Maverick Philosopher

How Strange!

How strange it would be if death were to leave us all in the dark as to the ultimate why and wherefore!  How strange if no one knows, no one ever knew, and no one will ever know what it's all about.  And not because the Answer is hidden, but because there is none.

If you say that it could be like that, I won't disagree. There is presumably and prima vista no presumption in favor of point, purpose, intelligibility and sense. But if you find nothing strange about this putative state of affairs, then I will view you and your spiritual vacancy with a mixture of pity and contempt.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Messages, Letters, Epistles, Novels and such

Bob Dylan,  Take a Message to Mary. I prefer it to the Everly Bros. effort. 

Boxtops, The Letter

R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

Beatles, Paperback Writer

Dinah Washington, I Could Write a Book

Donovan, Epistle to Dippy

10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

Simon and Garfunkel, I am a Rock. "I have my books and my poetry to protect me." 1960's teenage alienation at its finest.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters

Paul McCartney, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Original by Fats Waller.

How could I fail to include . . .

Monotones, The Book of Love.  I never did find out who wrote it.

"My Conscience is Clear"

You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.

The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism with Bread and Circuses

Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption. A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.

 

Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of Big Government and its leftist enablers.

 

The totalitarianism of bread and circuses is more insidious, and more conducive to social control, than that of gulag and Vernichtungslager.

 

The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left omni-invasive government by 'woke' global elites. There is nothing democratic about them.

The Monk and the Worldling

Monk: The world you love cannot last  and betrays its vanity thereby. Its impermanence argues its unreality. It is unworthy of your love, noble soul!

Worldling: The God you love is worthy of your love should he exist, but he does not, or at least you have no proof that he does; no proof sufficient to render reasonable your rejection  of  this passing world and its finite satisfactions for a possibility merely believed in.  

An Advantage of Childlessness

Our parents and relatives cared about us enough to judge us, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. They understood us and they didn't. Their intentions were mainly good, but their misunderstanding was a burden. They were wrapped up in their own lives and troubles; ours were relatively unreal to them. "What do you have to worry about?" a parent may say to a child drifting in the horse latitudes of teenage alienation, aimlessness, and cognitive dissonance. With their passing our burden of their misunderstanding was lifted. And they too were lifted -- beyond the reach of our critical judgments. 

Childlessness has this advantage: there is no one left to judge us. We are free. I am not an anti-natalist. I am merely pointing out an advantage to having reached a temporal 'space' in which some of us are safe from being boxed-in by the judgments of  well-meaning but uncomprehending kith and kin.  

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Enemies Have Their Uses

You may do your level best to hide your faults and defects, but others will expose them. Even if they do so maliciously they perform a service to those who are open to correction. An enemy is sometimes to be preferred to a friend in tacit collusion with one's moral complacency.

Civilization Requires Deterrence

Wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson. There is precious little of it on the Left. We are awash in the deleterious consequences. Excerpt below the fold.

Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism

There are respectable forms of atheism. The atheist needn't be a rebellious punk stuck in intellectual adolescence, swamped by sensuality, and given to self-idolatry.  

Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (Harper Torchbooks, 1960, tr. Natalie Duddington, p. 24):

It is precisely the traditional theology that leads good men, inspired by moral motives, to atheism. The ordinary theological conception of freedom in no way saves the Creator from the responsibility for pain and evil.  Freedom itself is created by God and penetrable by Him down to its very depths. In His omniscience, ascribed to Him by positive theology, God foresaw from all eternity the fatal consequences of freedom with which He endowed man. He foresaw the evil and suffering of the world which has been called into being by His will and is wholly in His power; He foresaw everything, down to the perdition and everlasting torments of many. And yet He consented to create man and the world under those terrible conditions. This is the profound moral source of atheism.

I read Berdyaev's The Beginning and the End in the summer of 1970.  The following autumn I committed myself to philosophy as my vocation. The Russian personalist moved me deeply at the time, but then other philosophical interests and concerns took over. It is wonderful to be reading him again some 50 years later.  If this existentialist is a bit on the febrile side, he at least avoids the empty intellectual gamesmanship of the analytic logic choppers  whose philosophical activity bespeaks their spiritual vacuity.  The task of the true philosopher is to combine rigor and Wissenschaftlichkeit with spiritual depth. Plato and Spinoza come to mind. We lesser lights are not quite up to the task, but we ought to take such luminaries as guides and tutelary spirits. 

Addendum 9/24

Some of us are old enough to remember seeing Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on television.  His message below is effectively answered by Berdyaev above. The cause of theism is not well-served by the caricaturing of atheists as all of the same stripe.  There are saints and scamps on both sides of the theological divide.

