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Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

Continue reading “Welcome to Maverick Philosopher“

The Political Theology of the Sanctuary Movement

The existence of sanctuary jurisdictions, whether state or local, is one of the main bones of contention between Left and Right. This is a fight to  the political death of one side or the other. There can be no compromise with our political enemies.  To understand what the fight is about, we need to know  the history of the sanctuary movement.  The following verbatim from Sean Davis, The Hard Truth About the Sanctuary Movement:

The American sanctuary movement, by contrast, rewards criminality and endangers innocent citizens. Its history began in 1971 in Berkeley, California, at the height of the anti-Vietnam protests, when city officials passed a resolution declaring Berkeley a “City of Refuge” for draft dodgers. Eleven years later, Gus Schultz, a left-wing Berkeley pastor, expanded the idea by declaring his church a safe harbor for asylum seekers fleeing El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.

In early 1985, the city of Berkeley passed the following resolution:

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that no employee of the City of Berkeley violate the established sanctuaries by assisting in investigations, public or clandestine, by engaging in or assisting with arrests for alleged violation of immigration laws by the refugees in the sanctuaries or by those offering sanctuary, or by refusing established public services to the established sanctuaries.

City councilors further resolved that the “sanctuary originally offered by the churches be expanded to include the entire city and that BERKELEY become a CITY OF REFUGE[.]” San Francisco, across the bay from Berkeley, followed suit in 1989, and the sanctuary city concept quickly spread across the country to Tucson, Seattle, Duluth, and Ithaca.

The actions of those offering sanctuary at the time violated U.S. immigration law, because the asylum claims being made by Latin American refugees were in almost every case rejected during the Reagan administration. The reasoning was that if the migrants were, as they claimed, fleeing violence in their home countries, they could flee to the nearest safe country—whether Mexico to the north or Venezuela or Colombia to the south—rather than to the U.S. Because they were not seeking refuge in the nearest safe country, they were determined by the U.S. government to be economic migrants, seeking economic opportunities in our country, rather than war refugees seeking an escape from violence. As such, they did not qualify for asylum.

Fast forward to 2021, when the Biden administration threw federal immigration law out the window. In effect, under the guise of granting asylum, it federalized and supercharged the sanctuary city efforts that began in the 1980s, erasing the border and inviting anyone into the U.S. who wished to come.

The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimated there were more than eight million encounters along the U.S.-Mexico border during the Biden years, with some estimates north of ten million. Migrants arrived from all over Latin America, often with the aid of drug cartel coyotes who were either paid by the job or expected services to be rendered once their charges reached the U.S. Coached by lawyers from so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to make asylum claims, they were then released into the U.S. on their own recognizance and told to appear in court years later to have their asylum claims adjudicated. The Biden administration even arranged to have many of them flown—at the American taxpayer’s expense—to cities of their choice.

Thus what had started as a narrow effort to take care of a small number of needy refugees in a single city developed, after several decades, into a sprawling global industry involving national governments, NGOs, criminal syndicates, and hundreds of billions of American taxpayer dollars a year. Every institution involved had either a political or an economic incentive to ensure a never-ending flow of migrants into the U.S. Forget vetting. Forget filtering out criminals and drug traffickers. Forget ensuring that only those willing to assimilate into our culture should be admitted into our country. The illegal immigration-industrial complex had become a self-perpetuating machine.

Over the past year-and-a-half, the second Trump administration has reestablished secure borders—without which a country can hardly claim to be a country—and has attempted to begin deporting those who entered illegally during the previous four years. But its efforts have been met at every turn with opposition, often violent, even when it comes to deporting the most dangerous illegal immigrants. And much of this opposition is sanctioned by state and city officials enlisted in the sanctuary movement.

