From The Catholic Thing:
. . . the University of Notre Dame ha[s] awarded its prestigious 2016 Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden – a man who is both a Catholic and at the same time one of the nation’s most conspicuous defenders of abortion rights and same-sex marriage.
Disgusting. The solution? Revolt of the alumni. The greedy, overpaid, cowardly, p.c.-whipped administrators will knuckle under if the alumni withhold funds.
How real to each
His problems seem
While those of others
Are like a dream.
Unjust we are
And will remain
Unless we work free
Of ego's game.
. . . I turned up this delightful tidbit in Gilleland the Erudite's archive of arcana from 2006:
Bill Vallicella (aka Maverick Philosopher) quotes the Latin phrase "Post coitum omne animal triste est," translates it as "After sexual intercourse every animal is sad," and remarks "The universal quantifier causes me some trouble." A variant of the phrase gives exceptions to the general rule: "Triste est omne animal post coitum, praeter mulierem gallumque," every animal except woman and rooster. Or should that be "Gallum," Frenchman?
And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40)
Can love be reasonably commanded? Love is an emotion or feeling. As such it is not under the control of the will. And yet we are commanded to love God and neighbor. How is this possible? An action can be commanded, but love is not an action. Love is an emotional response. So how can love be commanded?
In the case of loving God, there is not only the problem of how love can be commanded, but also the problem of how one can love what one doesn't know. Some people are such that to know them is to love them. Their lovableness naturally elicits a loving response. But apart from the mystical glimpses vouchsafed only to some and even to them only rarely and fitfully, God is not known but believed in. He is an object of faith, not of knowledge. (If you say that God is known by description via theistic 'proofs,' my response will be that such knowledge is not knowledge of God but knowledge that something or other satisfies the description in question.) How can we love God if we are not acquainted with God? Genuine love of God is love de re, not de dicto.
I won't be discussing the second problem in this entry, that of how one can love what one doesn't know, but only the first, namely: How can love be commanded, whether it be the love of God or the love of neighbor?
Here is quick little modus tollens. If love can be commanded, then love is an action, something I can will myself to do; love is not an action, not something I can will myself to do, but an emotional response; ergo, love cannot be commanded.
One way around the difficulty is by reinterpreting what is meant by 'love.' While I cannot will myself to love you, I can will to act benevolently toward you. And while it makes no sense to command love, it does make sense to command benevolent behavior. "You ought to love her" makes no sense; but "You ought to act as if you love her" does make sense. There cannot be a duty to love, but there might be a duty to do the sorts of things to and for a person that one would do without a sense of duty if one were to love her.
The idea, then, is to construe "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" as "Thou shalt act towards everyone as one acts toward those few whom one loves" or perhaps "Thou shalt act toward one's neighbor as if one loved him."
The above is essentially Kant's view as reported by William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality, pp.236 ff. It makes sense. But how does it apply to love of God?
Perhaps like this. To love God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul is to to act as if one loves God with one's whole heart, mind, and soul. But how does one do that? One way is by acting as if one loves one's neighbor as oneself. Another way, and this is my suggestion, is by living the quest for God via prayer, meditation, and philosophy.
We are in the age of post-consensus politics. We Americans don't agree on much of anything any more. As our politics comes more and more to resemble warfare, the warrior comes more and more to replace the gentleman.
Here is the best description of a gentleman I have encountered:
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe. -– John Walter Wayland
By this definition, Trump is no gentleman; he is rather the anti-gentleman. But a gentleman among thugs is a loser. You cannot appeal to the higher nature of a thug; he has none. So you need someone who can repay the leftist in his own Alinskyite coin. You need a man who will get into the gutter and fight the leftist with his own weapons. You need a man who will not shrink from the politics of personal destruction preached by V. I. Lenin and used so effectively by his successors in the Democrat Party.
Herein an argument for Trump. I am beginning to think that he alone can defeat the evil Hillary. Ted Cruz is a brilliant man compared to whom Trump is a know-nothing when it comes to the law, the Constitution, and the affairs of state, and Cruz is a better man than Trump; but the Texan is a senator and thus part of the Republican establishment against which there is justified rebellion.
