Maverick Philosopher

The Infirmity of Reason versus the Certitude of Faith

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind, and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.  I hope you agree with me that there is something utterly mad about torturing and murdering people over such an abstruse matter, one so far removed from any conceivable method of rational settlement.  I say this as a hard-core, life-long committed student of metaphysics who has a healthy contempt for such benighted neo-positivist 'philosophistines'  as David Stove. But even if it doesn't come  to bloodshed, the threats of 'cancellation' and dhimmitude for the heterodox are intolerable.  

Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far.  But what I just wrote is slightly tendentious. To put the point with the proper caution: the jettisoning of LNC is to be avoided if at all possible.  For LNC is the supreme law and norm of the discursive intellect. 

The dogmatic Christian will claim that his subjective certainty that God is triune is also objective; but the dogmatic Muslim will do the same with respect to the negation of the characteristic (orthodox) Christian claim.  Obviously, they can't both be right.  So one must be wrong.  Each will call the other wrong.  But neither will be justified in so doing.

Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):

1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

Therefore

2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

This is a non sequitur  for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Among church-goers, one goes to church. And this without dogmatizing about the evils of factory farms, the supposed health dangers of red meat, etc., and in the case of the church-goers without taking seriously the talk of "turning the other cheek," etc.  In the teeth of (1), one abandons the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One sticks to the classical Pyrrhonian  path of Sextus Empiricus & Co., a path that leads not upwards to the  object sof religion, downwards to a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.

Second, the above argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.) Given that we need divine revelation, which of the competing putative revelations should we accept? From the fact that we need revelation to set us straight, it does not follow that the Christian revelation will satisfy our need. Besides, there is reasonable dispute about what exactly the Christian revelation is. On both fronts we are thrown back upon our fail and exigent reason.

My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety. I have something to say about it over at Substack.

What are our options? Perhaps only these:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others who, in different ways and to different degrees,  develop the theme of the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane, if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet to me.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend and practice (D). Or are there other options?

Reason is infirm in that it cannot establish anything definitively as regards the ultimate questions that most concern us. It cannot even prove that doubting is the way to truth, "that it is certain that we ought to be in doubt." (Pyrrho entry, Bayle's Dictionary, tr. Popkin, p. 205) But, pace Pierre Bayle, the merely subjective certitude of faith is no solution either! Recoiling from the labyrinth into which unaided human reason loses itself, Bayle writes:

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind, and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.  I hope you agree with me that there is something utterly mad about torturing and murdering people over such an abstruse matter, one so far removed from any conceivable method of rational settlement.  I say this as a hard-core, life-long committed student of metaphysics who has a healthy contempt for such benighted neo-positivist 'philosophistines'  as David Stove. But even if it doesn't come  to bloodshed, the threats of 'cancellation' and dhimmitude for the heterodox are intolerable.  

Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far.  But what I just wrote is slightly tendentious. To put the point with the proper caution: the jettisoning of LNC is to be avoided if at all possible.  For LNC is the supreme law and norm of the discursive intellect. 

The dogmatic Christian will claim that his subjective certainty that God is triune is also objective; but the dogmatic Muslim will do the same with respect to the negation of the characteristic (orthodox) Christian claim.  Obviously, they can't both be right.  So one must be wrong.  Each will call the other wrong.  But neither will be justified in so doing.

Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):

1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

Therefore

2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

This is a non sequitur  for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Among church-goers, one goes to church. And this without dogmatizing about the evils of factory farms, the supposed health dangers of red meat, etc., and in the case of the church-goers without taking seriously the talk of "turning the other cheek," etc.  In the teeth of (1), one abandons the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. One sticks to the classical Pyrrhonian  path of Sextus Empiricus & Co., a path that leads not upwards to the  object sof religion, downwards to a tranquil re-insertion into the quotidian.

Second, the above argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.) Given that we need divine revelation, which of the competing putative revelations should we accept? From the fact that we need revelation to set us straight, it does not follow that the Christian revelation will satisfy our need. Besides, there is reasonable dispute about what exactly the Christian revelation is. On both fronts we are thrown back upon our fail and exigent reason.

My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety. I have something to say about it over at Substack.

What are our options? Perhaps only these:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others who, in different ways and to different degrees,  develop the theme of the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to what purports to be revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane, if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tri-personal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet to me.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosophy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend and practice (D). Or are there other options?

National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles

This document espouses a doctrine fairly close  to what I call enlightened nationalism. 

Critical remarks anent the Statement here.

The Latest from Michael Anton

Thorough, penetrating analysis of the . . . what? state of the Union? No, the state of the dismal disarray, unstable and pregnant with disaster, in which we find ourselves.  

They Can't Let Him In

 

Willie Horton Revisited

I posted the following on my Facebook page this morning. Go there for my political linkage and 'rantage.' 

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

I have a confession to make. I voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991. But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

 

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle, excuse, and now let off scot-free.

 

Is there one prominent Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this 'woke'-controlled party is bereft of moral sense. Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases.

 

William Voegli on Willie Horton:

. . . identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate. 

Questions about Pronouns, Sex, and 'Wokism'

Elliot Crozat writes, 

During my visit, one of our conversation topics was pronoun usage. If I recall, on one of the hikes, you gave the example "He who hesitates is lost” and asked about the function of ‘He.’ You then said that this pronoun seems to function as a universal quantifier such that, for any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost. I agree. Our agreement suggests that pronouns can function logically in ways that differ from their merely grammatical appearance.

BV: Right. Although 'he' and 'she' are classified grammatically as pronouns, their logical function in examples like the one I gave is not pronominal, but quantificational. Pronouns typically have noun antecedents, but 'he' in 'He who hesitates is lost' has no antecedent. It functions like a bound variable. I can imagine a Yogi Berra type joke. I say to Berra, "He who hesitates is lost," and he replies, "You mean Joe Biden?" (Here is a real Yogi Berra joke. Someone asked Berra what time it is. He replied, "You mean now?")

I spoke today with a friend, a philosopher, who is under some pressure from his employer to use the ‘preferred pronouns’ of colleagues and others even if such 'pronouns' don't align with the biological sex of the 'preferrers.' For various reasons concerning clarity and accuracy of language, freedom of speech and thought, and ideological disagreement, my friend is concerned about how to navigate this progressivist current in a responsible manner. We discussed some ideas.

Here’s one. Suppose a biological male, Mark, desires and requests to be referred to as ‘she.’ Suppose also that, generally speaking, all pronouns that are indexicals (i.e., demonstratives) refer to their respective persons or objects as they objectively are. Smith, a colleague of Mark, attempts to refer to Mark as ‘she.’ It would seem, then, that ‘she’ fails to refer – or that Mark fails to refer via ‘she’ – and thus ‘she’ is a useless and confusing bit of language. Smith’s use of ‘she’ is unhelpful on this account.

