Stacktopper. Here are four addenda to what I say in the Substack entry.
1) A skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier. Too many confuse doubt, the engine of inquiry, with denial. If I doubt that such-and-such, I neither affirm it nor deny it.
2) Is doubting whether a proposition is true the same as suspending judgment as to its truth-value? A subtle question. I think we should say that it is not. For if doubt is the engine of inquiry, then we doubt in order to attain such truth as we are able to attain. But if one suspends judgment as to the truth-value of some proposition P — if one 'suspends P' for short — one may do so with no intention of trying to determine whether P is true. For example, I suspend judgment, take no doxastic stance, on the question whether the number of registered Democrats in Maricopa County is odd or even. I don't know, I don't care, and I will do nothing to find out. Suspension, not doubt.
3) Another subtle difference is that between suspension (withholding of assent) or Pyrrhonist epoché in the broad sense, which is related to but quite different from Husserlian epoché, and Pyrrhonist epoché in the narrow sense. A standard treatment of the former is along the following lines (Wikipedia):
The Pyrrhonists developed the concept of "epoché" to describe the state where all judgments about non-evident matters are suspended to induce a state of ataraxia (freedom from worry and anxiety). The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus gives this definition: "Epoché is a state of the intellect on account of which we neither deny nor affirm anything." This concept is similarly employed in Academic Skepticism but without the objective of ataraxia.
Benson Mates adds a nuance by distinguishing between withholding assent with respect to truth-value and withholding assent with respect to sense (Frege's Sinn). I endorse the distinction. Consider the proposition expressed by the standard Trinitarian formula, 'There is one God in three divine persons.' (My example.) What mental attitudes can we take up with respect to this proposition? I count five: Affirm, Deny, Doubt, Suspendtv (withhold assent with respect to truth-value), Suspends (withhold assent with respect to the question whether the proposition has a determinate sense or meaning). For example, one might maintain that the Trinitarian formula has or makes no sense, which is to say that no definite proposition is expressed by the verbal utterance or inscription. If the formula makes no sense, then it does not express a proposition, a proposition being a sense, whence it follows that the formula cannot have a truth-value.
4) A solubility skeptic with respect to the central problems of philosophy is not the same as a problem skeptic. I am not a problem skeptic. I don't doubt that the central problems are genuine, pace the later Wittgenstein. The central problems are genuine, not pseudo, but I doubt whether they are soluble by us. So doubting, I conjecture that they are not soluble by us as the best explanation of why they haven't been solved.
Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110):
In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of the good, a shadow, a deficiency; on the other hand, it is an enormously effective power. But no one has succeeded in resolving it.
The problem is genuine, the problem is humanly important, and yet it gives every indication of being intractable. Jaspers is right: no one has ever solved it. To sharpen the contradiction:
1) Evil is privatio boni: nothing independently real, but a mere lack of good, parasitic upon the good. It has no positive entitative status.
2) Evil is not a mere lack of good, but an enormously effective power in its own right. It has a positive entitative status.
A tough nut to crack, an aporetic dyad, each limb of which makes a very serious claim on our attention. And yet the limbs cannot both be true. Philosophy is its problems, and when a problem is expressed as an aporetic polyad, then I say it is in canonical form.
My friend, I continue to read and reread your Heaven and Hell essay, especially the "Concluding Existential-Practical Postscript".
Psalm 23. "The Lord is my Shepherd. I shall not…." Let us pray that there is a Good Shepherd who cares deeply about his flock and will do things to relieve their suffering. Can we come to believe in him with an act of will?
Surely not by an act of will alone. You didn't carefully attend to what I wrote (and to which I now add bolding):
. . . while these philosophical and theological problems are genuine and important, they cannot be resolved on the theoretical plane. In the end, after canvassing all the problems and all the arguments for and against, one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live. In the end, the will comes into it. The will must come into it, since nothing in this area can be proven, strictly speaking. [. . .] The will comes into it, as I like to say, because the discursive intellect entangles itself in problems it cannot unravel.
Obviously, one cannot decide what the truth is: the truth is what it is regardless of what we believe, desire, hope for, fear, etc. But one can and must decide what one will believe with respect to those propositions that are existentially important. What is true does not depend on us; what we believe does (within certain limits of course: it would be foolish to endorse doxastic voluntarism across the board.)