Singular Concepts and Singular Negative Existentials

A re-post  from 15 May 2012. Reproduced verbatim.

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London Ed seems to be suggesting that we need irreducibly singular concepts (properties, propositional functions) if we are properly to analyze grammatically singular negative existence statements such as

1. Vulcan does not exist.

But why do we need to take 'Vulcan' to express a singular concept or haecceity property?  Why isn't the following an adequate analysis:

1A. The concept Small, intra-Mercurial planet whose existence explains the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit is not instantiated.

Note that the concept picked out by the italicized phrase is general, not singular.  It is general even though only one individual instantiates it if any does.  The fact that different individuals instantiate it at different possible worlds suffices to make the concept general, not irreducibly singular.

Singular Concepts Again

Ed writes,

Your counter-arguments are very useful but I find some of them puzzling. One argument that repeatedly occurs is that a concept cannot contain the object that it is a concept of. Our concept of Venus (if we have one) cannot contain Venus, for example.

My difficulty is that I agree with this argument, indeed it’s a cornerstone of the thesis in the book. See e.g.

The standard theory is a development of Mill’s theory, and is attended by the same difficulties. It explains properness by a semantic connection between proper name and bearer whereby the name can only signify that thing, but this leads to all the well-known difficulties mentioned in the last chapter, for example (i) how a large planetary body like Jupiter could be a part of a meaning or a thought, (ii) how identity statements involving different names for the same thing, such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” can sometimes be informative, and (iii) how negative existential statements, which apparently deny a meaning for the name, are possible at all.

My emphasis. So where are we disagreeing I wonder? Is it that I claim a singular term has a meaning or sense? But in other posts of yours, you seem to agree that singular terms have a sense.

Or is it that you think that the sense of a singular term is ‘general’?

BV: Yes, that is what I claim. A singular term such as a name has a sense, but its sense is general. But I note that you switched from 'concept' to 'sense.'  They are closely related. We may have to examine whether they are equivalent.  

If so, you need to define what ‘general’ means. I define it as repeatable. A repeatable concept is one that we can without contradiction suppose to be instantiated by more than one individual, perhaps by individuals in different possible worlds. A singular concept by contrast is one where we cannot suppose repeatability without contradicting ourselves. For example, I cannot rationally entertain the thought that there could have been someone else who was Boris Johnson in 2021. That is because ‘someone else’ in this context means ‘someone other than Boris Johnson’, but ‘who was Boris Johnson’ means ‘someone who was no other than Boris Johnson’.

Thus to suppose that there could have been someone else who was Boris Johnson in 2021 is to suppose that there could have been someone who was both (1) other than Boris Johnson and (2) not other than Boris Johnson.

BV: I accept your definitions of 'general concept' and 'singular concept' pending some caveats to come.  We agree that there are general concepts.  We also agree that there are general terms and that there are singular terms. Presumably we also agree that a term is not the same as the concept the term expresses.  The English word 'tree' and the German word 'Baum' are both token-distinct and type-distinct. But they express the same concept. Therefore, a word and the concept it expresses are not the same.  And the same goes for sense: a word is not the same as its sense.

We disagree about whether there are singular concepts. You say that there are and I say that there aren't.   

I think the onus is on you to establish that there cannot be unrepeatable concepts in the sense defined above.

BV: Why is the onus probandi on me rather than on you? Why is there a presumption in favor of your position that I must defeat, rather than the other way around? But let's not worry about where the burden of proof lies. We are not in a court room.  You want an argument from me to the conclusion that there are no singular/individual/unrepeatable concepts. The demand is legitimate regardless of burden-of-proof considerations.

We agree that a first-level singular concept C, if instantiated, is instantiated by exactly one individual in the actual world and by the very same individual in every merely possible world in which C is instantiated.  This is essentially your definition of 'singular concept.' I don't disagree with it but I say more. 

I say that every concept is a mental grasping by the person who deploys the concept of the thing or things that instantiate (fall under, bear) the concept.  A concept of an individual, then, would have to be a mental grasping of what makes that individual be the very individual it is and not some other actual or possible individual.  So if there is the irreducibly singular concept Socrateity, then my deployment of that concept would allow we to grasp the haecceity (thisness) of Socrates which is precisely his and 'incommunicable' (as a schoolman might say) to any other individual actual or possible.  But this is what minds of our type cannot grasp. Every concept we deploy is a general concept, and it doesn't matter how specific the concept is. Specificity no matter how far protracted never gets the length of singularity.

