We are 'reminded' (Plato) of the eternal both by the most transient and the least transient of things. The most transient teaches the ultimate ephemerality of all things finite. The least transient teaches that it is no substitute for the eternal.
Month: February 2013
William Safire
He is supposed to have said somewhere, "Avoid stock expressions like the plague."
Ah yes, the perils of giving writing advice. Even the great Orwell stumbles.
Voter Fraud
Liberals oppose photo ID at polling places because it would 'disenfranchise' all the blacks and others among us who somehow live without ID whose votes liberals need. And anyway, voter fraud never happens — except when it does.
The Great Blizzard of ’78 Remembered
I had an odd schedule in those days. I hit the sack at four in the afternoon and got up at midnight. I caught the last trolley of the night to the end of the line, Boston College station. Got off, hiked up the hill to my office where I worked all night on my dissertation while listening to a classical music station out of Waltham, Mass. Then I prepared my lectures, taught a couple of classes, went for a run, played a game of chess with my apartment-mate, Quentin Smith, and was in bed by four again. That was my schedule early fall '77 to late spring '78every single day holidays included.
That's how I got my dissertation done. I ruthlessly cut out everything from my life except the essential. I told one girlfriend, "See you at my dissertation defense." She later expressed doubts about marrying a man given to occasional interludes of "hibernation." Another girlfriend complained that I kept "odd hours." True enough. And I still do. I don't get up at midnight any more. I get up at 2 AM. I've become a slacker.
One night in early February the snow was coming down pretty thick as I caught the last trolley of the night. The trip up the hill to my office was quite a slog. A big drift against the main door to Carney Hall made it diffcult to get the door open. But I made it inside and holed up in my windowless office for two or three days as the Great Blizzard of '78 raged. I got a lot of work done and finished the dissertation on schedule.
The Impermanence of the Impermanent and the Permanent
The most ephemeral and fragile of things are yet not nothing: a wisp of cloud, a passing shadow, a baby whose hour of birth is its hour of death. And such seemingly permanent fixtures of the universe as Polaris are yet not entirely being. Both the relatively impermanent and the relatively permanent point beyond themselves to the absolutely permanent. Each is, absolutely considered, impermanent. No finite fixture is finally fixed.
Simone Weil puts the thought like this:
Stars and blossoming fruit-trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity. (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, p. 97)
Her formulation, however, is defective: stars are born and die. They are not utterly permanent. They too are impermanent. Under the aspect of eternity, the different time scales of Alpha Ursae Minoris and a bear cub mean nothing.
Morality, Religion, Law
The positive law codifies moral judgments the chief vehicle of which is religion. Attacks on religion therefore tend to undermine morality, and with it, the rule of law and respect for the rule of law. Is this thesis supportable?
Religion could be kept private and out of the public square. Many think that it should be. But law can't: the whole point of law is to set forth prescriptions and proscriptions for the behavior of citizens, especially in their relations to one another. The suggestion that religion be relegated to the private sphere is not incoherent. The suggestion that law be so relegated surely is.
Law, however, presupposes morality: the positive law is largely a codification of our moral judgments as to the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. We have laws against drunk driving, for example, because of our antecedent conviction that it is morally wrong to act in ways that needlessly endanger ourselves and others. The legal rests on the moral: legal normativity is grounded in moral normativity. If a law is genuinely normative, then it derives that normativity from a sound moral basis; otherwise the law is merely the say-so of legislators and not deserving of respect, though it might be something to fear. But while the legal rests on the moral, it must not be conflated with it. One proof of this is that laws can be morally evaluated. Morally sane people have no trouble pronouncing certain laws immoral. One thinks of the Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich. It would be no defense of these laws to insist that they were legal and enacted according to all the relevant protocols of the judicial system then and there in effect. 'Illegal law' is a contradition in terms. 'Immoral law' is not. The positive law is subject to moral evaluation.
Now the chief vehicle of morality for most people is and has been for centuries religion. The Ten Commandments, for example, are to be found in the Old Testament, and are at the ethical center of both Judaism and Christianity. There is much more to both religions than their respective ethical teachings, and there is much more to their ethical teachings than the Decalogue; but the latter is surely at the center of the ethical doctrine of both religions.
