinced one another  and that progress in philosophy has not occurred.  And the best and brightest have been at it for going on three thousand years.  That progress will occur in future is therefore the shakiest of inductions.   Given that shakiness, it is existentially if not logically absurd to lose oneself in, say, the technical labyrinth of the philosophy of language, as fascinating as it is.  Who on his deathbed will care whether reference is routed through sense or is direct? The following may help clarify my meaning.

 Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:

My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.

The suggestion is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and perhaps just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?

If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.

Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145)

As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly bagatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?

Am I a Body or Do I Have a Body?

In his last book, Mortality, the late Christopher Hitchens writes, "I don't have a body, I am a body." (86) He goes on to observe that he has "consciously and regularly acted as if this was  not true."  It is a curious fact that mortalists are among the worst abusers of the fleshly vehicle.  But that is not my theme.

Is a person just his body?  The meditation is best conducted in the first person: Am I just my body?  Am I identical to my body?  Am I numerically one and the same with my body, where body includes brain?  Am I such that, whatever is true of my body is true of me, and vice versa? Let's start with some 'Moorean facts,' some undeniable platitudes.

1. I am not now identical to a dead body, a corpse.  No doubt there is a dead body in my future, one with my name on it.  But that lifeless object won't be me.  I will never become a corpse.  I will never be buried or cremated.  Indeed, I cannot be buried or cremated. I am not now, never have been, and never will be identical to a dead body.  For when the corpse with my name on it  comes to exist, I will have ceased to exist; and when I cease to exist, it will have come to exist.  

'My' corpse is the corpse that will come into existence when I cease to exist, or, if mortalism is false, when I am separated from my body.  Strictly speaking, no corpse is my corpse: hence the scare quotes around 'my' in the preceding sentence.  But I can speak strictly of my body: my body is the body that is either identical  to me, or is related to me in some 'looser' way. 

2. I am obviously not identical to a dead body.  And I have just argued that I will never become identical to a dead body.  Am I  then identical to a  living body?  Not if the following syllogism is sound: My living body will become a dead body;  I will never become a dead body; therefore, I am not identical to a living body. 

This argument assumes that if x = y, then whatever is true of x is true of y, and vice versa.  Little is self-evident, but surely this principle, known in the trade as the Indiscernibility of Identicals, is self-evident.  There is something true of my living body now that is not true of me now, namely, 'will become a dead body.'  Therefore, I am not now identical to a living body.  And since the only living body I could be identical to if I were identical to a living body would be my living body, I am not identical to my living body.  Of course, I have a living body in some  sense of 'have'; the point is that I am not identical to my living body.

Putting (1) and (2) together: I am neither identical to a dead body nor to a living body.  Contra Hitchens, I am not a body. 

3. Consider now the following rather more plausible identity claim:  I am (identically) a self-conscious animal.  Let's unpack this.  I am a living human animal that says 'I' and means it; I am a thinker of I-thoughts, an example of which is the thought *I am just a self-conscious animal.*  I am self-aware: aware of myself as an object, both as a physical object, a body, through the five outer senses, and their instrumental extensions, and as a psychological object, a mind, through inner sense or introspection.  I examine my conscience. I evaluate morally my actions and my failures to act. I study my emotions, how they arise, how they subside, which of them are dominant, and so on. Both my body and my mind are objects for me as subject.  As such a self-aware animal, I am aware of being different from my body.  In some sense I must be different from my body (and from my mind) if  they are to be my objects, where 'my objects' means 'objects for me as subject.'  Why?

Well,  is it not self-evident that if x is aware of y, then x cannot be strictly identical to y? If x = y, then there is no 'distance' between subject and object. There is no 'distance' such as would allow for the thing to become an object for a subject.  In a rock, no duality of subject-object can arise: no rock is self-aware.  In a man this duality does arise.  No rock objectifies itself, and by the same token, no part of a rock is the subject for which the rest of the rock is an actual or potential object.  But I objectify myself, both my body and my psyche. I ascertain objective facts about myself: weight, pulse rate, blood pressure; I note that  consumption of media dreck can induce a pointless anger; I observe that I feel an aversion to unpunctual people, etc.  Who is the subject for whom I am the object? Who is the knower of the known self? I am both subject and object.  And yet this identity harbors a curious duality.

