Month: June 2020

Euthanizing Liberty

Chad McIntosh sees an upside in the recent closures of philosophy programs.  I agree with him.

In conclusion, I now see the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, as a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.

Since the spirit of true philosophy has fled the leftist seminaries, a New Monasticism is needed to preserve and transmit high culture:

I will end on a (slightly) more hopeful note. In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher says orthodox Christians should think of themselves as a people in exile, and that their best chance of preserving their faith and traditions is to form quasi-monastic communities within this increasingly hostile post-Christian culture. Those of us who still believe in the university, classically understood, would do well to consider adopting a similar strategy. Since we can no longer depend on modern institutions of higher education as places where the great classics of Western thought and tradition can be faithfully taught, learned, and engaged, we will have to do those things on our own. Thankfully, we are not in wholly untrodden territory. Homeschooling parents have been blazing these trails for a long time. As for aspiring academics, William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is a model. True, few people have the means to support themselves as an independent scholar. But those who find a way will be precisely those seek knowledge for its own sake. The independent scholar will not have to continually debase himself by justifying his own field of study to some institutional bureaucrat or even to his colleagues. Furthermore, being unburdened by the duties of managing classes of disinterested students and time-consuming administrative tasks, he is in a position to do his best work.

The Academic Job Market in the ‘Sixties

Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was:

. . . I reflect on the ease and endless rewards of my career, moving from comfortable position to comfortable position, and compare it with the terrible struggles of young academics trying to gain some sort of security and time for their own scholarship in an increasingly hostile job market.  The 'sixties, when my career was being launched, was a time of explosive growth of higher education in America.  Spurred by the G. I. Bill and the post-war economic boom, and fed by an endless stream of young men avoiding the Viet Nam draft, colleges and universities virtually metastasized.  State universities, which had existed ever since the Land Grant Acts of the 1860's, suddenly sprouted satellite campuses.  State colleges plumped themselves up into universities, and Community Colleges became State Colleges.  [I will add that junior colleges were renamed 'community colleges.'] There were so many new teaching positions to be filled that in the sixties and seventies graduate students were being offered tenure track positions before they had become ABD [all but doctorate].

BV: I'm  a generation younger than Professor Wolff.  By the time I began applying for jobs at the end of the '70s things had become grim and the gravy days of the '60s were a thing of the past.  But I lucked out and got a tenure track job in '78 right out of graduate  school at the University of Dayton.  Lucky me, I had no other offer.  I later learned that in the '60s there were four philosophy hires in one year at U.D., some of them sight unseen: no interview.  One of these gentlemen couldn't even speak English!  And of course the quality of the people hired was relatively low.

It is also worth pointing out that the '60s and early '70s were also a time when what William James in 1903 called the "Ph.D Octopus"  acquired many more tentacled arms.  New graduate programs started up and new philosophy journals as well.  Another Harvard man, Willard van Orman Quine, cast a jaundiced eye on the proliferation of journals in his delightful "Paradoxes of Plenty" in Theories and Things (Harvard UP, 1981):

Certainly, then, new journals were needed: they were needed by authors of articles too poor to be accepted by existing journals.  The journals that were thus called into existence met the need to a degree, but they in turn preserved, curiously, certain minimal standards; and so a need was felt for further journals still, to help to accommodate the double rejects.  The series invites extrapolation and has had it. (196)

At the same time, the Cold War and the Sputnik scare triggered a flood of federal money into universities. Most of it, of course, funded defense-related research or studies of parts of the world that America considered inimical to its interests [Russian Research Institutes, East Asia Programs, language programs of all sorts], but some of the money slopped over into the Humanities, and even into libraries and university presses.  For a time, commercial publishers found that they could not lose money on an academic book, since enough copies would be sold to newly flush university libraries to enable them to break even.  Those were the days when a philosopher willing to sell his soul (and who among us was not?) could get a contract on an outline, a Preface, or just an idea and a title.  The professor introducing me at one speech I gave said, "Professor Wolff joined the Book of the Month Club, but he didn't realize he was supposed to read a book a month.  He thought he was supposed to publish a book a month."  Well, we all thought we were brilliant, of course.

