Sweet gone Jack really did try to be a good boy and give up the booze and dissipation and all the near occasions of sin & temptation that fame brought him once he made it in '57 with the publication of On the Road. Here he is arrived at Lawrence Ferlinghett's (Lorenzo Monsanto's) cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur:
And in the flush of the first few days of joy I confidently tell myself (not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only) "no more dissipation, it's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it, first in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world, no booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody, no more I ask myself the question O why is God torturing me, that's it, be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only, in fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony . . . it's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that after all this whole surface of the world as we know it now will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time.. . Yay, for this, more aloneness" — "Go back to childhood, just eat apples and read your Cathechism — sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood" (remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hot lights of the Steve Allen Show in the Burbank studio, one hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plunks the piano, I sit there on the dunce's stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth, "I dont have to R E H E A R S E for God's sake Steve! " — "But go ahead, we just wanta get the tone of your voice, just this last time, I'll let you off the dress rehearsal" and I sit there sweating not saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches, finally I say, "No I cant do it, " and I go across the street to get drunk) (but surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big bore trying to read me her poetry and wont talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale)… So even that marvelous, long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life which now because a million lightyears away have taken on the aspect (as they must've for Proust in his sealed room) of pleasant movies brought up at will and projected for further study — And pleasure — As I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us. (Big Sur, ch. 6, pp. 24-25)
As the USA drifts daily farther in the direction of leftist totalitarianism, the words of Solzhenitsyn ought to be considered. Excerpt:
. . . the world had never before known a godlessness as organized, militarized, and tenaciously malevolent as that practiced by Marxism. Within the philosophical system of Marx and Lenin, and at the heart of their psychology, hatred of God is the principal driving force, more fundamental than all their political and economic pretensions. Militant atheism is not merely incidental or marginal to Communist policy; it is not a side effect, but the central pivot. The 1920’s in the USSR witnessed an uninterrupted procession of victims and martyrs amongst the Orthodox clergy. Two metropolitans were shot, one of whom, Veniamin of Petrograd, had been elected by the popular vote of his diocese. Patriarch Tikhon himself passed through the hands of the Cheka-GPU and then died under suspicious circumstances. Scores of archbishops and bishops perished. Tens of thousands of priests, monks, and nuns, pressured by the Chekists to renounce the Word of God, were tortured, shot in cellars, sent to camps, exiled to the desolate tundra of the far North, or turned out into the streets in their old age without food or shelter. All these Christian martyrs went unswervingly to their deaths for the faith; instances of apostasy were few and far between. For tens of millions of laymen access to the Church was blocked, and they were forbidden to bring up their children in the Faith: religious parents were wrenched from their children and thrown into prison, while the children were turned from the faith by threats and lies.
. . .
from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of your wish:
"The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . . . . . I wish I was free of that
slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead." (Mexico City Blues, 1959,
211th Chorus).
In 1955, The Paris Review paid a struggling Jack Kerouac fifty dollars for an excerpt from a then unpublished manuscript. The excerpt appeared as a short story titled “The Mexican Girl” and, after much acclaim, was picked up a year later by Martha Foley’s The Best American Short Stories. Due in large part to the success of “The Mexican Girl,” On the Road was soon accepted by Viking Press; the full novel was published in 1957. (reference)
Here is an audio clip of "The Mexican Girl." Meanwhile, the Mexican Girl, Bea Franco, has been found, written up, and assumes her place in the Beat pantheon.
Lest we forget, however, "Pretty girls make graves." (The Dharma Bums)
The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.
This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying. Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes. One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning. Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both.
Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!). And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense. Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.'
Here is another example of the annoying move in question.
The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun
its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my
kitchen a few years ago whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to
Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term
‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one. How typical. Being a good host, I didn't lay into
her as I probably should have for her 'spiritual' good. The opposing of 'religion' to 'spirituality' is bogus, religion being a form of spirituality, and there is no justification for reading a pejorative meaning into the former.
To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself. Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.
I have been defending the real distinction between essence and existence in contingent beings. Lukas Novak, though not rejecting the distinction, finds my arguments wanting. Here is his latest challenge to me:
1) First I will use your own weapons against you. The following triad is
inconsistent, any two propositions entail the negation of the remaining one.
Which limb do you reject?
a) Necessarily, Socrates exists iff Socrates is a man. b) Possibly,
Socrates does not exist. c) Necessarily, Socrates is a man.
Yes, the triad is inconsistent. I am tempted to reject (c). Socrates is essentially a man, but not necessarily a man. In terms of possible worlds: Socrates is a man in every possible world in which he exists, but, being contingent, he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially a man but not necessarily a man. God, by contrast, is both essentially divine and necessarily divine: he is divine in every world in which he exists, and he exists in every world.
