Top o' the Stack.
UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc."
https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz
The indented material is from Colin McGinn's blog. My responses are flush left and in blue.
Paradoxes exist.
True.
Paradoxes belong either to the world or to our thought about the world.
True, if 'or' expresses exclusive disjunction.
They cannot belong to the world, because reality cannot be intrinsically paradoxical.
True. And so one ought to conclude that paradoxes reside in our thought about the world.
They cannot belong to our thought about the world, because then we would be able to alter our thought to avoid them (they cannot be intrinsic features of thought).
But surely we can alter our thought to avoid the paradoxes that reside in our thought about the world but not in the world.
Therefore, paradoxes don’t exist.
Non sequitur.
Therefore, paradoxes both exist and don’t exist.
Non sequitur. Although paradoxes do not exist in the world, in reality, they do exist in our thinking about the world, thinking that can be altered so as to avoid paradoxicality.
This is the paradox of paradoxes.
There is no such a paradox. It seems to me that McGinn is equivocating on 'paradox.' His first three assertions are all true if 'paradox' means logical contradiction. But for the fourth assertion to be true, McGinn cannot mean by 'paradox' logical contradiction.
The Paradox of the Smashed Vase will help me make my point.
Suppose you inadvertently knock over a priceless vase, smashing it to pieces. You say to the owner, "There's no real harm done; after all it's all still there." And then you support this outrageous claim by arguing:
1) There is nothing to the vase over and above the ceramic material that constitutes it.
2) When the vase is smashed, all the ceramic material that constitutes it remains in existence.
Therefore
3) The vase remains in existence after it is smashed.
"I don't owe you a penny!" (Adapted from Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 91.)
This paradox arises from faulty thinking easily corrected. The mistake is to think that an artifact such as a vase is strictly and numerically identical to the matter that composes it. Not so: the arrangement or form of the matter must also be taken into consideration. This response is structurally the same as the much more detailed response I make to Peter van Inwagen's denial of the existence of artifacts.
1. From a contradiction, anything follows. Ex contradictione quod libet. Another way of putting it would be to say that every argument having contradictory premises is valid. 'Valid' is a technical term. An argument A is valid =df no argument of A's form has true premises and a false conclusion. Now if A has two premises and they contradict each other, then the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) assures us that one of the premises must be false. It follows that no argument of A's form can have true premises and a false conclusion.
As long as 'valid' is understood as a technical term having all and only the meaning it is defined as having, then there should not be any trouble understanding how every argument with contradictory premises is valid.
Now consider this derivation:
a. Al is fat and Al is not fat.
b. Al is fat. (From (a) by Simplification)
c. Al is fat or Bush is blind (From (b) by Addition)
d. Al is not fat. (From (a) by Commutation and Simplification)
e. Bush is blind. (From (c) and (d) by Disjunctive Syllogism)
This illustrates how any proposition follows from a contradiction.
2. Now if Russell's Paradox is a contradiction, then set theory harbors a contradiction. And if anything follows from a contradiction, this is a serious problem for the logicist program of reducing all of mathematics to set theory.
3. Unrestricted Comprehension is the intuitively attractive idea that for any condition, or open sentence, or propositional function, there is a corresponding set. Thus, corresponding to the condition 'x is a cat' there is the set {x: x is a cat}, in plain English, the set of all cats. Intuitively, it seems that no matter how strange or complex the condition, there ought to be a set of things that satisfy the condition. Thus, corresponding to 'x is either an apple or a sparkplug' there is the set of all x such that x is either an apple or a sparkplug. Unrestricted Comprehension appears to be self-evident.
4. Now consider 'x is not in my pocket.' That condition picks out the set S of all things not in my pocket. Thus my wife and the Eiffel Tower are members of S. But so is S! The set of all things not in my pocket is not in my pocket. Thus S is a member of S. S is a self-membered set. But other sets are non-self-membered. The set of philosophers, for example, is not a member of itself. No set is a philosopher.
5. Now consider R, the set of all non-self-membered sets. Is R self-membered or not? Clearly, R is self-membered if and only if R is not self-membered — which is a contradiction.
