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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“

Notes on John Dupré, The Metaphysics of Biology, I

A friend of mine is a medical doctor with a decided philosophical bent. He solicits my assistance in helping him understand a 2021 addition to the Cambridge Elements series entitled The Metaphysics of  Biology by John Dupré.  I am happy to  help him, thereby learning something myself about the philosophy of biology, about which I know very little.  It’s actually a double deficiency since I know even less about biology.  But, like my M.D. friend, I am a perpetual student.  So here goes.

This exercise will require a series of posts.  This one covers three sections in Part I: Metaphysical Perspectives, pp. 1-13.  Double quotation marks are used to quote verbatim; inverted commas or single quotation marks  are used to mention a term or phrase. Material in brackets is my insertion. Numbers in parentheses are page numbers.

A summary is inevitably an interpretive summary. Bear that in mind. I will add some critical remarks. Such remarks attempt to evaluate the claims I take the author to be making.

1 What is the Metaphysics of Biology?

We are told that metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that attempts to describe reality in the most general and abstract way. Metaphysics of biology, then, deals with the most general and abstract features of  that special  region of reality we call “the living world.” The author is assuming that not everything real is animate (living, dying, or dead): there is also the inanimate.  He doesn’t explicitly say this, but he implies it. If so, I agree. Not everything is animate.  Concrete items such as tectonic plates are not animate, and neither are such abstract items as numbers and mathematical sets. Hylozoism, then, is out, and so is panpsychism to the extent that the former supports the latter.

I hope the reader appreciates that if something is dead, then it was once alive, and so belongs to the category of the animate.  The category of the inanimate, on the other hand, embraces items that are never either alive or dead.

If I may be allowed a quibble, the author’s concern is with the metaphysics of the biotic, not the metaphysics of biology, which is the study of the biotic. The biotic is both logically and temporally prior to biology since (a) the study of a subject presupposes the subject studied, and (b) life processes were transpiring long before rational animals like us made the scene.  The biotic is what it is whether or not anyone studies it, whether or not there ever is any biology. Biology,  the logos of bios,  is something we do, a social construct;  the biotic is not: it needn’t be ‘biologized.’ Whether this  is a quibble or an important distinction, you are free to decide.

Now biology cannot be done a priori from the armchair: “biology proceeds not by reason [a priori] but by observation and experiment [a posteriori].” (2)  I take it that everyone will agree with that;  biology is an empirical science.  The author appears to conclude that the same goes for the metaphysics of biology: it proceeds by observation and experiment. In fact, he appears to conclude that all metaphysics must proceed in this way,  in a manner “more or less continuous with [empirical, natural] science.” The author thus advocates “a naturalistic or scientific metaphysics.” Both science and naturalistic metaphysics “draw essentially on experience.”  This continuity thesis is far from obvious; Edmund Husserl, for one, would reject it. The thesis is however reasonable, so let’s play along with it.

But now the question arises whether “a metaphysics specifically of biology [biotic reality] makes any sense.”  It would clearly make sense if vitalism were true.  Vitalism is the view  that holds “living things to be made of, or partly made of, something quite distinct from ordinary matter.” (3) But vitalism is not an option these days.  Or at least no one in the life sciences these days takes it seriously. There is only one world, the physical world in which everything is made of the same “physical stuff.” So, “does not the world of physics subsume that of biology?”  This amounts to the question whether biological or rather biotic phenomena reduce to physical phenomena. We will see that the author eschews reductionism in favor of emergentism.

I will reformulate the question in terms of an aporetic triad the constituent propositions of which cannot all be true.

A. Natural reality divides into the biotic (living) and the abiotic (nonliving).
B. Vitalism is not an option: there is only one world and everything in it is composed of the same sort of physical stuff. (3)
C. Physics subsumes biology: biotic phenomena are reducible  to the “properties, behaviour, and interactions of the smallest elements of matter.”

If (A) and (B) are true, then (C) cannot be true.  Why not? Because if the biotic reduces to physical, then the biotic is not really animate (living).

As I read him, the author solves this problem by rejecting (C) while affirming (A) and (B).