But if I reject (c), how can I claim, as I have, that while Socrates is possibly nonexistent, he is not possibly non-human? For if S. is not possibly non-human, that is equivalent to saying that he is necessarily human, which in turn is equivalent to (c).
Novak appears to have refuted my contingency argument for the real distinction.
2) When interpreting the modalities in your two sentences, one can interpret
the implicit quantifications over possible worlds as comprising either all
possible worlds, or just the possible worlds where Socrates exists at all.
Lukas is referring to the following two sentences, the first of which I claimed is true, and the second of which I claimed is false (because Socrates is essentially a man):
A. Socrates exists & Socrates is possibly such that he does not
exist.
B. Socrates is a man & Socrates is possibly such that he is not a
man.
I say that in order that (A) be true, it must be interpreted so that
"possibly" invokes quantification over all possible worlds, not just
those where Socrates exists (because there is no possible world among those in
which Socrates exists such that Socrates does not exist in that world). On the
other hand, in order that (B) be false, the quantification implicit in the
"possibly" must be restricted to those worlds only where Socrates exists.
Because it is not true that Socrates is human in worlds where he does not exist
at all. As you yourself concede, essence without existence is just nothing, so
in a world where Socrates does not have existence, he neither has his essence,
which is humanity. Thus the different modal behaviour of the sentences is merely
apparent, it is a result of your tendency to interpret the quantification
implicit in modal terms differently when speaking about existence and about
essential predicates.
Novak's very powerful objection, in effect, is that the following are both true:
A* There are possible worlds in which Socrates does not exist
B* There are possible worlds in which Socrates is not human
and that these are the same worlds. What's more, the starred sentences are the only possible readings of my (A) and (B). Since the starred sentences are both true, my contingency argument for the distinction between individual essence and existence in Socrates fails. What I had argued is that, since Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human, his existing is not identical to his being an instance of humanity.
Novak's point could also be put as follows. In every possible world in which Socrates exists, he is human, and in every world in which he is human, he exists. Hence there is no world in which he has the one property but not the other. Existing and being human are therefore necessarily equivalent, equivalent across all possible worlds. If so, it is not the case that Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human.
I grant the necessary equivalence, but deny that one can infer the identity of existing and being human from it. Necessary equivalence does not entail identity. Triangularity and trilaterality are necessarily equivalent but non-identical.
But this doesn't settle the matter. Lukas could agree that, in general, necessary equivalence does not entail identity, but still claim that I have not given a compelling reason for thinking that existing and being a concrete instance of humanity are non-identical. After all, he is not rejecting the real distinction, but arguing that I haven't proven it.
Despite the obvious force of Novak's argument, I think there is a way of construing 'Socrates is possibly nonexistent, but not possibly non-human' that evades the argument. Here goes.
Suppose we take 'Socrates' to refer to a concrete individual essence, one that, obviously, exists. We can say, with truth, that this essence might not have existed, that its nonexistence is possible in the sense that there is nothing in this essence to insure (entail) that it exist. But it is also true that this existing individual essence, this existing instance of humanity, could not have been anything other than an instance of humanity: it could not have been an instance of any other nature, felinity, say. The Socratic essence could not have been a feline essence. Understood in this way, it seems to me true to say that Socrates (the individual Socratic essence) is possibly nonexistent but not possibly non-human. But if it is not possibly non-human, then it is necessarily human, in which case the individual Socratic essence is to be found in every possible world.
This essence must have some ontological status, and indeed a necessary ontological status. But we have to avoid reifying it. We can say that is has a merely intentional status in those worlds in which Socrates does not exist. That is, it exists only as a divine accusative in such worlds. In such worlds the essence possesses esse intentionale but not esse reale. In those worlds in which Socrates exists, the Socratic essence posseses both esse intentionale and esse reale.
We can remove the contradiction in the original triad without hypostatizing essences by ascending to a higher viewpoint: we bring God into the picture. God is a necessary being, so all the essences that enjoy esse intentionale in his mind are necessary beings. To some of them such as the Socrates essence he superadds existence. Although it is false that, necessarily, Socrates is human, it is true that, necessarily, the Socratic individual essence includes humanity.
But then it seems that the real distinction stands and falls with the doctrine of divine creation.
Because of comments like these, though they are surely not the worst one can find. (I cite them only because my Referral List pointed me to the post to which they are appended.) But they are characteristic. In my experience, to discuss religion with the irreligious and the anti-religious is a sheer waste of time. You may as well discuss logic with the illogical, music with the unmusical, or poetry with the terminally prosaic.
