Month: April 2019

Running as Equalizer?

Kirk Johnson, To the Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance, Warner 2001, p. 179:

Runners, I believe, are the last great Calvinists.  We all believe, on some level, that success or failure in a race — and thus in life — is a measure of our moral fiber.  Part of that feeling is driven by the psychology of training, which says that success only comes from the hardest possible work output, and that failure is delivered unto those who didn't sweat that extra mile or that extra hour.  The basic core of truth in that harsh equation is also one of the more  appealing things about recreational racing: It really does equalize everyone out.  A rich man's wallet only weighs him down when he's running, and a poor man can beat him.  Hard work matters.

In one way running equalizes, in another it doesn't. 

It levels the disparities of class and status and income.  You may be a neurosurgeon or a shipping clerk.  You won't be asked and no one cares.  The road to Boston or Mt. Whitney is no cocktail party; masks fall away.  One does not run to shmooze.  This is not golf.  Indigent half-naked animal meets indigent half-naked animal in common pursuit of a common goal: to complete the self-assigned task with honor, to battle the hebetude of the flesh, to find the best that is in one, the 'personal best.'  

But in quest of one's personal best the hierarchy of nature reasserts herself.  We are not equal in empirical fact and the road race makes this plain.  In running as in chess there is no bullshit: result and rank are clear for all to see.  Patzer and plodder cannot hide who they are and where they stand — or fall.

So although running flattens the socio-economic distinctions, it does so only to throw into relief the differences of animal prowess and the differences in spiritual commitment to its development.

Life is hierarchical.

Pettiness

We are petty in our loves, hates, fears, hopes, interests, desires and aversions.

Spirit says to Flesh, "How petty you are! Flesh replies, "You can look down your long nose at human pettiness only so long as I allow you to. A couple of well-placed blows would suffice to reduce you, Noble One, who depend on me, to a writhing animal pleading for mercy."

The gist of it: The pettiness of the human animal is excusable. It is easy to be great-souled when all is well with the mortal coil. But the least little thing can start it unraveling.

Schopenhauer said it well when he said that the world is beautiful to behold but terrible to be a part of.

Notre Dame de Paris

Dr. Vito B. Caiati, historian, contributes the following:

With regard to Notre Dame, I have several observations. First, the cathedral had not been properly maintained. Its neglect by the French government has been raised by architectural conservationists for several years. Second, the fire alarm systems of Notre Dame appear to have been inadequate, in that the first alarm sounded at 18:20 on the day of the fire, but the technology employed did not indicate the location of the fire to the technicians in the cathedral. Thus, this first alarm was judged to be “false.” A second alarm sounded 23 minutes later, a lapse that allowed the fire to spread to the “forest” of ancient, roof-supporting oak timbers, many of which dated from the time of Charlemagne. The fire was so extensive and intense that the north tower of the cathedral was almost lost to it (15-30 minutes more of flame and it would have collapsed). Only now is the Minister of Culture calling for a review of the security systems in all cathedrals: too late. Fourth, there are “modernist” forces at work to interfere with the historical reconstruction of the cathedral. It is one thing to argue that the structure supporting the roof, which will be invisible, masked by the stone vault below and the copper roof above, need not be made of oak (1200 very old oak trees would be needed) as the original but rather of concrete, as in the reconstructed Cathedral of Reims or metal as the recently restored Collège de Bernardins in Paris, and quite another to impose some modernist horror in the form of a new spire, which is what the bien-pensant rulers of France apparently have in mind, the prime minister Edouard Philippe calling for a competition on its design and Macron (to whom Matteo Salvini hilariously refers as “il signorino”) recommending “un geste architectural contemporain.” These people are drawn from the same smart-set multiculturalists who blocked any reference to Europe’s Christian roots in the European Constitution and who have remained largely silent in face of the wave of church desecrations that have swept France in the last few years (878 cases in 2017 alone). Moreover, they are enthusiastic admirers of the modernist architectural horrors that now beset Paris, from the Pompidou Centre, to the Tour Montparnasse, to the Grande Arche, to the Bibliothèque nationale de France, to the Philarmonie de Paris, and to the proposed monstrosity The Triangle Tower. So the reconstruction may well become a real problem, given the disdain for history, tradition, and Christianity that infects the ruling elites of France. It seems to me that the spire should either be reconstructed according to the 19th century design of Viollet-le-duc or left off the roof entirely as it was before his renovation.

