No pain to speak of, leastways. And I've been at it over 38 years. Your mileage may vary, as does Malcolm Pollack's who, in his Pain, No Gain, reports:
I used to run. I never liked it much, but I did it anyway. I was never fleet of foot, and I never ran very far — two or three miles, usually, with the longest effort ever being only about six miles or so.
Mileage is indeed the key. Malcolm never ran far enough to experience what running is really about. He didn't take the first step. Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):
The first step to enjoying running — and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step — is to achieve perfect fitness. I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing. I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.
That's one hell of a first step. But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week. I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked. And then the real run begins. Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for yourself.
I don't move very fast these days. I do the old man shuffle. But I've got staying power. Completed a marathon at age 60. Enjoyed the hell out of last week's 10 K Turkey Trot. Surprisingly, the satisfactions of running are the same now as they were in fleeter days.
To avoid injuries, limit your running to two or three days a week and crosstrain on the other days. I lift weights, ride bikes, use elliptical trainers, hike, swim, and do water aerobics.
And don't forget: LSD (long slow distance) is better than POT (plenty of tempo).
Bill O'Reilly does a lot of good, but he made a fool of himself last night on his O'Reilly Factor. It was painful to watch. In the course of a heated exchange with David Silverman, president of American Atheists, O'Reilly claimed that Christianity is not a religion, but a philosophy. At first I thought I had misheard, but Mr. Bill repeated the ridiculous assertion.
And yet O'Reilly was right to oppose the extremism of Silverman and the zealots who seek to remove every vestige of religion from the public square, though they seem to be rather less zealous when it comes to the 'religion of peace.'
It is not enough to have the right view; one must know how to defend it properly. A bad argument for a true conclusion gives the impression that there are no good arguments for it. And this is where conservatives tend to fall short. See my Anti-Intellectualism on the Right and Why Are Conservatives Inarticulate?
O'Reilly's bizarre assertion shows that he has no understanding of the differences among philosophy, religion, and Christianity. For part of my views on the differences between philosophy and religion, see here. There is room for disagreement on the exact definition of 'religion,' but if anything is clear, it is that Christianity is a religion. O'Reilly only dug his hole deeper when he claimed that while Christianity is a philosophy, Methodism is a religion!
I am reminded of the inarticulate George W. Bush. He once claimed that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. That silly assertion showed that Bush understood neither philosophy nor Jesus. Jesus claimed not only to know the truth, but to be the truth. "I am the way, the truth, and the life . . . ." That is a claim that no philosopher qua philosopher can make. A philosopher is a mere seeker of truth, not a possessor of it, let alone truth's very incarnation. A philosopher is a person who is ignorant, knows that he is, and seeks to remedy his deficiency.
Neither God nor Christ are philosophers. And we can thank God for that!
I happened across a post from a couple of years ago on a defunct blog named Throne and Altar. For some reason the post's title drew me in: Another Casualty: Maverick Philosopher Embraces Tolerance. The author, one "bonaldo," claims that Islam has turned me into "a raving liberal." The entry of mine that drew his ire was a defense of the Pope entitled Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity. The post so offended bonaldo the extremist that he removed me (or rather a hyperlink to my weblog) from his blogroll. What got his goat were the final two paragraphs of my entry:
That is why both leftists and Islamists must be vigorously and relentlessly opposed if we care about our classically liberal values.
The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism put in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. — that doesn’t alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying ‘infidels’ — whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear ‘event’ in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000.
Now one would think that such a ringing statement would be greeted by two cheers of approbation, if not three, from anyone on the Right. To a fanatical right-winger, however, anyone who sees a scintilla of value in anything the least bit classically liberal is an enemy to be banished to the blogospheric equivalent of Siberia. For these ultra-reactionary extremists one cannot be Right enough. And so bonaldo the fanatic says the following:
After affirming his commitment to liberalism, MP asserts that Christianity is a false religion. Truth doesn’t need to be “chastened” or “checked”. Since truth never contradicts itself, the only thing that can check truth would be falsehood.
I have never asserted anywhere on this blog that Christianity is a false religion. The benighted bonaldo, however, takes this to be an implication of what I do say because he fancies himself to be in possession of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So fancying himself, he is blind to the importance of toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, and blind to the murderous intolerance that religions can breed. He quotes from a second post of mine, How Far Does Religious Toleration Extend?:
To the extent that Islam takes on jihadist contours, to the extent that Islam entails its imposition on humanity, it cannot and ought not be tolerated by the West. Indeed, no religion that attempts to suppress other religions can or ought to be tolerated, including Christianity. We in the West do, or at least should, believe that competition among religions in a free marketplace of ideas is a good thing.
