Month: June 2024

Around the ‘Stackosphere’

I just now coined the word. Who's going to stop me? If there is a blogoshere, then there is a stackosphere. 

You send traffic to me, I send traffic to you. Free speech! Open inquiry! Death to DEI! Down with the Dems and all the reprobable forces of anti-civilization!  Long live the Republic!

Philosophical Micro Notes

Knowland Knows.  Especially recommended for you young guys.

The Journal of Absolute Truth

Linkage does not constitute plenary endorsement.

Happiness

I am happy. I am living my kind of life in my kind of way, the life I envisaged and aspired to when I was 20 years old and wrote in my journal, "To live a philosophical life in a tumultuous, uncertain world is my goal." I am pulling it off, and have been for over half a century. But the task of self-individuation is not yet complete. There is work yet to be done in becoming in act and fact what I am  in potency and possibility. A human life is a project, a task, not something given but something to be accomplished.  Be who you are becoming; become who you are.

Buona fortuna has played her part, but also personal focus and determination and the willingness to renounce what is incompatible with a steady advance along a single line. "A no, a yes, a straight line, a goal." (Nietzsche) I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence, of the lives of companions afloat rudderless, at the mercy of social winds and currents, or else drifting in the horse latitudes of  Sargassian despond.

…………………

Dmitri writes, and I respond:

I was glad for you after reading your today's entry on happiness. I needed to look up Sargassian despond and horse latitudes to understand the ending, which was, as always, stimulating and enriching for me. Even if I completely missed your intended meaning, as I suspect I did, this entry was a great find.
The site to which you link is a curious one, and I cannot at the moment comment on it. But I will comment on "the horse latitudes of Sargassian despond."  'Sargassian' is an adjectival reference to the Sargasso Sea. But what does this have to do with horses and latitudes?
The horse latitudes are a region of the North Atlantic Ocean, located between 20° and 35° north latitude, where the winds are often calm and the sea is relatively still. This area is also known as the Sargasso Sea. (A.I. generated.) Further:
 
There is one such place renowned for its disquieting calms – the Sargasso Sea, a shoreless oval of water in the North Atlantic measuring some 2,000 by 700 miles. Bounded by ocean currents on all sides, the water rotates clockwise in an ocean gyre, slowly revolving like the eye of a hurricane. The area has struck terror into the minds of sailors for centuries. It was once known as the Horse Latitudes, after becalmed Spanish ships were forced to throw their horses overboard to save drinking water. Tales of ghost ships abound, their skeleton crews left to starve or go insane while their sails hung listlessly.
I became aware of the Horse Latitudes years ago via Jim Morrison's eponymous song.
 
As for my use of 'despond,' it is an allusion to the Slough of Despond  in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress:
The Slough of Despond is a metaphorical place of spiritual despair, first introduced in John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a deep, miry bog where Christian, the protagonist, sinks under the weight of his sins and guilt. The Slough represents the doubts, fears, and discouraging thoughts that can overcome a person, causing them to feel hopeless and trapped. (A.I. generated)
So what I was complaining about were those erstwhile companions of mine who were either without the means of self-direction ("afloat rudderless") or else had the means of self-direction but had drifted into a social environment lacking the right kinds of external stimulation ("drifting in the horse latitudes of Sargassian despond").
 
Dmitri continues:
Going back to the existence thread — I decided to buy and read your book as I do want to understand the notion of existence you argue for. If not too difficult and time consuming, I'd be grateful to wire the payment directly to you for the book and the shipment. An autograph would be a deeply appreciated bonus. If you don't have the time for this stuff, I get it and will buy my copy from Amazon.
If I had a spare copy, I'd sent it to you gratis. But hold off from paying the outrageous Kluwer asking price.  Perhaps someone has a copy they he will part with for a reasonable amount.  Another reason to hold off is that I am trying to finish my response to John Cottingham which I will post on the blog and solicit his comments. That may well answer the questions you have.

