Bill Vallicella – Page 233 – Maverick Philosopher

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sweet and Wholesome

I once asked a guy what he wanted in a woman. He replied, "A whore in bed, Simone de Beauvoir in the parlor, and the Virgin Mary on a pedestal." An impossible combo. Some just want the girl next door.

Bobby Darin, Dream Lover. With pix of Sandra Dee.

Audrey Hepburn, Moon River

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind, 1956. I'll take Lady Gogi over Lady Gaga any day.

Doris Day, Que Sera, Sera, 1956. What did she mean? The tautological, Necessarily, what will be, will be? Or the non-tautologically fatalistic, What will be, necessarily will be? Either way, she died in May.

William James on Self-Denial

Few preach self-denial anymore. We have become a nation of moral wimps. We need a taste of the strenuosity of yesteryear, and who better to serve it up than our very own William James, he of the Golden Age of American philosophy:

Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast.

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. (Principles of Psychology, vol. 1)

The Ascesis of the Lower

It is useful to suppose oneself composed of a lower and a higher self. Much good comes from denying the former, good that accrues to the latter.

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic. In terms of Aquinas' Latin, Platonism holds that homo est anima utens corpore, man is a soul using a body. On this view the person is essentially the soul, and the body is a temporary and accidental housing or vehicle. There are Platonic passages in which the soul is described as "imprisoned" in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul. The soul is in the body like an oyster in its shell. These and other metaphors can be found in the Platonic dialogues. If one thinks in this way, then death is not a calamity but something good. Death is liberation, release, the separation of one thing, the soul, from another, the body, to which it should not have been attached in the first place. The fall into time is a fall into the flesh. For Platonism, death undoes the fall into time. Death is to that extent good, and the philosopher welcomes it. Indeed, the philosophical life is a preparation for death. (Plato, Phaedo, 67e)

Christianity, however, in terms of Aquinas' Latin, maintains that (a) homo non est anima tantum, man is not the soul alone, and (b) anima forma corporis, the soul is the form of the body. The human person, then is essentially a form-matter composite, and not essentially a soul. On the Platonic view soul can exist without body, though not conversely, while on the Christian view as understood by Aquinas, neither soul nor body can exist without the other.* The two need each other: the body needs the soul to animate it and 'personalize' it, to make it a person's body as opposed to a corpse. And the soul needs the body to achieve its proper unfolding. Despite the difference between soul and body, man is a unitary being in a way in which he is not unitary on the Platonic conception.

There is another important difference. For Platonism, the fall into time — see Phaedrus — is a fall into an evil condition. But for Christianity, everything is and is good because it comes from God who is all-good. So our embodiment cannot be evil. For Christianity there is of course a Fall, but it is not a Fall into embodiment. It is a fall from a perfect form of embodiment to an imperfect form.

For Christianity, then, we are not immortal souls accidentally housed in mortal bodies, and death cannot be understood as affecting only our bodies. Death is not release of one part of the self from another, but the destruction of the entire unitary self. Being, bestowed as it is by God, is good, and so, if we are essentially embodied, death is a total calamity.

On the Christian view, then, we are not naturally immortal: we are mortal body and soul. Any immortality that we come to acquire requires a supernatural agent operating in a supernatural way. But weren't humans naturally immortal before the Fall? Didn't death enter the picture only when sin did?

It is true that on the Christian scheme death first enters the picture as punishment for sin. But it does not follow that we are naturally immortal in our prelapsarian state. The doctor angelicus discusses this question in the Summa Theologica, Q 97, art. 1. If prelapsarian, paradisiacal man were immortal by nature, then he could not have lost his immortality, which is precisely what happened when he sinned. Some of the angels sinned but did not lose their immortality because they are naturally immortal. But man is not: his prelapsarian immortality was a divine gift. By nature he is mortal, i.e., subject to death, able to die. Aquinas speaks of a "supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it itself remained subject to God."

In sum, man in his own nature is mortal, body and soul, in both his prelapsarian and postlapsarian states. But owing to a supernatural gift, man in his prelapsarian state was given the power to preserve himself as long as he willed to so so. Prelapsarian man could die, but not against his will. We, however, are condemned to death nolens volens by Adam's sin.

