Maverick Philosopher

A Liberal's Notion of Self-Restraint

Tavis Smiley Too? 'Inappropriate' Sexual Conduct?

The witch hunt is on and the Left eats its own.  PBS has suspended distribution of Smiley's late-night talk show. I don't think much of Smiley's opinions, you understand, but I fear that we may end up like the Soviet Union or China under the Cultural Revolution. Don't tell me it can't happen here; just look at the outrages that have already happened here. From the L. A. Times:

“I have the utmost respect for women and celebrate the courage of those who have come forth to tell their truth,” Smiley said. “To be clear, I have never groped, coerced, or exposed myself inappropriately to any workplace colleague in my entire broadcast career, covering six networks over 30 years.” [emphasis added]

If Smiley had exposed himself appropriately, then no problem?

By the way, what is it about liberals that makes them use 'inappropriately' inappropriately?

Whipping out your schlong in front of a female colleague is not inappropriate behavior but morally wrong behavior.  Why can't you liberal boneheads say that? Too 'judgmental'? But that's what you are doing: you are making moral judgments. Did Bubba behave 'inappropriately' with Juanita Broderick? But if Clinton had shown up at a black-tie event in a swimsuit, then you could say, appropriately, that  his behavior was inappropriate.

'Inappropriate' is far too weak a word for rape and sexual intimidation. On the other hand, 'reach out' is too strong a phrase for the uses to which it is put by contemporary language morons. If I hear that your wife has suddenly died, I may 'reach out' to you in sympathy and with an offer of assistance. But if I phone you to inform you that one of your tail lights is out, I haven't 'reached out' to you.

Finally, Smiley's 'tell their truth' is quite the howler. For his accusers are (at least) telling their truth.  Truth is truth. There is no such thing as his or hers or their truth. 

Is Anal Bleaching Racist?

It would have to be, right?

Logically prior question: what is anal bleaching?

Filed under: Decline of the West

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Infatuation

Infatuation is one part sexual desire, one part restlessness, and one part misdirected love of the Good.

Clinton Redux

Here:

In the past few days a number of notable liberals have decided to take allegations of sexual assault against former president Bill Clinton seriously. Let’s just say that discarding the Clintons when they’re no longer politically useful to retroactively grab the higher moral ground isn’t exactly an act of heroism. But if we’re going to re-litigate history, let’s get it right.

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Hugh Hefner's Legacy

Here:

Divorce, broken homes, bankruptcy, generations of children raised by a single parent, sexually-transmitted diseases, addiction, AIDs, early death, loneliness, despair, guilt, spiritual ruin, and 58 million innocent children butchered in the one place they should be safest, in their own mother’s womb.

Read it all.  I am not clear, however, how the libertarian opening coheres with the sequel.

Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner

Here: 

Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post-World War II era, men's magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair.

Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation — in which American men have never distinguished themselves — and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French.

Camille Paglia does not merit the plenary MavPhil endorsement, but C. P. is a good partial antidote to P. C. , and she never fails to entertain.

You may enjoy this critical piece: Camille Paglia on Philosophy and Women in Philosophy.

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Hugh Hefner went deaf from too much Viagra but said he'd rather have sex than hearing

The evolution of the Playboy woman's body type from the 1950s to now

Was Hefner a Condition of the Possibility of Post-'60s Feminism?

Damon Linker:

By mainstreaming pornography in Playboy magazine, and valorizing the pursuit of (male, heterosexual) hedonistic pleasure with his highly publicized playboy lifestyle, Hefner made a singularly important contribution to the overthrow of received norms of sexual morals that made modern (post-1960s) feminism possible. But he also accomplished this overthrow by exploiting women, reducing them to sex objects for use (and sometimes abuse) in the satisfaction of the insatiable (and now unconstrained) male libido.

If Linker's claim is that no sort of post-1960s feminism could have arisen without Hef's mainstreaming of pornography, valorization of male hedonism, and overthrow of received sexual norms, then I doubt it.  A sort of equity feminism could have arisen without the Hefnerian excesses and without women aping the basest elements in men.  I'd be interested in hearing what Christina Hoff Sommers would have to say about this.

That Playboy  was a necessary condition of the possibilility of Playgirl is a more credible claim than that the Playboy lifestyle was a necessary condition of the possibility of the rise of any sort of worthwhile post-1960s feminism.

Hugh Hefner Dead at 91

There is so much to say. 

For now, just this: If you have devoted your whole soul to the enjoyment and promotion of the pleasures of the flesh, then you had better hope that the soul dissolves with the dissolution of the body. Contemporaries will think that of course it does, but it is not quite obvious, is it?  

Hef thought of himself as a liberator and good person. But then I think of all the abortions, all the betrayals, all the marriages and families destroyed by the sexual revolution to which Hef was a major contributor.

Guardian article here.

David French, Hugh Hefner's Legacy of Despair

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Here:

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" my father used to say. It drove me crazy when he said that. Now, it's dawned on me that he was right.

What Do Women Want?

"They want dangerous men who are civilized." (Jordan Peterson)

Like it or not, it's true.

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The Role of Reich in the Widening Gyre

Wilhelm that is. I read his The Function of the Orgasm many moons ago, not long after I read a reference to him and his orgone accumulators in Kerouac's On the Road, which made it onto the Amazon 100 list.  The Orgasm book did not.  Neither did Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism, also in my library.

The Relativity of Lived Time

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), This Business of Living, Diaries 1935-1950, Transaction Publishers, 2009, p. 126, from the entry of 10 December 1939:

Idleness makes hours pass slowly and years swiftly. Activity makes the hours seem short and the years long. 

A very sharp observation. Unfortunately, most of Pavese's diary is not at this level of objective insight.  It is mostly self-therapy, a working though of his misery and maladjustment and self-loathing. For example,

And one can understand the innate, ravening loneliness in every man, seeing how the thought of another man consummating the act with a woman -- any woman -- becomes a nightmare, a disturbing awareness of a foul obscenity, an urge to stop him, or if possible destroy him. Can one really endure that another man -- any man -- should commit with any woman the act of shame? Noooo. Yet this is the central activity of life, beyond question. . . . However saintly we may be, it disgusts and offends us to know that another man is screwing. (p.64)

Has the poet come too much under the influence of Stile Nuovo? There is the tendency of romantics, and Italians are romantics, to put women on pedestals and make 'angels' of them. The thought of sexual intercourse, were it possible, with an angel or with a woman one has angelicized is admittedly repulsive. 

