To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe. It is a demand that cannot be satisfied. But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to become fringe. The transdiscursive, however, to which philosophy is beholden and to which she points, can never be brought into discursive focus. The transdiscursive, ineliminably obscure, must forever remain fringe.
The unity of the proposition, for example, without which no proposition can attract a truth value, and without which no proposition can be more than a truth-value-less aggregate of its sub-propositional parts, lies beyond the grasp of the discursive intellect.
Might we reasonably expect total clarity in the next world? The next world might be samsara 2.0, clearer, brighter, more intelligible, but still subject to the duality: clarity-obscurity. Ascend from the Cave, and you will still experience light and darkness, but more light and less darkness than down below. And beyond that there perhaps lies samsara 3.0, and so on. Ever subtler realms of chiaroscuro. The nirvanic terminal state would then be the extinction of all dualities, and the unspeakable unity of clarity and obscurity, intelligibility and ab-surdity. Could that be the ultimate Goal? Could the ens reallissimum himself take as his final goal, nibbanic extinction?
Could the ens perfectissimum et necessarium say to himself: Take it to the limit Old Man and become finally in truth what you were supposed to be all along, Absolute and Unconditioned?
The above is a species of nonsense from the point of view of the discursive intellect. Important nonsense or nugatory nonsense? If you plump for the latter, are you not assuming that the discursive intellect is unconditioned?
St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of unpacking the relevant passages.
The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll leave that question for later. Here is the passage:
If perchance I had to write a treatise on ethics, I would rank good humor as the first of our duties. I do not know what ferocious religion has taught us that sadness is great and beautiful, and that the wise man must meditate on death by digging his own grave. When I was ten years old, I visited the Abbey of La Trappe; I saw the graves the monks were digging a little each day, and the mortuary chapel where the dead were laid out for an entire week, for the edification of the living.
These lugubrious images and the cadaveric odor haunted me for a long time; but the monks had tried to prove too much. I cannot say exactly when and for what reasons I left the Catholic Church because I have forgotten. But from that moment on, I said to myself: "It is not possible that they have the true secret of life." My whole being rebelled against those mournful monks. And I freed myself from their religion as from an illness.
("Good Humor" in Alain on Happiness, tr. Cottrell, New York: Frederick Unger, 1973, p. 198. Paragraph break and italics added. Propos sur le bonheur was originally published in 1928 by Gallimard.)
The Attitude of the Worldling
Alain above frankly expresses his sense of life or sense of reality. I don't share it, but can I argue against it? Does it even make sense to try to argue against it? Probably not. In a matter such as this argument comes too late. Alain feels it in his guts and with his "whole being" that the religion of the mournful monks, the religion Alain himself was raised in, is world-flight and a life-denying sickness.
For a worldling such as Alain, the transient things of this world are as real as it gets, and all else is unreal. The impermanence of things and the brevity of life do not impress or shock him as they do someone with a religious sensibility. The worldling doesn't take them as indices of unreality as a Platonist would. If you point out the brevity of life to a worldling he might give a speech like the following:
Precisely because life is short, one must not waste it. Brevity does not show lack of reality or value, pace Plato and his latter-day acolytes such as Simone Weil, but how real and valuable life is. This life is as real as it gets. It is precious precisely because it is short. Make the most of it because there is not much of it, but what there is of it is enough for those who are fortunate, who live well, and who do not die too soon. Don't waste your life on religious illusions! Don't spend your life digging your grave and preparing for death. Live!
The attitude here is that life is short but long enough and valuable enough, at least for some of us. One should make friends with finitude, enjoying what one has and not looking beyond to what is merely imagined. Near the beginning of the The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus quotes Pindar, "O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible." (Pythian, iii)
A frat boy might put it like this:
Ashes to ashes Dust to dust Life is short So party we must.
You only go around once in life So you have to grab for all the gusto you can.
This attitude of the worldling is possible because it is actual and indeed widespread more so now than ever before in history, in good measure because of our technology that extends life and makes it vastly more endurable than in previous centuries. Our 24-7, 365(6) connectivity also practically insures that we will remain trapped within the sphere of immanence and human chatter and be unable to 'pick up any signals' from beyond the human horizon. Our communications technology is like a Faraday cage that blocks all irruptions from the Unseen Order.
The worldling's attitude is a matter of sensibility and it is difficult and probably impossible to argue with anyone's sensibility. I cannot argue you out of your sense of reality. Arguments come too late for that. In fact, arguments are often little more than articulations on the logical plane of a sensibility deep in the soul that was already in place before one attained explicit logical skills.
Is the worldling ignorant?