2 Reduction, Emergence, and Levels of Organization

The solution to the above problem by the rejection of (C) takes the form of a doctrine of emergence. “Biological properties” are “emergent — appearing in novel ways at higher levels of organisation, so that no knowledge of the properties of constituent parts is sufficient in principle for predicting such properties.”(3)

And so our author rejects various arguments for reductionism. His discussion strikes me as less than pellucid, but here is my way of putting one of the arguments he rejects:

D. “Physics is causally complete.” (4)  The idea is that if we had “full knowledge of  the laws governing the behaviour” of the smallest constituents of the material world at a given time, we would be able to predict any future state of the material world.

If so, then

E. “any macroscopic objects entirely composed of these [micro] constituents will have its behaviour fully determined by these same laws.”

What is murky here is the author’s apparent conflation of ‘horizontal’ (past-to- future)  causal determination with ‘vertical’ (upward as opposed to downward) causal determination.   Suppose past states of the material world determine future states in accordance with the laws of nature.  That is different from saying that at any given time the behavior of the micro-constituents of a thing (whether inanimate or animate) determine the behavior of the macro-thing.  But let’s move on.

3 Causation, Laws, Mechanisms and Models

If emergentism is to supplant reductionism, then we need to be able to make sense of downward causation.  “For if there is downward causation, causation that acts from wholes on the parts of which they are composed, then surely parts do not fully explain causally the behavior of wholes . . . .” (9)

The author uses the heart as an example. It is a whole consisting of parts including  chambers, valves, arteries. It functions as a pump causing oxygenated blood to circulate through the body of an animal.  From a reductionist point of view, the behavior of the heart is wholly explainable in terms of  the parts and their interaction. The causation would then be bottom-up, from the interacting parts to the whole.  How then does the heart differ from a non-living machine the behavior of which is fully explainable by the interaction of the parts?

The author makes the unexceptionable point that “Hearts cannot sit unused in drawers” (13) the way non-living machines can remain unused in storage without detriment to their functionality.  A heart that stops pumping for even a few minutes may be fatally damaged.  The author then makes a very interesting point. While there can be no contractions without chambers, it is also the case that there can be no chambers without contractions. This is because when the contractions cease, the chambers atrophy and die. “Contractions are necessary to provide the flow of oxygenated blood to the heart muscle tissue without which in a very short time it loses its capacity to function.” (13)  The author then generalizes: “Such causal dependence of the entity on its activity is characteristic of all biological systems . . . .” (13, emphasis added)

The heart is an entity whose characteristic activity is to pump blood.  The author accepts a dualism of entities and activities. He goes on to say that the dualism is not egalitarian in that “Activities are more fundamental” than the entities — which he will later understand as processes — that support them.  To bolster this point, he bids us compare the heart to a storm.  It’s a bit of a stretch, but very interesting.  He means a heart functioning normally, not a heart gone haywire electrically due to atrial fibrillation.

A storm is not a thing or substance that pre-exists its activity, but that very activity itself.  It is composed of air and water molecules in motion, and so we can distinguish between the stuff a particular storm is composed of and the storm without holding that there is a self-identical something — a substrate of storming if your will — that persists through the time the storm is occurring.  There is no diachronically self-same thing that storms; the storm just is its storming. The matter of the storm — air, water, leaves, whatever is swept up into it — is ever-changing as the storm arises,  moves from place to place and finally subsides.   We could give a particular storm the name ‘Hillary’ for ease of reference and to distinguish it from a person such as Hillary Clinton whose ‘storming’ is periodic, occasional and accidental (as opposed to essential): there is no nomological necessity that Hillary Clinton be in a continuous state of emotional outburst in the way a storm must of necessity be at every time  in a state of meteorological upset.

“The storm is a process that takes in bits of matter that are, for a time, parts of it. Just the same should be said of a heart or an elephant.” (13)

A striking assertion!

A couple of questions we might explore. First, are the author’s arguments for emergentism affected by the existence of totally artificially hearts? Second, if an elephant is a process, then so is a human being. Could a human being be understood adequately as a process? This is connected with the question of how emergentism in the philosophy of biology  is related to emergentism in the philosophy of mind.

Assorted Observations (1.V.26)

Our eyes on the distant, we become far-sighted; our fingers clutching the petty,  petty.

