June 2017 – Maverick Philosopher

Andrew Klavan on Fake News

A PragerU video, about five and a half minutes long.

Here are links to my Klavan posts.

Harry Binswanger on Why Language Matters

I am not a Libertarian or an Objectivist. But I do agree with much of what Harry Binswanger says here. (HT: C. Cathcart) I've been harping on similar themes for years. I'll pull some quotations.

. . . since words *are* the tools of language, they are the tools of thought. That means you must resist unto death using the terminology of your enemy. The side that controls language controls thought.

Or as I have said more than once, "He who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate."

This is why it is utter folly for a conservative to acquiesce in such misbegotten terminological innovations as 'Islamophobia' and 'Islamophobe.' These are question-begging leftist coinages the whole purpose of which is to stymie serious discussion. A phobia is an irrational fear. To accuse someone of being an Islamophobe is to imply that he is irrational and beyond the pale of rational discussion, when it is most eminently rational to sound the alarm concerning Islam.

If you are a conservative, don't talk like a 'liberal'!

As for 'liberal,' Binswanger talks sense:

"Liberal" is another word that is booby-trapped. Joe Lieberman is the last living liberal–a museum piece, really. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Paul Krugman, and the rest are not liberals but Leftists, if you want a shorter term than "anti-capitalists." Today's Leftists have nothing of substance in common with those we used to know as "liberals"–JFK, Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson.

The word "liberal" derives from "liberty." Liberty is the last thing on the mind of today's Leftists. They seek to stamp out not only economic freedom but freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Just make a visit to your local university. The term "liberal" should never be used for people whose driving ideology is, to use a proper term, statism.

Exactly right. Accurate terms to describe our ideological opponents are leftist, statist, and totalitarian, but not progressive. If you use 'liberal,' do as I do and put sneer quotes around it. There is little that is liberal about contemporary 'liberals.' Is that not obvious by now?

It is the totalitarian nature of the Left and of Islam that helps explain what is otherwise rather puzzling, namely, the fact that leftists are tolerant of Islam even in its most violent and anti-liberal manifestations but decidedly less tolerant of Christianity which, at the present time, is no threat to anyone. For a thorough discussion, see Why the Left Will Not Admit the Threat of Radical Islam.

Words matter because words stand for concepts–abstract ideas that join certain things and separate others. Your ideological enemy is your ideological enemy in part because he divides the world up differently from you. He works with different concepts, different classifications. Where you see the opposition of freedom vs. government force, he sees the opposition of "exploitation" vs. "equality." Where you see earning vs. freeloading, he sees "luck" vs. "compassion."

Even little, innocuous concepts are game-changers. Take "access." Is there some national, collective problem in the fact that some people don't have "access" to quality medical care? What if we rephrase the question to be: do some people have the right to force other people to pay for their medical care? Sounds a little different, doesn't it? I don't have "access" to your car, your home, and your bank account. That's a disgrace!

However one comes down on the health care issue one ought to understand that there is a serious underlying question here that ought to be out in the open and discussed: Is there a right to be provided by the government, and thus by taxpayers, with health care services?

For an unpacking of the issue, see A Right to Health Care?

All intellectually honest people ought to admit that it is wrong to obliterate this issue by linguistic hijacking and terminological fiat. But that is what 'liberals' do. Ergo, etc.

Physicalist Christology? Notes on Merricks

"And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us . . . . (John 1:14)

Physicalism is popular among philosophers these days. So it is no surprise that Christian philosophers are drawn to it as well, including those who subscribe to the central teaching that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Logos or Word, became man in Jesus of Nazareth.

Incarnation, whatever else it involves, involves embodiment. How is God the Son during his earthly tenure related to his body? Trenton Merricks assumes that "God the Son . . . is related to his body just as you and I are related to our respective bodies." ("The Word Made Flesh," 261.) One might have thought that the embodiment relation that connects the Son to his body would have to be very special or even sui generis; after all, the Logos is sui generis and so it might naturally be thought that any relation into which it enters would inherit that sui-generic quality. Merricks, however, assumes that divine and human cases of embodiment are cases of one and the same embodiment relation. The divine case is just a special case. Call this the Same Relation assumption. (My tag, not Merrick's).

