Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience

"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.

Imagine someone who would pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force. Imagine him declaring, "The only permissible passages are those initiated by me and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!" "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry." "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"

The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.

Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?

Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"

The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.

Trust or verify? The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.

I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things. Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe. All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal. Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.

But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object. That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.

The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct. So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.

All’s Well that Ends Well

The hike was almost over. The light was failing as we gingerly negotiated the last steps of the treacherous downgrade of Heart Attack Hill on the Bluff Spring Trail in the Superstition Mountains. Suddenly my hiking partner let out a yell and jumped back at the unmistakable sound of a diamond back rattlesnake (crotalus atrox). It was a perfect hike: physically demanding in excellent company with a dash of danger at the end.

Remembering Quentin Smith

My old friend died on this date last year. If in your life you find one truly kindred soul, then you are lucky indeed. Quentin was that soul for me. This piece captures the man.

Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who’s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia. The kind of philosophy professor who is supposed to exist, the one who responds to emails promptly and knows how to tie a tie and writes just enough articles that 10 other specialists in his tiny sub-sub area will read to jump through all the hoops of tenure and promotion but doesn’t lose enough sleep over the underlying philosophical problems to distract himself from pursuing from the PMC rat race, has some real virtues. That professor will be more responsible than Quentin seems to have been about grading. The cleaning staff won’t be overly troubled by the state of that other professor’s office. And that other professor definitely won’t miss as many classes as Quentin did through absent-minded preoccupation with actual, inner philosophical contemplation. Hell, that other professor probably gets to class 15 minutes early just in case there’s a problem with his PowerPoint.

Quentin was more like one of the rail-riding “Zen lunatics” that Jack Kerouac wrote about in his novel Dharma Bums. Or like Diogenes, the philosopher who ate in the marketplace, shat in the theater, and slept in a giant ceramic jar in the middle of Athens. Quentin was pretty much who Santayana had in mind when he said that the ideal job for a philosopher wasn’t professor of philosophy at a university but tender of umbrellas at some unfrequented museum.

Why I Will not Support my Alma Mater: An Open Letter

2 November 2021

Cheryl Mott Smith

Executive Director

Gift Planning

Loyola Marymount University

cheryl.smith@lmu.edu

Dear Cheryl Mott Smith,

I am an LMU graduate, class of '72. I am now in a position to make substantial monetary contributions to causes I deem worthy. LMU will not be on my list. As a classical liberal, I oppose the increasingly leftward lurch of LMU since the '60s and its uncritical embrace of the destructive and culturally-Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda. I stand for free speech, open inquiry, and the pursuit of truth. This retired philosophy professor will not support the transformation of universities into leftist seminaries. I will post this letter online and encourage others to write similar letters. A copy will be sent to the LMU president.

Sincerely,

Dr. William F. Vallicella

P. S. After composing the above, this outrage came to my attention.

………………………..

I hope others will write similar letters to their alma maters. One effective and nonviolent means of opposing the depredations of the destructive culturally-Marxist race-delusional Left is by reducing their funding. You cannot reach them with reasoned discourse: they do not inhabit the plane of reason. But everyone understands money and its withholding.

Speaking out has some value, but one runs the risk of being 'cancelled,' 'doxxed,' and otherwise harassed. But no one needs to know that you are refusing contributions to 'woke-stitutions.' A cute coinage that just now occurred to me. Too cute perhaps.

Cross-posted at my Facebook page where it has snagged 24 likes, 30 comments, and one share, so far.

An Old Descartes Joke

In the fall of 1989 a female student at Case Western Reserve University told me the following Descartes joke.

Our man stops at a bar, the 'tender asks whether he wants a drink, Descartes says, "I think not, then disappears. I replied, pedantically, "I think therefore I am" is not logically equivalent to "I think not therefore I am not" any more than "I am walking therefore I am moving" is logically equivalent to "I am not walking therefore I am not moving." So the joke rests on a logical mistake.

But this is true of many if not most jokes. I have toyed with the notion that most humor stems from logico-conceptual incoherence of one sort or another, ambiguity, amphiboly, equivocation and various formal mistakes. Another example is Yogi Berra's "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Or: "Who was that lady I saw you with last night? That was no lady, that was my wife!" Or: "I see you got a haircut. No, I got 'em all cut."

Not All Academic Philosophers are Leftists!

