Author: Bill Vallicella

Frege’s Horse Paradox, Bradley’s Regress, and the Problem of Predication

The concept horse is not a concept.  Thus spoke Frege, paradoxically.  Why does he say such a thing?  Because the subject expression 'the concept horse' refers to an object.  It names an object.  Concepts and objects on his scheme are mutually exclusive. No concept is an object and conversely.   Only objects can be named.  No concept can be named. Predicates are not names.  If you try to name a concept you will fail.  You will succeed only in naming an object.  You will not succeed in expressing the predicativity of the concept.  Concepts are predicable while objects are not. It is clear that one cannot predicate Socrates of Socrates. We can, however, predicate wisdom of Socrates.  It is just that wisdom is not an object.

But now we are smack in the middle of the paradox. For to explain Frege's view I need to be able to talk about the referent of the gappy predicate ' ___ is wise.'  I need to be able to say that it is a predicable entity, a concept.  But how can I do this without naming it, and thus objectifying it?  Ineffability may be the wages of Frege's absolute object-concept distinction.

To savor the full flavor of the paradox, note that the sentence 'No concept can be named'  contains the general name 'concept.'  It seems we, or rather the Fregeans, cannot say what we or they mean.  But if we cannot say what we mean, how do we know that we mean anything at all?  Is an inexpressible meaning a meaning?  Are there things that cannot be said but only shown? (Wittgenstein) Perhaps we cannot say that concepts are concepts; all we can do is show that they are by employing open sentences or predicates such as '___ is tall.'  Unfortunately, this is also paradoxical.  For I had to say what the gappy predicate shows. I had to say that concepts are concepts and that concepts are what gappy predicates (predicates that are not construed as names) express.

Why can't concepts be named?  Why aren't they a kind of higher-order object? Why can't they be picked out using abstract substantives?  Why can't we say that, in a sentence such as 'Tom is sad,' 'Tom' names an object while 'sad' names a different sort of object, a concept/property?  Frege's thought seems to be that if concepts are objects, then they cannot exercise their predicative function.  Concepts are essentially and irreducibly predicative, and if you objectify them — think or speak of them as objects — then you destroy their predicative function. A predicative proposition is not a juxtaposition of two objects.  If  there is Tom and there is sadness, it doesn't follow that sadness is true of Tom. What makes a property true of its subject?  An obvious equivalence: if F-ness is true of a, then *a is F* is true.  So we might ask the questions this way: What makes *a is F* true?

The Problem of the Unity of the Proposition and the Fregean Solution

We are brought back to the problem of the unity of the proposition. It's as old as Plato. It is a genuine problem, but no one has ever solved it. (Of course, I am using 'solve' as a verb of success.)

A collection of two objects is not a proposition.  The mereological sum Tom + sadness is neither true nor false; propositions are either true or false.  The unity of a proposition is a type of unity that attracts a truth value, whereas the unity of a sum does not attract a truth value.  The unity of a proposition is mighty puzzling even in the simplest cases.   It does no good to say that the copula 'is' in 'Tom is sad' refers to the instantiation relation R and that this relation connects the concept/property to the object, sadness to Tom, and in such a way as to make sadness true of Tom.  For then you sire Mr Bradley's relation regress.  It's infinite and it's vicious.  Note that if the sum Tom + sadness can exist without it being true that Tom is sad, then the sum Tom + R + sadness can also exist without it being true that Tom is sad. 

FregeEnter Frege with his obscure talk of the unsaturatedness of concepts. Concepts exist whether or not they are instantiated, but they are  'gappy':  if a first-level concept is instantiated by an object, there is no need for a tertium quid to connect concept and object. They fit together like plug and socket, where the plug is the object and the concept the socket.  The female receptacle accepts the male plug without the need of anything to hold the two together.

On this approach no regress arises.  For if there is no third thing that holds concept and object together, then no worries can arise as to how the third thing is related to the concept on the one side and the object on the other.  But our problem about the unity of the proposition remains unsolved.  For if the concept can exist uninstantiated, then both object and concept, Tom and sadness, can exist without it being true that Tom is sad. 

The dialectic continues on and on. Philosophia longa, vita brevis. Life is brief; blog posts ought to be.

