My attempts to lessen his negativity are not meeting with much success. It's as if he cannot see that it would be desirable should he learn to control his mind. Part of the problem is that people feel so justified in their hatreds. Their feeling of justification makes it impossible for them to appreciate the folly of allowing negative thoughts rent-free lodging in their heads.
Author: Bill Vallicella
We Annoy Ourselves
There are not a few situations in life in which we are tempted to say or think of another, 'Your behavior is annoying!' Thinking this, we only make ourselves more annoyed. Saying it is even worse. For then two are annoyed. Instead of saying or thinking of something external to oneself that he, she, or it is annoying, think to oneself: I am annoying myself, or I am allowing myself to become annnoyed.
Just as one enjoys oneself, one annoys oneself. Enjoyment of a thing external to oneself is enjoyment of oneself in relation to the thing. The same goes for annoyance. There is of course an objective stimulus, not in one's power. One's tablemate, for example, is slurping his soup. His slurping is not in one's power, or else not conveniently in one's power. (Shooting him only makes matters worse.) But how one responds to the slurping is within one's power.
Stoicism may not take us very far along the road to happiness, but where it takes us is worth visiting.
It goes without saying that adjusting one's attitude is the appropriate response only in some of life's difficult situations. One does not adjust one's attitude to the 'annoying' behavior of a terrorist: one literally shoots him, thereby inducing a radical attitude adjustment in him. If the shooting adversely affects one's ataraxia, too bad. Better a little less tranquillitas animi than death or submission to the religion of 'peace.' Better his being red than your being dead.
Trope Simplicity and Divine Simplicity Compared
I concluded my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the divine simplicity with an attempt at softening up the contemporary reader for the possible coherence of the doctrine of divine simplicity by adducing some garden variety examples of contemporary philosophical posits that are ontologically simple in one or more of the ways in which God is said to be simple. I gave the example of tropes. One might of course proceed in the opposite direction by tarring tropes with a close cousin of the (alleged) absurdity of the doctrine of divine simplicity. You decide whether there is anything to my comparison:
Tropes are ontologically simple entities. On trope theory, properties are assayed not as universals but as particulars: the redness of a tomato is as particular, as unrepeatable, as the tomato. Thus a tomato is red, not in virtue of exemplifying a universal, but by having a redness trope as one of its constituents (on one version of trope theory) or by being a substratum in which a redness trope inheres (on a second theory). A trope is a simple entity in that there is no distinction between it and the property it ‘has.’ Thus a redness trope is red , but it is not red by instantiating redness, or by having redness as a constituent, but by being (a bit of) redness. So a trope is what it has. It has redness by being identical to (a bit of) redness. In this respect it is like God who is what he has. God has omniscience by being (identical to) omniscience. Just as there is no distinction between God and his omniscience, there is no distinction in a redness trope between the trope and its redness. And just as the simple God is not a particular exemplifying universals, a trope is not a particular exemplifying a universal. In both cases we have a particular that is also a property, a subject of predication that is also a predicable entity, where the predicable entity is predicated of itself. Given that God is omniscience, he is predicable of himself. Given that a redness trope is a redness, it is predicable of itself. An important difference, of course, is that whereas God is unique, tropes are not: there is and can be only one God, but there are many redness tropes.
Not only is each trope identical to the property it has, in each trope there is an identity of essence and existence. A trope is neither a bare particular nor an uninstantiated property. It is a property-instance, an indissoluble unity of a property and itself as instance of itself. As property, it is an essence, as instance, it is the existence of that essence. Because it is simple, essence and existence are identical in it. Tropes are thus necessary beings (beings whose very possibility entails their actuality) as they must be if they are to serve as the ontological building blocks of everything else (on the dominant one-category version of trope theory). In the necessity of their existence, tropes resemble God.
If one can bring oneself to countenance tropes, then one cannot object to the simple God on the ground that (i) nothing can be identical to its properties, or (ii) in nothing are essence and existence identical. For tropes are counterexamples to (i) and (ii).
Russell’s Teapot: Does it Hold Water?
Here is a famous passage from Bertrand Russell's Is There a God?
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
One thing Russell is doing in this passage is making an unexceptionable point about burden of proof and/or the ad ignorantiam fallacy. If the existence of X has not been disproven, it does not follow that X exists, or even that it is reasonable to believe that X exists. So if anyone were to affirm the existence of something like Russell's celestial teapot or Edward Abbey's angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon, then the onus probandi would be on him to support his outlandish claims. The burden of proof would not rest on those who deny or dismiss such claims.
So far, so good. Russell is of course doing more than underscoring a couple of obvious points in the theory of argumentation. He is applying his points of logic to the God question. Here too I have no complaint. If the existence of God has not been disproven, it does not follow that God exists or even that it is reasonable to believe that God exists.
