Nevertheless, no one could read this book [Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust by Jan Tomasz Gross] without being, yet again, horrified by man’s inhumanity to man. Indeed, the term inhumanity seems almost an odd one in the circumstances, assuming as it does that Man’s default setting is to decency and kindness, whereas the evidence presented in this book is that, once legal and social restraints are removed, Man becomes an utter savage.
Exactly right. One of the most pernicious illusions of the Left is that human beings are basically good and decent, and that society has corrupted them.
According to Gross, people of all social strata in Poland gladly, even joyfully, plundered their Jewish neighbours; if so, they were not unique in having done so, for it happened across Europe during Nazi occupation, while in Rwanda, in 1994, ordinary Hutus happily and without conscience appropriated the property of their erstwhile but now massacred Tutsi neighbours.
You recently mentioned your being very happy, given what's wrong with the world, to be 62 rather than 26; I am 26. Although, sadly, I think liberalism will run until it destroys itself as a parasite that destroys its host, this metaphysical fact of evil's being self-destructive is reason enough for hope. People have always sensed that the world is falling apart, because in a sense it always has been, but even greater than the mystery of evil is the mystery of goodness. Rather than regretting my being 26 rather than 62, I remember, in my Mavphil-inspired gratitude exercises, that the cruelest regime in the history of mankind fell during my lifetime.
I have always believed that Good and Evil are not opposites on a par, but that somehow Good is more fundamental and that Evil is somehow derivative or interstitial or parasitic or privative. The Thomist doctrine of evil as privatio boni is one way of explaining this relation, though that doctrine is open to objections.
So I agree with my correspondent that, in the end, Good triumphs. Unfortunately, it is a long way to the end, a long march along a via dolorosa with many stations of suffering. I don't relish making that journey. Hence my satisfaction at the thought that my life is, most likely, three-quarters over. As I said in that post-election post,
One can hope to be dead before it all comes apart. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am in the habit of taking care of myself and could be facing another 25 years entangled in the mortal coil. When barbarism descends this will be no country for old men.
I too am grateful that the Evil Empire fell during my lifetime. But now we have an incompetent jackass in the White House, a hard-core leftist, who was given four more years by a foolish electorate for whom panem et circenses are the supreme desiderata. Innocent of the ways of world, trapped in leftist fantasy land, he is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan. We are in deep trouble.
But I do not counsel despair. We live by hope, within this life and beyond it. We shall hope on and fight on.
1. Why did the Japanese so foolishly attack Pearl Harbor?
2. Why did the Germans attack the Soviet Union so recklessly at a time when they had all but won the war?
3. Why did the United States stop after spring 1951 at the 38th Parallel, thereby ensuring a subsequent sixty-year Cold War and resulting in chronic worries about a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and poised to invade its neighbor to the south?
I asked commenter John whether he thought that temporal parts — assuming that there are temporal parts — would count as ontological constituents of an ordinary particular such as an avocado. Here is what he said:
. . . I believe that I would say that the temporal parts of an avocado are ontological constituents of it. A thing's temporal parts are much more like a thing's material parts than any other putative constituent of that object, so I would say that if a thing's material parts are ontological constituents of it, then so too are a thing's temporal parts.
But I don't think I would say that this commits perdurantists to constituent ontology in any interesting sense. I have always understood the contrast between constituent and relational ontologies to be primarily a matter of how a thing relates to its properties: does a thing have properties by standing in some external relation to those properties, or instead by having those properties somehow 'immanent' in it? Perhaps this is wrong. But if it's right, then I would say that perdurantists believe that the temporal parts of a thing are among its ontological constituents, but that this does not commit them to any interesting version of constituent ontology.
John's response is a reasonable one, but it does highlight some of the difficulties in clarifying the difference between constituent ontology (C-ontology) and relational ontology (R-ontology).
One of the difficulties is to specify what exactly is meant by 'ontological constituent.' John takes the material parts of a thing to be ontological constituents of it. I don't. Material parts are ordinary mereological parts. For me, ontological constituents are quasi-mereological metaphysical parts to be contrasted with physical (material) parts. Ontological parts are those parts that contribute to an entity's ontological structure. R-ontologists deny that ordinary concrete particulars have any ontological structure. This is not to deny that they have mereological structure. So R-ontologists have no use for ontological parts (constituents). But they have plenty of use for material parts as we all do. 'Ontological' and 'metaphysical' are interchangeable adjectives in this context.