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: Working Draft: The Case Against Facts
Arguing with Kripke over Existence
Direct and Indirect Reference
Does Reality Have a Sentence-Like Structure?

The Constitution, Reason, and Abstract Principles

This entry continues the 'religious test' discussion. (Last installment here.) The Canadian writes,

I agree that there's no incoherence in a statement such as "(1) The Constitution guarantees  freedom of religion and disallows religious tests.  (2) The Constitution guarantees these things subject to the proviso that the religion in question is compatible with the principles of the American founding."  But why is the most reasonable interpretation one that projects such a proviso on to the text?  What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation?  On the one hand, a reasonable interpretation might be one that results in a constitution that reasonable people could accept.  Naturally, if this is the criterion, no reasonable interpretation can produce a constitution that, in practice, would create a society where that same constitution would be destroyed.  On the other hand, it might simply be one that's adequately supported by the textual evidence (and other evidence, e.g., reasonably hypotheses about the authors' intentions).  Or maybe a reasonable interpretation is subject to both constraints.  In any case there is a tension between the two.  As you say, there's really no good textual evidence (or any other kind, as far as I know) to indicate that the Constitution really does implicitly limit the scope of religious freedom so as to preclude the freedom to practice traditional Islam, or that it limits the scope of 'No religious test' so as to allow for tests with respect to Islam.  I'd argue that a reasonable interpretation in the second sense–the most reasonable one, in that sense–is unreasonable in the first sense.  

"What are the criteria for a reasonable interpretation?" I agree that there is no evading this difficult question. One answer is that a reasonable interpretation is an internally coherent one.  The First Amendment guarantees the "free exercise" of religion and "freedom of speech," inter alia. Now if "no religious test" (Article VI, section III) is interpreted in so latitudinarian a fashion as to allow Sharia-supporting Muslims to gain political power, then we are on the road to an internal contradiction.  For these Muslims, once in power,  will of course try to shut down the free exercise of religions other than Islam, and they will attempt to prohibit freedom of speech if it involves any criticism, no matter how respectful, of Muhammad or of any aspect of their religion. They will have used the Constitution to destroy the Constitution.  They will have exploited our freedom of religion to eliminate freedom of religion, and our freedom of speech to eliminate freedom of speech.

It seems to me that the Constitution cannot be interpreted so as to allow the emergence of the following logical contradiction:

a) Under no circumstances shall (i) the freedom to practice the religion of one's choice (or to refrain from the practice of any religion) be prohibited by the government, or (ii) the freedom to express one's view publicly be abridged.

b) Under some circumstances (e.g., when enough Muslim fundamentalists gain power) the freedom of religion and the freedom of speech many be prohibited and abridged.

Note that the (a)-(b) dyad is logically inconsistent: the limbs cannot both be true.  What we have here is a strict logical contradiction.

But to embrace a logical contradiction is the height of unreasonableness. 

I conclude that to interpret the Constitution in such a way that it allows for the emergence of the above contradiction is unreasonable. The solution is obvious to me: one cannot allow a destructive political ideology such as Islam to count as a religion for purposes of Constitutional interpretation.  I am conceding that Islam is a religion and not a mere political ideology masquerading as a religion, and I am conceding that it is a religion in its own right and not a Christian heresy; the point is that it is a religion-cum-political ideology that is incompatible with the principles and values of the American founding.

Therefore, Islam ought not count as a religion when it comes to interpreting the Constitution. It may well be a way to God for those brought up on it and who know no better way, and it deserves respect for that reason. But this is no reason to abstract from its totalitarian and theocratic political nature, a nature at war with our political principles.

The Canadian continues:

In any case, I think that for your argument you need the first notion of reasonable interpretation.  But then there's a problem:  Leftists, whose ideas about reasonable political principles are very different from ours, can now argue on a similar basis that we should just ignore the seemingly plain meaning of the Constitution in cases where it conflicts with their values.  For instance, they can argue that since it's just not reasonable to let citizens buy AR-15s, the 2nd Amendment must be interpreted in such a way that citizens don't have that right.  That seems worrisome.  If there isn't even a generally agreed meaning for the constitution, the only way to politically resolve such disagreements is by some kind of debate over ultimate aims or values; but I know you agree with me that that isn't likely to happen either.  So it seems wise to insist that the constitution's meaning is the meaning of the text, not the meaning that we think it would have or should have in order to be most reasonable.  But then we're back to the problem that the text just doesn't seem to exclude Islamic freedom of religion, or to allow for a "religious test" in that case–or even to exclude the possibility that the Constitution is just internally inconsistent in some respects…  