Dark is the morning that passes without the light of your eyes.

Related: Suicide, Drafts, and Street Corners

Summer of Love, Winter of Decline

The down side of the 'sixties.

The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty.

The point is essentially correct, but I would add needed nuance by making a tetrapartite distinction among eros, philia, agape, and sexus. It is true that the word  eros puts most in mind of sex, raw and raunchy, down and dirty. And it is true that eros, the love of the lower for the higher, is often mixed with purely sexual desire and sometimes perverted by it. But the love of the spiritually empty for that which might fulfill them is erotic, even when freed of the sexual.  The longing love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the love of Wisdom, the love of God are not examples of philia or agape. Philia is friendship, and friendship is between equals. But I am not the equal of Wisdom or Justice or the Good; I merely aspire to be wise, just, and good.  

This aspiration for the higher is erotic. But it may be best to introduce a different word to ward off confusion: the aspiration is erothetic. In a decadent, corrupt, sex-saturated society any talk of eros and the erotic is bound to be misunderstood. Erothetic love is love that aspires and seeks to acquire. It is rooted in need and lack, spiritual need and lack.

As for agape, it is the love of the higher for the lower. It is a love that bestows, grants, helps. To put the point in a way that exploits the ambiguity of the genitive construction, the love of God (objective genitive) is erothetic; the love of God (subjective genitive) is agapic.  The same goes for the love of Christ. God does not lack anything; nor does he aspire or seek to acquire. The divine plenitude does not allow for aspiration or acquisition.

My point, then, is that eros is not to be condemned; it is not inherently "down and dirty." The love of the Good and the desire to be good, the desire to imitate the Good and participate in it are noble aspirations. (The Christian and Platonic allusions will not be missed by the well-educated, e.g., imitatio Christi, methexis.)

What ought to be condemned is not eros, but sex when it is divorced from such ennobling adjuncts as the erothetic, the philiatic, and the agapic.  What ought to be condemned is sex reduced to the 'hydraulic,' to the exchange of bodily fluids for the sake of mere sensuous gratification.¹  This perversion is well-conveyed by the contemporary phrase 'hook-up.' I hook up a hose to a tank to fill it. But we live in a sick society getting sicker with each passing day and I am something of a vox clamantis in deserto. So I don't expect many even to understand what I am saying, let alone agree with it.

These topics are deep and rich. If you want to gain some insight into them you need to begin at the beginning, or at least at the 'Athenian' beginning, as opposed to the 'Hierosolymic' beginning, with the 'divine' Plato and his Symposium. Then work your way through the history of thought, philosophical and theological. One good guide in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros.

But to have the time and energy for this you will have limit your consumption of media dreck, not to mention your tweeting, facebooking, and what all else.

NOTES

¹ Of course, sexual intercourse involving one or more humans is never a mere exchange of bodily fluids. Even among sub-human animals, sexual intercourse is never purely hydraulic in nature: sentience is involved and various emotions. Filling my gas tank in the usual manner would be an example of a purely hydraulic exchange. Insofar as humans approach the hydraulic in their 'love'-making, humans degrade themselves. This degradation is a free act possible only because humans are spiritual animals. An animal consumed by lust cannot degrade himself, but a man can. We could say that when a man tries to become less than an animal he proves that he is more than one.

Plain Talk About Transgenderism

Sometimes the cure for P. C. is C.P. , Camille Paglia, that is:

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

And a fortiori for transracialism.

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Polyamory

A reader sends us to an article on polyamory by Carrie Jenkins. The last time we had occasion to mention Professor Jenkins was when she was the recipient of a very sweet Christmas present from a  certain proprietor of a philosophy gossip site.  

About polyamory I will say only the following at the moment. Decide what the purpose of your life is and then decide whether polyamory fits with that purpose.

A Game I Play

I flip on a sit-com. Then I count the seconds before the onset of sexual innuendo, allusions, and the like.  

We are concupiscent from the ground up. And this by (fallen) nature. Our natural condition is exacerbated by the sex saturation of contemporary society.

I played my game most recently the other night when I watched the beginning of "Hot in Cleveland."  'Hot' says it all.  But what's hot today will be stone-cold tomorrow.  

Advice on Sex from Epicurus

Robert Blake is back in the news, which fact justifies, as if justification is needed, a re-post from 18 May 2011.

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

Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:

     I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much
     inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you
     will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb
     well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure
     your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked
     by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets
     any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not
     receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican
     Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)

Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the  centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise -- except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.

Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath  no fury like a woman scorned."

Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career.  Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.

This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks.  Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the  earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely. 

Shakespeare on Lust

Sonnet 129: Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame

 

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

 

Related:

 

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

 

Like a Moth to the Flame

 

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in -- wait for it -- Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what profiteth it to confess one's lust when one supports the destructive Dems, the abortion party, a party the members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

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The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

We are concupiscent from the ground up, and matters are only made worse by our living in sex-saturated societies.  As a result our erotic 'ears' are continually being pricked up by salacious tales and rumors.  

These distractions are  exploited by the Clinton machine which knows that digging up ancient dirt on the opponent will trump any serious discussion of his ideas and policies.

And that is what we are seeing.  Any intelligent and intellectually honest person should be able to grasp that what matters are the issues and the policies proposed to deal with them.  The national debt, immigration legal and illegal, national sovereignty, free speech, religious liberty, gun rights, abortion, the composition of the Supreme Court, globalism, trade policy, radical Islam, and so forth.

This is what we should be discussing primarily, not the character defects of the candidates.

Policies first, persons second.  Every man has his 'wobble,' and every woman too.  Look hard enough and you will find it. But men and women come and go.   Ideologies and institutional structures last a lot longer to either contribute to the flourishing of you, your children, and grand children -- or the opposite.

But as I said, we are concupiscent from the ground up.  We will stay distracted, and Hillary will win.

Plenty of other factors are in play, no doubt, such as the large group of 'tribal' women who will vote for Hillary because she is one of them.  