This contradiction is known in the trade as Russell's Paradox. The name, I'd say, is a misnomer. It ought to be called Russell's Antinomy since a paradox need not issue in a contradiction.
6. It is easy to see that the antinomy cannot arise without the Unrestricted Comprehension axiom which implies that, corresponding to the condition 'x is the set of all non-self-membered sets' there corresponds the set R. So one solution to the antinomy is via rejection of Unrestricted Comprehension.
Why not reject LNC instead?
A large part of moral progress is progress in the realization of how much you need it. So, initially at least, the recession of the goal as you approach it indicates progress toward it.
New and improved! Originally posted in October, 2015. For a longish review and critique of the Butchvarov volume mentioned below, see my "Butchvarov on the Dehumanization of Philosophy," Studia Neoaristotelica, vol. 13, no. 2 (2016), pp. 181-195. Butchvarov and Husserl are clearly related to my present and ongoing rehearsal of the problematic of Kantian transcendental realism.
……………………………………………………
From Kant on, transcendental philosophy has been bedeviled by a certain paradox. Here again is the Paradox of Antirealism (PA) discussed by Panayot Butchvarov, as I construe it, where the numerals in parentheses refer to pages in his 2015 Anthropocentrism in Philosophy:
PA: On the one hand, we cannot know the world as it is in itself, but only the world as it is for us, as it is “shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and our concepts.” (189) This Kantian insight implies a certain “humanization of metaphysics.” (7) On the other hand, knowable physical reality cannot depend for its existence or intelligibility on beings that are miniscule parts of this reality. The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna. (7)
As I was mulling this over I was reminded of the Paradox of Human Subjectivity discussed by Edmund Husserl in his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, in sections 53 and 54, pp. 178-186 of the Carr translation. Here is the paradox in Husserl's words:
PHS: How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?
The subjective part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole world and thus itself too. What an absurdity! Or is this a paradox which can be sensibly resolved . . . ? (179-180)
What is common to both of the paradoxical formulations is the idea that we are at once objects in the world and subjects for whom there is a world. This by itself is not paradoxical. For there is nothing paradoxical in the notion that we are physical parts of a physical world that exists and has the nature it has independently of us, and that our knowing ourselves and other things is a physical process. Paradox ensues if (A) the world is a product of our accomplishments (Leistungen) as Husserl would have it, or a product of our formation (via both the a priori categories of the understanding and the a priori forms of sensibility, space and time) of the sensory manifold, as on the Kantian scheme, and (B) we, the subjects for whom there is a world, are parts of the world. For then the entire vast cosmos would depend for its existence and/or nature on transient parts thereof. And surely that would be absurd. Butchvarov above mentions the intelligibility of physical reality. If this intelligibility is not intrinsic to nature but imposed by us, then this too would be absurd if we are but physical parts of the physical cosmos. Butchvarov again: "The whole world of space-time-matter cannot depend on certain of its fauna." For one thing, before we miserable human animals came on the evolutionary scene, the physical cosmos was 'already there.' So the cosmos could not possibly depend for its existence on the existence of measly parts thereof who, in addition, made the scene rather late in the game. As for intelligibility, the understandability of the cosmos has as a necessary though not sufficient condition its regularity. The laws of nature are at least regularities. Now if regularity is imposed or bestowed or projected by specimens of h. sapiens, then the universe would have to wait for us to arrive before it could be cosmos as opposed to chaos. And that is plainly absurd.
Dehumanizing Subjectivity
Interestingly, for both Butchvarov and Husserl, the solution to their respective paradoxes involves a retreat from anthropocentrism and a concomitant 'dehumanization' of subjectivity. For both, there is nothing specifically human about consciousness, although of course in "the natural attitude" (Husserl's natuerliche Einstellung) humans are the prime instances known to us of 'conscious beings.' For present purposes, consciousness is intentionality, consciousness-of, awareness-of, where the 'of' is an objective genitive. (I leave out of consideration putatively non-intentional states of awareness such as felt pain and felt pleasure.) For Butchvarov, consciousness-of is not a property of (subjective genitive) human beings or of metaphysical/noumenal/transcendental egos somehow associated with human animals. It is not a property of human brains or of human souls or of human soul-body composites. It does not in any way emanate from human subjects. It is not like a ray that shoots forth from a subject toward an object. Consciousness is subject-less. So it is not a relation that connects subjects and objects. It is more like a monadic property of objects, all objects, their apparentness or revealedness. The influence of both David Hume and Jean-Paul Sartre on Butchvarov is unmistakable.
