Month: July 2011

Never Say Die

Susan Jacoby's new book fell into my hands the other day.  It is entitled Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (Pantheon, 2011).  Although I noticed some things in the first chapter that are clearly true and worth pointing out, the preface raised my critical eyebrows a bit.  But I agree with Jacoby's realism:

. . . to suggest that ninety may soon become the new fifty — the premise of a panel at the widely publicized annual World Science Festival held in New York City in 2008 — is to engage in magical thinking. (5)

Surely she is right about that.  In the preface she writes,

I hope that this book about the genuine battles of growing old will provide support for all who draw their strength and courage from reality, however daunting that reality may be, rather than from platitudes about “defying old age.” This commonly used phrase in the annals of the so-called new old age fills me with rage, because the proximity of old age to death is not only undefiable but undeniable. Anger, by the way, is another emotion considered inappropriate in the old; the dubious notion of the “wisdom of old age” rests on the belief that elders can, and should, transcend the passions, vaulting ambition, and competitiveness of their younger adult lives and arrive at some sort of peace that passeth all understanding.

It is no doubt silly to speak of 'defying old age,' but why should this phrase elicit rage in the 63 year old Boomer?  And then, half-perceiving the inappropriateness of rage over such a thing, especially in a 63 year old, she opines that it is dubious that as we age we can and should transcend the passions, give up ambition, and set aside our youthful competitiveness.  Finally, making matters worse, she adduces a religious phrase that she doesn't understand.

On the contrary, I say

1. To live enslaved to one's passions is obviously bad and has been seen as bad in all the major wisdom traditions. It is precisely one of the compensations of old age, which I take to begin at 60, that it is easier and easier to free oneself from the grip of passion.  The fire down below  begins to subside, to mention the central and most delusive passion. The Buddhist injunction, "Conquer desire and aversion," is much easier to implement once the fires of lust have damped down.  Self-mastery is something within our power and something we ought to pursue. As I see it, Jacoby rightly opposes one form of contemporary nonsense, the Forever Young nonsense, only to succumb to another form of contemporary nonsense, namely, that passion is good.

2.  As for ambition, lack of ambition in the young is rightly seen as a defect. But when the old are still driven by their old ambitions, none of which were of too lofty a nature, are they not fools?  For the old ambitions, appropriate as they were in youth, have become absurd in old age.  Life is, or at least ought to be, progressive disillusionment, a growing insight into the ultimate nullity of name and fame, status and position, loot and lucre.  Or, as I put it in an aphorism:

The young, astride their steeds of ambition, should gallop boldly into the fray. But the old should know when to quit the game and dismount into dis-illusion. Homo ludens, when sapient, knows when to become de-luded.

 3. The same goes for competitiveness.  You waste your old age if you don't use it to see through "finite competitive selfhood"  to borrow a fine phrase from A. E. Taylor.  What baubles and trinkets are you competing for, old man?  What are they worth?  You were once a child but then you put aside childish things.  Why do you cling still to the toys of adulthood?

4. At the end of the above-quoted passage Jacoby adduces a New Testament phrase that she obviously does not understand.  At Philippians 4:7 in the King James Version, we read "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus."  So typical of a secularist to mock religion and then twist a line of religious provenience around to her own purposes!  This misuse of religious language is something that ought to be opposed.

And particularly block-headed is her reference to William Wordsworth at the end of her preface:

Anyone who has outlived his or her passions has lived too long. Wordsworth got it exactly right, at the tender age of thirty-seven, in his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”: O joy! That in our embers / Is something that doth live, / That nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!

If she had read the Ode carefully she would have known that it is deeply otherworldly and Platonic in inspiration.  It is about experiences that some of us had as children, experiences in which hints of our higher origin were vouchsafed to us.  It has nothing to do with "The search for new, earthbound ways to express lifelong passions . . . ."

I am reminded of Georg Lichtenberg's aphorism, Ein Buch ist ein Spiegel, wenn ein Affe hineinguckt, so kann freilich kein Apostel heraus sehen.  "A book is a mirror: if an ape looks in, no apostle will look out." 

