Author: Bill Vallicella

The Lethal Chamber of the Soul

I float the suggestion that the problem of the external world was originally ontological, not epistemological.

The material world is the great lethal chamber of the soul. Only spiritual heroes can arouse themselves sufficiently to escape from its stupefying effect upon consciousness. (Paul Brunton)

The Brunton quotation is distinctly Emersonian, as witness:

The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, the sign of insanity. (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Oversoul")

The outer senses are seductive. To seduce is to lead astray. From the Latin infinitive ducere, to lead. Dux, ducis is one who leads, a leader. Hence il Duce who led Italians astray into Fascism. (The latter term is  used properly to  refer only to the political philosophy of Benito Mussolini.)  Here are some other English verbs that derive from ducere: deduce, reduce, induce, educe, educate, abduct, deduct, conduct, induct, etc. and their abstract and concrete nominal forms: abduction, induction, inductance, etc. and abductor, inductor, etc.

But I digress.

The outer senses are seductive. They lead us to posit their objects as ultimately and unquestionably real when they are not. The world of the senses comes to exhaust the cartography of Being. Simone Weil, Platonist that she is, is good on this.  As seductive, the outer senses are deceptive: they deceive us into thinking that what is only derivatively real, and thus a mix of the real and the unreal, is ultimately or fully real. The deception concerns not their being, but their mode of being.

Among the philosophical acts whereby philosophy and the philosopher first come to be is by the suspension of our natural world affirmation.  This suspension was ancient long before it was modern. The problem of the external world was originally ontological, not epistemological. The question concerned the mode of being of the objects of the outer senses, not "our knowledge of the external world," to borrow a title from Bertrand Russell's eponymous 1929 collection of lectures. The ancient question was not the question: How do we know that there is an external world? but the question: What is the ontological status (illusory, merely apparent but not illusory, fully real) of the external world? 

This curious shift from the ontological to the epistemological may be illustrated by the different attitudes toward the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea. What is Zeno arguing? Four possibilities of interpretation:

A. There is no motion. Motion is wholly unreal. Whatever is real is intelligible. (Parmenidean principle: Omne ens qua ens intelligibile est.) Nothing contradictory is intelligible. Motion is unintelligible because contradictory. Ergo, nothing moves. Motion is an illusion.

B. Motion is wholly real, 'as real as it gets.' The apparent contradictions involved in motion are merely apparent. The Zenonian arguments are fallacious and they can be shown to be fallacious. The 'calculus solution.' See Wesley Salmon.

C. Motion is phenomenally real, but not noumenally real. It is neither wholly unreal not wholly real. It is mere appearance.  Ultimate reality is motionless , but phenomeal reality is not nothing.

D. Motion is unintelligible but nonetheless real. Mysterian position. The Zenonian arguments cannot be refuted, but motion is nevertheless wholly real. Motion is actual, hence possible, despite the fact that we cannot understand how it is possible. 

Democracy with State-Sponsored Election Interference?

I should think they are incompatible. Might a bit of Orwellian re-definition help?

Maybe it is like this. Just as the border is secure as DHS-head Alejandro Mayorkas defines 'secure,' state-sponsored election interference is compatible with democracy as the regime and its media shills define 'democracy.'

Our political enemies from the Big Guy on down are not just brazen and repeated liars, they are something worse: subverters of language.

I hand off to Alan Dershowitz, the best legal mind in the country, and  a Democrat.

Derek Parfit on the History of Ethics

David Edmonds, in his superb biography, Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality (Princeton UP, 2023, p. 160) reports,

Parfit once summed up the history of ethics in four neat steps:

1) Forbidden by God.

2)Forbidden by God, therefore wrong.

3)Wrong, therefore forbidden by God.

4) Wrong.

‘Post-Truth’

A buzz word much bandied about in 2016, usually in connection with Donald J. Trump.

Top o' the Stack.

You will learn something from this piece if you have an attention span. Too much twit-shit and your span may shrink to a point. You may transmogrify into a tweeting twit whose brain is fit only to flit.

Pride?

What are you proud of? Your paraphilias? Is that what your 'pride flag' signifies? Does the plus sign at the end of LGBTQ+ signify the inclusion of every paraphilia? Might that be taking 'inclusion' too far? Is every focus of erotic interest legitimate?  Should every mode of (what has traditionally been considered to be) deviant behavior be normalized? Should every factual abnormality be viewed as normative?  

Are you really proud of your pedophilia, pedovestism, coprophilia, necrophilia and anthropophagy? 

Here: 

The parade that capped off June’s Pride events in New York City proclaimed the movement’s actual intentions quite clearly. The message was chanted all along the route, repeatedly and at high volume:

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children.”

Now, there’s a sentiment that should make your blood run cold. It gives the lie to all those innocent protestations you’ve heard for years: “Gee, all we want is to live our lives and love who we love.”

It’s well past time to wake up and recognize the truth. We are living in a very dangerous time filled with threats to our physical and mental health, and to our immortal souls.

The pedophilic words chanted by a corps of New York drag queens were as vivid a wake-up call as can be imagined. This was perversion on proud display. It was an assault on childhood innocence, on family life, on decency, on religion, on basic human reality. It was as vivid and unignorable as a declaration of war.

You might call it our “Gender Pearl Harbor.”

The time for kindness and tolerance has passed. These people must be opposed on every level in every way.

The problem, of course, is that the gender movement has secured alliances among the leadership of government, business, finance, media, the arts — virtually every institution of society. The country has been severely compromised by this pervasive and insidious gender ideology.

Wittgenstein and Dreaming

On Certainty #383: The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well  and indeed it is also being dreamed that these words have any meaning.

I beg to differ. It is a plain fact that people have dreams in which they know that they are dreaming, and in which they think to themselves, 'I am now dreaming.' In those dreams they are not dreaming that they are dreaming, if dreaming that p entails that one does not know that p. For they they do  know that they are dreaming despite their being asleep and dreaming.  

And so Ludwig Wittgenstein in the above passage gives us no reason to dismiss the Cartesian dream argument for skepticism about the external world.

I once had an extremely vivid dream about my dead cat, Maya. There she was, as (apparently) real as can be. I saw her, I touched and petted her, I heard her. It was all astonishingly vivid and coherent. There was an ongoing perceiving in which visual, tactile, and auditory data were well-integrated. And yet I knew within the dream that she was dead, and I knew that I had buried her in April 2001 in the desert behind the house, and that coyotes had dug her up and had consumed her rotting corpse. 

And so I began to philosophize within the dream: I know that Maya is dead and that I am dreaming, and so these perceptions, as vivid and coherent as they are, cannot be veridical. Coherence is no guarantee of veridicality. Neither is their "force and vivacity" to borrow a phrase from Hume. I did not dream that I was dreaming, I knew that I was dreaming; and I did not dream the reasoning in the third-to-last sentence, I validly executed that reasoning. And the meanings of the terms in the reasoning were in no way affected by their being grasped within a dream.

Wittgenstein seems to be assuming that, for any proposition p, if one becomes aware that p while dreaming, then one has dreamt that p in a sense that entails that one does not know that p. But this assumption is false, as Descartes appreciated. Becoming aware that 2 + 3 = 5 while dreaming is consistent with knowing its truth in the way that dreaming that one is sitting before a fire, when one is lying in bed, is not consistent with knowing its truth.

So there is no reason to deny that one can become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming. To become aware that one is dreaming while dreaming is not to dream that one is dreaming in a sense that implies that one is not in reality dreaming. And to use words within a dream is not to dream the meanings of those words in a sense that implies that they do not in reality have those meanings.

My point, again, is that Wittgenstein in the above passage gives us no reason to dismiss the Cartesian dream argument for skepticism about the external world.

Susan Sontag on Elias Canetti

From Granta, 1 March 1982. This passage in particular resonated with me.  It reads well with 'weblog' substituted for 'notebook.'

The notebook is the perfect literary form for an eternal student, someone who has no subject or, rather, whose subject is ‘everything’. It allows entries of all lengths and shapes and degrees of impatience and roughness, but its ideal entry is the aphorism. Most of Canetti’s entries take up the aphorist’s traditional themes: the hypocrisies of society, the vanity of human wishes, the sham of love, the ironies of death, the pleasure and necessity of solitude, and the intricacies of one’s own thought processes. Most of the great aphorists have been pessimists, purveyors of scorn for human folly. (The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well,’ Canetti has noted.) Aphoristic thinking is informal, unsociable, adversarial, proudly selfish. ‘One needs friends mainly in order to become impudent – that is, more oneself,’ Canetti writes: there is the authentic tone of the aphorist. The notebook holds that ideally impudent, efficient self that one constructs to deal with the world. By the disjunction of ideas and observations, by the brevity of their expression, by the absence of helpful illustration, the notebook makes of thinking something light.

Related: Susan Sontag on the Art of the Aphorism

Emmett Till

Top of the Stack. 

Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly.   To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case.