Maverick Philosopher

An Ecclesiological Contretemps: Edward Feser versus Rod Dreher

Start here with Dreher.  Feser's response to Dreher. Dreher's reply (scroll down). Feser again.

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Addendum 5/31. Dr. Vito Caiati, historian, comments (minor edits added by BV):

With regard to the exchange between Edward Feser and Rod Dreher on the latter’s rationale for leaving Roman Catholicism for Orthodoxy, which I too have been closely following, I have an observation that may be worthy of your notice.

While I believe that Feser exposes the non-rational and hence inadequate motivation for Dreher’s apostasy (and Skojec’s crise de foi), he advances an argument regarding the present theological and ecclesial crisis of the Catholic Church that is not at all cogent or convincing. This is evident [from the] the essential equivalence he draws between it and earlier disputes and conflicts in the Church’s distant history. He writes:

Skojec is scandalized by the fact that the confusion and heterodoxy fostered by Pope Francis’s many doctrinally problematic statements have not yet been remedied despite his having been in office for eight years.  This is quite ridiculous.  Eight years is nothing in terms of Church history.  The utter chaos introduced into the governance of the Church by Pope Stephen VI’s lunatic Cadaver Synod lasted for decades.  So did the chaos of the Great Western Schism.  Pope Honorius’s errors were not condemned until forty years after his death.  Further examples could easily be given.  Few people remember these events now, because things eventually worked themselves out so completely that they now look like blips.  If the world is still here centuries from now, Pope Francis’s chaotic reign will look the same way to Catholics of the future. 

Leaving aside the question of whether relevant “further examples [that] could easily be given,” is it in fact the case that the nature of the contemporary crisis in the Church is essentially of a kind with the three cited medieval crises? In other words, is something going on at the present moment, under the present pope, and more broadly in the decades that stretch back well into the last century that indicates some fundamental rupture with traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice? Are we indeed simply witnessing events that, like those of the past, will “look like blips” in time, or are we, undergoing a unique crisis that, in the words of historian Roberto Pertricci, “segna il tramonto di quell’imponente realtà storica definibile come ‘cattolicesimo romano’” [‘marks the sunset of that imposing historical reality that can be defined as Roman Catholicism’]?

The histories of the three medieval crises mentioned by Feser are highly [complicated?]and resistant to rapid summary. Suffice it to say, that two of these, the Cadaver Synod of 897 [and] Great Western Schism (1378-1417) were the offshoots of political and dynastic conflicts among orthodox members of the Catholic household of Europe. Neither involved questions of dogma or doctrine, and if the latter was troubling for papal power and prestige, encouraging the conciliarism of the 15^th century and the graver Protestant challenge of the 16^th, its more long-term [effects?] were not. The case of Pope Honorius I (625-38) involves a letter written in 635 by this early medieval pontiff to Sergius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who successfully solicited Honorius’ support for the conciliatory position that he, following the Emperor Heraclitus, had adopted toward monothelitism to promote unity among his flock. Honorius was condemned by the Third Council of Constantinople (680-81) not for heresy but for allowing its propagation. Here, although the dispute was doctrinal in nature, touching on the Chalcedonian understanding of Christ’s two natures and two wills, we are dealing with an isolated, although fundamental doctrinal misjudgment, expressed in a letter that is otherwise orthodox, of a pope who was highly regarded during his reign and who manifested no other signs of heterodoxy.

I think that even this highly unsatisfactory summary of these distant events in the life of the Church is sufficient to set them apart from the events of our own time and particularly those under the present pope. There is no need to catalogue the questionable if not heretical statements and judgments of Bergoglio, all designed to encourage confusion and heterodoxy in the Church; his scandalous actions paying homage to pagan idols; his  protection and advancement of sexual predators and sodomites; his purges of orthodox prelates and laymen from important Vatican positions and commissions; his undermining of Church unity to the extent that the German Church is in actual, if not declared schism; his collaboration in the destruction of the loyal Catholic Church in China; his incessant attacks on orthodox Catholics; and his substitution of left wing politics for the Gospel. But more beyond the actions of this pope we have to take note of the systemic rot throughout so much of the Church that has made him and those of his ilk possible; everything from the protection of sexual predators, to the abandonment of Catholic teaching in the Church’s schools and universities, to the passivity of most bishops when confronted with heresy in the Church or public scandal (communion for those who advocate and advance abortion, for instance), and so on.  

