Because of comments like these, though they are surely not the worst one can find. (I cite them only because my Referral List pointed me to the post to which they are appended.) But they are characteristic. In my experience, to discuss religion with the irreligious and the anti-religious is a sheer waste of time. You may as well discuss logic with the illogical, music with the unmusical, or poetry with the terminally prosaic.
I am regularly surprised by how much garbage Victor Reppert tolerates in his ComBox. He will even allow people to insult him in vile ways. It may be that he is a model of Christian detachment, slow to anger, quick to forgive, tolerant to a fault. It may also be that he doesn't appreciate that to tolerate bad behavior is to invite more of the same. A conservative, I take a harsher line, one more in keeping with the realities of human nature, realities liberals tend to ignore. Conservatism as I espouse and practice it subsumes the classically liberal commitment to toleration. But toleration has limits. In any case, a weblog is private property where no one has free speech rights.
A man's home is his castle, and his blog his cybercastle. Just as I do not tolerate bad behavior in the first, I do not tolerate it in the second. But bloggers are free to run their blogs any way they see fit.
You might think that disallowing comments limits my traffic. Not so. Traffic is better than ever, recently up around 2000 pageviews per diem. Readers I respect tell me that they like my Comments Policy.
To end aphoristically:
The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.
I thought of Carolyn in September and I thought I ought to check the obituaries. She died September 20th at age 90, her longevity as if in counterpoise to the short tenures of her main men, wildman Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's 1957 On the Road, and the brooding Jack Kerouac himself. Carolyn played the stabilizer to the mania of the one and the melancholy of the other. Both quit the sublunary before the '60s had run their course. The tale of Jack's end has been told too many times, though I will tell it again on 21 October, the 44th anniversary of his exit from the "slaving meat wheel." Neal's demise is less frequently recounted.
Neal
died in February of 1968, also of substance abuse, having quaffed a nasty
concotion of pulque and Seconals, while walking the railroad tracks near San Miguel de
Allende, Mexico. Legend has it that Cassady had been counting the ties and that
his last word was "64, 928." (Cf. William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A
Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, pp. 157-158.)
Carolyn kept the beat while the wildmen soloed, seeking ecstasy where it cannot be found.
May all who sincerely seek beatitude find it. Kerouac: "I want to be sincere." May Jack with his visions of Gerard, of Cody, finally enjoy the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata.
This post continues my ruminations on the distinctio realis. If essence and existence are really distinct in a contingent being, should we think of its existence as accidental or essential, or neither?
Max, a cat of my acquintance, exists and exists contingently: there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. His nonexistence is broadly logically possible. So one may be tempted to say that existence is to Max as accident to substance. One may be tempted to say that existence is accidental to Max. In general, the temptation is to say that existence is an accidental property of contingent beings, and that this accidentality is what makes them contingent.
But this can't be right. On a standard definition, if P is an accidental property of x, then x can exist without P. So if existence were an accidental property of Max, then, Max could exist without existing. Contradiction.
Ought we conclude that existence is an essential property of Max? If P is an essential property of x, then x cannot exist without P. So if existence were an essential property of Max, then Max cannot exist without existing. The consequent of the conditional is true, but tautologically so.
From this one can infer either that (i) Max is a necessary being (because her has existence essentially) or that (ii) existence construed as an essential property is not the genuine article. Now Max is surely not a necessary being. It is true that if he exists, then he exists, but from this one cannot validly infer that he exists. Suppose existence is a first-level property. Then it would makes sense to say that existence is an essential property of everything. After all, in every possible world in which Max exists, he exists! But all this shows is that existence construed as an essential property is not gen-u-ine, pound-the-table existence.
We ought to conclude that existence is neither accidental to a contingent thing, nor essential to it. No contingent thing is such that existence follows from its essence. And no contingent thing is such that its contingency can be understood by thinking of its existence as an accidental property of it. The contingency of Max's being sleepy can be understaood in terms of his instantiation of an accidental property; but the contingency of his very existence cannot be so understood.
If every first-level property is either accidental or essential, then existence is not a first-level-property. But, as I have argued many times, it does not follow that existence is a second-level property. The Fregean tradition went off the rails: existence cannot be a second-level property. Instantiation is a second-level property, but not existernce. And of course it cannot be a second-level property if one takes the real distinction seriously, this being a distinction between essence and existence 'in' the thing or 'at' the thing.
