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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“

Against Ostrich Presentism and Problem-Blindness

I agree with the following remark in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Zettel. 

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called “loss of problems.” (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

I prefer to say that some philosophers are problem-blind. It is not as if they have lost the problems; they never found them. They are like unto the ostrich with his head in the sand.

Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems to me genuine and ‘deep.’  It has to do with the relation of time and existence. Do only temporally present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist?  For this to be a substantive question of metaphysics, ‘exist’ in both of its occurrences in the preceding sentence cannot be in the present tense. If they were, ‘Only present items exist’ would be logically true and ‘Past and present and future items all exist’ would be logically false.  For it is logically true that only present items exist at present, and logically false that past, present, and future items all exist at present, given that ‘past’ and ‘future’ mean wholly non-present. 

So there have to be two senses of ‘exist(s)’ in play for our question to make sense.  The question, again, is this: Do only temporally present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist? Well, maybe the question just doesn’t make sense.  This seems to be the Ostrich’s view. He seems to think that logical as opposed to metaphysical presentism is the only game in town: ‘Only the present exists’ is susceptible of only one reading, the logical reading, whereas I think it is susceptible of two readings, the logical one and a metaphysical one.  In one of his earlier comments, the Ostrich (Edward Buckner) writes:

He [the logical presentist] is putting forward not a substantive metaphysical thesis, but rather a substantive thesis about language, a thesis about the meaning of ‘exists’ and ‘at present’.

The thesis, I take it, is that ‘exists’ can only be used correctly in the present-tensed way.  But if so, ‘Boethius exists’ when used to convey that Boethius is neither fictional nor merely possible, but an actual albeit no longer present person, is nonsense.  In other words, ‘exists’ has no correct tenseless use. It seems to me, however, that ‘exist(s)’ does have correct tenseless uses.  It has correct tenseless uses when we are talking about timeless entities (if such there be) but also when we are talking about items in time.

Many philosophers have maintained that there are timeless entities. If so, then ‘exists’ can be used both tenselessly and correctly.  Suppose I tell you that a prime number greater than 3 and less than 7 exists. It would be a bad joke were you to reply, Yogi Berra style, “You mean now?” But I expect the Ostrich will have no truck with the timeless.  For the Ostrich is as much a nominalist as he is a logical presentist. But even if he were to countenance so-called abstract objects, he could restrict his logical presentism to temporalia. His claim would then presumably be that ‘exists’ has no correct tenseless or time-independent use in respect of any temporal item such as Boethius. 

He might tell us  that Boethius exists in that he either existed or exists or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed.  The disjunction is true because the first disjunct is true, and because it suffices for a disjunction to be true that one of its disjuncts be true.   The Ostrich could say, reasonably, that the disjunctively omnitemporal use of ‘exist(s)’ is not genuinely tenseless since it is parasitic upon tensed expressions.

The Ostrich bids us consider

. . . the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period. Using tensed language we can say, truly, that Boethius existed, but does not exist.  Why not be satisfied with this?  

Well, if Boethius does not exist, period, what is the difference in reality between his never having existed and his having existed? Those are plainly different. What is the difference between a purely fictional individual and a past non-fictional  individual? And what is the difference between a merely possible individual and and a past actual individual? Boethius is factual, not fictional; actual, not merely possible.  He is a wholly past factual and actual individual. Historians are students of the past.  They study facts, not fictions; actualities not mere possibilities.  One could accommodate these obvious differences by holding that ‘exist(s)’ can be used correctly in two ways, the present-tensed way and in a way that expresses existence simpliciter.  To ask whether cats that swim exist, is not to ask whether they exist now. It is to ask whether they exist somewhere in the world at some time. It is to ask whether they simply exist, i.e., belong to the “furniture of the world.” To ask whether God exists is not to presuppose that if he exists, then he exists now. For the question whether God exists leaves open whether he exists at every time, at no time, at some but not all times, or entirely outside of time. 

My claim is that there is a clear difference between ‘exist(s)’ used in the present-tensed way and ‘exist(s)’ used to express existence period, i.e., existence simpliciter.

