It is not uncommon to hear people confuse patriotism with jingoism. So let's spend a few moments this Fourth of July reflecting on the difference.
Author: Bill Vallicella
Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept
I had an excellent discussion with Mike Valle on a number of topics yesterday afternoon. The following post exfoliates one of the themes of our discussion.
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone so dramatic a deformation." (206) He speaks of "the migration of the concept of God in the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts." (205)
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Whittaker Chambers on Beethoven
Whittaker Chambers (Witness, p. 19) on the Third Movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony:
. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.
Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.
In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of. Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.
Ideals
Not only do we fail to live up to the ideals we have, we fail to have the ideals we ought to have. There are two problems here, the first pertaining more to the will, the second more to the intellect, or rather to the faculty of moral discernment. Let us consider the second problem.
It is not enough to have ideals, one must have the right ideals. This is why being idealistic, contrary to common opinion, is not always good. Idealism ran high among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schuetzstaffel (SS). The same is true of countless millions who became Communists in the 20th century: they sacrificed their 'bourgeois' careers and selfish interests to serve the Party. (See Whittaker Chambers, Witness, required reading for anyone who would understand Communism.) But it would have been better had the members of these organizations been cynics and slackers. It is arguably better to have no ideals than to have the wrong ones. Nazism and Communism brought unprecedented amounts of evil into the world on the backs of idealistic motives and good intentions. Connected with this is the point that wanting to do good is not good enough: one must know what the good is and what one morally may and may not do to attain it.
Linguistic Smuggling
Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchy, p. 72:
Only religious superstition or the folly of idealist metaphysics could encourage us to assume that nature will prove ultimately rational . . . .
Linguistic smuggling has all the advantages of theft over honest toil. The mere phrase 'religious superstition' smuggles in the proposition that all religion is superstition, while 'the folly of idealist metaphysics' insinuates the proposition that idealist metaphysics is foolish. Both propositions are false; but even if you disagree with me on that, you must agree that they cannot be assumed to be true.
A critical reader doesn't let himself be bullied by verbiage of the above sort. He unpacks the loaded phrases and tests their explosive power, if any.
Hume: Occasionalism Without God?
I wonder if I can get any of my esteemed readers to swallow the following suggestion. Ten years or so ago it came into my head that Hume's analysis of causation in terms of (i) temporal precedence, (ii) spatiotemporal contiguity, and (iii) constant conjunction can be reasonably viewed as occasionalism without God.
My Preferred Modes of Locomotion
Ambulatory and cursory, primarily, and then in distant second and third places respectively, natatory and saltatory.
Ducasse on the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation
0. Herewith, some interpretative notes on Curt Ducasse, "On the Nature and Observability of the Causal Relation," in Causation, eds. Sosa and Tooley, Oxford 1993, pp. 125-136.
1. Assuming that causality is a relation (not entirely obvious!), the question arises as to what sorts of entity can serve as its relata. Following Schopenhauer, whom he cites, Curt Ducasse holds that in strict propriety only events can be causes and effects. An event is either a change or an absence of a change. Thus a tree's losing its leaves is an event, but a tree is not. In strict propriety, it makes no sense to say that Bill was killed by a mountain lion. One has to say something like: Bill was killed by the attack of a mountain lion. In the attack the lion is the agent as Bill is the patient, but the latter is no more the effect than the former is the cause. The cause is the lion's attack, the effect is Bill's death. Some theorists distinguish between agent-causation and event-causation, but for Ducasse, there is no such thing as agent-causation: causation just is event-causation.
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: The King
The lately bruited hosannahs to a certain pretender to the throne notwithstanding — may peace finally be upon him — there is but one king. She Thinks I Still Care. He'll Have to Go. This is music with human meaning.
Apples and Sparkplugs
All too frequently people say, ‘You’re comparing apples and oranges’ in order to convey the idea that two things are so dissimilar as to to disallow any significant comparison. Can’t they do better than this? Apples and oranges are highly comparable in respects too numerous to mention. Both are fruits, both are edible, both grow on trees, both are good sources of fiber, both contain Vitamin C, etc.
Why not say, ‘You are comparing apples and sparkplugs’? Apples are naturally occurrent and edible while sparkplugs are inedible artifacts. That’s a serious difference.
This reminds me of a story I read as a boy in my hometown newspaper, the Post Advocate. (We paper boys called it the Pest Aggravate.) A man ate an entire car, sparkplugs and all. A feat of automotive asceticism to rival the pillar antics of Simon Stylites. He did it by cutting the car and its parts into small pieces that he then washed down with generous libations of buttermilk.
But a car is not just solid parts, but various fluids. You’ve got your gasoline, your crankcase oil, your tranny fluid, not to mention coolant, windshield wiper liquid, and what all else. How did he negotiate that stuff? Well, I suppose anything can be passed throught the gastrointestinal system if sufficiently watered down. So if a man gets it into his head to eat an entire car, he can do it. As my 4th grade teacher Sr. Elizabeth (Lizard) Marie used to say, "Where there’s a will there’s a way."
The Medical-Industrial Complex, Part II
Part I is here.
The liberal-leftist animus against corporations is undoubtedly excessive, as is their pollyannish trust in Big Government solutions to every problem under the sun; but this should not blind us to corporate irresponsibility especially when the corporate types work hand-in-hand with liberals to 'medicalize' the ordinary difficulties of life.
Meaning and Immortality
Some feel that if the fact of bodily death spells the extinction of the person, then this fact, if it is a fact, consigns human life to meaninglessness. This is a very strong intuition among those who have it, and I have it. But there are certain arguments from the naturalist camp that need to be addressed. I will now examine some of these arguments.
One can imagine a naturalist conceding arguendo that our lives do not end with bodily death, but then proceeding to question the bearing this could have on the meaning of life. For how could an extension of life beyond the grave give meaning to life this side of the grave? Wouldn't the same problems about existential meaning that arise on this side also arise on the far side? If this is so, then the postulation of an afterlife would accomplish nothing towards giving life a meaning.
The Medical-Industrial Complex
No doubt you have heard of ADD. Recently I learned of a new medical condition known as ADHD: attention deficit hyperactive disorder.
What could be called the medical-industrial complex is a curious alliance of soft-headed liberals eager to invent diseases and celebrate their 'victims' and money-grubbing corporate types out to turn a quick buck. Liberals invent the diseases and syndromes, while the big pharmaceutical companies supply the drugs for their alleviation. Compliant shrinks and medicos write the prescriptions and serve as go-betweens while Big Government programs divert tax dollars from legitimate uses to enrich the doctors and drug companies.
Emerson on Thoreau’s Lack of Ambition
Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry from June, 1851:
Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of [the] huckleberry party. (Bliss Perry, ed., The Heart of Emerson's Journals, Houghton Mifflin, 1926, p. 256.)
As a former student of engineering, I am glad Thoreau stuck to his walking and writing. Like Kierkegaard, he served as a much-needed corrective to the hustle and frenzy of his age. There is need of slackers to counterbalance the go-getters, and if slackers need a patron saint, Henry David would be a fine choice as would Walt Whitman.
Of E-Mail and Doing Nothing
I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:
Dolce Far Niente
Sweet To Do Nothing
which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.
So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizeable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.