Month: July 2012

Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

At any given time I am  reading twenty or so books.  One of them at the moment is Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2012.  In the midst of a lot of stuff, there are some gems.  Here is one:

Aphorism is aristocratic thinking: this is all the aristocrat is willing to tell you; he thinks you should get it fast, without spelling out all the details.  Aphoristic thinking constructs thinking as an obstacle race: the reader is expected to get it fast and move on.  An aphorism is not an argument; it is too well-bred for that. (512)

The last line is the best.  There is something plebeian about argument.  The thought is pure Nietzsche.  See "The Problem of Socrates" in Twilight of the Idols (tr. Kaufmann):

Section 4: Socrates' decadence is suggested not only by the admitted wantonness and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the hypertrophy of the logical faculty . . . .

Section 5: With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dalectics. [. . .]  What must first be proved is worth little.  Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon . . . . Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously . . . .

Whether or not argument is plebeian, it has no place in an aphorism.  As I put it:

An aphorism that states its reasons is no aphorism at all. But the reasons are there, though submerged, like the iceberg whose tip alone is visible. An aphorism, then, is the tip of an iceberg of thought.

and

Aphorisms and poems have this in common: neither can justify what they say while remaining what they are.

The Sontag-Nietzsche view seems to be that one needn't have reasons for what one aphoristically asserts;  mine is that one should have them but not state them, leastways, not in the aphorisms themselves.

Addendum, 4:30 PM:  That indefatigable argonaut of cyberspace, the ever-helpful Dave Lull, librarian non pareil, friend of bloggers and the just recipient of their heart-felt encomia, sent me a link to a post by James Geary entitled  Susan Sontag on Aphorisms. 

Geary rightly demolishes the silly conceit of another blogger who, commenting on Sontag, characterizes aphorisms as "the ultimate soundbitification of thinking."  That is truly awful and deserves to be buried in the deepest and most mephitic nether regions of the blogosphere.

But Geary says something that contradicts my claim above that argument has no place in an aphorism:

And aphorisms are arguments. That’s why they are so often written in declarative or imperative form. An aphorism is only one side of the argument, though.

It appears that Geary is confusing a statement with an argument.  Consider Nietzsche's "Some men are born posthumously."  This is a declarative sentence but certainly no argument.  An argument requires at least one premise and a conclusion.  To argue is to support a claim with reasons.   Nothing like this is going on in the one-sentence aphorism just quoted.

A Letter to Young Voters

I would quibble with parts of this piece  by Dennis Prager, but it is worth reading.   Excerpt:

Young people believe that when the government gives more money and benefits to more people it helps them. This is naïve. As you get older and wiser you realize that when people are given anything without having to earn it (unless they are physically or mentally utterly incapable of earning anything), they become ungrateful and lazy. They also become less happy. Every study shows that people who earn money are far happier than people who win many millions of dollars in a lottery. Happiness is earned, not given.

Here’s another: Young people are far more likely to believe that world peace is achieved when nations lay down their arms and talk through their differences. But this has never been the case. Of course, good nations stay peaceful when they talk to other good nations. Bad nations — that is, nations ruled by evil men — are never dissuaded from making war by talk. They are dissuaded only by good nations having more arms than they do. That is why the Marine Corps has done so much more for world peace than the Peace Corps.

If you want to vote Democrat, don’t do so because that is the party that cares more for the poor and the hungry. We older conservatives (and young ones, too) care just as much for the poor. But after living a life of seeing the naïve only make things worse for the poor, we are no longer seduced by caring rhetoric. We are seduced by policies based on the awesome American value of individual initiative combined with liberty to create and retain wealth. It’s now called “conservatism.”

And, finally, you should know this: The “idealists” that many of you find appealing are the ones leaving you with a national debt that will render it very difficult for you to attain the material quality of life that these people have had.

Will millenials be persuaded?  Not likely.

Whether Being is an Activity on the Thick Theory: Van Inwagen’s Straw Man Argument

(Note to Alfredo and Peter L:  I need your help in understanding this particularly opaque portion of PvI's paper.)