***

The pain you felt, and still feel, from the insult you received is far in excess of the pleasure felt, and forgotten, by the one who insulted you. You keep it alive; you can let it die. Let go, move on, live now!

***

If you endlessly post pictures of yourself, you take the ‘face’ in Facebook too seriously.

***

My wife of 43 years is easy to live with. Just as important, but rather more surprising, is that she finds me easy to live with.

***

There is a sense in which we inhabit our bodies, and there is a sense in which our bodies are our vehicles.  Habitat or vehicle? Combining the comparisons, I’ll suggest that our bodies are mobile homes.  ‘Mobile’ captures our viatory status. ‘Home’ our rootedness.   But don’t expect either to last long.

***

Henry David Thoreau tells us in Walden that as a youth he “inhabited his body with inexpressible satisfaction.” Perhaps he was lucky to die young as people did in the 19th century.

***

Warring metaphors. Plato has Socrates say that the body is the prison house of the soul.  Here if anywhere is a clear case of a house that is not a home. Thoreauvian satisfaction does not characterize such residency in such a domicile. But as I said, Henry David’s “inexpressible satisfaction” would not have lasted into dotage.  But to conclude on a Platonic note, no home in this world is a true home.

***

My overall life strategy is mainly avoidant, thus neither confrontational nor self-effacing. Independent, quietly self-assertive, conciliatory, pan-optic and syn-optic. More a seer than a doer.

***

It is so easy to love oneself! Why then is it so difficult to love others?  Because I am myself?  No doubt I am. Who else would I be? But I am also not myself in that I observe myself, judge myself, and within limits make myself.  I am object to myself as subject.  I am an object of self-observation and also an object of self-evaluation. Of scrutiny and of approbation and disapprobation. I am also the raw material of my self-improvement projects. My selfhood is a unity of these dualities. Still, my  otherness to myself is more intimately mine and thus more easy to love than my otherness to you — which I also need to be me.   This may be part of the explanation why self-love is easier than other-love.

***

Self-esteem sans phrase is axiologically neutral.  It is  a value only when it is a result of  achievement. Empty self-esteem, grounded in nothing, is a disvalue and ought not be promoted in children or in adults.  Barack Hussein Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come to mind as examples of individuals whose self-esteem is far in excess of accomplishment.  But I rank the community organizer and adjunct professor above the bar tender.

Lack of self-esteem is likewise axiologically neutral; a certain amount of it is valuable if it reflects self-knowledge of real defects and limitations.  It is a disvalue if it debilitates and prevents accomplishment.

Know thyself to esteem thyself in the measure appropriate.

***

Disagreement runs deep. Not only do the philosophers disagree about the world, their disciples and commentators disagree about what each has said about the world.  And the anti-philosophers? They too disagree, but  about what is wrong with philosophy, besides failing to note that they themselves philosophize.

***

If the philosophy room is too smoky, the door is unlocked. You are free to go. But the door is very special: if you proffer a justification of your egress, it will automatically lock you in. Just walk away, Renee.

***

“If you didn’t eat so much, you wouldn’t be so hungry.” In one sense, hunger signals the real need for nutrition. In another, it signals the artificial need to fill a stomach distended by inordinate eating. Do we eat because we are hungry, or are we hungry because we eat?  Primarily the first, secondarily the second.

***

First and foremost, food is fuel.  When you gas up your rig, do you inject the gasoline under pressure so as to distend the tank and increase its capacity?

***

You say philosophy bakes no bread? I say: Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. There’s more to life than food, sleep, and sex.

***

“He pretends to be what he is not.” But how much  of genuine aspiration is contained in this pretension? He who fakes it until he makes it is no mere pretender. On the other hand, much of what passes itself off as aspiration is mere pretension.

***

A modicum of phoniness is fitting in a world phenomenal.  Seeming is not being, but if there were no being in seeming it would be nothing at all. It is unseemly in a world of seeming to take everything at face value or to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve.

***

How generous are you if you can easily afford to be generous? How generous is my ‘generous donation’ if it is but one per cent of my monetary surplus? A donation is a giving, but I don’t give of self, but only of pelf, and of pelf a portion with which I can easily part.

