Author: Bill Vallicella

The Trick in Meditation

I had a good session on the black mat this morning from 2:55 to 3:35  ante meridian. When I went to the mat, I was riding high on the wild horse of the mind, and of course enjoying the ride as I always do.   But I reined in the beast within five minutes or so and slipped into one of the antechambers of quiescence where thoughts persist but at a slower pace and of a nobler sort. For example, "Who is thinking these thoughts?" "I am thinking these thoughts." "Who am I?" And then the thought arose: to identify the thinker of thoughts is to objectify that which, as the thinker of thoughts, cannot be objectified. Of course, THAT is just another thought: it is the thought of the irreducibly subjective, and thus nonobjectifiable ultimate subject of thinking. Just another bloody thought! And so still at a remove from the Source of thoughts. But then I slipped a little deeper down as these thoughts vanished. Next thing I knew I caught myself falling over. I had fallen asleep. This was about forty minutes into the session. And that brings me to my point.

The trick in meditation is to achieve cessation of all thoughts while remaining fully alert.  So you need to do two things: rein in the wild horse of the mind, and then abide in full alertness in the resultant mental quiet. 

But this is only the first stage in meditation proper.

Why are So Many Jews Democrats?

Paul Gottfried may have part of the explanation:

Most Jews dislike the Republican Party because they associate it with the idea of a Christian America. And since the 1960s, as Peter Novick exhaustively shows in The Holocaust in American Life, blame for the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews has shifted in both Jewish and non-Jewish accounts from Nazi pagans to white Christians. The Holocaust is now routinely—perhaps most starkly in a book by Daniel Goldhagen—placed at the doorstep of Christian civilization. In my view, this shift is based on reckless generalization and feeds into an unjustified Jewish hostility toward religious Christians. But it’s nonetheless convinced many Jews that even Christians who appear to be effusively philosemitic are really anti-Jewish. Democrats, meanwhile, are supposedly friendlier to Jews because they are cleansing public life of traditional biblical morality, most of which ironically comes from Hebrew Scripture. From 2016 to 2018, while the Trump administration was trying to hammer home that Democrats were unfriendly to Israel and, by implication, to American Jews, Jewish identification with the Democratic Party went from 71 percent to 79 percent.

Related: Paul Gottfried on Propositionalism

Race, Social Construction, and Lewontin’s Fallacy

I asked a correspondent what it means when leftists say that race is a social construct. Here is his response with my comments:

What do they even mean?  I wonder about that too.  What could it mean to say that race is a "social construct"?  Do they mean that there are no biological or ancestral differences at all between Whites and Blacks and Orientals?  That's just ridiculous — like saying there are no biological differences between human beings and gorillas. 

It is indeed ridiculous on the face of it. It's like saying that the difference between fish and mammals is a mere artifact of our conceptual decisions and classificatory activities. It implies that reality has no inherent structure or intelligibility; whatever intelligibility it has it acquires from us. But that is tantamount to saying that there is no reality. It is Kant gone wild: the Critical Philosophy without the Ding an sich and without an invariant categorial framework.

Here is perhaps the deepest metaphysical error of the Left: leftists deny that there is a reality antecedent to our classifications and conceptualizations. (V. I. Lenin was of course an exception.) Everything becomes a social-political construct. How convenient for identity-political totalitarians! The bird of reality can be carved up any way that suits the will to power of some interest group — because there is no bird to carve. Next stop: the Twilight Zone. Rachel Dolezal is black. Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee. Warren, a.k.a. Fauxcahontas, despite her contribution of a recipe for lobster bisque to Pow Wow Chow, that must-have cook book for the bien pensant, is the Rachel Dolezal of American politics. Continuing in the alimentary mode, she is now anent her Presidential pretensions, 'toast.'

I think in most cases they don't mean anything much.  They haven't thought about it.  It's a smart-sounding phrase they picked up from PBS or from some half-wit university lecturer.  It's the kind of thing the bien pensant people say.  So they say it too.  And they know that, whatever it really means, it must be true and morally right to say it.  They know that only Nazis disagree.  I've talked to some educated intelligent Leftists who say stuff like this.  They usually just retreat to Lewontin's fallacy–more differences within races than between, and all of that.  Again, it seems they just don't want to think about it and they use these dumb phrases as a way to avoid thinking.  The dumb phrases change once in a while.  I guess in earlier decades we'd hear more about how "There is only one race, the human race".  But it may be a mistake to expect any clear or coherent meaning behind these propaganda phrases.  

That's right. You might think that those who inhabit academe would be critical thinkers; the truth, however, is that many if not most are all-too-ready to succumb to groupthink, whether to advance themselves career-wise, or to fit in and be accepted, or just because they lack the skeptical, scientific spirit.

Lewontin's Fallacy?

A. W. F. Edwards on Lewontin's Fallacy

Wikipedia on Lewontin's Fallacy

Neven Sesardic, Race: The Social Destruction of a Biological Concept

Plato’s Great Inversion

A rerun unredacted from February, 2014.  To the memory of John  Niemeyer  Findlay.

