Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.
Last Call, Dave van Ronk. "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."
(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.
This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash. Wikipedia:
Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.
On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.
The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona. A very nice cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.
YouTuber comment: "I'd hate to think where we would be without Mr. Zimmerman's songwriting. So many covers done by so many great artists." If it weren't for Zimmi the Great American Boomer Soundtrack would have a huge, gaping hole in it.
Dusty Springfield before she was Dusty Springfield.
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.
This is the fifth in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). This entry covers pp. 71-83 of Chapter Four, pp. 64-91, entitled "Quality."
In our last installment we discussed whether Benatar is justified in his claim that the quality of life is in most cases objectively worse than we think it is. (I cast doubt on whether there is an objective fact of the matter.) But even if the quality of our lives is worse than we think it is, it does not follow that the quality of our lives is objectively bad. You will recall that Benatar holds that "while some lives are better than others, none are (noncomparatively or objectively) good." (67) In other words, each of our lives is objectively bad whether we think so or not. To arrive at this conclusion further argument is required. To its evaluation we now turn.
The Allegedly Poor Quality of Human Life
Benatar begins with the minor discomforts suffered by the healthy on a daily basis: thirst, hunger, distended bladders and bowels, heat and cold, weariness, and the like. Now most of us consider these sorts of things inconsequential even if we add to them humidity, mosquitoes, and the usual run of aches and pains and annoyances such as irritating noises and smells, etc. But for Benatar they are "not inconsequential" because:
A blessed species that never experienced these discomforts would rightly note that if we take discomfort to be bad, then we should take the daily discomforts that humans experience more seriously than we do. (72)
This is a signature Benatar move: adopt some nonexistent, and indeed impossible point of view, and then, from that point of view, issue a negative value judgment about what actually exists or some feature of what actually exists. There is no species of animal that never experiences anything like the discomforts mentioned above, and it seems to me that such a species of critter is nomologically impossible. Or to put the point a bit more cautiously, there is no species of animal relevantly similar to us that never experiences anything like, etc.
So why should the fact that I can imagine a form of animal life free of everyday discomforts have any tendency to show that we should take more seriously, i.e., assess more negatively, the everyday discomforts of our actual animal lives?
How can anything be devalued relative to a nonexistent standard of value? I will come back to this in a moment.
A second class of negative states includes those experienced regularly though not daily or by all. Itches, allergies, colds, fevers, infections, menstrual cramps, hot flashes, and so on. And then, beyond physical sensations there are the various frustrations and irritations of life: waiting in lines, having to put up with the bad behavior of others, traffic jams, boring work, loneliness, unrequited love, betrayals, jealousies, the list goes on.
But even these things are not that bad. If we stop here we don't have much of an argument for the claim that the quality of all our lives, even the lives of the luckiest, is objectively bad.
When we get to the really horrific events and setbacks, Benatar's case gains in credibility. Cancer and the miseries attendant upon its treatment, clinical depression, rape and murder and the tortures of the gulag, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and so much else bespeak the poor quality of human life. And don't think only of the present; consider also the horrors of the long past of humanity. Anyone who without blinkers surveys these miseries must admit that the quality of human life for many or most is very bad indeed. People like Roberto Benigni who gush over how wonderful life is, what a gift it is, etc. should be made to visit insane asylums, prisons, torture chambers, and battlefields. And even if my life is good, how good can it be given that I am aware of the horrific fates of others and that it is possible that I end up where they are?
But surely many are fortunate and escape the evils just enumerated and their like. So we still don't have a good argument for the extreme thesis that every human life is such that the objectively bad outweighs the objectively good.
But is There More Bad Than Good?
Benatar returns an affirmative answer: "There is much more bad than good even for the luckiest humans." (77) So no matter how well-situated you are, your life is objectively more bad than good, and if you think otherwise then your assessment of the quality of your life is biased and inaccurate.
