Bill Vallicella – Page 654 – Maverick Philosopher

Another Reader Who Prefers Comments Disabled

Yesterday I mentioned that I have received e-mail from readers who prefer blogs that do not allow comments. Here is another just over the transom from a reader in Lincoln, England:

One of the reasons, but not the most important consideration, why I read your blog is because you don't permit comments. There is a surfeit, which includes me now and then, of inane commenters on the internet – enough to satisfy anyone addicted to the puerile opinions of strangers.

Blogs, or some of them anyway, are a form of vanity publishing. After all, a first rate mind with something original to say could write a book and have it published in the regular way. So why bother blogging? But commenting on someone's blog is even more vain. The commenter desires to disseminate his second-hand views and inflict his opinions on a blog’s readership without the trouble of producing a thoughtful discourse in the first place.

Commenters are parasites in the blogosphere. If I had anything original and sagacious to say, and I could say it eloquently, then I could inform the attentive world on my own blog. Regarding the impact of eloquence: Not many bloggers can retain a discriminating audience by repeatedly exploring serious topics with stylish felicity.

I would qualify the "Commenters are parasites" remark with a 'most' or a 'many.' I have received excellent comments over the years that have helped me improve my thinking. As for vanity, I admit that there is something vain about blogging, mine included. But is not all self-presentation and self-expression vain when measured by monkish standards?

There is a Greek orthodox monastery in the desert not far from here. The monks there are allowed no internet access. And that is as it should be. Whatever the value of monasticism and world-renunciation, internet access is incompatible with it. Or so say I. I would expect The Blogging Monk to disagree.

Why I Don’t Allow Comments

Why don't I allow comments on most of my posts? Part of the reason is the 'high level' of discussion that tends to occur in threads attached to posts that address 'hot button' issues. A good example is the 'commentary' elicited by Why Sexism is Obsolete over at Victor Reppert's place. Not an edifying spectacle.

Curiously, the lack of comments does not seem adversely to affect my traffic. In fact, I have e-mails from people who positively like the paucity of comments.

Augustine Against the Stoics

Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar. In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4:

And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills, though at the same time they allow the wise man to commit suicide and pass out of this life if they become so grievous that he cannot or ought not to endure them. But such is the stupid pride of these men who fancy that the supreme good can be found in this life, and that they can become happy by their own resources, that their wise man, or at least the man whom they fancifully depict as such, is always happy, even though he become blind, deaf, dumb, mutilated, racked with pains, or suffer any conceivable calamity such as may compel him to make away with himself; and they are not ashamed to call the life that is beset with these evils happy. O happy life, which seeks the aid of death to end it? If it is happy, let the wise man remain in it; but if these ills drive him out of it, in what sense is it happy? Or how can they say that these are not evils which conquer the virtue of fortitude, and force it not only to yield, but so to rave that it in one breath calls life happy and recommends it to be given up? For who is so blind as not to see that if it were happy it would not be fled from? And if they say we should flee from it on account of the infirmities that beset it, why then do they not lower their pride and acknowledge that it is miserable?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Outer Space

1960's psychedelia explored inner space, but there were a few songs from the '60s about outer space themes. Telstar, an instrumental by the British band, The Tornados, 1962, was presumably in celebration of Telstar, the first communications satellite which also got high up in '62. (Telstar the song made it to the #1 slot on both the U. S. and British charts.)

Speaking of high, the Byrd's Eight Miles High, 1966, tells of a trip into the outer or perhaps into the 'inner' or both. I never paid much attention to the obscure lyrics. The Coltranish riffs executed on a 12-string Rickenbacker were what got my attention.

Also by the Byrds, 1966, is the playful Mr. Spaceman. And we can't omit Elton John, Rocket Man from 1972.

Off topic, but appropriate given current East Coast weather conditions: Good Night, Irene, 1950, the Weavers.

Finally, a tip of the hat this Saturday night to Victor Reppert who pointed me to this incredible oldies site.

Two Kinds of Critical Caution

One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first person uncritical, gullible, credulous, tender-minded in James' sense. The first is cautious lest he miss out on the real. The second is cautious lest he make a mistake.

The second, brandishing W. K. Clifford, criticizes the first for believing on insufficient evidence, for self-indulgently believing what he wants to believe, for believing what he has no right to believe. The second wants reality-contact only on his own terms: only if he can assure himself of it, perhaps by ‘constituting’ the object via ‘apodictic’ processes within his own consciousness. (Husserl) The first person, however, is willing to accept uncertainty for the sake of a reality-contact otherwise inaccessible.

