Month: January 2022

A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind."  While I do not deny that doubt  can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.

Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.  

The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term.  The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of  humanity. That's my first point.

Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self.  He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind.  He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it  clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.

And of course the religious  train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.  

Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will.  Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.

Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.

Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion.  Surely this  is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so.  (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)

Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical  reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable.  Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology  but also in scriptural exegesis.

Philosophy and religion are opposed  and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.

On the Eternal in Man

Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night (tr. Alexander Dru, Pantheon Books, 1950, p. 67, #263, written 1940):

The man who explicitly does not believe and does not will to believe (for the will to believe belongs to believing) in an eternal life, that is to say in a personal life after death, will become an animal, an animal being which among other things, man is. Man is 'planned as spirit,' as Kierkegaard puts it, but that includes the immortality of the soul. Whoever relinquishes that also gives up the spirit of man.

Man alone among the animals raises the question whether he is more than an animal.  His raising of this question does not prove  that he is more than an animal; perhaps it proves only that he is the most pretentious of all animals, a crazy animal, an evolutionary fluke who merely fancies himself more than  an animal. Such a fanciful conceit might even be accorded survival value within a naturalist scheme. Thinking himself the crown of creation, a child of God, with divine sanction to lord it over, but also cherish and protect the critters beneath him, this lofty self-conception, even if false, might enhance his chances of survival. It could be like that, or at least I cannot see a way definitively to exclude this epistemic possibility.

Or it could be like this:  Man's having a world (Welt) and not merely an environment (Umwelt) like the animals points to a higher origin, a spiritual origin,  and a higher destiny.  Elsewhere I catalog twelve meanings of 'world'; here I am using the term in my twelfth sense, the transcendental-phenomenological sense.  It remains an open question whether the world in this sense has an ontic anchor in God, whether the light of the transcendental-phenomenological Lichtung (clearing) has an onto-theological Source. We cannot know it to be the case, but we can reasonably believe it to be the case. That is as good as it gets here below.  And so I am brought around, once again, to the fact that, in the end, one must decide what to believe and how to live.

Haecker is right to point out that "the will to believe belongs to believing." Not all belief is voluntary, but religious and anti-religious belief is.  The will comes into it, as it does not in the case of some such mundane belief as that the Sun has risen. You are free to believe that you are a complex physical system slated for utter annihilation in a few years, months, days, minutes, and you are free to believe that you are "planned as spirit."  Either way reasons can be adduced, reasons that are not obviously bad reasons.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia and Americana

I post what I like and I like what I post.

Elmore James, Dust My Broom

Doors, Crystal Ship

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In.

Elvis Presley, Marie's the Name of His Latest Flame

Elvis Presley, Spanish Eyes

Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Take a Train to Cry, Cutting Edge take. 

Albert King, Crosscut Saw

Mississippi Sheiks, Sitting on Top of the World

YouTuber comment: "There is enough great music to listen to for a thousand years without ever having to listen to mindless shite if only people would explore the past." That's no shite, son.

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom.  One of Dylan's greatest anthems.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, Cod'ine

An equally powerful version by Janis Joplin

Mike Bloomfield, Carmelita Skiffle

A bar or two is all it takes recognize the signature sound of Michael Bloomfield, Jew, who exemplifies cultural appropriation at its best. My second guitar hero. My first was Dick Dale who, though not a Jew, gave us a version of Misirlou.

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Billy Joel, Piano Man

Don MacLean, American Pie

 

Vermittlung Über Alles?

Nothing finite is self-contained: it refers beyond itself for its determinations, for its being what it is, and for its existence.  Nothing finite.  This is true. A thing is what it is by not being what it is not.  Omnis determinatio est negatio. (Spinoza)

Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp Verlag, S. 109), however,  removes the qualifier: he thinks this reference beyond itself is true of everything and that Vermittlung is dafür lediglich ein anderes Wort, that "Mediation is just another word for it."

Nothing is immediate.  All is mediated.  But what about the system of mediating items?  What mediates it?  Or is it absolute?

Hegel begat Marx, Marx begat the Frankfurt School which begat cultural (as opposed to 'classical' economic ) Marxism which begat or perhaps is the mess we are now in.

