Author: Bill Vallicella

The Obama Movie, 2016

I'll be seeing  it soon.  Here are some remarks on the movie by Thomas Sowell. Excerpts:

It was refreshing to see how addressing adults as adults could be effective, in an age when so many parts of the media address the public as if they were children who need a constant whirlwind of sounds and movements to keep them interested.

That is one of my main objections to the destructive HollyWeird libruls who produce the mindless crap that fill our screens.  I continue in this vein, in only slightly more measured terms, in What I Look For in a Movie: A Rant.

The story of Barack Obama, however, is not just the story of how one man came to be the way he is. It is a much larger story about how millions of Americans came to vote for, and some to idolize, a man whose fundamental beliefs and values are so different from their own.

For every person who sees Obama as somehow foreign there are many others who see him as a mainstream American political figure — and an inspiring one.

This D'Souza attributes to Barack Obama's great talents in rhetoric, and his ability to project an image that resonates with most Americans, however much that image may differ from, or even flatly contradict, the reality of Obama's own ideological view of the world.

What is that ideological view?

The Third World, or anti-colonial, view is that the rich nations have gotten rich by taking wealth from the poor nations. It is part of a much larger vision, in which the rich in general have gotten rich by taking from the poor, whether in their own country or elsewhere.

Whatever its factual weaknesses, it is an emotionally powerful vision, to which many people have dedicated their lives, and for which some have even risked their lives. Some of these people appear in this documentary movie, as they have appeared throughout the formative phases of Barack Obama's life.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright is just the most visible and vocal of a long line of such people who played crucial roles in Obama's evolution. When Jeremiah Wright thundered about how "white folks' greed runs a world in need," he captured the essence of the Third World or anti-colonial vision.

But many of the other mentors, allies, family and friends of Barack Obama over the years were of the same mindset, as this documentary demonstrates.

More important, the movie "2016" demonstrates how so many of Obama's actions as President of the United States, which D'Souza had predicted on the basis of his study of Obama's background, are perfectly consistent with that ideology, however inconsistent it is with the rhetoric that gained him the highest office in the land.

 

Existentials and Their Equivalents: Aid and Comfort for the Thin Theory?

I grant that logical equivalents not containing 'exist(s)' or cognates can be supplied for all singular and general existentials.  Thus, 'Socrates exists' can be translated, salva veritate, as 'Something is identical to Socrates,' or, in canonical notation,  '(∃x)(x = Socrates).'  Accordingly,

Socrates exists =df (∃x)(x = Socrates).

But if the definiens preserves the truth of the definiendum, then the definiendum must be true, hence must be meaningful, in which case first-level uses of 'exist(s)' must be meaningful.  Pace Russell, 'Socrates exists' is nothing like 'Socrates is numerous.'

What's more, the definiendum is prior in the order of understanding to the definiens.  If I didn't already understand 'Socrates exists,' then I would not  be able to understand '(∃x)(x = Socrates).'  You couldn't teach me the Quinean translation if I didn't already understand the sentence to be translated.

One conclusion we can draw from this is that if 'exist(s)' is univocal across general and singular existentials, then  existence cannot be instantiation.  For the left-hand side of the definition does not make an instantiation claim.  It is simply nonsense to say of an individual that it is instantiated.  And if the right-hand side makes an instantiation claim, then we need those creatures of darkness, haecceity-properties.

But we don't have to give the RHS a Fressellian reading; we can give it a Quinean-Inwagenian reading.  (We could call this the 'Van' reading.)  Accordingly: There exists an x such that x = Socrates. On the Van reading, in stark contrast to the Fressellian reading,  'exist(s)' can be construed as a first-level predicate, as synonymous to the predicate 'is identical to something.'  Accordingly:

y exists =df(∃x)(x = y).

On the reasonable assumptions that (i) 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate and that (ii) there are no nonexistent objects, this last definition is unobjectionable.  If Tom exists, then there exists an object to which he is identical.  And if there exists an object to which Tom is identical, then Tom exists.  No doubt!