As of last year, the U.S. Department of Justice calculated that twelve states and the District of Columbia—nearly one-quarter of the country—had become sanctuaries for illegal immigration. In addition, many major cities outside of those states—including Albuquerque, Boston, New Orleans, Newark, and Philadelphia—had been designated as sanctuary cities. The Center for Immigration Studies counts the number of sanctuary cities or counties across the country at more than 200.

Of Fauci and the Fifth

Aaron Kheriaty, Icarus Descending

Whenever [Anthony] Fauci is in the news, Elon Musk takes the opportunity to post on X, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” Based on the number of reposts, even by Elon’s standards, countless disaffected Americans—who lost years of education during school closures, who were injured by a shot they were forced to take or who (like me) lost their jobs for refusing to take it, who were prevented from sitting with loved ones dying in hospitals, or who suffered depression, drug relapse, or suicidality during prolonged lockdowns—agree that there should be legal consequences for Fauci’s record of deception and manipulation, now thoroughly documented for anyone who cares to look.

Iran War: Two Very Good Articles

Victor Davis Hanson, What the Situation on the Ground in Iran Actually Looks Like

Brian T. Kennedy, A Defense of the President’s Strategy in Iran

The Iranian regime’s strategy today is simple. Fight a war of attrition against the United States. Maintain strategic, military, and economic relationships with Communist China and Russia to keep the economy afloat and the arsenal of drones and missiles replenished. And wait for the day when President Trump is out of office, trusting that his successor will lack his resolve. The mullahs believe time is on their side. Every American president before President Trump taught them to believe it.

[. . .]

To avoid a forever war, we need to understand a truth that our political class resists: as long as the Islamic Republic stands, it is a permanent enemy of the United States.

What we face is not a forever war, but a permanent problem—the perpetual ambition of the mullahs to build nuclear weapons—with which we must deal. If regime change is not possible, however desirable it may be, then the next best option is a military strategy that continuously destroys Iran’s nuclear capabilities as they appear, for as long as they appear, until American missile defenses are fully operational.

This is not the endless nation-building of Iraq and Afghanistan. It requires no occupation, no democracy promotion, no American garrisons rebuilding Iranian society. It is the periodic and decisive application of American power in defense of the American homeland—nothing more, and nothing less.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 60 Years Ago: REVOLVER

Good commentary here:

The LP was released in August 1966, when “Wild Thing” by the Troggs topped the Billboard charts. It was a fascinating musical moment historically: “Revolver” arrived just as pop music was pivoting from straightforward rock toward psychedelia, experimentation, and studio-driven albums. The Beatles were not the only ones evolving, of course. The year 1966 saw a remarkable wave of experimentation that also produced “Pet Sounds,” “Blonde on Blonde,” “Freak Out!,” and other ambitious studio works, as popular music rapidly evolved from straightforward rock-and-roll into a vehicle for artistic exploration. A creative arms race, if you will. Still, “Revolver” — raw, edgy, avant-garde, kaleidoscopic, and at times unsettling — ushered in a sound that would go on to define the rest of the 1960s.

Epic Life Elements

Vlastimil Vohanka  tells me he met  online with Marin Zhelezov on June 13, 2026 and discussed the nature and examples of epic life.  VV solicits my comments. Consume cum grano salis. I have not read Zhelezov beyond what he is quoted as saying below.  Here are the elements of an epic life, as formulated by Zhelezov as reported by VV.   My comments are signaled by ‘BV.’

1. Travel — must have, adventures unfold with travel.

BV: True! To the young, in particular, I say: get out there and take the risks. “A man sits as many risks as he runs.” (Henry David Thoreau) See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won’t regret your adventures. Then you can boast, “Been there, done that.” Forever after you will enjoy the having done what the old man, having had enough of this vain world, would no longer  want to do.

But be careful! Especially you women who too often are trusting to the point of being  pollyannish.  See The Young and the Restless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan.

2. Meaningful goal, not just entertainment.

BV: Of course. No ‘killing time.’ Make good use of your incarnation, your time in the human body. Serious games for entertainment, games that require concentration and deep study to play well: chess and Go, for example.