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*On Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics, the form and the matter of a primary sublunary substance are not themselves substances: they cannot exist on their own apart from the substance of which they are 'principles' or ontological factors. In particular, the soul, as form of an animal body, cannot exist disembodied. But then what accounts for the continuity of the human person from the time of death to the resurrection of the body? As I understand Aquinas, he simply makes an exception in the case of the deceased human animal: in this case the soul as form can exist apart from a material substratum. This exception goes along with the exception in the case of God himself, the forma formarum, form of all forms. God is self-subsistent pure form, form without matter and the human soul between death and resurrection is pure form as well, although not self-subsistent pure form.

The first exception strikes this philosopher as and ad hoc move that does not fit within Aristotelian hylomorphism. If the forms of sublunary substances are not themselves substances, then this should hold across the board and allow of no exceptions. It has been said that Aquinas is a Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven. Is this a problem? I should think it is, but others will disagree.

The Political Burden of Proof: Polite Version

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Time Apportionment as between Athens and Benares

If a philosopher who meditates spends five hours per day on philosophy, how many hours should he spend on meditation? One correspondent of mine, a retired philosophy professor and Buddhist, told me that if x hours are spent on philosophy, then x hours should be spent on meditation. So five hours of philosophy ought to be balanced by five hours of meditation. A hard saying! I find it very easy to spend five to eight hours per day reading and writing philosophy. But my daily formal meditation sessions are almost never more than two hours in duration. There is also mindfulness while hiking or doing other things such as clearing brush or washing dishes, but I don't count that as formal meditation.

What are the possible views on this topic of time apportionment?

1. No time should be wasted on philosophy. Pascal famously remarked that philosophy is not worth an hour's trouble. (I am pretty sure he had his countryman Renatus Cartesius in mind.) But he didn't proffer his remark in defense of Benares, but of Jerusalem. Time apportionment as between Athens and Jerusalem is a separate topic. Note that Pascal made an exception in his own case. He left behind a magnificent collection that comes down to us as Pensées. So no philosophy is worth an hour's trouble except Pascal's own. It would have shown greater existential consistency had the great thinker devoted himself after his conversion to prayer, meditation, and charitable works. But then we would have been the poorer for it.

2. No time should be wasted on meditation. Judging by their behavior, the vast majority of academic philosophers seem committed to some such proposition.

3. Time spent on either is wasted. The view of the ordinary cave-dweller or worldling.

4. More time ought to be devoted to philosophy. But why?

5. The two 'cities' deserve equal time. The view of my Buddhist correspondent.

6. More time ought to be devoted to meditation than to philosophy.

What could be said in defense of (6)? Three quotations from Paul Brunton (Notebooks, vol. II, The Quest, Larson, 1986, p. 13):

The intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual . . . .
The mystical experience is the most valuable of all experiences . . . .
. . . the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions.

Merton on the Monastic Journey

Thomas Merton, The Monastic Journey, p. 155:

If a solitary should one day find his way, by the grace and mercy of God, into a desert place in which he is not known, and if it is permitted to him by the divine pity to live there, and to remain unknown, he may perhaps do more good to the human race by being a solitary than he ever could have done by remaining the prisoner of the society where he was living.

Merton's life suggested that he wasn't really sold on the above idea. Merton the restless, Merton the conflicted. Human, all-too-human. See my Merton category for rich substantiation.

The Orwellian Left and Abortion

For leftists, words are weapons. Nothing new here. If you have been paying attention, however, you will have noticed that their weaponization of language is becoming increasingly Orwellian.

Case in point: OPPOSITION to abortion is now 'racist.' 'Racist' has long been a verbal cudgel in the hands (mouths?) of leftists, elastic in its meaning, but now an Orwellian twist is added. It makes some sense to say that abortion is 'racist' because it disproportionately affects pre-natal blacks. But to say that OPPOSITION to abortion is racist is just insane.

Not only is truth not a leftist value, sense isn't either. Being a lefty means not having to make sense.

The Democrats are now a hard-left party. So I ask one more time: Why are you still a Dem?

Of ‘Pussy’ and ‘Pusillanimous’ and Politics

A friend of mine recently maintained with a straight face that 'pusillanimous' derives from 'pussy.' As an etymological claim that is of course preposterous. But there are two questions here that we ought to distinguish.

The first is whether 'pusillanimous' has roughly the same meaning as 'pussy' when the latter is used as it is used in American slang. I'd say it does.

The second question is whether 'pusillanimous' is etymologically derivable from 'pussy.' No. It comes from the Latin pusillus (very small) + animus (mind, soul) –> L. pusillanimis –> late Middle English pusillanimous. And that reminds me of a certain pusillanimous former president.

