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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.

 

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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?

_______________

*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.)

Conservatives, Liberals, and Happiness

Top o’ the Stack.

Conservatives are happier. Why?

Conservative explanation. Marriage and religious faith are conducive to happiness. More conservatives are married than liberals, and more practice a religion. Ergo, conservatives as a group are happier than liberals as a group.

Liberal explanation. Conservatives are happier because they turn a blind eye to the injustices of the world. They are oblivious to inequality. And when they do see it, they rationalize it. Ignorance is bliss. Conservatives naively believe that people can better themselves by the practice of the old virtues of frugality, perseverance, hard work, self-control, deferral of gratification, and the like, when the truth is that people are products of their environment and need government help to do well.

As a conservative, I of course consider the liberal explanation to be bogus.

Rhetorical Questions

I asked, “Don’t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?” Tom Carroll responded, “I think you meant that rhetorically, but yes — that is the way I understand it.”

Two points.

First, rhetorical questions should be used sparingly if at all in serious, non-polemical writing. If you have something to say, say it and use the indicative mood.  So no, I did not mean the question about potencies rhetorically.  When I write philosophy I avoid rhetorical questions.  It is different when I write polemically. For example, “Whoever said that illegal aliens are illegal persons?”  is an example of a rhetorical question. *

Second, how should we define ‘rhetorical question’?  A rhetorical  question is a sentence, spoken or written, that is grammatically interrogative but logically indicative.  It is a sentence in the form of a question used to make a statement or assert a proposition. A sentence is not the same as the proposition it is used, by someone on a given occasion, to express.  We use ‘The sky is blue’ to express the same proposition a German speaker expresses when he  says Der Himmel ist blau.  The two sentences, which express one and the same sense (Frege’s Sinn) are both token-distinct and type-distinct. They are type-distinct because they belong to different languages.  These facts point us in a Platonic direction.

Just what is the ontological status of this proposition (Frege’s Gedanke)  that is one to the many of its sentential expressions?  And what about language-bound linguistic types, in particular sentence types, which are different for different languages? What is their ontic and epistemic status? What is their mode of being and how do we know them?  Do you eyeball (literally see) the type? No you don’t. These types too are one to the many of their tokens. These two questions pose quite the challenge to the nominalists among us and give aid and comfort to Platonists and other species of realists.

But I digress.

One more observation anent rhetorical uses of sentences. A father says to his teenaged daughter who borrowed the old man’s car and is seen yapping on a cell phone while driving: ” Do you have to talk on that blasted phone while driving?”

I’d say that that is a rhetorical question too despite the fact that the semantic content of the man’s grammatically interrogative sentence is not indicative but imperative.  He is issuing a command, not making a statement, by the use of a grammatically interrogative sentence.

____________

*By the way, polemics has no place in philosophy proper, a topic for a separate post, wherein I would have to define ‘philosophy proper.’ This goes hand-in-hand with my deep conviction that to philosophize is to inquire, and not to promote or defend a ready-made worldview.  It follows that an apology for philosophy is not a defense of any particular philosophy,  but of the practice of philosophy-as-inquiry. Philosophies are many; philosophy is one. It also follows that a particular philosopher’s  apologia pro vita sua (apology for his life) such as the one Socrates offers in the eponymous Platonic dialogue, is a defense of the highest and most noble form of the life of inquiry.   The Latin phrase alludes to a title of an autobiographical work by John Henry Newman, which I haven’t read, but whose The Idea of the University I have read and recommend that you read. If I were king of the world I would force ever leftist university admin to copy it out by hand.

 

The Fall of France and the Folly of Immigration without Assimilation

France’s Long Slide “is an excerpt from Éric Zemmour’s book, The Suicide of France: The Quiet Revolution That Destroyed a Nation, which was translated by Nathan Pinkoski and will be published by Encounter Books on July 14.” Zemmour offers a perceptive take on rhe MAGA movement’s two phases separated by Trump’s 2020-2024 ‘sabbatical.’ Zemmour appreciates Trump’s world-historical significance.