The first consideration Benatar adduces is the empirical fact that "the most intense pleasures are short-lived, whereas the worst pains can be much more enduring." (77) There is chronic pain but no chronic pleasure. Then there is the fact that the worst pains are worse than the best pleasures are good. (77). No one would trade an hour of the worst torture for an hour of the best pleasure. A third fact is that in a split second one can be severely injured, "but the resultant suffering can last a lifetime." (78) And then there is the long physical decline of the mortal coil, and the frustration of desires and aspirations, and the constant toiling and moiling, striving and struggling, that life involves to keep the whole thing going. We are effortlessly ignorant, "but knowledge usually requires hard work." (80) We value knowledge and longevity, but can realize these values only to a tiny extent. We are far closer to nescience than to omniscience.
Why Do We Fail to Notice the Preponderance of the Bad?
In short, the bad preponderates and for all. Why do we fail to notice the heavy preponderance of the bad in human life? Because we have accommodated to the human condition. (82) "Longevity, for example, is judged relative to the longest actual human lifespans and not relative to an ideal standard."
And similarly with respect to knowledge, understanding, and moral goodness. We measure ourselves against the human baseline and not against an ideal standard. This is why we fail to notice that the bad outweighs the good. If the standard of knowledge is the human baseline, then your humble blogger feels good about himself; but if the standard is omniscience, then he must sadly confess that he knows next to nothing. And while he fancies himself a better man than most, he owns to being an utter wretch, morally speaking, in comparison to Moral Perfection itself. In religious terms, we are all sinners in the eyes of God, and the moral differences between us shrink into insignificance relative to the divine standard of holiness.
Towards a Critique
At this juncture we need to ask again: How can anything be devalued relative to a nonexistent standard? If God exists, then we are by comparison miserably defective in every way. But Benatar's metaphysical naturalism rules out the existence of God along with such other entities as Platonic Forms and the Plotinian One. For on a full-throated naturalism the real is exhausted by space-time and its contents. So neither Omniscience nor Moral Perfection nor the Form of Justice, etc., exist. There is nothing supernatural whether concrete or abstract. The New Testament exhortation, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly father is perfect," (Matthew 5:48) presupposes for its very sense the existence of a perfect heavenly father. If there is no such being, then the exhortation is empty.
On metaphysical naturalism, the normative, if it is to be objective, can only be grounded in natural facts independent of our subjective attitudes. For on metaphysical naturalism, there can be no existing ideal standards for a species of living thing except actual perfect specimens. But any actual perfect specimen, whether leonine, human, whatever, will fall short of Benatar's demands. Even the best human specimen will be limited in longevity, knowledge, moral goodness, and the rest.
My point is that Benatar's ideal standards, without which he cannot denigrate as bad even the most fortunate of human lives, are merely excogitated or thought up by him: they can have no basis in physical or metaphysical reality given his naturalism. It seems to me that to fall short of a standard that is nowhere realized and has never been realized is not to fall short. But the point is stronger when put modally: to fall short of a standard impossible of realization is not to fall short. A lion without claws is a defective lion; he falls short of the standard, a standard that actually exists in non-defective lions. But a lion that cannot learn to speak Italian is not a defective lion since it is nomologically impossible that lions learn human languages.
One can imagine a cat that talks, and wouldn't the world be better if we could speak to our pets? But neither imaginability nor conceivablity entail real possibility, and if a state of affairs is not really possible, then no actual state of affairs can be devalued relative to it. It is not bad that cats can't talk. And it is not bad, give that human beings are just a highly-evolved species of land mammal, that they can't know everything or live to be a thousand years old. Thus it is no argument against the quality of human life that it falls short of a standard that is nowhere realized but is merely dreamed up as an empty logical possibility.
What Benatar is doing is a bit like complaining that turkeys don't fly around ready-roasted. That is no argument in denigration of the value of turkeys because it is nomologically impossible that turkeys fly around ready-roasted. Similarly, it is no argument against the value of human life that human longevity maxes out at about 122 years.