The Visage of Disillusion

The faces of the elderly, especially those of old men, often betray disillusionment with life: they've seen through it. It's a business that doesn't cover its costs. (Schopenhauer) Women too are among the disillusioned, but they are 'under-represented.'  That is because women as a group are more child-like than men as a group.  Is that a sexist remark? Not if it is true.  And it is true as anyone with any experience of life knows. Therein lies the charm of so many old ladies: they've retained their girlish enthusiasm.  They are still eager to 'do things' and they complain of their men that they 'don't want to do anything.'  My wife's an old lady, older than me: she's into drinking and dancing with her girlfriends. Me, I'm into thinking and trancing in solitude. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo!

Meaning and Word Order

Here is a linguistic bagatelle for your delectation. The striking difference in meaning between 'to see through something' and 'to see something through' is entirely due to word order. Thus the semantic and syntactic are linked. But they couldn't be linked if they weren't distinct.

Indexicality and Omniscience

Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument for the impossibility of divine omniscience. What I know when I know that

1. I am making a mess

is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that

2. BV is making a mess

or perhaps, pointing to BV, that

3. He is making a mess.

Just as no one except BV can refer to BV by tokening the first-person singular pronoun, no one except BV has access to the indexical fact that, as BV would put it to himself, I am BV. Only BV is privy to this fact; only BV knows himself in the first-person way. Now an omniscient being knows everything that can be known. Although I am not omniscient, there is at least one proposition that I know — namely (1) — that is not known by any other knower, including an omniscient knower. So an omnisicent being is impossible: by its very definition it must know every fact that can be known, but there are indexical facts that it cannot know. God can know that BV is making a mess but he cannot know what I know when I know that I am making a mess. For any subject S distinct from God, the first-person facts appertinent to S are inaccessible to every mind distinct from S, including God's mind. That is what I take to be Grim's argument.

I suppose one could counter the argument by denying that there are indexical facts.  But since I hold that there are both indexical propositions and indexical facts, that response route is not available to me.  Let me see if I can respond by making a distinction between two senses of 'omniscience.'

A. X is omniscient1=df X knows every fact knowable by some subject or other.

B. X is omniscient2 =df X knows every fact knowable by some one subject.

What indexical facts show is that no being is or can be omniscient in the first sense. No being knows every indexical and non-indexical fact. But a failure to know what cannot be known does not count against a being's being omniscient in a defensible sense of this term any more than a failure to do what cannot be done counts against a being's being omnipotent. A defensible sense of 'omniscience' is supplied by (B). In this second sense, God is omniscient: he knows every fact that one subject can know, namely, every non-indexical fact, plus all facts pertaining to the divine subjectivity. What more could one want?

Since no being could possibly satisfy (A), (A) is not the appropriate sense of 'omniscience.' Compare omnipotence. An omnipotent being cannot be one who can do just anything, since there are both logical and non-logical limits on what any agent can do.  Logical: God cannot actualize (create) an internally contradictory state of affairs. Non-logical: God cannot restore a virgin.  So from the fact that it is impossible for God to know what is impossible for any one being to know, it does not follow that God is not omniscient.

To sum up. There are irreducible first-personal facts that show that no being can be omniscient in the (A)-sense: Patrick Grim's argument is sound. But the existence of irreducible first-personal facts is consistent  with the truth of standard theism since the latter is committed only to a being omniscient in the (B)-sense of 'omniscience.'

A Monk and His Political Silence

Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton (Boulder: Shambala, 2018, 118):

By the late fifties Merton was deeply disturbed about his political silence.