Personality-wise, too, Cruz is not that attractive to the average disgruntled voter. He is not enough of a regular guy. And being a better man than Trump he probably won't descend deep enough into the gutter to really annihilate Hillary as she so richly deserves. Trump can mobilize Joe Sixpack and Jane Lipstick. These types don't watch C-SPAN or read The Weekly Standard. They can't relate to the bow-tie brigade over at National Review. They are heartily sick and tired of the empty talk of the crapweasels* of the Republican establishment. They want action.
_______________
*I borrow this delightful bit of invective from the fiery Michelle Malkin.
The latter argues John Hawkins.
Here is an extreme example of the leftist's reflexive love of underdogs qua underdogs. A Muslim terrorist stabs an Israeli in the neck. The Israeli pulls the knife out of his neck and stabs the terrorist to death with it. Now anyone who is morally sane will cheer the Israeli for his effective and morally legitimate self-defense. But a left-wing group took the side of the Muslim terrorist! How typical.
Peace Now is a leftist anti-Israel group funded by the EU, George Soros and the usual international gang of creeps and cretins. Its opposition to self-defense against Islamic terrorism is so extreme that it even condemns a stabbing victim for fighting back against his killer.
If Donald Trump is a sort of neo-Calliclean who celebrates the winner qua winner, regardless of how he came to be a winner, the typical leftist is the neo-Calliclean's opposite number who celebrates the loser qua loser, regardless of how he came to be a loser.
Some think so. The following from Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:
A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.
I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.
My response to Mann would be along these lines: It is precisely because men of the spirit must survive and must survive to create and enlighten that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?
I will have to find the passage in Plato's Laws where he says that the good who refuse to get involved in politics will end up ruled by the evil.
I'll grant you that it does if you grant me that truth, existence, order, conscience and twenty of so other phenomena prove the existence of God. And let's not leave out the moral heroism of Maximilian Kolbe.
You can reasonably ask how there could be a God given the fact of natural and moral evil. You can also reasonably ask how there could not be a God given the transcendent moral heroism and selflessness of Kolbe and others like him.
I'll grant you that evil argues the nonexistence of God if you grant me that evil also argues the existence of God. (Click on the first hyperlink and locate the argument from evil for the existence of God.)
My point is that there are no rationally compelling arguments for or against the existence of God.
According to Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter, Crown Forum, 2013, p. 64),
To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.
Robert Paul Wolff unwittingly provides corroboration:
On Easter Sunday, it is only fitting that the reliably despicable Ross Douthat should once again rise from the dead with an incoherently dreadful column on Piketty. I will not try to summarize it. As Aristotle observed [I think], shit has no form, and hence cannot easily be apprehended by reason. You may read it for yourself. I take Douthat's column as a good sign, a harbinger of Spring. When the rats on the sinking ship of capitalism pause in their scramble down the hawsers to acknowledge the reemergence of Marx from the dustbin of history [how's that for a mixed metaphor?], there is hope on this annual celebration of resurrection.
Note that Wolff does not address the content of Douthat's essay, though he does have the decency to link to it. What he does is portray Douthat as a reliably despicable zombie and rat, a shill for capitalism, who has penned an incoherently dreadful column, a piece of shit beneath the apprehension of reason.
Well thank you Professor Wolff for this wonderful Easter Sunday illustration of the Central Axiom and for reminding us once again of how dangerous you leftists are, and, indirectly, how important our Second Amendment rights are.
A leftist is a person who can justify unspeakably evil deeds to advance a worldview according to which people are basically good and evil does not exist.
A reader opines and I respond:
As far as I can tell, our thoughts on Trump’s unfitness are pretty close, and the way you’ve laid out the matter in your most recent post (Trumpian Propositions) also mirrors my thinking. This extends to the following sentence, which I’ve uttered almost verbatim to friends and family: “we know what Hillary will do, while we do not know what Trump will do.”
Where we disagree – or rather, where I may disagree with you, but am still working out my thoughts and waiting for further developments – is in evaluating the implications of that statement. You take it as an argument to vote for Trump; after all, you say, “[h]e might actually do something worthwhile.” I agree with that quotation as well. It seems to me that HRC will be a terrible President 100 times out of 100, while DJT may only be terrible 98 or 99 times out of 100.