You have read Sextus Empiricus and know something about Pyrrhonian skepticism. You know that, with respect to many issues, the arguments on either side, pro et con, 'cancel out' and leave one in a state of doxastic equipoise. In many of these situations, the rational course is to suspend judgment by neither affirming nor denying the proposition at issue, especially when the issues are contention-inspiring and likely to lead to bitter controversy and bloodshed. But not in all situations, or so say I against Sextus. One ought not in all situations of doxastic equipoise suspend judgment. For there are some issues that are existentially important. (One of them, of course, is whether we have a higher destiny attainment of which depends on how we comport ourselves here and now.) With respect to these existentially important issues, one ought not seek the ataraxia (imperturbableness) that supposedly, according to Sextus, comes from living adoxastos (belieflessly). To do so might be theoretically rational, but not practically rational. It would be theoretically rational, but only if we were mere transcendental spectators of the passing scene as opposed to situated spectators embroiled in it. We are embedded in the push and shove of this fluxed-up causal order and not mere observers of it. We have what Wilhelm Dilthey calls a Sitz im Leben.
As I like to put it, we are not merely spectators of life's parade; we also march in it. (A mere spectator of a parade may not care where it is headed; but if you are marching in it, swept up in it, you'd damned well better care where it is headed.)
Suppose in order to have a decent day physically I need to begin it with a 10 K run. Well, most or at least many days I can make myself run. But on some days my legs just will not. Pain and fatigue are the obstacles. Suppose to have a decent "inner" day I also need to begin it with believing in and trusting in our Good Shepherd. Some days, yes, but many days, I fear, I will not or cannot . Too much pain (before the meds) and too much exhaustion with the world.
I said, "In the end . . . one simply has to decide what one will believe and how one will live." I now add that, having made that decision after due consideration, one has to stick with it. You seem to think that belief and trust need to be generated each day anew. I say instead that they do not: you already made the commitment to believe and trust; what you do each day is re-affirm it. It's a standing commitment. Standing commitments transcend the moment and the doubts of the moment. And of course doubts there will be. One ought to avoid the mistake of letting a lesser moment, a moment of doubt or weakness or temptation, undo the commitment made in a higher moment, one of existential clarity.
It's like a marital vow. After due deliberation you decided to commit yourself to one person, from that moment forward, in sickness and in health, through good times and bad, 'til death do you part. You know what that means: no sexual intercourse with anyone else for the rest of your days; if she gets sick you will nurse her; if you have to deplete your savings to cover her medical expenses, you will do so, etc. You may be sorely tempted to make a move on your neighbor's wife, and dump your own when she is physically shot and you must play the nurse. That is where the vows come in and the moral test comes.
Inserting a benevolent Creator in this world I encounter is VERY difficult.
I agree that it is VERY difficult at times to believe that this world is the creation of an omni-qualified providential God, a 'Father' who lovingly foresees and provides for his 'children.' Why then did he not lift a finger to help his Chosen People who were worked to death and slaughtered in the Vernichtungslagern of the Third Reich? And so on, and so forth. Nothing new here. It's the old problem of evil. You can of course argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God. But you can also argue reasonably from the fact of evil to the existence of God, and in more than one way. The 'Holocaust argument' is one way.
This brings me back to my main point: in the end, you will have to decide what to believe and how to live. The will comes into it.
Maybe I've misunderstood you. I see "will" as a weak and unreliable route to a good life, much less salvation.
I disagree. While I don't agree with Nietzsche, for whom "The will is the great redeemer," 0ne of the sources, I would guess, of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph des Willens, I see will as the only way to offset the infirmity of reason, which I imagine you must have some sympathy with given your appreciation for the Pyrrhonistas. In the controversy between Leibniz and Pierre Bayle, I side with Bayle. Reason is weak, though not so weak as to be incapable of gauging its own weakness. We embedded spectators must act, action requires decision and de-cision — a cutting off of ratiocination — is will-driven
You see why I wonder whether we are not already in Hell. Where I have gone wrong?
