"You can't make the unhappy happy." I just heard Dennis Prager say this during his Happiness Hour. An important truth. There are people who are bent on being miserable, no matter what their circumstances or endowments. As a general rule, they are best avoided if you want to be happy yourself.
Companion post: People Are What They Are.
It would be neat if all actions could be sorted into three jointly exhaustive classes: the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory. These deontic modes would then be analogous to the alethic modes of possibility, impossibility, and necessity. Intuitively, the permissible is the morally possible, that which we may do; the impermissible is the morally impossible, that which we may not do; and the obligatory is the morally necessary, that which we must do.
Pursuing the analogy, we note that the following two alethic modal principles each has a deontic analog, where 'p' ranges over propositions and 'A' over actions:
1A. If p is necessary, then p is possible, but not conversely.
1D. If A is obligatory, then A is permissible, though not conversely.
2A. P is impossible iff ~p is necessary.
2D. A is impermissible iff ~A is obligatory. (e.g. Sexually molesting children is impermissible iff not sexually molesting children is obligatory.)
But of course the following ab esse ad posse principle has no deontic analog:
3A. If p is true, then it is possible that p is true.
3D. If A is done, then A is permissible.
This is not surprising since the deontic is a species of the normative.
Now let's try to characterize (not define) the deontic concepts of the permissible, the impermissible, and the obligatory in terms of the axiological concepts of good and bad:
4. If A is impermissible, then A is bad to do and good to leave undone.
5. If A is obligatory, then A is good to do and bad to leave undone.
6. If A is permissible then A is axiologically indifferent: neither bad to do and good to leave undone, nor good to do and bad to leave undone.
These characterizations seems to leave conceptual room for two other sorts of actions, actions that are good to do but NOT bad to leave undone, and actions that are bad to do but NOT good to leave undone. The former are supererogatory in a wide sense of the term, and the latter are suberogatory.
For example, paying one's bill in a restaurant is (legally and morally) obligatory: it is good to pay the bill and bad to leave without paying. But tipping is (legally, though perhaps not morally) supererogatory: it is good to tip but not legally required, and in this sense not bad to leave no tip. If this is unclear, consider tipping in excess of 20%. Surely this would be supererogatory: good to do (ceteris paribus) but not bad to leave undone. One could plausibly argue that restaurant patrons are morally obligated to tip in the amount of 15-20% of the tab given that waiters and waitresses work for minimum wage and rely on tips for a livable wage; but surely no one is obligated to leave a 50% tip, say. And yet it would be a very nice thing to do for that pretty waitress working her way through school. It would be good to do but not bad to leave undone.
Do you balk at calling such trifling actions supererogatory because they are not grand or heroic like throwing oneself on a grenade to save one's buddies? Well then, I will accommodate your point by distinguishing between wide and narrow senses of 'supererogation.' Or I might just give you the word as long as you grant me a category of actions an example of which I have just provided.
Now for some examples of suberogation. A supererogatory act is a good act that is in excess of what is morally or legally required. A suberogatory act is then one that is bad but not so bad as to be impermissible. The following might be examples: talking too much, public displays of affection, breaking wind in public, picking one's nose in front of others. The practitioner of public rhinotillexis does nothing legally or morally impermissible, but it is something bad, and not just aesthetically. I want to say that it is a morally bad action that not impermissible. So I say it is suberogatory.
More needs to be said. I am not sure that in the end the sub- and supererogatory don't collapse into the permissible thus obviating the need for two further categories of actions. Further reading: the SEP article, Supererogation.
As a philosopher, he loves reason. As a conservative, he is properly skeptical of it.
Visions of Cody, p. 12:
All you do is head straight for the grave, a face just covers a skull awhile. Stretch that skull-cover and smile.
Joseph Sobran is dead at the age of 64. Beginning as a paleocon, he ended up an anarchist, and apparently something of an anti-Semite. His 1985 Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow, however, contains a wealth of important ideas worth ruminating on. A couple of excerpts, not necessarily the best:
"The poor" are to liberalism roughly what "the proletariat" is to Communism–a formalistic device for legitimating the assumption of power. What matters, for practical liberals, is not that (for example) the black illegitimacy rate has nearly tripled since the dawn of the Great Society; it is that a huge new class of beneficiaries has been engendered–beneficiaries who vote, and who feel entitled to money that must be taken from others. It is too seldom pointed out that a voter is a public official, and that the use of proffered entitlements to win votes amounts to bribery. For this reason John Stuart Mill pronounced it axiomatic that those who get relief from the state should be disfranchised. But such a proposal would now be called inhuman, which helps account for the gargantuan increase in the size and scope of federal spending. Corrupt politicians make headlines; but no honest politician dares to refer to the problem of corrupt voters, who use the state as an instrument of gain.
[. . .]