If the Ostrich is right, and what no longer exists does not exist period, then the passage of time has annihilated the item in question.  Of course, we both agree that Scollay Square no longer exists, and that it is now nothing.   We also agree that it would be false to say that Scollay Square still exists.  But of course that is not what I mean when I say that it exists simpliciter. What I mean is that it is (tenselessly) part of the furniture of the world. What I deny, and what the Ostrich seems to affirm, is that the passage of time has annihilated the locale in question.

The past-tensed ‘Boethius existed’ is true. It is true now. What makes it true? Surely not Boethius! The Ostrich will presumably say that nothing makes it true, and there is no need for anything to make it true; it is just true!  I expect the Ostrich to adopt A. N. Prior’s redundancy theory of the present according to which everything that is presently true is simply true. (Cf. Craig Bourne, A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP,  2006, 42 f.)  Just as ‘It is true that ____’ is redundant. ‘It is now the case that ___’ is redundant.

For Prior, all tensed sentences are present-tensed.  Thus the past-tensed ‘Boethius existed’ MEANS that it is now the case that Boethius existed.  Given the redundancy of ‘It is now the case that ____,’ we are left with ‘Boethius existed.’  And that is all!  There is no need or room for a metaphysics of time.  There is nothing more to say about the nature of time than what is said in a perspicuous tense logic.

Thus the Ostrich. I am not satisfied. Past-tensed contingent truths need truth-makers.   ‘BV exists’ is true. It can’t just be true. It needs a truth-maker.  A plausible candidate is the 175 lb. animal who wears my clothes. ‘BV exists’ is true because BV exists.  Now it will be the case that BV no longer exists. When that time comes, ‘BV existed’ will be true. I conclude that if ‘BV exists’ needs a truth-maker, then so will ‘BV existed.’

As with BV, so with Boethius.

If ‘Boethius existed’ needs a truth-maker, and nothing at present can serve as truth-maker, then the pressure is on to resist the Ostrich thesis that ‘exists’ can only be correctly used in the present-tensed way.

The Ostrich, however, does not see the problem. Because he does not see the problem, I pronounce him ‘problem-blind.’ (Re-read the Wittgenstein quotation above.)

Pope Leo’s A. I. Encyclical

Blather, bromides, and a soupçon of bullshit to spice it up:
Most fanciful is the pope’s claim that the mandarins at the United Nations should be entrusted with overseeing AI. He says they “are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love, for they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts.” This is truly the triumph of hope over experience. (WSJ)
I’m all for love, dialogue, and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.  But ask yourself: could the pope, or anyone, by entering into loving dialogue with the members of the IRGC, persuade these thugs to stop murdering fellow Iranian citizens?  They have slaughtered some 42, 000 of them in recent months.
You cannot build a “civilization of love” with the anti-civilizational.
Our dear pope is a fool on several levels, and certainly no improvement over his predecessor, Bergoglio the Benighted.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan Turns 85 Tomorrow

Can one get tired of Dylan? That would be like getting tired of America. It would be like getting to the point where no passage in Kerouac brings a tingle to the spine or a tear to the eye, or getting to the point where the earthly road ends and forever young must give way to knocking on heaven’s door.

The scrawny Jewish kid from Hibbing Minnesota, son of an appliance salesman, was an unlikely bard, but bard he became. He’s been at it a long, long time, and his body of work is as vast and as variegated as America herself. We old fans from way back who were with him from the beginning are still finding gems unheard as we ourselves enter the twilight where it’s not dark yet, but getting there. But it is a beautiful fade-out from a world that cannot last.

Our boy’s been covered, and covered some more. Here are some outstanding specimens:

Johnny Rivers, Positively Fourth Street.

Of all the versions of my recorded songs, the Johnny Rivers one was my favorite. It was obvious that we were from the same side of town, had been read the same citations, came from the same musical family and were cut from the same cloth. When I listened to Johnny’s version of “Positively 4th Street,” I liked his version better than mine. I listened to it over and over again. Most of the cover versions of my songs seemed to take them out into left field somewhere, but Rivers’s version had the mandate down — the attitude and melodic sense to complete and surpass even the feeling that I had put into it. It shouldn’t have surprised me, though. He had done the same thing with “Maybellene” and “Memphis,” two Chuck Berry songs. When I heard Johnny sing my song, it was obvious that life had the same external grip on him as it did on me. Bob Dylan, Chronicles

Mary Travers interviews Bob Dylan. Not a cover but interesting to the true Dylan aficionado.