Attacks on religion, therefore, are indirect attacks on the morality of which religion is the vehicle, as well as indirect attacks on the law that codifies the morality.
Consider drunk driving again. It is illegal. And it ought to be: its legal impermissibility is morally defensible. To mount a moral defense of the law you have to argue from some moral principle or principles. Ultimately you will be arguing from "Thou shalt not kill," one of the Ten Commandments. Because we judge it immoral to take innocent human life, we also judge it immoral (thought not as immoral) to recklessly endanger human life as drunk drivers do.
"But couldn't one keep the moral prohibitions against killing, stealing, lying, etc. as a basis of public policy while relegating the religious 'packaging' to the private sphere?"
There are two questions here. The deeper one concerns the foundation of morality. To put it graphically, can the normativity of Judeo-Christian ethics survive the death of God? That may not be the best way to frame the question, but it conveys its flavor. My present concern, however, is with a less deep question: Does it make sense to attack the main means for the majority of people to acquire moral formation and guidance?
You know what my answer is.
Truth and Truthfulness
The bathroom scale doesn't lie, but it doesn't tell the truth either. It is either accurate or inaccurate. Only a spiritual being can be either deceptive or truthful.
I cannot lie by simply saying something false. I must have the intention to deceive. That is perfectly clear. Rather less obvious is that to tell the truth it does not suffice to say something true: I must also have the intention to be truthful.
"He told the truth but he wasn't being truthful" is not a contradiction. This is no more a contradiction than "He said something false but he wasn't intending to deceive." But how could one tell the truth without being truthful? One way is by saying something that happens to be true while intending to deceive. Another way is by saying something true to distract the hearer from the salient issue. A third way is by saying something true but omitting other truths relevant to the contextualization and understanding of the first.
Suppose the following sentence is true: "Jane shot Sam several times in the chest with a .45 caliber pistol after he came at her with a knife threatening to rape her." Someone who assertively utters the first independent clause while omitting to utter the second has said something true without being truthful.
In sum, one can say what is false without being untruthful and one can say what is true without being truthful.
Persons, not propositions, are truthful or the opposite. Propositions, not persons, are true or the opposite.
And yet there is some connection between truth and truthfulness.
Here is a mere outline of an argument. In a world without mind there could be no truth. For truth is some sort of correspondence or adequation of mind and world. There are no free-floating truths, no Wahrheiten an sich. Truth is moored in mind. But truth is absolute: it transcends the contents and powers of finite minds. The true is not what you or I believe or what all of us believe. Nor is the true the believable. The true is not the rationally acceptable, not even the rationally at the ideal limit of inquiry. The true is not the warrantedly assertible. There no viable epistemic/doxastic analysis of the truth predicate. And yet truth involves mind. Enter divine mind. The truth is grounded in the divine truthfulness. In God, truth and truthfulness colaesce.
Well, I warned you that it was a mere outline. Brevity is the soul of blog.
Realpolitik
The weak invite attack. That is a law of nature. Nations are in the state of nature with respect to each other. Talk of international law is empty verbiage without an enforcement mechanism. There is none. Or at least there is none distinct from every extant state. The same goes for diplomacy. There needs be a hard fist behind the diplomat's smiling mask. There had better be iron and the willingness to shed blood back of that persona.
Or as Herr Blut-und-Eisen himself is reported to have said, "Diplomacy unbacked by force is like music without instruments."
Plantinga Receives Rescher Prize
David J. Theroux would have me link to his Philosopher Alvin Plantinga Receives Prestigious Rescher Prize. I am happy to do so.
Feminism as Masculinism
I just heard Dennis Prager say that feminism is misnamed and ought to have been called 'masculinism.' He continued, "There is no celebration of the feminine in feminism." I remember having a similar thought back in 1973 when Playgirl Magazine first appeared. My thought was that there is nothing liberating in women imitating the worst features of men.
One ought to distinguish, however, between equity and gender feminism. See The Absurdity of Gender Feminism. There are undoubtedly good aspects of the former, pace certain conservative extremists.
Measurement by Regrets
We are measurable by the nature of our regrets. What do you regret? Not having drunk enough good wine? Not having amassed more wealth? Not having given in to the temptation to commit adultery with willing women or men in faraway places? Or is it rather your intellectual mistakes and moral failures that you regret?
We can be measured by the nature of our regrets as much as by the altitude of our aspirations.