BV: I will first make the minor point that an indexical is not the same as a demonstrative. Every demonstrative is an indexical, but not conversely. Suppose I am standing before the deli counter. Having temporarily forgotten that the name of what I want is 'prosciutto,' I say to the deli man, "I'd like some of that." My use of the demonstrative 'that' must be accompanied by a demonstration if I am to succeed in conveying my request. I have to point to the meat I want. But I don't have to point to myself when I utter the indexical 'I' in 'I'd like some of that." 'I' is not a demonstrative. 

A second minor point is that 'I' sometimes functions as a bound variable.  Suppose that in explaining intentionality to a student, I say, "I cannot think without thinking of something." I have not made an autobiographical remark. The proposition I am attempting to convey to the student is that, for any person x, if x thinks, then x thinks of something. 

Grammatical pronouns can function pronominally, indexically, and quantificationally.  Here is a sentence featuring a pronoun functioning pronominally and which therefore has  an antecedent:

Peter always calls before he visits.

In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.'  It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:

After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.

In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading.  The antecedency is therefore referential rather than temporal.  In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent.  The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent.  So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent. (And if the reference of the antecedent is mediated by a Frege-style sense or Sinn, then we have a double mediation.)  The antecedent is referentially prior to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent.  But suppose I point to Peter and say

He smokes cigarettes.

This is an indexical use of 'he.'  Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the non-linguistic context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction.  The sentence need not be situated in a linguistic context.  Another part of what makes 'he' in the example an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun that fixes the reference to Peter and nothing else, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference.  Now suppose I say

I smoke cigars.

This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is  purely indexical (David Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration:  I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.'  And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.'  Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.

In fact, it seems that no expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent.  Hector-Neri Castaneda puts it like this:

Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)

 For a quantificational use of a grammatical pronoun, consider

He who hesitates is lost.

Clearly, 'he' does not function here pronominally -- there is no antecedent -- nor does it function indexically.  It functions like the bound variable in

For any person x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

But is this token ‘she’ a pronoun in appearance only? It seems to function in some ways like a proper name (perhaps a sobriquet or a tag of sorts) of one who has undergone a name change. On this view, the token ‘she’ wouldn’t function as a rigid designator, since there are possible worlds in which Mark doesn’t use ‘she.’ But the token seems to work as a name or tag for Mark in relevant circumstances.

BV: I would say that 'she' has a sense which requires that any human being  successfully referred to by its use is a biological female. I am inclined to say that if you try to refer to a biological male as 'she,' then the reference won't be successful. But this is none too clear.  

Consider the example of Cassius Clay, who underwent a change in the way he viewed himself and hence selected a new name to reflect his subjective change of ‘self-identification.’ As a matter of respect for Clay as a person, others began to call him by his new name ‘Ali.’

Is the Clay-Ali scenario relevantly similar to the situation of Mark, who in this world subjectively identifies as female despite being biologically male and having formerly identified as male? Suppose Smith speaks about Mark by saying “She went to the market.” Does Smith refer successfully to Mark in virtue of using “she” as something like a proper name rather than a pronoun?

BV: One can change one's religion but one cannot change one's sex. That's an important difference. I myself find it very easy to identify with women, but surely it is impossible for me to identify as a woman if that means:  apperceive or interpret myself or alter my physicality or raiment in such a way as to bring it about that I become a woman. I can no more identify as a woman than I can identify as a cat or a carrot. Of course, I can pretend to be a woman and even successfully pass myself off as one.  (Cf. the movies "Tootsie" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" which you no doubt have seen.) But a man in drag remains a man, even if he is in what I call  'super-drag' where this includes surgical mutilation and augmentation of the body, hormone replacement 'therapy,' etc.  And the sexual frisson/excitation that a man might feel when putting on panties and bra is male frisson is it not? And thus further proof that he remains a man even if he has had his genitalia lopped off and a vagina fashioned from his former penis? 

I am inclined to say that a literal sex change operation is an impossibility. No animal can change its sex or have its sex changed.

Here is a proof from the metaphysics of time. Tell me what you think of it. Every adult woman was a girl. Every adult male was a boy.  The past is unalterable. (Not even God  can restore a virgin.) Now it is possible for a man to become a woman only if it is possible for a man to have been a girl. But that is impossible because it is impossible to alter the past.  Therefore, it is impossible for a man to become a woman no matter how he is altered, even chromosomally. The nature of time rules it out.

Here is another thought. You can change your religion or your political affiliation, but not your race or your sex.  These non-negotiable facts are extra-linguistic. Now with the exception of mere Millian tags, the senses of words determines their reference and not the other way around. I suggested above that one cannot successfully refer to a biological male using 'she.' And this for the reason that 'she' has a sense that is sexually restrictive, assuming that it is being used to refer to sexually-polarized animals such as human beings as opposed to ships and flags as in "She's a grand old flag; she's a high-flying flag . . . ." So is the extra-linguistic fact I mentioned partially determining the sense of 'she'? That's what I am puzzling over at the moment. But I am just 'shootin' from the hip here and perhaps what I have written is not sufficiently clear to permit evaluation.  

If the proper name account doesn’t succeed, perhaps ‘she’ has a non-indexical use. Some pronouns have non-indexical applications. David Braun lists three types of pronoun use: indexical(demonstrative), bound variable, andunbound anaphoric. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/#IndNonIndUsePro

Perhaps ‘she’ has a bound variable use, such as: “Every male who subjectively identifies as a female believes she will be better off doing so.” Or maybe ‘she’ has an unbound anaphoric use, such as: “Mark was late to work today. She was caught in traffic.”

These non-indexical accounts seem strained to me, and hence I’m thinking the proper name account might be better. Or maybe there is still another account that best explains what is happening in these linguistically-odd situations. Maybe all efforts to refer to Mark as 'she' fail to refer.

I’d like to hear what you have to say on this issue, since you’ve thought deeply about pronouns and about the philosophy of language. I’d be glad to give you a call this weekend to chat, if you're free. Or we can discuss via email. 

BV: I have time for one more comment. 'Mark was late for work because she was caught in traffic.' If I heard that I would ask, "Who was the female in question and what did her getting caught in traffic have to do with Mark's being late for work?"

Your philosopher friend should politely tell his employer that his preferred pronouns are those of standard English and that, while he is willing to tolerate the linguistic innovations of others, he expects toleration in return. If his tolerance is met with intolerance, then he should politely remind the intolerant about who has the guns.