All of our concepts are mental representations of the repeatable features of things.  It follows that all of our concepts are general. The individual, however, is essentially unrepeatable. For that very reason there cannot be a concept of the individual qua individual.

Consider Max Black's world in which there are exactly two iron spheres, alike in all monadic and relational respects, and nothing else. If there were an individual concept of the one sphere, then it would also be an individual concept of the other.  But then it would not be an individual or singular concept: it would be general.  It would be general because it would have two instances. The only way there could be two individual concepts is if each had as a constituent an iron sphere -- which is absurd.  Therefore, there cannot be any individual concepts.

 

A Part-Time Monk's Solution to Suggestibility

Substack latest.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on Prayer

From his magnificent essay, "Self Reliance":

Prayer that craves a particular commodity, -- anything less than all good, -- is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.

While I do not confer upon this passage a plenary endorsement, I am sympathetic to it, as should be evident from Give Us this Day our Daily Bread. 

See also Bernanos on Prayer which is mainly a long quotation from the great novelist.  At the end of the quotation I offer:

The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded  rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.

Bishop John Shelby Spong (1931-2021)

Yes, I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but I will make an exception in this case. This man filled his belly from Christianity while rejecting not only its specific tenets, but theism itself.  

Spong in his final years belonged to the now largely defunct Jesus Seminar, which voted with marbles on which scriptures were authentic, always rejecting verses that claimed the supernatural. With those scholars, Spong rejected divine interventions, including Jesus’ deity, resurrection, virgin birth and miracles. In the end, Spong denounced theism itself. He also questioned Christian teachings about the afterlife and suggested that their primary purpose was control of human behavior in this life.

Instead of playing the termite in a bishop's regalia, Spong should have had the intellectual decency to get an honest job.

“Heaven and Hell have got to go,” the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey retired bishop lectured at United Methodist-affiliated Drew Theological School after authoring his 2010 book Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. “Nobody knows what the afterlife is all about; nobody even knows if there is one.”

This quotation shows the man to have been a fool. Of course nobody KNOWS what the afterlife is ALL about, or whether there is one. It is a matter of reasoned faith. A man without faith in God and Christ who postures as a Christian bishop is comparable to a pacifist who expects to learn a living as a high-ranking military officer. 

Spong eventually described himself as a non-theist, rejecting not just historic Christian teachings in the Nicene Creed, but also the very idea of a personal God.

The Diocese of Newark tweeted:

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

That's hilarious!

Is Theism Empirically Refutable?

Consider the following passage from J. J. C. Smart:

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.

So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I say that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:

1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
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3. It is not the case that God exists.

The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omni-qualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. Such an evil would not be gratuitous. So it is just false to say, "If God exists, then there is no evil."

But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that -- (2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. As for epistemic possibility, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).

But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? How does one know that there is gratuitous evil? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant arguendo that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from sensory experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?

Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?

To say that an evil is gratuitous is equivalent to saying that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omni-qualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil.  Even if it is empirically obvious that there are evils such as the intense pain both physical and psychological of a fawn being incinerated in a forest fire, it is not empirically obvious that this evil is gratuitous.

The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils.  At most, there would only seem to be such.

Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition -- There is gratuitous evil -- is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'

One last observation. There is something strange about referring as Smart does to theism as an empirical hypothesis.  This is not the place to pursue this.   I will merely suggest that the existence of God is more like the existence of truth than it is like the existence of something empirically confirmable or disconfirmable. It would be easy to show the absurdity of the question, Is the existence of truth empirically refutable? So too, perhaps, with the existence of God. The existence of truth is an ultimate presupposition of all inquiry and all assertion. The existence of God may be in the same logical boat.

If you are thinking of God along the lines of Russell's celestial teapot, you have missed the boat.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

A mixed bag for your enjoyment, but mainly mine.  I post what I like and I like what I post. And I post what I've posted before. Links go bad, and even when they don't I never get tired of the old tunes I like. It's Saturday night, friends, pour yourself a stiff one and relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  I am drinking the fermented juice of the agave cactus mixed with a little orange juice and ginger ale. What's your libation? Forget for a time the swine who have taken over our great country, and enjoy the moment.

Thelonious Monk, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You

Wes Montgomery, 'Round Midnight

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away. In 7/4 time.

Ry Cooder, I Think It's Going to to Work Out Fine

Jeff Beck, Sleepwalk. The old Santo and Johnny instrumental from 1959.

Danny Gatton, master of the Telecaster. Phenomenally good, practically unknown.