I am regularly surprised by how much garbage Victor Reppert tolerates in his ComBox. He will even allow people to insult him in vile ways. It may be that he is a model of Christian detachment, slow to anger, quick to forgive, tolerant to a fault. It may also be that he doesn't appreciate that to tolerate bad behavior is to invite more of the same. A conservative, I take a harsher line, one more in keeping with the realities of human nature, realities liberals tend to ignore. Conservatism as I espouse and practice it subsumes the classically liberal commitment to toleration. But toleration has limits. In any case, a weblog is private property where no one has free speech rights.
A man's home is his castle, and his blog his cybercastle. Just as I do not tolerate bad behavior in the first, I do not tolerate it in the second. But bloggers are free to run their blogs any way they see fit.
You might think that disallowing comments limits my traffic. Not so. Traffic is better than ever, recently up around 2000 pageviews per diem. Readers I respect tell me that they like my Comments Policy.
To end aphoristically:
The best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.
I thought of Carolyn in September and I thought I ought to check the obituaries. She died September 20th at age 90, her longevity as if in counterpoise to the short tenures of her main men, wildman Neal Cassady, the Dean Moriarty of Kerouac's 1957 On the Road, and the brooding Jack Kerouac himself. Carolyn played the stabilizer to the mania of the one and the melancholy of the other. Both quit the sublunary before the '60s had run their course. The tale of Jack's end has been told too many times, though I will tell it again on 21 October, the 44th anniversary of his exit from the "slaving meat wheel." Neal's demise is less frequently recounted.
Neal
died in February of 1968, also of substance abuse, having quaffed a nasty
concotion of pulque and Seconals, while walking the railroad tracks near San Miguel de
Allende, Mexico. Legend has it that Cassady had been counting the ties and that
his last word was "64, 928." (Cf. William Plummer, The Holy Goof: A
Biography of Neal Cassady, Paragon, 1981, pp. 157-158.)
Carolyn kept the beat while the wildmen soloed, seeking ecstasy where it cannot be found.
May all who sincerely seek beatitude find it. Kerouac: "I want to be sincere." May Jack with his visions of Gerard, of Cody, finally enjoy the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata.
This post continues my ruminations on the distinctio realis. If essence and existence are really distinct in a contingent being, should we think of its existence as accidental or essential, or neither?
Max, a cat of my acquintance, 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 her 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. 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.
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 understaood 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 existernce. 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?
In my existence book I maintained that existence belongs to a contingent being such as Max not as accident to substance, or as essence to primary substance, or as property to possessor, or as proper part to whole, or by identity; but as unity to items unified. In brief, the existence of a contingent thing is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents. The existence of Max is not one of his constituents but the unity of all his constituents.
This approach solves the problem of how existence can belong to a contingent being without being a property of it. But it raises vexing questions of its own, questions to be taken up in subsequent posts in this series.
One question I need to address is whether philosophy would have come up with the real distinction if it were not for the doctrine of divine creation ex nihilo.
As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by President's Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets. Not because I believe in bigger government — I don't.
Obama is not just a bullshitter, but an Orwellian bullshitter.
If hell is separation from God, why wouldn't a body held in thrall by sensuous pleasure do as well as a body wracked with pain? Absorbed in sensuous pleasure, one is arguably farther from God than when in pain.
This post defends the real distinction between essence and existence. For some background, see Geach on the Real Distinction I.
In Aquinas on Being (Oxford 2002, p. 45), Anthony Kenny writes, "Peter's continuing to exist is the very same thing as Peter's continuing to possess his essence; if he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a human being and vice versa."
What Kenny is doing in this passage and the surrounding text is rejecting the real distinction between essence and (individual) existence. Thus in a cat, a dog, or a man, there is no distinction in reality between its essence or nature and its existence. In general, for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K. Thus for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man; for Socrates to continue to exist is for Socrates to continue to be a man; and for Socrates to cease to exist is for Socrates to cease being a man.
The claim that for items of kind K, to exist is to be a K, is to be understood, not as a logical or metaphysical equivalence, but as an identity that sanctions a reduction: the existence of Ks just is (identically) their K-ness. Individual (as opposed to what Kenny calls specific) existence reduces to nature. But that is just to say that there is no real distinction in a thing between its individual existence and its nature. For example, there is no non-notional or real distinction in Socrates between him and his existence.
I have three objections to this broadly Aristotelian theory of existence according to which individual existence reduces to nature.
An Argument from Contingency
Socrates might never have existed. If so, and if, for Socrates,
who is a man, to exist = to be a man, then Socrates might never have been a man. This
implies that a certain man, Socrates, might never have been a man, which
is absurd. Therefore, it is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist =
to be a man.
