Month: May 2020

How Could God be Justice itself?

David Gudeman writes; I reply:
 
George Berkeley was the first author who really shook my confidence in my existing world view. Before I read Berkeley, I had a Mr. Johnson-style contempt of physical idealism; after reading Berkeley, I realized that I had been naive–not because Berkeley was necessarily right, but because once I suppressed my presuppositions, I found him hard to refute, and came to realize how logically futile Mr. Johnson's refutation was.
Well, no one calls it 'physical idealism.' Stick with 'Berkeleyan idealism.' And of course it cannot be refuted ad lapidem, by kicking a stone.  Berkeley was not an eliminativist about material objects.  He did not maintain that rocks and trees do not exist; he did not question WHETHER they are; he offered an unusual ontological account of WHAT they are, namely ideas in the divine mind. 
 
I offer this story as evidence of my good faith in the following, because I know I have irritated you before by bringing up topics like this, and very much do not want to do so again. In particular, I do have hopes that there is something to be found here if only I can come to grasp it.
 
With that, I'd like to ask you if you can explain what you mean by phrases like "God is the measure of Justice. God is Justice itself." (From this entry.)
 
To me this looks like a couple of category errors. God is a person, a measure of justice is a measure, and justice is a quality. How can these three be equated in any literal sense? [. . .]
Fair questions. 
 
A. I take it that you will grant me that God is a wholly just person.  Now assume the following: God is unique; there are non-divine persons; none of the latter are wholly just.  You and I are non-divine persons, and neither of us is wholly just, although one of us may be more just than the other.  There are degrees of justice in non-divine (created) persons. Now it makes sense to say that God sets the standard with respect to justice or being just.  God is the measure of justice in that he is just to the highest degree, and we fail to measure up, to different degrees.
 
It therefore makes sense to say that God, a person, is the standard, exemplar, measure of justice.  There is no category mistake.  The second alleged category mistake is harder to deal with, and a wholly satisfactory answer is not possible because when we discuss God, the ultimate source of all being, value, and intrinsic intelligibility, we are at the outer limit of intelligibility. (The Intelligent Source of all intrinsic intelligibility, because it is an Other Mind, cannot be understood with the clarity and completeness with which we understand ordinary objects among objects.) All I can hope to show is that the accusation of category mistake can be turned aside or rationally repelled. So here we go.
 
B. God is a just person, and he is just to the highest possible degree. Now is God just in virtue of instantiating a property of justice that exists independently of him?  You say justice is a quality. I'll play along. Is God just in virtue of instantiating this quality?  (Perhaps you are thinking of this quality as a necessarily existent 'abstract object.') If you say yes, then you compromise God's aseity, his from-himself-ness.  God is the Absolute. Not an absolute, but the Absolute.  As such, he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his existence or nature.   You will grant that God cannot have a cause of his existence external to himself. You must also grant that for God to be God he cannot be dependent on anything external to himself for his nature (essence).  So he can't be just in virtue of instantiating your quality, justice.  God sets the standard by being the standard: there is no standard of justice outside of God that he needs to conform to.
 
If so, if God is not an instance of justice, a just entity, then he must be (identically)  justice.  The Platonist Augustine drew this conclusion, one that entails the divine simplicity, and the Jansenists followed Augustine in this. God is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form or paradigm.  Supreme Wisdom is itself wise; supreme Justice is itself just.  God is at once each of his attributes and also their unique instance.  God is, but he is not a being among beings.  God is (identically) Being itself, but not in a way the detracts from his being a being, or to be precise, the being.  For God to be God he must be unique in the highest possible sense: not one of a kind, not necessarily one of a kind, but necessarily such  that in him kind and instance are one.
 
The theist faces a dilemma.  Either God is or is not distinct from his attributes. if the former, then God is not God. If the latter, then God is beyond the comprehension of the discursive intellect.
 
(But is the second horn so bad? A God worth his salt must be transcendent, Transcendence itself. (Otherwise, your god is an idol. Whatever you say about Islam, it at least has a lively sense of the transcendence of God.)