I would say he is. But how prove it either to him or to myself? Can one PROVE that God and the soul are real? That this life is a vanishing quantity unworthy of wholehearted devotion? That what really matters is beyond matter and beyond mind in its presently paltry and darkened state? No. At best one can give a number of plausible arguments for these 'objects' and a number of plausible arguments against metaphysical naturalism. But at the end of the day one is going to have to invoke certain mystical vouchsafings, intimations from Elsewhere, glimpses, revelations, teachings of some magisterium deemed finally authoritative, all of which are easily hauled before the bench of reason to have their veridicality questioned, and, I should add, in good faith. In the end, a leap of faith is needed. You will have to decide what to believe and how to live. You will have to decide whether to live in accordance with your sense of life, whether it be of the worldly sort or the otherworldly.
Suppose I take the 'bite of conscience' as pointing to the existence of a Supreme Moral Authority of a personal nature. I could make a very strong case. But would it be rationally compelling? No. Could I ever be objectively certain that no naturalistic explanation could account adequately for the deliverances of conscience? No. So the will comes into it.
Is the worldling morally culpable for his ignorance?
Some might be, but in general, he is not. Pace St. Paul at Romans 1: 18-20, I don't find unbelief to be morally culpable. It is neither evident that God exists nor evident that he does not exist. One can of course dogmatize and one can of course be a 'presuppositionalist' of one sort or another. But those are not respectable positions.
Emile-Auguste Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. Were he alive and active today he would most likely be a blogger.
Today, the feast of St. Augustine, is a clear and dry day in the Valley of the Sun. A meditation, then, on light and the ascent to the Light.
Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hug the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive.
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it phenomenologically is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung (Heidegger), which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light. Heidegger would not approve of my last move, but so be it.
Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light, the light of Truth, upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an unchangeable light." He continues:
It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)
'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.
A tetrad of lights: physical, phenomenal, transcendental, and divine.
St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of unpacking the relevant passages.
Kreeft here lists fourteen features of mystical experience which comport well with my experience.
This is a redacted re-posting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 8 May 2015. It answers a question Fr. Kimel poses in the comments to Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse.
Reading through Vallicella’s article, I kept asking myself, Would Mascall agree with the proposition “existence exists”? I find the proposition odd. [. . .] What about the assertion of Pseudo-Dionysius that God is beyond all Being? Aquinas would certainly agree that the Creator transcends created being; but I suspect that Dionysius is trying to say something more. I wonder what the Maverick Philosopher thinks about “beyond Being” language (I can pretty much guess what Tuggy thinks about it).
I plan to discuss the strange question whether existence exists in a separate post. Here I will say something about whether God is beyond all Being.
Well, what would it be for God to be beyond Being? What could that mean?
First we must distinguish between Being and beings, esse and ens, das Sein und das Seiende. It is absolutely essential to observe this distinction and to mark it linguistically by a proper choice of terms. If we do so, then we see right away that Kimel's question is ambiguous. Is he asking whether God is beyond all beings or beyond all Being? Big difference! (Heidegger calls it the Ontological Difference.)
I think what Kimel means to ask is whether God is beyond all beings. A being is anything at all that is or exists, of whatever category, and of whatever nature. Being, on the other hand, majuscule Being, is that which makes beings be. Now one of the vexing questions here is whether Being itself is, whether that which makes beings be is itself a being or else the paradigmatic being. Heidegger and Pseudo-Dionysius say No! Aquinas says Yes! (That is, Aquinas says that Being is the paradigmatic being from which every other being has its being.) Dale Tuggy would presumably dismiss the question by maintaining that there just is no Being, there are only beings; hence the question lapses, resting as it does (according to Tuggy) on a false presupposition.
Now distinguish three positions. (A) God is a being among beings. (B) God is not a being among beings, but self-subsistent Being itself. (C) God is neither a being among beings, nor self-subsistent Being itself, but beyond every being. Tuggy, Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius. (You're in good company, Dale!)
I have already explained what it means to say that God is a being among beings. But to repeat myself, it it to say that the very same general-metaphysical scheme, the very same scheme of metaphysica generalis, that applies to creatures applies also to God. This implies, among other things, that God and Socrates (Socrates standing in for any creature whatsoever) exist in the same way. It implies that there are not two modes of Being, one pertaining to God alone, the other pertaining to Socrates. If, on the other hand, one maintains that God is not a being among beings, then one is maintaining, among other things, that God and Socrates exist in different ways. The difference can be put by saying that God is (identically) his existence and existence itself while this is surely not the case for Socrates: he has existence but he doesn't have it by being it. In God there is no real distinction, no distinctio realis, between essence and existence while in Socrates there is a real distinction between essence and existence.
