In chess, the object of the game is clear, the rules are fixed and indisputable, and there is always a definite outcome (win, lose, or draw) about which no controversy can arise. In philosophy, the object and the rules are themselves part of what is in play, and there is never an incontrovertible result.
So I need both of these gifts of the gods. Chess to recuperate from the uncertainty of philosophy, and philosophy to recuperate from the sterility of chess.
The very best books, or so it seems, are usually the ones that get withdrawn from circulation in local public libraries, while the trash remains on the shelves. The librarians' bad judgement, however, redounds to my benefit as I am able to purchase fine books for fifty cents a pop. A while back, the literary luminaries at the Apache Junction Public Library saw fit to remove Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Norton, 1991) from the shelves.
Why, I have no idea. (It wasn't a second copy.) But I snatched it up. A find to rejoice over. A beautifully produced first edition of over 400 pages, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America wanted $25 for it. I shall set it on the Beat shelf next to Kerouac's Dharma Bums wherein Rexroth figures as Reinhold Cacoethes. I hope the two volumes refrain from breaking each other's spines.
Moral: Always search diligently through biblic crap piles, remainder bins and the like. It is amazing what treasure lies among the trash.
It is time to recommence 'hostilities' with Edward Ockham. (I do thank him for engaging my ideas.)
I lately made two claims. One is that existence entails completeness. The other is that completeness does not entail existence. In support of the second claim, I wrote:
Why can't there be complete nonexistent objects? Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail. None of them exists or is actual. But each of them is complete. One of them God calls 'Charley.' God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists. It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, only 'now' it is actual.
To this Edward responds:
I say: if the God of Leibniz is contemplating something, then there is something he is contemplating. And I say that if each of them is determinate down to the last detail, some things are equivalent to them. And if each of them is complete, at least one of them is complete. All of the consequents imply existential statements, and whatever follows from the consequent, follows from the antecedent. I may be wrong, but all of this looks like an elementary example of the quantifier shift fallacy. If it is possible that a unicorn exists, it does not follow that some unicorn is such that it possibly exists. 'Possibly Ex Fx' does not imply 'Ex possibly Fx'.
But doesn't our friend make a mistake in his very first sentence? He moves from
a. God is contemplating something
to
b. Something is such that God is contemplating it.
But in intentional contexts quantifier exportation fails. Ironically, Edward taxes me with a quantifier shift fallacy when he commits one himself!
Furthermore, Edward is insulting the divine omnipotence and omnsicience. For he is saying in effect that God cannot bring before his mind a completely determinate intentional object — an object whose mode of existence is merely intentional — without that object being actual. But surely God can do that: he can conceive of a world that is fully determinate but only possibly existent. Such a world enjoys esse intentionale only. It exists only as an accusative of the divine intellect. What then must be added to make it real or actual or existent? The theist can say that the divine will must come into play. God wills that one of the possible worlds enjoy, in addition to esse intentionale, esse reale as well. Let there be Charley!
(Other questions arise at this point which are off-topic, for example, why Charley over Barley? Why Charely over any other world? Must God have a reason? And what would it be? Would it be because Charley is the best of all possible worlds? Is there such a things as the BEST of all possible worlds? Why some world rather than no world? And so on.)
You don't have to believe in God to appreciate the point I am making. The point is that existence cannot be identified with completeness. Admittedly, everything that exists — in the mode of esse reale of course – is complete, but there is more to existence than completeness. The theological imagery is supposed to help you understand the ontological point. All I need for my argument is the conceivability of the God of Leibniz. If you can conceive such a God, then you can conceive the irreducibility of existence to completeness. And if so, you can grasp that completeness does not entail existence.
In the end the dispute may come down to a profound and irresolvable difference in intuitions. For some of us existence is a deep (thick) topic, for others it is superficial (thin). I say it is deep. Part of what that means is that it cannot be explicated in broadly logical terms: not in terms of indefinite identifiablity, or property-possession, or instantiation, or completeness, or anything else.
You can't tow a U-Haul with a hearse.
Did they take the word 'ass' out too? Or has that word already been removed? Leave it to a liberal jackass to pander to the dumbest among us.
We conservatives need to gird our loins, saddle our asses and and sally forth to smite these change-for-the-sake-of-change jackwagons, planting our boots in their 'booties' as needed. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)
Like Nietzsche, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things." (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 24 March 1887, quoted in R. Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) Unlike Nietzsche, I
appreciate that the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is no solution.
The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.
But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillment, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity. So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life. Our spokesman is Boethius, inspired by Philosophia herself:
Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite
life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal
things. All that lives under the conditions of time moves through
the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in
time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime.
It cannot yet comprehend tomorrow; yesterday it has already lost.
And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing,
passing moment. And as Aristotle said of the universe, so it is of
all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor will
ever cease, and its life is coextensive with the infinity of time,
yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal. For though it
apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not
embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the
future. What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps
and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fullness of unending
life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the
fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself
to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself
the infinity of changing time. (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book
V; the Latin below the fold)
Continue reading “Boethius Contra Nietzsche on Time and Transition”
I picked up The Brooklyn Follies (2006) and the first couple of lines sucked me right in. "I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn . . . ."
Anarchism is to political philosophy as eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind. But untenable positions have their uses. They serve as foils for the development of sensible theories.
An astute reader comments:
Allowing for multiple modes of being may lead to too many or infinitely many modes. Using your own example and oversimplifying on purpose: if the mode of being of the house made of bricks is different from that of the bricks, what prevents us from claiming that there are different modes of being for all other structures that could be made from these bricks? I think there should be explicit arguments against this motivation.
A side note/question: "no individual can be instantiated." You state this as a self evident truth. It would help if you elaborate on this point.
I have read your blog for over a year, mostly due to my interest in identity, existence and other basic notions that I consider fundamental. I respect your intellectual honesty and find your general reflections stimulating and deep but not dry.
1. My claim is not that a house, a corral, a wall, etc. made of the same bricks each has a different mode of being. These wholes have the same mode of being as each other. The claim is rather that certain types of whole — not necessarily every type of whole — possess a different mode of being than their parts.
In the argument I gave, I made the simplifying assumption that the bricks are simples. But of course they are not and so the argument can be iterated in their case assuming that each brick is a whole of parts of the same type as the whole of bricks. Iterating the argument 'all the way down' we come finally to simples which exist-independently while all the wholes 'on the way up' exist-dependently.
My concern is to legitimate the very idea of there being modes of being as against the analytical orthodoxy according to which there cannot be any such modes. I grant, however, that if the MOB doctrine led to an endless proliferation of modes then that upshot would strongly count against it.
2. "No individual can be instantiated." This follows if you accept the following definitions.
D1. X is an individual =df X has properties but is not itself a property.
D2. X is a property =df X is possibly such that it is instantiated.
Since no individual is a property and only properties can be instantiated, no individual can be instantiated. To be instantiated is to have an instance.
3. "I respect your intellectual honesty and find your general reflections stimulating and deep but not dry." I shall try to live up to that comment. Thank you!
The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:
. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)
My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible. My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible. My permitting (forbidding) is justifed only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible). And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible. Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.
For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws. The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it. Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.
Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful. But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty. The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.
Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence. (For example,the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Paestinian cause or its methods.) See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.
The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable. Or so I would argue against the anarchists. But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and sometimes misused. This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.
We don't know whether or not God exists. But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and colaescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason.
Tough questions: Could such a transcendental Ideal (in Kant's sense) be merely a transcendental Ideal impossible of existence in reality? And could anything impossible count as an ideal? But if God is possible would he not have to be actual?
