Author: Bill Vallicella

A Vocation, not a Job

Heading out the door for a walk, the wife invited me along. I told her I had too much to do, that the clock was running, the format sudden death, the time-control unknown. 

"But you're retired."

I reminded her that philosophy is my vocation.  One can be retired from the largely meaningless job of teaching the unteachable, but one can never be retired from one's vocation in the proper sense of that term.

I hope to have my boots on when the flag falls.

In what state will death find you when the Reaper's scythe cuts you down?  Will it matter? Is that a question that needs to be investigated?

The Stupor Bowl is a Super Bore

Panem et circenses! 

I am no fan of spectator sports.  We have too many sports spectators and too many overpaid* professional louts. I preach the People's Sports, despite the leftish ring of that.

Remove your sorry tail from the couch of sloth and start a softball league with your friends and neighbors. Play volley ball whether in a pool or on dry land. Engage your fellow paisani in a game of bocce. (But don't call it bocce ball. Do you call tennis tennis ball?)

Or take the Thoreauvian high road, leave the People behind, and sally forth solo into the wild. As Henry said, "A man sits as many risks as he runs." Old Henry puts me in mind of Cactus Ed, the Thoreau of the American Southwest.

In Vox Clamantis in Deserto Edward Abbey opines:

Football is a game for trained apes. That, in fact, is what most of the players are — retarded gorillas wearing helmets and uniforms. The only thing more debased is the surrounding mob of drunken monkeys howling the gorillas on.

Was Abbey a racist? That depends on what a racist is. I'll leave it for you to decide what a racist is and whether Abbey was one.

________________

*Can anyone be 'overpaid'? If enough people like what you sell, and are willing to pay you for it, you may become rich indeed. Think of all the rich schlock novelists. Capitalist acts among consenting adults. That's the libertarian line.  Or do you prefer more government intervention in people's lives? For the record, I am not a libertarian. But I'll take a libertarian over a leftist any day.

Abbey Vox

Paradox and Contradiction between Athens and Benares

Philosophers love a paradox but hate a contradiction.  They love that which stimulates thought but are understandably averse to that which stops it dead in its tracks. 

Mystics love both. Where the discursive road ends, the mystic path begins. The mystic essays to ride contradictions, like so many koans, into the sky of the Transdiscursive.

The radical aporetician stands at the trailhead. Having travelled the road, he peers beyond without stepping onto the trail. He holds yet to reason as to that whose ultimate purpose is to clear the way for what lies beyond reason.

God and Existence: How Related?

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?
This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.
 
First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence.  It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.
 
This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple.  In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has.  Thus he has his existence by being his existence.  In this one case, the 'is' of identity and the 'is' of predication coalesce. Why must God be simple?  Because he is the absolute reality.  If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol.  The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute.  It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness. 
 
Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept.  Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common.  If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist.  But this violates the divine aseity.
 
Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.
 
Objection:  "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."
 
Reply:   The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing.  But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.
 
The picture is this.  Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist.  If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist.  So Existence itself exists.  It is identical to God.  God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God.  God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent.  God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.
 
In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates.  (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.)  God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.
 
Objection:  "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress.  If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation.  If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in.  But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."
 
Response:  The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist.  Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.
 
There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity.  This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God.  If God is God, then God exists. (Bonaventura) In every other case, existence is not self-identity.  No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

Platonism and Christianity

Brother Dave writes,
I'm re-reading Boethius' Consolation. Boethius does have a foot in Athens and one in Jerusalem, it seems to me. Now you sir are a Christian, and argue your positions in a blog subtitled Footnotes to Plato . . . .  Would it be fair to refer to you, as I would to Boethius, as a Christian Platonist?

As for whether I am a Platonist,  all of us who uphold the Western (Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman) tradition are Platonists broadly construed if Alfred North Whitehead is right in his observation that:

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.  I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings.  I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.  [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)

So in that general sense I am a Platonist.  And I also like the modesty conveyed by "footnotes to Plato."  Some say the whole of philosophy is a battle between Plato and Aristotle.  That is not bad as simplifications go, and if you forced me to choose, I would throw in my lot with Plato and the Platonists.  So that is a more specific sense in which I provide "footnotes to Plato." 

As for Platonism and Christianity, you could refer to me fairly as a Christian Platonist. But what does that come to?

Part of what it means for me is that a de-Hellenized Christianity is of no interest.  Christianity is a type of monotheism. The monotheistic claim is not merely that there is one god as opposed to many gods.  Monotheism as I see it overturns the entire pantheon; it does not reduce its membership to one god, the tribal god of the Jews. Monotheism does of course imply that there is exactly one God, but it also implies that God is the One, and that therefore God is unique, and indeed uniquely unique.  To understand that you will have to follow the link and study the entry to which it leads. Now if God is uniquely unique, then God is not a being among beings, but Being itself.  He is not an ens among entia, but esse: ipsum esse subsistens.  Kein Seiendes, sondern das Sein selbst.

