Maverick Philosopher

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)

 

 

 

Neither Angel nor Beast

I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea. 

Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than the angels, but a man who follows lust is lower than the brutes.

The angels face no ongoing battle with sensuality; so we who after long struggle master ourselves are greater than angels in self-mastery. We humans have both the vices of the flesh (lust, greed, gluttony) and the vices of the spirit (pride, envy, anger, and sloth)  to combat whereas the angels are tempted by only the latter four. The man who empties himself into the diaspora of the sense pleasures, however,  has degraded himself, reaching  a nadir inaccessible to any mere animal. While we, in our present state, cannot reach the celestial zenith, we can all-too-easily 'achieve' the sublunary nadir.

Such is man, a strange hybrid, amphibious as between the realms of spirit and matter. Some will say that he is a sick animal, sickened by spirit (Ludwig Klages, Geist als Widersacher der Seele. Others that he is a fallen spirit. 

God and Morality

A short piece by Richard Swinburne.

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits our Immorality

Substack latest.

"My Conscience is Clear"

You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.

The Witness of Maximilian Kolbe

Substack latest

Forgive and Forget

Forgetting is the easier and more effective of the options if you can manage it. A wrong forgotten is a wrong unavailable for either forgiving or the opposite. But where is the virtue in a mere mental lapse? To forgive the unforgotten wrong -- now there is the moral challenge, one rarely met, although almost all of us deceive ourselves in this regard.  We try to forgive, and we may succeed for a time, but then, in an unguarded moment, the memory of the offender obtrudes, and suddenly the thought is front and center: That asshole, that worthless piece of crap!  Such thoughts do not evince forgiveness.

What advice do I give myself? Guard the mind! But even the monks in their monasteries, far from the world and its provocations, are not very successful at that.

We aim at ideals the realization of which is beyond the reach of our own efforts.  One might conclude from this that there must be a Source of help beyond the human-all-too-human. For 'ought' implies 'can': what I morally must do, I must be able to do, if not by my own power, then with the assistance of Another. So there must be this Other.

Or one might conclude that because there is no Other to render assistance, we are crazy to torment ourselves with the contemplation of ideals, which, being unattainable by us, cannot count as ideals for us.

Death as the Muse of Morality Limits Our Immorality

How much more immoral we would be if we didn't have to die! Two thoughts.

1. Death sobers us and conduces to reflection on how we are living and how we ought to live.  We fear the judgment that may come, and not primarily judgment of history or that of our circle of acquaintances. We sense that life is a serious  'business' and that all the seriousness would be drained from it were there no final reckoning, no Last Judgment.  Some of us, like Wittgenstein, strive to make amends and put things to right before it is too late.  (Do not scruple over his scrupulosity but take the message of his example.)  We apply ourselves to the task of finally becoming morally 'decent' (anstaendig).  The end approaches swiftly, and it will make a difference in the end how we comport ourselves here and now.  One will especially feel this to be  so when the here and now becomes the hora mortis.

DRURY:  I had been reading Origen before.  Origen taught that at the end of time here would be a final restitution of all things.  That even Satan and the fallen angels would be restored to their former glory.  This was a conception that appealed to me -- but it was at once condemned as heretical.

WITTGENSTEIN:  Of course it was rejected.  It would make nonsense of everything else.  If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with.  Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than biblical.  Whereas my thoughts are one hundred per cent Hebraic.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rhees, Oxford,  1984, p. 161.)

Death has been recognized from the beginning as the muse of philosophy.  I supplement, or perhaps merely unpack, the Platonic thought by writing that death is the muse of morality.

2. Lives without limit here below would afford more time for more crime.  Death spells a welcome end to homo homini lupus, at least in individual cases.

Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist

Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192:

Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power.

I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances.

The first assurance might be thought to be  not specifically religious, or at least not theistically-religious. There might be -- it is epistemically possible that there are -- objective and absolute moral distinctions without God.  I hope we can agree that the wanton slaughter of human beings for one's sexual gratification is absolutely wrong: wrong always and everywhere and in every possible circumstance in which there are human beings. Take that as an example of an objectively true moral proposition. Think of propositions in a Platonic or quasi-Platonic sort of way, as subsisting independently of minds, including God's mind if a divine mind there be, and thus as belonging to a realm unto themselves apart from the realm of space, time and matter. It might then be thought that the indicative proposition just stated suffices to ground the imperative, "Thou shalt not wantonly slaughter, etc."

