Month: February 2011

Ayn Rand on Bobby Fischer

It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead for over three years now.  The king of the 64 squares died at age 64 on 17 January 2008.  Fischer's sad story well illustrates the perils of monomania. Ayn Rand did not realize how right she was in her 1974 "An Open Letter to Boris Spassky" (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 56):

     Bobby Fischer's behavior . . . is a clear example of the clash
     between a chess expert's mind, and reality. The confident,
     disciplined, obviously brilliant player falls to pieces when he has
     to deal with the real world. He throws tantrums like a child,
     breaks agreements, makes arbitrary demands, and indulges in the
     kind of whim worship one touch of which in the playing of chess
     would disqualify him from a high school tournament. Thus he brings
     to the real world the very evil that made him escape it:
     irrationality.

More on Modes of Being with Two Applications

Clarity will be served if we distinguish the following four questions:  

 Q1. What is meant by 'mode of being'?
 Q2. Is the corresponding idea intelligible?
 Q3. Are there (two or more) modes of being?
 Q4. What are the modes of being?

So far in this series of posts I have been concerned only with the first two questions. Clearly, the first two questions are logically prior to the second two. It is possible to understand what is meant by 'mode of being' and grant that the notion is intelligible while denying that there are (two or more) modes of being. And if two philosophers agree that there are (two or more) modes of being they might yet disagree about what these modes are.

I assume that if talk of modes of being is intelligible, then there is no mistake such as Peter van Inwagen alleges, or fallacy such as  Reinhardt Grossmann alleges, that is committed by partisans of any modes-of-being doctrine.  Van Inwagen's claim, you will recall, is that such partisans illictly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of an F to the existence of the F.  And Grossmann's claim, you will also recall, is that one cannot validly infer from a dramatic difference in properties as between two kinds of thing (concreta and abstracta, for exsample) that the two kinds of thing differ in their mode of being.

An Application to Philosophical Theology

Suppose you have two philosophers. They agree that God exists and they agree as to the nature of God. But one claims that God exists necessarily while the other claims that he exists contingently. What are they disagreeing about? That there is a being having such-and-such divine properties is not in dispute. Nor is the nature of God in dispute. It is at least arguable that the disagreement centers on God's Seinsweise, or modus essendi, or way of being, or mode of being or however you care to phrase it.  The one philosopher says that God exists-necessarily while the other says that God exists-contingently.  This is not a difference in nature or in properties but in mode of being.

This suggests that with respect to anything, we can ask: (i) What is it?  (ii) Does it exist? (iii) How (in what way or mode) does it exist? This yields a tripartite distinction among quiddity (in a broad sense to include  essential and accidental, relational and nonrelational properties), existence, and mode of existence (mode of being).
 
My claim, at a bare minimum, is that, contra van Inwagen, Grossmann, Dallas Willard, and a host of others, the notion that there are modes of being is intelligible and defensible, and needn't involve the making of a mistake or the commission of a fallacy. Of course I want to go beyond that and claim that a sound metaphysics cannot get by without a modes-of-being doctrine.  But for now I am concerned merely to defend the minimal claim.  Minimal though it is, it puts me at loggerheads with the analytic establishment.  (But what did you expect for a maverick?)

A contemporary analytic philosopher who adheres to the thin conception of being according to which there are no modes of being will accommodate the difference between necessary and contingent beings by saying that a necessary being like God exists in all possible worlds whereas a contingent being like Socrates exists in some but not all possible worlds. So instead of saying that God exists in a different   way than Socrates, he will say that God and Socrates exist in the same way, which is the way that everything exists, but that God exists in all worlds whereas Socrates exists only in some.  But this involves quantification over possible worlds and raises difficult questions as to what possible worlds are.

(It is worth noting that a modes-of-being theorist can reap the benefits of possible worlds talk as a useful and graphic façon de parler without incurring the ontological costs.  You can talk the talk without walking the walk.)

Presumably no one here will embrace the mad-dog modal realism of David Lewis, according to which all worlds are on an ontological par. So one has to take some sort of abstractist line and construe worlds as  maximal abstracta of one sort or another, say, as maximal (Fregean not Russellian) propositions. But then difficult questions arise about what it is for an individual to exist in a world. What is it for   Socrates to exist in a possible world if worlds are maximal (Fregean)  propositions? It is to be represented as existing by that world. So Socrates exists in the actual world in that Socrates is represented as existing by the actual world which, on the abstractist aspproach, is the one true maximal proposition. (A proposition is maximal iff it entails every proposition with which it is consistent.) And God exists  in all possible worlds in that all maximal propositions represent him as exsiting: no matter which one of the maximal propositions is true, that proposition represents him as existing.

