Maverick Philosopher

I Kill a Bug

And when I do, I apologize to him: "Sorry, man, nothing personal; but just one of my thoughts is worth more than your entire life."

But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low its level, is marvellous and mysterious and deserving of respect. 

But not just sentience elicits my awe. I took my rest on a rock atop Miner's Saddle in the Western Superstitions. It had been a hard climb. Endorphins released, contemplative repose supervened. A fly landed on my arm. The lambent light of the desert Southwest illuminated its intricacy. What a piece of engineering! What a beautiful specimen of designedness!    

The above is a nice introduction to The Concept of Design.

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

Vito Caiati writes,

“But if the insect is no distraction and can be easily dispatched to the outdoors, that is where he goes, or is sent. Sentience as such, no matter how low its level, is marvelous and mysterious and deserving of respect.”

Good for you, Bill! I faced a similar situation recently, one which involved a more evolved form of sentient life, a little mouse that had come in from my garden as the weather turned colder. He had been trapped at the bottom of my kitchen garbage bin, under the removal container, by my two cats. Removing them from the room, I lifted up the container and discovered him there, looking up at me. He, like your insect, was “dispatched” to the garden, rather than killed. These are small acts of mercy, but to arrive at them requires a good deal of humility and wisdom. I recall Henry Beston’s observation regarding animals, in The Outermost House, with which you may partially agree: “In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

It is always a pleasure to hear from you, Vito. And as I think of you now, a pun occurs to me, In Vito veritas!

I begin with a linguistic bagatelle. I see that when you quoted me you replaced my 'marvellous' with the more usual 'marvelous.' Why do I write 'marvellous' and 'tranquillity'? Being a linguistic conservative, I try to keep etymology in mind as far as I can given my limited erudition; the Latin is tranquillitas, and so to honor that origin I write the English counterpart with the double 'l.' Similarly with 'marvellous,' which is from Middle English merveillous, borrowed from Anglo-French, from merveille MARVEL entry 1 + -ous (Merriam-Webster).  You may call me an idiosyncratic pedant, but I am not, at least in these cases, aping the British spelling, although I am in conformity with it.

I enjoyed the mouse story. A mouse, of course, is 'more human' in the sense of more anthropo-morphic than a fly or spider, and I would not have killed the little guy especially after his having been terrorized by your cats. And then I thought of the 'mouse passage' near the beginning of Jack Kerouac's Visions of Gerard which I re-read back in October. 

One day he [Gerard] found a mouse caught in Scoop's mousetrap outside the fish market on West Sixth Street -- faces more bleak than envenomed spiders, those who invented mousetraps [. . .] The hungjawed dull faces of grown adults had no words to praise or please little trying-angels like Gerard working to save the mouse from the trap [. . .] the little mouse, thrashing in the concrete, was released by Gerard [. . .] Took it home and nursed it, actually bandaged it, held it, stroked it, prepared a little basket for it, as Ma watched amazed . . . . 

The beautiful quotation from Henry Beston resonates with me, especially when he writes that animals "move finished and complete."  I had a similar thought recently: "Cats are perfect as they are, or rather, a healthy non-defective cat is perfect as it is: it does not seek, or need to seek, wholeness or integration." That is part of a longer meditation which I am tempted to write up and post.  I suspect you will like it.

Duty and Inclination

It is one's duty to control one's inclinations despite the strong inclination to dismiss one's duty.

Tough and Forebearing

It is better to be tough on oneself and forebearing toward others than the other way around.

What does Populism Threaten?

First posted on my Facebook page on this date three years ago.

 

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

 

POPULISM is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to prove to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn't be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn't be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn't be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism. It is a mistake to confuse nationalism with white nationalism, a mistake deliberately promoted by leftists.

 

Populism in the style of Trump is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned and which contemporary 'liberals' confuse with the classically liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these 'liberals' constantly use the word 'democracy' as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is a democratic republic. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

 

Those who think that democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who 'the people' are and who are not 'the people.' The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain't democracy wonderful?