The Scatology of a Skeptic

Philip P. Hallie, in his "Polemical Introduction" to Sextus Empiricus (Hackett, 1985, p. 7) writes:

This special function of doubt [its "wiping off of the excrescences that befoul man's life and lead him into endless, bitter conflicts  with his fellow men"] is well though not pleasingly expressed by Sextus in the metaphor of the laxative. Doubt washes itself away along with the dubious unprovable claims it works on, and it does so, according to our Sceptical physician, "just as aperient drugs do not merely eliminate the humours of the body, but also expel themselves along with the humours." The ultimate purpose of   Scepticism is to make doubting unnecessary, to let the customs of our country, our needs for food and drink and so forth, and our plain everyday speech take over the direction of our thought and life after the doubting is done.

Unfortunately, what Hallie, echoing Sextus, is proposing here is unworkable, as I argue in Ataraxia and the Impossibility of Living without Beliefs.

The Debt Debate

A U.K. commenter remarks:

Meanwhile, changing the subject completely, I fail to understand the game of 'chicken' that the two houses are playing over debt. (Wasn't there a James Dean film that started that way, with bad results?). I would be interested in hearing your views in a post.

Here are some quick thoughts.

To understand what this wrangling is all about you must understand that the USA is a deeply divided country in which the common ground on which we formerly stood is shrinking.  To borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell, what divides us is a very deep "conflict of visions."  The conflict concerns the nature and purpose of government, its size, scope and reach, what it can and cannot legitimately do.  The Left favors, in practice if not always in theory, an ever-expanding welfare state which provides citizens with cradle-to-grave security.  Although liberals don't like to be called socialists, and will retreat to an exceedingly narrow definition of 'socialism' in order to avoid this label, their tendency is clearly in the socialist direction and they have been marching in this direction since FDR at least.  A perfect example is President Obama's health care initiative, popularly known as 'Obamacare,' which increases government control of the health care system.  Particularly offensive to libertarians and conservatives is Obamacare's individual mandate which requires citizens to purchase health care insurance whether they need it or not, whether they want it or not.  A clear indication of the 'visionary' and ideological nature of this initiative is that it is being forwarded at a time when the country simply cannot afford another entitlement program.  But this hard fact cuts no ice with the ideologues of the Left.

The Right, on the other hand, resists the expansion of government power, championing the traditional values of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and limited government.  This deep Right-Left conflict of visions plays out over a myriad of issues major and minor from guns to light bulbs to soda pop to circumcision to using federal tax dollars to fund abortion clinics, and so on.

Perhaps we should distinguish the political and the economic aspects of the conflict of visions.  What I have just sketched is the political difference, the difference as to what the polis, the state, ought to be and ought to do.  But there is also deep disagreement about economics.  The Left favors central planning and top-down control while the Right looks to a more or less free market for solutions. 

If you ask a liberal how to generate government revenue he will tell you to raise taxes while the conservative will say the opposite: lower taxes, thereby stimulating the economy.  The creation of jobs will increase income, FICA, and sales tax revenues.  Each side looks for 'facts' to support its overarching vison, which underscores the fact that what we have here is fundamentally a conflict of radically opposed visions. 

In sum, we Americans are fundamentally divided and in a way that is irreconcilable at the level of ideas.  We do not stand on the common ground of shared principles and there is no point in blinking this fact.  Left and Right are riven by deep and unbridgeable value differences.  And so any compromises that are reached are merely provisional and pro tem, reflecting as they do the fact that neither side has the power to  clobber decisively the other and push the nation in the direction in which it thinks it ought to move.

And so it should come as no surprise that there is bitter wrangling over the national debt.  Making it worse is the fact that on the Republican side there is a split between libertarians and true conservatives on the one hand and RINOs (Republicans in name only) on the other.  A proper subset of the first group is the Tea Party folks whose central animating desideratum is fiscal responsibility.  The Dems are more unified toeing as they do the leftist party line.

The Tea Party faction has rightly sounded the alarm concerning the national debt which under Obama is increasing at the rate of 4.1 billion dollars per day.  (Under G. W. Bush the rate of increase was also unacceptable but much less, around 1.6 billion per day.)  Unfortunately, their standing on principle could have disastrous effects.  I mean the principle that the debt ceiling ought not be raised.  The crucial fact here is that the Republicans do not control the Senate or the White House.  So they really can't do much.  What they can do is get themselves perceived as pigheaded extremists.  If enough ordinary Americans come to view  Republicans as obstructionists or extremist then then the Right will lose the 2012 battles and it will be all over.