And what relation is that? On physicalism, "You have a body if and only if you are identical with that body." (294) So the Same Relation assumption in conjunction with physicalism yields the conclusion that the Incarnate Son is "identical with the body of Jesus." (294) So in becoming human, the Incarnate Son "became [numerically identical to] a body."

This does not make much sense to me and I find it more worthy of rejection than of acceptance. My problems begin with physicalism itself.

Physicalism

The physicalism in question is not physicalism about everything, but about beings like us, minded organisms, if you will, which include all human animals. (If there are so-called 'abstract objects,' then they are not physical, and presumably before the Incarnation, no member of the Trinity was a physical object.) Physicalism is "the claim that each of us is a physical object." (294). Now there is a sense in which it is obviously true that each of us is a physical object, and that is the sense in which it is obviously true that each of us has a body; but one quits the precincts of the obvious and the datanic and enters the space of philosophical theories when one claims that one has a body by being numerically identical to a body, or that the the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is the 'is' of identity.

For this is not obvious. How do you know that the 'is' in 'Each of us is a body' is not the 'is' of composition? (Compare: 'Each of these statues is bronze.' That can't mean that each of the statues is identical to bronze or to a particular hunk of bronze. A statue and its proximate matter have different persistence conditions both temporally and modally.)

But we are discussing physicalism. I am not asserting that we are composite beings. And I am not espousing substance dualism either. I am merely considering whether physicalism about minded organisms is an intellectually satisfying position. Does it command our assent? Merricks thinks it is "pretty obvious" that physicalism is true. (294) I don't find it obvious at all. And as Hilary Putnam once quipped, "It ain't obvious what's obvious."

On physicalism, I am identical to the living, breathing, sweating animal wearing my clothes. Of course, I am not always sweating and not always wearing clothes; but if I cease breathing, I cease living and, on physicalism, I cease existing. (The physicalist claim is obviously not that I am identical to a corpse or an inanimate hunk of human-looking flesh and bones wearing my clothes.) To underscore the obvious, when I speak of identity I mean numerical identity.

One might find physicalism hard to swallow. If x and y are identical, then whatever is true of x is true of y and vice versa. That is necessarily so, and part of what we mean by 'identity.' But it is true of me that I am a "spectator of all time and existence," (Plato, Republic VI) whereas that is not true of my body. So I can't be identical to my living body. To take a less grand example, I am now thinking of a girl I used to know. So is my body thinking of her? The whole body? Some proper part or parts thereof? Presumably not the plantar fascia in my left foot. My brain? The whole brain? Some proper part thereof? How could any portion of the brain be the subject of acts of thinking? That doesn't make much sense. In fact, it does not make any sense. A bit of highly organized meat is the subject of acts of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of 'thinking' which includes memorial acts? Are you serious?

Could it nonetheless be true that what thinks in me when I think is the brain or some portion thereof? I suppose, but then it would be a mystery how it is true. The Incarnation may be a mystery, but if we are trying to understand the Incarnation physicalistically, then physicalism had better not be a mystery too. I'll come back to this point below.

The obviousness of physicalism seems to have vanished. Merrick does not give the following invalid argument, but what he says on 294 ff. suggests it:

Whatever has physical properties is a physical object.
Socrates has physical properties.
Therefore
Socrates is a physical object.
Therefore
Physicalism is true.

The argument is rendered invalid by an equivocation on 'is' as between the 'is' of class inclusion and the 'is' of identity.

What I have said does not refute physicalism, but it does show that physicalism is far from obvious and does not follow from such Moorean facts as that you and I have shape and mass. So I balk at Merricks' "it seems pretty obvious that physicalism . . . is true." (294) It is not obvious at all.

Property Dualism

Can these objections be met by adopting property dualism? Merricks' view is that while we are physical objects having physical properties, we are not merely physical objects: we also have mental properties. "Persons also have mental properties." (295) Furthermore, these mental properties are irreducible to physical properties. Merricks tells us that his physicalism is consistent with property dualism. (295) I think it is fair to say that with respect to beings like us, he is a substance monist and a property dualist.