Generalizing: if it is impossible that a state of affairs S obtain, there is no actual state of affairs T such that T is devalued by S.
The objection I am making is conditional upon the acceptance of naturalism. Given that Benatar accepts naturalism, he is in no position to argue that every human life, even the best, is objectively bad.
. . . and even if it were, there is no evidence that Trump colluded with the Russians. That is the considered opinion of Alan Dershowitz who, by the way, voted for Hillary. I hope you will grant me that the Harvard professor knows something about the federal criminal code. Watch this video which is less than five minutes in length.
Dershowitz reports that his liberal pals won't have him over for dinner any more. It's their loss. What a pack of idiots!
It is time for the witch hunt to end.
Hillary's Boomerang: What goes around comes around.
The personable Dr. Neal recounts her experiences during this 13 and a half minute video clip. The following from an interview with her:
The easy explanations—dreams or hallucinations—I could discount quickly, because my experience—and the experience described by anyone who's had a near death experience or other experiences that involve God directly—is different in quality and memory from a dream or hallucination. It's just entirely different. The memory is as precise and accurate now, years later, as it is when it's happening.
So then I thought it must be due to chemical changes or chemical releases in a dying brain. I did a lot of reading about that. If my experience had lasted five, six, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes, I am sure that no matter how real it seemed to me, I would have said that's a reasonable explanation. But the people who resuscitated me would say that I was without oxygen for up to thirty minutes.
It took them ten or fifteen minutes to figure out, first, that I and my boat were both missing. Then once they identified where they thought I was, they started their watch. They're used to doing this—you have to know the timing so you can recognize whether you're trying to rescue someone or you're trying to go for body recovery. So on the watch it was fifteen minutes, but about thirty minutes in all. I tend to stick with the fifteen minutes, because that's an absolute timing. But even at fifteen minutes, that is way longer than can be explained by a dying brain. The human brain can hang on to oxygen for maybe five or six minutes, and so even if you give it another four minutes to go through its dying process, that still doesn't add up to fifteen minutes. And so after I looked at all that, my conclusion was that my experience was real and absolute.
To paraphrase Blaise Pascal, there is light enough for those who want to see and darkness enough for those who don't. Atheists and mortalists will of course not be convinced by Neal's report. Consider her first paragraph. She underscores the unique phenomenological quality of OBEs. Granting that they are phenomenologically different from dreams and ordinary memories, there is nonetheless a logical gap between the undeniable reality of the experiencing and the reality of its intentional object. Into that gap the skeptic will insert his wedge, and with justification. No experience, no matter how intense or unusual or protracted, conclusively proves the veridicality of its intentional object.
Phenomenology alone won't get you to metaphysics. Everything I am perceiving right now, computer, cup, cat, the Superstition ridgeline and the clouds floating above it (logically) might have a merely intentional existence. How do I know I am not brain in a vat? If I cannot prove that I am not a brain in a vat, how can I know (in that tough sense in which knowledge entails objective certainty) that cat, cup, etc. are extramentally real? The skeptic can always go hyperbolic on you. How are you going to stop him?
The other consideration Dr. Neal adduces will also leave the skeptic cold. Her point is that her brain had to have been 'off-line' given the amount of time that elapsed, and that therefore her experiences could not be the product of a (mal)functioning brain. We saw in an earlier post that Dr. Eben Alexander employed similar reasoning. The skeptic will undoubtedly now give a little a speech about how much more there is yet to know about the brain and that Neal is in no position confidently to assert what she asserts, etc.
The mortalist starts and ends with an assumption that he cannot give up while remaining a mortalist, namely, that there just cannot be mental functioning without underlying brain activity, and that therefore no OBEs can be credited if they are interpreted in a manner to support the claim that consciousness can exist without a physical substratum. How does the mortalist/materialist know this? He doesn't. It's a framework assumption. He certainly doesn't know it from any natural-scientific investigation. It is clear that some brain changes are followed by mental changes. That shows that embodied consciousness is dependent on the brain. But it says nothing about consciousness in its disembodied state.