You cannot seriously mean that we are in hell now. That makes as little sense as to say that we are in heaven now. "Words mean things," as Rush Limbaugh used to say in his flat-footed way, and in a serious discussion, I expect you will agree that one must define one's terms. The 'Jebbies' (Jesuits) got hold of you at an impressionable age, and you became, as you told me, a star altar boy. You've had a good education, you know Latin and Greek, and went on to get a doctorate in philosophy in the U.K.
So you must know that what 'hell' means theologically is “[the] state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1033.) To be in hell is to be in a state that is wholly evil and from which there is no exit. Now is this world as we experience it wholly evil? Of course not. Neither it is wholly good.
It simply makes no sense, on any responsible use of terms, to describe this life, hic et nunc, as either heaven or hell. If you want to tag it theologically, the appropriate term would be 'purgatory.' As I wrote earlier,
. . . it is reasonably held that we are right now in purgatory. The case is made brilliantly and with vast erudition by Geddes MacGregor in Reincarnation in Christianity (Quest Books, 1978, see in particular, ch. 10, "Reincarnation as Purgatory."
Are there any beliefs over which we have direct voluntary control?
I am a limited doxastic voluntarist: I hold that there are some beliefs over the formation of which one has direct voluntary control. That is, there are some believable contents — call them propositions — that I can bring myself to believe at will, others that I can bring myself to disbelieve at will, and still others about which I can suspend judgment, thereby enacting something like the epoché (ἐποχή) of such ancient Pyrrhonian skeptics as Sextus Empiricus.
Note that the issue concerns the formation of beliefs, not their maintenance, and note the contrast between direct and indirect formation of beliefs. Roughly, I form a belief directly by just forming it, not by doing something else as a means to forming it. Suppose the year is 1950 and you are a young person, sincere and idealistic, eager to consecrate your life to some cause higher than a bourgeois existence of conspicuous consumption in suburbia. You have vibrant stimulating friends who are members of the Communist Party USA. They tell you that the Revolution is right around the corner. You don't believe it, but you want to believe it. So you go to their meetings, accept Party discipline, toe the Party line, and soon you too believe that the Revolution is right around the corner. In this example, the formation of belief is indirect. You do various things (go to the meetings, repeat the formulas, hawk the Daily Worker, toe the line, etc.) in order to acquire the belief. But then in 1956 you learn of Krushchev's denunciation of Stalin and your belief in the glorious Revolution and its imminence suddenly collapses to be replaced by an opposing belief. The formation of the opposing belief is direct.
A correspondent supplies an example of the third case, that of suspending belief:
Suspending belief. Sometimes in the face of good or strong evidence that p, I refuse to believe that p or again that not-p. I suspend any opinion on p.
This has always been my attitude on OJ and the murders he was charged with. Recently I talked with someone who had been teaching OJ knife-fighting in conjunction with a Commando-style TV show that never got launched. His evidence was excluded from the trial. Even in the face of this new evidence that OJ was competent with a knife, I do not form an opinion as to whether or not OJ killed his wife. (This is close to the classical skeptical epoche, except I do not bother to inquire and try to build a counterbalancing case for the opposite belief. Pyrrhonian skepticism says that I always can build such a case and the result will be spontaneous cessation of belief.)
In both these cases [I omitted my correspondent's first example] I think it's clear that what I believe (or don't believe ) is a function of what I will or wish to believe, trumping the evidence on hand and any reasonable induction therefrom. Hopefully, in both case it is also a principled refusal on my part to buy into beliefs that condemn other people. To believe my wife a poisoner or OJ a killer, I require evidence several parsecs beyond a reasonable doubt. You can say that that standard is too liberal [too stringent?], but I can choose to live (and die) by it and it is for several grounds an attractive ethics of belief.
This addresses my concern about the possibility of an ethics of belief. My correspondent suspends judgment, holds no opinion, on the guilt or innocence (as charged) of O.J. Simpson. By suspending judgment, he deliberately impedes or rather prevents the formation of two beliefs, the belief that O.J is guilty and the belief that O.J. is not guilty. I find that I have the same power of doxastic abstention, except that in this particular case I assent to the proposition that O. J. is guilty since I judge the evidence that he is guilty as charged to be overwhelming, and the notion that 'racism' played any part in this case utterly absurd. (My ethics of belief is perhaps less stringent than my correspondent; but we both have an ethics of belief.)