***

Philosophy is as dubious a vocation as is the vocation to the priesthood or indeed the calling to anything ‘higher.’ Aspiration or pretension? Hubris? An Icarian reaching for the unattainable that justifiably elicits the scorn of the earth-bound and the ‘practical’?  I say No, but opinions differ.

***

Some say the Bible is inerrant in every particular. Is this type of  inerrantism a form of presuppositionalism? You would be hard-pressed to make a rational case for the claim, let alone prove it.   But what you cannot prove you can always presuppose. And you are free to do so. What you must not do is to think that to argue in a circle is to proffer a proof.

***

We are all affected by the “climate of opinion” as by the actual weather. People believe what others believe because the others believe it. Conformity in belief and behavior is conducive to social success. We go along to get along. The rebel too is subject to the weather. Tied to what he rejects, reacting against it, he is defined by it. He ineptly and unwittingly defines himself by opposing that which he opposes.  But rebels too seek the like-minded so as to form a comforting conformist cohort.  The beatnik in black has his beret and his bible.  In the late’50s, Kerouac’s On the Road was touted as the “bible of the beat generation.”

“No Religious Test” and Islamic Law

In Article VI of the U. S. Constitution we read:

. . . no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Does it follow that the U. S. Constitution should be so interpreted as to allow a Muslim citizen who supports Sharia (Islamic law) to run for public office?  No!  For the same Constitution, in its First Amendment, enjoins a salutary separation of church/synagogue/mosque and state, though not in those words.  Sharia and the values and principles enshrined in the founding documents are incompatible.  On no sane interpretation is our great Constitution a suicide pact.

It is important to realize that Islam is as much  an anti-Enlightenment political ideology as it is a religion.  Our Enlightenment founders must be rolling around in their graves at the very suggestion that Sharia-subscribing Muslims are eligible for the presidency and other public offices.

Many assume that no restriction may be placed on admissible religions for the purposes of the implementation  of Article VI.  I deny it. A religion that requires the subverting of the U. S. Constitution is not an admissible religion when it comes to applying the “no religious Test” provision. One could argue that on a sane interpretation of the Constitution, Islam, though a religion, is not an admissible religion where an admissible religion is one that does not contain core doctrines which, if implemented, would subvert the Constitution.

Or one might argue that Islam is not a religion at all.  Damned near anything can and will be called a religion by somebody.  Some say with a straight face that leftism is a religion, others that Communism is a religion.  Neither is a religion on any adequate definition of ‘religion.’  I have heard it said that atheism is a religion.  Surely it isn’t.  Is a heresy of a genuine religion itself a religion?  Arguably not.  Hillaire Belloc and others have maintained that Islam is a Christian heresy.  Or one could argue that Islam, or perhaps radical Islam,  is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology masquerading as a religion.  If an X masquerades as a Y, then the X is not a Y. How to define religion is a hotly contested issue in the philosophy of religion.

The main point here is that “religious” in “. . . no religious Test shall ever be required” is subject to interpretation.  We are under no obligation to give it a latitudinarian reading that allows in a destructive ideology incompatible with our values and principles. And we ought not.  Religious liberty, like every other kind, has limits.

Related articles
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What Should We Call Secular Ideologies like Marxism and Social Justice?

John Tettemer and Thomas Merton

What treasures lie buried in the “vasty deep” of cyberspace!

I just now discovered MANAS Journal. I was on the prowl for an online comparison of John Tettemer and Thomas Merton. I finally found something in volume 5 , no. 39, September 24, 1952 of the aforementioned journal. Scroll down a bit for a review of Tettemer’s autobiographical  I Was a Monk, 1951, entitled “In and Out of Rome.” The writer is presumably the editor of MANAS, Henry Geiger.  Near the end, Geiger offers a brief comparison of Tettemer’s book with  Merton’s autobiographical 1948 Seven Storey Mountain.

These two fascinating characters deserve an extended comparative study. No surprise there isn’t one, Tettemer being  pretty much forgotten except for aficionados of the arcane and the neglected such as your humble correspondent. His mind drifts back to the ’90s and  solo backpacking trips into the Sierra Nevada above Bishop, California and nights in the tent reading Tettemer by flashlight at 12,000 feet.  Solitude and high mountains make for deep thoughts.  Being alone prevents self-loss into the social and sharpens the sense of the mystery of things.

