September 2020 – Page 2 – Maverick Philosopher

‘The Wrong Side of History’

(An edited re-post from 15 May 2012.)

I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was 'on the wrong side of history.' But surely this is a phrase that no self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. The phrase suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and those outcomes are somehow justified by the actual tendency of events. But how can the mere fact of a certain drift justify that drift? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it? I think not.

'Everyone today believes that such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is true. 'Everyone now does such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such ought to be done. 'The direction of events is towards such-and-such.' It doesn't follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. In each of these cases there is a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, or values from facts.

One who opposes the drift toward socialism, a drift that is accelerating under President Obama, is on the wrong side of history. But that is no objection unless one assumes that history's direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that, one for whom all the real is rational and all the rational real. Marxists and 'progressives' might believe it. But no conservative who understands conservatism can believe it.*

The other night a conservative talk show host told a guest that she was on the wrong side of history in her support for same-sex marriage. My guess is that in a generation the same-sex marriage issue will be moot, the liberals having won. The liberals will have been on the right side of history. The right side of history, but wrong nonetheless.

As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative don't talk like a liberal. Don't validate, by adopting, their question-begging phrases.

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*Memo to self: this entire problematic needs more careful thought. What about the theist who believes that God has a providential plan and that what happens happens in accordance with the divine will? And doesn't Christian eschatology in good measure drive the Hegelian and Marxist schemes?

Guilt and Personal Identity

Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then? Not very well. I was different all right, but not numerically.

One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity. (Roughly, a person at a time is a bundle of mental data; a person over time is a bundle of these bundles.) But even if such a theory were otherwise in the clear it is difficult to square such a theory with what appears to be a non-negotiable datum: I and no one else did such-and-such 30, 40, 50 years ago; I am the source of that misdeed; I could have, and should have, done otherwise. We convict ourselves in memory knowing that the one who remembers is strictly the same as the one who did the deed.

The mystery of the self!

Without Affect

Try to absorb criticism without affect, attending only to its merits or demerits.

Is There Anything Good About Moral Failure?

Moral failure makes us humble and it casts serious doubt on the proposition that we can appreciably improve ourselves by our own efforts whether individual or collective. Taken to heart, moral failure points us beyond the secular sphere for the help we know we need. Whether there is anything beyond said sphere, and whether help is available there, are further questions.

Voting and the Stupidity of Liberals

A re-post from February 2018.

Michelle Malkin:

Two adult men, occupying lofty perches as law professors, argued this week that the voting age in the U.S. should be lowered to 16 because some high school survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting who want gun control "are proving how important it is to include young people's voices in political debate."

Read it all.

There is really nothing so idiotic that it won't be embraced by some destructive leftist. And you are still a member of the Democrat Party?

If breathing is a sufficient condition for voting, then cats and dogs should have the vote. So I should have three votes, my own and two cat proxies. The cat lady down the street, who is reputed to have nine cats, should be allowed ten votes. After all, cats and dogs and children and illegal aliens and felons have an interest in clean air and clean water and other things affected by political arrangements. So why shouldn't they have a vote?

If I have to explain to you why, then you are too obtuse, morally or intellectually or both, to profit from any explanation. Do you remember that race-hustler Jesse Jackson? He wanted felons to have the vote. He wanted people who lack the sense to order their own lives to have a say in how a society, or rather our lives, should be ordered. But of course the destructive leftist is not interested in right ordering, but in any ordering that grants him and his ilk maximum power. So it is no surprise that leftists never miss an opportunity to assault our Constitutional rights.

Vile, mendacious, and stupid. In that order.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sibelius, Symphony No. 1 in E Minor, Opus 39

Leonard Bernstein conducts.

20th century classical music with human meaning. My favorite part is the Andante movement, starting around 13:00.

Commentary by Robert Reilly: Jean Sibelius' Music of the Logos.

Sibelius said, “There is music in the whole universe.” He believed in the “Music of the Spheres,” the classical Greek view that held that the mathematical relationships among the heavenly bodies are the same as those of music. The heavens are literally harmonious. He said, “I believe that there are musical notes and harmonies on all planets.” This included planet earth. Sibelius’s experience of the world was essentially musical.

[. . .]

Though Sibelius was not religious in a conventional sense, he was a deep believer. “The essence of man’s being,” he said, “is his striving after God.” He saw art as hieratic and composition as a vocation. In words that could hardly go more directly to the heart of the matter, he said, “It [composition] is brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that really has significance.”

Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God

Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights. But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it:

The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective 'I exist' and an objective 'the world around me exists' awareness is unsustainable as long as the the ultimate reality of God is not part of this experience, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this they exposed themselves to Hume's and Kant's biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience.

Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.

A man like me has one foot in Jerusalem and the other in Athens. Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard, however, have both feet in Jerusalem. They just can't understand what drives the philosopher to seek a rational demonstration of the existence of God. Soloveitchik's analogy betrays him as a two-footed Hierosolymian. Obviously, the bride in the embrace of the beloved needs no proof of his reality. The bride's experience of the beloved is ongoing and coherent and repeatable ad libitum. If she leaves him for a while, she can come back and be assured that he is the same as the person she left. She can taste his kisses and enjoy his scent while seeing him and touching him and hearing him. He remains self-same as a unity in and through the manifold of sensory modes whereby he is presented to her. And in any given mode, he is a unity across a manifold. Shifting her position, she can see him from different angles with the visual noemata cohering in such a way as to present a self-same individual. What's more, her intercourse with his body fits coherently with her intercourse with his mind as mediated by his voice and gestures.

I could go on, but point is plain. There is simply no room for any practical doubt as to the beloved's reality given the forceful, coherent, vivacious, and obtrusive character of the bride's experience of him. She is compelled to accept his reality. There is no room here for any doxastic voluntarism. The will does not play a role in her believing that he is real. There is no need for decision or faith or a leap of faith in her acceptance of his reality.

Our experience of God is very different. It comes by fleeting glimpses and gleanings and intimations. The sensus divinitatis is weak and experienced only by some. The bite of conscience is not unambiguously of higher origin than the Freudian superego and social suggestion. Mystical experiences are few and far-between. Though unquestionable as to their occurrence, they are questionable as to their veridicality because of their fitful and fragmentary character. They are not validated in the ongoing way of ordinary sense perception. They don't integrate well with ordinary perceptual experiences. And so the truth of these mystical and religious experiences can and perhaps should be doubted. It is this fact that motivates philosophers to seek independent confirmation of the reality of the object of these experiences by the arguments that Soloveitchik and Co. dismiss.

The claim above that the awareness expressed by 'I exist' is unsustainable unless the awareness of God is part of the experience is simply false. That I exist is certain to me. But it is far from certain what the I is in its inner nature and what existence is and whether the I requires God as its ultimate support. The cogito is not an experience of God even if God exists and no cogito is possible without him. The same goes for the existence of the world. The existence of God is not co-given with the existence of the world. It is plain to the bride's senses that the beloved is real. It is not plain to our senses that nature is God's nature, that the cosmos is a divine artifact. That is why one cannot rely solely on the cosmic experience of nature as of a divine artifact, but must proceed cosmologically by inference from what is evident to what is non-evident.

Soloveitchik is making the same kind of move that St. Paul makes in Romans 1: 18-20. My critique of that move here.

Women Need to ‘Man Up’

A member of the distaff contingent advises. If men are too 'cocky,' then perhaps the female equivalent is the answer rather than the cultivation of grievances:

How did we create an entire class of highly privileged, mostly affluent young women who feel unsafe on campus, microaggressed at every turn, utterly unable to cope with the garden-variety misdemeanours of boys and men, who have been behaving badly since time began despite our many efforts (most quite successful) to civilize them?

Well, you know the answer. The universities are hothouses for a grievance culture that sees racism, sexism and misogyny under every rug. Many of the faculty derive their livelihoods from it. These institutions have constructed increasingly elaborate codes of conduct and large administrative apparatuses to detect and uproot these evils, however subtle and invisible they may be to ordinary people.

Wanted Dead and Alive

Something Good from these Politically Trying Times?

One positive upshot of these times that try our souls is that more and more of us will come to appreciate the hopelessness of this world and the people in it. Self-satisfied worldlings will find it difficult to retain their worldliness and self-satisfaction as civil order collapses and the tide of irrationality rises. Their naive faith in humanity will experience a serious rebuke. They will come to realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from our dire predicament by human, all-too-human, means. Some will despair unto anti-natalism or even suicide. But others will enter upon the Quest for a saving Reality beyond this passing scene of ignorance and evil. They will tread the paths of prayer and meditation. Feeling for the first time the pangs of spiritual hunger, they will turn in the right spirit to the great scriptures and the writings and practices of the sages. Their smug complacency will be a thing of the past.

The Main Threat of the Left to the Right

The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement:

. . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.

In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.

This is why sane and decent Americans absolutely must vote for Donald J. Trump. Dreher doesn't draw this conclusion due to his irrational Trump hatred, but indications are that he too will vote for Trump come November.

