December 2020 – Maverick Philosopher

New Year’s Eve at the Oldies: ‘Last’ Songs for the Last Night of the Year

Happy New Year, everybody.

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel.

Last Call, Dave van Ronk. "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash. Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.^[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.^[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Wokespeak and Wokespoke

Here:

“Equity.” Equity has now replaced the Civil Rights–era goal of “equality” — a word relegated to vestigial Wokespoke. After 60 years, equality apparently was exposed as a retrograde bourgeois synonym for the loaded “equality of opportunity” rather than a necessary, mandated “equality of result.”

And rightly so, since any and every inequality of outcome can only be explained by something nefarious such as racism or sexism.

A Conversion Story

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in her own words.

An important part of what opened me to Catholicism—and to the peerless gift of faith in Christ Jesus—was my growing horror at the pride of too many in the secular academy. The sin is all the more pernicious because it is so rarely experienced as sin. Educated and enjoined to rely upon our reason and cultivate our autonomy, countless perfectly decent and honorable professors devote their best efforts to making sense of thorny intellectual problems, which everything in their environment encourages them to believe they can solve. Postmodernism has challenged the philosophical presuppositions of the modernists’ intellectual hubris, but, with the same stroke, it has pretended to discredit what it calls “logocentrism,” namely, the centrality of the Word. In the postmodernist universe, all claims of universal certainty must be exposed as delusions, leaving the individual as authoritative arbiter of the meaning that pertains to his or her situation. Thus, what originated as a struggle to discredit pretensions to intellectual authority has ended, at least in the American academy, in a validation of personal prejudice and desire.

In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

The 'thin' conception of being or existence entails that there are no modes of being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-being doctrine, the MOB doctrine if you will, is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics, although I won't argue for the stronger claim here.

My task is not to specify what the modes of being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of being. So I plan to look at a range of examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of being they involve.

This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of being, and not merely in their respective natures.

1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, whitecaps, and carpet bulges are all items that exist, but not on their own. They need — as a matter of metaphysical necessity — faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:

D1. S is a (primary) substance =_df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

D2. A is an accident =_df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.

By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in A. Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.

The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to another. You can't literally catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is an intimate one. But it is an intimacy shy of identity. A substance has accidnet; it cannot therefore be identical to any one of them or even the whole lot of them.

2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A exist and exist in the very same way. Suppose that S and A are the only two items that exist. Then of course there is a sense in which both items exist: each is something and not nothing. Both are there to be quantified over. We can say '( $\exists$ x)(x = S)' and '( $\exists$ x)(x = A)': 'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.'

3. Now the issue is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' a semantic term; 'mode' an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of being. They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.

4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither could exist without the other. But S can exist without A. Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their mode of being. One cannot make sense of inherence without distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of being.

5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of being entails the unintelligibility of modes of being, the thin conception ought to be rejected.

But I have never met a more scintillating interlocutor!

Talking to oneself is often idle talk too.

If You Understood, You’d Agree!

There is a privileging of one's position whereby every objection can only be proof of misunderstanding. I get this privileging impression from Eugen Fink. One example is on p. 47 of The Sixth Cartesian Meditation.

A Mystical Approach to the Incarnation

I have been, and will continue, discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner. Now what do I mean by that? Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this: How can three things be one thing? With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man? These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of ordinary experience. We seek intelligibility by an objective route. We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one. See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

2. The doctrine of the Trinity spelled out in the Athanasian Creed, is that there is one God in three divine Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Each person is God, and yet there is exactly one God, despite the fact that the Persons are numerically distinct from one another. According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, the second person of the Trinity, the Son or Logos, became man in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a strong temptation to think of the doctrinal statements as recording (putative) objective facts and then to wonder how they are possible. I have touched upon some of the logical problems the objective approach encounters in previous posts. The logical problems are thorny indeed and seem to require for their solution questionable logical innovations such as the notion (championed by Peter Geach) that identity is sortal-relative, or an equally dubious mysterianism which leaves us incapable of saying just what we would be accepting were we to accept the theological propositions in question. The reader should review those problems in order to understand the motivation of what follows.