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

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

Elvis Presley, Little Sister 

Carole King, You've Got a Friend

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

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

Marty Robbins, El Paso. Great guitar work.

C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil

In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed.  This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects.  "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."

So far, so good. It is equally true, however,  that two people being tortured to death  is worse than one person  being tortured to death.  Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.

I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists.  Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe."  And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.) 

My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.

Suffering Pleasure

We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be patient rather than agent, to be acted upon, to be in the thrall of another, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self.  Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:

. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.

It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities.

The mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won't advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.

On the Suffering of Non-Human Animals

Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal suffers. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.

Generic and Specific Problems of Evil

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The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.

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Vito Caiati comments:

I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”

However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?  

It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments.  The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world.  Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned?  Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.  

None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.

You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito.  I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals.  I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can.  'You' in what follows refers to me!

1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths  and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss. 

2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."

3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil.  You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.

4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering -- imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! -- is in no way recompensed or outweighed.  And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.

5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook. 

I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.

A. We can take something like the  line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them.  The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)

B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains.  One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real,  are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.

C.  One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist.  Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.

While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).

ComBox now open.

ADDENDUM (9/17)

This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.

The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)

The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well.  Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved -- aufgehoben in Hegel's sense  -- in eternity.  How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.  

In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Recently Dead and Gone

As a sort of intro, The Who, My Generation. "I hope I die before I get old." My English readers will enjoy the video.

Charlie Watts at 80, 1941-2021. Rolling Stones, Sittin' on a Fence. A lovely tune. Trigger warning!  Under My Thumb. Eerily appropriate these days: Gimme Shelter

Don Everly at 84, 1937-2021. When Will I Be Loved?

Nanci Griffith at 68, 1953-2021. Boots of Spanish Leather. Bob would be proud.

B. J. Thomas at 78, 1942-2021. I Just Can't Help Believing

Lloyd Price at 88, 1933-2021. Stagger Lee. Personality

Chick Corea at 79, 1941-2021. Armando's Rhumba

Mary Wilson at 76, 1944-2021. Our Day Will Come

Jimmie Rodgers at 87. 1933-2021. Honeycomb

Phil Spector at 81, 1939-2021.  The Wall of Sound

Charley Pride at 82, 1938-2021. 

Len Barry at 78, 1942-2020. You Can't Sit Down

Jerry Jeff Walker at 78, 1942-2020. Mr. Bojangles

Spencer Davis at 81, 1939-2020. Gimme Some Lovin'

An Admiring but Critical Note on an Edmund Burke Quotation

A quotation and a question:

Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love to [of] justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

Edmund Burke, letter to François-Louis-Thibaut de Menonville, 1791, bolding added.

A fine statement to which I largely agree, but I have one reservation. An  external check upon the wills and appetites of individuals who will not check themselves is necessary if there is to be civil order.  But the administrators of the external check are cut from the same crooked timber as the rest of us.  Our trust in them must therefore be cautious and as limited as the power we grant them. The conservative assessment of human nature is sober and realistic: every true conservative knows that power goes to the heads of its possessors, and this regardless of how paltry the power may be. 

Who checks the checkers? Who keeps them in check?  Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?  The checkers cannot be expected to check themselves any more that the Roman Catholic hierarchy can be expected to check the concupiscence of its clerics and punish priestly paedophiles and ephebophiles with sufficient severity. They will protect their own first, setting the interests of the institution above the interests of those  they are supposed to serve.  The same goes for government which can degenerate into a self-serving hustle like any hustle.  So-called civil servants too often serve themselves first and those they are supposed to serve second if at all.

A sound conservatism must advocate checks and balances across the board with every individual and group kept in check and keeping in check.  For one example, armed civilians are needed to keep both the criminal element and government in check, just as government is need to keep armed civilians in check via the enactment and enforcement of reasonable gun laws.

A sound conservatism will not succumb to the authoritarian temptation; it must take on board as much of classical liberalism as is necessary to stymy the drift toward the totalitarian. The true conservative treads the via media between knee-pad Toryism and anything-goes libertarianism. 

I Walk the Line

Over at Facebook. The line between saying what needs to be said and being de-platformed. I don't much cotton to book burners and their latter-day equivalents. Free speech and open inquiry! Not for their own sakes, but in pursuit of the truth. Not 'my truth' or 'your truth,' but the truth.

Claustration

Claustration may be likened to social castration.  If voluntary, it often follows upon the insight that social intercourse is idle and unproductive.  

Theodor Haecker on the Teaching of Latin and Greek

Substack latest.