What is the nature of this duality? What is the nature of the 'distance' within me that makes possible my becoming an object to myself? It is obviously not a spatial or temporal distance.  We may call it a transcendental difference since it is a necessary condition of the possibility of self-objectification. I cannot be an object for myself, as I plainly am, without this transcendental difference. 

At this point one will be tempted to reify one or both of the terms of the duality and make of the transcendental duality/difference an ontological duality/difference. Am I a composiite of two substances, a thinking substance (res cogitans) and an extended substance (res extensa)? That way Cartesian substance dualism.  I won't now say anything further about the ontologization of the transcendental difference.  I will however insist that there is at least a transcendental difference within me between subject and object. 

We can sum that up by saying that I am transcendentally different from the psychophysical complex that bears the name 'BV.' If so, I am not identical to the psychophysical complex that bears my name and wears my clothes.

Now if you were paying attention you noticed that I made an inferential move the validity of which demands scrutiny.  I moved from

a) I am aware of being different from my body

to

b) I am different from my body.

A materialist is bound to resist this inference.  He will ask how we know that the awareness mentioned in (a) is veridical.  Only if it is, is the inference sound.  He will suggest that it is possible that I have an non-veridical, an illusory, awareness of being different from my body.  I can't credit that suggestion, however.  It cannot be an illusion that I am different from anything I take as object of awareness including any body parts such my brain or any part of my brain.  That is a primary and indubitable givenness. Awareness is by its very nature awareness of something: it implies a difference between that which is aware, the subject of awareness, and the object of awareness.  Without that difference there could be no awareness of anything.  If the self-aware subject were identical to that object which  is its animal body, then the subject would not be aware of the body. 

4.  Will you say that the body is aware of itself? Then I will ask you which part of the body is the subject of awareness.  Is it the brain, or a proper part of the brain?  When I am aware of my weight or the cut on my arm, is it the brain or some proper part of the brain that is aware of these things?  This makes no sense.  My brain is no more the subject of awareness than my eye glasses are.  My glasses don't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the glasses.  Similarly, my brain doesn't see the wound; I see the wound by the instrumentality of the brain (and the visual cortex, and the optic nerves, and the glasses, etc.)  The fact that my visual awareness is causally dependent on my having a functioning brain does not show that my brain or any part of it is the subject of awareness.  I am not identical to my brain or to any bodily thing.

5. Who or what asks the question:  Am I identical to this body here?  Does the body ask this question?  Some proper part of the body such as the brain?  Some proper part of this proper part?  How could anything physical ask a question?

"Look, there are are certain physical objects that ask themselves whether they are identical to the physical objects they are, and entertain the (illusory) thought that they are not identical to the physical objects they are."

This little materialist speech is absurd by my lights since no physical object -- as we are given to understand 'physical object' by physics -- could do such a thing.   If you insist that some physical objects can, then you have inflated 'physical' so that it no longer contrasts with 'mental.' 

So with all due respect to the late Mr. Hitchens, brilliant talker about ideas whose depth he never plumbed, I think there are very good reasons to deny that one is identically one's body.

Further questions:  If I am not identical to any physical thing, can it be inferred that I am identical to some spiritual thing?  If I am not identical to my body or any part thereof, do I then have a body, and what exactly does that mean? 

"I ain't got no bod . . . y."

Rawls and the Rejection of Truth

An important essay by Michael Pakaluk

On the Role of Concupiscence in the Decline of the Catholic Church

Substack latest.

Of Friendship and Expiry

Some friendships have expiration dates, typically in very fine print illegible to the eager eyes of the newly enamored.

'Gun Buy Back'

An obfuscatory Orwellianism! Well, what did you expect from the mendacious mouths of Democrat subversives? Substack latest.

The Ought-to-Do, the Ought-to-Be, and the Aporetics of "Be Ye Perfect"

Could one be under a moral obligation to perfect oneself?  Substack latest.

On the Academentia Front: You Have to Read This

Bari Weiss:

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

He Who Writes, Remains . . .

. . . but in the vast majority of cases, merely on the shelves, unread and forgotten. Well, oblivion is better than nonexistence.

I now hand over to Samuel Johnson.

Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong?

A Substack meditation inspired by Matthew 5.27-28

Is Everything in the Bible Literally True?

Substack latest.