Richard Swinburne's Paper Now Online

Here is the paper by the distinguished philosopher of religion that was found 'hurtful' by the culturally Marxist crybullies at the recent Midwest meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers.

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

UPDATE (10/4): The hyperlink to the Swinburne paper, embedded within the First Things entry, is not now working but it was yesterday.

For compensation, read Rod Dreher's Rallying the Kukla Clan.  Excerpt:

Some people present for the talk melted down when confronted by Swinburne’s view. The president of the SCP, Michael Rea, apologized for all the butthurt caused by the discussion of Christian ideas in a gathering of Christian philosophers. But when word of the controversy got out to the broader philosophy community, some prominent philosophers reacted with anger — at Swinburne’s defenders, and those who were angry that the SCP president had apologized for Swinburne’s speech. Among the critics was Georgetown’s Rebecca Kukla:

So Swinburne, one of the world’s most prominent philosophers, is guilty of “hate” and “privilege,” as are his defenders — this, according to Kukla, a Georgetown philosopher who is also senior researcher at the Jesuit university’s Kennedy School of Ethics.

Well, Kukla went on to post the following comment — now deleted — on the Facebook page of Yale philosopher Jason Stanley, under a remark in which he denounced Swinburne and his defenders this: “F–k you, assholes.” Said the editor-in-chief of the Kennedy Institute’s ethics journal:

I apologize to readers for offense caused by the coarse language here, but it’s important to know exactly what passes for critical discourse among academic progressives near the top of the philosophy profession — especially given that the statement has disappeared down the memory hole.

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The Custody of the Heart

If you practice the custody of the heart, it may save you from unnecessary folly -- as delightful as romantic follies can be.  Do you feel yourself falling in love with your neighbor's wife?  Don't tell yourself you can't help it. Don't hijack Pascal's "The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing."  Get a grip on yourself.

Don't follow the musical example of 'The King.'   "Wise men say/ Only fools rush in/ But I can't help/ Falling in love with you."

A liberal will accuse me of 'preaching.'  Damned straight I'm preaching. Perhaps I should have saved this for Sunday morning.

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The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1971.

Epigram 57

Here lies my wife. Eternal peace
Be to us both with her decease.

Epigram 59

I married in my youth a wife.
She was my own, my very first.
She gave the best years of her life.
I hope nobody gets the worst.

J. V. Cunningham is the model for John Williams' 1965 novel  Stoner.  An underappreciated and unfortunately titled masterpiece, it is about one William Stoner, an obscure professor of English at the University of Missouri, Columbia.  At its publication in '65 it pretty much fell still-born from the press, but the years have been kind to it and it is now valued as the great novel that it is.  Unfortunately, Williams, who died in 1994, did not live to see its success.

In Five Books of Professors, the late D. G. Myers describes it like this:

(4.) John Williams, Stoner (1965). Based on the life of J. V. Cunningham and especially his disastrous marriage to Barbara Gibbs. Easily the best novel ever written about the determined renunciations and quiet joys of the scholarly life. Stoner suffers reversal after reversal—a bad marriage, persecution at the hands of his department chair, the forced breakup of a brief and fulfilling love affair with a younger scholar—but he endures because of two things: his love for his daughter, who wants nothing more than to spend time with her father while he writes his scholarship, and his work on the English Renaissance. His end is tragic, but Stoner does not experience it that way. A genuinely unforgettable reading experience.

"Genuinely unforgettable" sounds like hype, but this is one novel I, for one, will not forget.  For more by Myers on Stoner, see here.

My copy of the novel sports a blurb by Myers: "It will remind you of why you started reading novels: to get inside the mystery of other people's lives."  Yes.

Companion post:  A is A: Monism Refuted

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Callicles as Precursor of De Sade

At Gorgias 492, tr. Helmbold, the divine Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Callicles:
  
     A man who is going to live a full life must allow his desires to
     become as mighty as may be and never repress them. When his
     passions have come to full maturity, he must be able to serve them
     through his courage and intelligence and gratify every fleeting
     desire as it comes into his heart.

     [. . .]

     The truth, which you claim to pursue, Socrates, is really this:
     luxury, license, and liberty, when they have the upper hand, are
     really virtue, and happiness as well; everything else is a set of
     fine terms, man-made conventions, warped against nature, a pack of
     stuff and nonsense!

Now let us consider what the decidedly undivine Marquis de Sade has Mme. Delbene say in Julliette or Vice Amply Rewarded:

     . . . I am going to dismiss this equally absurd and childish obligation which enjoins us not to do unto others that which unto us we would not have done. It is the precise contrary Nature     recommends, since Nature's single precept is to enjoy oneself, at the expense of no matter whom. But at our leisure we shall return to these subjects; for the nonce, let's now put our theories into  practice and, after having demonstrated that you can do everything without committing a crime, let's commit a villainy or two to  convince ourselves that everything can be done. (p. 30, emphasis  in original, tr. Casavini)

From the cover: "abridged but unexpurgated from the original  five-volume work especially for the adult reader." In other other words, the good stuff, i.e., the philosophy, has been cut, but the 'adult matter' remains. I get a kick out of this use of 'adult' -- but that's another post.

The natural man, in the grip of his lusts, is a natural sophist:  what can be done is eo ipso permissible to do.  Reason in a philosopher without God easily becomes unhinged.

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At Gorgias 492, tr. Helmbold, the divine Plato puts the following words into the mouth of Callicles:
  
     A man who is going to live a full life must allow his desires to
     become as mighty as may be and never repress them. When his
     passions have come to full maturity, he must be able to serve them
     through his courage and intelligence and gratify every fleeting
     desire as it comes into his heart.

     [. . .]

     The truth, which you claim to pursue, Socrates, is really this:
     luxury, license, and liberty, when they have the upper hand, are
     really virtue, and happiness as well; everything else is a set of
     fine terms, man-made conventions, warped against nature, a pack of
     stuff and nonsense!