Bonaldo sees something "ironic" in my position: "What about the belief system that suppresses all belief systems that would suppress other belief systems?" He ignores the fact that I have repeatedly said that toleration has limits. I am not advocating universal toleration. That would be incoherent. If one were universally tolerant, one would have to tolerate those who reject the principle of toleration. Said principle, however, is not a suicide pact. A toleration that tolerated every belief system would undermine itself. What I am saying, from the point view of my conservatism, is that:
No religion that attempts to suppress (by killing, imprisoning, or in any way harming) adherents of other religions ought to be tolerated. Toleration has limits. No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration. And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status. Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive. The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.
Bonaldo speaks of "irony," but I think what he means is that my position is internally inconsistent. But it would be inconsistent only if I were advocating universal toleration – which I am not. It would be inconsistent to maintain both that one ought to tolerate every belief system and suppress the belief system that suppresses other belief systems. But there is no logical inconsistency in maintaining what I do maintain. It is true: I want to suppress radical Muslims when their murderous beliefs spill over into murderous actions. And I extend that to radical religionists of any stripe who act upon murderous beliefs.
But why must we be tolerant? I explain this in On Toleration: With a Little Help From Kolakowski. I also explain there why toleration must not be confused with indifference to truth or relativism about truth. There are too many knuckleheads on the fanatical Right who cannot distinguish between fallibilism and relativism, a distinction explained in: To oppose relativism is not to embrace dogmatism.
I'll be having more to say about ideological extremism later. Lawrence Auster is another prime offender. For just a small taste of his fanatical hostility to conservatives that don't toe his exact party line, see The Trouble with Larry.
Whittaker Chambers long ago warned that the source of the Left's strength was not the appeal of its theory, but the power of its faith. It is believing in something worth dying for that makes leftists a formidable foe. Reason and experience are neutralized by the Left's preening assurance of its own rectitude and of being on the side of the angels. It never has to explain how its efforts to create economic "justice" and plan social abundance have blighted the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings and caused mass murder on an epic scale. The radical faith has outlived "the end of history" and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The ideas that inspired its odious schemes continue to thrive because there is only one law that the Left obeys, a law on which its survival is based: don't look back. Reactionary in ideology, immune to evidence, impervious to logic, the Left still sees itself as forward-look-ing and humane and its opponents as regressive and "mean spirited."
I've continued to think on one of our old disagreements, the one about religion and zealotry, and I'd like to continue the discussion. Previously, I'd put forward the argument attempting to show that religious belief is rationally unacceptable. Now, I'm thinking it might be profitable to repackage the argument for a more modest conclusion. I want to say something like, "Given other epistemic commitments that I have and, on reflection, find myself unable to give up, I find that I am rationally unable to accept religious belief of the sort in question." Since I take these commitments to be closely related to the conservative disposition which you and I share, perhaps you will find that you, too are committed to abandoning religious belief." This is, to use a phrase from Robert Nozick, non-coercive philosophy, and I am growing increasingly inclined to think that herein all real persuasion lies.
BV: I suggest we divide persuasion into nonrational and rational, and then subdivide rational persuasion into coercive and noncoercive. Noncoercive rational persuasion, I take it, would be rational persuasion that makes use only of propositions already accepted by the person to be persuaded in an attempt to get him to accept a proposition to which he is logically committed by what he already accepts but does not yet accept. I agree that in the vast majority of cases only noncoercive rational persuasion has a chance at success.
Let me now re-frame the argument that I have presented earlier, with the hope that I can improve on my earlier formulations. When I was a soldier in Afghanistan, I attended a ceremony for a fallen comrade. Nobody I knew. In main sermon, the chaplain said, "Sgt. So-and-so got a big promotion that day," referring to the day an IED [improvised explosive device] ended the life of this unfortunate soldier. His reasoning is that now this soldier was enjoying the loving embrace of Jesus. Whatever suffering this caused him or his family is comparatively small.
I found the chaplain's speech off-putting because his account robbed this soldier's death of its tragedy. He went well beyond consoling the survivors to telling us that we should be positively happy that this event occurred. What disturbed me more, though, is that the chaplain arrived at this conclusion very reasonably from very widely held set of religious beliefs. If one believes, as a majority of the people of the world do, that an eternity of happiness of a much higher grade than any that exists on earth awaits the righteous after death, then one is left to draw this, and other unpalatable conclusions. For instance, if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it.
I too am put off by the chaplain's speech but for a different reason. What I find offensive is his presumption to know that the unfortunate soldier is now in a far better state. No one can legitimately claim to know that God exists, or that we survive our bodily deaths as individuals, or that Jesus is the son of God, or that a given person is in heaven as opposed to the other place, etc. (Nor can one legitimately claim to know the negations of any of these propositions.) People can and do believe these things, and some have good reasons for (some of) their beliefs. Since no one can know about these things, the chaplain had no right to offer the kind of ringing assurance he offered or to make the claim that one should be positively happy that the soldier was blown to bits.