Equivalently, if God is a being among beings, then God is one member of a totality of beings each of which exists in the very same sense of 'exists' and has properties in the very same sense of 'has properties.' But if God is not a being among beings, then there is no such totality of beings each of which exists in the very same sense of 'exists' and has properties in the very same sense of 'has properties' such that both God and Socrates are members of it.
How does (B) differ from (C)? On (B) God is (identical to) Being but also is. God is not a being, but the being that is identical to Being itself. (C) is a more radical view. It is the view that God is so radically transcendent of creatures that he is not! This is exactly what pseudo-Dionysius says in The Divine Names (Complete Works, p. 98) It is the view that God is other than every being. But if God is other than every being, then God in no way is.
This can also be explained in terms of univocity, analogicity, and equivocity. For Tuggy & Co. 'exists' in 'God exists' and 'Socrates exists' has exactly the same sense. The predicate is univocal across these two occurrences. For Aquinas, the predicate is being used analogously, which implies that while God and Socrates both are, they are in different ways or modes. But for Pseudo-Dionysius the predicate is equivocal.
Fr. Kimel suspects that Pseudo-Dionysius is saying more than that God transcends every creature. The suspicion is correct. Whereas Aquinas is saying that God is, but transcends every creature in respect of his very mode of Being, Pseudo-Dionysius is saying more , namely that God is so transcendent that he is not.
My question for Fr. Kimel: Do you side with the doctor angelicus, or do you go all the way into the night of negative theology with Pseudo-Dionysus?
Is it possible to take grace seriously these days?
Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat. For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by someone, then I go beyond the given: I move from phenomenology to theology. No philosopher worth his salt can escape the question whether such a move is or is not an illicit slide. An experience describable as having a gift-character needn't be a gift.
Still, the experience was what it was, and could not be doubted a few moments ago, nor now in its afterglow. It is in such experiences that we find the phenomenological roots of the theology of grace which, growing from such roots, cannot be dismissed as empty speculation or projection or wish-fulfillment or anything else the naturalist may urge for its dismissal.
There cannot be a phenomenology of the Absolute but only a phenomenology of the glimpses, gleanings, vouchsafings, and intimations of the Absolute. To put the point with full philosophical precision: there can only be a phenomenology of the glimpses, etc. as of the Absolute. That curious phrase from the philosopher's lexicon expresses the latter's professional caution inasmuch as no experience that purports to take us beyond the sphere of immanence proves the veridicality of its intentional object.
On the other hand, the fact of the experience, its occurrence within the sphere of immanence, needs accounting. However matters may stand with respect to the realitas objectiva of the experience, its realitas formalis needs to be explained. I would venture to say that the best explanation of the widespread occurrence of mystical experiences is that some of them are indeed veridical.
Philosophers contradict one another, but that is not the worst of it. The grandest philosophical conclusion is and can only be a proposition about reality and not reality itself. But it is reality itself that we want.
Can religion help? Its motor is belief. But belief is not knowledge, either propositional or direct. And if an appeal to divine revelation is made, then the question inevitably arises: how does one know that a putative revelation is genuine?
If you certify the revelation by appeal to the authority of your church, then I will ask how you know that your church is the true church. After all, not every Christian is Catholic. Are those stray dogs who refuse Rome recalcitrant rebels who simply reject the truth when it is plainly presented to them? I think not.
The motor of philosophy is discursive reason. The motor of religion is belief and obedient acquiescence in authority. Neither Athens nor Jerusalem seems to be a wholly satisfying destination. Nor is straddling them with a leg in each a comfortable posture.
That leaves Benares.
The motor of mysticism is meditation. Its goal is direct contact with ultimate truth. Direct: not discursive or round-about. Direct: not based on testimony.
So should we pack for Benares? Not so fast. It has its drawbacks. Later.
If I want to be read, I have to be brief.
See here for a richer development of these themes.
A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience. He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling. He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird occurrence of no significance. Vouchsafed a hint of what might have been a reality beyond the ordinary, he chose to ignore it as if it were not worth the trouble of investigating. That sort of dismissive attitude is one I have trouble understanding. Especially in a philosopher!
It would be as if the prisoner in Plato's Cave who was freed of his shackles and was able to turn his head and see an opening and a light suggestive of a route out of the enclosure wherein he found himself were simply to have dismissed the sight as an insignificant illusion and then went back to 'reality,' the shadows on the wall.
I have no trouble understanding someone who, never having had any religious or mystical experiences, cannot bring himself to take religion seriously. And I have no trouble understanding someone who, having had such experiences, and having seriously examined their epistemic credentials, comes to the conclusion that they are none of them veridical. But to have the experiences, and not think them worth investigating — that puzzles me.