The idea is that the human individual having properties is a physical object, but that it has two different mutually irreducible sorts of properties, physical properties and mental properties. But how does this help? I am thinking about a girl I used to know, a particular girl, Darci. Is there a mental property corresponding to the predicate '___ is thinking about Darci'? I doubt it, for reasons I don't have ther space to go into, but suppose there is this strange property. Call it 'D.' Presumably it is an abstract object unfit to do any thinking. So it is not the subject of the thinking, that in me which thinks when I think.

Should we say that I am thinking about Darci in virtue of my instantiating of D? But who am I? On physicalism, I am identically this living body. So this animal body instantiates the mental property. But this brings us right back to our earlier question as to which part of the animal body does the thinking. Introducing a dualism of properties does not answer this question.

How Could a Non-Physical Object Become a Physical Object?

But even if physicalism is true, how could it, in tandem with the Same Relation assumption mentioned above, be used to make sense of the Incarnation, or rather the embodiment the Incarnation implies? How could the second person of the Trinity, a purely spiritual, nonphysical person, at a certain point in history become numerically identical to the body of Jesus? How could an immaterial being become a material being? I should think that an item's categorial status is essential to it. So if an abstract object such as the number 7 or the set of primes is nonphysical, then this object is nonphysical in all possible worlds in which it exists, and indeed in all possible worlds, full stop, given that 7 and the number of primes are necessary beings. If so, then in no possible world could the number 7 or the set of primes become a concrete item sporting causal properties and spatiotemporal locations.

Something similar holds for that necessary being which is the second person of the Trinity. Its purely spiritual, wholly nonphysical nature is essential to it. So, on the face of it, its embodiment in a particular human being cannot be understood as its becoming numerically identical to that human being. For then, per impossibile, it would have to quit its kind and become another kind of thing.

Rejecting Kind-Essentialism

Now the above is an obvious and obviously powerful objection to which Merricks makes a daring response. He recommends rejecting the kind-essentialism that is at the back of it:

Believers in the Incarnation must reject kind-essentialism. Once kind-essentialism is rejected, it is hard to see why the non-physical God the Son could not become [numerically identical to] a human organism. Perhaps this is the sort of thing that might not seem possible merely upon reflection, given no relevant revelation. But the same thing goes for God the Son's becoming human. This is the mystery. (296)

I don't follow the reasoning here. Let us assume that we accept as revealed truth that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. And let us assume that the Incarnation is, as Merricks says, a mystery. Now faith seeks understanding. Fides quarens intellectum. In this case we want to understand how God became man. How is understanding helped by the rejection of what appears to the unaided intellect as obviously true, namely, kind-essentialism? Is its falsity supposed to be a mystery too?

If I want to understand the Incarnation, I have to use principles that to the unaided discursive intellect appear secure. If I use the Incarnation to reject kind-essentialism, which is one of the principles that appear secure to the finite intellect, then I haven't made sense of the Incarnation; I have wreaked havoc on the discursive intellect. Would it not be better simply to rest with the Incarnation as mystery and forgo desperate attempts to make sense of it that violate very secure principles that are arguably definitive of finite understanding?

Why Not Reject the 'Same Relation' Assumption?

Suppose one wants to retain one's physicalism about humans at all costs and to accept the Incarnation as well. Would it not be better to jettison the 'same relation' assumption? Would it not be better to say that embodiment in the divine case is a different relation from embodiment in (merely) human cases? Suppose that in the merely human cases, to have a body, i. e., to be embodied, is just to be a body, i.e., to be identical to a (living) body, while in the divine case to have a body is something else, something perhaps incomprehensible to us in our present state. One could then be a physicalist without rejecting kind-essentialism.

Note that Merricks is not a physicalist about God or any of the persons of the Trinity prior to the Incarnation. He does not hold that every mind is physical. He makes an exception for the divine mind. Well, then he can make an exception in the way a divine mind becomes embodied should such a mind become embodied.

There seems to be two ways to go for one who aims to accept the Incarnation while also accepting physicalism about minded organisms. Accept either package A or package B:

Package A

Incarnation; physicalism; 'same relation' assumption; rejection of kind-essentialism.

Package B

Incarnation; physicalism; 'different embodiment relation' assumption; acceptance of kind-essentialism.