The Truly Philosophical Spirit

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 36, #146):

The truly philosophical spirit is a contemplative spirit. It is not captivated by the things that one can change, but but by those, precisely, which cannot be changed.

 

A Proof of Individual Concepts?

This just in from Edward:

Proof that singular concepts (aka individual concepts) exist.

1. Common terms (‘cat’) and singular terms (‘this cat’, ‘Max’) exist.

2. These terms are meaningful, i.e. their meanings exist.

3. A concept is the meaning of a term.

4. Thus (from 1,2, 3) singular concepts, aka singular meanings, exist.

QED

This argument equivocates on 'meaning.' There are of course general and singular terms and they both have meanings if the meaning of a term is its extension, the (set of) things to which it applies. Accordingly, the meaning/extension of 'cat' is (the set of)  cats, and the meaning/extension of 'Max' is Max, or his singleton.  General terms also have meaning in the sense of intension.  'Cordate' and 'renate' are general terms that have the same extension but differ in intension.  But the singular term 'Max,' while it has an extension, lacks an intension.

So for both (1) and (2) to be true, the meaning of a term must be its extension. But for (3) to be true, the meaning of a term must be its intension. So the argument trades on an equivocation and is for that reason invalid.

Here is a sound argument:

5. A concept is the intension of a term.

6. Singular terms lack intensions.

7. If a term lacks an intension, then there is no concept the term expresses.

Therefore

8. Singular terms do not express concepts. (From 5, 6, 7)

9. If a term does not express a concept, then there exists no concept the term expresses.

Therefore

10. There are no singular/individual concepts.

Just ask yourself: how could there be a concept of precisely Max and nothing actually or possibly different from Max? Suppose that there is a definite description that Max alone satisfies in the actual world.  That description would express a concept that only one thing could bear or instantiate. But such a concept would not be singular but general since something else might have satisfied the description.   For there to be an individual concept of Max, Max himself would somehow  have to be a constituent of the concept. But that is impossible and for two reasons.  First, concepts reside in the mind but no cat is a constituent of anything in my mind.  Second, a concept is distinct from its bearer and can exist whether or not its bearer exists.  But the concept MAX, if there were such a concept, would not be wholly distinct from its bearer and could not exist without its bearer.

The individual qua individual cannot be conceptualized. My conceptual grasp of an individual such as Max is always and necessarily by way of general concepts: cat, domestic cat, black cat, Tuxedo cat, black male Tuxedo cat five years old and weighing 20 lbs,  cat presently in my visual field, this cat to which I am now pointing.  Note that Max need not be this cat to which I am presently pointing, whence it follows that the haecceity of Max himself  cannot be reached or grasped or conceptualized in the concept this cat to which I am presently pointing.

For My Divorced Friends

A little poem by Dorothy Parker:

Comment

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania.

(From the front matter of Joseph Epstein, Divorced in America: Marriage in an Age of Possibility, E. P. Dutton, 1974.)

Care of Soul and Body

To care properly for the first, live each day as if it will be your last. To care properly for the second, live each day as if your supply of days is infinite. (Adapted from Evagrius Ponticus.)

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

The mortalist body-abuser is one puzzling hombre.

Christopher Hitchens loved to drink and he loved to smoke and he knew that the synergistic effects of drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney could lead, as it did in the case of Humphrey Bogart, to an untimely shuffling off of the mortal coil.  (Hamlet's soliloquy, Act 3, Scene 1) You would think that someone who was utterly convinced that he was nothing more than an animated body, a clever land mammal, would want to take care of  his body. Hitchens was not suicidal. He loved to write and he had writing projects planned out. He died of cancer of the esophagus at age 62 in 2011. Those of us who champion  free speech miss him greatly and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world.  

People think they have plenty of time. But it's later than you think. The Reaper Man is sharpening his scythe as we scribblers sharpen our pencils.

Synoptics

Synoptics are the optics of the true philosopher. 

Intentionality, Singularity, and Individual Concepts

Herewith, some notes on R. M. Sainsbury, Intentionality without Exotica.  (Exotica are those items  that are "nonexistent, nonconcrete, or nonactual." (303) Examples include Superman and Arcadia.)

'Jack wants a sloop' could mean three different things. (a) There is a particular sloop Jack wants.  In this case, Jack's desire is externally singular.  Desire is an object-directed mental state, and in this case the object exists and is singular.

(b) There is no particular sloop Jack wants; what he wants is "relief from slooplessness" in Quine's phrase. In this case the desire, being "wholly non-specific," is not externally singular.  In fact, it is not singular at all.  Jack wants some sloop or other, but no particular sloop whether one that exists at present or one that is to be built.