Husserl and Butchvarov: Brief Contrast and Comparison
Husserl operates in a number of his works (Cartesian Meditations, Paris Lectures, Ideas I) with the following triadic Cartesian shema:
Ego-cogito-cogitatum qua cogitatum
Subject ——————–> object (where the arrow represents a directed cogitatio, a mental act, an intentional Erlebnis, and where 'object' is in the singular because the noema of a noesis is precisely the noema of that very noesis. Got that?)
Butchvarov's schema is not triadic but dyadic along the lines of Sartre's radically externalist, anti-substantialist theory of consciousness (where the arrow does not represent a mental act but monadic universal 'of-ness,' Sartre's "wind blowing towards objects" and where 'objects' is in the plural because subject-less consciousness is one to their many):
——————————->objects.
For Butchvarov, following Sartre, consciousness is no-thing, no object, and thus other than every object, not in the world, and hence not restricted to the measly specimens of a zoological species. It is not restricted to them because not embodied in them. It is not a property of human animals, or something going on in their brains, or something supervenient upon, or epiphenomenal to, or emergent from intracranial goings-on. Consciousness, again, is a "wind blowing towards objects," a wind that blows from Nowhere and Nowhen. It blows without a blower. Someone might think of God as the Cosmic Blowhard who blows the bubble of space-time-matter from a 'place' outside of space and time, and keeps the bubble inflated for as long as he likes. But of course that is not what Sartre and Butchvarov mean. There is no blower of the intentional wind. The relevant text is Sartre's early The Transcendence of the Ego, directed against Husserl, according to which the ego is not an 'inhabitant' of consciousness but a transcendent item, an object alongside other objects. (Personal anecdote: when I first espied this title as a young man I thought to myself: "Great! A book that will teach me how to transcend my ego!")
Bear in mind that the phenomenological notion of transcendence is transcendence-in-immanence, not absolute transcendence.
Of course there is a paradox if not a contradiction lurking within the Sartrean, radically externalist, anti-substantialist conception of consciousness: consciousness is nothing, but not a 'mere nothing,' a nugatory nothing, ein nichtiges Nichts (to borrow a phrase from Heidegger) inasmuch as consciousness, which is no-thing, is that without which objects would not be revealed or manifested or apparent. It is both something and no-thing. It is something inasmuch as without it nothing would appear when it is a plain fact that objects do appear. That objects appear is self-evident even if it is not self-evident that they appear to someone or something. It is not clear that there is a 'dative of appearing' though it is clear that there are 'accusatives of appearing.' Consciousness is nothing inasmuch as it is no object and does not appear. This apparent contradiction is to my mind real, to Butchvarov's mind merely apparent. (Via private communication.) It is clearly a different paradox than the Paradox of Antirealism. It is a paradox that infects a particular solution to the Paradox of Antirealism, Butchvarov's solution.
How does Husserl dehumanize subjectivity?
Here is a crucial passage from Crisis, sec. 54, p. 183:
But are the transcendental subjects, i.e., those functioning in the constitution of the world, human beings? After all, the epoché has made them into 'phenomena,' so that the philosopher within the epoché has neither himself nor the others naively and straightforwardly valid as human beings but precisely only as 'phenomena,' as poles for transcendental regressive inquiries. Clearly here, in the radical consistency of the epoché, each 'I' is considered purely as the ego-pole of his acts, habitualities, and capacities . . . .
[. . .]
But in the epoché and in the pure focus upon the functioning ego-pole . . . it follows eo ipso that nothing human is to be found, neither soul nor psychic life nor real psychophysical human beings; all this belongs to the 'phenomenon,' to the world as constituted pole.