What should we fear more, loss of contact with objective reality, or being wrong?

Analogy. Some are gastronomically timorous: they refuse to eat in restaurants for fear of food poisoning. Their critical abstention does indeed achieve its prophylactic end — but only at the expense of the foregoing of a world of prandial delights.

Now suppose a man believes in God and afterlife but is mistaken. He lives his life in the grip of what are in reality, but unbeknownst to him, life-enhancing illusions. And of course, since he is ex hypothesi wrong, death cannot set him straight: he is after dying nothing and so cannot learn that he lived his life in illusion. But then why is his being wrong such a big deal? Wouldn't it be a much bigger deal if his fear of being wrong prevented his participation in an unsurpassably great good?

"But he lived his life in the grip of illusions!"

To this I would respond, first: how do you know that he lived his life in untruth? You are always demanding evidence, so what is your evidence for this? Second, in a godless universe could there even be truth? (No truth without mind; no objective truth without objective mind.) Third, even if there is truth in a godless universe, why would it be a value? Why care about truth if it has no bearing on human flourishing? Doesn't your concern for evidence only make sense in the context of a quest for truth?

Grief: Three Solutions

That we grieve over the loss of a finite good shows our wretchedness. But the cure for grief is not the substitution of attachment to another finite good. We should not distract ourselves from our grief, but experience it and try to grasp the root of it, which is our inner emptiness, rather than the loss of a particular finite good. The proximate cause of my grief, the death of a beloved companion, is not grief’s ultimate cause. The inner emptiness, infinite in that nothing finite can assuage it, has but one anodyne: the infinite good, God.

If God be denied, then either the inner emptiness must be extinguished, or we must learn to fill it with finite goods. The latter, common as it is, is a miserable stop-gap measure and no ultimate solution. But to extinguish the inner emptiness, we must extinguish desire itself. This, the solution of Pali Buddhism, cuts but does not untie the Gordian knot.

So I count three solutions to grief: seek God; Pascalian divertissement; Buddhist extinction. Perhaps there are others.

The Stoic Ideal

The Stoic sage would be as impassible as God is impassible. But here's something to think about: Jesus on the cross died in agony like a man, even though, if he was God, he could have realized the Stoic ideal.

What is the lesson? Perhaps that to be impassible is for us impossible, and so no ideal at all.

Addendum 8/26: Leo Mollica supplies this appropriate quotation from Malebranche's The Search after Truth (Bk. II, Pt. iii, Ch. 4; tr. Lennon and Olscamp):

Epicurus was right in saying that offenses were bearable by a wise man. But Seneca was wrong in saying that wise men cannot even be offended…. Rather, let Christians learn from their Master that the impious are capable of hurting them, and that good men are sometimes subjected to these impious ones by the order of Providence. When one of the officers of the High Priest struck Jesus Christ, this wise man of the Christians, infinitely wise, and even as powerful as He is wise, confessed that this servant was capable of wounding him. He is not angered, He is not vengeful like Cato, He pardons, as having been truly wronged. He could have been vengeful and destroyed His enemies, but He suffered with a humble and modest patience injurious to no one, not even to this servant who had wronged Him.

I Stub My Toe

I just stubbed a bare toe on the oaken leg of my computer table. But it took a second or two after the moment of impact for the pain to 'register.' So I philosophized: if there was no pain at the moment of impact when the (minor) damage was done, but there is pain now after the fact, then this pain is of no use to me. It's only a sensation. To hell with it. It has nothing to do with me.

"It's only a sensation." This little reminder is a handy addition to the Stoic's pharmacia, though it is admittedly no panacea. It can help us buck up under some of life's stresses and strains. Stoicism may not take us very far, but where it does take us is a place worth visiting.

SIEGEL: Some people read into the Tea Party's almost neuralgic reaction to government spending, a sense that white people figure black people benefit disproportionately from federal programs. Do you suspect a racial subtext to that whole argument?

BOND: Absolutely. And I'm not saying that all of the Tea Party members are racist. Not at all. I don't think anybody says that. But I think there's an element of racial animus there and the feeling that some white people have that these black people are now getting something that I'm not getting and I should be getting it, too.

Yet another reason to defund NPR. Neuralgic reaction to government spending? How obtuse can an obtuse liberal be? Companion posts:

The Bigger the Government, the More to Fight Over: The NPR Case

National Public Radio Needs Your Support!

'The Tit ofthe State': Krauthammer versus NPR's Totenberg