(c) Jack wants a sloop of a certain description, one that, at the time of the initial desire, no external object satisfies. He contracts with a ship builder to build a sloop to his exact specifications, a sloop he dubs The Mary Jane. It turns out, however, that the sloop is never built.  In this case, Sainsbury tells us, the desire is not externally singular as in case (a), but internally singular:

The concept The Mary Jane that features in the content of the desire is the kind of concept appropriate to external singularity, though that kind of singularity is absent, so the desire counts as internally singular. The kind of concept that makes for singularity in thought is one produced by a concept-producing mechanism whose functional role is to generate concepts fit for using to think about individual things. I call such a concept an ‘‘individual concept’’ (Sainsbury 2005: 217ff). Individual concepts are individuated by the event in which they are introduced. In typical cases, and when all goes well, an act of attention to an object accompanies, or perhaps is a constituent of, the introduction of an individual concept, which then has that object as its bearer. In cases in which all does not go well, for example in hallucination, an individual concept is used by the subject as if it had an object even though it does not; an act internally indistinguishable from an act of attending to an object occurs, and in that act an individual concept without a bearer comes into being. A concept so introduced can be used in thought; for example an individual concept C  can be a component in wondering whether C is real or merely hallucinated. In less typical cases, it is known to the subject that the concept has no bearer. An example would be a case in which I know I am hallucinating.     

    External singularity is relational: a subject is related to an object. Internal singularity is not relational in this way. (301, bolding added.)

 

What interests me here is the notion of an individual concept (IC). We are told above that an IC is distinct from its bearer and can exist without a bearer.  So the existence and identity of an IC does not depend on its having a bearer. We are also told that one and the same IC can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience, the seeing of a dagger, say.  So it is not the bearer that individuates the IC. What individuates it is the mental event by which it is introduced.

 

To these two points I add a third: it is built into the sense of 'individual concept' that if an individual concept C has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer in the actual world, and the same bearer in every  possible world in which it has a bearer.  So if there is an individual concept SOCRATES, and it has a bearer, then it has exactly one bearer, Socrates, and not possibly anything distinct from Socrates.  This implies that individual concepts of externally singular items are as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts. This in turn implies that no individual concept of an externally singular item is general:  no such concept is multiply instantiable or multiply 'bearable.'

 

I now add a fourth point: concepts are mental entities in the sense that they cannot exist apart from minds. Concepts are representations and therefore mental entities in the sense indicated.  A fifth point is that our minds are finite and our powers of conceptualization correspondingly limited. One obvious limit on our power to conceptualize is that no concept of ours can capture or grasp the haecceity (thisness) of any externally singular item.  We ectypal intellects cannot conceptually eff the ineffable, where what is ineffable is the individual in its individuality or singularity or haecceity, i.e.,  in that which makes it be this individual and no other actual or possible individual.  God, the archetypal intellect, may be able to grasp the haecceity of an individual, but this is clearly beyond our 'pay grade.' If God can do it, this is presumably because he creates the individual ex nihilo.

 

It follows from the fourth and fifth points that all of our concepts are general.  Suppose that the concept FASTEST MARATHONER (FM) applies to Jones. That concept is general despite the fact that at any given time t only one person can instantiate or bear it.   For at times earlier and later than t, some other runners were and will be the FM.  Therefore, FM does not capture Jones' haecceity. But even if Jones is the FM at every time in the actual world, there are possible worlds in which some other person is the FM at every time. What's more, at any time at which Jones is the FM, he might not have been the FM at that time.

 

Sainsbury's theory of individual concepts strikes me as incoherent.  The following cannot all be true:

 

1) There are individual concepts.

2) Concepts are representations in finite minds, and our minds are finite.

3) Individual concepts of externally singular items must be as singular in content as the items of which they are the concepts.

4) Every externally singular item exists. (There are no 'exotica.')

5) Every externally singular item is wholly determinate or complete where x is complete =_df x  satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (tertium non datur).

6) No concept in a finite mind of an externally singular item is singular in content in the sense of encoding every property of the wholly determinate or complete thing of which it is the concept.

7) One and the same individual concept can figure in both a veridical and a non-veridical  (hallucinatory) experience.

 

Sainsbury is committed to each of these seven propositions, and yet they cannot all be true. The first five propositions, taken in conjunction, entails the negation of (6).   Or if (6) is true, then (1) is false.  (6) and (7) cannot both be true.

 

I conclude that there are no individual concepts, and that the distinction between externally singular and internally singular object-directed mental states cannot be upheld.  

