Author: Bill Vallicella

Grace

Christian meditationIs it possible to take grace seriously these days?

Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat.  For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by someone, then I go beyond the given: I move from phenomenology to theology. No philosopher worth his salt can escape the question whether such a move is or is not an illicit slide. An experience describable as having a gift-character needn't be a gift.

Still, the experience was what it was, and could not be doubted a few moments ago, nor now in its afterglow. It is in such experiences that we find the phenomenological roots of the theology of grace which, growing from such roots, cannot be dismissed as empty speculation or projection or wish-fulfillment or anything else the naturalist may urge for its dismissal.

There cannot be a phenomenology of the Absolute but only a phenomenology of the glimpses, gleanings, vouchsafings, and intimations of the Absolute.  To put the point with full philosophical  precision: there can only be a phenomenology of the glimpses, etc. as of the Absolute. That curious phrase from the philosopher's lexicon expresses the latter's professional caution inasmuch as no experience that purports to take us beyond the sphere of immanence proves the veridicality of its intentional object.

On the other hand, the fact of the experience, its occurrence within the sphere of immanence, needs accounting.  However matters may stand with respect to the realitas objectiva of the experience, its realitas formalis needs to be explained. I would venture to say that the best explanation of the widespread occurrence of mystical experiences is that some of them are indeed veridical.

Why Do Leftists Blame the Weapon Over the Wielder?

I spoke of 

. . . the bizarre liberal displacement of responsibility for crime onto inanimate objects, guns, as if the weapon, not the wielder, is the source of the evil for which the weapon can be only the instrument.

What explains this displacement?  A reader proffers an explanation:

Maybe they displace responsibility here because, if we blame the person shooting the gun, next we have to notice just how often that person is black, and how rarely he is white.  And noticing that, for liberals, would be racist.  Nothing that makes blacks look bad, or worse than others in any way, can be noticed.  It must be a gun problem because otherwise it would be a black problem.  (Largely, on the whole — given what a small proportion of the population is black and what a huge proportion of the 'gun problem' consists of black people shooting people for no good reason.)

Right. It is politically incorrect to take note of differences between blacks and other groups when these differences show blacks to be worse in some respects than these other groups.  

On the other hand, when once in a while the person shooting the gun is a white person–and, best of all, a white person who just might conceivably be associated with conservatism or even some kind of white consciousness –liberals will find that the problem is, for once, not just a gun problem but also the problem of 'angry white men', 'racists', 'white supremacists' or even just 'white people'…  And then we learn that it's those people — those bad white people–who are responsible for this awful gun culture and gun problem.  So once again, the liberals are really engaged in race hatred and race baiting and maybe, some day, open race war.  So as with so many other things, it seems they don't really believe their own supposed principles, e.g., that the problem is guns not people shooting guns . . . .

My reader's point seems to be that leftists try  to have it both ways at once. By blaming the weapons rather than the wielders, leftists can uphold their cherished but plainly false conviction that blacks are no more criminally prone than whites: there is nothing about blacks that makes them more criminally prone; it is the availability of guns! But their real agenda as destructive leftists is to foment racial division. So when a white man goes on a rampage, then they drop the notion that the availability of guns is the problem and play the race card.

Related articles
Is Good Faith Dialogue Possible with Leftists?
Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?
Controversial author Charles Murray to speak at University of Michigan

On the Supposed Political Equivalence of the Two Tribes

As I  read Andrew Sullivan's recent tribalism essay, he is bravely attempting to maintain an equivalency thesis: roughly, the two tribes, the Left tribe and the Right tribe, are equally tribal and equally in the wrong. But in some places in his long essay he does a pretty lame job of it. Here is one:

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes. Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

Let's start with the first sentence. That different outcomes for men and women are entirely a function of sexism is a preposterous claim that anyone with common sense and knowledge of the world should immediately see to be false. It implies that biological differences between the sexes have no bearing whatsoever on behavioral outcomes. But there is good reason to be skeptical of the claim that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet.  

Suppose we grant that there is global warming, and suppose we grant that human activity plays a role in its etiology. There still remain questions as to the extent to which global warming is anthropogenic and what exactly the various causal factors are. The claim that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet is an extremely strong claim.  Compare that to the trivially obvious claim that there is more to the explanation of differential outcomes for the sexes than sexism.

Similarly with the other examples. One cannot, unless one is insane or else a truth-disregarding leftist ideologue, deny the distinction between legal and illegal immigration. But that Bush authorized torture presupposes that waterboarding is torture which is far from obvious and is a reasonably contested assertion. See Is Waterboarding Torture?