In conclusion, Gudeman's second accusation of category error can be rationally resisted as I have just done.  One can cogently argue  up to the divine simplicity. The problem, however — and I freely admit it — is that the discursive intellect cannot wrap itself around  (cannot understand) how something can be ontologically simple. One is reduced to pointing beyond the discursive sphere.

 
Here we reach an impasse beyond which we cannot move by philosophical means. But what justifies the conceit that the only way to the ultimate truth is the philosophical way?

E. J. Lowe on Existence and Substantial Change: Critical Remarks

We have seen that and how Lowe reduces property change to existential change. The latter is the change that occurs when something comes into existence and passes out of existence.  What of the reverse reduction, the reduction of existential change to property change?  What are its prospects?   Could we say that when an individual substance (an individual, for short) comes to exist it does so by acquiring the property of existence, and that when it passes out of existence it loses this property? This notion is fraught with difficulties which I will not rehearse. Lowe, like many philosophers, rejects the idea that existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals.

So what then is it for an object to exist, if not to possess the property of existing? Some philosophers would answer: It is for it to be the case that something is (identical with) that object. The contention, in other words, is that . . . 'E!a' ('a exists') is equivalent in meaning to '∃x(x = a).' ("How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), pp. 275-293, 277)

I deny that the expressions have the same meaning, but I cheerfully accept their logical equivalence. (Logical equivalence is equivalence across all broadly logically possible worlds. It is the necessitation of material equivalence.) I concede that, for example,

1) Necessarily, Max exists iff Max is identical to something.

'Something' here is elliptical for 'something or other.'  The idea is not that each thing that exists exists iff it is identical to some one thing; that would lead straightaway to an intolerable monism. The idea is that each thing exists iff it is self-identical.  Unless one is a Meinongian, one will accept as true all biconditionals of the form of (1).   Lowe continues:

One way to express this idea is to say that the predicate 'exists' in fact expresses or denotes a second-level property, that is, a property of first-level properties: to wit, the property of having at least one instance. Thus, it may be said, 'a exists' expresses the thought that the property of being identical with a has at least one instance . . . . (277)

There are at least two problems with this view that Lowe sees and that I have mentioned many times before. First, there are no haecceity properties.  For example, there is no such property as Socrateity, the property of being identical with Socrates.  Second, even if there is the property, identity-with-a, a's existence cannot be explained by saying that the haecceity property has an instance. This is because identity-with-a, or a-ness, cannot have an instance unless the instance exists.  One moves in an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter if one maintains that for a to exist is for a-ness to be instantiated when a-ness cannot be instantiated unless a exists. I therefore agree with Lowe:

. . . the notion of an object's existing seems to be more basic than that of a (first-level) property's having an instance, whence the former notion cannot really be explained in terms of the latter. (277)

Seems? Nay, 'tis! The upshot for Lowe and me is that existence can be neither a first-level nor a second-level property.  Lowe concludes that existence is not a property at all. A property, whether it is a universal or a trope (mode), is an entity within the totality of entities. But neither existence nor identity "figure in an ontological inventory of the entities that reality as a whole comprehends." (278)  So existence is not one of the things that exists. Existence does not exist, as it would if it were a property. Existence is not a property, but a concept, a "formal ontological concept." Such concepts do not "pick out beings or entities of any sort." (278)  What's more, existence is a "primitive" and "indefinable" concept.  It cannot be analyzed in terms of more basic concepts.

But now trouble looms.  I quoted Lowe above: "what then is it for an object to exist?" An excellent question! He rightly rejects two answers. The first is that an object exists in virtue of possessing the first-level property of existence. The second is that an object exists in virtue of the instantiation of its haecceity property. Lowe concludes that existence is not something that exists in reality, an item that would have to be listed in an adequate ontological inventory.  Objects exist, but existence does not exist. So he says that existence is a concept, and indeed a "primitive" and "indefinable" one.