Contra Husserl
Husserl is a great philosopher and one cannot do him justice in one blog post or a hundred; but I don't see how his position is tenable. On the one hand, each transcendental ego functioning as such cannot be a human being in nature. For nature and everything in it including all animal organisms is an intentional formation constituted by the transcendental ego. But not only can the world-constituting ego not be a physical thing, it cannot be a meta-physical spiritual thing either. It cannot be a res cogitans or substantia cogitans. As Husserl sees it, Descartes' identification of his supposedly indubitable ego with a thinking thing shows a failure fully to execute the transcendental turn (transzendentale Wendung). The Frenchman stops short at a little tag-end of the world (ein kleines Endchen der Welt) from which, by means of shaky inferences, he tries to get back what his hyperbolic doubt had called into question.
Husserl's thinking in sections 10-11 of Cartesian Meditations seems to be that if one fully executes the transcendental turn, and avoids the supposed mistake of Descartes, one is left with nothing that can be posited as existing in itself independently of consciousness. Everything objective succumbs to the epoché. No absolute transcendence is reachable: every transcendence is at best a transcendence-in-immanence, a constituted transcendence. Everything in the world is a constitutum, and the same holds for the world itself. If Descartes had gone all the way he would have seen that not only his animal body could be doubted, but also his psyche, the psychophysical complex, and indeed any spiritual substance 'behind' the psyche. He would have seen that the cogito does not disclose something absolutely transcendent and indubitable. For Husserl, everything objective, whether physical or mental, ". . . derives its whole sense and its ontic validity (Seinsgeltung), which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental ego, the ego who comes to the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché." (CM, p. 26. I have translated Seinsgeltung as ontic validity which I consider more accurate than Cairns' "existential status.") In Formal and Transcendental Logic, sec. 94, along the same lines, we read: "nothing exists for me otherwise than by virtue of the actual and potential performance of my own consciousness."
One problem: just what is this transcendental ego if it is the purely subjective source of all ontic validity, Seinsgeltung? Does it exist? And in what sense of 'exist'? It cannot exist as a constituted object for it is the subjective source of all constitutive performances (Leistungen). But if it is not an indubitable piece of the world, then it cannot existent transcendently either.
Descartes thought that he had reached something whose existence cannot be bracketed, eingeklammert, to use Husserl's term, and that that was himself as thinking thing. He thought he had hit bedrock, the bedrock of Ansichsein. Husserl objects: No, the ego's existence must be bracketed as well. But then nothing is left over. We are left with no clue as to what the transcendental ego is once it is distinguished from the psychological or psychophysical ego who is doing the meditating. To appreciate the difficulty one must realize that it is a factical transcendental ego that does the constituting, not an eidos-ego. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction is not an eidetic reduction. It would be a serious mistake to think that the re-duction (the leading back, the path of regress) from the psychological ego to the transcendental ego is a reduction to an eidos-ego, an ideal ego abstractly common to all factical egos.
Here is another approach to the problem. The transcendental-phenomenological reduction regresses from everything objective, everything naively posited as existing in itself, to the subjective sources of the ontic validity (Seinsgeltung) and Being-sense (Seinssinn) of everything objective. This radical regression, however, must leave behind everything psychological since the psychological co-posits the objective world of nature. But how can Husserl execute this radical regression and yet hold onto words like 'ego' and 'cogitatio' and 'cogitatum'? How does he know that it is an I or an ego that is the transcendental-phenomenological residuum? In simpler terms, how does he know that what he gets to by the trans-phen reduction is something that can be referred to by 'I'? How does he know that it is anything like a person?
After all, indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun are used by human beings to refer to human beings.
Husserl and Butchvarov: Similarities and Differences
1. Both philosophers espouse versions of antirealism, albeit very different versions.
2. Both philosophers face versions of the Paradox of Antirealism.
3. Both philosophers solve the paradox by retreating from anthropocentrism and advocating the 'dehumanization' of consciousness.