On Looking Up Words

Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence is a man after my own mold:

When I encounter a new word, lengthy or not, I like to know what it means and where it comes from. I won’t necessarily use it, in writing or speech, but I’ve grown accustomed to plugging holes in my knowledge of the world. Plain speaking is essential but so, on the right occasions, are eloquence and verbal lushness. Part of linguistic effectiveness is sensitivity to context and audience. When it’s not mere showing off, deployment of obscure words adds a pleasurable texture to poetry and prose – one of many reasons we read Shakespeare and Sir Thomas Browne. A gifted writer commands styles and is not limited to one. In addition, what’s obscure or pretentious to you may be familiar and homely to me.

My sentiments exactly.

The blogosphere is vast, and she is deep. If the ordinary modes of human interaction have left you high and dry  in your quest for the like-minded, a little fishing in her vasty deeps should satisfy your needs.

The Joe Gould Story

Jack Kerouac, ON THE ROAD:

[...]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

Substack latest: Even Misfits Find Their 'Fit'

Wer Schreibt, der Bleibt!

"He who writes, remains."

But the goal cannot be to 'remain' but to express the truth .

Being With

It is sometimes good to be with others, but never if it demands loss of self.

The Philosopher Prays for Light, not Loot

We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.

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

For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."

On Transcending Tribalism: A Critique of Jonathan Haidt

My latest at Substack.

Jonathan Haidt, who is well worth reading, naively thinks that closer proximity and more interaction, more 'conversations,' will bring us together. A nice, heart-warming sentiment, that; one with no basis in reality, however.

Why Do I Write about Political Topics?

People are increasingly 'siloed into' their positions. I don't write to change the minds of our political enemies. Why do I write, then?

First, to arrive at the truth as best I can for my own edification and enjoyment. People like me like to figure things out and understand things. On our good days we theoreticians approach the blissful self-sufficiency of Aristotle's NOESIS NOESEOS.

Second, to provide argumentative ammo to those on our side. The choir DOES need to be preached to, so as to be fortified, and provided with tools for ideological combat.

Third, to persuade fence-sitters, people with open minds who can be nudged one way or the other.

Fourth, to let our enemies know that they will be opposed, and their lies exposed. Enough of us protesting loudly, but with wit, style and solid arguments, can have an intimidating effect on our enemies.  Winning in a war requires intimidation. To intimidate is to induce a weakening fear in the enemy.

Fifth, because I'm a natural-born scribbler who takes great pleasure from writing and re-reading what he has written. The hunt for the incisive formulation that penetrates to the heart of the matter is a source of pleasure.

Back on the Rant

During Lent I was, in a manner of speaking, hors de combat, but of my own free will. But now the happy warrior is back in the Facebook trenches doing battle with our political enemies. No leftists need apply.  Fruitful discussion is possible only on the common ground of shared attitudes, values, presuppositions, and principles. That common ground no longer exists inasmuch as the Democrat Party is now an outlet of hard leftism to such an extent that our political opponents are now political enemies.

I am afraid Carl Schmitt is right: in the political sphere the defining opposition is that of Freund und Feind, friend and enemy.

Don't Talk Like a 'Liberal'!

A Substack sermon.

Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body

For Cyrus

"I believe in . . . the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." Thus ends the Apostles' Creed. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) addresses the meaning of this article of faith on pp. 347-359 of his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004). The book first appeared in German in 1968 long before Ratzinger became Pope.  Herewith, some interpretive notes and commentary.

1) Despite the undeniable Platonic elements in Christianity, to which Ratzinger is sensitive, the Biblical promise of immortality pertains to the whole man, not to a separated soul. Some, Lutherans in particular, recoiling from Platonic soul-body dualism, have gone so far as to maintain that the Greek doctrine of the immortality of the soul is positively un-Christian. (347) This is going too far. It is clear, though, that on Christianity a man is not in his innermost essence a pure spirit like an angel; he is, by nature, a corporeal, embodied  being whose ultimate good is to live forever in an embodied, not an angelic, state.  'By nature' implies that we are not accidentally embodied, as on Platonism, but essentially embodied.

2) On the other hand, the idea of immortal (living) bodies, immortal animals, seems utterly absurd given what we know about the natural world, as Ratzinger admits (348).  Schopenhauer mocks this notion as immortality mit Haut und Haar, with skin and hair.  By contrast, the notion of human immortality as the immortality of a simple (metaphysically incomposite) soul substance is not absurd but defensible, even if not Christian. 

