Month: April 2019

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread”

This is another topic that it would have been great to discuss with Dale Tuggy during his visit thereby bringing my supposed 'gnosticism' into collision with his supposed 'spiritual materialism.'  The problems are very difficult and I do not claim to have the answers.  The first thing and the main thing, as it seems to me, is to cultivate a deep appreciation of the issues and their difficulty.

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I tend to look askance at petitionary prayer for material benefits. In such prayer one asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or for another, as in the case of intercessory prayer. In many of its forms petitionary prayer borders on idolatry and superstition, and in its crassest forms it crosses over. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the person who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is one who prays for the death of a business rival.  When Paul Tibbets, Jr. took off in the Enola Gay on his mission to Hiroshima in August of 1945, a Catholic priest blessed his mission, petitioning God for its success.  I'll leave you to think about that.

Perhaps not all petitionary prayer for mundane benefits is objectionable.  Some of it simply reflects, excusably,  our misery and indigence.  Did not Christ himself engage in it at Gethsemane?  But much of it is objectionable.  What then should I say about the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse petitionary prayer for material  benefits?

The other five petitions in the Pater Noster are either clearly or arguably prayers for spiritual benefits.   In a spiritual petition one asks, not for physical bread and such, but for things like acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of  cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity, or at least with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others. 

The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural, beyond all sublunary substances, and beyond all creatures. To ask for this heavenly bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive.

For a long time I perhaps naively thought that 'daily bread' had to refer to physical bread and the other necessities of our material existence.  So for a long time I thought that there was a tension, or even a contradiction, between 'daily bread' and 'supersubstantial bread.'  A tension between physical bread and meta-physical bread. 

Cassianus_portretBut one morning I stumbled upon what might be the right solution while reading St. John Cassian.  The same bread is referred to by both phrases, and that same bread is spiritual or supersubstantial, not physical.  'Supersubstantial' makes it clear that 'bread' is to be taken metaphorically, not literally, while 'daily' "points out the right manner of its beneficial use." (Selected Writings, p. 30)  What 'daily' thus conveys is that we need to feed upon spiritual bread every single day.  On this reading, the fourth petition is as spiritual as the others, and the whiff of superstition and idolatry that I found offensive is removed.*

This reading also has the virtue of cohering nicely with Matthew 4:4 according to which man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.  Man lives, not by physical bread, but by meta-physical 'bread.'

"Give us this day our daily bread" is thus a request that we be supplied on a daily basis with spiritual bread that we need every day.  And since we need it every day, we must ask for it every day. But who needs it?  Not the bodily man, but the "inner man" says Cassian.  The inner man is the true man. 'Inner man' is a metaphor but it indicates a literal truth: that man is more than an animal. Being more than an animal, he needs more than material sustenance. 

Addendum on the Literal and the Metaphorical

Here is a question that vexes me.  Are there literal truths that cannot be stated literally but can only stated or gotten at metaphorically?  Can we state literally what a man is if he is more than an animal? Or must we use metaphors?

"Man is spirit."  Isn't 'spirit' a metaphor?  "Man has a higher origin."  'Higher' is metaphorical.  "Man is made by God in his image and likeness."  Aren't 'made,' 'image,' and 'likeness' metaphors?

I once heard a crude and materialistic old man say that if man is made in God's image, then God must have a gastrointestinal tract.  I tried to explain to the man that 'image' is not to be taken in a physical sense but in a spiritual sense.  But I got nowhere as could have been expected:  anyone who doesn't understand right away the spiritual sense of 'made in God's image' displays by that failure to understand an incapacity for instruction.  It is like the student who doesn't get right away what it means to say that one proposition follows from another, and thinks that it refers to a temporal or a spatial relation. 

The question is whether the spiritual sense can be spelled out literally.

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*  For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

Joe Biden: Creep, Clown, Opportunist, and Ignoramus

As as all of those things, a 'worthy' representative of the contemporary hard-Left Democrat party. Ben Shapiro has his number:

More importantly, however, Biden's characterization of "English jurisprudential culture" as "white man's culture" is profoundly disturbing. English jurisprudential culture is rooted in the belief in the rule of law, due process of law, equal rights under law; English jurisprudential culture is responsible for preserving the natural rights we hold dear, rights which were imperfectly but increasingly extended over time to more and more human beings, particularly minorities. No less a leftist figure than Barack Obama explained just that in 2009, saying he sought a system at Guantanamo Bay that "adheres to the rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system."

Protection of individual rights — and in particular, minority rights — lies at the heart of English jurisprudence. Yet Biden boiled down those rights to racial privilege. And the attempt to reduce the fundamental principles of our civilization to a mask for racial hierarchical power is both false and frightening. It suggests that those principles ought to be undermined for purposes of disestablishing that supposed hierarchy. Get rid of English jurisprudential law, presumably, in order to fight racism.

townhall.com
 
When You Don't Appreciate Your Civilization
Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the Biden Courage…

Presentism: A Bit of Discussion with Dale Tuggy

Tuggy iconThe topic of presentism in the philosophy of time came up during Dale Tuggy's visit last weekend.  Dale anounced that he's a presentist.  So I pressed him a bit. I had him consider some such grammatically past-tensed truth as 'JFK was assassinated.' This sentence is contingently true and indeed contingently true at present.  Although the sentence is about a wholly past event, the sentence is now true. Using tensed language, we speak truly when we say that it IS true that Kennedy WAS assassinated.  What I have just set forth is a Chisholmian pre-analytic datum or a Moorean fact, a given that cannot be reasonably controverted.