What is going on now, right before our eyes will never become some historical “blip.” The magisterium, both ordinary and extraordinary, may still stand, but how long will this be the case if it is increasingly ignored, subverted, and questioned? If the words of the Pater Noster, which are clear in both Greek and Latin, can be altered at will to make them more theologically acceptable to the bien pensant, what is beyond the reach of “reform”? Thus, those who remain loyal to the Church should have no illusions about the uniquely destructive nature of this crisis. It is being advanced by dangerous “progressive” forces, increasingly aligned with the global Left, that have taken control of the leading institutions of the Church and whose objective is the eradication of the very core of traditional Roman Catholic thought and practice.

Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

Burnout or visio mystica? Substack latest.

It Ain't Necessarily So: On Not Confusing the Modal with the Temporal

If someone says, ‘Houses sell above the asking price around here,’ it is idiomatically correct, if not quite grammatical, to respond, ‘Not necessarily’ or 'It ain't necessarily so.' ‘Not necessarily’ in this context means not always. Its meaning is not modal, but temporal: there are times when the houses sell above asking price, and times when they do not.

 

In ordinary English, the confusion of the temporal ‘always’ with the modal ‘necessarily’ is not often a problem. But in more abstruse contexts, the distinction must be made. Suppose A asks, ‘Why does the universe exist?’ and receives the reply from B, ‘Because it always existed.’ This does not constitute a good reply even if it is true that the universe always existed. The reason is because a thing’s having existed at every past time gives no good answer to the question as to why it exists at all. Even if the past is infinite, the reply is defective. For even if (i) there is no past time at which the universe does not exist, and (ii) no metrically first moment of time, one can still reasonably ask: ‘But why does the universe exist at all?’ ‘Why not no universe?’

If, however, it were said that the universe necessarily exists (cannot not exist), then (assuming the truth of the universe’s necessary existence) that would amount to a good reply to the question as to why it exists. For if X cannot fail to exist, then it makes no clear sense to ask why it exists if one expects an explanans distinct from the explanandum.

Some atheists think themselves quite clever in objecting to theists as follows. ‘You say that God is needed to explain the existence of the universe; but then what explains the existence of God?' The short answer is that God is a necessary being, one that cannot not exist, and that to ask for the explanation of a necessary being makes no sense. This does not end the debate, of course, but it moves it from the sophomoric level up a notch to the ‘junior’ level.

5K or Marathon: Which is Harder?

Which is harder, to run 3.1 miles or 26.2?  They are equally hard for the runner who runs right.  The agony and the ecstasy at the end of a race run right is the same whether induced by 42.2 km of LSD or 5 km of POT.  Below, I am approaching the final stretch of a 5 K trail race (2nd annual CAAFA 5K Race Against Violence, Prospector Park, Apache Junction, Arizona).  The date is wrong: should be 3/21/2010.  I finished in 45th place in a mixed field of 113, and 28th among 44 men.  Time: 33:38.8 for a pace of 10:49.8.  That's nothing to crow about, but then I was 60 years old as was the gal right behind me.  At age 40 I could cover this distance at a 7:45 min/mile pace.  There were five 60+ males and I finished first among them.  Not a strong field!  But a beautiful cool crisp morning and a great course and a great run.  I could have pushed harder!  Could have and should have!

LSD: long slow distance.  POT: plenty of tempo.  Both terms borrowed from Joe Henderson.

Life is for living, and the strenuous life is best by test!

The Noble and the Base

If a noble man becomes aware of my moral defects, he is saddened, disappointed, disillusioned perhaps.  But the base man reacts differently: he is gleeful, pleased, reassured. "So he isn't better than me after all! Good!"

The noble seek those who are above them so that they can become like them.  The base deny that anyone could be above them.

Slow Down!

