Author: Bill Vallicella

Total Dependence and Essence/Existence Composition

Anthony Flood has done metaphysicians a service by making available John N. Deck’s excellent, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Language of Total Dependence. This is an essay that Anthony Kenny, no slouch of a philosopher, saw fit to include in his anthology, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

Mr. Flood finds Deck’s argument to be "unanswerable" to such an extent that it broke the hold of Thomism on him. Although I am not a Thomist, I believe I can show that Deck’s argument is not compelling.

This essay divides into two parts. In the first, I state what I take to be Deck’s argument; in the second, I show how it can be answered from the position worked out in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated (Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002).

Deck’s Argument Entdeckt

Continue reading “Total Dependence and Essence/Existence Composition”

Kerouac to Whalen on Buddhism

It's October again, Kerouac month at MavPhil.  Perhaps I will post a quotation a day throughout this wonderful month that always passes too quickly — as if bent on proving the vain and visionary nature of phenomenal existence.

Jack Kerouac finished Some of the Dharma on 15 March 1956.  The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.  By 1959, Kerouac was moving away from Buddhism.  On 10 June 1959 he wrote to Philip Whalen:

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am Not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that sarvam dukkham?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why?  Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had. 

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected; the problem is desire itself.  The soulution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated). 

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' — to hazard an oxymoron — the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent.  Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real and truly important.  But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I reject both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is faulty because incoherent: it presupposes while denying the exstence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be nonexistence.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously –except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

 

Armor Against Superlatives

Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pp.  98-99:

As we circled over Casablanca for landing, I saw below an enormous
swimming pool or reservoir. I turned to the man sitting next to me,
a grizzled old army colonel, and said to him, "That has to be the
biggest swimming pool in the world."

"The second biggest," he said.

"And where's the biggest?"

"Sonny," he said to me, "whatever it is, wherever it is, there's
something bigger or something better."

That stayed with me — one of several observations that cut into me
and stayed — and I passed it on to my children as armor against
superlatives.

Time and Tense: A Note on the B-Theory

What is time?  Don't ask me, and I know.  Ask me, and I don't know. (Augustine)  This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time.

On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible  monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming.  My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death  approaching from the future, getting closer and closer.  Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality.  At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality.

Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality.  Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago.  Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say,  lies in the future.  Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period.  And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.

This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.'  He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned.  Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t.  An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.

Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is.  But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.

The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege.  Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter.  This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness.  There just is no irreducible property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  The opposite view is that of the presentist: there is a genuine property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property.  Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent.  If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist.

Why be a B-theorist?  McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction.  We should examine that argument in a separate post.

 

No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale UP, 1989, pp. 48-49):

From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam [submission to Allah] the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular.  The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere of God's absolute claim and limitless compassion and mercy.  And so islam, God-centredness, is not only an inner submission to the sole Lord of the universe but also a pattern of corporate life in accordance with God's will.  It involves both salat, worship, and falah, the good embodied in behaviour.  Through the five appointed moments of prayer each day is linked to God. Indeed almost any activity may be begun with Bismillah ('in the name of Allah'); and plans and hopes for the future are qualified by Inshallah ('if Allah wills').  Thus life is constantly punctuated by the remembrance of God.  It is a symptom of this that almsgiving ranks with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and confession of faith as one of the five 'pillars' of Islam.  Within this holistic conception the 'secular' spheres of politics, government, law, commerce, science and the arts all come within the scope of religious obedience.

What Hick calls a "holistic conception," I would call totalitarian.  Islam is totalitarian in a two-fold sense.  It aims to regulate every aspect and every moment of the individual believer's life. (And if you are not a believer, you must either convert or accept dhimmitude.)   But it is also totalitarian in a corporate sense in that it aims to control every aspect of society in all its spheres, just as Hick points out supra.

Islam, therefore, is profoundly at odds with the values of the West.  For we in the West, whether liberals or conservatives, accept church(mosque)-state separation.  We no doubt argue heatedly over what exactly it entails, but we are agreed on the main principle.  I regularly criticize the shysters of the ACLU for their extremist positions on this question; but I agree with them that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."