Addendum (9/7). Dr. Vito Caiati comments:

Thank you for posting that long quotation from Rod Dreher, which well sums up the principal threat of the social, cultural, and intellectual threat of the Left.

Today, Malcolm Pollack calls attention to the coming post-election mayhem that the Left will unleash given a Trump victory in November He links to Michael Anton's "alarming" essay on the form this "coup" will take (https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/). Anton may well be right, and if so, the threat that we are facing goes far beyond that of the "soft-totalitarianism" so often discussed by Dreher. Very dark times have arrived if even a fraction of Anton's prognostication occurs.

I am increasingly convinced that this federal republic of ours, the product of early capitalist and pre-capitalist social forces, that is, of a particular historical conjuncture in the history of early modern Europe and its colonial offshoots, is at odds with the underlying interests of contemporary corporate capital,whose ruling class and the myriad of minions who either serve it directly or are sustained and tolerated by it–all anti-national, globalist, technocratic, anti-democratic, and anti-(classical) liberal to one degree of another–and that they are determined to sweep it away. The Left today is bizarrely made up of the most disparate and far-flung social elements, from the anarchist or pseudo-Marxist Antifa shock troops in the streets; the apparatchiks of the federal, state, and local governments; the swarms of ill-educated "intellectuals" in and out of the universities; the leftist heretical or cowed"Christian" leaders of the Catholic and other churches; and of course the hacks of the media and the culture industries. Whether this coalition, wielded together only partially by ideology, can withstand the inevitable leftward track that would come with full power is unlikely, but in the meantime it will have reduced what remains of the Old Republic and its traditions to ruins.

PS. In my quick list of the Left's "disparate" elements, I forgot to include the significant portion of very rich corporate elite, the core of the ruling class, which have become the key funders and advocates of its ideology and policies, whether through conviction or convenience. Here, one can speak of a strange compromesso storico, one based on continued corporate dominance (for example, silence on real economic and social problems), and hence the interests of the ruling class, in return for the advancement of the tribalist, racist, anti-American, anti-Western ideology and policies of the Left. This is not the first time that capitalists and corporate elites have coalesced with anti-democratic and anti-liberal political formations; one only has to consider the accommodations of German big capital with the Nazi regime or that of Japanese zaibatu with Japanese militarism. This time, however, the dance is with the Left.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs

September already. A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil 'secular liturgy.'

Dinah Washington, September in the Rain

Rod Stewart, Maggie May. "Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It's late September and I really should be back at school."

Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until September

Django Reinhardt, September Song

George Shearing, September in the Rain

Walter Huston, September Song

Addendum

This from a London reader:

Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0_zZ7qQDA. Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an account of her conversion to Christianity here.

I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road. I too love the 'Bird'-like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley 'Bird' Parker, also beloved of Kerouac. Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition. Believe it or not, King's version is a demo. That's one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 'British Invasion.' I wonder why.

More on “God + World = God”

The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position? Let's consider both sides of the question.

A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.

Consider two possible scenarios. In the first, God alone exists. In the second, God exists and creates a world. On a view of God according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible. It is possible that God create and it is possible that he not create. There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. Clearly, the scenarios are different. But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios. For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios. Therefore, it is not the case that God + World = God.

To extend the argument:

If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else? If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else? How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself? Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?

After all, it is evident to the senses, even if not self-evident, that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing. Nor it is a dream or an illusion. Nor is it a world of Spinozistic modes, but a world of finite substances. I would also say that it is 'better known' that this material world of multiple substances exists than that God exists. But suppose God does exist. Then both the world (creatures) and God exist. Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone? Someone who maintains that God + world = God is maintaining in effect that there are no creatures at all.

B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.

Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being. For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct, then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.

So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence. To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy. I am standing before a mirror looking at my image. How many men? One, not two. I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man. An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man. To be of a man is not to be a man. My image is of a man (genitivus objectivus); it is not a man. And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists. I exist and my image exists. Both exist, but in different ways. I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist. Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture. (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.)

It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image. (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.) Now we cannot say that the man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not. But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man. There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an objective genitive.

Man and image both exist. Yet there is an important difference. I say it is a difference in mode of existence. The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property. This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.

So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence.

Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man. This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it. If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image = Man.

Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it.

C. Aporetic Conclusion

The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling. But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling. If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong. One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being. But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong. In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.

I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.

My interim conclusion is aporetic: both positions on our question are reasonably maintained. They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.

I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.

Suicide as Premature Jailbreak

Man up, and serve your time in the penal colony of the world. You'll die soon enough.