Four Attitudes Toward Embodiment

Am I ineluctably trapped in a dying animal? Is embodiment an axiologically negative state of affairs or is it an axiologically positive one?  Here are four possible attitudes toward having a material body. They may be loosely associated, respectively, with the names Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Benatar.

a) To exist is good, but it would be better to exist without a gross material body subject to decay and dissolution. The body is an impediment, a vehicle for sublunary roads that it would be better not to have to travel.  I am neither identical to my body, nor dependent on it for my existence; I am a soul temporarily incarcerated in a body from which I will be released upon death. I have fallen from a topos ouranios into a spatiotemporal matrix and meat grinder extrication from which is both possible and desirable.

b) To exist is good, but a gross material body is necessary to exist as a conscious and self-conscious being, whence it follows that embodiment is at least instrumentally  good. I am not (identically) a soul; I am a soul-body composite, both components of which are necessary to exist at all.  

c) To exist is good, but only with a 'resurrected' and perfected body supplied by a divine being that needs no body to exist.

d) To exist is not good because possible only with a gross body.  (See my Benatar category.)

Moral Progress: Our Tantalusian Predicament

If I drive to Santa Fe, the town stays put while I get closer and closer. Moral progress is different. A good part of the moral journey involves the recession of the destination. This morning I discovered that C. S. Lewis had had a similar thought. 

"No man knows how bad he is until he tries very hard to be good." (Mere Christianity, 124)

Allowance made for  a bit of exaggeration, our moral predicament is describable as Tantalusian.  Remember your Greek mythology?

Tantalus (Ancient Greek: Τάνταλος Tántalos), also called Atys, was a Greek mythological figure, most famous for his punishment in Tartarus: for trying to trick the gods into eating his son, he was made to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches, with the fruit ever eluding his grasp, and the water always receding before he could take a drink. (Wikipedia)

Something of a stretch, but a tantalizing conceit that I couldn't resist. 

Can What is Impossible to Achieve be an Ideal for Us?

This Stack topper proposes a generalization of the age-old principle from Roman law, ultra posse nemo obligatur.

Excerpt:

This is an important topic because having the wrong ideals is worse than having no ideals at all.  Many think that to be idealistic is good.  But surely it is not good without qualification.  Think of National Socialist ideals, Communist ideals, DEI-driven ‘wokester’ ideals and of their youthful and earnest and sincere proponents.  Those are wrongheaded ideals, and some of them are wrongheaded because not realizable.  The classless society; the dictatorship of the proletariat; the racially pure society; the society in which everyone is made materially equal by the power of the state including the states’ agents of equalization.  Ideals like these cannot be achieved, and if the attempt is made terrible evils will be the upshot.  The Commies broke a lot of eggs in the 20th century (100 million by some estimates) but still didn't achieve their fabulous and impossible omelet. 

Their ideals were not realizable because not warranted by the actual facts of human nature. The possibility of their realization was merely imagined, merely ‘cooked up’ or excogitated in the febrile heads of such utopians as the Nowhere Man John Lennon.

 

Play the Current Position

In life as in chess. There's no use fretting how you got into it. If not even God can restore a virgin, then surely you cannot undo the mess you are in. You're in it, now play it.  Fretting is of use only if it helps you avoid the pickle next time.

And that reminds me of an online chess player's moniker: Next Time.  Even better: Weaker than F7.

After a hard day of tournament play the chess player came home to his wife. The love light shone in her eyes. "Not tonight, honey, I'm weaker that F7."

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Solitary, Alone, Lonely, Lonesome

Neil Diamond, Solitary Man.  Johnny Cash does it better.  Nothing better than the sound of an acoustic guitar, well-made, well-played, steel-stringed, with fresh strings. This one goes out to Dave Bagwill.

Calexico, Alone Again Or. 

Original (1967) by Love, an underrated '60s psychedelic band.

Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely

Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo

Stay free from petty jealousy
Live by no man's code
Save your judgment for yourself
Lest you wind up on this road.

Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.  Whatever happened to William Zantzinger?  Well, he died at 69 in 2009.  NYT obituary here.

A couple of bonus cuts for a NYC friend:

Lovin' Spoonful, Summer in the City. Great song, great video.

Barrett Strong, Money (1959)

 A curious rendition by The Flying Lizards

Assuming that God exists, could the atheist’s denial of God be reasonable?

I say Yes to the title question; Greg Bahnsen, glossing Cornelius Van Til, says No. 

Yet it should be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is 'reasonable' to believe in him. (Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til's Apologetic: Readings and Analysis, P & R Publishing, 1998, p. 124, fn. 108, emphasis added.)