Ross Douthat assembles some examples similar to the case of my quondam colleague in his Christmas Eve column, Varieties of Religious Experience, a title he borrows from the eponymous masterpiece of William James. Here is one:
As a young man in the 1960s, the filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered into a Pentecostal church and suddenly felt “the Holy Ghost descending … as if a laser beam was cutting through my head and my heart was on fire.” He was in the midst of dealing with his then-girlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy; after they procured an abortion, he had a terrifying, avenging-angel vision during a screening of “King Kong.” The combined experience actively propelled him away from anything metaphysical; the raw carnality of his most famous films, he suggested later, was an attempt to keep the numinous and destabilizing at bay.
That makes about as much sense to me as blinding oneself lest one see too radiant a light.
I am trying to soften up the Opponent for the Inexpressible. Here is another attempt.
……………………..
Surely this is a valid and sound argument:
1. Stromboli exists. Ergo 2. Something exists.
Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first. How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order predicate logic with identity? Taking a cue from Quine we may formulate (1) as
1*. For some x, x = Stromboli. In English:
1**. Stromboli is identical with something.
But how do we render (2)? Surely not as 'For some x, x exists' since there is no first-level predicate of existence in standard logic. And surely no ordinary predicate will do. Not horse, mammal, animal, living thing, material thing, or any other predicate reachable by climbing the tree of Porphyry. Existence is not a summum genus. (Aristotle, Met. 998b22, AnPr. 92b14) What is left but self-identity? Cf. Frege's dialog with Puenjer.
So we try,
2*. For some x, x = x. In plain English:
2**. Something is self-identical.
So our original argument becomes:
1**. Stromboli is identical with something. Ergo 2**. Something is self-identical.
But what (2**) says is not what (2) says. The result is a murky travesty of the original luminous argument.
What I am getting at is that standard logic cannot state its own presuppositions. It presupposes that everything exists (that there are no nonexistent objects) and that something exists. But it lacks the expressive resources to state these presuppositions. The attempt to state them results either in nonsense — e.g. 'for some x, x' — or a proposition other than the one that needs expressing.
It is true that something exists, and I am certain that it is true: it follows immediately from the fact that I exist. But it cannot be said in standard predicate logic.
What should we conclude? That standard logic is defective in its treatment of existence or that there are things that can be SHOWN but not SAID? In April 1914. G.E. Moore travelled to Norway and paid a visit to Wittgenstein where the latter dictated some notes to him. Here is one:
In order that you should have a language which can express or say everything that can be said, this language must have certain properties; and when this is the case, that it has them can no longer be said in that language or any language. (Notebooks 1914-1916, p. 107)
Applied to the present example: A language that can SAY that e.g. island volcanos exist by saying that some islands are volcanos or that Stromboli exists by saying that Stromboli is identical to something must have certain properties. One of these is that the domain of quantification contains only existents and no Meinongian nonexistents. But THAT the language has this property cannot be said in it or in any language. Hence it cannot be said in the language of standard logic that the domain of quantification is a domain of existents or that something exists or that everything exists or that it is not the case that something does not exist.
Well then, so much the worse for the language of standard logic! That's one response. But can some other logic do better? Or should we say, with the early Wittgenstein, that there is indeed the Inexpressible, the Unsayable, the Unspeakable, the Mystical? And that it shows itself?
Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches. Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische. (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 6.522)
My opponent says Yes; I return a negative answer. This entry continues the discussion in earlier theological posts, but leaves the simple God out of it, the better to dig down to the bare logical bones of the matter. Theologians do not have proprietary rights in the Inexpressible and the Ineffable.
Argument For
The opponent offers a reductio ad absurdum:
a. It is not the case that everything is an object. (Assumption for reductio) Therefore b. Something is not an object. (From (a) by Quantifier Negation.) c. 'Something' means some thing, some object. Therefore d. Some object is not an object. Contradiction! Therefore e. Everything is an object. (By reductio ad absurdum)
The argument could also be put as follows. An object is anything that comes within the range of a logical quantifier. So someone who denies that everything is an object must be affirming that something is not an object, which is tantamount to saying that some item that comes within the range of a quantifier — 'some' in this instance — does not come with the range of a quantifier. Contradiction. Therefore, everything is an object!
Argument Against
First, two subarguments for premises in my main argument against.
Subargument I
Every declarative sentence contains at least one predicate. No predicate functioning as a predicate is a name. Therefore No declarative sentence consists of names only.
For example, 'Hillary is crooked' cannot be parsed as a concatenation of three names. A sentence is not a list of names. And the unity of a proposition expressed by a sentence is not the unity of a collection of objects. A proposition attracts a truth-value, but no collection of objects attracts a truth-value. The mereological sum Hillary + instantiation + crookedness is neither true nor false. But Hillary is crooked is true.