Here are some notes on section 2 of Peter van Inwagen's "Being, Existence, and Ontological Commitment" (pp. 476-479 of the Metametaphysics volume).

The first of the Quinean theses that van Inwagen maintains is that "Being is not an activity."  Here is the opening sentence of the section:

Many philosophers distinguish between a thing's being and its nature.  These philosophers seem to think of, e.g., Socrates' being as the most general activity Socrates engages in.

These two sentences have me flummoxed.  Let me explain why.

First, the two sentences taken together imply that philosophers who distinguish between a thing's being (existence) and its nature think of a thing's being as the most general activity it engages in.  That's just false.  There are philosophers who distinguish between being and nature (Aquinas for example) without holding that a thing's being is the most general activity it engages in.  Since I hesitate  to impute something plainly false to the dean of the thin theorists, I must question what he's driving at.

My suspicion is that van Inwagen (447) gets the notion that being is an activity entirely from J. L. Austin's jocose footnote to p. 68 of Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford, 1962):  "The word ['exist'] is a verb, but it does not describe something that things do all the time, like breathing, only quieter — ticking over, as it were, in a metaphysical sort of way."  That's clever all right, but too frail a reed to support a global imputation to all thick theorists of the view that being is a peculiarly quiet activity.

Second, since van Inwagen goes on to deny that being is an activity, are we to conclude that he rejects the distinction between being and nature?  Is PvI denying that there is a distinction between Socrates' nature and his existence?  Is he suggesting the following argument:

a. If there is a distinction between a thing's being and its nature, then being is the most general activity the thing engages in.

b. Being is not the most general activity a thing engages in.

Therefore

c. There is no distinction between a thing's being and its nature.

I hope van Inwagen is not suggesting any such argument.  For that would not cohere with his commitment to a Quinean translation of 'Socrates exists' into 'It is not the case that everything is identical to Socrates.'  This implies that the existence of Socrates is his identity-to-something — in which case there is a distinction between Socrates' nature and his existence.  After all, Socrates' nature and the property of being identical to something are distinct.

Third,  PvI speaks of "many philosophers' but gives no examples.  He needs a footnote right at the end of the second sentence above.  He needs to quote philosophers who explicitly say that being is a most general activity.  Farther down the page he mentions Heidegger and Sartre, but no page references are given and no quotations.  So my third point is that PvI seems to be committing a Straw Man fallacy.  Which philosopher ever said that being is the most general activity a thing engages in?

The view van Inwagen ascribes to thick theorists such as Heidegger and Sartre  involves the following propositions:

1. Being is an activity.

2. Being is the most general activity that a thing engages in, one that is implied by every other activity the thing in question engages in.  Thus if Socrates is running, then he is moving on his feet, and if so, then he is moving through space, etc.  until we come to some one terminal activity that is implied by all the other activities  the thing is engaged in at the time.

3.  This most general terminal activity — being — is the same activity at every time the thing in question is engaging in any activity.

4.  This most general activity is the same for each member of a given category, Thus it is the same for Socrates and Plato, but presumably not the same for a bridge or an ass.

5.  This most general terminal activity of being (existing) is different (or can be different) for different categories of entity. Thus the most general activity of a table is not the same as the most activity of a human being.  And so there are different kinds of being, different kinds of this most general terminal activity. 

Van Inwagen imputes the above five theses to Heidegger and Sartre and, it appears, to all thick theorists.

There are  several topics to discuss.  One, which I will leave until later, is whether Heidegger and Sartre are committed to the five theses listed.  A second is whether thick theorists in general are committed to them.

Well, I'm a thick theorist and I don't see that I am committed to them.  As a thick theorist I am committed to the intelligibility of the idea that there are modes of existence (ways or modes of being).  The thin theory, however, entails the unintelligibility of this idea.  For van Inwagen, the idea springs from a clear-cut mistake, namely, the mistake of transforming a difference in nature into a difference in mode of existence.  For van Inwagen, the vast difference between a human being and a rock is simply a vast difference in their natures, and does not imply any difference in the mode of being of that which has these natures.  The idea is not that a rock and a human being have the same mode of being, but that one cannot intelligibly speak of one or more modes of being at all.  The rock exists, the man exists, and to say that is just to say that each is identical to something or other.

