I settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue 'Service' a few days ago. How about you? I had to pony up, but that's better than a 'refund.' If you let them take too much and hold your money without paying you for the use of it, then you are, shall we say, ordering your temporal affairs suboptimally. Time now to kick back with this live version of Taxman featuring George Harrison and Eric Clapton.
Month: April 2009
The Urge to Scribble
You got out of bed to write down another of your wretched aphorisms? Thereby compromising your rest? Is not sleep's oblivion superior to the pseudo-reality reachable by words? And will you make of that an aphorism? Well, now that you're up you may as well relieve the pressure on your bladder too.
Carpe Noctem
Would that we could seize and record the fugitive thoughts that patrol the strange no-man's-land between sleeping and waking. We have learned to seize the day, and the children of the day, but night's offspring elude us.
Why Forgive?
Because we ourselves need to be forgiven. "But I have never done anything that requires forgiveness." Really? Then please forgive me for considering you either a liar, or an amnesiac, or self-deceived, or morally obtuse.
Easter Morn
The magic came at 6:25 AM. I was 50 minutes into the run when conditions turned auspicious. The fleshly vehicle, now properly stoked, rose to the occasion of some serious striding under the sign of a celestial conjunction: the Moon, on the wane but still nearly full, was setting over Dinosaur Mountain just as Old Sol began his ascent over the Superstitions. The heavy rains of the day before had released the subtle scents of the desert. Their dominant note was supplied by the tiny oily dark green leaves of the creosote bush. The palo verdes were in bloom. The body rose, but receded, to enable that peculiar awareness in which one is Emerson's "transparent eyeball" witnessing Santayana's realm of essence. There seemed in that moment nothing better to be than a transparent transcendental eyeball running down a road.
Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis
In a comment to Can Mere Thoughts be Morally Wrong? I wrote:
There is nothing wrong with the mere occurrence of a thought, any thought, even the thought of killing someone just to get his wallet. For the thought might arise without my willing it to arise. My point is that once it has arisen, once it is present to my mind, it becomes a legitimate object of moral evaluation, whether or not that particular thought is followed by a corresponding action.
Peter Lupu responded:
Unless I misunderstand what he intends to say here, Bill appears to endorse thesis (A); i.e., that even a single mere-thought with a certain content is “a legitimate object of moral evaluation” and the verdict of immorality. Notice that moral scrutiny applies to the thought, not the person (I suppose because, under the conditions specified, the person is shielded by the principle “ought implies can”).
I can see that I haven't stated my thesis clearly enough. We need to make some distinctions.
Continue reading “Thoughts as Objects of Moral Evaluation: Refining the Thesis”
F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain
I have argued
at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view. The agreement of Peter Lupu, however, fortified me in my adherence to it. I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences. Please note that the intentionality of my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below. No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains. The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):
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Are You a Natural-Born Scribbler? Take the Gide Test
Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.
It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? . . . And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.
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Questions About Religion and Superstition. Superstitious Materialism
1. Is there a difference between religion and superstition, or is religion by its very nature superstitious? There seem to be two main views. One is that of skeptics and naturalists. For them, religion, apart perhaps from its ethical teaching, is superstitious in nature so that there could not be a religion free of superstition. Religion just is a tissue of superstitious beliefs and practices and has been exposed as such by the advance of natural science. The other view is that of those who take religion seriously as having a basis in reality. They do not deny that there are superstitious beliefs, practices, and people. Nor do they deny that religions are often interlarded with superstition. What they deny is that religion is in its essence superstitious.
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Hypocrisy, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Left
If, per impossibile, there were such a catalog as the Seven Deadly Sins as seen from the Left, hypocrisy would be in first place. Why? Although some who identify themselves as liberals or leftists can be counted among the religious, the dominant note of the Left from at least 1789 on has been anti-religious. Couple this with the fact that perhaps the most egregious forms of hypocrisy are found among religionists, especially the televangelical species thereof, and you have the beginning of an explanation why liberals and leftists find hypocrisy so morally abhorrent. That men of the cloth and their followers exhibit the worst forms of hypocrisy is captured in standard dictionary definitions of 'hypocrisy.' My Webster's shows, "a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; esp.: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion." One reads something similar in the OED.
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“He Sank Beneath Your Wisdom Like a Stone”
Leonard Cohen, Suzanne.
And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.
Advice for the Disputatious
Louis Lavelle, The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. W. T. Gairdner (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 156:
We must refrain from every dispute in which the victory counts for more than what one wins by it. If the defeat of our enemy is also the defeat of the truth, it is our defeat too. It follows that battles over ideas are more to be feared than any other, for they stimulate men's amour-propre [self-love, high opinion of oneself] in the very domain where it is our especial duty to subdue it. Every dispute darkens the inner light: the wise man perceives this light precisely because he preserves his soul in peace. And if he is wrong, he finds more happiness in giving way than he would have found in a triumph; for in the latter case he merely keeps what he already had, in the former he gains something new.
This passage approaches perfection in both content and style. To comment on it would be to sully it — or invite disputation.
Life’s Fugacity
Here the point is very cleverly made:
I turned 52 yesterday. The first decade of my life took 20 years. The second decade took 15 years. The third decade took a decade. The fourth decade took five years. The past dozen years took 12 minutes. At this rate, I'll be dead in less than half an hour.
As we age, the passage of time seems to accelerate. This is a mere seeming since, if time passes at all, which itself may be a mere seeming, time presumably passes at a constant rate. When we are young, the evanescence of our lives does not strike us. But to us midstreamers the fluxious fugacity of this life is all too apparent.
Why does time's tempo seem to speed up as the years roll on? Part of the explanation must be that there is less change and more stasis from decade to decade. Dramatic changes in body and mind and environment occur in the first two decades of life. You go from being a helpless infant to a cocky youth. Your horizon expands from the family circle to the wide world. In the third decade, biological growth over with, one typically finishes one's education and gets settled in a career. But there are still plenty of changes. From age 20 to 30, I lived in about 15 different places In California, Massachusetts, Ohio, Austria, and Germany, studied at half a dozen universities, and worked as a guitar player, logger, tree planter, furniture mover, factory worker, mailman, taxi driver, exterminator, grave digger, and philosophy professor. But from 30 to 40, I lived in only five different places with exactly one job, and from 40 to 50 in three places, and from ages 49 to 59 I have had exactly one permanent address. And it won't be long, subjectively speaking, before I have exactly one address that is permanent in the absolute as opposed to the relative sense.
Tempus? Fugit!
Is Religion the Problem? Why Isn’t Belief As Such the Problem? The Special Pleading of Some Atheists
One of the arguments against religion in the contemporary atheist arsenal is the argument that religious beliefs fuel war and terrorism. Rather than pull quotations from such well-known authors as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, I will quote a couple of passages from one of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. His piece is entitled "Overcoming Christianity." After describing his movement from his evangelical Christian upbringing to a quietistic rejection of Christianity, Sinnott-Armstrong tells us how he became an evangelical atheist:
Tax Advice for Philosophers
Philosophers should be sure to avail themselves of the Transcendental Deduction this year as it has been increased. But to take it they will need the Platonic Form. Be advised that attempts to copy the Platonic Form have been known to cause the glitch commonly referred to as the Third (Tax) Man.