He peered over the keyboard bespectacled and thoughtful, playing the professor to Jim Morrison's wild man, an Apollo of musical order to anchor the drunken Dionysian front man. Morrison joined the 27 Club in the summer of 1971, expiring of his excesses in a Parisian bath tub, while Manzarek lived on another 40 some years to die on May 20th at age 74. He seems to have negotiated those calm anticlimactic years well.
Here is a beautiful 'Crystal Ship" solo from 2012. The original 1967 Crystal Ship.
The other day I headed for the sporting goods department at a local Wal-Mart. I was looking to stock up on .38 and .45 rounds. Shelves were nearly bare and the pickin's were slim. They were out of almost everything except 20 gauge and .410 shotgun shells. A sign stated that each customer is limited to three boxes per day. This is not just a local phenomenon due to the proximity of gun-totin' Apache Junction rednecks.
A Wal-Mart employee said that 7:15 A.M. was the time to get there on days when shipments arrived. But he couldn't tell me which days those were and he had no opinion about the allegation of some that the Feds are buying up ammo like crazy in a sort of 'arms race' against civilian gun owners. According to the Associated Press (AP), Homeland Security is aiming to buy 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition. That is the same AP that has recently been the target of Obama administration document seizures. Something strange is going on here. Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?
Now would our wise and benevolent government, a government that Obama insists "is us," do a thing like buy ammo to starve the civilian supply? Well, would our government use the IRS to target and harrass conservative groups and individuals such as Frank Vandersloot? Would it lie about Benghazi?
How do these shots differ? Find at least four differences. Trivia Test:
Who is the lady in red? Who is on the cover of Time Magazine? What year is it? What is the name of the album behind the lady in red and who is the artist? Who is the guitarist doffing his hat? The name 'Lotte' appears. The first name of whom? The second shot appears on the album cover of which Dylan album in which year?
Dylan turns 72 today. Check out this performance of his signature number from the summer of '65 with Carole King on piano and plenty of other notables.
Bob Dylan's World: An interactive map of every street, town, and country Dylan has ever sung about.
According to David Hume, "Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent." (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) I've long believed Hume to be right about this. I would put it this way, trading Latin for plain Anglo-Saxon: Our minds are necessarily such that, no matter what we think of as existing, we can just as easily think of as not existing. This includes God. Now God, to be divine, must be a necessary being, indeed a necessary concretum. (God cannot be an abstract entity.) Therefore, even a necessary being such as God is conceivable or thinkable as nonexistent.
Try it for yourself. Think of God together with all his omni-attributes and then think of God as not existing. Our atheist pals have no trouble on this score. The nonexistence of God is thinkable without logical contradiction.*
Note the ambiguity of 'conceivable.' It could mean thinkable, or it could mean thinkable without (internal) logical contradiction. Round squares are conceivable in the first sense but not in the second. If round squares were in no sense conceivable, how could we think about them and pronounce them broadly logically impossible? Think about it!
Now try the experiment with an abstract necessary being such as the number 7 or the proposition *7 is prime.* Nominalists have no trouble conceiving the nonexistence of such Platonica, and surely we who are not nominalists can understand their point of view. In short, absolutely everything can be thought of, without logical contradiction, as not existing.
Humius vindicatus est.
I now define the sense of contingency as the sense that everything is thinkable without logical contradiction as nonexistent. I claim that this sense is essential to the type of mind we have. I also claim that the sense of contingency does not entail that everything is modally contingent, i.e., existent in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds. So from the mere fact that I can think the nonexistence of God without logical contradiction, it does not follow that God is a contingent being. I further claim that we have a hard-to-resist tendency to conflate illicitly the sense of contingency (precisely as I have just defined it) with genuine modal contingency.
So, if someone argues a contingentia mundi to God as causa prima, he can expect the knee-jerk response: what caused God? Behind that reflexive question is the sense of contingency: if the universe is contingent (because conceivably nonexistent) and needs a cause, then so is anything posited as first cause. What then caused the First Cause? If nothing caused it, the knee-jerk responder continues, then it just exists as a matter of brute fact; and if we can accept brute-factuality at the level of the First Cause, then we can accept it at the level of the universe and be done with this nonsense. We can say, with Russell, that the universe just exists and that's all.