I will now given an example which to my mind shows that it is intelligible that there be modes of existence.  We will have to see if I am committing the mistake of transforming a difference in nature into a difference in mode of existence.

Pains and Brains

Phenomenal pains exist and brain states exist.  More generally, there are non-intentional mental states and there are physical states.  But felt pains and felt pleasures and such have a “first-person ontology” as John Searle puts it.  The being of a pain is (identically) its being perceived.  But nothing physical is such that its being is (identically) its being perceived.  This certainly looks like a difference in mode of existence.  Pains exist in a first-person way while brains exist in a third-person way.  

What can the thin theorist  say in rebuttal?  The thins think that we thick-heads illicitly transfer what belongs to the nature of an item to its existence.  So a thin theorist must say that it belongs to the nature of a particular pain that it belong to some particular person.  But this cannot be right.  It cannot belong to the nature of this pain I am now enduring that it be felt by me.  For natures are multiply realizable.  We can of course say that it is the nature of pains in general to be perceived by someone or other. If a pain exists, however, it is a particular pain and it cannot be part of the nature of that particular pain to be perceived by some particular person sich as me.  The dependence of a particular pain on its being perceived is therefore due to its dependent mode of existence and not due to its nature.

Note also that nothing I said implies that the being of the particular pain I am in is a most general activity the pain is engaging in.  My pain is not an agent engaged in an exceedingly quiet activity; it is not an agent at all but a subjective state.

We must also note that the being of my felt pain and the being of your felt pain are numerically different contra van Inwagen's #4 above.

As far as I can see, little or nothing van Inwagen says in  section 2 of his paper  touches the thick theory.  What he has given us is a straw man argument.

California: Road Warrior is Here

Another great column by Victor Davis Hanson.

Meanwhile San Berdoo bites the dust.  Excerpt:

Intellectually bankrupt, morally bankrupt — the city is under criminal investigation for sundry financial shenanigans — San Bernardino is above all old-fashioned bankrupt bankrupt, a pitiful penniless pauper that cannot even afford a cup of coffee: Seriously — the coffee guy wants cash up front now and has stopped serving the municipal office building until the city makes good on its latte liabilities. This is a paddle-free scato-riparian fiscal expedition of the first order.

In plain English: up shit 'crick' (creek) without a paddle.

In the Face of Totalitarians

In the face of totalitarians one cannot retreat into one's private life for they, being totalitarians, won't allow any private life.  So the conservative is forced willy-nilly to become an activist against his natural tendency.  He must draw a line in the sand and say "This far but no farther."

A minor example.  My friends Peter and Mike who teach at community colleges in Maricopa County, Arizona, were on the rant once again yesterday morning over the smoking ban that went into effect on 1 July.  This draconian ruling forbids smoking anywhere on campus, including parking lots and closed cars in such lots.  Bear in mind that reasonable smoking restrictions were already in effect and that my friends, only one of whom smokes, had no objection to them.

Now what is behind the new ruling?  Nothing but lust for power and a desire on the part of its promoters to outdo themselves in pursuit of PC thereby earning 'brownie-points' with the higher-ups.  (I intend 'brownie-points' as a double-entendre with an allusion to brown-nosing.)

And so the breakfast conversation turned to means of combating the insanity: massive disobedience, smoke-ins, and libertarian 'flash mobs':  the tweets go out, the students and faculty assemble quickly to blow some smoke and then just as quickly disperse.  Imagine several such mobs assembling and dispersing at different open-air campus locations on a single day.

The people charged with enforcement would be overwhelmed, the ruling would be flouted into risibility, and then ignored.

Mockery and derision are powerful weapons and perfectly legitimate when one is dealing with willfully stupid and morally stunted Pee-Cee power-heads.

Companion post:  The Conservative Disadvantage

Epicurus in One Sentence and the Comforts of Materialism

When we are, death is not; when death is, we are not.

Some say people hold to religion because of its comforts.  A superficial way of thinking  given religion's moral demands and  the fears it inspires.  It was precisely such fears for which Epicurean materialism  was prescribed as anodyne.

