I hit upon 'uniquely unique' the other day as an apt predicate of God. But it is only the formulation that is original; the thought is ancient.
To be unique is to be one of a kind. It will be allowed that nothing counts as God unless it is unique. So at a bare minimum, God must be the one and only instance of the divine kind. (This kind could be thought of as the conjunction of the divine attributes.) Beyond that, it will be allowed that whatever counts as God must be essentially unique: nothing that just happens to be uniquely of the divine kind could count as God. What's more, it will be allowed that nothing counts as God that is not a necessary being. Putting these three allowances together, I say that God is not just essentially, but necessarily unique. (In the patois of 'possible worlds,' God is unique in every possible world in which he exists, and he exists in every possible world.)
But some of us want to go further still. We want to say that God is uniquely unique. His uniqueness extends to his mode of being unique. He is unique in a way that no other thing is unique. Suppose there is more than one necessarily unique being. The necessarily unique God would then be just one of many necessarily unique beings. In that case he would not be uniquely unique. He would share the property of being necessarily unique with other items. (Fregean propositions and other platonica are epistemically possible candidates.)
But then something greater could be conceived, namely, a being that transcends the distinction between kind and instance in terms of which uniqueness is ordinarily defined. If I asked someone such as Plantinga wherein resides the divine uniqueness, he would presumably say that it resides in the fact that the there is one and only one possible instance of the divine nature: this nature exists in every world and God instantiates it in every world. But then God is just another necessarily unique necessary being.
A truly transcendent God, however, must transcend the ontological framework applicable to everything other than God. So it must transcend the distinction between kind and instance. In a truly transcendent God there cannot be real distinctions of any kind and thus no real distinction between kind and instance, nature and individual having the nature.
Now if God transcends the distinction between instance and kind/nature, and is uniquely unique, unique in a way that no other being is or could be unique, then that is equivalent to maintaining that God is ontologically simple.
But why think that God is ontologically simple and uniquely unique? Here is where the paths diverge.
Some of us feel impelled to say that a God worth his salt cannot be anything other than the absolute reality, the Absolute. So God cannot be relative to anything or dependent on anything or immanent to anything as he would be if he were just one more being among beings. For then he would be immanent to what I earlier called the Discursive Framework. It is rather the case that God transcends this framework. If God is the absolute, then he must be simple; otherwise he would depend on properties distinct from himself to be what he is.
Again, if God is the absolute, then he cannot be one of many; he must be the ONE that makes possible the one and the many. As such he transcends the Discursive Framework in which the one opposes the many. The ONE, however, is the ONE of both the one and many. It cannot be brought into opposition to anything.
"But such a God as you are describing is ineffable! I want a God that that can be addressed in petitionary prayer, a God that is a Thou to my I."
What you want is to stop short at a highest finite object, when the religious-metaphysical quest is animated by dissatisfaction with every finite thing. The truly religious quester is a nihilist with respect to every finite object. A God worthy of our highest quest must be absolute, simple, transcendent, and ineffable.
Here. Radosh addresses Andrew Klavan's objections. I wonder if Radosh is aware of Dylan's 1983 song in defense of the Rosenbergs. See below.
Did you see Radosh on 60 Minutes Sunday night during the segment on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Radosh and co-author Joyce Milton definitively showed that the Rosenbergs were guilty as charged, or at least Julius was.
This seems to be becoming an Internet meme. It comes with the implication that certain death will be the result. (See graphic below.) Let's think about this, just for fun.
Strictly speaking, one can play Russian Roulette only with a revolver. But surely something analogous to Russian Roulette can be played with a semi-automatic pistol with a non-zero probability of surviving.
Here is one way. Have 'a friend' load the magazine randomly with live and dummy rounds. Insert the magazine and rack the slide, thereby chambering a round. Point the gun at your head and press the trigger. If you hear a click, then the hammer fell on a dummy round. Congratulations! You are not dead. Care to press your luck? Then press the trigger a second time.
Here is a second way. Pick up a semi-auto pistol and remove the magazine. Point at head, pull trigger. If there is a live round in the chamber, you're a goner. A dummy round or nothing in the chamber and you survive to be a fool another day. Unlike Terry Kath.
