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James N. Anderson Defends Van Til

In this entry I respond to Dr. James Anderson‘s comments on a post of mine on presuppositionalism, God, Doubt, Denial, Truth: A Note on Van Til. But first a redacted excerpt from a letter of mine to Anderson explaining my interest in the topic:

Thank you for your willingness to respond. I consider you to be the intellectually sharpest among the presuppositionalists. Why am I interested in the ‘presuppers’? (No disrespect intended, just a cute abbreviation.)  Well, I am a philosopher of religion but I also have a long-term interest in transcendental philosophy. I wrote my dissertation on the ontological status of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, then followed the line down through the German Idealists, the neo-Kantians, to Brentano, Husserl, and Heidegger, who in Being and Time (1927) re-ignites the Being question within the purview of transcendental philosophy. So I am interested in how the ‘presuppers’ fit into that tradition with their TAG (transcendental argument for God).

I now turn to Anderson’s comments. My responses are in 14 pt:

I don’t think this [BV’s OP] quite captures what VT [Cornelius Van Til] has in mind. In context, he is arguing against the idea of a “neutral methodology” for evaluating truth-claims about reality (whether scientific or metaphysical). The underlying thought is that one’s theory of reality and one’s theory of knowledge must be coordinated; there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology, no epistemology that is entirely indifferent to the nature and existence of God, the nature of the universe, the nature of man and his relationship to his environment, etc.

BV: I agree that the theory of reality and the theory of knowledge must be coordinated. As Gustav Bergmann famously remarked, “epistemology is but the ontology of the knowing situation.” (Logic and Reality, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1964, pp. 106, 324.)  Nicolai Hartmann, in his Metaphysik der Erkenntnis, 1921, is another who insists on the need for an ontology of cognition. 

To coin a slogan of my own, “The knowledge of being (objective genitive) presupposes the being of the knower (subjective genitive).”  So I agree with Anderson that “there is no metaphysically-neutral epistemology.” But he packs more into the quoted sentence  than I do, as we shall see. 

Specifically, a “neutral methodology” (as VT conceives it) holds the pretense that human knowledge and reasoning are possible whether or not God exists; thus the question of the existence of God is an open one from the outset, just like questions about the existence of black holes or Higgs bosons.

BV: Here is where the disagreement begins.  We agree that knowing is rooted in being and thus that epistemology  needs to be grounded in ontology. In particular, the knowledge of being presupposes the being of the knower. But how do get from these propositions, which will be readily granted by most if not all philosophers, to the proposition that the knowledge of being presupposes the being of God? To say that there is no knowledge without an existing knower is one thing, but quite another to say that there is no knowledge without God.  

It is important to realize than when Van Til and Co. speak of God they do not mean just any old god, but the God of the Bible, indeed the triune God of the Christian Bible with all of the Calvinist add-ons, and indeed some plainly Athenian extra-Biblical add-ons as well, such as the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS)! Van Til claims to find Old Testament support for DDS, a claim I question in my  Van Til on Divine Simplicity and the One and the Many.

I grant that if we are creatures of God, then there is no human knowledge without God. For if we are creatures of God, then God exists, whence it follows that human knowledge cannot exist unless God exists. No doubt. But that is logically consistent with saying that no God exists. To affirm a conditional is not to affirm its antecedent.

I think that Anderson will agree with me that God is not a being among beings, and is thus very different from a black hole, a subatomic particle, a planet, not to mention Russell’s celestial teapot and Edward Abbey’s angry unicorn on the dark side of the Moon.

Edward Abbey Quote: “Is there a God? Who knows? Is there an angry unicorn on the dark side of the moon?”

If God exists, he is not just one more thing that exists in addition to all the other things that exist. If God exists, then God is the metaphysical ground of the very existence of every contingent being, and indeed, of every being distinct from himself. This is not true of horses and teapots let alone of lunar unicorns and celestial teapots. If there is a lunar unicorn, then this is just one more isolated fact about the universe. But if God exists, then everything is unified by this fact: everything has the ground of its being and its intelligibility in the creative activity of this one paradigmatic purely spiritual being. The God question cannot therefore be reduced to the question whether the totality of beings includes a very special being, God, with very special properties.  For if God exists, then everything other than God is a creature, which implies that everything other than God has an ontological status very different from the status it would have were God not to exist. We may call this status createdness or creaturliness.  Accordingly, the mode of Being of creatures is createdness whereas the mode of Being of God is very different, call it aseity, from-itself-ness. Creatures exist in a dependent way or mode while God exists in an independent way or mode.

I would say that God differs from every other being in (i) his mode of Being, (ii) his mode of necessity (he is not a necessary being in the same way that the number 7 is a necessary being, pace Alvin Plantinga), and (iii) his mode of property-possession: he does not instantiate his attributes, pace Plantinga: he is in some mysterious way identical to his attributes. As St. Augustine says, God IS what he HAS: he has attributes by being identical to them.  Van Til, as already noted, embraces the divine simplicity, although it strikes me as obvious that this is a Greek idea foreign to the Bible, and that therefore there is a tension between a strictly philosophical (Athenian) and a Bible-based (Hierosolymitan) approach to God.

If I am right, the question of the existence of God is not merely a question in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) along with questions about the soul and the world as a whole. (Recall that Kant divides special metaphysics into three subdisciplines: natural theology, rational psychology, and rational cosmology.) It is also a question in general metaphysics (metaphysica generalis) or ontology which concerns itself quite generally with ens qua ens, das Seiende als solches in its relation to esse, Sein. For again, if God exists, then the ontology of every non-divine being is different from the ontology it would have if God were not to exist.  The existence of God has general-metaphysical (ontological) repercussions.