But if existence is indefinable, then it cannot be explicated in terms of temporal presentness, which is plainly what Lowe is attempting to do.  Every presentism maintains, at least with respect to items in time, that only temporally present items exist simpliciter.  For Lowe, the items include objects and their tropes, but not times and events.  But no matter: he answers his own question by maintaining that for an object to exist is for an object to be temporally present.

But if existence is not a property, then neither is temporal presentness.  Temporal presentness is time itself. For what is past is nothing, having been annihilated, and what is future is also nothing, not having been created. Time, in turn, is temporal passage. Temporal passage is real, objective, mind-independent. Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." ("Presentism and Relativity," 137)  Lowe insists more than once that the italicized phrases be taken seriously and literally: what passes out of existence is absolutely annihilated.  The wholly past is nothing.

Well, what is this existence into which things come and out of which they go? It cannot be a concept. It cannot be subjective. It is not something we add to the world; it is the world itself in its temporal reality. Existence, existing, is some sort of metaphysical process, an ongoing upsurge of the Now and of Being, a continual Presencing that combines the temporal sense of 'presence' with the existential sense.   This seems to be the root metaphor that underlies Lowe's presentist vision of time and existence: a continual upsurge of presencing.  Of course, sober analyst that he is, Lowe would not use such romantic language as I am now using, language reminscent of a Continental philosopher like Sartre.

So, while existence is not an existent among existents, existence in the end does exist as this primal Presencing.  There is a structural similarity with the view I arrived at in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence (Kluwer, 2002): both Lowe and I think of existence in its difference from existence as a paradigm Existent. In the end, existence exists for both of us, but not as a property or any existent among existents. It is logically and ontologically prior to the Quinian inventory.

Something about Nothing

Consider the following contradictory propositions:

1) Something exists.

2) Nothing exists.

(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false.  So much for truth value. What about modal status?  Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true.  If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.

Is it possible that nothing exist?   Is it possible that there be nothing at all?  Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.

Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist.

A strict Pyrrhonian would have to say that there is an argument that cancels out the one just given.

Is there?

The Most Boring Philosophers

Nowadays philosophy so absorbs me in all its branches and movements that I find no philosopher boring. Indeed,  no subject is boring except to the bored who make it  so. Dry texts, like dry wines, are often delightfully subtle and simply require an educable and educated palate. Although no philosophers now bore me, here is a list of philosophers who bored me, or would have bored me, when I was one and twenty:

   1. G. E. Moore
   2. Elizabeth Anscombe
   3. Paul Ziff
   4. Norman Malcolm
   5. John Wisdom
   6. Roderick Chisholm

Philosophers who excited my 21-year-old self:

   1. Nicholas Berdyaev
   2. Miguel de Unamuno
   3. Karl Jaspers
   4. Friedrich Nietzsche
   5. Martin Heidegger
   6. Jean-Paul Sartre

Now imagine a philosophy department composed of the twelve aforementioned. Do you think it would split into two factions? What, if anything, do they have in common that justifies subsuming them under the rubric, philosophers?

I have become in many ways more analytic and less Continental over the years. I tend to think that this is a lot like becoming less liberal and more conservative, as these terms are popularly understood. One becomes more cautious, careful, precise, piece-meal, rigorous, attentive to details and differences and empirical data, less romantic, more patient, more logical, less impressionistic, less sanguine about big sweeping once-and-for-all solutions. . . .

In sum, and in a manner to elicit howls of protest:  In philosophy, the trajectory of maturation is from Continental to analytic.  In politics, from liberal to conservative.

Howl on, muchachos.

Pascal the Jansenist

Herewith, a note on Pascal inspired by Leszek Kolakowski's fascinating book, God Owes Us Nothing (University of Chicago, 1995).

Faith is a divine gift, bestowed arbitrarily, not a reward for merit. We postlapsarians groaning under Adam's sin are wholly without merit. There is no way we can get right with God by our own efforts.  Grace is both necessary and sufficient for salvation. God cannot be called unjust in arbitrarily bestowing the grace that leads to faith and salvation on some but not others — for God is not measured by Justice, a standard external to him; God is the measure of Justice.  God is Justice itself. In this respect he is like a self-exemplifying Platonic Form. Justice is just; God is Justice; God is just. Whatever Supreme Justice does is just by definition. This is a consequence of God's absolute sovereignty. Kolakowski hasn't (so far in my reading) mentioned divine simplicity, but this doctrine is arguably entailed by absolute sovereignty.

