Maverick Philosopher

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.

Reason's Ultimate Purpose

Karlfried Graf Durckheim, Absolute Living, p 127: ". . . reason's ultimate purpose is to clear the way for something that transcends it . . . ."

Credo

It is my belief that there is no better and more noble way to spend the best hours of one's brief time here below than by living the Great Questions, reverentially but critically.  And that includes the question of the possibility and actuality of divine revelation and all the rest of the theological and philosophical conundra, including Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Ascension, Assumption, and so on, until death lifts the curtain and brings us light.

And if there is no lifting, and no light? Well then, we have spent our lives in an excellent way and have lost nothing of value.  A riddle dissolved, like a riddle solved, is a riddle no more.

CREDO: Agency and Spectatorship

Whether or not God and the soul are real, and whether or not this life has any final meaning, we are free to live as if they are and as if it does.  And this is how we ought to live. We can go around and around on the Big Questions, and to do so is a way of honoring the seriousness of life and of living at the highest pitch possible; but we will achieve no satisfactory result on the theoretical plane. Reason is weak and its conclusions are inconclusive.  God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. The same goes for the objectivity of morality and every other question on the far side of the quotidian, including the question of the freedom of the will.

The freedom of the will is proven, in the only way it can be proven, by an act of will, by descending from the theoretical to the practical plane. And then the theoretical question becomes moot: to act is to demonstrate practically the freedom to act. To act is to act freely.  The freedom of the will in the pregnant sense as liberum arbitrium indifferentiae is a presupposition of action. So act, and verify, in the sense of make true, the presupposition.

By acts of will we de-cide what to believe and what to do. By de-ciding, we cut off reflection which, left to itself, is interminable. After due consideration, I WILL accept this and I WILL reject that; I WILL live according to my best lights, dim and flickering as they may be, for as long as I can and as best  I can, all the while continuing the search for truth on the theoretical plane.  I WILL NOT allow doubts to undermine decisions arrived at in moments of of high existential clarity.

"But can't one still ask whether the will is really free?" You can, but then you are abandoning the point of view of the agent for the point of view of the  spectator. Mirabile dictu: we are both actors and spectators. We both march in, and observe, life's parade.  How is that possible? How integrate our subjective freedom and our objective determination? A nut that cannot be cracked at the level of theory can only solved at the level of praxis.

RELATED:

Could it be Reasonable to Affirm the Infirmity of Reason?

On Suicide

My knowledge of my ignorance regarding the ultimate disposition of things keeps me from viewing suicide as a live option should the going get tough. I lack the complacent assurance of those atheists and mortalists who are quite sure that there is no afterlife. I also lack the complacent assurance of those theists and immortalists who feel sure that God will forgive them.  And it seems to me that I have good grounds for both lacks of assurance.

"You may be fooling yourself. It may be that what keeps you from viewing suicide as a live option is your having been brought up to believe that it is a mortal sin. The priests and nuns got hold of your credulousness before you could erect your critical defenses."

To which my reply will be that others, brought up in the same way, went on to commit suicide and to commit without qualm other sins that they were taught were mortal. They were brought up the same way and taught the same things at a time when the Catholic Church was taken seriously as a source of theological and moral authority.  Those others were not receptive to the religious teaching. They received it, but they were not receptive to it, and so they did not really receive it.  A doctrine can be taught but not the receptivity thereto. Seeds can be sown, but if the soil is inhospitable, nothing will grow.

My innate receptivity to the message that something is ultimately at stake in life and that it matters absolutely how we live does not prove that the message is true. But the innateness of the receptivity to the message shows that it was not a matter of indoctrination but a matter of maieutic.

Apologia Pro Vita Mea: A Reply to a Friendly Critic

Vito Caiati responds to yesterday's Could it be like this?

In yesterday's post, you write, “So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.”

The "always a little out of breath" bit gives my statement of a personal credo a perhaps excessively romantic and needlessly literary accent.  But the questing life is the highest life for me, and not just for me. That I sincerely believe. I will add, however, that integral to an examined life is a critical examination of whether the highest life is indeed the examined life. So I am aware of the danger of erecting a dogmatic edifice of my own.

While I appreciate the intellectual and spiritual sentiment that underlies this assertion, I am troubled by two things: First, the fact, which you have acknowledged in the past, that only a minute portion of humanity possesses either the “aptitude” or “stamina” to engage in [the search for] “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.”  That this is the case is beyond dispute, but why should it be so?  

It is indeed beyond dispute and is further evidence that the human condition is a predicament, and a nasty one, a predicament to which there may be no good solution.

I find the question very troubling. Historical demographers estimate that between 80 and 100 billion human beings have lived and died since the origin of our species.  The figure is staggering, but as staggering is the fact that all have met their ends in complete ignorance of ultimate truth. 

But we don't know that, Vito. It is after all possible that when Thomas Aquinas had the mystical experience that put an end to his writing, he veridically experienced the ultimate truth and enjoyed an earthly foretaste of the Beatific Vision.  And if the angelic doctor's amanuensis, Reginald, never had any such experience but believed what the master taught, and if what he taught was true, then Reginald too was in contact with the ultimate truth, not in propria persona, but "through a glass darkly," that glass being faith. And the same holds for all the millions of Christians, not to mention adherents of other religions, throughout the ages who have believed without verifying glimpses into the Unseen and also without being able to give good reasons for their belief.  It may have been that all these folks were in contact with ultimate truth even if they can't be said to have known such truth in a manner to satisfy exacting modern requirements on knowledge.

Disease, hunger, violence, physical or mental infirmity, and indigence have precluded even the notion of such a search for most.  The lack of a philosophical or religious inclination has precluded it for almost all of the rest. Thus, a gross and general ignorance of final matters has been and remains the lot of mankind.  Something is profoundly wrong here, and the conviction that a few might have the means and inclination to diverge from the norm is, at best disquieting, and at word [worst?], questionable.

So even if an ultimate, saving truth could be discovered by a proper search, circumstances and personal inadequacy have prevented and will prevent the vast majority from ever finding it on their own.  Something is indeed "profoundly wrong here."  But of course this is just one more goad to the seeker's seeking. 