Joan Baez, Hard Rain

Gary U.S. Bonds, From a Buick Six

Peter, Paul, and Mary, Too Much of Nothing

Arlo Guthrie, Percy’s Song

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom

Jimi Hendrix, All Along the Watchtower

Stephen Stills, Ballad of Hollis Brown

McGuinn, Harrison, Clapton, Petty et al., My Back Pages

Marianne Faithful, Visions of Johanna

But nothing touches the original. This is the bard at his incandescent mid-’60s best. From Blonde on Blonde.

 

Suggestions on How to Meditate

A Substack follow-up to Meditation: What and Why in response to Tom Carroll’s query.  And then we’ll ‘swim the Ganges.’ But I might not get to the Ganges tomorrow since I’ll be heading to the shooting range.

The neo-Kantian German philosopher Eugen Herrigel wrote a book entitled Zen in the Art of Archery.  Tomorrow I will practice Zen and the Art of Handgunnery. Can you trigger an explosion a couple of inches from your face without flinching or moving the gun, with equanimity and detachment from the outcome, hitting a bulls-eye eleven yards off?

Comments on and Questions about a Passage in Vohanka’s “Love or Contemplation?”

Vlastimil Vohánka’s  article Love or Contemplation: Hildebrandian and Aristotelian Ways to High Happiness  is surpassingly excellent,  and smooth-sailing for me until I came to the following passage on pp. 10-11 about which I have some questions.

Following Conway and the Aristotelian Josef Pieper, I say that the contemplation of God’s existence and qualities is not to be understood as the process of inquiring whether God exists and what his qualities are.

BV:  I agree. It would be better, though, to refer to Pieper more specifically as a Thomist.  No Aristotle, no Thomas. But there is more to Thomas than Aristotle.  There is a decided Platonic and neo-Platonic strain in Thomas. Ratzinger, the last pope worth his salt, would back me up on this.

Rather, the contemplation is an attentive beholding or seeing that God exists and what God is like. Aristotelians typically depict the contemplation as monologic rather than dialogic, as argumentative rather than intuitive or even non-discursive, and as propositional rather than non-propositional.

BV: The first sentence is fine, but I struggle with the second. What do you mean by ‘monologic’ and ‘dialogic’?  The first from ‘monologue’ and the second from ‘dialogue’?  Admittedly, one cannot have a dialogue with the Prime Mover whereas one presumably can with the personal God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. You seem to be saying that in Aristotle contemplation is a form of argument, and therefore discursive, and not intuitive.  You may be right, but some citation of Aristotelian texts would be helpful. That you are right is suggested by the contrast in Aristotle between the vita contemplativa (bios theoretikos) and the vita activa.  Accordingly, both reasoning about God and directly apprehending God by intellectual intuition (visio intellectualis) — assuming that Aristotle while in a Platonic mood would admit such a thing —  would fall on the side of contemplation.

Suppose some person attentively rehearses, step by step, the soundness of an argument that God exists, which she has seen to be sound many times before. She is contemplating in a typical Aristotelian manner. But, following Pieper, we can understand the contemplation more broadly: as possibly non-argumentative, non-discursive, non-propositional, or non-monologic.  Suppose that the person attends to the putative fact that if God exists then he is omnipresent, and finds it, as she has done before, intuitively self-evident or obvious. Even now she is contemplating. Later she dwells non-discursively (i.e., without elaborate thinking, imagining, remembering, or inner or outer talking) and also without any argumentative or self-evident assurance — but with an assent of faith — on the putative fact that God exists and is omnipresent. She is contemplating, too. Later, she dwells non-discursively on a non-propositional idea of God, or of someone omnipresent. Even so she is contemplating. She is also contemplating when she attentively observes whatever obtains in or outside of her in the present moment (her breath, sensations, feelings, thoughts, outer events or objects) as something caused or enabled by God.

BV:  I am somewhat sympathetic to this broad understanding of ‘contemplation’ which embraces both reasoning, which is discursive, and direct insight/intuition, which is not. Both are epistemic procedures. But faith is not knowledge. So I balk at the notion that an act of faith can be booked under ‘contemplation.’  I would also point out that talk of assent implies assent to a proposition, as opposed to faith in a person. Faith in God is trust in God, and thus non-epistemic.

