Category: Autobiographical

The Hyphenated American

One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.

I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bicultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for 'Polish-American' and related coinages.  My mother was both bilingual and bicultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.

And that doesn’t make a  difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive.  Suppose you come from Croatia.  Is that something to be proud of?  You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents.  It wasn't your doing.  It is an element of your facticity.  Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe.  Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.

If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not 'group-think.'    The Left in its perversity has it backwards.  They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind.  They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.

So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values.  Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African?  Does he enjoy dual citzenship?

If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead.  There is no 'institutional racism.'  There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals.  Man up and move forward.  Don't blame others for your problems.  That's the mark of a loser.  Take responsibility.  We honkies want you to do well.  The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.

But here is an encouraging development: many blacks according to yesterday's WSJ are rejecting the 'African-American' label.  

Some Aptronyms

An aptronym is a name that "suits the nature or occupation of its   bearer," as the erudite Dr. Gilleland explains. Some examples from my  experience:

1. During part of my tenure at the University of Dayton, the secretary of the Philosophy Department was Mrs. Betty Hume.

2. While a graduate student in Boston in the 1970s, I heard tell of a knee specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital, one Dr. Patella.

3. A number of philosophers bear aptronymic names: John Wisdom, Gerald Vision, J.J.C. Smart, and others that escape me at the moment.

4. Wasn't Jimmy Carter's main spokesman a man by the name of Larry Speakes?

5. Joe Bastardi, Fox News meterologist, is not an aptronym because he is not a name, and his demeanor and delivery suggest that his name isn't either.

Dale Tuggy Pays Me a Visit; Belief Versus Acceptance

Dale Tuggy was kind enough yesterday to drive all the way from Tucson to my place in the foothills of the Superstition Mountains.  He came on short notice and late in the day but we managed to pack in more than six hours of nonstop conversation on a wide range of philosophical and theological topics.  He was still going strong when, two hours after my bedtime, I had to send him on his way.

Talk got  on to mysterianism, of course, and his ongoing debate with James Anderson.  Dale made a distinction that I hadn't considered, namely, one between belief and acceptance.  My tendency up to now has been to identify believing that p with accepting that p.  Up to now I thought I should make a four-fold distinction: Accept, Reject, Suspend, Withhold. 

For the distinction between belief and acceptance, see Raimo Tuomela, Belief Versus Acceptance.

I repaid Dale for his gift of the belief vs. acceptance distinction by pointing out the distinction (or  putative distinction) between supension and withholding which I borrow from Benson Mates:

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 and suspension of judgment. 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.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment. Close but not the same.

Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered

My former colleague Xavier Monasterio died last year on this date.  Curiously, January 4th was also the date of death of his philosophical hero Albert Camus.  This being a weblog, and thus an online journal of the personal and the impersonal, I didn't want the day to pass without a brief remembrance of the man.  I'll say a little today and perhaps supplement it later on.

Continue reading “Xavier Ortiz Monasterio (1926-2011): An Existentialist Remembered”

Legal’s Mate Via the Smith-Morra Gambit

The summer of '95 found me in Charlottesville, Virginia. A lovely place hard by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachian Trail. The largesse of the American taxpayer had made it possible for me to attend a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar at the University of Virginia. One dark and rainy night, wearied by philosophy of science arcana, I stumbled into the C-ville chess club, sat down opposite an old man, and uncorked this miniature:

 Vallicella – Oldtimer, Charlottesville, 1995

1. e4 c5 2. d4 cd 3. c3 dc 4. Nxc3 e5 5. Nf3 d6 6. Bc4 Bg4 7. Nxe5 Bxd1 8. Bxf7+ Ke2 9. Nd5 mate.

Of course, you knew about Legal's mate. But did you know it could be reached via the Smith-Morra gambit?

Third Anniversary of the TypePad Incarnation of Maverick Philosopher

This weblog commenced  on 4 May 2004 and has been in operation for seven and a half years.  This, the latest incarnation, the Typepad version, began on Halloween 2008.  Here are the posts from three years ago. Typepad is not the perfect platform; I doubt if there is one.  But it is superior for my purposes to the crappy Blogger, the defunct Powerblogs, and the adequate WordPress.

