Author: Bill Vallicella

Why I Want to Live Long

I want to live a long life so as to be able to experience and reflect upon this bizarre predicament from every humanly possible temporal perspective. For each age of life has its characteristic insights and illusions.  Youth has its truth as midlife its crisis, a crisis risible to the man ten years beyond it: "What the hell was that all about?"  And as the years roll on, and the fire down below subsides, certain insights become possible which were not before.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.  That's true both phylogenetically, as Hegel intended it, but also ontogenetically.  And as I once heard Gadamer say, Die Erntejahren eines Gelehrten kommen spät.  "A scholar's harvest years come late."

On Accomplishing Non-Accomplishment

Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by  flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot — this too is a sort of accomplishment.  You have to work at it a bit.  Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and the larger society's suggestions.  Eradicating one's suggestibility is actually a life-long task, and none too easy.

The world's a vast project of often useless neg-otiation. There is need of those who will 'otiate' it, enjoying "leisure with a good conscience" to cop a phrase from Nietzsche, that untimely saunterer.  Slow down! You'll get to your grave soon enough.  Why rush?  Is the universe in a rush to get somewhere?  Are you any less cosmic, you microcosm?

Affinity

There is the affinity of the blood-related, and what could be called the affinity of propinquity: the affinity of those who grew up together.  But the only true affinity is spiritual.  It has nothing to do with blood or proximity.

Compassion

Feeling compassion for the earthquake victims, he was pleased by his sensitivity, but his warm feeling did not motivate him to do anything such as make a monetary contribution to the Red Cross.  His feeling remained mere sentiment and to that extent mere self-indulgence.

Better to feel compassion than to define it. Better still to act upon the feeling.  But now an interesting question arises.  Would it not be even better to act in alleviation of the other's suffering without feeling the negative affect?  This line of thought is explored in Spinoza on Commiseratio.

A Poem by Robert Dodsley (1703-1764)

From The Oxford Book of Short Poems, eds. Kavanagh and Michie, OUP 1985, p. 100:

Song

Man's a poor deluded bubble,
    Wandering in a mist of lies,
Seeing false, or seeing double,
    Who would trust to such weak eyes?
Yet, presuming on his senses,
    On he goes, most wondrous wise:
Doubts of truth, believes pretences,
    Lost in error lives and dies.

 

The Wild Diversity of the Solutions to the Problem of Human Existence

How wildly diverse the concrete solutions to the problem of life that each works out for himself! 

There was Leon Trotsky the professional revolutionary who worshipped life-long at the altar of politics.   Politics was his substitute for religion.  (If religion is the opiate of the masses, revolutionary politics is  the opiate of the intellectuals.) 

And then there was Trotsky's secretary and bodyguard Jean van Heijenoort who, after finally seeing through the illusions of Communism after years of selfless service to its cause, renounced politics entirely and devoted himself to mathematical logic, becoming a distinguished historian of the subject.  One is struck by the extremity of this turn away from something of great human relevance to something of almost none.  A retreat from messy reality into a realm of bloodless abstractions.  An escape from the bloody horrors of politics into the arcane.  At the same time, a turn from devotion to a great but ill-conceived cause to bourgeois self-indulgence in sex, 'romance,' and love affairs.  Sadly, his fatal attraction to Ana Maria Zamora got him killed in the same place, Mexico City, where Trotsky met his end at the point of an ice axe wielded by a puppet of Stalin.  Zamora shot van Heijenoort with her Colt .38 while he slept .  From revolutionary to bourgeois professor of philosophy at Brandeis University.  But he was never so bourgeois as to respect the bourgeois institution of marriage.

Dr. George Sheehan's escape was into running to which he ascribed a significance it could not bear.  He was an inspiration to a lot of us with his 1975 On Running.  But then came a string of rather more fatuous and portentous titles, starting with Running and Being. As if der Sinn von Sein is poised to disclose itself to the fleet of foot.  All due praise to running, but homo currens qua currens is not on the way to Being.

And then there are those who went from politics to religion.  Unlike van Heijenoort who moved from leftist politcs to mathematical logic, Simone Weil went from leftist politics to religion. "The great error of the Marxists and of all of the nineteenth century was to believe that by walking straight ahead one had mounted into the air."  Exactly right.

Edith Stein, another very bright Jewish philosophy student, went from philosophy to religion.  Seeking total commitment she fled to a Carmelite monastery.  She was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz as Trotsky was murdered by the long arm of Stalin in Mexico City.  When I say that Stein went from philosophy to religion, I do not mean that she abandoned the first for the second: she wrote weighty tomes in the convent, Finite and Eternal Being and Potency and Act, to name two.  But they were written under the banner, philosophia ancilla theologiae.

It is fruitful to compare Weil and Stein.  The former, despite her attraction, kept her distance from the Roman church — Kenneth Rexroth speaks of her "tortured prowling outside the doors of the Catholic Church" – while the latter embraced it in the most committed way imaginable.  There is a 'logic' to  such commitment, one that is operative in the lives of many a convert, Thomas Merton being another example:  if it is The Truth that one has found, then surely it demands and deserves total commitment.  Religion really embraced and made existential make a totalitarian claim — which is why the totalitarians of the Left must make total war on it.

