Wife and Life, Truth and Practice

My wife is easy-going, tolerant, forgiving, good-hearted, and unselfish. Hungry, she bought herself a Costco hot dog and then, without my asking, gave me the lion's share,* concerned that I was hungry! I chose well in matters marital.

Human nature leaves a lot to be desired. And yet there is goodness and nobility in some people. The world is ugly, but there is also beauty in it. Life can seem meaningless, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," and yet it also at times appears under the aspect of ultimate Sense and Rightness.

You will have to decide which of these seemings to live by. Try both and see which is more conducive to happiness. The one that makes you happier has a solid claim on being the truer. That the truth should in the end thwart us strikes me as implausible. But the question cannot be resolved theoretically. You resolve it by living, thoughtful living, each for himself and by himself.

Titans once bestrode Harvard Yard.** Josiah Royce was one, William James the other. The latter held that truth is "the good in the way of belief." I commend that thought to your delectation, examination, and practical implementation.

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*Time was, when the lion's share of something was the whole of it. Despite my linguistic conservatism, I have acquiesced in the latter-day usage according to which the lion's share of something is most of it. If lions could speak, they would protest the semantic dilution.

**Pygmies now rule.

Willie Horton Revisited

I posted the following on my Facebook page this morning. Go there for my political linkage and 'rantage.'

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I have a confession to make. I voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988! Do I have an excuse? If I have one, it is that my 'default setting' is apolitical. I'm a metaphysician by inclination, and I remain so inclined. I was a registered Democrat until 1991. But when I started to think concretely about social and political matters with the help of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and the classics, I realized that there was very little to keep me among the Dems, a bunch that was increasingly moving in the direction of hard leftism and identity politics.

One thing that stuck in my craw and still does is that libs and lefties have a disgustingly casual attitude toward criminal behavior. You can rely on them to take the side of the screw-up, the criminal, and the underdog even when the underdog is responsible for his sub-canine status. And this while making it difficult for the decent citizen to protect himself by Second Amendment means from the criminal element that liberals coddle, excuse, and now let off scot-free.

Is there one prominent Dem nowadays who supports the death penalty? No. (Correct me if I am wrong!) This is clear proof that this 'woke'-controlled party is bereft of moral sense. Capital punishment is precisely what justice demands in certain well-defined cases.

William Voegli on Willie Horton:

. . . identity politics determined the Democratic reaction in 1988 when George W. Bush’s presidential campaign raised the “Willie Horton” issue against his opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. It was intolerable, liberal activists and journalists declared, to bring to public attention an incident where a black man had brutalized a white couple. What was tolerable, by implication, was a policy (unique to Massachusetts) that gave violent felons, serving life sentences and ineligible for parole, unsupervised furloughs. Little wonder that Joe Sixpack voters tuned into Reagan Democrats as they came to associate liberalism with “profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility, and sanctimoniousness,” as sociologist Jonathan Rieder put it in Canarsie (1985). To this day, Democrats think that what Bush said about Willie Horton was outrageous but that what Dukakis did was, at worst, unfortunate.

Pretty Feeble Stuff

Much of what I post here is pretty feeble stuff. But damned if I don't love this daily scribbling!

So What’s up with the Metaphilosophy Book?

I was happy to find the following item in the mailbag the other morning:

Hi Bill,

I recall (however, I can't find exactly where) that you mentioned in an old blog post your intention to publish a work on metaphilosophy at some point in the future. I am curious, is this still a goal of yours? If so, is it in progress? I would be delighted to read it, but I understand if you've chosen not to pursue that project.

Your grateful reader,

Chandler

Thank you for your inquiry, Chandler. Yes, the metaphilosophy book is in progress, and has been for longer than I care to reveal. Why am I taking so long with it?

I gave the following dissertation advice a few posts ago:

. . . finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic. Finish it before your standards become too exacting. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish.

My current predicament is the opposite. I am now old and my standards have become as exacting as they ever will be. I'm under time pressure but it's of a different sort than the young person's. The young philosopher needs to 'make it' and secure a space within which he can pursue his vocation. He has to solve 'the problem of the belly.' He may also be driven by worldly ambition. I have secured the space, solved the problem of livelihood, and I have renounced all worldly ambition in line with Wittgenstein's 1948 observation, "Ambition is the death of thought." (Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens, Culture and Value, p. 77)

So now I can afford to set high standards. Trouble is, they slow you down. That's good in one way. I take to heart the advice of Wittgenstein and Brentano. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: 'Take your time!'"

A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this: Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft. "One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis."

On the other hand, the clock is running, the flag will fall, and the time control is sudden death. There is no secondary or tertiary control; nor can one take an 'incomplete' when the Grim Reaper comes knocking, his scythe glistening in the rays of the setting sun.

‘Handsome Devil’

I visited a couple of aunts some years back. As I entered her house, Aunt Ada exclaimed, "My, you are a handsome devil!" Aunt Margaret said to Ada, "Don't call him a devil!" But of course Ada did no such thing; Margaret failed to appreciate that 'handsome' in 'handsome devil' in this context and almost all others functions as an alienans adjective.

For more examples and a definition see my adjectives category.

University of Dayton Philosophy Department Circa 1980

Amazing what one can dredge up from the vasty deeps of cyberspace!

Why Am I So Happy?

From my Facebook page, three years ago, pre-COVID-19, pre-Biden, before things really got bad. But I am still happy. For some of us happiness is a basal state, bred-in-the-bone, affected somewhat by external circumstances, but not by much.

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My beloved country looks to be going the way of the Roman empire: overextended abroad and collapsing within under the weight of its own decadence. We can't agree about much of anything anymore and are arguing bitterly about things we ought not be arguing about. The future looks grim. Civil war may be in the offing. Idiots and overgrown children now occupy positions of power in our government. The Speaker of the House regularly spouts nonsense. Deep State operatives deploy fascist techniques against harmless citizens to intimidate and spread fear. People who should know better apologize for speaking the truth. Journalism is pretty much dead and lies are rampant. Delusional race-baiters who retail incoherence are celebrated by white 'liberals' in the pages of once respectable publications. Bootless neocons with no skin in the game advocate spreading 'democracy' among benighted tribalists regardless of the expenditure of American blood and treasure. The rights that are every American's birthright are under assault. Roughly half of our fellow citizens are reasonably viewed as domestic enemies. And the litany continues.

So why am I so happy?

When I was 20 I wrote into my journal, "Philosophy, the joy of my youth and the consolation of my old age." I was prescient, but not prescient enough. Philosophy has proven to be not only the consolation but also the joy of my old age, and a greater joy than ever.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk, and this owl is reaping a rich harvest as the shadows grow long and the end of the trail comes into view.

It helps if you can look beyond this life and see it as a passing scene, real enough as far as it goes, and certainly no dream, but a scene of no final reality or importance.

And so I pity the poor secularist who has nothing beyond this hopeless world.

Why We Get Along

I'm reasonable; she's sweet and agreeable.

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.

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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.