 

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may or more likely will decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word 'migrant?' It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

 

A sane and defensible populism rests on an appreciation of an insight I have aphoristically expressed as follows:

No comity without commonality.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of cultural coherence. A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

 

Can you show I'm wrong?

Trotsky's Faith in Man

Substack latest.

On 20 August 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

It's a House, not a Home

Don't talk like a realtor unless you are one.  And even then . . .

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Dylan on Rick Nelson and James Burton

Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One (Simon and Shuster, 2004), p. 13:
 
He was different from  the rest of the teen idols, had a great guitarist who played like a cross    between a honky-tonk  hero and a barn-dance fiddler. Nelson had never been a bold innovator like the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships. He didn't sing desperately, do a lot of damage, and you'd never mistake him for a shaman. 

Nosiree, Bob, no shaman was he. There is more interesting material on Nelson in the vicinity of this excerpt. Dylan discusses Ricky Nelson in connection with his 1961 hit, Travelin' Man. But the great guitar work of James Burton to which Dylan alludes was much more in evidence in Hello Mary Lou. The Dylan Chronicles look like they will hold the interest of this old 60's Dylan fanatic.

Here is a better taste of James Burton and his Fender Telecaster with Elvis Presley.  And here he is with the Big O dueling with Springsteen.  Here he jams with Nelson's sons.  Orbison on Nelson.

It has been over thirty years now since Nelson died in a plane crash while touring. The plane, purchased from Jerry Lee Lewis, went down on New Year's Eve 1985. That travelin' man died with his boots on -- as I suspect he would have wanted to. In an interview in 1977 he said that he could not see himself growing old.

Be careful what you wish for.

The Sartorial Functionalist Speaks

Substack latest.

The Game of Life

The game of life is 'sudden death' with the time control unknown.

Are You Hungry?

Don't let the thought of the pleasures of the table persuade you to eat if you are not hungry. Eat only at meal times, but never because it is meal time. An exception is breakfast for those quitting their domiciles for a sally-forth into a mean world.  To leave your house without food in your gut is like driving into the desert without gas in your tank. You don't know what awaits you. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

The last two horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:

And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

Still and all, we have much to be grateful for.  But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty."  Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful. So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic!

The Trial of Kyle

The Rittenhouse trial was not about the 17-year-old primarily, but about one's right to defend oneself with lethal force against a lethal threat. Hence the great significance of this case. An absolutely crucial moral and legal principle is at stake. The righteous Right won this time, but the fact that the pernicious Left tried to railroad and destroy the intelligent, decent, and well-meaning kid shows that they will stop at nothing to destroy our Anglo-American system of justice, the best the world has yet to see.  Leftists smeared him as a 'white supremacist' against all evidence, and against all sense: Kyle and his assailants are all white. The Democrat 'president' of the United States, Joseph Biden, joined in the smear.  Rittenhouse's defensive actions, and the ensuing show trial, had nothing directly to do with race. And given all the clear video evidence, Rittenhouse should not have been criminally charged in the first place. 

But again, it is not primarily about Rittenhouse.  As bad as the Left's policy of personal destruction is, far worse is their policy of political destruction: the hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, aims to "fundamentally transform" (Obama), i.e., destroy, the American polity and system of government by, among many other things, opening the borders to any and all, eliding the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, giving the franchise to non-citizens, conspiring to give the vote to felons while still in prison, defunding the police, emptying the prisons, eliminating cash bail, transforming the public schools and the universities into  culturally Marxist seminaries, erasing the historical record, putting up statues to criminals  . . . .

The battle lines have never been clearer. Get ready. 

The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast

The slow one now will later be fast

As the present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fading

And the first one now will later be last

For the times, they are a-changin'.

The Biblical Dylan in prophetic mode. The civil rights battles of the '60s were fought and won. Now a different civil rights struggle is upon us, and Dylan's words again resonate and apply.

 

Related: Victor Davis Hanson, Can the FBI be Salvaged?

Do You Drive Your Car to Fill Your Tank?

No? Then why do you live to eat?

Death

Death is a journey to a destination the existence of which cannot be known prior to arrival.

