Author: Bill Vallicella

Political Aporetics: Liberty Versus Equality

Political disagreement is ultimately rooted in philosophical disagreement.  So if the latter is objectively irresolvable, then so is the former.  I claim that both are irresolvable due to value differences that cannot be resolved either by appeal to empirical facts or by reasoning.  In illustration of my thesis, consider the the values of individual liberty and material (as opposed to formal) equality.  I will assume that both are indeed values to which all of us accord respect.  Even so, value conflict can arise  in the form of a conflict of prioritizations.  I value liberty over equality, while Peter, say, values equality over liberty.  That difference suffices to put us at serious odds despite the fact that we both value liberty and equality.  The conflict over prioritization — our difference as to which trumps which — makes the following aporetic tetrad objectively irresolvable:

1. Justice demands redistribution of wealth from the richer to the poorer.  A just society is a fair society, one in which there is a fair distribution of the available social and economic goods.

2. Wealth redistribution requires an agency of redistribution which forces, via the coercive power of government, the better off to pay higher taxes, forego benefits, or in some other way compensate the worse off so that greater material equality is brought about.

3. Coercive redistribution violates the liberty of the individual.

4. It is wrong to violate the liberty of the individual in the way that redistribution requires.

It is easy to see that the limbs of this tetrad, despite the plausibility of each, cannot all be true: the first three, entail the negation of the fourth.  Indeed, any three of them entails the negation of the remaining one.  To solve the inconsistency problem, one of the propositions must be rejected.  But which one?  (2) and (3) are uncontroversial and so not candidates for rejection.  This leaves (1) and (4).

The conservative/libertarian will reject (1) while the liberal/leftist will reject (4).  Each will thus solve the problem — from his own point of view.  But surely neither amounts to an objective solution to the problem since the solutions are logically incompatible and both are equally rational and equally consistent with all relevant empirical facts.

Indeed, this is why there is a philosophical problem in the first place.  There is nothing illogical about the conservative or liberal positions: neither falls afoul of any logical rule or canon of reasoning.  And there is no empirical fact that allows us to decide between the two positions.  The difference between the positions is ultimately rooted in a value difference, specifically, a difference concerning the prioritization of liberty and equality.  To the conservative, it is self-evident that liberty is such a high value that no consideration of material equality or fairness of distribution could provide any reason to violate the liberty of the individual by, for example, taxing him at a higher rate because he is more economically productive. To the liberal,on the other hand, it is is just self-evident that justice demands redistribution and so a certain amount of coercive taking of what belongs to the productive and a giving of it to the less or non-productive(for example, in the form of food stamps).

Because the doctrinal differences are rooted in a value difference, the doctrinal difference can be objectively resolved only if the value conflict can be objectively resolved.  But the latter cannot be, not by any appeal to empirical facts and not by any abstract reasoning.  If so, the political dispute regarding liberty and equality is objectively irresolvable.

I conjecture that all of the fundamental political problems are like this.  All are at bottom philosophical problems representable by an aporetic polyad consisting of propositions which are individually plausible but not jointly consistent.  If so, a certain political pessimism is the upshot.  We cannot resolve our political differences by appeal to empirical facts or by abstract reasoning or by the two together.  We are stuck with irreconcilable differences rooted in ultimately divergent values.

The question then becomes one of figuring how we can nonetheless continue to live with each other in some semblance of peace despite our irreconcilable differences.  Federalism may be part of the answer.  See my post Can Federalism Save Us?

Society and Solitude

Individuals need society to socialize them and raise them from the plane of mere animality. The quality of society, however, depends on true individuals, who are made by solitude. Moses was alone on Mt. Sinai; Jesus was forty days in the desert; alone Socrates communed with his daimon; Siddartha forsook the company of the royal compound; Henry "I have no walks to throw away on company" Thoreau went for walks solo. . . .

Thus society profits from its solitaries, assuming that those who escape from it for their own good return to it for its own good. In a Platonic figure, the escape from the Cave ought to be followed by a return to the Cave.

Kerouac No Role Model

Lest I lead  astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty bound to point out that this month's focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated.  Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as a child and the Buddhist precepts he assiduously studied in the mid-1950s.  Not that he was a hypocrite; he was just a deeply flawed human being.  I just now recall a critique of Kerouac by Douglas Groothuis from some years ago.  (Old Memory Babe ain't got nothing on me.)  Ah yes, here it is.   I am in basic agreement with it.