Second, the search, whether it has taken a religious or philosophic form, has endured for thousands of years and produced no definite or even probable answers, so why continue to engage in it? The assumption appears to be that if pursued with the right attitude, sufficient dedication, and intellectual honesty, it will yield something of this “ultimate truth.” But is it not the case that all the evidence weighs against this belief?

The problem is not that no definite answers have been produced, but that there are too many of them, they contradict one another on key points, and that this is good reason to be skeptical of any particular answer.  To add to the trouble, what I just said will be denied by many intelligent and sincere philosophers.  They will insist that their worldview is either true or more likely to be true than any other, and that the plethora of mutually incompatible worldviews is no decent argument to the contrary. But this too is just part of the predicament we are in, a predicament that the spiritually sensitive find intolerable and seek a way out of.

I am not saying that one is not entitled to devote oneself to this search, but I do not understand the conviction that it a worthwhile pursuit. All sorts of scientific questions remain unresolved, some for hundreds of years, but in approaching them, we are encouraged by the signs of small progress that have been made.  We have no such intellectual incentives in the matters of which you speak. Now, I understand that we have not been able to reach any sort of agreement on a host of other matters, from politics to morals, but in such cases, we at least understand the rough givens with which we are dealing. Of “the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters,” we lack such an understanding. This is hardly encouraging.

This is the nub of the matter. I said in effect that the best life for a human being is a life whose dominant purpose is the search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. (By the way, this search does not exclude politics and morality which rest on controversial philosophical assumptions.) And of course I mean a truth that one existentially appropriates (makes one's own) and lives. There are several ways of objecting to my thesis. Some will claim to have the truth already, and see no point is seeking what one possesses.  There are the dogmatic atheists for whom God and the soul are no longer issues. There are the dogmatic theists who have an answer for everything.  There are the dogmatic agnostics who are quite convinced that nothing can be known or even reasonably believed about ultimates (God, the soul, the meaning of human existence) and who think bothering one's head over these questions is simply foolish and might even drive one crazy such that the best way to live is to focus on the easily accessible foreground objects in the Cave and to make friends with finitude, accepting whatever mundane satisfactions come along until death puts an end to it all.

Vito may be flirting with the agnostic camp. He wonders how what we may as well call The Quest could be "a worthwhile pursuit." One of his arguments is that very few are in a position to pursue the Quest. The other is that the Quest, although pursued by the best and the brightest since time immemorial, has arrived at no solid result acceptable to all thinking people.

To the first point, I would say that the value of the Quest does not depend on how many are in a position to pursue it.  To the second point, I would say that no serious quester give up the Quest for the reason Vito cites.  The Quest is his vocation; he is called to it even if he cannot explain who or what is calling him. He finds deep satisfaction in the searching and the momentary glimpses of insight, and his satisfaction is reinforced by his conviction that the paltry objects pursued by the many are relatively worthless. He sees the vanity, the emptiness, of the world that most find most solidly real. Name and fame, property and pelf, are to him bagatelles.  The Quest is his spiritual practice and it is satisfying to the quester even when there is no tangible outcome. He likes to pray, meditate, study, reason, think, write.  This is all underpinned by a faith that there will be a favorable outcome, if not here, then Elsewhere.

Could it be like this?

I find the following scenario exceedingly strange. We die and become nothing and no question gets answered. Could it be like this? It is epistemically possible, possible for all we know. All we know is damned little. But then what would have been the point of the evolution of animals that pose unanswerable questions? No point! Human life would then be like a joke, but a joke without a teller.

We can't know that the above scenario is true, and we can't know that it is false. So in the end you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. There is no theoretical resolution of the problem; the resolution must be personal, pragmatic, and existential. So I say: if you have the aptitude and the stamina, you live best by seeking the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters with your whole heart and mind and soul, with everything else you do subordinate to that quest and in service of it, and you keep up that quest until the hour of death, always a little out of breath, with no comfortable lounging in any dogmatic edifice, whether atheist, theist, or agnostic.

You meet death with faith, hope, and love. Faith that in some way we cannot now understand we will continue to exist as persons; hope that this is the case and that our present predicament will open out onto something marvellous and finally satisfactory; love for everybody and everything that brought us to this point. You don't want death to find you cursing and snarling, doubting and despairing, let alone sunk in evil-doing.

But to meet death in that salutary way, you must live now as if the above is true. So you can't live like Anthony Bourdain who lived for food and the pleasures of the flesh ("The body is not a temple but an amusement park.") He hanged himself last year as if to say: there is no life beyond this brief material life and its paltry pleasures; so when they run out, you ought to as well. Was he quite sure that there is nothing beyond this mortal predicament? Is that not an astonishing form of dogmatism, the equal of the dogmatism of those who claim to have precise information about the afterlife, its rewards and punishments, and who gets which?

Related:

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Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone

Ten Political-Economic Theses

Here are ten theses to which I subscribe in the critical way of the philosopher, not the dogmatic way of the ideologue.

1.  There is nothing wrong with money.  It is absolutely not the root of all evil.  The most we can say is that the inordinate desire for money is at the root of some evils.  I develop this theme in Radix Omnium Malorum.

 

2. There is nothing wrong with making money or having money.  There is for example nothing wrong with making a profit from buying, refurbishing, paying propery taxes on, and then selling a house.

 

3. There is nothing wrong with material (socio-economic) inequality as such.  For example, there is nothing wrong with Bill Gates' having a vastly higher net worth than your humble correspondent.  And there is nothing wrong with the latter's having a considerably higher net worth than some of his acquaintances. (When they were out pursuing wine, women, and song, he was engaging in virtuous, forward-looking activities thereby benefiting not only himself but also people who come in contact with him.)   Of course, when I say that there is nothing wrong with material inequality as such, I am assuming that the inequalities have not come about through force or fraud. 

 

4. Equality of outcome or result is not to be confused with equality of opportunity or formal equality in general, including equality under the law.  It is an egregious fallacy of liberals and leftists to infer a denial of equality of opportunity -- via  'racism' or 'sexism' or whatever -- from the premise that a certain group has failed to achieve equality of outcome.  There will never be equality of outcome due to the deep differences between individuals and groups.  We must do what we can to ensure equality of opportunity and then let the chips fall where they may. This is consistent with support for government-run programs to help the truly needy who are in dire straits through no fault of their own.