And so the very question whether God acts justly in damning some and saving others presupposes what cannot be the case given absolute sovereignty, namely, that God can be judged by a standard external to him. This view leads by inexorable logic to some horrific consequences.  One is the justice of the consignment of unbaptized infants to eternal torment.  Pascal bites the Augustinian bullet.  See p. 85 ff.

The Presentism of E. J. Lowe: Summary

Lowe E. J.This entry is Part One of a multi-part attempt to understand and evaluate the late E. J. Lowe's 'untimely' version of presentism.  It is 'untimely' in that he resists what he takes to be the reification of time and times, and because his presentism is very different from its contemporary competitors. I am basing my interpretation mainly on "Presentism and Relativity: No Conflict" in Ciuni, et al. eds., New Papers on the Present (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 133-152) and on "How Real is Substantial Change," The Monist, vol. 89, no. 3 (2006), 275-293. Page references in parentheses refer to the first article unless otherwise noted. All emphases are in the original.

1) Lowe insists on "The ontological primacy of present reality and the objective status of temporal passage." (133)  These commitments justify calling him a presentist.

2) But he "repudiates [what he takes to be] the reification of time and 'times,' including the 'present moment' . . . ." (133) To reify is to treat as real what is not real. Lowe appears to be saying that there are no such items as times, and thus no such item as the present time. If so, one cannot quantify over times.  This would seem to scotch fairly standard definitions or definition-schemata of 'presentism' along the following lines:

(P1) Always, only present items exist.

That is: every time is such that only what is non-relationally present at that time exists simpliciter. 

3) The focus for Lowe is not on the present moment, but on the "fundamental reality of change . . . ." (133)

4) Change, however, is in every case "existence change — that is, the coming into or going out of existence of entities of one kind or another . . . ." (133) We are being told that all change is existential or substantial change.  (See The Monist article cited above.) Now one kind of change is qualitative change as when a tomato goes from being green to being red.  This can be understood to be a species of existence change if properties are assayed as  tropes. The greenness trope in the tomato goes out of existence and  a redness trope comes into existence while the tomato stays in existence.  On this way of thinking, both the coming into existence of the tomato and its change of color are existential changes.

5) Objects (individual substances) change, but there are no events in addition to these changes.  We need only the object and its tropes: we need no events such as the event of a leaf's turning brown. Furthermore, there is no event of a trope's going out of existence or coming into existence.  If there were, a vicious infinite regress would ensue. (150) Events are "shadows cast by language rather than fundamental ingredients of temporal reality." (151) There are changes, but no events. I take Lowe to be saying that an event is an (illicit) reification of a change.  If an animal dies, there is no such event as the animal's death in addition to the dead animal. There is just the animal which ceases to exist. (137)

6) Because there are no events, change cannot be ascribed to events. Because there is no such entity as my birth, my birth has no properties such as occurring at a certain place or being past.  Because there are no events, no events change in their A-determinations, their monadic (non-relational) pastness, presentness, and futurity.  There is thus no event, my birth, that was once future, then present, then past, and then ever more past. To think otherwise is to confuse events with objects, which amounts to a reification of events, an illicit treatment of them as if they are objects when all they could be are changes in objects.

7) It is not just that nothing has A-determinations; there are no such determinations to be had. McTaggart's A-determinations  are pseudo-properties based on a "false analogy between events and objects." (136)  There are no times, no events, and no A-determinations. This puts paid to McTaggart's claim that the A-series is contradictory, which is a key lemma in his overall argument for the unreality of time.  That lemma requires that there be events and A-determinations.  Very roughly, what McTaggart argues is that time is unreal because (i) time requires the A-series, but (ii) said series is contradictory in that each event has all three of the A-determinations. D. H. Mellor is a contemporary philosopher of time who accepts McTaggart's argument against the A-series, but concludes, not that time is unreal, but that time is exhausted by the B-series.

