Maverick Philosopher

Do We Love the Person or Only Her Attributes?

Substack latest.

Gleanings from a passage from Pascal.

This supplements and deepens the recent discussion of subjective and objective views of death.

The God Question and the Christian Proposition

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

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

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 Europe no longer represents progress as the framework for the coming forth of a new association of humanity, of an industrial or socialist society, as August Comte or Karl Marx thought;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

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

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

The rest of the discussion is pretty good too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Can Evil be Eradicated?

Not by our own effort, as I argue at Substack.

Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

Substack latest.

It is a mistake to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

On Wasting Time with Philosophy (with a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

What's more, he who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must uncritically assume that those who give a different answer are simply wrong. And that involves a further unexamined assumption, namely, that one's own faculties are immeasurably superior to those of others. It is as if one thinks to oneself, "I am so well-endowed that I just know, without inquiry or self-examination, which ends are choice-worthy." Or one uncritically assumes that one's culture knows, or one's religion.

A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. But Pascal was a thoughtful person, and didn't he dismiss philosophy as a waste of time? "Not worth an hour's trouble," he said with Descartes in his sights.

Pascal wrote a big fat book of Pensées  — and a magnificent book it was. But why did he bother if philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble? Because he made an exception in his own case: his philosophy, he felt, was different! Well, all philosophers feel that way. All feel themselves to be questing for the truth as for something precious, even when they, like Nietzsche, perversely deny truth. None feel themselves to be engaged in 'empty speculation' or 'mental masturbation' or 'meaningless abstraction.'

And if Pascal really believed that philosophy was a waste of time, why did he scribble, scribble, scribble? Why didn't he spend all his time in religious observances and mathematical studies? One might put a similar question to other philosophizing denigrators of reason such as that prodigious literary engine, Kierkegaard.

The consistently thoughtful, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Its questions are inevitable, and one who does not find them so merely betrays his incapacity. But although philosophy raises questions, it is not very good at answering them. It is much better at questioning answers than at answering questions. And herein lies the rub of our strange predicament.

If we are thoughtful, we see that we cannot live blindly, thoughtlessly, dogmatically, accepting this and rejecting that without ever attempting to give an account of our reasons for and against. But when we set about to give our reasons we find the task daunting and interminable and not at all  generative of consensus. What is to be done?

Since there is no going back to doxastic naivete, I have nothing better to say than that we should blunder on in quest of a light that may one day dawn. The quest itself is worthwhile whatever the upshot. I closed this morning's meditation session in the way I have closed many such a session, with a renewal of vows: I dedicate my life to the ultimate truth, the ultimate light, the ultimate insight. And if death ends it all? And nothing s revealed? Then so be it.

The quest itself suffices whatever the upshot. In the end, and at last, this world has nothing to offer us compared to what the quest promises us.

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

Someone who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must therefore hold that these questions are a waste of time. He must simply and dogmatically assume answers to them. He must assume that the question about choice-worthy ends makes sense and has an answer. And he must assume that he has the answer. He must assume that he knows, for example, that piling up consumer goods, or chasing after name and fame, is the purpose of human existence. Or he must assume that getting to heaven, or bringing down capitalism, or 'helping other people,' is the purpose of human existence.

What's more, he who holds that philosophy is a waste of time must uncritically assume that those who give a different answer are simply wrong. And that involves a further unexamined assumption, namely, that one's own faculties are immeasurably superior to those of others. It is as if one thinks to oneself, "I am so well-endowed that I just know, without inquiry or self-examination, which ends are choice-worthy." Or one uncritically assumes that one's culture knows, or one's religion.

A thoughtful person, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. But Pascal was a thoughtful person, and didn't he dismiss philosophy as a waste of time? "Not worth an hour's trouble," he said with Descartes in his sights.

Pascal wrote a big fat book of Pensées  — and a magnificent book it was. But why did he bother if philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble? Because he made an exception in his own case: his philosophy, he felt, was different! Well, all philosophers feel that way. All feel themselves to be questing for the truth as for something precious, even when they, like Nietzsche, perversely deny truth. None feel themselves to be engaged in 'empty speculation' or 'mental masturbation' or 'meaningless abstraction.'

And if Pascal really believed that philosophy was a waste of time, why did he scribble, scribble, scribble? Why didn't he spend all his time in religious observances and mathematical studies? One might put a similar question to other philosophizing denigrators of reason such as that prodigious literary engine, Kierkegaard.

The consistently thoughtful, therefore, cannot dismiss philosophy as a waste of time. Its questions are inevitable, and one who does not find them so merely betrays his incapacity. But although philosophy raises questions, it is not very good at answering them. It is much better at questioning answers than at answering questions. And herein lies the rub of our strange predicament.

If we are thoughtful, we see that we cannot live blindly, thoughtlessly, dogmatically, accepting this and rejecting that without ever attempting to give an account of our reasons for and against. But when we set about to give our reasons we find the task daunting and interminable and not at all  generative of consensus. What is to be done?

Since there is no going back to doxastic naivete, I have nothing better to say than that we should blunder on in quest of a light that may one day dawn. The quest itself is worthwhile whatever the upshot. I closed this morning's meditation session in the way I have closed many such a session, with a renewal of vows: I dedicate my life to the ultimate truth, the ultimate light, the ultimate insight. And if death ends it all? And nothing s revealed? Then so be it.

The quest itself suffices whatever the upshot. In the end, and at last, this world has nothing to offer us compared to what the quest promises us.