But here’s the problem: I fear that his worst could be worse, maybe much worse, than Hillary’s. He is a thug, or at least often behaves like one (e.g. in his use of eminent domain both in the U.S. and in Scotland) and expresses admiration for thugs (e.g. Putin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, the Chinese in cracking down in the Tiananmen Square massacre back in ’89, etc.). Trump, it seems to me, wants to be El Jefe, not merely the commander in chief of a Republic, subject to checks and balances and limitations on executive power. (See for example his incredible statement in the debate that he would give illegal orders to members of the armed forces, and they would follow them.)
BV: If we use 'thug' to refer to someone who habitually engages in thuggish behavior, then perhaps Trump is not fairly called a thug. But he is often thuggish, and he clearly admires thugs and thuggish behavior. This is a disqualifier. Lacking self-knowledge, he cannot see this fact about himself. This is another disqualifier.
It is also important to note that much of the admiration and support for Trump reflects a dark side of human nature, namely, the tendency secretly to admire supposed tough guys and 'winners,' and to have contempt for 'losers' many of whom 'lose' because they are reasonable, civil, conciliatory, and concerned for the common good, Mitt Romney being one example. To admire a winner just in virtue of his winning while ignoring the question of the morality of the means to victory is human-all-too-human. It is rooted in our animal nature. In Trump's moral calculus, the worst sort of human being is the loser. This is why the first thing he said in his response to Mitt Romney was that the latter lost.
To the extent that we can ascribe a moral theory to a shallow-pate like Trump, his is the morality of Thrasymachus, if we take that to be the view that it is right and just that the strong should dominate the weak. Might makes right. Success justifies. If the panzers of the Wehrmacht roll into Poland crushing all resistance, then the fact justifies the deed. My power to kill you confers moral justification on my killing you. On the other hand, failure condemns. If you are too weak to win and you lose, then it is right and just that you lose. When Hitler saw that the fatherland was about to be destroyed, his attitude was that it deserved to be destroyed. So he ordered the scorched earth Nero Decree as much to punish the Germans for losing as to prevent useful infrastructure from falling into the hands of the enemy.
In light of this it is easy to understand Trump's mocking of the man with the palsied hand and his reference to Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle. The cripple is weak and less worthy of life. Women are weaker than men and so their claims can be dismissed as products of their weakness. It also sheds light on Trump's assuring us that his sexual apparatus is large and in good working order. For any weakness in that area would detract from his status as alpha male and argue his lack of value. For a man as crude as Trump the measure of a man is the size and rigidity of his penis and the extent of his net worth. Now many a man is concerned with penis and pelf; but few are so morally vacuous as to have no compunction about tying one's worth as a person to such things.
What matters for our latter-day Thrasymachus is to win, whatever the cost. And or course winning is measured in the crudest quantitative terms imaginable. Trump tweeted to a journalist who criticized him, "I get more pussy than you." What matters is quantity of 'pussy,' size of net worth, height of buildings . . . . It doesn't matter that those buildings are casinos wherein people degrade and impoverish themselves.
And notice that he doesn't care that these damning facts are known about him. He is not ashamed to be the crude vulgarian that he is. He is like Bill Clinton in this regard. Nixon, who was brought up right, could be shamed, but not Bill Clinton. "I did it because I could." And like Bill Clinton, Trump has no compunction about lying. It comes as naturally to him as breathing.
And nothing he says has to make sense since it is not about making sense but about winning. So he can make noises as if he is supportive of Christianity even though, by his own moral calculus, he ought to despise Jesus Christ. For the world has never known a bigger loser and more utter failure than Jesus. Humanly speaking, Jesus was a total loser. If that is not obvious, the case has been made most convincingly by Romano Guardini in Jesus Christus, chapter 3, "Failure."
Like Obama, Trump will say anything if he thinks it will get him what he wants. It doesn't matter whether it is true or even makes sense, or contradicts what he said the day before.
