Horace Jeffery Hodges on American Al-Awlaki's call for the killing of Americans. Is he calling for his own killing?
All religions are the same, right? So there must be Confucian, Daoist, B'hai, . . . , calls for mass murder. If not, am I permitted the thought that just maybe Islam is uniquely violent?
According to this morning's Arizona Republic, Rudy Bustamante of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement helped bust a major human-smuggling ring.
Nomen est omen.
. . . when we have none we are in danger. (English proverb)
A proverb whose pertinence is proven by recent developments.
Not Fade Away. The dingbat won't slink off into the sidelines. Pretty face, though. Too bad there's nothing behind it.
The late Ted Kennedy's favorite song actually was The Impossible Dream. Figures. It sums up the Left so well: the pursuit by any means of impossible mirage-ideals without regard for consequences. "To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause." To be willing to break 100 million eggs for omelet-in-the-future.
So conservatives don't have ideals? Not at all. Ours are reality-based, grounded in genuine potentials of human action, and respectful of hard facts about man and nature.
Companion post: Standing on the Terra Firma of Antecedent Reality
Spencer Case e-mails:
I am as big an enemy of relativism in all its manifestations as you are. However, I think you were a bit too quick in your recent post on the supposed difficulties of standing resolutely for things you value only relatively. For instance, consider the following passage:
Now here's the question. Given that the two [the conservative and the libertarian]maintain contradictory value-prioritization theses [with respect to the prioritizaqtion of liberty and security] , how can either "stand unflinchingly" for his thesis given that each recognizes that each thesis is true only from his orientation, an orientation which rests crucially on his value-prioritization, a value-prioritization that he has no objective reason to prefer over that of his opponent?
You seem here and throughout your piece, to be operating on the assumption that there is a foundation of absolute values upon which our relative values are grounded, so that we should be troubled to find our deepest, sincerest values are not "any better than" contradictory values in ultimate terms. Maybe that's fine in the context of a discussion of Berlin's thought (with which I am not familiar). However, if the discussion is supposed to be a general discussion about absolute versus relative values, than it betrays the fact that you have insufficiently internalized the mindset of a truly radical subjectivist like Simon Blackburn.
Suppose, like Blackburn, you hold that all values are relative, that values simply are non-cognitive expressions of subjective yays! and boos! In that case, what's wrong with standing unflinchingly for what is only subjectively valued? What else could we possibly stand unflinchingly in favor of than those things to which we are most deeply committed, albeit with commitment understood in a non-cognitive way? Your mistake, Blackburn would say, is that you seem to think your deepest subjective commitments require absolute grounding, and in so doing sell your own commitments short. To misquote Wittgenstein, just as nothing holds up the world, nothing holds up your deepest subjective values.
On one point I think we are in agreement. If one adopts a noncognitivist theory according to which values are nothing more than purely subjective expressions of preferences and aversions, then there cannot be any reason of an axiological sort not to stand unflinchingly in favor of one's commitments. This is a point that is often not appreciated. If values are subjective and relative in this way, and it is one of the values of our group to dominate and subjugate other groups, then there cannot be any reason of an axiological sort to prevent us from doing so. So relativists fool themselves if they think that relativism necessarily breeds tolerance. It is a non sequitur to reason, "Because all values are relative, one must respect the values of other cultures." After all, if all values are relative, then the value of respecting the values of other cultures cannot be absolute but must itself be relative. A commitment to the relativity of values is logically consistent with obliterating other value-systems and their proponents.
So far, then, agreement!
But I am not assuming that values are relative; indeed I am presupposing that they are not. For example, I was in earlier posts presupposing that liberty, equality, and security are nonrelative values, and that the propositions which express their ordering (e.g., 'Liberty is a higher value than security') are objectively true if true.
The point I was making was about justification. Even if liberty and security are objective values, and it is objectively the case that one trumps the other, it can still be the case that one will not be able to show that one is right and one's opponent wrong. I claim that this is the predicament we are in with respect to some value conflicts. Now suppose that is the case. Then, contra Berlin-quoting-Schumpeter, I ought to be bothered by the fact that my opponent — who, we are assuming, is a sincere truth-seeker, possessing all the moral and intellectual virtues, well-informed of all the relevant empirical facts, etc. — disagrees with me. I ought to flinch! Otherwise I am privileging my own point of view simply because it is mine — which is irrational.
Right now I'm Manas, Kyrgyzstan about to fly back to Fort Lewis, Washington for stateside outprocessing, so this will be the last email you get from me on this deployment (in a non-sinister way). Take care and thanks for all the correspondence over the months!
You're welcome. Have a safe trip back, and thank you for your service to our country.