But these days I've been reading the slacker poet, Charles Bukowski, so perhaps he deserves a place in this little incomplete catalog.  His epitaph reads, Don't try."  He avoided bourgeois mediocity, no doubt, but along a path that cannot be recommended: one of piecemeal physical and spiritual suicide.  Whatever you say about Trotksy, van Heijenoort, Sheehan, Weil and Stein, they were strivers.  They understood that a life worth living is a life of relentless effort and exertion and self-overcoming.  It is about subduing the lower self, not wallowing in it. 

When I was a young man I came to the conclusion that I had three choices, three paths: suicide, mediocrity, striving.  A lifetime later I verify that my choice of the third was best.

Bukowski gravestone

 

 

My Lately Posted Logic Problem Pondered . . .

. . . and pondered well by David Parker over at Pondering the Preponderance.  I challenged the reader to spot what is wrong in the following argument, an argument I thought was interesting because it is fairly seductive, as compared to the stock examples in logic texts:

The Argument
1. A necessary truth is true.
2. Whatever is true is possibly true.
3. Whatever is possibly true could be false.
Therefore
4. A necessary truth could be false.

(I hope it is clear that 'possibly' and 'could' are not being used epistemically in this argument.)  Since the conclusion is plainly false, the argument is unsound either in virtue of invalidity, or in virtue of one or more false premises, or both.  There is nothing wrong with the formal logic of the argument, so I pointed out, correctly, that while (1) and (2) are each true, (3) is false. 

But there is an alternative analysis which Parker notes (and I didn't just to keep the post short), namely that one can see the argument as trading on an equivocal use of 'possibly true.'  And this alternative analysis helps explain why the argument is seductive.  After all (3) would be true if 'possibly true' meant 'contingently true.'  That is not what it means, but one could be forgiven for thinking so.  One could then say that the argument goes wrong because it commits the informal fallacy of equivovation: 'possibly true' is used with different senses in (2) and (3).  On this alternative analysis one could say that all the premises are true, but the argument commits the informal fallacy of equivocation.

But there is another wrinkle, and one which Parker notes.   Equivocation is standardly classified as an informal fallacy, buy doesn't every case of equivocation in a deductive argeument induce a formal fallacy?  Yes it does.  The form of the above argument could be depicted as follows:

Every F is a G
Every G is an H
Every H is an I
Ergo
Every F is an I

The form just depicted is clearly valid, whence it follow that every argument instantiating this form is valid.  It is of course assumed that the terms are being used univocally.  But if there is an equivocation on 'possibly true,' then the form of the original argument is not the above, but this:

Every F is a G
Every G is an H
Every I is a J
Ergo
Every F is a J

which is plainly invalid.

One moral is that the distinction between formal and informal fallacies is not hard-and-fast. (Composition and Division would also be interesting to discuss in this connection).  One can analyze our original argument as involving an equivocation on  'possibly true' in which case the argument is invalid, or one can take the argument to be valid but reject it because of the falsity of premise (3).

Ah, the pleasures of analysis!

God and the ‘No Angry Unicorn’ Argument

This from an astute reader commenting on the Hell post:

'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon'

Does this not refer to doxastic uncertainty rather than a fatuous equation of God with something material? This is how I interpreted it when I read it. More in the vein of: why venerate something tenuous in lieu of a Lucretian reality? Not a profound solution by any means, but an almost noble one if lived humbly– not sensually. Although , I suppose this is an agnostic take on the phrase. ( I've been reading too much of Montaigne!)

Thanks for exposing me to Henryk Gorecki . Do you know of Arvo Part?

I love Arvo Part, and Montaigne too.  But onto the issue you raise. To quote Cactus Ed himself, "Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?"

Angry unicorn Now it would be foolish to try to discern in the scribblings of Ed Abbey anything very clear or precise or carefully thought-through.  But it seems clear to me that Abbey is likening God to an intramundane object much as Bertrand Russell likened him to a celestial teapot.  In so doing, both demonstrate a profound ignorance of what sophisticated theists mean by 'God.'  They are not talking about a being among beings, let alone a material being among beings. (Deus est ipsum esse subsistens, et cetera.)  But you focus on the epistemic side, with justification, as the quotation shows. 

Accordingly, Abbey is suggesting that, regardless of the nature of God, the evidence of his existence is no better than the evidence of the existence of an irate lunar unicorn, a lunicorn if you will.   

But please note that questions about the evidence for something are connected to questions about the nature of that something.  The existence of a lunicorn would be strongly disconfirmed were a a bunch of lunar modules to fail to detect the presence of any such critter.  But no number of space probes could disconfirm the existence of God.  Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was surely talking nonsense when he reported that he saw no God during his famous suborbital flight.  The empirical undetectability of God no more tells against his existence than the empirical undetectability of the square root of pi tells against its existence. 