Now let us consider what the decidedly undivine Marquis de Sade has Mme. Delbene say in Julliette or Vice Amply Rewarded:

     . . . I am going to dismiss this equally absurd and childish obligation which enjoins us not to do unto others that which unto us we would not have done. It is the precise contrary Nature     recommends, since Nature's single precept is to enjoy oneself, at the expense of no matter whom. But at our leisure we shall return to these subjects; for the nonce, let's now put our theories into  practice and, after having demonstrated that you can do everything without committing a crime, let's commit a villainy or two to  convince ourselves that everything can be done. (p. 30, emphasis  in original, tr. Casavini)

From the cover: "abridged but unexpurgated from the original  five-volume work especially for the adult reader." In other other words, the good stuff, i.e., the philosophy, has been cut, but the 'adult matter' remains. I get a kick out of this use of 'adult' -- but that's another post.

The natural man, in the grip of his lusts, is a natural sophist:  what can be done is eo ipso permissible to do.  Reason in a philosopher without God easily becomes unhinged.

Prostitution

A great evil well-exposed by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute, in Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (W. W. Norton, first American edition 2015).

While on Ego Surfari . . .

. . . I turned up this delightful tidbit in Gilleland the Erudite's archive of arcana from 2006:

Bill Vallicella (aka Maverick Philosopher) quotes the Latin phrase "Post coitum omne animal triste est," translates it as "After sexual intercourse every animal is sad," and remarks "The universal quantifier causes me some trouble." A variant of the phrase gives exceptions to the general rule: "Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque," every animal except woman and rooster. Or should that be "Gallum," Frenchman?

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Can Love be Commanded?

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)

Can love be reasonably commanded?  Love is an emotion or feeling.  As such it is not under the control of the will. And yet we are commanded to love God and neighbor.  How is this possible?  An action can be commanded, but love is not an action. Love is an emotional response.  So how can love be commanded?

In the case of loving God, there is not only the problem of how love can be commanded, but also the problem of how one can love what one doesn't know.  Some people are such that to know them is to love them.  Their lovableness naturally elicits a loving response. But apart from the  mystical glimpses vouchsafed only to some and even to them only rarely and fitfully, God is not known but believed in.  He is an object of faith, not of knowledge.  (If you say that God is known by description via theistic 'proofs,' my response will be that such knowledge is not knowledge of God but knowledge that something or other satisfies the description in question.)  How can we love God if we are not acquainted with God?  Genuine love of God is love de re, not de dicto.

I won't be discussing the second problem in this entry, that of how one can love what one doesn't know, but only the first, namely: How can love be commanded, whether it be the love of God or the love of neighbor?

Here is quick little modus tollens.  If love can be commanded, then love is an action, something I can will myself to do;  love is not an action, not something I can will myself to do, but an emotional response; ergo, love cannot be commanded.

One way around the difficulty is by reinterpreting what is meant by 'love.'  While I cannot will myself to love you, I can will to act benevolently toward you.  And while it makes no sense to command love, it does make sense to command benevolent behavior. "You ought to love her" makes no sense; but "You ought to act as if you love her" does make sense.  There cannot be a duty to love, but there might be a duty to do the sorts of things to and for a person that one would do without a sense of duty if one were to love her.

The idea, then, is to construe "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as "Thou shalt act towards everyone as one acts toward those few whom one loves" or perhaps "Thou shalt act toward one's neighbor as if one loved him."

The above is essentially Kant's view as reported by William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, pp.236 ff.  It makes sense.  But how does it apply to love of God? 

Perhaps like this.  To love God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul is to to act as if one loves God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul.  But how does one do that?  One way is by acting as if one loves one's neighbor as oneself.  Another way, and this is my suggestion, is by living the quest for God via prayer, meditation, and philosophy. 

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St. Valentine's Eve at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

A Curious Extrapolation

The old man's libido on the wane, he thinks more clearly and more truly about sexual matters.  And when the waning of all his physical forces and endowments reaches its term -- will he then think best of all, or not at all?

The dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance.  But the dove is mistaken.  The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle.  Are we like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly.  Do we need the body to think?  Is the body necessary for thought?  Pascal says that our whole dignity consist in thought.  Is our dignity tied of necessity to the flesh ?

Or are we like the rocket whose propulsion has nothing to do with wings, the rocket the  principle of whose propulsion is Newton's Third Law of Motion: To every action there is an equal but opposite reaction?

A curious extrapolation and a strange analogy.

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Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he may be even more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag-team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandalstraps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

Mirabile Dictu: Playboy to Drop Nudity

Reports the NYT.   Commentary by Mollie Hemingway:

Mollie: This is the most interesting paragraph in the New York Times article:

When Mr. Hefner created the magazine, which featured Marilyn Monroe on its debut cover in 1953, he did so to please himself. ‘If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80, Playboy is meant for you,’ he said in his first editor’s letter. ‘We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex …’

This was the advertisement for the product he sold. The reality, of course, was very different. By the end of his life—for at least the last few decades, really—Hefner’s lady friends were bought off with drugs, nice digs, and a chance at fame, later telling stories about how much they detested what they had to do in exchange for those things. They weren’t in a position to discuss Picasso, Nietzsche, or jazz any more than Hefner could.

He may have thought that his vision of sexual libertinism would please himself but only the most adolescent of men would believe that he achieved that. It’s a great morality tale about what happens when you throw off received knowledge about something as important and foundational as sex. Sex is much more complicated than Hefner’s commercial product suggested and pretending otherwise was a good way to end up extremely lonely, if not diseased.

On some level, the image of manhood and sexuality that Hefner was selling was always contradictory. You don’t get to be a cultured and refined modern man without exercising judgment and self restraint, but the sexual revolution that Hefner helped kickstart encouraged men and women to abandon the very inhibitions that helped make sex so alluring in the first place.

Hefner suggested that the complete male was a man who appreciated the finer things in life. In this view, women were just one of the many consumer goods that a gentlemen would appreciate. But such a view is profoundly demeaning to women and, it turns out, even worse for men. Hefner threw away the intimacy and drama of monogamy for what was supposed to be the excitement and fulfillment of easy sex.

The lack of any naked ladies in the pages of Playboy is a perfect description of where sexual libertinism actually leads.

Like a Moth to the Flame

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself.  There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky.  For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless.  He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic.  He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers.  The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.  

One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being.  The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man.  He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway.  And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?  

One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life.  If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic.    All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest?  So what good is it?  Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature.  Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?

SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books.  I've read both twice.)

Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.

Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.

Related:  Trotsky's Faith

The Last Words of Leon Trotsky

 

Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, with van Heijenoort standing behind Frida.

