Author: Bill Vallicella

Lust

Lust is both evil and paltry. The lecher makes himself contemptible in the manner of the glutton and the drunkard. The paltriness of lust may support the illusion that it does not matter if one falls into it. Thus the paltriness hides the evil. This makes it even more insidious.

Dust in the Wind

We are little more than organized dust in the wind. And yet we feel ourselves superior to the universe! In a sense, we are right: we know the universe; it is our object. We know it, but it doesn’t know us. It can crush us, but it cannot know us.

On Socializing

To socialize, one must accommodate oneself to the mentality of the group. One must conform, fit in, be a ‘regular guy,’ and above all avoid serious conversation! But no independent spirit, no true individual, can tolerate this sort of self-denial unless it is absolutely forced on him. Ganz man selbst sein, kann man nur wenn man allein ist! (Schopenhauer) “You can only be entirely yourself when you are alone.” “Whosoever would be a man must be a nonconformist.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) In another place, Emerson tells that he does not visit the homes of his relatives because he does not like to be alone. I salute you, Waldo!

Perils of Praise

We do not like to be praised if: the praiser is beneath us; what is praised in us is something insignificant or common; the praise is felt to be insincere, perhaps by having an ulterior motive; the praise is mistaken in that we lack the excellence attributed to us. Particularly galling is to be praised for something insignificant while one’s actual virtues go unappreciated. So be careful in your bestowal of praise: take care that you do not offend the one you hope to flatter.

The Parable of the Tree and the House

A man planted a tree to shade his house from the desert sun. The tree, a palo verde, grew like a weed and was soon taller than the house. The house became envious, feeling diminished by the tree’s stature. The house said to the tree: “How dare you outstrip me, you who were once so puny! I towered above you, but you have made me small.”

The tree replied to the house: “Why, Mr. House, do you begrudge me the natural unfolding of my potentiality, especially when I provide you with cooling shade? I have not made you small. It is not in my power to add or subtract one cubit from your stature. The change you have ‘undergone’ is a mere Cambridge change. You have gone from being taller than me to being shorter; but this implies no real change in you: all the real change is in me. What’s more, the real change in me accrues to your benefit. As I rise and spread my branches, you are sheltered and cooled. The real change in me causes a real change in you in respect of temperature.”

Heed well this parable, my brothers and sisters. When your neighbor outstrips you in health and wealth, in virtue and vigor, in blog posts or the length of his curriculum vitae – hate him not. For his successes, which are real changes in him, need induce no real changes in you. His advance diminishes you not one iota. Indeed, his real changes work to your benefit. You will not have to tend him in sickness, nor loan him money; your tax dollars will not be used to subsidize his dissoluteness; the more hits his weblog receives, the more yours will receive; and the longer his CV the better and more helpful a colleague he is likely to be.

Thus spoke the Sage of the Superstitions.

The Potentiality Principle Again

Here once again is the Potentiality Principle:

PP: All potential descriptive persons have a right to life.

From this principle one can easily mount a powerful argument against the moral acceptability of abortion. I endorse both the principle and the ensuing Potentiality Argument. Peter Lupu rejects both the principle and the argument. Now it seems to me that there are exactly three possible outcomes of our discussion. Either I convince Peter, or he convinces me, or we both come to agree that the question is rationally undecidable. I find this discussion intriguing, not merely because of the immediate subject matter, namely, abortion and the underlying metaphysics of potency and act, but also metaphilosophically: Is it possible to resolve even one well-defined question?

In this post I will try to explain why I do not accept Peter’s argument against PP.

His argument begins with the uncontroversial point that potentiality excludes actuality. Thus, if x is a potential F at time t, then x is not an actual F at t. This is a conceptual truth that merely unpacks what we mean by ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality.’ For this reason, it is immune to counterexamples. One who seeks a counterexample to it is in in a position similar to one who seeks a counterexample to ‘All bachelors are male.’

Continue reading “The Potentiality Principle Again”

Fake Halloween Tombstones and the Brevity of Life

One fake Halloween tombstone bore the inscription:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So party we must.

But why not:

Ashes to ashes
Dust to dust
Life is short
So work out your salvation with diligence!

These are two diametrically opposed responses to one and the same admitted fact, the brevity of life. The worldling, to give him a name, take the shortness of life as a reason to make the most of it, to “grab for all the gusto you can,” in the words of a 1960’s beer commercial since, in the words of the same commercial, “you only go around once in life.” The idea is that since our days are few, our pleasures and experiences must be many, so that we may ‘get the most out of life.’

The seeker, however, rejects this merely quantitative solution to what strikes him as a qualitative problem. Fundamentally, the problem is not that our time is short, but that we are in time in the first place. Let me try to make this clear.

For the person I am calling the seeker, the problem is not that our days are few in number, a problem that could be solved by having more of them, but that each day, each hour, each minute is defective in its mode of being, so that even an endless supply of days would not solve the problem. The problem is that the world of change is a scene of unreality. Desire seeks a satisfaction it cannot find in any transient object so that piling one finite satisfaction upon another does nothing to yield true satisfaction. Among the seekers we find:

Gotama the Buddha: “Decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!” (Supposedly the Tathagata’s last words.)

Plato: “nothing which is subject to change…has any truth” (Phaedo St 83).

Aurelius Augustinus: “Things that are not immutable are not at all.”

Should we take the side of the worldling and view impermanence as a reason to enter into this life more appreciatively and to live it more fully, without hope for anything beyond it, or should we take the fact of impermanence as a reason to seek salvation from this world? Should we seek the deepest and richest satisfaction of our earthly desires in the brief time allotted us, or should we curtail or perhaps even renounce these desires in the hope of satisfying a higher desire? Should we party more or meditate more?

The answer depends on the answer to this question: Does impermanence entail relative unreality, a relative unreality that points to an absolute reality? Or is this impermanent world as real as it gets?

An Aphorism of Giacomo Leopardi and a Comment

Giacomo Leopardi (1798 – 1837) was just a name to me until Michael Gilleland inspired me to read some of his work. Here is an aphorism from Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri, Bilingual Edition, trans. W. S. Di Piero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 105:

Men are shamed by the insults they receive, not by those they inflict. So the only way to shame people who insult us is to pay them back in kind.

The only way? This ignores a second way, namely, by turning the other cheek. In some circumstances, this is the most effective way to shame the aggressor.  But there is a second problem with Leopardi’s aphorism. If you insult me, and I insult you back, you are more likely to feel justified in having insulted me in the first place rather than to feel shamed. In addition, you may feel that a further insult is called for to answer mine. Being perverse, human beings rarely take repayment in kind as settling the matter. If Hamas orchestrates a murderous attack on Israeli noncombatants, and the IDF responds with a counterstrike against Hamas combatants, the latter never consider that the score has been settled. Hamas will not say, "We attacked you, and you responded in kind, so now we are even."

Of Blogging and Blitz

Blitz chess is supposed to hurt one’s slow game, but it is not altogether clear: blitz teaches one to size up a situation very quickly indeed, a skill needed when one drifts into Zeitnot in a slow game. Blogging may hurt one’s slow writing, but again it is not entirely clear: blogging teaches one to get to the point, with pith and precision.