3. A sense of leveling up, catching progressively stronger pokemon —> boss battle.

BV:  The formulation here is too sloppy for it to be worth my time trying to make sense of it.

4. Flow state, act at the edge of your competence.

BV: There are two ideas here that ought to be separated.  You can perform at the edge of your competence without entering the flow state, but if you enter said state it will probably be at the edge of your competence.  Take it to the limit to see where your limits lie.  The trick is to go to the limit without falling into the abyss.

In the late ’70s, training for a marathon, I pushed as hard as I could. One day after a training run, I urinated blood. I had taken it to the limit. A one-time event. Never pissed blood again. I had the good sense to back off. But if you don’t push hard, you won’t know where your limits lie.

During that marathon training  I had gotten myself into the shape you have to be in to experience the flow state called the ‘runner’s high.’ I experienced  it a few times. It is rare, like a mystical experience, but it is not a mystical experience. It is a form of ‘mundane transcendence’ in which your vehicle is no longer  a Volkswagen bus but a supercharged Corvette.

As a a young man I drove many a time from Dayton, Ohio where I had a teaching job to Boston, Massachusetts where I had girlfriends, without stopping except for gas. 18-20 hours of driving. Thermos coffee and sandwiches for body fuel. The first ten hours were a warm-up.  I then entered the flow state, in touch with my inner Neal Cassady,  ready for some serious driving.  “Put me on a highway/Show me a sign/ Take it to the limit/One more time.” (Eagles, 1975)

Some years later I traded in the VW bus for  a 1988 Jeep Cherokee base model: five-speed manual tranny, 4.0 liter, six-cylinder engine, four-wheel drive, off-road shocks, oversized tires, and manual air conditioning. Bought it in Ohio, but kept it in Arizona despite the fact that I live in the infernal Valle del Sol — from which I don’t escape in the summer like some snowbird wimps I could mention.

Manual air  conditioning: if you want air, you use your God-given hands to roll  down the windows. In this part of the country manual AC is also know to the politically incorrect as ‘Mexican air conditioning.’ “Roll down the windows, Manuel!”

One blazingly hot August I drove straight through from Bishop, California up on U.S. 395 to Chandler, Arizona, 600 miles, alone. Stopping for gas in Blythe, on the California side of the Colorado river, I noted that the afternoon temperature was 115 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. Bouncing along Interstate-10 I saw that the only people with their windows down were me and the Mexicans.

It’s no big deal, really, driving through 115 degree heat in the middle of the day in the middle of the desert with the windows down.  You take a bandanna and soak it in the ice water in your cooler and wrap it around your neck. When the dry blast of desert wind hits the wet bandanna some serious evaporation takes place, cooling your neck and with it the rest of your body. Feeling a little drowsy after four hundred miles of nonstop driving? Stoke up a cheap cigar, say that Swisher Sweet that’s been aging under the seat alongside those oily shop rags, and throw another audio tape into the deck. May I recommend Dave  Brubeck? Or how about Kerouac reading to the piano accompaniment of Steve Allen? Or perhaps that latter-day beat, Tom Waits.

With four on the road, one in the hand, a cigar in the mouth, some boiling hot McDonald’s drive-through java in the other hand, Brubeck on the box,  proudly enthroned at the helm of a solid chunk of Detroit iron, rolling down a wide-open American road, with a woman waiting at the end of the line, you’re feeling fine.

5. Winning = you must defeat someone, curing cancer is meaningful but it won’t feel epic.

BV:  I agree if the one you attempt to defeat is your own lower self. But why must one defeat someone other than oneself?  The above reads like a  ‘manospheric’ compensatory reaction to the feminization of boys, a reaction by boys who were prevented from exercising their innate masculine aggressiveness in the schoolyard or on the playing fields.

