Month: February 2012

Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the ‘Deformation’ of the God Concept

One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)

Why speak of deformation rather than of reformation, transformation, or refinement? Dennett's view is that the "original monotheists" thought of God as a being one could literally listen to, and literally sit beside. (206) If so, the "original monotheists" thought of God as a physical being: "The Old Testament Jehovah, or Yahweh, was quite definitely a super-man (a He, not a She) who could take sides in battles, and be both jealous and wrathful." (206, emphasis in original). The suggestion here is that monotheism in its original form, prior to deformation, posited a Big Guy in the Sky, a human being Writ Large, something most definitely made in the image of man, and to that extent an anthropomorphic projection.

What Dennett is implying is that the original monotheistic conception of God had a definite content, but that this conception was deformed and rendered abstract to the point of being emptied of all content. Dennett is of course assuming that the only way the concept of God could have content is for it to have a materialistic, anthropomorphic content. Thus it is not possible on Dennett's scheme to interpret the anthropomorphic language of the Old Testament in a figurative way as pointing to a purely spiritual reality which, as purely spiritual, is neither physical nor human. Dennett thereby simply begs the question against every sophisticated version of theism.

Dennett seems in effect to be confronting the theist with a dilemma. Either your God is nothing but an anthropomorphic projection or it is is so devoid of recognizable attributes as to be meaningless. Either way, your God does not exist. Surely there is no Big Guy in the Sky, and if your God is just some Higher Power, some unknowable X, about which nothing can be said, then what exactly are you affirming when you affirm that this X exists? Theism is either the crude positing of something as unbelievable as Santa Claus or Wonder Woman, or else it says nothing at all.

Either crude anthropomorphism or utter vacuity.  Compare the extremes of the spectrum of positions I set forth in Anthropomorphism in Religion.

Dennett's Dilemma — to give it a name — is quite reasonable if you grant him his underlying naturalistic and scientistic (not scientific) assumptions, namely, that there is exactly one world, the physical world, and that (future if not contemporary) natural science provides the only knowledge of it. On these assumptions, there simply is nothing that is not physical in nature. Therefore, if God exists, then God is physical in nature. But since no enlightened person can believe that a physical God exists, the only option a sophisticated theist can have is to so sophisticate and refine his conception of God as to drain it of all meaning. And thus, to fill out Dennett's line of thought in my own way, one ends up with pablum  such as Tillich's talk of God as one "ultimate concern." If God is identified as the object of one's ultimate concern, then of course God, strictly speaking, does not exist. Dennett and I will surely agree on this point.

But why should we accept naturalism and scientism? It is unfortunately necessary to repeat that naturalism and scientism are not scientific but philosophical doctrines with all the rights, privileges, and liabilities pertaining thereunto. Among these liabilities, of course, is a lack of empirical verifiability. Naturalism and scientism cannot be supported scientifically. For example, we know vastly more than Descartes (1596-1650) did about the brain, but we are no closer than he was to a solution of the mind-body problem. Neuroscience will undoubtedly teach us more and more about the brain, but it takes a breathtaking lack of philosophical sophistication — or else ideologically induced blindness — to think that knowing more and more about the physical properties of a lump of matter will teach us anything about consciousness, the unity of consciousness, self-conciousness, intentionality, and the rest.

This is not the place to repeat the many arguments against naturalism.  Suffice it to say that a very strong case can be brought against it, a case that renders its rejection reasonable. (See J. P. Moreland's The Recalcitrant Imago Dei for one case against it.) Dennett's reliance on naturalism is thus dogmatic and uncompelling. Indeed, when he pins his hopes on future science and confesses his faith that there is nothing real apart from the system of space-time-matter, he makes moves analogous to the moves the theist makes who goes beyond what he can claim to know to affirm the existence of a spiritual reality within himself and beyond himself.