Then the bubble burst.  First the good jobs disappeared.  Then even jobs we would never have deigned to notice started drying up.  Universities adopted the corporate model, and like good, sensible business leaders, started cutting salaries, destroying job security, and reducing decent, hard-working academics to the status of itinerant peddlers.  Today, two-thirds of the people teaching in higher education are contract employees without good benefits or an assured future.  Scientists do pretty well, thanks to federal support for research, but the Humanities and non-defense related Social Sciences languish.  The arts are going the way of high school bands and poetry societies.

The truth is that I fell off the cart onto a nice big dung heap, and waxed fat and happy, as any self-respecting cockroach would.  My career happened to fit neatly into the half century that will, in future generations, be looked back on as the Golden Age of the American University.  There is precious little I can do for those unfortunate enough to come after me.  But at least, I can assure them that their bad luck is not a judgment on the quality of their work.  And, of course, I can write increasingly lavish letters of recommendation in a desperate attempt to launch them into the few remaining decent teaching jobs.  I would have liked to do better by them.  They deserve it.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Politically Incorrect Tunes

No day without political incorrectness! And no night either.

But I suppose I should issue a TRIGGER WARNING to the 'safe space' girly-girls and pajama boys.  

Do not click on any of these links!  I am not responsible  for your psychic meltdown.

Ray Stevens, Ahab the Arab.  Here is the original from 1962. 

In the lyrics there are references to two hits from the same era, Chubby Checker's The Twist (1960) and Lonnie Donegan's British skiffle number  Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor?  On second thought, the reference is to Checker's Let's Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer (1960).

Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960). "What am I doin' here?"

And now a trio of feminist anthems.

Marcie Blaine, Bobby's Girl.  "And if I was Bobby's girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I'd be." 

Carol Deene, Johnny Get Angry.   Joanie Sommers did it first.  "I want a cave man!"  Nice kazoo work.  k. d. lang's parody. 

Little Peggy March, I Will Follow Him.  "From now until forever."

Meanwhile the guys were bragging of having a girl in every port of call.  Dion, The Wanderer (1961). Ricky Nelson, Travelin' Man. (1961)

Addendum:  I forgot to link to two Ray Stevens numbers that are sure to rankle the sorry sensibilities of  our liberal pals: Come to the USA, God Save Arizona.  If you are a liberal shithead do not click on these links!  But if  if you have any sense you will enjoy them.

On J. P. Moreland’s Theory of Existence

A re-post from February of 2016 with corrections and addenda.

 

Moreland J. P.What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58.  It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article.  First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland.   Then I explain and raise two objections to his theory.  The Moreland text I have under my logical microscope is pp. 134-139 of his 2001 Universals (McGill-Queen's University Press). 

 

Common Ground with Moreland on Existence

We agree on the following five points (which is not to say that Moreland will agree with every detail of my explanation of these five points):

1) Existence is attributable to individuals.  The cat that just jumped into my lap exists.  This very cat, Manny, exists.  Existence belongs to it and is meaningfully attributable to it.  Pace Frege and Russell, 'Manny exists' is a meaningful sentence, and it is meaningful as it stands, as predicating existence of an individual.  It is nothing like 'Manny is numerous.' To argue that since cats are numerous, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny is numerous is to commit the fallacy of division.  Russell held that the same fallacy is committed by someone who thinks that since cats exist, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny exists.  But Russell was mistaken: there is no fallacy of division; there is an equivocation on 'exists.'  It has a general or second-level use and a singular or first-level  use.

There are admissible first-level uses of '. . .exist(s).'  It is not the case that only second-level uses are admissible. And it is only because Manny, or some other individual cat, exists that the concept cat is instantiated.  The existence of an individual cannot be reduced to the being-instantiated of a property or concept.  If you like, you can say that the existence of a concept is its being instantiated.  We sometimes speak like that.  A typical utterance of 'Beauty exists,' say, is not intended to convey that Beauty itself exists, but is intended to convey that Beauty is exemplified, that there are beautiful things.  But then one is speaking of general existence, not of singular existence. 