I recall reading about the schoolyard  ‘tug of war’ being replaced by a ‘tug of peace’ along with the dodge ball we played back in the day.  Sickening! I of course oppose such asinine feminization. But I also oppose the mindless reaction thereto: the abuse and denigration of women.

6. Element of collecting, like Diablo 2, collecting items, making you stronger, proof of past adventures.

BV: I am a collector of trophies, ribbons, photographs, religious and secular mementos, not to mention  books, books, and more books all as proof of past adventures, literary and otherwise, especially during my Wanderjarhren.  I don’t understand people who get rid of their books.  Many of my books are like treasured photographs. I can tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek. That book, like so many others with their inscribed accession date, marginalia,  tell-tale bookmarks, love letters, dedications, and what-not are treasured mementos.

It is not clear to me, however, how this vast pile-up of personal antiquities makes one stronger.

7. Esoteric knowledge put in practice, secrets.

BV: I need some examples.

8. Coadventurers, RPG party, guild, sense of belonging to an exclusive identity (wizard’s guild). Builds frenship [sic]

BV:  What’s the RPG party?  The Reactionary Philatelic Gastroenterologists? The Royal Patrons of Goombahs? The promiscuous use of unexplained abbreviations rankles my ass. And we can’t have that.

9. Winning a battle brings a maiden as a reward.

BV: Here the toxic masculinity of these argonauts of the ‘manosphere’ again  rears its ugly head.  How much of this is mere reaction, reflexive as opposed to reflective, to their feminization? And as I have stated many times, masculinity as such is not toxic, any more than femininity as such. But there are forms of masculinity that are appropriately described as ‘toxic,’ meaning poisonous and destructive to their agents and even more to their victims.  Anyone who can’t see that is a combination of stupid and morally obtuse.

Few are the women these days who fancy themselves ‘damsels in distress’ waiting for a heroic male in shining armor to come along and save them.  Few are the ‘maidens’ these days who see themselves as rewards or trophies.  They will not object to being mounted, in a context of love and commitment, but not on a wall.

10. Must have some form of risk.

BV: I agree. Life is for living. No living to the full without some risk-taking. The risks are all out there waiting to be taken, in matters of money, of love, of the spiritual quest.  In the latter, the serious seeker must face the risk of demonic assault.  The demons hate us and want to destroy us. There is Unseen Warfare; Lorenzo Scupoli calls it Combattimento Spirituale.    So the highest warrior is the spiritual warrior. Take no risks without prior calculation: look before you leap. On the other hand, he who hesitates is lost. Balance your maxims. Better to sit or better to run? “A man sits as many risks as he runs.”  (Henry David Thoreau)

Later addition, after the podcast:

11. To be epic, your goal must save (some part of) the world or transcend death in the spiritual realm.

BV: Agreed.

A Trendy Example of an Alienans Adjective: ‘Artificial’ in ‘Artificial Intelligence’

My examples scattered hitherto over many a post were stodgy such as ‘decoy’ in ‘decoy duck’ and faux in ‘faux marble.’  A decoy duck is not a duck.  Faux marble is not marble. An aktuell example is ‘artificial’ in ‘artificial intelligence.’  Artificial intelligence is not intelligence any more than artificial leather is leather.  Just as there are not two kinds of leather, artificial and real, there are not two kinds of intelligence, artificial and real.  Artificial leather simulates (real) leather;  artificial intelligence  simulates (real) intelligence.  Those are bare assertions.  I link to an argument of mine at the end of this post. This just over the transom from Tony Flood:

Philosophically trained, this Substacker asks the right questions re:  “AI without minds.” Doubting, as a good Lonerganian should, that AI is at all a species of intelligence, I’ve nevertheless been socially inhibited about using locutions like “so-called AI.” But no more. A baby brain is not an incipient computer, and computers neither are nor have minds. That insight might resonate with you as it does with me. She’s my “go-to” on this topic.

