Maverick Philosopher

New Year's Eve at the Oldies: 'Last' Songs for the Last Night of the Year

Happy New Year, everybody. But as our great republic comes to an end, Irving Berlin's "The Song is Ended" seems an appropriate way to kick things off convey the thought that happiness in the coming year is more likely to be found by an inner path.  "Take your happiness while you may." Here's a hipster version, my favorite.

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box. You were young. Custodia cordis was not in your vocabulary, let alone in your life. Years had to pass before it entered both, and serenitas cordis supervened. 

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Not enough nostalgia? Try this.

Happy New Year, everybody. But as our great republic comes to an end, Irving Berlin's "The Song is Ended" seems an appropriate way to kick things off convey the thought that happiness in the coming year is more likely to be found by an inner path.  "Take your happiness while you may." Here's a hipster version, my favorite.

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box. You were young. Custodia cordis was not in your vocabulary, let alone in your life. Years had to pass before it entered both, and serenitas cordis supervened. 

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Not enough nostalgia? Try this.

Happy New Year, everybody. But as our great republic comes to an end, Irving Berlin's "The Song is Ended" seems an appropriate way to kick things off convey the thought that happiness in the coming year is more likely to be found by an inner path.  "Take your happiness while you may." Here's a hipster version, my favorite.

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box. You were young. Custodia cordis was not in your vocabulary, let alone in your life. Years had to pass before it entered both, and serenitas cordis supervened. 

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Not enough nostalgia? Try this.

Pope Benedict XVI Dead at 95

I was mightily impressed with the power of Joseph Ratzinger's intellect when I first read his Introduction to Christianity in 2016. I have been recently re-reading it. Ratzinger makes quite the contrast with the benighted Bergoglio.

How do we best honor a thinker? By re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically, appropriating and developing what stands up to scrutiny.  One attempt on my part is my Substack article, Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body. Another is The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation. A third is my defense of the controversial Regensburg speech.

Other minor pieces are collected in my Ratzinger category.   Here is an excerpt from one of them:

Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)

I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict  XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968).  Here is one relevant quotation among several:

The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142) 

Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that

. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)

Plato and Moses!  The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.

The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later. 

Lousy Teachers

They unwittingly gave me the confidence that I could do what they do, and indeed do it better, but they also deprived me of the intellectual formation that I had to spend years developing on my own. They set me forward, and they set me back.

To cheat students is bad enough; to corrupt them is far worse. The latter is happening now in classrooms at all levels throughout the land.  To speak of a decline in standards would be an understatement: perversion of standards.

A Proposed Change to the Pater Noster

Substitute "Do not allow us to be led into temptation" for "Lead us not into temptation." For why on earth or in heaven would the Father of Lights want to lead us into the darkness of temptation?

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

Vito Caiati comments:

With regard to today’s short post, “A Proposed Change to the Pater Noster. I think that you may find Aquinas’ understanding of the petition “Lead us not into temptation” worthy of your consideration. Specifically, in the “Explanation of the Lord’s Prayer” (Expositio in orationem dominicam), he writes:

But does God lead one to evil, that he should pray: "Lead us not into temptation"?

I reply that God is said to lead a person into evil by permitting him to the extent that, because of his many sins, He withdraws His grace from man, and as a result of this withdrawal man does fall into sin. Therefore, we sing in the Psalm: "When my strength shall fail, do not Thou forsake me."[23] God, however, directs man by the fervor of charity that he be not led into temptation. For charity even in its smallest degree is able to resist any kind of sin: "Many waters cannot quench charity."[24] He also guides man by the light of his intellect in which he teaches him what he should do. For as the Philosopher says: "Everyone who sins is ignorant."[25] "I will give thee understanding and I will instruct thee."[26] It was for this last that David prayed, saying: "Enlighten my eyes that I never sleep in death; lest at any time my enemy say: I have prevailed against him."[27] We have this through the gift of understanding. Therefore, when we refuse to consent to temptation, we keep our hearts pure: "Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God."[28] And it follows from this petition that we are led up to the sight of God, and to it may God lead us all! (https://isidore.co/aquinas/PaterNoster.htm)

This interpretation of the text in question not only avoids the clearly undesirable implication that God would “want to lead us into the darkness of temptation” but it also logically follows from the fifth (“forgive us our trespasses”) and sixth (“deliver us from evil”) petitions, the former asking forgiveness for our sins and the latter protection against all the evils of the world, many of which flow from them. Thus, these concern the effects of past sin, ours or our ancestors, while the seventh implores God not to remove the very grace that protects us from sinning again, given our fallen state.

I thank Vito for his erudite comment and for exposing my ignorance of the fact that the doctor angelicus had addressed my puzzlement long ago.  I am having some trouble, though, making sense of Thomas' explanation. He seems to be saying the following.

Man freely sins. God freely responds by withdrawing his grace. This withdrawal of grace either causes or raises the probability that man commit further sins.  "Lead us not into temptation" is thus a request that God not withdraw or withhold the grace we need to keep from sinning.  Accordingly, God leads us into temptation when he withdraws or withholds the grace we need to keep from sinning. I am sorry but I find this a rather strained attempt at making sense of the petition, "Lead us not into temptation." 

How does it go in Greek? Not knowing Greek, I cannot say.  In any case, Christ did not speak Greek. So we cannot be sure of the sense of the words Christ used when he taught his disciples the "Our Father." 

Aquinas quotes Aristotle  in the passage above. But did The Philosopher have the word sin' or the Greek equivalent in his philosophical vocabulary?  Was there a Greek equivalent that has the same  sense as 'sin' when used by Jews and Christians? Sin is an offense against God. Can one sin against the Unmoved Mover, against Thought thinking itself (noesis noeseos)? Can one sin against any of the Greek gods, Zeus for example? I don't know.  Nescio, ergo blogo.

The Introvert Advantage

Currently atop  the Substack pile.  With a little help from Kafka, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, and Einstein.

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

Thomas writes (12/29),

A very nice note for the (nearly) new year. It took me decades to realise I am one of those who was nearly socially self-sufficient all his life - no school yard bullying ever touched me, although I was one of the shorter ones until I grew late. And I had no problem concentrating, reading and creating (a few) new ideas in my work for hours on end (indeed, for years on end), whereas I find most people never ever perform such simple feats even once in their lives - concentrating and writing for 4 - 8 hours? How do you do it? How do you not do it, I reply . . .