In many cases there is no "plain meaning."  The meaning has to be 'excavated.' Does "establishment of religion" have a plain meaning in the First Amendment? (That's a rhetorical question.) "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."  The meaning is open to interpretation.  Or take the Second Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does 2A bear its meaning on its sleeve? Of course not. What is the Militia? Is the right individual or collective? Does the initial clause supply a reason, or the only reason, in justification of the right to keep and bear arms? I have argued elsewhere that it supplies a reason, not the only reason. I am sure many if not most would disagree.

So I deny the Canadian's assumption that the Constitution has a plain meaning that can just be 'read off' the text. There is no avoiding interpretation in the light of principles that are not themselves articulated in the Constitution. The Law of Non-Contradiction, for example, is not stated in the Constitution. We bring that principle to the text, and reasonably so.  

Or consider the Principle of Charity in interpretation. To save keystrokes I won't formulate the principle.  My astute readers know more or less what it is. Well, does "All men are created equal" in the Declaration have a plain meaning?  There are benighted souls who think it implies the empirical equality of all human beings.  But this violates the Principle of Charity since if the declaration in the Declaration were so interpreted it would come out false! The Charity principle, however, is not to be found in any of the founding documents; we bring it to the text and we do so reasonably.

There is no avoiding interpretation. The text does not have a plain meaning. The other extreme, however, is far worse. There are those who say that the Constitution means whatever SCOTUS says it means.  But then there is no text; there is a tabula rasa upon which people in black robes write whatever they want.  The most SCOTUS can do is decide upon an enforceable meaning among candidate possibilities that find support in the text.  That alone is the reasonable view.

For example, are 2A rights collective or individual? It was decided that they are individual. SCOTUS in this decision came to the 'right' decision. Yes, my use of 'right' is tendentious. More on this problem below.

What I am saying, then, is that there is a text, not a tabula rasa; the text has a meaning; the meaning is not obvious; the meaning is subject to interpretation in the light of principles brought to the text.

But whose principles are these?  Those of a reasonable person. But what constitutes reasonableness? Here is where the crunch comes, as my Canadian interlocutor fully appreciates.  SCOTUS has the power to lay down the law and enforce an interpretation of the Constitution.  But who has the power to decide what the principles of rationality are? Logically prior question: Are the principles of rationality matters of decision at all?

The Canadian concludes:

We might be back to a recurring deeper disagreement here.  I don't think that any system of abstract principles and values is enough to provide a framework for a workable society.  I think some kind of pre-rational or pre-conceptual horizon of meaning and practice and natural community is the basis; explicit principles and values have a role, but only when they're understood by everyone to operate within that specific cultural world.  The principles of "no religious test" or "freedom of religion" were just fine when they were only being applied to a fairly small range of fairly similar religions, practiced by relatively similar people.  (And, sure, there were always some who were not so similar–Africans, Amerindians–but they were small in number and had no real influence.)  Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems.  Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones.  But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles.  I suspect that the very idea of "religion" that we in the west tend to take for granted is really an artefact of our specific religious and cultural heritage.  There is probably no useful general account of "religion" across all human cultures.  So it would be unwise to propose any kind of freedom for  that kind of thing. 

I agree that abstract principles and values are not enough. They have to reflect a (temporally) prior pre-conceptual shared understanding that is taken for granted. The principles and values cannot be imposed ab extra, but must be a sort of distillate or articulation on the conceptual plane of what is already tacitly understood and accepted at the pre-conceptual level.  Otherwise we will argue about the principles.

Argument about first principles is the province of philosophy and is legitimate there. In philosophy, nothing is immune to scrutiny. I should think that 'nothing immune to scrutiny'  is a constitutive rule of the philosophical 'game' or enterprise.  But if our politics becomes a philosophical free-for-all, then we are in trouble. 

There is no place for dogmas in philosophy. But in politics and religion we seem to need them. We need propositions that are unquestionably accepted.