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Modality, Possible Worlds, and the Accidental-Essential Distinction

This from a reader:

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes in its article on Essential vs. Accidental Properties, "A modal characterization of the distinction between essential and accidental properties is taken for granted in nearly all work in analytic metaphysics since the 1950s.”  Personally, I find modal definitions of this type very hand wavy.  Ed Feser states my objection more eloquently than I can: 

 

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, the possible worlds analysis of essence has things backwards: we need to know what the essence of a thing is, before we can know what it would be like in various possible worlds; talk of possible worlds, if legitimate at all, must get explained in terms of essence, not essence in terms of possible worlds ( Aquinas, iBooks edition, page 90).  

 

I think the modal characterization will be a dead end for us.

Response

Two points.  First, I do not understand how one could characterize the essential versus accidental distinction except modally.  Second, a modal characterization need not be in terms of so-called 'possible worlds.'  One should not suppose that a characterization is modal if and only if it is in terms of possible worlds.

First point first.  I am a blogger and a native Californian.  I might not have been either.  So being a blogger and being a native Californian are accidental properties of me.  I could have existed without possessing these properties.  But I could not have existed without being human.  So being human is an essential property of me.  Generalizing, if P is an essential property of x, then x must have P, it cannot not have P.  If P is an accidental property of x, then x need not have P, it could lack P.  And conversely in both cases.

Note that I had to use modal words to characterize the distinction: 'might,' 'could,' 'must,' 'need not,' 'cannot.'  I conclude that the accidental-essential distinction is irreducibly modal: it cannot be made except modally.  It is indeed essentially modal!

To appreciate this, consider the first two accidental properties I mentioned.  I was not always a blogger: speaking tenselessly, there are times at which I am not a blogger.  But I was always and will always be a native Californian.  Speaking tenselessly again, there are no times at which I am not a native Californian.*  It follows that we cannot define an essential (accidental) property of x as a property x has (does not have) at every time at which it exists.  The distinction cannot be made in temporal terms; one needs to employ modal language.

If a thing has a property essentially, then it has the property at every time at which it exists.  But not conversely:  if a thing has a property at every time at which it exists, it does not follow that it has the property essentially.  So again it should be clear that the distinction in question is ineliminably modal.

I should make it clear that the modality in question here is non-epistemic/non-doxastic.  Suppose Tom died an hour ago, unbeknownst to me.  I ask you, "Is Tom teaching now?"  You say, "Could be!"  But of course it can't be that he is teaching now if he is dead now.  You are not saying that it is (really) possible that he be teaching now; you are saying that his teaching now is logically consistent with what you know or believe, that it is not ruled out by what you know/believe. 

Second point second.  From what I have written it should be clear that we don't need the jargon of possible worlds to talk modally.   But it is a very useful and graphic way of talking.  Accordingly,

D1. P is an accidental property of x =_df there are possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

D2. P is an essential property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

We can add a third definition:

D3. P is a necessary property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P, and x exists in every possible world.  Example:  Omniscience is a necessary property of God: he has it in every world in which he exists, and, since he is a necessary being, he exists in every world.  Non-theological example: Being prime is a necessary property of the number 7:  7 has it in every metaphysically possible world in which it exists, and it exists in every such world.

The above definitions do not sanction the reduction of the modal to the non-modal.  For modal terms appear on both sides of the biconditionals.  Nor could we say that the right-hand sides explicates or analyzes the left-hand sides.  So I agree with Feser as quoted above.  What is first in the order of metaphysical explanation is a thing's being essentially thus and so or accidentally thus and so.  We can then go on to represent these states of affairs in possible worlds terms, but we need not do so.

Jenner and Dolezal.  Is Jenner essentially male?  I should think so.  Being male is a biological determination.  It can be spelled out in terms of sex chromosomes.   They are different in males and females.  Jenner as he is today is a sort of super-transvestite: he is not just a male in women's clothing, but a male who has had his body surgically altered to have female anatomical features.  But he is still male.  How could he be a woman?  You can't be a woman without first being a girl, and he was never a girl.

If you deny that Jenner is essentially biologically male, will you also deny that he is essentially biologically human?  If not, why not?  If literal sex change is possible, is species change possible? 

Is Rachel Dolezal essentially Caucasian?  Well, of course.  Race, like sex, is biologically based.  It is not something you choose.  Nor is it a social construct.  Barack Obama thinks that we Americans have racism in our DNA.  That's bullshit, of course.  There is nothing biological about being a racist.  But there is something biological about race.  You can be a traitor to your country, but not to your race.

Biology matters!  And so does clear thinking and honest talk.  Obama take note.

______________________

*Ignoring the fact, if it is a fact, that I existed pre-natally.  If this wrinkle troubles you, I can change my example.

 

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Sexbots and Sublunary Arts

This just in from D. B.:

Apropos of fairly recent usage of the word 'sublunary' on the MavPhil  blog,
and the entry on sexbots, I offer you C.S. Lewis' take on both in this
paragraph from That Hideous Strength. 

"On this side (of the moon, facing the earth - DB), the womb is barren
and the marriages are cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. 
There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each 
lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by 
devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in 
their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
(First Scribners Classics ed., 1996, p. 271) 

The Dawn of the Sexbots

'Dawn' in the title above is curiously inapt in these times of twilight as the light goes out in the West. Indications of decline: fascination with the grotesque and the abnormal; the mainstreaming of deviant behavior; the cultural ubiquity of pornography; the loss of any sense that we are spiritual beings with a destiny that transcends the merely physical; the loss of the belief that there is anything worth living for beyond the gratification of our basest desires; the abdication of those in positions of authority, together with their denial of reality and their routine lying, as witness the brazen mendacity of Obama and Hillary.  Vanity Fair, May 2015:

At 55, he [David Mills] is tired of atheism activism, which he’s been doing since the late 1970s, and ready for a career reboot. Recently he became the owner of a RealDoll—the Rolls-Royce of sex dolls, created two decades ago by artist and entrepreneur Matt McMullen. Mills, who learned about them from an episode of the sitcom Family Guy, visited the company’s Web site and was convinced the photos were of models, not dolls, because they all looked so realistic. More research proved otherwise.