Yes, Tony, your Lonerganian point resonates with me although I put it in a different way above using ‘alienans adjective,’ a term  I picked up from Peter Geach, no slouch of a philosopher.  From whom did he get it? No idea.  Probably from some medieval dude.

I explore the topic further and give more examples in Fiction and Alienans Adjectives.

As for the substantive question whether AI systems are conscious, I argue for a negative answer in my Substack article Artificial Intelligence and the Unity of Consciousness.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kitsch, Sentimentality, and Dylan

April Stevens’ and Nino Tempo’s version of Deep Purple  became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I’ve enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:

But I have been re-reading Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (1961), said to be his best novel, wherein we find on p. 135:

“This whole country’s rotten with sentimentality,” Frank said one night, turning ponderously from the window to walk the carpet. “It’s been spreading like a disease for years, for generations, until now everything you touch is flabby with it.”

And then there is the poet Wallace Stevens with his great aphorism, “Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.”

Yates would approve.

Richard Yates and Bovarysme

The two favorite novels of Richard Yates were Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  You now can guess what bovarysme means. An A. I. bot, cribbing from the 2008 New Yorker article Like Men Betrayed by James Wood explains the term and Yates’s use of it in Revolutionary Road.

Richard Yates utilized the concept of bovarysme—the delusional desire to escape one’s reality through romantic fantasy, derived from Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary—as a central critique of mid-century American masculinity and suburban life. In his novel Revolutionary Road, the protagonist Frank Wheeler exhibits this trait by clinging to the dream of a creative life in Paris while remaining trapped in a mundane job and domestic routine. 

The narrative serves as a “savage inversion” of Flaubert’s work: whereas Emma Bovary’s delusions lead to her suicide, April Wheeler dies trying to break free from suburban stagnation, while Frank ultimately “wins” by retreating into the safe, conformist stability she despised. Yates portrays Frank as a “rank escapist” who arrogantly claims the right to dream of adventure while secretly craving the timidity and security of the status quo.

This theme extends beyond Revolutionary Road to Yates’s broader body of work, where male characters are depicted as anxious, hysterical, and easily provoked by female resistance. Their bovarysme functions as a defense mechanism against feelings of inadequacy, often exacerbated by their perceived failures to live up to patriarchal or wartime expectations.  Critics note that this obsessive focus on male anxiety and the failure of romantic delusions makes Yates’s work a radical, albeit traditional, indictment of the “American solitude” found in post-war suburbia. 

‘The Dutch Act’

I just now came across this phrase for the first time on p. 442  of Blake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty.   If literary biography/pathography is your thing, Bailey’s the man.  The context is a discussion of suicide, which is the act the phrase names.  I recommend this  erudite disquisition on the term and its variants.

As for Yates’s attitude to suicide, it seems he held that one was a wimp to off oneself, but also a wimp to give up the hard drinking and heavy smoking — piecemeal suicide one might call it —  which put paid to his life at the relatively young age of 66.

What surprises me is the cocksurety of Yates and others who believe that we are mere material systems, and thus that we are easily disposed of. I am not saying we are not merely material systems.  I am not a dogmatic affirmer of this view. Maybe we are. But to be cocksure of such a thing in the face of counter-evidence is surprising and suggests an unseriousness of attitude bordering on insanity.  The sane look before they leap in matters large and small. Beware the leap of despair. Such a leap is a ‘leap of faith’ in one’s ultimate nonentity.

I have often wondered to what extent one’s cock or the female counterpart thereof influences the over-confident conviction of the mortalist.  Is it your cock,  the dowsing rod of your concupiscence, that makes you so sure?  Our concupiscence contributes mightily to the sense most people have that the sense world exhausts reality.  There may or may not be eternal life, but  it is clear that the long dong of concupiscence will not lead one to the waters of eternal life.

As for the word ‘cocksurety,’ I thought I had coined it.  I was wrong. We are not only concupiscent but vain as well, and much else besides. And so the the Calvinists speak of total depravity — which brings us back around to the Dutch.