 

It takes a long time for me to understand the difference because of course we all think we are the same inside until we inspect some bit of human behaviour and find differences. One difference is: socially reliant people have no mental resilience. They can't deal with difficulties on their own. Therefore in crisis situations, which often occur in social groups reacting to wider events, most people determine their responses in a miasma of fear and group-think - a guarantee of poor quality outcomes. So the socially self-sufficient nearly always under-estimate the state of constant frustration (due to non-achievement) and anxiety (when no idle chat or other filler activity is available) of others. So we are amazed when society takes the turns it does. We are exceptionally ignorant, until we study mental lassitude scientifically!

 

Your whisky aphorism has it right. We do need a bit. After all, wit (in the esprit sense) partly comes from talk. And the Kafka quote: responding to corns should just be done, not heard, while one is actually thinking about or discussing things of import, or at least containing some wit.

 

But perhaps there is something to mindless chat? Maybe it serves a purpose such as to limit social violence, in the same way that greeting others (in European culture at least) with a kiss on both cheeks probably (?) limits fist-swinging, at least for that day. I have no idea.

 

Good points.  I never thought of describing extroverts as 'socially reliant,' but the characterization fits.  This 'social reliance' makes them suggestible and inclines them toward conformism, group-think, and foolish fads such as buccal fat removal. But of course we are social animals whether we like it or not. No man an island, etc. 

 

A little socializing is good even unto a bit of mindless chit-chat. Women as a group are extremely good at this and we introverted males can learn from them. The trick, however, is not to take what the other person says seriously. I have made the following mistake. I am hiking along and I meet someone who says, "Beautiful weather we're having today!" I reply, "Well, it's overcast and a bit windy, so I wouldn't call it beautiful."  That's a social mistake or faux pas (a double-entendre to keep with the hiking theme) because the other guy was probably just signaling friendliness or harmlessness or something. He had no intention of conveying a meteorological truth.  In situations like this the introvert who was thinking about the third derivative of position with respect to time has to turn off his truth-drive and go with the silly-ass flow. And not be a jerk.

 

Strangely, I have found that a little socializing is often physically stimulating.  On an early morning ramble, I am doing OK, but feeling a bit sluggish.  I encounter an acquaintance. We chat for a few minutes. When I start up again I feel energized. There's a spring in my step and  glide to my stride.  

 

And now my mind drifts back to a book I read as a teenager, Games People Play, by Eric Berne. He was pushing something he called "transactional analysis" if memory serves. Look it up.

 

To end with the whisky metaphor. If one shot is good, ten shots is not ten times better.

Tulsi Gabbard Exposes George Santos

Would that Tulsi would and could lay  bare the brazen bullshit of every single swamp critter in the District of Columbia from the life-long liar Joey B. on down and not leaving out Alejandro Mayorkas, 'Director of Homeland Security' -- how is that for an Orwellian title! -- and Elizabeth 'Fauxcahontas' Warren, and do it with the style, grace, and integrity she demonstrates in this amazing video. 

Please watch it and propagate it. 

On the Infirmity of Reason

Weak in leading us to truth, reason is also weak in the correction of bad behavior. Reason in us waxes strong, however, in finding excuses for our weakness. Cigarette smokers, for example, typically claim to be 'addicted' to nicotine. They misuse the word 'addiction' to cover their refusal to exercise their will power. Unexercised, it atrophies.  A will atrophied unto extinction then validates the claim of 'addiction.'

Weak in determining behavior, reason is strong in rationalizing its weakness.  Why is reason in us so miserably weak? Is this weakness a noetic consequence of the Fall? If it is, then the weakness is not essential to it, but accidental. The Fall, after all, was a contingent event: there was no necessity that it occur. Man might have remained in his prelapsarian state. In that state, man's reason was strong and healthy not like it is now suborned by its lust and greed and envy, and all the rest of the deadly adjuncts of the Initial Moral Collapse. 

Continence

There is continence sexual and gustatory. Custody of the eyes and of the heart are forms of continence.  Continence should also extend to rebuttals, replies, ripostes, rejoinders, responses, and reactions. Deny yourself the desire for vindication, and getting in the last word. Better retraction than self-serving reaction. The self denied is the ego; the self that denies is the soul.

A Life Goal

Full self-integration, maximal self-individuation.

Aim high. You won't be able to achieve the goal in this life. So believe beyond the sublunary. Live as if your life does not end at death. What harm could it do? No harm at all, and indeed the opposite. We live better here and now when we believe that life has a meaning that transcends the petty and particular, the vain and the transient; when we believe that we are not just dust in the wind.

Rod is Right

Here:

. . . in a turn of fate that is like something out of Greek mythology, the United States is once again fully committed to a war of choice with unpredictable consequences. Except this time, it's a proxy war against a nuclear superpower. As John Mearsheimer has warned, we are playing Russian roulette with nuclear missiles in the chamber. And yet, all of official Washington, as well as the Establishment's media mouthpieces, are cheering on this war, with urgently necessary discussion about the national security interests of the US in this matter, the war's endgame, and suchlike, shoved to the side so Very Important People of the unified War Party can carry on about how Ukraine's fate is the most important issue facing our country -- and anybody who raises a peep of protest is plainly simping for Putin. [Hyperlink added.]

 

Conscience, Brain, and Scientistic Pseudo-Understanding

Substack latest.

If nothing else, philosophy is prophylaxis against infection by scientistic pseudo-understanding.  Take the jab! Boosters to follow.

Who Killed JFK?

Here: 

In a remarkable television broadcast on December 15, 2022, Tucker Carlson made an explosive charge. He pointed out that, contrary to law, the White House was refusing to release thousands of pages of documents about the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carlson said that these documents proved CIA involvement in the assassination and that someone within the government who had looked at these documents made a direct statement to this effect.

Here is what Carlson said: “Not long after Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald on camera in the basement of Dallas police headquarters, a lot of Americans started to have some questions about the Kennedy assassination. It was, you’d have to admit, a pretty extraordinary sequence of events. A lone gunman murders the president of the United States. And then, less than 48 hours later, that lone gunman is himself murdered by another lone gunman.

What are the odds of that?

And here is the Tucker Carlson broadcast that RFK, Jr. called "the most courageous newscast in 60 years."

Two Natures, One Suppositum

I forgot where I found this diagram. (HT to Dmitri Dain who after my initial posting e-mailed me the reference.) The diagram is pretty good except insofar as it suggests that the divine nature of Christ is a proper part of the divine nature.     