Error Invincibilis

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (Pantheon, 1950, tr. Dru), #691:

Spiritual blindness differs from physical blindness in this, that it is not conscious. That is the essence of error invincibilis.

Compare Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to reply, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to reply, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

Pascal the Jansenist

Herewith, a note on Pascal inspired by Leszek Kolakowski's fascinating book, God Owes Us Nothing (University of Chicago, 1995).

Faith is a divine gift, bestowed arbitrarily, not a reward for merit. We postlapsarians groaning under Adam's sin are wholly without merit. There is no way we can get right with God by our own efforts.  Grace is both necessary and sufficient for salvation. God cannot be called unjust in arbitrarily bestowing the grace that leads to faith and salvation on some but not others -- for God is not measured by Justice, a standard external to him; God is the measure of Justice.  God is Justice itself. In this respect he is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form. Justice is just; God is Justice; God is just. Whatever Supreme Justice does is just by definition. This is a consequence of God's absolute sovereignty. Kolakowski hasn't (so far in my reading) mentioned divine simplicity, but this doctrine is arguably entailed by absolute sovereignty.

And so the very question whether God acts justly in damning some and saving others presupposes what cannot be the case given absolute sovereignty, namely, that God can be judged by a standard external to him. This view leads by inexorable logic to some horrific consequences.  One is the justice of the consignment of unbaptized infants to eternal torment.  Pascal bites the Augustinian bullet.  See p. 85 ff.

Reading Now: Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing

I'm on a Kolakowski binge.  I've re-read Metaphysical Horror (Basil Blackwell, 1988) and Husserl and the Search for Certitude (U. of Chicago, 1975).  I purchased the first at Dillon's Bookstore, Bloomsbury, London, near Russell's Square in late August, 1988.  Auspicious, eh? I was in the U. K. to read a paper at the World Congress of Philosophy in Brighton.  Both of the aforementioned books are outstanding even if the translations are inadequate. But knowing the ideas, I can figure out how the translation should have gone.

Kolakowsi is erudition on stilts. The man's range is stunning. While some of his essays are sketchy, he can be scholarly when he wants to be, as witness his magisterial three-volumed Main Currents of Marxism.

Kolakowski began as a communist but soon saw through the destructive ideology. For the great sin of speaking the truth, he was stripped of his academic post and prohibited from teaching in Poland.  He found refuge in Canada, The U. S. A. and the U.K. When the Left takes over the West, where will dissident truth-tellers go? Here is what Kirkus has to say about the exciting book I am now reading:

GOD OWES US NOTHING: A BRIEF REMARK ON PASCAL'S RELIGION AND ON THE SPIRIT OF JANSENISM

by Leszek Kolakowski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1995

A provocative critique of the Jansenist movement and of its celebrated proponent Blaise Pascal, from internationally renowned scholar Kolakowski (The Alienation of Reason, 1968, etc.; Committee on Social Thought/Univ. of Chicago). Jansenism, the powerful 17th-century heresy condemned by Rome, has often been called the Catholic form of Calvinism. Inspired by the writings of Bishop Cornelius Jansen of Utrecht, the Jansenists claimed to be orthodox disciples of St. Augustine and taught that salvation was gratuitous in a way that ruled out any human cooperation. Since those whom God had freely predestined would inevitably be saved, Jesus Christ died only for the elect; all others would be justly condemned to eternal torments, irrespective of whether they were good or bad, including unbaptized babies. Human nature was totally corrupted by sin, especially original sin. Kolakowski gives us a detailed account, with copious quotations, both of St. Augustine and of the positions of Jansen and his followers, and he guides us through the central questions of the debate. He devotes the second half of his study to the writings of Pascal, whose profound pessimism he sees as embodying the Jansenists' world-denying ideals. The arts, free intellectual inquiry, and even hugging one's children had no place in what Kolakowski calls Pascal's religion of unhappiness. The author rarely refers to other studies of this great controversy. He is surely being malicious when he holds that Rome's rejection of Jansenism was a compromise with the world and a de facto abandonment of the Church's tradition, since he presents the latter in an overly Augustinian form, choosing to ignore, for example, the Eastern Fathers, Aquinas, and the basic doctrine that the human person, endowed with free will, is made in the image of God. Brilliantly cynical presentation of an unpopular but still influential religious outlook.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-226-45051-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995

Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

Pascal Weighs in on the Wuhan Flu

"All of a man's problems derive from his inability to sit quietly alone in his room."  

An exaggeration, no doubt, but curiously apropos at the present time. 

More on Pascal in my Pascal category.

Thomas Merton wrote a very good book, The Silent Life. Had he been more assiduous in the living of that life he would not have quit his hermitage to attend a theology conference in Bangkok where he met his end by electrocution at the young age of 53.

I will come back to what for Merton and for many of us is the central conflict in the spiritual life, that between contemptus mundi and secular concern.

More on Merton in my Merton category.

Neither Angel nor Beast

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329:

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.

The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations for his self-degradation.

It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirituality.

Only a spiritual being can be bestial.

Some Questions About Animal Suffering and Religious Belief

This just in from Karl White:

A couple of questions.

 

1. The gist of your posts seems to be that we can never know for sure that an evil is pointlessly evil, therefore no evil rules out definitively the potential existence of an omni-loving God.

 

Yes, that's the gist of it, but strike 'potential.'

 

So in your view does that imply that there is no amount of evil that could rule it out? If the entire planet were like Auschwitz would that still not rule it out? (And it is estimated that roughly 150 million animals are slaughtered per day for human consumption, so it could plausibly be maintained that for animals the world is a kind of Auschwitz.)