Should he have been? This world is a passing scene. The temporal order is next to nothing compared to eternity. That is the old-time Roman Catholic teaching that justifies the world-flight of monks and nuns. From The Seven Storey Mountain we know that Merton understood and deeply felt the contemptus mundi enjoined by the monastic tradition. His sense of the vanity and indeed nullity of the life lived by the worldly, and the super-eminent reality of the "Unseen Order," a phrase I borrow from William James, is what drove Merton to renounce the world and enter the monastic enclosure. Despite his increasing critical distance from the enthusiasms and exaggerations of the book that brought him instant fame, he never lost his faith in the reality of the Unseen Order. He never became a full-on secularist pace David D. Cooper, Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist, University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008. Although Cooper is wrong in his main thesis, his book is essential reading for Merton enthusiasts.

Merton and his hermitageTo repeat, the conflicted monk never lost faith in the Unseen Order. But the reality of said Order is not like that of a ham sandwich. To the world-bound natural man, the 'reality' of such a sensible item cannot be doubted despite its unreality and insignificance under the aspect of eternity. But the Reality of the Unseen Order can. It is given to those to whom it is given fitfully and by intimations and glimpses. Their intensity does not compensate for their rarity. They are easily doubted. The monastic disciplines are insufficient to bring them on. Meanwhile the clamorous world won't shut up, and the world of the 'sixties was clamorous indeed. The world's noisy messages and suggestions are unrelenting.  No surprise, then, that Merton wobbled and wavered. Cooper describes him as a failed mystic (Chapter 6) who never reached infused contemplation.  I agree with that.  This is why it is foolishly hyperbolic when his fans describe him as a 'spiritual master.' But I don't agree with Cooper that Merton resolved his conflict by becoming a radical humanist. He remained conflicted. 

Merton came to realize that the monkish ideal of a life of infused or passive or mystical contemplation was unattainable by him.  That, together with his literary ambition and his need for name and fame, threw him back toward the world and drove the doubts that made him disturbed over his political silence.

It's a hard nut to crack. If you really believe in God and soul, then why are you not a monk? And if you are not, do you really believe in God and the soul?  

I enjoyed Mary Gordon's book very much and will be returning to it.  The lovely feminine virtue of sympathetic understanding is on full display.

Absurdistan: The Cross of Christ is Supposed to be an Argument against the Death Penalty!

From a German correspondent I learned about the theology blog Nachtgedanken, Night Thoughts. I agree entirely with the current post which begins:

"In der Karfreitagspredigt sagt Bischof Ulrich Neymeyr: "Der Justizirrtum, dem auch Jesus zum Opfer gefallen ist, ist eines der schlagkräftigen Argumente gegen die Todesstrafe". Tagespost 19.4.2019.
 
Diese bischöfliche Aussage evoziert eine Frage: Was wäre, wenn Pontius Pilatus dieser Justizirrtum nicht unterlaufen wäre? Jesus Christus wäre nicht gekreuzigt worden, er wäre so nicht für unsere Sünden gestorben und wir wären so Nichterlöste. Wenn aber die an Jesus Christus vollstreckte Todestrafe uns erlöst hat, sie so also Gutes gewirkt hat, wie soll dann diese vollstreckte Todesstrafe gegen die Todesstrafe sprechen? 
 
The stupidity of this 'bishop' beggars understanding.  He obviously does not understand the Christian narrative he is supposed to be articulating and promoting. Had Christ not been crucified, he would not have died for our sins, and we would not have been redeemed. It was God's will that Christ, the sinless one, suffer the death penalty. How then can the execution of Christ speak against the death penalty? 
 
Quite apart from Christian teaching, anyone who is not morally obtuse should be able to see that the death penalty is precisely what justice demands in certain cases.   The punishment must fit the crime.
 
I explain the PFC principle here and distinguish it from barbaric versions of lex talionis.

Prager, the Left, and ‘Easter Worshippers’