For example, if we don't all accept that there is a  sense in which we are all equal, equal as rights-possessors, then we are in deep trouble. And if we don't all accept that certain ideologies such as Islam are incompatible with the principles enshrined in the U. S. Constitution, then we are in deep trouble.  Examples are easily multiplied.

I think we agree on why we are in the mess we are in. As you put it, "Once every religion on earth was included in American society, that was bound to create insoluble problems."   But benign non-Christian religions such as Buddhism are not the problem. The problem is Islam.  The solution is extreme vetting of immigrants from Muslim countries.  "Of course, one option is to simply say that there will be freedom of religion for a specific list of religions, and only those ones.  But that seems contrary to other traditional American principles."

I disagree. Which traditional American principle are you referring to?  Don't tell me "freedom of religion." Islam is not a religion in a sense that could allow it to be on a list of acceptable religions given American principles.

Can a multi-cultural society flourish?  There is reason to be skeptical. A society cannot flourish without shared principles and values. But the latter presuppose and grow out of a shared public culture.  Acquiescence in and assimilation to that shared culture — Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian — must be demanded of all would-be immigrants.  Otherwise we will break apart and become easy pickings for foreign aggressors.

I suspect it is already too late to turn things around peacefully. Civil war is a real possibility.

Black Privilege


White guilt“The story at Starbucks isn’t racism but entitlement. The two men felt entitled to loiter on private property without buying anything. They decided that the rules didn’t apply to them. And apparently they were correct.” —Matt Walsh

I love hanging out in coffee houses, reading, talking, and most of all, playing chess. I fancy myself a strong coffee house player, which means that I'm a patzer, but I'll clean your clock if you learned the game from your uncle. (Full disclosure: I'm in the B category; highest USCF rating = 1720. I beat Reppert once in a coffee house (on the White side of a Smith-Morra gambit) and two or three experts (2000-2200) at tournaments.)

I consider myself entitled to take up space only if I have purchased something.

Being black is not carte blanche for bad behavior. 


Michael J. Totten on Cuba

Excerpt:

As Christopher Hitchens once said of North Korea, communist states are places where everything that isn’t absolutely compulsory is absolutely forbidden. Mounting any kind of resistance against them is nearly impossible unless and until the state loses its will to continue. Don’t be deceived by Havana’s crumbling beauty, its upbeat music and people, its enviable location in the Caribbean. “The surveillance and denunciation system is so rigorous,” French historian Pascal Fontaine wrote in The Black Book of Communism, “that family intimacy is almost nonexistent.” “Cuba looks exactly like its photos,” M.J. Porter wrote in the Introduction to Havana Real by Cuban dissident Yoani Sanchez in 2011, “and yet if feels different. I fell in love with Cuba and Cubans. Something felt like home. Completely unforeseen, however, was the weight of the totalitarian state.”

Surveillance-cum-denunciation. Don't say it can't happen here. It is happening here.  

And you are still a Democrat?

Related: Mona Charen on the Left-Leaning Pope Francis

Dissertation Advice on the Occasion of Kant’s Birthday

Kant Can SoImmanuel Kant was born on this day in 1724. He died in 1804. My dissertation on Kant, which now lies 40 years in the past, is dated 22 April 1978.  But if, per impossibile, my present self were Doktorvater to my self of 40 years ago, my doctoral thesis might not have been approved! As one's standards rise higher and higher with age and experience one becomes more and more reluctant to submit anything to evaluation let alone publication. One may scribble as before, and even more than before, but with less conviction that one's outpourings deserve being embalmed in printer's ink. (Herein lies a reason to blog.)

So finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. Get it done by age 30 and before accepting a full-time appointment. And all of this before getting married. That, in my opinion, is the optimal order. Dissertation before 30, marriage after 30. 

Now raise your glass with me in a toast to Manny on this, his 294th birthday. Sapere aude!

 Related: Right and Wrong Order

Earth Day 2018

Maverick Philosopher loves Earth with an ordinate love but doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So he refers you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of  Earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

One recalls the case of Timothy Treadwell  who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the grisly tale. 

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal."

There are here the unmistakeable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or some other 'icon.'