Later still, she regards herself — attentively and non-discursively — as addressing God from a dialogic, second-person Thou-perspective (although perhaps her message cannot be translated accurately into literal descriptions and can only be described in metaphors or gestures). Or she regards God as addressing her from the same sort of perspective. Or she regards herself and God as aware of each other and also of their mutual awareness. In all these latter cases, the person is praying to God, but contemplating God as well.

BV: If one enters into a person-to-person, I-Thou relation with God, that relation in and of itself is not an act of contemplation, although one could, apart from that relation, also contemplate God.

Suppose my wife and I are sitting in the same room. She is immersed in a book, and I am contemplating her lovingly.  That contemplation is not an I-Thou relation. If I were to initiate an I-Thou relation by addressing her, I would thereby cease to be contemplating her. Contemplation involves a certain objectification which is foreign to the I-Thou relation.  Or so it seems to me.

Meditation: What and Why

Tom Carroll asks,

When you say “meditation,” what do you mean? Is there a specific practice or set of practices you have in mind? I am genuinely curious. I am a 69-year-old Catholic, well-ensconced in Holy Mother Church with absolutely no desire to “swim the Ganges,” as one might say. Still, I have read a bit on Vedanta recently and it’s interesting. That’s part of what prompts my question, I suppose.

Here is part of my answer.  More later on specific practices and ‘swimming the Ganges.’ Feel free to ask me any question about it.

Heaven and Hell: the Looming of the Last Things at the End of the Trail

Top o’ the Stack.

Note to Vlastimil:

This is the newly-redacted full-length version of the text you quote over at Facebook. Look near the top of my current feed.  I toned down the part where you sensed anger on my part at pedophile priests. The Roman way around the problem of the spiritual efficacy of confessing your sins to a corrupt priest is via the doctrine of ex opere operato, which is a topic for a separate occasion, as is the dangerous folly of face-to-face confession, now mindlessly re-named, “Reconciliation.”

Choice-Worthy, Achievable Goals: Responses to Vohanka

Vlastimil Vohanka put three questions to me:
1) Would you agree with the claim, suggested in my “Boredom of the Gods” rant  that we live at times when people (esp.  white men)  find it hard to find overarching, dominant life-goals that would seem to them both (a) (viscerally) attractive and (b) realistically achievable?

(Maybe you know Bolitho’s quite famous book Twelve Against the Gods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bolitho_Ryall, which, among other things, comments on the same problem. )

BV: I wasn’t aware of Bolitho, but the following excerpt from the Wikipedia article is relevant, especially inasmuch as I am now an old man who will no longer take the risks he took as an adventurous young man.
He [Bolitho] sees human endeavour as a duality between conformity and non-conformity. “We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quite die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.”[9] He points out that their lives [the lives of adventurers] show the difficulties involved, and the scant reward to be expected from such adventuring.[9]
Before I try to answer your question, one better put to a sociologist, I will ask you why the extensive quotation from that morally obtuse Andrew Tate? Your title suggests that you consider him a god. Do you really want to imply that? He better resembles a demon. He says, “Fucking women sucks cuz women are bad people.” False twice-over.  The second half is on a par with Rosie O’Donnell’s recent claim that “Men suck.” Why quote this defective specimen?
This Tate guys seems to be the very poster boy for toxic masculinity. My line on this, which you may be aware of,  is the only reasonable one. Neither masculinity as such, nor femininity as such are toxic; but there are cases that are well-described as cases of toxic masculinity.  See my Substack article, Masculinity. I give examples of toxic and non-toxic masculinity. There are specifically male virtues and specifically female virtues, a difference based in biology and perhaps also in metaphysics.  Men and women need each other’s virtues.  Related: Decent Man, Manly Man, Otherworldly Man.
As for V’s question #1, I disagree with his presupposition that the problem of finding a life-goal that is both attractive and achievable is a recent one. It’s age-old. It is not just V’s and younger generations that face it.  “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Thoreau in the 19th century.  Ever since Adam was kicked out of the Garden, life for the majority has been drudgery and servitude.  The great affluence we enjoy in the West makes things easier than they used to be. But this affluence has also had the opposite effect by fueling the dissatisfaction of many of the young.  The affluence makes possible the leisure that breeds  dissatisfaction. The self-esteem movement plays a role. People brought up to have an excessively high opinion of themselves despite actual accomplishments will naturally kvetch when they find that it is hard to live large and heroically.
Despite what I said, the problem remains of finding a life-goal that is noble and inspiring but also  achievable.
What’s my advice? First off, you need to make a list of choice-worthy goals. Empty celebrity and the adulation of know-nothings ought not be on the list.  Nor should food and sex. Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. To live is to live in a way befitting a human being.  There is nothing wrong with doing well so long as you do well by doing good.
Once you have your list of choice-worthy goals, you need to determine which are achievable by you . This requires self-knowledge.  Do you have what it takes to be a Navy SEAL, a firefighter, a medical doctor, an astronaut, an engineer?
You then must sacrifice to attain your goals. “You have to pay your dues if you want play the blues.”
2) In https://otherlife.co/every-angel-is-terrifying-by-riva-tez-and-praxis-society, philosopher Riva Tez says:

