Author: Bill Vallicella

Now the Battle Begins in Dead Earnest

Speaker Pelosi really outdid herself last night in point of mendacity.  She referred to the opening sentence of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness . . ."  She then tried to link yesterday's successful leftist takeover of the health care system to the principles and values of this great document, suggesting that there is a right to health care.  How's that for chutzpah?  What is despicable about her and her ilk is their mendacity: they know full well that their welfare state principles are radically at odds with the founders' conception of limited government, but they refuse to state clearly to the American people what they stand for.

But it ain't over til it's over and these lying leftists will have hell to pay.  The battle is just beginning.  Some commentary:  Victor Davis Hanson, Newt Gingrich, Varadarajan, Trende.

An Empirical Refutation of the Law of Non-Contradiction?

Nice work if you can get it!  Here we read:

A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical "ground state"– the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as well as as atomic-scale particles.

So we have a little object, visible to the naked eye, that is simultaneously moving and not moving.  Is that possible?  Yes, if one part is moving and a distinct part is not moving.  Presumably that is not what is meant above.  What is meant is that the whole object is simultaneously both moving and not moving.  That too is possible if 'simultaneously' or 'at the same time' is being applied to an interval of time.  Consider a temporal interval five seconds in duration.  Let 't' refer to that interval.  It is surely possible that object O, the whole of it,  be at rest at t and in motion at t.  But this triviality is also not what  is meant above. 

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I’m Telling You All I Know

The Website of Novelist, Short Story Writer & Poet William Michaelian.  A search for writing about Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel brought me to this site.  Couldn't find a copy in Border's the other day.  Moving from the Rs to the Ws, I noted the resurgence of Ayn Rand: several of her titles in new editions were prominently displayed.  I had the thought that, as long as there are adolescents, there will be no lack of readers of Nietzsche, Rand, and Kerouac.  Every generation discovers them anew and finds something to relate to before moving on to the better and the truer.

At first in the bookstore I drew a blank: couldn't remember the name of the author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River.  So I asked a matronly lady who worked that section and who looked intelligent.  She had never heard of these titles.  People nowadays don't know jackshit.  But I feel too good this Sunday afternoon to start in on a rant, having acquitted myself nobly and without screw-up this morning in a 5 K trail race.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: A Baker’s Dozen Road Songs Plus One

Entangled deep in the psyche of every true American is a deep love of the open road.  Here are some tunes to be enjoyed while seated at the helm of a solid chunk of Detroit iron, while 'motorvatin' over some lonesome desert highway in the magic west of buttes and mesas, with four on the road, one in the hand, and the other wrapped around a fine cigar or a cup of steaming java.

Woody Guthrie, Hard Travelin'.  Hank Williams, Lost Highway.  Spade Cooley, Detour.  Leonard Cohen, Passing Through.  Bob Dylan, Highway 51 Blues.  Robert Johnson, Crossroad Blues.  Eric Clapton, Crossroads. Nelson Riddle, Route 66.  Chuck Berry, Get Your Kicks on Route 66.  Johnny Cash, I've Been Everywhere.  The Doors, Roadhouse Blues.  Johnny Cash, Highway 61 Revisited.  Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited.

Steve Allen and Jack Kerouac, A reading from On the Road.

Aphorisms Good and Bad

These, by Nicolas Gomez Davila, tr. Michael Gilleland, are good:

With God there are only individuals. (I, 16)

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An Analogy for the Categorial Difference Between Consciousness and Matter

Some people pin their hopes on future science for a solution of the problem of consciousness as if hope, which has a place in religion, has any place in a strictly scientific worldview. If we only knew enough about the brain, these people opine, we would understand how consciousness arises from it.

But consider an analogy. Suppose you explain to a person that the natural number series is infinite, that there is no largest natural number since for every n, there is n + 1. The person seems to understand, but then objects when you say that it is impossible that there be a largest natural number due to the very nature of the natural number series. Your use of 'impossible' sticks in the guy's craw. He tilts Leftward, you see, and he thinks, quite confusedly, that anything's possible. He doesn't like it when people invoke natures and impossibilities and necessities and  lay claim to a  priori knowledge.  That's too rigid and static for his taste. So he says,

Troubles With Truthmaking: The Truthmaker and Veritas Sequitur Esse Principles

Some recent attempts (by G. Oppy, J. Brower, A. Pruss and perhaps others) at making sense of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) have invoked the truthmaker principle (TMP).  I made heavy use of TMP in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence  (Kluwer 2002), though not in defense of DDS. Being a self-critical sort, I am now re-examining the case for TMP.  Note that acceptance of TMP does not straightaway commit one to acceptance of any particular category of entity as truthmakers such as concrete states of affairs.  One could accept TMP and hold that truthmakers are tropes.  And there are other possibilities. So before we can address the truthmaker defense of DDS we must (i) argue for TMP and then (ii) decide on what can and cannot function as truthmakers.  In this post I consider some of what can be said for and against truthmaking in general. It looks like we might be in for a long series of posts on this fascinating but difficult topic.

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Should Conservatives Take the High Road When Opposing the Left?

This just over the transom from a regular reader:

Your recent, small quip about the possibility of accusing liberals of racism had me curious of something. Clearly you think that many on the left use unfair or unjust means of persuasion (Attempting to label their opponents as racists, for example.) And I've often heard it lamented that liberals tend to fight tooth and nail, using every fair and unfair advantage they can, in a political dispute (see the possibilities of the 'nuclear option' or bypassing a vote in this health care debate, etc.) while conservatives tend to be reluctant to.

So here's my question. Do you think conservatives should mimic liberals in this regard – fight tooth and nail, use every means available, including calling their opponents racists, etc,? Or do you think conservatives should (regardless of pure pragmatic effectiveness) always take the high road? Doubly so since conservatives actually believe there is a real high road to take?

High road low road I wish I had a good answer to this excellent question.  First of all, I agree to the central presupposition of the question, namely, that leftists will do and say anything to win, no matter how outrageous.  (Here is a recent example of the  widespread race-baiting and slander that even prominent leftists routinely engage in.)   They do it because they think the end justifies the means, and  because of their conviction that, as the Bard has it, "all's fair in love and war."  Leftists think of themselves as good and decent people who are battling valiantly against the dark forces of bigotry, racism, religious fanaticism, science-denial, etc.  And because they see themselves in a noble fight against people who are not just wrong, but evil, they feel entirely justified in doing whatever it takes to win. 

The essence of it is that the Left accepts and lives by what I call the Converse Clausewitz Principle: Politics is war conducted by other means.  (Von Clausewitz's famous remark was to the effect that war is politics conducted by other means.)  The party that ought to be opposing the Left, the Republicans, apparently does not believe that this is what politics is.  This puts them at a serious disadvantage. 

 David Horowitz, commenting on "Politics is war conducted by other means," writes:

In political warfare you do not just fight to prevail in an argument, but rather to destroy the enemy's fighting ability.  Republicans often seem to regard political combats as they would a debate before the Oxford Political Union, as though winning depended on rational arguments and carefully articulated principles.  But the audience of politics is not made up of Oxford dons, and the rules are entirely different.

You have only thirty seconds to make your point.  Even if you had time to develop an argument, the audience you need to reach (the undecided and those in the middle who are not paying much attention) would not get it.  Your words would go over some of their heads and the rest would not even hear them (or quickly forget) amidst the bustle and pressure of everyday life.  Worse, while you are making your argument the other side has already painted you as a mean-spirited, borderline racist controlled by religious zealots, securely in the pockets of the rich.  Nobody who sees you in this way is going to listen to you in any case.  You are politically dead.

Politics is war.  Don't forget it. ("The Art of Political War" in Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey Spence 2003, pp. 349-350)

It is clear how Horowitz would answer my reader's question:  Because politics is war, conservatives, if they want to win, must deploy the same tactics the lefties deploy.  Joe SixPack does not watch C-Span or read The Weekly Standard.  He won't sit still for Newt Gingrich as this former history professor calmly articulates conservative principles.  He needs to be fired up and energized.  The Left understands this.  You will remember that the race-hustling poverty pimp Jesse Jackson never missed an opportunity to refer to Gingrich's "Contract with America" as "Contract ON America."  That outrageous slander was of course calculated and was effective.  Leftists know how to fight dirty, and therefore the 'high road' is the road to political nowhere in present circumstances.

The fundamental problem, I am afraid, is that there is no longer any common ground. When people stand on common ground, they can iron out their inevitable differences in a civil manner within the context of shared assumptions.  But when there are no longer any (or many) shared assumptions,  then politics does become a form of warfare in which your opponent is no longer a fellow citizen committed to similar values, but an enemy who must be destroyed (if not physically, at least in respect of his political power) if you and your way of life are to be preserved.

As I have said before, the bigger and more intrusive the government, the more to fight over.  If we could reduce government to its legitimate constitutionally justified functions, then we could reduce the amount of fighting.  But of course the size, scope, and reach of government is precisely one of the issues most hotly debated.

Coming back to my reader's question, I incline toward the Horowitz answer, though I am not comfortable with it.  You will have to decide for yourself, taking into consideration the particulars of your situation.  Some of us are buying gold and 'lead.'  I suspect things are going to get hot in the years to to come, and I'm not talking about global warming.  Things are about to get interesting.

Clarity is Not Enough

This scribbler has penned paragraphs which, upon re-reading, not even he could make head nor tail of. That is often a sign of bad writing. It can also indicate sloppy thinking. But it may also show a noble attempt to press against the bounds of sense and the limits of intelligibility.  And if philosophy does not make that attempt, what good is it?

There is, after all, such a thing as superficial clarity. (He said with a sidelong glance in the direction of Rudolf and Ludwig.)

Living Right While Thinking Left

Liberals who have amounted to something in life through advanced study, hard work, deferral of   gratification, self-control, accepting responsibility for their actions and the rest of the old-fashioned virtues are often strangely  hesitant to preach those same conservative virtues to those most in need of them. These liberals  live Right and garner the benefits, but think Left. They do not make excuses for themselves, but they do for others. And what has worked for them they do not think will work for others. Their attitude is curiously condescending.  If we conservatives used 'racist' as loosely and irresponsibly as they do, we might even tag their attitude 'racist.'

The First Step to Enjoying Running

Arthur Lydiard, Run to the Top (2nd ed. Auckland: Minerva, 1967, p. 4):

The first step to enjoying running — and anyone will enjoy it if he takes that first step — is to achieve perfect fitness.  I don't mean just the ability to run half a mile once a week without collapsing.  I mean the ability to run great distances with ease at a steady speed.

That's one hell of a first step.  But the great coach is right: you will never enjoy running or understand its satisfactions if you jog around the block for 20 minutes four times per week.   I find that only after one hour of running am I properly primed and stoked.  And then the real run begins.  Or as I recall Joe Henderson saying back in the '70s in a Runner's World column: Run the first hour for your body, the second for your self.

Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the Incarnation, how can the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal and impassible Logos, be identical to a particular mortal man?  These puzzles get us thinking about identity and difference and set us hunting for analogies and models from the domain of  ordinary experience.  We seek intelligibility by an objective route.   We ought to consider that this objectifying approach might be wrongheaded and that we ought to examine a mystical and subjective approach, a 'Platonic' approach as opposed to an 'Aristotelian' one.  See my earlier quotation of Heinrich Heine.

1. The essence of Christianity is contained in the distinct but related doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Josef Pieper (Belief and Faith, p. 103) cites the following passages from the doctor angelicus: Duo nobis credenda proponuntur: scil. occultum Divinitatis . . . et mysterium humanitatis Christi. II, II, 1, 8. Fides nostra in duobus principaliter consistit: primo quidem in vera Dei cognitione . . . ; secundo in mysterio incarnationis Christi. II, II, 174, 6.

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