Clearly, general existence presupposes singular existence in the following sense:  if a first-level concept or property is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, and this individual must exist in order to stand in the instantiation nexus to a concept or property.  From here on out, by 'existence' I mean 'singular existence.'  There is really no need for 'general existence' inasmuch as we can speak of instantiation or of someness, as when we say that cats exist if and only something is a cat. The fundamental error of what Peter van Inwagen calls the 'thin theory' of existence is to imagine that existence can be reduced to the purely logical notion of someness.  That would be to suppose, falsely, that singular existence can be dispensed with in favor of general existence.  Existence is not a merely logical topic ; existence is a metaphysical topic.

2) Existence cannot be an ordinary property of individuals.  While existence is attributable to individuals, it is no ordinary property of them, and if one were to define properties as instantiable entities,  it is no property at all.   There are several reasons for this, but I will mention only one:  you cannot add to a thing's description by saying of it that it exists. Nothing is added to the description of a tomato if one adds 'exists' to its descriptors: 'red,' round,' ripe,' etc.   As Kant famously observed, "Being is not a real predicate," i.e., being or existence adds nothing to the realitas or whatness of a thing. Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, Kant did not anticipate the Frege-Russell theory.  He does not deny that 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate.  (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75, esp. 48-50.)

3) Existence is not a classificatory concept or property.  The reason is simple: there is no logically prior domain of items classifiable as either existent or nonexistent.  Pace Meinong, everything exists.  There are no nonexistent items.  On Meinong's view, some items actually have properties despite having no Being at all.

4) Existence makes a real difference to a thing that exists.  In one sense existence adds nothing to a thing.  It adds nothing quidditative.  In another sense it adds everything:  if a thing does not exist, it is nothing at all! To be or not to be — not just a question, but the most 'abysmal' difference conceivable.    In this connection, Moreland rightly speaks of a "real difference between existence and non-existence." (137)

5) Existence itself exists.  This is not the trivial claim that existing things exist.  It is the momentous claim that that in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists.  It is a logical consequence of (4) in conjunction with (3). As Moreland puts it, "[i]f existence itself does not exist, then nothing else could exist in virtue of having existence." (135)

The above five points are criteria of adequacy for a theory of existence: any adequate theory must include or entail each of these points.   Most philosophers nowadays will not agree, but  I think Moreland will.  So he and I stand on common ground.  I should think that the only fruitful disputes are those that play out over a large chunk of common ground. 

But these criteria of adequacy also pose a problem:  How can existence belong to individuals without being a property of them?  Existence belongs to individuals as it would not belong to them if it were a property of properties or concepts; but it is not a property of individuals.  How can we uphold both of these insights?

Moreland's Theory

Moreland's theory gets off to a good start:  "existence is not a property which belongs, but is the belonging of a property." (137)  This insight nicely accommodates points (1) and (2) above:  existence is attributable to individuals without being an ordinary property of them.  Indeed, it is not a property at all. I infer from this that existence is not the property of having properties. It is rather the mutual belongingness of a thing and its properties.  Moreland continues:

Existence is the entering into the exemplification nexus . . . . In the case of Tony the tiger, the fact [that] the property of being a tiger belongs to something and that something has this property belonging to it is what confers existence. (137)

I take this to mean that existence is the mutual belonging together of individual and property.   It is 'between' a thing and its properties as that which unifies them, thereby tying them into a concrete fact or state of affairs.  The existence of Tony is not one of his properties; nor is the existence of Tony identical to  Tony.   And of course the existence of Tony is not the being-exemplified of some such haecceity property as identity-with-Tony.  Rather, the existence of Tony, of that very individual, is his exemplifying of his properties. The existence of a (thick) individual in general is then the exemplification relation itself insofar as this relation actually relates (thin) individual and properties.  Existence is not a first-level property, or a second-level property, but a very special relation, the exemplification relation.

Moreland implies as much.  In answer to the question how existence itself exists, he explains that "The belonging-to (exemplification, predication) relation is itself exemplified . . ." (137)  Thus the asymmetrical exemplification relation x exemplifies P is exemplified by Tony and the property of being a tiger (in that order). Existence itself exists because existence itself is the universal exemplification relation which is itself exemplified.  It exists in that it is exemplified by a and F-ness, a and G-ness, a and H-ness, b and F-ness, b and G-ness, b and H-ness, and so on.  An individual existent exists in that its ontological constituents (thin particular and properties) exemplify the dyadic exemplification relation which is existence itself.

