Month: November 2009

Neither Angel Nor Beast

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #329:

Man is neither angel nor beast; and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

The first half of the thought is unexceptionable: man is indeed neither angel nor beast, but, amphibious as he is between matter and spirit, a hybrid and a riddle to himself.

The second half of Pascal's thought, however, is unfair to the beasts. No beast can act the beast the way a man can. No beast is bestial in the way a man can be bestial. The difference is that while the beast acts according to his nature, man freely degrades himself contrary to his nature. Having done so, he allows his freely indulged passions to suborn his intellect: he constructs elaborate rationalizations of his self-degradation.

It is not our animality that corrupts us but our free misuse of our animality, a misuse that derives from our spirtuality.

William James on Self-Denial

No one preaches self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

The Demons of the Desert

The desert fathers of old believed in demons because of their experiences in quest of the "narrow gate" that only few find. They sought to perfect themselves and so became involved as combatants in unseen warfare. They felt as if thwarted in their practices by oppponents both malevolent and invisible. The moderns do not try to perfect themselves and so the demons leave them alone.

Gerede

Conversation about trivial matters can be idle and useless, and usually is. But the same is true of conversation about 'deep matters.' In some moods, intellectual and spiritual conversation is more offensive to me than mundane chit-chat. Talk can degenerate into profanation. We need periodic recuperation from it in the form of entry into silence.

Validity, Invalidity, and Logical Form

When we say that an argument is valid we are saying something about its logical form. To put it epigrammatically, validity is a matter of form. We are saying that its form is such that no (actual or possible) argument of that form has true premises and a false conclusion. Validity is necessarily truth preserving. I just used the expression, 'its form.' But since an argument can have two or more forms, a better formulation is this:

1. An argument is valid iff it instantiates a valid argument-form.

Given (1), some will be tempted by

2. An argument is invalid iff it instantiates an invalid argument-form.

But (2) is false. After all, every (noncircular) argument instantiates an invalid form. 'Some cameras are digital devices; therefore, some digital devices are cameras,' which is obviously valid, instantiates the invalid form p therefore q. Similarly, every valid syllogism has the invalid form p, q, therefore r. Consider this argument:

The Metaphysics 101 Argument for Propositions

In his SEP entry on propositions, Matthew McGrath presents what he calls the 'Metaphysics 101' argument for propositions. Rather than quote him, I will put the argument in my own more detailed way.

1. With respect to any occurrent (as opposed to dispositional) belief, there is a distinction between the mental act of believing and the content believed. Since believing is 'intentional' as philosophers use this term, i.e., necessarily object-directed, there cannot be an act of believing that is not directed upon some object or content. To believe is to believe something, that the door has been left ajar, for example. Nevertheless, the believing and the believed are distinct.

Grades of Prayer

1. The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessionary prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, and this amounts to idolatry, the worshipping of a false god.

Continue reading “Grades of Prayer”

Joubert on Mystical Experience

From The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, p. 29, tr. Paul Auster:

Forgetfulness of all earthly things, desire for heavenly things, immunity from all intensity and all disquiet, from all cares and all worries, from all trouble and all effort, the plenitude of work without agitation. The delights of feeling without the work of thought. The ravishments of ecstasy without medication. In a word, the happiness of pure spirituality in the heart of the world and amidst the tumult of the senses. It is no more than the gladness of an hour, a minute, an instant. But this instant, this minute of piety spreads its sweetness over our months and our years.

So excellent and accurate is this description of the mystical experience that I cannot doubt that the above entry records an actual experience of Joubert's.

François Fénelon

François Fénelon the Christian sounds like a Buddhist when he speaks of the annihilation of the soul in God:

Nothing would give us more delight than that God should do all his pleasure with us, provided it should always be to magnify and perfect us in our own eyes. But if we are not willing to be destroyed and annihilated, we shall never become that whole burnt offering, which is entirely consumed in the blaze of God's love.

We desire to enter into a state of pure faith, and retain our own wisdom! To be a babe, and great in our own eyes! Ah! what a sad delusion!

I am attracted by the thesis of the esoteric (transcendent) unity of all religions, a thesis argued by Frithjof Schuon. Beyond divergence of doctrine, unity. But I am also skeptical of the unity thesis. If Islam affirms the radical unicity of God, and Christianity denies it by affirming the tri-unity of God, what is the synthesis in which this thesis and that antithesis are aufgehoben? And so on down the line. How reconcile The Buddhist anatman doctrine with Christian personalism?

The Inconceivable

It is arguable that all religions and salvation-paths point to the Inconceivable and terminate in it if terminus they have. The Nibbana of the Pali Buddhists. The ontologically simple God of Thomas Aquinas. A theory of the Inconceivable would have to show that it is rationally admissible that there be something that cannot be grasped rationally. The theory would not be a grasping, but a pointing to the possibility of the Ungraspable. It would include a discursive refutation of all attempts at foreclosing on this possibility. The theory would deploy itself on the discursive plane, but the purpose of it would be to point one beyond the discursive plane, to make a place, as it were, for the possibility of the Transdiscursive.

But such a philosophical project is self-contradictory. If you say that the Inconceivable is possibly existent, then you exclude its necessary nonexistence. You make a determinate predication of the Inconceivable and therefore think it, conceive it, as having the property predicated. But then you fall into contradiction by affirming something of that of which nothing can be affirmed. There is no transcending the duality of thought if you are to think at all. A 'theory' that consists of a pointing to the Transdiscursive must needs be gibberish. The Real is exhausted by the discursively graspable. Outside it, nothing.

Is this a good objection or not?

Control Your Mind!

A thought arises. Interrogate it: Whither? To what purpose? The climber tests each foothold before putting his weight on it. So should we test each thought before living in it and losing ourselves in it. Why? Because the seed of word and deed is in the thought. To control thought is to control the seed of word and deed. Meditation, if nothing else, is a training in thought control. Daily meditation releases the mind's wonderful power of self-regulation.