Readership is trending upwards.  I now routinely receive 1,000 to 1,700 pageviews per day.  The total pageview count for the last three years is now over one million: 1,029,176 as of a few moments ago. That averages to 939.89 pageviews/day with 2,828 total posts and 4,971 comments.

Can you say cacoethes scribendi?

I've missed only a few days in these seven and a half  years so it's a good bet I'll be blogging 'for the duration.'  It's like reading and thinking and meditating and running and hiking and playing chess and breathing and eating and drinking coffee. It is not something one gives up until forced to.  Some of us are just natural-born scribblers.  We were always scribbling, on looseleaf, in notebooks, on the back of envelopes, in journals daily maintained.  This is just an electronic extension of all of that. 

Except now I conduct my education in public.  This has some disadvantages, but  they are vastly outweighed by the advantages.  I have met a lot of interesting and stimulating characters via this blog, many in the flesh.  You bait your hook and cast it into the vasty deeps of cyberspace and damned if you don't snag some interesting fish.  The occasional scumsucker and bottomfeeder is no counterargument.

I thank you for your patronage, and I hope my writings are of use not just to me. 

My Relation to Catholicism

This from a graduate student in philosophy who describes himself as a theologically conservative Protestant who is toying with the idea of 'swimming the Tiber':

In a recent post  you say this: ""Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic  Church is a good recent example.)"

Until I read this comment, I, for some reason, was under the impression that you were a Catholic.  I was wondering if you would be willing to elaborate on this comment, say more about your take on the Catholic Church, direct me to a post in which you say more about these  issues, or direct me to some literature on this topic that you think  would be useful.

This request allows me to clarify my relation to Catholicism.  (This clarification may be spread over a few posts.)  I was brought up Catholic and attended Catholic schools, starting in the pre-Vatican II  days before the rot set in, when being Catholic was something rather more definite than it  is now.  Many with my kind of upbringing were unfazed by their religious training, went along to get along, but then sloughed  off the training and the trappings as soon as they could.  For a religion to take root in a person, the person must have a religious nature or predisposition to begin with.  Only some have it, just as only some have a philosophical predisposition.  Having the former predisposition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of a religion's taking firm root.  Another necessary condition is that the person have some religious and/or mystical experiences.  Without the predisposition and the experiences, religion, especially a religion as rich in dogmatic articulation as Roman Catholicism, will be exceedingly hard to credit and take seriously in the face of the countervailing influences from nature (particularly the nature in one's own loins) and society with its worldly values.  For some Catholics of my Boomer generation, the extreme cognitive dissonance between the teachings of the Church and the 'teachings' and attitudes of the world, in particular the world of the '60s,  led to radical questioning.  For example, we were taught that all sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments were mortal and that premarital and extramarital sex  even in those forms that fell shy of intercourse were wrong.  The 'teachings' of the world and the surrounding culture were of course quite the opposite.  For many brought up Catholic, this was not much of a problem: the cognitive dissonance was quickly relieved by simply dropping the religion or else watering it down into some form of namby-pamby humanism.  For others like myself who had the religious predisposition and the somewhat confirmatory religious/mystical experiences, the problem of cognitive dissonance was very painful and not easily solved.

And, having not only a religious, but also a philosophical predisposition, it was natural to turn to philosophy as a means of sorting things out and relieving the tension between the doctrines and practices that had been the center of my life and the source of existential meaning, on theone hand,   and the extramural wide world of sex, drugs, rock & roll, and the secular values of 'making it' and getting ahead, on the other.  The sex bit was just one example.  The fundamental problem I faced was whether any of what I was brought up to believe, of what I internalized and took with utmost seriousness, was true.  Truth matters!  As salutary as belief is, it is only true beliefs that can be credited.  This brings me to a fundamental theme of this weblog, namely, the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. I see this as a fruitful tension, and I see the absence of anything like it the Islamic world as part of the explanation of that world's inanition.