“I thought, Well, gee, I would enjoy something like that!” he recalls. “I mean, I love women. God, I absolutely love women.” And especially their legs. “That’s what attracts me to a woman as much as a face, if not more.” Big problem, though: “My fundamental personality conflict is that I really like women but I don’t like to be around people.”

Mills is morally sick with a sickness that  eventually comes to seem normal to its victim.  For Mills, a woman is just a female animal body.  But such bodies have their manifold physical imperfections. So he wants a perfect body, one that maximally excites his lust, whether or not the body embodies a person.  To relate to a person is too much of a bother when the gratification of lust is the supreme desideratum.  Enter the sexbot, a body that embodies nothing.

What’s an average day like for him [Mills] now?

“Well, somebody will send me an e-mail: Oh, it’s just so sadddd. I know you’re such a sad person with this doll and I feel sooo sorry for you,” he says, mocking this individual. “Well, here’s how sorry you should feel for me: I sleep till 11, and if I want, maybe later. I get up. I sit around a couple hours, watch TV, maybe have lunch with my daughter if she comes. You know, go out to a restaurant and have a good dinner, come back, maybe watch some porn or TV. Maybe have a late-night snack, a beer or two, and go to bed. So don’t feel sorry for me, for Christ’s sake.”

Matt McMullen, above, of the appropriately named Abyss Creations.  Look at his eyes.  If the eyes are the windows of the soul . . . . Look at his arms, plastered with ugly tattoos, the graffiti  of the human body whereby a spiritual animal defaces the temple of the spirit . . . .

Elizabeth Anscombe, "Contraception and Chastity"

An untimely meditation by a brilliant mind.  A powerful antidote to the confused suggestions of the age.

Excerpt:

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here - not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can't be the mere pattern of bodily behaviour in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition.

Why Stop Here?

Why stop at these traffic lights? (Pun intended) We need to go further so as to include the pederasts of NAMBLA and PIE. We need lights depicting an adult hand-in-hand with a child with a little heart between them to signify the sexual love that unites them.  After all, it is discriminatory to marginalize the practitioners of sexual perversions.  Surely it is the role of the state in these enlightened times to provide full acceptance and legitimation of everyone, regardless of race, creed, or sexual perversion.  Story here.

When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963.  Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis.  It was indeed a wonderful/remarkable year.  I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough to remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain.  What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way?  Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

St. Valentine's Day's Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them -- like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda (2/15):

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  -- is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

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Feser on Sex, Part II

The phenomenal Edward Feser.  How does he do it?  He teaches an outrageous number of courses at a community college; he has written numerous books; he gives talks and speeches, and last time I checked he has six children.  Not to mention his weblog which is bare of fluff and filler and of consistently high quality, as witness his second in a series on sex.  It concludes:

So just what is the deal with sex, anyway?  Why are we so prone to extremes where it is concerned?  The reason, I would say, has to do with our highly unusual place in the order of things.  Angels are incorporeal and asexual, creatures of pure intellect.  Non-human animals are entirely bodily, never rising above sensation and appetite, and our closest animal relatives reproduce sexually.  Human beings, as rational animals, straddle this divide, having as it were one foot in the angelic realm and the other in the animal realm.  And that is, metaphysically, simply a very odd position to be in.  It is just barely stable, and sex makes it especially difficult to maintain.  The unique intensity of sexual pleasure and desire, and our bodily incompleteness qua men and women, continually remind us of our corporeal and animal nature, pulling us “downward” as it were.  Meanwhile our rationality continually seeks to assert its control and pull us back “upward,” and naturally resents the unruliness of such intense desire.  This conflict is so exhausting that we tend to try to get out of it by jumping either to one side of the divide or the other.  But this is an impossible task and the result is that we are continually frustrated.  And the supernatural divine assistance that would have remedied this weakness in our nature and allowed us to maintain an easy harmony between rationality and animality was lost in original sin. 

 

So, behaviorally, we have a tendency to fall either into prudery or into sexual excess.  And intellectually, we have a tendency to fall either into the error of Platonism -- treating man as essentially incorporeal, a soul trapped in the prison of the body -- or into the opposite error of materialism, treating human nature as entirely reducible to the corporeal.  The dominance of Platonism in early Christian thought is perhaps the main reason for its sometimes excessively negative attitude toward sexual pleasure, and the dominance of materialism in modern times is one reason for its excessive laxity in matters of sex.  The right balance is, of course, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position -- specifically, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology, which affirms that man is a single substance with both corporeal and incorporeal activities; and Aristotelian-Thomistic natural law theory, which upholds traditional sexual morality while affirming the essential goodness of sex and sexual pleasure.

 

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Feser on Sex

Old Ed pulls no punches.  In response to Peter Singer's claim that "sex raises no unique moral issues at all," Feser remarks, "I have long regarded this as one of the most imbecilic things any philosopher has ever said."  I agree.  Feser goes on to make a number of important points.

The Part-Time Monk

The part-time monk saves his spunk for the marital bunk.

The Dirty and the Funny

The muse of philosophy must have visited my otherwise undistinguished classmate Dolores back in the fifth grade.  The topic was dirty jokes and that we should not tell them or listen to them.  "But sister," Dolores piped up, "what if you laugh not because the joke is dirty but because it is funny?"

It was a good distinction then and a good distinction now.

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The Shrinking of the Friend Zone in a Sex-Saturated Society

Editorial commentary at the Gray Lady nowadays resembles micturition more than intelligent cogitation, but there are a couple of notable counter-instances, one being the writings of Ross Douthat.  Herewith, three quotations from his recent Prisoners of Sex:

The culture’s attitude is Hefnerism, basically, if less baldly chauvinistic than the original Playboy philosophy. Sexual fulfillment is treated as the source and summit of a life well lived, the thing without which nobody (from a carefree college student to a Cialis-taking senior) can be truly happy, enviable or free.

In his second sentence above, Douthat puts his finger on another indicator of our junk culture's having gone off the rails. Must I explain why?

Meanwhile, social alternatives to sexual partnerships are disfavored or in decline: Virginity is for weirdos and losers, celibate life is either a form of unhealthy repression or a smoke screen for deviancy, the kind of intense friendships celebrated by past civilizations are associated with closeted homosexuality, and the steady shrinking of extended families has reduced many people’s access to the familial forms of platonic intimacy.