There are tough questions about the possibility and the actuality of divine revelation. An examination of some ideas of the neglected philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916) from the Golden Age of American philosophy will help us clarify some of the issues and problems. One such problem is this: How can one know in a given case that a putative piece of divine revelation is genuine? Before advancing to this question we need a few sections of stage-setting. (That's Royce on the right, by the way, and William James on the left. Surely it was degeneration when American philosophy came to be dominated by the likes of Quine and Rorty.)
1. Concern for Salvation as Essential to Religion. It is very difficult to define religion, in the sense of setting forth necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of the term, but I agree with Royce's view that an essential characteristic of anything worth calling religion is a concern for the salvation of man. (The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner and Sons, 1912, p. 8) Religious objects are those that help show the way to salvation. The central postulate of religion is that "man needs to be saved." (8-9) Saved from what? ". . . from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin." (8) In an earlier post on Simone Weil I spoke of generic wretchedness. It is that which we need salvation from.
2. The Need for Salvation. "Man is an infinitely needy creature." (11) But the need for salvation, for those who feel it, is paramount. The need depends on two simpler ideas:
a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain. (12)
b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good. (12)
To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). I would put it like this. The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition. Some people don't, and it cannot be helped. One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to the them.
3. Religious Insight. Royce defines religious insight as ". . . insight into the need and into the way of salvation." (17) No one can take religion seriously who has not felt the need for salvation. But we need religious insight to show that we really need it, and to show the way to it.
4. Royce's Question. He asks: What are the sources of religious insight? Of insight into the need and into the way of salvation? Many will point to divine revelation through a scripture or through a church as the principal source of religious insight. But at this juncture Royce discerns a paradox that he calls the religious paradox, or the paradox of revelation.
5. The Paradox of Revelation. Suppose someone claims to have received a divine communication regarding the divine will, the divine plan, the need for salvation, the way to salvation, or any related matter. This person can be asked, "By what marks do you personally distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?" (22-23) How is a putative revelation authenticated? By what marks or criteria do we recognize it as genuine? The identifying marks must be in the believer's mind prior to his acceptance of the revelation as valid. For it is by testing the putative revelation against these marks that the believer determines that it is genuine. One needs "a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will." (p. 25) But how can a creature who needs saving lay claim to this prior acquaintance with the marks of genuine revelation?
The paradox in a nutshell is that it seems that only revelation could provide one with what one needs to be able to authenticate a report as revelation:
Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge — that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible?
Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. (103)
Is it a genuine problem or not? Can the church's teaching authority be invoked to solve the problem? Suppose a point of doctrine regarding salvation and the means thereto is being articulated at a church council. The fathers in attendance debate among themselves, arrive at a result, and claim that it is inspired and certified by the Holy Spirit. By what marks do they authenticate a putative deliverance of the Holy Spirit as a genuine deliverance? How do they know that the Holy Spirit is inspiring them and not something else such as their own subconscious desire for a certain result? But this is exactly Royce's problem.
It is not merely an academic problem. To see why see the earlier post on Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
October's scrounging around in used book dens for Beat arcana uncovered Barry Miles' biography of this laureate of low life. It has been holding my interest. Bukowski, though not an associate of the Beat writers, is beat in the sense of beaten down and disaffected but not in Kerouac's sense of beatific. A worthless fellow, a drunkard, a lecher, a misogynist, a shameless user and betrayer of his benefactors, Bukowski (1920-1994) is nonetheless a pretty good scribbler of poetry and prose. (I call him a worthless fellow, but child is father to the man, and Bukowski had a terrible childhood.) If I need an excuse to poke into the particulars of his paltry life, there is my masthead motto, "Study everything, join nothing," and the Terentian homo sum, nihil humani, etc. The other night I read about him in bed, a mistake, since the night mind should be primed for its nocturnal preconscious ruminations with ennobling rather than debasing images. In compensation I read Simone Weil in the predawn hours of the next day. A comparison of the two would be an interesting exercise.
The Dean of Dissipation versus the Red Virgin. A celebration of the base, sordid, cheap, tawdry, depraved, degraded, of the complete abdication of the spirit to the flesh and its lusts, versus an anorexic asceticism bordering on nihilism.
How wild the diversity of human types! How impossible to be bored in a world so populated. How should we live? There is no substitute for finding your own path.
Henry Roth published his first novel, Call It Sleep, in 1934. Sixty years had to pass before his second novel appeared.
The topic of evil brought us to the topic of pain. Herewith, some distinctions and theses for your examination. With regard to physical pain, at least, we ought to distinguish among:
a) The physical substratum of the pain. The cause of the pain. In the case of lower back pain, for example, a pinched nerve. But not just the salient cause, e.g. the pinched nerve, but the totality of causal conditions in the body that 'underpin' the experience of pain. All that makes up the physical substratum of a physical pain.
b) The pain-as-felt, the felt pain. This is the pain one experiences or lives through. Pain as Er-lebnis. The phenomenal pain to which the subject of pain alone has access. (Access to the physical substratum is public; access to the felt pain is private.) With respect to felt pain, esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. So for a felt pain, appearance and reality coincide. Its being as a mental datum is exhausted by its appearing. This is not the case with the physical substratum of the pain.