Excerpts from the excerpt:

. . . in Arab-Muslim civilization, the process [of civilization] that Elias describes has never happened, and passions, impulses, emotions have continued to be suppressed by ferocious, brutal reprisals. When people who have learned to control themselves encounter, on the same soil, those who expect fierce and brutal reprisals that never come, it’s a safari for the latter, where the people who have undergone Elias’s “process of civilization” become game. Against them, anything goes.

[. . .]

The existential anguish of the French people in the face of their disappearance is finally being taken seriously. The “great replacement” is no longer marginalized as a literary fad or a conspiracy theory. The French people’s desire to emancipate themselves from the State’s shackles, standards, and taxes, which enslave them without protecting them, is also recognized by all. Ideological victory has not led to political victory, but we know that it always takes time to move from one to the other.

We saw this in the United States. Trump’s unexpected success in the 2016 presidential election had caused nothing irreversible. Nobody was really ready: neither the candidate’s teams, nor the president. Nor, doubtless, the country itself. The triumph of 2024 has a completely different significance. The MAGA camp engaged in a veritable counterrevolution. A counterrevolution in the sense of the “Counter-Reformation” of the Council of Trent after the Protestant revolution. I don’t think the comparison is excessive. The revolution brought about by the Left in the 1960s tore America away from its age-old history, like a river diverted from its course. France, as we have seen in this book, followed exactly the same path in the 1970s. This revolution, which started in America, set fire to the whole of the West. It was therefore necessary for the counterrevolution to start from America too, if it is to have any chance of prevailing. [emphasis added.]

[. . .]

The 21st century will be terrible: it will be a telluric mix between the 19th century and the Middle Ages. It will see the return of states, peoples, and nations, a confrontation between great powers, where “force takes precedence over law,” in Bismarck’s famous phrase, and where the game between European rivals, France, England, and Germany, will simply be extended to the whole world, with these new players: China, the United States, Russia, India, and Turkey. It will see the return of religious fanaticism carried out by Islam, as in the 7th century, with its cohort of violence, intolerance, sacrilege, and superstition; with tribalism, pillage, massacres, mass rape, obscurantism, and irrationality.

The time has come for every people, for every continent, to return to the very essence of their civilization. This is already happening all over the planet: Russians are rediscovering Orthodoxy and the tsars, even when they were Red; China is returning to the teachings of Confucius, India to Buddha, Islam to Mohammed and the Ummah, Turkey to the Koran and the Ottoman Empire. All of them are returning to their deepest identities in order to tear themselves away from Western universalism, which they experience—partly with good reason—as a dispossession, an illusion, a subjection. Only Europe and the West are slow to reclaim their roots, perverted as they are by a corrupted universalism and a poorly digested humanism. Paradoxically, this Western universalism, once the weapon of European imperialism, has now become its prison, even its deadly poison. In the United States, the Trump network, with Vice President JD Vance as its mouthpiece, no longer hesitates to proclaim the greatness of Western civilization, Jewish prophecy and Catholic majesty, Greek rationality and Roman law. Some European countries, often the smallest, in the east but also in the west of the continent, have understood the danger and are no longer deluded by the suicidal mirages of a nihilistic universalism. That leaves the great European nations, France, Germany, and England, who are the last to understand where the wind of renewal is blowing.

Through word and deed, I’m fighting with all my might to put France back at the heart of this struggle to return to our roots, to the roots of our Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman identity, to our genius for freedom, rationality, and beauty. [emphasis added]

Gary Kasparov on Socialism

Top o’ the Stack.

In the same vein, here is a quick little rant of mine on Facebook (3 July):

THE REVOLT OF DSA know-nothings like Darializa Chevalier and that Kiros woman is less an embrace of communism than an adolescent-female rebellion against the strut and swagger of patriarchal Trump and a febrile expression of the frustration of pampered, spoiled, entitled, and over-‘educated’ malcontents who wasted years and money getting worthless degrees from leftist seminaries and can now find work only as baristas and bartenders. The notion that these punks are going to “seize the means of production” is risibility on stilts.