Our question does not concern the content of an ethics of belief, but the very possibility of one whatever its content. Since 'ought' implies 'can,' if I ought to withhold judgment in some cases — and surely there are some cases in which I ought to withhold judgment — then I can withhold judgment. I have the power to withhold judgment; hence my epoché (ἐποχή) is voluntary. So here seems to be a case in which believing/disbelieving is under the direct control of the will: I decide to neither believe nor disbelieve. And from this it follows that the application of deontological categories is legitimate. For example, "You ought not believe that your neighbor Jones is a homosexual on the basis of such flimsy evidence as that he is unmarried and has a Martha Stewart-like interest in home furnishings! You ought to suspend judgment!"
My provisional conclusion is that our manifest ability to suspend judgment in some cases shows that we do have direct voluntary control over some of our believings. I have no control over my believing that a naked woman is standing in front of me if in fact such is the case (in good light, etc.) And I have no control over my believing that the Imperium Romanum no longer rules Western Europe (to adapt an example from Alston, Beyond 'Justification', p. 63). But I do have direct voluntary control over my believing that neighbor Jones is a homosexual.
Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied." Aporia is not doubt. Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding. The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.
Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent to the meaningfulness of a claim and suspension of judgment as to the truth or falsity of a claim. (Meaningfulness is a necessary condition of a claims's being either true or false.) One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies. See Mates, p. 32. A good distinction! Add it to the list.
Consider, for example, this statement of the doctrine of the Trinity: "There is one God in three divine persons." The epochist, to give him a name, takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal formulation makes sense. He neither affirms nor denies that there is a proposition that the formula expresses. Propositions are the vehicles of the truth-values; so by practicing epoché our epochist takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal sentence expresses anything that is either true or false. The suspender of judgment, by contrast, grants that the sentence expresses a proposition but takes no stand on its truth or falsity.
So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment. Close but not the same. One in the psychological state of aporia may or may not go on to practice epoché. Suppose I am stumped by what you say. I might just leave it at that and not take the further step of performing epoché.
The aporia Mates describes is an attitude. But there is another sense of the term, a non-attitudinal sense, and I use it in this other propositional sense: an aporia is a propositional polyad, a set of two or more propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent.
I also distinguish broad and narrow sub-senses of aporia in the second, the propositional, sense. What I just described is a propositional aporia in the broad sense. In the narrow, balls-to-the-wall sense, an aporia is an absolutely insoluble problem set forth as a set of collectively inconsistent propositions each of which makes such a strong claim on our acceptance that it cannot be given up.
Consider the following contradictory propositions:
1) Something exists.
2) Nothing exists.
(1) is plainly true. It follows that (2) is false. So much for truth value. What about modal status? Is (1) contingent or necessary? If (1) is contingent, then its negation is possible, in which case it is possible that (2) be true. If (1) is necessary, then it is not possible that (2) be true.
Is it possible that nothing exist? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? Arguably not, since if there were nothing at all, that would be the case: that would be that obtaining state of affairs, in which case there would be one 'thing,' namely, that state of affairs.
Therefore, it is impossible that there be nothing at all. It follows that it is necessary that something (at least one thing) exist.
A strict Pyrrhonian would have to say that there is an argument that cancels out the one just given.
It is widely admitted that there is something deeply unsatisfactory about the human condition. One aspect of our wretched state is recognized and addressed by the Pyrrhonists: we want certain knowledge but it eludes us. And so we must content ourselves with belief. But beliefs are in conflict and this conflict causes suffering which ranges from mental turmoil to physical violence.
Ours is a two-fold misery. We lack what we want and need, knowledge. We must make do with a substitute that engenders bitter controversy, belief.
Skeptic solution? Live belieflessly, adoxastos! But that is no solution at all, or so say I.
Michael Frede urges a distinction between two kinds of assent. The one he calls "just having a view," and the other "making a claim, taking a position." ("The Sceptic's Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge" in Philosophy in History, eds. Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, Cambridge UP, 1984, p. 261.)