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ambulo Ergo Sum

Dionne Warwick, Walk On By

Leroy Van Dyke, Walk On By.  Same title, different song.

Patsy Cline, Walkin' After Midnight

Gus Cannon, Walk Right In, 1929.  Is that a kazoo I hear? Rooftop Singers' 1962 version.

Rufus Thomas, Walking the Dog, 1965

Ventures, Walk Don't Run. The boys are aging nicely.  A big hit back in 1960.

Everly Brothers, Walk Right Back

Four Seasons, Walk Like a Man. Sing like a castrato.  Walk or wop?

Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line

Ronnettes, Walkin' in the Rain

Left Banke, Walk Away Renee

Robert Johnson, Walkin' Blues.  

Jimmy Rogers, Walkin' By Myself.  Butterfield and Bloomfield with the latter's solo at 3:42 ff.

UPDATE (4/23)

James Soriano sends this:

You may have seen this, but there is sonic evidence of the voice of a  late 19th century castrato on YouTube.  Alessandro Moreschi (1858 –1922) sings the Bach/Gounod "Ave Maria" in a 1904 recording.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjvfqnD0ws
 
Whatever the circumstances of his castration, Moreschi was the soprano at St. John Lateran by the time he was 13 years old.  
 

Seven Forces Driving America Toward Civil War

No one in his right mind could wish for civil war. At the moment it is unlikely, but it is becoming more likely each day as the nation sinks into madness, 'thanks' almost exclusively to the ever-expanding extremism of the hard Left which has captured the Democrat Party. 

John Hawkins lists seven 'forces' pushing us in the direction of armed civil conflict: disrespect for the Constitution; tribalism; the ever-expanding power of the Federal government; moral decline; the national debt; lack of a shared culture; mindless gun-grabbing.

We certainly do live in interesting times! Who can be bored?

Kurt Schlichter Lays into Never Trumpers

Cum ira et studio.

A take-off on a line from Tacitus, sine ira et studio, "without anger and partiality."  There is a place for righteous anger as there is for partiality and polemic. Schlichter's rant ends thusly:

You’ve talked and talked and talked about principles, but as James Comey and Robert Mueller and your gal Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit undermined every principle this country was founded on, all you did was clutch pearls about how Trump is icky. This country is in real danger of breaking apart, of actual conflict, but all you can think of is recovering your cheesy little seat on the Beltway bench.

No one’s fooled. And no one cares. Which ought to scare the hell out of you. Because when the liberals figure out that you have zero credibility with us real conservatives, you’ll stop being their useful idiot. You’ll just be a plain old idiot.

Still and all, I retain a soft spot in my heart for Never Trumper Mona Charen.

David Horowitz on Black Reparations

Here:

Horowitz destroys the argument for reparations, and in a second chapter, he challenges the victimization logic that offers white racism as the excuse for any "underperformance" by the black community.  There is no one alive today who held any slaves or personally was a slave.  Many black Americans in the country today have no ancestors in America who were slaves.  A majority of Americans are descended from people who came to the United States after the Civil War and bear no guilt for the ugly practice in one region of the United States two centuries ago.  Those who are descended from people who lived in the states that did not join the Confederacy have 400,000 dead Union soldiers, plus many hundreds of thousands injured, as their sacrifice to liberating the slaves and preserving the Union.  Reparations for Japanese-Americans in the United States or Holocaust survivors in Europe were paid to people who had themselves lived through specific horrors or criminal behavior by governments.  Must all Americans today pay for something that ended over 150 years ago and for which a bloody war was fought?  Are all African-Americans equally entitled to compensation for something that impacted some of their ancestors seven generations back?

The victimization theme – that white racism is solely responsible for the economic situation of black Americans, their higher crime rates and poor academic performance, eliminates any agency for individuals to beat the odds or take advantage of the increased opportunities that are now available, including trillions spent on social welfare programs over the past half-century, much of that designed to address the needs of African-Americans.  These programs include affirmative action admissions to universities and similar approaches to hiring by corporations and other firms.  Martin Luther King was aware that racism and discrimination were present in 1960s America, as was segregation in large parts of the country, but he believed that these should not be an excuse for black American behavior that only worsened their plight.  Charlatans and race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have dominated the civil rights movement since King's death, always pushing the white racism bogeyman, while those more in line with King's legacy, including Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and Glen Loury, are ignored or condemned as sell-outs.  Arguing that cultural norms within a community can be damaging to the success of future generations is simply a forbidden theme – witness the recent campaign against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

From Bad to Worse

His johnson became his dousing rod, but it led him not to the waters of life, but to the fleshpots. This after abandoning organized religion and its hypocrisies, but also its curbs and checks on destructive behavior. So he went from bad to worse. He started on down that Lost Highway.