In the grip of that materialist framework assumption, the mortalist will do anything to discount the veridicality of OBEs. Push him to the wall and he will question the moral integrity of the reporters. "They are just out to exploit human credulousness to turn a buck." Or they will question the veridicality of the memories of the OBEs. The human mind can be extremely inventive in cooking up justifications for what it wants to believe. That is as true of mortalists as it is of anyone. To paraphrase Pascal again, there is enough darkness and murk in these precincts to allow these skeptical maneuvers.
Our life here below is a chiaroscuro.
There is no proof of the afterlife. But there is evidence. Is the evidence sufficient? Suppose we agree that evidence for p is sufficient just in case it makes it more likely than not that p. Well, I don't know if paranormal and mystical experience is sufficient because I don't know how to evaluate likelihood in cases like these.
So let's assume that the evidence is not sufficient. Would I be flouting any epistemic duties were I to believe on insufficient evidence? But surely most of what we believe we believe on insufficient evidence. See Belief and Reason categories for more on this.)
Those who believe that it is wrong, always and everywhere, to believe anything on insufficient evidence believe that very proposition on insufficient evidence, indeed on no evidence at all.
Thomas Merton, Journals, vol. 5, p. 183, entry of 25 December 1964:
St Maximus [the Confessor] says that he who "has sanctified his senses by looking with purity at all things" becomes like God. This is, I think, what the Zen masters tried to do. A letter from John Wu spoke of running into [D. T.] Suzuki at Honolulu last summer. They talked of my meeting with him in New York. Suzuki was going to ask me a question but didn't. "If God created the world, who created the Creator?' A good koan.
Nice try, Tom, but surely that old chestnut, sophomoric as it is, is not a good koan. Or at least it is not a good koan for one who is intellectually sophisticated. And this for the reason that it is easily 'solved.' A koan is an intellectual knot that cannot be untied by discursive means, by remaining on the plane of ordinary mind; a koan is a sort of mental bind or cramp the resolute wrangling with which is supposed, on an auspicious occasion, to precipitate a break-through to non-dual awareness.
God is the Absolute. The Absolute, by its very nature, is not possibly such as to be relativized by anything external to it. In particular, qua absolute, God does not depend on anything else for his existence or nature or modal status. It follows straightaway that he cannot have a cause. If to create is to cause to exist, then God quite obviously cannot have a creator. Since God cannot have a creator, one cannot sensibly ask: Who or what created God? Or at least one cannot ask this question in expectation of an answer that cites some entity other than God.
Classically, God is said to be causa sui. This is is to be read privatively, not positively. Or so I maintain. It means that God is not caused by another. It does not mean that God causes himself to exist. Nothing can cause itself to exist. If something could cause itself to exist, then it would have already (logically speaking) to exist in order to bring itself into existence. Which is absurd.
Equivalently, God is ens necessarium. In my book, that means that he is THE, not A, necessary being. He enjoys a unique mode of necessity unlike 'ordinary' necessary beings such as the set of natural numbers. Arguably, there is a nondenumerable infinity of necessary beings; but there is only one necessary being that has its necessity from itself (i.e., not from another) and this all men call God.
Accordingly, to ask who created God is to presuppose that God is a contingent being. Given that the presupposition is false, the question can be dismissed as predicated on misunderstanding. This is why the question is not a good koan. It is easily solved or dissolved on the discursive plane. Nothing counts as a koan unless it is insoluble on the discursive plane.
"But if God doesn't need a cause, why does the world need a cause?" The short answer is: because the world is contingent. We must regress from the world to God, but then that at God we must stop. No vicious infinite regress.
A Much Better Christian Koan: The Riddle of Divine Simplicity
I have just demonstrated to my own satisfaction that the old chestnut from John Stuart Mill is no good as a koan. But suppose we dig deeper. It is not wrong to unpack the divine necessity by saying that God exists in all metaphysically possible worlds. But it is superficial. For this is true of all necessary beings. What is the ground of the divine necessity?