So I would say that the chaplain was doubly presumptuous. He presumed to know what no one can know, and he presumed to make a comforting assurance that he was not entitled to make. But had he said something tentative and in keeping with our actual doxastic predicament, then I wouldn't have been offended. Suppose he had said this: "Our faith teaches us that death is not the end and that this life is but a prelude to a better life to come. We hope and pray that Sgt So-and-So is now sharing in that higher life." I would not be put off by such a speech. Consolation without presumption.
What you are offended by is something different, the very content of the Christian message. But suppose it is true. Then there is nothing ultimately "tragic" about the soldier's death. (I also think you are misusing 'tragic.' Was hubris displayed by the soldier prior to his death?) He has left this vale of tears and has gone to a better 'place.' You see, if Christianity is true, then death does not have the 'sting' that it has for an atheist (assuming the atheist values life in this world). Are you then just assuming that Christianity is false? If it is false, then Nietzsche is right and it is a slander upon this life, the only life there is. But is it false? You can't just assume that it is.
Distinguish the question whether Christianity is true from the question whether it can be known to be true (by anyone here below). I claim that it cannot be known to be true, using 'know' in a strict and intellectually responsible way.
Now one of the "unpalatable consequences" you mention is this: "if you could inflict a great amount of suffering on an innocent person, and by so doing, influence that person's choice, or someone else's choice, to turn to religion, then it would seem one should do it." But this is not a consequence of Christian belief, but at best a consequence of the fanatical and dogmatic belief that one knows that Christianity is true. Suppose I did know that Christianity — or rather some fire-and- brimstone variant of Christianity– is true, then why wouldn't I be justified in torturing someone until he accepts the saving truth, the truth without which he will spend all eternity in hell? What's worse, a day of torture or an eternity of it? Besides, if I really care about you, wouldn't I want you to have an eternity of bliss?
What you are giving us, I think, is an argument against religious fanaticism, not an argument against religion. Religion is a matter of faith, not knowledge. More precisely, genuine religion is a matter of a faith that understands that it is faith and not knowledge. Once that is understood your "unpalatable consequences" do not ensue. For if I understand that my faith transcends what I can legitimately claim to know, then this understanding will prevent me from torturing someone into acceptance of my creed. For surely it is clearer that one ought not torture people into the acceptance of metaphysical propositions than that said propositions are true.
Now, as our previous discussions have shown, one is not compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook, as I have done, because of these considerations. One is only compelled to adopt a non-religious outlook if one also accepts the idea that earthly goods are not negligible in terms of the reasons they provide. To be clear, I mean things like: the pleasures of laughter, friendship, sex, families, etc., as well as achieving important life goals (including the goal of living a philosophical life in a tumultuous world.) I accept that these things are non-negligible and I feel confident that any theory of the Good Life must afford them a central place. I don't think I can provide a further justification for why I believe this, other than I find the thought compelling. If an interlocutor is happy to accept that these are all axiological ciphers because they are nothing when compared with the goodness of God in the next world, then I must part ways with him. I would, however, be surprised for a conservative to take that view, since conservatives, more than progressives, tend to value the familiar.
I am not sure I follow this last paragraph, but I take you to be saying that there are certain non-negligible goods that this life provides (friendship, etc.) and that anyone who accepts that there are must adopt a non-religious outlook. Your argument can perhaps be put as follows:
1. If a religion such as Christianity is true, then the good things of this world are relatively unimportant as compared with the good things of the world to come.
2. But it is not the case that the good things of this world are relatively unimportant: they are absolutely important.
Therefore
3. Someone of conservative bent, someone who is capable of appreciating what actually and presently exists, ought to reject a religion such as Christianity.
I would respond to this by saying that the goods of this world are certainly not absolutely important, but they are not "axiological ciphers" either. A theist will say that what exists in this world is good because it comes from the source of all goodness, God. So the conservative theist has plenty of reason to appreciate what actually and presently exists, but he is also in a position to evaluate the goodness of finite goods properly and without idolatry because he appreciates that they are other than that which is wholly good. The goods of this world are neither negligible nor absolute, neither illusory nor absolutely real.
I would further argue that atheists typically succumb to axiological illusion: they take what is relatively valuable for absolutely valuable.
1. Care about truth. 2. Care about grammar. 3. Care about eloquence in speaking.
4. Develop refined tastes in everything you can. 5. Develop a masterful BS detector. 6. Speak truths that no one else will, but which need to be heard. 7. Never flatter. 8. Don't sell character for success. 9. Be skeptical of whatever "the herd" likes. 10. Do not watch TV. In fact, turn them off whenever possible. 11. Lament stupidity, inanity, and insanity. They are everywhere.