Now we are well up into the Platonic stratosphere. Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)

I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict  XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968).  Here is one relevant quotation among several:

The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142) 

Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that

. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)

Plato and Moses!  The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.

The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later.

A Discussion with Lukas Novak about Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Ego

The extended comment thread below began life in the comments to Why Did I Move Away from Phenomenology? (13 October 2020)

………………………..

Dear Bill,

You have exactly nailed my fundamental problem with transcendental idealism by this:

What is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot exist at all.

Of course, transcendental idealists will standardly respond something along the lines like:

The problem that you raise in this post only arises because you are asking the question, “What is the transcendental ego?” and expecting an answer which posits some kind of object or other;

but the problem is that the question asked does not "expect some kind of object", it simply asks whether the transcendental ego is something at all, whether it recedes [proceeds?] from pure nothingness, or not. Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" – as if pure logic could be thus confined.

Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out – viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?

Another great spot-on complaint of yours is that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of constitution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich – and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else — why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and thoroughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?

Posted by: Lukáš Novák | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 12:22 PM

Dear Lukáš,

It is indeed a pleasure to find you in agreement with me since you are one of the smartest people I know. I hope you and your family are well. I have fond memories of my time in Prague and the Czech Republic.

>>Transcendental idealism is an effort to find some room between reality and nothingness, an attempt to declare this basic dichotomy as a mere artifact of the "natural attitude" – as if pure logic could be thus confined.<<

That's right. In Sartre, for example, consciousness is no-thing, thus nothing. A "wind blowing towards objects" but blowing from no direction and without any cause or ground. Hence the title *Being and Nothingness.* But of course consciousness is in some sense something since without it no objects would appear. So consciousness is both something and nothing — which certainly looks like a contradiction.

Butchvarov, too, is tangled up in this problem.

Central to Heidegger's thinking is the ontological difference between das Sein und das Seiende (taken either collectively or distributively). But if Being is other than every being, and from the whole lot of them taken together, then Being is nonbeing, nichtseiend. So Sein und Nichts are the same, although not dialectically as in Hegel. But das Nichts ist kein nichtiges Nichts; it is not a nugatory nothing, but some sort of reality, some sort of positive Nothing — which is structurally the same problem we find in Husserl, Sartre, and Butchvarov.

Also structurally similar is the notorious 'horse paradox' in Frege: "The concept HORSE is not a concept."

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 01:32 PM

Dr. Novak:

>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way out – viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that "transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just ordinary parts of the world?<<

Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer. Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.

If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part of the world."

I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry and other positive sciences.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:09 PM

>>Another great spot-on your complaint that in phenomenology, we never get the real thing: we never get real transcendence, real objectivity etc., everything is merely constituted-as-such-and-such. I would add here: which deprives us of our epistemic rights to make any claims whatsoever about what the objective matter-of-fact really is with matters we are talking about (the nature of transcendental ego, the mechanisms of constitution, etc., whatever). In all seriously meant philosophical claims a phenomenologist is making statements about what the object of his talk (such as transcendental ego, the various structures and mechanisms claimed to be "described" etc.) is, really, an sich — and not merely qua constituted by the particular phenomenologist's ego. For else — why should such subjective constructs be of any relevance to philosophy, or to me?

In other words, the self-destructivity of transcendental idealism reveals itself not only with respect to the transcendental ego, whose Seinsgeltung cannot be merely constituted-by-the-ego but somehow original or genuine; but also with respect to the meta-question, what kind of objectivity is claimed for the transcendental idealist's philosophical statements. Either it is genuine objectivity, but then TI claims its own falsity, or a mere constituted objectivity, and then such statements are not part of philosophical discourse concerning life, universe and everything. In both cases we arrive at the conclusion that TI cannot ever be consistent and thoroughgoing: there must be a residual of realism, i.e. of a claimed capability to cognize reality as it is in itself, rather than merely qua-constituted, qua-a-priori-formed etc.

But perhaps you would not be willing to go thus far in your critique?<<

You raise a good objection. For example, when Husserl makes a claim about outer perception, that it is intentional, presumptive, that it presents its object directly without images or epistemic intermediaries, etc., he means these claims to be eidetic not factual. He aims to make claims that are true even if there are no cases of outer perception. He is concerned with the essence of perception, the essence of memory, of imagination, etc. Now these essences and the propositions about them are ideal objects that cannot depend on factical subjectivity for their Seinsinn.