Substack latest

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Dave Bagwill comments:

I've enjoyed Lin Yutang's book The Importance of Living for quite some time. Your post today (5/26) reminded me of a number of quotes from that book. Here's a couple, and a link. He is definitely on the "sunnier side of doubt." (Tennyson)

“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
― Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

“If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live”
― Lin Yutang

Of Gasoline, Oil, and Masks

I gassed up the Jeep Wrangler at Costco, Mesa yesterday to the tune of $2.899 per gallon for regular. Shell and other distributors were charging $3.18. Those of you who live under Californication are paying a lot more. Please take no offense, but you should really consider your complicity in allowing leftist termites to undermine a great state, once golden, now brown as you-know-what.

 

And then I entered the vast warehouse to buy six quarts of Mobil 1 Advanced Synthetic for my annual oil change. I've been doing it myself for a number of years, having been ripped off by some local grease monkeys. I do the job and I do it right and by the book. Do you think the low-paid mechanic will replace the O-ring on the filter housing and lubricate it properly or at all? The grease monkey reasons, "This rube is not going to check, and even if he did he would not know whether I had replaced the O-ring, and if I had replaced it, whether I used dirty or clean oil to lube it."

 

To my delight Costco has relaxed its draconian mask rule. Half of the shoppers were walking around with no masks. Last time I was there, I was reminded (in a friendly way) that my bandanna had slipped or been pulled down. A man has to breathe. (Which puts me in mind of George Floyd who drew his last breath on this date one year ago.) Damned near every time the bandanna came down, the enforcers of 'woke' conformity were on my case.  And then a week or two later I received a polite letter telling me if I didn't comply I would be banned from Costco. I was on camera the whole time and it was no big deal to identify me. Welcome to Sino-style surveillance!

 

How many years until we are a full-on police state? Perhaps you have noticed that 'woke' capital is in cahoots with Big Government. Bill Clinton's "The era of big government is over" was of course bullshit in Professor Frankfurt's sense, as one would expect from a Clinton.

The Way Forward

It seems we are condemned helplessly to watch our country be destroyed. The drift of events is ever downward. To turn things around would require something most of don't want to talk about -- and for good reason. Angelo Codevilla ends his analysis with talk of "rebuilding the Republic" but he offers no concrete proposals. What he and almost everyone else on our side offers is just more talk, more analysis. Our enemies are impervious to reason and appeals to reason. There can be no reasoned discourse with people who maintain absurdities -- e.g., that mathematics  is racist -- and subvert language with their Orwellian innovations.  To attempt to engage with them on the plane of reason in search of the truth is to fail to understand that it is power, not truth that they seek.  

So what do you do? You secure your own little space and live the best life you can within it. That's the main thing. Retreat within your physical citadel, but even more importantly, retreat within your inner citadel to cultivate the soil therein. Properly cultivated, it should bring you to the insight that this world is a passing scene, a vanishing quantity, and nothing worthy of the full measure of your love and attention. But we ought not give up on it entirely. We watch and we wait. If there is an opportunity to make a difference, we do so. We may have only one night to spend in this bad inn, but it is a long night, and it is better to be warm than to shiver.

It Pays to Publish, but Don't Pay to Publish

This came over the transom a while ago:

Dear Colleague,

British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science (ISSN: 2278-0998) is an OPEN peer-reviewed INTERNATIONAL journal. We offer both Online publication as well as Hard copy options. Article Processing Charge is only 100 USD as per present offer. This journal is now publishing Volume 10.

Only 100 semolians?  Get out of here, and take your crappy journal with you.

If you need to pay to publish, then you shouldn't be publishing.   It is not that difficult to publish for free in good hard-copy outlets.  If I can do it, so can you.  Here is my PhilPapers page which lists some of my publications.  My passion for philosophy outstrips my ability at it, but if you have a modicum of ability you can publish in decent places.  When I quit my tenured post and went maverick, I feared that no one would touch my work.  But I found that lack of an institutional affiliation did not bar me from very good journals such as Nous and Analysis.

Here are a few suggestions off the top of my head. 

1. Don't submit anything that you haven't made as good as you can make it.  Don't imagine that editors and referees will sense the great merit and surpassing brilliance of your inchoate ideas and help you to refine them. That is not their job. Their job is to find a justification to dump your paper among the 60-90 % that get rejected. 

2. Demonstrate that you are cognizant of the extant literature on your topic. 

3. Write concisely and precisely about a well-defined issue.  Adhere to the format guidelines. Check for typographical, spelling, and grammatical errors.