The felt pain factors into two aspects:
c) The sensory quale of the felt pain, its raw feel to use an old expression of Herbert Feigl. This is the qualitative content, the Nagelian what-it-is-like of the felt pain. Each pain feels like something to the one who has it, though he would be hard pressed to put this feeling into words.
d) The painfulness of the felt pain. The felt pain has a quality, but this quality is not the same as its painfulness. Thus I factor the felt pain into the sensory quale (raw feel) and the painfulness of it. Suppose I am outside in the cold and I feel a stinging sensation in my bare hands. It seems that the painfulness of this sensation depends, at least in part, on my attitude toward it, my aversion. Or consider any olfactory sensation you take to be unpleasant, the smell of cooking broccoli, say. One can learn to overcome such aversions, which is not to say that one overcomes the sensation itself. Or perhaps you are in a public restroom. You focus on the stench and remind yourself that it is only a sensation and one that betokens nothing harmful to the body. As a result of this reflection, the unpleasantness diminishes while the sensation itself remains constant. A reasonable inference from phenomena such as these is that the sensory quale of a pain and its painfulness are distinct, and not just conceptually, but in reality. In some cases it is the attitude of aversion that makes a sensory quale into a pain sensation, but I don't claim that this is true for all cases.
Two Theses
T1. Felt pain is mental, a conscious phenomenon. This is true of both physical and psychological pain. Physical pain, toothache, headache, backache and the like are called 'physical' because of their physical substrata — see (a) above — even though in themselves they are mental. Felt pain cannot be identified with any physical process. Correlated, but not identified.
T2. Felt physical pain is a conscious state with no intentional object. Pains are non-intentional experiences. They are not of or about anything in the way that believing and desiring are
object-directed. But here I need an argument since some maintain that pains exhibit intentionality or object-directedness.
Suppose we compare a visual perceiving of my foot, and a feeling of pain 'in' my foot. The perceiving of my foot is an intentional experience: the act of perceiving 'takes an accusative,' is directed to an object. The perceiving presents the foot as having such and such properties. But what does the pain present? It doesn't present damage to the foot, although there presumably is damage to the foot, a torn Achilles tendon, perhaps. The torn tendon is the cause of the pain sensation, but it is not the intentional object of the pain sensation. The torn tendon is hidden from the pain experience in the way the foot is not hidden from the visual experience. So what is the intentional object of the pain sensation? I say there is none. There is a pain sensation and its cause, but no intentional object. The cause is not presented to me by the pain sensation.
The relation of intentional experience to intentional object is nothing like the relation of pain to its cause. If X is caused by Y, then both X and Y must exist. But if X is an awareness-of Y, if X is intentionally related to Y, then Y need not exist.
For more on non-intentional experiences, see the Intentionality category.
Suppose evil is an illusion. Then the illusion of evil is itself evil, a non-illusory evil, whence follows the falsity of 'Every evil is an illusion.'
Or is that too quick? Then permit me some exfoliation.
1. Every evil is illusory. (Assumption for reductio ad absurdum)
2. The illusion that there are evils is not itself an illusion: it is real. (See subargument A infra)
3. The illusion that there are evils is itself evil. (See subargument B infra)
Therefore
4. There is an evil that is not illusory, namely, the illusion that there are evils.
Therefore
5. (1) is false: it is not the case that every evil is illusory.
Subargument A: The illusion or false seeming that there are evils, qua false seeming, is either nothing or something. If nothing, then it cannot be the case that every evil is illusory. (After all, evil must have some entitative status, however exiguous, if 'illusory' is to be predicable of it.) If, on the other hand, the illusion or false seeming that there are evils is something, then this false seeming, though nonveridical, exists in people's minds and is as real as can be.
Subargument B: The illusion that there are evils, which subargument A shows to be real qua false seeming, is itself evil because it is false and deceptive.
One of the metaphysical problems of evil is that, while evil cannot be an illusion, as I have just demonstrated, it cannot be fundamentally real either, as such luminaries as Augustine and Aquinas clearly saw. Evil has a strange 'in-between' status, an ontologically derivative status. This is what the classical doctrine of evil as privatio boni is supposed to capture. That doctrine, though, we have seen to be problematic. But progress has been made in better understanding the question, What is evil?
Part One is here.