 

5. We the people do not need to justify our keeping of what is ours; the State has to justify its taking.  We are citizens of a republic, not subjects of a king or dictator or of the apparatchiks who have managed to get their hands on the levers of State power.

 

6. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.   Socialism and communism spell the death of individual liberty.  The more socialism, the less liberty.  "The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." (D. Prager)

 

7.  The individual is the locus of value, not any collectivity, whether family, tribe, race, nation, or State.  We do not exist for the State; the State exists for us as individuals.

 

8.  Property rights, contra certain libertarians, are not absolute: there are conditions under which an 'eminent domain' State seizure (with appropriate compensation) of property can be justified.  This proposition tempers the individualism of the preceding one.

 

9.  Governments can and do imprison and murder.  No corporation does.  Liberals and leftists and 'progressives' have a naive faith in the benevolence of government, a faith that is belied by that facts of history: Communist governments in the 20th century murdered over 100 million people. (Source: Black Book of Communism.)  Libs and lefties and progs are well-advised to adopt a more balanced view, tranfering some of their skepticism about corporations -- which is in part justified -- to Big Government, especially the omni-intrusive and omni-competent (omni-incompetent?)sort of governments they champion.

 

10.  Our social and political troubles are rooted in our moral malaise, in particular, in inordinate and disordered  desire.  It is a pernicious illusion of the Left to suppose that our troubles have an economic origin solely and can be alleviated by socialist schemes of redistribution of wealth.

I Renew My Vow

My traffic has been insanely high over the past week or so.  Can I now make money by selling advertising?  But I stand by my pledge, and if I ever violate it you may shoot me.

My pledge: You will never see advertising on this site.  You will never see anything that jumps around in your visual field. You will not be assaulted with unwanted sounds.  I will not load crap into your computer. I will not beg for money with a 'tip jar.'  This is a labor of love and I prize my independence.

The rest of the pledge.

What I Believe About Free Will

My position, bluntly stated, is that we are libertarianly free (L-free).  One is L-free just in case (i) one is the agent cause or unsourced source of some of one's actions, and (ii) with respect to an action of which one is the agent cause, one unconditionally could have done otherwise.  As far as I'm concerned, the following argument is practically decisive. By 'practically decisive' I mean decisive with respect to one's actual practice in living one's life. An argument can be practically decisive for a person without being, in general, rationally compelling.

 

1. We are morally responsible for at least some of our actions and omissions.
2. Moral responsibility entails libertarian freedom of the will.
Therefore
3. We are libertarianly free.

 

That clinches it for me. But is this a compelling argument?  By no means.  No argument for any substantive philosophical thesis is compelling. One could, with no breach of logical propriety, deny the conclusion and then deny one or both of the premises.  As we say in the trade, "One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens."  Any valid argument can be thrown into 'inferential reverse,' the result being a valid argument. For example, one might plausibly, and with no breach of logical propriety, deny (3) on the ground that L-freedom is an incoherent notion; accept that we are sometimes morally responsible, and conclude that moral responsibility does not entail libertarian freedom of the will.  This second argument, which a compatibilist could give, is of course also uncompelling.

 

While the original argument is not compelling, it is practically decisive for me.  I  accept both premises. That I am morally (as opposed to causally, and as opposed to legally) responsible for at least some of what I do and leave undone I take to be more evident than its negation. I can't shake the idea.

 

And, like Kant, I see compatibilism as a shabby evasion, "the freedom of the turnspit."  I apperceive myself as the unsourced source, the agent cause, of some of my actions and omissions and indeed in such a way that I could have done otherwise.  

 

Some will say that libertarian free will and the deep moral responsibility that entails it are illusions.  I find this view incoherent for reasons supplied in Could Free Will be an Illusion?

 

A reader poses the question, "How do you reconcile one's given character and moral responsibility?"  I have no really good answer to this, but I would say that no one's character is entirely given: it is in part made by the agent. One's life is a project and a task. The materials we must work with are not our doing, but what we do with them is our free doing.  Suppose you find you have an irascible temperament. That is not your doing. But you are free to either give rein to your irascibility or rein it in.  Suppose you excuse your expressions of irascibility by insisting "Hey, that's just the way I am."  That too is a free act, a free display of what Sartre calls "bad faith."

 

Having mentioned Sartre, I believe he says somewhere something to the effect that freedom is what we do with what has been done to us.

 

And now it occurs to me that the Sartre reference serendipitously jibes with the existentialist beatnik graphic above.

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Sunday Morning Sermon: Life Well Lived

To make good use of your time in this world, think of your life above all as a quest, a seeking, a searching, a striving.  For what?  For the ultimate in reality, truth, value, and for their existential appropriation.  

One appropriates reality by being authentic, truth by being truthful, values and norms by living them.  

It may all be absurd in the end, a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  But one cannot live well on the assumption that it is.

So assume that it is not and explore the question along all avenues of advance.

Twelfth Anniversary Pledge

This weblog commenced operations on 4 May 2004.  I thank you for reading.

My pledge: You will never see advertising on this site.  You will never see anything that jumps around in your visual field.  You will not be assaulted with unwanted sounds.  I will not beg for money with a 'tip jar.'  This is a labor of love and I prize my independence.

I also pledge to continue the fight, day by day, month by month, year by year, against the hate-America, race-baiting, religion-bashing, liberty-destroying, Constitution-trashing, gun-grabbing, lying fascists of the Left.  As long as health and eyesight hold out.

I will not pander to anyone, least of all the politically correct.

And I won't back down.  Are you with me?  Then show a little civil courage.

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Life Without Views

Could one live well without views, 'long' views?  I address the question in Long Views and Short Views: Is Shorter Better?

The Big Unplug Starts Today

Starting now, I will unplug from this hyperkinetic modern world for a period of days or weeks.  How long remains to be seen.  I will devote myself to such spiritual exercises as prayer, meditation, spiritual reading, hard-core philosophy and theology pursued for truth as opposed to professional gain, and the exploration of nature.

I will avoid unnecessary conversations and their near occasion, socializing, newspapers, telephony, radio, television, blogging, facebooking, tweeting, and all non-essential Internet-related activities. In a word: all of the ephemera that most people take to be the ne plus ultra of reality and importance. (As for Twitter, I am and hope to remain a virgin: I have never had truck with this weapon of mass distraction.)