Metaphysically, our mess results from the denial of the Absolute.

Why Am I So Happy?

From my Facebook page, three years ago, pre-COVID-19, pre-Biden, before things really got bad. But I am still happy. For some of us happiness is a basal state, bred-in-the-bone, affected somewhat by external circumstances, but not by much.
 
………………………………
 
My beloved country looks to be going the way of the Roman empire: overextended abroad and collapsing within under the weight of its own decadence. We can't agree about much of anything anymore and are arguing bitterly about things we ought not be arguing about. The future looks grim. Civil war may be in the offing. Idiots and overgrown children now occupy positions of power in our government. The Speaker of the House regularly spouts nonsense. Deep State operatives deploy fascist techniques against harmless citizens to intimidate and spread fear. People who should know better apologize for speaking the truth. Journalism is pretty much dead and lies are rampant. Delusional race-baiters who retail incoherence are celebrated by white 'liberals' in the pages of once respectable publications. Bootless neocons with no skin in the game advocate spreading 'democracy' among benighted tribalists regardless of the expenditure of American blood and treasure. The rights that are every American's birthright are under assault. Roughly half of our fellow citizens are reasonably viewed as domestic enemies. And the litany continues.
 
So why am I so happy?
 
When I was 20 I wrote into my journal, "Philosophy, the joy of my youth and the consolation of my old age." I was prescient, but not prescient enough. Philosophy has proven to be not only the consolation but also the joy of my old age, and a greater joy than ever.
 
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, and this owl is reaping a rich harvest as the shadows grow long and the end of the trail comes into view.
 
It helps if you can look beyond this life and see it as a passing scene, real enough as far as it goes, and certainly no dream, but a scene of no final reality or importance.
 
And so I pity the poor secularist who has nothing beyond this hopeless world.

Can a Sentence be Named?

One thing we do with words is make assertions, as when I assert that snow is white. I use those words, but I can also talk about them, refer to them, mention them. You are all familiar with the use-mention distinction. 'Boston' is disyllabic, but no city is. 

One way to mention an expression is by enclosing the words in single quotation marks, thus: 'Snow is white.' One can then go on to say things about that sentence, for example, that it is true, that it is in the indicative mood, that it consists of three words, that it is in the present tense, and so on.  But a puzzle is soon upon us. Try this aporetic triad on for size:

1) No name is either true or false.

2) 'Snow is white' is the name of a sentence.

3) 'Snow is white' is true.

The propositions are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true. Which will you reject? 

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purposes of government are to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad. This is lost on the present-day  Democrat party which has been hijacked by the hard Left.  Despite what they say, they are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property. So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat.  Why 'any'? Because Democrat politicians are under party discipline and toe the party line. The one or two exceptions prove the rule. Because these exceptions are few and not reliably exceptional, my rule stands.
 
The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property. Or at least some of them do. And they have become less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one,  located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. His recent behavior is less inspiring. In any case, the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.  As for the third point, you must never forget that politics is praxis, not theoria. What matters is not to have the best theory, but the best implementable theory.  No implementation of policy without power. No power without winning. Win, gain power, implement ameliorative policies.  If you don't have your hands on the levers of power, you are just another talker like me.  Two other related maxims.
 
First, it is folly to let the best become the enemy of the good. Second, politics is never about perfect versus imperfect, but about better versus worse. You find Trump deficient in gravitas? Well, so do I and defective in other ways to boot. But he was better than the alternative in 2016 and he will be better than the alternative in 2024. (And thank you, Sleepy Joe, for making Trump's virtues and accomplishments stand out so clearly.)
 
I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property despite any mendacious protests to the contrary.
 
ANTI-LIFE. The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They absurdly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. They are not ashamed to embrace such Orwellian absurdities as that abortion is health care. To make matters worse, they violate the sincerely held and cogently argued beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of taxpayer funding for abortion.  You will recall that the 'devout Catholic' Joe Biden reversed himself on the Hyde Amendment. He showed once again who and what he is, a political opportunist grounded in no discernible principles, not to mention a brazen liar whose mendacity is now compounded by being  non compos mentis, not of sound mind.  
 