An avocado is an improper physical part of itself. Among its proper physical parts are the skin, the meat, and the pit. Of course, each of these has proper physical parts, and the parts have parts. All of these parts are parts in the strict mereological sense of 'part.' Now consider the dark green (or greenness) of the skin. It is not a physical or material or spatial part of the skin. I can't peel it off the skin or cut it up or eat it. If it is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part of the skin. And the same goes for every other property of the skin: if is is a part at all, it is a metaphysical part. These metaphysical property-parts together perhaps with some other metaphysical parts (bare or thin particulars, various sorts of nexus, Castanedan ontological operators. . .) make up what we can call the ontological structure of an ordinary particular. This quasi-mereological ontological structure is distinct from the strictly mereological structure of the object in question.
Everyone agrees that things like avocados and aardvarks and asteroids have physical parts. But not all agree that they have in addition metaphysical parts. As I see it, the issue that divides C-ontologists from R-ontologists is the question whether concrete particulars have metaphysical parts in addition to their physical parts where the thing's properties are among its metaphysical parts. C-ontologists say yes; R-ontologists, no.
This is a broader understanding of the difference between C- and R-ontology than John's above. For John the difference is between how concrete particulars have properties. For a C-ontologist, a thing has a property by having it as an ontological constituent. For an R-ontologist, a thing has a property, not by having it as a constituent, but by standing in an external relation to it. That is not wrong, but I think it is too narrow.
John seems to be suggesting that the only ontological constituents there are are properties, and that the only items that have such constituents are ordinary concrete particulars. My understanding is broader. I maintain that among ontological constituents there are or could be other items such as bare or thin particulars, various type of nexus, ontological operators, and perhaps others, in addition to properties (whether taken to be universals or taken to be tropes). I am also open to the possibility that entities other than ordinary concrete particulars could have ontological constituents.
Take God. God is presumably a concrete particular, concrete because causally active, particular because not universal; but surely God is not an ordinary concrete particular, especially if 'ordinary' implies being material. Arguably, God is not related to his attributes; if he were his aseity would be compromised. So I say he has his attributes as constituents. If he is identical to them, as on the doctrine of divine simplicity, then a fortiori he has them as constitutuents, improper constituents.
Return to the humble avocado. Our avocado is green, ripe, soft, etc. So it has properties. This simple observation gives rise to three philosophical questions:
Q1. What are properties?
Q2. What is the item that has the properties?
Q3. What is property-possession? (What is it for an item to have properties?)
I will now contrast one R-ontological answer with one C-ontological answer. What follows are very rough sketches.
One R-ontological answer is this. Properties are abstract objects in a realm apart. They are causally inert, atemporal, nonspatial, not sense-perceivable. Not only do properties not enter into causal relations, they do not induce causal powers in the things that have them. They are what is expressed by such open sentences as '____ is green' analogously as propositions are expressed by such closed sentences as 'Ava is green.' If, per impossibile, God were to annihilate all of these abstract objects, nothing would change in our humble avocado. I say per impossibile because the abstract objects in question are necessary beings. My point is that they do no work here below. They are as irrelevant to what is really going on in the avocado as the predicates 'ripe' and 'green' are.
The item that has properties is just the ordinary concrete thing, the avocado in our example, not a propertyless substratum or any other exotic item. The having is a relation or nonrelational tie that connects the concrete thing to the abstract property.
Now for a C-ontological answer. Properties are universals. Whether or not they can exist unexemplified, when they are exemplified, they enter into the ontological structure of ordinary particulars as metaphysical parts thereof. Thus the greenness of the avocado is 'in' it as a metaphysical part. Same holds for the ripeness, the softness, etc. These universals are empirically detectable and induce causal powers. The thing that has these universals is the avocado viewed as a complex, indeed, as a concrete fact. What makes it particular is a further constituent, the thin particular, which is nonrelationally tied to the universals and unifies them into one thick particular.
What would the soundtrack of the '60s have been without Shankar's sitar? Here is the Shankar I heard at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67. Here is an extended performance at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh.
Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important?
In a line often (mis)attributed to St. Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine."
So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.
Perhaps we are here to be taught humility. Some indications that this could be so:
1. War is endless and ubiquitous at every level and there is nothing much we can do about it. A 'war to end all wars" in Woodrow Wilson's claptrap phrase would be a war that put an end to humanity. It is an excellent bet that there will be wars as long as there are human beings. There are wars within families and between tribes and nations and gangs and interest groups. There is class warfare and racial hatred and the battle of the sexes. There are inter-generational tensions ("Don't trust anyone over 30!") and intrapsychic conflicts. There is inter-species predation. Not only is man a wolf to man, wolves are wolves to men, and men to wolves. If extraterrestrials should show up it is a good bet that a 'war of the worlds' would ensue. If they came to serve man, it would be to serve him for dinner, as in the famous Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man."