But veritas sequitur esse, truth follows being, so I am inclined to say that the abstractist approach has it precisely backwards: the necessity of God's existence is the ground of each maximal proposition's representing him as existing; the necessity of God's existence cannot be grounded in the logically posterior fact that every maximal proposition represents him as existing.
 
The ground of the divine necessity, I say, is God's unique mode of being which is not garden-variety metaphysical necessity but aseity.  God alone exists from himself and has his necessity from himself
unlike lesser necessary beings (numbers, etc) which have their  necessity from God. The divine aseity is in turn grounded in the  divine simplicity which latter I try to explain in my SEP article.

Summing up this difficult line of thought that I have just barely sketched: if we dig deep into the 'possible worlds' treatment of metaphysical necessity and contingency, we will be led back to an   ontology that invokes modes of being.

Application to the Idealism/Realism Controversy

Consider this thing on the desk in front of me. What is it? A coffee cup with such-and-such properties both essential and  accidental. For example, it is warm and full of coffee. These are accidental properties, properties the thing has now but might not have  had now, properties the possession of which is not necessary for its  existence. No doubt the coffee cup exists. But it is not so clear in what mode it exists. One philosopher, an idealist, says that its mode of being is purely intentional: it exists only as an intentional object, which means: it exists only relative to (transcendental)   consciousness. The other philosopher, a realist, does not deny that the cup is (sometimes) an intentional object, but denies that its  being is exhausted by its being an intentional object. He maintains that it exists mind-independently.

What I have just done in effect is introduce two further modes of being. We can call them esse intentionale and esse reale, purely intentional being and real being. It seems that without this   distinction between modes of being we will not be able to formulate the issue that divides the idealist and the realist. No one in his right mind denies the existence of coffee cups, rocks, trees, and   'external' items generally. Thus Berkeley and Husserl and other idealists do not deny that there exist trees and such; they are making a claim about their mode of existence.

Suppose you hold to a thin conception of being, one that rules out modes of existence. On the thin conception, an item either exists or it does not and one cannot distinguish among different ways, modes, kinds, or degrees of existence. How would an adherent of the thin conception formulate the idealism/realism controversy?  The idealist, again, does not deny the existence of rocks and trees.  And he doesn't differe with the realist as totheir nature.  Without talk of modes of being, then, no sense can be made of the idealism/realism controversy.

Reinhardt Grossmann Against Modes of Being

Here is a plausible principle:  if n items stand in an n-adic relation, then all of them exist.  And necessarily so.  If Miami is between Superior and Globe, then all three towns exist.  Combine this principle about relations with the plausible idea that the intentional nexus is a dyadic relation that relates a thinker (or a mental act of a thinker) to an object of thought.  So far, so good.  But what if the object of thought does not exist?  Then what we have is a relation that relates an existent thinker to a nonexistent object in violation of the plausible principle about relations.  The puzzle can be cast in the mold of an aporetic triad:

1. We sometimes think about the nonexistent.
2. Intentionality is a relation that ties a thinker to an object of thought.
3. Every relation is such that, if it holds, then all its relata exist.

The limbs are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent.

Some will be tempted at this point to distinguish between two modes of being, a  strong mode and a weak mode if you will, call them existence and subsistence.  The relations principle could then be reformulated to say that if a relation R holds, then all of R's relata have being (either exist or subsist).  This seems to allow a solution of our problem.  When Tom thinks about a nonexistent item such as a mermaid, he does indeed stand in a relation to something, it's just that the item in question subsists rather than exists. The object of thought has being but does not exist.

Now I don't think this solution is a good one even if there are different modes of being, but at least it  illustrates how one might be tempted to embrace a doctrine of modes of being.  And  I agree with Reinhardt Grossmann that the above is not a good argument for modes of being.  But he seems to think that there are no good arguments for modes of being, and indeed that the very idea is fallacious.  Grossmann writes,

Are there any other arguments for the existence of modes of being?

It seems to me that all the rest of such arguments are of the following form.  One first points out that two kinds of thing are fundamentally different, that they differ 'categorially', so to speak.  Then one asserts that such a tremendous difference must be a difference in their modes of being.  While one kind of thing, say exists, the other kind merely subsists. [. ..] 