Adding a further object will not transform the sum into a proposition for well-known Bradleyan reasons.
So what makes the difference between a mereological sum of sub-propositional (but proposition-appropriate) items and a proposition? A noncompound proposition is clearly more than its sub-propositional constituents. The proposition a is F is more than the sum a + F-ness. The former is either true or false; the latter is neither. (Bivalence is assumed.) What does this 'more' consist in? The 'more' is not nothing since it grounds the difference between sum and proposition. The 'more' is evidently not objectifiable or reifiable.
The ancient problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition was already sighted by the 'divine' Plato near the beginning of our tradition. The problem points us beyond the realm of objects.
The paradox, of course, is that I cannot say what I mean, or am 'pointing to.' For if I say: 'Something lies beyond the realm of objects,' then I say in effect: 'Some object is not an object.' But I am getting ahead of myself.
Subargument II
Names refer to objects and predicate expressions refer to concepts. Anything that can be quantified over can in principle be named. Concepts cannot be named. Therefore Concepts cannot be quantified over.
In support of the second premise: 'Some horse is hungry' cannot be true unless there is a particular horse in the domain over which the existential/particular quantifier ranges, and this horse must in principle be nameable as, say, 'Harry' or 'Secretariat.' There needn't be a name for the critter in question; but it must be possible that there be a name.
Now for the main argument contra:
A. There are declarative sentences. B. No declarative sentence consists of names only; predicative expressions are also required. (Conclusion of subargument I) C. Predicates refer to concepts, not objects. D. Concepts cannot be quantified over. (Conclusion of Subargment II) Therefore E. Concepts are real ingredients of propositions but they are not objects. Therefore F. Not everything real is an object among objects.
Summary
The unity of the sentence/proposition is one of several problems that point us beyond what I have been calling the Discursive Framework (DF). These problems, properly understood, show the inadequacy of this framework and refute its claim to unrestricted applicability. The unity of the sentence/proposition needs accounting. (There is also the unity of concrete truth-making facts or states of affairs that cries out for explanation.)
Now we should try to account for sentential/propositional unity as parsimoniously as possible. We shouldn't bring in any queer posits if we can avoid them, a point on which my opponent will insist, and in those very terms. Unfortunately, we cannot eke by with objects alone. To repeat: a sentence is not a list; a proposition is not a collection of objects. So we need to bring in some queer entities,whether Fregean unsaturated concepts, or Strawsonian nonrelational ties, or relational tropes, or some odd-ball Bergmannian nexus, even my very own Unifier. (See A Paradigm Theory of Existence, Kluwer, 2002.)
The problem, of course, is that these queer items entangle us in contradictions when we try to state the theories in which they figure. The contradictions give aid and comfort to the Opponent who takes them as justifying his claim that the DF is unrestricted in its applicability.
Frege's paradox of the horse illustrates this very well. Frege notoriously asserted, "The concept horse is not a concept." Why not? Because 'the concept horse' names an object, and no object is a concept. An application of existential/particular generalizattion to Frege's paradoxical sentence yields: Some concepts are not concepts. But that's a contradiction, as is the original sentence.
But Frege was no 'stoner' to use an expression of the Opponent. His contradiction is, shall we say, motivated. Indeed, it is rationally motivated by the noble attempt to understand the nature of the proposition and the nature of logic itself.
Why can't concepts be named? Suppose we try to name the concept involved in 'Hillary is crooked.' The name would have to be something like 'crookedness.' The transformation of the predicate into an abstract substantive loses the verbal chararacter, the characterizing character of the predicate '___ is crooked' functioning as a predicate. If 'crookedness' has a referent, then that referent is an object. But as I said, the proposition Hillary is crooked is not the mereological sum Hillary + crookedness. The former attracts a truth-value; the latter doesn't.
The unity of a proposition, without which it cannot be either true or false, is not the unity of an object or a collection of objects, which is just a higher-order object. This peculiar truth-value attractive unity cannot be accounted for in terms of any object or collection of objects. And yet it is real. So not everything real is an object.
Impasse?
We seem to be in an aporetic bind. We need to bring in some queer elements to solve various problems that are plainly genuine and not pseudo. But the queer items generate paradoxes which, from within the DF, are indistinguishable from bare-faced contradictions. The paradoxes/contradictions arise when we attempt to state the theories in which the queer entities figure. They arise when we attempt to talk about and theorize about the pre-objective or non-objectifiable. I cannot state that no concept is an object, for example, without treating concepts as objects. But doing so drains the concept of its predicative nature. I cannot say what I mean. I can't eff the ineffable.