But the real appeal to atheists and agnostics of the Teapot passage rests on a third move Russell makes. He is clearly suggesting that belief in God (i.e., belief that God exists) is epistemically on a par with believing in a celestial teapot. Just as we have no reason to believe in celestial teapots, irate lunar unicorns (lunicorns?), flying spaghetti monsters, and the like, we have no reason to believe in God. But perhaps we should distinguish between a strong and a weak reading of Russell's suggestion:
S. Just as we cannot have any reason to believe that an empirically undetectable celestial teapot exists, we cannot have any reason to believe that God exists.
W. Just as we do not have any reason to believe that a celestial teapot exists, we do not have any reason to believe that God exists.
Now it seems to me that both (S) and (W) are plainly false: we have all sorts of reasons for believing that God exists. Here Alvin Plantinga sketches about two dozen theistic arguments. Atheists will not find them compelling, of course, but that is irrelevant. The issue is whether a reasoned case can be made for theism, and the answer is in the affirmative. Belief in God and in Russell's teapot are therefore not on a par since there are no empirical or theoretical reasons for believing in his teapot.
Another suggestion embedded in the Russell passage is the notion that if God existed, he would be just another physical thing in the physical universe. But of course this has nothing to do with anything maintained by any sophisticated theist. God is a purely spiritual being.
Another problem with the teapot analogy is that God as traditionally conceived in the West is not an isolani — to use a chess expression. He is not like an isolated pawn, unsupported and unsupporting. For if God exists, then God is the cause of the existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic being.
This is connected with the fact that one can argue from general facts about the universe to the existence of God, but not from such facts to the existence of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. Thus there are various sorts of cosmological argument that proceed a contingentia mundi to a ground of contingent beings. But there is no similar a posteriori argument to a celestial teapot. There are also arguments from truth, from consciousness, from apparent design, from desire, from morality, and others besides.
The very existence of these arguments shows two things. First, since they move from very general facts (the existence of contingent beings, the existence of truth) to the existence of a source of these general facts, they show that God is not a being among beings, not something in addition to what is ordinarily taken to exist. Second, these arguments give positive reason for believing in the existence of God. Are they compelling? No, but then no argument for any substantive philosophical conclusion is compelling.
People like Russell, Dawkins, and Dennett who compare God to a celestial teapot betray by so doing a failure to understand, and engage, the very sense of the theist's assertions. To sum up. (i) God is not a gratuitous posit in that there are many detailed arguments for the existence of God; (ii) God is not a physical being; (iii) God is not a being who simply exists alongside other beings. In all three respects, God is quite unlike a celestial teapot, a lunar uncorn, an invisible hippopotamus, and suchlike concoctions.
I am quite at a loss to explain why anyone should think the Teapot analogy any good. It leaks like a sieve.
Bradley’s Regress and the ‘Adicity’ of Compresence: Is it Dyadic, Triadic, or N-Adic?
This is an addendum to Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress. In that paper I touched upon the question whether the compresence relation is dyadic or not, but did not delve into the matter in any depth. Now I will say a little more with the help of George Molnar's excellent discussion in Powers: A Study in Metaphysics (Oxford 2003), pp. 48-51. Molnar draws upon Peter Simons, "Particulars in Particular Clothing: Three Trope Theories of Substance (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, September 1994, 553-575), which I have also consulted.
Don’t Say ‘Turkey Day’
Say 'Thanksgiving' and give thanks. You don't need to eat turkey to be thankful. Gratitude is a good old conservative virtue. I'd expatiate further, but I've got a race to run. You guessed it: a 'turkey trot.' In Mesa, Arizona, 10 kilometers = 6.2 miles.
With only a couple of exceptions I've run this race every year since 1991. Today is the first case of cold and rainy weather. But I am thankful for the rain since it will 'inspire' me to run faster and harder. I will run as if the Grim Reaper (the ultimate Repo man) is right behind me with the scythe of hypothermia at the ready.
UPDATE (11/28): The rain let up before the 9 AM starting gun went off. My official time: 1:05:15. A shamefully slow time especially given that I lost 23 lbs for this event. In mitigation, I plead the fact that I went on a mere 19 training runs in preparation for the race beginning on September 7th. That, age, and a paucity of fast-twitch fibers add up to my being no favorite of the goddess of running. Nevertheless, I remain her humble acolyte.
Gratitude: A Thanksgiving Homily
We need spiritual exercises just as we need physical, mental, and moral exercises. A good spiritual exercise, and easy to boot, is daily recollection of just how good one has it, just how rich and full one's life is, just how much is going right despite annoyances and setbacks which for the most part are so petty as not to merit consideration.
Start with the physical side of your life. You slept well, and a beautiful new day is dawning. Your breath comes easy, your intestines are in order. Your mind is clear, and so are your eyes. Move every moving part of your body and note how wonderfully it works, without any pain to speak of.
Brew up some java and enjoy its rich taste, all the while rejoicing over the regularity of nature that allows the water to boil one more time, at the same temperature, and the caffeine to be absorbed once more by those greedy intercranial receptors that activate the adrenalin that makes you eager to grab a notebook and jot down all the new ideas that are beginning to percolate up from who knows where.
Finished with your body, move to your mind and its wonderful workings. Then to the house and its appliances including your trusty old computer that reliably, day after day, connects you to the sphere of Nous, the noosphere, to hijack a term of Teilhard de Chardin. And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.
A quotidian enactment of something like the foregoing meditation should do wonders for you.
Trope Theory Meets Bradley’s Regress
This is the paper I am scheduled to present at the Bradley Conference at the University of Geneva in early December, warts and all. No doubt it needs more work. So comments and criticism are welcome.
Trope Theory Meets Bradley's Regress
William F. Vallicella
1. Introduction
One of the perennial tasks of ontology is that of analyzing a thing’s having of properties. That things have properties is a datum consistent with different theories as to what properties are, what the things are that have the properties, and how best the having is to be understood. Any theory will have to provide a three-fold answer to this three-fold question. In so doing, it must show how the elements it distinguishes fit together to form the unified phenomenon of a thing having properties. Analysis is not enough for understanding; synthesis is also needed to show how the elements separated out by analysis form a unity. One of the criteria of adequacy for any theory is whether or not it can avoid the threat to unity known as Bradley’s regress.
This paper argues that trope theory may have trouble passing the Bradley test. In particular, what it argues is that (i) trope theory requires a compresence relation to account for the difference between a unified thing and its disparate property-constituents; (ii) the compresence relation is external and therefore open to Bradleyan challenge; (iii) the various attempts to defuse Bradley’s regress are unsuccessful; hence, (iv) Bradley’s vicious infinite regress is unavoidable and trope theory in its current versions may be untenable.
Carl Schmitt on Compassion
Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, p. 284, entry of 20 December 1949:
Mitleid beruht auf Identifikation; daraus machen die Mystiker des Mitleids, Rousseau und Schopenhauer, eine magische Identität. Aber das Mitleid, dessen man sich bewußt ist, kann nur Selbstmitleid sein und ist deshalb nur Selbstbetrug.
Compassion rests upon identification; the mystics of compassion make of it a magical identity. The compassion of which one is conscious, however, can only be self-compassion and is therefore only self-deception. (tr BV)
The old Nazi's cynical thought is that one deceives oneself when one thinks one is feeling compassion for another. What one is feeling, in truth, is compassion for oneself.
I wonder if Schmitt's thought is coherent. Compassion requires both identification and differentiation. On the one hand, I must identify with you in some manner and in some measure if I am to feel compassion for you. There must be some recognition of common humanity. If I have completely dehumanized you, like the Nazi the Jew, or the Commie the bourgeois class enemy, then there is no question of compassion. On the other hand, compassion as a conscious state is a state of me as distinct from you. So Schmitt is only half right. Compassion is at once self-compassion and other-compassion.
Example. A schoolmate of mine, Lee Didier, was killed at the age of 19 in a motorcycle accident. Ten years later, his mother Mabel was at my mother's funeral. Our eyes met and she gave me a look of compassion such as I have never experienced before or since. She had lost her only child; I had lost my only mother. It is not that Mabel felt my grief, which is impossible; she felt something analogous to my grief. She felt her own grief at the loss of a loved one and at the same time co-suffered (mit-leidet) my grief as an affect analogous to hers. Thus Mabel identified with me, but without any mystical or magical becoming identical with me. It was an identification presupposing differentiation, as opposed to an identification issuing in identity.
So I say Schmitt is wrong. He mistakenly thinks that identification entails identity. He does not see how there can be compassion along with differentiation. Failing to see this, he falls into the cynical view that compassion is at bottom compassion for oneself. If that were true, there would be no compassion.
The Enmity Potential of Thought
Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, hrsg. v. Medem (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1991), S. 213 (14. I. 49):
Das Feindschaftpotential des Denkens ist unendlich. Denn man kann nicht anders als in Gegensätzen denken. Le combat spirituel est plus brutal que la bataille des hommes.
The enmity potential of thought is infinite. For one cannot think otherwise than in oppositions. Spiritual combat is more brutal than a battle of men. (tr. BV)
There is something to this, of course. Philosophy in particular sometimes bears the aspect of a blood sport. But thinking is just as much about the reconciliation of oppositions as it is about their sharpening. A good thinker is rigorous, precise, clear, disciplined. These are virtues martial and manly. But there are also the womanly virtues, in particular, those of the midwife. Socratic maieutic is as important as ramming a precisely formulated thesis down someone's throat or impaling him on the horns of a dilemma. The Cusanean coincidentia oppositorum belongs as much to thought as the oppositio oppositorum.
There is more to philosophy than "A thing is what it is and not some other thing." There is also, "The way up and the way down are the same."
But it is no surprise to find the unrepentant Nazi onesided on the question. We shall have to enter more deeply into the strange world of Carl Schmitt.
He Was a Friend of Mine
John F. Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago today. Here is The Byrds' tribute to the slain leader. They took a traditional song and redid the lyrics. The young Bob Dylan here offers an outstanding interpretation of the old song.
I was in the eighth grade when Kennedy was gunned down. We were assembled in an auditorium for some reason when the principal came in and announced that the president had been shot. The date was November 22, 1963. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was seated behind my quondam inamorata, Christine W. My love for her was from afar, like that of Don Quixote for the fair Dulcinea, but at the moment I was in close physical proximity to her, studying the back of her blouse through which I could make out the strap of her training bra . . . .
By the way, if you want to read a thorough (1,612 pages with notes on a separate CD!) takedown of all the JFK conspiracy speculation, I recommend Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It was a tale of two nonentities, Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. Both were little men who wanted to be big men. Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy. Ruby, acting alone, shot Oswald. That is the long and the short of it. For details, I refer you to Bugliosi.
An Ambiguous Translation from Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
Nessun maggior segno d'essere poco filosofo e poco savio, che volere savia e filosofica tutta la vita.
There's no greater sign of being a poor philosopher and wise man than wanting all of life to be wise and philosophical. (Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri, tr. W. S. Di Piero, Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1981, p. 69)
Do you see how the translation imports an ambiguity that is not present in the Italian original? 'Poor philosopher and wise man' could mean either (poor philosopher) and wise man or poor philosopher and poor wise man. There is no such ambiguity in the original since poco qualifies both filosofo and savio.
I will be told that the aphorism as a whole makes clear the intended meaning. Indeed, it does, but I have just wasted time on disambiguation. Why not write it right the first time so that the reader needn't puzzle over the meaning? It is relevant to point out that a philosopher is not the same as a wise man. A philosopher is a lover, not a possessor, of wisdom.
"You, sir, are a pedant." And proud of it. We could use more scrupulosity in all areas of life.
Nascimur uno modo, multis morimur
We are born in one way, we die in many ways.
Commentary here at AudioLatinProverbs.com. (A tip of the hat to Seldom Seen Slim)
What is Language? Tool, Enabler, Dominatrix?
I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.
So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim Wort Genommen, pp. 134-135:
Ich beherrsche die Sprache nicht; aber die Sprache beherrscht mich vollkommen. Sie ist mir nicht die Dienerin meiner Gedanken. Ich lebe in einer Verbindung mit ihr, aus der ich Gedanken empfange, und sie kann mit mir machen, was sie will. Ich pariere ihr aufs Wort. Denn aus dem Wort springt mir der junge Gedanke entgegen und formt rueckwirkend die Sprache, die ihn schuf. Solche Gnade der Gedankentraechtigkeit zwingt auf die Knie und macht allen Aufwand zitternder Sorgfalt zur Pflicht. Die Sprache ist eine Herrin der Gedanken, und wer das Verhaeltnis umzukehren vermag, dem macht sie sich im Hause nuetzlich, aber sie sperrt ihm der Schoss.
I do not dominate language; she dominates me completely. She is not the servant of my thoughts. I live in a relation with her from which I receive thoughts, and she can do with me what she will. I follow her orders. For from the word the fresh thought springs, forming retroactively the language that created it. The grace of language, pregnant with thought, forces me to my knees and makes a duty of my expenditure of trembling conscientiousness. Language is a mistress of thought. To anyone who would reverse the relationship, she makes herself useful but denies access to her womb.
I might have translated Herrin as dominatrix if I wanted to accentuate the masochistic tone of the passage. 'Mistress' is obviously to be read as the female counterpart of 'master.'
Karl Kraus on the Art of the Aphorism
Beim Wort Genommen, p. 132:
Einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn man es kann, ist oft schwer. Viel leichter ist es, einen Aphorismus zu schreiben, wenn mann es nicht kann.
It is often difficult to write an aphorism, even for those with the ability. It is much easier when one lacks the ability. (tr. BV)