Top o’ the Stack.
Edward Feser’s Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.
The problem I discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as numerically distinct persons.
Donald Trump is in the process of shredding every norm of decent behavior and wrecking every institution he touches. Unable to behave responsibly, unable to protect himself from COVID-19, unable to even tell the country the truth about his own medical condition, he undermines the basic credibility of the government and arouses the suspicion that every word and act that surrounds him is a lie and a fraud. Finally, he threatens to undermine the legitimacy of our democracy in November and incite a vicious national conflagration that would leave us a charred and shattered nation.
I cannot take Brooks and his political projection seriously. He seems to have degenerated badly. But he always was a pseudo-conservative, a member of the yap-and-scribble bow-tie brigade, along with Bill Kristol, George Will, Mona Charen, Max Boot, and the rest. These types love to write and talk, but when it comes time to act and support a man who has already done so much in the face of vicious opposition to implement conservative policies, they clutch their pearls, straighten their ties, and chicken out. I get the distinct impression that their main political goal is to remain among the respectable so as to preserve their privileges, perquisites, and invitations to the high-toned soirees of the bien-pensant. They seem to fear nothing more than becoming persona non grata in the manner of Alan Dershowitz. Accepting something like political dhimmitude, Brooks and the cruise-ship conservative cohort are content to play the lap-dog role assigned to them by the Left, talk quietly about taxes and such, and allow the Left’s culturally Marxist juggernaut to roll on.Brooks goes on about norms. But he will give either his direct or indirect support to a party that is hell-bent on destroying the norms and institutions of the Republic. The Left has become brazen about what they stand for: packing the Supreme Court, ending the filibuster, eliminating the Electoral College, removing the Second Amendment to the Constitution, tolerating and expanding ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions, eliding the distinction between citizen and non-citizen — and I am just warming up.Like Rod Dreher, Brooks apparently believes that civility and good manners trump every other consideration: better that race-delusional Marxist thugs destroy our cities than that an alpha male punch back against the chaos and defend the American Way. Trump is boorish, but there is nothing radical about him unlike the Orwellian ‘moderate’ Joe Biden who is a driverless vehicle or rudderless vessel soon to be piloted by Kamala Harris and the squadristi to hard-Left destinations.
Some anti-Searlean remarks over at the Stack. It begins like this:
John R. Searle has quit the sublunary for points unknown. We wish him the best. Since his 1969 Speech Acts, he has been a major contributor to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of society. How best do we honor a philosopher? By reenacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically, with an eye to learning what he has to teach us.
Was Secretary of War Hegseth’s address to the generals a bit OTT? Perhaps. But that is in the nature of a correction. The military had gone off the rails into wokery and they needed to be brought back on track. Hegseth did the job admirably. But a certain do-nothing, yap-and-scribble Beltway gal found fault. Well, look in the mirror: what did you do to stop the slide of the USA into the abyss? Trump’s traction is largely a function of pseudo-con inaction. So blame yourself for any excesses.
William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says:
Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was mistaken; “Cogito ergo sum” — “I think therefore I am”? Nonsense. “Amo ergo sum” — “I love therefore I am.”
This is pseudo-intellectual tripe of the worst sort. It is an asinine form of cleverness in which one drops names without understanding the doctrines behind the names. It is the sort of thing that can impress only the half-educated, while eliciting scorn from the true intellectual who drinks deep from the Pierian spring.
Socrates’ point is that self-examination is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. Coffin’s point is that commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. These two points are obviously consistent: they can both be true. And I say they are both true. But by saying that Socrates had it wrong, Coffin implies that his view entails the negation of Socrates’ view — which is silly. Suppose A says that G. W. Bush was once governor of Texas, and B says, ‘No you’ve got it wrong, he was once in the National Guard.’ It is the same kind of silliness.
It should also be pointed out that even if commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived, it doesn’t follow that it is a sufficient condition thereof. The committed but unexamined lives of a Nazi, a Communist, or an antisemitic Islamo-commie such as Zohran Mamdani are not examples of lives well-lived.
As for Descartes, Coffin doesn’t understand him at all. Else he would have realized that loving is a species of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of the term. Thinking in this sense covers all mental acts, including remembering, anticipating, perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, loving, hoping, and thinking in the narrow sense of conceiving. All mental states having the property Brentano called intentionality (object directedness) fall under the cogito, the ‘I think.’ Thus Coffin commits an obvious ignoratio elenchi when he takes Descartes to be using cogito in the narrow sense that excludes amo.
It was Alexander Pope who penned the following lines.
A little learning is a dangerous thing
Drink deep or taste not of the Pierian spring
Where shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
But drinking largely doth sober us again.
I learned these lines in high school, and they have stood me in good stead ever since. ‘Pierian’ from Pieria, a region of ancient Macedonia where the Muses lived. Not to be confused with Peoria.
Ought we avoid the toxicity of polarization by a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I think not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can’t play the philosopher on the battlefield. A warrior at war cannot be “a spectator of all time and existence,” as noble as such spectatorship is.
A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen. He will know that in the end “The pen is mightier than the sword.” But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don’t survive the fight, there will be no life left for ‘penmanship.’
Top of the Substack pile. A reader wanted to read this article, the link to which was busted after the demise of Typepad. So here it is in violation my rule to post at most once a day at Substack.
I thought Leo might be an improvement over Francis. I’m having serious doubts.
Substack latest.