A Battle of Titans

Substack upload.

It is sometimes said that there are only two kinds of philosophers, Platonists and Aristotelians.  What follows is a quotation from Heinrich Heine which expresses one version of this useful simplification.  Carl Gustav Jung places it at the very beginning of his Psychological Types (Princeton UP, 1971, p. 2. Jung does not properly source the Heine quotation.)

Christmas Eve at the Oldies

Dylan Thomas, A Child's Christmas in Wales

The following selections and commentary courtesy of Edward Buckner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LndB94i2F_0

“Dieux Parmi Nous” (God among us) by the French composer Olivier Messiaen. The glorious final movement from Messiaen's nine-part La Nativité is performed by Richard Gowers on the organ of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. It is a tradition in England for the family to listen to the carols from King’s on Christmas Eve, and for the women to talk over it. [Ed's remark cannot be sexist if it is true.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YamipW44v4c

“Toccata on 'Veni Emmanuel'” by the English composer Andrew Carter. The origin of the melody was a mystery for some time but it was recently found in a 15th-century manuscript in the National Library of France. Keep an eye out for the organist’s socks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SixnHKwyrjI

“Jesus Christ the Apple Tree" by English composer Elizabeth Poston. During World War II Poston is supposed to have worked as a secret agent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq8mgyBUJgk

“Nativity Carol” by English composer John Rutter. Rutter is hated by many as verging on kitsch, but “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without this magnificent carol”. Judge for yourself.  [A little kitsch never hurt anybody.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXOaTOylx0c

“This Christmas Night” by Australian composer Malcolm Williamson. Williamson worked as a nightclub pianist when he moved to London, but soon converted to Roman Catholicism. He became the Master of the Queen's Music in 1975.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XQwLp9d5eg

“A Babe is Born” by Welsh composer William Mathias. His anthem “Let the people praise Thee, O God” was written for the July 1981 royal wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, and thus heard by 1 billion people. The tenor part is difficult for us tenors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1wHyMR_SCA

“O Come, All Ye Faithful” (Adeste Fideles) from our wonderful Westminster Abbey. The origin of the melody is unknown, but was first published by John Francis Wade in his collection Cantus Diversi. Watch out for the lovely descant at ‘Sing choirs of angels’.

The Constitutional Maverick

Richard A. Epstein:

The maverick takes issue with both modern liberals and modern conservatives because he alone refuses to abandon two key pillars of our classical liberal constitutional theory: limited government and strong property rights. The modern maverick thus works in the Lockean tradition that was ascendant during the founding period. This classical liberal approach should not be misconstrued to hold that all forms of legislation and taxation are illegitimate. The classical liberal is no hard-line libertarian, for she accepts the legitimacy of state power, even if she thinks that it is always an uphill battle to justify government limits on individual freedom. Stated otherwise, the classical liberal does not ask, as do modern liberals and conservatives, why any assertion of individual rights poses a challenge to democratic institutions. Rather, he insistently questions the extent to which democratic institutions may misuse political power to limit individual rights. The position is not geared solely to economic issues of private property and contractual freedom; it also extends to such key areas of human interaction as political speech and religious conscience.

The Hatfields and the McCoys

Whether or not it is true, the following  has a clear sense:

1. The Hatfields outnumber the McCoys.

(1) says that the number of Hatfields is strictly greater than the number of McCoys.  It obviously does not say, of each Hatfield, that he outnumbers some McCoy.  If Gomer is a Hatfield and Goober a McCoy, it is nonsense to say of Gomer that he outnumbers Goober. The Hatfields 'collectively' outnumber the McCoys. 

It therefore seems that there must be something in addition to the individual Hatfields (Gomer, Jethro, Jed, et al.) and something in addition to the individual McCoys (Goober, Phineas, Prudence, et al.) that serve as logical subjects of number predicates.  In

2. The Hatfields are 100 strong

it cannot be any individual Hatfield that is 100 strong.  This suggests that there must be some one single entity, distinct but not wholly distinct from the individual Hatfields, and having them as members, that is the logical subject or bearer of the predicate '100 strong.'

So here is a challenge to Ed Buckner the nominalist.  Provide truth-preserving analyses of (1) and (2) that make it unnecessary to posit a collective entity (whether set, mereological sum, or whatever) in addition to individual Hatfields and McCoys.

Nominalists and realists alike agree that one must not "multiply entities beyond necessity."   Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem!  The question, of course, hinges on what's necessary for explanatory purposes.  So the challenge for Buckner the nominalist is to provide analyses of (1) and (2) that capture the sense and preserve the truth of the analysanda and yet obviate the felt need to posit entities in addition to concrete particulars.

Now if such analyses could be provided, it would not follow that there are no 'collective entities.'  But a reason for positing them would have been removed.

Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists

Top of the Substack stack.

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

Tony Flood comments (12/23):

This was enjoyable on so many levels. There's irony in labeling these gents "idealists" (I know the sense in which you meant it) since Marxists considered theists like Merton metaphysical "idealists," but and how could any mathematician, even a Marxist one, be anything but an idealist when it comes to the reality of numbers? Your historical vignette is rich and your comparison and contrasts apt. 

I know that Karl Marx occupied himself with the foundations of analysis (calculus), but I don't know whether or not he wrote anything about the philosophy of mathematics.  To answer Tony's question with a question: Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?

Tony replies (12/24):

"Why couldn't a Marxist take a nominalist tack and simply deny the existence of numbers and other mathematical items?"

Abstractly, Bill, I have no idea what tack Marxist materialists might take if pressed about the reality of numbers, e.g., what (and "where") they are (Plato's problem); how they're "unreasonably effective" in the natural sciences, which Marxists revere, i.e., how numbers can cause mathematical belief (Benacerraf's problem); and how numbers are knowable on the materialist/naturalist terms to which Marxists subscribe, i.e., what neural process could possibly answer to the perception of a mathematical object (Goedel's problem). I wish I could have asked Stalinist mathematician Dirk Struik (1896-2000) these questions when he and I were comrades, but I wasn't asking them then. (I'm not asking them these days, but your question stimulated memories of when I did.) Nominalism is not an integral way out for Marxists, but what grounds Marxists have for valuing integral solutions, I have no idea. 