So while I respect Sully's attempt at being "fair and balanced," I reject his equivalency thesis. The Left is far more mindlessly and destructively tribal than the Right.  

Related articles
The Rising Danger of Left-Right Tribalism | Minding The Campus

Andrew Sullivan on Tribalism

This is a very good article. There is plenty to disagree with, but I agree entirely with this excerpt:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters. But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority. It’s a term that implies there is no difference in race relations between America today and America in, say, the 1830s or the 1930s. This rhetoric is not just untrue, it is dangerous. It wins no converts, and when actual white supremacists march in the streets, you have no language left to describe them as any different from, say, all Trump supporters, including the 13 percent of black men who voted for him.

Compare my Is Every Racist a White Supremacist?

Sullivan also deserves praise for pointing out the excesses of Ta-Nehisi Coates:

He remains a vital voice, but in more recent years, a somewhat different one. His mood has become much gloomier. He calls the Obama presidency a “tragedy,” and describes many Trump supporters as “not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos.” He’s written about how watching cops and firefighters enter the smoldering World Trade Center instantly reminded him of cops mistreating blacks: They “were not human to me.” In his latest essay in the Atlantic, analyzing why Donald Trump won the last election, he dismisses any notion that economic distress might have played a role as “empty” and ignores other factors, such as Hillary Clinton’s terrible candidacy, the populist revolt against immigration that had become a potent force across the West, and the possibility that the pace of social change might have triggered a backlash among traditionalists. No, there was one meaningful explanation only: white supremacism. And those who accept, as I do, that racism was indeed a big part of the equation but also saw other factors at work were simply luxuriating in our own white privilege because we are never under “racism’s boot.”

Jewish Humor

Here:

Rabbi Altmann and his secretary were sitting in a coffeehouse in Berlin in 1935. “Herr Altmann,” said his secretary, “I notice you’re reading Der Stürmer! I can’t understand why. A Nazi libel sheet! Are you some kind of masochist, or, God forbid, a self-hating Jew ?”

“On the contrary, Frau Epstein. When I used to read the Jewish papers, all I learned about were pogroms, riots in Palestine, and assimilation in America. But now that I read Der Stürmer, I see so much more: that the Jews control all the banks, that we dominate in the arts, and that we’re on the verge of taking over the entire world. You know – it makes me feel a whole lot better!”

Why Maintain a Journal?

KierkegaardIt was 47 years ago today that I first began keeping a regular journal under the motto, nulla dies sine linea, no day without a line.  Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals.

When I was 16 years old, my thought was that I didn't want time to pass with nothing to show for it. That is still my thought. The unrecorded life is not worth living. For we have it on good authority that the unexamined life is not worth living, and how examined could an undocumented life be?

The maintenance of a journal aids mightily in the project of self-individuation. Like that prodigious journal writer Søren Kierkegaard, I believe we are here to become actually the individuals we are potentially. Our individuation is not ready-made or given, but a task to be accomplished. The world is a vale of soul-making; we are not here to improve it, but to be improved by it.  

Henry David Thoreau, another of the world's great journal writers,  said in Walden that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation." I  would only add that without a journal, one's life is one of quiet dissipation. One's life dribbles away, day by day, unreflected on, unexamined, unrecorded, and thus fundamentally unlived. Living, for us humans, is not just a biological process; it is fundamentally a spiritual unfolding. To mean anything it has to add up to something, and that something cannot be expressed with a dollar sign.

I have always had a horror of an unfocused existence. In my early twenties, I spoke of the supreme desideratum of a focused existence.  What bothered me about the people around me, fellow students in particular, was the mere aestheticism of their existence: their aimless drifting hither and yon, their lack of commitment, their unseriousness, their refusal to engage the arduous task of   self-definition and self-individuation, their willingness to be guided and mis-guided by social suggestions. In one's journal one collects and re-collects oneself; one makes war against the lower self and the forces of dispersion.

Another advantage to a journal and its regular maintenance is that one thereby learns how to write, and how to think. An unwritten thought is still a half-baked thought: proper concretion is achieved only by  expressing thoughts in writing and developing them. Always write as well as you can, in complete sentences free of grammatical and spelling errors. Develop the sentences into paragraphs, and if the Muse is with you those paragraphs may one day issue in essays, articles, and chapters of books.

Finally, there is the pleasure of re-reading from a substantial temporal distance.  Six years ago I began re-reading my journal in order, month by month, at a 40 year distance.  So of course  now I am up to October 1977.  40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.