On the Nature of Accidents: Objections and Replies
Lukas Novak comments and I respond.
Bill, what follows is what I consider the most important objection against your theory. It seems to me that in order to keep the basic meaning of "universal" and "particular" the following definitions must be assumed:
1. A universal is that which is (truly) predicable of many particular instances. BV: I agree if 'many' means two or more. I would add that a universal is a repeatable entity. But I suspect Novak will not agree with my addition. I suspect his view is that there are no universals in extramental reality. Universals are concepts. Hence I would expect him to balk at 'entity.'
2. X is an instance of a given universal U iff U is predicated of X. BV: I would say 'predicable' instead of 'predicated.' Predication is something we do in thought and with words. A universal can have an instance whether or not any predication is taking place.
3. U1 is subordinate to U2 iff all instances of U1 are instances of U2. This is expressed in language in the form "Every U1 is an U2" – for example, "Every man is an animal". BV: OK.
4. Every universal has at least some possible instances, unless it is intrinsically inconsistent. Now whiteness and color are universals. By common sense, color is superordinate to whiteness. So, every whiteness is a color. Peter's whiteness, on the other hand, is a particular. We must assume that Peter's whiteness is an instance of whiteness, and also of color – since whiteness and color are not intrinsically inconsistent and there are no more plausible candidates to [be] their instances than Peter's whiteness, Bob's blackness etc. BV: So far, so good!
But here comes the problem. If Peter's whiteness contains whiteness, then Peter's color contains color as its constituent. BV: It is true that Peter is white, and it is true that if Peter is white, then he is colored. But it doesn't follow that there is the accident Peter's coloredness. Accidents are real (extramental) items. Peter really exists and his whiteness really exists. But there is not, in addition to Peter's whiteness, the accident Peter's coloredness.
Argument 1: It is accidental that Peter is white (or pale) due perhaps to a deficiency of sunlight. But it is not accidental that Peter is colored. Peter is a concrete material particular, and necessarily, every such particular has some color or other. Therefore, being colored is not an accident of Peter. Being colored is essential to Peter.
Argument 2: The truth-maker of 'Peter is white' is Peter's being white. But Peter's being white is also the truth-maker of 'Peter is colored.' Therefore, there is no need to posit in reality, besides Peter's being white, Peter's being colored.
I therefore say that there is no such accident as Peter's being colored. Consequently, the rest of Novak's reasoing is moot.
You may perhaps say that Peter's whiteness also contains color because whiteness contains color, but certainly color does not contain whiteness in that case (else they would coincide), and therefore Peter's color does not contain whiteness.
BV: We have to be careful not to equivocate on 'contain.' In one sense of 'contain,' whiteness contains color or coloredness. We could call this conceptual inclusion: whiteness includes coloredness as a part. In a second sense of 'contain, ' if x is an ontological constituent of y, then y contains x. Thus the accidental compound [Peter + whiteness] contains the substance Peter and the accident whiteness, but does not contain them in the way whiteness contains color.
Consequently, Peter's color is not an instance of whiteness. But this contradicts the fact that Peter's color just is Peter's whiteness, because Peter's whiteness is a color (by def. 3, assuming that whiteness is subordinate to color), and there is no other color in Peter than his whiteness (let us so stipulate).
Put very simply: if Peter's whiteness is just Peter+whiteness+NE+time, then Peter's color is just Peter+color+NE+time, but then Peter's whiteness is not Peter's color. But this is wrong since whiteness is subordinate to color and so any instance of whiteness must be identical to an instance of color.
BV: Novak's argument could be put as follows:
a. If Peter's whiteness is a complex having among its constituents the universal whiteness, then Peter's coloredness is a complex having among its constituents the universal coloredness.
b. These are numerically distinct complexes.
Therefore
c. Peter's whiteness is not Peter's coloredness.
d. (c) is false.
Therefore
e. Peter's whiteness is not a complex.
By my lights, the argument is unsound because (a) is false as I already explained: there is no such complex as Peter's coloredness.
Max Black in Meditation
Substance and Accident: The Aporetics of Inherence
1.If substance S exists and accident A exists, it does not follow that A inheres in S. An accident cannot exist without existing in some substance or other, but if A exists it does not follow that A exists in S. If redness is an accident, it cannot exist except in some substance; but if all we know is that redness exists and that Tom exists, we cannot validly infer that Tom is red, i.e., that redness inheres in Tom.