Some pains, though bad in themselves, are instrumentally good. You go for broke on your mountain bike. At the top of a long upgrade your calves are burning from the lactic acid build-up. But it's a 'good' pain. It is instrumentally good despite its intrinsic badness. You are satisfied with having 'flattened' that hill one more time. The net result of the workout is hedonically positive. But surely not all pains are classifiable as instrumentally good. Think of someone who suffers from severe chronic joint pain so bad that he can barely walk let alone pedal a bike. In alleviation thereof he daily ingests a cocktail of drugs with nasty side effects that make it impossible for him to think straight or accomplish anything. Surely the person's condition is evil. (But don't get hung up on the word 'evil' and don't assume that every evil is the responsibility of a finite agent. The evil of pain is a natural or physical, not a moral, evil.) Is this not a counterexample to the thesis that every evil is a privation or absence of good?
Now pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:
A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' I developed this suggestion in Part One and found reason to reject it.
B. Or one might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. One might point to the fact that pains are often very useful warning signals that indicate that something is going wrong in the body or that some damage is being done to the body: the pains in my knees inform me that I am running too long and hard and am in danger of an overuse injury. On this suggestion, then, pains are real but not evil. Consequently, pains are not counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni.
But this response is not very convincing. There are several considerations.
1. If pains are warning signals, then they are instrumentally good. But what is instrumentally good may also be intrinsically evil. The searing pain in a burnt hand, though instrumentally good, is intrinsically evil. Its positive 'entity' (entitas in scholastic jargon) is apparently not well accommodated on the classical doctrine that evils are privationes boni. Again, the pain is not the mere absence of the good of pleasure, but something positively bad. After all, the hand is not numb or as if aenesthetized; there is a positive sensation 'in' it, and this positive sensation is bad. So even if every pain served to warn us of bodily damage, that would not detract from the positive badness of the pain sensation. One cannot discount the intrinsic positive badness by pointing to the fact that the pain is instrumentally good.
2. If pains are warning signals, it seems that many of them could perform this function without being so excruciating. The intensity of many pains seems out of all proportion to the good that they do in warning us of bodily damage. This excruciatingness is part of the evil of pain.
3. It is a fact that the pain in my hand that warns me to remove it from the hot stove typically does not subside when the hand is removed. It continues to hurt. But what good purpose does this serve given that the warning has been heeded and the hand removed from the hot stove? The argument that pain is good, not evil, because it warns us about bodily damage fails to account for the pain that persists after the warning has been heeded. The pain in my burnt hand continues, of course, because the hand has been damaged; but then that pain is intrinsically and positively evil and the evil cannot be discounted in the way the pain at the time of the contact of hand with stove can be discounted.
4. There is no necessity that a warning system be painful. A robotic arm could have a sensor that causes the arm to retract from a furnace when the furnace temperature becomes damagingly high. The robot would feel nothing. We might have had that sort of painless warning system.
My interim conclusion may be set forth as follows:
Pains are natural evils
The evil of pain is not a mere absence of good
Ergo
Not all evils are privationes boni.
REFERENCE: Jorge J. E. Gracia, "Evil and the Transcendentality of Goodness: Suarez's Solution to the Problem of Positive Evils" in Scott MacDonald, ed., Being and Goodness (Cornell UP, 1991), pp. 151-176.
A reader recalled my posts on evil as privatio boni from the old blog and wants me to upload them to the new, which I will gladly do. So far I managed to scare up two. Here is the first.
………………………
The goddess of blogging sent me Peter Lupu whose comments are a welcome stimulant. Peter displays the virtues of a good commenter and indeed co-worker: he is 'up to speed,' 'in there' with the terminology, and he knows how to oppose without becoming churlish. He tells me that theists, confronted with the logical argument from evil should not reject the premise that objective evil exists. I agree. But a good philosopher examines every aspect of a problem, no matter how bizarre it appears at first, and every premise and every inferential joint of every argument pertaining to the problem. So we need to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:
For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present –namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.
If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as standardly defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.
Without going that far, let us first note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.
The Problem of Pain
But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.
The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.
The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness. Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, etc.
Two Possible Responses. Pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:
A. One might argue that pains are evil but not objectively real in that they exist only 'in the mind.' One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. But the painfulness of this substratum is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.
What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness. If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent. This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.
Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain. Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.
B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for another time.
Haiku Grammar Lament
Into desuetude
Falls the subjunctive mood
Along with the hyphen.
Haiku Commentary on Marx's 11th Thesis on Feuerbach
The Marxist Nowhere Man
Attempts to change
What he does not understand.
Anti-Commie Haiku
Utopic heads in fog,
They broke real eggs
For an unreal omelet.
9/11 Haiku
Nihilist numbskulls
Virgins in brain,
Topple a tower with a plane.
Get it right, or don't play it at all.
What starts out as legitimate grooming and hygiene ends up as vanity.