Is 'Monkey Pox' Racist?

Substack latest.

Short, sweet, and lethal. Match grade argumentative ammo for your encounters with your leftist pals.

Faith's Immanent Value

Suppose you sincerely believe in God and the soul but that your faith is in vain. You die and become nothing. Your faith was that the curtain would lift, but it falls, irrevocably.  My question is whether, and to what extent, that upshot would matter. What if there is nothing on the other side of the Great Divide?

My answer is that it won't matter because you won't know it. You will not learn that your faith was in vain. You will not discover that your faith was a life-enhancing illusion. You will have had the benefit of a faith which will have sustained you until the moment of your annihilation as an individual person. You will not die alone for you will die with the Lord-believed-in, a Lord never to be known, but also never to be known not to be.   If the Lord-believed-in is enough for this life, and this life turns out to be the only life, then the Lord-believed-in is enough, period.

Your faith will have had immanent value. If this life is the only life, then this immanent value is the only value your faith could have had.

"But then your faith will have been in vain!" 

Yes, I said that myself at the outset. But it is true only from a point of view external to my life, a point of view that cannot be my point of view.  What then is that to me when I no longer exist? In life, I can view my life from outside: I can play the spectator of my life. But if and when I no longer  exist, I cannot play that role. If my faith is lived here and now by me in full conviction of its non-vanity and non-illusoriness, then nothing that happens after my annihilation can retroactively mark my lived faith as vain and illusory. It will have served a good, life-enhancing purpose, and indeed the only purpose it could have served if my earthly tenure ends in utter annihilation.

"The believer believes that God exists independently of  whether or not anyone, including himself, believes that God exists. The sincere belief in God is belief in a transcendent being."

Yes, that is right, but it doesn't follow that God exists. It also does not follow that God does not exist. The life-enhancing content of the belief is what it is whether or not the transcendent object of the belief exists. My point is that sincere belief in God suffices for this life, and suffices sans phrase (without qualification) if this life of mine ends utterly with death.

"What do you mean by 'suffices for this life.'"

I mean that a sincere lived (existentially appropriated and practically manifested)  faith in God suffices to confer upon this life value, purpose, and moral structure, making it affirmable as good, and worth living.

"But  if a believer took this attitude you are describing and apparently also advocating, then that believer would be in some doubt as to whether there would be any post-mortem experiential confirmation by the believer himself of the transcendent validity of his faith. If so, his faith would not be subjectively certain to him, and would then be neither knowledge nor faith!"

I respectfully disagree!  It would not be knowledge, of course, but it would be genuine faith. A faith that is subjectively certain is not a living faith, but a crutch, a convenience, a cop-out, an evasion.  Living faith, genuine faith, is faith sustained in the teeth of doubt. Only then is it authentic.

"Why is an authentic faith one that lives with doubt?"

Because our predicament in this life is not such as to allow us any certainty about such ultimate matters as the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, whether we have a higher destiny, whether we are called to divine fellowship, whether theosis is a real possibility, and so on. One ought not dogmatize about the uncertain. To do so is to pretend to enjoy an insight that one does not enjoy.  Such epistemic pretension is a kind of hubris that could have tragic consequences.  Think of all the people who have been murdered and tortured to death because others claimed to be certain about what they had no right to believe they could be certain about.

"But aren't you dogmatizing when you claim that one cannot be certain about the matters in question?"

No, because I am claiming merely that there are plausible reasons to believe that there are no rationally compelling reasons to believe that one can be certain about the things that the dogmatists claim to be certain about.

Genuine faith is not blind, but it is at best reasoned faith. Experience, however, teaches that reason is weak and vacillating.  This experientia docet is not a dogmatic pronunciamento.  In plain English, I am not dogmatizing when I report what experience teaches.  Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot apprehend its own infirmity. It is weak, but not impotent.  Its infirmity affects both arguments for and arguments against  God, the soul, and rest of the ultimate matters. And this includes arguments for and against the veridicality of a putative divine revelation. 

We are not wholly in the dark or wholly in the light. Our predicament is a chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark. It is as if we are in a cave in which  there is light enough to discern reasonably a possible route of escape from a condition which is admittedly not wholly satisfactory, but darkness enough reasonably both to doubt whether there is an escape and  to suspect that those who claim to see a way to the fullness of light of being empty dreamers, wishful thinkers, utopian reality-deniers, mentally unstable, or even utterly mad.  Some in the cave will reasonably argue that their condition is as good as it gets and that we must accept reality and not muck things up by reaching for the unattainable. They will deny, with justification, that their condition is speluncular. Other in the cave will reasonably argue the opposite. Neither party is entitled to dogmatize.

If our condition is cave-like, then a reasoned faith is as good as it gets and its ongoing vitality feeds from its tension with reasoned unfaith.  

Here below we ought not allow our inquiry into the ultimate matters to degenerate into either denialism or  dogmatism.  Saying this, I am not dogmatizing, but expressing my reasoned conviction. Thus place is made for reasoned faith which is neither blind nor dogmatic. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Outstanding Dylan Covers

Johnny Rivers, Positively Fourth Street.

Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me. Bob Dylan , Chronicles

Mary Travers interviews Bob Dylan. Not a cover but interesting to the true Dylan aficionado.

Joan Baez, Hard Rain

Gary U.S. Bonds, From a Buick Six

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Too Much of Nothing

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

Stephen Stills, Ballad of Hollis Brown

McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty et al., My Back Pages 

Marianne Faithful, Visions of Johanna

But nothing touches the original. This is the bard at his incandescent best. Mid-'60s. Blonde on Blonde album.

More later. Time to rustle up some vittles for wifey, pour myself a stiff one and get tuned up for Bongino. Enjoy your Saturday night.

Rely on Conscience

In matters moral, reason is weak, easily suborned by the passions, given to rationalization, and easily entangled in the threads of its own dialectic. Reason is not  to be despised but not quite reliable. In matters moral, it is better to rely on conscience.

This advice rests on two presuppositions. One is that conscience is a source of moral knowledge, which itself presupposes that there is moral knowledge. The other is that one's conscience has been well formed. Both presuppositions need examination. But don't make the reliance on conscience contingent on the completion of their examination.

Left, Right, Gender, and Sex

There is nothing in the graphic below to disagree with, although more could be said. But one quibble: The correct word is not 'gender,' but 'sex.' Gender is a grammatical category first and foremost. But it is not unreasonable to allow a widening of the term to cover certain social roles that one's sex fits one to play.  So if you want to talk about gender roles, go right ahead. One such is the firefighter role.  This is a social role typically filled by biological males, and for good reason. Men make better firefighters than women due to their  greater physical strength, an attribute grounded in their sex, which is a biological category.  That men are physically stronger than women is a generic statement, and such a statement, since it is not a universal affirmative, cannot be refuted by adducing cases in which some woman is stronger than some man.