This type of argument  is obviously fallacious.  From the fact that two kinds of things differ fundamentally in their properties, it simply does not follow that they must have different modes of being.  Of course, they may exist in different modes, but that they do so exist cannot be shown in that way.  (The Existence of the World: An Introduction to Ontology, Routledge 1992, pp. 95-96)

Grossman is making two claims here.  One is about the invalidity of a form of argument whereby one infers a difference in mode of being from the fact that two kinds of thing are very different.  Grossmann is right that this is a non sequitur.  The other claim is that all arguments for modes of being have this fallacious form.

But this second claim is false.  Earlier I argued that if there are substances and if there are accidents, then substances and accidents differ in their mode of being.  My argument was not that substances and accidents are so radically different in their natures that this difference in nature entails a difference in mode of being.  My argument hinged on the relation between substances and accidents.  Suppose Socrates is a substance and his being sunburned is an accident inhering in him.  The substance and the accident both exist and they differ in nature.  But then how do we account for the fact that an accident cannot exist except as inhering in the substance whose accident it is?  We cannot  account for this characteristic feature of accidents by saying that both exist or that they differ in nature.  We have to say that accidents and substances exist in different ways.  Accidents exist in an existentially dependent way whereas substances exist in an existentially independent way.

Clearly, we have to introduce a distinction between different modes of being if we are to explain how substances and accidents are related.  Now this argument I just gave does not commit the fallacy that Grossmann mentions.  It does not infer a difference in mode of being from a difference in nature.  So Grossmann's second claim is mistaken.

On Civility and the Recent Civility Initiatives

Civility is a good old conservative virtue and I'm all for it.  But like toleration, civility has limits.  If you call me a racist because I argue against Obamacare, then not only do I have no reason to be civil in my response to you, I morally ought not be civil to you.  For by being civil I only encourage more bad behavior on your part.  By slandering me, you have removed yourself from the sphere of the civil.  The slanderer does not deserve to be treated with civility; he deserves to be treated with hostility and stiff-necked opposition.  He is deserving of moral condemnation.

If you call me a xenophobe because I insist that the federal government do what it is constitutionally mandated to do, namely, secure the nation's borders, then you slander me and forfeit whatever right you have to be treated civilly.  For if you slander me, then you are moral scum and deserve to be morally condemned.  In issuing my moral condemnation, I exercise my constitutionally-protected First Amendment right to free speech.  But not only do I have a right to condemn you, I am morally obliged to do so lest your sort of evil behavior become even more prevalent.

Examples can be multiplied, but the point is clear.  Civility has limits.  One ought to be civil to the civil.  But one ought not be civil to the uncivil.  What they need is a taste of their own medicine.

One must also realize that 'civility' is a prime candidate for linguistic hijacking.  And so we must be on our guard that the promoters of 'civility' are not attaching to this fine word a Leftward-tilting connotation.    We must not let them get away with any suggestion that one is civil if and only if one is an espouser of liberal/left positions. 

The Left no more owns civility than it owns dissent.

The motto of the No Labels outfit is "Not Left. Not Right. Forward."  'No Labels' is itself a label and a silly one , implying as it does that there are no important differences between Left and Right which need identification and labeling.  It is also preposterous to suggest that we can 'move forward' without doing so along either broadly conservative or broadly liberal lines.  To 'move forward' along liberal lines is to move in the direction of less individual liberty and ever-greater control by the government.  This is simply unacceptable to libertarians and conservatives and must be stopped.  There is little room for compromise here.  How can one compromise with those whose fiscal irresponsibility will lead to a destruction of the currency?  Any compromise struck with them can only be a tactical stopgap on the way to their total defeat.  Fiscal responsibility and border security are two issues on which there can be no compromise.  For it is obviously absurd to suppose that a genuine solution lies somewhere in the middle.

Worst of all, however is to claim that one is neither Left nor Right but then take policy stances that are leftist.  This demonstrates a lack of intellectual honesty.  The 'No Labels' folks cite the following as a "Shared Purpose": 

  • Americans want a government that empowers people with the tools for success – from a world-class education to affordable healthcare – provided that it does so in a fiscally prudent way.

    • But that's not a shared purpose but a piece of pure leftism.  First of all, it is not the government that 'empowers' people — to acquiesce for the nonce in this specimen of PC lingo — government is a necessary evil as libertarians and conservatives see it, and any empowering that gets done is best done by individuals in the absence of governmental shackles.  It is also not the role of  the federal government, as libertarians ansd conservatives see it, to educate people or provide health care.  Only liberals with their socialist leanings believe that.