Why? Some reasons in Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration.

But I am no benighted neo-Luddite.  The air conditioning will stay on in my abode in the shadows of the Superstitions.

I ask my valued correspondents to refrain from sending me any links to events of the day or commentary thereon.  I am going on a 'news fast' which is even more salutary for the soul than a food fast is for the body.

From time to time we should devote time to be still and listen beyond the human horizon.  Modern man, crazed little hustler and  self-absorbed chatterbox that he is, needs to enter his depths and listen.

"Be still, and know that I am God."  (Psalm 46:10)

A Partial Philosophical Defense of the Monastic Life

The suggestion was made that I give a little talk to the monks of Christ in the Desert, a Benedictine monastery outside of Abiqui, New Mexico.  I thought I would offer a few words in defense of the monastic life, not that such an ancient and venerable tradition needs any defense from me, but just to clarify my own thoughts and perhaps help others clarify theirs either by way of agreement or disagreement with mine. I will attempt three things.  I will first list some convictions I hold to be of the essence of religion.  Then I will suggest that the monastic path is an excellent way to implement these convictions.  Finally I will ask myself why I am not a monk.

The Essence of Religion

There is much more to a religion than its beliefs and doctrines; there are also its practices.  The practices, however, are informed and guided by certain central convictions whose importance cannot be denied. Religion is not practice alone. Now it is not easy to define religion, and it may be impossible. (Religion may be a family-resemblance concept in Wittgenstein's sense.)  In any case I will not attempt to define religion by specifying necessary and sufficient conditions of the concept's application.  But as I see it,  most of the following are essential (necessary) to anything that deserves to be called a religion, and all of them are essential to Christianity.  What I offer is a characterization, not a definition.

1. In first place, and not just in the order of exposition, is the belief that there is what William James calls an "unseen order." (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 53)  This is a realm of absolute reality that lies beyond the perception of the five outer senses and their instrumental extensions.  It is also inaccessible to inner sense or introspection.  It is also not a realm of mere abstracta or thought-contents.  So it lies beyond the discursive intellect, as it does beyond the senses. One can reason about it, and reason to it, but one cannot access it directly via the discursive intellect.  It is accessible from our side via mystical and religious experience.  An initiative from its side is not to be ruled out in the form of revelation.

Compare the first item in Simone Weil's Profession of Faith: "There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties."

2. The  belief that there is a supreme good for humans and that "our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves" to the "unseen order." (Varieties, p. 53)  The Unseen Order is thus not merely a realm of absolute reality, but also one of absolute value and an object of our highest and purest desire. 

Compare the second item in Weil's profession: "Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."

3. The conviction that we are morally deficient, and that this deficiency impedes our adjustment to the Unseen Order.  Man is in some some sense fallen from the moral height at which he would have ready access to the Order which alone is the source of his ultimate happiness and final good.  His moral corruption, however it came about, has noetic consequences. That is, our ability to know the saving truth has been impaired by our moral deficiency.

4. The conviction that our moral deficiency cannot be made sufficiently good by our own efforts to afford us ready, or perhaps any, access to the Unseen Order. Proximately, we need the help of others; ultimately, we need help from the Unseen Order.

5.  The conviction that adjustment to the Unseen Order requires moral purification/transformation.

6. The conviction that help from the side of the Unseen Order is available to bring about this purification and adjustment.

7. The conviction that the sensible order, while not unreal, is not plenary in point of reality or value, that it is ontologically and axiologically derivative, and as derivative defective.  It is a manifestation or emanation or creation of the Unseen Order.

Each of these seven convictions is an element in my personal credo.  Can I prove them?  Of course not.  But then nothing of a substantive nature in philosophy, theology, or any controversial field, can be proven.  But each of the above convictions is rationally defensible.  So while not provable, they are not matters of mere faith either.  They can be argued for, their negations are rationally rejectable, and there are experiences that vouch for them. (See Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It.)

The Monastic Path

I will now suggest that the monastic life is perhaps the best way to realize existentially the above convictions, but also to have the sorts of experiences that tend to provide evidence for the convictions.  One lives the convictions, and by living them is granted experiences and intimations that validate the convictions.

Let us suppose that you accept all or most of the above seven propositions, in their spirit if not in their letter, and that you also share with me the meta-conviction that these first-order convictions  are to be lived (existentially realized, realized in one's Existenz) and not merely thought about or talked about or argued over. 

Then it makes sense to go into the desert.  The negative reason is to escape the manifold distractions of the world which keep one scattered and enslaved to the ephemeral, while the positive reason is to live a life focused on the the absolute and unchanging Source of all reality and value.  The entrance into the monastery signals that one is truly convinced of the reality of the unseen (#1), it supreme value for us and our happiness (#2) and the relative unreality and insignificance of this world of time and change and vain ambition (#7).

To live such a focused existence, however, requires discipline. We have a fallen nature in at least two senses.  First, we are as if fallen from a higher state.  Second, we are ever falling against the objects of our world and losing ourselves in them, becoming absorbed in them.  (Compare Heidegger's Verfallenheit, fallingness.)  Here we find the ontological root of such sins of the flesh as avarice, gluttony, and lust.  Given our fallen and falling nature, a monastic institution can provide the moral discipline and guidance that might be difficult if not impossible to secure on the outside, especially in a secularized and sex-saturated society such as ours has become.  The weight of concupiscence is heavy and it drags us down.  We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so we are largely unable to control our drives to the extent necessary to develop spiritual sight.  The thrust of desire confers final reality upon the sensuous while occluding one's spiritual sight.  Sensuous desire, especially inordinate sensuous desire, realizes the things of the senses while de-realizing the things of the spirit.

Here, as I see it, is the main reason for sexual continence.  We are not continent because we are undersexed, or prudes, or anti-natalists, or despisers of matter.  (Certainly no Christian could despise the material world, and a Christian such as Kierkegaard who at the end of his life waxed anti-natalist veered off into a personal idiosyncrasy.)  The continence of the loins subserves the continence of the mind and heart which in turn are probably necessary, though certainly not sufficient, for a Glimpse of spiritual realities.  (I say 'probably necessary' because divine grace may grant sight to the committed worldling nolens volens.)