So it is entirely natural and unsurprising that men are 'over-represented' among firefighters. You would have to be in the grip of the 'equity' delusion to think that there is something wrong with this 'over-representation.' The term is here being used in its factual or non-normative sense. It is a mark of the muddled to confuse factual and normative uses of terms. There are proportionally more male firefighters than female. This is a 'feature' grounded in biological  reality not a 'bug' introduced by 'sexists.' It is a fact that does not need fixing.

Wokesters are social constructivists gone wild. No doubt there are social constructs. For example, textbooks of biology are social constructs. They would not exist if social animals such as ourselves did not exist and did not interact socially to produce them and to consume them. Biology itself is a cooperative social enterprise, and, as such, a social construct.  Just don't confuse biology with the biotic, or, in general, the study of some range of natural  phenomena with the natural phenomena studied.  Biology is a social construct, but the biologists we are familiar with are all of them human animals and therefore not social constructs.

It should be obvious that not everything could be a social construct. Life itself, as a necessary precondition of all social constructing, cannot itself be a social construct.  The same goes for the abiotic stratum that undergirds the biotic. Could the social constructors themselves be social constructs? Whose? Who constructs the constructors? Either a vicious infinite regress arises, or you must accept the nonsense of social constructivist bootstrapping: one socially constructs oneself. And note that such  self-construction could not be social if others did not help with the task. This adds a further layer of absurdity. If my self-construction requires your help, and yours mine, then we must first exist non-socially in order to socially construct each other. But then I am not, at bottom, a social construct.

And then there is the fact that, before human beings came along, there already was sexual polarity in plants and animals.  Will you seriously maintain that there was no such sexual polarity before humans made the scene and started doing botany and biology? 

If you think about all of this carefully, you should be able to see the absurdity of the idea of 're-imagining' (as a wokester might say) what is natural and both logically and temporally antecedent to the social as a social construct. The world cannot be social construction 'all the way down.'

I cannot explain it now in any detail, but this woke social constructivism, which issues in such lunacies as that babies on birth are 'assigned' their sex, is a particularly virulent and degenerate form of metaphysical idealism according to which reality is mind-made. This idealist motif has coherent articulations, but woke social constructivism is not one of them. 

Isn't It Morally Sick to Enjoy Killing?

The above reads like the sophistry of a morally sick old man, full of himself, a drunkard, who blew his brains out at the age of 60, a man who kept a list of the men he killed and the women he 'had.'

The Pig, the Fool, and Socrates

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Truth and Decision

One cannot decide what the truth is. But one can and must decide what one will accept and live by as the truth.

The Odd Man Out Among the Cardinal Virtues

It is always prudent to be prudent, temperate, and just, but often imprudent to be courageous.

Rocks and Gravel

I forgot how good this is. He played better guitar in the old days, and could do amazing things with his voice.  

Two Excellent Substack Articles

Keith Burgess-Jackson, The Abortion Pendulum

Michael Robillard, How I Left Academia, or, How Academia Left Me

Why are Women 'Over-Represented' among Realtors?

Here is my Substack answer to the title question together with a healthy serving of conceptual analysis as part of  my ongoing quest to disembarrass sad wokeheads and Dementocrats of their fatuities, fallacies, and overall intellectual feculence. ('Feculence' as you may know is from feces.)  I am being polite. I am showing some 'class.' 

But here is something very important for you to know.

In the political sphere, and not just there, the ability to kick ass is far more important than class. The first value clearly trumps the second. It is a mark of a RINO not to understand this.

So I predict that, even if the Republicans gain control of both the House and the Senate come November, they will not deploy their majorities in an effective way against their political enemies. Little will get done to reverse the assault on the Republic. And that is because they, as a group and because of the large number of RINOs, do not have the civil courage to punch back in the manner in which they are punched at. 

Trump tried to teach them how to fight, but they ignored his clear message, or, more likely, they simply lack the civil courage to implement it.  Of the four cardinal virtues, courage is the most difficult to display. For it, unlike the other three, exacts a high cost.  I myself lack the courage, not to mention the social skills, to enter the political arena. I'm Italian, a lover not a fighter -- until pushed to the wall.

In any case, no true philosopher could consider the political the locus of ultimate reality.

Book Lust

The old man's libido may be on the wane, but this man's book lust  remains as stiff-standing as ever.  I'm reading along in Anthony Kenny's Aquinas on Being and I find a footnote in which he praises a certain Hermann Weidemann's article contained in a certain anthology. I think, "Oh boy, when I am in Tempe on Friday I'll snag that volume from the Arizona State University  library."

In the bookman's eros we descry the superiority of the spirit over the flesh. The pleasures of the mind can extend for decades, from earliest youth to advanced old age.  But not even the artifices of a Hugh Hefner can help those enmired  in the dotage and decrepitude of the flesh.

At the end, even stoked to the max with Viagra to the point of hearing loss, Hef couldn't get it up sufficiently to penetrate the young lovelies who cavorted around him. He was reduced to manual mode while the bunnies romped with each other exchanging intimacies I charitably imagine to be more innocently sororal than libidinously lesbian.

Are the Names on Grave Stones Proper Names?

You will reflexively answer in the affirmative. But the names on grave stones are proper names for only so long as the memories of survivors are extant to supply reference-fixing context. With the passing of the survivors the names revert to commonality. After a while the dead may as well lie in a common grave. 

No matter how unusual the name, every so-called proper name either actually has, or could have had, more than one bearer. A name that has more than one bearer is surely not proper, but common.  Thus so-called proper names are not properly so-called.  If a name  has exactly one bearer  in actuality, but could have had more than one, then it does not designate either one.  

Names are rigid designators in Kripke's sense.

What lies below the stone is not Patrick J. McNally, but a Patrick J. McNally.  And not even this; rather, the bodily remains of a Patrick J. McNally.  The person has fled or else no longer exists.

Generic Statements

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Can 'Birds fly' be fit into the Square of Opposition?  Is it an A, an I, an E, or an O?

Artifacts, Organisms, and Modes of Existence

Hello Dr. Vallicella, greetings from Germany!

I have been revisiting your paper "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, eds. Novotny and Novak, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.  One of the most intriguing arguments you give against the opponent of modes of being/existence is the argument at the end against Peter van Inwagen's semantic claim that 'exist(s)' is univocal in sense and the corresponding ontological claim that there are no modes of being/existence. On p. 67 you present the following aporetic pentad and argue that it is best solved by the rejection of (5).  