Dissident Philosophers

Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy

EDITED BY T. ALLAN HILLMAN AND TULLY BORLAND

The book consists of sixteen essays (and an introduction) from prominent philosophers who are at odds with the predominant political trend(s) of academic philosophy, political trend(s) primarily associated with leftism. Some of these philosophers identify explicitly with the political right – an admittedly broad term which ranges from American conservative to British Tory, from religious right to non-religious right, from libertarian to authoritarian. Yet other dissident philosophers eschew the left/right dichotomy altogether while maintaining a firm political distance from the majority of their (left-leaning) colleagues. The primary goal of the volume is to represent a broad constituency of political philosophies and perspectives at variance with the prevailing political sentiments of the academy. Each essay is partly autobiographical in nature, detailing personal experiences that have influenced these philosophers throughout their lives, and partly philosophical, putting forth reflections on the intellectual viability of a right-leaning (or decidedly non-left leaning) political philosophy or some segment of it. The contemporary university is supposed to be the locus of viewpoint diversity, and yet as is evident to professors, students, and virtually anyone else who sets foot within its halls, it most certainly is not – particularly in matters political. Nevertheless, these essays are not instances of special-pleading or grievance incitement. Instead, each article provides a glimpse into the life of an academic philosopher whose views have largely been at odds with peers and colleagues. Furthermore, all of the essays were consciously constructed with the aim of being philosophically rigorous while eschewing technical language and verbose prose. In short, the essays will be enjoyable to a wide audience.

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My Facebook comments:

Your humble correspondent's contribution is entitled "From Democrat to Dissident." Click on the link to see the Table of Contents and a review. I was planning on buying a number of copies for my friends. But the $120 price tag is somewhat disuassive.

I have carefully read the introductory chapter by Allan Hillman and Tully Borland. Well written, exciting, rigorous, with a delightful soupçon of snark.

The Left gets its collective and collectivist @ss royally kicked by a formidable crew of philosophers. Formidable or not, I am honored to be among them.

Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge

Dwight Green writes,

I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year.

A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here. (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.)

The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.

Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse. Thanks for reminding me of the passage:

So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing. Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)

I am a native Californian who knows Jack's book and the coastal road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur. Gazing out at the Pacific nearly 50 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast.

Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity. Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.

The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:

. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.

Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides. You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser.

The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge. I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth. Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.

Addendum: At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.

Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism

There are respectable forms of atheism. The atheist needn't be a rebellious punk stuck in intellectual adolescence, swamped by sensuality, and given to self-idolatry.

Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (Harper Torchbooks, 1960, tr. Natalie Duddington, p. 24):

It is precisely the traditional theology that leads good men, inspired by moral motives, to atheism. The ordinary theological conception of freedom in no way saves the Creator from the responsibility for pain and evil. Freedom itself is created by God and penetrable by Him down to its very depths. In His omniscience, ascribed to Him by positive theology, God foresaw from all eternity the fatal consequences of freedom with which He endowed man. He foresaw the evil and suffering of the world which has been called into being by His will and is wholly in His power; He foresaw everything, down to the perdition and everlasting torments of many. And yet He consented to create man and the world under those terrible conditions. This is the profound moral source of atheism.

I read Berdyaev's The Beginning and the End in the summer of 1970. The following autumn I committed myself to philosophy as my vocation. The Russian personalist moved me deeply at the time, but then other philosophical interests and concerns took over. It is wonderful to be reading him again some 50 years later. If this existentialist is a bit on the febrile side, he at least avoids the empty intellectual gamesmanship of the analytic logic choppers whose philosophical activity bespeaks their spiritual vacuity. The task of the true philosopher is to combine rigor and Wissenschaftlichkeit with spiritual depth. Plato and Spinoza come to mind. We lesser lights are not quite up to the task, but we ought to take such luminaries as guides and tutelary spirits.

Addendum 9/24

Some of us are old enough to remember seeing Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on television. His message below is effectively answered by Berdyaev above. The cause of theism is not well-served by the caricaturing of atheists as all of the same stripe. There are saints and scamps on both sides of the theological divide.

Quietism at War with Activism

EVAGRIOS PONTIKOS enjoins apatheia, a state of deep calm, of tranquillity of mind. Hard to achieve, it is in need of constant protection. Why then do I follow current political and other events? Why do I put myself in a position to have my peace of mind disturbed?

I tell myself to do both: live like a monk while keeping an eye on the world. But experience suggests, if it does not conclusively show, that the ideal is unattainable. An ideal unattainable by me cannot be an ideal for me. A valued conservative friend of mine told me that he doesn't watch conservative television because it makes him angry. So I explained my ideal to him: stay informed while retaining one's equanimity. But in all honesty it is very difficult and I often fail to pull it off. It seems entirely fitting to be angered by the outrages of the Left.

