Author: Bill Vallicella

Acting with Others versus Talking with Others

An excellent insight from Alain's essay, "The Ills of Others":

To act with others is always good; to talk with others for the sake of talking, complaining, and recriminating, is one of the greatest scourges on earth . . . . (Alain on Happiness, Frederick Ungar 1973, p. 160)

I once built a small dock with another man. We had little or nothing in common intellectually or spiritually. You could say we lived on different planets. Conversation with him about any matter beyond the sensibly present was pointless or worse. But with tools in hand, confronting the recalcitrance of matter, with a definite physical end in view, engaged in a common project, his words were guided and anchored, and our words together served a purpose. Acting together we achieved something. The job done, the handiwork admired, I found myself actually liking the guy.

But had we been just talking, I would have found it a moral challenge not to be disgusted with him. Few possess the mental equipment and discipline to engage in fruitful conversation that is not anchored in the mundane.

Again I note, as in an earlier Alain post, the French love of the universal quantifier: "To act with others is always good. . . ." Obviously, acting with others is not always good, for reasons you an easily supply yourself. So why the exaggeration? For literary effect.

Please don't accuse me of committing a hasty generalization. I am not inferring some such proposition as 'French writers misuse universal quantifiers for literary effect' from this one instance, or this instance plus the one cited in the earlier post; what I am doing is illustrating an antecedently established general proposition. This is a distinction one should observe, but is too often not observed, namely, the distinction between generalizing and illustrating. Someone who illustrates a general claim by providing an example is not inferring the general claim from the example.

Alain (Emile Chartier)

Fragment of a Credo

I cannot know whether my life makes ultimate sense.  But I can live as if it does, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it does not.

I cannot know whether my life is bounded by bodily birth and death. But I can live as if it is not, and if I do I will live better than if I live as if it is.

LIes and Counterfactuals

Suppose I say

1) Had Jeb Bush won the 2016 Republican  nomination, Hillary Clinton would have won the presidential election.

Suppose a Never-Trumper calls me a liar.  Have I lied?  A lie is an intentional misrepresentation of a truth known by the one who lies in order to deceive the person or persons being lied to.  Now (1) is either true or not true, but no one knows which it is. So no one can rightly call me a liar for asserting (1).  

If I am not lying when I assert (1), what am I doing?  I am offering a reasonable, but practically unverifiable, speculation.  And the same goes for a person who denies (2).

Donald Trump famously boasted, 

2) Had it not been for all the illegal votes, I would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.

Leftists, who compile long lists of Trump's supposed lies, had among their number some who counted (2) — an accurate paraphrase of what Trump said, not an exact quotation — as a lie.

But it is obviously not a lie. The worst you could call it is an unlikely self-serving speculation.  He did not assert something he knew to be false, he asserted something he did not know to be true.

Trump haters who compile lists of his 'lies,' need to give a little thought as to what a lie is; else their count will be wrong. 

Are Atheists Vincibly Ignorant?

In Catholic thought there is what is called vincible ignorance. Here is a definition:

Lack of knowledge for which a person is morally responsible. It is culpable ignorance because it could be cleared up if the person used sufficient diligence. One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known; guilt then depends on one's lack of effort to clear up the ignorance.

For present purposes, it suffices to say that 'God' refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.

This puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.

How Can Anyone Live for This Life Alone?

This just over the transom:

There's a question I've been pondering for some time that I'd like your opinion on if you're willing. I've always been fascinated by people who have been occupied and consumed by the things of the world- power, money, fame, sex, etc. For example, I just finished watching a documentary about Ronnie Coleman, one of, if not the most, famous body builders of all time. For him, body building was his life, he won 8 Mr. Olympia titles. Now, in his old age, he has horrible back issues from all his training and gets around on crutches. Yet he says he regrets nothing. There are countless examples of people who spend their entire lives devoted to the material and transient world, seemingly in complete ignorance of the Divine and the eternal.

As a Christian, I find it hard to understand how this is possible. If God does exist, and there is an eternal realm as Plato thought, then how can someone be 'satisfied' with a life that was devoted to the temporal and earthly realm? Is it that such persons are simply ignorant? Or perhaps such persons are willfully ignorant? As a person who has always had a religious disposition, like yourself, I find it hard to understand and sympathize with people who do not. 