4. Advance a well-defined thesis.

5. Don't rant or polemicize. That's what your blog is for.  Referring to Brian Leiter as a corpulent apparatchik of political correctness and proprietor of a  philosophy gossip site won't endear you to his sycophants one or two of whom you may be unfortunate enough to have as referees.

6. Know your audience and submit the right piece to the right journal.  Don't send a lengthy essay on Simone Weil to Analysis.

7. When the paper you slaved over is rejected, take it like a man or the female equivalent thereof.  Never protest editorial decisions.  You probably wrote something substandard, something that, ten years from now, you will be glad was not embalmed in printer's ink.  You have no right to have your paper accepted or even reviewed.  You may think it's all a rigged wheel and a good old boys' network.  In my experience it is not. Most of those who complain are just not very good at what they do.

Sorry if the above is a tad obvious.

Weakness is No Justification: The Converse Callicles Principle

It needs to be said again at this time when Israel is under attack again due in no small measure to President Biden's weakness and senility. First posted 24 July 2014.

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Might does not make right, but neither does impotence or relative weakness. That weakness does not justify strikes me as an important principle, but I have never seen it articulated. The Left tends to assume the opposite.  They tend to assume that mightlessness makes right.  I'll dub this the Converse Callicles Principle.

The power I have to kill you does not morally justify my killing you. In a slogan: Ability does not imply permissibility.  My ability to kill, rape, pillage and plunder does not confer moral justification on my doing these things.  But if you attack me with deadly force and I reply with deadly force of greater magnitude, your relative weakness does not supply one iota of moral justification for your attack, nor does it subtract one iota of moral justification from my defensive response.  If I am justified in using deadly force against you as aggressor, then the fact that my deadly force is greater than yours does not (a) diminish my justification in employing deadly force, nor does it (b) confer any justification on your aggression.

Suppose a knife-wielding thug commits a home invasion and attacks a man and his family. The man grabs a semi-automatic pistol and manages to plant several rounds in the assailant, killing him. It would surely be absurd to argue that the disparity in lethality of the weapons involved diminishes the right of the pater familias to defend himself and his family.  Weakness does not justify.

The principle that weakness does not justify can be applied to the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the summer of 2006 as well as to the current Israeli defensive operations against the terrorist entity, Hamas.  The principle ought to be borne in mind when one hears leftists, those knee-jerk supporters of any and every 'underdog,' start spouting off about 'asymmetry of power' and 'disproportionality.'  Impotence and incompetence are not virtues, nor do they confer moral justification or high moral status, any more than they confer the opposite.

The principle that mightlessness makes right seems to be one of the cardinal tenets of the Left.  It is operative in the present furor over the enforcement of reasonable immigration laws in Arizona.  To the south of the USA lies crime-ridden, corrupt, impoverished Mexico.  For millions and millions it is a place to escape from.  The USA, the most successful nation of all time, is the place to escape to.  But how does this disparity in wealth, success, and overall quality of life justify the violation of the reasonable laws and the rule of law that are a good part of the reason for the disparity of wealth, success, and overall quality of life?

Tennyson Strikes a Chord

The bolded passage below is a beautiful poetic summation of  my philosophical position.

IF thou would’st hear the Nameless, and wilt dive
Into the Temple-cave of thine own self,
There, brooding by the central altar, thou
May’st haply learn the Nameless hath a voice,
By which thou wilt abide, if thou be wise, 5
As if thou knewest, tho’ thou canst not know;
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake
That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there
But never yet hath dipt into the abysm,
The Abysm of all Abysms, beneath, within 10
The blue of sky and sea, the green of earth,
And in the million-millionth of a grain
Which cleft and cleft again for evermore,
And ever vanishing, never vanishes,
To me, my son, more mystic than myself, 15
Or even than the Nameless is to me.
And when thou sendest thy free soul thro’ heaven,
Nor understandest bound nor boundlessness,
Thou seest the Nameless of the hundred names.
And if the Nameless should withdraw from all 20
Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark.