Now suppose there are these two kinds of assent. The Skeptic would then have the resources to rebut a fairly obvious criticism, namely, that he himself dogmatizes in a number of ways, that he himself is doxastically committed despite his avowed aim of living adoxastos, without beliefs.
A critic might urge the following:
He who treads the Skeptic Path is committed to the value of ataraxia, and this value-commitment obviously transcends his present impressions. It is the organizing principle behind his therapeutic procedures and his entire way of life, a way of life he recommends to his future self and to others. It is what his quasi-medicinal treatments are for. Ataraxia is the goal, the 'final cause,' of the therapy. So here we have a doxastic-axiological commitment that is part and parcel of the Skeptic Way. The Skeptic would appear to be involved in some form of self-deception were he to say that it only seems to him here and now that ataraxia is a high goal or that it is a high goal only for him. Plainly, he is advocating his way of life for his future self and for other selves. He is a partisan for his way of life and is at odds with the partisans of other ways of life.
This shows that the Skeptic Way is not viable: the Skeptic essays to live without belief, but one cannot live without beliefs and commitments, including beliefs about the supposed defects of alternative ways of life. One needs all sort of beliefs about ataraxia, its nature, its value, its relation to happiness, our capacity to achieve it, the means of achieving it, its superiority to other states thought to be conducive to happiness, and so on.
A similar problem arises with the respect to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). Is the Skeptic committed to it or not? Does he accept it or not? It seems he must accept it. After all, he needs it. Ataraxia is supposed to supervene upon the suspension of judgment. Suspension, however, arises from the state of evidential equipoise when it is seen that the arguments for thesis and antithesis balance and cancel out. The background assumption, of course, is that a thesis and its negation cannot both be true. The Skeptic appears committed to the truth of (LNC) as part of his therapeutic procedure.
So our Skeptic appears to have at least this one belief, namely, that (LNC) is true. He cannot live without beliefs. There is a line from Husserl's diary I have long loved: Alle Leben ist Stellungnehmen, "All living is the taking of a position." One cannot live 'positionlessly.' Or so say I.
If Frede is right, however, the Skeptic can plausibly rebut this line of criticism. He thinks one can have a view without making a claim or taking a position. If so, then one can withhold assent from all claims and position-takings while yet assenting in a different sense.
I am afraid I don't buy it. Let me see if I can explain why. The question in one form is whether one can validily move from
1) It seems to me, here and now, that p
to
2) It seems to me, here and now, that p is true.
I say the move is valid: necessarily, if it seems that p, then it seems that p is true. Similarly, to accept (believe, judge, affirm, assert, assent) that p is to accept (believe judge, affirm, assert, assent) that p is true. No doubt my acceptance of p as true is consistent with p's being false, just as its seeming-to be-true that p is consistent with p's being false. The point is that to accept is to accept-as-true. There is no accepting-as-false. Necessarily, if it seems to me here and now to be true that p, then is seems to me here and now that p is true.
So I say there is one one kind of assent, and that no kind of assent is noncommittal.
Belief is oriented toward truth whether or not it attains truth. Knowledge is also oriented toward truth, but in a different way. Necessarily, if S knows that p, then p is true. There is no false knowledge. But there is false belief. But both knowledge and belief aim at truth. It is just that knowledge always, and indeed necessarily, hits the mark, whereas one's being in a belief state with respect to a proposition is no gurantee that the proposition is true.
Today I preach upon a text from Karl Jaspers wherein he comments on St. Augustine (Plato and Augustine, ed. Arendt, tr. Mannheim, Harcourt 1962, p. 110):
In interminable discussions, men have tried to sharpen and clarify this contradiction: on the one hand, evil is a mere clouding of the good, a shadow, a deficiency; on the other hand, it is an enormously effective power. But no one has succeeded in resolving it.
The problem is genuine, the problem is humanly important, and yet it gives every indication of being intractable. Jaspers is right: no one has ever solved it. To sharpen the contradiction:
1) Evil is privatio boni: nothing independently real, but a mere lack of good, parasitic upon the good. It has no positive entitative status.