Any thoughts you might have would be much appreciated. Thanks so much for your time. 

How can so many live for the goods of this life alone?

The short answer is that they don't take seriously the idea that there is any other life and any other goods.  It is not just that they don't believe that there is an eternal realm, Unseen Order, divine milieu, or whatever you want to call it.  It is not even an issue for them.  The question is idle and otiose: it simply does not arise for them in any existentially arresting form.  Questions about God and the soul are simply dismissed in the way almost all adults dismiss questions about Santa Claus.

But WHY don't they take Unseen Things seriously? 

It comes down to what could be called one's sense of reality.  For the worldling, 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 then 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!

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 be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. 

The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult 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?

My reader and I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to us? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? 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, 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. In the end, a leap of faith. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live.

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?  I don't think so.

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.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

I post what I like and I like what I post.

Barrett Strong, Money.  Flying Lizards' parody.

Buckwheat Zydeco, Jackpot

Dolly Parton, Silver Dagger.  Great version, but then so is Joan Baez's.

Elmore James, Dust My Broom

Since 1992, the most beat-to-crap broom on my premises was always given the name, 'Hillary's Broom.'  "Wifey, hand me Hillary's Broom.  I got me a dirty job to do."

Canned Heat, Dust My Broom

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights.  Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

Bonnie Owens, Philadelphia Lawyer

Curtis Lee, Pretty Little Angel Eyes (the original!)  This one goes out to wifey with love.

Curtis Edwin Lee, one-hit wonder, hailed from Yuma, Arizona.  He died at 75 years of age on 8 January 2015.  Obituary here. His signature number became a hit in 1961, reaching the #7 slot on the Billboard Hot 100. The record was produced by the legendary Phil Spector, No wonder it is so good.  After the limelight, Lee returned to Yuma for a normal life.

Facebook Update

Some of you have messaged me to say that you are unable to send me a FB friend request.  That was my fault. I had the software set to accept friend requests only from friends of friends. I have fixed that. You should be able to get through now.

I apologize if I don't get around to responding to all your kind messages. There is only so much time . . . .

Three Lockean Reasons to Oppose the Democrats

The main purpose of government is to protect life, liberty, and property. Subsidiary purposes are subordinate to the Lockean triad.  The Democrats, however, are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property.  So if you value life, liberty, and property, then you must not vote for any Democrat. The Republicans in their timid way do stand for life, liberty, and property.  And they are becoming less timid under Trump's tutelage. Lindsey Graham, for one, has recently located his manly virtue and put it to work during the Kavanaugh confirmation. So the choice is clear. Vote Republican, never vote for any Democrat, and don't throw away your vote on unelectable third-party candidates.

I will now briefly list some, but not all, of the reasons why the Democrats are anti-life, anti-liberty, and anti-property.

Anti-Life.  The Dems are the abortion party. They support abortion on demand at every stage of fetal development. They are blind to the moral issues that abortion raises. They wrongly think that abortion is merely about women's health and reproductive rights. To make matters worse, they violate the beliefs of fellow taxpayers by their support of tax-payer funding for Planned Parenthood which is an abortion provider.

Anti-Liberty. The Dems are opposed to free speech, religious liberty, and gun rights.  They regularly conflate free speech with 'hate speech' and religious liberty with 'theocracy.'  And this while going soft on genuine theocratic regimes such as Iran's. All of this puts them at odds with the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution. And in general we can say that contemporary Democrats  are anti-Constitutional inasmuch  as an open or living constitution, which they advocate, is no constitution at all, but a mere tabula rasa they hope to deface with their anti-American leftist ideology.

Anti-Property. Today's Democrats, as hard leftists, are ever on the slouch toward socialism, which, in full flower (to put it euphemistically) requires central planning and government ownership of the means of production.  That is where they want to go even though, as stealth ideologues, they won't admit it.