And then there is the great problem of suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not.  In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.  Here is another reason why a community of the like-minded may be necessary for most spiritual seekers.  They provide reinforcement and the requisite counter-suggestions.  (It is worth noting that if cults can 'brainwash' their members, whole societies can go off the rails and brainwash their members.)

Why Am I not a Monk?

"If you think so highly of the monastic life, what are you doing on the outside?" 

A fair question deserving a straight answer. I didn't come to religion; I was brought up Roman Catholic by a pious Italian mother and pre-Vatican II nuns and priests.  But I had a religious nature, so the training 'took.'  But I also had a strong intellectual bent and was inclined philosophically from an early age.  So I couldn't avoid asking, and not just intellectually, but existentially as well: how much of this is true and how do I know?  The ferment of the 1960s only intensified my cognitive dissonance as the religious upbringing clashed on the one side with my philosophical questioning, and on the other with the secular and counter-cultural suggestions of the 'sixties.  I remember in 1965 listening intently to the words of Bob Dylan's Gates of Eden and trying to discern its compatibility, if any, with Catholic teaching.  (By the way, attending a Dylan concert in those days was like going to church: the audience remained dead quiet, hanging on every word.)

So philosophy took over the role in the pious youth's life that religion had played. That kept me away from any conventional religious vocation.  And so it kept me out of the monastery.  For one cannot join a monastery in general; it must be either Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or Buddhist or whatever, and to do that in good faith and with a clear intellectual conscience one must accept the central doctrinal content of those religions.  But that content was exactly what to my mind needed examination. Athens at that point got the upper hand over Jerusalem.  So why am I not a monk?  Because of Athens.

But now, as I approach the end of the trail, I see ever more clearly the vanity of any philosophy that does not complete itself in something beyond it.  But what? The empty discursivity of reason needs to be filled and completed by a direct spiritual seeing.  Concepts without intuitions are empty. (Kant)  So philosophy needs completion by mystical intuition, but this is rare and sporadic and fragmentary here below, mere Glimpses;  to sustain us in the between times we need faith grounded in revelation. 

Related articles

Kierkegaard: "To Hell With the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life

Christ in the Desert Monastery

Credo

Simone Weil's Profession of Faith begins  as follows. 

There is a reality outside the world, that is to say, outside space and time, outside man's mental universe, outside any sphere whatsoever that is accessible to human faculties.

Corresponding to this reality, at the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Another terrestrial manifestation of this reality lies in the absurd and insoluble contradictions which are always the terminus of human thought when it moves exclusively in this world.

Just as the reality of this world is the sole foundation of facts, so that other reality is the sole foundation of good.

That reality is the unique source of all the good that can exist in this world: that is to say, all beauty, all truth, all justice, all legitimacy, all order, and all human behaviour that is mindful of obligations.

"At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world."

Those minds whose attention and love are turned towards that reality are the sole intermediary through which good can descend from there and come among men.

Related articles

The Strange World of Simone Weil: God Does and Does Not Exist

If Everyone Goes Straight to Heaven . . .

On the Brevity of Life

Fragment of a Credo

Three Possible Death-Bed Thoughts

• I'm glad I lived, but I'm glad it's over.  "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo)  Once is enough.
• I wish I'd never been born.  Once is too much. 

This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is,  of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, section 3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is -- to die soon."

• I love this life and wish it didn't have to end. Once is not enough.

My view is the first.  Suppose a representative of Governance appears to you at life's end.  He says he has the power to grant you another go-round on the wheel of becoming:  if you accept his offer you will repeat your life with every detail the same.  Every detail! Including the detail of accepting the offer of Noch Einmal!  (Think about what that entails.) I would say, "Hell no!," not again, not even once let alone endlessly.  Up or out! Either up to a better state, or annihilation.

This life is preliminary and probationary; surely no end in itself.  And if not preliminary and probationary, then meaningless.  In this life were are in statu viae.

Related articles

Death Limits Our Immorality: Death as the Muse of Morality

Wise Man and Fool on Their Death Beds

Is Death an Evil or Not?

Oidipus Auf Kolonos - Sophokles - SGD3

Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too: More Quest Than Conclusions

The following is from an interview with A. C. Grayling who is speaking of the open mind and open inquiry:

It’s a mindset, he reveals, that “loves the open-endedness and the continuing character of the conversation that humankind has with itself about all these things that really matter.”

It’s also a way of thinking that marks a line in the sand between religion and science. The temptation to fall for the former—hook, line, and sinker—is plain to see: “People like narratives, they like to have an explanation, they like to know where they are going.” Weaving another string of thought into his tapestry of human psychology, Grayling laments that his fellow human beings “don’t want to have to think these things out for themselves. They like the nice, pre-packaged answer that’s just handed to them by somebody authoritative with a big beard.”

A. C. Grayling, like many if not most militant atheists, sees the difference between religion and science in the difference between pre-packaged dogmas thoughtlessly and uncritically accepted from some authority and open-ended free inquiry.

That is not the way I see it.  For me, mature religion is more quest than conclusions.  It too is open-ended and ongoing, subject to revision and correction. It benefits from abrasion with such competing sectors of culture as philosophy and science.  By abrasion the pearl is formed.

All genuine religion involves a quest since God must remain largely unknown, and this by his very nature. He must remain latens Deitas in Aquinas' phrase:

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, Quæ sub his figuris vere latitas;
Tibi se cor meum totum subjicit, Quia te contemplans totum deficit.

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore, Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

(tr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, here.)
 

But as religion becomes established in the world in the form of churches, sects, and denominations with worldly interests, it becomes less  of a quest and more of a worldly hustle. Dogmatics displaces inquiry, and fund-raising faith. The once alive becomes ossified.  All human institutions are corruptible, and are eventually corrupted.

Mature religion must be more quest than conclusions. It is vastly more a seeking than a finding. More a cleansing of windows and a polishing  of mirrors than a glimpsing. And certainly more a glimpsing than a comfortable resting upon dogmas. When philosophy and religion and mysticism and science are viewed as quests they complement one another. And this despite the tensions among Athens, Jerusalem, Benares, and Alexandria.