2) Evil is not a mere lack of good, but an enormously effective power in its own right. It has a positive entitative status.
A tough nut to crack, an aporetic dyad, each limb of which makes a very serious claim on our attention. And yet the limbs cannot both be true. Philosophy is its problems, and when a problem is expressed as an aporetic polyad, then I say it is in canonical form.
In Support of the First Limb
We need first to consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:
For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present –namely, the diseases and wounds — go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, — the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils — that is, privations of the good which we call health — are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.
If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem — dating back beyond Hume to Epicurus — of reconciling the existence of God (as classically defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.
Without going that far, let us note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Call this the Anti-Manichean Intuition. What speaks for it?
In one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. The same goes for the evil of blindness and countless other examples. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.
The anti-Manichean intuition is that evil, while not an illusion, cannot be fully real. It is in some way parasitic upon the good. It cannot exist without the good, but depends on it, the way shadows depend on light and holes on perforated things.
Here is a second consideration. Manicheanism is deeply repugnant to the intellect. Suppose there are two coeval principles, Good and Evil, equal but opposite, neither derivative from the other, forever at odds with each other. This is intellectually repugnant because the mind's explanatory drift is necessarily toward unity. The mind seeks unity in the conviction that reality is ultimately one, not ultimately many, and that therefore the undeniable reality of the many must in some way derive from the the One. Ultimate reality cannot be Two. (Whether the tendency toward unity is only a transcendental presupposition of our intellectual operations, as opposed to a trait of the Real, is a difficult question I have addressed in other posts.)
The second consideration, then, is that our natural intellectual nisus finds ultimate dualism to be repugnant.
In Support of the Second Limb
But if evil is privatio boni, then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains, which are often far out of proportion in intensity of painfulness to their warning and protective functions, are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils. Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The Nagelian what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations. (And did it have to hurt that much to warn you not to slam your knees and other joints into hard objects?)
Now imagine the passion of Christ and his excruciating death on the cross. Try to convince yourself that what he experienced was a mere lack of well-being, that his horrendous sufferings were privations and deficiencies comparable to clouds and shadows and blindness in the eye.
The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a felt pain is a positive evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good. So the nature of evil cannot lie in privatio boni.
The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness. Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, despair, ordinary depression, clinical depression, anomie, the sense of abandonment in a meaningless universe, etc.
Christ on the cross did not merely experience the most horrific physical tortures, but also the worst spiritual torture, the sense of utter abandonment by God together with doubt in the reality of God. What Christ experienced in his passion was the reality of abandonment to evil agency with no consolation. (If you deny that he suffered in this way, then you deny that he was fully man.) Of course, Christ needn't come into this at all since I can make my point using other examples.
A Solution?
Much more can be said in support of the two limbs of our aporetic dyad. But let's consider a possible solution.
Solve the problem in the typical philosophical way by drawing a distinction. Distinguish evil effects from their source(s). Think of evil effects as evil deeds or the consequences of evil deeds. Think of the causal source(s) of evil effects as evil agents who freely (with the liberty of indifference, liberum arbitrium indifferentiae) bring about evil effects. It might then seem that there is a way between the horns of our dilemma. The positivity of evil derives from the reality of the agents of evil whereas the lack of the positivity of evil is due to the lack of reality of the evil effects.
Lucifer, the bearer of light, became a creature of darkness. His Fall came before the Fall of man in Adam. The angel Lucifer was created by the Good, i.e., God. Lucifer, qua creature, was good in virtue of his positive entitative status. To be is to be good. (Ens et bonum convertuntur.) But his will was free, and he chose to misuse his freedom, thereby bringing evil into the realm of creatures.
The solution, then, is that the reality of evil is the reality of free agents who freely do evil deeds whereas the unreality of evil is the relative unreality of evil effects. The responsibility for evil cannot be charged to the account of the Good principle. On the other hand, Evil is not pushed entirely out of the Good principle and hypostatized as on Manicheanism. For the agents, both demonic and human, who freely do evil depend for their existence and nature as free upon the Good principle, which is also the principle of Truth and Being.
The problem with the solution is that God or the Good must harbor within itself the possibility of evil wills and evil deeds.