Preparing to Die

Some want to die; some wait to die; some fear to die; some don't care whether they live or die. The philosopher prepares to die.

Why Women are 'Over-Represented' among Realtors

Have you ever wondered why women are 'over-represented' among realtors? It is because they excel men when it comes to conciliation and mediation.  I don't mean this as a snarky put-down of the distaff contingent.  I mean it as praise.  And if females do not take it as praise, are they not assuming the superiority of male virtues? 

It is a non sequitur to think that if the Xs are 'under-represented' among the Ys, then the Xs must have been the victims of some unjust discrimination.  Men are 'under-represented' among massage therapists, but the explanation is obvious and harmless: men like to have their naked bodies rubbed by women in dark rooms, but women feel uncomfortable having their naked bodies rubbed by men in dark rooms.   It is not as if there is some sort of sexism, 'institutional' or individual, that keeps men out of massage therapy. If you retort that some women do like massages from men not their intimates, then you don't understand generic statements.  

Blacks are 'over-represented'  in the NFL and the NBA. Is that because of some racism 'institutional' or individual, that keeps whitey out?  Of course not. Blacks are better than whites at football and basketball.  Jews are just terrible.  Chess is their athletics.  Jews dominate in the chess world.  Is that because the goyim have been suppressed?  

Does my talk of blacks and Jews make me a racist and an anti-Semite ?  To a self-enstupidated leftist or 'progressive,'  yes.  For they are too often incapable, or have rendered themselves incapable, of distinguishing between a statement whose content is race and a racist statement.  If you accuse me of retailing stereotypes, I will point out that some stereotypes have a basis in reality.  Leftists tend to embrace negative and groundless stereotypes about stereotypes.

I am treading a via media between the excesses of the neo-reactionaries (NRs) and the even worse excesses of the leftists. My challenge to the NRs:  How can you fail to see the importance of equal treatment of men and women?  One NR of my acquaintance claimed that the notion of equality of opportunity is vacuous. Why?  To require that applicants for a job not be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, or creed, is not vacuous.  It has a definite content. That it could use some spelling out is not to the point.  

What I mean is this. Some creeds are such that people who hold them must be discriminated against. Suppose you are an orthodox Muslim: you subscribe to Islamic law (sharia) and hold that it takes precedence  over the U. S. Constitution and Anglo-American law. You ought to be discriminated against.  You ought not be allowed to immigrate into the USA.  The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact.  

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kitsch, Sentimentality, and Dylan

April Stevens' and Nino Tempo's version of Deep Purple  became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch: 

When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in the night
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
Breathing my name with a sigh.

 In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you're gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams.

Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently 'wallows' in a song like this, giving into its 'cheap' emotions. The emotions are 'false' and 'faked.' The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, 'catchy.' The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to 'push the listener's buttons.' The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on. Theodor Adorno would not approve.

There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don't collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I've read almost none of it.  Who has time? 

This brings me to Bob Dylan who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s.  In the '60s  I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero.  And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.  

But the Nobel Prize for Literature?  That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and sound bites.  A large theme.  Get to it conservative bloggers.  Why do I have to do all the work?

Dylan's most sentimental song?  I don't know, but Forever Young is in serious contention.  

A long, long way from It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding and Visions of Johanna (Marianne Faithful) and Desolation Row. Here is the original of Visions of Johanna. 

All's Well that Ends Well

The hike was almost over.  The light was failing as we gingerly negotiated the last steps of the treacherous downgrade of Heart Attack Hill on the Bluff Spring Trail in the Superstition Mountains.  Suddenly my hiking partner let out a yell and jumped back at the unmistakable sound of a diamond back rattlesnake (crotalus atrox).  It was a perfect hike: physically demanding in excellent company with a dash of danger at the end. 

"You've Ruined my Life, Professor Craig!"

Here, with William Lane Craig's response.

The Tree and the House

A parable about envy.

Substack latest.  Opening:

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: "How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small."

Once More on Envy

His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might -- and make the father look small.

Envy Again

How little you must know about me to envy me!

Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target?

Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which, if not a sin is nonetheless ugly -- and deadly.

Envy

How little you must be to envy me!