One move the Opponent can make is to flatly deny that there is the Inexpressible, thereby defying the author of Tractatus 6.522. Das Mystische does not exist, and, not existing, it cannot show itself (sich zeigen).
If the Opponent is a theist, then his god must be a being among beings, a highest being, a most distinguished denizen of the Discursive Framework, but not ipsum esse subsistens.
How might the Opponent deal with the problem of the unity of the sentence/proposition? Perhaps he will say that a noncompound proposition is a partially but not wholly analyzable unity of sense, but that the 'more' that makes the proposition more than the sum of its constituents has no Deep Meaning, it does not 'point' us anywhere, and certainly not into Cloud Cuckoo Land but is merely a curious factum brutum for which there is no accounting, no philosophical explanation.
I don't think this would be a good answer, but this entry is already too long.
At the moment I would happy if I could get the Opponent to make a minimal concession, namely, that I have mounted a strong, though not compelling, rational case for the thesis that reality is not exhausted by objects, and that I have not "destroyed all of logic" in so doing.
But I am undermining the claim of the DF to have universal applicability. This undermining takes place within the DF by reflection of something essential to the DF, namely, propositions. As long as I refrain from making positive assertions about the Transdiscursive, I avoid contradiction.
Here is an important passage from Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80:
It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause: its existence is an element superadded to its essence. But as regards a being whose existence is not due to any cause — God alone is that being, for His existence, as we have said, is absolute — existence and essence are perfectly identical; He is not a substance to which existence is joined as an accident, as an additional element. His existence is always absolute, and has never been a new element or an accident in Him. Consequently God exists without possessing the attribute of existence. Similarly He lives, without possessing the attribute of life; knows, without possessing the attribute of knowledge; is omnipotent without possessing the attribute of omnipotence; is wise, without possessing the attribute of wisdom: all this reduces itself to one and the same entity; there is no plurality in Him, as will be shown.
God is the Absolute. As such, he is radically other than creatures. God is not just another thing that exists and possesses properties in the way creatures possess properties. He differs from creatures in his mode of existence, his mode of property-possession, his mode of necessity, and his mode of uniqueness. See the following recent posts: God is Uniquely Unique and The Anthropomorphism of Perfect-Being Theology.
Existence accedes to creatures; it is accidental to them. As Maimonides says, existence is "superadded to their essence." This implies a real composition of essence and existence in creatures. But in God there can be no such composition. God does not have existence; he is his existence. As Maimonides puts it, "God exists without possessing the attribute of existence." And similarly for properties such as wisdom and omniscience, etc. God is wise without possessing the attribute of wisdom.
That is a hard saying. Does it make sense? And what sense does it make?
First we need to understand what is being maintained. There are those who will say that there are no properties/attributes but that nonetheless there are true predications. This is the position of the extreme nominalist. Accordingly, 'Socrates is wise' is true but there is nothing in reality picked out by the predicate 'wise' or '___wise' that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the individual. There are predicates but no properties. That is to say: 'Wise' is correctly predicated of Socrates despite the fact that there is nothing in reality that Socrates instantiates or otherwise has in virtue of which Socrates is wise.
This is not what Maimonides is saying. He is not denying that there are properties/attributes. I take him to be saying two things. First, God does not have or possess his attributes. He does not have them by standing in a relation of instantiation to them, nor does he have them as ontological 'parts.' Second, none of the divine attributes is an attribute of creatures.
As for the first point, God does not have his attributes; he is (identically) them. God is radically One. His unity is so 'tight' as to disallow any internal composition or stucturation. And his absoluteness disallows his standing in relation to any properties or factors distinct from him on which he would be dependent for his nature or existence. Thus God does not have existence and wisdom; he is existence and wisdom. The second point, I think, follows from the first: the wisdom of Socrates cannot be the same attribute as the wisdom of God.
On the semantic plane, the two occurrences of the predicate 'wise' in 'Socrates is wise' and 'God is wise' cannot have the same sense. For if they have the same sense, then they pick out the same property; but there cannot be one and the same property of wisdom shared by God and Socrates given that God, but not Socrates, is identical to wisdom. Therefore there is no univocity across the two sentences with respect to the predicate. As I read Maimonides, he holds that 'wise' is equivocal in its human and divine uses.
Maimonides and his fellow travellers on the via negativa are radical foes of even the most sophisticated forms of anthropomorphism. Socrates is powerful. The anthropomorphizer says that God too is powerful and in the very same sense; it is just that whereas the philosopher's power is limited, God's power is maximal. Someone who thinks along these lines is placing God and Socrates on the same scale or order, when God, if absolute and truly transcendent, is "trans-ordinal" to borrow word from Henri Dumery. What the anthropomorphizer does is take some of the attributes of humans and think of God as having those very same attributes.