The Boehner Plan is the way to go given the current political climate and the current distribution of power among the branches of government.

Charles Krauthammer has it nailed. (Get the pun?) 

Actually, Krauthammer would make a great president except that he looks like a cadaver, is bound to a wheel chair, and is a chess player.  Totally unelectable.

Dennis Prager, Jealousy, and Envy

Talk-show host Dennis Prager is a fount of wisdom.  I recommend his Happiness Hour to you, and the rest of his show as well. But I just heard him say on the Happiness Hour segment of his show, "jealousy slash envy."  I beg to differ.  I see a distinction between the two.  See my Envy, Jealousy, and <i>Schadenfreude</i>.

Distinctions are good so long as they cut the bird of reality at the joints.  The more the better.

Christian Stoicism

Richard Wurmbrand, From Torture to Triumph (Monarch, 1991), p. 5:

     A brother who had been terribly tortured by the Communist police
     shared the same prison cell with me and told the following incident:

     I once saw an impressive scene in a circus. A sharpshooter set out
     to demonstrate his skill. In the arena was his wife with a burning
     candle on her head. From a distance he shot the candle so that it
     fell, leaving his wife unharmed.

     Later I asked her, "Were you afraid?" She replied, "Why should I
     be? He aimed at the candle, not at me."

     I thought about this when I was under torture. Why should I be
     afraid of the torturers? They don't beat me. They beat my body. My
     'me,' my real being, is Christ. I was seated with him in the
     heavenly places. This — my real person — could not be touched by
     them.

Scenes from the Superstitions

IMG_0838

James L., fanatical hiker, who I have been introducing to the Superstition Wilderness.  A native Arizonan, he has no problem with hiking in the summer in this rattlesnake infested inferno.  I hope not to have to make use of his nurse practitioner skills.  The knife hanging from his belt suggests he might, in a pinch, be up for some 'meatball surgery.'IMG_0843

 

 

James and I encountered this tarantula on the Dutchman's trail near dawn, last Wednesday.  And then a bit farther down the trail, and smack dab in the middle of it, we spied a baby diamondback rattlesnake:

IMG_0845

 

IMG_0844

 

Weaver's Needle at daybreak from the Dutchman's trail near Parker Pass.  We were doing the Black Mesa Loop out of First Water trailhead in the counter-clockwise direction.  Covered the 9.1 miles in 5 1/2 hours.  Not bad considering the monsoon humidity and a high of about 108 deg. Fahrenheit.  Last year in July three Utah prospectors died near Yellow Peak which is on this route.  We passed right by the black basaltic rock on which they expired, rock that can reach a temperature of 180.  See Another Strange Tale of the Superstitions.  For the rest of the story see Tom Kollenborn, A Deadly Vision.

 

‘Home Grown Terrorists’

That's politically correct jargon for Muslim terrorists who happen to be Americans.  The liberal media shies away from the accurate phrase 'Muslim terrorist.'  But it doesn't hesitate to label Anders Behring Breivik a Christian terrorist despite the lack of evidence of his being a Christian, a fact that even Sam Harris notes. Don't you love liberals with their double standards, their moral equivalency 'arguments,' their lack of intellectual honesty, and their thought-stifling PeeCee mentality?

How Are Form and Matter Related in Compound Material Substances?

Favoring as I do constituent ontology, I am sympathetic to that type of constituent ontology which is hylomorphic ontological analysis, as practiced by Aristotelians, Thomists, et al.  The obscurity of such fundamental  concepts as form, matter, act, potency, substance, and others is, however, troubling. Let's see if we can make sense of the relation between form and matter in an artifact such as a bronze sphere. Now those of you who are ideologically committed to Thomism may bristle at an exposure of difficulties, but you should remember that philosophy is not ideology. The philosopher follows the argument to its conclusion whether it overturns his pet beliefs or supports them, or neither. He knows how to keep his ideological needs in check while pursuing pure inquiry.  If the inquiry terminates in an aporetic impasse, then so be it.