A Conversion Story

The historian Eugene D. Genovese started out Catholic, became a Communist, but then returned to the church of his upbringing. Here he tells the story of his wife's conversion. (HT: Karl White) I have read parts of one book by Genovese, The Southern Front: History and Politics in the Culture War (University of Missouri Press, 1995). I recommend it.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a prominent historian, feminist and author of works on the South and women’s history, was a convert to the Catholic faith. In 2003 she received from President Bush the National Humanities Medal, which recognized her as “defender of reason and servant of faith”. She was a member of the editorial board of Voices until her death on January 2, 2007, at age sixty-five. Her husband, Eugene Genovese, equally well-known professor of history at Emory University and author of books on the history of slavery in the South, recently published a personal reminiscence of his beloved wife, titled Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2009.) Chapter 3, “Nature and Grace”, details her conversion to Catholicism. Dr. Genovese has very graciously granted permission to reprint a slightly edited version of this chapter in Voices.

Filed under Conversions.

The Introvert Advantage

Social distancing? I've been doing it all my life. O beata solitudo, sola beatitudo! Happy solitude, the sole beatitude. How sweet it is, and made sweeter still by a little socializing.

Full lockdown? I could easily take it, and put it to good use. It provides an excellent excuse to avoid meaningless holiday socializing with its empty and idle talk.

Franz Kafka: The Diaries 1910-1923, ed. Max Brod, Schocken 1948, p. 199:

In the next room my mother is entertaining the L. couple. They are talking about vermin and corns. (Mrs. L. has six corns on each toe.) It is easy to see that there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort. It is information that will be forgotten again by both and that even now proceeds along in self-forgetfulness without any sense of responsibility.

I have read this passage many times, and what delights me each time is the droll understatement of it: "there is no real progress made in conversations of this sort." No indeed. There is no progress because the conversations are not seriously about anything worth talking about. There is no Verantwortlichkeit (responsibility): the talk does not answer (antworten) to anything real in the world or anything real in the interlocutors. It is jaw-flapping for its own sake, mere linguistic behavior which, if it conveys anything, conveys: ‘I like you, you like me, and everything’s fine.’

The interlocutors float along in the inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit) of what Martin Heidegger calls das Man, the ‘they self.’ Compare Heidegger’s analysis of idle talk (Gerede) in Sein und Zeit (1927), sec. 35.

Am I suggesting that one should absolutely avoid idle talk? That would be to take things to an unnecessary and perhaps imprudent extreme. It is prudent to get yourself perceived as a regular guy — especially if you are an 'irregular guy.'

I am not under full lockdown like the Canadians in Ontario province. But the weight room now allows only six at a time and for one hour only, and you have to book each session in advance. This Christmas Eve should be very nice. I booked a 3-4 pm slot. I expect no one else to be there; I can overstay into the 4-5 pm slot. I can sing, talk to myself, grunt, groan, and use any machine. The TVs will be on; I can crank the fans way up. I shall commandeer the stationary bike upon which I will pedal while reading J. J. Valberg's superb The Puzzle of Experience. Ditto tomorrow.

Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist. (Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena) "Only when one is alone can one be entirely oneself." (tr. BV)

I wouldn't make a very good socialist.

Oh happy solitude, sole beatitude! The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune, in old age, as Einstein attests.

Albert Einstein, "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5:

. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

Intimations of Elsewhere Ignored

A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience. He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling. He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance. Vouchsafed a hint of what might be a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating. That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding.

It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.

I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously. And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical. But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating — that puzzles me.

So maybe some things human are foreign to me after all.

Merry Christmas to All Readers, Old and New . . .

. . . and best wishes for the New Year. This from a liberal reader:

I've read your blog daily for six years now because I want a rational conservative voice in my life to challenge my own (very opposite) beliefs. You've provided that in spades, and I'm grateful for it.

Would that all liberals were as good-natured and open to challenge. We might then be able to hope for a lessening of tensions in the coming year. But I am no pollyanna: 2021, I predict, will be a year of acrimony to rival the worst years of the '60s.

Some Posts and Ghosts of Christmas Past

'Merry Xmas'

Egyptian Muslims Serve as Human Shields at Coptic Christmas Mass

Socializing as Self-Denial

Merry Scroogemas!

Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Limits of Doxastic Voluntarism

In the Interests of Prandial Harmony

Minimalist and Maximalist Modes of Holiday Impersonality

Of Christograms and Political Correctness

Thoughts in and of Ancient Lycia, Asia Minor

From my Turkish journal, 22 February 1996:

Phaselis is a romantic tangle of Graeco-Roman ruins in a beautiful natural setting. I hiked back into the brush, got scratched up, but was rewarded by ruins and views out to the Mediterranean, and up to snow-capped mountains.