So we face a problem. Platonic dualism cannot do justice to our  unitary corporeal nature. It involves an ontological denigration of the body and of materiality in general.  The material world, however, created by God, is good, and not to be flown from in Platonic-Plotinian-gnostic fashion.  The body is not the prison-house of the soul, but something rather more positive: its necessary expression or realization.  But how on earth could the living bodies of humans live forever?

3) One solution that suggests itself  -- call it the additive solution -- is to add the Biblical notion of bodily resurrection to the Platonic notion of soulic immortality. When you die, soul and body separate: the soul continues to exist while the body returns to dust. ("Remember man, thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return . . .")  At the end of the world, the dead are raised and soul is reunited with its body, the same one it had on Earth, although presumably spiritualized and transformed or transfigured.  Although Ratzinger does not cite Aquinas in the stretch of text I am commenting on, the Angelic Doctor's view is additive.

On this view, (i) resurrection is resurrection of the (human) body, not of the whole man, and (ii) this resurrected body will be numerically identical to the body that lived and died on Earth. In other words, the pre-mortem and post-mortem bodies of a resurrected person are one and the same.  After the resurrection you will have the very same body that you have now. This is compatible with the resurrected body being property-wise different from the earthly body.   I take this same-body view to be the traditional view. We find it, for example, in Aquinas:

For we cannot call it resurrection unless the soul return to the same body, since resurrection is a second rising, and the same thing rises that falls; therefore resurrection regards the body which after death falls, rather than the soul which after death lives. And consequently if it is not the same body which the soul resumes, it will not be a resurrection, but rather the assuming of a new body. (1952, 952, quoted from here)

For the sake of concretion, let's assume the Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism of Aquinas according to which a human being is a composite of soul and body where the soul is the form of the body. For Aquinas, the soul continues to exist after the body ceases to exist, and resurrection is the uniting of that soul with its body, not some body or other, but its body, the same one it had on Earth, although perfected, subtilized, spiritualized, and rendered free of defects.

4) The Thomistic synthesis of the Greek and the Biblical is an uneasy one, fraught with difficulties. I'll mention just one.  On the Platonic view, salvation is salvation of the soul from the body; it is not the salvation of the whole, undivided, man.  The soul is a naturally immortal spiritual substance** that comes into its own only when freed from the evil predicament of embodiment.   Death, as separation of soul from body, is release and therefore something good.  The Biblical conception is very different: death is not good, but bad: the fitting punishment for Adam's sin. Death is not a welcome release from the material world, but the calamity of all calamities. We were intended by God to live forever in Paradise in an embodied, material form. But Adam (man) fell, and is now subject to sickness, old age, and death in a material world that is itself fallen and in which demonic agents are at play in various ways.

Now suppose you are a philosopher and a Christian who wants to find a way to accommodate man's essential corporeality. Following Aristotle, you bring Plato's Forms down to Earth where they cease to be substances in their own right and become factors in the ontological analysis of such sublunary substances (prote ousiai) as statues, horses -- and humans.  Socrates, then, is not a naturally immortal soul accidentally attached to a perishable body, but a hylomorphic compound of form and (proximate) matter in which  anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. 

The soul, which was a substance for Plato becomes in Aristotle a non-substantial 'principle' invoked in the analysis of genuine substances.  The I that thinks when Socrates thinks is then presumably not his soul but the whole man, the entire hylomorphic compound. That which thinks when Socrates thinks is Socrates, not the form of his body. For how could an enmattered form think?  How could it be the subject of thinking (of cogitationes in the broad Cartesian sense)? An enmattered form is a respect in which a sublunary substance is intelligible, but it is not intelligent, being merely one factor in the ontological analysis of a whole man who is the one doing the thinking.   A subject of thinking must be a substance, and on the Aristotelian analysis, the soul is not a substance but a form.

Might it be, contrary to what I have just maintained, that the soul is an enmattered form that is both intelligible and intelligent? If so, then the soul-form is what I refer to when I thoughtfully deploy the first-person singular pronoun, and not the whole man, body-cum-soul.  This seems to lead us back to the view according to which I am identical to my soul, and away from the Aristotelico-Thomist view according to which I am not identical to my soul, but identical to a composite of soul and body.

To state the problem succinctly, Thomas is an Aristotelian on Earth, but a Platonist in heaven, and he has to be both to satisfy simultaneously the exigencies of both Christianity and Aristotle. But the exigencies are in tension one with the other, a tension tantamount to contradiction. Thomas qua Christian needs a substantial soul capable of surviving bodily death, a soul that then 'waits' for its completion in the resurrection of the body.  Qua Aristotelian, however, the soul must be a form and not a substance.  The upshot is a contradictory construct: a form that is and is not a substance.  A soul-form which is not a substance but a principle when embodied,  becomes a substance on its own after death.