Finally, is it slanderous to speak of Dutch valor in the case of the pot-valiant?

Sentimental Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

“A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on.” (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody.   YouTuber comment: “Late 1959. I was in 4th grade, listening to KFWB Los Angeles.”  Same here. Same year, same grade, same station, KFWB, Channel 98! Color Radio! ‘Color Radio!’ as part of their promo was not a racial reference but an allusion to the fact that color TV had recently become available.

My favorite deejay was B. Mitchel Reed.  I learned ‘semolian’ and the Yiddish ‘mishigas’ from him. His real surname is ‘Goldberg,’ which means mountain of gold. I will say no more lest, at this time of resurgent anti-semitism, ‘thanks’ to the despicable Democrats,  I ‘trigger’ any anti- or philo-semites that might be hanging around. It’s Saturday night, friends.  Let’s forget about this political Scheissdreck for a few hours.  Tomorrow’s another day. I now take a sip of my Jack & Coke and slide into some Boomer nostalgia.

Timi Yuro, Hurt. When I first heard this I was sure she was black. I was wrong. She’s Italian, and her real name is Rosemarie Timotea Auro. What pipes!

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Roy Orbison, In Dreams

Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon

Ketty Lester, Love Letters

Etta James, At Last 

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Sentimental you say? What would life be without sentiment? You say it’s overdone? You suffer from an excess of cool. It’s Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, and feel. Tonight we feel, tomorrow we think.  About sentimentality and everything else under the sun.

A Question about the “Our Father”

Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven. (sicut in caelo et in terra.)

This is the first half  of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples according to Matthew 6: 9-13. My question concerns a seeming ambiguity in the second two lines.  Are we praying that a) the kingdom come on earth, or are we praying b) not that the kingdom come on earth, but that it come in heaven, and that the will of the Father be done on earth as it is in heaven?

Perhaps it would be better to put the problem in terms of an amtriguity (to coin a word).  In the second two lines, are we praying that

a) the Father’s kingdom be realized on earth?

or that

b) the Father’s kingdom be realized in heaven?

or that

c) the Father’s kingdom be realized both on earth and in heaven, perhaps by way of some mysterious spiritualization of the material realm concomitantly with a materialization of the spiritual realm?

I claim that there is this amtriguity (three-fold ambiguity)  in the second two lines.  How deal with it? My natural Platonic (some would say ‘gnostic’) tendency is to view (b) as the correct interpretation.  But I am open to (c) and thus to the idea that Christianity in its innermost core is involved in a mysterious synthesis, a sort of quasi-Hegelian Aufhebung of the matter-spirit opposition in a way that lies beyond the power of our  discursive-dianoetic minds to grasp, except by way of images and shaky analogies.

But we need to back up a step.

I take ‘earth’ to refer to the entire material realm, and not to the planet Earth, although of course our home planet, “the third stone from the Sun” (Jimi Hendix) is a tiny bit of the material realm, i.e., the physical cosmos. This is an important distinction, which is why you should always use the majuscule ‘E’ when referring to our home planet.   When the Artemis astronauts  broke free of the Earth’s gravitational field, and took a look at the dark side of the Moon, they remained  on earth (in terra).  They remained within the material realm. They did not enter heaven, assuming that ‘heaven’ refers to a pure spiritual, and thus immaterial, realm. You cannot rocket into heaven, and no matter where in the universe the rocket takes you, you will be on earth. Not even Elon Musk can rocket you into heaven.

Collateral observation: When Christ ascended into heaven, he did not take off like a rocket into outer space.  He did not ascend like a rocket ascends. He ‘dematerialized.’ But not in the ‘beam-me-up-Scotty’ sort of way via matter transmitter, but in a mysterious, wholly spiritual way.  In the Ascension, Christ did not de-materialize in order to re-materialize in a different spatiotemporal location. “The right hand of the Father” cannot refer to a spatial location. In the Ascension, Christ vanished from the material realm and entered a purely spiritual, hence wholly immaterial, realm.  Or at least, that is the (Platonic-gnostic) way I am inclined to think of the Ascension.