1. The house exists.
2. The bricks exist.
3. The house is composed of the bricks, all of them, and of nothing else and is therefore not something distinct from them or  in addition to them.
4. Since the bricks can exist without the house but the house cannot exist without the bricks, the house is distinct from the bricks.
5. “Exist(s)” is univocal in (1) and (2), and there are no modes of existence.

The house doesn't exist apart from the bricks arranged house-wise, and yet if we reject mereological nihilism,  there must be something not identical to the bricks that makes up the house. Did I broadly capture the idea?

BV:  Broadly, yes. The five propositions are individually plausible to a very high degree, and yet they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. So we have a problem if we wish to uphold the law of non-contradiction. And we certainly want to hold onto said law if at all possible. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. That, I claim, is (5). Van Inwagen would instead reject (1) and (4).  He and I will accept (2) and (3)  as the most plausible of the five propositions.  Of course, you have to understand that this is a 'toy example,' so to speak. After all, each brick is an artifact so that, if the house does not exist because it is an artifact, as per van Inwagen's teaching, then neither do the bricks. In the spirit of the 'toy example,' think of the bricks as atoms in the etymological sense: as really indivisible or non-partite. 

What (3) says is that the house is not something 'over and above' its parts. It is not an entity in addition to them. So if the house is composed of 50,000 bricks, then there are 50,000 entities in the place where the bricks are, not 50,001.  The house just is the bricks. (Mereology is ontologically innocent.) To appreciate the plausibility of this, suppose that the Wise Pig has just finished building his brick house, and you say to him, "I see all the bricks, Mr. Pig, but where is the house?" He will respond, "You, sir, are committing the fallacy of hypostatization: the house just is the bricks; it is not something 'above and beyond it.'"

As for (4), I think it is obviously true.  While I grant that the house is not something 'over and above' the bricks, it is also not just the bricks, but the house-wise arrangement of the bricks, an arrangement that is not nothing, but something real that makes the house distinct from the bricks. 

And so I reject (5) and say that, while house and bricks both exist, they exist in different ways.  By my lights, this is more intellectually palatable than the strange doctrine that there are no artifacts.  

I want to propose a way to strengthen the argument however. Despite your qualms with it, I see the appeal of mereological nihilism for artifacts, since it's questionable whether the "house" as distinct from the bricks is really needed here, or whether it can be eliminated for the mere arrangement of bricks.

BV:  It seems to me that the house must be distinct from the bricks for the simple reason that the bricks can exist without constituting a house, whereas the house cannot exist without the bricks.  A pile of bricks does not make a house. I would also insist that the house-wise arrangement of the bricks is not nothing. It is not nothing because it makes the difference between bricks that can shelter the pig and bricks that cannot.  The house is of course a dependent entity in that it depends for its existence on the bricks, but it does so without being identical to the bricks. That is why I say that the house exists in a different way than the constituent bricks, contrary to van Inwagen's claim that there are no ways or modes of existence. 

As long as there is no telos the house would have that can't be identified with the mere arrangement of bricks, the question is valid. Obviously if we look at something complex and goal directed like the immune system, the reduction here to the mere arrangement of the most basic particles sounds almost preposterous.

BV: Granted, the bricks taken collectively do not have an in-built telos or a nisus towards actualization; nevertheless, the house cannot be reductively identified with the bricks. The bricks can survive the demolition of the house, and at any time t at which the bricks form a house, the bricks might not have formed a house at t. The house is doubly contingent: it is contingent on the bricks and it is contingent on their proper arrangement. Or so it seems to me.

The question thus doesn't seem to arise when we're concerned with biological entities and their complex actions. Mereological nihilism for animals is not a view worth discussing and van Inwagen explicitly rejects it, instead opting for a kind of non-reductionism while still holding onto a view he identifies as materialism ("A Materialist Ontology of Human Persons" 2007). What I dispute, given your initial argument above, however is the compatibility of this position with his rejection of modes of being. If your aporia is correct and the opponent would have to embrace mereological nihilism for artifacts, doesn't that expand into the biological realm as well? It seems so, at least I don't see why it should be invalid [should not so expand.]

BV: I'm not sure I follow you here.  Van Inwagen is clearly not a nihilist with respect to organisms. (I am not a nihilist with respect to artifacts or organisms.) Are you asking whether his non-reductionism with respect to organisms commits him to the MOB doctrine? (MOB = modes of being.)

So let's reformulate your pentad:

1. The dog exists.
2. The atoms exist (atom designating a fundamental, simple physical and no relevant scientific theory)
3. The dog is composed of its atoms, all of them and of nothing else and is therefore not something distinct from them or in addition to them.
4. Since the atoms can exist without the dog,  but the dog can't exist without the atoms, the dog is distinct from its atoms.
5. “Exist(s)” is univocal in (1) and (2), and there are no modes of existence.

What do you think? If your argument can be reformulated this way we either show that non-reductionism and a rejection of modes of beings are contrarians [logical contraries? or logical contradictories?], so that one must be false. Or the interlocutor is forced to adopt an additional thesis that is at best questionable within a materialist/post-Cartesian ontology, e.g. that the particles are only virtually present in the human, but I doubt van Inwagen has any space in his theory for such positions of Aristotelians like David Oderberg.

Thanks for your time.

BV: I take it you are asking whether van Inwagen's views about living things commit him to the acceptance of modes of being/existence.  To answer that question I would have to pull Material Beings from the shelf and devote hours to re-reading the relevant portions, and for that I do not have time at present. 

The Decline of the West Proceeds Apace

Roger Kimball:

Angry at the Gyndes River for sweeping away and drowning one of his sacred white horses, Cyrus decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle. This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past in order that we might gambol undisturbed in distracted present-tense ignorance. An illustrative case in point is the Princeton classics department, where woke educationists panting for relevance recently jettisoned the requirement that its students learn Latin or Greek, never mind both. At the same time, they publicly celebrate the fifty-seven varieties of racial-trans-wonderfulness that have become the focus of academic obsession. It is a situation that is as absurd as it is malignant.

In The Present Age(1846), Kierkegaard described the jaded spirit that “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.” That is where we are today: occupying a husk of decadence assiduously emptied of vitality. Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and the rest of the querulous educational establishment are sodden with money but spiritually and intellectually bankrupt. They continue to look like educational institutions: leafy walks, imposing libraries, impressive buildings. But most of the activities they sponsor are inimical to real education, inciting thousands of puny Cyruses to divert and stymie the waters of tradition in order to polish the mirror of their narcissism.