Of Palate and Penis

The control of the one aids in the control of the other, and the control of the other in the control of the one. The Desert Fathers knew this, and enjoined the control of both.

The Grand Central Polarity: Objective and Subjective

Objectively viewed, an individual human life is next-to-nothing: a fleeting occurrence in the natural world. But we know this, and we know it as subjects for whom there is a world of nature. If objectively we are next-to-nothing, subjectively we are everything. 

"When I die, the world ends."

The thought expressed by this sentence is not the absurdity that when a measly specimen of an animal species dies, the whole of nature collapses into nonbeing. The thought is that when I as subject die, assuming that I as subject will cease to exist, the entire universe ceases to be for me: it ceases to appear, this appearing being a necessary condition of anything having meaning for me and of anything being objectively knowable by me.  (Note that while it is objectively certain that the animal that I am will die and thereby cease to exist, it is not objectively certain that I precisely as subject will cease to exist.) 

Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung wrote Arthur Schopenhauer in the first sentence of his magnum opus. "The world is my representation." He means by 'world' the world as object, the world as phenomenon in Immanuel Kant's sense, the world that appears to the subject and is knowable by the subject and is knowable only to a subject. No object without a subject.  Herein lies the perennial, if partial, truth of idealism.  It runs like the proverbial red thread (roter Faden) though the entire history of philosophy.

But the idealistic motif is partial and wants completion. The aporetician in me doubts that this completion is achievable here below.  What do I mean?

One cannot reduce object to subject or subject to object; nor can one eliminate either. The objective point of view (POV) is a POV -- so it seems that the (transcendental) subject takes priority both in the order of being and in the order of knowing. But this subject, despite its transcendental spectator function, is undeniably a factical subject embedded in the natural and social worlds.

And so there is a strong temptation to say that the thinking and knowing subject 'emerges' -- to avail myself of  that weasel word -- from the natural and social orders and can be understood only in terms of them.  Thus is the priority reversed, at least in the order of being.  If we adopt the objective POV, then the ontological prius is nature, the material universe splayed out in space-time. In the fullness of objective time certain highly advanced critters evolve with the power to know things, including themselves, and the power to pose the questions now being posed. This power 'emerges.' The weasel word papers over the how of the process of 'emergence' and is essentially only a naming of the puzzle as opposed to a solution it. It explains nothing. 

So on the one hand you have the ontic and epistemic priority of the thinking and knowing subject while on the other you have the ontic. if not the epistemic, priority of the object which, as ontically prior, is not a mere object for a subject, but an independent real. (Note that if thinking and knowing could be adequately accounted for in terms of brain functioning, then the objective POV would enjoy both ontic and epistemic priority. That would consummate the marriage of realism with physicalism/materialism.)  

The idealistic motif counters and is countered by the realistic motif.  My natural tendency is to give the palm to the former.  It has always seemed to me easier to get matter out of mind, than mind out of matter. Why? Well, I have the power to fictionalize and imagine.  I can imagine material things that do not exist. Imagining them I imagine them to exist.  Flying horses, talking donkeys. of course, I cannot make them exist by imagining them, but perhaps a divine intellect could.  It makes sense -- whether or not it is true -- to say, as ome distinguished philosophers have said, that God is to creatures as fiction author to (wholly fictional) characters.

But I can attach no sense to the conceit that mind is a 'creation' of matter.  

For now I end on an aporetic note. Despite what I just wrote, how do we integrate transcendental mind with the brain and CNS of this stinking animal that I am?  The great Husserl sweated over a version of this puzzle but he could not solve it. It was questions like this one that made me appreciate the limits of phenomenology and convinced me that I had to come to grips with the bracing currents of the analytic-Anglophonic  mainstream. 

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

Read the rest at Substack.

Linked at my Facebook page. You may leave a comment there if you wish, or send me an e-mail message.  I have come to refer to Facebook as Furzbuch because its suppression of free speech surely stinks to high heaven. 

There I must walk the line. But I won't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle* against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

____________

*"Now the trumpet summons us again--not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need--not as a call to battle, though embattled we are-- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'--a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state wokesters who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden.