8) But if there are no events, then there is no B-series either. There is no series of events ordered by the so-called B-relations, earlier than, later than, and simultaneous with.  This puts paid to the view of D. H. Mellor and others that real time (to allude to the title of Mellor's book) is exhausted by the B-series.  For Lowe, then, there are no times, no events, no A-series, and no B-series.

9) For Lowe, time is objectively real; it is not unreal as on McTaggart's view, nor is it in any sense   transcendentally ideal (Kant) or constituted in consciousness (Husserl).  But it is not real in the manner of a container or a dimension.  Time is just temporal passage.  Since time is objectively real, temporal passage is also objectively real and in no way mind-dependent.  Temporal passage "consists in the continual coming into and going out of existence of entities . . . ." (137) Lowe is referring to temporal entities only, those that are not timeless such as propositions. He has in mind objects (individual substances) such as a cat and its properties (assayed as tropes) such as being asleep.  This ceaseless existential change is what temporal passage consists in. In sum, for Lowe, time = temporal passage = the ever ongoing creation and annihilation of entities.

As I read him, Lowe is not maintaining that to exist = to be temporally present tout court, but that for temporal items, to exist = to be temporally present. This makes him an existence presentist with respect to temporalia. Recall that for Lowe, all change is existential (substantial) change. See (4) supra. 

10) We tend to think of time as the dimension of change, a fourth dimension in addition to the three spatial dimensions.  We tend to assume that "time is a dimension in which reality as a whole is extended." (Monist, 283)  If you think that objects persist by perduring, by having different temporal parts at different times, then you are making this assumption.  But most, though not all, endurantists make the same assumption when they say that an object endures by being 'wholly present' at each time at which the object exists. Lowe denies that time is a dimension. For if there are no times ordered by the B-relations, earlier and later, then time is not a dimension. Reality is not temporally extended.  Lowe seeks to uphold an endurantism that does not presuppose that time is a dimension.

11) Lowe's view of time is thoroughly dynamic by contrast with the static character of time on eternalism, and with the partially static and partially dynamic theories of Growing Block and Spotlight.  The reality of time "consists simply in the reality of change . . . . (140)  The latter "constitutes" temporal passage.  This of course implies that without change, there is no time; but we can live with that.  What's more, there are no events and there are no times, and so there is no present time.  Lowe concludes that we need no account of what times are, and in particular, no "ersatzist" account of time in terms of abstract objects such as propositions. He is opposing views like that of Craig Bourne, for whom "a time is a set of propositions that states the other truths about what happens at that time." (A Future for Presentism, Oxford UP, 2006, 52.)

12) The view that all change is existential change commits Lowe to the view that properties of things in time are not universals but tropes or modes (particularized properties). These are not temporal parts of objects.  (141) Tropes are therefore consistent with endurantism.  Suppose that a changes from being F at t1 to G at t2.  "We can continue to say that a itself exists at both t1 and t2 despite having no temporal parts, thus being, in that sense, 'wholly present' at both of these times." (141) I note in passing how Lowe helps himself to talk of times. 

13) The object that has tropes is neither a bundle of tropes not a bare particular or substratum that supports them. The 'relation' between an object and its tropes is left unclear. (141).

14)  Objects persist through changes in intrinsic properties. How? Change in intrinsic properties occurs when "monadic tropes"  successively "come into and go out of existence while it (the object) stays in existence." (142)

15)  Lowe's presentism: "When 'time passes' the content of reality itself changes — entities come into and go out of existence." This is intended "literally and absolutely." Going out of existence is absolute annihilation. (146)  But then coming into existence would have to be creation out of nothing, would it not?