The sun is setting in the Land of the Evening. Our going under may be inevitable, but there is no use in supposing it to be so. Man up, fight on, calmly but daily. Your alma mater asks for money? Refuse her. That's one thing you can do. All understand it. Money is the common currency of fallen man. 

Withdrawn from Circulation

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His Story

History is largely His Story, but part of that story is how place was made, by men mainly, but not solely, for Her Story. 

Eugene O'Neill

A tortured soul if ever there was one. A  soul in torment lacking the sense to know that saucing the mix with John Barleycorn is like pouring gasoline on a fire barely contained but eager to engulf house and home, wife and child.

Dowling's biography's another pathography. Well-spent a scholarly life digging through dirty laundry? My time well-spent inspecting the soiled rags?

Pretty Feeble Stuff

Much of what I post here is pretty feeble stuff. But damned if I don't love this daily scribbling!

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Purgation of Memory and the Waters of Oblivion

So many of our memories should be allowed to sink forever beneath the waters of oblivion. But not all. Let's recall some songs about forgetting and water.

Bob Dylan and the Band, Too Much of Nothing

Say Hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivian
Give them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion.

Doors, Soul Kitchen. "Learn to forget, learn to forget."

Bobby Rydell, Forget Him

Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, Moon River

Henry Mancini, Moon River.  Video with shots of Rita Hayworth. YouTuber comment: indimenticabile Rita, stupenda Rita, vivi nei nostri ricordi, vivi nei nostri cuori. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song.  Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken."  Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity."  They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song.  Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's.  Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do.  A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. 

Chase Webster, Moody River

Is the January 6th 'Insurrection' the Left's Reichstag Fire?

I put the title question to an historian. Here is his response:

It is not too far of a stretch to consider January 6^th as the Left’s Reichstag fire, in that the Left is portraying the former event, chaotic but minor, as a serious insurrection against the Republic, the very Republic that the Left despises, as the Nazis despised the Weimar Republic. Obviously, the Reichstag Fire Decree (suspension of habeas corpus and all the basic freedoms) , coupled with the arrest of thousands of Communists, went much further in suppressing the civil liberties of those opposed to the Nazi Party, but one sees something of the same pattern in the Left’s reaction today, as in the imprisonment without bail of many innocent persons who were in the Capitol on January 6^th, and in the attempt to destroy the MAGA movement by discrediting President Trump and ostracizing, as much as possible, those who support him.  

But I would say that another similarity should be kept in mind: that of the massive street violence of ANTIFA and other leftist and nihilist groups in the months preceding the 2020 election, violence encouraged and condoned by the Democrat Party in its urban bastions and among its national leadership; for me, these riots are akin to the violent and murderous actions of the SA [Sturmabteilung] in the 1920s and early 1930s by which the Nazis sought to beat its opponents into submission and to create a climate of fear and disorder.

Related: Roger Kimball, Regime Propaganda, Ray Epps, and The New York Times

Paul Brunton on Eugene O'Neill

The Notebooks of Paul Brunton, vol. 7, Healing of the Self, p. 50:

The need to take care of the nature of our thoughts was illustrated by the life-story of Eugene O'Neill. The gloomy themes of his plays, the gaunt tragedy and overhanging doom with which he deliberately permeated them, brought him down in his later years with an incurable disease. His palsied hand could not write, and dictated material always dissatisfied him. Those who deny the line of relevant connection between his grim thinking and his sickness ignore the fact that he was an ultrasensitive man -- so sensitive that a large part of his life was occupied with the search for a solitary place where no people could interrupt him and where he could live entirely within himself.

I recall reading "Desire Under the Elms" as a college freshman, but since then nothing else by or about the Irish-American playwright. A few days ago the Brunton passage decided me to buy Robert M. Dowling's biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts, Yale University Press, 2014. Outstanding! Reads like a novel. What a character that besotted playwright was!  I will have something to say later about his strange and incoherent sense of life. It will anger some literary types. 

Drunkards seem 'over-represented' among literary writers. Wokesters need to address this 'inequity.' 

 

Thomas Klingenstein on Trump's Virtues

Outstanding! Memorize it and propagate it.

I am very happy to have discovered Klingenstein. He is right on target. Here is a short (4:28) explanation of the war we are in. This is the truth. Face it!

A Hitherto Unknown Portrait of Edmund Husserl and his Relation to Leonard Nelson

 Sketch found in the notebooks of Leonard Nelson. This page offers some insights into the Husserl-Nelson relationship if you want to call it that. Husserl appears in a churlish light as a Fachphilosoph looking down on a lowly dozent and perceived amateur. Husserl apparently ignored or dismissed  Nelson's The Impossibility of the Theory of Knowledge despite its relevance to Husserl's project of founding philosophy als strenge Wissenschaft, as strict science.

Roman Ingarden, Husserl's distinguished student, has  the following to say about Nelson (a German despite his very English surname) in his On the Motives which Led Husserl to Transcendental Idealism: 

It so happened that in the very years that Husserl jumped into the arena of epistemology, Leonard Nelson directed a sharp attack against the theory of knowledge. (footnote #1o:  Cf. Leonard Nelson, Ueber das sogenannte Erkenntnisproblem. Die Unmoeglichkeit der Erkenntnistheorie, vol. III, Abhandlungen der Friesschen Schule, also in the Acts of the IV International Congress of Philosophy, 1911. Husserl's ideas must have been completely crystallized in this period. Nelson was a Dozent in Goettingen from the year 1909.)

We know that Nelson made an attempt to show the impossibility of epistemology by pointing out that inevitably in it one cannot avoid committing the error of petitio principii. Husserl, as far as I know, never spoke nor wrote about this opinion expressed by Nelson and must have seen this danger clearly for himself, but he certainly knew about Nelson's book. Whatever the relations were between the two thinkers, it is a fact that in the period when I heard Husserl's lectures (with interruptions, from 1912 to 1917) he very often drew attention in his lectures and seminars to the "nonsense" (Widersinn) in the attempt to arrive at an epistemological solution, e.g. concerning the cognitive value of outer perception, by appealing to the existence of qualities in objects given in cognition of the kind which is investigated when, e.g. -- as was usual in the psycho-physiology of the second half of the 19th century -- we appeal to "physical stimuli" which act upon what is called our senses in order to show that sense perception falsely informs us about "secondary" qualities of material objects. It is also a fact that the application of the phenomenological reduction, which Husserl introduced with another aim in mind in Ideas I, eo ipso removes the danger of petitio principii in the investigations into the experiential mode of cognition of the objects of the real world. After having carried out this reduction we find ourselves, nevertheless, ipso facto in the area of pure transcendental consciousness inside which we are to carry out all epistemological investigations; but, in addition, it has to be agreed that every being (real or ideal or purely intentional) is to be deduced from the essence of the operations (acts) of pure consciousness. It seems to be that from the point of view of a valid epistemological methodology a certain kind of priority is to be demanded for pure consciousness, and that this is possible is also shown by the theory of immanent perception and the results of the analysis of primary constitutive consciousness constituting, for example, time. But, along with this, this "priority" of pure consciousness begins to assume a metaphysical character in the form even of a thesis of the absolute existence of pure consciousness, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of an existential dependence of all other being, and, above all, of the real world, on pure consciousness. The danger of petitio principii in epistemology is removed by the phenomenological reduction but it leads to an account of the existence of the world which (in spite of all differences, from, for example, Berkeley's position, which Husserl himself constantly and emphatically stressed) comes alarmingly close to the Marburgian Neo-Kanti[ani]sm, of which Husserl was often accused on the grounds of similarities between his Ideas and [Paul] Natorp's Allgemeine Psychologie of 1912. (pp. 11-13)