Two Related Political Mistakes

1) One is the idea that we can all live together and get along despite deep differences in language, race, religion, culture, political convictions and basic values.  This, the contemporary liberal position, either is or tends towards the idea that there are no limits on productive and mutually beneficial interaction among  very different types of people.   It  either is or tends toward the conceit that a viable One can be made out of any Many. This is e pluribus unum taken to an extreme and reduced to absurdity. The Latin dictum on our coinage has a rather more moderate meaning: it means that out of  many individuals and geographical regions and states one nation can arise, provided that there are deep commonalities of language, culture, religion, and values. Whose values? Well, not the values of sharia-supporting Muslims whose values are antithetical to traditional American values which are, in the main, the values of the Enlightenment.  The Founders, for example, were anti-theocratic but not anti-religious. 

2) The other mistake is the idea is that those who have, or believe they have,  a superior worldview are justified in imposing it on others, by force if necessary, for their own good.  Forced religious conversion is one form of this. A second is the ill-starred attempt at nation building which has played a central role in the current debacle in Afghanistan.  You cannot impose upon people whose backward culture is downstream from an inferior religion a way of life that cuts against their grain and for which they lack the prerequisites. They would have had to have gone through something like our Enlightenment to to be able to benefit from our tutelage when it comes to setting up a viable system of governance.  

3) The two mistakes may seem to pull in opposite directions. The first presupposes that we are all the same, have the same values, and want the same things.  The second presupposes that some need to be 'straightened out' and taught the right way of doing things. But the mistakes share a common element, that it would be good to bring people together and that it is possible to do so. This is a failure to understand that there are irreconcilable differences. There is no way we can straighten out the Taliban and teach them how to live, especially when we are collapsing under the weight of our own decadence.  'Woke' madness and Western decadence is no cure for Islamist fanaticism any more than National Socialism is the cure for Communism.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September already.  A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

The 'sixties forever! We were young, raw, open, impressionable, experience-hungry; we lived intensely and sometimes foolishly.  We felt deeply, and suffered deeply. Youth has its truth. And our popular music put to shame the crap that came before and after. Or so we thought. Would I want to live though the 'sixties again? Hell no, I am having too good a time enjoying it memorially at a safe distance.  Youth has its truth, but if you can make it into old age with health and intellect intact, and a modicum of the lean green, you are winning the game. 

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song 

Van Morrison, September Night

Brothers Four, Try to Remember. I do remember when I was "a tender and callow fellow." 

Addendum

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September.’  Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an  account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road.  I too love the 'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac.  Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition.  Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.'  I wonder why.

Do You Value This Life? How Much?

It is the hour of death.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? Noch einmal? If you say yes, you are at the upper limit of life affirmation. For me, once is enough. Up or out! This life has point only as prelude. The wheel of samsara is  the wheel of Ixion, and an eternity of re-turning is a shabby and indeed horrifying substitute for true eternity.

Nietzsche was a genuine instance of homo religiosus, but possessing as he did the bladed intellect of the skeptic, he could not bring himself to believe.

Speaking Truth to Power

When a leftist speaks truth to power, it is not out of respect for truth, but out of respect for the power that he hopes to achieve by using truth-telling as a means to his end. 

It Can't be Legislated

A law can be legislated, but respect for the rule of law cannot be legislated. In the absence of the latter, positive laws are but tools of the powerful.

All is Fleeting

The 'is' gladdens; the 'fleeting' saddens. The 'All' reminds us that man is a metaphysical animal.

Nietzsche to his Friend Overbeck

"I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." So he preached the Eternal Recurrence of the Same,  letting an ersatz Absolute in through the back door. Becoming became enshrined as Being. Thus was an attempt made to fix the flux and assuage the metaphysical need. 

Addendum

After penning the above observation, I stumbled upon the following entry in Theodor Haecker's Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 31, #127):

The most radical denial of need of redemption in this world seems to me to lie in the phrase, 'the eternal recurrence of the same' (Nietzsche). Logically it represents a fantastic confusion  thought, since quite evidently everything points in the very opposite direction. Theologically, it is at an infinite distance from God, and it turns everything upside down. At this point discussion is no longer possible.

Haecker is on the right track, The eternity of Recurrence is a paltry substitute for true eternity and in the end no true redemption.

Dura lex, sed lex

"The law is hard, but the law is the law." Not to a leftist, however, for whom the law is but an expression of power. Power knows no moral constraint.

Can Rigorous Philosophy be Therapeutic?

Is philosophical analysis relevant to life as she is lived? 