    What the No Labels bunch is serving up is mendacity.  First they paper over genuine differences of opinion and then they put forth their own opinion as neutral, as neither Left nor Right, when it is obviously leftist.  So what these people are saying to us is that we should put aside all labels while toeing the leftist party line.  And be civil too!  I say to hell with that.  Let's be honest and admit that there are deep differences.  For example, if you say that health care is a right and I say it is not a right but a good, or a commodity, then we have a very deep difference. 

    In the wake of the Tucson shootings, the University of Arizona has set up a National Institute for Civil Discourse.  And then there is the American Civility Tour. Just what we need: more wastage of tax dollars on feel-good liberal nonsense.

    I conclude by referring you to a very interesting Allegheny College survey, Nastiness, Name-Calling, and Negativity. 

    The ‘Religion of Peace’ Strikes Again

    A London man was viciously attacked (face slashed, skull fractured) "for teaching other religions to Muslim girls." 

    I guess the Brits haven't learned that toleration has limits and that allowing mass immigration of uncivilized and uncivilizable elements can't lead to anything good.  (Or do they perhaps have a death wish?)  One hopes that the Brits wise up in time.  England is the mother country.  Every true American feels a certain fondness for her, regardless of ethnic origin.

    And here  Alan West shows how to respond to an apologist for Islamism. 

    Frank Brady’s End Game Reviewed

    It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead three years already.  He died on 17 January 2008.   Last night I saw Frank Brady on C-Span's Book Notes.  Brady was pitching his new book End Game which tells the rest of the Fischer story.  I will definitely be on the lookout for it in the used book bins.  Here is an NYT review.  And here is another.

    The Decline of Liberalism

    Conrad Black provides some historical perspective.  A balanced assessment as the following excerpt demonstrates:

    Roosevelt's social programs were left essentially unaltered for 20 years after he died, until President Lyndon Johnson cut taxes while expanding the social ambitions of the federal government with his Great Society War on Poverty, and massive job retraining efforts, coupled to great and long-delayed advances in civil rights. Kennedy and Johnson favored civil rights more actively than had their predecessors, and backed conservatives into pious humbug about the Constitution not allowing for federal imposition of voting rights and official social equality for African Americans. Johnson overcame that opposition and it was one of liberalism's finest hours. But the long Roosevelt-Truman-Eisenhower consensus frayed badly when Johnson, who had been a congressman during the New Deal years, determined to take it a long step further and proposed a policy extravaganza that promised to buy the end of poverty through social investment. As all the world knows, it was a disaster that destroyed the African American family and severely aggravated the welfare and entitlements crises.

     

    Toleration of Vandalism and the Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals

    I sometimes speak of the difference between conservatives and liberals as a 'planetary' one: conservatives and liberals 'live on different planets.'  This Dennis Prager column on graffiti and its toleration by the  tolerate-anything-except-common-sense-and-conservatives Left will help you understand the 'planetary' difference. 

    In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

    The 'thin' conception of being or existence, lately explained, entails that there are no modes of being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-being doctrine is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics.

    My task in this series of posts is not to specify what the modes of being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of being. So I plan to look at a range of   examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of being they  involve.  Against van Inwagen (see post linked above), I maintain that no mistake is made by partisans of the thick conception.  They do not, pace van Inwagen, illicitly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of a thing to its existence.

    This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of being, and not merely in their respective natures.

    1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, white caps, carpet bulges are items that exist, but
    not on their own. They need — as a matter of metaphysical necessity — faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:

    D1. S is a (primary) substance =df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

    D2. A is an accident =df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.

    By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.

    The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to   another. You can't catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from   Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is an intimate one.

    2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A  exist.  Suppose that S and A are the only two items that exist. Then of course there is a sense in which both items exist: each is something and not nothing. Both are there to be quantified over. We can say '(Ex)(x = S)' and '(Ex)(x = A)':  'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.'

    3. Now the issue is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or   other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' a semantic term; 'mode' an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of being.  They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.

    4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in   S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither  could exist without the other. But S can exist without A. Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially  dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A  exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their  modes of being. One cannot make sense of inherence without  distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of being.

    5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of being entails that there cannot be modes of being, that the very idea is unintelligible, the thin conception ought to be rejected.

    Truth and Consolation

    Nothing is true because it is consoling, but that does not preclude certain truths from being consoling.  So one cannot refute a position by showing that some derive consolation from it.  Equally, no support for a position is forthcoming from the fact that it thwarts our interests or dashes our hopes.

    We Get What We Deserve

    It is perhaps only fitting that fiscally irresponsible people should get a fiscally irresponsible government. Before blaming stupid legislators and greedy lenders, take a hard look into the mirror.  At least the person staring back at you is a person over whose behavior you have some control.