ANTI-LIBERTY. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and self-defense rights. They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.' And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats are anti-Constitutional inasmuch as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.
 
ANTI-PROPERTY. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production. That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.
 
But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways. They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, the government is not us, as Barack Obama has said. 'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.' The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian? 
 
Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

Moral Progress in the West and its Benchmarks

A London correspondent writes,

A question for you: is there a set of verifiable practices that would act as a benchmark for the Western Enlightenment? I can think of (i) widespread (but not universal) respect for science (ii) separation of church and state (iii) end of judicial torture (iv) abolition of slavery, etc.

1) I will assume that moral progress, both individually and collectively, is possible, both in moral theory and in moral practice. This is not obvious inasmuch as one might insist that while there has been moral change, there has been  no moral progress. Progress, by definition, is change for the better, and a moral/cultural relativist will claim that there is no better or worse with respect moral beliefs and practices.  

2) If moral progress is possible, is it also actual? I would say so.  Holding as I do that slavery is a grave moral evil, I also hold that we in the West have made progress in this regard.  The same goes for penal practices. We in the West no longer punish in the barbaric ways still employed in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Example are easily multiplied.

3) Is overall moral progress consistent with a certain amount of moral regress? I would like to say so. Mass murder and mass enslavement in Germany 1933-1945 are recognized in the West for the moral abominations they were. The Germans have come to their moral senses.   But what about the situation in the East under communism, in particular the communism practiced in China as we speak? I am thinking of the forced labor in China's Xinjiang region.

4) We cannot overlook the moral degeneration of the West, which suggests that while we made progress in the West, it is now being undone.  The Biden administration, for example, is the most lawless in American history; as a matter of policy it aids and abets criminality and then lies about what it is doing.

5) As for the benchmarks of progress, the ones listed by my correspondent are essential.  I would also add the following: religious liberty, limited government, the rule of law, equality of all citizens before the law, due process, universal suffrage, open inquiry and academic freedom, free markets, and the right to free speech  and freedom of assembly without fear of reprisal.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Americana

Tim Hardin, Lady Came from Baltimore

Arlo Guthrie, Percy's Song. Dylan's 1963 original

Byrds, Pretty Boy Floyd

Marty Robbins, El Paso

Bob Dylan, Red Cadillac and a Black Moustache

Bob Luman, Let's Think About Livin'

Charley Ryan, Hot Rod Lincoln, the original.  Before Johnny Bond, before Commander Cody. 

Dave Dudley, Six Days on the Road

Red Sovine, Phantom 309. Tom Waits' cover. YouTuber comment:

I don't know what it is about this particular Tom Waits song. Out of all the music I've heard, this is the only one that tears me up from the first chord. I'm a big boy, all grown-up. But I'm helpless to stop those tears. I've seen my fair share, and more, of pain and suffering and death, and so should be fairly immune to such sentimentality. Many songs are supposedly more tear-jerking, . . .  but NOT ONE moves me like this. Maybe because I used to hitchhike a lot? Maybe because I've seen, and been involved in, several car accidents? Maybe because a trucker friend was drowned when the ferry he was travelling on sunk? I don't know. I've always appreciated, and liked a lot, Tom Waits' compositions and performances, and yet this one song captures me completely, emotionally. Perhaps I'm turning into a softy. More likely, I'm just getting too old for this life. Answers on a postcard, please… (Tom Foyle)

Yes, one can get too old for this life.

A Question about Donald Trump

This from a reader:

It would be very interesting to hear your take on Trump — why do you think that his leadership of the country, despite obvious personality flaws, is less risky for the US and the world than a reasonable alternative? Yes, the ideological, thoughtless, and totalitarian far-left is dangerous, but isn't unprincipled, pugilistic and me-and-my-family first leadership any better? Is your thinking driven by "the lesser of two (or three) evils"?
1) I avoid talk of the lesser or least of evils. I prefer to speak of the better or the worse. 
 