But let's assume that the statement I just made is exaggerated and that Dems really don't want socialism as it is classically defined. Still, they are anti-property in various ways.  They think that we the people have to justify our keeping whereas government doesn't have to justify its taking. That is precisely backwards. They don't appreciate that the government exists for us; we don't exist for the government. They confuse taxation with wealth redistribution. And by the way, government is not us, as some idiots such as Thom Hartman say.  'The government is us' is as perversely knuckle-headed as 'Diversity is our strength.'  The latter stupidity is plainly Orwellian. What about the former? Pre-Orwellian?  Both are Pelosi-stupid, which is the ne plus ultra of stupidity.

Finally, you need to understand that private property is the foundation of individual liberty.

The Presumptuousness of Blogging

Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties/Der Streit der Fakultäten, tr. Gregor (University of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 177:

To want to entertain others with the inner history of the play of my thoughts, which has subjective importance (for me) but no objective importance (valid for everyone), would be presumptuous, and I could justly be blamed for it.

There is no doubt about it: we bloggers are a presumptuous and vain lot. We report daily on the twists and turns of our paltry minds. In mitigation, a couple of points.

First, I don’t force my posts on anyone. If you are here, it is of your own free will.  Second, there is something fascinating to me about the origin of my own and others' ideas and how they in their abtractness percolate up out of the concretion of their authors' Existenz. The blogs of most interest to me combine the existential with the theoretical, the autobiographical with the impersonal. The question of the origin of ideas must not be confused with the question of their validity or lack thereof.  But both questions are fascinating, and how exactly they connect is even more so. Now if I find the intertwinement of the existential and the theoretical interesting, then perhaps you do as well; herein may reside some justification for reports on "the inner history of the play of my thoughts."

I oppose the nomenclature whereby individual weblogs (as opposed to group weblogs) are referred to as ‘personal’ weblogs. This blog is more impersonal than personal and I fret over the ratio. Objektive Wichtigkeit should predominate over subjektive. But by how much?

By the way, Streit der Fakultäten is a fascinating book. I’m an old Kant man; I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of the transcendental unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. That was back in 1978. But it was only in 2008 that I cracked my copy of The Conflict of the Faculties. This is a nice edition: German Fraktur on the left, good English translation on the right.

October Ends . . .

. . .  and we say farewell once again to Jack Kerouac, cat man and mama's boy, as he prepares to "leave all San Francisco behind and go back home across autumn America" proving once again to his romantic predecessor Thomas Wolfe that one can go back home again where

it'll all be like it was in the beginning — Simple golden eternity blessing all . . . My mother'll be waiting for me glad — the corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine making my home more homelike somehow — On soft Spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars — Something good will come out of all things yet — And it will be golden and eternal just like that – There's no need to say another word. (Big Sur, 1962, last lines, last page.)

It's a good last word: something good will come of it all: of all of the wandering, all of the searching, all of the pain, and misery, and drunken folly, and lonely nights, and broken dreams.  The vanity will give way to vision.  The beat will taste beatitude.  The road will end and the restless will rest.

Kerouac home in October

More on the Hypostatic Union

I am very impressed with Thomas Joseph White, OP, The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology, The Catholic University of America Press, 2017, xiv + 534 pp. It deserves to be called magisterial, the work of a magister, a master.  I am presently working through Chapter One, "The Ontology of the Hypostatic Union."

White and I are concerned with the intelligibility of the one person, two natures doctrine. (See yesterday's entry for background.)  Fr. White of course considers the doctrine  to be intelligible while I have my doubts. This entry presents one of the problems I am having.

Christ is one person in two distinct individual natures, the one divine, the other human.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the Second Person of the Trinity.  The Word is eternal, impassible, and necessary. In the patois of possible worlds, the Word exists in every metaphysically possible world. The hypostatic union is the union of the Word with the individual human nature (body and soul) of Jesus where the hypostasis or suppositum is the Word. It is that which has the nature or exists in the nature.  White tells us that this union is not

. . . merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God. Rather the Word subsists personally as man in a human nature. Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son existing as man. (113)

We are being told that the person of Jesus is the eternal Word, the Son, not a human person.  There is human nature in Jesus, but no human person in Jesus.  So it not as if there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus.  There is only one person, the person of the Word. To think otherwise is the Nestorian heresy.