My correspondent is worried that Trump's worst may be worse than Hillary's worst. Could be. We just don't know. But we do know Hillary will do whereas we do not know what Trump will do. So it strikes me as reasonable to roll the dice in his favor should he get the nomination. Meanwhile, we should do our damndest to make sure he doesn't get the nomination.
It isn’t clear to me that he’s better than Hillary Clinton, even leaving aside his Napoleonic complex. Is there anything that you know he stands for? He thinks Planned Parenthood is “great”, he’ll let all the “good ones” (Mexicans) back in, likes H1B visas, imported immigrants to work at his resort while rejecting American labor as recently as last July, was for restrictions on the second amendment until about 30 seconds ago, recommends higher taxes on the rich, has advocated torture, opposes free trade, wants to further limit the first amendment, has been playing footsies with the KKK and the white supremacists (the “bad earpiece” try was a joke, as he himself mentioned David Duke and white supremacists in that CNN interview), has a decades-long track record of engaging in crony “capitalism” – and the list goes on and on. I don’t see where he’s better than she is, except on a very few issues where his “conversion” goes back to the instant he decided to run, and which in every case has been retracted or at least undermined by later statements during the campaign. He’s a bullshitter, a bully, and a blusterer, and if you go by his actions instead of his words he’s just another liberal democrat.
BV: There is one thing I KNOW Trump stands for, namely, his own ego. He is all the awful things you say he is. And I agree that it is not CLEAR that he is better than Hillary.
So I just don’t see it. [. . .]
The only possible and meaningful plus I see for Trump is the possibility that he appoints conservatives to SCOTUS. There is no chance that Hillary will do so, but he might. (I’m not absolutely sure about that, but it’s moderately possible.) Maybe that’s a good enough reason. Given that his sister is a pro-choice judge, and given his social liberalism, and given his seeming ignorance of and disdain for the U.S. Constitution (I especially liked his recent comments about judges signing bills into law), the odds of his nominating an originalist justice are iffy at best. But again, maybe that’s good enough. Still: does one elect a liberal ignoramus who might be Mussolini for a shot at 2-3 (relatively) good Supremes?
BV: Hillary is Obama in a pant suit. She will continue his "fundamental transformation of America." Like Obama, she is a destructive leftist. She must be stopped. Therefore, you must vote for the Republican nominee whoever it is. It will be either Trump or Cruz.
I don't think it is right to say that the only good thing Trump might do is appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court. It is a very good bet that he will put a severe dent in the influx of illegal aliens across the southern border. (Forget his bluster about making Mexico pay for the wall.) But we KNOW that hate-America Hillary will do nothing to stem the illegal tide. If anything she'll encourage it because in her cynical eyes they are undocumented Democrats.
A third thing Trump might very well do is stop the outrage of sanctuary cities. But we KNOW Hillary won't.
A fourth thing Trump can be expected to do enforce civil order in the face of rampaging blacks of the Black Lives Matter ilk. These lying scum have targeted the police and are actively working to undermine the rule of law. Hillary is in bed with them. The evil bitch repeats all the lies about Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, 'mass incarceration' and so on. And what is most despicable is that she does it cynically for her own personal advantage.
A fifth thing Trump might do is defend religious liberties. We KNOW that Hillary won't. Never forget that the Left is anti-religion and has been since 1789. Part of the reason for this is that the Left is totalitarian: it can brook no competitors to State power. This is why it must destroy belief in God and in the family. The god of the leftist is the State, the apparatchiks of the latter being the State's 'priesthood.'
A sixth thing Trump might do is defend Second Amendment rights. We KNOW that Hillary won't. She is a mendacious 'stealth ideologue' who won't admit that she is for Aussie-style confiscation, but that is what the liberty-bashing bitch is for. She realizes that guns in the hands of citizens is a check on her leftist totalitarianism.
Here is the situation. If it comes down to Trump versus Hillary, then you face a lousy choice between two awful candidates. So you must vote for the least awful of the two. And that is Trump. Alles klar?
"But why not vote for neither?"
The short answer is that the Left is totalitarian. You can't withdraw from politics, because they won't let you. And again, we know that Hillary is a leftist who will try to extend the reach of government into every aspect of our lives. You must take a stand.
The refusal of Pope Francis properly to confront and condemn radical Islam is a case of abdication of authority. While Christians are being slaughtered, and their holy sites pulverized, the foolish Francis commits the No True Muslim Fallacy. The man is a clown:
We have too many clowns in high places: Bill Clinton, 'Bozo' de Blasio, Obama the POMO prez, 'Pope' Francis, and now the greatest show on earth, Trump the Clown.
What do they all lack? Gravitas.
Do you think I am being unfair to Francis? Then see here.
There is too much buffoonery in high places.
It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles. What they do after hours is not our business. So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear. Remember that one? Boxers or briefs? He answered the question! All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States." And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!
Herewith, some notes on Chapter 2 of William E. Mann, God, Modality, and Morality (Oxford UP, 2015), "Divine Simplicity." I have been invited to review the book for Faith and Philosophy. This entry, then, by way of warm-up. For an introduction to the topic of divine simplicity, see my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry.
One of the entailments of the classical doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that God is what he has. (Augustine, The City of God, XI, 10.) Thus God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. And similarly for the other divine attributes. The Platonic flavor of this is unmistakable. God is not an all-knowing being, but all-knowing-ness itself; not a good being, or even a maximally good being, but Goodness itself; not a wise being or the wisest of beings, but Wisdom itself. Not a being among beings, not an ens among entia, but self-subsistent Being (esse) itself. (Aquinas: Deus est ipsum esse subsistens.) To our ordinary way of thinking this sounds like so much nonsense: how could anything be identical to its attributes? Something that has properties is eo ipso distinct from them. Is that not obvious? But on another way of thinking, DDS makes a good deal of sense. How could God, the absolute, self-sufficient reality, be just one more wise individual even if the wisest? God is better thought of as the source of all wisdom, as Wisdom itself in its prime instance. Otherwise, God would be dependent on something other than himself for his wisdom, namely, the property of being wise. There is more on motivation in my SEP entry. I will say no more here about motivation. This post is for those who accept or are inclined to accept DDS but are worried about how rational sense can be made of it.
As Mann points out, the Platonic approach as we find it is the Augustinian and Anselmian accounts of DDS leads to difficulties a couple of which are as follows:
D1. If God = wisdom, and God = life, then wisdom = life. But wisdom and life are not even extensionally equivalent, let alone identical. If Tom is alive, it doesn't follow that Tom is wise. (23)
D2. If God is wisdom, and Socrates is wise by participating in wisdom, then Socrates is wise by participating in God. But this smacks of heresy. No creature participates in God. (23)
Property Instances
Enter property instances. It is one thing to say that God is wisdom, quite another to say that God is God's wisdom. God's wisdom is an example of a property instance. And similarly for the other divine attributes. God is not identical to life; God is identical to his life. Suppose we say that God = God's wisdom, and God = God's life. It would then follow that God's wisdom = God's life, but not that God = wisdom or that wisdom = life.
So if we construe identity with properties as identity with property instances, then we can evade both of (D1) and (D2). Mann's idea, then, is that the identity claims made within DDS should be taken as Deity-instance identities (e.g., God is his omniscience) and as instance-instance identities (e.g., God's omniscience is God's omnipotence), but not as Deity-property identities (e.g., God is omniscience) or as property-property identities (e.g., omniscience is omnipotence). Support for Mann's approach is readily available in the texts of the doctor angelicus. (24) Aquinas says things like, Deus est sua bonitas, "God is his goodness."
But what exactly is a property instance? If the concrete individual Socrates instantiates the abstract property wisdom, then two further putative items come into consideration. One is the (Chisholmian-Plantingian as opposed to Bergmannian-Armstrongian) state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. The other is the property instance, the wisdom of Socrates. Mann holds that they are distinct. All states of affairs exist, but only some of them obtain or are actual. By contrast, all property instances are actual: they cannot exist without being actual. The wisdom of Socrates is a particular just as Socrates is and is concrete (in space and/or time) just as Socrates is. If we admit property instances into our ontology, then the above two difficulties can be circumvented. Or so Mann maintains.
Could a Person be a Property Instance?
But other problems loom. One is this. If the F-ness of God = God, if, for example, the wisdom of God = God, then God is a property instance. But God is a person. From the frying pan into the fire? How could a person be a property instance? I will display the problem as an inconsistent triad:
a. God is a property instance.
b. God is a person.
c. No person is a property instance.
Mann solves the triad by denying (c). (37) Some persons are property instances. Indeed, Mann argues that every person is a property instance because everything is a property instance. (38) God is a person and therefore a property instance. If you object that persons are concrete while property instances are abstract, Mann's response is that both are concrete. To be concrete is to be in space and/or time. Socrates is concrete in this sense, but so is his being sunburned. (37)
If you object that persons are substances and thus independent items while property instances are not substances but dependent on substances, Mann's response will be that the point holds for accidental property instances but not for essential property instances. Socrates may lose his wisdom but he cannot lose his humanity. Now all of God's properties are essential: God is essentially omniscient, omnipotent, etc. So it seems to Mann that "the omniscience of God is not any more dependent on God than God is on the omniscience of God: should either cease to be, the other would also." (37)
Mann's argument for the thesis that everything is a property instance involves the notion of a rich property. The rich property of an individual x is a conjunctive property the conjuncts of which are all and only the essential and accidental properties, some of them temporally indexed, instantiated by x throughout x's career. (38) Mann tells us that for anything whatsoever there is a corresponding rich property. From this he concludes that "everything is a property instance of some rich property or other." (38) It follows that every person is a property instance. The argument seems to be this:
A. For every concrete individual x, there is a corresponding rich property R. Therefore,
B. For every concrete individual x, x is a property instance of some rich property or other. Therefore,
C. For every concrete individual x, if x is a person, then x is a property instance.
I am having difficulty understanding this argument. The move from (A) to (B) smacks of a non sequitur absent some auxiliary premise. I grant arguendo that for each concrete individual x there is a corresponding rich property R. And I grant that there are property instances. Thus I grant that, in addition to Socrates and wisdom, there is the wisdom of Socrates. Recall that this is not to be confused with the abstract state of affairs, Socrates' being wise. From what I have granted it follows that for each x there is the rich property instance, the R-ness of x. But how is it supposed to follow that everything is a property instance? Everything instantiates properties, and in this sense everything is an instance of properties; but this is not to say that everything is a property instance. Socrates instantiates a rich property, and so is an instance of a property, but it doesn't follow that Socrates is a property instance.
Something is missing in Mann's argument. Either that, or I am missing something.
There is of course no chance that Professor Mann is confusing being an instance of a property with being a property instance. If a instantiates F-ness, then a is an instance of the property F-ness; but a is not a property instance as philosophers use this phrase: the F-ness of a is a property instance.
So what do we have to add to Mann's argument for it to generate the conclusion that every concrete individual is a property instance? How do we validate the inferential move from (A) to (B)? Let 'Rs' stand for Socrates' rich property. We have to add the claim that there is nothing one could point to that could distinguish Socrates from the property instance generated when Socrates instantiates Rs. Rich property instances are a special case. Socrates cannot be identical to his wisdom because he can exist even if his wisdom does not exist. And he cannot be identical to his humanity because there is more to Socrates that his humanity, even though he cannot exist wthout it. But since Socrates' rich property instance includes all his property instances, why can't Socrates be identical to this rich property instance? And so Mann's thought seems to be that there is nothing that could distinguish Socrates from his rich property instance. So they are identical. And likewise for every other individual.
But I think this is mistaken. Consequently, I think it is a mistake to hold that every person is a property instance.
Argument One: rich properties and haecceity properties
Socrates can exist without his rich property; ergo, he can exist without his rich property instance; ergo, Socrates cannot be a rich property instance or any property instance. The truth of the initial premise is fallout from the definition of 'rich property.' The R of x is a conjunctive property each conjunct of which is a property of x. Thus Socrates' rich property includes (has as conjunct) the property of being married to Xanthippe. But Socrates might not have had that property, whence it follows that he might not have had R. (If R has C as a conjunct, then necessarily R has C as a conjunct, which implies that R cannot be what it is without having exactly the conjuncts it in fact has. An analog of mereological essentialism holds for conjunctive properties.) And because Socrates might not have had R, he might not have had the property instance of R. So Socrates cannot be identical to this property instance.
What Mann needs is not a rich property, but an haecceity property: one that individuates Socrates across every possible world in which he exists. His rich property, by contrast, individuates him in only the actual world. In different worlds, Socrates has different rich properties. And in different worlds, Socrates has different rich property instances. It follows that Socrates cannot be identical to, or necessarily equivalent to, any rich property instance. An haecceity property, however, is a property Socrates has in every world in which he exists, and which he alone has in every world in which he exists. Now if there are such haecceity properties as identity-with-Socrates, then perhaps we can say that Socrates is identical to a property instance, namely, the identity-with-Socrates of Socrates.
Unfortunately, there are no haecceity properties as I argue elsewhere.
So I conclude that concrete individuals cannot be identified with property instances, whence follows the perhaps obvious proposition that no person is a property instance, not God, not me, not Socrates.
Argument Two: The Revenge of Max Black
Suppose we revisit Max Black's indiscernible iron spheres. There are exactly two of them, and nothing else, and they share all monadic and relational properties. (Thus both are made of iron and each is ten meters from an iron sphere.) There are no properties to distinguish them, and of course there are no haecceity properties. So the rich property of the one is the same as the rich property of the other. It follows that the rich property instance of the one is identical to the rich property instance of the other. But there are two spheres, not one. It follows that neither sphere is identical to its rich property instance. So again I conclude that individuals are not rich property instances.
If you tell me that the property instances are numerically distinct because the spheres are numerically distinct, then you presuppose that individuals are not rich property instances. You presuppose a distinction between an individual and its rich property instance.
This second argument assumes that Black's world is metaphysically possible and thus that the Identity of Indiscernibles is not metaphysically necessary. A reasonable assumption!
Argument Three: Love is of the individual qua individual, qua essentially unique. The revenge of Josiah Royce.
Suppose Phil is my indiscernible twin. Now it is a fact that I love myself. But if I love myself in virtue of my instantiation of a set of properties, then I should love Phil equally. For he instantiates exactly the same properties as I do. But if one of us has to be annihilated, then I prefer that it be Phil. Suppose God decides that one of us is more than enough, and that one of us has to go. I say, 'Let it be Phil!' and Phil says, 'Let it be Bill!' So I don't love Phil equally even though he has all the same properties that I have. I prefer myself and love myself just because I am myself. My Being exceeds my being a rich property instance.
This little thought-experiment suggests that there is more to self-love than love of the being-instantiated of an ensemble of properties. For Phil and I have the same properties, and yet each is willing to sacrifice the other. This would make no sense if the Being of each of us were exhausted by our being instances of sets of properties. In other words, I do not love myself solely as an instance of properties but also as a unique existent individual who cannot be reduced to a mere instance of properties. I love myself as a unique individual. And the same goes for Phil: he loves himself as a unique individual. Each of us loves himself as a unique individual numerically distinct from his indiscernible twin.
Classical theism is a personalism: God is a person and we, as made in the image and likeness of God, are also persons. God keeps us in existence by knowing us and loving us. God is absolutely unique and each of us is unique as, and only as, the object of divine love. The divine love penetrates to the very ipseity and haecceity of me and my indiscernible twin, Phil. God loves us as individuals, as essentially unique (Josiah Royce). But this is not possible if we are reducible to rich property instances.
I detect a tension between the personalism of classical theism and the view that persons are property instances.
The Dialectic in Review
One of the entailments of DDS is that God is identical to his attributes, such defining properties as omniscience, omnipotence, etc. This view has its difficulties, so Mann take a different tack: God is identical to his property-instances. This implies that God is a property-instance. But God is a person and it is not clear how a person could be a property instance. Mann takes the bull by the horns by boldly arguing that every concrete individual is a property instance — a rich property instance — and that therefore every person is a property instance, including God. The argument is found to be uncompelling for the three reasons given.