Some warn of the militarization of space as if it has not already been militarized. It has been, and for a long time now. How long depending on how high up you deem space begins. Are they who warn unaware of spy satellites? Of Gary Powers and the U-2 incident? Of the V-2s that crashed down on London? Of the crude Luftwaffen, air-weapons, of the First World War? The Roman catapults? The first javelin thrown by some Neanderthal spear chucker? It travelled through space to pierce the heart of some poor effer and was an early weaponization of the space between chucker and effer.
"I will not weaponize space," said Obama while a candidate in 2008. That empty promise came too late, and is irresponsible to boot: if our weapons are not there, theirs will be.
The very notion that outer space could be reserved for wholly peaceful purposes shows a deep lack of understanding of the human condition. Show me a space with human beings in it and I will show you a space that potentially if not actually is militarized and weaponized. Man is, was, and will be a bellicose son of a bitch. If you doubt this, study history, with particular attention to the 20th century. You can bet that the future will resemble the past in this respect. Note that the turn of the millenium has not brought anything new in this regard. And whatever happened to the Age of Aquarius?
Older is not wiser. All spaces, near, far, inner, outer, are potential scenes of contention, which is why I subscribe to the Latin saying:
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
If you want peace, prepare for war.
2. At the level of ideas there is unending controversy, often acrimonious, in almost every field. There is the strife of systems, not to mention the strife of the systematic with the anti-systematic. (Hegel versus Kierkegaard, for example.) Despite invincible ignorance ignorant of itself as ignorance, contentious humans proudly proclaim their 'knowledge' — and are contradicted by fools of opposing stripes.
3. My third point is subsumable under my first, but so important that it deserves separate mention. Homo homini lupus. Never eradicated, man's inhumanity to man is seemingly ineradicable. As we speak, people are being poisoned, shot, stabbed for the flimsiest of reasons or no reason at all. Girls are being raped and sold into slavery. The abortion 'doctors' are slaughtering innocent human beings while apologists whose intellects have been suborned by their lusts cook up justifications. The Iranian head of state calls for the destruction of Israel and its inhabitants. Meanwhile benighted leftists ignore the threat of radical Islam and label 'islamophobic' those who see straight. Every hour of every day extends the litany of the 'lupine.' And there is not much we can do about it.
4. And then there is the eventual if not present corruption of all the institutions that are supposed to ameliorate the human condition: the churches, the criminal justice system, the U. N., governments. The reformers reform until they too become corrupted. And there is little we can do about it.
5. Let's not leave out our animal nature that insures fragility, sickness, death and untold miseries. Transhumanist fantasies aside, there is not much we can do about it. (We can do something, and we have, and that is good; but sickness, old age, and death are as much with us as in the days of the Buddha.)
Meditating on such points as these one might hazard the inference that this world is a vale of soul-making wherein a chief virtue to be learned is that of humility. Our minds are dark, our wills weak, our hearts foul. What is to be so proud about?
Since the past is no longer, to let go of the past is to let go of thoughts of the past. But these thoughts, like all thoughts, are in the present. So we are brought back again to the importance of cultivating the ability to let go of thoughts here and now. Mind control in the present automatically takes care of the two nonpresent temporal modes.
He who avoids socializing avoids pointless conversations, some of which are worse than pointless. For example, chatting with a stranger can turn ugly very quickly if it happens that you differ politically. Still, socializing is not all bad. Like whisky, a little is good now and again. But more is not better.
In an earlier entry that addressed Lukas Novak's argument against bare particulars I said the following:
The notion of a bare particular makes sense only in the context of a constituent ontology according to which ordinary particulars, 'thick particulars' in the jargon of Armstrong, have ontological constituents or metaphysical parts.
[. . .]
LN suggests that the intuitions behind the theory of bare particulars are rooted in Frege's mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive distinction between concepts and objects. "Once this distinction has been made, it is very hard to see how there might be a genuine case of logical de re necessity." (115) The sentence quoted is true, but as I said above, the notion of a bare particular makes no sense except in the context of a constituent ontology. Frege's, however, is not a constituent ontology like Bergmann's but what Bergmann calls a function ontology. (See G. Bergmann, Realism, p. 7. Wolterstorff's constituent versus relation ontology distinction is already in Bergmann as the distinct between complex and function ontologies.) So I deny that part of the motivation for the positing of bare particulars is an antecedent acceptance of Frege's concept-object distinction. I agree that if one accepts that distinction, then logical or rather metaphysical de re necessity goes by the boards. But the Fregean distinction is not part of the motivation or argumentation for bare particulars.
My claim that bare particulars are at home only in constituent ontology raised the eyebrows of commenter John and of LN, who writes:
I cannot see why the notion of a bare particular should make sense only in a constituent ontology. A bare particular is a particular which has none of its non-trivial properties de re necessarily. This notion is quite intelligible, irrespectively of the way we go on to explain the relation of "having" between the particular and the property, whether we employ a constituent or functional or some other approach (of course, saying that it is intelligible is not saying that it is consistent!). If Bill agrees that once one makes the sharp Fregean distinction between concepts and objects then there is a strong motivation against conceding any de re necessity, then he should also agree that making this distinction provides a strong motivation for claiming the bareness of all particulars.