The Truth of Life and the Art of Life

We must face reality to learn the truth of life. But the art of life requires that we sometimes turn away, look away, shrug our shoulders, peremptorily dismiss, ask not why, and acquiesce in a jaded ignoramus et ignorabimus. Prudent folk often acquiesce in such an unreflective understanding.  They sense the difference between the true and the life-enhancing. But the tension does not much concern them; perhaps they feel that to fret over it would be the opposite of life-enhancing and get them into trouble. Not for them the examined life.

The tension is left to the philosophers to reflect on. Their sort of life is enhanced by the paradoxical, the antinomian, and the absurd. Desirous of Sense they will wander to the edge of Nonsense and peer over the edge into an Abgrund, risking Nietzsche's warning that  "if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." (Beyond Good and Evil, sec.146.)

The weak among them will shrink back and take comfort in the smiley-faced nihilism of the Last Man of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The resolute will weather the Great Doubt and press on with faith and determination.

Identity Politics: Is it Possible to Remain Classically Liberal?

There is an identity politics of the Left and an identity politics of the Right. The second kind became obvious to me when, after objecting to the tribalism of blacks, Hispanics, and other racial/ethnic groups, and after calling for a transcending of tribalism, I was countered by certain alt-rightists/neo-reactionaries who reject any such transcending and think that what is needed is a white tribalism to oppose tribalisms 'of color.'

 

While I reject the destructive falsehoods of left-wing tribalists, and understand the urge of 'alties' to oppose them with vigor, I don't want to go into reactionary mode if I can avoid it. The reactionary is defined by what he reacts against. I want to move in a positive direction. I want to reject identity politics of both the Left and the Right by transcending them both. To be identity-political is to take one's primary self-identification to be a tribal or group identification, an identification in terms of race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, disability, socio-economic class, or some combination of these.

 

That is not how I self-identify, and I believe that no one should self-identify in that way. I identify as a person, as a rational being, as a free agent, as a truth-seeker, as a lover of the good and the beautiful, as a conscious and self-conscious subject. I do not primarily self-identify as an object in nature, a two-legged land mammal, or in any such way. Of course, I am an animal, a genetically human animal, essentially (not accidentally) Caucasian, and essentially (not accidentally) male, whence it follows, contrary to current leftist lore, that I cannot change my race or my sex. But while I am an animal, I am also a person, a spirit.

 

Here is one problem we face. Our enemies on the 'woke' and thus tribalist Left reject this scheme which ultimately rests on a personalist and theistic foundation. They are an existential threat to us, where an existential threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence, but also, and more importantly, a threat to one's way of life as a spiritual, cultural, and historical being as opposed to a mere biological system for whom biological survival is the only value. There is no reaching these 'woke' folk  with talk of persons and rights and the equality of persons and of rights. That is to them just bourgeois ideology that serves only to legitimate the extant social order. They are tribalists who refuse to transcend their tribal identifications and see themselves as persons, as rational beings, as autonomous agents. But not only that, they are also race realists despite their obfuscatory and logically inconsistent talk of race as a social construct. The inconsistency doesn't bother them because truth is not a leftist value, and logical consistency can count as a value only to those for whom truth is a value. This is because truth enters into the definition of logical consistency. 

 

The problem, then, is that it is probably not possible to defeat our enemies -- who, nota bene, do not want peaceful coexistence -- except by going tribal ourselves, and engaging them in the way they apparently want to be engaged, with blood and iron. Either that, or we accept political dhimmitude. And so a certain amount of pro tempore white tribalism may be needed to counteract the tribalists 'of color.' 

 

I would like it not to be true, but I fear that it is. 

William Faulkner on Privacy

Harper's Magazine, 1955. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Jimmy Elledge and Some Other One-Hit Wonders

Jimmy Elledge, Funny How Time Slips Away.  Born January 8, 1943 in Nashville, Elledge died June 10, 2012 after complications following a stroke.  The song, written by Willie Nelson, made the #22 slot on Billboard Hot 100 in 1961, and sold over one million copies. Elledge never had another hit. As a YouTube commenter points out, that does sound like Floyd Cramer tickling the ivories.  A great song.  I always thought it was a female singing.

Rosie and the Originals, Angel Baby, 1960.  Perfect for cruising Whittier Boulevard in your '57 Chevy on a Saturday night.  This one goes out to Tom Coleman.

Claudine Clark, Party Lights, 1962

Contours, Do You Love Me? 1962

Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog,' 1966.   A forgotten oldie if ever there was one.  If you remember this bit of vintage vinyl, one of the strangest songs of the '60s, I'll buy you a beer or a cat named 'dog.' One.

Bruce Channel, Hey! Baby, 1962

Barbara George, I Know, 1962

And now a couple more forgotten one-hit wonders who get almost no play on the oldies stations which is exactly why you need Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies:

Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin'  Trivia question: The song contains references to three contemporary songs.  Name them.  And how quaint the reference to the fellow with the switch-blade knife.

Larry Finnegan, Dear One, 1962 

David Bowie?  Who's he?

UPDATE.   Dave B. tells me that I owe his wife Ronda a beer:

Yeah she remembered that song from the opening riff.

What a waste of a nice Gibson SG...

You are quite right, Dave: the girl is flailing at a Gibson SG standard.  Clapton, a.k.a 'God,' played them before switching over to Fender Strats.  I wanted an SG back around '67 or '68 but they were too much in demand.  So I 'settled' for  a Gibson ES 335 TD.  But then I did the dumbest thing I ever did a few years later.

Which Side Are You On?

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Pete Seeger was a commie populist. I prefer the anti-commie variety.