So while Abbey's remarks do have an epistemological flavor, they cannot be divorced from their metaphysical import.

But there is also an axiological side to it, which may be even more important.  Abbey is implying that it doesn't much matter whether God exists or not.  He could have added 'Who cares?' after 'Who knows?' to his list of questions.  After all, it is of no great moment whether there are any lunicorns or celestial teapots out there.  My happiness cannot hang on that.  The meaning of life does not stand or fall with the existence or nonexistence of such things. 

Abbey's aphorism sums up the atheist attitude quite well.  Does God exist?  Who cares? Who cares whether there is some weird extra object in the ontological inventory?  And how would you know anyway?  "Bartender, another round!"

A Vision of Hell

The spiritually immature have spiritually immature conceptions of man and God, heaven and hell. If you think of man as just a physical being, then, if you think of God at all, you will most likely think of him as a physical being, as a sort of Man Writ Large, or Big Guy in the Sky. This will lead either to a childish form of theism (God as Big Daddy, supplier of material needs, wish-fulfiller) or to a form of atheism of the Edward Abbey 'No angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon' variety.

Something similar is true of conceptions of heaven and hell. The materially minded will develop crass conceptions. Popular Islam's notion of paradise as an endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins, as a doing there all the carnal things one is forbidden here, is as theologically hopeless as is a Christian fundamentalist's notion of hell as fire and brimstone.

I suggest the following as closer to the theological reality of hell where hell is permanent separation, recognized as such, from one's absolute good, recognized as such.

To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one's vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell not as a state of pain but of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual  promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool's paradise –  think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. The fire of desire endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists.

An Argument Against Bukowski

He had no appreciation of nature.  That says something about a man. And what it says ain't good.  I'll have to dig up one of his anti-nature poems for documentation.  I recall one in which he has good things to say about smog, the atmosphere of LaLaLand, the oxygen of (fallen) Angelenos.  Those last cute phrases are mine not his.

There is a Bukowski category now, for more on this dude.

The Lure of the Trail

It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around. But I can easily understand how many would feel differently about this.

I once proposed to a woman that she and her husband accompany me and my wife on a little hike. She reacted as if I had proposed that she have all her teeth extracted without benefit of anaesthetic. She   seemed shocked that anyone would suggest such a thing. Finally she said, "Well, maybe, if there's a destination."

A destination? Each footfall, each handhold, each bracing breath of cold mountain air is the destination. Did John Muir have a destination when he roamed the Range of Light? Was Henry Thoreau trying to get somewhere during his crosscountry rambles?

Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live. Surrounded by beauty, he is yet oblivious to it, rushing to his destination. If one does not have the time to meditate on the moonset, celebrate the sunrise, or marvel at a stately Saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridgeline, it is a serious question whether one is alive in any human sense at all.

You may end up at your destination all right — in a box, never having lived.

Pseudo-Intellectual Tripe from William Sloane Coffin

William Sloane Coffin (Credo, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 5) thinks to correct Socrates and Descartes but makes a fool of himself in the process. Here is what he says:

     Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the
     uncommitted life that is not worth living. Descartes too was
     mistaken; "Cogito ergo sum" –"I think therefore I am"? Nonsense.
     "Amo ergo sum" — "I love therefore I am."

This is pseudo-intellectual tripe of the worst sort. It is an asinine form of cleverness in which one drops names without understanding the doctrines behind the names. It is the sort of thing that can impress only the half-educated, while eliciting scorn from those who drink deep from the Pierian spring.

Socrates' point is that self-examination is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. Coffin's point is that commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived. These two points are obviously consistent: they can both be true. (And I should think they are both true.) But by saying that Socrates had it wrong, Coffin implies that his view entails the negation of Socrates' view — which is silly. Suppose A says that G. W. Bush was once governor of Texas, and B says, 'No you've got it wrong, he was once in the National Guard.' It is the same kind of silliness.

It should also be pointed out that even if commitment is a necessary condition of a life well-lived, it doesn't follow that it is a sufficient condition thereof. The committed but unexamined lives of a Nazi, Communist, or Islamo-totalitarian are not examples of lives well-lived.

As for Descartes, Coffin doesn't understand him at all. Else he would have realized that loving is a species of thinking in the broad Cartesian sense of the term. Thinking in this sense covers all mental   acts, including remembering, anticipating, perceiving, imagining, wishing, willing, loving, hoping, and thinking in the narrow sense of conceiving. All mental states having the property Brentano called   intentionality (object directedness) fall under the cogito, the 'I think.' Thus Coffin commits an obvious ignoratio elenchi when he takes Descartes to be using cogito in the narrow sense that excludes amo.

Alexander Pope  penned the following lines:

     A little learning is a dangerous thing
     Drink deep or taste not  the Pierian spring
     There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain
     But drinking largely  sobers us again.

I learned these lines in high school, and they have stood me in good stead ever since. 'Pierian' from Pieria, a region of ancient Macedonia  where the Muses lived. Not to be confused with Peoria.