Maverick Philosopher

Alan Watts and John Deck

Ah, the wonders of the Internet!

If you are old-school and intellectually and morally disciplined like me, with the old virtues firmly in place, it is a wonderfully useful tool, and not damaging, except perhaps as a bit of a time-sink.  I coined a word in an earlier entry, schlepfussing. Original with me? A search with DuckDuckGo turned up nothing. But a search on schlepfuss (drag-foot) brought me to this entry by James J. O'Meara, There and Then: Personal and Memorial Reflections on Alan Watts (1915-1973)

Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s.  Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things,  Alan Watts and his writings.  But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him.  He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher.  Entertaining he was indeed.

I heard him speak on 17 January 1973 in the last year of his life .  He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control.  Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia)  Here is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973 that reports on the lecture I heard at El Camino Junior College.

What struck me about O'Meara's post was his reference to John N. Deck. From Watts to Deck! Now there's a weird transition.  O'Meara on Deck:

Was Watts, then, a (shudder) “father figure”? Perhaps. Further evidence might lie ahead.

For, after whimsically choosing to attend an unheralded college in provincial Ontario (again, remarkable lack of parental supervision, they being happy as long as it was a Catholic college), I had decided to major in Philosophy, since that seemed to be where Watts’ ideas seemed to have led, and as noted, my parents had no interest in any practical results of my studies.[14] Fortunately, Windsor, in its very backwardness, was more like the sort of seminaries Watts was familiar with, teaching Aristotle and St. Thomas, rather than the modern, analytic schools that Watts loathed, where one “does” philosophy from 9 to 5 and then home to martinis.[15] I did dabble a bit in Asian Studies, and Religious Studies, but not at all in Psychology, but they were clearly as limited to specialists as Watts would have thought.[16]

Besides, since Watts advocated a “no-practice” approach to spirituality,[17] there didn’t seem to be any need, or much point, in undertaking anything but a theoretical path.[18]

And sure enough, though apparently wandering aimlessly and un-guidedly through the venia legendi, I found myself smack dab under the influence of another likely “father figure,” Prof. John Norbert Deck, PhD.[19]

Now Deck, though apparently rather more anti-Semitic than even most of his generation,[20] did show a propensity to create what Kevin MacDonald has called the “Jewish Guru Effect,” the creation of authoritarian study groups around charismatic figures, often involving the creation of private languages to keep outsiders at bay.[21]

Looking like Schopenhauer but dressed as a Trotskyite shop steward, Deck was easily the most oddly charismatic professor around, and I eagerly joined his Neoplatonic cult.[22] In an unprecedented burst of enthusiasm, I completed my coursework in little more two years, and eagerly entered the more private realms of the graduate seminar. Whereupon, the heavy-smoking, heavy-German-food-eating Deck dropped dead, in his mid-fifties.

That’s right, dear readers, two mentors, both almost immediately dead. And I was barely twenty![23]

[18] Deck, in fact, made quite a study of theoria among the Greeks; see his doctoral dissertation, Nature, Contemplation and the One (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967; Burdett, NY: Larson, 1998), Appendix A; while the text of my Introduction to Philosophy class, Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1952; new translation by Gerald Malsbary, with an Introduction by Roger Scruton, South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998) promoted, based on St. Thomas if not Guénon, the need for a caste devoted to pure contemplation. This was an easy transition from Watts, whom a contemporary reviewer considered to be “one of the few contemporary [1953!] philosophers for whom contemplative reflection precedes action in the world.” — Columbus and Rice, p. 7, quoting P. Wheelwright.

[19] It occurs to me that both Watts and Deck had huge families, with over 12 children and grandchildren, although Deck, the more traditional Catholic, had but one, obviously rather put-upon, wife.

And then it dawned on me that this O'Meara is the same O'Meara to whom Anthony Flood links here. Follow the link for more biographical information about Deck, and copies of some of his articles.

For an evaluation of some of Deck's ideas, see the articles in my Deck category.

John Deck's Contrast Argument Against the Philosophy of Being

John N. Deck is a highly interesting, if obscure, figure in the neo-Scholasticism of the 20th century. I first took note of him in 1989, ten years after his death, when his article "Metaphysics or Logic?" appeared in New Scholasticism (vol. LXIII, no. 2, Spring 1989, pp. 229-240.) Thanks to the labors of Tony Flood we now have a better picture of the man and his work. The case of Deck may well prove to be a partial confirmation of Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."

What interests me about Deck is that he attacks the neo-Scholastic philosophy of Being from within. Holding a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Toronto (1960), he cannot be suspected of any lack of acquaintance with the tradition against which he lodges his objections. Yet he arrives at conclusions similar to those of the pragmatist Sidney Hook (see his The Quest for Being) and the empiricist Donald C. Williams (see his "Dispensing with Existence," The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LIX, no. 2, 1962, pp. 748-763.)