This raises a very serious question.  Is Islam –  pure, unEnlightened, un-watered-down, fundamentalist, theocratic Islam — deserving of First Amendment protection?  We read in the First Amendment that Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion.  Should that be understood to mean that the Federal government shall not prohibit the  establishment and  free exercise of a  totalitarian, fundamentalist  theocratic religion in a particular state, say Michigan? 

The USA is a Christian nation with a secular government.  Suppose there was a religion whose aim was to subvert our secular government.  Does commitment to freedom of religion enjoin toleration of such a religion?

 

Test Your Religious Knowledge

Here.  Your humble correspondent answered 14 out of 15 questions correctly for a score of 93%. 

Jews are at the top, which is no surprise.  As I once said to my Israeli friend Peter, "I have never met a stupid Jew."  He immediately shot back, "Then you've never lived in Israel."  The alacrity of the repartee of course supports  my point about Jewish intelligence.  Atheists come in right after Jews, which again is no surprise: people who identify as atheists are exercised over religion and know a lot about it the better to oppose it. Hispanics and Blacks are at the bottom.  A liberal will infer that the survey is racist.

Joseph Bottum on the Ground Zero Mosque

Here.  Excerpt:

Of course, the first thing that has to be said about the building of an enormous Muslim center so close to the destroyed towers is that it’s wildly offensive. And the second thing to be said is that it’s wildly constitutional.

The offensiveness looks like this: Regardless of how it is intended, it will be perceived by radical Muslims around the world as a giant monument, in the heart of the beast itself, to their success in attacking America. Indeed, it will be perceived by many Americans that way. The funereal and memorial emotion that embraces one on a visit to the Ground Zero site will be weakened—poisoned, just a little—by the presence of this new, grand construction. 
  

Louis Lavelle on the Stoic Wisdom and its Limitations

I am a lover of the Stoics. Why waste time on New Age hucksters when one can read Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius? But while the Stoics can take us a good stretch down the road to wisdom, they cannot bring us to the end — a fact long appreciated by first-rate minds. In late antiquity, Aurelius Augustinus offered a critique of the Stoics in Book XIX, Chapter 4 of The City of God, a critique worthy of being called classical. We will have to examine that critique one of these days. But today I want to draw your attention to some passages from Chapter 10, Section 4 of Louis Lavelle's The Dilemma of Narcissus (Allen & Unwin, 1973, tr. Gairdner):

The Stoics claimed that happiness depends on accurately distinguishing between the things which depend on us and those which do not. Govern the former by reason, and ignore the latter — this was their principle of supreme wisdom, to the practice of which our will should be unceasingly applied.

But hiding behind this apparent humility there is the spirit of sovereign pride and contempt, contempt for all those things which do not depend on us but of which our life is nevertheless composed, and with which it is inextricably entwined. It is impossible to assert that we can remain indifferent to them . . . . (p. 154)

There are things that are in our power, and things that are not. The flood that sweeps away my house is not in my power; but my response to the flood is. I can make myself miserable by blaming other people, from the president down; or I can limit my suffering by taking control of my own mind. Your insulting me is not in my power; but whether or not I let it affect me is in my power. And so on.

The Stoics had a very important insight into the mind's power to regulate itself. When you really understand their point it can come as quite a revelation. I was once thinking of a dead relative and how he had wronged me. I began to succumb to negative thoughts, but caught myself and suddenly realized that I am doing it. In other words, I am allowing these negative thoughts to arise and I have the power to blot them out. The incident was years in the past, and the malefactor was long dead. So the present perturbatio mentis was entirely my own creation. My sudden realization of this — aided no doubt by my reading of Stoic and other wisdom literature — caused it to vanish.

In short, the Stoics discerned the mind's amazing power to regulate itself and master, rather than be mastered by, its thoughts. They saw that, within certain limits, we create our own reality. Within limits, we can make ourselves miserable and we can make ourselves blessed. There is an inner citadel into which one can retreat, and where a very real peace can be enjoyed — assuming that one is willing to practice, rather than merely read about, the Stoic precepts.

What Lavelle sees, however, is that Stoic practices take one only so far along the road to happiness. He sees that Stoicism cannot be a final solution since it rests on a denial of our finitude. In theistic terms, it rests on a denial of our createdness. (A materialist could perhaps agree with my general point by substituting material conditionedness for createdness.)

My creaturely finitude is reflected in the fact that I have no control over either my existence or my essence (nature). Thus it was little more than existentialist braggadocio and romantic posturing when the early Sartre in "Existentialism is a Humanism" (1946) claimed that "existence precedes essence" in a sense to deny that there is any pre-given human nature, and that "Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself."

The truth is that we have a nature whether created by God or 'created' by material forces, and this nature prescribes limits to our freedom. As prescribing limits to our freedom, our nature is not within the control of our freedom. We cannot lift ourselves into an enduring happiness by our own bootstraps. We are held hostage by a physical world that is not our making and not in our control, except superficially. Tranquillitas animi is a wonderful thing, and partially attainable by Stoic and cognate methods; but it can't be worth that much if a stomach cramp or a buzzing fly can interrupt it. I can to a certain extent identify with the hegemonikon or guiding element within me which stands above the fray, observing it. I am that ruling element, that transcendental witness. But I am also this indigent body, this wholly exposed mass of frailties. And try as I might, I cannot dissociate myself from it. The ideal of the Sage who negotiates with perfect equanimity fortune and misfortune alike is unattainable by us. In the end, the precepts and practices of Stoicism leave us in the lurch.

We cannot save ourselves via the path of political activism as many 20th century Communists learned the hard way. But a wholly self-reliant quietism is also a dead-end. We cannot be lamps unto ourselves. If salvation is to be had, it must come from Elsewhere. Nur ein Gott kann uns retten, "Only a God can save us," as Heidegger said in his Spiegel-interview near the end of his life.

The Two Kinds of People and the Manifold Uses of Blogging

I once worked as a mail handler at the huge Terminal Annex postal facility in downtown Los Angeles. I was twenty or twenty one. An old black man, thinking to instruct me in the ways of the world, once said to me, "Beell, dey is basically two kahnds a people in dis world, the fuckahs and the fuckees, and you gonna have to decide which side you gonna be on." This morning I found the thought expressed with a bit more elegance by Giacomo Leopardi (1798- 1837) in his Pensieri:

The human race, from the individual on up, is split into two camps: the bullies and the bullied. Neither law nor force of any kind, nor advancement in civilization and philosophy, can prevent men now or in the future from belonging to one of these two camps. So, he who can choose, must choose. Although not everyone is able, nor is the choice always available. (Pensieri [Thoughts], tr. Di Piero, Louisiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69)

Am I endorsing the alternative?  No. I am merely presenting it for your consideration.

My posts are not all of the same type. Some are just notes to myself, records of what I am reading and thinking about. Others are meant to draw the reader's attention to this or that for his edification or delectation. Some carefully argue a thesis I believe to be true. Others merely assert a thesis I believe to be true. Some are sloppy and impressionistic. In others, the rigor mentis approaches rigor mortis.

Some posts are aphoristic. But don't assume that an aphorism cannot have deep and rigorous and systematic thought at its origin. Some posts are polemical. There are people who do not occupy the space of reasons so that attempting to engage them in that space is a fool's errand. They are in need of defeat or perhaps therapy, not rational persuasion. The verbal equivalent of a blow to the head or a kick in the ass will do them more good than a patient setting-forth of reasons beyond their comprehension.

The uses of blogging are manifold.

The Politics of Gold

The price of gold has topped $1300 an ounce.  And this while inflation is low.  The upswing is driven mainly by the fear of inflation.  In order to handle otherwise unsustainable levels of debt, the government will resort to 'monetizing' it, i.e., printing money and causing inflation.  By counterfeiting its own currency, a government steals real wealth from its citizens.  Is this acceptable to you?  If not, you may wish to register your disapprobation come November 2nd. 

For more insight, see Thomas Sowell's Politics Versus Gold.

An Argument for Necessary Beings

1. A contingent being is one the nonexistence of which is possible, whereas a necessary being is one the nonexistence of which is impossible. (At play in these definitions is broadly logical possibility which is between narrowly logical and nomological possibility.)

2. Framing a definition is one thing, showing that something answers to it is another. Are there any necessary beings? Since a necessary being could be either abstract or concrete, I can show that there are necessary beings by showing that there is at least one abstract necessary being. To convey the senses of 'concrete' and 'abstract' by example one could say that God and Socrates are concrete while the proposition 7 is prime and Socrates' singleton — {Socrates} — are abstract. All and only concreta are causally active/passive whereas abstracta are not. Please avoid the mistake of thinking that x is concrete iff x is physical.

3. Some truths are necessary, others are contingent. 'I am now blogging' is contingently true: it is true, but it might not have been true. I might have been doing something inconsistent with blogging now, sleeping for instance. By contrast, 'If I am blogging, then I am writing' is necessarily true. To see this, negate the sentence in question. The result is a sentence expressing a broadly logical impossibility: 'I am blogging and it is not the case that I am writing.' Consider also, 'If I am blogging, then it is not the case that I am not blogging.' This too is necessarily true, except that the negation expresses a narrowly logical impossibility: 'I am blogging and I am not blogging.'

I don't see how any reasonable person can deny that there are necessary truths. Another example: '7 is a prime number' expresses a necessary truth. This doesn't just happen to be true in the way that it just happens to be true that there are seven cans of Dr. Pepper left in the reefer. It is necessarily true: true in all (BL)-possible worlds.

4. A truth is a true truth-bearer. Now I don't understand how ink on paper, or chalk on a blackboard, or any physical modification of any physical medium, no matter how complex the modification and how complex the medium, could be true or false. I don't understand how anything physical could, qua physical, be a truth-bearer or truth-vehicle, i.e., an item capable of being either true or false. Marks on paper cannot be either true or false. They just exist. But suppose you think they — or complex modifications of the stuff between your ears — can be either true or false. Still, the marked-up paper exists contingently. Consequently, the sentence-token '7 is prime' scratched onto the paper exists contingently. Similarly for anything inscribed in your brain. Your brain and its 'inscriptions' are contingent.

5. But then how could any truth be necessarily true? How could any truth be necessarily true if no truth-bearer is necessarily existent?  There is no possible world in which 7 is not prime, but there are worlds in which there are no material things.  Material things are contingent.  How could the proposition in question be true in those worlds if there is nothing in those worlds to serve as truth-bearer? Let's spell this out.

If an item has a property, then, pace Meinong, the item exists: existence is a necessary condition of property-possession.   So if an item such as a truth-bearer has the property of being necessarily true, then that truth-bearer necessarily exists. For if the truth-bearer is true in every world, then it exists in every world.  Therefore, if there are necessary truths, then there are necessary beings. Now there are necessary truths. Therefore, there are necessary beings. Given that everything physical is contingent, these necessary beings are nonphysical. So they are either mental (accusatives of mental acts) or abstract. For present purposes, it doesn't matter which of these they are. The present point is that there is good reason to believe in (i.e., believe that there are) necessary beings.

6. But I hear an objection coming: An item can have a property essentially without having it necessarily. Thus Socrates is essentially human, but not necessarily human. He is human in every world in which he exists, but he does not exist in every world. So he is essentially but not necessarily human. Why can't the proposition expressed by '7 is prime' be like that? Why can't it be essentially (as opposed to accidentally) true, true in every world in which it exists, but neither true nor false in the worlds in which it does not exist? If this is the way it is, then your argument from necessary truths to necessary beings collapses.

The objector is suggesting that truth-bearers are contingent beings. But this is problematic as Alvin Plantinga argues (Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford UP, 1993, p. 119.) Suppose that truth-bearers are brain inscriptions, and consider the proposition

1. There are brain inscriptions.

(1) is such that it could not have been false. For in a possible world in which there are no brain inscriptions, there are no truth-bearers, which implies that (1) in those words is neither true nor false, hence not false. And in every world in which there are brain inscriptions, (1) is of course true. So (1) is true in every world in which it exists, and not false in every world in which it does not exist. So (1) could not have been false. But this bizarre. Surely there might have been no brains and no brain-inscriptions. It is not necessarily true that there are brains. If it is not necessarily true that there are brains, then it is possibly true that there are no brains. Now what is this possibility of there being no brains? It is plausibly identified with the possibly being true of the proposition, There are no brains. But then this proposition must exist in those possible worlds in which it is not true.