1. Although it perhaps requires arguing, I will here take it for granted that form and matter as these terms are used by Aristotle and his followers are items 'in the real order.' 'Item' is a maximally   noncommittal term in my lexicon: it commits me to very little. Anything in whatever category to which one can refer in any way  whatsoever is an item. 'Real' is that which exists whether or not it is an intentional object of an act of mind. So when I say that form and matter are items in the real order I simply mean that they are not projected by the mind: it is not as if bronze spheres and such have  form and matter only insofar as we interpret them as having form and matter. The bronze sphere is subject to hylomorphic (matter-form) analysis because the thing in reality is made up of form and matter.   'Projectivism' is off the table at least for the space of this post. I am thus assuming a version of realism and am viewing form and matter as distinct ontological constituents or 'principles' of compound   substances.

2. The foregoing implies that the proximate matter of the bronze sphere,  namely, the hunk of bronze itself, is a part of the bronze sphere.  After all, 'ontological constituent' is just a fancy way of saying  'ontological part.'  But an argument I now adapt from E. J. Lowe ("Form Without Matter" in Form and Matter: Themes in Contemporary  Metaphysics, ed. Oderberg, Blackwell 1999, p. 7) seems to show that  the notion that the proximate matter of a compound material substance is a part of it is problematic.  The argument runs as follows.

A. If the hunk of bronze composing the sphere is a part of the sphere, then either it is a proper part or it is an improper part, where an improper part of a whole W is a part of W that overlaps every part of   W.

B. The hunk of bronze is not an improper part since it is not identical to the bronze sphere. (One reason for this is that the persistence conditions are not the same: the piece of bronze will still exist if the sphere is flattened into a disk, but the sphere cannot survive such a deformation. Second, the two are modally discernible: the hunk of bronze is a hunk of bronze in every possible world in which it exists, but the hunk of bronze is not a sphere in every possible world in which it exists.)

C. The hunk of bronze is not a proper part of the bronze sphere since there is no part of the bronze sphere that it fails to overlap.

Therefore

D. The hunk of bronze is not a part of the bronze sphere.

Therefore

E. The composition of form and matter is not mereological. (Lowe, p. 7)

This raises the question of how exactly we are to understand form-matter composition. If the proximate matter of a substance cannot  be a part of it in any sense familiar to mereology, the form-matter composition is 'unmereological,' which is not necessarily an objection except that it raises the question of how exactly we are to understand this unmereological type of composition. This problem obviously extends to essence-existence composition.

3. Now let's look at the problem from the side of form. Could the spherical form of the bronze sphere be a part of it? A form is a principle of organization or arrangement, and it is not quite clear how an arrangement can be a part of the thing whose other parts it arranges. Lowe puts the point like this: ". . . the arrangement of certain parts cannot itself be one of those parts, as this would involve the very conception of an arrangement of parts in a fatal kind of impredicativity." (p. 7)

4. In sum, the difficulty is as follows. Form and matter are real 'principles' in compound substances. They are not projected or supplied by us. We can say that form and matter are ontological constituents of compound substances. This suggests that they are parts of compound substances. But we have just seen that they are not parts in any ordinary mereological sense. So this leaves us in the dark as to just what these 'principles' are and how they combine to constitute compound material substances.

‘Leibniz’s Law’: A Useless Expression

Pedant and quibbler that I am, it annoys me when I hear professional philosophers use the phrase 'Leibniz's Law.'  My reason is that it is used by said philosophers in three mutually incompatible ways.  That makes it a junk phrase, a wastebasket expression, one to be avoided.  Some use it as Dale Tuggy does, here, to refer to the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived.  (Roughly, if a = b, then whatever is true of a is true of b, and vice versa.)  Fred Sommers, referencing Benson Mates, also uses it in this way.  (See The Logic of Natural Language,  p. 127)

Others, such as the distinguished Australian philosopher Peter Forrest, use it to refer to the Identity of Indiscernibles, a principle rather less luminous to the intellect and, in my humble opinion, false.  (Roughly, if whatever is true of a is true of b and vice versa, then a = b.)  And there are those who use it as to refer to the conjunction  of the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Identity of Indiscernibles.

So 'Leibniz's Law' has no standardly accepted usage and is insofar forth useless.  And unnecessary.  You mean 'Indiscernibility of Identicals'?  Then say that.  If you mean its converse, say that. Ditto for their conjunction.