Long ago I was told the following story by a nun. One day St. Augustine was walking along the seashore, thinking about the Trinity. He came upon a child who had dug a hole in the sand and was busy filling it with buckets of seawater.
Augustine: "What are you doing?"
Child: "I am trying to empty the ocean into this hole."
Augustine: "But that’s impossible!"
Child: "No more impossible than your comprehending the Trinity."
What holds for the Trinity holds for the great problems of philosophy: we can no more solve them than the child could empty the sea into a hole on the seashore. Our minds are not large enough for these problems, not strong enough, not free enough from distorting, distracting, suborning factors. We know that from experience.
Philosophy teaches us humility. This is one of its most important uses. And this despite the fact that too many paid professors of it are the exact opposite of humble truth-seekers. But worse still are the scientistic scientists whose arrogance is fueled by profound ignorance of the questions and traditions that made their own enterprise possible.
I have been searching various databases such as JSTOR without success for a good article on deus ex machina objections in philosophy. What exactly is a deus ex machina (DEM)? When one taxes a theory or an explanatory posit with DEM, what exactly is one alleging? How does a DEM differ from a legitimate philosophical explanation that invokes divine or some other nonnaturalistic agency? Since it is presumably the case that not every recourse to divine agency in philosophical theories is a DEM, what exactly distinguishes legitimate recourse to divine agency from DEM? Herewith, some preliminary exploratory notes on deus ex machina.
This question is personally very interesting to me because Arianna Betti here (third paragraph) accuses my theory of facts of deus ex machina, a theory I initially sketched in my 2000 Nous article "Three Conceptions of States of Affairs" and then presented more fully in my 2002 Existence book.
1. Deus ex machina is Latin for 'God out of a machine.' Let us begin by making a distinction between DEM objections in literary criticism and in philosophy. A DEM objection can be brought against a play or a novel if the behavior of a character is not "necessary or probable" (as Aristotle puts it at Poetics 1454a37) given the way the character has already been depicted, or if an incident is not a "necessary or probable" consequence of earlier incidents. From a lit-crit point of view, then, a playwright or a novelist can be taxed with a DEM if he allows something to irrupt into the scene from outside it which doesn't fit with the characters and action so far depicted. As I understand it, the literal meaning of 'DEM' comes from the lowering of a god via stage machinery into the setting of an ancient Greek play. See, for example, Plato, Cratylus 425d where Plato has Socrates speak of "the tragic poets who, in any perplexity have their gods waiting in the air . . . ." If any novelist or playwright is reading this, he is invited to supply some examples of DEM and explain what is wrong with them.
2. My interest, however, is less literary and aesthetic than philosophical. In the context of philosophical and perhaps also scientific explanations, a DEM objection would be to the effect that illegitimate recourse has been had to an explanatory posit that belongs to an order radically other than the order of the explananda. I put it so abstractly because I want to leave open the possibility of DEM objections to explanations that invoke agents or powers other than God. We now consider two putative examples of DEM. The first is Leibniz's recourse to God in his solution of the mind-body problem and in his theory of causation generally, and the second is Malebranche's invocation of God for a similar purpose. What is particularly interesting is that Leibniz accuses Malebranche of deus ex machina, but does not consider himself liable to the same objection.
3. Leibniz,Psychophysical Parallelism, and Pre-Established Harmony. There are reasons to believe that psychophysical interaction is impossible. Indeed, Leibniz has reasons for denying intersubstantial causal influx quite generally, even between two material substances. And there are reasons to believe that (i) there are both mental events and physical events as modifications of mental and physical substances respectively and (ii) these events are mutually irreducible. Suppose you accept both sets of reasons. And suppose you want to explain the apparent law-like correlation and covariation of mental and physical events, e.g., how a desire for a cup of coffee, which is mental, is correlated with the physical events that eventuate in your bringing a cup of coffee to your lips. Or, proceeding in the other direction, you want an explanation of why a hammer blow to a finger causes pain. Given that psychophysical interaction is impossible and that there are mutually irreducible mental and physical events, how explain the 'constant conjunction' of the two sorts of event?
One might be tempted by a theory along the lines of Leibniz's pre-established harmony. Roughly, on such a theory there is no intersubstantial causal interaction: the states of one substance cannot act upon the states of another. But there is intrasubstantial causation: the states of a substance cause later states of the same substance. So physical events in a body are caused by earlier physical events in the same body, and mental events in a mind are caused by earlier mental events in the same mind. Mental-physical correlation is explained in terms of pre-established harmony: "each created substance is programmed at creation such that all its natural states and actions are carried out in conformity with all the natural states and actions of every other created substance."(link) The explanation thus invokes God as the agent who establishes the harmony when he creates finite substances.