‘And since—from when this earth began—
The Nameless never came
Among us, never spake with man, 25
And never named the Name’—

Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son,
Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in,
Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone,
Nor canst thou prove that thou art spirit alone, 30
Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one:
Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no
Nor yet that thou art mortal—nay my son,
Thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee,
Am not thyself in converse with thyself, 35
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith
She reels not in the storm of warring words, 40
She brightens at the clash of ‘Yes’ and ‘No’,
She sees the Best that glimmers thro’ the Worst,
She feels the Sun is hid but for a night,
She spies the summer thro’ the winter bud,
She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, 45
She hears the lark within the songless egg,
She finds the fountain where they wail’d ‘Mirage’!

The Ancient Sage

On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski

Substack latest. I pose the question: Why is toleration a value?

Student Relativism

From my first weblog, dated 28 September 2004:

Student relativism  is not so much a philosophical theory as a form of psychic insulation. An outgrowth of adolescent rebelliousness, it says: "You can't teach me anything because truth is relative; we all have our own truths."

Not being a philosophical theory, Student Relativism cannot be refuted in the usual ways. It is a pathology that must be outgrown. Unfortunately, we live in a society in which adolescence in many extends into the twenties, thirties, and beyond. Some remain life-long adolescents in their mentality. Many if not most of these characters are found on the Left.

The Enigmatic B. Traven and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Substack latest.

Happiness Maxims 2021

They work for me; they may work for you.

Substack latest.

Religion as Morality and as Metaphysics

I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a matter of the here and now alone. The moral life is ultimately meaningful only in a theological setting. There has to be a Ground of morality with the power to effect a final adjustment of virtue to happiness beyond the grave.  And we have to be more than these miserably indigent bits of the Earth's fauna. None of this obvious, of course, and will remain forever in dispute, or at least until such time as we are replaced by robots.

While  the appeal of religion as morality is strong, and such metaphysics as must be presupposed to make sense of religion as morality, I cannot say the same about the appeal of religion as systematic metaphysics. It is difficult to understand, let alone believe, such doctrines as that of the Trinity and the Incarnation, let alone those more specific doctrines of Ascension, Assumption, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, and Transubstantiation.

The discursive intellect is flummoxed by such teachings.  (But it is also keenly stimulated by them, a topic for another occasion.)

But in the end, which is more important: orthodoxy or orthopraxy?  The latter.  Better to practice compassion than to write a book about it.

Morality needs a metaphysical underpinning, but must such an underpinning be rationally transparent to us? And if it cannot be rendered rationally transparent, how much ought that bother us?  Not so much that it causes us to stop living by the Ten Commandments and avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins. 

You will never be able to prove the immortality of the soul, but it is well within your power to live in such a way as to be worthy of it.  So live and you live well, no matter what the outcome. If death should prove to be annihilation of body and soul, what have you lost?

A Life Spent Making Repairs

Psychologically damaged early on by parents, relatives, teachers, circumstances, and blows of fate, one spends the rest of one's life making repairs.

Presentism and Actualism: Tenseless Existence and Amodal Existence

The analogy between presentism and actualism has often been noted.  An unpacking of the analogy may prove fruitful if it doesn't perplex us further.  Rough formulations of the two doctrines are as follows:

P. Only the (temporally) present exists.

A. Only the actual exists.

Now one of the problems that has been worrying us is how to avoid triviality and tautology.  After all, (P) is a miserable tautology if 'exists' is present-tensed.  It is clear that the typical presentist does not consider the thesis to be a tautology. It is also clear that there is a difference, albeit one hard to articulate, between presentism and the various types of anti-presentism.  Consider the difference between presentism and eternalism. The presentist holds that only present items exist whereas the eternalist holds that past, present, and future items exist.  The disagreement obviously presupposes agreement as to what is meant by 'exists.'   There is a substantive metaphysical dispute here, and our task is to formulate the dispute in precise terms.  This will involve clarifying the exact force of 'exists' in (P).  If not present-tensed, then what?

A similar problem arises for the actualist.  One is very strongly tempted to say that to exist is to be actual.  If 'exists' in (A) means 'is actual,' however, then (A) is a tautology.  But if 'exists' in (A) does not mean 'is actual,' what does it mean? 

We seem to have agreed that Disjunctive Presentism is a nonstarter:

DP.  Only present items existed or exists or will exist.