Kerouac October Quotation #23: How Can You be Clever in a Meatgrinder?

Jkerouacmom Here is Kerouac on the road, not in a '49 Hudson with Neal Cassady, but in a bus  with his mother:

Who are men that they can insult men? Who are these people who wear pants and dresses and sneer? What am I talking about? I'm talking about human helplessness and unbelievable loneliness in the darkness of birth and death and asking "What is there to laugh about in that?" "How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?" "Who makes fun of misery?" There's my mother a hunk of flesh that didnt ask to be born, sleeping restlessly, dreaming hopefully, beside her son who didnt ask to be born, thinking desperately, praying hopelessly, in a bouncing earthly vehicle going from nowhere to nowhere, all in the night, worst of all for that matter all in noonday glare of bestial Gulf Coast roads — Where is the rock that will sustain us? Why are we here? What kind of crazy college would feature a seminar where people talk about hopelessness forever?

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Desolation Angels, 1960, p. 339.

Compare Mexico City Blues, 1959, 211th Chorus:

The wheel of the quivering meat conception . . .
. . . I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel
and safe in heaven dead.

Of the Beat triumvirate, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs, "sweet gone Jack" alone really moves me, and the quotations above I find to be among the most moving in all his writings.

On Our Knowledge of Sameness

How ubiquitous, yet how strange, is sameness!  A structure of reality so pervasive and fundamental that a world that did not exhibit it would be inconceivable. 

How do I know that the tree I now see in my backyard is numerically the same as the one I saw there yesterday? Alvin Plantinga (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford 1993, p. 124) says in a Reidian vein that one knows this "by induction." I take him to mean that the tree I now see resembles very closely the one I saw yesterday in the same place and that I therefore inductively infer that they are numerically the same. Thus the resemblance in respect of a very large number of properties provides overwhelming evidence of their identity.

But this answer seems open to objection. First of all, there is something instantaneous and immediate about my judgment of identity in a case like this: I don't compare the tree-perceived-yesterday, or my memory of the tree-perceived-yesterday, with the tree-perceived-today, property for property, to see how close they resemble in order to hazard the inference that they are identical. There is no 'hazarding' at all.  Phenomenologically, there is no comparison and no inference. I just see that they are the same. But this 'seeing' is of course not with the eyes. For sameness is not an empirically detectable property or relation. I am just immediately aware — not mediately via inference — that they are the same.  Greenness is empirically detectable, but sameness is not.

What is the nature of this awareness given that we do not come to it by inductive inference?   And what exactly is the object of the awareness, identity itself?

A problem with Plantinga's answer is that it allows the possibility that the two objects are not strictly and numerically the same, but are merely exact duplicates or indiscernible twins. But I want to discuss this in terms of the problem of how we perceive or know or become aware of change.  Change  is linked to identity since for a thing to change is for one and the same thing to change. 

Let's consider alterational (as opposed to existential) change. A thing alters iff it has incompatible properties at different times.  Do we perceive alteration with the outer senses? A banana on my counter on Monday is yellow with a little green. On Wednesday the green is gone and the banana is wholly yellow. On Friday, a little brown is included in the color mix. We want to say that the banana, one and the same banana,  has objectively changed in respect of color.

But what justifies our saying this? Do we literally see, see with the eyes, that the the banana has changed in color? That literal seeing would seem to require that I literally see that it is the same thing that has altered property-wise over ther time period. But how do I know that it is numerically the same banana present on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? How do I know that someone hasn't arranged things so that there are three different bananas, indiscernible except for color, that I perceive on the three different days? On that extraordinary arrangement I could not be said to be perceiving alterational change. To perceive alterational change one must perceive identity over time. For there is change only if one and the same thing has different properties at different times. But I do not perceive the identity over time of the banana.

I perceive a banana on Monday and a banana on Wednesday; but I do not visually perceive that these are numerically the same banana. For it is consistent with what I perceive that there be two very similar bananas, call them the Monday banana and the Wednesday banana.   I cannot tell from sense perception alone whether I am confronting numerically the same banana on two different occasions or two numerically different bananas on the two occasions. If you disagree with this, tell me what sameness looks like. Tell me how to empirically detect the property or relation of numerical sameness. Tell me what I have to look for.