I should think that Package B is the more attractive of the two.

Merricks' paper is here. Many thanks to Professor Andrew M. Bailey for uploading it! Ditto to Kevin Wong for drawing my attention to it and for supplying me with a bibliography of recent work on physicalist Christology. Mr. Wong is a gentleman and a scholar!

Care of Soul and Body

Care for your soul as if you will die tomorrow; care for your body as if it will last indefinitely.

(The formulation is mine; the thought is borrowed from Evagrios Pontikos.)

John Pepple is Burned Out

I’m burned out and will take a break from blogging. Don’t expect to hear much from me before September. Basically, I’m up against total irrationality, and I think it’s worthless to engage in rational argument.

Agreed, liberals and leftists are beyond the reach of rational argument. They need defeat not debate. Let's hope it can be achieved by political means. Nevertheless, there are reasons to continue writing political posts. One is to develop one's ideas. Another is to support and inspire fellow conservatives. A third is to persuade the open-minded and undecided.

Summer of Love, Winter of Decline

The down side of the 'sixties.

The counter-culture validated styles of living once considered coarse, delinquent, tragic, or mad. It was said to be about Love. Was that eros, or philia, or agape? One cannot be sure, but the gross hypersexualization of entertainment and culture since suggests eros, down and dirty.

The point is essentially correct, but I would add needed nuance by making a tetrapartite distinction among eros, philia, agape, and sexus. It is true that the word eros puts most in mind of sex, raw and raunchy, down and dirty. And it is true that eros, the love of the lower for the higher, is often mixed with purely sexual desire and sometimes perverted by it. But the love of the spiritually empty for that which might fulfill them is erotic, even when freed of the sexual. The longing love of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the love of Wisdom, the love of God are not examples of philia or agape. Philia is friendship, and friendship is between equals. But I am not the equal of Wisdom or Justice or the Good; I merely aspire to be wise, just, and good.

This aspiration for the higher is erotic. But it may be best to introduce a different word to ward off confusion: the aspiration is erothetic. In a decadent, corrupt, sex-saturated society any talk of eros and the erotic is bound to be misunderstood. Erothetic love is love that aspires and seeks to acquire. It is rooted in need and lack, spiritual need and lack.

As for agape, it is the love of the higher for the lower. It is a love that bestows, grants, helps. To put the point in a way that exploits the ambiguity of the genitive construction, the love of God (objective genitive) is erothetic; the love of God (subjective genitive) is agapic. The same goes for the love of Christ. God does not lack anything; nor does he aspire or seek to acquire. The divine plenitude does not allow for aspiration or acquisition.

My point, then, is that eros is not to be condemned; it is not inherently "down and dirty." The love of the Good and the desire to be good, the desire to imitate the Good and participate in it are noble aspirations. (The Christian and Platonic allusions will not be missed by the well-educated, e.g., imitatio Christi, methexis.)

What ought to be condemned is not eros, but sex when it is divorced from such ennobling adjuncts as the erothetic, the philiatic, and the agapic. What ought to be condemned is sex reduced to the 'hydraulic,' to the exchange of bodily fluids for the sake of mere sensuous gratification.¹ This perversion is well-conveyed by the contemporary phrase 'hook-up.' I hook up a hose to a tank to fill it. But we live in a sick society getting sicker with each passing day and I am something of a vox clamantis in deserto. So I don't expect many even to understand what I am saying, let alone agree with it.

These topics are deep and rich. If you want to gain some insight into them you need to begin at the beginning, or at least at the 'Athenian' beginning, as opposed to the 'Hierosolymic' beginning, with the 'divine' Plato and his Symposium. Then work your way through the history of thought, philosophical and theological. One good guide in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros.

But to have the time and energy for this you will have limit your consumption of media dreck, not to mention your tweeting, facebooking, and what all else.

NOTES

¹ Of course, sexual intercourse involving one or more humans is never a mere exchange of bodily fluids. Even among sub-human animals, sexual intercourse is never purely hydraulic in nature: sentience is involved and various emotions. Filling my gas tank in the usual manner would be an example of a purely hydraulic exchange. Insofar as humans approach the hydraulic in their 'love'-making, humans degrade themselves. This degradation is a free act possible only because humans are spiritual animals. An animal consumed by lust cannot degrade himself, but a man can. We could say that when a man tries to become less than an animal he proves that he is more than one.