The first premise ought to be uncontroversial. Speaking tenselessly,
Socrates exists and Socrates is a man. But there is no logical or
metaphysical necessity that the man Socrates exist. So, Socrates, though he exists, is
possibly such that he does not exist. (This is equivalent to saying that
he is a contingent being.) So, given that to exist = to be a man,
the man Socrates is possibly such that he is not a man. But this
contradicts the fact that Socrates is essentially a man. For if he is essentially a man, then he is necessarily such that he is a man. Therefore, it
is not the case that, for Socrates, to exist = to be a man.
Convinced? Here is another way of looking at it. I point to Socrates and say, 'This might not have existed.' I say something true. But if I point to him and say, 'This might not have been a man,' I say something false. Therefore, for Socrates, to exist is not to be a man. Of course, he cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot BE a man without BEING. But that is not the question. The question is whether Socrates' being or existence is reducible to his being a man. I have just shown that it is not. Therefore, there is a real distinction between essence and existence in Socrates.
What holds for Socrates holds for every man. No man's very existence is reducible to his being a man. And in general, no individual K's individual existence is reducible to its being a K.
An Argument from Reference
If for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man, then, when he ceases to exist, he ceases to be a man. But then the proper name 'Socrates' used after the philosopher's death does not refer to a man. But it does refer. For I can make true statements about Socrates, e.g., 'Socrates taught Plato.' And the name refers to a man. When Socrates ceased to exist, 'Socrates' did not commence referring to some other thing, a jelly fish say, or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy, or more plausibly, a corpse. A man taught Plato, not a corpse, or a pile of ashes. Therefore, it is not the case that for Socrates to exist is for Socrates to be a man.
To understand this argument, please note that it is not being denied that, necessarily, at every time at which Socrates is alive, Socrates exists if and only if he is a man. Socrates cannot exist without being a man, and he cannot be a man without existing. What is being denied, or rather questioned, is the identification of Socrates' existing with his being a man. As I have pointed out many times before, logical equivalences do not sanction reductions.
A Third Argument
We cannot say that to exist = to be a cat, for then only cats could exist. We, or rather the Aristotelian, has to say that, for cats, to exist = to be a cat. In general, for K-items, to exist = to be a K. But why stop here? Can we stop here? There are no cats in general. There are only particular cats, any two of which are numerically distinct, and each of which has its own existence. Consider Max and Manny, two cats of my acquaintance. Each has his own existence, but they share the nature, cat. So if each exists in virtue of being a cat, then each exists in virtue of being the very cat that it is, which is to say: for Max to exist is for Max to be Max, and for Manny to exist is for Manny to be Manny. But then, generalizing, to exist = to be self-identical. The theory we began with collapses into the existence = self-identity theory.
But while each thing is self-identical — this is just the Law of Identity — no contingent thing is identical to its own existence. For if Max were identical to his own existence, then Max would necessarily exist. If God exists, then God is identical to his own existence. But Max is not God. Therefore, existence cannot be reduced to self-identity in the case of contingent beings.
Of course, given that contingent things exist, they must be self-identical, and they cannot BE self-identical unless they ARE or exist. But there might not have been any contingent things at all. So the existence of a thing cannot be reduced to the self-identity it could have only if it exists. Get it? If yes, then you understand the real distinction.
First of all, what is doublethink? We turn to George Orwell's 1984 and the following quotation therefrom reproduced in Wikipedia:
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
This official website is an excellent contemporary example of doublethink, from the State of Idaho, of all places. (One expects PeeCee doublethink and newspeak in the People's Republic of Taxachusetts and in the once Golden State of Californication, but in Idaho, with all its Mormons and gun-totin' conservatives? Holy moly, things are worse than I thought.) At the State of Idaho website we read:
The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare's Self Reliance Office 6/2010
What is the Self Reliance office?
The Self Reliance office is the portion of Idaho Health and Welfare where people can apply for state funded public assistance.
This is what we call an 'Orwellian' use of language. It is language perverted and destroyed so as to serve leftist ideology and make clear thinking impossible. Accordingly, one who accepts welfare via the State from productive citizens is 'self-reliant,' when in truth he is the exact opposite.
Black is white, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and reliance on others is self-reliance.
Limited government is anarchism.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness = ObamaCare. (Idiot Pelosi accurately paraphrased.)
Fiscal responsibility = fiscal irresponsibility.
Semi-automatic rifle = fully- automatic rifle.
Semi-automatic rifle used purely defensively = assault weapon.
Constitutionally-mandated border control = xenophobia.
ID requirement at polling place = disenfranchisement.
Critic of a black person's ideas = racist.
And so on. Continue the list and resolve to do your bit to resist and oppose the liberal-left scumbaggers. It is your life, liberty and happiness that are at stake.