Dennett needs to give up the question-begging and the straw-man argumentation. His talk of the "deformation" of the God concept shows that he is unwilling to allow what he would surely allow with other subject-matters, namely, the elaboration of a more adequate concept of the subject-matter in question. Instead, he thinks that theists must be stuck with the crudest conceptions imaginable. Thinking this, he merely projects his own crude materialism into them.

Genuine religion is ongoing, open-ended and (potentially) self-correcting.  It is more quest  than conclusions.  We don't hold it against science that its practioners contradict each other over time and at times. That is because we understand that science is an ongoing project, open-ended and self-correcting.  That is the way we should treat religion as well.  If you protest that there are huge differences between religion and science and that the latter has been highly successful in securing consensus while the former has not, I will simply agree with you and chalk that up to the great difference in their respective subject-matters.

It is no surprise that natural science secures consensus: it has available to it the touchstone of sense experience.  We all have sense organs, while the same cannot be said of moral and spiritual 'organs.'

‘Legally Dead’

Someone declared legally dead  is presumed dead.  Such a person may or may not be dead. So I say 'legally' in 'legally dead' is an alienans adjective.  What is the test for an alienans adjective?

Let 'FG' be a phrase in which 'F' is an adjective and 'G' a noun.    'F' is alienans if and only if either an FG is not a G, or it does not follow from x's being an FG that x is a G. For example, your former wife is not your wife, a decoy duck is not a duck, artificial leather is not leather, and a relative truth is not a truth. Is an apparent heart attack a heart attack? It may or may not be. One cannot validly move from 'Jones had an apparent heart attack' to 'Jones had a heart attack.' So 'apparent' in 'apparent heart attack'  is alienans.

'Legally dead' is like 'apparent heart attack' if we replace 'dead' with 'dead person.'  If Smith is a legally dead person, it does not follow that he is a dead person.  If a legally dead person should show up at your door, you don't dub him 'Lazarus.'

These linguistic niceties, besides being intrinsically interesting,  are sometimes philosophically relevant.

More on this in the Adjectives category. 

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bicultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages.  My mother was both bilingual and bicultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a  difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values.  Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African?  Does he enjoy dual citzenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead.  There is no 'institutional racism.'  There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals.  Man up and move forward.  Don't blame others for your problems.  That's the mark of a loser.  Take responsibility.  We honkies want you to do well.  The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

But here is an encouraging development: many blacks according to yesterday's WSJ are rejecting the 'African-American' label.  

Giles Fraser Credits Nietzsche with Making a Christian of Him

Two things I like about Fraser's Guardian piece are that he appreciates Nietzsche's deep religiosity and the role that his worship of power played in the development of Nazi ideology.  Both of these points should infuriate leftists which of course constitutes an excellent recommendation of them.

See Nietzsche and National Socialism.  Soteriology in Nietzsche and the Question of the Value of Life contains some discussion of Fraser's Nietzsche book. 

As for Nietzsche's religiosity, here is the way I put it in one of my aphorisms: "His was the throbbing heart of the homo religiosus wedded to be bladed intellect of the skeptic."

Composition: Formal or Informal Fallacy?

Although the fallacy of composition is standardly classified as an informal fallacy, I see  it is a formal fallacy, one rooted in logical form. Let W be any sort of whole (whether set, mereological sum, aggregate, etc.) Suppose each of the proper parts (if any) of W has some property P (or, for the nominalistically inclined, satisfies some predicate F). Does it follow that W has P or satisfies F? No it doesn't. To think otherwise is to commit the fallacy of composition: it is to argue in accordance with the  following invalid schema:
 
   1. Each member of W is F
   Therefore
   2. W is F.

To show that an argument form is invalid, it suffices to present an argment of that form having true premises and a false conclusion.  (This is because valid inference is truth-preserving: it cannot take one from true premises to a false conclusion. But it doesn't follow that invalid inference is falsehood-preserving: there are valid arguments with false premises and a true conclusion. Exercise for the reader: give examples.) Here is a counterexample that shows the invalidity of the above pattern: Each word in a given sentence is meaningful; ergo, the sentence is meaningful. (Let the sentence be 'Quadruplicity drinks procrastination.')  Since the premise is true and the conclusion false, the argument pattern is invalid. So every argument of that form is invalid, even in the case in which the premises and conclusion are both true.