Remember him? He was the blazingly fast guitarist for the band Chicago. In 1978, while drunk, he shot himself in the head with an 'unloaded' gun. At first he had been fooling with a .38 revolver. Then he picked up a semi-automatic 9 mm pistol, removed the magazine, pointed it at his head, spoke his last words, "Don't worry, it isn't loaded," and pulled the trigger. Unfortunately for his head, there was a round in the chamber. Or that is one way the story goes.
Such inadvertent exits are easily avoided by exceptionless observation of three rules: Never point a gun at something you do not want to destroy. Treat every gun as if loaded, whether loaded or not. Never mix alcohol and gunpowder.
Perhaps I should add a fourth: Never mix dummy rounds with live rounds. Variant: Dummies should stay clear of guns, loaded or unloaded, and ammo, live or dummy.
Uncle Bill has a fifth rule for you: Never try to cure someone's hiccups by pointing a gun at him or her. A Fort Hood soldier availed himself of this method to cure a fellow soldier's hiccups, but ended up 'curing' him of life itself. (A cock to Asclepius!) The soldier, who was drunk at the time, said he thought the gun was loaded with dummy rounds. And now for the graphic, from Diana West via Bill Keezer.
We are concupiscent from the ground up, and matters are only made worse by our living in sex-saturated societies. As a result our erotic 'ears' are continually being pricked up by salacious tales and rumors.
These distractions are exploited by the Clinton machine which knows that digging up ancient dirt on the opponent will trump any serious discussion of his ideas and policies.
And that is what we are seeing. Any intelligent and intellectually honest person should be able to grasp that what matters are the issues and the policies proposed to deal with them. The national debt, immigration legal and illegal, national sovereignty, free speech, religious liberty, gun rights, abortion, the composition of the Supreme Court, globalism, trade policy, radical Islam, and so forth.
This is what we should be discussing primarily, not the character defects of the candidates.
Policies first, persons second. Every man has his 'wobble,' and every woman too. Look hard enough and you will find it. But men and women come and go. Ideologies and institutional structures last a lot longer to either contribute to the flourishing of you, your children, and grand children — or the opposite.
But as I said, we are concupiscent from the ground up. We will stay distracted, and Hillary will win.
Plenty of other factors are in play, no doubt, such as the large group of 'tribal' women who will vote for Hillary because she is one of them.
Do you value religious liberty? Then you must work to defeat Hillary Clinton, which is to say: you must vote for Donald Trump.
The Left, being totalitarian, brooks no opposition and is brutal in its suppression of religion. Consider the example of Fr. Ernest Simoni:
Persecution in Albania was exceptionally harsh, even for Communist Eastern Europe. Among the living martyrs who were present and greeted Francis was Fr. Ernest Simoni. He gave a moving account of his almost three decades spent in Albanian labor camps; Francis was visibly moved.
The history behind this personal story is worth recalling. The conflict between the Catholic Church and Communist state in Albania can be divided into three stages:
1) 1944-1948 when the government terrorized and persecuted believers and clergy;
2) 1949-1967 when the government tried to “nationalize” or Albanize the country’s religions, and to establish a National Albanian Catholic Church similar to the Patriotic Church created by Albania’s then-ally, Communist China. This stage reached its culmination with Albania proclaiming itself the world’s first atheist state;
3) 1990 to the present, during which the Albanian Church awoke after decades of martyrdom and persecution.
Fr. Simoni was arrested on December 24, 1963, just after he had finished celebrating the Christmas Vigil Mass in the village of Barbullush, Shkodër. Four officers from the Albanian Secret Police (Sigurimi) showed up at his church and presented him with arrest and execution orders. “They tied my hands behind my back and began beating me, while we were walking to the car,” he recalled.
He was brought to the interrogation facility and kept in complete isolation, suffering unbearable tortures for three consecutive months. The accusation was that he had been teaching his “philosophy.” He taught his people “to die for Christ.” During three months of confinement and interrogation, the persecutors tried to force him provide evidence against the Catholic hierarchy and his brother priests, which he refused.