Remembering Quentin Smith

My old friend died on this date last year. If in your life you find one truly kindred soul, then you are lucky indeed. Quentin was that soul for me.  This piece captures the man.  

Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who’s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia. The kind of philosophy professor who is supposed to exist, the one who responds to emails promptly and knows how to tie a tie and writes just enough articles that 10 other specialists in his tiny sub-sub area will read to jump through all the hoops of tenure and promotion but doesn’t lose enough sleep over the underlying philosophical problems to distract himself from pursuing from the PMC rat race, has some real virtues. That professor will be more responsible than Quentin seems to have been about grading. The cleaning staff won’t be overly troubled by the state of that other professor’s office. And that other professor definitely won’t miss as many classes as Quentin did through absent-minded preoccupation with actual, inner philosophical contemplation. Hell, that other professor probably gets to class 15 minutes early just in case there’s a problem with his PowerPoint.

Quentin was more like one of the rail-riding “Zen lunatics” that Jack Kerouac wrote about in his novel Dharma Bums. Or like Diogenes, the philosopher who ate in the marketplace, shat in the theater, and slept in a giant ceramic jar in the middle of Athens. Quentin was pretty much who Santayana had in mind when he said that the ideal job for a philosopher wasn’t professor of philosophy at a university but tender of umbrellas at some unfrequented museum.

Seriousness as Camouflage of the Nullity of Our Lives

Substack latest. I assess some thoughts of the stevedore and autodidact, Eric Hoffer. 

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part Two (2021 Version)

Part One is here.

Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having 'flattened' that hill one more time. The net result of the workout is hedonically positive. But surely not all pains are classifiable as instrumentally good. Think of someone who suffers from severe chronic joint pain so bad that he can barely walk let alone pedal a bike. In alleviation thereof he daily ingests a cocktail of drugs with nasty side effects that make it impossible for him to think straight or accomplish anything. Surely the person's condition is evil. (But don't get hung up on the word 'evil' and don't assume that every evil is the responsibility of a finite agent. The evil of pain is a natural or physical, not a moral, evil.) Is this not a counterexample to the thesis that every evil is a privation or absence of good?　

Now pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' I developed this suggestion in Part One and found reason to reject it.

B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.

But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.

1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if anaesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.

2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciating intensity is part of the evil of pain. 

In The Human Predicament, David  Benatar adduces the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77) There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) 

3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.

4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.

My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:

Pains are natural evils

The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good

Ergo

Not all evils are privationes boni.

REFERENCES: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176. David Benatar, The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017)

The Opinions of Others: Signal and Noise

"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your inner voice." (Steve Jobs) 

True as far as it goes. But there is both signal and noise is the opinions of others. Heed the signal, lest your inner voice become a noisy idiolect.

God Doesn't Philosophize

He doesn't need to.  We need to. But our neediness goes together with our inability to make any progress at it.  A double defect: need and inability.  The truth we need we cannot acquire by our own efforts.  It is this fact that motivates some philosophers to consider the possibility of divine revelation. Can they raise the question of revelation without leaving Athens?  Can they show the need for, and the possibility of, divine revelation without ceasing to be philosophers?  If I understand Maurice Blondel, that was his project.

Study history to know yourself and what you are capable of

In this important video, Jordan Peterson explains how history describes you.

Part of what he is doing is railing against the pernicious leftist displacement of evil onto external conditions, social and economic, and its removal from its original and true locus, the foul and diseased heart of the human animal. For your own good, please pay close attention to the whole talk.

Most assuredly, you would have been a Nazi had you been a German in Germany 1933-1945.

And you will be a 'woke' totalitarian commie if we don't get this country back on track. You will go along to get long. You will fall in line out of fear and the instinct of self-preservation. You will snitch on your neighbors. You will practice self-censorship. You will acquiesce in the pronoun nonsense oblivious as you are to the power of language to guide and mis-guide thought.  You will submit to absurd health mandates. You will sell your birthright for a mess of pottage. And you will have no trouble rationalizing and justifying your compliance. "I have a family to support." And in other more creative ways.  The capacity for rationalization in humans is near-infinite.