Thanks for the Wigner pdf. It gets at a question that fascinated me when I was a student of electrical engineering at the end of the 'sixties.  How is it that the theory of complex numbers -- developed a priori in response to a purely theoretical question about the roots of negative integers -- finds application in alternating current theory? 

I say 'developed,' Wigner says 'invented.' "The principal emphasis [in mathematics] is on the invention of concepts. Mathematics would soon run out of interesting theorems if these had to be formulated in terms of the concepts which already appear in the axioms." I wrote 'developed' because of my platonizing tendency to view mathematical entities -- 'entities' betrays me too inasmuch as it begs the question I am about to pose --  as discovered rather than invented. The question that my use of 'entities' begs is precisely the question whether mathematical 'items' -- a colorless, non-question-begging bit of terminology -- are made up by us (in which case they cannot be called entities or beings) or are really but non-spatially 'out there' in Plato's topos ouranios. My platonic drift links up with my classical theism and issues in the view that the unspeakably vast actual infinity of mathematical items are accusatives of divine awareness: their Being is their being-known/created by the archetypal intellect.  This sort of view allows for the mediation of two extremes, a synthesis if you will.

Thesis: math items exist in themselves in splendid independence of ectypal intellects (whether human, Martian, angelic, whatever). Antithesis: math items do no such thing; they are the conceptual/linguistic fabrications of ectypal intellects such as ours. And now my mind drifts back to Hartry Field's nominalistic Science without Numbers, circa 1980,  the gist of which is that science can be done without ontological commitment to any so-called abstract entities.  There are some very smart nominalists  and they are hard to beat. Shooting from the hip, I say Field  'out-quines' Quine.

But here's a thought. Suppose Wigner is right and mathematica are inventions by us, which is to say that they are conceptual/linguistic fabrications that do not refer to anything real anywhere, whether in Plato's heaven or on Aristotle's earth. Would that not make the problem of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world utterly insoluble?

There is a Kantian-type solution, but then you have to take on board the Kantian baggage.  

It looks like I have, willy-nilly this Christmas eve, added a log to my aporetic fire in support of my metaphilosophical thesis that the central problems of philosophy, though obviously meaningful, pace the later Ludwig, are all of them absolutely insoluble by intellects of our constitution. Insofar forth, I am mightily impressed by the thesis of the infirmity of reason. The Fall had noetic consequences.

Below: Raphael, The School of Athens depicting Plato gesturing upwards, as if to the mundus intelligibilis and Aristotle downwards as if to the mundus sensibilis.

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

'Tis the season for the letter carriers of the world to groan under their useless burdens of impersonal greetings.

 

Impersonality in the minimalist style typically takes the form of a store-bought card with a pre-fabricated message to which is appended an embossed name. A step up from this is a handwritten name. Slightly better is the nowadays common family picture with handwritten name but no message.

 

The maximalist style is far worse. Now we are in for a lengthy litany of the manifold accomplishments of the sender and his family which litany may run to a page or two of single-spaced text.

 

One size fits all. No attempt to address any one person as a person.

 

"It's humbug, I tell you, humbug!"

Memories of the Moscow Trials

An important 1984 essay by Sidney Hook. 

Related: The Trial of Kyle: The Show Trial Comes to America

See also: 

Sidney Hook Reviews Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

Sidney Hook on Freda Utley

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and my own. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us unto temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

Read the rest at Substack.

Civilizational Collapse: The Case of NYC

The Big Apple is now rotten to the core, thanks to 'progressives.' There is no wisdom on the Left, no common sense, no basic decency. Cal Thomas:

The exodus of New Yorkers for less expensive and safer climes has been well documented. In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 300,000 residents left New York state. I suspect the number this year will match or exceed that. High taxes, crime, and the cost of housing and living are all contributing factors. Police are leaving, too: 831 so far this year. Who can blame them, given the way they are treated?

[. . .]

It gives a new meaning to the opening line of the Frank Sinatra song “Start spreading the news. I’m leaving today.” Except the leaving now is from, not to New York.   

One thing you need to know about 'progressives' is that the spirit that animates the leaders of their movement, if not every rank-and-file useful idiot and somnambulant fellow-traveller,  is the spirit of Mephistopheles. Goethe had his number:

I'll translate the first two lines. "I am the spirit that always negates! And rightly so. For the worth of all that comes to be is in its ceasing to be." This is the spirit of Mephisto and of Karl Marx, who quotes  it approvingly somewhere.  (Look it up! Why do I have to do all the work?)

'Progressive' nihilism is supposed to issue in utopia and the immanentization of the eschaton. But how do the destroyers know that it will? How do they know that burying the hard-won wisdom of the past and destroying what has taken centuries to build will clear the ground for the arisal of an earthly paradise? They don't know it. But we know that past attempts have failed disastrously.  We know that from history, the same history that the 'progressives' with their latter-day equivalents of book burning will not learn from but will attempt to erase.

You need to ask yourself whether you support the depredations of cultural Marxism which include ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government . . . and I'm just warming to my theme.

One more thing.

There are really only two effective ways of 'voting.' One is with your feet, as when, for example, New Yorkers head for DeSantisLand. The other is with your wallet.

If your alma mater supports the DEI agenda, politely inform their financial officers that they will not receive one red cent from you as long as they do. This is something you can do that is not merely 'performative' as this word is now being used. (For the record, I do not approve of this linguistic innovation.)  For, as Lee Iaococca said, "When money talks, ideology walks."  Even the most irrational among us begin to think straight when money is on the table and their financial survival is on the line.

Here is a letter you are free to take as a model.

For more on cultural collapse, take a gander at this seven-minute video featuring the inimitable Camille Paglia.

Death, Consolation, and 'Life Goes On'

Substack latest.

Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die.  Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation.  Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.'  In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die:

And when I die
And when I'm gone
There'll be one child born in this world
To carry on, carry on.

The singer consoles herself with the thought that life goes on.  But is the thought that 'life goes on' a legitimate and reasonable source of consolation? Or is it an "escapist self-deception" as Robert Spaemann asserts? (Persons, Oxford UP, 2017, 115. Orig. publ. in German in 1996; first publ. in English in 2006)

I attempt in this entry to show that Spaemann is right.

 

Tucker Carlson on the Tulsi Gabbard Show

Long, but good.  

Tony Flood comments:

Their occasional descent into verbal coarseness was as disappointing as it was unexpected. It seems that even for some people I most admire, the effort to resist that cultural pull downward is no longer worth the bother.  