My point is that it is the sense of contingency, together with the illicit conflation just mentioned, that fuels the knee-jerk response to the argument to a causa prima.
The sense of absurdity as described by Thomas Nagel is analogous to the sense of contingency, or so I claim. The sense that our lives are Nagel-absurd does not entail that they are objectively absurd. And yet we are necessarily such that we cannot avoid the sense of Nagel-absurdity. About absolutely everything we can ask: what is the purpose of it? What is it good for? What is the point of it? The subjectively serious, under the aspect of eternity, viewed wth detachment from nowhere, comes to appear objectively gratuitous. This holds for every context of meaning, no matter how wide, including the ultimate context. Suppose the ultimate context is eternal fellowship with God. Reflecting on it from our present perspective, viewing it from outside, we can ask what the point of it would be, just as we can ask what caused God.
The classical answer to 'What caused God?' is that God is a necessary being. He has no external cause or explanation, but his existence is not a brute fact either. God is self-existent or self-grounding or self-explanatory. Nagel has trouble with this idea: "But it's very hard to understand how there could be such a thing." (WDIAM, 99) Why does our man have trouble? Because there is nothing that could put a stop to our explanation-seeking 'Why?' questions. In a sense he is right. The structure of our finite discursive intellects makes it impossible to stop definitively, makes it impossible to have self-evident, question-squelching, positive insight into the absolute metaphysical necessity of God's existence in the way have self-evident positive insight into the impossibility of round squares or the necessity of colors being extended. The best we can do is see the failure of entailment from 'Everything is conceivably nonexistent' to 'Everything is modally contingent.'
Just as Nagel cannot suppress the question 'What explains God?,' he cannot suppress the question 'What is the point of God?' or 'What is the point of fulfilling God's purpose for our lives?' Nagel cannot see how there could be something that gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but has no external point itself. He cannot see how God can be self-purposing, i.e., without external purpose but also not purposeless. Nagel thinks that if the point of our lives is supplied by a pointless God, and a pointless God is acceptable, then we ought to find pointless lives acceptable.
Nagel can't see how the ultimate point could be God or eternal life with God. "Something whose point cannot be questioned from outside because there is no outside?" (100) Given the very structure of our embodied awareness, there is always the possibility of the 'outside view' which then collides with the situated subjective 'inside view.' It is this unavoidable duality within finite embodied consciousness, and essential to it, that makes it impossible for Nagel to accept a self-purposing, self-significant, self-intelligible ultimate context.
So for Nagel objective meaninglessness is the last word. For me it is not: our lives are ultimately and objectively meaningful. But Nagel has a point: we cannot, given the present configuration of finite, discursive, embodied awareness, truly understand with positive insight God's metaphysical necessity or how there could be an ultimate context of existential meaning that is self-grounding axiologically, teleologically, and ontologically.
So I suggest that ultimate felicity and ultimate meaningfulness can be had only by a transfiguration and transformation of our 'present' type of finite, discursive consciousness with its built-in duality of the subjective and the objective.
But I can only gesture in the direction of that Transfiguration. I cannot present it to you while we inhabit the discursive plane. All I can do is point to the Transdiscursive, and motivate the pointing by exfoliating the antinomies and aporiai that remain insoluble this side of the Great Divide.
________________________
*One way to oppose this is via the Anderson-Welty argument lately examined. If the exsistence of God is the ultimate presupposition of the laws of logic, then all reasoning, whether valid or invalid, to God or away from God or neither, and all considerations anent logical possibility, necessity, impossibility, contradiction and the like presuppose the existence of God.
A second way of opposition was tread by me in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence.
I heard there was a beheading in London. At first I thought the perpetrator had to have been a Catholic nun or maybe a Buddhist monk. Imagine my shock when I learned that a practitioner of the Religion of Peace did the dastardly deed!
But of course only an Islamophobe would conclude that the U.K. needs to examine its immigration policy. Concern over incidents like these is surely irrational and motivated only by nativism, bigotry, racism, and xenophobia, not to mention the superciliousness and arrogance the English are known for.