Posted by: BV | Tuesday, October 20, 2020 at 02:49 PM

Dr. Novak by e-mail (27 January 2021):

I take also this opportunity to finally respond to your reactions to my
comment on your post
— I apologize I did not manage to do so in time — you know, I am always behind my schedule with my work…
 
L.N.:
>>Now I wonder: you label it "Aporetic Conclusion". Why? Isn't it
>>rather a reductio of transcendental idealism, leaving a clear way
>>out – viz. a rejection of TI? Why can't we just conclude that
>>"transcendental ego" is an incoherent notion and revert back to
>>noetic realism, where both the subject and the object are just
>>ordinary parts of the world?<<
 
B.V.:
> Fair question, and the right one to ask. But not easy to answer.
> Since you are a scholastic realist, perhaps I can soften you up by
> citing Aristotle, De Anima 431b20: "in a sense the soul is all
> existing things." Here perhaps is the charter for all subsequent
> transcendental philosophy. Accordingly, the soul is not merely the
> life principle of a particular animal organism. It is the
> transcendental subject to which the body and its states appear as
> well as the animal's mental states such as fear, lust, etc.
>
>If this is right, then the subject cannot be "just an ordinary part
>of the world."
 
LN: Obviously, this hinges on the meaning of "ordinary". I certainly don't
propose reducing cognition and appetition to something merely material
or sub-animal. But why cannot genuine, unreduced cognition and
appetition be part of the reality just as pebbles of quartz are?
 
I agree that soul is a subject of cognitions and appearances and
appetitions. But why "transcendental"? Why must it be pushed out of
the picture, so to speak? When I say "I cognize myself", isn't the "I"
both the real, intramundane subject who does the cognizing, and the
object of this cognizing?
 
BV: >I need to hear more about your "noetic realism." Presumably you do
>not mean we are just parts of the material world and that all of our
>intellectual and spiritual functions can be accounted for
>naturalistically. Perhaps you will agree with me that not even
>sentience can be explained adequately in terms of physics, chemistry
>and other positive sciences.
 
LN: Of course I agree with all that. By "noetic realism" I mean that
cognition is (i) non-representationalist (i.e., terminating at reality
itself, not at some representations of reality — against Locke etc.);
and (ii) receptive, i.e., assimilative to, and measured by, the
object, not vice versa (against all sorts of idealism). Note that (i)
does not imply that cognition cannot err, nor does it exclude the
existence of mental representations as of that _by means of which_
(as opposed to _that which_) we cognize. And it also does not exclude
that reality-qua-cognized may in certain respects differ from
reality-qua-out-there — but it is one and the same reality which is
both out there and cognized.
 
I would say we are indeed parts of the material world (we are bodies),
but not "just parts" of it. We are not mere bodies, but spirited
bodies. But a spirited body is a body, nevertheless. I am not sure if
this dual nature of man can be analyzed in hylomorphic terms, but I
insist with P.F.Strawson that both bodily and mental predicates are
to be ascribed to one and the same subject (and unlike Strawson, I
take this to be a feature of reality, not just of our conceptual
scheme).
 
Best regards,
 
Lukas
 
BV to LN (28 January 2021): For you, the notion of a transcendental subject is incoherent and should be simply dropped. There is no genuine problem here as I think there is. For you, Husserl took a wrong turn, the transcendental turn, and went down a false path.   For you, the ultimate subject of conscious states is an "ordinary part of the world." But you don't mean this materialistically or physicalistically. You admit the "dual nature of man." Man is an animal, but not just an animal: he is also a spirit.  You are rightly skeptical of hylomorphic dualism. Are you then a substance dualist? It seems not since you say that "both bodily and mental predicates are to be ascribed to one and the same subject."  But what is this subject? Is it the body in nature?  The body is a material thing and the body, qua material, cannot think.  My brain doesn't think any more than my eye glasses see.   The latter are instruments of vision, the former an instrument of thought.  The brain cannot be the ultimate subject of experience.  The same goes for each of my body parts and for my body as a whole. I don't think with my liver or feel with my heart, which is just a pump made out of meat.  The liver is just a filter made of meat.  

 
Could the psyche be the ultimate ego?  No, it is an object of introspection not the subject that introspects. Similarly for the psychophysical complex. It is not the ultimate subject of experience.   You see where I am going with this. I am regressing to the ultimate condition of anything appearing. This ultimate condition is not to be found among the objects of consciousness. We say it is 'transcendental' though not in the Aristotelian-scholastic sense.   Whether or not it is an ego is a further question; but let's assume  that it is. 
 
I have just motivated  — in a sketchy way –  the introduction of the transcendental ego.   You don't accept this. You will say that one and the same intramundane subject is both cognizer and cognized.  So when I inspect my body, is my body inspecting my body, or some part of my body inspecting some other part of my body?  What part of the body has the power to do this?  Is my hand sensing the soles of my feet? No, I am sensing in tactile fashion the soles of my feet by the instrumentality of a hand.  Is this I a metaphysical self?  If it is, how can it be identical to the physical body?
 
You are trying to think of subjectivity in an objective/objectivistic/objectifying way like a good Aristotelian. But this approach seems as problematic as Husserl's transcendental idealism.