Contemporary feminism is very good — better than my fellow conservatives often acknowledge — at critiquing these pathologies. But feminism, too, is often a prisoner of Hefnerism, in the sense that it tends to prescribe more and more “sex positivity,” insisting that the only problem with contemporary sexual culture is that it’s imperfectly egalitarian, insufficiently celebratory of female agency and desire.

Sex, War, and Moral Rigorism: The Aporetics of Moral Evaluation

Fr. Robert Barron here fruitfully compares the Catholic Church's rigoristic teaching on matters sexual, with its prohibitions of masturbation, artificial contraception, and extramarital sex, with the rigorism of the Church's teaching with respect to just war.  An excellent article.

Although Fr. Barron doesn't say it explicitly, he implies that the two topics are on a par.  Given that "the Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives,"  one who accepts just war rigorism ought also to accept sexual rigorism.  Or at least that is what I read him as saying.

I have no in-principle objection to the sexual teaching, but I waffle when it comes to the rigorous demands of just war theory.  I confess to being 'at sea' on this topic.

On the one hand, I am quite sensitive to the moral force of 'The killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances'  which is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine.  Having pored over many a page of Kant, I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature,  wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances.    But what would have been the likely upshot had  the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in WWII?  Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us.  But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens.  The Catholic doctrine implies that if Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age  for two centuries -- he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Indeed, if the killing of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done.  This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish."

This extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true.    If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant.  If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant.

But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics.  No problem with that -- if the metaphysics is true.  For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know it is true?  Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism. (Not every naturalist is an eliminativist loon.) 

If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that one absolutely must resist the evildoer, and absolutely must not turn the other cheek to a Hitler?

An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered.  But a leader of a nation  is in a much different position.  Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me.  Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her rigorism remains tenable.

To sum up these ruminations in a nice, neat antilogism:

1. Some acts, such as the intentional killing of noncombatants, are intrinsically wrong.
2. If an act is intrinsically wrong, then no possible circumstance in which it occurs or consequence of its being performed can substract one iota from its moral wrongness.
3. No act is such that its moral evaluation can be conducted without any consideration of any possible circumstance in which it occurs or possible consequence of its being performed.

The limbs of the antilogism are collectively inconsistent but individually extremely plausible.

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A Question About Marriage

For many years now I have been an occasional reader of your blog, and I greatly appreciate your insight on many subjects, particularly your criticism of the Left. I am, I hate to admit, an aspiring academic who is taking on enormous debt to finish a Ph.D. in sociology of religion, and am immersed in the poisonous Higher Ed world of the SIXHIRB musical litany, but that is another story for another time.

 

My question concerns choosing a wife: Can the marriage between a non-religious person and a religious person be successful and a happy state of affairs? 

 

I am an incorrigible INFP, and I thought your logical precision and holistic perception as an INTP would aid my thinking process, which is mostly intuition/feeling. You have been married quite awhile, and I respect that greatly. You say that your wife is religious, a practicing Catholic, and that you believe that to be a good thing. I agree, and thus I am in this dilemma.

 

My Romance Story: 

 

I come from a devout Mexican Catholic family from Texas, with a very religiously devout mother who is never found without a rosary, and I consider myself 'religious' and Catholic, i.e. I go to Mass every Sunday, I pray, I believe, I read the Bible, and so forth. Now, I am certainly not a saint, as the rest of my story will show.

 

I met, during a study abroad this year, a stunning young woman  who works for the United Nations. One night, our date over red wine at a cafe quickly escalated into dozens of nights of passionate, indulgent sex, and then into several trips throughout Europe in which we brought our negligent sexual passion into the creaky beds of many hotels. Sex crazed, we were.

 

Now that I am back in the States for the holidays, free from the physical presence and temptations of the Woman, the big question of our future is at hand. Should we continue or not?  

 

We have been dating now for five months, and she is wonderful in all things, successful, an excellent conversationalist, and best of all, not a feminist! But, she has no faith, does not go to church, and largely thinks religion is oppressive, and most painfully for me, she does not believe in Christianity. I would also add she is more of an agnostic than a militant atheist, since she believes in some vague afterlife, and respects my religious beliefs. 

 

'Listen to your heart' is what they say, but my heart is confused at the moment, and the damned sex monkey does not help. The Woman is wonderful, but long term speaking, once the infatuation is over through the sobering, cold water of marriage, will religion be the stone upon which we stumble? Will I be happier instead with a practicing Catholic woman? What will my Mexican-Catholic mom say when I bring home a non-believer? She won't like it, that's for sure.

 

In my opinion, I am skeptical that it will work long term, but she thinks there is no problem. What do you say?

 

Your question is:  Can the marriage between a non-religious person and a religious person be successful and a happy state of affairs? My answer is: Yes it can, but it is not likely.  And in a matter as important to one's happiness as marriage, and in a social climate as conducive to marital break-up as ours is, it is foolish to take unnecessary risks.  I would say that career and marriage, in that order, are the two most important factors in a person's  happiness.  You are on track for happiness if you can find some occupation that is personally satisfying and modestly remunerative and a  partner with whom you can enjoy an ever-deepening long-term relationship.  Religion lies deep in the religious person; for such a person to have a deep relationship with an irrreligious person is unlikely.  A wise man gambles only with what he can afford to lose; he does not gamble with matters pertaining to his long-term happiness. 

 

So careful thought is needed.  Now the organ of thought is the head, not the heart.  And you have heard me say that every man has two heads, a big one and a little one, one for thinking and one for linking.   The wise man thinks with his big head.  Of course, it would be folly to marry a woman to whom one was not strongly sexually attracted, or a woman for whom one did not feel deep affection.  But a worse folly would be allow sex organs and heart to suborn intellect.  By all means listen to your heart, but listen to your (big) head first.  Given how difficult successful marriage is, one ought to put as much as possible on one's side.  Here are some guidelines that you violate at your own risk:

• Don't marry outside your race
• Don't marry outside your religion
• Don't marry outside your social class
• Don't marry outside your generational cohort
• Don't marry outside your educational level
• Don't marry someone whose basic attitudes and values are different about, e.g., money
• Don't marry someone with no prospects
• Don't marry a needy person or if you are needy. A good marriage is an alliance of strengths
• Don't marry to escape your parents
• Don't marry young
• Don't imagine that you will be able to change your partner in any significant way.