Our society-wide descent into verbal and other forms of coarseness and crudity outside of locker-room-type contexts can with justice be laid at the doorstep of the Boomer cohort (1946-1964). Tucker and Tulsi are Gen-Xers, and their generation followed ours in the downward direction.  I myself, on Facebook and also here a few times, have employed harsh invective against our political enemies using such words as 'shithead,' 'crapweasel' (which I picked up from Michelle Malkin), and 'chucklephuck.' I may also have used 'asshole.'  Much less offensive is 'p.c.-whipped,' which I got from Ed Feser. I don't need to explain the allusion.

There are two words, however, that I never use in any context. These are words I never even mention let alone use, except via oblique mention.  The one is the c-word when used as a synecdoche. So used, it is not merely crude but vile. The other is the mf-word, which is unspeakably vile for reasons only the morally obtuse will not understand.

One attempt at justification goes like this. "You attack me verbally or physically and I will reply in kind to give you a taste of your own medicine in the hope that this will dissuade you from future bad behavior." For when bad behavior goes unpunished, more bad behavior inevitably follows. As one of my aphorisms has it:

Be kind, but be prepared to reply in kind.

The problem, however, is that our enemies won't be dissuaded in this way, except in a few instances. They feel themselves to be fully justified in their attacks on us. And so the downward spiral continues. Cruder and cruder. I call it 'crudification,' to give an ugly word to an ugly thing.

Tony Flood is a Christian and he knows that charity is demanded of Christians. But is it prudent in this time of civilizational collapse to be a Christian and walk the walk? It all depends on whether the underlying metaphysics is true.

And so once again we see that all roads lead to metaphysical Rome.

And Heraclitus Wept

Substack latest.

 

Some Questions about Existence, Part I

Pat F. inquires:

Your theory is that existence is the unity of a thing’s constituents. What I wasn’t entirely clear on is just what those constituents are. In one section of your book, you argue for the real distinction between essence and existence, which gave me the impression that existence was a constituent (rather than, as Miller would say, a component) along with essence (which seems to me the traditional compositional analysis);however, elsewhere you deny existence is a constituent. I am sure the misunderstanding is on my part, but clarification would be most helpful.

My question at the beginning of the book is: What is it for a concrete contingent individual to exist? My cat Max is an example of a concrete individual. Max exists. Nothing can exist without properties. So Max has properties. Some are essential, some are accidental, some are monadic, and some are relational. Take the conjunction of all of these properties and call it the wide essence or quiddity (whatness) of Max.  Now one of my claims is that existence is not included in the wide essence of any contingent being. (Max is of course a contingent being which is to say that, although he exists, at every moment at which he exists his nonexistence is possible.) At the same time, though, existence is predicable of Max: 'exists' is an admissible first-level predicate, pace the 'Fressellians.' Barry Miller and I agree about this.  

I have said enough to motivate  a version of the famous distinctio realis, the real distinction of essence and existence. About anything whatsoever we can ask two different questions: What is it? (Quid sit?) and Is it? (An sit?)  In a contingent being (ens), the distinction between what the thing is (wide essence, quiddity) and its existence (esse) is real, meaning that the distinction pertains to the thing (res) itself apart from our modes of considering it. 'Real' in this context does NOT mean that in Max there are two things, one res being the essence, the other res being the existence. That is supposedly what Giles of Rome held, not what Aquinas or I hold. 

Analogy: my head and my eyeglasses are really distinct in the Giles-of-Rome way: head and glasses can each exist on its own apart from the other. But the convexity and concavity of a particular lens cannot exist on their own apart from each other. And yet the distinction is real, not projected by us.  The real distinction that I espouse is like the distinction between the particular convexity and the particular concavity concavity in a particular lens. 'Like,' not 'the same as.' The real distinction between essence and existence in a contingent being such as an optical lens is sui generis: there is no adequate model for it.   

So, to answer the reader's first question, while I do hold to some version of the real distinction, I do not maintain that the existence of a contingent being is a constituent thereof. The existence of a contingent being is not a spatial, temporal, or ontological part of it. It is the contingent unity or contingent togetherness of all of its ontological parts; it could not possibly be one of them. The whole thing exists; the existence of the thing cannot be assigned to one proper part thereof. I believe I call this "The holism of existence" in my book.

To get some idea of what an ontological part might be, consider a bundle theory of ordinary concrete particulars. The ontological parts are the properties, whether universals or tropes, the bundling of which constitutes the particular. The existence of an ordinary particular, Max, for example, would then be the contingent compresence of the properties, where the compresence of the properties is not itself a property. (Exercise for the reader: explain why compresence cannot itself be a property or a relation.) 

Now the bundle-approach is not the approach to constituent ontology that I espouse in my book, but it is in some ways similar.  In my book I assay ordinary particulars as concrete facts, taking Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong as inspirations.  The latter's thick particulars are facts of the form a's being F, where F is a maximal conjunction of properties and a is a thin particular. On this assay, my beloved Max has as ontological constituents a thin particular and a maximal bunch of properties construed as universals.  The existence of Max then turns out to be the peculiar fact-making contingent unity of all of his  ontological constituents, a unity that equips him to serve as the truth-maker of all the wonderful truths (true truth-bearers) about him.

There is a problem with this view and it is similar to the mess the hylomorphic constituent ontologists get into when they find that they have to posit materia prima which is, arguably, a Grenzbegriff if not an Unbegriff. 

Memory: Content and Affect

Substack latest.

Safety is Overrated

Body, Soul, Self

  Tony Flood writes:

Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question.

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a "less-than-true" or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man's self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year.

 

Also interested in knowing whether there's anything you want to share from your retreat.

 

Tony is referring to this sentence of mine: "Those of us who champion  free speech miss him [Hitchens] and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul." What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person's self.  But why true self?  Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then 'my' soul, or rather me qua soul is 'my' true self. There are a number of different questions here, all very difficult.

 

To begin, we need to clarify our terminology. 'Soul' (psyche, anima, Seele) is ambiguous.  It could refer to the life-principle in living things.  'Soul' could also be used to refer to the subject or possessor of a person's mental states. For the Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne, "Each actual human being is essentially  a pure mental substance . . . " and ". . . a person has mental properties because their [sic] soul has mental properties." (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 80)  

 

Now ask yourself which of the following is true:

 

(A) I am (identical to) a substance the form of which is my soul and the matter of which is my body.  Anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body.