4. Both philosophers oppose (Berkeleyan) idealism if that is the view that "all reality is mental" (Butchvarov, p. 213), a view that entails that "the perception of a tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of pain and the pain felt." (213)
5. Both philosophers hold that there are specifically philosophical indexical uses of the first-person singular pronoun.
6. Both philosophers agree that the existence of such uses is, in Butchvarov's words, "evident from the intelligibility of Cartesian doubt. . . ." (196)
7. Both philosophers hold that these uses are referring uses.
8. Both philosophers hold that these referring uses do not refer to human beings.
9. Both philosophers oppose Descartes in holding that the specifically philosophical uses of the indexical 'I' do not refer to anything in the world.
10. Husserl and Butchvarov disagree on what these uses refer to. For Husserl they refer to the factical transcendental ego, which is the constitutive source of everything worldly as to its Seinsgeltung (ontic validity) and Seinsinn (ontic sense or meaning). For Butchvarov, they refer to the world itself, not things in the world, distributively or collectively, but the totality of these things. Butchvarov's theory is essentially that of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "I am my world." (5.63) There is no metaphysical subject in the world. (5.633) There is an ultimate philosophical I but it is not in the world; it is the limit of the world (5.632), or rather the world itself.
11. Husserl and Butchvarov agree that, in Wittgenstein's words, "there really is a sense in which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way." (5.641) But of course the ways in which the two philosophers talk about the self non-psychologically are radically different.
12. Another major disagreement is this. Husserl sticks with the Cartesian Ansatz while attempting to radicalize it, but he never succeeds in clarifying the difference between the transcendental and psychological ego. Butchvarov abandons (or never subscribed to) the ego-cogito-cogitatum schema of Descartes, and of Kant too, and in a sense cuts the Gordian knot with Sartrean scissors: there is nothing psychological or egological or 'inner' or personal or subjective about consciousness. And so there is no problem of intersubjectivity such as bedeviled Husserl in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation and elsewhere. Butchvarov goes 'Hegelian.'
There is much more to be said, later.
I'm not, but you might be.
Suppose you inadvertently knock over a priceless vase, smashing it to pieces. You say to the owner, "There's no real harm done; after all it's all still there." And then you argue:
1) There is nothing to the vase over and above the ceramic material that constitutes it.
2) When the vase is smashed, all the ceramic material that constitutes it remains in existence.
Therefore
3) The vase remains in existence after it is smashed.
"I don't owe you a penny!"
Adapted from Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 91.
The above may serve as an introduction to the problem of the composition of material artifacts and to Peter van Inwagen's strange thesis that such items do not exist. See Van Inwagen's Denial of Artifacts.
I was asked by a commenter what motivates the thin theory of existence. One motivation is
. . . the old Platonic riddle of nonbeing. Nonbeing must in some sense be, otherwise what is it that there is not? This tangled doctrine might be nicknamed Plato's beard; historically it has proved tough, frequently dulling the edge of Occam's razor. (Willard Van Orman Quine, "On What There Is" in From a Logical Point of View, Harper Torchbook ed., 1963, pp. 1-2)
As I see it, here is how the paradox arises.
1) 'Pegasus does not exist' is true. Therefore:
2) The sentence in question has meaning. (Only meaningful sentences have a truth value.)
3) If a sentence has meaning, then so do its (sentential and sub-sentential) parts. (Compositionality of meaning.) Therefore:
4) 'Pegasus' has meaning. Therefore:
5) Something is such that 'Pegasus' refers to it. ('Pegasus' is a proper name, and the meaning of a proper name is its referent, that to which it refers.) Therefore:
6) 'Pegasus' refers to something that exists. (Everything exists; there are no nonexistent objects; one cannot refer to what does not exist for it is not there to be referred to.) Therefore:
7) Pegasus must exist for it to be true that Pegasus does not exist. Paradox!