The critic of religion wants to pin it down, reducing it to dogmatic contents, so as to attack it where it is weakest. Paradoxically, the atheist 'knows' more about God than the sophisticated theist -- he knows so much that he knows no such thing could exist. He 'knows' the divine nature and knows that it is incompatible with the existence of evil -- to mention one line of attack.  What he 'knows,' of course, is only the concept he himself has fabricated and projected.  Aquinas, by contrast, held that the existence of God is far better known than God's nature -- which remains shrouded in a cloud of unknowing.

The (immature) religionist also wants religion pinned down and dogmatically spelled out for purposes of self-definition, doxastic security, other-exclusion, worldly promotion, and political leverage. This is a reason why reformers like Jesus are met with a cold shoulder -- or worse.

How is it that someone as intelligent as Grayling could have such a cartoonish understanding of religion?  The answer is that he and his brethren  utterly lack the religious sensibility.  They lack it in the same way many scientists lack the philosophical sensibility, many prosaic folk the poetic sensibility, and so on.

This is why debates with militant atheists are a waste of time.  To get a taste of the febrile militancy of Grayling's atheism, see here. 

Related articles

Hitchens: No Understanding of Religion

Trotsky's Faith

Atheist Blogger Swims the Tiber

Atheist A.C. Grayling is a meretricious thinker, but a marvelous comedian

Why bad science is like bad religion

Religious Belief and What Inclines Me to It

This from an English reader:

As you may recall, I'm a persistent reader of your blog - even when the 'topic of the day' goes right over my head.

On the minimalist version of Pascal's wager, you summarize: "So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."

I've mulled over this rational incentive to believe in God many and many a time. But belief doesn't come. If faith is a 'gift from God' or depends on the possession of a religious disposition, then for some unfathomable reason I've missed out. I guess there are many people like myself who are 'trying to believe' but don't and perhaps never will succeed. (And it's not from the want of pressure and sometimes disinterested tuition, when I was a lad, from my Jesuit teachers.)

I think the sorts of pragmatic considerations I adduced the other day  in support of the rationality of religious belief will leave unmoved someone lacking the religious disposition.  (I'll leave aside the question whether the religious disposition is a divine gift.) Without the disposition the issue cannot be a "live option"  in William James' sense.  You have to be antecedently inclined to take seriously the possibility that some form of religion is true.  This has nothing to do with intelligence or knowledge or upbringing.  Not intelligence: there are both intelligent and unintelligent theists and atheists.  Not knowledge: there is no empirical knowledge that rules out theism or rules in atheism.  Not upbringing: some are raised atheists and becomes theists, and vice versa.  What you need is a certain sort of spiritual depth that is present in, say, Ludwig Wittgenstein, but absent in, say, Daniel Dennett.  If you are 'surface all the way down' religion won't get a grip on you.

In the reader's case religious belief seems to be a live option in the way in which it is not for most atheists.  (For most atheists, and for all of the militant atheists, the truth of some religion is no more a live existential option than numerology or Marxism is for me.)  But for the reader, apparently, the disposition is not enough.  I wish I could help him.

Let me just state what, in my own case, are the additional factors, factors beyond the religious disposition, that move me to accept religious belief. 

1. The Manifold Failures of Naturalism.  There are four questions that need answering. 

The first is why there is anything (or at least anything concrete and contingent) at all.  This is an intelligible question but there is no good naturalist answer to it.   The physicist Lawrence Krauss recently made a fool of himself over this question as I demonstrated in earlier posts.  The second question is how life arose from inanimate matter.  Life has to have arisen before natural selection can go to work upon random mutations.  The third is how consciousness arose in some living organisms, and the fourth is how self-consciousness, conscience, reason and all related phenomena arose.  There are many, many questions here, but it is widely accepted that naturalism has failed to give adequate answers to them.  Naturalists give answers all right, but they are no good. For the gory details, see my Naturalism category.

Now of course nothing I said will convince any naturalist, but that's not my purpose.  My purpose is to explain how one can reasonably take religion seriously.  I could not take it seriously if naturalism were true. The refutation of naturalism therefore removes an obstacle to religious belief.  If, on the other hand, you are convinced that naturalism is true, then you cannot, consistently with that conviction, accept theism -- whether or not you have a religious disposition.

It is also important to realize that if naturalism as we currently know it is false, it doesn't follow that some form of theism is true.  It doesn't even follow that no form of naturalism is true.  It could be that there is a version of naturalism, over the horizon, which will adequately answer the questions I mentioned.  If I have understood the thrust of Thomas Nagel's latest book, Mind and Cosmos (Oxford 2012), that is what he is aiming at.  He is trying to find a way between naturalism in its current onfiguration and theism.  He wants to be able to see mind as somehow essential to the fabric of nature and not, as it must appear on evolutionary naturalism, as an accidental byproduct of purely physical processes. 

It is also worth noting that not all of the critics of contemporary evolutionary naturalism are theists.  If they were, then one might suspect that their criticisms were ideologically motivated.  Not so.  Nagel is both an atheist and an opponent of contemporary naturalism.  Given that Nagel's 'middle path' is merely a gesture in the direction of a possible distination, as opposed to a concrete alternative, I think it is resonable to accept theism given the hopelessness of naturalism.

2. Mystical, Religious, and Paranormal Experiences and Intuitions

Suppose that someone (i) has the religious disposition and (ii) agrees that theism is superior to naturalism.  That still might not do it.  Abstract reasoning, even to intellectual types who flourish in its element, is no substitute for experiences.  In fact, I doubt that anyone could really take religion seriously (in a way that would make a concrete difference in how one lives one's life) who lacked the sensus divinitatis, or the feeling that the deliverances of conscience emanate from a sphere beyond the human, or who never had a mystical glimpse or a religious experience, or who never lived through anything paranormal such as an out-of-body experience or an experience of pre-cognition.

This is not the place to try to explain the differences among mystical, religious, and paranormal experience and other senses, intuitions, intimations, visitations and vouchsafings  that religious types speak of.  But let me give a couple of examples of religious experiences, which I distinguish on the one hand from mystical experiences and on the other from paranormal experiences. 