The interesting  question, however, is whether any of this affords aid and comfort to the thin theory.  Well, what exactly is the thin theory?  It is the theory that existence is exhaustively understandable in purely logical, indeed purely syntactical, terms.  The thin theory is a deflationary theory that aims  to eliminate existence as a metaphysical topic.  It aims to supplant the metaphysics of existence (of whatever stripe: Thomist, Heideggerian, etc.) with the sober logic of 'exist(s).'  The aim of the thin theory is to show that there is no sense in which existence is a non-logical property of individuals.  The aim is to be able to consign all those tomes of metaphysical rubbish to the flames with a good conscience.

Now glance back at the definition.  Every mark on the RHS  is a bit of logical syntax.  Ignoring the parentheses which in this instance can be dropped, we have the backwards-E, two bound occurrences of the variable 'x,' a free occurrence of the variable 'y,' and the sign for identity.  There are no non-logical expressions such as 'Socrates' or 'philosopher.'  On the LHS, however, we find 'exists' which is not obviously a logical expression.  Indeed,  I claim that it is not a logical expression like 'some' or 'all' or 'not.'  It is a 'content' expression.  What could be more important and contentful than a thing's existing?  If it didn't exist it would be nothing and couldn't have properties or stand in relations.

Surely my sheer be-ing is my most impressive 'feature.'  "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Since there is content on the LHS there has to be content on the RHS.  But how did it get there, given that every expression on the RHS is just a bit of syntax? In only one way: the domain of the bound variables is a domain of existents.  But now it should be clear that the definition gives us no deflationary account of existence.  What it does is presuppose existence by presupposing that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents.  Existence is that which existents have in common and in virtue of which they exist.

In short, I have no objection to the definition read in the 'Van' as opposed to the  'Fressellian' way.  It is perfectly trivial!  My point, however, is that it gives no aid and comfort to the thin theory.  A decent thin theory would have to show how we can dispence with existence entirely by eliminating it  in favor of purely logical concepts.  But that is precisely what we cannot do given that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents.  (Of course, if the domain were populated by Meinongian nonexistent objects, then the definition would be false). 

Some Aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

LecI have discovered the aphorisms of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec via a reference in a book by Josef Pieper.  Here are a few that  impressed me from More Unkempt Thoughts (Curtis Publishing, 1968, tr. Jacek Galazka), the only book of Lec's I could easily lay hands on.

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. (9)

Why can't you believe in paradise on earth when you know there is hell on earth? (10)

When they blow the horn of plenty this loud, it must be empty. (15)

In him there is a void filled to the brim with erudition. (18)

Do not greet people with open arms.  Why make yourself easier to crucify? (19)

Take good care of yourself: Property of the State. (22)

Cannibals prefer men who have no spines. (28)

To keep fit fame needs the massage of applause. (31)

Ladies, do not complain about men:  their aims are as transparent as your clothes. (36)

The strongest brakes fail on the path of least resistance. (37)

Percussion wins every discussion. (38)

You cannot rely on people to remember, or, alas, to forget. (42).

In some countries life is so open you can spot the Secret Police everywhere. (42)

Not every shi- can age gracefully and become valuable guano. (48)

America! We gave you Kosciuszko and Pulaski; please send us some used clothes. (48)

Woe to those who have more hate than enemies. (49)

Who created the world? So far only God admits to it. (52)

When reasons are weak, attitudes stiffen. (52)

He had a clear conscience. Never used it. (53)

Bread opens all mouths. (56)

You may give a barbarian a knife or a gun, but never a pen.  He will turn you into barbarians as well. (56)

How did they get a permit to create the world? (57) 

To Doctor Empiric

When men a dangerous disease did 'scape
    Of old they gave a cock to Aesculape
Let me give two, that doubly am got free
    From my disease's danger, and from thee.

Ben Jonson (1753?-1637) from Epigrams and Epitaphs (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 27.

At the very end of the Phaedo, having drunk the hemlock, Socrates is reported by Plato as saying to Crito, "I owe a cock to Asclepius; do not forget to pay it." (tr. F. J. Church) Asclepius is the Greek god of healing.  Presumably, Socrates wanted to thank the god for his recovery from the sickness of life itself.