For more on Tettemer see the Wikipedia entry, and here is a more personal response.

Claude Opus 4.7 and the End of Online Anonymity

An article you should read.

Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one.

Civil War in Britain? Notes on a Talk by David J. Betz, King’s College, London

The following could be called ‘interpretive notes.’ I will stay close to what Betz says, but sometimes put things my own way, and insert comments and examples he might not endorse.

Professor Betz sees Britain headed for civil war.  Early on in his talk, he mentions Karl Popper’s observation that unlimited toleration leads to the destruction of toleration. It’s true and I’ve said it myself many times. Betz then states that Britain today is the condition Samuel Francis referred to as “anarcho-tyranny.”  And what might that be? Francis explains:

. . . “anarcho-tyranny,” is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

There are plenty of recent state-side examples of this anarcho-tyranny that I needn’t rehearse if you follow current events.  (Exercise for the reader: mention some of them in the comments below.)

Back to Britain. it’s “broken,” Betz notes, because of ‘factionalization,’ a condition of society in which the titular group (nation, tribe, etc.) splits into subgroups that battle one another and work to advance their own interests to the detriment of the common good. Betz proposes a spectrum of factionalization.  I see it like this, using his terms.

Normal politics –> contentious politics –> issue factionalism –> polar factionalism –> militancy –> civil war.

Normal politics is the state in which the government in power is recognized as legitimate.  USA politics is not normal by this criterion: Hillary Clinton, among others,  has questioned the legitimacy of the Trump administration. Continuing with the USA as an example, we are well beyond normalcy (broadly recognized legitimacy of the government in power) and deeply embroiled  in bitter contention over particular issues (Second Amendment rights, abortion, death penalty, etc.) — this is issue factionalism — and involved as well in polar factionalism. The latter takes the form, in Betz’s words, of “symbolic identity cleavages.” This is what I have referred to as tribalism and identity politics: whites versus blacks; Muslims versus Jews; etc. Militancy too has reared its ugly head here and in Britain.  Assassinations would be booked under this head.

Next stop civil war.

According to Betz, Britain is at the polar stage.  Many of ‘the people,’ as opposed to the elites, accept the Great Replacement theory, according to which elites aim to replace the white population with ‘persons of color.’   The British people’s grievances are mainly two: two-tiered justice and media bias. We too complain about those two. Responses include a peasant revolt against the elites, increasing ethnic Balkanization, and white flight.

If civil war erupts, it will lead to a siege of ethnically Balkanized urban areas in the form of attacks by paramilitary forces on the infrastructure in non-native enclaves. The political object would be to compel the non-natives to leave. The strategy would be to make make conditions intolerable for the non-natives. The tactics would involve the use of simple tools such as angle grinders, sledge hammers, and acetylene torches. The central premise: the instability of modern urban conditions.

Targets would include fuel distribution systems. Gas stations, for example, being flammable,  are easy to attack and destroy  and difficult to rebuild, especially since in a state of civil war insurance funds would not be available. What’s more, an attack on fuel distribution is also an attack on food distribution.  Cutting off the enemy’s food supply is traditional siege craft.

Britain is a powder keg waiting to explode.  Either Britain will, thanks to ever-increasing Balkanization, cease to exist as “a coherent cultural entity” but continue to limp along; or it will succumb to hot civil war.  The three main belligerents are the armed forces, the elite-run government, and the people. When push comes to shove, and shove comes to shoot, will the military stick with the government or side with the people?  If the armed forces support the elite-run government, then the elites prevail over the people. If, on the other hand, the military sides with street over the elite, then the elite go to Madame Guillotine.

A third possibility is that the military remain neutral as between the elite and the street.

Betz rightly points out that  Balkanization, made inevitable by wide-open immigration,  was an elite choice, a very unwise one that went against the will of the people. Re: immigration, the elite beat the street into the dirt.

We here in the States have a good chance of evading Britain’s fate because of one man, and one man only: Donald J. Trump.