5) Ratzinger rejects the additive approach to resurrection. A restored body is not added to a post-mortem soul.  For "the biblical train of thought . . . presupposes the undivided unity of man." (349) Scripture speaks of "the awakening of the dead, not of bodies!" (349)  The "real heart of the faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the restoration of bodies . . . ." (349)  Man is not composed of body and soul with the soul the carrier of his immortality. If you start with that conception, then resurrection becomes the restoration of bodies, which are then added onto the souls which have been waiting  for their bodily completion. This scheme is precisely what Ratzinger is opposing. So how does he propose that we understand resurrection?

6) He speaks of a "dialogic immortality" that is an "awakening."(350) Man cannot "totally perish because he is known and loved by God." (350)  As against Platonism, there is nothing in man that is indestructible.  Man is saved from annihilation by being drawn into dialogue with the Creator. In this way the whole man, not just his soul, is awakened and brought to life.

From here on out the discussion tapers off into vagueness.  Resurrection is not a restoration of one's earthly body. The person "goes on existing because it lives in God's memory." (353)  To go on existing as a merely intentional object of someone's memory, even of God's, seems insufficient. I remember my mother, but does she live on in my memory? Such an afterlife would be a paltry thing indeed, and not just because my memories of her are both incomplete and in some respect erroneous.  The main problem is that an object of memory cannot be by being remembered be transformed from a non-living subject into a living one.  My memory cannot be constitutive of your subjectivity. But perhaps with God it is different . . . .

_______________________

*While man is not a pure spirit, the Christian worldview admits the existence of  finite pure spirits, namely angels and demons (fallen angels). Christianity is therefore not a materialist worldview: it does not hold that finite intelligence cannot occur except as physically realized or materially embodied. And of course God himself, the infinite, archetypal spirit, is a pure spirit, fully real, and fully concrete, despite being wholly immaterial.  Christianity is not materialism, but it does, in the teeth of Platonism, valorize the material world.

**An individual substance is definable as anything metaphysically capable of independent existence.

From Positivism to Realism: The Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann

By William Heald via the WayBack Machine.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, 1960. (Source)

Given what we know from yesterday's Updike entry, the suspicion obtrudes that, while Updike clearly understands the Resurrection as orthodoxy understands it, his interest in it is merely aesthetic in Kierkegaard's sense, and not ethical in the Dane's sense, which suspicion comports well with the charge that Updike radically divorced Christian theology from Christian ethics.

Or perhaps, as a Protestant, Updike thinks that since God in Christ did all the work of atonement, he needn't do anything such as reform his life and struggle and strive for metanoia but can freely enjoy himself in the arms and partake of the charms of other men's wives.  Am I being fair?

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies

Herewith, six definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he uses them to say something.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, Hear Me Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass.  Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon the radical, McCartney the romantic, Starr the regular guy.

John Updike's Christianity

Gerald R. McDermott (emphases added):

In Updike’s religion, then, there are no commandments we are meant to keep except the obligation to accept what is: “Religion includes, as its enemies say, fatalism, an acceptance and consecration of what is.” Our only responsibility is to “appreciate” the great gift that life represents. He learned from Barth that the next life is simply this life in review, and from his Lutheranism, he wrote, “a rather antinomian Christianity”—the idea that there are no laws we should fear or live by—which he was “too timid to discard.” There is no hint of final judgment. Nor is there any imperative to repent or improve ourselves: in Begley’s words, “Original sin may be inescapable, but any concerted effort to improve one’s game resembles a righteous struggle for salvation.” And if there was anything he learned from Barth, it was that all human efforts to save ourselves are wrongheaded and futile. As one critic summed it up, Updike “radically divorced” Christian theology from Christian ethics.

The upshot was a self-indulgent religion that basked in self-affirmation while running from voices that would challenge the self to change, particularly in ways that were not pleasant. It is telling that Updike’s last poem ends with words of self-assurance from Psalm 23: “goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, forever.”