None of the first four propositions is plausibly denied. To avoid the conclusion, we must deny either (5) or (6) and the assumptions that generate them. Now Quine is no Meinongian/Wymanian. Quine advocates a Russellian solution which amounts to rejecting (5) by rejecting the assumption that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its reference. For Russell, ordinary proper names are definite descriptions in disguise. This allows them to have meaning or sense without reference. Thus 'Pegasus' is elliptical for 'the winged horse of Greek mythology.' This allows the following contextual paraphrase of 'Pegasus does not exist':
It is not the case that there exists an x such x is the winged horse of Greek mythology
which is free of paradox. What the paraphrase says is that the definite description which gives the sense of 'Pegasus' is not satisfied. Equivalently, it says that the concept winged horse of Greek mythology is not instantiated. Thus the original sentence, which appeared to be about something that does not exist but which, if it existed, would be an animal, is really about about a description or concept which does exist and which is assuredly not an animal.
It is a brilliant solution, prima vista. It works for negative general existentials as well. 'Unicorns do not exist,' despite its surface grammar, cannot be about unicorns — after all, there aren't any — it is about the concept unicorn and predicates of it the property of not being instantiated. Extending the analysis to affirmative general existentials, we can say that 'Horses exist,' for example, is not about horses — after all, which horses would it be about? — it is about the concept horse and predicates of it the property of being instantiated.
What about singular affirmative existentials such as 'Harry exists'? Quine maintains that, in a pinch, one can turn a name into a verb and say, with truth, 'Nothing pegasizes' thereby avoiding both Plato's Beard and Meinong's Jungle so as to enjoy, clean-shaven, the desert landscape bathed in lambent light. So what's to stop us from saying 'Something Harry-sizes'? (Quite a bit, actually, but I won't go into that in this post, having beaten it to death in numerous other entries. Briefly, there are no haecceity-concepts: there is no such concept Harry-ness that (i) can exist uninstantiated; (ii) if instantiated is instantiated by Harry and Harry alone in the actual world; (iii) is not instantiated by anything distinct from Harry in any possible world.)
Let us now pause to appreciate what the Russellian (or rather 'Fressellian') approach accomplishes in the eyes of its advocates. It untangles Plato's Beard. It avoids Meinong's jungle. It preserves the existence-nonexistence contrast by situating it at the second level, that of descriptions, concepts, propositional functions, properties, as the contrast between satisfaction-nonsatisfaction (for descriptions), instantiation-noninstantiation (for concepts and properties), and having a value-not having a value for propositional functions, or as Russell puts it, being sometimes true or the opposite.
What's more, it diagnoses the failure of certain versions of the ontological argument. Descartes' Meditation Five version has it that God exists because God has all perfections and existence is a perfection. But if Frege and Russell are right, existence is not even a property of God let alone a perfection of him inasmuch as '. . .exist(s)' has no legitimate use as a first-level predicate and can be be properly deployed only as a second-level predicate. (God is an individual.)
Last, but not least, the Fressellian analysis consigns entire libraries of school metaphysics to he flames, the books in which drone on endlessly about Being and Existence and the distinctio realis, and the analogia entis, and ipsum esse subsistens, ad nauseam. Swept aside are all the hoary and endlessly protracted debates about the relation of essence and existence in individuals: is it a real distinction, and what could that mean? Is it a formal distinction, and what could that mean? Etc. On the Frege-Russell approach there simply is no existence of individuals.
And now you know why the thin theory is called 'thin.' It could also be called 'shallow' in that it eliminates existence as a deep and mysterious topic. The thin theory disposes of existence as a metaphysical topic, reducing it to a merely logical topic. As Quine famously says in an essay other than the one cited above, "Existence is what existential quantification expresses." Thus 'Cats exist' says no more and no less than 'For some x, x is a cat.' You will note that the analysans makes no mention of existence. It features only the word 'cat' and some logical machinery. Existence drops out as a metaphysical topic.
Of course, I don't accept the thin theory; but as you can see, I appreciate what motivates it in the minds of its adherents.
Philosophers love a paradox but hate a contradiction. They love that which stimulates thought but are understandably averse to that which stops it dead in its tracks.
Mystics love both. Where the discursive road ends, the mystic path begins. The mystic essays to ride contradictions, like so many koans, into the sky of the Transdiscursive.
The radical aporetician stands at the trailhead. Having travelled the road, he peers beyond without stepping onto the trail. He holds yet to reason as to that whose ultimate purpose is to clear the way for what lies beyond reason.