Materialism has its comforts too.  Will you then say that people believe it because it is comforting?

Materialism has its comforts but it also renders human life meaningless. That goes on the debit side of the balance sheet.

A Reason Why Germany Had to Lose the War

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A. Dru, Pantheon, 1950, p. 172, entry #579 of 10 September 1941:

A year ago today the official propagandist, Fritsche, talking on the wireless, said of the bombing of London: 'Once upon a time fire rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrha, and there only remained seventy-seven just men; it is very doubtful whether there are seventy-seven just people in London today.'  I already know many reasons why Germany will not win the war.  Fritsche's speech is one.

See the eponymous category for more from his pen.

Concluding punctilious postscript:  I added a hyperlink to (Dru's translation of) Haecker's text.  That bit of contextualization enriches and thus modifies the sense of his text.  Worth noting if not worth worrying about.

Photo ID: Eric Holder’s Assault on Common Sense

I was shocked (shocked!) to hear over breakfast a while back that my friend Peter L. will vote for neither Obama nor Romney.  All my posts about how politics is a practical business, how it's always about the lesser of evils,and about how foolish it is to let the best become the enemy of the good have fallen on deaf ears.  But I won't give up on old Peter: he's worth saving from the remnant of his liberal folly.

When you vote for a president, you are not voting for just that one person.  You are voting for his entourage as well.  And for Obama that entourage is a sorry  lot including as it does Eric Holder who became Attorney General.  Remember the outrageous suit his Justice Department brought against Arizona re: S. B. 1070? (See my Arizona category for 1070 posts.)  Now the issues raised by S. B. 1070 are complex.  But the issue raised by photo ID laws is not.  It's a very simple issue and there ought not be any dispute about it whatsoever.  And yet our esteemed Atty Gen'l is going after states with photo ID laws making irresponsible accusations of 'disenfranchisement' and comparing the requirements to poll taxes.

Anyone with common sense ought to be able to appreciate that voting must be conducted in an orderly manner, a manner to inspire confidence in the citizenry, and that only citizens who have registered to vote and have satisfied the minimal requirements of age, etc., are to be allowed into the voting booth. Given the possibility of fraud, it is therefore necessary to verify the identities of those who present themselves at the polling place. To do this, voters must be required to present a government-issued photo ID card, a driver's license being only one example of such. It is a reasonable requirement and any reasonable person should be able to see it as one.

Suppose you don't have a driver's license.  How hard is it to get a photo ID?  Not very hard.  In Arizona it costs only $12 and is available at any DMV office.  And it's good for 12 years.  That comes to a dollar a year.  That's a hell of a deal, especially when you consider all the other things you can do with that nifty photo ID such as open a bank account, cash checks, use credit cards, buy alcohol and tobacco products, apply for store credit, secure a library card, etc.  You can now start doing all the things that normal citizens do.  Ain't that grand? You can stop being a nonentity.  Remember what your Uncle Quine taught you, "No entity without identity." If you tell me you don't do any of those things, and don't have any desire to do them, then why are you so interested in voting?  You don't have a bank account, or cash checks, etc., but you have a burning desire to vote?

If you are 65 or older or a recipient of Social Security disability benefits you can get the ID for free.   So what's your excuse for not securing a photo ID?  If you  are that lazy, how informed will you be about the issues on which you have such a burning desire to vote?

Liberals feel that the photo ID requirement will 'disenfranchise' many blacks and other minorities.  This shows that we conservatives have a higher view of you minorities than do your 'keepers,' the Dems. 

Some people want to play the 'numbers game.' They claim that there have only been a few cases of voter fraud.  If you think that, then I refer you to the work of John Fund and Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia.  And please note that the number of convictions in courts of law for voter fraud is bound to be much much lower than the actual cases of voter fraud.  And if there are. contrary to fact, very few cases of voter fraud, then, by the same token, there are very few people who lack photo ID. 

But there is no need to play the numbers game at all.  It's matter of principle. Will we have a election system that is credible and worthy of respect or not? 

Those who oppose photo ID have no good reasons, but they have plenty of motives, and I fear that they are of the unsavory kind.