Eminent Domain Abuse

Little Pink House, a movie.

The right to private property is another thing leftists don't understand, unless it is their private property. 

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 177:

The Revolution is good.  But why?  One must have an idea of the civilization one wishes to create.  The abolition of property is not an end.  It is a means.

This is foolish. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem is not private property, but too few people owning property, property they have worked for, and thus value and care about.  I include among private property the means for the defense of life, liberty, and property against assorted malefactors from unorganized criminals to rogue elements in the government.  

Could a Theist Maintain that Some Lack a Religious Disposition?

Suppose you believe that man has been created in the image and likeness of God.  Could you, consistently with that belief, hold that only some possess a religious disposition?

I have discussed this before, but the question came up again in an e-mail from a reader.

I often say things like the following:

The religious person perceives our present  life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory and unameliorable by unaided human effort whether individual or collective; he feels it to be, not a mere condition, but a predicament; it strikes him as vain or empty if taken as an end in itself; he sees himself as homo viator, as a wayfarer or pilgrim treading a via dolorosa through a vale of tears that cannot possibly be a final and fitting resting place but is instead a place of probation and a vale of soul-making; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness.  He feels his fellows to be fools endlessly distracted by bagatelles, sunken deep in Pascalian divertissement, as Platonic troglodytes unaware of the Cave as Cave.

I maintain that one in whom the above doesn't strike a chord, or sound a plaintive arpeggio, is one who lacks a religious disposition.  In some the disposition is simply lacking, and it cannot be helped.  I 'write them off' no matter how analytically sharp they are.   One cannot discuss religion with them, for it cannot be real to them, any more than one can share one's delight in poetry with the terminally prosaic, or one's pleasure in mathematics with the mathematically anxious.  For those who lack the disposition, religion is not what William James in "The Will to Believe" calls a "living option," let alone a "forced" or "momentous" one. It can only be something strained and ridiculous, a tissue of fairy tales, something for children and old ladies, an opiate for the weak and dispossessed, a miserable anthropomorphic projection, albeit unconscious, a wish-fulfillment, something cooked up in the musty medieval cellars of priest-craft where unscrupulous manipulators exploit human gullibility for their own advantage.

A perceptive interlocutor raises an objection that I would put as follows. 

You say that some lack a religious disposition.  I take it you mean that they are utterly bereft of it.  But how is that consistent with the imago dei?  For if we are made in the divine image, then we are spiritual beings who must, as spiritual beings, possess at least the potentiality of communion with the divine source of the spirit within us, even if this potentiality is to no degree actual.  After all, we are not in the image of God as animals, but as spiritual beings, and part of being a spiritual being is having the potentiality to know itself, and thus to know that one is a creature if in fact one is a creature, and in knowing this to know God in some measure.

How might I meet this objection? 

One way is by denying that all biologically human beings bear the divine image, or bear the divine image in its fullness.  Maybe it is like this.  The existence of specimens of the zoological species to which we belong is accounted for by the theory of evolution.  God creates the physical universe in which evolution occurs, and in which human animals evolve from lower forms.  The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis is not an account of how human animals came to be that is in competition with the theory of evolution.  It is not about human animals at all.

Adam is not the first man; there was no first man.  Eve is not the first woman; there was no first woman.  Adam and Eve are not the first human animals; they are the first human animals that, without ceasing to be animals, became spiritual beings when God bestowed upon them personhood, which involves self-consciousness, free will, and moral sense, but also the sense of the divine and a call to a higher life.  But the free divine bestowal was not the same for all: from some he withheld the sensus divinitatis and with it the power to know God and become godlike.