Libertarians and Drug Legalization

Stack topper

With a look back at Ron Paul, the father of Rand Paul.  Concluding paragraph:

As for Ron Paul, he blew his 2012 presidential chances with his remarks on heroin. It’s too bad. The country needs to move in the libertarian direction after decades and decades of socialist drift. But the American people do not cotton to fanatics and the doctrinaire. A sound conservatism includes the best of libertarianism. The best includes limited government, free markets, private property, and individual liberty. But it does not include open borders and legalization of all drugs. Legalized marijuana use has in recent years proved a bane not a boon. The fundamental error of libertarians is to suppose that people know their own best long-term interests. That is a species of optimism refuted by experience. It is an error opposite to that of socialists who think that government knows best. Neither political theory is grounded in an understanding of human nature.

Ralph McInerny on Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Political Activism

From The Catholic Thing, Vice and Verse:

Why is it that so many whose personal lives are a shambles are drawn to political activism? Since the agitation is usually for liberal and morally destructive causes, this is perhaps not too puzzling. Millay, Dorothy Parker too, and of course Simone de Beauvoir set out to change the world when they couldn’t get their own house in order.

A few years ago, Paul Johnson wrote a book about the disastrous personal lives of so many who have wanted to prescribe for mankind. He was chided for this. Didn’t he know that personal immorality has nothing to do with public policy? Did he, poor benighted devil, think with Plato that the good ruler must first be a good man?

The notion that vice is the prerequisite for verse, for art generally, is akin to that, I suppose, but do not ask me to lay it out analytically. It is a Romantic notion that the artist is exempt from ordinary moral rules. However tragic his personal life, however depraved his morals, the art that results is taken to be the justification of vice.

Tell it to Dante. Tell it to Browning or Wordsworth. Tell it to the Marines.

Tribalism and Diversity

Substack latest.  First two paragraphs with a Study Guide I’ve just now appended.

Tribalism is on the rise while classical liberalism is on the wane. Given this fact, does it make sense to admit into one’s country ever more different tribes? A piety oft-intoned by leftists is that diversity is our strength. An Orwellianism, that, if tribal diversity is at issue.* For that would amount to the absurdity that the more domestic strife, the stronger we become. It is plain, after all, that different tribes do not like each other, and do not see themselves in the other. Tribal identification is other-exclusive. There is no comity without commonality.

I am against tribal identification. I realize, however, that I am sawing against the grain of the crooked timber of humanity. People will continue to identify themselves as members of groups. Classically liberal ideals such as toleration are no match for the ingrained tendency to revert to the tribal. So the realist in me says that immigration policy must favor those who are assimilable to our values and principles and must exclude those who aren’t.

You should be able to explain each of these terms:  tribalism, classical liberalism, Orwellianism, comity, toleration.

Who am I alluding to with the phrase “crooked timber of humanity”?

Life’s Path: Some Trail Notes

Google AI summarizes my book:

Life’s Path: Some Trail Notes is a collection of philosophical reflections by William F. Vallicella (also known as the “Maverick Philosopher”). Published as a departure from his technical academic work, the book presents a “life-philosophy” aimed at navigating the complexities of human existence. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Key Themes and Structure

The book is structured as a series of aphorisms, observations, maxims, and mini-essays. Rather than building a singular technical theory, it offers “trail notes” to guide readers through practical and existential dilemmas. [2, 5]
Key topics include:
  • Human Stages: Reflections on youth, old age, and the transition between them.
  • Desires and Values: Exploration of happiness, ambition, love, lust, and the proper use of money.
  • Metaphysical Concerns: Insights into the relationship between the body and soul, as well as “the last things” (death and what may follow).
  • Ethics and Society: Commentary on manners, morals, and contemporary cultural “decadence”. [2, 5, 6, 7]

Core Philosophy

Vallicella advocates for a critical attitude and a non-dogmatic spirit. His writing in this volume focuses on: [2]
  • Existential Realism: Moving away from “ivory tower” abstractions to address the “edge” of real life.
  • The Soul’s Journey: He often argues that while our consciousness is currently impacted by bodily states (like sleep or drunkenness), it does not prove that consciousness is identical to the body or that it ceases upon death.
  • Objective Standards: He maintains that the standards by which we judge our lives cannot be merely subjective; they must be objectively binding to have true meaning. [1, 2, 8, 9, 10, 11]
Would you like to explore a specific aphorism or topic from Vallicella’s collection in more detail? If you do, bang on the first link at the tippy-top of this post.

