Mail Bag – Maverick Philosopher

On the Many Nietzsches

Karl White writes,

I was wondering if I might share a philosophical irritant. I was recently in correspondence with a well-established Nietzsche scholar, a nice guy with a recent book out. Thing is, like all Nietzsche scholars, or so it seems to me, he confidently proclaimed that all other Nietzsche scholars had overlooked the ‘real Nietzsche’ and that his book would ‘surprise them’.

Now obviously the critical enterprise regarding all philosophers should be ongoing, but it strikes me that in regard to certain thinkers, and Nietzsche in particular, there is a never-ending production line of tomes declaring the ‘real thinker’. Now while Nietzsche fans might say this is a validation of Nietzsche’s own ‘perspectivism’ and so on, I am drifting closer to the possible view that on the contrary it may also signal a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘project’. If there are so many views and with no end in sight to their formulation, then it is not possible that the subject in question is a ‘Sphinx without a secret’?

Curious if you’ve any views.

Good to hear from you, Karl.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, Section 6, Nietzsche says that every great philosophy is the personal confession of its author (Selbstbekenntnis ihres Urhebers). I believe he is right about this, and that the observation applies also to us lesser lights who are unlikely to produce any great philosophy: an ineluctable subjectivity attaches to our quest to know the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. I would add that the observation also applies to the efforts of the commentators to penetrate the Nietzschean corpus.

They see in Nietzsche what interests them, and they find what they can exploit for their own projects. Three Germans from same generation, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Alfred Baeumler read our man in very different ways. My post Nietzsche and National Socialism, which may add to your irritation, sports a link to an excerpt from Baeumler. Heidegger has two fat volumes on Nietzsche. Have you read them? How about Jaspers’s book? And then there are the analytic Nietzsche enthusiasts. Have you read Laird Addis? He’s “Iowa School” (Gustav Bergmann and associates). I was impressed by the former’s Natural Signs, but I haven’t been able to acquire his Nietzsche book, a review of which is here. If you have a copy I will buy it from you should you want to sell it. Same goes for the book by Jaspers, whether in English or in German. I’m a big fan of Jaspers. In fact, my own philosophical position shares deep affinities with his.

You are right to be irritated by those who claim to have laid bare the “real Nietzsche.” A deep thinker, a tormented soul, whose deep entanglement in problems that are lived and felt and not merely thought about, is unlikely to arrive at a nice, neat, pat view with an easily discernible sense. There is no “real Nietzsche,” or at least no such person accessible to the academics who live from philosophy rather than for it.

Is the multiplicity of interpretations a validation of Nietzsche’s perspectivism? No. An incoherent doctrine cannot be validated. I explore the problem in a number of posts, all of which require re-thinking and revision.

“I am drifting closer to the possible view that on the contrary it may also signal a fundamental incoherence at the heart of Nietzsche’s ‘project’. If there are so many views and with no end in sight to their formulation, then it is not possible that the subject in question is a ‘Sphinx without a secret’?”

I sympathize with your drift, Karl, and thanks for writing.

One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism

This morning's mail brought a longish letter from philosophy student Ryan Peterson. He would like some comments and I will try to oblige him as time permits, but time is short. So for now I will confine my comments to the postscript of his letter:

P.S. Just as crazy as one category trope bundle theory is to me, is the later Brentano’s attempt at a different one category ontology, ‘reism’, where “For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)” (from Uriah Kriegel’s Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism). I like to rigorously understand all the different views put forth by intelligent philosophers on a topic but I do like to spend the most time understanding the more plausible seeming views first.

Leaving trope theory to one side for the moment, I am happy to agree with Peterson's assessment of Brentano. While not literally a product of insanity, Brentano's view I find to be incomprehensible. (And I don't mean that to be a merely autobiographical remark.)