 

No. The idea is that the existence of evils that are necessary for a greater good are logically compatible with the existence of an all-good God. So the goods have to outweigh the evils.  It follows that there has to be a limit to how much evil there is.

 

And let's leave out of the present discussion the human slaughter of humans and animals, for that belongs under the rubric 'moral evil,' whereas the topic under discussion is natural evil. One question for a separate post is whether natural evil is itself a species of moral evil, namely, the evil perpetrated by fallen angels. But for now I will assume that natural evil is not a species of moral evil; I will assume that it is not the result of free agency.

 

To put it more formally: is there any state of affairs, call it X, that would rule out the existence of God?

 

Yes. Just one case of pointless or unjustified evil would rule out the existence of God.

 

I am uncomfortable with the idea of saying yes, as I suspect it pushes the notion of an omni-God toward the brink of meaninglessness. We generally think that if a proposition cannot be proven or disproven then it is in a certain sense meaningless or at best useless. The Theist will reply that the existence of God is a unique case and fine, but I still feel that we are within our rights to ask for some form of verification without having the whole concept of God becoming meaningless.

 

I rather doubt that  a proposition is meaningful iff it is verifiable. Consider the following proposition

 

a) My grandfather Alfonso drank a glass of dago red on 1 January 1940.

 

By Bivalence, (a) is either true, or if not true, then false.  And this is so even though it is impossible now to determine (a)'s truth value.  Since (a) must either be true or false, it must be meaningful, despite its unverifiability.  Similarly for 

 

b) The execution of Sophie Scholl (of White Rose fame) was not a pointless evil.

 

(b) is meaningful but not empirically verifiable in the present life.

 

Note also, that if one is a verificationist, there is no need to mess around with the problem of evil: one can put paid to all (synthetic) claims about God, such as the claim that God exists, by maintaining that they are meaningless because not empirically verifiable in the here and now.

 

2. You push the pragmatic, Pascalian line about the benefits of believing in God quite regularly. But isn't there a sort of question-begging to this, in that it assumes only beneficial consequences? What if someone reads the Quran, sees the lines about killing non-believers and thinks "I may as well, because if God exists, he'll reward me, and if he doesn't, it doesn't matter anyway." Or if someone adopts a religion that promotes the total subjection of women?

 

My Pascalianism is not blanket; it kicks in only in specific circumstances.  Islam is "the poorest and saddest form of theism" (Schopenhauer), It is clearly an inferior religion as compared to Christianity (morally if not metaphysically) if it (Islam) is a religion at all as opposed to a political ideology masquerading as a religion, or a Christian heresy (Chesterton).  It was founded by a warrior who was arguably a fraud and it enjoins immoral practices such the genital mutilation of girls, the subjection of women, and the slaughter of 'infidels.' . So if one exercises due doxastic diligence one excludes Islam and other pseudo-religions from the Pascalian option.

 

The Pascalian move is made in a situation like the following.  One is a serious and sensitive human being who cares about his ultimate felicity.  One is alive to the vanity of this world. One is psychologically capable of religious belief and appreciates that God and the soul are Jamesian live options. One is intellectually sophisticated enough to know that God and the soul can neither be proven nor disproven. One appreciates that not to choose to live as if God and the soul are real is to choose to live as if they are not real.  One understands that it is prudentially irrational to suspend judgment.  At this point the Pascalian reasoning kicks in.

 

By the way, my Pascalian move is merely reminiscent of he great Pascal; I am not concerned with accuracy to the details of his view.  I write as a kind of 'existentialist.' What matters is how I live here and now and what helps me here and now.  I borrow what is useful and appropriable by me here and now; I am not committed to the whole Pascalian kit-and-kaboodle.

Adapted from Pascal

There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for those who don't.

To Understand the Religious Sensibility . . .

. . . two books are essential: Augustine's Confessions and Pascal's Pensées. If you read these books and they do not speak to you, if they do not move you, then it is a good bet that you don't have a religious bone in your body. It is not matter of intelligence but of sensibility.

"He didn't have a religious bone in his body." I recall that line from Stephanie Lewis' obituary for her husband David, perhaps the most brilliant American philosopher of the postwar period. He was highly intelligent and irreligious. Others are highly intelligent and religious. Among contemporary philosophers one could mention Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen, and Richard Swinburne. The belief that being intelligent rules out being religious casts doubt on the intelligence of those who hold it.

Let us suppose that you do not have the time or the stamina or the education to read Augustine's great book itself. Then I recommend to you on this, the feast day of St. Augustine, Peter Kreeft's I Burned for Your Peace: Augustine's Confessions Unpacked (Ignatius Press, 2016). It consists of key quotations with commentary by Kreeft.

But don't expect a high level of philosophical rigor. It is a work of popular apologetics by a master of that genre. 

Kreeft's lack of philosophical rigor is illustrated by his view that "The refutation of this materialism is simple." (147)

For a long time Augustine struggled with the question of how there could be purely spiritual realities such as God and the soul. He was in the grip of a materialism according to which everything that is real must have a bodily nature and occupy space. But then he noticed that the mental acts by which we form bodily images are not themselves bodily images. My image of a cat, for example, has shape and color, but the mental act of imagination does not have shape and color.  As Kreeft puts it:

The imagination cannot imagine itself. The understanding, however, can understand itself. We can have a concept of the act of conceiving, and we can also have a concept of the act of imagining. [. . .] The light of the projection machine must transcend the images it projects on the machine. A material image cannot create an image; only an immaterial soul can.