This raises the following question.

If the Word is a necessary being, and the union of the Word with human nature is not accidental, but essential, are we to conclude that the Word has a concrete human body and human soul in every possible world, and thus at every time?   It would seem so.  If x is united with N essentially, then x is united with N in every possible world in which x exists.  So if x is a necessary being, then x is united with  N in every possible world, period, which is to say that there is no possible world in which x is not united with N. Therefore,

1) If the Word is united to a human nature essentially, then there is no possible world in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

But then how is this consistent with the belief that the Incarnation was an historical event that occurred at a particular time and whose occurrence was contingent, not necessary? God became man to save man from the sin he incurred with Adam's fall, a fall that was itself contingent upon Adam's free choice to violate the divine command.   That is,

2) There are possible worlds in which God does not create at all, and possible worlds in which God creates humans but there is no Fall, no need for Redemption, and thus no need for Incarnation.  

Therefore

3) There are possible worlds in which the Word is not united to a human nature.

Therefore

4) It is not the case that the Word is united to a human nature essentially. (From 1, 3 by modus tollens)

Therefore

5) The Word is united to a human nature accidentally.

But this is contrary to the orthodox view at least as explained by Fr. White who draws upon Thomas.  White tells us that "the humanity of Jesus  is united to the Word as an intrinsic, 'conjoined instrument.' The being of the man Jesus is the being of the Word." (83)  We are also told that the unity is "substantial not accidental." (83)

Why does Aquinas think that the Word must be united to the humanity of Jesus intrinsicaly and essentially as opposed to extrinsically and accidentally? Because he thinks that this is the only way to avoid the Nestorian heresy according to which there are two persons, the person of the Word and the person of Jesus.

The reasoning seems to go like this. In an ordinary man, body and soul form a substantial unity.  If in Jesus body and soul formed a substantial unity, then Jesus would be a different substance and a different suppositum (hypostasis) from the Word, and Nestorianism would be the upshot. To avoid this, the proposal was made that body and soul in Christ do not form a substantial unity as they do in ordinary human beings. Thus on the so-called habitus theory, the third theory of the hypostatic union mentioned in Peter Lombard's Sentences,  ". . . both the body and the soul are said to accrue to the person of the Word 'accidentally' as qualities or properties of the Word, but without subsistence in the Word." (85) This implies that body and soul are accidental to each other, which of course is unacceptable given the background Aristotelian commitments of Thomas.

So while the habitus theory aims to be anti-Nestorian, it ends up in an implicit Nestorianism according to White's Aquinas.  You've got the Word and over against it the body of Jesus and the soul of Jesus as an accidental, not a substantial, unity.  On this scheme the individual humanity (body and soul) of Jesus is accidental to the Word.

My point is that, on the one hand, this is how it should be given the contingency of the Fall and the contingency of the Incarnation.  The Word is not essentially incarnated; it is accidentally incarnated. The humanity of the Word is accidental, not essential.  That would seem to fit nicely with the Christian narrative. But on the other hand, if it is not the substance of the Son who dies on the cross, if it is not God himself who enters history and dies on the cross, if it is a man who is only accidentally and for a time united with the Word, then the debt that only God himslef can pay has not been paid in full.

So I think we can understand why the one person, two natures doctrine was deemed orthodox. But if I am right in my reasoning above, the orthodox doctrine entails the absurdity that the Word has a "concrete body and soul" (113) at every time and in every possible world.

To put it another way, the Incarnation makes no sense unless it is a contingent event, but it cannot be on the radically anti-Nestorian view of  White's Aquinas. 

Facebook Update

I'm on a roll over there as things heat up and the mid-term elections loom. 

Yes, we've spoken of watershed elections before, but this is the Big One, at least until the next one.  If you want to hear me rock, roll, and rant, send me a friend request, but only if you are a member of the Coalition of the Sane. Otherwise I'll unfriend you in a heartbeat. There is also a bit of hard-core philosophy there that doesn't appear here.

I am still drawing the line at Twitter, but Spencer Case has been urging me to sign up for that as well.