I assume what to me seems to be well-nigh self-evident: some, but not all, truths need truth-makers. (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) A truth is a true truth-bearer. The primary truth-bearers — the primary vehicles of the truth-values — are propositions. An assertive utterance at a particular time by a particular person of the declarative sentence 'Socrates is wise' expresses the proposition Socrates is wise. I will assume that propositions are abstract in the Quinean, not the trope-theoretic, sense of 'abstract.' (You can hear an asserted sentence and see a written sentence; you cannot hear or see a proposition.) A truth-bearer is not a truth-maker, except in some recherché cases I won't mention. (And don't confuse a truth-maker with a truth condition.)

There has to be something in the world of concreta (the spatiotemporal realm of causal reality) that makes it true that Socrates exists. To avoid the word 'makes,' we can say that the sentence and the proposition it expresses need an ontological ground of their being-true. Now you either get it or you don't. There are those who don't have a clue as to what I am talking about. Such people have no philosophical aptitude, and must simply be shown the door. A contingent truth cannot just be true, nor can it be true in virtue of someone's say-s0: a contingent truth requires something in reality external to the truth-bearer and its verbal expression that 'makes' it true, where this 'making' or grounding is neither narrowly logical nor causal. (Its not being either the one nor the other sensu stricto is what prejudices some against it. I kick them off my stoa as lacking philosophical aptitude.)

Now what in the world could function as the ontological ground of the contingent truth of 'Socrates exists'? The obvious answer is: the concrete particular Socrates. (Aristotle makes this very point somewhere in The Categories.) A particular may be defined as an unrepeatable entity by contrast with universals (if such there be) that are by definition repeatable.

There is an obvious difference between 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is Greek,' on the one hand, and 'Socrates exists' on the other. It is the difference between predicative and existential sentences. Now we come to the nub of the issue. It seems blindingly evident to me that the two predicative sentences (and the propositions they express), if they need truth-makers at all, need concrete states of affairs (STOAs) as truth-makers, and that these truth-making states of affairs must be numerically distinct. I have no objection to saying that wise-Socrates makes true the first sentence and Greek-Socrates the second if 'wise-Socrates' and 'Greek-Socrates' refer to concrete states of affairs (not to be confused with Chisholmian abstract states of affairs).

But that is not what Brentano is saying. His reism cannot allow for concrete states of affairs of the form a's being F. For the predicate 'F' either picks out an abstract particular, a trope, or it picks out a universal. But on reism, all you've got are things, concrete particulars, which, moreover, cannot be assayed as concrete states of affairs along either Bergmannian or Armstrongian lines.

On reism one must therefore swallow the absurdity that "wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)." So they are one and the same and yet numerically different?? A question for Peterson: Is Kriegel defending truth-maker nominalism? I hope not. For it makes no bloody sense. For one thing it implies that the putatively two but at the same time one concrete particular(s) are property-less and are thus 'bare,' though not in Gustav Bergmann's precise sense. They are property-less if there are no properties, and there are no properties if there are no tropes nor any universals. A predicate is not a property.

'Red,' 'rot,' 'rouge,' and 'rosso' are four different predicates in four different languages. If Tom the tomato is red, as we say in English, he is not red only in English or rosso only in Italian. That way lies an absurd linguistic idealism. The predicates are true of Tom because there is something in or related to Tom that makes the predicates true of him, that grounds their applicability to him. This something in Tom is either the trope in him (assuming he is a complete bundle of tropes) or a universal that he instantiates. Nominalism makes no sense. The reality of properties is non-negotiable. But of course they needn't be universals. Trope-nominalism makes sense. 'Ostrich' nominalism does not. The same goes for van Inwagen's 'ostrich realism.'

Here is another argument. Socrates, while essentially Greek (Cf. Kripke's essentiality of origin), is only accidentally wise: had he lived long enough he might have gone 'Biden.' At every time at which he exists, our man is Greek, but only at some times is he wise. (He wasn't wise when he peeped his head out from between the legs of his mother, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.) So if he is one and the same concrete individual over time, then there has to be a distinction between him and real properties (not predicates!) that are either in him as tropes or related to him as universals.