I myself am neither a Thomist nor a neo-Thomist. My route to the philosophy of Being was via the transcendental philosophy of Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger. My dissatisfaction with the phenomenological approach to ontology as well as with the logical approach one finds in Frege and Russell led me to re-think in my own way and in my own terms the old Thomist idea of ipsum esse subsistens. I gave my thoughts a rough and provisional form in my 2002 book A Paradigm Theory of Existence to which I attached the perhaps excessively triumphalist subtitle, Onto-Theology Vindicated. The gist of the subtitle can be put in the slogan: Being is neither a phenomenological nor a logical notion, but an onto-theological one.

Not having discussed Deck in my book, I will make good that omission here in one or more posts.

It is a matter of experience that our world is a plural world, one consisting of a manifold of beings or existents. The manifoldness is undoubtedly real, but it is not a pure manyness but a plurality of things that are, that have Being or existence in common, that form a community of being. There are many beings, but each is. It is undeniable that Being is in some sense common to beings. As common, it must be distinct from each of them taken distributively and from all of them taken collectively.

The question in dispute, however, is whether both Being and beings are real in the "extra-cognitional order" to use a phrase of Deck's, or only beings are. I maintain that both Being and beings are extra-cognitionally real whereas Deck maintains that only beings are. Thus Deck's view is that beings exist outside the mind, but that their unity and commonality is merely that of a concept, and so is imposed by the mind to satisfy its own logical exigencies. Deck's view could be put as follows. When we say of a thing that it exists, what we say is true; but there is no real unity in things that grounds our application of the predicate 'exists' to them. There is no Being in the things that are that makes it true to say of them that they are: Being is a concept we impose. The diversity of beings is real (extramental, extra-cognitional), but their unity is merely conceptual.

One could say that Deck takes a deflationary line: there is no such 'thing' as Being outside the mind. Clearly, this must be opposed by anyone who, like me, sees merit in the notion of ipsum esse subsistens, self-subsistent existence. For to say that existence is self-subsistent is to say that it itself exists.  But in philosophy it all comes down to the arguments one can adduce for or against. In support of his deflationism, Deck says the following:

There is no alternative to being. Everything is. Thus there is no ultimate intelligibility in the contention that all things that are agree in this, that they are all opposed to, or even equally opposed to, non-being — they would be at one, as it were, in the non-non-being feature. (232)

This passage suggests a Contrast Argument:

1. If a term T denotes something real, then there must be items to which T does not apply.
2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
Ergo
3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not denote anything real.

In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. 'Self-identical' is not rendered either senseless or reference-less by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. I don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.

But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication Deck thinks it has. He seems to think that if everything exists, then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between (actual) existence and possible nonexistence.

It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples of nonexistents. But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is no real unity in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them?

It seems to me that Deck is making a rather obvious mistake. He is assuming that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. He is thinking of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is what he has to say:

The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a distinction between the more general and the less general. This is a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not point to two distinct principles within Rover — dog and animal. Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog — there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a dog. (232-233)

This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus. Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general what-determination. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being or existence is not a summum genus as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22 of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion, Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is.

I'll have more to say about this later. For now, the main point is that Deck's Contrast Argument above is unsound. Not only does it share the defect of every contrast argument, it also confuses Being or existence with a highest what-determination.

Total Dependence and Essence/Existence Composition

Anthony Flood has done metaphysicians a service by making available John N. Deck’s excellent, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Language of Total Dependence. This is an essay that Anthony Kenny, no slouch of a philosopher, saw fit to include in his anthology, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

Mr. Flood finds Deck’s argument to be "unanswerable" to such an extent that it broke the hold of Thomism on him. Although I am not a Thomist, I believe I can show that Deck’s argument is not compelling.

This essay divides into two parts. In the first, I state what I take to be Deck’s argument; in the second, I show how it can be answered from the position worked out in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated (Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002).

Deck’s Argument Entdeckt

On classical theism, divine creation is creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. Of course, this does not mean that God creates out of some stuff called ‘nothing’; it means that it is not the case that there is something distinct from God out of which God creates. Thus divine creation, classically understood, is not the forming of a pre-given matter, or any sort of operating upon something whose existence is independent of God. Creation out of nothing thus implies that created entities (creatures) are totally dependent on God. By comparison, when I make a sandwich, the product is only partially dependent on me: I merely assemble pre-given ingredients. Human 'creations' are out of something distinct from their 'creators.' Divine creations are out of nothing distinct from their Creator.