Richard Sorabji:

Stoic cognitive therapy consists of a package which is in part a philosophical analysis of what the emotions are and in part a battery of cognitive devices for attacking those aspects of emotion which the philosophical analysis suggests can be attacked. The devices are often not philosophical and are often shared with other schools. But I believe it is wrong to suppose that they are doing all the work. The work is done by the package and the philosophical analysis is an essential part of the package. Admittedly somebody who just wanted to be treated passively as the patient of a Stoic therapist would not have to understand the philosophical analysis. But anyone who wants to be able to deal with the next emotional crisis that comes along and the next needs to learn how to treat themselves and for this the philosophical analysis of emotion is essential. What is under discussion here is the role of philosophical analysis as relevant to life.

I am indebted to Bernard Williams not only for expressing a diametrically opposite view but for discussing it with me both orally and in print.¹ His case demands the most careful consideration. His claim . . . is that rigorous philosophy cannot be therapeutic.

Read more.

Quietism at War with Activism

EVAGRIOS PONTIKOS enjoins apatheia, a state of deep calm, of tranquillity of mind. Hard to achieve, it is in need of constant protection. Why then do I follow current political and other events? Why do I put myself in a position to have my peace of mind disturbed? 

I tell myself to do both: live like a monk while keeping an eye on the world. But experience suggests, if it does not conclusively show, that the ideal is unattainable.  An ideal unattainable by me cannot be an ideal for me. A valued conservative friend of mine told me that he doesn't watch conservative television because it makes him angry.  So I explained my ideal to him: stay informed while retaining one's equanimity. But in all honesty it is very difficult and I often fail to pull it off. It seems entirely fitting to be angered by the outrages of the Left.  

If I cannot productively blend quietism and activism, what should I do? For me, full-on activism and the secularism it presupposes would be psychologically impossible. To be wholly consumed by the mundane is a horror to someone of my type. Besides, this world is a vanishing quantity and simply cannot merit the full measure of our concern. Now you either see that or you don't. If you don't, then these ruminations are not for you. 

This leaves quietism, the retreat into the inner citadel, the cultivation of one's inner garden, abstention from media dreck, the avoidance of idle talk and empty socializing, together with devotion to spiritual exercises premised on a resolute NO! to the self-evacuation of the self into the world's sensory-social diaspora. One enters upon the quest for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters recognizing that this quest alone can give to human life the meaning that we intuitively feel it must have.  One stops living for a future that cannot be one's own future, and is chimerical in any event. One accepts that our earthly tenure is either prelude or pointless.

What speaks against full-on quietism is the fact that our political enemies, totalitarians, will not let us be. They pose an existential threat, one to both our physical and our spiritual lives and their continuance. One could ignore this threat if one knew that God and the soul are real. But we don't know that. At best, it is a reasoned faith and a matter of inquiry.

So what should I do? Perhaps this: let the quietism dominate while keeping an eye on the passing scene.  

"You are missing the Boethian Option: ignore the political and devote yourself wholly to the spiritual quest. Withdraw and accept whatever persecution and incarceration should come your way. Did not Boethius write Consolatio Philosophiae in prison? After all, you yourself regularly point out the vanity, transiency,  and ultimate nullity of this world of shadows.  If the Object of the spiritual quest is real, then these shadowlands are by comparison nothing or next-to nothing.   Why keep an eye on, and get activated and upset over, what is next-to-nothing?"

Well, I am no Boethius for starters. We lesser lights and weaker spirits could easily be broken under persecution.  A broken soul cannot engage in soul-making. And besides, this passing scene, though ontologically derivative, is not, strictly speaking, nothing. If it were, God created nothing. And why would God incarnate into it if it were not worth saving and we with it?  

And so I debate with myself.

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

Richard Sorabji on Evagrios Pontikus (c. 345–99 anno domini)

The Decisive Difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #689, p. 212, written in 1944:

The endless chatter about Nietzsche and Kierkegaard is quite hopeless. Outward similarities set up a superficial sphere of comparison that is utterly meaningless, for they are localised and limited by a decisive difference at a deeper level; the one prayed, the other did not. 

 

Stoic Advice

KNOW IN ADVANCE that people will respond to you in the most diverse ways, favorably, with hostility, indifferently, in every way. Do not be surprised or much affected. Take as much of it as you can with equanimity. Observe their antics  with detachment.  Observe as well your emotional responses. 

Treat feelings and emotions as they arise  as interesting objects of study.  Holding them at mental arm's length, objectifying them, we lessen their grip on us.

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

Substack latest. 

Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism, but Mill takes it too far.