“Nietzsche’s concept of the last man is a prophetic description of the world as it is today. You are basking in a fake glory. You are entertained and satiated. You are seemingly productive, but you are not great. If you feel this and aren’t bothered by it, look away. If you feel this and it bothers you, listen on.”
BV: Nietzsches Last Man “who has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night” is no role model. But then Nietzsche himself has nothing better to offer.
3) I am an elitist: most people can’t be great. And, relatedly, most people can’t do philosophy well. See https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/the-abyss-and-the-soy-latte

Q: Would you agree with both?
BV: Yes, I would agree to both, as long as you mean by ‘elitism’ the elitism of spirit and not that of social privilege and position.  Life is hierarchical.  Indeed, life is many hierarchies, the hierarchy of the spirit being one of them. Few are great. There are only a few great philosophers. The vast majority of philosophers, even if they are sincere truth-seekers,  have a much more humble role, that of striving upwards to the level of the greats.
We should all aspire to be great, but few will make the cut. And when we
write our more serious writing we should write for the ages even though we know we will be lucky to end up footnotes in forgotten books and journals.

Seven Ways of Life

The following is the meat of a Substack post by our friend Vlastimil Vohanka.  He is the man in the middle. To his left is Lukas Novak, and to his right an American philosopher whose name I have forgotten. I took the picture in  a tea house in Prague in June of 2018.  Since then V’s views seem to have changed considerably.  I don’t know the whole story; he can add whatever details he likes.   He strikes me as in the grip of a midlife crisis.  If so, that may help explain the dark jag he is now on.  He converted to Catholicism around the time I met him, if I rightly recall, but has since, as it seems to me, performed a sort of theological epoché  with respect to the teachings of Rome.

To anyone in a midlife crisis my advice is to hunker down and ride it out. A Philosopher on the Midlife Crisis adds some details and tells my story.  When you come out on the other end you may ask yourself as I asked myself after a crisis that took about eight years fully to recover from: What was that all about?

Here is what V has to say in the post in question. Feel free to comment.

Claim: ordinary life is (a) okayish but (b) not worth living. Even Socrates and Schopenhauer agree on (b). So do many religious people. The strategies vary but go in several and at times compatible types: (1) martyr yourself or do something else heroic (the way of optimistic hazards of saints, missionaries, Don Quijote, Nietzsche, Juenger, Camus, conquerors, explorers, revolutionaries, guerrilas, adrenaline sportsmen, and psychopaths), (2) kill yourself (the way of desperates), (3) wait for death and have hope beyond it (the way of believers; most common, often most tame and inconspicuous, recall Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith), (4) stop thinking (the way of Schopenhauer and some Eastern people), (5) think real deep (the way of Socrates and Einstein), (6) go intense raw hedonic (the way of rock stars and addicts), (7) go intense subtle hedonic (the way of dedicated artists, psychonauts, occultists, and some Eastern people). I respect most some variations on the 1st way.

I can relate to this. V and I agree that the unexamined life of the ordinary schlep is not worth living.  And yes, Socrates and Schopenhauer agree on this point despite their differences.  V and I both seek Something More than what is envisaged from the vantage point of bourgeois mediocrity.  We are both existentialists in a sense I won’t pause to define except to say that philosophy, the real thing, is not an arcane academic game from which  some manage to fill their bellies, but the  pursuit and appropriation of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters.