One day many years ago I was pacing around  in an extremely agitated frame of mind over a matter that I won't go into.  But suffice it to say that my mind and heart were filled with extremely negative thoughts and desires.  Suddenly, without any forethought, I raised my arms to the ceiling and exclaimed, "Release me from this!"  In an instant I was as calm as a Stoic sage, as quiescent as a Quietist.  The roiling burden was lifted.  I was at peace.  I want to stress that that I had had no intention to pray.  The whole episode transpired spontaneously.  Now what happened?  Phenomenologically, my unintended, spontaneous prayer was answered.  Does that unforgettable experience prove that a Higher Power hears and grants some of our heart-felt requests?  No, for the simple reason that no (outer) experience proves anything.  My current visual experiences of this computer do not prove its existence.  But the religious experience is evidence of something Transcendent and if you have had such experiences you may be inclined to think that they carry a lot more weight than abstract reasoning from questionable premises.

On another occasion, while deep in meditation, I had an experience of -- or an experience  as of, to put the point with pedantic epistemological caution -- being the object of Someone's love.  "I am being loved by some unknown person" was my thought during the experience. That's what it felt like. I was alone sitting in the dark on the black mat.     It was an unmistakeable experience, but still only an experience.  A brain fart you say?  A random neuronal swerve?  Could be, but then our ordinary mundane experience could be a brain fart too -- only more coherent and protracted.

There are those who simply dismiss experiences like these.  That is a strange attitude, at once unempirical and dogmatically rationalistic.  See Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored.

It's a bit of evidence that I add to the other bits of experiential evidence such as a deep sense of the superficiality of ordinary human relations, and of the relative unreality and unimportance of the impermanent world.  Without experiences like these Plato, Augustine, Pascal, and Simone Weil could not have written what they wrote.

3. The Arguments for Theism

And then there are the dozens of arguments for theism which, taken together, make a strong cumulative case for theism's truth especially in tandem with the refutation of the atheistic arguments.

4. Conclusion

Now add it all together: the manifold inadequacies and outright absurdities of the naturalist/materialist/reductionist Weltanschauung, the wide variety of mystical glimpses, religious vouchsafings, paranormal experiences, the deliverances of conscience, the testimony of beauty and order and purposivesness, and the rest of the intuitions, intimations and senses, the refutations of atheism and the arguments for theism -- add this all together, take it as a big cumulative case, and its just might take someone who has the religious disposition over the line into a living belief.

And THEN, and only then, comes the capstone that clinches it for someone like me:  "So how can I lose? Even if they are illusions, believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits."   

Is Death an Evil or Not?

I go back and forth on this question.  I should be ashamed of myself.  Forty years a philosopher and no fixed view on such a fundamental question?  What am I (not) being paid to do?  To gain some clarity, I will sketch some possible views.  I will also sketch the  view to which  I incline (despite my vacillation).

But first I define 'mortalist.'  A mortalist is someone who holds that we human beings are mortal, i.e., subject to the natural necessity of dying, both in body and in mind.  Accordingly, all human beings will eventually die, and when they do they will utterly cease to exist as individuals, even if they persist for a while after death as corpses or as smoke and ashes.  (By the way, I consider transhumanist dreams of immortality here below to be the worst sort of self-deluding, ultra-hubristic sci-fi nonsense.  Pox and anathema be upon this house of cards.)  For the mortalist, then, as I define the term, there is no natural immortality, as in Platonism, nor any supernatural immortality via divine agency as in Christianity. 

A. Views According to which Death is not an Evil

1. The first view, that of the pessimistic mortalist, we can label 'Silenian.'  On this view, death is not an evil because it removes us from a condition which on balance is not good, a condition which on balance is worse than nonexistence.  This is the wisdom, if wisdom it is,  of Silenus, reported by Sophocles (Oedipus at Colonus, ll. 1244 ff.) and quoted by Nietzsche in The Birth ofTragedy, section
3:

There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him.  When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man.  Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words:  "O wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.  But the second best for you is -- to die soon."

Better never to have been born, but here we are.  So second best is to die as soon as possible.  Death is not an evil, but a good, since it releases us from an evil condition, that of being alive.

2. The second view is that of Epicurus. On the Epicurean view, death is not an evil for the one who dies because when death is, one is not, and when one is, death is not.  My being dead is not an evil state of affairs for me (though it may be for others) because there is no such state of affairs (STOA) as my being dead. There is no such STOA because when I am dead there is no bearer of the property of being dead.  And there being no such STOA entails that it it cannot be an evil STOA, or a good one for that matter.

I must point out that some find this reasoning sophistical.  Well, if it is, is is not obviously sophistical.  Some of the complexities of the reasoning are explored in a number of posts collected in the Death and Immortality and Epicureanism categories.  I can't go into this now since this post is mainly just taxonomic.

The Epicurean line is consistent with life affirmation. The Epicurean is not saying that being dead is good and being alive evil; he is saying that being dead is not evil.  It is not evil because it is axiologically neutral.  The Epicurean is therefore also committed to saying that being dead is not a good.

The Silenian pessimist renders a negative value verdict on life as a whole:  it's no good; better never to have been born, with  second best being to die young.  By contrast, the Epicurean's point is that the ontology of the situation makes it impossible for death to be an evil for the one who has died. 

3.  Platonism.  For the Silenian, death  is not evil because it releases one from life, which is evil.  For the Epicurean death is not  evil because the decedent is nonexistent, hence removed from all goods and evils.  One cannot experience loss, or suffer in any way, if one does not exist.  On the Platonic view death is also not an evil but for a different reason: death is release of the naturally immortal soul (the person in his essence) from embodiment.  From a sub-standard 'cave-like' existence, the soul is freed to enjoy a true existence.  On Platonism, the true self continues to exist post mortem in better conditions. 

4. Illusionism.  Whether or not actually held by anyone, there is the possible view according to which  dying and being dead are illusions.  If so, then how can they be evil?  The enlightened sage sees through the veil of maya and recognizes his true identity as the deathless Atman (=Brahman).  We don't exist as separate individuals and we don't die as separate individuals. I am the eternal Atman, and as such deathless. Moksha, enlightenment, liberation,  is to realize  my identity with the eternal Atman thereby seeing through the illusion of separateness.  For some puzzles relating to moksha, see here.