Is there a Platonic realm of agential oughts and ought-nots that subsist independently of mind and matter and that suffice to make it morally impermissible to, say, rape and murder for pleasure and morally obligatory to, say, feed and care for one's children?  And all of this without a foundation in a divine intellect and will?

Perhaps; I can't prove the opposite.  My metaphysical hunch, however, is that such Platonic moral propositions, and not just moral propositions,  cannot 'hang in the air': they need support in a mind. That's my hunch, and I can articulate it rigorously in argumentative form. No argument in metaphysics in support of a substantive proposition, however, no matter how rigorously deployed, is rationally compelling. So none of my arguments will be rationally compelling. I can render my hunch reasonable, but I cannot force you to accept it on pain of your being taxed with irrationality should you not accept it.

Nevertheless,  I say we need God to ground the existence of moral absolutes. Britton says as much when he says that the absolute good has power.  For if the absolute good has power, then the absolute good is God.

Suppose you disagree.  Free-floating Platonica suffice, you say. It is enough that there subsist in Plato's topos ouranos an entire system of such propositions as Wanton slaughter of innocents for sexual gratification is wrong and Caring for one's offspring is morally obligatory.   The latter prescribes an ought-to-do, a moral must.  Who enforces it? If no one does, then it is an entirely impotent ought.  If we mortals sometimes enforce it, then the ought is not wholly impotent: we provide the power to enforce the moral imperatives that follow from moral declaratives.

Could a moral ought be wholly powerless?  Could it be true that one ought to X and oufht to refrain from Y even if there are no consequences in the realm of fact when the prescriptions and proscriptions are violated?  Could the Ideal and the Real, the Normative and the Factual subsist in such separation? Could Being be so bifurcated?

Would the moral law be the moral law were it never enforced? Enforcement is the bringing to bear of the Ideal upon the Real.

Consider the case of a philosophically sophisticated rapist. It is his pleasure to hunt women and have his way with them. He finds one in an isolated place where she cannot summon help. She pleads and protests: Rape is wrong! He admits that it is wrong.  He gives a little speech:

Yes, it is true, absolutely true, that rape is objectively morally wrong. It is wrong in Plato's heaven, but here we are on earth where there is nothing to prevent me from raping you. I am strong and you are weak.  I can and will satisfy my raging desire.  I have no reason not to. For my raping you will entail no negative consequences for me. I will make sure of that by strangling you while I rape you.  The dead tell no tales.  I will not offer the pseudo-justification that might makes right, that what I am about to do to you is morally permissible because I have the power to do it.   A right that might makes is no right at all. Might cannot make right. 'Might makes right' is eliminativism about right, not an identification of its essence. No such Thrasymachean sophistry for me. What I am about to do to you is not right, but wrong.  But the wrongness of the deeds I am about to do has no relevance  to what actually happens in this material world of fact where we find ourselves. It is a wrongness that subsists in Plato's heaven, but not here in the sublunary. The wrongness is neither here nor there. 

Why should I care that rape and murder are wrong? I am not saying that they are not wrong; I am admitting that they are. I am saying that it doesn't matter in the real world.  Why should I act morally in circumstances in which there are no negative consequences for me if I act immorally?  Will you tell me that I must act morally because it is the morally right thing to do?  That I ought to do right because it is right?  Why? There is no God and no post-mortem regard or punishment.  There is no enforcer of the right and there will be no one upon whom to enforce it.  I grant you your Platonic moral absolutes, but they hang in the air, and in a tw0-fold sense: no God supports them in their existence, and no God enforces them in the phenomenal order.  My final happiness does not depend on doing the morally right thing in those circumstances in which I can get away with doing the wrong thereby satisfying my lust for power, pleasure, and domination. Now take off your clothes!

My view is that something like God is necessary both to explain the existence of the Platonic moral absolutes and their relevance to our animal life here below.  We need God both as support and as enforcer.  Being is One. It is not so bifurcated that the Ideal and the Real are poles apart without communication. God bridges the gap and mediates the opposites.  He brings about the mutual adjustment of virtue and happiness, to borrow a Kantian formulation. But why do we need God to do this job?  Because we cannot do it all by ourselves. A truly just adjustment of virtue and happiness cannot occur for most in this life.

If the absolute good does not have (absolute) power, then the absolute good is 'neither here nor there' in both senses of this phrase.

Moral Failure and Moral Capacity

Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. So I had the thought: we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of.  So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin.  I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.

A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.

On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.

The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually.  That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.

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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.