As a young man, it was for me either suicide, mediocrity, or striving. And so I gave up electrical engineering and an assured path for the risks of the philosophical quest.  It was the ’60s, a time of great ferment socially, politically, religiously.  The Vietnam war had become a quagmire. Who was I to believe about it? I didn’t want to end up in the military-industrial complex working for Raytheon, say, designing  guidance systems for missiles.  I needed Perspective, the Big Picture, and you can’t get that from material science, fluid mechanics, or by struggling to solve ‘diffy q’s.’ (differential equations).

V  wants to live heroically, epically; he wants a great life.  Of the three people he mentions under (1) above,  my impression is that he is most attracted by the life-path of  Ernst Jünger.  V can tell us whether he has read Jünger’s recently translated and released Approaches: Drugs and Altered States (Telos Press, 2022).

(2) is out for both of us. Nothing is stupider than to kill yourself when life itself will perform that service soon enough.  Your girl friend dumped you? Give it six months and you will wonder what you ever saw in her in the first place.  I have elsewhere expressed my lack of sympathy for that gastro-tourist Anthony Bourdain who hanged himself. (By the way, this pedant reminds you that a man is hanged; his coat is hung.) You will call me ‘insensitive’ re: Bourdain, but I grant that suicide make sense and is forgivable  and even morally justifiable in some cases, extreme clinical depression being one of them.  A contemporary locus classicus on this topic is William Styron’s Darkness Visible.  I was mercifully spared clinical depression. My depressions were amenable to my own self-brewed logotherapy.  The worst year of my life was my 21st when I experienced what I called my Existential Malaise Crisis. Good old Emersonian self-reliance pulled me through. If you really need help that you cannot self-provide, however, don’t be afraid to ask for it!

And if you are tempted by suicide, are you quite sure what’s on The Other Side?  The link will take you to a book  by a well-known theological ‘quantity’ in the ’60s, Bishop James A. Pike, about his son who killed himself, and supposedly reports back.

The raw hedonism of (6) is out for me.  The search for the Real in intensity of experience was trademark ’60s  and many of us were beguiled by it to the point of dying from it. I dabbled with it and came close but pulled back in time.

I was never tempted by the subtle hedonism of (7).  An early familiarity with Kierkegaard and his Stages on Life’s Way (the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious)  anesthetized me to  aestheticism. But it wouldn’t have had that effect had I not been antecedently predisposed, by my training in pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, to take seriously the moral and the related religious points of view.  That training and teaching fell, not on stones, but on fertile soil that was there innately.

I suppose the difference between me and Vlastimil is that, while he is drawn to some of the life-styles of (1), I am drawn to an amalgam of (3), (4), and (5) in that I hope beyond this life in the conviction that, if this is it, the game ain’t worth the candle; that the ability to silence at will the discursive mind (“stop thinking” as V puts it) is an ability that one ought to cultivate and practice; that the rational mind must be celebrated within its limits and taken as deep as one can take it.

One Nation? A Pessimistic Prognosis

Some say that a multi-racial society is possible while  a multi-cultural one is not. This is true as far as it goes but it presupposes that the several races in a society accept or can be brought to accept the same culture. Is the presupposition true? I don’t think so.

Traditional American culture is built on what the Smithsonian has tendentiously called “white values.” These include self-reliance,  “objective, rational linear thinking” [as opposed to what? subjective circular thinking?], hard work, respect for legitimate authority, ability to defer gratification, civility, and control of emotions.  Here is the Smithsonian’s full list.

These values and virtues are universal, not ‘white.’ When I say  that they are universal I mean that they are good for everyone, regardless of race. They are genuine values and virtues the implementation of which will lead to human flourishing.  The values on the Smithsonian list are universal in that everyone can profit from them. They  are ‘white’ only in that whites have excelled in their discovery, articulation, and implementation.

For example, whites are better at deferring or delaying gratification than blacks, which largely explains why, as a group, they do better economically than blacks as a group.  “A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.” (Wikipedia) Social competence consists of the skills needed successfully to adapt to social situations. Lack of impulse control is one sort of social incompetence. Disproportionately more blacks than whites are shot by police in routine traffic stops, not because of ‘racism,’ but  because disproportionately more blacks than  whites ‘blow their cool’ in such tense interactions and engage in threatening behavior which elicits predictable responses from law enforcement officers.  This is not to deny that there are LEOs who commit murder under color of law. There are.  But they are a small fraction of the cases in which LEOs legally shoot and sometimes justifiably kill black  and other ‘motorists’ in self-defense.