What Does Populism Threaten?

Populism is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely  to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn’t be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn’t be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn’t be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned, an internationalism which contemporary ‘liberals’ confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these ‘liberals’ constantly use the word ‘democracy’ as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is not a democracy but a constitutionally-based republic that allows for significant democratic input.  Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

Those who think that pure democracy democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium and in other  countries. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who ‘the people’ are and who are not ‘the people.’ The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain’t democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word ‘migrant?’ It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of “cultural coherence.” A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

Can you show me I’m wrong?

Andre Gide: Evangelical Atheist

Julian Green, Diary 1928-1957, an excerpt from the entry of 24 March 1951, p. 243:

Since my return to France in 1945, I never had an opportunity of  seeing Gide without his attempting, one way or the other, to aim a blow at my [Roman Catholic] faith. [. . .] It would be understanding him very badly to say that he played the part of Satan. Quite the contrary, his purpose was to save me. He wanted to win me over to unbelief and exerted all the zeal of a Christian trying to convince an infidel. That is what perturbed me. Any means seemed good to him in order to make me doubt, because that was the price of salvation. And what was religious in him lent a particular form to his atheism, and to his nonbelief the aspect of a religion. On the other hand, his extraordinary intuition of human beings allowed him to sense how much I was upset by our talks on Catholicism, no matter what pains I took to hide my state of mind. I sometimes eluded this trying subject; he brought me back to it, gently, firmly, with the obstinacy of a missionary.  Finally, he realized he was wasting his time (I could no more fall back than a man with a wall behind him), but he never quite gave up trying to convert me, and did so visibly for conscience’ sake and sometimes against his will.

I find Gide’s evangelically atheist attitude exceedingly strange. What was Gide trying to save Green from? Error? Being wrong? Surely not from  perdition! Perhaps Gide was trying to save Green from anxiety in this life over whether he would end up in hell in the next. But I see no evidence of this in Gide.

And what was Gide trying to convert Green to? The truth? That would make Gide a proselyte for the truth when Gide was opposed to the proselytic mentality. He didn’t like it when Paul Claudel, who presumed to be in firm possession of the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, tried to bring Gide into the Roman Catholic fold.

If Gide did not like people trying to convert him to what they took to be true for his own good, how could he, consistently with that dislike, aim to convert people like Green to what he, Gide, took to be true, namely, that there is no God, no soul, no higher purpose to human existence, no ultimate justice for the countless victims of injustice, no final succor or salvation from our earthly predicament? Claudel was sincerely concerned about Gide’s spiritual welfare.  Given what Gide believed, could he be concerned with Green’s spiritual welfare?

And how could Gide be so cocksure that he had the truth? Giben that he was skeptical of Green’s belief, why wasn’t he also skeptical of his own disbelief?

The deepest issue here, it seems to me, is the question of the value of truth.  Is it good for us to know the truth, or would it be better for us not to know the truth?  You might respond that it depends on what the truth is.  If the truth is that we will can look forward to a blissful eternity, then that is a truth it would be good to know. But if the truth is that we will shortly be worm fodder, then that is a truth it would not be good to know.

To respond in this way, however, would show a failure to understand the question.  The question is whether truth, whatever it is, is a value. Value for whom? For us. So the question is whether the truth would be good for us know.

Truth is one thing, its value another.  If you have the truth, then you are in touch with the way things are, whether partially or completely.  One way of being in touch is by knowing how things stand in reality.  Another is by believing truly how things stand in reality, where to believe truly is to have a true belief.   Knowing and believing truly are not the same but they can be subsumed under the rubric  reality-contact. Either way one is in contact with reality. But is it good for us to be in contact with the way things are? Will this contact contribute to our flourishing, our living well, our being happy on balance and in the long run? To say yes is to say that truth, or rather contact with reality whether via knowledge or belief,  is a value, a good thing.

Gide’s attitude seems to be that the truth is the supreme value whether or not it is good for us to know it. The opposite attitude is that of William James who maintained that the true is the good by way of belief.

But now we are in deep. Time to rustle up some vittles for the evening’s repast before Mark Levin comes on.  There’s more to life than philosophy. There’s politics!