2) Politics is not theoretical; it is practical. There is political theory, of course, and it divides into political science (empirical and non-normative) and political philosophy (normative). But politics is neither of the two, despite the fact that politics is informed by political theory. Politics is a practical game! It is not about having the right views. That does no good unless one can implement them. And only a fool lets the best become the enemy of the good. Politics is a matter of better or worse, not perfect or imperfect.  Politics is about accomplishing something in the extant suboptimal circumstances with the best implementable ideas.
 
3) And which ideas are those? The ideas, values, and principles of the Founders. They arrived as close as anyone ever has to a sound and viable political theory. 
 
4) Now if you accept (2) and (3), then the choice is clear: you support Trump over Hillary, and Trump over Biden. For Trump, unlike Hillary and Biden,  supports those values and not just with words. He proved his support for them in the teeth of vicious opposition by pseudo-cons and leftists alike  in his four years as POTUS.  A long list of his accomplishments could be inserted here. To mention just one, and a very important one: the SCOTUS appointments.
 
5) If you complain about Trump's character, I will agree that he is flawed but go on to point out that the same is true of Hillary and Biden.  Character-wise, the three are on a par. The difference is that Hillary and Biden are professional politicians deeply practiced in the arts of deception: mendacious to the core, they know how to hide their flaws, faults, and foibles.   Anyone can see that Biden is a fraud and a phony rooted in no principle except that of  the promotion of himself and his family's interests. The same goes for Hillary to a lesser extent. Trump, on the other hand, crudely lets it all hang out. He tells you what he thinks. He is blunt, brusque, boorish, and sometimes pointlessly brutal. (I am thinking of that nasty slur he hurled against Carly Fiorina.)
 
6) What decides the question for me is that Trump alone supports the American system of government whereas this is plainly not the case with Hillary or with Biden who is the puppet of puppet masters out to undermine the American system.  That should be blindingly evident to anyone who has been paying attention.
 
7) There comes a time when a corrective is needed, an outsider self-powered, un-owned, and unafraid to kick the asses of the Demo Rats to his Left and expose the fecklessness of the cuckservatives to his Right.  A corrective and a clarifier. No more of the usual Left versus Right. The battle for the soul of America is now a contest between the borderless globalism of the greedy elites and an enlightened nationalism, populist and patriotic.  Hillary/Biden versus The Donald, to personify it.

The Virtuous are Too Scrupulous to Rouse the People against their Tyrants

Here:

Describing Wilkes and two of his allies, Walpole wrote, “This triumvirate has made me often reflect that nations are most commonly saved by the worst men in [them].” Why? Because, he concluded, “The virtuous are too scrupulous to go the lengths that are necessary to rouse the people against their tyrants.”

Until the coming of The Donald, that had certainly become the case in recent American politics. Until the Orange Menace loosed the fearful lightning of his terrible swift tweets, the “virtuous,” rather battle-fatigued traditional conservative movement—even when controlling both houses of the Congress—had been out-shouted and outmaneuvered by the unholy alliance of a Left-dominated, morally nihilist pop culture and educational establishment, and what is laughably referred to as the “mainstream” media, all nudging an increasingly radicalized Democratic Party further and further to the left.

Boethius and the Second Death of Oblivion: Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?

We die twice. We pass out of life, and then we pass out of memory, the encairnment in oblivion more final than the encairnment in rocks. Boethius puts the following words into the mouth of Philosophia near the end of Book Two of the Consolations of Philosophy.

Where are Fabricius's bones, that honourable man? What now is Brutus or unbending Cato? Their fame survives in this: it has no more than a few slight letters shewing forth an empty name. We see their noble names engraved, and only know thereby that they are brought to naught. Ye lie then all unknown, and fame can give no knowledge of you. But if you think that life can be prolonged by the breath of mortal fame, yet when the slow time robs you of this too, then there awaits you but a second death.

And why are these engraved names empty? Not just because their referents have ceased to exist, and not just because a time will come when no one remembers them, but because no so-called proper name is proper. All are common in that no name can capture the haecceity of its referent. So not only will we pass out of life and out of memory; even in life and in memory our much vaunted individuality is ineffable, and, some will conclude, nothing at all.

"We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep." (Shakespeare, The Tempest.)