16) Yet "some things that exist today already existed yesterday." (146) For example, the very same person who exists and is 'wholly present' now also existed and was 'wholly present' yesterday. (146)

17) Only present objects and tropes exist.  The sum-total of these entities is ever changing. What ceases to be present is annihilated. But not everything that exists at present is annihilated at the same time.  Suppose Elliot, who was drunk yesterday, is sober today.  Elliot yesterday co-existed with a D-trope, and Elliot today co-exists with an S-trope. The tropes, however,  are not coexistent with each other since the D-trope was annihilated by the passage of time while the S-trope presently exists. Lowe's presentism thus implies the non-transitivity of co-existence. It also implies that, while temporal reality is ever created and annihilated by  the passage of time, not everything is annihilated or created at the same time.  The annihilation of Elliot's drunkenness left Elliot the object unscathed. 

Carpe Diem!

Carpe diem skullSeize the day,  my friends, the hour of death is near for young and old alike.  How would you like death to find you?  In what condition, and immersed in which activity?  Contemplating the eternal or stuck in the mud of the mundane or lost in the diaspora of sensuous indulgence?

The clock is running, and in the game of life it is sudden death with no way of knowing when the flag will fall.

For some of us the harvest years come late and we hope for many such years in which  to reap what we have sown, but we dare not count on them.  For another and greater Reaper is gaining on us and we cannot stay the hand that wields the scythe that will cut us down.

Not Dark Yet: Bob Dylan Turns 79 Today

DylanHe has been called "rock's greatest songwriter."  A  better description is "America's greatest writer of popular songs." Bar none.  We can discuss the criteria later, and consider counterexamples.  His earliest four or five albums are not in the rock genre.  I'll permit quibbling about #5, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), but Bob Dylan (1962), The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) , The Time's They Are A'Changin' (1964), and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) are better classified as folk, not that they sit all that comfortably in this niche.

These early albums are studded with lasting contributions to Americana. This is music with meaning that speaks to the mind and the heart.  No Rat Pack crooner Las Vegas lounge lizard stuff here. Two lesser-known compositions both from The Times They Are a'Changin' (1964):

The Ballad of Hollis Brown   Performed by Stephen Stills. Dave Bagwill recommends this outstanding extended version (Freewheelin' outake 2, 1962) of "The Ballad of Hollis Brown." Move over, Stephen Stills! The harp fills don't quite make it, however, in this minor-keyed tune.

North Country Blues.  Written from the point of view of a woman and so appropriately sung by the angel-throated Joan Baez.

D. A. Pennebaker on the making of Don't Look Back.  I saw it in '67 when it first came out.  I just had to see it, just as I had to have all of Dylan's albums, all of his sheet music, and every article and book about him. I was a Dylan fanatic.  No longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.

May he die with his boots on.  It ain't dark yet, but it's gettin' there. When his 30th album Time Out of Mind came out in 1997, twenty three years ago now, I was amazed to discover that Dylan could still tap back into that magic mood he achieved in the mid-60s.

Sometimes my burden is more than I can bear
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.
 
I was born here and I'll die here, against my will
I know it looks like I'm movin' but I'm standin' still
Every nerve in my body is so naked and numb
I can't even remember what it was I came here to get away from
Don't even hear the murmur of a prayer
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Sinatra is supposed to have said that a pro is one who can play it the same way twice.  Dylan rarely plays it the same way twice. Here is a version of "Just Like a Woman" which is lyrically and in other minor ways different from the Blonde on Blonde version. 

Thanks, Bob, for all the music and all the memories, and for your wonderfully individual and self-reliant appropriation, critique, and celebration of America. It wouldn't have been the long strange trip it's been without you.  May you die with your boots on.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Help

Canned Heat, Help Me.

"Help me consolate my weary mind." I love that 'consolate.' Alan 'Blind Owl' Wilson at his best.  I saw him and the boys at the Kaleidoscope in Hollywood in 1968.  Wilson was a tortured soul and ended up a member of the 27 Club. He quit the sublunary sphere on 3 September 1970.

Aficionados of that time and place will want to read Canned Heat: The Twisted Tale of Blind Owl and the Bear.

Johnny Cash, Help Me.

