The true skeptic does not deny truth. He is an inquirer who so loves truth that he will accept no substitutes, no easy answers, no comforting dogmatisms. That some skeptics become Pyrrhonian slackers is no argument against skepticism properly understood. The true skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier.
Month: April 2021
At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron
A Good Friday meditation at Substack.
Addendum 4/4/21. Vito Caiati writes,
I have been pondering the profound and poignant Good Friday meditation, “At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron,” that you just posted on Substack. The Weil text that inspired your post leaves me, nevertheless, with a tormenting question, one which arises from her conviction that when an iron spike rips through the flesh of a human hand, “The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation.” However, does the assumed equivalence between the overwhelming pain and suffering of human beings whose flesh is pierced by iron and that of Christ really hold, for it is the Second Person of the Trinity who is crucified and, as such, a Being who is omniscient? However the admixture of the divine and human natures of Christ are conjoined in his Person, we cannot assume, without falling in heresy, that one of those natures, with its inherent intellectual capacities, ceases to be operational at certain moments, so that on the Cross only the human nature is present. If both natures are present, than the divine nature of Christ faces death with the divine knowledge of those things that are hidden from other men, in particular the certainty of God’s existence and the knowledge of His nature, the destiny of the soul after death, its relation to God, and so on. Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die without the terrors of the unknown that plagues us ordinary human beings. Thus, it would seem that the analogy of his suffering and ours holds but only to a certain point and not absolutely. Am I wrong on this?
Well, Vito, I can't say that you are wrong. Indeed, I think you are right about an implication of the orthodox and traditional "two natures, one person" understanding of the Incarnation. If Christ is one person with two natures, then both natures must be "operational" to use your word at all times during Christ's earthly sojourn. (What happens after the Ascension is a further question.) But if there is no 'switching off' of the divine nature during the Crucifixion, then how can Christ experience fully the human predicament in which the worst of suffering is not mere physical suffering but the latter together with the utter desolation of abandonment? Recall that the traditional understanding, hammered out over a number of Church councils, was that Christ is fully man, and of course fully God as well. And to experience fully the horror of the fallen human predicament, one would have to experience the spiritual and emotional agony of abandonment, and this to its highest degree. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Who is speaking here? Not the Second Person of the Trinity. A man is speaking, no ordinary man, of course, but a man nonetheless who came into the world in the usual way, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. There is no satisfactory clarification of this state of affairs, at least none satisfactory to the discursive intellect. This is because the Incarnation as traditionally understood is logically contradictory. I have discussed this many times. (See Trinity and Incarnation category.) In the present context, the contradiction takes the following form. The man dying on the cross is the God-Man; he is one person (hypostasis) in two (individual) natures. Now who cries out in extremis to the Father? Not a nature, hence not Christ's human nature. A nature can do no such thing. A person can. But there is only one person on the cross, the Logos Itself, the Word, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Second Person is crying to the First Person: Why have you forsaken me? That's absurd, i.e. logically impossible (given the background theological assumptions). God cannot forsake God. Don't forget: Trinity is not tritheism. God is one.
I would say that that the absurdity of the Incarnation, which was recognized by Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Shestov, et al. is what allows the heresies to arise such as the one espoused by Simone Weil. The heresies are attempts to make rational sense out of a combination of ideas unintelligible to the discursive intellect. They have a logic to them.
Could it be that some contradictions are true, and that the Incarnation is one of them? Call that the dialetheic way out. Or you might take the view that no contradictions are true, and that, in reality the Incarnation is non-contradictory; it is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for such weak reeds as we are to understand how it is non-contradictory. Call that the mysterian way out. You could also ditch both Trinity and Incarnation (as traditionally understood) and go Unitarian.
On the Consolations of Tense Logic
What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been. What time has mothered, no future time can touch. What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being in indelible ink whether or not anyone will read the record. And all your deeds and misdeeds with you. You will die, but your having lived will never die. But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny! Time has made you and she will unmake you. In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux. Thanks a lot, bitch! You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.
………………….
The entry above, posted 10 March 2010, caught the sharp eye of Alan Rhoda who isolated the animating tense-logical principle:
You here express the tense-logical idea that p–>FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt.
Believe it or not, this has been denied, by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:
"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p. 128.)
This is an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his denial of what strikes me and Rhoda as a self-evident axiom of tense logic and because of the consolation he derives from its denial. (Is it really consolation if that from which it derives is false?)
I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't a unique actual past. And I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible.
What Lukasiewicz is maintaining is really quite preposterous. He is saying, in effect, that a past-tensed truth such as 'Poland was invaded by Hitler's Wehrmacht on 1 September 1939,' which is true now, and was true at every time after the event, will cease to be true in the future when all of the presently existing traces of the invasion have been obliterated. And surely such a time will come. When our sun goes supernova . . . .
Lukasiewicz is assuming that (a) contingent past-tensed truths need truth-makers, but (b) the only available truth-makers are presently existing causal traces of the events recorded by the past-tensed truths. (B) is a consequence of presentism, roughly, the view in the philosophy of time according to which the temporally present alone exists simpliciter, which implies that wholly past and wholly future times and events do not exist, and are now nothing at all. If so, actual past events and merely possible past events are on an equal ontological footing.
But to me it seems obvious, a plain datum, that there is an importance ontological difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her. Now that datum tells against presentism — unless you bring God into the picture.
This is what Rhoda does in an excellent article of his, Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.
Abstract: The truthmaker objection to presentism (the view that only what exists now exists simpliciter) is that it lacks sufficient metaphysical resources to ground truths about the past. In this paper I identify five constraints that an adequate presentist response must satisfy. [. . .] Consideration of how these responses fail, however, points toward a proposal that works, one that posits God’s memories as truthmakers for truths about the past. I conclude that presentists have, in the truthmaker objection, considerable incentive to endorse theism.
But if we don't put God to work, or find other ways to supply presently existing truth-makers for past-tensed truths, and want to hold to presentism, then we are stuck with the preposterous view that the passage of time will not only erase individual and collective memory of past events, but will also erase the events themselves, and, to add to the absurdity, transform their modal status from actual to merely possible.
The past is a realm of fact, not fiction, actuality, not mere possibility. What was. actually was, and will remain actual even though it is no longer present. The passage of time cannot alter the past. You may hope that your transgressions will be forgotten, but one cannot reasonably hope that they will cease to be. The waters of Lethe merely hide the past from view; they do not undo the past.
As for consolation, I hope we can agree that a view's being consoling or the opposite is irrelevant to the question whether it is true. If Lukasiewicz found consolation in his doctrine, that is no indicator of its truth since a doctrine doesn't have to be true to be consoling. It merely has to be believed. And if consolation were the touchstone of truth, then, the contradictory consolation deriving from p–>FPp would would cancel it out.