This is equivalent to saying that if x existed or x exists or x will exist, then x presently exists.  And this is plainly false. Now corresponding to the temporal modi past, present, and future, we have the modal modi necessary, actual, and merely possible.  This suggests Disjunctive Actualism:

DA.  Only the actual necessarily exists or actually exists or merely-possibly exists.

This too is false since the merely possible is not actual.  It is no more actual than the wholly future is present.

We must also bear in the mind that neither the presentist nor the actualist intends to say something either temporally or modally 'solipsistic.'  Thus the presentist is not making the crazy claim that all that ever happened or ever will happen is happening right now.  He is not saying that all past-tensed and future-tensed propositions are either false or meaningless and that the only true propositions are present-tensed and true right now.  The presentist, in other words, is not a solipsist of the present moment. 

Similarly with the actualist. He is not a solipsist of this world.  He is not saying that everything possible is actual and everything actual is necessary.  The actualist is not a modal monist or a modal Spinozist who maintains that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world which, in virtue of being actual and the only one possible, is necessary.  The actualist is not a necessitarian.

There is no person like me, but I am not the only person.  There is no place like here, but here is not the only place.  There is no time like now, but now is not the only time.

In sum, for both presentism and actualism, tautologism, disjunctivism, and solipsism are out! What's left?

To formulate presentism it seems we need a notion of tenseless existence, and to formulate actualism we need a notion of amodal existence (my coinage).   

We can't say, on pain of tautology, that only the present presently exists, and of course we cannot say that only the present pastly or futurally exists.  So the presentist has to say that only the present tenselessly exists.  

What do I mean by amodal existence?  Consider the following 'possible worlds' definitions of modal terms:

Necessary being: one that exists in all possible worlds
Impossible being: one that exists in no possible world
Possible being: one that exists in some and perhaps all possible worlds
Contingent being: one that exists in some but not all possible worlds
Merely possible being: one that exists in some possible worlds but not in the actual world
Actual being: one that exists in the actual world
Unactual being: one that exists either in no possible world or not in the actual world.

In each of these definitions, the occurrence of 'exists' is modally neutral analogously as 'exists' is temporally neutral in the following sentences:

It was the case that Tom exists
It is now the case that Tom exists
It will be the case that Tom exists. 

My point, then, is that the proper formulation of actualism (as opposed to possibilism) requires an amodal notion of existence just as the proper formulation of presentism requires an atemporal (tenseless) notion of existence.

But are the atemporal and amodal notions of existence free of difficulty?  This is what we need to examine.  Can the requisite logical wedges be driven between existence and the temporal determinations and between existence and the modal determinations? If not then presentism and actualism cannot even be formulated and the respective problems threaten to be pseudo-problems.

The Philosophy of Furniture

By Edgar Allan Poe. Enjoy!

To speak the truth, one must be free to speak

Here:

One of the two men who had joined us for the conversation shared an anecdote from a family member in America. The family member’s little girl came home from school after receiving the standard antiracist indoctrination in whiteness and white supremacy. The child said, “I don’t understand this. Don’t all lives matter?” The child’s mom told her not to ever say those words — “all lives matter” — outside the home, because she could get in trouble.

Bishop Istvan nodded. Those who grew up under Communism know exactly what’s going on here. His interlocutor continued, saying that he is hearing that the phrase “white silence is violence” is a thing in America. He’s right:

The idea is that your silence — that is, your failure to affirm the ideology — is evidence of your guilt. One thinks of the story Solzhenitsyn tells in The Gulag Archipelago:

At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name). … For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the stormy applause, rising to an ovation, continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who really adored Stalin.

However, who would dare to be the first to stop? … After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on – six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly – but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

The director of the local paper factory, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter…

Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved!

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him:

“Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding.”

You begin to see why the Soviet-bloc emigres are so panicked about what’s happening in America today, don’t you?

 

Letter of Note

Into Eternity

Do I Miss Teaching?

I am enjoying classroom teaching quite a bit now that I no longer do it. With some things it is not the doing of it that we like so much as the having done it. 