 

(P) I am (identical to) a purely mental substance that contingently possesses a living human body.

 

A substance may be defined as any individual entity metaphysically capable of independent existence, where 'individual' implies unrepeatability and impredicability.

 

(A) is the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. A person is one substance, the individual human being, the soul of which is not a substance. 

 

(P) is the Platonic-Cartesian view. It is substance-dualist. In the book mentioned, Swinburne defends substance dualism according to which "each human consists of two parts -- a soul (a pure mental substance) and a body (a physical substance)." (p. 141)

 

So, when I wrote in my Substack entry about Hitchens taking care of himself, or rather his body, I signaled my inclination to accept the Platonic-Cartesian view. You can destroy your body with hooch and weed, but not your soul.  

 

Now which of the two views above is more biblical? This, I take it, is the question that exercises Tony, and I suspect that his view is either (A) or neither. I suspect that Tony's view is that the Platonic-Cartesian view is wholly unbiblical and thus that Christianity has little or nothing to do with Platonism.  

 

Serendipitously, Tony's question ties in nicely with a discussion I had with a man at the monastery about Mark 12: 18-27 and Christ's argument against the Sadducees re: bodily resurrection. Don't we need Platonic souls during the time between hora mortis nostrae and general resurrection?

 

Combox open.

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

A conversation between Alain Fikielkraut and Pierre Manent.  Very French and very flabby, but here is an excerpt that I approve of (emphasis added):

P.M. What is the nature of Islam’s challenge for us? And who is this “we” being challenged? The challenge lies in the fact that what is happening is that Islam is exerting considerable pressure on Europe, which should not have happened according to the grand progressive narrative elaborated since the eighteenth century—this philosophy of history, according to which humanity, under the leadership of the European avant-garde, was supposed to emancipate itself irresistibly from religious claims, dogma, and doctrine. The vitality that Islam as a whole has maintained, or rather reinforced, goes against a historical perspective that the weakening or “secularization” of Christianity seemed, to many, to validate. Islam is, in any case, the religion that refuses to come to an end and that affirms itself in ways that are manifestly public and triumphalist, casting doubt at least on the grand narrative of secularization. This challenges the consciousness upon which the self-confidence of modern Europe once rested.

Progressivism will not reconsider its approach to the religious question. What, then, does it do? On the one hand, it radically modifies its definition of progress in order to make Islam a part of the grand narrative. Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought; on the contrary, it now represents progress because it has totally renounced self-affirmation and has reinvented itself as unlimited openness to the other—even when this other goes as directly as possible against our principles, particularly those concerning the equality of men and women. Since we now measure the quality of our progressivism by our disposition to welcome Islam unconditionally, Islam obliges us by confirming our grand narrative rather than refuting it. But since it is necessary all the same to take account of the fact that Muslim customs conflict with some of our essential principles, we decree with confidence (in a complementary strategic move) that secularism will take care of the problem by requiring Muslims to remove at least the visible signs of the subordination of women. While the first move boasts of its acceptance of Muslims as they are, the second promises that secularism will make them what they ought to be. Thus is removed all limitation on the welcoming of Islam, whether in the name of its present difference or in the name of its future similarity. Of course, this similarity will be slow in coming; progressivism lives by waiting.

MavPhil 'intervention': European progressivism is so progressive that it transmogrifies into ethno-masochism and cultural suicide. The progressivity of this progressivism is that of  a progressive disease. With the exception of Hungary, Europe is decadent-unto-death, and there is no decadent like a French decadent. (Am I being fair, Vito?) Of course, we over here are decadent as hell as well, but not as decadent, since about half of our population is willing to punch back against ethno-masochistic wokery, 'critical' race-delusionality, reality-denying social constructivism, the celebration of grotesquerie, the canonization of worthless individuals, the destruction of monuments to the great and noble, the destruction of the family, the moral corruption of children, the excusing of brazen mendacity at the highest levels of government, and all the rest of the depredations of cultural Marxism.

As for the "complementary strategic move," good luck with that! Do you Frenchies have the WILL to defend your superior culture against that of the Muslim invaders? Will European secularism "take care of" Muslim barbarism? Maybe. But addiction to la dolce vita is vitiating, weakening in plain English, and you Europeans may end up in dhimmitude. (My use of the Italian phrase may be inappropriate given the current 'stiffening' in my ancestral country, powered by a fiery Italian female.)

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

Le Figaro: The Catholic and Republican frameworks that hold together French society have become dislocated, as Jerome Fourquet explains at the beginning of his work L’Archipel francais. And so, we seek alternative religions. The philosopher Jean-Francois Braunstein recently published La religion woke. Alain Finkielkraut, what do you make of the idea of looking at wokeism as a religion?

A.F. I am not comfortable with this metaphorical use of the term religion. I am not convinced by the concept of secular religions. The promise of a radiant future is not religious. In his book, Pierre Manent sets up a very illuminating debate between Pascal and Rousseau. Original sin occupies a central place in Pascal’s thought. Manent writes: “The claim to overcome human injustice by ourselves, the injustice in which we are born and in which we will live as long as God has not delivered us, is the beginning and indeed the height of our injustice.” Rousseau says the opposite; he excludes the hypothesis of original sin: “I have shown that all the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it; I have stated the manner in which they are born. I have followed their genealogy, so to speak, and I have shown how through the continuous deterioration of their original goodness, men finally become what they are.”

Rousseau replaces original sin by the original crime: property, inequality. Those we call the oppressors are the successors of this crime. For Rousseau, politics must take responsibility for the whole of reality, and its final purpose becomes the elimination of evil. This project can take no other form than the elimination of the wicked; this is what the totalitarian experience teaches us. This is why we see the unexpected return of a meditation on original sin in late nineteenth-century thought. We human beings do not have the strength to deliver ourselves from sin.

Now, with wokeism, we return to the original crime, as if totalitarianism had never happened. With wokeism, evil has an address: evil is the male, white heterosexual over 50. Evil must be eliminated at all costs. Thus, cancel culture arises and spreads.