There is an interesting American connection to his persecution. One of the accusations against Fr. Simoni was that he had celebrated a requiem Mass for the repose of President Kennedy’s soul, exactly a month after the Catholic president’s death. A journal found in Fr. Simoni’s room featured a picture of President Kennedy and was presented to the court as material proof – of something or other.
“By God’s grace, the execution was not carried out,” Fr. Simoni recalled. After the trial, he was sentenced to twenty-eight years of forced labor, working first in the mines and then as a sanitary and sewage worker, until the fall of Communism in 1991.
It was 46 years ago yesterday that I first began keeping a regular journal under the motto, nulla dies sine linea. Before that, as a teenager, I kept some irregular journals.
Why maintain a journal?
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 1976. 40 Years from now I will be at the present, or dead. One.
Trump’s defeat would translate into continued political subversion of once disinterested federal agencies, from the FBI and Justice Department to the IRS and the EPA. It would ensure a liberal Supreme Court for the next 20 years — or more. Republicans would be lucky to hold the Senate. Obama’s unconstitutional executive overreach would be the model for Hillary’s second wave of pen-and-phone executive orders. If, in Obama fashion, the debt doubled again in eight years, we would be in hock $40 trillion after paying for Hillary’s even more grandiose entitlements of free college tuition, student-loan debt relief, and open borders. She has already talked of upping income and estate taxes on those far less wealthy than the Clintons and of putting coal miners out of work (“We are going to put a whole lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business”) while promising more Solyndra-like ventures in failed crony capitalism.
We worry about what Citizen Trump did in the past in the private sector and fret more over what he might do as commander-in-chief. But these legitimate anxieties remain in the subjunctive mood; they are not facts in the indicative gleaned from Clinton’s long public record. As voters, we can only compare the respective Clinton and Trump published agendas on illegal immigration, taxes, regulation, defense spending, the Affordable Care Act, abortion, and other social issues to conclude that Trump’s platform is the far more conservative — and a rebuke of the last eight years.
[. . .]
Something has gone terribly wrong with the Republican party, and it has nothing to do with the flaws of Donald Trump.
[. . .]
The Beltway establishment grew more concerned about their sinecures in government and the media than about showing urgency in stopping Obamaism. When the Voz de Aztlan and the Wall Street Journal often share the same position on illegal immigration, or when Republicans of the Gang of Eight are as likely as their left-wing associates to disparage those who want federal immigration law enforced, the proverbial conservative masses feel they have lost their representation. How, under a supposedly obstructive, conservative-controlled House and Senate, did we reach $20 trillion in debt, institutionalize sanctuary cities, and put ourselves on track to a Navy of World War I size? Compared with all that, “making Mexico pay” for the wall does not seem all that radical. Under a Trump presidency the owner of Univision would not be stealthily writing, as he did to Team Clinton, to press harder for open borders — and thus the continuance of a permanent and profitable viewership of non-English speakers.
One does not need lectures about conservatism from Edmund Burke when, at the neighborhood school, English becomes a second language, or when one is rammed by a hit-and-run driver illegally in the United States who flees the scene of the accident. Do our elites ever enter their offices to find their opinion-journalism jobs outsourced at half the cost to writers in India? Are congressional staffers told to move to Alabama, where it is cheaper to telecommunicate their business? Trump’s outrageousness was not really new; it was more a 360-degree mirror of an already outrageous politics as usual.
Our tendency is to drift through life. If life is a sea, too many of us are rudderless vessels, at the mercy of the prevailing winds of social suggestion. Death in its impending brings us up short: it forces us to confront the whole of one's life and the question of its meaning. Death is thus instrumentally good: it demands that we get serious. To face it is to puncture the illusion that one has all the time in the world.
You might be dead before nightfall. In what state would you like death to find you?
East and West, death has served as the muse of philosophy and of existential seriousness.
Gotama the Buddha: "Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" (said to be the Tathagata’s last words.)
Plato: "nothing which is subject to change…has any truth" (Phaedo St 83).
April Stevens' and Nino Tempo's version of Deep Purple became a number one hit in 1963. I liked it when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:
When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls And the stars begin to twinkle in the night Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me Breathing my name with a sigh.