READINGS FOR DARK TIMES

When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America.  But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.  The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost, liberty-wise. Consider what is happening in Australia of all places.

What was it like to live in the Third Reich?  What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.

Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.

Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017

All of these are easy reading, especially the second two.

Related: Theodor Haecker entries.

Are There Reproductive Rights?

There are, but abortion is not one of them.

Substack latest.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Beethoven, Billy Bob, and Peggy Lee

The Man Who Wasn't There is one of my favorite movies, and the best of Ludwig van Beethoven is as good as classical music gets.  So enjoy the First Movement of the Moonlight Sonata to the masterful cinematography of the Coen Brothers.

Here is the final scene of the movie.  Ed Crane's last words:

I don't know where I'm being taken.  I don't know what I'll find beyond the earth and sky.  But I am not afraid to go.  Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away.  Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

That is the way I see death, as an adventure into a dimension, into "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns," in which we might come to understand what we cannot understand here, a movement from night and fog into the clear light of day.  It is a strange idea, I admit, the idea that only by dying can one come into possession of essential knowledge.  But no more strange  than the idea that  death leaves the apparent absurdity of our existence unredeemed, a sentiment expressed in Peggy Lee's 1970 Is That All There is?

Language and Intellectual Honesty

Precision in the use of language is the beginning of intellectual honesty.

An Insufficient Argument against Sufficient Reason

This is an emended version of an entry that first saw the light of day on 21 May 2016. It is a set-up for a response to a question put to me by Tom Oberle.  I'll try to answer Tom's question tomorrow.

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

Explanatory rationalism is the view that there is a satisfactory answer to every explanation-seeking why question. Equivalently, it is the view that there are no propositions that are just true, i.e., true, contingently true, but without explanation of their being true. Are there some contingent truths that lack explanation? Consider the conjunction of all contingent truths. The conjunction of all contingent truths is itself a contingent truth. Could this contingent conjunctive truth have an explanation? Jonathan Bennett thinks not:

Let P be the great proposition stating the whole contingent truth about the actual world, down to its finest detail, in respect of all times. Then the question 'Why is it the case that P?' cannot be answered in a satisfying way. Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'; but if Q is only contingently the case then it is a conjunct in P, and the offered explanation doesn't explain; and if Q is necessarily the case then the explanation, if it is cogent, implies that P is necessary also. But if P is necessary then the universe had to be exactly as it is, down to the tiniest detail -- i.e., this is the only possible world. (Jonathan Bennett, A Study of Spinoza's Ethics, Hackett 1984, p. 115)

A clever little argument, this. Either Q is contingent or Q is necessary. If Q is contingent, then it is a conjunct in P and no explanation of P is to be had. But if Q is necessary,  then so is P.  So explanatory rationalism fails: there is no explanation of P's contingent truth.

Bennett's point is that explanatory rationalism entails the collapse of modal distinctions.  To put it another way, the principle of sufficient reason, call it PSR, according to which every truth has a sufficient reason for its being true, entails the extensional equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary.  These modal words would then differ at most in their sense but not in their reference. If we assume, as most of us will, the non-equivalence of the possible, the actual, and the necessary, then, by modus tollens, we will infer the falsity of explanatory rationalism/PSR.  

This is relevant to the God question.  If PSR is false, then cosmological arguments for the existence of God which rest on PSR will be all of them unsound.

Now let's look at Bennett's argument in detail.

The world-proposition P is a conjunction of truths all of which are contingent. So P is contingent. Now if explanatory rationalism is true, then P has an explanation of its being true.  Bennett assumes that this explanation must be in terms of a proposition Q distinct from P such that Q entails P, and is thus a sufficient reason for P. Now  Q is either necessary or contingent. If Q is necessary, and a proposition is explained by citing a distinct proposition that entails it, and Q explains P, then P is necessary, contrary to what we have assumed. On the other hand, if Q is contingent, then Q is a conjunct in P, and again no successful explanation has been arrived at. Therefore, either explanatory rationalism is false, or it is true only on pain of a collapse of modal distinctions.  We take it for granted that said collapse would be a Bad Thing.  