If I cannot productively blend quietism and activism, what should I do? For me, full-on activism and the secularism it presupposes would be psychologically impossible. To be wholly consumed by the mundane is a horror to someone of my type. Besides, this world is a vanishing quantity and simply cannot merit the full measure of our concern. Now you either see that or you don't. If you don't, then these ruminations are not for you.

This leaves quietism, the retreat into the inner citadel, the cultivation of one's inner garden, abstention from media dreck, the avoidance of idle talk and empty socializing, together with devotion to spiritual exercises premised on a resolute NO! to the self-evacuation of the self into the world's sensory-social diaspora. One enters upon the quest for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters recognizing that this quest alone can give to human life the meaning that we intuitively feel it must have. One stops living for a future that cannot be one's own future, and is chimerical in any event. One accepts that our earthly tenure is either prelude or pointless.

What speaks against full-on quietism is the fact that our political enemies, totalitarians, will not let us be. They pose an existential threat, one to both our physical and our spiritual lives and their continuance. One could ignore this threat if one knew that God and the soul are real. But we don't know that. At best, it is a reasoned faith and a matter of inquiry.

So what should I do? Perhaps this: let the quietism dominate while keeping an eye on the passing scene.

"You are missing the Boethian Option: ignore the political and devote yourself wholly to the spiritual quest. Withdraw and accept whatever persecution and incarceration should come your way. Did not Boethius write Consolatio Philosophiae in prison? After all, you yourself regularly point out the vanity, transiency, and ultimate nullity of this world of shadows. If the Object of the spiritual quest is real, then these shadowlands are by comparison nothing or next-to nothing. Why keep an eye on, and get activated and upset over, what is next-to-nothing?"

Well, I am no Boethius for starters. We lesser lights and weaker spirits could easily be broken under persecution. A broken soul cannot engage in soul-making. And besides, this passing scene, though ontologically derivative, is not, strictly speaking, nothing. If it were, God created nothing. And why would God incarnate into it if it were not worth saving and we with it?

And so I debate with myself.

………………………………….

Richard Sorabji on Evagrios Pontikus (c. 345–99 anno domini)

Almost Mugged in the Big Easy

I came close to being mugged in New Orleans' French Quarter in '90 or '91. I was there to read a paper at an American Philosophical Association meeting. Early one morning I left the hotel to sample the local color and grab some breakfast. Striding along Bourbon street, I noticed a couple of black dudes on the other side of the street. I was wearing a beret, which may have suggested to the loiterers that I was a foreigner and an easy mark. One dude approached and commented on my shoes in an obvious attempt to distract me and throw me off my guard. My situational awareness saved me. That, together with my stern mien, height, leather jacket and purposeful stride. I gave the punk a hard look, increased my pace, and blew him off.

Profiling is part of situational awareness. Profiling is just common sense, which is why 'progressive' fools oppose it. A couple of black youths loitering in a touristy area are probably up to no good. It is a well-known fact that blacks as a group and more criminally prone than whites as a group. There is nothing racist about pointing that out because a fact about race is not a racist fact. It cannot be racist to speak the truth in situations where it is important that the truth be spoken. But if common sense and truth-telling make me a racist, then we should all be racists, including decent black folk.

Religion as Morality and as Metaphysics

I can't shake the thought that something is at stake in life. I cannot throw off the moral point of view. It addresses us from Elsewhere and calls us insistently to a Higher Life. It matters how we live. And this despite our being miserable bits of the Earth's fauna. This mattering cannot be a matter of the here and now alone. The moral life is ultimately meaningful only in a theological setting. There has to be a Ground of morality with the power to effect a final adjustment of virtue to happiness beyond the grave. And we have to be more than these miserably indigent bits of the Earth's fauna. None of this obvious, of course, and will remain forever in dispute, or at least until such time as we are replaced by robots.

While the appeal of religion as morality is strong, and such metaphysics as must be presupposed to make sense of religion as morality, I cannot say the same about the appeal of religion as systematic metaphysics. It is difficult to understand, let alone believe, such doctrines as that of the Trinity and the Incarnation, let alone those more specific doctrines of Ascension, Assumption, Virgin Birth, Immaculate Conception, and Transubstantiation.

The discursive intellect is flummoxed by such teachings. (But it is also keenly stimulated by them, a topic for another occasion.)

But in the end, which is more important: orthodoxy or orthopraxy? The latter. Better to practice compassion than to write a book about it.

Morality needs a metaphysical underpinning, but must such an underpinning be rationally transparent to us? And if it cannot be rendered rationally transparent, how much ought that bother us? Not so much that it causes us to stop living by the Ten Commandments and avoiding the Seven Deadly Sins.