In the still of the night once again I hold you tight Though you're gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we'll always meet Here in my deep purple dreams.
Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently 'wallows' in a song like this, giving into its 'cheap' emotions. The emotions are 'false' and 'faked.' The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, 'catchy.' The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to 'push the listener's buttons.' The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on. Adorno would not approve.
There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don't collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I've read almost none of it. Who has time?
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was recently awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s. In the '60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and soundbites. A large theme. Get to it conservative bloggers. Why do I have to do all the work?
Friedrich Nietzsche was born on this date in 1844. He died on 25 August 1900. 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.
Mark Anderson writes to tell me that his book, Zarathustra Stone, has been published.
By Edward Buckner, here, at Dale Tuggy's place. Ed's text is indented; my comments are not. I thank Ed for the stimulating discussion. He begins:
I have been telling the Maverick Philosopher here about Benjamin Sommer’s theory of divine fluidity, which is one solution to the problem of anthropomorphic language in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is not just Genesis 1:26 (‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness’) but also Genesis 3:8 ‘They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze’. Can God be a man with feet who walks around the garden leaving footprints? As opposed to being a pure spirit? The anthropomorphic conception is, in Maverick’s opinion ‘a hopeless reading of Genesis’, and makes it out to be garbage. ‘You can’t possibly believe that God has feet’.
Yet Benjamin Sommer, Professor of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages at the Jewish Theological Seminary, proposes such a literal and anthropomorphic interpretation. As he argues (The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel), if the authors of the Hebrew Bible had intended their anthropomorphic language to be understood figuratively, why did they not say so? The Bible contains a wide variety of texts in different genres, but there is no hint of this, the closest being the statement ofDeuteronomy 4.15 that the people did not see any form when the Ten Commandments were revealed at Sinai.
I should first of all say that I haven't read Sommer's book; so none of this is directed against Sommer except in modo obliquo. My target is Buckner's take on the matters discussed by Sommer. I should also point out that Ed quotes from my Combox where I am known to make remarks even less guarded than in my main entries. I was a little irritated that he had hijacked my thread by using 'anthropomorphic' in a way other than the way I had defined it. My post has nothing to do with the Bible or divine revelation. You could say that my concern there is the absolute and therefore ontologically simple 'God of the philosophers' not 'the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,' to acquiesce for a moment in that dubious but provocative distinction.
My aim there was to show that (i) univocity of predicate sense across such predications as 'God is wise' and 'Socrates is wise' is incompatible with the divine simplicity, and that the friends of univocity support a conception of God that is anthropomorphic in the narrow sense of being a conception according to which the great-making properties of God are really just great-making properties of creatures even if they are the maxima of those of the great-making properties that admit of degrees. This narrow and refined sense of 'anthropomorphic' has to be distinguished from the more ordinary, crude sense according to which 'anthropomorphic' means having the form of a human animal, including its physical form and composition. So if you imagine God stomping around in a physical garden leaving footprints, then your conception is crudely anthropomorphic. But if you think of God as a pure spirit having many of the same properties as Socrates possesses, but none of his physical properties, and having all of his properties in the same way that Socrates has his – two different but connected issues here, nota bene — then you have an anthropomorphic conception of God, albeit a refined one.
But now onto the topic dear to Ed's heart. He asks: " if the authors of the Hebrew Bible had intended their anthropomorphic language to be understood figuratively, why did they not say so?" This rhetorical question is grammatically interrogative but logically declarative: it amounts to the declaration that the authors did intend their crudely anthropomorphic language to be taken literally because they didn't say otherwise. This declaration, in turn, is a telescoped argument:
The authors did not say that their language was to be taken figuratively;
ergo
Their language is to be taken literally.
The argument, however, is plainly a non sequitur. It therefore gives me no reason to change my view.
Besides, it is preposterous to suppose that the creator of the the physical universe, "the heavens and the earth," is a proper part of the physical universe. Since that is impossible, no intelligent reading of Genesis can take the creator of the universe to be a bit of its fauna. Presumably, God gave us the intelligence to read what is obviously figurative as figurative.