It is a fruitful tension in the West but also in those few individuals who are citizens of both 'cities,' those few who harbor within them both the religious and the philosophical predisposition.  It is a tension that cannot be resolved by eliminationof one or the other of the 'cities.' But why is it fruitful?

The philosopher and the religionist need each other's virtues. The philosopher needs reverence to temper his analytic probing and humility to mitigate the arrogance of his high-flying inquiry and overconfident reliance on his magnificent yet paltry powers of thought. The religionist needs skepticism to limit his gullibility, logical rigor to discipline his tendency toward blind fideism, and balanced dialectic to chasten his disposition to fanaticism.

So am I a Catholic or not?  Well, I am certainly a Catholic by upbringing, so I am a Catholic in what we could call a sociological sense.  But it is very difficult for a philosopher to be a naive adherent of any religion, especially a religion as deeply encrusted with dogma as Roman Catholicism.  He will inevitably be led to 'sophisticate' his adherence, and to the extent that he does this he will wander off into what are called 'heresies.'  He will find it impossible not to ask questions.  His craving for clarity and certainty will cause him to ask whether key doctrines are even intelligible, let alone true.  Just what are we believing when we believe that there is one God in three divine persons?  Just what are we believing when we believe that there once walked on the earth a man who was fully human but also fully divine? 

I distance myself both from the anti-Catholic polemicists and the pro-Catholic apologists.  Polemics and apologetics are two sides of the same coin, the coin of  ideology.  'Ideology' is not a pejorative term in my mouth.  An ideology is a set of beliefs oriented toward action, and act we must.  So believe we must, in something or other.    Religions are ideologies in this sense.  But philosophy is not ideological.  For more on this, see Philosophy, Religion, and the Philosophy of Religion: Four Theses.

I am skeptical of organizations and institutions despite the fact that we cannot do without them.  The truth is something too large and magnificent to be 'institutionalized.'  The notion that it is the sole possession of one church, the 'true' church, is a  claim hard to credit especially in light of the fact that different churches claim to be the true one.  Also dubious is the notion that extra ecclesiam salus non est, that outside the church there is no salvation.  And note that different churches will claim to be the one outside of which there is no salvation.  That should gve one pause.  If it doesn't, then I suggest you are insufficiently critical, insufficiently concerned with truth, and too much concerned with your own doxastic security.  Why do I need a church at all?  And why this one?  Why not Eastern Orthodoxy or some denomination of  Protestantism? 

Now if you are a philosopher this is all just more grist for the mill, along with all the things that Catholic apologists will say in defense of their faith.  They will say that their church is the true church because it was founded by Jesus Christ (who is God) and has existed continuously from its founding under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit whose inspiration guarantees the correctness of the teachings on faith and morals. 

They will tell me that a church is necessary to correct the errors of private opinions.  Now it must be frankly admitted that thinking for oneself, treading the independent path, and playing the maverick can just as easily lead one into error as into truth.  If thinking for oneself were the royal road to truth, then all who think for themselves would agree on what the truth is.   They don't.  But let us not forget that that church dogmas often reflect the private opinions of the dominant characters at the councils.  The common opinion is just the private opinion that won the day.  You say Augustine was   inspired by the Holy Spirit?  That is a claim you are making.  How validate it?  Why don't the Protestants agree with you?  Why don't the Eastern Orthodox agree with you?

This only scratches the surface, but one cannot spend the whole day blogging.  This may turn out to be a long series of posts.

 

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Study Everything, Join Nothing

Do I live up to this admonition? Or am I posturing? Is my posture perhaps a slouch towards hypocrisy?

Well, it depends on how broadly one takes 'join.' A while back, I joined a neighbor and some of his friends in helping him move furniture. Reasonably construed, the motto does not rule out that sort of thing. And being a fair and balanced guy, as everybody knows, I recently joined the Conservative Book Club to balance out my long-standing membership in the left-leaning and sex-saturated Quality Paperback Book Club. (It would be interesting to compare these two 'clubs' in respect of their target memberships — but that's another post.)