The basic idea is this.  The existence of a thick particular such as Tony, that is, a particular taken together with all its monadic properties, is the unity of its ontological constituents.  (This is not just any old kind of unity, of course, but a type of unity that ties items that are not facts into a fact.)  This unity is brought about by the dyadic exemplification relation within the thick particular.   The terms of this relation are the thin particular on the one hand and the properties on the other. 

Moreland's theory accommodates all five of the desiderata listed above which in my book is a strong point in its favor.

A Bradleyan Difficulty

A sentence such as 'Al is fat' is not a list of its constituent words.  The sentence is either true or false, but neither the corresponding list, nor any item on the list, is either true or false.  So there is something more to a declarative sentence than its constituent words.  Something very similar holds for the fact that makes the sentence true, if it is true.  I mean the extralinguistic fact of Al's being fat.  The primary constituents of this fact, Al and fatness, can exist without the fact existing. The fact, therefore, cannot be identified with its primary constituents, taken either singly, or collectively.    A fact is more than its primary constituents.  But how are we to account for this 'more'? 

On Moreland's theory, as I understand it, this problem is solved by adding a secondary constituent, the exemplification relation, call it EX, whose task is to connect the primary constituents.  This relation ties the primary constituents into a fact.  It is what makes a fact more than its primary constituents.  Unfortunately, this proposal leads to Bradley's Regress. For if Al + fatness do not add up to the fact of Al's being fat, then Al + fatness + EX won't either.  If Al and fatness can exist without forming the fact of Al's being fat, then Al and fatness and EX can all exist without forming the fact in question.  How can adding a constituent to the primary constituents bring about the fact-constituting unity of all constituents?  EX has not only to connect a and F-ness, but also to connect itself to a and to F-ness.  How can it do the latter?  The answer to this, presumably, will be that EX is a relation and the business of a relation is to relate. EX, relating itself to a and to F-ness, relates them to each other.  EX is an active ingredient in the fact, not an inert ingredient.  It is a relating relation, and not just one more constituent that needs relating to the others by something distinct from itself.  For this reason, Bradley's regress can't get started.  This is a stock response one can find in Brand Blanshard and others, but it is not a good one.

The problem is that EX can exist without relating the relata that it happens to relate in a given case.  This is because EX is a universal.  If it were a relation-instance as on D. W. Mertz's theory, then it would be a particular, an unrepeatable, and could not exist apart from the very items it relates.   Bradley's regress could not then arise.  But if EX is a universal, then it can exist without relating any specific relata that it does relate, even though, as an immanent universal, it must relate some relata or other.  This implies that a relation's relating what it relates is contingent to its being the relation it is.  For example, x loves y contingently relates Al and Barbara, which implies that the relation is distinct from its relating.  The same goes for EX: it is distinct from its relating.  It is more than just a constituent of any fact into which it enters; it is a constituent that does something to the other constituents, and in so doing does something to itself, namely, connect itself to the other constituents.  Relating relations are active ingredients in facts, not inert ingredients.  Or we could say that a relating relation is ontologically participial in addition to its being ontologically substantival.  And since the relating is contingent in any given case, the relating in any given case requires a ground.  What could this ground be? 

My claim is that it cannot be any relation, including the relation, Exemplification.  No relation, by itself, is ontologically participial. More generally, no constituent of a fact can serve as ontological ground of the unity of a fact's constituents.  For any such putatively unifying constituent will either need a further really unifying constituent to connect it to what it connects, in which case Bradley's regress is up and running, or the unifying constituent will have to be ascribed a 'magical' power, a power no abstract object could possess, namely, the power to unify itself with what it unifies.  Such an item would be a self-grounding ground: a ground of unity that grounds its unity with that which it unifies.  The synthetic unity at the heart of each contingent fact needs to be grounded in an act of synthesis that cannot be brought about by any constituent of a fact, or by the fact itself. 

My first objection to Moreland's theory may be put as follows.  The existence of a thick particular (which we are assaying as a concrete fact along the lines of Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong) cannot be the fact's constituents' standing in the exemplification relation.  And existence itself, existence in its difference from existents, cannot be identified with the exemplification relation.