The opening question was whether a multi-racial society can survive over the long term. It can, but only if the different racial, ethnic, and religious groups can be brought to accept a common culture.  This will not happen unless all illegal immigration is stopped, illegal aliens are deported, and legal immigration is structured so as to (i) prevent certain groups from entering, e.g., sharia-supporting Muslims, and (ii) gives preference, as used to be the case, to the entry of assimilable groups who share our values, broadly speaking.  For example, U.K. and other English speakers over Europeans, Europeans over Asians,  Asians over Africans.

There is no right to immigrate and every nation has the the right to insist that immigration work to the benefit of the host country and the preservation of its culture.

In the USA that common culture is Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman, and classically liberal, with the classically liberal values of the Enlightenment and the Founders (our greatest generation)  mitigating  the excesses and correcting the mistakes of the Greeks (slavery), the Romans (cruel and unusual punishment), and Christianity (ostracism and murdering of ‘heretics’).

Do we have the will to preserve our civilization and to to mitigate its decadence (due in large part to our great but corrupting affluence and to certain extreme forms of liberalism)?

The prognosis is not good.  A good half of the country now comprises an Internal Enemy that has hijacked the Democrat Party and is working to overturn the Constitution and the founding principles  But it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and we fight on to the end.

The Hard Problem in the Philosophy of Mind: Comments on Vlastimil Vohanka

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COMMENTS

What is the so-called ‘hard problem’? Vlastimil thinks it is the problem of specifying which natural (physical) item a given mental item is identical to.  But this is a misuse of the term ‘hard problem.’ As  used in contemporary literature, its meaning is rather more specific.  Although the problem so-labelled has been around for a long time, the label ‘hard problem’ as used in contemporary discussions was first introduced by David Chalmers in a 1995 article and then fully explained in his 1996 book The Conscious Mind.  It is to be understood by contrast with (supposedly) ‘easy problems’ in the philosophy of mind.  So what is the hard problem?  And what is an example of a (supposedly)  easy problem?

The Hard Problem

Suppose I inadvertently touch a hot stove top, experience a pain sensation, and withdraw my hand.  My behavior (stove-touching, hand-withdrawal) is third-person accessible: I see it and others around  me see it. And if no one around me is present? They could see it if they were present.  But surely there is more to pain than pain-behavior. There is the sensation itself.  But what is the sensation itself?  There are two ways of considering it. In one way it too is third-person accessible or outwardly observable. In the other way it is not.

The first way is by taking the pain sensation to be a state or event or process literally internal to (spatially inside of) the organism. In the present example, the organism is the animal  that wears my clothes. So the sensation is a physical process occurring in BV’s brain-body composite. This physical process is then plausibly taken to be the salient cause of the aversive behavior whether physical or verbal  (the hand-withdrawal and/or various spoken obscenities.)

The second way I’ll call phenomenological. The subject of the painful experience simply attends by introspection to the felt pain precisely as it is felt while bracketing (in roughly Husserl’s sense) all such considerations as the causation of the experience and its location in the organism.  In so doing, the subject does not deny that the felt pain has a cause or that the pain has neural correlates located in the brain. He does not even doubt their existence.  He simply leaves those factors out of consideration, and makes no use of them, the better to focus on the undeniable (pace Dennett the Denier) phen0menological datum, the felt pain precisely as it is felt. The subject focuses his attention exclusively on the phenomenal or qualitative features of the experience he is enduring.

The so-called ‘hard problem’ can now be stated. It is the problem of giving an account, consistent with (metaphysical) naturalism, of these qualitative features or properties of sensations,  the so-called qualia (singular: quale), when the sensations are taken, not behavioristically, nor neuro-scientifically, but precisely as they themselves appear from the first-person point of view (POV) of  the subjects who consciously experience them. There is something it is like to experience the phenomenal pain consequent on touching a hot stove. This Nagelian ‘what it is like’ is undeniably real — is there anything more real than pain? — but it cannot be slotted into a wholly third-personal naturalistic ontology. The felt pain is ineluctably subjective: there is simply no place for it in a naturalist world-scheme.