From the Mail Bag: Old-Time Reader Swims the Tiber

This just in from Russell B.:

Long time no talk.

I hope you’re doing well. I have been thinking about your work on existence over the past 3-4 years very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has made me swim the Tiber (well, I was born and raised Catholic so did I actually leave?). But I had to leave Protestantism; there was nothing left for me there. However, my biggest problem was divine simplicity. Long story short: I think your view (and Barry Miller’s view) is more or less the proper way to think about existence which in turn helps make DDS easier to swallow. And, if I might add, while the view is philosophically rich, I find the mystical and religious implications much richer. I have been obsessed with the mystics and in particular Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz. I am unsure if you have felt similar ways in which their ideas deeply coincide with a God that just is Being itself. I don’t really know if I have words to describe how other than it just 'appears' to me that way.

Another way in which you helped me religiously was helping me decide between between Eastern Orthodoxy and Rome. They are essentially the same religion but I remember you saying that we need to approach truth from four different angles: philosophically, morally, religiously, and mystically. Well, I would say that Catholicism uses all four of these approaches while Orthodoxy ignores the first. This was huge for me. Now I know you have problems with the amount of dogma the Catholic Church has. This was also a stumbling block for me but I have tried to approach the matter like the parable where Jesus says only a child will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It has been humbling to say the least.

Very good to hear from you, Russell. Here are a couple of questions and some comments that will interest you and perhaps others.

1) What were your reasons for becoming a Protestant in the first place and then leaving Protestantism, apart from acceptance of DDS? And what sect did you leave?

2) You ask whether I think mysticism, particularly that of the two great Spanish mystics you mention, coheres with the notion of a God who is ipsum esse subsistens. I do indeed. I am sure you are aware of Exodus 2:14: Ego sum qui sum . . . dic illis: QUI EST misit me ad vos. On Mount Sinai God reveals himself to Moses, and communicates to him the following message to be relayed to those at the foot of the mountain, a message presumably not couched in the words of any human language: "I am who am . . . say this, 'He Who Is sent me to you.' "

To my mind, this passage from Exodus expresses the identity of the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers. The God of the Bible, a being, reveals himself to man as Being itself. The two upward paths, that of religion and that of philosophy, come together as one at the apex of the ascent in the divine simplicity. The ascent to the Absolute is thus onto-theological. And so, the two paths, neither of which in itself is a mystical path, culminate in a mystical unity, that of the simple God. It is a mystical unity in that it defies discursive grasp. We ineluctably think in opposites and naturally balk at talk of a thing identical to its attributes, its attributes identical to one another, its essence identical to its existence, and so on.

You can come to understand how a God worth his salt must be ontologically simple without being able to understand how he could be ontologically simple. You can reason your way up to the simple God, but not into him or his life. There will be no syllogizing in the Beatific Vision. Discursivity must be dropped as it must also be dropped in the transition from ordinary, discursive prayer to the Prayer of Quiet, the first stage of infused contemplation, with several more beyond it. These stages are well-described in Teresa's Interior Castle, and in all the manuals of mystical theology. Poulain, about whom I say something over at Substack, is particularly good.

Mystics properly so called, such as Teresa de Avila and Juan de la Cruz, are able to jump immediately to the apex by mystical intuition. And so there are three upward paths, although the mystical way is perhaps not well-described as a path inasmuch as it can be trod in an instant without any preparatory ascesis if one receives an infusion of divine grace. (Grace is gratuitous and so cannot be brought about by any technique.) The philosopher plods along, discursively, step by step. The religionist proceeds tediously with rites and rituals, petitions and penances and processions, fasting and almsgiving, kneeling and standing. Mystics, properly so-called, do these things as well, but not as well and not as much. You may have noticed, Russell, that St. Teresa is a pretty sharp thinker who works out a criteriology for the evaluation of mystical experiences in The Interior Castle, a late work of hers, and the one I would recommend to people above her others. It is short and easy to read.