Can Existence Exist Without Being Uniquely Self-Existent?

I agree with Moreland that existence itself exists.  One reason was supplied by Reinhardt Grossmann: "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (Categorial Structure of the World, 405) But I have trouble with the notion that existence itself is the exemplification relation.  Existence as that which is common to all that exists, and as that in virtue of which everything exists cannot be just one more thing that exists.  Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership, such as the category of relations.  For reasons like these such penetrating minds as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Panayot Butchvarov have denied that existence itself exists. 

In my 2002 existence book I proposed a synthesis of these competing theses:  Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it.  From this point of view, Moreland has a genuine insight, but he has not taken it far enough: he stops short at the dubious view that existence is the relation of exemplification.  But if you drive all the way down the road with me you end up at Divine Simplicity, which Moreland has  good reasons for rejecting.

The Owl of Minerva and the Consolations of Philosophy

It appears that a tipping point has been reached in America's decline. Our descent into twilight and beyond is probably now irreversible.  Collective race madness blankets the land, the dogs of destruction have been set loose, and the authorities have abdicated.

Should any of this trouble the philosopher?

Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes to us from Plato's Republic (486a).  The rise and fall of great nations is just more grist for the philosopher's mill.  His true homeland is nothing so paltry as a particular nation, even one as exceptional as the USA, and his fate as a truth-seeker cannot be tied to its fate.  Like the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly Athens is not bound to a geographical location.

National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however, it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, wisdom  arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.

Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey — no longer green and full of life.  And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane.   The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood.  Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight.  What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.

Some of us, those of the tribe of Plato, not that of Hegel, look beyond time's horizon to the topos ouranos where the heavenly Jerusalem and the heavenly Athens are one. We see this world as a vanishing quantity whose very nature is to vanish as all things vain must vanish.

The consolations of philosophy are many.

A Country Not Salvageable

As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.

What’s That Again?

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

Andrew [Sullivan] writes that liberals should stop saying "truly stupid things like race has no biological element." I agree. Race clearly has a biological element — because we have awarded it one.

That is quite a clever self-contradiction, and undoubtedly a delight to the bien-pensant readers of The Atlantic.  Race has a biological element and yet it doesn't because race is merely socially construed to have a biological element.

Socially construed by whom? 

"Race," writes the great historian Nell Irvin Painter, "is an idea, not a fact." Indeed. Race does not need biology. Race only requires some good guys with big guns looking for a reason.

Got that?

A Reader Needs Advice re: Graduate School

The following is from a reader who approves of my idea of soliciting advice from the rest of you, many of whom are better apprised than me of the current academic climate and job market. Name and identifying details have been elided.

If you have a moment to offer some advice on the situation I've found myself in, I would be very grateful. If not, no worries. 
 
I moved a great distance from home with my wife (still within my country, ____) to attend a Ph.D. program in philosophy. I am [under 30]. The faculty member whom I desired to supervise my work is well-known and respected in her field and her interests align perfectly with mine. I completed the first year of my Ph.D., satisfying all my course requirements, only to learn yesterday that my supervisor has taken up a new position elsewhere in ___, and effective immediately will no longer be part of our department. I knew this was a risk of attending a school for the sake of one person. My gamble did not pay off. It is too late for me to transfer schools for this year. Waiting another year to reapply to other programs seems like a waste of time, especially at my age. There is no one at my department who can supervise my current interests (and if there are, they are nobodies). Part of me wonders if this is a sign to get out of academia now while I have the chance. But the skills I desire to acquire and the questions I want to pursue can only be acquired and pursued, 'professionally' anyway, in academia. What to do?
 
You did not say whether your wife is employed (and making good money) or whether you have children or intend to have them in the near future. Is she supportive both spiritually and materially? These are relevant factors.  Since you are a white male getting close to 30 whose political leanings are broadly conservative (else you wouldn't be corresponding with me), my advice is to leave academia now.  The job market is brutal, you are getting old, and the academy is a hostile environment for conservatives.  This is advice I tender with my 'practical hat' on, not my 'idealistic hat.'  I could say that philosophy is a noble calling worthy of years of sacrifice, that the genuine article needs to be defended and upheld in the currently decadent halls of academe; but that is advice I would feel comfortable giving to myself alone.  Rather than put up with the low pay and humiliations of the academic world, why not find the modern-day equivalent of lens-grinding and make like Spinoza pursuing philosophy as a free man unburdened by the institutional constraints of the leftist seminaries? Is it not nobler to separate truth-seeking from money-making, subordinating end to means?
 