I would argue that the divine necessity rests on the divine simplicity according to which there are no real distinctions in God. See my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry for details. This implies, among other things, that God does not instantiate his attributes; rather he is (identical to) them. God has omniscience by being omniscience, for example. As St Augustine says, "God is what he has." The same goes for the other attributes as well. If you think about it you will soon realize that the logical upshot is that every attribute is identical to every other one.
God's being the Absolute implies that he is unique, but uniquely so. God is uniquely unique: he is not one of a kind, but so radically One that he transcends the distinction between kind and instance. God is not the unique instance of the divine kind: he is (identically!) his kind. That is why I say that God is uniquely unique: he is unique in his mode of uniqueness.
But surely, or rather arguably, this makes no discursive sense which is why very astute philosophical theologians such as A. Plantinga reject the simplicity doctrine. although he doesn't put it quite like that. (See his animadversions in Does God Have a Nature?) Almost all evangelical Christians follow him (or at least agree with him) on this. (Dolezal is an exception.) How could anything be identical to its attributes? To put it negatively, how could anything be such that there is no distinction between it and its attributes?
We are beginning to bite into a real koan: a problem that arises and its formulable on the discursive place, but is insoluble on the discursive plane.
On the one hand, God as absolute must be ontologically simple. No God worth his salt could be a being among beings, pace my evangelical friends such as Dale Tuggy. On the other hand, we cannot understand how anything could be ontologically simple. There are no good solutions to this within the discursive framework. There are solutions, of course, and dogmatic heads will plump for this one or that one all the while contradicting each other. But I claim that there is no ultimately satisfactory solution to the problem. Note that this is also a problem for the divine necessity since it rest on the divine simplicity.
My suggestion, then, is that here we have a candidate for a good koan within Christian metaphysics.
The Ultimate Christian Koan
This, I have long held, is the crucified God-Man. It is arguably absurd (logically contradictory) as Kiekegaard held that God become a man while remaining God. It is the height of absurdity that this God-Man, the most perfect of all men, should die the worst death the brutal Romans could devise, crucifixion.
If to accept this is to accept the crucifixion of the intellect, then here we have the ultimate Christian koan.
Your point about the twin threats coming from the Left and from Islam reminded me of an email I received from Fr. Schall some months ago when I shared a draft of the Syllabus with him. He made the same point, as both the Left and Islam are voluntarist systems where will is exalted over reason. He called the parallel between them the main issue of our time. Many of the points in the Syllabus were paraphrases of an earlier Schall essay on voluntarism.
Benedict is not denigrating Islam or its prophet but setting forth a theological problem, one that arises within Christianity itself, namely the problem of the tension between the intellectualism of Augustine and Aquinas and the voluntarism of Duns Scotus. "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?" Roughly, does the transcendence of God — which both Christianity and Islam affirm though in different ways — imply that God is beyond our categories, including that of rationality?
Perhaps a better way to put the question would be in terms of divine sovereignty. Is God absolutely sovereign and thus unlimited in knowledge and power? Or are there logical and non-logical limits on his knowledge and power? For example, is a law of logic such as Non-Contradiction within God's power? In his 2012 Creation and the Sovereignty of God, Hugh McCann argues that God is not only sovereign over the natural order, but also over the moral order, the conceptual/abstract order, and the divine nature itself. That seems to give the palm to voluntarism, does it not?
I consider McCann's view to be highly problematic as I argue in my long discussion article, "Hugh McCann on the Implications of Divine Sovereignty," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 1 (Winter 2014), pp. 149-161.
It is fun to play the public intellectual and drop the names of authors whose works one has never read with care. And it is very easy to get out beyond one's depth. At the moment I am thinking of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and to a lesser extent, Rod Dreher. Their commentarial confidence is sometimes out of proportion to their competence. Gottfried, praising and drawing upon Gordon, here lays into Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism.