There is also the problem of using a great philosopher's name to label a principle that the philosopher may not even have held.  Analytic philosophers are notorious for being lousy historians.  Not all of them, of course, but the run-of-the-mill.  If Sommers is right, Leibniz was a traditional logician who did not think of identity as a relation as Frege and Russell do.  (p. 127) Accordingly, 'a = b' as this formula is understood in modern predicate logic does not occur in Leibniz.

 

Why I Reject Individual Concepts

Consider the sentences 'Caissa is a cat' and 'Every cat is an animal.'  Edward the Nominalist made two  claims in an earlier comment thread that stuck in my Fregean craw:

1. The relation between 'Caissa' and 'cat' is the same as the relation between 'cat' and 'animal'.

2. The relation between *Caissa* and *cat* is the same as the relation between *cat* and *animal.*

Single quotes are being used in the usual way to draw attention to the expression enclosed within them.  Asterisks are being used to draw attention to the concept expressed by the linguistic item enclosed within them.  I take it we agree that concepts are mental in nature in the sense that, were there no minds, there would be no concepts. 

Affirming (2), Edward commits himself to individual or singular concepts.  I deny that there are individual concepts and so I reject (2).  Rejecting (2), I take the side of the Fregeans against the traditional formal logicians who think that singular propositions can be analyzed as general.  Thus 'Caissa is a cat' gets analyzed by the TFL-ers  as 'Every Caissa is a cat.'

To discuss this profitably we need to agree on the following definition of 'individual concept':

D1. C is an individual concept of x =df x is an instance of C, and it is not possible that there be a y distinct from x such that y is an instance of C.

So if there is an individual concept of my cat Caissa, then Caissa instantiates this concept and nothing distinct from Caissa does or could instantiate it. We can therefore say that individual concepts, if there are any, 'capture' or  'grasp' or 'make present to the mind' the very haecceity (thisness) of the individuals of which they are the individual concepts.

We can also speak of individual concepts as singular concepts and contrast them with general concepts.  *Cat* is a general concept.  What makes it general is not that it has many instances, but that it can have many (two or more) instances.  General concepts are thus multiply instantiable. 

The concept C1 expressed by 'the fattest cat that ever lived and ever will live' is also general.  For, supposing that Oscar instantiates this concept, it is possible that some other feline instantiate it.  Thus C1 does not capture the haecceity of Oscar or of any cat.   C1 is general, not singular.  C1 is multiply instantiable in the sense that it can have two or more instances, though not in the same possible world.

And so from the fact that a concept applies to exactly one thing if it applies to anything, one cannot validly infer that it is an individual or singular concept.  Such a concept must capture the very identity or thisness of the thing of which it is a concept.  This is an important point.  To push further I introduce a definition and a lemma.

D2. C is a pure concept =df C involves no specific individual and can be grasped without reference to any specific individual.

Thus 'green,' 'green door,' 'bigger than a barn,' 'self-identical,'  and 'married to someone' all express pure concepts.  'Taller than the Washington Monument,' 'married to Heidegger,' and 'identical to Heidegger' express impure concepts. 

Lemma 1: No individual concept is a pure concept.

Proof.  By (D1), if C is an individual concept of x, then it is not possible that there be a y distinct from x such that y instantiates C.  But every pure concept, no matter how specific, is possibly such as to have two or more instances.  Therefore, no individual concept is a pure concept.

Consider the famous Max Black example of two iron spheres alike in all monadic and relational respects.  A pure concept of either, no matter how specific, would also be a pure concept of the other.  And so the haecceity of neither would be captured by that pure concept.

Lemma 2.  No individual concept is an impure concept.

Proof.  An individual  concept is either pure or impure.  If C is impure, then by (D2) it must involve an individual.  And if C is an individual concept it must involve the very individual of which it is the individual concept. But individuum ineffabile est: no individual can be grasped as an individual.  But that is precisely what one would have to be able to do to have an impure concept of an individual.  Therefore, no individual concept is an impure concept.

Putting the lemmata together, it follows that an individual concept cannot be either pure or impure.  But it must be one or the other.  So there are no individual concepts. Q. E. D.!