Related:
 

Patrick Kurp on the urge to sack, defile, vandalize, despoil, tear down and raze

Here at Anecdotal Evidence:

“Anno 1527, when Rome was sacked by Burbonius [Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor], the common soldiers made such spoil that fair churches were turned to stables, old monuments and books, made horse-litter, or burned like straw; reliques, costly pictures defaced; altars demolished; rich hangings, carpets, &c. trampled in the dirt.”

The human urge to sack, defile, vandalize, despoil, tear down and raze has a long and ever-present history. Let’s distinguish it from a related crime, theft, which is most often motivated by greed and envy. Heaving a brick through a window in order to steal a flat-screen television is one thing; it almost makes sense. Pulling down the statue of someone about whom you know little or nothing, and that was paid for with private or public funds, is quite another. There’s a blind hatred in many humans for all that is sacred, noble and aesthetically pleasing. Such things reproach us and remind us that we are not always worthy of them. Entropy never sleeps but its slow-grinding work is accelerated by the human mania for desecration. The passage above is from Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He confirms what we already suspected — vandals will not remain content destroying only inanimate objects:

“. . . senators and cardinals themselves dragged along the streets, and put to exquisite torments, to confess where their money was hid; the rest murdered on heaps, lay stinking in the streets; infants’ brains dashed out before their mothers’ eyes.”

Once the appetite for vandalism is whetted and goes unstanched, what’s next? Churches, synagogues, libraries and schools, and then human beings, individually and in groups. Murder is vandalism with its logic extended. Even the educated and enlightened revel in the destruction, so long as it’s undertaken by proxies. Referring to Martin Luther in The Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay writes:

“Rome to him had no virtues. He was, no doubt, of those who grimly rejoiced in the awful sack and massacre by the Imperialist troops in 1527. This shattering event and its consequences, while increasing the number of Roman ruins, for some years kept visitors nervously away, as well as driving into exile and beggary hundreds of the noble families and the scholars.”

Why a Philosopher Should Meditate and Why it is Difficult for a Philosopher to Meditate

If a philosopher seeks the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then he should do so by all available routes.  Qua philosopher he operates in the aether of abstract thought, on the plane of discursive reason, but he cannot consistently with his calling ignore other avenues of advance.  It is after all the truth that is sought, not merely the truth as philosophically accessible.  There is surely no justification for the identification of truth with philosophically accessible truth.

Meditation is difficult for intellectual types because of their tendency to overvalue their mental facility and cleverness. They are good at dialectics and mental jugglery, and people tend to value and overvalue what they are good at. Philosophers can become as obsessed with their cleverness and gamesmanship  as body builders with muscular hypertrophy.  Indeed, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the typical analytic philosopher suffers from hypertrophy of the critical/discursive/dialectical faculty.  He can chop logic, he can mentally and verbally jabber, jabber, jabber, and scribble, scribble, scribble, but he can't be silent, listen, attend. He would sneer, to his own detriment, at this thought of Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 107):

The capacity to drive away a thought once and for all is the gateway to eternity.

Compare this striking line from Evagrius Ponticus (The Praktikos and Chapters of Prayer, tr. Bamberger, Cistercian Publications, 1972, p. 66, #70):

For prayer is the rejection of concepts.

Credo

It is my belief that there is no better and more noble way to spend the best hours of one's brief time here below than by living the Great Questions, reverentially but critically.  And that includes the question of the possibility and actuality of divine revelation and all the rest of the theological and philosophical conundra, including Trinity, Incarnation, Transubstantiation, Ascension, Assumption, and so on, until death lifts the curtain and brings us light.

And if there is no lifting, and no light? Well then, we have spent our lives in an excellent way and have lost nothing of value.  A riddle dissolved, like a riddle solved, is a riddle no more.