You will never be able to prove the immortality of the soul, but it is well within your power to live in such a way as to be worthy of it. So live and you live well, no matter what the outcome. If death should prove to be annihilation of body and soul, what have you lost?

Do I Miss Teaching?

I am enjoying classroom teaching quite a bit now that I no longer do it. With some things it is not the doing of it that we like so much as the having done it.

One day in class I carefully explained the abbreviation ‘iff’ often employed by philosophers and mathematicians to avoid writing ‘if and only if.’ I explained the logical differences among ‘if,’ ‘only if,’ and ‘if and only if.’ I gave examples. I brought in necessary and sufficient conditions. The whole shot. But I wasn’t all that surprised when I later read a student comment to the effect that Dr. V can’t spell ‘if.’

On another occasion I explained that 'When does life begin?' is not the right question to ask in the abortion debate. For one thing, are we talking about life on Earth? Human life on Earth? An individual human life? If the question pertains to an individual human life, then the answer is obvious: at conception. So that can't be the question. The question concerns personhood: when does an individual human life become a person? I then explained descriptive personhood, the criteria of same, normative personhood, the relation between the two and added a bit about rights and duties and their correlativity.

After I was done with these distinctions, a kid raised his hand and asked, "But isn't the question when life begins?"

I was struck once again by the pointlessness of most 'teaching,' but I didn't quit my job then and there. More time had to pass before the 'meaningfulness' of being paid was no longer meaning enough.

It may be a generational characteristic. We Boomers want every moment to be meaningful. I suppose we are spoiled in that regard.

I did have a few good students. A memorable Kant seminar was composed of ten students, eight of whom were outstanding. I would have taught that class for free.

Why Do I Write about Political Topics?

People are increasingly 'siloed into' their positions. I don't write to change the minds of our political enemies. Why do I write, then?

First, to arrive at the truth as best I can for my own edification and enjoyment. People like me like to figure things out and understand things. On our good days we theoreticians approach the blissful self-sufficiency of Aristotle's NOESIS NOESEOS.

Second, to provide argumentative ammo to those on our side. The choir DOES need to be preached to, so as to be fortified, and provided with tools for ideological combat.

Third, to persuade fence-sitters, people with open minds who can be nudged one way or the other.

Fourth, to let our enemies know that they will be opposed, and their lies exposed. Enough of us protesting loudly, but with wit, style and solid arguments, can have an intimidating effect on our enemies. Winning in a war requires intimidation. To intimidate is to induce a weakening fear in the enemy.

Fifth, because I'm a natural-born scribbler who takes great pleasure from writing and re-reading what he has written. The hunt for the incisive formulation that penetrates to the heart of the matter is a source of pleasure.

My PhilPapers and PhilPeople Pages

I have been hard at work sprucing up these pages, adding content and links for the download of some of my papers, and correcting errors. I still have a lot of work to do. Take a gander if you care to. Most of my reviews are substantial review articles, not book reports. There are a lot of new bells and whistles to play with.

Why am I so Happy?

Every day there are multiple outrages from the Left as my country turns into a police state. Why should I be happy?

Well, I live in Arizona, a destination state if ever there was one, and I have lived here for going on 22 years. Today is another one of those exquisitely beautiful, halcyon, February days in the Sonoran desert. I am sitting here, windows open, shirt off. My work is going well. My health is good. I enjoy the bliss and security of obscurity while garnering all the recognition I need. I take delight in my wife, and she in me. I have everything I could possibly want materially speaking. I am reaping the benefits of a lifetime of Italian frugality. Each day is my own. The consolations of philosophy are mine. The owl of Minerva is my friend. As dusk descends, he spreads his wings, sheltering me. More than a consolation, philosophy and the life of the mind remain a reliable source of joy. Boethius wrote philosophy in prison, but I have reason to believe that I won't be tested in that way. Old age is on my side. The clock is running, the format is sudden death, and though the time control is unknown, I have reason to believe that the flag will fall before a Boethian fate befalls me.

Most importantly, I believe that, after our brief sublunary tenure, we continue on as individuals in some way that, from this side, must remain mainly a matter of faith and speculation. What we do now is meaningful because there is something like a future for us. To live well we must not only hope within this life but also hope beyond it. If you believe that death spells the utter end of the individual, then I will ask you: whence the meaning of your life? Are you really fulfilled by the little meanings of the quotidian round? Are you satisfied by yet another repetition of a paltry pleasure, a further concupiscent twitch, another unneeded material possession, one more uptick in your net worth? Is hitting a little white ball into a hole enough to make you happy?