Fr. Deinhammer tells us, ". . . Gott fällt nicht unter Begriffe, er ist absolut unbegreiflich. . . ." "God does not fall under concepts; he is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable. . . ."
Edward the Logician sent me an e-mail in which he forwards a stock objection:
Who is it who is absolutely inconceivable or unconceptualizable? Either ‘he’ tells us, or not. If so, the proposition is false. If not, the proposition is incoherent.
I appreciate that you are quoting the person who wrote to you, but my aporia stands.
Ed's aporetic point can be summed up as follows. Talk of God as inconceivable is either false or meaningless. If the person who claims that God is inconceivable is operating with some concept of God, then the claim is meaningful but false. If, on the other hand, the person is operating with no concept of God, then saying that God is inconceivable is no better than saying that X is inconceivable, which says nothing and is therefore meaningless. (X is inconceivable is at best a propositional function, not a proposition, hence neither true nor false. To make a proposition out of it you must either bind the free variable 'x' with a quantifier or else substitute a proper name for 'x.')
A Response to the Objection
Suppose we make a distinction between those concepts that can capture the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts (Grenzbegriffe). Thus the concept cube captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully. The concept heliotropic plant captures, partially, the essence of those plants which exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun.
Now the concept God cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For in God essence and existence are one, and there is no ordinary concept of existence. (The existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized.) Again, in God there is no real distinction between God and his nature, whereas no ordinary concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God.
There is, then, a tolerably clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God. The concept God is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts. It is the concept of something that lies at the outer limits of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept God is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.
If this is right, then there is a way between the horns of the above dilemma. But of course it needs further elaboration and explanation.
Is it objectively true that objectivity is a white-supremacist value?
Assert that it is, and you presuppose it.
But if you say that it isn't, then why should we listen to you?
An Inconsistent Tetrad
a. Socrates is mortal.
b. Socrates is dead.
c. A man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies.
d. A man cannot die twice.
If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal. But Socrates is dead. Now a man is mortal only if there is a future time at which he dies. But a man cannot die twice, and so there is no future time at which Socrates dies.
The limbs of the tetrad cannot all be true, yet each seems true.
Should we conclude that the dead are not mortal?
First question: Is the tetrad a genuine aporia, or is it soluble?
Second question: If soluble, what is the most plausible solution?
This puzzle, similar to Peter Geach's Tibbles the Cat in content, is unlike it in vintage. Its origin is attributed by Philo of Alexandria (30 B.C. – 45 A. D.) to Chrysippus the Stoic (c. 280 B.C. – c. 206 B. C.) What follows is my take on the puzzle. I draw heavily upon Michael B. Burke, "Dion and Theon: An Essentialist Solution to an Ancient Puzzle," The Journal of Philosophy, 1994, pp. 129-139.
Yesterday, Dion was a whole man, but today he had his left foot successfully amputated. Yesterday, 'Theon' was introduced as a name for that proper part of Dion that consisted of the whole of Dion except his left foot. (To keep the formulation of the puzzle simple, let us assume that dualism is false and that Dion is just a living human organism.) It is clear that yesterday Dion and Theon were numerically distinct individuals, the reason being that yesterday Theon was a proper part of Dion. (By definition of 'proper part,' if x is a proper part of y, then x is not identical to y. And if x and y are not identical, then x and y are distinct. Two items can be distinct without being wholly distinct.) Now the question is which of the following is true today, after the amputation:
The problem is to justify one of these answers. If none of the answers can be rationally justified, then we have a tetralemma which might be taken to suggest that there is something deeply problematic about our ordinary talk and thought about material particulars and their persistence. Given my conception of philosophy as at once both aporetic and revisionist, this would be a welcome result if I could support it.
Ad (A). Because Dion and Theon both existed yesterday, you might think they both exist today. There is, however, a reason to think that it cannot be true that both Dion and Theon exist today after the amputation. The reason is that it is impossible both that (i) Dion and Theon be numerically distinct and that (ii) Dion and Theon occupy exactly the same place and be composed of exactly the same matter arranged in exactly the same way, as is the case today after the amputation.