I then brought up the need for truth-makers for at least some truths.  (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) Consider ' I am seated' said by BV now as he sits in front of his computer. The sentence is (or expresses) a contingent truth.  Now would it be at all plausible to say that this sentence is just true?  Define a brute truth as a contingent truth that is just true, i.e., true, but not in virtue of anything external to the truth. The question is then: Is it plausible that 'I am seated' or the proposition it expresses be a brute truth?

I say that that is implausible in the extreme. There has to be something external  to the truth-bearer that plays a role in its being true and this something cannot be anyone's say-so. At a bare minimum, the subject term 'I' must refer to something extra-linguistic, and we know what that has to be: the 200 lb animal that wears my clothes.  So at a bare minimum, the sentence, to be true, must be about something, something that exists, and indeed exists extra-mentally and extra-linguistically.

Without bringing in truth-making facts or states of affairs, I have said enough to refute the notion that 'I am seated' could be a brute truth.  So far so good.

Now if 'I am seated' needs a truth-maker (in a very broad sense of the term), then presumably 'Kennedy was assassinated' does as well.  It can no more be  a brute truth than 'I am seated' could be a brute truth. 

Dale balked at this, claiming that the Kennedy sentence is a brute truth. It is easy to see his reason for saying it. The reason is presentism.

Roughly, presentism is the view that only temporally present items (times, events, individuals, property-instantiations, etc.) exist, full stop.  Whatever exists, exists now, where the first occurrence of 'exists' cannot be present-tensed — that way lies tautology and triviality — but must be in some sense be tenseless. 

It is not at all clear that presentism can be given a formulation that is at once both precise and coherent. What I have just said is very rough and I have papered over some nasty difficulties. But I think I have conveyed what the presentist is trying to say.  He is out to restrict the totality of what (tenselessly) exists to what presently exists.  An 'eternalist' — the going term but a howling misnomer — by contrast resists the restriction, holding as he does that the totality of what (tenselessly) exists includes past, present, and future items.  

Now if presentism is true, then JFK does not exist at all. It is not just that he does not exist now — that's trivial — but that he does not exist period. Well then, how can 'Kennedy was assassinated' be true?  There is nothing in existence to serve as truth-maker.  Neither Kennedy nor the event of  his being assassinated exist.  There is nothing for that sentence to be about. For on presentism, what no longer exists, does not exist at all.

The truth-maker principle and presentism come into conflict.  Tuggy's 'solution' is to deny that past-tensed truths need truth-makers and hold that they are brute truths. The problem may be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad:

1) There are contingent past-tensed truths.

2) Past-tensed truths are true at present.

3) Truth-Maker Principle: contingent affirmative truths need existing truth-makers.

4) Presentism: Only present items exist.

The limbs of the tetrad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.  It's a nasty problem. Which proposition will you deny?

Some will deny (1) by holding that all past-tensed truths are either false or without truth-value. Good luck with that!

Some will deny (2). Also a non-starter.

Some will deny or revise (3) by maintaining that past-tensed truths are brute truths. This is Tuggy's line.  Very hard to swallow!

Some will deny (4).  This might be the best solution, but it too has its drawbacks which I can't go into now.

It may be that the problem is insoluble in the sense that, no matter which solution you offer, that solution will give rise to puzzles as bad or worse than the original puzzle.  I am tempted to say something along these lines.  But then I am aporetically inclined.

But for now my purpose is merely to induce in Tuggy some skepticism about presentism.   One ought to be skeptical of it since it conflicts with the truth-maker principle which in my minimalist formulation is exceedingly plausible, more plausible, I would say, than presentism, about which there are serious doubts that it is susceptible of a coherent formulation.

And please note that if one rejects presentism one is not thereby forced to embrace eternalism. While they cannot both be true, they can both be false.

A Commonplace Blog

A Commonplace Blog is the best literary weblog that I am aware of. It is defunct, its proprietor and sole contributor, D. G. Myers, having died in September, 2014. I believe I first came upon it via Patrick Kurp's excellent Anecdotal Evidence.

Now while the literary knowledge and literary sensibility of this metaphysician and logic-chopper lag far behind those of the gentlemen mentioned, this has not prevented him from voicing some literary opinions of his own with which Professor Myers has generously but critically engaged.  His discussions of my work can be found in six of his entries, here.

D. G. Myers

Celebrity Privilege

Add that to Black Privilege and Leftist Privilege and you've got some serious privileging going on. Not to mention the tribalism of blacks which makes it very difficult for them to be objective about members of their own race. Remember the O. J. Simpson trial?

And to those on the Reactionary Right, I say: white tribalism is no good and truly ameliorative response to black and Hispanic tribalism, although it is a natural response: Get in whitey's face and he may come to discover that he too has an identity . . . .

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Typo Man Salutes Two Eagle-Eyed Readers

C. P. and J.I.O. warrant my gratitude for catching errors.  Platonizer that I am,  my mind goes directly to the trans-sensible sense and is appropriately inattentive to its mere material embodiment.  I try to catch all my typographical errors but I am regularly surprised at how many I miss.

I probably missed one in the line just written. 

And damned if I didn't find one, after writing the last sentence, a typo now duly corrected.

Prayer

Do you pray for worldly benefits and boons such as bodily health and material wealth, whether for yourself or for others? Or do you pray for spiritual goods such as detachment?

Do you pray that your desires be fulfilled and your aversions avoided? Or do you you pray to get beyond desire and aversion?

I should have pressed these questions in my dialog with Dale Tuggy over the weekend. His spirituality is more 'materialistic' while mine is more 'gnostic.' I readily admit that there are problems on both sides.