He also targets Dinesh D'Souza and Dennis Prager:
Perhaps one of the most ludicrous examples of the conservative movement’s recent attempt at being sophisticated was an exchange of equally uninformed views by talk show host Dennis Prager and Dinesh D’Souza, on the subject of the fascist worldview. The question was whether one could prove that fascism was a leftist ideology by examining the thought of Mussolini’s court philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944). Gentile defined the “fascist idea” in his political writings while serving as minister of education in fascist Italy. He was also not incidentally one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century; and in works like General Theory of the Spirit as Pure Act, adapts the thought of Hegel to his own theory of evolving national identity. It would be hard to summarize Gentile’s thought in a few pithy sentences; and, not surprisingly, the Canadian historian of philosophy H.S. Harris devotes a book of many hundreds of pages trying to explain his complex philosophical speculation.
Hey, but that’s no big deal for such priests of the GOP church as Prager and D’Souza. They zoom to the heart of Gentile’s neo-Hegelian worldview in thirty seconds and state with absolute certainty that he was a “leftist.” We have to assume that Prager, D’Souza and the rest of their crowd know this intuitively, inasmuch they give no indication of having ever read a word of Gentile’s thought, perhaps outside of a few phrases that they extracted from his Doctrine of Fascism. Their judgment also clashes with that of almost all scholars of Gentile’s work, from across the political spectrum, who view him, as I do in my study of fascism, as the most distinguished intellectual of the revolutionary right.
That's the scholar talking. I agree. But let me say a word in defense of Prager & Co. They reach people. They have influence. Who has heard of Paul Gottfried? Me and five other guys. I exaggerate, but in the direction of an important truth.
Or take Limbaugh. One day he demonstrated his ignorance of the concept of negative rights. But so what given that politics is a practical game the purpose of which is to defeat opponents and remove them from power?
And then there is the much-hated Trump. You say he has the vocabulary of a 13-year-0ld? That he is obnoxious and unpresidential? I agree. But he defeated ISIS. (And accomplished a dozen other important things in his first year in office.) Did Obama defeat ISIS? Would Hillary have? Of course not. She couldn't bring herself to utter the words 'radical Islamic terrorist.'
Skholiast at Speculum Criticum sends a friendly greeting that I have shortened a bit:
Like the recent correspondent you quote in your Christmas post, I've been reading you a long time — I guess ten years now — and I read you from across the political divide. Possibly I am further "left," or "radical," or whatever, than that reader — I know I don't think of myself as "liberal," anyway. But when my liberal acquaintances get irritated with me, it's as likely to be because I've cited Burke, or Robert George, as Marx or Cornell West . . .
I'm closer to apolitical (duly acknowledging the dangers and possible incoherence of such a stance). Sure, you and I would have plenty to argue about — and we would argue because the differences matter — but I like to think we'd walk away still respectful, if shaking our heads. . . . Still, I read you for a lot more than curmudgeonly politics. It's for your critiques of scientism, your sane openness to mystery (does the [desert] landscape reinforce that?), and above all your study-everything-join-nothing stance, which has always resonated with me.
I share your love of — and I think your reasons for loving — Kerouac. And there's no other blogger from whom I'm more likely to learn a new name to track down. (For a long time, you were the only philosophy blogger I'd ever read who had cited [Erich] Pry[z]wara.)
You are right (I am afraid) that 2018 will bring more acrimony, not less, to politics . . . . My real concern is simply that philosophy itself remain possible (though *arguably* philosophy must seek justice & so must remain politically — & socially — "engaged," this is not obvious). Some regimes, and some social climates, are better than others for the possibility of philosophy. I am fairly persuaded that the acrimony doesn't help, but who knows? Perhaps philosophy is threatened more, in a different sense, when it is easier for it to fly under the radar w/o giving "offense." In any case I hope that real thinkers will always be able to recognize each other.