It is exceedingly strange that many otherwise intelligent philosophers today simply cannot see this point when they embrace a materialist "solution" to the mind-body problem." (148)

Now I reject materialism about the mind, but surely this is a dubious argument.  

It is not obvious that there are mental acts, but let us suppose there are.  So we distinguish the act of imagining a cat, from the object imagined, the cat.  Now it must be granted that phenomenological reflection fails to note any physical or spatial feature in the act of imagining or in any act of any type. When we introspect the operations of our minds we find no evidence that they are brain processes. But lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.  The lack of evidence that mental acts are material is not evidence that they are not material.  It might be that mental acts are brain processes, but that we are unable to cognize them in their true nature.  That they do not appear to be material does not prove that they are immaterial.

That's one problem. Second is that Kreeft moves immediately from the immateriality of mental acts to an immaterial soul substance as subject of these acts. That move needs to be mediated by argument. 

Another Uncompelling Argument in Illustration of Our Pascalian Predicament

This relates to my earlier discussion with Dr. Novak. See articles referenced infra. A reader thinks the following syllogism establishes its conclusion:

a) What doesn't have necessity from itself is caused;

b) The contingent does not have necessity from itself;

Ergo

c) The contingent is caused.

An argument establishes its conclusion just in case: (i) the argument is deductive; (ii) the argument is valid in point of logical form; (iii) the premises are all of them objectively certain. Establish is a very strong word; it is as strong as, and equivalent to, prove.

The argument above is a valid deductive argument, and the minor is true by definition. The major, however, is not objectively certain. In fact, it is not even true. The impossible doesn't have necessity from itself, but it has no cause since it doesn't exist.

But a repair is easily made. Substitute for (a)

a*) Whatever exists, but does not have necessity from itself, is caused.

Then the argument, for all we know, might be sound. But it still does not establish its conclusion.  For the major, even if true, is not objectively certain.  Ask yourself:

Is the negation of the repaired major a formal-logical contradiction? No. Is it an analytic proposition? No. Does it glow with the light of Cartesian self-evidence like 'I seem to see a tree' or 'I feel nauseous'? No.

So how can Novak & Co. be objectively certain that (a*) is true?  This proposition purports to be about objective reality; it purports to move us beyond logical forms, concepts, and mental states. Nice work if you can get it, to cop a signature phrase from the late, great David M. Armstrong.  (For the record: I reject Armstrong's naturalism and atheism.)

I conjecture that it is the overwhelmingly strong doxastic security needs of dogmatists that prevent them from appreciating what I am saying. They cannot tolerate uncertainty, and so they manufacture a certainty that isn't there.

That being said, Dr. Novak may like my Pascalian conjecture that it is due to the Fall of Man that we are in this suboptimal epistemic predicament, the predicament of craving certainty without being able to attain it.

Related articles

Is It Epistemically Certain that Whatever Begins to Exist is Caused?

Are Any Substantive Philosophical Propositions Epistemically Certain?

Do We Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

The following ruminations belong among the metaphysical foundations of debates about tribalism, racism, and the differences between my brand of conservatism and the neo-reactionary variety.  For example, I say things like, "We should  aspire to treat individuals as individuals rather than reduce them to tokens of types or members of groups or instances of attributes."  This of course gives rise to questions like, "What exactly is it to treat an individual as an individual, given that there are no individuals bereft of attributes?"  And before you know it we are deep in the bowels of metaphysics, entangled, to shift metaphors, in conundra that may well be  insoluble.  Here are two theses I will just state on the present occasion:

T1. All the hot-button issues (abortion, immigration, capital punishment, etc.) are metaphysical at bottom.

T2. The insolubility of the underlying metaphysical problems, if they are insoluble, 'percolates up' into the popular debates and renders them insoluble as well.

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

Here is a remarkable passage from Pascal's remarkable Pensées:


A man goes to the window to see the passers by. If I happen to pass by, can I say that he has gone there to see me? No; for he is not thinking of me in particular. But does he who loves someone for her   beauty, really love her? No; for small-pox, destroying the beauty without destroying the person, will put an end to love. And if I am loved for my judgment, for my memory, am I loved? No; for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where then is this 'I,' if it resides neither in the body, nor the soul [mind]? And how  love the body or the soul [mind] save for these qualities which do not  make the 'me,' since they are doomed to perish? For can one love the soul [mind] of a person in the abstract, irrespective of its qualities? Impossible and wrong! So we never love anyone, but only  qualities. (p. 337,  tr. H. F. Stewart)

This passage raises the following question. When I love a person, is it the person in her particularity and uniqueness that I love, or merely the being-instantiated of certain lovable properties? Do I love Mary as Mary, or merely as an instance of helpfulness, friendliness, faithfulness, etc.?  The issue is not whether I love Mary as Mary versus loving attributes in abstracto; the issue is whether I love Mary as Mary versus loving her as an instance of lovable attributes.

These are clearly different. If it is merely the being-instantiated of an ensemble of lovable properties that I love, then it would not matter if the love object were replaced by another with the same ensemble of properties. It would not matter if Mary were replaced by her indiscernible twin Sherry. Mary, Sherry, what's the difference? Either way you get a package of the very same delectable attributes.

But if it is the person in her uniqueness that I love, then it would matter if someone else with exactly the same ensemble of properties were substituted for the love object. It would matter to me, and it would matter even more to the one I love. Mary would complain bitterly if Sherry were to replace her in my  affections. "I want to be loved for being ME, not for what I have in common with HER!"