One cannot help thinking that Updike’s religion helped build the theological scaffolding for mainline Protestantism’s baptism of gay marriage. Updike wrote of mainline Protestants and their efforts to justify the sexual revolution. Although Updike himself regarded heterosexual sex as normative, his elevation of sex as a way to transcendence would prevent heterosexual Protestants from barring the door to other kinds of sex. Updike told the CBS reporter, “Sex is one of the means—maybe the foremost means—whereby the [moral and religious] search is conducted.” Once mainline America became persuaded—even in the absence of empirical evidence—that gays are born that way, how could they deny that their sex might be their way to the divine? Updike would surely have agreed. And millions of Updike readers could thank the novelist for helping them see that marriages defined by desire were not only a right but also a sacrament.

'See' is standardly employed as a verb of success. I wonder: does the author in his last sentence so intend it?  'Believe' would work better, no?

More importantly, it is just self-serving nonsense to view sex as the foremost means for conducting the moral and religious search. That sounds like a joke. I am put in mind of Chogyam Trungpa. According to one report, ". . . Trungpa slept with a different woman every night in order to transmit the teaching to them. L. intimated that it was really a hardship for Trungpa to do this, but it was his duty in order to spread the dharma."

We are concupiscent from the ground up. So it is no surprise that even Christianity can be so twisted as to serve the sex monkey by one who apparently was its slave.

But if truth be told, I just now ordered Couples to see how the brilliant Updike makes his case.  Updike is a master of social phenomenology as I discovered when I read Rabbit is Rich in the early '90s.

As for the radical divorce of theology and ethics, there cannot be anything salutary about splitting them asunder. But if split them you must, it would be better to jettison the theology and keep the ethics for the sake of our happiness in this world, which we know, as opposed to the next which we merely believe in.  It is an empirical question, but on balance the sexual revolution has not improved human eudaimonia. Our predicament post-pill is hardly a paradise.

Updike looks to be a poster boy for the false dichotomy of spirituality versus religion. 

Related: A Death Poem at Year's End.  I reproduce and comment on a fabulous Updike poem.

The Skeptic

The true skeptic does not deny truth. He is an inquirer who so loves truth that he will accept no substitutes, no easy answers, no comforting dogmatisms.  That some skeptics become Pyrrhonian slackers is no argument against skepticism properly understood. The true skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier.

At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

A Good Friday meditation at Substack.

Addendum 4/4/21. Vito Caiati writes,

I have been pondering the profound and poignant Good Friday meditation, “At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron,” that you just posted on Substack.  The Weil text that inspired your post leaves me, nevertheless, with a tormenting question, one which arises from her conviction that when an iron spike rips through the flesh of a human hand, “The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation.”  However, does the assumed equivalence between the overwhelming pain and suffering of human beings whose flesh is pierced by iron and that of Christ really hold, for it is the Second Person of the Trinity who is crucified and, as such, a Being who is omniscient? However the admixture of the divine and human natures of Christ are conjoined in his Person, we cannot assume, without falling in heresy, that one of those natures, with its inherent intellectual capacities, ceases to be operational at certain moments, so that on the Cross only the human nature is present. If both natures are present, than the divine nature of Christ faces death with the divine knowledge of those things that are hidden from other men, in particular the certainty of God’s existence and the knowledge of His nature,  the destiny of the soul after death, its relation to God, and so on.  Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die without the terrors of the unknown that plagues us ordinary human beings. Thus, it would seem that the analogy of his suffering and ours holds but only to a certain point and not absolutely. Am I wrong on this?

Well, Vito, I can't say that you are wrong. Indeed, I think you are right about an implication of the orthodox and traditional "two natures, one person" understanding of the Incarnation.  If Christ is one person with two natures,  then both natures must be "operational" to use your word at all times during Christ's earthly sojourn. (What happens after the Ascension is a further question.) But if there is no 'switching off' of the divine nature during the Crucifixion, then how can Christ experience fully the human predicament in which the worst of suffering is not mere physical suffering but the latter together with the utter desolation of abandonment?  Recall that the traditional understanding, hammered out over a number of Church councils, was that Christ is fully man, and of course fully God as well.  And to experience fully the horror of the fallen human predicament, one would have to experience the spiritual and emotional agony of abandonment, and this to its highest degree.  "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Who is speaking here?  Not the Second Person of the Trinity. A man is speaking, no ordinary man, of course, but a man nonetheless who came into the world in the usual way, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.   There is no satisfactory clarification of this state of affairs, at least none satisfactory to the discursive intellect.  This is because the Incarnation as traditionally understood is logically contradictory.  I have discussed this many times. (See Trinity and Incarnation category.) In the present context, the contradiction takes the following form. The man dying on the cross is the God-Man; he is one person (hypostasis) in two (individual) natures. Now who cries out in extremis to the Father? Not a nature, hence not Christ's human nature.  A nature can do no such thing. A person can. But there is only one person on the cross, the Logos Itself, the Word, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Second Person is crying to the First Person: Why have you forsaken me? That's absurd, i.e. logically impossible (given the background theological assumptions). God cannot forsake God. Don't forget: Trinity is not tritheism.  God is one.