Nietzsche comments at the the beginning of "The Problem of Socrates" in The Twilight of the Idols:

Concerning life, the wisest men of all ages have judged alike: it is no good.  Always and everywhere one has heard the same sound from their mouths — a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness of life, full of resistance to life.  Even Socrates said, as he died: "To live — that means to be sick a long time: I owe Asclepius the Savior a rooster." (tr. W. Kaufmann)

Coyne versus Vallicella Vapaista Valinnoista

I can't read it, but maybe you can.  It is a response to my Jerry Coyne on Why You Really Don't Have Free Will.

Update (22 August):  Ilari Malkki writes:

I noticed that you posted a link to my blog post "Coyne versus Vallicella Vapaista Valinnoista" (Coyne vs Vallicella on Free Will).  Thanks for the link! The main language is Finnish, so I´m not too  surprised that you can´t read it.

One correction, though. It is not a "response" to you, but to Jerry  Coyne. I just lay out your arguments on that post and defend them  against Coyne.

Trotsky’s Faith

Leon Trotsky died on this date in 1940.  Here is something I posted about two and a half years ago:


TrotskyThe last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil,
oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.  That is a lot of eggs to waste for a nonexistent omelet.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social programme that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people' is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana. It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  it is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

Literarily Pleasing, but Incoherent

I found the folllowing quotation here:

But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. 

— Umberto Eco
The world is a play of phenomena, an enigmatic play of appearances beneath which there is no reality.  Harmless in itself, the world is made terrible by us when we make the mad attempt to lay bare an underlying truth it fails to possess.  Part of Eco's thought, I take it, is that those who seek the world's underlying truth fool themselves into thinking that they have found it, and having convinced themselves that they are now in possession of it, feel entitled and perhaps even obligated to impose it on others for their own good.  But these others, naturally, resist the imposition and react violently.  Hence the pursuit of the truth leads to contention and bloodshed. Better to live and let live and admit that there is a variety of perspectives, a diversity of interpretations, but no God's Eye perspective and no final interpretation, let alone an uninterpreted reality in itself, a true world hidden by the world of appearances.   The world is interpretation all the way down.  Being has no bottom.
 
The line of thought is seductive but incoherent.  If the world is an enigma, then it is true that it is an enigma.  If it is harmless, then it is true that it harmless.  If it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it, then it is true that it is made terrible by our attempt to interpret it.  If our attempt is mad, then it is true that our attempt is mad.  And if it has no underlying truth, then it is true that it has no underlying truth.
 
If that is the truth, then there is after all an underlying truth and the world cannot be a play of relativities, of  shifting perspectives, of mere interpretations.  If the world is such-and-such, then it is, and doesn't merely seem.

Some Recent Writing on Kerouac

October is Kerouac month hereabouts and she is still a good six weeks off.  But Danny Lanzetta's In Defense of Kerouac and Other Flawed Literature should be noted before it scrolls into cyber-oblivion.  Excerpt:

Kerouac's work is undoubtedly sophomoric at times. He is hopelessly naïve about people, which sometimes leads to this and other times just comes off as laziness, a selfish desire to write the way he wanted to write and live the way he wanted to live, collateral damage be damned.

The first link is to this OTR passage:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!"

Lanzetta seems to be suggesting that this is a particularly bad specimen of  Kerouac's scrivening.  But although too often quoted, it is passages like this that grabbed my attention and gave me shivers back in the '60s  and that still do now in my 60s.  My 'beatitude' is considerably more measured these days, and it's a good thing too: too much 'madness' leads to an early grave.  Jack's prodigious quaffing of the joy juice caught up with him in '69 at the tender age of 47, and his hero Neal Cassady (the Dean Moriarty of On the Road) was found dead on the railroad tracks near San Miguel Allende, Mexico the year before a few days shy of his 42nd birthday.

But it is for the hyper-romanticism and the heartfelt gush & rush that some of us read Kerouac still despite his many literary flaws, not to mention the mess he made of his life and the lives of others.  He was no cool beatnik.  He was mad to live, to talk, to feel, to know, to be saved.  He was a restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears & mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore.

More in the Kerouac category.