Self Love

The point is subtle.  It is perhaps more clearly made using the example of self-love.  Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin.  Now it is a fact that I love myself.  But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of properties, then I should love Phil equally.  For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do.  But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil.  Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go.  I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have.  I prefer myself and love myself  just because I am myself.

This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties.  For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other.  This would make no sense if the being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties.  In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual.  And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual.  Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.

We can take it a step further.   If love is blind as folk wisdom has it, self-love is blind in excelsis.  In some cases self-love is present even when the lover/beloved lacks any and all lovable attributes.  If there are cases like this then there is love of self as a pure individual. I love me just because I am me and not because I instantiate lovable attributes.  I love myself, not as an instance of attributes, but as a case of existence.  Instances are interchangeable; cases of existence are not.   I love myself in that I am in a sense of 'am' that cannot be identified with the being-instantiated of a set of properties. I love my very existing.   If so, and if my love is a 'correct emotion' (Brentano), then my sheer existing must be good. 

I take this to show that self-love cannot be identified with, or reduced to, love of an instance of lovable attributes qua instance of those attributes.

Other Love

Now it is a point of phenomenology that love intends to reach the very haecceity and ipseity of the beloved: in loving someone we mean to  make contact with his or her unique thisness and selfhood. It is not a mere instance of lovable properties that love intends, but the very  being of the beloved. It is also true that this intending or meaning is in some cases fulfilled: we actually do sometimes make conscious contact with the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved. In the case of self love we not only intend, but arrive at, the very being of the beloved, not merely at the co-instantiation of a set of multiply instantiable lovable properties.  In the case of other love, there is the intention to reach the haecceity and ipseity of the beloved, but it is not clear how arriving at it is possible given Pascal's argument.

In the case of self love, my love 'reaches' the beloved because I am the beloved.  In the case of other-love, my love intends the beloved, but it is not clear that it 'reaches' her.

The question underlying all of this is quite fundamental: Are there any genuine individuals? X is a genuine individual if and only if X is essentially unique. The Bill and Phil example suggests that selves are genuine individuals and not mere bundles of multiply instantiable properties.  For each of the twins is acutely aware that he is not the other despite complete agreement in respect of  pure properties. 

Here are some of my metaphysical theses: 

1. There exist genuine individuals.
2. Genuine individuals cannot be reduced to bundles of properties.
3. The Identity of Indiscernibles is false.
4. Numerical difference is numerical-existential difference: the existence of an individual is implicated in its very haecceity. 
5.  There are no nonexistent individuals. 
6. There are no not-yet existent individuals.

Related articles

Distasteful Slang

God and Socrates: Two Different Ways of Existing?

On the Tombstone of the USSR

"Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer tr., p. 242)

Related articles

Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

The Extremism of Simone Weil

Time Apportionment as Between Athens and Benares

How Will Death Find Us?

We have it on good authority that death is the muse of philosophy. The muse reminds us that our time is short and to be well used.  We ought to heed the following lines from St. Augustine's Confessions, Book VI, Chapter 11, Ryan trans.:

Let us put away these vain and empty concerns.  Let us turn ourselves only to a search for truth.  Life is hard, and death is uncertain.  It may carry us away suddenly.  In what state shall we leave this world?  Where must we learn what we have neglected here?  Or rather, must we not endure punishment for our negligence?  What if death itself should cut off and put an end to all care, along with sensation itself?  This too must be investigated.

This too must be investigated.  For as Blaise Pascal remarks, "It affects our whole life to know whether the soul is mortal or immortal."  

On Natural Science

Natural science pursued for its own sake is a magnificent and noble thing.  But in the end one ought to consider whether it is but a high-minded diversion, an extremely  high-level form of Pascalian divertissement. 

Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars."  Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which  he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654.  Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):

These words represent Pascal's change of heart.  He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham.  Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought.  The God of Abraham . . . is not susceptible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature.  What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)

Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard.  We encountered it before when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea.  But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread.  As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- the God of religion -- to the God of philosophy.  In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction.  Let's try to sort this out.

It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and  cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc.  But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or to the judgments I make about it.  I am sitting on a chair, not a concept of a chair.  The chair, like God, is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments.  The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object.  And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence, so much so that it is plausibly argued that 'person' in application to God can only be used analogically.

Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him.  But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God.  In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur.  He moves from the unproblematically true

1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation

to the breathtakingly false

2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica)  is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.

As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error.  When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.  When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing.  A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind.  She remains in her interiority as a person delightfully transcendent of my acts of thinking.

It is interesting to observe that it is built into the very concept God that God cannot be a concept.  This concept is the concept of something that cannot by its very nature be a concept.  This is the case whether or not God exists.  The concept God is the concept of something that cannot be a concept even if nothing falls under the concept.

It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al.  Or at least it is bogus to make this oppositin for the reason Buber supplies.  There is and can be only one God.  But there are different approaches to this one God.  By my count, there are four ways of approaching God:  by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense.  To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes.  Suppose Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary each summit by a different route.  Mary cannot denigrate the accomplishments of the males by asserting that they didn't really summit on the ground that their respective termini were merely immanent to their routes.  She cannot say, "You guys didn't really reach the summit; you merely reached a point on your map."

I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality.  It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu.  But that's not to say that the menu is about itself:  it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating.  The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it.  Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Child, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"

I believe I have established my point against Buber conclusively.  But to appreciate this, you must not confuse the question I am discussing with another question in the vicinity.