A standard analogy for the parallelism is in terms of two perfectly synchronized clocks. Whenever clock A shows 12, clock B strikes 12. There is an Humean 'constant conjunction' of striking and showing, but no showing causes a striking if 'causes' means produces or brings into existence. What accounts for the constant conjunction is the pre-synchronization by an agent external to the two clocks. Similarly with all apparent causal interactions: there are in reality no intersubstantial causal interactions, given the windowlessness of Leibnizian monads, but there are law-like correlations which constitute causation a phenomenon bene fundata. But these law-like correlations are grounded in the harmony among the internal states of the monads established when God first created the entire system of finite monads.
4. Now here is my question: Can one dismiss this Leibnizian scheme by saying it is a deus ex machina? Note that on Leibniz's scheme God plays an explanatory role not only with respect to the mind-body problem, but also with respect to the phenomenon of secondary or natural causation in general. For without the monadic harmony pre-established by God when he created the system of finite monads, there would be no law-like regularity such as constitutes causation in the phenomenal world.
Is the Leibnizian proposal a deus ex machina or is it a legitimate form of philosophical explanation? The logically prior question is: What exactly is a DEM? I can think of five answers.
Answer One:Any appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM. On this latitudinarian understanding of DEM, any reference to God in a theory of causation or a theory of truth or a theory of objective value would be a DEM. If this is what is meant by a DEM, then of course Leibnizian parallelism is a DEM. But surely this understanding of DEM is entirely too broad and ought to be rejected. For it allows that any explanation of anything that invokes God is a DEM. But then the problem is not primarily that Leibniz brings God into the theory of mind and body, or the theory of secondary causes, but that he invokes God to explain the existence of things. To give a cosmological argument for the existence of God would be to commit a DEM. But surely a sophisticated cosmological argument for the existence of God cannot be dismissed by slapping the 'DEM' label on it.
It is different if one is seeking a scientific explanation of the very existence of things. The rules of the scientific game preclude the invocation of anything beyond the natural order, beyond the realm of space-time-matter. My concern, however, is DEM as a philosophical objection. That being understood, we can safely set aside Answer One.
Answer Two: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM if and only if no independent reasons are given for the existence of the supernatural agent. This is a much better answer. But then one will not be able to tax Leibniz with a DEM since he gives various arguments for the existence of God. The same goes for other philosophers such as Descartes and Berkeley who 'put God to work' in their systems. If one can supply reasons for the existence of God that are independent of the natural phenomenon to be explained, then it is legitimate to invoke God for explanatory purposes.
But this second answer seems to have a flaw. Why would the reasons for the supernatural agent have to be independent, i.e., independent of the job the agent is supposed to do? Suppose the appeal to a divine agent takes the form of an inference to the best or the only possible explanation of the natural explananda. Then the appeal to the divine agent would be rationally justified despite the fact that the agent is posited to do a specific job. Accordingly, Leibnizian pre-established harmony could be interpreted as an argument for God as the best explanation of the phenomena of natural causation.
Answer Three: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent. This is an improvement over Answer Two, but a problem remains. Suppose a philosopher gives arguments for the existence of God, and then puts God to work in the phenomenal world. If the work he does involves the violation of natural laws, then his workings here below are miraculous in one sense of the term and for this reason philosophically objectionable. So we advance to
Answer Four: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff EITHER no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent, OR the working of the agent violates natural laws. But in Malebranche's system, neither disjunct is satisfied, and yet Leibniz accuses Malebranche of DEM. For Malebranche there is only one genuine cause and that is God, the causa prima. All so-called secondary causes are but occasions for the exercise of divine causality. Thus the occurrence of event e1 is not what makes e2 occur; God creates e1 and then e2 in such a way as to satisfy the Humean requirements of temporal precedence of cause over effect; spatiotemporal contiguity of cause and effect, and constant conjunction, which is the notion that whenever events of the first type occur they are contiguously succeeded by events of the second type. On this scheme, no causal power is exercised except divine causal power, which involves God in every causal transaction in the natural world. Leibniz objects that this is a DEM because it makes of each cause a miracle. (See Kenneth Clatterbaugh, The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637-1739, p. 122.)
But it is not a miracle in the sense of the violation of a natural law. It is a miracle in the sense that the work that should be done by a finite substance is being done by God. A miracle for Leibniz need not be an unusual event; an event that surpasses the power of a natural substance can also be a miracle. Thus Malebranche's denial of causal efficacy to finite substances makes God's involvement in nature miraculous, which amounts to saying that the appeal to God is a DEM.