The last point is very important.  What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out.  People don't change.  They are what they are.  The few exceptions prove the rule.  The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities.  "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12) As I said, it is foolish to gamble with your happiness.  We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose.  So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that  you will change her.  You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.

 

There is also the business about right and wrong order.  Right Order: Finish your schooling; find a job that promises to be satisfying over the long haul and stick with it; eliminate debts and save money; get married after due consultation with both heads,  especially the big one; have children.

Wrong Order: Have children; get married; take any job to stay alive; get some schooling to avoid working in a car wash for the rest of your life.

 

I think it is also important to realize that romantic love, as blissful and intoxicating as it is, is mostly illusory.  I wouldn't want to marry a woman I wasn't madly (just the right word) in love with, but I also wouldn't want to marry a woman that I couldn't  treasure and admire and value after the romantic transports had worn off, as they most assuredly will.  Since you are a Catholic you may be open to the Platonic-Augustinian-Weilian thought that what we really want no woman or man can provide. Our hearts cannot be satisfied by any of our our earthly loves which are but sorry substitutes for the love of the Good.

 

Related: Al-Ghazzali on Choosing a Wife

 

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Some Points on Homosexuality in the Context of the Culture War

A few days ago I was blissfully unaware of Duck Diversity Dynasty, the reality show on the Arts and Entertainment channel.  I still haven't watched even one episode, nor am I particularly inclined to; the antics of rednecks are not  my thing.  I have gathered, however, that the series falls more on the entertainment end of the Arts and Entertainment spectrum. One of the characters whose reality is depicted, Phil Robertson, shown on the left, has made comments on homosexuality  that have drawn attention, to put it mildly.  I won't rehearse the details of a brouhaha about which my astute readers can be expected to be familiar.  I will simply make a few comments bearing upon the contretemps that strike me as important.

1. To have the homosexual disposition or inclination or proclivity is one thing; to exercise it in homosexual sex acts such as anal intercourse is quite another.  You may be born with the proclivity, and stuck with it, but you are free to exercise it or not.  The proclivity may be part of 'who you are,'  ingredient in your very identity, but  the practices are freely engaged in.  Acts done or left undone are contingent and thus no part of anyone's identity.  Moral criticism of  homosexual practices is not criticism of anyone for who he is.

2. It follows that rejection of homosexual sex acts as immoral is consistent with acceptance of homosexuals as people. In a trite phrase, one can hate the sin but love the sinner.  The sinful and the immoral, however, are not quite the same, though I cannot expatiate on the distinction at the moment.

It is therefore very bad journalism to describe Robertson's comments as 'anti-gay' for that elides the distinction I just drew.  Opposition to homosexual practices is not opposition to homosexuals.

And of course there is nothing  'homophobic' about Robertson's comments.  I don't reckon  that the good old boy pictured above has any irrational fear of homosexuals.  'Homophobic' is a coinage of leftists to prevent one of those famous 'conversations' that they otherwise call for.  It is a question-begging epithet and semantic bludgeon meant to close down debate by the branding of their opponents as suffering from a mental defect.  This is why only a foolish conservative acquiesces in the use of this made-up word.  Language matters.  One of the first rules for successful prosecution of the  Kulturkampf  is to never  let the enemy distort the terms of the debate.  Insist on standard English, and always slap them down when they engage in their notorious 'framing.'  As for 'gay,' that too is a word we ought not surrender.  Use the neutral 'homosexual.'   Same with 'queer.'   'Queer' is a good old word.  Nominalists think abstracta are queer entities.  There is no implication that the analysis of such is in any way proctological.

3.  Whether or not Phil Robertson and people like him can cogently defend their opposition to homosexual practices, they have a right  to hold and express their opinions in public fora,  and a right to be tolerated by those who oppose their views.  To tolerate is not approve of, let alone endorse; it is to put up with, to allow, to refrain from interfering with the promulgation of distasteful ideas.  Without widespread toleration it is hard to see how a nation as diverse and pluralistic as the USA can remain even minimally united. 

4. There are solid arguments based in theology and philosophy for rejecting as immoral homosexual practices.  And they are available to Robertson and Co. should they decide to lay down their shotguns long enough to swot them up.  These arguments won't convince those on the the other side, but then no argument, no matter how well-articulated and reasonable, no matter how consistent with known empirical fact and free of logical error, convinces those on the other side of any 'hot button' issue.

5.  As a corollary to (4), note that arguments against homosexuality needn't presupose the truth of any religion.  They can be purely philosophical.  The same goes for abortion.  If I argue against late-term abortion on the the ground that it is sufficiently like infanticide to inherit the moral wrongness of infanticide, then I argue in a way that makes no use of any religious premise.

6.  The A & E Network has every right to fire Robertson and Co. By the same token, a baker or a florist has every right to refuse service to a same-sex couple planning a same -sex 'marriage' and it is simply wrong for government at any level to force the baker or the florist to violate his conscience.

7.  In the interests of comity,  homosexuals and their practices ought to be tolerated.  Whether or not the practices are immoral, they ought to be legally permissible as long as they are between consenting adults.  But this right to be tolerated does not translate into a right to be approved or applauded or celebrated or a right to impose their views on others, or a right to change the culture to their liking.  In particular, it does not translate into a right to have their 'marriages' legally recognized.

8. Given the obvious distinction made in (1) above, the following sort of argument is invalid.  "Tom didn't choose to be homosexual; he was born that way, so his practice of homosexuality via anal intercourse is morally acceptable."  That sort of argument obviously proves too much.  Pedophiles, sadomasochists, necrophiliacs,  and so on down the list of sexual perversions are most of them born with their proclivity, but that fact does not justify their engaging in the corresponding practices.

For more on this delightful topic, see Jim Goad, When Ducks Cry.

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A Cure for Infatuation

Marriage is an excellent cure for infatuation.

It is also a test whether the infatuation was something more. If the marriage lasts and deepens, then it was; if not, then it wasn't.

To be infatuated is to be rendered fatuous, silly.  Not that infatuation is all bad.  A love that doesn't begin with it is not much of a love.  The silly love song That's Amore well captures the delights of love's incipience.  But fools rush in where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/so how are they to know?

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