Suppose one philosopher argues to an unmoved mover, another to an ultimate ground of moral obligation, and a third to an absolute source of truth.  How do we know that thesee three notionally distinct philosophical Gods are the same as each other in reality and the same as the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob, in reality?  This is an important question, but not the one I am addressing in this entry.  The present question is whether a philosophical treatment of God transforms God into a mere concept or mere idea.  The answer is resoundingly in the negative.  Such a treatment purports to treat of the very same real God that is addressed in prayer, seen in mystical vision, and  sensed in the deliverances of conscience.

Related articles

Martin Buber and "Bogus Grandeur" - A Note on Saul Bellow's Literary Treatment of Buber in "Herzog"

Pascal on Materialism

"Atheists should say things that are perfectly clear.  Now it is not perfectly clear that the soul is material." (Krailsheimer, #161, p. 82)  An atheist needn't be a mortalist, and a mortalist needn't be an atheist.  But let that pass.  Although the one does not logically require the other, or the other the one, atheism and mortalism naturally 'go together.'  (McTaggart, for example, was an atheist but an immortalist with, apparently, no breach of logical consistency.)

If it were perfectly clear that that the soul is mortal as the body is mortal, then then why all the wild disagreement among materialists/naturalists/physicalists?  Think of all their different theories.  For example, there are eliminative materialists who rely on the (true) premise that no brain state is intrinsically intentional.  They conclude that there are no mental states given that mental states are intrinsically intentional.  But other materialists reject the (true) premise, maintaining that some brain states are intrinsically intentional, namely, the ones that are identical to mental states.

So here is a deep dispute within the materialist camp.  Identity theorists affirm what eliminativists deny, namely, that there are mental states.  Members of each camp believe that materialism is true, but they contradict each other as to why it is true.  Now if it not clear why materialism is true, then it is hardly clear that it is true.  That, I take it, is Pascal's point.

It is not clear that the soul is material (and thus mortal) and it is not clear that it isn't.  Neither view is ruled out or ruled in by the reason resident in the thinking reeds we are.  So you are free to believe either way.  And you are free to act either way.  If you act and live as if the soul is immortal, then you may come to believe that it is.  (See the 'holy water' passage.)  What's more, if you believe that it is then you will live better in this world if not beyond it.  So why not believe?

Of course, you may be constitutionally incapable of believing.  In that case you have a problem that is better addressed by a psychotherapist than by a philosopher.

Related articles

Is a Thinking Man's Afterlife Conceivable?

Mary Neal's Out-of-Body Experiences

Thinking Meat?

Mortalism

Eben Alexander: "We Are Conscious in Spite of Our Brains"

Mortalism Again

Lent for Atheists?

The Mortalist's Hope

Made for Thinking

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer #620:

Man is obviously made for thinking.  Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought.  Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our author, and our end.

Now what does the world think about?  Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring, etc., and fighting, becoming king, without thinking about what it means  to be a king or to be a man. 

Related articles

No Resting Place in Any Earthly Desire

Thinking Meat?

Memory and the Operations of Reason

Man's Greatness Deducible From his Wretchedness

Memory and the Operations of Reason

"Memory is necessary for all the operations of reason." (Blaise Pascal, Pensées, Krailsheimer, #651) 

This seems right.  Consider this quick little argument against scientism, the philosophical, not scientific, view that all knowledge is natural-scientific knowledge:

1. I know by reason alone, a priori, and not by any natural-scientific means, that addition has the associative and the commutative properties and that these properties are distinct.

2. If scientism is true, then  it is not the case that (1).

Therefore

3. Scientism is not true.

I grasp (understand) this argument and its validity by reason.  To grasp any such argument, it is not sufficient that a succession of conscious states transpire in my mental life.  For if the state represented by (1) falls into oblivion by the time I get to (2), and (2) by the time I get to (3), then all I would undergo would be  a succession of consciousnesses but not  the consciousness of succession.  But the consciousness of succession is necessary to 'take in' the argument.  And this consciousness of succession itself presupposes a kind of memory.  To grasp the conclusion as a conclusion -- and thus as following from the premises -- I have to have retained the premises. There has to be a diachronic unity of consciousness in which there is a sort of synopsis of the premises together with the conclusion with the former entailing the latter.

But of course something similar holds for each proposition in the argument.  The meaning of a compound proposition is built up out of the meanings of its propositional parts, and the meaning of a simple proposition is built up out of the meanings of its sub-propositional parts, and these meanings have to be retained as the discursive intellect runs through the propositions.  ('Discursive' from the L. currere, to run.)  This retention -- a term Husserl uses -- is a necessary condition of the possibility of understanding.

And so while I do not grasp an argument by memory (let alone by sense perception or introspection), memory is involved in rational knowledge.

The Pascalian aphorism bears up well under scrutiny.

Example of associativity of addition: (7 + 5) + 3 = 7 + (5 + 3).  Example of commutativity:  (7 + 5) + 3 = (5 + 7) + 3.  The difference between the two properties springs to the eye (of the mind).  Now what must mind be like if it is to be capable of a priori knowledge?  Presumably it can't just be a hunk of meat.

But if the below companion post is right, not even sense knowledge is such that its subject could be a hunk of meat.  We are of course meatheads.  But squeezing meaning out of mere meat -- there's the trick!