Now suppose you are, for whatever reasons, committed to that naturalist scheme. Then you face a very hard problem indeed, so hard, I would say, as to count as insoluble.  The problem is well-formulated in the inconsistent triad  Vlastimil cites at the top of the page.  Scroll up and take another look at it.  The third proposition cannot be denied on pain of the naturalist’s ceasing to be a naturalist.  The first cannot be denied unless our naturalist is an eliminativist about consciousness, a position with absolute nothing to recommend it. The naturalist’s only hope is somehow to hold onto the second proposition  — consciousness is not physical.   But how? By going mysterian.  But first a word about easy problems, one of which is intentionality.

A (Supposedly) Easy Problem

Not every episode of consciousness is object-directed.  The felt pain I have been using as an example is not object-directed, or an instance of intentionality.  It has a cause outside the body, the hot stove, and a neural correlate inside the brain, Delta-A fiber excitation let us suppose, but the felt pain does not reveal or display or make manifest anything in the way my seeing of a glorious Arizona sunset reveals said sunset to me.  The pain is not of or about anything; the seeing is. We have to distinguish between consciousness and consciousness-of.  Of course, an episode of consciousness-of may have some associated qualia, if I am, say, watching a glorious sunset or moonrise, but there are qualia free object-directed mental states. But this is a complicated special topic we cannot now discuss.  I will just refer you to an earlier entry, Intentionality not a ‘Hard Problem’ for Physicalists?

Mysterianism

What our friend Vlastimil is calling mysterianism about consciousness I take to be the thesis that, while humans either do or can — unclear which he means — know that, in general, every mental item (whether intentional or non-intentional)  is identical to some natural item or other, what they cannot know, and what must remain a mystery to them, is whether any given mental item such as a phenomenal pain felt on a given occasion by a particular subject is both natural and mental.  They cannot know it as both mental and physical.  While experiencing headache pain, for example, I can and do know it self-evidently to be a mental datum, but  I cannot also know it to be wholly natural, even if in reality it is!  Thus our friend is advocating the mysterianism of Colin McGinn.

Vlastimil  distinguishes this mysterian form of naturalism about the mind from an old-school anti-naturalist mysterianism according to which we cannot recognize mental items to be natural items because there are no natural items to which they could be identical.

But here I must raise a question about the tenability of this distinction. If a particular felt pain cannot be identified with, and thus reduced to, a particular instance of Delta-A fiber stimulation because the former has properties the latter cannot have, and vice versa, why call this mysterianism?  Where is the mystery? What we would have  here is a straight-forward  argument which, if sound, shows that some or all mental items cannot be reduced to natural items. What we would have is an argument for dualism, whether property dualism or substance dualism.

To have a mystery in the strict sense you need propositions that appear and cannot fail to appear to intellects of our constitution as logically inconsistent, but in reality, and beyond our ken, are somehow consistent. Trinity and Incarnation are mysteries in this sense.

Similarly for McGinn: We cannot understand how qualia, which are undeniably real, are identical to natural items, and yet they are!  It is imply beyond our ken.  Our cognitive architecture is so structured as to disallow any insight on our part as to how this pain I am feeling is nothing more than a physical occurrence!

My 22nd ‘Blogiversary’

Blogging is no longer ‘the thing’ it used to be in the early ‘aughts,’ but it has certainly enriched my life, mainly by attracting like-minded people.

Among them, and in no particular order: Malcolm Pollack, Vito Caiati, Trudy Vandermolen, Steven Nemes, Vlastimil Vohanka, Lukas Novak, Daniel Novotny, Dmitri Dain, Karl White, Jeff Hammond, Josh Eskew,  David Brightly, Edward Buckner, James Soriano, David Klubert, Keith Burgess-Jackson, Michael Gilleland, Horace Jeffery Hodges, Dale Tuggy, Ed Feser, Phil Flemming, Mike Valle . . . I’ll remember some more tomorrow.  I thank you all.

And then there are the MavPhil ‘fallen’ who will not be forgotten: Ray Stahl  Bill Tingley, Bill Keezer, Lady Dymphna , Thomas C. Coleman.

Living or dead, these are people I never would have met  apart from the blogosphere.

And then there are those I won’t mention, some of whom succumbed to TDS, and others who turned against me for reasons unknown.