But if we go the Maimonides route, what do we do with a sentence such as 'God is powerful'? Must we say that it is nonsense? We know what it means to say that Socrates is powerful. But what could it mean to say that God is powerful if the predicate is equivocal across 'Socrates is powerful' and 'God is powerful'? Note also that the subject-predicate form of 'God is powerful' implies a distinction in its truth maker between God and one of his attributes — in violation of the divine simplicity. How can we think or talk about the simple Absolute if all our thinking and talking must have subject-predicate form (or relational or other forms that require distinctions not applicable to the simple God)?
One response would be to bite the bullet and admit that sentences like 'God is powerful' are, and must remain, strictly nonsensical to the discursive intellect. But this nonsense is not mere gibberish, but a Higher Nonsense, an heuristic nonsense whose function is to point us beyond the limits of the discursive intellect while we are operating within it. From the SEP entry:
As severe as Maimonides' position is, even this is not enough. Although negation is preferable to affirmation, even negation is objectionable to the degree that it introduces complexity: God is neither this nor that. What then? Maimonides' reply (GP 1.58) is that ultimately any kind of verbal expression fails us. Rather than provide a precise metaphysical account of the nature of God, the purpose of theological discourse is heuristic: to “conduct the mind toward the utmost reach that man may attain in the apprehension of Him.” Theological language is important to the degree that it eliminates error and sets us along the path of recognizing God's transcendence. Unless one could speak about God, she could easily fall into the trap of thinking that God is corporeal. But in the end, the only thing it reveals is that God is beyond the reach of any subject/predicate proposition. Thus GP 1.59:
Know that when you make an affirmation ascribing another thing to Him, you become more remote from Him in two respects: one of them is that everything You affirm is a perfection only with reference to us, And the other is that He does not possess a thing other than His essence …
Citing Psalm 65, Maimonides concludes that the highest form of praise we can give God is silence.
It seems to me that what you call the ‘Discursive Framework’ is what I and others call ‘logic’, and that it reflects a Kantian view of logic that prevailed before Russell and Frege, namely that logic reflects the ‘laws of thought’ only. Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?
I was re-reading Kant’s Logic last week and it is full of this stuff.
Logic. I would define logic as the normative science of inference. Science: scientia, study of. Inference: the mental process of deriving a proposition (the conclusion) from one or more propositions (the premises). Normative: logic is not concerned with how people think as a matter of fact, which is a concern of psychology, but with how they ought to think if they are to arrive at truth and move from known truths to further truths. The task of logic is to set forth the criteria whereby correct inferences may be distinguished from incorrect inferences.
The above definition is neutral with respect to any number of ontological questions. Thus I used 'proposition' above innocuously without presupposing any theory as to what propositions are. I spoke of inference as a mental process, but this too is innocuous inasmuch as one could be a mind-brain identity theorist and agree with me about logic. (But if you are an eliminativist about the mental, then you 'get the boot': it is a Moorean fact that there are inferences.)
Discursive Framework. This is not the same as logic, pace the Historian, even though it does contain such logical principles as LNC and LEM, and indeed the whole of standard logic. (We can argue about 'standard' in the ComBox.) The DF also contains principles that are not strictly logical — they are not logical truths — but are better classifiable as metaphysical, as propositions of metaphysica generalis. Examples:
a. Everything exists: There are no nonexistent items. Pace van Inwagen, the negation of this is not a logical contradiction.
b. Everything has properties. (Partisans of bare or thin particulars do not deny this.)
c. Nothing has a property P by being identical to P. (The 'is' of predication is not assimilable to the 'is' if formal identity.)
d. Principles of logic, such as For any x, x = x, are not just true of objects of thought qua objects of thought, but are also true of mind-independentally real items. Thus the principles of logic are not merely principles of thought but principles of reality as well. Not merely logical, they are also ontological. There is a jump here, from the logical to the ontological, that Aristotle was aware of. With that jump comes the problem of justifying it.
e. The thinking of ectypal intellects such as ourselves is necessarily such as to involve a distinction between subject and predicate. There are no simple thoughts/propositions if by that we mean thoughts/proposition lacking sub-propositional structure. Every proposition is internally structured, e.g. Fa, Rab, (x)Fx, etc.
Laws of Thought but No Psychologism. Kant, Husserl, and Frege all rejected psychologism in logic. Are the laws of logic laws of thought? Yes, of course. What else would they be? But this is not to say that they are laws of human psychology. They are laws that govern the thinking of any actual or possible ectypal intellect. They might also be laws of reality, all reality, with no exceptions. But surely it would be uncritical simply to assume this. It wants proof, or at least argument. As I said, Aristotle had already seen the problem.