Answer Five: An appeal to a supernatural agent in a theory of natural phenomena is a DEM iff EITHER no reasons are supplied for the existence of the divine agent, OR the working of the agent violates natural laws, OR the agent's intervention in nature is miraculous in the sense in that it takes over a job that ought to be done by a natural entity. But if this answer be adopted, then Leibniz himself can be accused of DEM! Arguably, the job of grounding mental-physical correlations ought to be done by the terms of theose correlations and not by God.
5. The foregoing remarks are highly tentative and inadequate, but at least they show that a lot of work needs to be done in this area of metaphilosophy.
The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.
This is proving to be a fascinating topic. Let's push on a bit further.
Aquinas says that any given nature can be considered in three ways: in respect of the esse it has in concrete singulars; in respect of the esse it has in minds; absolutely, in the abstract, without reference to either mode of esse. The two modes are esse naturale (esse reale) and esse intentionale. We can speak of these in English as real existence and intentional existence.
According to Schopenhauer, the medievals employed but three examples: Socrates, Plato, and an ass. Who am I to deviate from a tradition at once so hoary and noble? So take Socrates. Socrates is human. The nature humanity exists really in him, and in Plato, but not in the ass. The same nature exists intentionally in a mind that thinks about or knows Socrates. For Aquinas, there are no epistemic deputies standing between mind and thing: thought reaches right up to and grasps the thing itself. There is an isomorphism between knowing mind and thing known. The ground of this isomorphism is the natura absoluta, the nature considered absolutely. Call it the common nature (CN). It is so-called because it is common to both the knower and the known, informing both, albeit in different ways. It is also common to all the singulars of the same nature and all the thoughts directed to the same sort of thing. So caninity is common to all doggy thoughts, to all dogs, besides linking the doggy thoughts to the dogs.
My concern over the last few days has been the exact ontological status of the CN.
This morning, with the help of Anthony Kenny, I realized that there are four possible views, not three as I stated earlier:
A. The CN really exists as a separate, self-subsistent item.
B. The CN exists only intentionally in the mind of one who abstracts it from concrete singulars and mental acts.
C. The CN has Meinongian Aussersein status: it has no mode of being whatsoever, and yet is is something, not nothing. It actually has properties, but is property-incomplete (and therefore in violation of LEM) in that it is neither one nor many, neither universal nor particular, neither intentionally existent nor really existent.
D. The CN exists intentionally in the mind of God, the creator.
(A) is a nonstarter and is rejected by both me and Lukas Novak. (B) appears to be Novak's view. (C) is the interpretation I was tentatively suggesting. My thesis was that the CN must have Aussersein status, but then it inherits — to put it anachronistically — all the problems of Meinongianism. The doctor angelicus ends up with Meinongian monkey on his back.
Let me now try to explain why I reject (B), Novak's view, and incline toward (C), given that (A) cannot possibly be what Aquinas had in mind.
Consider a time t before there were any human animals and any finite minds, and ask yourself: did the nature humanity exist at t? The answer has to be in the negative if there are only two modes of existence, real existence in concrete singulars and intentional existence in finite (creaturely) minds. For at t there were no humans and no finite minds. But surely it is true at t that man is rational, that humanity includes rationality. This implies that humanity at t cannot be just nothing at all. For if it were nothing at all at t, then 'Man is rational'' at t would lack a truth-maker. Furthermore, we surely don't want to say that 'Man is rational' first becomes true when the first human being exists. In some sense, the common nature must be prior to its existential realization in concrete singulars and in minds. The common nature cannot depend on these modes of realization. Kenny quotes Aquinas (Aquinas on Being, Oxford 2002, p. 73):
Socrates is rational, because man is rational, and not vice versa; so that even if Socrates and Plato did not exist, rationality would still be a characteristic of human nature.
Socrates est rationalis, quia home est rationalis, et no e converso; unde dato quod Socrates et Plato non essent, adhuc humanae naturae rationalitas competeret. (Quodl. VIII, I, c, 108-110)
Aquinas' point could be put like this. (i) At times and in possible worlds in which humans do not exist, it is nevertheless the case that rationality is included in humanity, and (ii) the metaphysical ground of humans' being rational is the circumstance that rationality is included in humanity, and not vice versa.
Now this obviously implies that the CN humanity has some sort of status independent of real and intentional existence. So we either go the Meioningian route or we say that CNs exist in the mind of God. Kenny:
Aquinas' solution is to invoke the divine mind. There are really four, not three ways of considering natures: first, as they are in the mind of the creator; second, as they are in the abstract; theitrs, as they are in individuals; and finally, as they are in the human mind. (p. 74)
This may seem to solve the problem I raised. CNs are not nothing because they are divine accusatives. And they are not nothing in virtue of being ausserseiend. This solution avoids the three options of Platonism, subjectivism (according to which CNs exist only as products of abstraction), and Meinongianism.