The Marvellous Powers We Misuse

Thought, speech, free action, sexual generation.

Don’t Harbor the Negative

When negative thoughts drift into port, note them, but don't let them drop anchor. Let them drift out again.

Names on Grave Stones

The names on grave stones are proper names for a time, while the memories of survivors provide reference-fixing context. But with the passing of the survivors the names revert to commonality. After a while the dead may as well lie in a common grave.

What lies below the stone is not Patrick J. McNally, but a Patrick J. McNally. And not even this; rather, the bodily remains of a Patrick J. McNally. The person has fled or no longer exists.

Continence

The Catholic Church is in sad shape. Have you heard a good sermon lately? I could do better off the top of my head, and I am a very poor public speaker.

Here are some notes for a sermon I will never give, unless this weblog is my pulpit.

Remind people of the importance of continence both for their happiness here below, and for the good of their souls. Distinguish the following sorts of continence: mental (control of thoughts), emotional (control and custody of the heart), sensory-appetitive (custody of the eyes together with sexual restraint). Explain the importance of containing the outgoing flow, whether mental, emotional, or sensory-appetitive, and the misery consequent upon incontinence.

Illustrate by adducing the sad case of Bill Cosby.

Explain the key words and phrases. Don't use words like 'adduce.' Attention spans in these hyperkinetic times are short, so keep it short.

The abdication of authorities has lead to the dumbing-down of the masses. Don't expect much.

Do You Remember the ‘Sixties?

According to the old joke, if you do, you weren't there. This is worth a look.

Filed under: 'Sixties

The Antithesis of Obstruction

Andrew C. McCarthy:

The “collusion” narrative was a fraud, plain and simple. We know that now. Hopefully, it won’t take another six months to grasp a second plain and simple truth: Collusion’s successor, the “obstruction” narrative, is a perversion.

[ . . .]

To be clear, the Russia investigation is not a fraud. The Trump collusion narrative is. Russia did try to interfere in our election, as it always does. And there were associates of Trump’s who had business with Russian interests. Nothing unusual about that either. No one had shadier business with Kremlin cronies than Bill and Hillary Clinton. The difference is that the Clintons did collude in the Russian regime’s acquisition of American uranium assets. There is no evidence that Trump colluded in Russia’s election meddling. To stoke suspicions to the contrary was fraudulent.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

Punch Brothers, Rye Whisky

Lonely Heartstring Band, Ramblin' Gamblin' Willy

Bonnie Owens, Philadelphia Lawyer

Cowboy Jack Clement, A Girl I Used to Know

Bobby Bare, Lullabies, Legends, and Lies

Brewer and Shipley, One Toke Over Line. Forgot how good this song is!

The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona. A very nice cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.

John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You're the Reason

The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler. 'Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz' lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name.

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails

Patsy Cline, She's Got You

Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation. A lovely song, if a bit pretentious. Paul Simon was an English major.

And we spoke of things that matter
With words that must be said.
Can analysis be worthwhile?
Is the theater really dead?

Beatles, We Can Work It Out. Listen for the time signature change from 4/4 to 3/4. Knowing a little music theory adds to one's enjoyment.

Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, You Really Got a Hold on Me

Barbara Lynn, You'll Lose a Good Thing. Her moves and appearance are reminsicent of Jimi Hendrix — or the other way around. Check out how she strums that left-handed Telecaster.

EmmyLou Harris, Save the Last Dance for Me. That's one big guitar.

Marty Robbins, Blue Spanish Eyes. What a wimpy guitar!

Dalida, O Sole Mio. Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan! Che bella donna!

Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday. Ditto!

Nana Mouskouri, Farewell Angelina. One of Bob Dylan's most haunting songs. Hats off in homage to the angel-throated ladies such as Nana and Joan, but nothing touches the mood & magic of Dylan's spare mid-60s renditions such as this one.

Freddy Fender, Cielito Lindo. Tex-Mex version of a very old song.

Marty Robbins, La Paloma. Another old song dating back to 1861.