Enter the Pyrrhonian
Imagine a Pyrrhonian Skeptic making the scene. His precious tranquillitas animi is upset by this dialectical bickering back and forth. So he suspends judgment on the great question and pretends no longer to care. But is this any solution? Not at all.
The great questions are disputed, often bitterly. There is no agreement, and there is no reasonable hope for agreement. But could one reasonably suspend judgment on questions of great existential moment — especially on the paltry ground that thinking about these things is disturbing?
Either we have a higher origin or we don't. What is the truth? The answer you give will inform the way you live — and the way you die. The Pyrrhonist stops caring to save himself mental disturbance and anxiety. But is his a peace of mind worth wanting?
We cannot know the ultimate truth in this life (contra dogmatism), but we also cannot reasonably not care what the ultimate truth is (contra Pyrrhonism). We cannot know because of the infirmity of reason: our fallen state has noetic consequences. But we are also inclined not to care because we are fallen and so easily swamped by the delights of the senses and by social suggestions.
There is the complacency of dogmatic belief, but also the complacency of not caring. One succumbs to the temptation of thinking that none of this really matters — which is itself a sort of dogmatism, that of believing that it's all just a play of phenomena and that when you are dead, that's it. Call it the Great Temptation.
Exit the Pyrrhonian
Resisting the Great Temptation, and avoiding both the complacency of dogmatism and the complacency of the uncaring worldling, we must continue the search for truth which, as Jaspers remarks above, is the way of philosophy.
Both Pyrrhonists and dogmatists aim at and achieve a sort of psychological security: the former by ceasing to inquire and by living more or less adoxastos, without beliefs; the latter by the rigid and unquestioning holding of contentious beliefs. The dogmatists hold on, the skeptics let go. The former live tenaciously, clinging to their tenets; the skeptics live or try to live without beliefs and tenets. (The Latin tenere means to hold.)
What the two opposing groups have in common is that they cease inquiry. The dogmatist, secure in his dogmas, feels no need to inquire. "We don't seek the truth; we have the truth." The Pyrrhonian skeptic, despairing of finding truth, and sick of the agitation consequent upon discussion and debate, gives up inquiry. "We don't seek the truth; the truth is not to be had."
Neither form of doxastic security is to be recommended.
Peter Wust in his excellent but largely forgotten Ungewißheit und Wagnis (1937), speaking of dogmatists and skeptics, writes that:
Beide wollen sich von dem Zustand des Unterwegsseins befreien . . . (UW 236)
Both want to free themselves from the state of being on the way . . .
. . . when man, here below, is and must remain homo viator.
In this world we are ever in statu viae, on the road, coming from we know not where, headed for we know not where. The Whither and Whence remain shrouded in darkness, and the light that guides us is but a half-light. On this road there is no rest from inquiry. Rest, if rest there be, lies at the end of the road.
Some of us are tempted by the metathesis (MT) that every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out.' But the metathesis is itself a philosophical thesis. So if the metathesis is true, then every argument in support of it is cancelled out by an equally plausible argument against it. But then (MT), if true, is such that we cannot have any good reason to accept it.
Is there a genuine problem here for a latter-day quasi-Pyrrhonian who subscribes to the metathesis?
Definitions
D1. An argument A1 for a thesis T cancels out an argument A2 for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'
Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any. Thus plausibility is unlike soundness, which is absolute, like truth herself. Note that there cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is 'fallout' from the definition of 'sound,' see D2 below. But then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.
Canceling out is symmetrical: If A1 cancels A2, then A2 cancels A1. It seems to follow that canceling out is also conditionally reflexive, which is to say that if A1 cancels A2, then A1 cancels itself. Right?
A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer. A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if Tom is a competent practitioner in the philosophy of religion, say, then he is a a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; and so on.
D2. An argument is sound just in case it is valid and all of its premises are true.
D3. An argument for a thesis is unopposed just in case there is no argument for its negation plausible to all competent practitioners.
D4. A proposition is rationally acceptable just in case it involves no logical contradiction, and coheres with the rest of what we know or justifiably believe.
Rational acceptability, like plausibility, and unlike truth, is a relative property: That water is an element was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks, but not to us.