One day in class I carefully explained the abbreviation ‘iff’ often employed by philosophers and mathematicians to avoid writing ‘if and only if.’ I explained the logical differences among ‘if,’ ‘only if,’ and ‘if and only if.’ I gave examples. I brought in necessary and sufficient conditions. The whole shot. But I wasn’t all that surprised when I later read a student comment to the effect that Dr. V can’t spell ‘if.’

On another occasion I explained that 'When does life begin?' is not the right question to ask in the abortion debate. For one thing, are we talking about life on Earth? Human life on Earth? An individual human life? If the question pertains to an individual human life, then the answer is obvious: at conception.  So that can't be the question. The question concerns personhood: when does an individual human life become a person?  I then explained descriptive personhood, the criteria of same, normative personhood, the relation between the two and added a bit about rights and duties and their correlativity.

After I was done with these distinctions, a kid raised his hand and asked, "But isn't the question when life begins?"

I was struck once again by the pointlessness of most 'teaching,' but I didn't quit my job then and there.  More time had to pass before the 'meaningfulness' of being paid was no longer meaning enough.  

It may be a generational characteristic. We Boomers want every moment to be meaningful. I suppose we are spoiled in that regard.

I did have a few good students. A memorable Kant seminar was composed of ten students, eight of whom were outstanding. I would have taught that class for free.

Shestov on the Fool

Lev Shestov (1866-1938), Job's Balances:

"The fool said in his heart: There is no God." Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakes, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?

Quoted from D. M. White, Eternal Quest (Paragon, 1991), p. 111.

The penutimate knowledge, I take it, would be the knowledge that without God, life is meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." This was Nietzsche's knowledge, and Nietzsche's dead end. The ultimate knowledge would then be the knowledge that God exists, a knowledge that begins in earnest once one has come through the Great Doubt expressed by the fool.

The Future as the Most Completely Temporal of the Temporal Modi and the Least like Eternity

A tip of the hat to Brother Inky for reminding me of the following intriguing passage from C. S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. The following is lifted verbatim from Powerline:

Another classic passage that bears on the essential maliciousness of the modern “Progressive” mind comes from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. If you’re not familiar with this work, it is the fictional ironic letters written to a junior officer in Satan’s army with instructions on how to corrupt the particular human assigned to this junior tempter. Although geared to higher spiritual matters, here and there are passages of great perception about modern ideology. Like this one from Chapter 15, which illuminates the malignancy of Progressivism’s fixation on “the Future” and the “side of history” that they always want to help move along at a faster pace:

Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. . . It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. Do not think lust an exception. When the present pleasure arrives, the sin (which alone interests us) is already over. The pleasure is just the part of the process which we regret and would exclude if we could do so without losing the sin; it is the part contributed by the Enemy, and therefore experienced in a Present. The sin, which is our contribution, looked forward.

To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too — just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is not straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

 

Is it Rational to be Politically Ignorant?

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Still at it after all these years

This weblog turns 17 today.  I won't repeat what I said on this date last year though it still holds.

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The Lure of the Trail

Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live.

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Politics and Philosophy

Politics is a practical game. One has to win to be effective. Merely to have the better set of ideas and policies is to fail. Philosophy, however, is not about winning. It is about ultimate understanding, spiritual self-transformation, and wisdom. A politics fully informed by insight and understanding would be ideal if it were not impossible. This 'ideal,' however is not an ideal for us. Nothing can count as an ideal for us if it is unattainable by us.

Ars longa, vita brevis. The same is true of philosophy. The philosopher has time and takes his time. Hear Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: Take your time!"

The philosopher can resist the urge for a quick solution. He takes his time because he is a "spectator of all time." (Plato, Republic, Book VI) He's in the game for the long haul, for the 'duration.' After his death he is still in the game if his Nachlass is found worthy. He may concern himself with the questions of the day, but he never loses sight of the issues of the ages. And he has an eye for the presence of the latter within the former.

In politics we have enemies; political discourse is inherently polemical. But there are no enemies in philosophy. For if your interlocutor is not a friend, then you are not philosophizing with him. Ideally, philosophy is the erothetic love of truth pursued either in solitude or  among friends who love each other but love the truth more than they love each other.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. (Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1096a15; but the thought is already in Plato at Republic, Book X, 595b-c and 607c. I am tempted to say that everything is already in Plato . . . . . I shall resist the temptation.)  

W. H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

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