………………………………………

Our long-time friend Horace Jeffery Hodges kindly linked to and riffed upon my recent quotage of a bit of whimsicality from the second volume of J. N. Findlay's Gifford lectures.  So here's another Findlay quotation for Jeff's delectation, this time from Plato and Platonism: An Introduction (Times Books, 1978):

It is not here, we may note, our task to defend Plato's Great Inversion, the erection of instances into ontological appendages of Ideas rather than the other way round.  It is only our task to show what this inversion involves, and that it does dispose of many powerful arguments.  For despite much talk of the concretely real and of what we can hold in our hands, it is plain that nothing so much eludes us or evades us as the vanishing instances which surround us or which go on in us. Even our friends leave nothing in our hands or our minds,  but the characteristic patterns on which we can, alas, only ponder lovingly when as instances they are dead, and we ourselves and our whole life of care and achievement leave nothing behind but the general memory of what we did and were. (23)

My esteemed teacher's poetic prose may have got the better of him in that last sentence redolent as it is of an old man's nostalgia.  For it is not only Findlay's characteristic patterns once so amply instantiated here below that I now ponder lovingly, but the actual words he wrote, many of them printed, some of them hand-written, that strikingly singular voluminous flow of Baroque articulation so beautifully expressive of a wealth of thoughts. In his books, I have the man still, and presumably at his best, even if he himself, long dead as an instance, has made the transcensive move from the Cave's chiaroscuro to the limpid light wherein he now, something of a Platonic Form himself, beholds the forma formarum, the Form of all Forms.

You will be forgiven if you think my poetic prose has gotten the better of me.

J N Findlay seated

How Much Logic Do I Need?

A reader who reports that his main interest is in contemporary metaphysics inquires:

Should I learn as much logic as humanly possible during my PhD? Or should I learn only what I need along the way? I have a basic grasp of symbolic and predicate logic, but little meta-logic.

First of all, it makes no sense to oppose symbolic to predicate logic.  Modern symbolic logic includes both propositional logic and predicate logic.

Second, learn what you need as you go along.  For example, existence is one of the central topics in metaphysica generalis. To work on this topic in an informed way you have to understand the modern quantificational treatment of existence in mathematical logic. 

Here is the minimum required for doing metaphysics. First, a thorough grounding in traditional formal logic including the Aristotelian syllogistic. Second, modern symbolic logic including the propositional calculus and first-order predicate logic with identity.  Third, some familiarity with axiomatics and the concepts of metalogic including consistency and completeness of axiom systems.  Fourth, axiomatic set theory. Fifth, some (alethic) modal logic both propositional and quantified.

The best way to master these subjects, or at least the first two mentioned, is by teaching them to undergraduates.  

Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:

If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.

These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible  that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness. 

("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.) 

The Attitude of the Worldling

Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality.  I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.   

For a worldling such as Alain,  the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility.  The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:

Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it.  Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets.  It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions!  Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!

The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us.  One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined.  Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)

A frat boy might put it like this:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

Or in the words of a 1970 beer commercial:

You only go around once in life
So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.

This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly  more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon.  Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that.  In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane  of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.

Is the worldling ignorant?

I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.

Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature.  I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No.  Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience?  No. So the will comes into it.

Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?

Some might be, but in general, he is not.  Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable.  It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.

Alain (Emile Chartier)

Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.

Sunshine is the Best Disinfectant. . .

. . . but not for the obstructionist crapweasel Democrats who will say and do literally anything to destroy a duly elected president.  They understandably do not want their skulduggery to come to light.

One of the signal services of Mr. Trump is that he has forced the Democrats to show their true hard-Left colors. He has caused the scum of the Democrat party to rise to the very top to be seen in the plain light of day. Trump has clarified our politics. He is the Great Clarifier.  To call him the Great Divider is knuckleheaded. The divisions were already in place. He merely gave effective voice to one side of the divide — which is what drove and drives the Dems crazy.

Trump Let the Dogs Out:

The Democrats, stumbling down the road to impeachment, were stunned by President Trump’s executive order on Thursday.

The order is in two parts. First, it directs the intelligence agencies to cooperate with Attorney General William Barr’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation that was the vehicle used to spy on candidate Trump’s campaign and President Trump’s administration when it was new.

The second part of the order delegates to Barr the president’s authority to declassify — or reduce the level of classification of — anything that the intelligence agencies will give him.

Read it all.

The Facebook Offload

I have offloaded a good deal of my political linkage, 'rantage,' and commentary onto my FB page. But given the state of the Republic, it is important to punch back against the destructive Left in every venue and from every platform. So I will continue to post political material here.  You may try to avoid the political, but don't expect it to reciprocate.  You may seek to evade the totalitarians and retreat into your private life, but it is the nature of  totalitarians to seek total control.  Retreat into your private life, and you  may wake up one day to find that there is no private life.

Free speech! Use it or lose it. But the Constitution that protects our rights is just paper without a certain backup element:

Pb