This is the exact opposite of clear. Atheists believe that there in no God, and thus that the Christian God does not exist, and the philosophically sophisticated among them have argued against the reasonableness of believing that the Christian God exists using both 'logical' and 'probabilistic' arguments.  So how could it be clear even to the atheist that if the Christian God exists, it is reasonable to believe that God exists?  Bahnsen's claim makes no sense.  It makes no sense to say to an atheist who sincerely thinks that he has either proven, or rendered probable, the nonexistence of  God that it is nonetheless reasonable for him to believe that God exists even if in fact, and unbeknownst to the atheist, God does exist.

Bahnsen is missing something very important: although truth is absolute, reasonableness is relative.  This is why an atheist can find it unreasonable to believe that the Christian God exists even if it is true that the Christian God exists.  Let me explain.

I do not need to spend many words on the absoluteness of truth. I've made the case numerous times.  Here for example. In any case, whatever  presuppositionalists  such as Bahnsen think of the details of my arguments, they will agree with my conclusion that truth is absolute. So that is no bone of contention between us.

Reasonableness or rational acceptability is something else again.  It is not absolute but can vary from person to person, generation to generation, social class to social class, historical epoch to historical epoch, and in other ways.  Let's quickly run through a few familiar examples.

1) Falling bodies. It 'stands to reason' that the heavier an object the faster it falls if dropped from a height. It's 'logical' using this word the way many ordinary folk often do.  Wasn't Aristotle, who maintained as much in his Physics, a reasonable man? But we now know that the rate of free fall (in a vacuum) is the same in a given gravitational field regardless of the weight of the object in that field.  So what was reasonable to Aristotle and his entire epoch was not reasonable to Galileo and later epochs. Rational acceptability is relative.

2) For the ancients, water was an element. For John Dalton (English chemist, early 19th cent.) it was a compound, HO. For us it is H2O. Has water changed over the centuries? No. Truth is non-relative. What it is reasonable to believe has changed. Rational acceptability is relative.

3) Additivity of velocities. It 'stands to reason' that if I am on a train moving in a straight line with velocity v1  and I throw a ball in the direction of the train's travel with velocity v2, then the velocity of the ball will be v1 + v2. It also 'stands to reason' that this holds across the board no matter the speed of the objects in question. But this belief, although reasonable pre-Einstein, is not reasonable post-Einstein. Once again we see that rational acceptability is relative.

4) Sets and their members. Suppose S is a set and T is one of S's proper subsets. Then every member of T is a member of S, but not every member of S is a member of T. Now suppose someone comes along and asserts that there are sets such that one is a proper subset of another and yet both have the same number of members.  Many if not most  people would find this assertion a highly unreasonable thing to say.  They might exclaim that it makes no bloody sense at all. And yet those of us who have read Georg Cantor find it reasonable to maintain.  If N is the set of natural numbers, and E is the set of even numbers, and O is the set of odd numbers, then E and O are disjoint (have no members in common), and yet each is a proper subset of N which the same cardinality (number of members) as N.

5) When I was a very young boy I thought that, since I am right-handed, my right hand and arm had to be weaker than my left hand and arm because I use my right hand and arm more. Was that reasonable for me to believe way back then? Yes! I had a reason to hold the empirically false belief. Of course, my little-boy reasoning was based on a false analogy. If you flex a piece of metal back and forth you weaken it. If you a flex a muscle back and forth you strengthen it. Use it and use it up?  No, use it or lose it!

Examples are easily multiplied beyond all necessity. The point, I trust, is clear: while truth is absolute, rational acceptability is relative. What is true may or may not be reasonable, and what is reasonable may or not be true. 

What Bahnsen and the boys appear to be assuming is that both truth and reasonableness (rational acceptability) are absolute.   Well they are — but only for God, only from God's point of view.  God is the IRS, the ideally rational subject. He knows every truth and he knows every truth without possibility of mistake. So for God every truth, being a known truth, is in accordance with divine reason, and everything in accordance with divine reason is true.  But we do not occupy the divine point of view. To put it sarcastically, only a 'presupper' does.

But of course neither we nor the presuppositionalists occupy the divine point of view. They only think they do.  But that conceit is the whole essence of presuppositionalism, is it not?