Why then is Composition standardly grouped with the informal fallacies? Petitio principii is a clear  example of an informal fallacy. If I argue p, therefore p, I move in a circle of embarrassingly short diameter. But the inference is valid. (Bear in mind that 'valid' is a terminus technicus.) And if p is true, the argument is sound. Nevertheless, any argument of this form is probatively worthless: it it does not prove, but presupposes, its conclusion. Since this defect is not formal, we call it informal!

So there are clear examples of informal fallacies. But what about Equivocation? It is usually classed with the informal fallacies. Consider the syllogistic form Barbara (AAA-1):

   All M are P
   All S are M
   All S are P.

Suppose there is an equivocation on the middle term 'M.' Although this is an informal defect (in that it has not to do with logical syntax,  but with semantics) it translates into a formal defect, the dreaded quaternio terminorum or four-term fallacy, which is of course a formal fallacy: no syllogism with more than three terms is valid. (A syllogism by definition is a deductive argument having exactly two premises and exactly three terms.)

It can be shown that every equivocation on a key term in an argument induces a formal defect. So the standard classification of Equivocation as an informal fallacy cannot be taken too seriously. By  contrast, Petitio Principii is seriously informal in its probative defectiveness.

I say that Composition is like Equivocation: it is a formal fallacy in informal disguise. (And the same goes for Division, which is roughly Composition in reverse.) So I disagree with the author of a logic book who writes:

     . . . the fallacy of composition is indeed an informal fallacy. It
     cannot be discovered by a mere inspection of the form of an
     argument , that is, by the mere observation that an attribute is
     being transferred from parts onto the whole. . . . The critic must
     be certain that, given the situation, the transference of this
     particular attribute is not allowed. . . .

So the fallacy of composition is not always a fallacy, but only when it is a fallacy? That is the silliness that the author seems to be espousing. He is saying in effect the following: if you transfer an attribute from parts to whole, that is fallacious except in those cases in which it is not fallacious, i.e. those cases in which the transfer can legitimately be made.

But then what is the point of isolating a typical error in reasoning called Composition? What is the point of this label? Why not just say: there are many different part-whole relationships, and it is only be close acquaintance with the actual subject-matter that one can tell whether the attribute transfer is legitimate?

Logic is formal: it abstracts from subject-matter. So mistakes in logic are also formal. A mistake that is typical (recurrent) and sufficiently seductive to warrant a label is called a fallacy. To say or imply that the fallaciousness of a fallacy depends on the particular subject-matter of the argument is to abandon logic and  embrace confusion.

Example.  Every brick in this pile weighs more than five lbs; ergo, the pile weighs more than five lbs. This is an example of the fallacy of composition despite the fact that it is nomologically impossible that the pile not weigh more than five lbs.

Another example.  Every being in the universe is contingent; ergo, the universe is contingent.  This too is the fallacy of composition.  And this despite the fact that it is metaphysically impossible that a universe all of whose members are contingent be necessary.  

Religion and Anthropomorphism with an Oblique Reference to Mormonism

A young man who was brought up Mormon, retains much if not all of the salutary character formation, but is now an atheist, writes (emphasis added):

I've been thinking about some of our conversations about theology and epistemology. Particularly the stuff on Mormonism. I'm sitting in on [Professor X's] medieval philosophy class reading St. Anselm among others, and I'm constantly struck by how far removed Anselm's view of God is from the one I grew up with. And, it seems to me, how far removed from the God of the Bible. I mean, Anselm and Aquinas both are absolutely relentless in denying God any anthropogenic [anthropomorphic?] qualities whatever. We are left with something that is faceless, devoid of human emotion, and about as difficult to relate to as anything I can even imagine. I can appreciate the intellect of men like Anselm and Aquinas, but this picture of God seems repugnant.