Companion post: Pascal on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience  

Related articles

Rosenberg's Definition of Scientism and the Problem of Defining 'Scientism'

Steven Pinker on Scientism, Part One

Eric Voegelin's 1948 Definition of Scientism

Jerry Fodor's Idiosyncratic Understanding of 'Scientism'

Man's Greatness Deducible From his Wretchedness

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

Man's greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals is wretchedness in man, thus recognizing that, if his nature is today like that of the animals, he must have fallen from some better state which was once his own. (Pensées, Penguin, p. 59, #117, tr. Krailsheimer)

"What is nature in animals is wretchedness in man."  That is a profound insight brilliantly expressed, although I don't think anyone lacking a religious sensibility could receive it as such.  The very notion of wretchedness is religious.  If it resonates within you, you have a religious nature.  If, and only if.

Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as healthy and well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in Pascalian divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. Pascal writes that we "must have fallen from some better state."  That is not obvious.  But the fact remains that we are in a dire state from which we need salvation, a salvation we are incapable of achieving by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

How do we know that?  From thousands of years of collective experience. 

Related articles

Is a Thinking Man's Afterlife Conceivable?

Schopenhauer on Islam, "The Saddest and Poorest Form of Theism"

Are the Dogmas of Catholicism Divine Revelations?

No Resting Place in Any Earthly Desire

Pascal's Wager: Minimalist Version

Believing in God and the soul incurs no costs and disbelieving brings no benefits.

Pascal Again on the Immateriality of the Subject of Experience

It is surprising what different people will read into and read out of a text.  A reader challenged me to find a valid argument in Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57): "What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial."

Rising to the challenge, I offered this:

1. We are sentient: we feel pleasure, pain, etc. (suppressed premise)
2. Nothing material could be sentient.
Therefore
3. As subjects of sentient states we are not material beings.

 

This is a valid argument, hence not a non-sequitur, as my correspondent had claimed.   (Non sequitur is Latin for 'it does not follow.')

There is no doubt that we have material bodies.  And there is no doubt that many physical pains and pleasures can be assigned more or less determinate bodily locations,  typically where some damage or stimulation has occurred or is occuring.  Those are 'Moorean facts.'  As data of the problem they are not in dispute.  The question, however, is whether that which feels pleasure and pain, etc., call it the subject of sentient states, is material or immaterial in nature.  Pascal thinks it obvious that it is not.  I don't think it is obvious one way or the other.  But I do maintain that there are very good reasons to hold that the subject of sentient states is immaterial.  To put it another way, I don't think it is obvious that materialism about the mind is false.  But I do think it is reasonably rejectable.

My correspondent subsequently suggested the following argumentative reconstruction of the above passage:

 

1. We feel pleasures, pains, etc.
2. We do not feel these sensations "in our hand or arm or flesh or blood."
3. Therefore, not in any part of our body or in our body as a whole.
4. So, if not in our body (the "material" part of us), then in an "immaterial" part of us (mind or spirit).
5. So, An immaterial part of us must exist as the only part of us in which pleasures, pains, etc can reside.

 

The trouble with this reconstruction is that it is uncharitable: it ascribes to the genius Pascal a premise he could not possibly maintain, namely, (2).  (2) is plainly false, and so not reasonably imputed to any half-way intelligent person, let alone to one of the most powerful minds of the 17th century.  "I take it that Pascal meant to suggest that we don't experience pains and pleasures as located in various parts of our body. But we do, all the time."

 

But surely Pascal in not denying the obvious, namely, that we say things like, 'Doc, I've got a pain on the left side of my left knee.'  It is a plain fact that we experience physical pains and pleasures as located in various part of our body: toothaches in a tooth, headaches in or at the head, etc. 

 

The point, however, is that the pleasures and pains as felt, as experienced, as data of consciousness, cannot be identified with anything physical.  It may sound paradoxical, but it is true: physical pains and pleasures are mental in nature.  My patella is not mental in nature, nor is my chondromalacia patellae, nor are it causes.  But the pain I feel is mental in nature.  And it is clearly  not literally in the knee, or literally in any part of my body or brain.  'In' is a spatial word.  You will not find my knee pain literally in my knee or literally in my brain.  What you will find are the physical causes of the pain.

 

That's one point.  Related to it is the point that the subject (that which feels them and that in which they inhere) of these sensory qualia is also irreducibly mental in nature.  (No doubt the transition from the first point to the second is subject to Humean scruples, but that is whole other post.)

 

Now it may not be obvious that Pascal is right to maintain that pains and their subjects are irreducibly mental in nature, and thus immaterial.  But I think it is perfectly obvious that this is what Pascal is maintaining., and that what he is maintaining is in no way ruled out by any obvious fact.   My judgment, of course, is not based on that one slender quoted passage but on having read the whole of Pascal's magnificent book of Thoughts.  

Pascal on the Subject of Experience: A Non Sequitur?

I recently quoted Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57): "What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial."

 A reader comments, "Doesn't P. 108 strike you as a hopeless non-sequitur, if we take it as an argument at all? Just try to recast it as a valid inference."

If I thought that the aphorism embodied a non sequitur, I would not have approvingly quoted it.  So let me rise to the challenge and present Pascal's thought in the form of a valid argument.

But let's first note that  the first question in the Pascal quotation is genuine while the second is rhetorical.  The second, therefore, is a statement  in interrogative dress.  The second question expresses the proposition that nothing material is the subject of sentient states.  Needless to say, Pascal is not talking about just hand, arm, flesh, and blood.  They are but examples of any physical part of the body where 'body' covers brain as well.

But does the passage embody an argument?   The 'must' in the third sentence suggests that it does. So let's interpret the passage as expressing an enthymematic argument. The argument could be made explicit as follows:

1. We are sentient: we feel pleasure, pain, etc.  (suppressed premise)
2. Nothing material could be sentient.
Therefore
3. As subjects of sentient states we are not material beings.