Beach Boys, Help Me, Rhonda

Hank Williams, I Can't Help it If I'm Still in Love with You 

Ringo Starr, With a Little Help from My Friends

Elvis Presley, Can't Help Falling in Love

Andrea Bocelli does a great live job with it.

Highwaymen, Help Me Make it Through the Night

While we have the Highwaymen cued up, let's enjoy Ghost Riders in the Sky

Joni Mitchell, Help Me

Hank Locklin, Please Help Me, I'm Falling

Here is Skeeter Davis' answer to Hank.

Thomas Merton and Walker Percy

Percy WalkerI have long been fascinated by the conflicted man revealed in Thomas Merton's Journals, all seven volumes of which I have read and regularly re-read.  He was a spiritual seeker uncomfortably perched between the contemptus mundi of old-time monasticism and 1960's social engagement and 'relevance,' to use one of the buzz words of the day.  He was hip to the '60s, its music and its politics, surprisingly appreciative of Dylan and Baez, and this despite being 50 years old in '65 when Dylan was 24. 

I recently came across a journal entry in which Merton praises Walker Percy's 1962 novel, The Moviegoer. Then I recalled that the philosopher and surfer Tim Mosteller who visited me a year or so ago, and acquitted himself well on a memorable hike in the Superstitions, had mentioned some work by Percy, whom I have never read, but will. A search turns up he following articles of interest to Merton aficionados:

An Interview with Walker Percy about Thomas Merton

Pilgrim in the Ruins

Merton's 'True Spirit'

Existentialism, Semiotics and Iced Tea   (Roger Kimball)

The Myth of the Fall from Paradise: Thomas Merton and Walker Percy

ADDENDUM (5/25)

Tim Mosteller writes,

I haven't read all of Percy's work, but I have enjoyed a lot of what I have read of him.
 
I simply can't recall which work of his I mentioned when I last saw you.
 
Here's his fiction that I have read:
 
The Moviegoer
The Last Gentleman
Love in the Ruins
Lancelot
The Thanatos Syndrome
 
I think that I looked over, but didn't really study his collection of philosophical essays, some of them quite good on C. S. Peirce and semiotics which were published in top-ranked philosophy journals.
 
Those essays are collected in The Message in the Bottle.  
 
Peter Kreeft is quite fond of Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book.  I think I've looked this one over too, but haven't read it.  Kreeft has an essay on this book in his C. S. Lewis for the Third Millenium, and I recall enjoying the essay.  In fact, I think that was how I got introduced to Percy.
 
I've enjoyed everything I've read by Percy.  It's rare to have a Christian writer who is a first rate philosopher (who was also a medical man) and a first rate novelist.  Some of his novels are quite graphic and disturbing, which as a rule I don't enjoy reading, but they are not gratuitous. 
 
Percy is too heavily influenced by Kierkegaard and C. S. Peirce, but his story-telling makes of for some of the things I disagree with from these thinkers. 
 
Here is a great video lecture which Percy gave which captures a lot of his views:  "Walker Percy The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve1f83mxE7k
 
Hope this helps!

Grievance is a Growth Industry

Leftists cling to their grievances despite progress made and remedies applied. And then they invent new ones. For they must remain permanently aggrieved. That is who they are: permanently adolescent in a state of permanent rebellion.  That they have less and less to be angry about means nothing. The merest microaggression suffices to 'trigger' them. 'Racism,' for example,  is everywhere. 

Did you know that hiking and running are racist?

There is nothing so mind-numbingly knuckleheaded that some 'liberal' won't maintain it.

Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?

In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist. But suppose none of these predicates attach to you.  Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or sub-discipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.

Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.

If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis?  Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?

We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement.  This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.

I am a Conciliationist. Or at least that is my natural tendency.  Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it.  It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think that I would be intellectually amiss, and less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think that I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it to yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth.  Truth cannot be mine or yours.

The Steadfaster, however, stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But if  you are a Steadfaster, then, when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.

But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me on the meta-issue.   (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)

It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals.  So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:

  • Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
  • Make an exception for the Conciliationist thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it at the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
  • Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
  • Do something else?