5. The view to which I incline.  Although the process of dying for most of us won't be easy, physically or mentally, the evil of dying is outweighed by the good of being dead, the good of being released from a predicament which is plainly unsatisfactory, whether or not we survive our bodily deaths as individuals.   One aspect of the unsatisfactoriness of our present predicament -- and it is indeed a predicament -- is our deep ignorance, an ignorance that in some takes the form of delusion.  (We are de-luded, played for fools, by a world which obtrudes itself upon us as the ne plus ultra of reality when calm reflection shows that it can be no such thing.) 

If you deny that this life is plainly unsatisfactory, and can in the end offer us nothing that truly satisfies, then you live on a different planet and I can't help you except to refer you to Buddha, and the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, and Plato, and Augustine, and Thomas a Kempis, and Schopenhauer, and a thousand other philosophers and sages East and West.

Mine is not the position of the pessimistic mortalist, the Silenian, because I am neither an out-and-out pessimist nor a mortalist.  Life is not thoroughly bad, but a mixture of good and bad, a chiaroscuro of axiological light and shade if you will.  It's not all night and fog; there is daybreak and sunshine and thus intimations of Elsewhere.  And if this life is a vale of soul-making, as I am inclined to think, then it is instrumentally good.

Mine is not the Epicurean position because I am not a mortalist.

Mine  is not the Platonic position because I do not dogmatically affirm the immortality of the soul.  (By 'Platonic' I do not mean the actual views of Plato, whatever they were, but something much broader and caricature-like.)  I maintain merely that belief in it is rationally acceptable.  The rationality of the belief supports the hope that we may come to learn in death what we cannot learn in life.  On this view death is not an evil but an adventure into Shakespeare's "undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns." (Hamlet's soliloquy.)  Death is an adventure, and one to be embraced and prepared for, given that one has perceived that this world has nothing much to offer us.

The poet and drunkard Dylan Thomas had it exactly wrong when he advised not going gently into that good night but raging, raging against the dying of the light.  I liked his famous lines (which I did not just now quote but paraphrase) when I was an adolescent, but I have put aside childish things.

Peter Lupu once asked me why, if I believe that being dead is good insofar as it is a release from this unsatisfactory predicament, I take such good care of myself.  My answer follows from what I have said.  This vale of tears is also a vale of soul-making.  So I need to 'do my time.'  (Here, in nuce, is an argument against suicide.)  I need more time here below to earn merit and make up for earlier transgressions.  I need more time to complete my philosophical projects and prepare for death.  No reasonable person embarks upon a long journey to a foreign land, there to take up permanent residence, without adequate preparations.  How foolish, then, not to prepare for the journey to Shakespeare's "undisovered country"?  You say there is no such "undiscovered country"?  Well, then you need to inquire into the grounds of your belief.  Or do you hold beliefs about matters of the utmost importance thoughtlessly?

B. Views According to Which Death is an Evil

6.  Optimistic Mortalism.  Death is an evil because life is unqualifiedly good and death deprives us of it.  Does this need refutation?

7.  Christian Mortalism.  Death is an evil because we were intended to live in an embodied state forever in paradise with God.  But now we are under sentence of death due to Adam's sin.  Death was not intended by God but is a punishment for Adam's sin.  Death, though an evil, is yet a portal to eternal life for those who accept Jesus as savior.  So Chrisitan mortalism is not mortalism full-strength as I defined it at the outset, but a mitigated mortalism which pins its hopes on supernatural divine agency and the resurrection of the body. 

My Position on Free Will

This from a Norwegian reader:

I have been enjoying your blog for a couple of years now, and I have to say that I like how your mind works. There are a lot of issues I am thinking about currently regarding philosophy and that didn't change after reading Angus Menuge's book Agents Under Fire. If you haven't read that, I strongly recommend you to. He has some very interesting arguments regarding reason, intentionality, agency, reductionism, materialism etc.  One issue is bugging me particularly these days, and it is the ever-lasting question of free will. I hope I am not asking too much, but would you be able to tell me what your position about free will is and briefly explain why you hold that position?

My position, bluntly stated, is that we are libertarianly free.  As far as I'm concerned the following argument is decisive:

 

1. We are morally responsible for at least some of our actions and omissions.
2. Moral responsibility entails libertarian freedom of the will.
Therefore
3. We are libertarianly free.

 

Is this a compelling argument?  By no means.  (But then no argument for any substantive philosophical thesis is compelling. Nothing substantive in philosophy has ever been proven to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.)  One could, with no breach of logical propriety, deny the conclusion and then deny one or both of the premises.  As we say in the trade, "One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens."  Any valid argument can be thrown into 'inferential reverse,' the result being a valid argument.

 

I of course acccept both premises. That I am morally (as opposed to causally, and as opposed to legally) responsible for at least some of what I do and leave undone I take to be more evident than its negation.  And, like Kant, I see compatibilism as a shabby evasion, "the freedom of the turnspit." 

 

Some will say that free will and moral responsibility are illusions.  I find that incoherent for reasons supplied here.  Other posts in the Free Will category touch upon some of the more technical aspects of the problem.

 

There is a lot of utter rubbish being scribbled by scientists these days about philosophical questions.  Typically, these individuals, prominent in their fields, don't have a clue as to the nature, history, or proper exfoliation of these questions.  Recently, biologist Jerry Coyne has written a lot of crap about free will that I expose in these posts:

 

 

Jerry Coyne on Why You Don't Really Have Free Will

More on Jerry Coyne on Free Will

 

This stuff is crap in the same sense in which most of Ayn Rand's philosophical writings are crap.  The crappiness resides not so much in the theses themselves but in the way the theses are presented and argued, and the way  objections are dealt with.  But if I had to choose between the scientistic crapsters (Krauss, Coyne, Hawking & Mlodinow, et al.) and Rand, I would go with Rand.  At least she understands that what she is doing is philosophy and that philosophy is important and indispensable.  At least she avoids the monstrous self-deception of the scientistic crapsters who do philosophy while condemning it.

Fragment of a Credo

I cannot know whether my life makes ultimate sense.  But I can live as if it does, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it does not.

I cannot know whether my life is bounded by bodily birth and death. But I can live as if it is not, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it is.