P.M. The new ideology no longer sees in human bonds the expression and fulfillment of human nature, but what threatens freedom and injures the rights of the individual. The new progressive finds his way in society as in a suspect country. The sole common cause is the protection of nature—but protection against whom? Against human beings, who stain or destroy nature, in one way or another. Political ecology introduces a principle of distrust or of limitless enmity between human beings and with respect to humanity as such. The desire for an earth without people turns humanity against itself and thus feeds the project of effacing what is special about humanity, of making human beings animals like the others, and so, in the end, inoffensive. Thus, at the moment when we claim to base all collective order on the sole principle of human rights, we wish to remove from humanity all that is distinctive by promulgating the rights of animals, plants, and rocks against humanity. Those who speak on behalf of species incapable of speaking need fear no refutation. All of nature provides them with an inexhaustible supply of motives in their accusations against other human beings.

As I have said, contemporary progressivism would have us admit that our species has no real or legitimate privilege over other species, which ultimately have as many rights as we do. And yet there is one point concerning which progressivism absolutely refuses to consider us as animals like the others: it rejects the idea that our lives should be organized according to the difference between the sexes, the natural polarity between males and females. How can we be animals like the others if the human order must construct itself on the basis of the negation of this natural difference that we have in common with animals? In this way, contemporary ideology succeeds in combining a radical contestation of the human difference with a radical contestation of the animal part of our natures. We have only to open the Bible to the book of Genesis to recover a bit of common sense.

 

The Main Argument against Secular Humanism

Humans.

The Ultimate Orwellianism

The ultimate Orwellianism is to refer to the terminally benighted as 'woke.'

Paul Claudel

"The nearer we are to the mountain, the smaller we are. The nearer to eternal Sanctity, the more sinful we seem to ourselves to be." (Claudel-Gide Correspondence, p. 91)

 

 

 

Is Obama a Semi-Racist?

The illustrious Joe Biden has enriched the national conversation with his introduction of 'semi-fascist.' Why not then 'semi-racist'? A semi-racist is one who is half-racist. Now we know that every white, but no black, is a racist. So anyone who is half-white and half-black is a semi-racist. 

1984 Bumpersticker

It read: 1984 is not an instruction manual.

True, but it may be that some of the novel's dystopian ideas can be turned against the Left.

The Militant Defends Religious Liberty!

Will wonders never cease? This article receives the coveted MavPhil nihil obstat.  I found nothing in it to disagree with. Excerpt:

Today anti-Catholic prejudice is being whipped up by Democrats and the middle-class left, who argue the “main threat to democracy” comes from “semi-fascists” and the far right, including Catholics who they smear as reactionary.

“The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade at a time when it has an unprecedented Catholic supermajority,” The Associated Press complained June 30 in an article entitled “Anti-Roe justices a part of Catholicism’s conservative wing.”

While acknowledging that the 71 million Catholics in the U.S. have a wide range of opinions on abortion, the article pounds away at the six justices who “were raised Catholic.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a special target of leftists, who insist she seeks to impose her religious and moral agenda through her votes in court cases.

Nowhere in the AP article does it explain that the Dobbs ruling is based on a reading of the Constitution, not on religious belief. Or that the decision neither bars nor restricts abortions, but turns this decision over to the people in each state and their elected officials.

Exactly right. This is not to say, of course, that I share The Militant's stated goal of "overcoming capitalism." Capitalism, rightly deployed, is not the problem but the solution. I am for free markets and for private property. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. Socialism, however, requires public ownership and control of the means of production, central planning, top-down interference with states, localities, and the private lives of citizens. What public control comes to, however,  is State control which is to say: control by the few who run the omni-invasive and omni-(in)competent State.  

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it must fail because it collides with certain  essential truths about human nature. One of them is that people need incentives to behave in economically and socially productive ways. People will work their asses to the bone if they see some benefit that will accrue to them and theirs (family, friends, local community, tribe), but will slack off like Maynard G. Krebs if forced to labor for some such nebulosity as 'the common good.'  

Countering the Absurd with an Argument from Desire: Preliminaries

Vito Caiati comments:

I have been thinking about your intriguing post in which you write: “For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to.  To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose.”

Does this intuitive, subtle yearning for purpose have some probative value with relation to large questions such as belief in God and, if so, how much?  Does its existence reveal some innate need for an Ultimate Ground of meaning and purpose or can it be dismissed as a vain hope, a refusal by conscious beings to accept the chancy, hollow state of the world? Might it be one more ambiguous indicator that allows for either conclusion, leaving its evidential value as an open question?

Vito is asking the right follow-up questions. Here are five questions that his comments suggest to me.

Q1) Can one mount an argument from desire for the existence of God in which God serves as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose? Answer: Yes, of course. It's been done.

Q2) Is any such argument probative in the sense that it proves (demonstrates, definitively establishes) the existence of such a God? Answer: Not according to my metaphilosophy. For I maintain that there are no rationally compelling arguments for any substantive theses in metaphysics. 

Q3) Despite the nonexistence of any probative arguments from desire, are there any such arguments that render reasonable the belief that there is a God who (among other services) serves as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose, and in particular, the meaning and purpose of human life? Answer: Yes.

Q4) Given an affirmative answer to (Q3), are there also arguments that render reasonable the belief there is no entity, whether classically divine or not, that can that serve as ultimate ground of meaning and purpose of human life and indeed the world as a whole?  Answer: Yes. 

Q5) Given affirmative answers to both (Q3) and (Q4), how should one proceed? Answer: it is up to the individual to decide, after careful consideration of the pros and cons of the issue, what he will believe.  It is a matter of personal, free, decision. There is no algorithm, no objective decision procedure, that can decide the issue for you.  The life of the mind and spirit, like life in general, is a venture and an adventure. You could say that a leap of faith is involved as long as it is understood that the leap is a calculated one made after the exercise of due doxastic vigilance. The decision is free but not arbitrary, in that it is guided by, but not determined by,  reasons.

Of course I am not saying that the truth is a matter of free decision; I am saying that what one accepts as the truth, what one believes to be the truth, is a matter of free decision in a matter like the one before us.

But it all depends on whether I can make good on my claim that that are no rationally compelling arguments either for or against the existence of God. 

I will conclude today's installment by nuancing something I said earlier.  I now distinguish two sub-senses of the existential sense of 'absurd':  (a) the absurd as that which exists, exists contingently, but has no cause, ground, reason, or purpose for its existence; (b) the absurd as that which is absurd in the (a)-sense, but also necessarily refers back to a demand, desire, or expectation on our part that it fails to satisfy. In the (b)-sense, the world, human life, whatever is judged to be absurd, ought,  or is supposed to, or is expected to meet our demands for meaning and intelligibility but doesn't. 