Are you mooting the possibility of beings which defy conception under these laws, or realms where the laws do not apply?
Yes, that is what I am doing, although I wouldn't speak of beings. That's plural, and the singular-plural distinction is part and parcel of the Discursive Framework. My aim is to make philosophy safe for mysticism. My aim is to show that while remaining in philosophy, in the DF, one can come to descry the 'possibility' of a, or rather, THE transdiscursive realm. I deny that the via negativa is the road to nowheresville or u-topia.
I am not attempting anything new; the novelty is merely in the way I go about it. And there is nothing illogical about it. Or can you find non sequiturs or other strictly logical mistakes in the above or in recent cognate posts? If there is a suprarational realm would it not be sloppy thinking, and thus 'illogical,' to assume that it must be infrarational?
Nothing new: we have seen this sort of thing in the Far East in Buddhist schools like that of Nagarjuna and in Taoism; in the ancient and medieval Western world, e.g., Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, and in the modern period with Kant and then again in the early Wittgenstein.
The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) Helps Focus The Issue. Duality is unavoidable on the discursive plane. To think is to judge, and to judge at the most basic level is to judge of a that it is or is not F. At a bare minimum, then, there is the duality of subject and property. (Brentano transformations of predications into existential sentences avail nothing: the duality of existence-nonexistence remains.) As I said above, no thought/proposition, no content of an act of thinking, is simple. But God is simple according to DDS. He is identical to his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one. If he weren't then he would be dependent on his attributes for his nature, and he would not be the absolute reality. He could not possess aseity. He could not be uniquely unique. If God were unique only in the sense that he is necessarily one of a kind, then he would one of a class of such beings, and a greater could be conceived, namely, a being uniquely unique, i.e., unique in the sense of transcending the very distinction between instance and kind.
Now if God is simple, then how can our talk and thought, which is necessarily discursive, be literally true of him? One response is that God talk is literal but analogical. This needs exploring in a separate post. But if we cannot accept the doctrine of analogy, then the simple God lies entirely beyond the DF.
A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig. Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him. (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson)
As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation, the belief of many theists is not a result of religious experience. It comes from upbringing, tradition, and participation in what Wittgenstein called a "form of life" with its associated "language game." I myself, however, could not take religion seriously if it were not for the variety of religious, mystical, and paranormal experiences I have had, bolstered by philosophical reasoning both negative and positive. Negative, as critique of the usual suspects: materialism, naturalism, scientism, secular humanism, and so on. Positive, the impressive array of theistic arguments and considerations which, while they cannot establish theism as true, make a powerful case for it.
But my need for direct experience reflects my personality and, perhaps, limitations. I am an introvert who looks askance at communal practices such as corporate prayer and church-going and much, if not all, of the externalities that go with it. I am not a social animal. I see socializing as too often levelling and inimical to our ultimate purpose here below: to become individuals. Socializing superficializes. Man in the mass is man degraded. We need to be socialized out of the animal level, of course, but then we need solitude to achieve the truly human goal of individuation. Individuation is not a given, but a task. The social animal is still too much of an animal for my taste.
It is only recently that I have forced myself myself to engage in communal religious activities, but more as a form of self-denial than of anything else. My recent five weeks at a remote monastery were more eremitic than cenobitic, but I did take part in the services. And upon return I began attending mass with my wife. Last Sunday a man sat down next to me, a friendly guy who extended to me his hand, but his breath stank to high heaven. Behind me some guy was coughing his head off. And then there are those who show up for mass in shorts, and I am not talking about kids. The priest is a disaster at public speaking and his sermon is devoid of content. Does he even understand the doctrine he is supposed to teach? And then there are all the lousy liberals who want to reduce religion to a crapload of namby-pamby humanist nonsense. And let's not forget the current clown of a pope who, ignorant of economics and climatology, speaks to us of the evils of capitalism and 'global warming' when he should be speaking of the Last Things. (Could he name them off the top of his head?)
But then I reason with myself as follows. "Look, man, you are always going on about how man is a fallen being in a fallen world. Well, the church and its hierarchy and its members are part of the world and therefore fallen too. So what did you expect? And you know that the greatest sin of the intellectual is pride and that pride blinds the spiritual sight like nothing else. So suck it up, be a man among men, humble yourself. It may do you some good."
I read about your recent experiences with communal
religion. Your self-reflection reminded me of something Rabbi Harold Kushner
writes about in his book WHO NEEDS GOD. He talks about visiting with a young man
who told him, "I hate churches and synagogues, they're full of nothing but
hypocrites and jerks"...Kushner says he had to fight the urge to say, 'yep, and
there is always room for one more'.