Suppose I get wired up on methamphetamines and stare at the banana the whole week long. That still would not amount to the perception of alterational change. For it is consistent with what I sense-perceive that there be a series of momentary bananas coming in and out of existence so fast that I cannot tell that this is happening. (Think of what goes on when you go to the movies.) To perceive change, I must perceive diachronic identity, identity over time. I do not perceive the latter; so I do not perceive change. I don't know sameness by sense perception, and pace Plantinga I don't know it by induction. For no matter how close the resemblance between two objects, that is consistent with their being numerically distinct. And note that my judgment that the X I now perceive is the same as the X I perceived in the past has nothing tentative or shaky about it. I judge immediately and with assurance that it is the same tree, the same banana, the same car, the same woman. What then is the basis of this judgment? How do I know that this tree is the same as the one I saw in this spot yesterday? Or in the case of a moving object, how do I know that this girl who I now see on the street is the same as the one I saw a moment ago in the coffee house? Surely I don't know this by induction.

How then do I know it?

Hermetic Jokes

Among the jokes classified by Ted Cohen as hermetic in Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1999) are the following that he classifies as strongly hermetic:
 
What did Lesniewski say to Lukasiewicz? "Logically, we're poles apart."

What is a goy? A goy is a person who is a girl if examined at any time up to an including t, and a boy    if examined at any time after t.

One day a paleographer came into his classics department in great excitement. "There has been an earth-shaking discovery," he  anounced. "The Illiad and the Odyssey were not written by Homer, but by some other Greek with the same name."

If you got those, then try this severely hermetic one on for size:

What's round and purple, and commutes to work? An Abelian grape.

These three also fall under the hermetic rubric, though they are not especially so:

According to Freud, what comes between fear and sex? Fuenf.

A young Catholic woman told her friend, "I told my husband to buy all the Viagra he can find." Her Jewish friend replied, "I told my husband to buy all the stock in Pfizer he can find."

After knowing one another for a long time, three clergymen — one Catholic, one Jewish, and one Episcopalian — have become good friends. When they are together one day, the Catholic priest is in a sober, reflective mood, and he says, "I'd like to confess to you that although I have done my best to keep my faith, I have occasionally lapsed, and even since my seminary days I have, not often, but sometimes, succumbed and sought carnal knowledge."  "Ah well," says the rabbi, "It is good to admit these things, and so I will tell you that, not often, but sometimes, I break the dietary laws and eat forbidden food." At this the Episcopalian priest, his face reddening, says, "If only I has so little to be ashamed of. You know, only last week I  caught myself eating a main course with my salad fork."

Kerouac October Quotation #21: Sweet Gone Jack 41 Years Down the Road

Kerouacs Jack Kerouac was a big ball of affects ever threatening to dissolve in that sovereign soul-solvent, alcohol. One day he did, and died.  The date was 21 October 1969. Today is the 41st anniversary of his release from the wheel of the quivering meat conception and the granting of his 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)

I own eight Kerouac biographies and there are a couple I don't own.  The best of them, Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe (Grove Press, 1983), ends like this:

The night of Sunday October 19, he couldn't sleep and lay outside on his cot to watch the stars.  The next morning after eating some tuna, he sat down in front of the TV, notebook in hand, to plan a new novel; it was to be titled after his father's old shop: "The Spotlight Print."  Just getting out of bed Stella [Sampas, his third wife pictured above] heard groans in the bathroom and found him on his knees, vomiting blood.  He told her he didn't want to go to the hospital, but he cooperated when the ambulance attendants arrived.  As they were leaving, he said, "Stella, I hurt," which shocked her because it was the first time she had ever heard him complain.  Then he shocked her even more by saying, for the second time since they had married, "Stella, I love you."

Less than a day later, on the morning of October 21, after twenty-six blood transfusions, Jean Louis Kerouac died in St. Anthony's Hospital of hemorrhaging esophageal varices, the classic drunkard's death.

On Dizzy Gillespie's birthday. (p. 697)

He was 47.  I was 19.  On a restroom wall at my college, I scribbled, "Kerouac lives."  A day or two later a reply appeared, "Read the newspapers."

Kerouac October Quotation #20: The Body So Thick and Carnal

Kerouac Blaise Pascal says not to look to ourselves for the cure to misfortunes, but to God whose Providence is a foreordained thing in Eternity; that the foreordainment was that our lives be but sacrifices leading to purity in the after-existence in Heaven as souls disinvested of that rapish, rotten, carnal body — O the sweet beloved bodies so insulted everywhere for a million years on this strange planet. Lacrimae rerum. I dont get it because I look into myself for the answer. And my body is so thick and carnal I cant penetrate into the souls of others equally entrap't in trembling weak flesh, let alone penetrate into an understanding of HOW I can turn to God with effect. The situation is pronounced hopeless in the very veins of our hands, and our hands are useless in Eternity since nothing they do, even clasp, can last. (Vanity of Duluoz, p. 133. Photo by Tom Palumbo.)

Christine O’Donnell and the First Amendment

Although O'Donnell  comes across as an airhead, she was actually right: there are no such words as "separation of church and state" in the First Amendment.  The Establishment Clause reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ."  Chris Coons got it wrong when he misquoted the clause as "Government shall make no establishment of religion."  Not government, but congress.  William A. Jacobson explains why this matters  Not "make no establishment of religion," but "make no LAW RESPECTING an establishment of religion."  In other words, Congress shall not enact any law that sets up any particular religion as the state religion.  (But it seems it also can be interpreted  to have the further meaning: Congress shall enact no law that disestablishes  any particular religion that happens to have been established.)

I refer you to Professor Jacobson for detailed analysis.

And another thing.  I have never understood why liberals oppose the posting of the Ten Commandments in, say, a judge's chambers. (Well, I do understand why they oppose it; my point is that I can't see that they have a logical or First Amendment leg to stand on.)  First, the Decalogue is not specific to Christianity or to the other two Abrahamic faiths: it is precisely common to all three in virtue of its Old Testament provenience.   Hence even if its posting could establish a religion as the state religion it would be no particular religion that would be thereby established.  Second, and more fundamentally, it is ludicrous to suppose that the mere posting of the Ten Commandments could have the effect of establishing any particular religion as the state religion.

What motivates leftists (and contemporary liberals whose slouch towards leftism leaves them for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the former) is hatred of Judeo-Christian religion, and with, it hatred of the morality that such religion conveys.  Note that I wrote 'Judeo-Christian' and not 'Abrahamic.'  For it is a bizarre fact about the Left that they are soft on that religion which is uniquely violent and uniquely anti-Enlightenment at the present time, Islam.

Rise and Shine With Manny

Kant-3 For, "The bed is a nest for a whole flock of illnesses." (Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, tr. Gregor, p. 183)

I read Kant and about Kant at an impressionable age, and it really is a pleasure plowing through his texts again as I have been doing recently. I suspect my early rising goes back to my having read, at age 20, that Kant was wont to retire at 10 PM and arise at 5 AM.

Soon enough, however, I was out-Kanting Kant with a 4 AM arisal from the bed of sloth. And when I moved out here to the Zone, 4 became 2:30. (A Zone Man must make an early start especially on outdoor activities before Old Sol gets too uppity.) I've tried 2 AM, the time the Trappist monks of Merton's day got up, but I couldn't hack it. 2:30 is early enough. (I don't know whether the Trappist regimen is as rigorous today as it was in the '40s and '50s, and I'm not sure I want to know.)

The New York Times Kerouac Obituary

Tomorrow, October 21, is the 41st anniversary of Jack Kerouac's death.  I remember the day well, having noted Jack's passing on a piece of looseleaf I still have in a huge file full  of juvenilia from that period. 

The NYT obituary features a perceptive quotation from Allen Ginsberg: "A very unique cat — a French Canadian Hinayana Buddhist Beat Catholic savant."  For pith and accuracy, that's hard to beat.  The obituary concludes by noting that Kerouac "had no use for the radical politics that came to preoccupy many of  his friends and readers."

"I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic," he said last month. He showed the interviewer a painting of Pope Paul VI and said, "Do you know who painted that?  Me."

Kerouac October Quotation # 19: Vanity of Vanities

Vanity of Duluoz, p. 23:

Still I say, what means it? You may say that I'm a braggart about football, although all these records are available in the newspaper files called morgue, I admit I'm a braggart, but I'm not calling it thus because what was the use of it all anyway, for as the Preacher sayeth:  "Vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity."  You kill yourself to get to the grave. Especially you kill yourself to get to the grave before you even die, and the name of that grave is "success," the name of that grave is hullaballoo boomboom horseshit.