As for Thomas Aquinas, the main exponent of DDS, he too is a mystic, a minor mystic if you will, not at the level of Teresa and Juan, not to mention Meister Eckhart, et al. I believe the only experience of Thomas's we are aware of is the one at the end of his life which prompted him to give up writing. See my Substack article, Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished? Aquinas is all three: philosopher, religionist, mystic. Or it might be better to say he wears four hats: philosopher, religionist, theologian, mystic.

This response is beginning to get lengthy, so I'll leave two more comments I have until later. The Comments are enabled.

Just over the Transom from Malcolm Pollack

Hi Bill,

My neighbor didn't call me a Trumper to my face, but mentioned (back in April) to my wife that he had the impression that I was one. (I felt obliged to unpack the assertion in a post.)

The Cape has a lot of Dems, but most of the working people out here are what Zman calls "dirt people" (i.e., those who encounter actually existing reality in their work), and they are . . . well, Trumpers. They are also well-armed.

[. . .]

The post to which Malcolm links, from April, is up to his usual high standard and is one you ought to read. I agree with it in its entirety. As the political temperature rises, its relevance does as well.

An Online Catalog of Theistic Arguments

Chad McIntosh writes,

I'd like to let you know about a project I've been working on for the past two years that I have just completed (for now): a fairly comprehensive, organized list and summary of theistic arguments. I hope it will be a useful resource.

https://www.camcintosh.com/theistic/index.html

I've also included at the very end (under META > Cumulative Case) a calculator that allows visitors to come up with their own estimate of the evidential power of the arguments.

The website is a little clunky, but serviceable (it is best as expanded window on desktop). Of course, I've included several of your arguments:

ONTOLOGICAL > Possibility Defenses > Kordig & Vallicella
METAPHYSICAL > Facts
AXIOLOGICAL > Deontic Value > Modal Axiarchism

I thought I should take a look at your book A Paradigm Theory of Existence with the intent to summarize it's main argument, but that's a hard book to get a hold of! There's also a similar argument just published by Christoph de Ray called "Existence Exists and it is God," in which he interacts with your book. I may integrate both yours and de Ray's arguments in a future update to the page.

Great to hear from you, Chad. You've created an interesting and useful resource. The site is a bit clunky but it displays clearly and easily on my desktop and is easy to navigate. Thank you for your references to my work. As for my existence book, I'd send you a copy if I had one to spare. If someone reading this has a copy he would be willing to part with, please contact Chad. I don't recommend that you buy it; it is way overpriced, although on occasion the Amazon pricing algorithm goes haywire and the tome becomes relatively affordable.

Thanks also for referring me to Christophe de Ray, whose article I found here. I will have to read it.

Let me make two minor comments on the material in the Prolegomena section. You define 'theistic argument' as follows:

Theistic arguments are arguments for (or the rationality of belief in or commitment to) the existence of a being with at least one God-like attribute, such as necessity, God-like power or knowledge, ground of morality, creator or designer of the natural world, and so on.

The first is that you need a second 'for' after 'or' in the parenthesis. The second is substantive. Suppose an entity has exactly one God-like attribute. I wouldn't call an argument for the existence of such an entity an argument for God given your definition of theism:

Theism is the view that there is a personal God like that worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims.

The Good of Plato, the One of Plotinus, the deus sive natura of Spinoza, the objevktiver Geist of Hegel, and F. H. Bradley's Absolute, to mention just these five, are each such as to have one or more God-like attributes, but none of them are persons. I have no objection to your definition of theism; my point is that it does not comport well with your definition of 'theistic arguments.' The latter is easily repaired, but I'll leave that to you.

Comments are enabled and invited.

From the Mail Bag: Tony Benvin on Need

On Aug. 7th you wrote ". . .the best response to the leftist who asks, "'Why do you need a gun?' is wrong question!"

I have been saying for years that debating that question is allowing the left to set the premise of the debate.