The enemy, for socialism, is any permanent authority, whether it is a long-standing church or a holy scripture, whose tendency is to put a brake on political power. In fact power and authority are often confused nowadays: the thoroughly politicized man who seeks power can only experience and interpret authority as a rival form of power, because it impedes his ambition for a thoroughly politicized society. But authority is more nearly the opposite of power. It offers a standard of truth or morality that is indifferent and therefore often opposed to current desires and forces, standing in judgment over them. If God has revealed Himself to man, the progressive agenda may find itself seriously inconvenienced.
For this reason, religion is a source of deep anxiety to the liberal. He harps on its historical sins: Crusades, Inquisitions, witch burnings, wars. He never notices that the crimes of atheist regimes, in less than a century, have dwarfed those of all organized religions in recorded history. He sees Christianity's sporadic persecutions as being of its essence; he regards Communism's unbroken persecution as incidental to its potential for good. He warns of the "danger" posed by American fundamentalists (one of the most gentle and law-abiding segments of the population) and is unchastened by the results of "peace" in Vietnam and Cambodia.
Here.
This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day.
From On the Road:
… one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying 'Right-orooni' and 'How 'bout a little bourbon-arooni.' In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals sat at his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar and bongo drums. When he gets warmed up he takes off his undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head. He'll sing 'Cement Mixer, Put-ti Put-ti' and suddenly slow down the beat and brood over his bongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; you think he'll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making an imperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can't hear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes the mike and says, very slowly, 'Great-orooni … fine-ovauti … hello-orooni … bourbon-orooni … all-orooni … how are the boys in the front row making out with their girls-orooni … orooni … vauti … oroonirooni …" He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can't hear. His great sad eyes scan the audience. Dean stands in the back, saying, 'God! Yes!' — and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating. 'Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.'
Light up a cigarodi, mix yourself a wine spodiodi and then dig Slim Gaillard's Cement Mixer mentioned above. While you're at it, check out the cat on bass in this clip. Go, man, go! (Never did get around to reading John Clellon Holmes' Go.)
Frank Sinatra died on 14 May 1998. Here we read:
. . . as Sinatra began to recover from Gardner, he became more outspoken. In 1957, he denounced rock 'n' roll as "the most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear. … It manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the Earth."
That is about as fair as my judgment, back in the '60s, of the music of Sinatra and his fellow Rat Pack crooners: "lounge lizard music." Enamored as I was of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Sinatra's music struck me as so much booze-drenched escapist rubbish, devoid of reality content. Empty glamor and glitz, at home in the plastic fantastic fool's paradise called Las Vegas.
But escapism is what Sinatra and his generational cohort needed, as mine needed a music of engagement. Different generations with different needs and sensibilities. In the meantime, I've come to appreciate his artistry.
Over Sunday breakfast at Cindy's, a hardscrabble Mesa, Arizona eatery not unwelcoming to metaphysicians and motorcyclists alike, Peter Lupu fired a double-barreled objection at my solution to Deck's Paradox. The target, however, was not hit. My solution requires that (a) concrete particulars can be coherently 'assayed' (to use a favorite word of Gustav Bergmann), or given an ontological analysis in terms of constituents some or all of which are universals, and (b) modally contingent concrete particulars can be coherently assayed as composed of necessary beings.
Peter denies both of (a) and (b), without good reason as it seems to me. Let's begin with some definitions pithily presented.
Definitions
Abstract =df causally inert.
Concrete =df not abstract.
Universal =df repeatable (multiply exemplifiable).
Particular =df unrepeatable.
Modally contingent=df existent in some but not all broadly-logically possible worlds.
Modally necessary =df not modally contingent and not modally impossible.
Ad (a). One form of the question is: Could a concrete particular be coherently construed as a bundle universals? Peter thinks not: "But the unification of two universals U and V is another universal W, not a particular." (From a two page handout he brought to breakfast. How many people that you know bring handouts to breakfast?!) Now bundle-of-universals theories of particulars face various standard objections, but as far as I know no one in the literature has made Peter's objection. Presumably for good reason: it is a bad objection that confuses conjunction with the bundling relation.
We understand conjunction as a propositional connective. Given the propositions a is red and b is round we understand that the conjunction a is red & b is round is true iff both conjuncts are true. It is clear that a conjunction of propositions is itself a proposition. By a slight extension we can speak meaningfully of a conjunction of propositional functions, and from there we can move to talk of conjunctions of properties. Assuming that properties are universals, we can speak of conjunctions of universals. It is clear that a conjunction of universals is itself a universal. Thus the conjunction of Redness and Roundness is itself a universal, a multiply exemplifiable entity. I will use 'Konjunction' to single out conjunction of universals.
Now it should be obvious that a bundle of universals is not a conjunction of universals. Let K be the Konjunction operator: it operates upon universals to form universals. Let B be the bundling operator: it operates upon universals to form particulars. Bundling is not Konjunction. So far, then, Peter seems to have failed to make an elementary distinction.
Now suppose Peter objects that nothing could operate upon universals to form a particular. Universals in, universals out. Then I say that he is just wrong: the set-theoretical braces — { } — denote an operator that operates upon items of any category to form sets of those items. Now it should be obvious that a set of universals is not itself a universal, but a particular. A Konjunction of universals is a universal, but a set of universals is not a universal, but a particular. The Konjunction of Redness and Roundness is exemplifiable; but no set is exemplifiable.
Am I saying that a bundle of universals is a set of universals? No. I am saying that it is false to assume that any operation upon universals will result in a universal. What I have said so far suffices to refute Peter's first objection, which was that the unification of two universals yields a third universal. You can see that to be false by noting that the unification into a set of two or more universals does not yield a universal but a particular.
Ad (b). Our second question is whether a contingent particular could have as ontological constituents necessary beings. Peter thinks not. He thinks that anything composed of necessary beings will itself be a necessary being. And so, given that universals are necessary beings, and that concrete particulars are composed of universals, no concrete particular can be modally contingent.
This objection fares no better than the first. Suppose Redness and Roundness are compresent. (You will recall that Russell took the bundling relation to be the compresence relation. See An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940, Chapter 6.) Each of these universals, we are assuming, is a necessary being. But it doesn't follow that their compresence is necessary; it could easily be contingent. Here and now I see a complete complex of compresence two of whose constituent universals are Redness and Roundness. But surely there is no necessity that these two universals co-occur or be com-present. After all, Redness is often encountered compresent with shapes that are logically incompatible with Roundness. Compresence, then, is a contingent relation. It follows that complexes of compresence are contingent. Necessarily, Rednessexists. Necessarily, Roundness exists. But it does not follow that, necessarily, Redness and Roundness are compresent: surely there are possible worlds in which they are not.
Peter's argument for his conclusion commits the fallacy of composition:
1. Every universal necessarily exists.
2. Every concrete particular is composed of universals. Therefore,
3. Every concrete particular is composed of things that necessarily exist. Therefore,
4. Every concrete particular necessarily exists.
The move from (3) to(4) is the fallacy of composition. One cannot assume that if the parts of a whole have a certain property, then the whole has those properties.
"Time is the purest and cheapest form of doom." (Visions of Cody, McGraw-Hill, 1972, p. 374)
Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place.
In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence. That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered. The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.
Spencer Case reports from Afghanistan, and I comment in blue (older comments of mine in dark orange):
Greetings again from Afghanistan. I've been reading your blog regularly although I haven't written in a while, so I hope you'll forgive a few preliminaries. Things are winding down in my tour, despite an attack on my base by a few Taliban last week (of which my report can be found here: http://www.cjtf101.com/en/regional-command-east-news-mainmenu-401/3362-us-afghan-servicemembers-respond-during-attack.html).
Also, I became interested in Robert Reilly's book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis because of your pointer. I reviewed it in the Idaho State Journal and on my Dateline Afghanistan blog. Imagine my delight when none other than Reilly himself posted
a comment to my review! (online at: http://www.pocatelloshops.com/new_blogs/afghanistan/?p=99)
By the time this month expires I will be drinking my much awaited first post-deployment beer. Speaking of worldly pleasures, I'd like to make a second stab at an unresolved argument we had a couple of months ago. I am still convinced that sincere conviction in a religious afterlife commits one to zealotry. After all, given a sincere conviction in Christian salvation, how could the pursuit of any finite good be justified? And who could be more of a paradigm case of zealotry than the person who thinks all worldly goods are completely overridden by some one eternal Good?
In your response to my argument, you write:
Continue reading “Report from Afghanistan and More on Religious Zealotry”
Sweet gone Jack made such an effort to be a good boy, but failed so utterly as to break one's heart. Here is a Some of the Dharma entry (p. 127) written sometime between July and October 1954, before success and fame and alcohol undid him:
RESOLVED
One meal a day
No drinking of intoxicants
No maintaining of friendships
That, if I break any of these elementary rules of Buddhism, which have been my biggest obstacles, hindrances t othe attainment of contemplative happiness and joy of will, I will give up Buddhism forever. [He did break them and did give up Buddhism.]
Agreed, that I may finish the literary work I began, by the age of 40, after which my only work is to be in the Dharma Teaching, to be followed by all cessation of work, striving or mental effort when Nirvana is nigh and signs indicate there is no more to write and teach.
One meal a day means, the mind not to be taunted and tempted by the senses. (Sensation of taste left uncultivated.) No intoxicants means, the heart not to be deranged, beaten in, (as in excessive drinking), nor the brain hystericalized and over-filled with anxious drug-thoughts and irrelevant images. No maintaining of friendships means, no relations whatever to contaminate the good of contemplation, no pleasure-seeking, no ego-personality activity, no Co-Ignorance.
Quand tu t'ennui souffre . . .
Not drinking preserves contemplative strength
Eating once a day, contemplative sensitivity
No friends or lusts, contemplative serenity
Strength, Sensitivity, Serenity = Joy
Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:
Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."
. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]