I asked a reader about a month before the 2016 election whether the graphic above was too tasteless to post to my high-toned blog, adding, "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'" My reader responded with a fine statement (emphasis added):

Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny. We should go to battle with a song in our hearts. Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”. How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times? Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair. He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around. After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake. So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.

My reader is right. Trump is all we've got. And the very foundation of the Republic is at stake. He has a dubious character, but then so does Hillary. This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers. This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious, stealth ideologue. That is part of what led to her defeat. People saw through her flip-flopping opportunism and refusal to come clean.

Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to principles, policies, and programs. And now, well into President Trump's first term, it is obvious that we who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades.

Liberals and Segregation

When a liberal hears 'segregation,' he thinks of racial segregation, thereby confusing the genus with one of its species, and of course, being the bien-pensant fellow he is, he reflexively comes out against it in words for public consumption. But in his private life he practices segregation, racial and otherwise: he lives in a lily-white, non-deplorable, gated and guarded enclave with his own ilk and would not think of sending his children to public schools, there to enjoy a truly 'diverse' educational 'experience.'

Surely it is racist to want to deprive your children of close contact with 'people of color.' No?

Two Marks of Maturity

One is the ability to take a joke and the other is the ability to live without dogmatic pseudo-certainty while striving for genuine certainty.

The Optimist and the Art of Life

The optimist is no cosmologist seeking the final truth about the world but a cosmetologist who puts a pretty face on it. He applies cosmetics to the cosmos. He knows the art of life and how to make the most of life, and does not shy away from such life-enhancing illusions as are conducive to his making the most of it. The philosopher, however, seeks the truth of life. Come hell or high water, or both, or neither.

There is the art of life and the truth of life, and there is a tension between them, a tension to be investigated by those of us who seek the truth of life. The investigation of this tension cannot be recommended to the artful livers. They would do well to ignore, and leave unexamined, the Socratic "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Philosophy between the Impersonal and the Personal

Philosophy aspires to the impersonal truth but, like a rocket that fails to achieve escape velocity, it remains forever in orbit around the personal, tied to it, expressive of it. This ineluctable tie-in to the personal works against philosophy's pursuit of the universal. And so, while in aspiration one, in execution philosophy is many, which is to say that there is no philosophy, only philosophies. There is no philosophy except in aspiration and in the drive to the truth that breaks free from the personal. In execution, philosophy does not break free; it breaks apart into philosophies.

And so I cannot disagree with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) who, in Part One of Beyond Good and Evil, "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers," tells us that "every great philosophy" has bisher, hitherto, been eine Selbsterkenntnis ihres Urhebers, a confession or self-cognition of its author, and eine Art ungewollter und unvermerkter mémoires, a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.

That's right. But what did old Fritz mean by 'hitherto'? That he was an exception? But he was surely no exception. His philosophy was just another confession of its author, just another rocket aimed at truth that failed to achieve escape velocity and fell back into orbit around the personal-all-too-personal.

What a rich specimen of humanity he was. He did a lot of damage, but he dug deep and he dug fearlessly and at personal cost. We honor him for that.

The Fall of John Searle

By now you will have heard that the distinguished philosopher, John R. Searle, has been stripped of his emeritus status at the University of California, Berkeley. He was found to have violated sexual harrassment policies. A long-time reader of this blog astutely observes that things went worse for Peter Abelard, and then adds:

Also, behaviour which would not have shocked me if it had involved an investment banker (although investment bankers often get a bad press in that respect), shocks me in a philosopher. OK, philosophers are not priests. But there is a sort of commitment to, er, What Is Higher, and I don’t see any such commitment in what has been described of Searle. E.g. watching pornography in front of students, with the explicit intention of making them aware of the pornography, or of making a signal of some kind, not sure what. (E.g. did he imagine that the pornography would create some desire in a female student one third of his age? Then he is a silly old fool. But then no fool like an old fool).

I am slightly surprised that my correspondent, an old man, a conservative, a man of the world, and a philosopher reports being shocked. As I would put it, we are concupiscent from the ground up, and in a social climate in which the old-time restraints have been removed, is it any surprise that a man like Searle who sports a huge ego — I've seen him in action — and is an atheist and a naturalist to boot, should get in touch with his inner lecher, especially in a far-Left Left-coast venue such as Berkeley, California?