Where does this leave us? Max exists. Pace Russell, saying that Max exists is NOT like saying that Max is numerous. 'Exists,' unlike 'numerous,' has a legitimate first-level use. So existence belongs to Max. It belongs to him without being a property of him. One argument has already been sketched. To put it explicitly: Every first-level property is either essential or accidental; Existence is neither an essential nor an accidental first-level property; ergo, Existence is not a first-level property.
Existence belongs to Max without being a property of him. How is existence 'related' to Max if it is not a property of him?
In my existence book I maintained that existence belongs to a contingent being such as Max not as accident to substance, or as essence to primary substance, or as property to possessor, or as proper part to whole, or by identity; but as unity to items unified. In brief, the existence of a contingent thing is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents. The existence of Max is not one of his constituents but the unity of all his constituents.
This approach solves the problem of how existence can belong to a contingent being without being a property of it. But it raises vexing questions of its own, questions to be taken up in subsequent posts in this series.
One question I need to address is whether philosophy would have come up with the real distinction if it were not for the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo.
As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't.
Obama is not just a bullshitter, but an Orwellian bullshitter.
If hell is separation from God, why wouldn't a body held in thrall by sensuous pleasure do as well as a body wracked with pain? Absorbed in sensuous pleasure, one is arguably farther from God than when in pain.
This post defends the real distinction between essence and existence. For some background, see Geach on the Real Distinction I.
In Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002, p. 45), Anthony Kenny writes, "Peter's continuing to exist is the very same thing as Peter's continuing to possess his essence; if he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a human being and vice versa."
What Kenny is doing in this passage and the surrounding text is rejecting the real distinction between essence and (individual) existence. Thus in a cat, a dog, or a man, there is no distinction in reality between its essence or nature and its existence. In general, for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K. Thus for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man; for Socrates to continue to exist is for Socrates to continue to be a man; and for Socrates to cease to exist is for Socrates to cease being a man.
The claim that for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K, is to be understood, not as a logical or metaphysical equivalence, but as an identity that sanctions a reduction: the existence of Ks just is (identically) their K-ness. Individual (as opposed to what Kenny calls specific) existence reduces to nature. But that is just to say that there is no real distinction in a thing between its individual existence and its nature. For example, there is no non-notional or real distinction in Socrates between him and his existence.
I have three objections to this broadly Aristotelian theory of existence according to which individual existence reduces to nature.
An Argument from Contingency
Socrates might never have existed. If so, and if, for Socrates,
who is a man, to exist = to be a man, then Socrates might never have been a man. This
implies that a certain man, Socrates, might never have been a man, which
is absurd. Therefore, it is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist =
to be a man.
The first premise ought to be uncontroversial. Speaking tenselessly,
Socrates exists and Socrates is a man. But there is no logical or
metaphysical necessity that the man Socrates exist. So, Socrates, though he exists, is
possibly such that he does not exist. (This is equivalent to saying that
he is a contingent being.) So, given that to exist = to be a man,
the man Socrates is possibly such that he is not a man. But this
contradicts the fact that Socrates is essentially a man. For if he is essentially a man, then he is necessarily such that he is a man. Therefore, it
is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist = to be a man.
Convinced? Here is another way of looking at it. I point to Socrates and say, 'This might not have existed.' I say something true. But if I point to him and say, 'This might not have been a man,' I say something false. Therefore, for Socrates, to exist is not to be a man. Of course, he cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot BE a man without BEING. But that is not the question. The question is whether Socrates' being or existence is reducible to his being a man. I have just shown that it is not. Therefore, there is a real distinction between essence and existence in Socrates.
What holds for Socrates holds for every man. No man's very existence is reducible to his being a man. And in general, no individual K's individual existence is reducible to its being a K.
An Argument from Reference
If for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man, then, when he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a man. But then the proper name 'Socrates' used after the philosopher's death does not refer to a man. But it does refer. For I can make true statements about Socrates, e.g., 'Socrates taught Plato.' And the name refers to a man. When Socrates ceased to exist, 'Socrates' did not commence referring to some other thing, a jelly fish say, or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy, or more plausibly, a corpse. A man taught Plato, not a corpse, or a pile of ashes. Therefore, it is not the case that for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man.
To understand this argument, please note that it is not being denied that, necessarily, at every time at which Socrates is alive, Socrates exists if and only if he is a man. Socrates cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot be a man without existing. What is being denied, or rather questioned, is the identification of Socrates' existing with his being a man. As I have pointed out many times before, logical equivalences do not sanction reductions.