And what if I join you for lunch, or join in a discussion in a chat room? A good while ago, the anonyblogger who ran The Will to Blog, but then lost the will to blog and deleted his site, opined that my motto ought to preclude my being a conservative. But surely one does not join a set of beliefs. One joins a political party, an organization, a church, and the like. Our anonyblogger might have been making the mistake of thinking that an independent thinker cannot arrive at any conclusions, for, if he did, then he would be joining something, and lose his independence. 

In the context of Paul Brunton's thought, "Study everything, join nothing" means that one ought to beware of institutions and organizations with their tendency toward self-corruption and the corruption of their members. (The Catholic Church is a good recent example.) "Join nothing" means avoid group-think; avoid associations which will limit one's ability to think critically and independently; be your own man or woman; draw your identity from your own resources, and not from group membership. Be an individual, and not in the manner of those who want to be treated as individuals but expect to gain special privileges from membership in certain 'oppressed' or 'victimized' or 'disadvantaged' groups.

Be Emersonian, as Brunton was Emersonian:

"Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist."

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

"Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one one of its members."

"We must go alone."

"But your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is, must be elevation."

(All from Emerson's essay, "Self-Reliance.")

In Brunton's mouth, the injunction means: study all the religions and political parties, but don't join any of them, on pain of losing one's independence.

Note finally, that the motto is mine (by acceptance not by origin); it does to follow that it ought to be yours.

Three Reasons to Stay Home

These days I have money to travel, time, and opportunities.  In close communion with my 'inner Kantian,' however, I resist the blandishments and with them the vexations of spatial translation. By my present count, there are three chief reasons to keep to my Southwestern Koenigsberg, the Emersonian, the Pascalian, and the Vallicellan. The first is that travel does not  deliver what it promises; the second is that it delivers us into temptation and vexation; the third is that it knocks us out of our natural orbit, to return to which wastes time.

The first reason is from Ralph Waldo Emerson's wonderful essay, "Self-Reliance," wherein he writes, "Travelling is a fool's  paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places." (Selected Essays, ed. Ziff, p. 198) This notion of the indifference of places is one I believe Emerson borrowed from the Roman Stoic Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), though I can't remember where Seneca says this. The idea is simple and sound.

Wherever we are, we see the world through the same pair of eyeballs, and filter its deliverances through the same set of conceptions, preconceptions, anxieties, aversions, and what-not. If I travel to Naples, thinking to get away from myself, what I find when I wake up there is "…the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from." (Ibid.) Shift your spatial horizon as you will, you may not effect any change in your mental horizon. If you can't find enlightenment in Buffalo, where the water is potable and mosquitoes are rare, what makes you think you will find it in Benares where mosquitoes are ubiquitous and the water will give you dysentery?

Forty years ago I had a conversation with a young Austrian at the train station in Salzburg, Austria. He told me he was headed for Istanbul "to make holiness." But could he not have made holiness in Salzburg? Could he not have found a Pauline 'closet' somewhere in that beautiful city of Mozart wherein to shut himself away from the world and pray to his Father in secret?

But to the young and romantic the lure of foreign destinations is well-nigh irresistible.

The second reason is from Blaise Pascal who sees "the sole cause of man's unhappiness" in the fact that "he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." (Pensees, trans. Krailsheimer, p. 67.) Sallying forth from his monastery, the monk exposes himself to every manner of distraction and vexation. The alluring world may even lure him to his destruction. Had Thomas Merton remained in his hermitage at Gethsemane, instead of flying off to a useless conference in Bangkok, he would not have met his early death by accidental electrocution.

The third reason is that vacations tend to require a recovery period for getting reestablished in our natural orbits. In the summer of  2000, two weeks in Poland and Germany cost me another two weeks of recovery time before I could get back into the philosophy writing groove. Is the time spent travelling wisely used? It is not clear to me. But then I may have been unduly influenced by Kant, who never   strayed from Koenigsberg. Your mileage may vary.