Thomas Nagel suggests as much at the end of Chapter 10, "The Meaning of Life," of his little introductory text, What Does It All Mean? (Oxford UP, 1987):
If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously. On the other hand, if we can't help taking ourselves so seriously, perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous. Life may be not only meaningless, but absurd. (101)
Did you catch the allusion to Longfellow? It is to the second stanza of "A Psalm of LIfe":
Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
Now one might naturally think that life is meaningless if and only if life is absurd, that in this context 'meaningless' and 'absurd' are equivalent expressions. The Nagel quotation, however, suggests that the equivalence fails. While an absurd life is a meaningless life, a meaningless life needn't be absurd.
But how? How can a life be meaningless but not absurd?
I
Well, suppose your life (and everyone's life) is objectively meaningless, objectively without point or purpose. That does not translate into the "philosophical sense of absurdity" (phrase from Nagel's 1971 article) unless one takes one's life seriously. To take one's life seriously, Nagel suggests, is to aim at more than comfort and survival. It is to dedicate oneself to something important, "not just important to you, but important in some larger sense: important, period." (101) The problem, as we have seen from earlier discussions, is that seriousness collides with the view from nowhere. Viewing my life from the outside tends to drain it of seriousness. The sense of absurdity arises when "the incurable tendency to take ourselves seriously" comes into conflict with the view "from the outside." The serious appears gratuitous under the aspect of eternity.
To avoid absurdity, then, we must stop taking our lives seriously. Nagel's message, at least in his little 1987 text, seems to be that our lives are objectively meaningless whether or not we take ourselves seriously. If we take ourselves seriously, then our lives are both meaningless and absurd. If we stop taking our lives seriously, then our lives will be meaningless but not absurd.
We ought to distinguish two problems:
P1. How are we to deal with the objective meaninglessness of human existence?
P2. How are we to deal with the absurdity of human existence?
Nagel seems to be saying that we solve the first problem by simply accepting objective meaninglessness, and that we solve the second by taking short views and not worrying about the point or pointlessness of one's life as a whole: "The trick is to keep your eye's on what's in front of you, and allow justifications to come to an end within your life, and inside the lives of others to whom you are connected." (100)
Objective meaninglessness is not up to us: it is a given. Absurdity, which for Nagel is indistinguishable from the sense of absurdity, is up to us: we can mitigate it by taking short views even if we cannot entirely eliminate it.
So absurdity is not much of a problem for Nagel. It certainly does not call for suicide or for existentialist heroics of the Camusian sort whereby man shakes his fist in defiance at the unintelligible and heartless universe. Irony, Nagel tells us, is the proper response.
II
But is human existence objectively absurd? Problem (P1) above presupposes that it is. But is it? Nagel gives an argument in WDIAM that we ought to examine. Please note that he is is arguing, not from the sense of absurdity as he describes it, but from objective considerations. Note also that his argument seems to contradict his rejection of the "chains of justification" argument he examines near the beginning of the 1971 article. (MQ, p. 12) The WDIAM argument seems to be the following.
1. If x has meaning, then x is a proper part of a whole within which it has its meaning. Thus the particular activities and projects of my life have their existential meaning within the whole of my life. Therefore
2. My life as a whole has meaning only if there is a wider whole within which my life as a whole has meaning. Such a wider context might be my family, my profession, a political movement.
3. But each such wider context can be viewed from outside and questioned as to its meaning. This includes the ultimate context if there is one, for example, God's plan for humanity. Therefore
4. The ultimate context, if there is one, must be meaningless. This is because nothing has meaning apart from a context, and no context is immune from questioning as to its point or purpose. Therefore
5. Since the ultimate context must be meaningless, my life as a whole must be ultimately meaningless, whatever proximate meaning it may have for my family, my profession, the party, etc.
By way of illustration, consider the catechism answer to the question of the purpose of human existence: Our purpose is to love and serve God in this world and be happy with him forever in the next. In Thomistic terms, the purpose of life is to achieve the visio beata, the Beatific Vision.
Now should anyone who accepts this Thomistic answer be troubled by Nagel's argument? He needn't be. For the argument rests on a questionable assumption, namely, that no context is the source of its own meaningfulness. Now that is true of all sub-ultimate contexts, but why should it be true of the ultimate context?
What is the point of the Beatific Vision? That is like asking, What caused God? God is causa sui, a necessary being. He is self-existent. Similarly, the Beatific Vision is self-intelligible, self-purposive, self-significant. The buck stops there.