My concern too is that "philosophy itself remain possible." I would prefer to let the world and its violent nonsense go to hell while cultivating my garden in peace. Unfortunately, my garden and stoa are in the world and exposed to its threats. My concern, of course, is not just with my petty life, but with the noble tradition of which I am privileged to be a part, adding a footnote here and there, doing my small bit in transmitting our culture. In the great words of Goethe:
Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
What from your fathers you received as heir,
Acquire if you would possess it. (Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)
The idea is that what one has been lucky enough to inherit, one must actively appropriate, i.e., make one's own by hard work, if one is really to possess it. The German infinitive erwerben has not merely the meaning of 'earn' or 'acquire' but also the meaning of aneignen, appropriate, make one's own.
Unfortunately the schools and universities of today have become leftist seminaries more devoted to the eradication of the high culture of the West than its transmission and dissemination. These leftist seed beds have become hot houses of political correctness.
The two main threats, as I have explained many times, are from the Left and from Islam. They work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly.
So politics, which has too little to do with truth and too much to do with power, cannot be ignored. This world is not ultimately real, but it is no illusion either, pace some sophists of the New Age, and so some battling within it, ideological or otherwise, cannot be avoided. But philosophy is not battling, nor is it ideology. There is no place in philosophy for polemics, though polemics has its place.
I'll presume it fraudulent until it is proven not. Here:
Bitcoin is an old fashioned fraud clothed in the new age wonder of technology. Promoting bitcoin is not so much about a new asset class as its is a class of felony, yet civil authorities have so far been unwilling to shut it down. Bitcoin is perhaps the most impressive speculative bubble in modern history and one that will tolerate no contradiction since it gains credibility as the price soars ever higher.
I don't know if that is right or not. But I do know that greed, like lust, has a preternatural power to suborn a man's good sense.
This old entry, which had been languishing in the old Powerblogs archive, still strikes me as making some important and plausible points. Here it is again, spruced up and supplemented.
…………………
There are philosophers who seem to think that doctrines held by great philosophers and outstanding contemporaries don't need to be studied and refuted but can be shamed or ridiculed or caricatured out of existence. Daniet Dennett is an example:
Dualism (the view that minds are composed of some nonphysical and utterly mysterious stuff) . . . [has]been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with alchemy and astrology. Unless you are also prepared to declare that the world is flat and the sun is a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses unless, in other words, your defiance of modern science is quite complete you won't find any place to stand and fight for these obsolete ideas. (Kinds of Mind, Basic Books, 1996, p. 24)
This is an amazing passage in that it compares the views of distinguished dualist philosophers such as Richard Swinburne to the views of astrologers, alchemists, and flat-earthers. It would be very interesting to hear precisely how the views of Swinburne et al. are in "defiance of modern science" — assuming one doesn't confuse science with scientism. But let's look at what Dennett has to say in his more substantial (511 page!) Consciousness Explained (1991).
Dennett there (mis)characterizes dualism as the doctrine that minds are "composed not of ordinary matter but of some other, special kind of stuff. . . ," and materialism as the view that "there is only one sort of stuff, namely matter — the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology — and the mind is some nothing but a physical phenomenon." (33) "In short, the mind is the brain." (33)
Plausibly and charitably read, however, a substance dualist such as Descartes does not hold that minds are composed of some extraordinarily thin intangible stuff. The dualism is not a dualism of stuff-kinds, real stuff and spook stuff. 'Substance' in 'substance dualism' does not refer to a special sort of ethereal stuff but to substances in the sense of individuals capable of independent existence whose whole essence consists in acts of thought, perception, imagination, feeling, and the like.
Dennett, who often comes across as a sophist, is exploiting the equivocity of 'substance' as between stuff and entity metaphysically capable of independent existence. For example, when we speak of Socrates as a substance, we are not referring to his proximate or ultimate matter, but to his capacity for existence on his own, in contrast to his pallor which, as an accident of Socrates as substance, cannot exist on its own but only in a substance, and indeed only in the very substance of which it is the accident, namely, Socrates.