We Romantics

We are enticed by what is hidden, out of reach, around the corner, over the horizon. It is the lost mine lost, not the lost mine found, that inspires and focuses our energies. Our metaphysics is visionary and revisionary, not descriptive. We study the world to see what is beyond the world. We study the Cave to find an exit, not to inventory the paltry stuff found within it, or even the categories of paltry stuff found within it. Our speleology is transcendental, not empirical: we would know what makes the Cave possible and actual, and what is its point and purpose.

And if there is no exit? And no ultimate condition of possibility? Then we want to know that and why the Cave exhausts the cartography of being.

Lynne Ballew

At the time I knew her, in the mid-'70s, I had no idea what a remarkable person she is.  I was a graduate student and she was a young professor.  We spoke a few times in the hallway.  A while back I was re-reading some Plato and I came upon a marginalium of mine: "Ask Lynne about this."  That put me in mind of her and I wondered what had become of her.  I had heard that she had left academe but knew nothing more.  A few key strokes  and her inspiring story unfolded before me.

Scenes from the Superstitions

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James L., fanatical hiker, who I have been introducing to the Superstition Wilderness.  A native Arizonan, he has no problem with hiking in the summer in this rattlesnake infested inferno.  I hope not to have to make use of his nurse practitioner skills.  The knife hanging from his belt suggests he might, in a pinch, be up for some 'meatball surgery.'IMG_0843

 

 

James and I encountered this tarantula on the Dutchman's trail near dawn, last Wednesday.  And then a bit farther down the trail, and smack dab in the middle of it, we spied a baby diamondback rattlesnake:

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IMG_0844

 

Weaver's Needle at daybreak from the Dutchman's trail near Parker Pass.  We were doing the Black Mesa Loop out of First Water trailhead in the counter-clockwise direction.  Covered the 9.1 miles in 5 1/2 hours.  Not bad considering the monsoon humidity and a high of about 108 deg. Fahrenheit.  Last year in July three Utah prospectors died near Yellow Peak which is on this route.  We passed right by the black basaltic rock on which they expired, rock that can reach a temperature of 180.  See Another Strange Tale of the Superstitions.  For the rest of the story see Tom Kollenborn, A Deadly Vision.

 

John Leslie and Hostage Chess

I learned recently that the philosopher John Leslie is the inventor of a chess variant, Hostage Chess. Left-click on the hyperlink and scroll down.

I have never played any of the chess variants, and they don't interest me. Penetrating the arcana of standard chess has me sufficiently occupied. Such a patzer am I that I could not explain the Lucena and Philidor positions without consulting the manuals. But could you? And my endgame savvy is weak. My excuse is that I didn't get seriously into chess until I was deep into middle age.

I can say of Caissa what Augustine said of the Eternal Unchanging Light: "Too late have I loved thee." Not that the former takes the place of the latter, you understand.

Word of the Day: ‘Pot-Valiant’

If you think I have a large vocabulary, you are right.  But despite my voracious reading I have never stumbled upon 'pot-valiant' until just now, in a piece by Mona Charen wherein I found the sentence, "And it's true that some Republicans, like Americans for Tax Reform's Grover Norquist, have fetishized their opposition to taxes to the point where they defend pot-valiantly even tax subsidies such as those for ethanol."

To be pot-valiant is to have the courage that comes from being drunk. Noah Webster puts it this way in his 1828 American Dictionary: "Courageous over the cup; heated to valor by strong drink." See here. 

The reason I have a large vocabulary is because I rarely allow myself the luxury of skipping over words I don't know.  With few exceptions I look them up and then write them down, either in my journal or on my calendar.  Or I 'blog' them.  It is no good merely to look them up.  You must write them down and then re-read what you have written.  Only then will they stick.

Trouble is, in a barely literate society of tweeting twits getting dumber by the minute, you will elicit incomprehension or worse from your fellow citizens if you put your vocabulary to use.  Of course,  catamite, louche, canaille, desuetude, animadversion, apotropaic and zetetic will be lost on them.  But yours will be the pleasure of reading high-grade literature with comprehension.