A Third Argument
We cannot say that to exist = to be a cat, for then only cats could exist. We, or rather the Aristotelian, has to say that, for cats, to exist = to be a cat. In general, for K-items, to exist = to be a K. But why stop here? Can we stop here? There are no cats in general. There are only particular cats, any two of which are numerically distinct, and each of which has its own existence. Consider Max and Manny, two cats of my acquaintance. Each has his own existence, but they share the nature, cat. So if each exists in virtue of being a cat, then each exists in virtue of being the very cat that it is, which is to say: for Max to exist is for Max to be Max, and for Manny to exist is for Manny to be Manny. But then, generalizing, to exist = to be self-identical. The theory we began with collapses into the existence = self-identity theory.
But while each thing is self-identical — this is just the Law of Identity — no contingent thing is identical to its own existence. For if Max were identical to his own existence, then Max would necessarily exist. If God exists, then God is identical to his own existence. But Max is not God. Therefore, existence cannot be reduced to self-identity in the case of contingent beings.
Of course, given that contingent things exist, they must be self-identical, and they cannot BE self-identical unless they ARE or exist. But there might not have been any contingent things at all. So the existence of a thing cannot be reduced to the self-identity it could have only if it exists. Get it? If yes, then you understand the real distinction.
First of all, what is doublethink? We turn to George Orwell's 1984 and the following quotation therefrom reproduced in Wikipedia:
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
This official website is an excellent contemporary example of doublethink, from the State of Idaho, of all places. (One expects PeeCee doublethink and newspeak in the People's Republic of Taxachusetts and in the once Golden State of Californication, but in Idaho, with all its Mormons and gun-totin' conservatives? Holy moly, things are worse than I thought.) At the State of Idaho website we read:
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare's Self Reliance Office 6/2010
What is the Self Reliance office?
The Self Reliance office is the portion of Idaho Health and Welfare where people can apply for state funded public assistance.
This is what we call an 'Orwellian' use of language. It is language perverted and destroyed so as to serve leftist ideology and make clear thinking impossible. Accordingly, one who accepts welfare via the State from productive citizens is 'self-reliant,' when in truth he is the exact opposite.
Black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reliance on others is self-reliance.
Limited government is anarchism.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness = ObamaCare. (Idiot Pelosi accurately paraphrased.)
Fiscal responsibility = fiscal irresponsibility.
Semi-automatic rifle = fully- automatic rifle.
Semi-automatic rifle used purely defensively = assault weapon.
Constitutionally-mandated border control = xenophobia.
ID requirement at polling place = disenfranchisement.
Critic of a black person's ideas = racist.
And so on. Continue the list and resolve to do your bit to resist and oppose the liberal-left scumbaggers. It is your life, liberty and happiness that are at stake.
A tip of the beret to Monterey Tom, fellow Kerouac aficionado, Octoberite, native Californian, and fellow lonesome traveller along Highway One for alerting me to the arrival of Big Sur, the movie, based on the eponymous novel by Jack Kerouac. Appropriately enough, it is scheduled to open here in the Valle del Sol on November 1st, All Saints' Day on the Catholic calendar. If you live hereabouts it will debut locally at the Harkins Shea 14 in Scottsdale. I think I'll catch the 11:00 AM performance, then have lunch at an authentic Jewish delicatessen Peter L. introduced me to: Goldman's Deli near the corner of N. Hayden and E. Indian Bend.
I stumbled upon a good brisk read the other day by David Mamet in the genre, How I finally saw the light and stopped being a benighted leftist. The title is The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (Sentinel, 2011). Here is a taste, from a footnote on p. 10:
*The Left and the Right, I saw, differ not about programs, but about goals — the goal of the Left is a government-run country and that of the Right the freedom of the individual from Government. These goals are difficult to reconcile, as the Left cannot be brought to actually state its intentions, nor to honestly evaluate the results of its actions.
In his second sentence, Mamet makes two extremely important points. The first is that leftists employ a stealth strategy. They are not open about their ultimate goals. The gun-grabbers among them, for example, will rarely state openly that one of their goals is the banning of the private ownership of handguns. They know full well that an open espousal of their totalitarian agenda would incite the opposition of the 'tea-baggers' as they derisively call Tea Party members as well as that of the rest of the rubes of fly-over country. The second point it that leftists, as adherents of a quasi-religion, are committed to its nostrums whether or not they work out in reality. Are the public schools better than they were in '65? Obviously not. So throw more money at them while harrassing homeschoolers and blocking voucher programs.
But I must quibble with Mamet's first sentence. It is simply not the case that the goal of the Right is freedom of the individual from government. That is a goal of anarchists, but conservatism is twice-removed from anarchism. For between anarchism and conservatism lies libertarianism. Conservatives are law and order types. They believe in a strong national defense. They want the nation's borders to be secure. All of this requires local, state, and Federal government.
When leftists say as they repeatedly do that conservatives are anti-government, that is a lie and they know it. It is a mistake for Mamet to give aid and comfort to this lie. Conservatives are for limited government. It takes no great logical acumen to see that if one is for limited government, then one is for government. And even a liberal should be able to understand that it is a false alternative to suppose that the choice is between no government and totalitarian government.
Addendum (10/14)
Christopher Hitchens' NYT review of Mamet begins thusly: "This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason."
And as I read more of it, I am becoming irritated myself. Consider his answers to the questions put to him in an interview. The questions are serious, but he returns frivolous answers, e.g.:
You also wrote about hating “every wasted, hard-earned cent I spent in taxes.” What cent did you hate the most? All of them gall me the most.
Only a lunatic extremist would think every cent paid in taxes was wasted. And surely no conservative would maintain such an absurd position.
We don't need more extremists. Contemporary liberalism is a set of extreme positions. The answer, however, is not some opposite form of extremism. I believe it was Goethe who said that no one is more hostile to a position than one who once espoused it but has come to reject it. I paraphrase.
Given the shenanigans in Washington, D. C., you would naturally expect me to begin with . . . wait for it . . . . Shut Down!
Then I Kissed Her is the Beach Boys' response to the Crystal's Then He Kissed Me. Nice job, boys, but nothing can hold a candle to Phil Spector's wall of sound.
Apparently, Brian Wilson was obsessed with the Ronette's Be My Baby, another Phil Spector production. Wilson's response was Don't Worry Baby.
In an earlier post I commented with some trenchancy on Ronald Dworkin's views about religion in Religion Without God as these views were represented by Peter Berkowitz in a recent article. Although I was careful to point out that my remarks presupposed the accuracy of Berkowitz's representation, I was a bit uneasy about my comments, not having consulted Dworkin's book. I am therefore happy to reproduce the following missive from a Columbia University graduate student, Luke MacInnis, to balance out the picture.
………….
I enjoy your blog, and especially your excellent running commentary on Tom Nagel. I wanted to comment on your recent post on Peter Berkowitz's review of Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God. Berkowitz's comments center exclusively on, and misrepresent, a very short passage toward the start of the book, which you suggest amounts to a "miserable leftist substitute for religion" that "leaves out what is absolutely central to religion, namely, the conviction that there is a transcendent dimension, an "unseen order." But in fact Dworkin does not say that religion "consists in" those two central judgments. Immediately (the next page) after describing these judgments, he adds "For many people religion includes much more than those two values", approvingly quotes William James' view that religion "adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or logically deducible from anything else", and then himself adds that this "enchantment is the discovery of transcendental value in what seems otherwise transient or dead." He provides important, though brief, discussions of Rudolph Otto's views on religion's numinous character, and emphasizes his own rejection of naturalist metaphysics (a long-running theme in all of Dworkin's work, but most explicit and developed in Justice for Hedgehogs).
So he does not deny religion's transcendent, unseen dimension. Nor does he offer any definitions that offend ordinary language (he provides many examples to make this point. Berkowitz mentions none of them). Dworkin describes the "two judgments" as a manifestation of a particular kind of religious attitude (or temperament, to use Nagel's term) that some (though not all) atheists might be said to have, and which does not include a belief in a supreme, intelligent creator. Dworkin's general account of religion is broad because he aims at ecumenism. That hardly makes it a "miserable leftist substitute". It is an attempt to find common ground between atheists and theists in a more basic reverence toward the "unseen" both share but cash out in inconsistent metaphysics.
Regarding your final question ("if it is wrong for the State to impose religion on its citizens, why isn't it also wrong for the State to impose leftist ideology on its citizens as it is now doing here in the USA?), you might be interested in Dworkin's answer in Chapter 3 of RWG, where he concedes the symmetry between theistic and scientific explanations of the origin of conscious life ("if relying on one judgment to mandate a curriculum is an unconstitutional establishment of religious belief, then so is relying on the other." (128)), recognizes that liberalism to this point has no adequate response to this problem, and offers what is indeed a "radical" argument that involves eliminating specific rights to religious freedom altogether.
Berkowitz ignores all of this, and I wish others would not comment so decisively on the book based on such an inadequate review (notwithstanding your brief "if this is what Dworkin maintains" qualification). I find this is particularly common with Dworkin's work, and it is unfortunate because it usually obscures the complexity and value of his contribution.