Preliminary Skirmishing

Bennett's is a cute little argument, a variant of which  impresses the illustrious Peter van Inwagen as well,  but I must report that I do not find the argument in either version  compelling. Why is P true? We can say that P is true because each conjunct of P is true. We are not forced to say that P is true because of a distinct proposition Q which entails P.

I am not saying that P is true because P is true; I am saying that P is true because each conjunct of P is true, and that this adequately and non-circularly explains why P is true. Some wholes are adequately and non-circularly explained when their parts are explained.  In a broad sense of 'whole' and 'part,' a conjunction of propositions is a whole the parts of which are its conjuncts. Suppose I want to explain why the conjunction Tom is broke & Tom is fat is true.  It suffices to say that Tom is broke is true and that Tom is fat is true. Their being conjoined does not require a separate explanation since for any propositions their  conjunction automatically exists. Nor does the truth of a conjunction need a separate explanation since the truth of a conjunction supervenes upon the truth of its conjuncts. It is an aletheiological free lunch.

Suppose three bums are hanging around the corner of Fifth and Vermouth. Why is this threesome there? The explanations of why each is there add up (automatically) to an explanation of why the three of them are there. Someone who understands why A is there, why B is there, and why C is there, does not need to understand some further fact in order to understand why the three of them are there. Similarly, it suffices to explain the truth of a conjunction to adduce the truth of its conjuncts. The conjunction is true because each conjunct is true. There is no need for an explanation of why a conjunctive proposition is true which is above and beyond the explanations of why its conjuncts are true.

Bennett falsely assumes that "Any purported answer must have the form 'P is the case because Q is the case'. . ." This ignores my suggestion that P is the case because each of its conjuncts is the case. So P does have an explanation; it is just that the explanation is not in terms of a proposition Q distinct from P which entails P.

Going Deeper 

But we can and should go deeper.  P is true because each of its conjuncts is true.  But why are they each true?  Each is true because its truth-maker makes it true.  A strong case can be made that there are truth-makers and that truth-makers are concrete facts or states of affairs.  (See D. M. Armstrong, et al.)  A truth-making fact is not a proposition, but that which makes a contingently true proposition true.  Contingent truths need ontological grounds. Armstrong finds the thought already in Aristotle. My being seated, for example, makes-true 'BV is seated.'  The sentence (as well as the proposition it is used to express) cannot just be true: there must be something external to the sentence that makes it true, and this something cannot be another sentence or anyone's say-so.  As for Bennett's "great proposition P," we can say that its truth-maker is the concrete universe. Why is P true?  Because the concrete universe makes it true.  'Makes true' as used in truth-maker theory does not mean entails even though there is a loose sense of 'makes true' according to which a true proposition makes true any proposition it entails.  Entailment is a relation defined over propositions: it connects propositions to propositions.  It thus remains within the sphere of propositions. Truth-making, however, connects non-propositions to propositions.  Therefore, truth-making is not entailment.  

We are now outside the sphere of propositions and can easily evade Bennett's clever argument.  It is simply not the case that any purported answer to the question why P is the case must invoke a proposition that entails it. A genuine explanation of why a contingent proposition is true cannot ultimately remain within the sphere of propositions.  In the case of P it is the existence and character of the concrete universe that explains why P is true.

Going Deeper Still

But we can and should go deeper still.  Proposition P is true because the actual concrete universe U -- which is not a proposition -- makes it true.  But what makes U exist and have the truth-making power?  If propositional truth is grounded in ontic truth, the truth of things, what grounds ontic truth?  Onto-theological truth?

Theists have a ready answer: the contingent concrete universe U exists because God freely created it ex nihilo.  It exists because God created it; it exists contingently because God might not have created it or any concrete universe.  The ultimate explanation of why P is true is that God created its truth-maker, U.

Now consider the proposition, God creates U.  Call it G.  Does a re-run of Bennett's argument cause trouble?  G entails P.  G is either necessary or contingent.  If G is necessary, then so is P, and modal distinctions collapse.  If G is contingent, however, it is included as a conjunct within P.  Does the explanation in terms of divine free creation therefore fail?