Clarificatory note: (2) is to be understood as saying that nothing material could be the ultimate subject of sentient states, the ultimate bearer or possessor of such states.  This is compatible with the admission that, in a secondary sense, the body of a sentient being is also sentient.  (Compare indicative sentences and the propositions they express.  That propositions are the primary truth-bearers does not prevent us from saying that sentences are in a secondary sense either true or false.) 

The above is a valid argument: the conclusion follows from the premises.  Hence the Pascal passage, interpreted as I have interpreted, does not embody a non sequitur, let alone a "hopeless" non sequitur.

Of course, a much more interesting question is whether we have good reason to accept the premises.  Since the first is self-evident, the soundness of the argument rides on the second.   Now some will say that the argument begs the question at the second premise.  But that depends on what exactly 'begging the question' amounts to.  Let's not go there.  And please note that begging the question is an informal fallacy, whereas accusations of non sequitur question the formal validity of arguments.  I will cheerfully concede, however, that the anti-materialist must support (2): he cannot just proclaim it obvious or self-evident as he can in the case of (1).

I will conclude by pointing out that although (2) is not self-evident, neither is its negation.  So this is a point on which reasonable dispute is possible.  This is a live issue.  (That some do not consider it such is not to the point.) Subsequent posts will examine the case for the immateriality of the subject of experience.   

What am I?

Blaise Pascal, Pensees #108 (Krailsheimer, p. 57):

What part of us feels pleasure? Is it our hand, our arm, our flesh, or our blood? It must obviously be something immaterial.

Is it my eyeglasses that see yonder mountain? No, they are merely part of the instrumentality of vision. Is it my eyes that see the mountain, or any part of the eye (retina, cornea, etc.)? The optic nerves or the visual cortex? All of this stuff hooked together? If you say yes, then what accounts for the unity of the visual experience? Eyeglasses, eyes, and all the rest are merely parts of the instrumentality of visual consciousness, its physical substratum. Not eye, but I see the mountain. What am I? Arguably, if not obviously, something immaterial.

Kerouac October Quotation #20: The Body So Thick and Carnal

Blaise Pascal says not to look to ourselves for the cure to misfortunes, but to God whose Providence is a foreordained thing in Eternity; that the foreordainment was that our lives be but sacrifices leading to purity in the after-existence in Heaven as souls disinvested of that rapish, rotten, carnal body -- O the sweet beloved bodies so insulted everywhere for a million years on this strange planet. Lacrimae rerum. I dont get it because I look into myself for the answer. And my body is so thick and carnal I cant penetrate into the souls of others equally entrap't in trembling weak flesh, let alone penetrate into an understanding of HOW I can turn to God with effect. The situation is pronounced hopeless in the very veins of our hands, and our hands are useless in Eternity since nothing they do, even clasp, can last. (Vanity of Duluoz, p. 133. Photo by Tom Palumbo.)

And Yet Again on the God of the Philosophers: A Summing Up

This topic is generating some interest.  I 've gotten a good bit of e-mail on it.   Herewith, a summing-up by way of commentary on an e-mail I received.  Joshua Orsak writes:

I wanted to email you to tell you how once again you have elevated the medium of the Internet blog with your recent threads on "The God of the Philosophers" and "The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob". As a minister, a person interested in  mystical experience, AND with a keen interest and even passion for philosophy, I have always found myself perplexed why we have to bifurcate our heart-based and mind-based encounter with the world like that. Personally, I've always thought of philosophy (of religion) and religion as encountering the same Divine reality in different ways. In philosophy we study God as an object, in religion we encounter Him as a subject.

Pascal and Buber on the God of the Philosophers

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob -- not of the philosophers and scholars."  Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which  he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654.  Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):

These words represent Pascal's change of heart.  He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham.  Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought.  The God of Abraham . . . is not suspectible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature.  What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)

Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard.  We encountered it yesterday when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea.  But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread.  As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob -- the God of religion -- to the God of philosophy.  In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction.  Let's try to sort this out.

It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and  cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc.  But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or the judgments I make about it.  It too is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments.  The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object.  And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence. 

Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him.  But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God.  In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur.  He moves from the unproblematically true

1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation

to the breathtakingly false

2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica)  is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.

As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error.  When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought.  When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing.  A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind.  She remains in her interiority  delightfully transcendent.

It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al.  There is and can be only one God.  But there are different approaches to this one God.  By my count, there are four ways of approaching God:  by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense.  To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes.

I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality.  It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu.  But that's not to say that the menu is about itself:  it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating.  The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it.

Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Childs, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"

On Owning Land

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #113 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 59):

It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it. 

Pascal is right:  what good will owning acres and acres of land do me? In the end a man needs only -- six feet.  And before the end I should be seeking truth, not lusting after land.  So I remind myself when the urge to buy land grips me.

Neither Angel Nor Beast

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329:

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.

The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations of his self-degradation.

It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirtuality.

A Pascalian Indication of Our Fallenness

Edward T. Oakes in a fine article quotes Pascal:

The greatness of man is so evident that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is called nature we call wretchedness in man; by which we recognize that, his nature now being like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his. For who is unhappy at not being a king except a deposed king? Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no one ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes; but anyone would be inconsolable at having none.

My Favorite Pascal Quotation

Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to repy, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

On Wasting Time With Philosophy (And a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.