The Puzzle as an Aporetic Tetrad
1) Every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out. (MT)
2) MT is a philosophical thesis.
3) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable only if there is at least one good unopposed argument for it.
4) MT is rationally acceptable.
Solutions
The quartet of propositions is inconsistent. Any three limbs, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the remaining one. Which should we reject? (2) is not plausibly rejectable: metaphilosophy is a branch of philosophy.
One could hold that the first three propositions are true, but the fourth is false. This implies that a proposition could be true but not rationally acceptable. But if MT is true but not rationally acceptable, what reason could we have for believing it?
A better solution of the tetrad is by rejection of (1). This is the position of the optimist about philosophical knowledge. He holds that some theses are supported by unopposed arguments and that we know what these arguments are.
I accept (1) on the basis of strong inductive evidence which renders it rationally acceptable. Accepting as I do (1), (2), and (4), I must reject (3). Well, why not?
Why can't I say the following?
3*) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable just in case there are some good arguments for it accepted by some competent practitioners.
Why Accept the Metathesis?
MT expresses a very bold claim; I imagine most philosophers would just deny it. To deny it is to affirm that there is at least one philosophical thesis that can be conclusively demonstrated. Can anyone give me an example? It has to be a substantive thesis, though, not, for example the thesis that it is contradictory to hold that it is absolutely true that all truths are relative. Here are some examples of substantive philosophical theses:
There are no nonexistent objects.
There are uninstantiated properties.
There are no modes of existence.
The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
God exists.
The soul is immortal.
The human will is libertarianly free.
Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
Anima forma corporis.
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
Truths need truth-makers.
Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
There are no facts.
Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
There are no properties, only predicates.
The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
Race is a social construct.
Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.
Will to Power #437 contains a marvellous discussion of Pyrrho of Elis. A taste:
A Buddhist for Greece, grown up amid the tumult of the schools; a latecomer; weary; the protest of weariness against the zeal of the dialecticians; the unbelief of weariness in the importance of all things. (tr. Kaufmann)
Years ago I noted the strange similarity of some arguments found in Nagarjuna and the late Pyrrhonist, Sextus Empiricus. (Memo to self: blog it!)
What is so bad about the strife of systems, controversy, conflict of beliefs? Are they always bad, never productive? Is it not by abrasion (of beliefs) that the pearl (of wisdom) is formed? At least sometimes?
Doxastic conflict can be mentally stimulating, a goad to intellectual activity. We like being active. It makes us happy. Happiness itself is an activity, a work, an ergon, taught Aristotle. It is not a passive state. There is the joy of movement: running, hiking, climbing, dancing. The joy extends to mental movement. We like problem-solving in our homes, in our jobs, in the aethereal precincts of mathematics and philosophy and science. We like puzzles of all sorts. We like to test our wits as much as we like to test our muscles. The rest after the test is the keener, the keener the test. Mental disturbance, the aporetic predicament, can be enlivening and exhilirating. Damn me, but there must be a way out, a way forward, a work around, a solution! Engineers and chess players and route finders know what I am talking about.
It is equally true that conflicts of belief can be troubling, painful, depressing, unmooring. Cognitive dissonance can induce extreme mental suffering. ('Doxastic dissonance' is a better name for it.) We want certain knowledge, but the indications are many that it is out of reach in this life. We are thrown back on that miserable substitute, belief. Belief butts up against counter-belief. The joys of dialectic transmogrify into acrimonious division.
So Sextus and the boys are on to something. They see the problem, not that their their diagnosis, let alone their cure, can be reasonably endorsed. Unfortunately, they see the problem onesidedly. They see what is bad about belief and the conflicts of belief. But they ignore the good. Insofar forth they could be called epistemic wimps.
This fits well with the decadence of the late Hellenic schools of Greek philosophy. Things went south after the passing of the titans, Plato and Aristotle. Social and cultural decline brought with it a turn away from pure theory and a concern with the practical and therapeutic. The desire for knowledge gave way to a desire for freedom from disturbance.
That is a peace not worth wanting as I argued the other day.
I now hand off to the Franz Brentano, Vier Phasen der Philosophie.