Not at all.  For it is not a proposition that explains P's being true but God's extra-propositional activity, which is not a proposition. God's extra-propositional activity makes true P including G and including the proposition, God's extra-propositional activity makes true P.

Conclusions 

I conclude that Professor Bennett has given us an insufficient reason to reject the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

I apply a similar critique to Peter van Inwagen's version of the argument in my "On An Insufficient Argument Against Sufficient Reason," Ratio, vol. 10, no. 1 (April 1997), pp. 76-81.

Arguments to God a contingentia mundi that rely on PSR are not refuted by the Bennett argument. 

Is it Ever Legitimate to Question Motives?

Absolutely. Suppose someone 'argues' that a photo ID requirement disenfranchises blacks because blacks don't have photo ID. That is a transparently worthless argument, based as it is on a plainly false premise. Once an argument has been refuted it is perfectly legitimate to inquire into the motives of the one giving it. People who give this and similar 'arguments' are out to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. Their 'arguments' are merely a smokescreen to mask their fraudulent intent.

 

What is NOT legitimate is to think that one can bypass the evaluation phase. Arguments stand and fall on their own merits quite apart from the psychology of their producers. Only after an argument has been show to be unsound is one justified in psychologizing the producer of it.

It Can't Be Legislated

Respect for the rule of law cannot be legislated. A law that mandated respect for the rule of law would presuppose the very respect without which it could not be an effective law. Such respect is among the moral prerequisites of the positive law.

Why I Will not Support my Alma Mater: An Open Letter

2 November 2021

 

Cheryl Mott Smith

Executive Director

Gift Planning

Loyola Marymount University

[email protected]

 

Dear Cheryl Mott Smith,

 

I am an LMU graduate, class of '72. I am now in a position to make substantial monetary contributions to causes I deem worthy. LMU will not be on my list. As a classical liberal, I oppose the increasingly leftward lurch of LMU since the '60s and its uncritical embrace of the destructive and culturally-Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. I stand for free speech, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth. This retired philosophy professor will not support the transformation of universities into leftist seminaries. I will post this letter online and encourage others to write similar letters. A copy will be sent to the LMU president.

 

Sincerely,

 

Dr. William F. Vallicella

 

P. S. After composing the above, this outrage came to my attention.

 

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

 

I hope others will write similar letters to their alma maters. One effective and nonviolent means of opposing the depredations of the destructive culturally-Marxist race-delusional Left is by reducing their funding. You cannot reach them with reasoned discourse: they do not inhabit the plane of reason. But everyone understands money and its withholding.

 

Speaking out has some value, but one runs the risk of being 'cancelled,' 'doxxed,' and otherwise harassed.  But no one needs to know that you are refusing contributions to 'woke-stitutions.' A cute coinage that just now occurred to me. Too cute perhaps. 

 

Cross-posted at my Facebook page where it has snagged 24 likes, 30 comments, and one share, so far.

Doubt

It can be corrosive, but also cleansing.

Contemplating Suicide?

Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit.  You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your existence on its existence?  You might want to think about this before making the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity.  

It would be fairly easy to give strong arguments why TO BE is not the same as TO BE PHYSICAL. Think of so-called 'abstract objects.' It is much more difficult to argue persuasively that the identity fails in the case of persons. And yet persons are rather remarkable. The ones we are regularly acquainted with are also animals. Sunk in animality as we are, it is easy to think that we are are just highly evolved animals.  It is easy to miss the wonder of personhood. But the abyss that separates man from the animal should give one pause. 

Bishop James A. Pike's son Jim committed suicide. He supposedly communicated the following message to his father from the Other Side:

I thought there was a way out; I wanted out; I've found there is no way out. I wish I had stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings.  (James A. Pike, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena, Doubleday, 1968, p. 118.)

 

If you were around in the '60s and hip to what was happening you will recall Bishop Pike. He was a theological liberal who made quite a splash the ripples of which have long since subsided. The book I have cited  is worth reading but best consumed with a mind both open and critical.

Live Long

There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here.