Could we say that Dion and Theon both survived the operation but are now one and the same? This is impossible given the Indiscernibility of Identicals. For today, after the operation, something is true of Dion which is not true of Theon, namely, that he, Dion, once had two feet. So Dion and Theon cannot be or have become identical.
Ad (B). This option is so counterintuitive that no one has maintained it.
Ad (C). It seem obvious that Dion survives the amputation. But what about Theon? Can we say that Theon ceases to exist after the amputation? Michael Burke (p. 134 ff.) thinks we can. He gives something like the following argument:
1. The concept of a person is maximal: the proper parts of persons are not themselves persons.
Therefore
2. Theon before the amputation was not a person.
3. Persons are essentially persons, and hence nonpersons are essentially nonpersons.
Therefore
4. Theon before the amputation was essentially a nonperson.
Therefore
5. Theon could not have survived a change that would have made it, if it survived, a person.
6. The amputation of Dion's left foot is a change that would have made Theon, if it survived, a person.
Therefore
7. Theon did not survive the amputation of Dion's left foot, and so does not exist after the amputation.
Ad (D). If one adopts mereological essentialism, then one can say that Theon survives but Dion does not. Mereological essentialism is the doctrine that wholes have their parts essentially. Accordingly, for any whole W and part x of W, if x is a part of W, then necessarily x is a part of W. This implies that no whole can survive the gain or loss of a part. If so, then Dion ceases to exist when he loses his left foot. But Theon continues to exist. Unfortunately, mereological essentialism applied to ordinary continuants such as cats and cabbages and cars is highly counterintuitive. My car does not cease to exist when the antenna is snapped off.
None of the solutions is satisfying as far as I can see. One might conclude that reason in us is weak and dialectical in Kant's sense.
Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.
…………………
That's an old thought, not original with me, but I do not know who deserves the attribution.
Its literary effect trades on equivocation.
In one sense, an old thing is a thing that has been in existence a long time. Now something can be in existence a long time without getting old in the second sense. Consider a Roman coin in pristine condition, preserved out of circulation by numismatists over the centuries. Very old, but not worn out.
Something analogous is true of humans. There are 90-year-olds who are hale and hearty and compete creditably in foot races. And there are 40-year-olds whose bodies are shot.
A man who gets old calendrically cannot help but age physiologically. But the rates of physiological ageing are different for different people.
It is conceivable that one get old without getting old. It is even conceivable that one get old while getting younger. Those are paradoxical sentences that express the following non-paradoxical propositions: It is conceivable that one get old calendrically without getting old physiologically. It is conceivable that one get old calendrically whle getting younger physiologically. The conceivability and indeed imaginability of the latter is the theme of the Twilight Zone episode, A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain. I should adde for the aficionados of modality that conceivability does not entail possibility.
Now return to the opening aphorism: Most if not all want to become old, but few if any want to be old.
The expression is paradoxical, but the thought is non-contradictory. The thought, expressed non-paradoxically is: Most if not all want to live a long time, but few if any want to suffer the decrepitude attendant upon living a long time.
One logic lesson to be drawn is that a paradox is not the same as a contradiction.
It is therefore a mistake to refer to Russell's Antinomy as 'Russell's Paradox.'
Leftists hold that borders and walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' and 'fascist' and that the nation state is an illegitimate construct. They bristle at talk of national identity and national sovereignty. Is it not then paradoxical for these same leftists to embrace identity politics at the sub-national level?
And if walls are 'racist' and 'hateful' then so is Obama's Wall:
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal.
In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.
But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction. Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.
Now consider a naturalist about the human species who is also a misanthrope and an animal lover. He hates man while loving animals even though he holds that man is just an animal. He hates man because he is destroying the earth and the flora and fauna upon it.
There is something paradoxically selective about our naturalist's misanthropic love of animals. He is out to save the whales but doesn't give a rat's ass about prenatal human animals . . . . He loves animals except for the species of animal of which he is a specimen.
The misanthropy goes together with nature idolatry.
Unable to worship God, and unable to appreciate man's greatness, he makes a god of nature and its irrational beasts.
You may recall the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out.
In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or some other 'icon.'
Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.'