The main point is made very well by the prominent idealist, T. L. S. Sprigge:
It is often difficult to get people to realize that the non-physical mind of which Cartesians speak is not, as some have thought it, 'a ghost in the machine' of the human body, since ghosts and 'spirits' such as might appear in a seance are, in contrast to it, as physical, if made of a finer stuff, as our ordinary bodies. When we speak of the mental we do so mostly or entirely in metaphors (more or less sleeping) of a physical kind: we grasp ideas and have thoughts in our minds. Whatever the real source of this materialism which is endemic to most of our thinking, it is not surprising that there should be a theory of existence which follows its leadings. As thinkers we are subjects, but the natural object of thought is objects and it is only with effort that the subject turns its thoughts upon its own un-object-like nature. (Theories of Existence, pp. 46-47, bolding added.)
Dennett Plays the Interaction Card (Canard?)
Now Dennett trots out the "standard objection to dualism" which to Dennett is decisive. Ignoring non-interactionist types of substance dualism, Dennett tells us that mind and body, if distinct things or substances, must nonetheless interact. But how could the mind act upon the brain? How could a mental state make a difference to a brain state if mental states lack physical properties?
A fundamental principle of physics is that any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy, and where is this energy to come from? It is this principle of the conservation of energy that accounts for the physical impossibility of "perpetual motion machines," and the same principle is apparently violated by dualism. This confrontation between quite standard physics and dualism . . . is widely regarded as the inescapable and fatal flaw of dualism. (35)
Now any unprejudiced person should be able to see that this "fatal objection" is inconclusive. Notice first of all that Dennett is presupposing that mental-physical causation must involve transfer of energy. For Dennett's objection is essentially this:
a. Energy must be transferred to a physical entity to cause a change in it. b. No energy can be transferred from an immaterial to a material entity. Therefore c. No immaterial entity such as a mind can cause a change in a material entity such as a brain/body.
But why should we accept the first premise? Why should we endorse a transfer theory of causation? Note that to assume a transfer theory of causation is to beg the question against the dualist: it is to assume that the mind must be material. For only a material thing can be a term in an energy transfer. Dennett thinks that dualism must collide with standard physics because he foists upon the dualist a conception of causation that the dualist will surely reject, a conception of causation that implies that there cannot be any nonphysical causes.
The materialist says: mind and body cannot interact because interaction requires transfer of energy, and only bodies can be the transferers and transferees of energy.
The interactionist dualist says: Since mind and body do interact, interaction does not require transfer of energy.
Let M be a type of mental event and B a type of brain event, and let m and b be tokens of these types. Perhaps there is nothing more to causation than this: m causes b =df (i) b follows m in time; (ii) Whenever an M even
t occurs, a B event occurs. On this regularity approach to causation, Dennett's objection dissolves.
Indeed, on any theory of causation in which causation does not consist in a transfer of a physical magnitude from cause to effect, Dennett's objection dissolves. Therefore, the objection can be made to stick only it is assumed that the transfer theory of causation is true of all types of causation. But then the question has been begged against dualist interaction.
There are two key points here that need to be developed in subsequent posts. One is that the nature of causation is not a physics problem. The natural scientist can tell us what causes what, but is singularly ill-equipped to tell us what causation is. The second point is that it is not at all clear that causation, even in the physical world, is a physical process. It is not all clear, in other words, that the causal structure of the physical world is itself something physical.
Dennett thinks that the incoherence of dualism is so obvious that it doesn't require "the citation of presumed laws of physics." (35). Casper the Friendly Ghost is all the help one needs. He can pass through a wall, yet grab a falling towel. But that's incoherent, since something that eludes physical measurement cannot have physical effects. The mind, as 'ghost in the machine,' is no better off. Only physical things can move physical things. But the mind of the substance dualist is not a physical thing, ergo, the mind cannot act upon the body.
But again, Dennett is just begging the question against the dualist as I have already explained.