The problem with the solution is that it smacks of deus ex machina: God is brought in to solve the problem similarly as Descartes had recourse to the divine veracity to solve the problem of the external world. One ought to be forgiven for thinking that solutions to the problems of universals, predication, and intentionality ought to be possible without bringing God into the picture. But this is a separate can of worms.
The following is a comment by Dr. Novak on an earlier post about Stanislav Sousedik's Thomist theory of predication. That post has scrolled off into archival oblivion, so I reproduce the comment here and add some comments in blue.
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What is, for me, most striking about Bill's troubles with Sousedík's elaboration of the Thomistic theory of predication is first, that he seems to spell out precisely the questions that I regard as the most fundamental ones in all this business, and second, that these are precisely the questions that had stirred the development of the more and more elaborate late-scholastic theories of universals (or predication, for this is one and the same problem for the scholastics). In this comment, I will try just to sketch the direction in which I think the answers can be found; perhaps to elaborate on some points later.
BV: I am encouraged by LN's judgment that I have stumbled upon the most fundamental questions despite my lack of deep familiarity with late Scholasticism.
Now the core problem of course is the problem of common natures. I am afraid that there is a slight misunderstanding about the meaning of this term, and Sousedík's choice of his term – "absolute subject" – just makes it worse. It is common to talk of a common or "absolute" nature as though it were an entity or item beside universals and individuals, indeed, "jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein". Truly it seems absurd to postulate such an entity which clearly violates the principle of excluded middle.
However, despite the manner of talk of the scholastics and of Sousedík, one must resist considering an "absolute nature" as an item or entity. There is no such entity called "absolute nature". There are particulars which exist really, and there are universals which exist intentionally. And they have something in common — the "objective content" which exists both really, as individualised and identified with the particular(s), and intentionally, as abstracted and universalised, as a universal. This "something in common" is called the "common nature", but it is not something over and above the universal or the particular. We should not say – and we do not say, properly – that there is some "absolute nature". The nature can only be absolutely considered, that is, considered under a kind of "second order abstraction" – viz. under abstraction from the fact whether it is or is not considered under abstraction from individuality.
BV: I note that LN uses 'item' and 'entity' interchangeably. That is not the way I use the terms. For me, an entity is anything that has being or existence, anything that has esse. 'Nonexisting entity' is therefore a contradiction in terms. My use of 'item,' however, is ontologically noncommital. Accordingly, 'nonexisting item' is not a contradiction in terms. I am pleased to find that I use the term in exactly the same way that Daniel D. Novotny does in his paper, "Scholastic Debates About Beings of Reason" in Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic (Ontos Verlag, 2012), p. 26. 'Item' as I use it is the most inclusive term in the philosophical lexicon. Anything to which one can refer, anything that one can single out in thought, anything that can be counted as one, whether it exists or not, is an item. Nonexistent objects, impossible objects, incomplete objects — all are items.
Now the common nature, the nature considered absolutely, i.e., considered apart from both real existence and intentional existence and from the accidents that accrue to it when it exists either really (in things) or intentionally (in the mind), is clearly not an entity, but it is an item. Or so I maintain. It is not an entity because it has neither esse naturale nor esse intentionale. Here LN and I agree. But it is an item because we have singled it out in thought and are talking about it. After all, the common nature is not nothing. It is a definite item. Take felinity considered absolutely. It is distinct from humanity considered absolutely. It is not the felinity in my cat, nor the felinity in my mind when I think about the cat. It is a selfsame item that can exist in either way, or in both ways. And is is a different selfsame item than the common nature humanity that can exist either in particular humans or in minds or both.
LN says that the common nature " is not something over and above the universal or the particular." If this means that the common nature felinity is not an entity in addition to really existing particular cats and the intentionally existing universal, then I agree. It is not an entity because it has no mode of being. But surely the selfsame felinity that is in my cat and in my mind when I think about the cat, precisely because it is common, cannot be identical to the felinity really existing in cats or the felinity intentionally existing in minds thinking about cats. So in that sense it is indeed an item (not an entity) "over and above the universals or the particular."
The intended meaning of the saying that this "absolute nature" is neither one nor many, neither real nor intentional etc. is not that there is in fact some primitive constituent item out there devoid of all these properties. That would indeed be absurd. The meaning is that the nature – which in factis both many [namely according to its real existence in particulars] and one [according to its intentional existence in a universal] (note that this is not a contradiction!) — this very nature does not possess any of these two modes of being and the consequent properties "of itself", that is, necessarily, i.e. it can be consistently grasped without them or "absolutely"; and only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that. Just like a chemist can grasp water as water, that is, according to the properties that belong to water on the basis of its chemical constitution, and disregard whether it is for example cold or hot. He would say that water as water is neither hot nor cold, even neither hot nor not-hot – without thereby necessarily postulating some item called "absolute water" over and above the individual instances of water of various temperatures.