Of course, I am not condoning his bad behavior; I condemn it. I'm just not shocked by it. The man considers religion to be in bad taste. No curb on his behavior from that direction! With a Luciferian (phosphorescent, light-bearing) intellect and an ego to match, widely-respected, he probably considered himself bullet-proof. Pride comes before the fall. And no fool like an old fool, as my correspondent notes.

Didn’t I tell you of Kingsley Amis’s remark that sexual desire was like ‘being handcuffed to a lunatic’? Right, but he also said the benefit of middle age was being released. So he acknowledged the absurdity of the desire. Searle apparently did not acknowledge such absurdity. I mean, it’s fairly absurd in a young man, but wholly and fantastically absurd in a man aged 86, or whatever it is.

Amis is right, except that middle age is too young for release. I say you are young until 30, middle-aged 30-60, and old thereafter. If you feed your sex monkey, he can torment you throughout that middle-aged period and beyond depending on your level of vigor. It is interesting, and indeed important, to note that according to St. Augustine, who had wide experience in these matters, no man achieves continence without divine assistance. So rather than say that insatiable lust is absurd, I prefer to say that it is border-line demonic.

Lord Russell, if I rightly recall, refused to remain faithful to his wife even in his 80's. Now that truly is absurd. You chase a woman. Suppose you catch her. What the hell do you do then? Sniff her hair like creepy Joe Biden? It is natural for a young man to be on the prowl, and you would entertain certain doubts about a young man who wasn't; but an old man on the prowl cuts a ridiculous figure, and is failing to make use of his old age for what it is good for: finally breaking his bondage to the flesh.

Searle story here. Something about the philandering Freddy Ayer, here. And if, after all that salaciousness, you are by any chance interested in Searles' ideas, go here.

Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained

Why do the powerful arguments against abortion have such little effect?

The 'pro-choice' movement, to use the polite euphemism, is fueled by concupiscence. Not entirely, of course. To what extent, then?

One naturally wants the pleasures of sexual intercourse without any consequences. One seeks cost-free indulgence in the most intense sensuous pleasure known to man. Unrestricted abortion on demand is a convenient remedy to an inconvenient pregnancy should other birth-control methods fail. Combine the following: a fallen being, a powerful drive, advanced birth-control and abortion technology, the ever-increasing irrelevance of religion and its moral strictures, 24-7 sex-saturation via omni-invasive popular media – combine them, and the arguments against the morality of abortion come too late. As good as they are in themselves, they are impotent against the onslaught of the factors mentioned.

It's always been that reason is reliably suborned by passion; it's just that now the subornation is quicker and easier.

And then there is the feminist angle. Having come into their own in other arenas, which is good, women are eager to throw off the remaining shackles of family and pregnancy. They insist on their rights, including reproductive rights. And isn't the right to an abortion just another reproductive right? Well, no it isn't; but the sexual itch in synergy with emancipatory zeal is sure to blind people to any arguments to the contrary. (That there are some reproductive rights I take for granted.)

And now for a little paradox. Sexual emancipation 'empowers' women. But in a sex- and power-obsessed society this 'empowerment' also empowers men by increasing the cost-free availability of women to male sexual exploitation. Enter the 'hook-up,' the name of which is a perfect phrase, hydraulic in its resonance, for the substitution of impersonal fluid-exchange for the embodiment of personal love.

It is no surprise that men with money and power who operate in enclaves of like-minded worldings take full advantage of the quarry on offer. But lust like other vices is hard to control once it is given free rein. And so the depradations of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and a hundred others is the natural upshot.

Women rightly push back but too many veer to the extreme of #metoo.

The result is a strange blend of sexual licentiousness-cum-sanctimony.

A lefty will say that I preaching, posturing, moralizing. But for a lefty all moral judgment is moralizing, except when they do it not knowing what they do; and all preaching is hypocritical, except when they do it.

But don't ever expect to get through to benighted people whose will to power has so suppressed their will to truth that they cannot look into the mirror and see themselves.

Related:

The Role of Concupiscence

Ohne Fleiß Kein Preis

The Role of Concupiscence in the Politics of the Day

Shakespeare on Lust

Shakespeare on the Fire Down Below

Like a Moth to the Flame (on the lessons to be learned from Anne-Marie Zamora's murder of the logician Jean van Heijenoort)

Addendum

The Latin above is 1 John 2:16: "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV)

Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .