Author: Bill Vallicella

Age Quod Agis: Agent and Awareness

Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing."  A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper.

Verbally a tautology, the admonition expresses a non-tautological truth: attend to what you are doing.  I cannot fail to do what I am doing, but I can fail to attend to what I am doing. The admonition is in the same logical boat with "Be here now!" and "Live in the present!"

How could I fail to be here now? Where else would I be? And when else would I be? But that would be to miss the point. The tautological form of words expresses a non-tautological thought: Attend to the moment and be aware of your situation.

For a human being, to be is not merely to exist as a thing among things, but to be aware. The Being of a human being involves an element of material facticity — you are this indigent material thing right here — but also an element of transcendence in that, as aware, you are way beyond the miserable chunk of matter your awareness inhabits. You are way beyond it by being aware of the not-self. The not-self includes not only everything other than your body, but also your body inasmuch as your body and its parts are objects of awareness and thus not identical to you as subject of awareness. You are not merely a thing in the world, but also, as the subject of awareness,  a being  for whom there is a world.

As for living in the present, this is not a mere biological living. As a bit of nature's fauna, how could you biologically live other in the temporal present? To live in the present, as per the admonition, is to attend to the present, to impede the outward scatter of your thoughts, to bend back the outward intentionality (object-directedness) of mind to the present moment and its contents. You draw in your thoughts from the diaspora of the past and the future and the elsewhere in space and the elsewhere in general and bring them home. You could call it 'bringing it all back home.'  You could call it spiritual intro-version, or swimming upstream to the Source of thought's river. ("Man is a stream whose source is hidden" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

The Being of the human being is a living, but not a merely biological living, not a mere living as understood by the objectifying natural science of biology. The ineluctable subjectivity ingredient in the Being of human beings cannot be understood from the point of view of biology.

Consider now the sentence 'I am hungry' asserted by BV.  It is true now at 12:45 PM.  What is it about? It is about BV, a publicly identifiable person. What does it predicate of BV? It predicates the property of being hungry. The predicational tie is signified by the copula 'am.' Does this copula express merely the object BV's instantiation of the property? No, it also expresses the speaker's awareness that he himself is hungry. Property-possession in a human being is more than a merely objective relation. This fact complements the earlier one about the ineluctable subjectivity of the Being of human beings. Both the Being and the Being-propertied of human beings is unlike anything else in the world.

Political Action

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration:  Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

Read more at Substack.

The Destructive Bergoglio

At a time when we need our most venerable institutions to stand as bulwarks against the rising tide of wokery, what we find instead is capitulation.  When the head of the ancient Roman church abdicates, we are surely in for it. Corruptio optimi pessima.

Cardinal Pell vents his righteous fury at the Vatican's theological direction here.

What explains the stampede toward wokery? One causal factor is groupthink.

Horribile dictu: the Girl Scouts have joined the mad rush, offering a merit badge for LGBTQ+ awareness. 

'Wokeassery,' a coinage of mine, is another word for wokery, a word to be found in reputable dictionaries. It brings in the donkey theme, the jackass being the symbol of the Dementocrats.

Related: Heather Mac Donald on cultural survival and the Left's new default setting. Brilliant and deep analysis. But again just more analysis with nary a concrete suggestion as to what to do to restore sanity.

UPDATE (7/13)

Rod Dreher on Bergoglio's consolidation of his 'progressive' revolution.

Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

From a December, 1985 journal entry.

……………………

Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.

Summer Slowdown

"Blogging will be light," as we used to say in the early days of the blogosphere. I have a couple of books I need to finish and some practical business to attend to. But this won't be a total unplug as in earlier years. I plan to blog on both here and at Substack, but at a more leisurely pace.

Enjoy your summer!

James Soriano at The American Thinker

His latest on Ukraine is America's 'Revolutionary Moment.'

What follows is his response to the comments made here on his earlier article Do Not Underestimate Russia's Resolve:

I just read through the comments this weekend.  There certainly was a spirited debate.  

The comments divide into two kinds, with Michael Brazier and Dimitri raising points about how I’ve mis-measured Russia’s intent and its imperialistic history.  Dimitri seemed to be somewhat surprised that a retired Foreign Service Officer wasn’t better informed about Russian history.  Since when is the State Department required to have a firm grasp of history?  That principle has never applied to it in the past and I see no reason why I should conform to it now.  Ha! 

Ben made very good points pushing back against the Russia bogey.   His comment about Churchill and Roosevelt approving the inflow of Russian power into Eastern Europe is noteworthy.  That fact is typically ignored when an anti-Russia speaker talks about how the Soviet bloc was really a modern replication of the Russian Empire.  It is as though Russia was the only actor on the scene and Eastern Europe was merely putty in its hands.  But events were shaped by other actors as well, especially the Anglo-Americans who agreed to Russia’s westward advance (although they may not have liked it), as well as local Communist parties which looked to Moscow for support. 

The other kind of comments were about the realist/idealist schools of foreign policy, with Russia playing Aristotle to America’s Plato.  Elliott picked up on it and you seconded.  
 
Oz linked to a NYT article on why the most prominent anti-war voices seem to be on the right.  That may be so, but I think the real story is the bipartisan consensus for fighting undeclared war against Russia.  Fair to say that US assistance to the Ukrainian army has killed more Russian soldiers than the Ukrainian army acting alone.  Many a “conservative” voice can be heard on the U.S. war wagon.  I’m sure you know the story about Lindsey Graham who approvingly told Zelensky recently that “Russians are dying” and that US support for Ukraine was the “best money we’ve ever spent”.  Shame on him.

Joe Odegaard made a good point about Russia fighting to fend off the imperial reach of the West’s Woke agenda.  That story’s out there in the blogosphere in various forms.  It’s a two-part story:  there’s the U.S. push for globalizing Woke, which R.R. Reno wrote about recently at First Things, and then there’s the resentment against it in the patriarchal and traditional societies of the so-called “Global South.”  I think that’s one reason the Global South has not signed up to sanction Russia.  It likes the idea of having a strong Russia and China around to curb American excesses.

France’s Agony

Rod Dreher reports on the ravages of the allowance of the mass immigration of unassimilable elements. Will we learn? Little chance of that. Dreher concludes:

I feel strongly that one reason so many of us in the West — including many conservatives — cannot bring ourselves to deal with realities like those posed by mass migration is because the things we would have to face in order to deal effectively with the situation make us sick, or at the very least confused. We thought the world was one way, but it’s not. There is a direct line between the hubristic, cruel, catastrophic US invasion of Iraq to make it a liberal democratic bastion, and the disaster France (and Europe more broadly) has brought onto itself, and continues to bring onto itself, through mass migration, coupled with a woke elite that detests their own civilization.

UPDATE (7/2): 'Migrants' destroy French public library. But it's only property damage. No big deal, right? A guy I know raised the question whether our Christian values have made us unfit to survive in a world of savages aided and abetted by 'woke' leftist globalists.  Are the decadent French getting what they deserve?  But we are right behind them, just a little less decadent.

David Berlinski on Evolution

Under three minutes.  Nice production job.

Related: David Gelernter, Giving Up Darwin.  Wasn't Gelernter one of the recipients of a Unabomber package?

Part of being an American conservative in my sense of the phrase is a commitment to the respectful but critical evaluation of whatever passes for orthodoxy in science, in religion, in philosophy, in literature and the arts, and wherever else.  Of course, that is not to say that the heterodox, as such, is credible.  In fact, being conservative, I am open to the notion that there is a  defeasible presumption in favor of the orthodox and traditional. If you have no idea what 'presumption' means, see Presumption and Suspension of Judgment. 

Note the adjective 'respectful'; it goes a long way toward distinguishing my type of critical stance from that of the leftist.

Cat Blogging Lives! Tuxies at the Door

The tuxedo cat is the most 'iconic' of cats; so it is  only fitting that Max Black and his brother Manny K. Black should guard the entrance to the inner sanctum.

Felix was a tuxie as was Sylvester. And who can forget Socks the presidential pussy when the Clintons occupied the White House? 

Like all cats the tuxie has nine lives; what distinguishes him is that he is always dressed to the nines. All dressed up with nowhere to go.

Tuxies at the door

How to Write a Good Comment

I offer a comment of mine as an example.  It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat.  Here is the comment:

Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.

(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.

And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."

As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.

PROVISIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS
 
Time, Death, and Existence
 
Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here’s one from near the end of the play: “You can’t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.” As I take it, “one of the dead” means “one belonging to a community of dead persons.”
 
 
JUNE 27, 2023
 
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So what makes my comment good?
 
1. I interact directly with what the  author has written.
2. In doing so, I show that I have made a good faith attempt to understand him.
3. I tell him whether I agree or disagree and why.
4. I do not go off on irrelevant tangents.
5. I keep my comments brief and to the point.
6. I try to be helpful.
7. I do not use his site to promote myself or to advertise my wares or to dump large undigested quotations from other writers.