I would say that that the absurdity of the Incarnation, which was recognized by Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Shestov, et al. is what allows the heresies to arise such as the one espoused by Simone Weil.  The heresies are attempts to make rational sense out of a combination of ideas unintelligible to the discursive intellect.  They have a logic to them.

Could it be that some contradictions are true, and that the Incarnation is one of them?  Call that the dialetheic way out. Or you might take the view that no contradictions are true, and that, in reality the Incarnation is non-contradictory; it is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for such weak reeds as we are to understand how it is non-contradictory. Call that the mysterian way out. You could also ditch both Trinity and Incarnation (as traditionally understood) and go Unitarian.

On the Consolations of Tense Logic

What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been.  What time has mothered, no future time can touch.   What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being in indelible ink whether or not anyone will read the record.  And all your deeds and misdeeds with you. You will die, but your having lived will never die.  But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny!  Time has made you and she will unmake you.  In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux.  Thanks a lot, bitch!  You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.

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

The entry above, posted 10 March 2010, caught the sharp eye of Alan Rhoda who isolated the animating tense-logical principle:

You here express the tense-logical idea that p-->FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt.

Believe it or not, this has been denied, by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:

"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in  Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p. 128.)

This is an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his denial of what strikes me and Rhoda as a self-evident axiom of tense logic and because of the  consolation he derives from its denial. (Is it really consolation if that from which it derives is false?)

I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't a unique actual past. And I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible.  

What Lukasiewicz is maintaining is really quite preposterous. He is saying, in effect, that a past-tensed truth such as 'Poland was invaded by Hitler's Wehrmacht on 1 September 1939,' which is true now, and was true at every time after the event, will  cease to be true in the future when all of the presently existing traces of the invasion have been  obliterated.  And surely such a time will come. When our sun goes supernova . . . .

Lukasiewicz is assuming that (a) contingent past-tensed truths need truth-makers, but (b) the only available truth-makers are presently existing causal traces of the events recorded by the past-tensed truths. (B) is a consequence of presentism, roughly, the view in the philosophy of time according to which the temporally present alone exists simpliciter, which implies that wholly past and wholly future times and events do not exist, and are now nothing at all.  If so, actual past events and merely possible past events are on an equal ontological footing.

But to me it seems obvious, a plain datum, that there is an importance ontological difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her. Now that datum tells against presentism -- unless you bring God into the picture.

This is what Rhoda does in an excellent article of his, Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.

Abstract: The truthmaker objection to presentism (the view that only what exists now exists simpliciter) is that it lacks sufficient metaphysical resources to ground truths about the past. In this paper I identify five constraints that an adequate presentist response must satisfy. [. . .] Consideration of how these responses fail, however, points toward a proposal that works, one that posits God’s memories as truthmakers for truths about the past. I conclude that presentists have, in the truthmaker objection, considerable incentive to endorse theism.

But if we don't put God to work, or find other ways to supply presently existing truth-makers for past-tensed truths, and want to hold to presentism, then we are stuck with the preposterous view that the passage of time will not only erase individual and collective memory of past events, but will also erase the events themselves, and, to add to the absurdity, transform their modal status from actual to merely possible.

The past is a realm of fact, not fiction, actuality, not mere possibility. What was. actually was, and will remain actual even though it is no longer present.  The passage of time cannot alter the past.  You may hope that your transgressions will be forgotten, but one cannot reasonably hope that they will cease to be. The waters of Lethe merely hide the past from view; they do not undo the past.

As for consolation, I hope we can agree that a view's being consoling or the opposite is irrelevant to the question whether it is true.  If Lukasiewicz found consolation in his doctrine, that is no indicator of its truth since a doctrine doesn't have to be true  to be consoling.  It merely has to be believed. And if consolation were the touchstone of truth, then, the contradictory consolation deriving from p-->FPp would would cancel it out.