On this Date in 1844

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844.  He died on 25 August 1900.  You must attend to him if you would understand our current spiritual/cultural situation. His great aphorism, "Some men are born posthumously" applies to him, and I am sure that when he penned it he was thinking of himself.

What makes it a great aphorism? Economy of expression; penetrating insight; literary quality.  An aphorism must be short, but not merely clever: it has to set a truth before us. And it has to do that in an arresting and memorable way. 

My

Some men die before they are dead

is good but does not achieve quite the same level.  For one thing, it is derivative as the converse of the Nietzschean saying. 

Aphoristic discourse is not argumentative discourse. Like a thunderbolt that does not bring in its train any explanation, a good aphorism is an assertion bare of reasons. It is fitting that Nietzsche should aphorize given his aversion to dialectics:

With Socrates, Greek taste changes in favor of dialectics. What really happened there? Above all, a noble taste is thus vanquished; with dialectics the plebs come to the top. Before Socrates, dialectic manners were repudiated in good society: they were considered bad manners, they were compromising. The young were warned against them. Furthermore, all such presentations of one's reasons were distrusted. Honest things, like honest men, do not carry their reasons in their hands like that. It is indecent to show all five fingers. What must first be proved is worth little. Wherever authority still forms part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons. One must have to enforce one's right: until one reaches that point, one makes no use of it. The Jews were dialecticians for that reason; Reynard the Fox was one — and Socrates too? (Twilight of the Idols, "The Problem of Socrates.") 

Mark Anderson kindly sent me his book, Zarathustra Stone.

I am impressed by how sympathetically he has entered into Nietzsche's mind and spirit. 

The Suicide of American Liberalism

Robert Tracinski:

The far left, under the banner of Black Lives Matter, is protesting a campus speaker again. Who is it this time? Some neo-Nazi like Richard Spencer? An unscrupulous provocateur like Milo Yiannopoulos? Just a garden-variety scary conservative like Ben Shapiro? Nope, it’s the American Civil Liberties Union as represented by Claire Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia.

Read it all.

I have never hid my contempt for the ACLU. But at least we share some sliver of ground with that bunch of shysters. For they have at least some, albeit highly selective, respect for portions of the Constitution.  The absurdly self-appellated Antifa thugs, however, will not abide the Constitution at all and absurdly opine that liberalism is white supremacy.

Here is one of my fulminations against the ACLU together with links to two other rather more measured pieces. 

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: Will the Culture War Issue in Civil War?

Dennis Prager on Liberalism, Leftism, and Race

Dennis Prager insists on a distinction between leftism and liberalism. "The two have almost nothing in common," he tells us.  He points to a number of differences. I will comment on just one:

Race: This is perhaps the most obvious of the many moral differences between liberalism and leftism. The essence of the liberal position on race was that the color of one’s skin is insignificant. To liberals of a generation ago, only racists believed that race is intrinsically significant. However, to the left, the notion that race is insignificant is itself racist. Thus, the University of California officially regards the statement “There is only one race, the human race” as racist. For that reason, liberals were passionately committed to racial integration. Liberals should be sickened by the existence of black dormitories and separate black graduations on university campuses.

a) A minor point: while color of skin is a phenotypical manifestation of race, race is not the same as skin color. Otherwise, how do you explain the differences in attitudes towards blacks and people from India, many of whom are very dark in color?   It is their behavior, not skin color, that determines attitudes toward blacks, and behavior is a better indicator of race than skin color.  Most white liberals would not think of buying a house in a predominantly black area. Is that because of skin color or typical behavior patterns? The question answers itself.

On second thought, my "minor point" is not so minor. To speak of race in terms of something as superficial as skin color is to assume that race is of no significance.  But this is a question that ought not be begged. Is sex also of no significance? I say No and Prager says the same.

How can Prager hold that race is of no significance when he also holds, rightly, that sex is of great significance and that the behavioral differences of men and women are rooted in biological differences and are not just a matter of socialization? Is it at all plausible to think that gender differences are rooted in biological differences while racial differences are not so rooted?  No, it is not.

b) What is it for race to be significant or insignificant? Is the idea that race has no explanatory connection to any behavioral attributes?  But that cannot be right. How explain the 'over-representation' of blacks in the NBA and NFL?  Why are blacks, as a group, so much better than other groups at basketball and football?  Even if part of the explanation is social and cultural, surely part of its has to do with the biological realities of race.

Consider parallel questions about sex. Are men and women equally capable of being competent fire fighters? Of course not. That fact cannot be explained by differential socialization such as a lack of toy fire trucks in the nurseries of little girls. The explanation must invoke biological realities having to so with muscle mass, upper body strength, etc.  