Resolving the Dispute
I believe that this is a merely a terminological dispute concerning the use of 'bare particular.' I am a terminological conservative who favors using words and phrases strictly and with close attention to their historical provenience. To enshrine this preference as a methodological principle:
MP: To avoid confusion and merely verbal disputes, never use a word or phrase that already has an established use in a new way! Coin a new word or phrase and explain how you will be using it.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, the phrase 'bare particular' enters philosophy first in the writings of Gustav Bergmann. So we must attend to his writings if we are concerned to use this phrase correctly. Now in the terminology of Wolterstorff, Bergmann is a constituent ontologist as opposed to a relational ontologist. In Bergmann's own terms, he is a "complex" as opposed to a "function" ontologist, Frege being the chief representative for him of the latter style of ontology.
"In complex ontologies, as I shall call them, some entities are constituents of others." (Realism, p. 7) "In function ontologies, as I shall call them, some entities are, as one says, 'coordinated' to some others, without any connotation whatsoever of the one being 'in' the other, being either a constituent or a part or a component of it." (Ibid.)
Bergmann, then, is a constituent or complex ontologist and his introduction of bare particulars (BPs) is within this context. BPs are introduced to solve "the problem of individuation." A better name for this problem is 'problem of differentiation.' After all, the problem is not to specify what it is that makes an individual an individual as oppose to a member of some other category; the problem is to specify what it is that makes two individuals (or two entities of any category) two and not one.
How does the problem of individuation/differentiation arise? Well, suppose you have already decided that "some entities are constituents of others." For example, you have already decided that ordinary particulars (OPs) have, in addition to their spatial parts, special ontological parts and that among these parts are the OP's properties. Properties for Bergmann are universals. Now suppose you have two qualitatively indiscernible round red spots. They are the same in respect of every universal 'in' them and yet they are two, not one. What is the ontological ground of the numerical difference?
On Bergmann's way of thinking, one needs an entity to do the job of individuation/differentiation. Enter bare particulars. And pay close attention to how Bergmann describes them:
A bare particular is a mere individuator. Structurally, that is its only job. It does nothing else. In this respect it is like Aristotle's matter, or, perhaps more closely, like Thomas' materia signata. Only, it is a thing. (Realism, p. 24, emphasis added)
Bare particulars, then, have but one explanatory job: to ground or account for numerical difference. They are the Bergmannian answer to the question about the principium individuationis. But please note that the positing of such individuators/differentiators would make no sense at all if one held to a style of ontology according to which round red spots just differ without any need for a ground of numerical difference. For a relational ontologist, OPs have no internal ontological structure: they are ontological simples , not ontological complexes. Here is Peter and here is Paul. They just differ. They don't differ on account of some internal differentiator. Peter and Paul have properties, but these are in no sense parts of them, but entities external to them to which they are related by an exemplification relation that spans the chasm separating the concrete from the abstract. And because OPs do not have properties as parts, there is no need to posit some additional ontological factor to account for numerical difference.
I think I have made it quite clear that if we use 'bare particular' strictly and in accordance with the phrases' provenience, then it simply makes no sense to speak of bare particulars outside the context of constituent ontology.
Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, I am not the king of all philosophers and I lack both the authority and the brute power to enforce the above methodological imperative. So I can't force otber philosophers to use 'bare particular' correctly, or to put it less tendentiously: in accordance with Bergmann's usage. But I can issue the humble request that other philosophers not confuse the strict use of the phrase with their preferred usages, and that they tell us exactly how they are using the phrase.
Novak's usage is different than mine. He tell us that "A bare particular is a particular which has none of its non-trivial properties de re necessarily." On this usage my cat would count as a bare particular if one held the view that there are no non-trivial essential properties, that all non-trivial properties are accidental. But for Bergmann a cat is not a bare particular. It — or to be precise, a cat at a time — is a complex one of whose constituents is a bare particular. My cat Max is a Fregean object (Gegenstand) but surely no Fregean object is a Bergmannian bare particular. For objects and concepts do not form complexes in the way BPs and universals form complexes for Bergmann.
On a Fregean analysis, the propositional function denoted by '___ is a cat' has the value True for Max as argument. On a Bergmannian analysis, 'Max is a cat' picks out a fact or state of affairs. But there are no facts in Frege's ontology.
To conclude: if we use 'bare particular' strictly and in accordance with Bergmann's usage, one cannot speak of bare particulars except in constituent ontology.