From Phaselis to the resort town of Kemer. I am sitting at the moment facing the sea drinking beer at an 'Italian' bistro. Table set on the lawn. Vegetation like Arizona: prickly pear cactus, rosemary in bloom, a palm or two, oleander, ice plant. Overcast and a bit cool. The cactus pads have names carved into them: Hasan, Samer, Erkan.

Living life versus thinking and reflecting on it and its 'meaning.' Surely this is a bogus distinction? For a man to live thoughtlessly is not to live, and to live the thinker's life is to live in a certain way. So what is the valid content of the distinction? Thought interferes with the immediacy of experience. Thought distances, and distance is distortion. But total immediacy would be blindness.

Thought without life is empty; life without thought is blind. The true life is a thinking life infused with experience broad and deep. So travel and suffer and get scratched up by the brambles of experience, but take good notes! Press the grapes of experience for the wine of wisdom. Stomp them for their juice.

Breathe and feel and take a good snort of the sea breeze. Play the fool; better to love and have lost than never to have loved. Take your best shot, put your ass on the line, go deep, pay your dues, sing the blues.

Above all, take risks! Calculated, deep thought risks. You learned long ago in your Thoreauvian adolescence that a man sits as many risks as he runs. Go to the brink, but with cautious steps. Take it to the limit, but know the limit. Dissolution into the Apeiron can wait for later. Travel and act but don't neglect to meet the mat of meditation often to quell both action and thought.

Richter on Rationality

Hi, Bill. I love your Maverick blog.

I’m Reed Richter: a 71 yr old ex-academic, retired and living in Chapel Hill, NC. I was an undergrad philosophy major at UNC and did my PhD at UC Irvine. My early work was on decision theory. After teaching at UCI, UNC, and Duke, I moved to Europe. I taught a year in Salzburg, but dropped out of academics to run a family business. Nevertheless I continued to participate in academic philosophy and publish a few more papers.

BV: Small world. I'm a year younger, quit the teaching racket and a tenured position thirty years ago to write philosophy and live an eremitic life in the Sonoran desert; from Southern California, applied for graduate work at U.C. Irvine for the bad reason that a quondam girlfriend had transferred there; was luckily rejected, studied in Salzburg, Boston, and Freiburg; taught at Boston College, University of Dayton, Case Western Reserve University, and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. I work and publish in German philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. I know little about decision theory, and I don't call myself a political philosopher. So caveat lector.

My son is now a philosophy major, but he’s totally into anarchism, Hegel, and continental philosophy. I have little interest in that material and can’t help him much there. But he’s writing an honors thesis on Wolff and autonomy and, helping him I ran across your excellent commentary. A couple of comments.

A comment on this point: [The following is from my November 2009 entry Notes on Anarchism II: Wolff on Authority]

According to Robert Paul Wolff, "Every man who possesses both free will and reason has an obligation to take responsibility for his actions . . . ." (In Defense of Anarchism, Harper 1970, 13) Here a question arises: Is it in virtue of my possession of free will and reason that I have the aforementioned obligation? If yes, would Wolff not be inferring an 'ought' from an 'is'? That I am free, and that I possess reason are non-normative facts about me. Taken together they entail that I am capable of taking responsibility for my actions. But how does it follow that I ought to take responsibility of them, that I am morally obliged to? Let's let this query simmer on the back burner for the time being.

Richter: It occurs to me that possessing reason implies being rational. And being rational is implicitly normative, implying oughts. So from the brute facts—I possess reason; I’m rational; in fact above all else, I want a cup of water; and there is a cup of perfectly potable water in front of me—it follows that therefore I ought to drink that cup of water. All things equal, rationality requires maximizing expected utility, generating oughts. Well, at the very least, if one doesn’t want to view rationality as implicitly normative, then that’s a great example of is implying ought. But that’s a trivial point.

BV: I don't follow the above. To possess reason is to possess the capacity to act rationally. I take it that rationality in the means-end sense is at issue. The talk of MEU makes that clear. Suppose an agent exercises his capacity to reason in a given situation: he chooses means conducive to the end he desires to attain. He wants a drink of water; potable water is in front of him, and so he drinks the water. How does normativity come into this? Well, if you want water, and potable water is available, then you ought to drink it. It would be rational in the means-ends sense to drink the water, and irrational in the same sense not to drink it.

But if an ought is thereby generated, it is a mere hypothetical, not a categorical ought. How do we get to the categorical moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions from the capacity to reason in the means-end sense plus free will?

Moral Progress Report

Between my abandonment of my vices and their abandonment of me, progress has been made. The weaker the flesh, the stronger the spirit.