This is the sense of 'absurd' operative in Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. For Camus, absurdity is rooted in the perceived discrepancy between demand and satisfaction, a demand that we ineluctably make and that the world appears unable to satisfy.  There is a disconnect between the deep desire of the heart that 'it all make sense in the end' and the despairing belief that it does not make sense, that it is absurd in the (a)-sense. What constitutes the absurd sensibility so skillfully depicted in Camus' essay is not merely that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact, and is therefore existentially absurd in the (a)-subsense, but that the universe so exists  and in so existing fails to satisfy an ineluctable exigency or demand that the best of us make, namely, the demand that it have a purpose, a final cause in Aristotelean jargon, and our lives in it.

I am distinguishing between the absurd sensibility, which is a feeling, mood, attitude that Camus had and some of us have, or rather a disposition occurrently to possess such a feeling, mood, attitude, on the one hand, and the property of being absurd in the (a)-subsense, on the other, a non-relational property such that, if the universe has it, it has it whether or not there are any beings like us who make demands or harbor expectations of intelligibility.

Scruton on Foucault

Although linkage does not entail endorsement, I do endorse the following from Powerline:

Roger Scruton’s charming and invaluable memoir, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, includes a chapter explaining how he first started turning in a conservative direction (he wasn’t raised one—his father was a devoted semi-socialist Labourite), when he witnessed first-hand the student revolt in Paris in May 1968. He was repelled by the spectacle, and concluded that ‘whatever these people are for, I’m against.’

But what were the student protestors for? He recounts arguing with a radical acquaintance on the scene over the question:

What, I asked, do you propose to put in place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom your owe your freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? . . .

She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things], the bible of the soixante-huitards [“sixty-eighters,” as the May protestors are still known], the text that seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the epistime, imposed by the class that profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. [Emphasis added.]

Albert Camus: He's a Rebel!

You'll enjoy it. If you don't,  you are not MavPhil material.

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, tr. A. Bower, Vintage 1991, p. 15, French original published by Gallimard in 1951:

Better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees.

Good advice if one can take it without false heroism and existentialist hyperventilation.

The Afterlife of Habit upon the Death of Desire

A Substack short.

He of the Scowl of Minerva lends a hand.

Care of Soul, Care of Body

A Sunday Substack sermon.

A Minor Correction Anent 'Absurd' with a Little Help from Mark Rothko

In a Substack entry I distinguished four senses of 'absurd,' the logico-mathematical, the semantic, the existential, and the ordinary. About the existential sense I had this to say:

3) Existential.  The absurd as the existentially meaningless, the groundless, the brute-factual, the intrinsically unintelligible.  The absurdity of existence in this sense of 'absurd' is what elicited Jean-Paul Sartre's and his character Roquentin's  nausea.  The sheer, meaningless, disgusting, facticity of the chestnut tree referenced in the eponymous novel, for example, was described by Sartre as de trop and as an unintelligible excrescence.

That's pretty good, but it leaves out an important nuance.  In "A Case in Reason for God's Existence?" Joseph Donceel, S. J. points out that it is not enough for a thing to count as absurd in what I am calling the existential sense that it be meaningless or unintelligible.  For the absurd is not simply that which makes no sense; it is that  which makes no sense, but ought to, or is supposed to.  To say that life is absurd is not merely to say that it has no point or purpose; it is to say that it fails to meet a deep and universal demand or expectation on our part that it have a point or purpose. Donceel:

No one calls decorative painting absurd, but many people feel that most modern painting is absurd, because they expect it to make sense for them, and it does not. We understand what is meant when people say of reality or of life that it does not make sense. But their claim that it is absurd implies that it should make sense, that they expect it to make sense. (God Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Roth, Fordham UP, 1973, p. 181.) 

The decadent 'art' of Mark Rothko et al., which is presumably intended to be art and not mere wall decoration or ornamentation meant to add a splash of color to an otherwise drab room, reflects the absurdist sensibility of the post-modern era. Healthy folk -- as opposed to neurotic 'transgressive' NYC hipsters -- find it absurd because it defeats their expectation that art should 'mean something' not just in the sense of representing something, but in the sense of representing something that inspires and uplifts and is beautiful in the Platonic sense that brackets (encompasses) the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is kitsch, the king of which is Thomas Kinkade. Bang on the hyperlink to see samples of his work. I am not for kitsch, but I will take it over the decadent stuff. It is less fraying of the fabric of civilization. At the present time, the anti-civilizational forces are on the march and in dire need of stiff-necked opposition. But now I am straying into aesthetics about which I know little. But that doesn't stop me since, as you know, one of my mottoes is:

Nescio, ergo blogo.

What's with "Footnotes to Plato" from your Masthead? Are you a Platonist?

Well, all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists in a broad sense if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

So in that general sense I am a Platonist.  And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato."  Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle.  That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists.  So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato." Philosophy for me is a spiritual quest as it was for Plato, but less so for Aristotle. And our contemporaries? A sorry lot who, in the main, have lost the thread entirely. 

In Praise of the Useless

A Substack short.

Not Everyone in Academe is a 'Woke' Coward

Some are displaying a bit of civil courage:

We are faculty of the College of Science and Mathematics, and we are writing to you to express our extensive concerns about the first public draft of the Mission Statement and Vision Statement that was recently presented to the faculty. . .

We believe this document is deeply flawed in content, direction, and representation. Moreover, we believe that the absence of significant changes to this draft would bring serious damage to the College of Science and Mathematics, to the reputation of UMass Boston as a beacon of knowledge and education, and to the demographically and ideologically diverse group of students we serve – particularly those who see education as a means to rise socio-economically. . .

Under no circumstances can political or ideological activism be the primary purpose of a public university. . . It is important to emphasize that the fundamental role of the public university can neither be political nor ideological activism. In part, this is due to the illegality of compelled speech in public institutions and our legally binding commitment to academic freedom as outlined in the so-called “red book” on academic personnel policy. Additionally, ideological activism cannot be a central goal of the university because at times it will conflict with education and research. The search for truth can never be subjugated to social or ideological beliefs. [Emphasis in original.]

The above is quoted from Powerline, here.  There you will also find the Mission and Vision statements of the 'woke' academented.

It is fitting in a perverse sort of way that academentia should be rampant in a nation the President of which suffers from dementia. And you who voted for Joey B, what exactly were you thinking?