BV: What the foregoing implies, however, is that the common nature exists only in the mind of one who abstracts both from real existence and from intentional existence. The crucial phrase is, "only insofar as it is thus grasped, we can say that it is neither this nor that." This implies that the common nature is only as grasped by a mind. That in turn implies that common natures have esse after all — in contradiction to the theory. It also implies that common natures are universals — again in contradiction to the theory.
In this connection it is important to note that Jacques Maritain, no slouch of a Thomist, speaks of THREE esse's. (Degrees of Knowledge, p. 129, n. 115) He calls them esse naturae [sic], esse intentionale, and esse cognitum seu objectivum. The latter mode of being is the mode of being of common natures.
My cat exists outside the mind as a concrete singular. Its mode of existence is esse naturae, or esse naturale. Now my mind, in knowing the cat, does not become a cat. So the felinity in my mind when I know the thing before me as a cat cannot exist in my mind in the same way that it exists in the cat outside my mind. Rather, it exists in the mode of esse intentionale which implies that it is abstract and universal as opposed to concrete and singular. Now suppose I abstract from both of these modes of existence. So abstracting, I focus upon the common nature. About this common nature, Maritain says that it too is "abstract and universal." (Ibid.)
The fact that Maritain speaks of a third mode of esse points up the problem I am having with common natures. What Maritain says strikes as reasonable. But it contradicts what LN says is the Thomist doctrine. The official doctrine is that the common nature is neither universal nor particular. Maritain, however, quite reasonably says that the common nature is abstract and universal.
In other words: you cannot start with "absolute natures" as some elementary items and then try to build the common-sense particulars out of them. Quite the other way around: you take the familiar particulars, then you become aware that you are able to grasp them by means of universal concepts, and then you proceed to identify what the universal concept has "taken" from the particular (its "objective content") and what not (the properties of concepts /like being universal/ as opposed to their notes). That which the universal concept has captured of the particular is the "common nature"; it is something existing as really identified to the particular (or else it could not have been abstracted from there) – therefore it cannot, of itself, require universality. But it is also something capable of existing as identified to a universal concept; therefore it cannot, of itself, be incompatible with universality.
So, a common nature is not some elementary ontological item, a philosophical "atom"; it is an abstraction of an abstraction.
BV: LN's phrase 'objective content' is a felicitous one. The common nature is the objective content of my subjective concept of a cat, say, but it is also to be found in the cat existing in the mode of esse naturale. Now the dispute, as I see it, is about the exact status of these objective contents or common natures. I can think of three possibilities:
A. The common nature really exists. B. The common nature does not exist, really or intentionally, but has Meinongian Aussersein status. (This seems to be Novotny's view. See p. 34 of his article cited above.) C. The common nature exists intentionally, not really, as an object of a double abstraction.
Now both LN and I reject (A). I opt for (B). Accordingly, my thesis is that the doctrine of common natures inherits — to put it anachronistically! — all of the problems of Meinong's doctrine of Aussersein. LN seems to be opting for (C). The trouble with(C) is that it contradicts Thomist doctrine according to which the common nature is neither universal nor particular, neither one nor many, and neither really nor intentionally existent. For on (C), the common nature, as Maritain said, is "abstract and universal." It is also one not neither one nor many, and intentionally existent, not neither really nor intentionally existent.
There is more to LN's comment, but the rest will have to be addressed in a separate post or posts.
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.
Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.
Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
The attitude of gratitude conduces to beatitude. Can it be said in plain Anglo-Saxon? Grateful thoughts lead one to happiness. However you say it, it is true. The miserable make themselves miserable by their bad thinking; the happy happy by their correct mental hygiene.
Broad generalizations, these. They admit of exceptions, as goes without saying. He who is afflicted with Weilian malheur or clinical depression cannot think his way out of his misery. Don't get hung up on the exceptions. Meditate on the broad practical truth. On Thanksgiving, and every day.
Liberals will complain that I am 'preaching.' But that only reinforces my point: they complain and they think, strangely, that any form of exhortation just has to be hypocritical. Besides not knowing what hypocrisy is, they don't know how to appreciate what actually exists and provably works. Appreciation is conservative. Scratch a liberal and likely as not you'll find a nihilist, a denier of the value of what is, a hankerer after what is not, and in too many cases, what is impossible.
Even the existence of liberals is something to be grateful for. They mark out paths not to be trodden. And their foibles provide plenty of blog fodder. For example, there is the curious phenomenon of hypocrisy-in-reverse.