Being an atheist, I don't have a dog in this fight, but it does seem to me that there is more to be said for the Mormon view of God than most theists, you included, seem to realize. I recently read a book called The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion by Sterling McMurrin. I highly recommend you check it out and read it, especially the supplementary chapter in later versions on the question of whether God is a person. I think if you do, you will find yourself forced to take Mormonism a bit more seriously as a religion.

I have spoken more than once of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem, and Athens and Benares.  I am now tempted to speak of the tension between Athens and Salt Lake City, though this third tension is but an exacerbated form of the first.   My understanding of Mormonism is limited,  so I won't address it directly. But my understanding is that Mormons maintain that God is a physical being who inhabits a physical planet.  This conception of God, whether or not it is exactly what Mormons accept, is  as repugnant to me as the Anselmian-Thomistic one is to my correspondent.  This post raises the question of anthropomorphism in religion.

Imagine a spectrum of positions. 

1. At one end crude anthropomorphism:  God as a physical being, a superman, as is suggested by such phrases as 'the man upstairs'  and 'the big guy in the sky.'  This is the way many if not most atheists think of God and why they indulge in such mockeries as 'flying spaghetti monster,' and compare God with the Tooth Fairy (Dennett), Santa Claus, a celestial teapot (Russell), an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon (Ed Abbey), etc.  Many if not most atheists, being most of them materialists, can only think in material terms:  the only way God could be real would be for him to be a physical being.  (The tacit assumption being that to be real = to be a denizen of spacetime.)  So they think that if God is real, then he must be a physical being; and since the 'highest' physical being is man, then God is a Big Man  literally out there somewhere.  (Does he perhaps drink Celestial Seasonings (TM) tea from Russell's teapot?)  On his 1961 suborbital flight, about a month before astronaut Alan Shepard's, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was reported to have said  that he didn't see any God.  When I heard the news report I was 11 years old.  I exclaimed: "That dumb commie doesn't know that God is a purely spiritual being!"  Atheists, who typically can think only in material terms, then naturally deny the existence of God since it is surely absurd to think of God as a Big Man, mit Haut und Haar (Schopenhauer), etc.  So I sincerely hope that Mormons do not hold that God is literally a physical being with skin, hair, a GI tract . . . .  If that were the only option for theists, then we should all be atheists.

2.  At the other end of the spectrum, a conception of God so attenuated and diluted as to turn God into a mere concept, or a mere feeling ('God is the feeling one has when one is with those one loves') or one's ultimate concern (Tillich), or an unconscious anthropomorphic projection (Ludwig Feuerbach) or perhaps a causally inert abstract object, a denizen of the Platonic menagerie. 

3.  The positions at both ends of the spectrum are demonstrably untenable.  Briefly, God cannot be a physical being because no physical being is a necessary being, and God is a necessary being.  By definition, God is the ultimate ground of the existence of everything contingent.  (He is more, of course, but at least that.)  As such, he cannot himself be contingent, and so cannot be physical.  That is just one argument.  I am not assuming that God exists; I am merely unpacking the concept of God.  It is equally easy to show that God cannot be a concept, or an anthropomorphic projection, or an abstract entity.  I needn't waste words on whether God is a feeling or one's ultimate concern.

God cannot be a concept because concepts depend for their existence on minds, and God, by definition, is a se,  and so cannot depend for his existence on anything, not even himself. ('Causa sui' is to be taken privatively, not positively: God does not cause himself, which would require that he be logically or temporally prior to himself; it is rather the case that God is not caused by another.)  There are of course concepts of God, but God cannot be a concept.

For similar reasons, God cannot be an anthropomorphic projection.  The concept of God is the concept of a being that exists whether or not humans exist.  Obviously, such a being cannot be an anthropomorphic projection.  So if one says that God is an anthropomorphic projection, that is just a roundabout way of saying that God does not exist.  Nor can God be an abstract entity.  Abstracta, by definition, are causally inert, and God, by definition, is the first cause.