Of course, given the nature of our consciousness with its in-built duality of subjective and objective modes of consideration, we can question the point of the BV (or the VB if you prefer). But we have no reason to think that this questioning by us reveals anything objective about the VB. Similarly, one can question whether God exists and why God exists, but that does not show that there is a real distinction in him between essence and existence.
The fact that I can think of God as nonexistent does not show that God is not a necessary being. The fact that I can wonder about the point of the ultimate context does not show that the ultimate context is without point, that it is not self-intelligible, self-purposive, and self-significant.
The sense of the absurd will always be with us in this life. But the sense of the absurd does not entail objective or absolute absurdity. Life can be absurd without being meaningless, just as it can be meaningless without being absurd.
mid-15c., "plot where plants are raised from seeds," from Latin seminarium "plant nursery," figuratively, "breeding ground," from seminarius "of seed," from semen (genitive seminis) "seed" (see semen). Meaning "school for training priests" first recorded 1580s; commonly used for any school (especially academies for young ladies) from 1580s to 1930s. Seminarian "seminary student" is attested from 1580s.
The universities today are places where the seeds of leftism are planted in skulls full of mush.
I am told that the consumption of paleolithic vittles conduces to weight loss. Maybe it does. But I say unto you: What doth it profit a man to lose weight if he suffereth the clogging of his arteries or the loss of his mortal anus to colorectal cancer? On the other hand, you are not going to take away my olive oil and nuts.
So I'm sticking with the Mediterranean diet as a via media between every Scylla and Charybdis the food faddists can fabricate. But don't make a religion of this stuff. Brother Jackass needs to be kept in shape. Well maintained, he will carry you and your worldly loads over many a pons ansinorum. Just don't expect him to convey you to the summum bonum.
Avoid fads and extremes. Where is the extremist Nathan Pritikin now? Long dead. A little butter won't kill you. Use common sense. Eat less, move more. Keep things in perspective. Just one pornographic movie can damage your soul irreparably, but one greasy double bacon cheeseburger will have no adverse effect on your body worth talking about. And fight the nanny-staters and food fascists every chance you get. A pox upon their houses of cards.
And now the anti-gluten craze is abroad in the land. Those with Celiac Disease need to avoid the stuff. But I don't see that that the rest of us need to fear it or that our well-being will be improved by abstaining from it. Be skeptical.
My title is the literal translation of the fake-Latin Illegitimi non carborundum, often passed off jokingly or by the pseudo-erudite to mean "Don't let the bastards grind you down."
A good maxim when it comes to Latin is: If you don't know it, don't throw it.
I said a few entries back that liberals lack common sense. Here is further proof, as if further proof is needed:
This week, the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second-largest in the nation—decided to end the practice of suspending or expelling students for "willful defiance," starting this fall. District officials said the practice disproportionately affects minority students' education and leads to more disciplinary problems for students down the line.
Both the policy and the justification for it are insane. That the policy is crazy is self-evident to anyone of sound mind. The justification too is completely crack-brained. It assumes that the only reason minority students are disproportionately affected by the old expulsion rule is because they are unjustly discriminated against on the basis of their skin color. But that is obviously false: the minorities are disproportionately affected and 'overrepresented' among the ones expelled because they are disproportionately trouble-causing. It is not their skin color, but their bad behavior that explains why they get expelled and suspended more often.
Liberals cannot see this because they are blinded by their politically correct notion that all groups are equal in every respect and so differential outcomes have to be chalked up to racism. Too many liberals are willfully stupid people in willful defiance of common sense and we ought to expel them from the precincts of the reasonable before they do any more damage to educational institutions.
Contemporary liberals have something like the opposite of the Midas Touch. Everything King Midas touched turned to gold. Everything a liberal touches turns to dreck.
Not only will we be forgotten, we will be forgotten by people who never really knew us in the first place. So we will not even be forgotten. You can't remember or forget a person you never knew.
There are vows, oaths, and solemn promises the breaking of which can be costly. There are Nixonian and Clintonian lies and cover-ups that exact a high price in the end. There are verbal assaults that bring reprisals that don't always remain verbal. And there are other sorts of 'fighting words' and incendiary speech.
His eyes glowed a couple of times with a devilish green light. He was going on about how we are just physical systems. Me: "If so, why does this matter so much to you?"