I also wanted to point out that questioning "need" is inherently a socialistic/communistic premise (". . . to each according to his need") which betrays the underlying nature of the gun controller's attack. It's also an argument that is only ever selectively used. No one questions the need for air conditioning in a car (or an office for that matter), no one questions the need for a 75 inch OLED television, etc. In fact, one of my touchstones for years has been asking would-be socialists to explain just why Leonid Breshnev NEEDED an antique car collection along with my offer to join their ranks if they could adequately respond.

After years of making that offer I have still not needed to join, and thought you might enjoy my essay in American Thinker about deconstructing socialists and their ilk:

Thanks for your blog. Your observations and discussions often make my day.

UPDATE (8/11) Tony adds:

Wow! A post! I didn't expect that or I would have written a little less informally. Thank you for the attention and citation.

You mention trying times; that they are, but I am also quite hopeful because I see success written in our national DNA. My grandparents came to this country with little more than the clothes on their backs and to a language they didn't speak (I'll bet this applies to you, too). Like Columbus, they set sail and took the chance that there be dragons out there, and now here we are two former professors (in my case, just the 2nd generation removed from the plow) with Ph.D.s and successful careers; we are the legacy of their bravery both personally and nationally.

BV: Yes, it applies to me as well. All four of my grandparents immigrated from Italy, and my mother as well, coming over at age ten. All learned English and assimilated. The children were given Anglo names and not just because of the prejudice against Italians, but out of respect for Anglo-American culture. Before the rot set in in the 'sixties, it was understood that immigration without assimilation would lead to trouble of the identity-political and tribalist sorts we are now experiencing. It was also understood that the borders had to be enforced and that only legal immigrants were to be allowed in. What's more — and this is also very important and now completely ignored — it was understood that there is no right to immigrate and that legal immigration was to be allowed from only some countries and that these countries were to be ranked in terms of the potential contributions of their citizens to the well-being of the host country. It was understood that an immigration policy is not a suicide pact, and that ethnomasochists are to have no hand in its formulation. But now we must witness the spectacle of a destructive fool who calls himself ALEJANDRO Mayorkas, a brazen liar who heads the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, who repeats against the evidence of the senses that the border is secure! It is evident that he and the entire Biden Administration is working to destroy the United States as she was founded to be.

And so, Tony, I am considerably less sanguine than you are. We are over-extended abroad and collapsing under the weight of our own decadence within. All of our institutions are being undermined by leftist termites. But we fight on, nonetheless, to the tune of 'It ain't over til it's over.' It will be very 'interesting' to see if the fight can be confined to the political sphere.

As I'm sure you know, good men create good times, good times create soft men, soft men create bad times, and bad times create good men. We are in the latter stage of that cycle, but unfortunately for you and I, that can mean generational change.

UPDATE (8/12). Vito Caiati chimes in:

Your and Tony’s stories on immigrant ancestors brought to mind that of my maternal grandfather Giovanni, who arrived with my grandmother, Anna, and three very little daughters in New York City just after the turn of the last century. Giovanni, who was a skilled machinist, in the days when that meant literally making and assembling the parts of machines, leaves his job at the naval shipyard in Palermo, travels to Naples to board a liner, crosses the Atlantic with a wife and three children, arrives in New York, where he is met by a cousin, Fausto, who is employed in a company that makes machines to produce paper bags. The cousin leads the immigrants to a small apartment in the Bronx, which he has procured for them, and early the very next morning, Giovanni, who speaks no English, leaves with the cousin, descends into the subway, emerges in mid-Manhattan, and ends up in a factory adjacent to the West Side piers, where he is immediately hired by the company (no big state welfare with this crowd) and where he works more than fifty years, sitting alongside of immigrant German machinists, all of them fashioning parts for prototype machines. Like your grandparents and mother, everyone learned to speak, read, and write English, although the girls were given Italian names and Sicilian, along with English, was spoken at home.

Another America, another New York, both of which I love dearly, now unrecognizable in my old age.