I know that this is not theologically orthodox.  But it fits with my experience.  I have always felt that some human beings lack depth or spirit or soul or inwardness or interiority or whatever you want to call it.  It is not that I think of them as zombies as philosophers use this term: I grant that they are conscious and self-conscious.  But I sense that there is nothing to them beyond that.  There is no sense of the Higher. They sense no call to the task of self-individuation.  There is no depth-dimension: they are surface all the way down. They are bereft of spirit. They may have moral sense, but it doesn't point them beyond this life. They may have conscience but it is only a product of acculturation and not a source of spiritual insight. They are human biologically but not normatively: there is a sense in which, ringing a change on Nietzsche, the death of God is by the same stroke the death of man: he suffers demotion and is after God's death back among the animals and in series with them, just the cleverest of the land mammals.

So the first conjecture is that not all human animals, even if biologically normal, are spiritual beings.

But it may be that a better line for me is the simpler one of saying that in all there is the religious disposition, but in some it is  undeveloped or unmanifested, rather than saying that in some it is not present at all. (A disposition need not be manifested to exist; glass is disposed to shatter if suitably struck, but a particular piece of glass needn't shatter to possess (actually not potentially!) the disposition to shatter.)

The "perceptive interlocutor" (Steven Nemes) mentioned above responds (and these are his actual words):

To suppose that some persons lack the religious disposition is certainly not theologically kosher, at least not from the Christian perspective. This is more akin to certain varieties of predestinarian gnosticism to which early Christian theologians (e.g., Origen, Irenaeus, et al.) vehemently objected. These gnostic theories proposed that there were various different classes of human persons, some of whom were structurally determined to realize saving knowledge (gnosis) of Reality whereas others were cruder, baser, and doomed to live unenlightened lives in the body. The difference between classes was not choices they had made or anything of the sort; it was simply their ontological structure to reach enlightenment or not. The early Christians objected to this in two ways: first, it is denial of the freedom of the will of the human person, since some evidently are intrinsically incapable of choosing salvation; second, it is incompatible with God's goodness, since if he is good, he desires the salvation of all and works to accomplish it.
 
I don't disagree that these are  among the theologically orthodox responses to my suggestion above.  How good they are, however, is a separate question.  First, if God does not grant to some class of persons the religious disposition, that is not a denial to them of freedom of the will.  They can be as free as you please; they just lack that particular power, the power of achieving salvific knowledge.  I am not free to fly like a bird, but it doesn't follow that I am not free.
 
As for the second point, there may be a confusion of damnation with non-knowledge of God.  The suggestion above is that only some biologically human persons  are disposed to seek God and possibly know God.  That is not to say that these persons are predestined to a state in which they are conscious of God's existence but cut off from God.
 
God desires the ultimate beatitude of all that have the power to achieve it — but not all have this power on the above suggestion.  If God desires the ultimate beatitude of all whether or not they have the power to know God, then God desires the ultimate beatitude of dolphins and apes and cats and dogs.
I suppose these are the two greatest problems for the quasi-gnostic position you consider above. Another problem would be that it might ethically justify mistreatment and prejudice against persons deemed to lack a religious disposition. After all, if they cannot sense God's existence and enjoy communion with him, how are they any different from animals? If God himself didn't care to make them such that they could know him, why should theists and those having the religious disposition care for them any more than for a dog?
I don't see any problem here either.  Not all human beings have the same powers, but people like me and my interlocutor would not dream of using this fact to justify mistreatment of  certain classes of people.  (Analogy: I don't believe that animals have rights, but I don't need to assign rights to them to have good reason to treat them humanely
 
Interim Conclusion
 
Many if not most people in the West these days fail to manifest a genuine religious disposition.  (Going along to get along by attending services etc. does not attest a genuine disposition.) While it does not follow that they lack such a disposition, absence of manifestation is defeasible evidence of the disposition's nonexistence.  Supposing there is no religious disposition in some, the theist can, consistently with his theism, explain the fact in the unorthodox 'Gnostic' way sketched above.
 
Or the theist can insist that the disposition is present in all, but in some so buried under the detritus of sin and social suggestions as to be indiscernible by the person himself or others.
 
On the other hand, if one is a metaphysical naturalist, the problem dissolves: there is no God and the religious disposition is an evolutionary quirk in some that bespeaks nothing.