And if one takes the Bible to be divine revelation, then it is natural to assume that God is using the authors to get his message across. For that to occur, the authors needn't be terribly bright or apprised of the variety of literary tropes. What does it matter what the authors intended? Suppose they intended talk of man being made in the divine image and likeness to be construed in some crassly materialistic way. Then they failed to grasp the profound spiritual truth that they, willy nilly (nolens volens), were conveying.
Buckner continues:
‘Until Saadiah [the 10th century father of Jewish philosophy], all Jewish thinkers, biblical and post-biblical, agreed that God, like anything real in the universe, has a body’. A proper understanding of the Hebrew Bible requires not only that God has a body, but that God has many bodies ‘located in sundry places in the world that God created’. These bodies are not angels or messengers. He says in this this interview that an angel in one sense is not sent by God but actually is God, just not all of God.
>>[It] is a smaller, more approachable, more user-friendly aspect of the cosmic deity who is Hashem. That idea is very similar to what the term avatara conveys in Sanskrit. So in this respect, we can see a significant overlap between Hindu theology and one biblical theology.<<
Do hard-assed logicians such as ourselves balk at such partial identity? Not necessarily. I point to a shadow at the bottom of the door, saying ‘that is the Fuller Brush man’. Am I saying that the Fuller Brush man is a shadow? Certainly not! Nor, when I point to a beach on the island, saying ‘that island is uninhabited’, am I implying that the whole island is a beach. By the same token, when I point to the avatar, and truly say ‘that is God’, am I implying that God is identical with the avatar? Not at all. Nor am I saying that God has feet, even though the avatar has feet. The point is that the reference of ‘that’ is not the physical manifestation before me, but God himself. Scholastic objections that we cannot think of God as ‘this essence’ (ut haec essentia) notwithstanding.
I grant that if an avatar of God has feet, it doesn't follow that God has feet. My wife's avatar on Second Life has a tail, but you will be relieved to hear that my wife does not, literally, have a tail. And yet there is a sense of 'is' according to which the avatar is my wife. But how does this deal with my objection? My point was not that God cannot have feet, but that God cannot be a physical being. The creator of the physical universe cannot be a proper part thereof.
Now suppose God himself is a pure spirit who has the power to manifest himself at will in and through various physical avatars. This is an interesting and quite different notion, but apparently not the one that Sommer is floating.
The Jewish philosopher/theologian who turns my crank is the great Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) as he is known in the West. He goes to the opposite extreme rejecting both crude and refined anthropomorphism. His path is that of the via negativa, a path beset by its own perils. I hope to say something about it in a later entry.
Since when did we decide that men and women are interchangeable in hand-to-hand combat on the front lines? Why do we insist on women in combat but not in the NFL? Because we take football seriously. That’s no joke; it’s the sad truth.
We take panem et circenses seriously, but not the defense of the Republic.
I asked a reader whether the graphic to the left was too tasteless to post to my blog, adding, "But then these are times in which considerations of good taste and civility are easily 'trumped.'" My reader responded with a fine statement:
Of course it’s tasteless, but it’s funny. We should go to battle with a song in our heart. Never had patience for the hand-wringing by the beskirted Republicans and professional “conservatives”. How could anyone be surprised by the locker room braggadocio of a man who appeared on the Howard Stern show 600 times? Trump is a deeply flawed messenger of the right message, but politics is a practical affair. He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard in this go-around. After all it’s only the very foundation of the republic at stake. So let’s have some fun while beating the drum for him.
My reader is right. Trump is all we've got. He has a rotten character, but then so does Hillary. This may not be obvious because, while Trump broadcasts his faults, she hides hers. This is part of her being a slimy, mendacious stealth ideologue.
Given that both are sorry specimens on the character front, it comes down to policy.
Another thing you must bear in mind is that a vote for Hillary is a vote for her entire ilk and entourage. Do you want Huma Abedin in the White House?
It may not be possible except for some of us some of the time: to be in the world, but not of it. Engaged, yet detached. To battle our enemies without becoming embittered or like them. To retain the equanimity of the monk in the midst of the world. To float like a lotus blossom without getting wet.
Or to paraphrase the Bhagavad Gita: to enter and partake of the fray but with detachment from the fruits of action.