4.  The interesting positions are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.  God is not physical; God does not depend on any mind for his existence; God is not an abstract entity.  What is left but to say that God is a mind?  Now the only minds to which we have access in the first-person way, that way which alone reveals them in their true intrinsic nature, are our minds.  Since I know my own mind, and know it to be both causally efficacious and not physical, I conjecture that either God is a mind, or more like a mind than like anything else.  One's own mind provides a model whereby one can think about God. In fact, it is the only decent model we have.   So the most adequate, and only,  way to think about God is to think about God as an unembodied mind, or better as an unembodied person where a person is a "subsistent individual of a rational nature." (Aquinas, ST I, 29, 3.)  Thinking  of God as person might not be perfectly adequate, but the other ways I have mentioned are entirely  inadequate and utterly hopeless.  So God is a person but not  a man.  A person needn't be human.

5.  If we think of God as a bodiless person we avoid the Scylla of anthropomorphism.  God is not in the form of a man; it is the other way around; man is in the form of God.  God is not anthropomorphic; man is theomorphic.  This is how we ought to read Genesis 1, 26-27:

Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram . . . (Gen 1, 26) Let us make man in our image and likeness. . .

 Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam. . . (Gen 1, 27) And God created man in his image. . .

 An oft-repeated mistake is to take these spiritual sayings in a materialistic way as if to imply that God has the form of a man.  It's as if one were to argue:

Man is made in God’s image.
Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.

But that would be  like arguing:

This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
This statue is composed of marble.
Therefore
Lincoln is composed of marble.

The point of Gen 1, 26-27  is not that God must be physical because man is, but that man is a spiritual being just like God, potentially if not actually. The idea is not that God is a big man, the proverbial ‘man upstairs,’ but that man is a little god, a proto-god, a temporally and temporarily debased god who has open to him the possibility of a higher life with God, a possibility whose actualization requires both creaturely effort and divine grace.

6.   The upshot is that God is a person, a pure spirit or unembodied mind, or at least more like a person than like anything else with which we are familiar.  The Scylla of anthropomorphism and 'spiritual materialism' is avoided by thinking of God as a bodiless person.  The Charybdis of abstractionism/conceptualism is avoided by thinking of God as a person, and thus as a concrete individual who knows, loves,  and freely acts.

If we stop right here we have a position in the middle of our spectrum, one that is represented by many contemporary theists, Plantinga being one of them.  But we can't stop here, as it seems to me.

For God  is also the absolute reality.  If God is absolute, then God is ontologically simple: he is Being itself in its prime instance, and wholly partless and incomposite, hence free of act/potency composition.  I can't repeat the arguments here.  The simple God of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is a second position in the middle of the spectrum, one even farther from anthropomorphism than the first according towhich God is a bodiless person, but not simple. 

I can easily understand how my correspondent above would find the simple God to be, as he says, "repugnant."  We are left with something that is faceless, devoid of human emotion, and about as difficult to relate to as anything I can even imagine. In response I will say two things.

First, the simple God of Anselm, et al., despite  its difficulties — which intellectual honesty forbids me from 'papering over' –  is vastly superior to the crude anthropomorphism which Mormons apparently accept.  (If I have misrepresented the Mormon position, then I should like to hear exactly what their position is on the topic under discussion.)  

Second, religion is about transcendence and transcending, about reaching beyond the human-all-too-human, and beyond all the images  of  the picture-loving imagination.  Religion is not about the positing of a hinterworld that duplicates this world with the negative removed.  It is not about crude, materialistic, wish-fulfillment.  This is why we find the Islamic 72 virgins conception of paradise so paltry and ridiculous:  it is a blatant pandering to the basest elements in our nature, a pandering at once both superstitious and idolatrous.  Religion aims at a spiritualizationof the human being which cannot  be imagined and is just barely conceivable.  It is about theosis (deification) as is maintained in Orthodox Christianity.  And because the ultimate goal for humans is not imaginable and barely conceivable, it is repeatedly pictured in crude and absurd materialistic  ways — which only fuels the fires of atheism.  Actually, one ought to be an atheist in respect of the anthropomorphic God-conceptions.

This is a difficult topic to write about and of course no materialistically-minded worldling could possibly be persuaded by it.  No matter how much light one sheds on an object, a blind man won't see it — he lacks the requisite organ.   But perhaps an analogy may be of some use.  Imagine a fetus in the womb who finds his environment quite acceptable, and indeed the ultimate in what is real and worthwhile.  You try to persuade the fetus that staying  in the womb indefinitely is decidely suboptimal, a mistake in that he  is capable of a marvellous development after an event called  'birth.'  He of course doesn't know what you are talking about and is in no position to imagine what it is like to be born and develop.  And he will find it almost impossible to conceive. For him birth is death: the end of his cozy and secure womb-life.   His natural tendency is to say that you are 'bullshitting' him: 

"Look man, this is reality, this is what I know, this is what I have evidence for; you are pushing some fantasy projection, some opiate so that we we fetuses won't work to improve conditions here in the womb but will waste our time dreaming about some nonexistent goodies on the other side of what you call 'birth' but we know to be death and annihilation.  Sure,  it would be nice if there were something more, but there ain't.  Your talk of infants, and children, and adolescents, and adults, is just a lie to make people denigrate the only reality there is, the reality here and now, in what you call 'womb' but we anti-birthers  call 'reality.'"

Lavelle on Living in the Present

Louis Lavelle (1883-1951), The Dilemma of Narcissus, tr. W. T.  Gairdner (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), p. 153:

Life breaks the surface of reality and emerges at the present moment; we must not hold our gaze fixed on a future which, when it comes, will be merely another present. The unhappy man is he who is  forever thinking back into the past or forward into the future; the happy man does not try to escape from the present, but rather to penetrate within it and take possession of it. Almost always we ask of the future to bring us a happiness which, if it came, we would have to enjoy in another present; but this is to see the problem the wrong way round. For it is out of the present which we have already, and from the way we make use of it, without turning our eyes to right or to left, that will emerge the only happy future we will ever have.

Some Aptronyms

An aptronym is a name that "suits the nature or occupation of its   bearer," as the erudite Dr. Gilleland explains. Some examples from my  experience:

1. During part of my tenure at the University of Dayton, the secretary of the Philosophy Department was Mrs. Betty Hume.

2. While a graduate student in Boston in the 1970s, I heard tell of a knee specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, one Dr. Patella.

3. A number of philosophers bear aptronymic names: John Wisdom, Gerald Vision, J.J.C. Smart, and others that escape me at the moment.

4. Wasn't Jimmy Carter's main spokesman a man by the name of Larry Speakes?

5. Joe Bastardi, Fox News meterologist, is not an aptronym because he is not a name, and his demeanor and delivery suggest that his name isn't either.

A Kierkegaardian Passage in Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), ed  von Wright, tr. Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 53e:

     I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound
     doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or
     the direction of your life.)

     It says that all wisdom is cold; and that you can no more use it
     for setting your life to rights that you can forge iron when it is
     cold.

     The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you
     can follow it as you would a doctor's prescription. — But here you
     need something to move you and turn you in a new direction. —
     (I.e. this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned
     around, you must stay turned around.

     Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard
     calls a passion.

Sound doctrines are useless? It would be truer to say that faith as a mere subjective passion is useless. The fideisms of Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein fall far below the balanced positions of Augustine and Aquinas. The latter thinkers understood that sound doctrine, though insufficient, was an indispensable guide. They neither denigrated reason nor overestimated its reach. Reason without faith may be existentially empty and passionless, but faith without reason is blind and runs the risk of fanaticism.