Race, like sex, does matter.  Why is it 'racist' to point this out?  It can't be racist since it is true. Is it 'ageist' to point out that there is a good reason why one cannot enlist in the U. S. Army if one is over 40 years of age? 

Is it 'discriminatory' in a pejorative sense to require that enlistees be in good health, be fluent in English, and have a high school diploma or equivalent?  Of course not. Only a liberal knucklehead could think otherwise.

Is age a mere social construct? Of course not. Age, as it relates to activities like schlepping heavy packs and climbing over obstacles is related to ageing, the latter being a biological process.

c) Since Prager is a sex realist he ought to be a race realist as well. Just as it would be absurd for him to say that there is only one sex, the human sex, it is absurd for him to say that there is only one race, the human race.

But surely it is not racist to say this as crazed leftists think. On the contrary, it expresses the salutary desire to get beyond racial differences and find common ground in our common humanity. That can't be bad!  So why do leftists think that it is racist to to say that there is only one race, the human race?

It is because they think it implies a denial of black identity.  

I suggest that the correct view lies between Prager's race irrealism according to which race is just skin color and to that extent insignificant,  and the identitarian view, found both on the Left and on the Alt-Right, that race is constitutive of who one is at a very deep level.

The correct view is that racial differences are real and significant just as sexual and age differences are real and significant, but that for purposes of social harmony and political cooperation we had better not identify ourselves racially but in terms of attributes more conducive to comity. And what might these be? 

Some candidates: fellow citizen, rational animal, American (for Americans), child of God.  

I will leave it to the reader to explain why each of these candidates has become in recent decades highly problematic.  For example, if you believe in the nonsense of a 'living constitution' which is in reality no constitution at all, then you are not an American in the sense required to secure some common ground.

So I end with a dark thought: in the end tribalism wins. 

Creation, Existence, and Extreme Metaphysical Realism

 This entry is a continuation of the ruminations in The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation.

Recapitulation

Divine creation ex nihilo is a spiritual/mental 'process' whereby an object of the divine consciousness is posited as non-object, as more than a merely intentional object, and thus as a transcendent reality. By 'transcendent reality' I mean an item that is not immanent to consciousness, whether human or divine,  but exists on its own. And by 'consciousness' in this discussion I mean intentional (object-directed) consciousness. 

(I deny that every instance of consciousness is a consciousness of something: there are, I claim in agreement with Searle, non-intentional conscious states, states not directed upon an object.   See Searle on Non-Intentional Mental States and the  good ComBox discussion to which Harry Binswanger and David Gordon contribute. Objectivist Binswanger disagrees with Searle and me. And even if every consciousness is a consciousness of something, it does not follow that every consciousness is a conscious of something that exists.)

So God creates independent reals. What he creates exists on its own, independently, an sich. At the same time, however, what he creates he sustains moment-by-moment. At every moment of its existence the creature depends on the Creator for the whole of its Being, for its existence, its nature, as well as for such  transcendental determinations as its intelligibility and goodness.  Ens et verum convertuntur is grounded in God's being the ultimate source of all truth,and ens et bonum convertuntur is grounded in God's being The Good itself and thus the ultimate source of all goodness in creatures.

Creatures, then, depend for their whole Being on the Creator according to the classical conception of divine creation that involves both an original bringing-into-existence (creatio originans) and an ongoing conservation of what has been brought into existence (creatio continuans). And yet creatures exist on their own, independently. As I emphasized in the earlier post, finite persons are the prime examples of this independence. And yet how is such independence possible given divine conservation? It appears to issue in a contradiction: the creature exists both independently and dependently.

Does it follow that a creator God does not exist? (It would take a separate post to show that a God worth his salt cannot be conceived along deistic lines.)

Rand to the Rescue?

Thinking about this I recalled Ayn Rand and her notorious axiom, "Existence exists." On a charitable reading it is not the tautology that whatever exists, exists, but expresses an extreme metaphysical realism: whatever exists exists independently of all consciousness, including divine consciousness.  But then it follows that God cannot exist, and our problem dissolves. Here, then, is a Rand-inspired argument for the nonexistence of God resting on Rand's axiom of existence.

1) To exist is to exist independently of all consciousness. (The notorious axiom)

2) Things other than God exist. (Obviously true)

Therefore

3) Things other than God exist independently of all consciousness. (Follows from 1 and 2)

4) If God exists, then it is not the case that everything that exists exists independently of all consciousness. (True given the classical conception of God as creator)

Therefore

5) God does not exist. (Follows from 3 and 4 by standard logical rules including modus tollens)

Is there any good reason not to accept the above argument?  

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation