One who lives long better appreciates that life is short.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Micro-Agressions = Micro-Nooses
No day without some new bit of academic lunacy. Re: the brouhaha surrounding poly sci prof Jerry Hough of Duke University.
Being Itself: Continuing the Discussion with Dale Tuggy
I admire Dale Tuggy's resolve to continue this difficult discussion despite the manifold demands on his time and energy. (This Gen-X dude is no slacker! If one of us is a slacker, it's this Boomer. Or, if you prefer, I am a man of leisure, otium liberale, in the classical sense.) The core question, you will recall, is whether God is best thought of as a being among beings, or as Being itself. The best way to push forward, I think, is via very short exchanges. In Part 2, near the top, we read:
“Being itself,” I take it, is something like a universal property, an abstract and not a concrete object. (Or at least, it’s not supposed to be concrete; maybe he thinks that it is neither abstract nor concrete.) I’m not sure if Bill would accept those characterizations, but if not, I invite him to say a little more about what he means by “Being itself.” The “itself,” I assume, entails not being a self. But God – that is, the God of Christianity, or of biblical monotheism – is a god, and a god is, analytically, a self. I’m pretty sure that no self can be “Being itself” in the way that Bill means it, but again, I invite him to say more about what it is to be “Being itself.”
1. First a comment on 'itself' in 'Being itself.' I don't understand why Dale thinks that 'itself' entails not being a self or person. In expressions of the form 'X itself,' the 'itself' in typical instances functions as a device to focus attention on X in its difference from items with which it could be conflated or confused. In a Platonic dialogue Socrates might say to an interlocutor: "You gave me an instance of a just act, but I want to know what justice itself is." Justice itself is justice as distinct from just acts whether the latter are taken distributively or collectively. The same goes for knowledge itself, virtue itself, piety itself. Piety itself is not any given pious act or the collection of pious acts, but that in virtue of which pious acts are pious. It is that which 'makes' pious acts pious. 'Itself' in these constructions is a device of emphasis. It is a form of pleonasm that serves a sort of underlining function. Compare the sentence, 'Obama himself called for transparency in government.' 'Himself' adds a nuance absent without it. It serves to insure that the reader appreciates that it is Obama and not some other person who made the call for transparency; Obama, that very man, who is not known for his contributions to transparency.
Similarly with Being itself and Existence itself. When I speak of Being/Existence itself, I speak of Being/Existence in its difference from beings/existents. I am making it clear that I intend Being as other than each being and from the whole lot of beings. I am emphasizing the difference between Being and beings. I am warning against their conflation or confusion or (thoughtless) identification. I am implying, among other things, that Being does not divide without remainder into beings. Or rather, I am raising this as a question. For after investigation we may decide that Being does, in the end, divide without remainder into beings. But note that to make this assertion one has to have distinguished Being from beings. Otherwise, the assertion would be a miserable tautology along the lines of: beings are beings.
2. Now does 'Being itself' imply that Being is not a self? 'Self' has a narrow use and a wide use. In the narrow use, a self is a person. Now suppose it were said that God himself is a person. Would that imply that God is not a person? Of course not. In the wide use, a self is anything that has what Buddhists call self-nature or own-being. The Buddhist anatta doctrine amounts to the claim that nothing has self-nature, that nothing is a self in the broad sense. This could be interpreted to mean that nothing is a substance in the Aristotelian sense. (Cf. T. R. V. Murti) A mark of substance in this sense is independence: X is a substance iff x is logically capable of independent existence. Now God is either a substance or analogous to a substance. If God is a self in the broad sense, than this is consistent with God's being a person either univocally or analogically.
3. Can an abstract object be a person? No! On this point I am confident that Dale and I will rejoice in agreement. Here is a quick argument. Persons are agents. Agents do things. No abstract object does anything: abstracta are causally inert. They cannot act or be acted upon. Therefore, no person is an abstract object.
Dale operates within a certain general-metaphysical scheme common to most analytic philosophers, a scheme that he does not question and that perhaps seems obvious to him. On this scheme, every object or being is either abstract or concrete, no object is both, and no object is neither. For Dale, then, persons are concrete objects; God is a person; hence God is a concrete object.
On this understanding of 'concrete,' a concretum is anything that is either capable of being causally active or capable of being causally passive. And this, whether or not the item is a denizen of space and time. For Dale, God is not in space or time without prejudice to his being concrete. I don't know whether Dale thinks of God as impassible, and I rather doubt that he does; but one could hold that God is impassible while also holding that God is concrete given the definition above. On some conceptions, God acts but cannot be acted upon.
4. But is Being an abstract object? No! First of all, I question Dale's general-metaphysical scheme according to which everything is either abstract or concrete, nothing is neither, and nothing is both. So I don't feel any dialectical pressure to cram Being or Existence into this scheme. Being is not a being among beings; therefore, it is not an abstract being or a concrete being.
Being is that which makes beings be: outside their causes, outside the mind, outside language and its logic, outside of nothing. Being is that without which beings are nothing at all.
5. Is Being a property of beings? No. But this denial does not give aid and comfort to the Fregean view that Being or existence is a property of properties. There is a clear sense in which Being belongs to beings: one cannot kick it upstairs in the Fressellian manner. But while Being belongs to beings, it is not a property of them in any standard sense of 'property.' Suppose we agree with this definition that I got from Roderick Chisholm:
P is a property =df P is possibly such that it is instantiated.
Accordingly, every property is an instantiable item, and every instantiable item is a property. The question whether Being is a property of beings then becomes the question whether Being is instantiated by beings. In simpler terms, are beings instances of Being in the way Max and Manny are instances of felinity? I argue against this in my existence book. Being (existence) does not and cannot have instances or examples. Max is an instance of felinity, an example of cat; he is not an instance or example of Being.
Here is one consideration among several. If x, y are instances of F-ness, then x, y are not numerically distinct just in virtue of being instances of F-ness. Qua instances of F-ness, x, y are identical and interchangeable. Whatever it is that makes x, y two and not one has nothing to do with their being instances of F-ness. Max and Manny, for example, are numerically distinct, but not numerically distinct as cats, i.e., as instances of felinity. But they are numerically distinct as existents. Therefore, existents are not instances of existence. If you think otherwise, you are thinking of existence as a quidditative determination, a highest what-property. But existence pertains not to what a thing is, but to its very Being. Two cats are not numerically different as cats, but they are numerically different as existents: existence enters into their numerical diversity. For this reason, existence is not common to existents in the manner of a property or essence or quiddity or what-determination or concept.
Here is a second argument. First-level instantiation is a dyadic relation that connects an individual to a property. Now it is a necessary truth about relations that if a relation holds between or among two or more items, then all of these items exist. For example, Socrates cannot be an instance of the property of being a philosopher, as he is, unless he exists and unless the property exists. But then it should be clear that nothing exists in virtue of being an instance of a property, including the putative property of existence.
6. Is Being universal? Yes. It is common to every being, and in that sense universal. But it is not universal in the manner of a property or concept. If existence itself is God, then existence is common to existents in the manner of a common metaphysical cause, or as I prefer to say, common metaphysical ground. (I reserve 'cause' for so-called 'secondary causes.')
7. I suspect the above won't make much sense to Dale. It is very difficult to get analytically-trained philosophers to 'think outside the box.' They (the vast majority of them anyway) are boxed in by dogmas that they never question such as that "existence is what existential quantification expresses" (Quine); that there are no modes of existence; that properties are 'abstract objects,' and others.
Empty Rhetoric, Disregard for Reality
Thomas Sowell versus Barack Obama.
Can a Return to Federalism Save Us?
The Problem
I fear that we are coming apart as a nation. We need to face the fact that we do not agree on a large number of divisive, passion-inspiring issues. Among these are abortion, gun rights, capital punishment, affirmative action, legal and illegal immigration, same-sex 'marriage,' taxation, the need for fiscal responsibility in government, the legitimacy of public-sector unions, wealth redistribution, the role of the federal government in education, the very purpose of government, the limits, if any, on governmental power, and numerous others.
We need also to face the fact that we will never agree on them. These are not merely academic issues since they directly affect the lives and livelihoods and liberties of people. And they are not easily resolved because they are deeply rooted in fundamental worldview differences, in a "conflict of visions," to borrow a phrase from Thomas Sowell. When you violate a man's liberty, or mock his moral sense, or threaten to destroy his way of life, or use the power to the state to force him to violate his conscience, you are spoiling for a fight and you will get it.
We ought also to realize that calls for civility and comity and social cohesion are pretty much empty. Comity (social harmony) in whose terms? On what common ground? Peace is always possible if one side just gives in. If conservatives all converted to leftism, or vice versa, then harmony would reign. But to think such a thing will happen is just silly, as silly as the silly hope that Obama, a leftist, could 'bring us together.' We can come together only on common ground, or to invert the metaphor, only under the umbrella of shared principles. And what would these be?
There is no point in papering over very real differences.
Not only are we disagreeing about issues concerning which there can be reasonable disagreement, we are also disagreeing about things that it is unreasonable to disagree about, for example, whether photo ID ought to be required at polling places, and about what really happened in the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin cases. When disagreement spreads to ascertainable facts, then things are well-nigh hopeless.
The rifts are deep and nasty. Polarization and demonization of the opponent are the order of the day. Do you want more of this? Then give government more say in your life. The bigger the government, the more to fight over. Do you want less? Then support limited government and federalism. A return to federalism may be a way to ease the tensions, some of them anyway, not that I am sanguine about any solution.
What is Federalism?
Federalism, roughly, is (i) a form of political organization in which governmental power is divided among a central government and various constituent governing entities such as states, counties, and cities; (ii) subject to the proviso that both the central and the constituent governments retain their separate identities and assigned duties. A government that is not a federation would allow for the central government to create and reorganize constituent governments at will and meddle in their affairs. Federalism is implied by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Federalism would make for less contention, because people who support high taxes and liberal schemes could head for states like Massachusetts or California, while the conservatively inclined who support gun rights and capital punishment could gravitate toward states like Texas.
We see the world differently. Worldview differences in turn reflect differences in values. Now values are not like tastes. Tastes cannot be reasonably discussed and disputed while values can. (De gustibus non est disputandum.) But value differences, though they can be fruitfully discussed, cannot be objectively resolved because any attempted resolution will end up relying on higher-order value judgments. There is no exit from the axiological circle. We can articulate and defend our values and clarify our value differences. What we cannot do is resolve our value differences to the satisfaction of all sincere, intelligent, and informed discussants.
Example: Religion
Consider religion. Is it a value or not? Conservatives, even those who are atheistic and irreligious, tend to view religion as a value, as conducive to human flourishing. Liberals and leftists tend to view it as a disvalue, as something that impedes human flourishing. The question is not whether religion, or rather some particular religion, is true. Nor is the question whether religion, or some particular religion, is rationally defensible. The question is whether the teaching and learning and practice of a religion contributes to our well-being, not just as individuals, but in our relations with others. For example, would we be better off as a society if every vestige of religion were removed from the public square? Or does Bible study and other forms of religious education tend to make us better people?
For a conservative like Dennis Prager, the answer to both questions is obvious. No and Yes, respectively. As I recall, he gives an example something like the following. You are walking down the street in a bad part of town. On one side of the street people are leaving a Bible study class. On the other side, a bunch of Hells [sic] Angels are coming out of the Pussy Cat Lounge. Which side of the street do you want to be on? For a conservative the answer is obvious. People who study and take to heart the Bible with its Ten Commandments, etc. are less likely to mug or injure you than drunken bikers who have been getting in touch with their inner demons for the last three hours. But of course this little thought experiment won't cut any ice with a dedicated leftist.
I won't spell out the leftist response. I will say only that you will enter a morass of consideration and counter-consideration that cannot be objectively adjudicated. You won't get Christopher Hitchens to give up his view.
My thesis is that there can be no objective resolution, satisfactory to every sincere, intelligent, and well-informed discussant, of the question of the value of religion. And this is a special case of a general thesis about the objective insolubility of value questions with respect to the issues that most concern us.
Another sort of value difference concerns not what we count as values, but how we weight or prioritize them. Presumably both conservatives and liberals value both liberty and security. But they will differ bitterly over which trumps the other and in what circumstances. Here too it is naive to expect an objective resolution of the issue satisfactory to all participants, even those who meet the most stringent standards of moral probity, intellectual acuity, knowledgeability with respect to relevant empirical issues, etc.
Example: Abortion
Liberal and conservative, when locked in polemic, like to call each other stupid. But of course intelligence or the lack thereof has nothing to do with the intractability of the debates. The intractability is rooted in value differences about which consensus is impossible. On the abortion question, for example, there is no empirical evidence that can resolve the dispute. Empirical data from biology and other sciences are of course relevant to the correct formulation of the problem, but contribute nothing to its resolution. Nor can reason whose organon is logic resolve the dispute. You would have to be as naive as Ayn Rand to think that Reason dictates a solution.
Recognizing these facts, we must ask ourselves: How can we keep from tearing each other apart literally or figuratively? Guns, God, abortion, illegal immigration — these are issues that get the blood up. I am floating the suggestion that federalism and severe limitations on the reach of the central government are what we need to lessen tensions. (But isn't border enforcement a federal job? Yes, of course. In this example, what needs to be curtailed is Federal interference with a border state's reasonable enforcement of its borders with a foreign country. Remember Arizona Senate Bill 1070?)
Suppose Roe v. Wade is overturned and the question of the legality of abortion is returned to the states. Some states will make it legal, others illegal. This would be a modest step in the direction of mitigating the tensions between the warring camps. If abortion is a question for the states, then no federal monies could be allocated to the support of abortion. People who want to live in abortion states can move there; people who don't can move to states in which abortion is illegal. Each can live with their own kind and avoid having their values and sensibilities disrespected.
I understand that my proposal will not be acceptable to either liberals or conservatives. Both want to use the power of the central government to enforce what they consider right. Both sides are convinced that they are right. But of course they cannot both be right. So how do they propose to heal the splits in the body politic?
Doubly Foolish
Even if what we cling to could last, what we cling with can't. Our clinging is doubly foolish.
Homo Viator
We are not at home in this world, a fact more likely to be revealed by travelling than by staying home.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kings of the Blues
Albert King, Born Under a Bad Sign
Albert King, Crosscut Saw
B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out
B. B. King and Eric Clapton, Riding With the King
Playlist
1. "Riding with the King"
2. "Ten Long Years"
3. "Key to the Highway"
4. "Marry You"
5. "Three O'Clock Blues"
6. "Help the Poor"
7. "I Wanna Be"
8. "Worried Life Blues"
9. "Days of Old"
10. "When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer"
11. "Hold On, I'm Comin'"
12. "Come Rain or Come Shine"
Clapton's tribute on King's passing. New York Times obituary.
All of us blues guitar players of a certain age copied those signature licks. So long, B. B. King.
Maimonides on Existence as an Accident and on Divine Simplicity
I'm on a bit of a Jewish jag at the moment, in part under the influence of my Jewish friend Peter who turned me on to Soloveitchik. But Peter should labor under no false expectation that he will convert me to any version of Judaism; it is more likely that I shall get him out on the Rio Salado on a truck tire inner tube whereupon I shall baptize him in nomine Patris et Fillii, et Spiritus Sancti, and indeed by full immersion, not by the 'watered down' Roman rite.
Joking aside, here is an interesting passage from Moses Maimonides (The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80) which is related to my ongoing conversation with Dale Tuggy, the Protestant theistic personalist:
It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause: its existence is an element superadded to its essence. But as regards a being whose existence is not due to any cause — God alone is that being, for His existence, as we have said, is absolute — existence and essence are perfectly identical; He is not a substance to which existence is joined as an accident, as an additional element. His existence is always absolute, and has never been a new element or an accident in Him. Consequently God exists without possessing the attribute of existence. Similarly He lives, without possessing the attribute of life; knows, without possessing the attribute of knowledge; is omnipotent without possessing the attribute of omnipotence; is wise, without possessing the attribute of wisdom: all this reduces itself to one and the same entity; there is no plurality in Him, as will be shown.
Question: Could existence be an accident of all things that are due to some cause? And if it is not an accident, is it essential to them?
Max, a cat of my acquaintance, exists and exists contingently: there is no broadly logical necessity that he exist. His nonexistence is broadly logically possible. So one may be tempted to say that existence is to Max as accident to substance. One may be tempted to say that existence is accidental to Max. In general, the temptation is to say that existence is an accidental property of contingent beings, and that this accidentality is what makes them contingent.
But this can't be right. On a standard definition, if P is an accidental property of x, then x can exist without P. So if existence were an accidental property of Max, then, Max could exist without existing. Contradiction.
Ought we conclude that existence is an essential property of Max? If P is an essential property of x, then x cannot exist without P. So if existence were an essential property of Max, then Max cannot exist without existing. The consequent of the conditional is true, but tautologically so.
From this one can infer either that (i) Max is a necessary being (because he has existence essentially) or that (ii) existence construed as an essential property is not the genuine article. Now Max is surely not a necessary being. It is true that if he exists, then he exists, but from this one cannot validly infer that he exists. Suppose existence is a first-level property. Then it would makes sense to say that existence is an essential property of everything. (Plantinga says this.) After all, in every possible world in which Max exists, he exists! But all this shows is that existence construed as an essential property is not gen-u-ine, pound-the-table existence. Gen-u-ine existence, the only kind I care to have truck with, is existence that makes a thing be or exist, and, to be sure: outside the mind, outside language and its logic, outside its causes, outside of nothing. With a quasi-poetic, Heideggerian flourish: existence is that which establishes a thing in its Aufstand gegen das Nichts, its insurrection against Nothingness.
We ought to conclude that existence is neither accidental to a contingent thing, nor essential to it. No contingent thing is such that existence follows from its essence. And no contingent thing is such that its contingency can be understood by thinking of its existence as an accidental property of it. The contingency of Max's being sleepy can be understood in terms of his instantiation of an accidental property; but the contingency of his very existence cannot be so understood.
If every first-level property is either accidental or essential, then existence is not a first-level-property. But, as I have argued many times, it does not follow that existence is a second-level property. The Fregean tradition went off the rails: existence cannot be a second-level property. Instantiation is a second-level property, but not existence. And of course it cannot be a second-level property if one takes the real distinction seriously, this being a distinction between essence and existence 'in' the thing or 'at' the thing.
Where does this leave us? Max exists. Pace Russell, saying that Max exists is NOT like saying that Max is numerous. 'Exists,' unlike 'numerous,' has a legitimate first-level use. So existence belongs to Max. It belongs to him without being a property of him. One argument has already been sketched. To put it explicitly: Every first-level property is either essential or accidental; Existence is neither an essential nor an accidental first-level property; ergo, Existence is not a first-level property.
Existence belongs to Max without being a property of him. How is existence 'related' to Max if it is not a property of him?
My existence book essays an answer, but it too has its difficulties.
Existence is one hard nut to crack.
A Dog Named ‘Muhammad’
There is a sleazy singer who calls herself 'Madonna.' That moniker is offensive to many. But we in the West are tolerant, perhaps excessively so, and we tolerate the singer, her name, and her antics. Muslims need to understand the premium we place on toleration if they want to live among us.
A San Juan Capistrano councilman named his dog 'Muhammad' and mentioned the fact in public. Certain Muslim groups took offense and demanded an apology. The councilman should stand firm. One owes no apology to the hypersensitive and inappropriately sensitive. We must exercise our free speech rights if we want to keep them. Use 'em or lose 'em. And support the Second Amendment while you're at it. It is the Second that backs up the First.
The notion that dogs are 'unclean' is a silly one. So if some Muslims are offended by some guy's naming his dog 'Muhammad,' their being offended is not something we should validate. Their being offended is their problem.
Am I saying that we should act in ways that we know are offensive to others? Of course not. We should be kind to our fellow mortals whenever possible. But sometimes principles are at stake and they must be defended. Truth and principle trump feelings. Free speech is one such principle. I exercised it when I wrote that the notion that dogs are 'unclean' is a silly one.
Some will be offended by that. I say their being offended is their problem. What I said is true. They are free to explain why dogs are 'unclean' and I wish them the best of luck. But equally, I am free to label them fools.
With some people being conciliatory is a mistake. They interpret your conciliation and willingness to compromise as weakness. These people need to be opposed vigorously. For the councilman to apologize would be foolish.
Of ChiComs, Cojones, and Civilization
At least the ChiComs have the cojones to defend their civilization against the Islamist barbarians. Not that I approve of the method, the use of state power to force shop keepers to sell alcohol and tobacco products. But if you put a gun to my head and force me to choose between Communist and Islamist totalitarianism, I'll go with the former. Here in the States we have an ever-more-totalitarian leftist government that coddles and excuses and refuses to face and name the reality of Islamist terrorism. (You may recall that the 2009 Fort Hood Islamist terrorist rampage of Nidal Malik Hasan was dismissed by the Obama administration as "work-place violence.") So you can't count on Stateside leftists to go after radical Muslims under that description; they have their hands full persecuting the Christian owners of obscure pizza joints, bakeries and floral shops.
Chinese authorities have ordered Muslim shopkeepers and restaurant owners in a village in its troubled Xinjiang region to sell alcohol and cigarettes, and promote them in “eye-catching displays,” in an attempt to undermine Islam’s hold on local residents, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported. Establishments that failed to comply were threatened with closure and their owners with prosecution.
Facing widespread discontent over its repressive rule in the mainly Muslim province of Xinjiang, and mounting violence in the past two years, China has launched a series of “strike hard” campaigns to weaken the hold of Islam in the western region. Government employees and children have been barred from attending mosques or observing the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. In many places, women have been barred from wearing face-covering veils, and men discouraged from growing long beards.
In the village of Aktash in southern Xinjiang, Communist Party official Adil Sulayman, told RFA that many local shopkeepers had stopped selling alcohol and cigarettes from 2012 “because they fear public scorn,” while many locals had decided to abstain from drinking and smoking.
The Koran calls the use of “intoxicants” sinful, while some Muslim religious leaders have also forbidden smoking.
Story here. (HT: Karl White)
Pascal, Buber, and the God of the Philosophers
"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars." Thus exclaimed Blaise Pascal in the famous memorial in which he recorded the overwhelming religious/mystical experience of the night of 23 November 1654. Martin Buber comments (Eclipse of God, Humanity Books, 1952, p. 49):
These words represent Pascal's change of heart. He turned, not from a state of being where there is no God to one where there is a God, but from the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham. Overwhelmed by faith, he no longer knew what to do with the God of the philosophers; that is, with the God who occupies a definite position in a definite system of thought. The God of Abraham . . . is not susceptible of introduction into a system of thought precisely because He is God. He is beyond each and every one of those systems, absolutely and by virtue of his nature. What the philosophers describe by the name of God cannot be more than an idea. (emphasis added)
Buber here expresses a sentiment often heard. We encountered it before when we found Timothy Ware accusing late Scholastic theology of turning God into an abstract idea. But the sentiment is no less wrongheaded for being widespread. As I see it, it simply makes no sense to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — the God of religion — to the God of philosophy. In fact, I am always astonished when otherwise distinguished thinkers retail this bogus distinction. Let's try to sort this out.
It is first of all obvious that God, if he exists, transcends every system of human thought, and cannot be reduced to any element internal to such a system whether it be a concept, a proposition, an argument, a set of arguments, etc. But by the same token, the chair I am sitting on cannot be reduced to my concept of it or to the judgments I make about it. I am sitting on a chair, not a concept of a chair. The chair, like God, is transcendent of my conceptualizations and judgments. The transcendence of God, however, is a more radical form of transcendence, that of a person as opposed to that of a material object. And among persons, God is at the outer limit of transcendence, so much so that it is plausibly argued that 'person' in application to God can only be used analogically.
Now if Buber were merely saying something along these lines then I would have no quarrel with him. But he is saying something more, namely, that when a philosopher in his capacity as philosopher conceptualizes God, he reduces him to a concept or idea, to something abstract, to something merely immanent to his thought, and therefore to something that is not God. In saying this, Buber commits a grotesque non sequitur. He moves from the unproblematically true
1. God by his very nature is transcendent of every system of thought or scheme of representation
to the breathtakingly false
2. Any thought about God or representation of God (such as we find, say in Aquinas's Summa Theologica) is not a thought or representation of God, but of a thought or representation, which, of course, by its very nature is not God.
As I said, I am astonished that anyone could fall into this error. When I think about something I don't in thinking about it turn it into a mere thought. When I think about my wife's body, for example, I don't turn it into a mere thought: it remains transcendent of my thought as a material thing. A fortiori, I am unable by thinking about my wife as a person, an other mind, to transmogrify her personhood into a mere concept in my mind. She remains in her interiority as a person delightfully transcendent of my acts of thinking.
It is interesting to observe that it is built into the very concept God that God cannot be a concept. This concept is the concept of something that cannot by its very nature be a concept. This is the case whether or not God exists. The concept God is the concept of something that cannot be a concept even if nothing falls under the concept.
It is therefore bogus to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, et al. Or at least it is bogus to make this oppositin for the reason Buber supplies. There is and can be only one God. But there are different approaches to this one God. By my count, there are four ways of approaching God: by reason, by faith, by mystical experience, and by our moral sense. To employ a hackneyed metaphor, if there are four routes to the summit of a mountain, it does not follow that there are four summits, with only one of them being genuine, the others being merely immanent to their respective routes. Suppose Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary each summit by a different route. Mary cannot denigrate the accomplishments of the males by asserting that they didn't really summit on the ground that their respective termini were merely immanent to their routes. She cannot say, "You guys didn't really reach the summit; you merely reached a point on your map."
I should think that direct acquaintance with God via mystical/religious experience is superior to contact via faith or reason or morality. It is better to taste food than to read about it on a menu. But that's not to say that the menu is about itself: it is about the very same stuff that one encounters by eating. The fact that it is better to eat food than read about it does not imply that when one is reading one is not reading about it. Imagine how silly it would be be for me to exclaim, while seated before a delicacy: "Food of Wolfgang Puck, Food of Julia Child, Food of Emeril Lagasse, not of the nutritionists and menu-writers!"
I believe I have established my point against Buber conclusively. But to appreciate this, you must not confuse the question I am discussing with another question in the vicinity.
Suppose one philosopher argues to an unmoved mover, another to an ultimate ground of moral obligation, and a third to an absolute source of truth. How do we know that thesee three notionally distinct philosophical Gods are the same as each other in reality and the same as the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob, in reality? This is an important question, but not the one I am addressing in this entry. The present question is whether a philosophical treatment of God transforms God into a mere concept or mere idea. The answer is resoundingly in the negative. Such a treatment purports to treat of the very same real God that is addressed in prayer, seen in mystical vision, and sensed in the deliverances of conscience.
Soloveitchik on Proving the Existence of God
Joseph B. Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights. I thank Peter Lupu for having a copy sent to me. But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it:
The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective 'I exist' and an objective 'the world around me exists' awareness is unsustainable as long as the the ultimate reality of God is not part of this experience, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this they exposed themselves to Hume's and Kant's biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience.
Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God.
A man like me has one foot in Jerusalem and the other in Athens. Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard, however, have both feet in Jerusalem. They just can't understand what drives the philosopher to seek a rational demonstration of the existence of God. Soloveitchik's analogy betrays him as a two-footed Hierosolymian. Obviously, the bride in the embrace of the beloved needs no proof of his reality. The bride's experience of the beloved is ongoing and coherent and repeatable ad libitum. If she leaves him for a while, she can come back and be assured that he is the same as the person she left. She can taste his kisses and enjoy his scent while seeing him and touching him and hearing him. He remains self-same as a unity in and through the manifold of sensory modes whereby he is presented to her. And in any given mode, he is a unity across a manifold. Shifting her position, she can see him from different angles with the visual noemata cohering in such a way as to present a self-same individual. What's more, her intercourse with his body fits coherently with her intercourse with his mind as mediated by his voice and gestures.
I could go on, but point is plain. There is simply no room for any practical doubt as to the beloved's reality given the forceful, coherent, vivacious, and obtrusive character of the bride's experience of him. She is compelled to accept his reality. There is no room here for any doxastic vountarism. The will does not play a role in her believing that he is real. There is no need for decision or faith or a leap of faith in her acceptance of his reality.
Our experience of God is very different. It comes by fleeting glimpses and gleanings and intimations. The sensus divinitatis is weak and experienced only by some. The bite of conscience is not unambiguously of higher origin than Freudian superego and social suggestion. Mystical experiences are few and far-between. Though unquestionable as to their occurrence, they are questionable as to their veridicality because of their fitful and fragmentary character. They are not validated in the ongoing way of ordinary sense perception. They don't integrate well with ordinary perceptual experiences. And so the truth of these mystical and religious experiences can and perhaps should be doubted. It is this fact that motivates philosophers to seek independent confirmation of the reality of the object of these experiences by the arguments that Soloveitchik and Co. dismiss.
The claim above that the awareness expressed by 'I exist' is unsustainable unless the awareness of God is part of the experience is simply false. That I exist is certain to me. But it is far from certain what the I is in its inner nature and what existence is and whether the I requires God as its ultimate support. The cogito is not an experience of God even if God exists and no cogito is possible without him. The same goes for the existence of the world. The existence of God is not co-given with the existence of the world. It is plain to the bride's senses that the beloved is real. It is not plain to our senses that nature is God's nature, that the cosmos is a divine artifact. That is why one cannot rely solely on the cosmic experience of nature as of a divine artifact, but must proceed cosmologically by inference from what is evident to what is non-evident.
Soloveitchik is making the same kind of move that St. Paul makes in Romans 1: 18-20. My critique of that move here.
The Decline of the West Proceeds Apace
Thanks to 'progressives.'
Norwegian sex ed for eight-year-olds. If you get people addicted to sexual excess early on, then they will be easy to control by the totalitarian 'progressives.' Panem et porno.
Classical Mythology Too 'Triggering' For Columbia University Students. The poor little pussies need a 'safe space' lest their tender sensibilities be offended by Ovid.
Civil Courage
A reader sent me a batch of critical comments prefaced as follows. "I’ve been enjoying your work, and I have great admiration for your guts. Hopefully no members of the “religion of peace” will put your bravery to the test." In this connection one ought to wonder about the lack of civil courage of liberals and leftists who work so hard to build a secular society only to go soft on the greatest threat to such a society. It is understandable, of course. People are afraid, journalists especially. But by allowing themselves to be intimidated, they encourage more of the same from the malefactors. Lack of civil courage encourages the anti-civilization jihadis.
The issue here is whether enough of us can muster the civil courage necessary to oppose the enemies of civilization who, at this historical juncture, are not National Socialists or Fascists or Communists, but Muslim fanatics and their leftist enablers. I say that those who can't muster it are not deserving of its fruits. Is every Mulsim a fanatic? Of course not. (Don't be stupid.)
As for the quantity and quality of my 'guts,' they are nothing as compared to those of so many others, including Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and the fiery Judge Jeannine Pirro. Watch this video!
What is civil courage? The phrase translates the German Zivilcourage, a word first used by Otto von Bismarck in 1864 to refer to the courage displayed in civilian life as opposed to the military valor displayed on the battlefield. According to Bismarck, there is more of the latter than of the former, an observation that holds true today. (One example: there is no coward like a university administrator, as Dennis Prager likes to point out.) Civil courage itself no doubt antedates by centuries the phrase.