I hope the Ascensive digression helps  explain the distinction between earth (the earthly realm) and heaven (the wholly spiritual, and thus immaterial, realm).

But there is wrinkle that must be noted. I distinguished between earth (the material realm) and the planet Earth.  But of course Earth is a part of the material realm. (Everything Earthly is earthly, but not conversely.) So if the Father’s kingdom comes (is realized on earth), it will presumably be realized on the planet Earth, although not necessarily to the exclusion of its being realized elsewhere in the material realm.

Now given the distinction between the earthly as the realm of space-time-matter and the heavenly as the realm of the immaterial, non-spatial, and eternal, there is a clear difference between the realization of God’s kingdom on earth in the future and its realization in heaven in eternity.

(The vexing question of the relation of time and eternity obtrudes here, but it must relegated to  the ‘back burner’  for now. For example, does eternity come after Time? What on earth, or in heaven, could that mean?)

And so, in conclusion, I pose the question: which of (a)-(c) did Christ intend when he taught his disciples to pray the Pater Noster?

Word of the Day: Aboulie with a note on Literary Pathography

I came across this French word in Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 177: “Here is the heart of Eliot’s aboulie in the autumn of 1921: a horrified glimpse of human depravity and the fear that few have the stature to transcend it.” I should have realized that  it is the French form of ‘abulia.’  Merriam-Webster: an abnormal lack of ability to act or to make decisions.  Further:

The English term we use today comes from a New Latin word that combines the prefix a-, meaning “without,” with the Greek word boulē, meaning “will.” Abulia can refer to the kind of generalized indecision that makes it impossible to choose what flavor ice cream you want, though it was created to name a severe medical disorder that can render a person nearly inert.

Cf. here:

Le terme « aboulie » provient du grec ancien a- (privatif) et boulê (volonté), signifiant littéralement « absence de volonté ». En psychiatrie, il désigne un trouble mental caractérisé par une diminution ou une privation de la volonté, rendant difficile l’initiation et la coordination des actions, même planifiées.

I thank Vito Caiati for recommending Gordon’s outstanding 721 page biography five summers ago. I am currently re-reading it.  Biblioteca Vallicelliana  accession date: 9 July 2021.  The real Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome is described here.  Been there, done that. I would be surprised if Dr. Caiati has never played the archivarius in its depths.  I myself did not make it inside. Came at the wrong time, a pretty Italian woman informed me. Lunch time, siesta, la dolce vita, the Italian thing, their thing. La loro cosa.

T. S. Eliot is a man worth a 700 page plus biography. I am not so sure about  Richard Yates, John Cheever, Charles Jackson, and Philip Roth, literary artists of high relatively recent repute. The consummate literary biographer Blake Bailey has written stomping tomes about each.  They are meticulously  done and you will not find a bad sentence anywhere in those thousands of pages.  I have read the first three.

But I wonder:  is it a good use of a life to poke through the details of lives of men far from exemplary? Eliot was imperfect but he had a sense of what is at stake in this life.  Yates didn’t.  Cheever, the ‘Catholic cocksman,’ did, but refused to rein in his concupiscence which he freely indulged  with both sexes. Poor Mary Maldisposta,* as he called his wife.  He was ever eager to mount her, well into his old age, unsated by his extramural activities, but Mary, though no prude, was, well, maldisposta. Can you blame her?

At what point does literary pahthography negate the value of literary biography?

And what about me? How much am I a philosopher seeking to answer the question How should we live? and how much a literary voyeur?

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*Maldisposta is the feminine singular form of the Italian adjective maldisposto, which translates to ill-disposed, hostile, unfavorable, or prejudiced.  It describes a person or attitude that is unwilling, averse, or openly antagonistic towards someone or something.  (AI generated.)