Month: September 2019

A Rule for Reading the Bible

What we know to be the case constrains Biblical interpretation. For example, we know that an individual human life does not begin with its first breath. If any passage in the Bible states or implies otherwise, that passage may and indeed must be dismissed and cannot count as divine revelation. So much for Biblical inerrancy, at least on one reading of that phrase.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Philosophical Justification for a Drink or Two

From time to time  it is perhaps appropriate that we should relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  A fitting apologia for a bit of indulgence and even overindulgence  is found in Seneca, On Tranquillity of Mind, XVII, 8-9, tr. Basore:

At times we ought to reach even the point of intoxication, not drowning ourselves in drink, yet succumbing to it; for it washes away troubles, and stirs the mind from its very depths and heals its sorrow just as it does certain ills of the body; and the inventor of wine is not called the Releaser [Liber, Bacchus] on account of the license it gives to the tongue, but because it frees the mind from bondage to cares and emancipates it and gives it new life and makes it bolder in all that it attempts. But, as in freedom, so in wine there is a wholesome moderation.

Sed ut libertatis ita vini salubris moderatio est.

. . .

Yet we ought not to do this often, for fear that the mind may contract an evil habit; nevertheless there are times when it must be drawn into rejoicing and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be banished for a while.

Scotch bourbon beerAmos Milburn, One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer

The Champs, Tequila.  Arguably unique in that its lyrics consist of exactly one trisyllabic word.

Electric Flag, Wine.  Great video of the late Mike Bloomfield and his Gibson Les Paul in their prime, at the Monterey Pop Festival, 1967.  Definitive proof that a Jew can play the blues. Cultural appropriation at its finest. We all could profit from more cultural appropriation, blacks especially. Think what they could learn from the kike, the chink, and the honkey, not to mention the dago, the guinea, the greaseball, and the wop. 

Canned Heat, Whisky-Headed Woman.

Tommy McClennan, Whisky-Headed Woman, 1939

Doors, Whisky Bar

Buck Owens, Cigarettes, Whisky, and Wild, Wild Women

Cigarettes are a blot on the whole human race
A man is a monkey with one in his face
So gather 'round friends and listen to your brother
A fire on one end, a fool on the other.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot's version

What are you drinking? I'm having me a Whisky Highball, classic, and simplicity itself: ginger ale and your favorite whisky. Mine tonight is Canada Dry ginger ale and Jim Beam bourbon.  

Addendum 9/16

David G. writes,

Back when I was working for Google and making crap loads of money, I started sampling high-end bourbon and scotch. Maybe I'm just not a connoisseur, but in my judgement, although some of the 12-year-old Glen's were marginally better than Jack Daniels, none of the bourbons were, and there were several high-end whiskeys that were noticeably worse than Jack, so now that I'm poor, I really don't mind going back to my old friend Jack.

Also, as I'm sure you are aware, you can't post a list of songs on the internet and not have someone tell you you missed some. One you probably know:

EmmyLou Harris, Two More Bottles of Wine

and one you probably don't, unless you follow local Arizona bands:

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, Jack vs. Jose.

Jack is good enough for me, too, and so is Jose Cuervo Gold, and if you are mixing these bad boys, not with each other mind you, but with, say, ginger ale or tonic water respectively, then there is no call to shell out for the top-shelf hooch which is outrageously overpriced. You don't always get what you pay for.  If a snob challlenges your judgment, Dave, arrange a blind taste test.

Fratello Pepito recommends The Four Deuces, White Port Lemon Juice, 1956.

Old and Jaded

The trick is to get old without becoming jaded.

My valued colleague H. N. couldn't pull it off. He had a certain depth and a certain wisdom, and we were on good terms. He knew how to take my intensity and he wasn't threatened by my intelligence: his was a healthy self-confidence. But he had become lazy and complacent among unstimulating colleagues. I couldn't engage him. An idea of mine might be dismissed with "That's already in Spinoza." Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. "But what do you think of the idea?" No answer. Didn't care. Tired, jaded.  

He was dead wood on the path to petrification. Jaded, he was turning to stone.

What I didn't say to him out of affection and because it would have done no good:  What are you doing here? You have the wherewithal to retire. Why do you continue to draw a salary? 

In Vino Veritas

Literally, "in wine, (there is) truth."  But the sentence does not bear its meaning on its semantic sleeve. What the familiar Latin saying is used to express, by those who use it correctly, is the thought that a person under the influence of alcohol is less likely to dissemble and more likely to speak his mind and perhaps reveal something that he would not have revealed if sober. 

Linguistic meaning, though not reducible to use, cannot be adequately understood apart from use. 

The Question of Private Judgment

I have commented critically on the Roman Catholic teaching on indulgences. One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Church on faith or morals may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church.  Two quick observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources.  It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment.  So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine.  He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence.  Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council.  

So the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run.  A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc?)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess.  In the main they were manly and admirable men.  But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the priests of my youth. 

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a liberal such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

Addendum

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible. 

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to — in effect — question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong.  But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect?  Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox. 

The Grave Danger to the Republic of ‘Red Flag’ Laws

Destructive Democrats now label the National Rifle Association  a 'domestic terror organization.' Mind-mannered Mike of Mesa is a member and receives their publications. His mail man, though, is a flaming lefty. The mail man reports Mike to the government as a domestic terrorist on the ground that anyone who is a member of a terrorist organization is a terrorist. ATF agents break into Mike's house in the wee hours and seize his one and only firearm, a semi-automatic pistol. A year later, Mike is able to get his gun back, but he must pay all court costs.

Not quite Nazi Germany, but getting there.

If Democrats call NRA members domestic terrorists, I call Democrats totalitarian proto-Nazi scum. The difference between the two labels is that my label applies.

Never forget that the Left's strategy is incremental: gun confiscation in violation of both the Second and Fourth Amendments.

The Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party. 

The Notebook and its Ideal Entry, the Aphorism

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti:

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

The first two sentences sound for all the world like a description of this here weblog.  Or as I put it above:

. . . this weblog is just one philosopher's online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet.    A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative.  I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths.  Here below we are in statu viae, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic.  Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me.