2. So if A inheres in S, this inherence is something in addition to the existence of S and the existence of A. There is more to Tom's being red than Tom and redness. We must distinguish three items: S, A, and the tie of inherence. S and A are real (mind-independent) items. Presumably the tie of inherence is as well. Presumably we don't want to say that A inheres in S in virtue of a mental synthesis on our part.
3. My question: what is inherence? What is the nature of this tie? That the accident of a substance is tied to it, and indeed necessarily tied to it, is clear. The nature, not the existence, of the tie is what is in question.
4. Inherence is not an external relation on pain of Bradley's regress.
5. Inherence is not identity. This was argued earlier.
6. A is not a part of S. This too was argued earlier.
7. Is S a part of A? For Brentano, an accident is a whole a proper part of which is the substance itself — but there is no other proper part in addition to the substance! Every part of the accident is either the substance or a part of the substance. This I find bizarre. Suppose a chocolate bar is both brown and sticky. What distinguishes the brownness accident from the stickiness accident if both have as sole proper part the chocolate bar? (For a very clear exposition of Brentano's theory, see R. Chisholm, "Brentano's Theory of Substance and Accident" in his Brentano and Meinong Studies.)
8. I made a similar suggestion, namely, that S is a part of A, except that I assayed accidents as akin to facts. This has its own difficulties.
9. Here is Dr. Novak's scholastic suggestion:
I take the connexion between S and A to be that of a receptive potency and its corresponding act. S contains an intrinsic relation of "informability" to all its possible accidents, and A contains an intrinsic relation of informing toward S. Together these two constitute an accidental whole of which they are not just parts but complementary intrinsic causes: S is its material cause and A its formal cause. They are unified in jointly intrinsically co-causing the one accidental composite.
This implies that we must distinguish among three items: the substance (Peter, say), his accidents (being hot, being sunburned, being angry, being seated etc.) and various accidental wholes each composed of the substance and one accident.
So it seems that Novak is committed to accidental compounds such as [Socrates + seatedness] where Socrates is the material cause of the compound and seatedness the formal cause. Moreover, the substance has the potentiality to be informed in various ways, and each accident actualizes one such potentiality.
Recall that what we are trying to understand is accidental change. And recall that I agree with Novak that we cannot achieve a satisfactory analysis in terms of just a concrete particular, universals, and an exemplification relation. If Peter changes in respect of F-ness, and F-ness is a universal, then of course there are two times t and t* such that Peter exemplifies F-ness at t but does not exemplify F-ness at t*. But this is not sufficient for real accidental change in or at Peter. For the change is not relational but intrinsic to Peter. So, whether or not we need universals, we need a category of entities to help us explain real change. As Novak appreciates, these items must be particulars, not universals.
What we have been arguing about is the exact nature of these particulars. I suggested earlier that they are property-exemplifications. Novak on the basis of the above quotation seems to be suggesting that they are accidental compounds.
Suppose Socrates goes from seated to standing to seated again. In this case of accidental change we have one substance, three accidents, and three accidental compounds for a total of seven entities. Why three accidents instead of two? Because the second seatedness is numerically different from the first. (Recall Locke's principle that nothing has two beginnings of existence.) And because the second accident is numerically distinct from the first, the first and the third accidental compound are numerically distinct.
When Socrates stands up, [Socrates + seatedness] passes out of being and [Socrates + standingness] comes into being and stays in being until Socrates sits down again. So these accidental compounds are rather ephemeral objects, unlike Socrates.
Perhaps they help us understand change. But they raise their own questions. Socrates and seated-Socrates are not identical. Presumably they are accidentally the same. Is accidental sameness the same as contingent identity? What are the logical properties of accidental sameness? Is an Ockham's Razor type objection appropriately brought against the positing of accidental compounds?
The Morality of Suicide
There is a well-informed discussion of the topic at Auster's place. I have serious reservations about Lawrence Auster's brand of conservatism, reservations I may air later, but for now I want to say that I admire him for his courage in facing serious medical troubles and for soldiering on in the trenches of the blogosphere. He courageously tackles topics many of us shy away from. I hope he pulls through and carries on.