Thomas Jefferson on Shooting as Bodily Exercise

The following, snagged from an outlying precinct of cyberspace, sounded bogus, so I put Snopes on the case:

A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercises, I advise the gun. While this gives moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be your constant companion of your walks. —Thomas Jefferson, letter to Peter Carr, 1785

Snopes verified the quotation:

Origins:   The passage quoted above is indeed an excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to his nephew, Peter Carr, on 19 August 1785, as collected in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. It was part of a longer section in which Jefferson touted the benefits of physical exercise (such as walking or shooting) in ensuring both bodily health and mental health:

Encourage all your virtuous dispositions, and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises, being assured that they will gain strength by exercise as a limb of the body does, and that exercise will make them habitual … Give about two [hours] every day to exercise; for health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprize, and independance to the mind. Games played with the ball and others of that nature, are too violent for the body and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk. But divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far. The Europeans value themselves on having subdued the horse to the uses of man. But I doubt whether we have not lost more than we have gained by the use of this animal. No one has occasioned so much the degeneracy of the human body. An Indian goes on foot nearly as far in a day, for a long journey, as an enfeebled white does on his horse, and he will tire the best horses. There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue. I would advise you to take your exercise in the afternoon. Not because it is the best time for exercise for certainly it is not: but because it is the best time to spare from your studies; and habit will soon reconcile it to health, and render it nearly as useful as if you gave to that the more precious hours of the day. A little walk of half an hour in the morning when you first rise is adviseable also. It shakes off sleep, and produces other good effects in the animal economy. (Emphases and irregularities of usage occur in the original.)

1) Interestingly, Schopenhauer also recommends two hours of walking exercise per diem, but makes no mention of packing heat. He did, however, keep a loaded firearm on his night stand. The two great men also concur that the walker should walk and not pack a book or read. TJ appears to have been an early exponent of situational awareness and would undoubtedly have decried the all-too-common practice of walking about while hunched over a smartphone. The trick, of course, is to use your smartphone without becoming a dumbass.

2) If Jefferson could only see how enfeebled the white man has become these days.

3) Jefferson had his priorities straight: the care of the soul and mind ought to come first in the day and the care of the body only later.

John Pepple's Last Post and a Look Back

I stopped by John Pepple's place this evening and found not his latest, but his last, post. A twinge of nostalgia tinged with sadness ensued. We bloggers form a loose fellowship and when one of us moves on, whether by quitting the blogosphere, or, more drastically, by quitting the sublunary, certain emotions arise.  So long, John, it's been good to know you.  What follows is my first mention of his weblog, dated 13 July 2010:

JOHN PEPPLE WANTS A NEW LEFT

During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepple, aims to develop a self-critical leftism.  Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike:  why does Pepple hang on to the 'leftism' label?

But labels aren't that important.  What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepple.  In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  Sounds very familiar!  The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring."  I started out in Electrical Engineering at the same time but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy."  I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.

Why did so many of us '60s types end up in philosophy?  Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.

Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic.  I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded.  She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.

Obscure, Neglected, and Underrated Philosophers

A reader demands a list.  Here we go.  It is very far from complete.  To list is not to endorse.  A philosopher my be well worth studying but far from the truth of things. Contemporary academic philosophy is hyper-professionalized and over-specialized.  An exposure to some of the following may have a broadening effect.  Philosophy is a mansion with many wings and many rooms. Asterisks indicate a MavPhil category on the right sidebar.

Maurice Blondel*

Constantin Brunner (English)

Constantin Brunner (German)

Panayot Butchvarov*

Wolfgang Cramer*

John Niemeyer Findlay*

Jakob Friedrich Fries

Reinhardt Grossmann*

Nicolai Hartmann*

Roman Ingarden*

Ludwig Klages

Barry Miller*

Leonard Nelson

Xavier Zubiri

On Perceptual 'Taking'

Ed writes,

Something to think about. “I take an X to be a Y”.

This can be true when there is no Y. For example, I take a tree root to be a snake. There is a tree root, but no snake.

But what about the other way round? I take a mirror image to be a person occupying the space behind the mirror, thinking it to be a window. In that case there is also no Y (because no such person) but is there an X? That is, does “I take a mirror image to be a person” imply that there is some X such that X is a mirror image and I take X to be a person?

It is the ‘ontological’ (=referential) questions that interest me. I have never had any interest in epistemology. Is a mirror image a τόδε τι, a hoc aliquid, a this-something?

Over to you.

BV:  I don't believe anyone who knows English would ever say, 'I take a tree root to be a snake' as opposed to 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'  If you see something that you believe to be a tree root, then you cannot at the same time take it to be a snake.  If, on the other hand, if you take something to be a snake, and further perception convinces you that it is a tree root, then you can say, 'I took a tree root to be a snake.'

Suppose we try to describe such a situation phenomenologically. I am hiking in twilight through rattlesnake country. I suddenly stop, and shout to my partner, "I see a snake!" People say things like this. What we have here is a legitimate ordinary language use of 'see.'  Sometimes, when people say 'I see a snake,' there is/exists a snake that they see.  Other times, when people say, 'I see a snake,' it is not the case that there is/exists a snake that they see.  In both cases they see something. This use of 'see' is neutral on the question whether the seen exists or does not exist. Call this use the phenomenological use. It contrasts with the 'verb of success use' which is also a legitimate ordinary language use. On the success use, if subject S sees X, it follows that X exists.  On this use of 'see,' one cannot see what does not exist. On the phenomenological use, if S sees X, it does not follow that X exists. Mark the two senses as see_s  and see_p respectively.

I see_p a snake. But as I look more closely the initial episode of seeing is not corroborated by further such episodes. The snake appearance of the first episode is cancelled. By 'appearance' I mean the intentional object of the mental act of seeing_p. This appearance (apparent item)  is shown to be a merely intentional object. How? By the ongoing process of visual experiencing. The initial snake appearance (apparent item) is cancelled because of its non-coherence with the intentional objects of the subsequent perceptual acts. The subsequent mental acts present  intentional objects  that have some of the properties of a tree root. As the perceptual process continues through a series of  visual acts the intentional objects of which cohere, the perceiver comes to believe that he is veridically perceiving a tree root. He then says, "It wasn't a snake I saw after all; I took a tree root to be a snake!"

Clearly, I saw something, something that caused me to halt. If I had seen nothing, then I would not have halted. But the something I saw turned out not to exist.

So my answer to your concluding question is in the affirmative.

Finally, if you have no interest in epistemology, then you have no interest in the above question since it is an epistemological question concerning veridical and non-veridical knowledge of the external world via outer perception.

You are some kind of radical externalist.  But how justify such an extreme position? 

Philosophy Under Attack

An exercise in philosophical apologetics. 

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