The question, however, is whether the existence of God has epistemological repercussions. If God exists, does his existence have implications for the nature and scope of human knowledge?  The epistemological question is epitomized in Kant’s famous “What can I know?” To this we may add the question, “How do I know what I know?” If God exists, is what I can know and how I know it different from what I can know and how I know it if God were not to exist? Is it perhaps the case that if God were not to exist, we would know nothing at all? That may be the case, but one cannot just presuppose that this is the case.

VT [Van Til] reasons that if God exists (specifically, the absolute God of the Reformed Christian tradition) then all human knowledge necessarily depends on God. All creaturely knowledge is a kind of divine revelation; an analogical reconstruction of God’s definitive interpretation of his creation. As VT often put it, human knowledge is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” A distinctively Christian metaphysics implies a distinctively Christian epistemology, in which case a “neutral” epistemology (if such were possible) would be a de facto denial of the Christian God. A method of inquiry according to which the existence of God and the existence of divine revelation are open questions is an anti-Christian method. That’s what VT means by “to doubt God is to deny him” — or, as he puts it two sentences later, “Neutrality toward God is in effect negation of God.”

BV:  I grant that the conditional If God exists, then all human knowledge depends on God is necessarily true. But how do we know that the antecedent of the conditional is true?  That is the question. If we know that the antecedent is true, then we can apply modus ponens to arrive at the knowledge that the conclusion is true. But how do we know that the antecedent is true?   If a conditional is true, it does not follow that its antecedent (or its consequent) is true. And as I said earlier, if one affirms a conditional, one does not thereby affirm its antecedent or its consequent. For example, to affirm that if Joe Biden is demented, then he is unfit for office, is not thereby to affirm either that he is demented or that he is unfit for office.    

One is of course free to presuppose the existence of the God of the Christian Bible with all the Calvinist and Athenian add-ons, but then one is arguing in a circle.  “We know that God exists because the existence of God is attested in the Bible which we know is true because it is God’s very Word.”   But of course this objection I am raising is ‘old hat’: Anderson has heard it hundreds of times.  The question, however, is whether he or any presuppositionalist has a good response to it. I’ll come back to this point shortly.

I will also point out that the penultimate sentence in the immediately preceding quotation is  not true. It is not anti-Christian to consider  questions about the existence of the God of the Christian Bible and about divine revelation to be open to investigation.  It is neither anti-Christian nor pro-Christian. Suppose one is a committed Christian theist. Why is it anti-Christian for such a person to inquire whether there are good reasons (whether of a demonstrative or a non-demonstrative sort) to maintain his commitment? Did Thomas Aquinas display an anti-Christian bias when he set forth his quinque viae?  Obviously he did not.

All this to say, I don’t take VT to be offering or defending a transcendental argument here; if anything, he is simply assuming the transcendental necessity of God. He isn’t reasoning from epistemology to metaphysics, but rather from (Christian) metaphysics to (Christian) epistemology. The idea that there can be no religiously-neutral epistemology is one of the animating themes of VT’s entire philosophy (although not one to which he holds exclusive rights).

Anderson’s first sentence displays a confusion of  ‘transcendental’ with ‘transcendent.’ By definition, God is a transcendent being: he exists whether or not creatures exist. If by ‘world’ we mean the totality of created beings, God is transcendent in that he exists whether or not the world exists.  Since Kant, we distinguish between transcendent and transcendental. The TAG argument is a transcendental argument in roughly Kant’s sense. But to explain this thoroughly would take us too far afield for a mere blog entry.

Finally, something about arguing in a circle.  It is blindingly evident that one cannot prove a proposition by presupposing it. And yet Van Til and his followers are surely within their epistemic/doxastic rights when they presuppose the truth of the their Bible-based Christian worldview together with all its Calvinist and Athenian add-ons. Maybe they are right! They go wrong, however, when they pretend to KNOW that they are right instead of humbly affirming that their worldview commitment  is a matter of reasoned FAITH and living in this faith and the uncertainty that faith brings with it. So they make fools of themselves by making the sophomoric logical mistake of thinking that they can prove a proposition by presupposing it. It is as if their doxastic security needs are so overwhelmingly strong that they cannot tolerate the least bit of uncertainty. 

Professor Anderson ends on an irenic note that suggests that he appreciates the difficulty of the Van Tilian position:

No doubt VT’s position is provocative, even for philosophers with Christian convictions. Whether his objection to a “neutral methodology” is cogent is a matter of debate. I offer these comments as an explanation rather than as a defense. Sufficient for the day is the trouble thereof. 🙂

Mental Change and the Potency-Act Distinction: Response to Tom Carroll

Tom Carroll comments:

Moments ago I imagined a red sailboat. Now that imagined sailboat is blue. Immaterial things change constantly, rapidly, ceaselessly. So there *must* be a principle of change operating at the immaterial level. Potency — understood as the principle of change — must apply beyond the matter/form of the mundane world.

In an earlier comment, Tom had written,

[Gavin] Kerr says, “In bringing the potentially existing essence into existence, esse is not received in some distinct pre-existing essence bringing about a change therein, but actuates the essence whole and complete… [W]hen God creates, He brings into existence the essence-esse composite all at once.”

The earlier comment got me thinking about whether it makes sense to apply the potency-act distinction, which first surfaces in Greek philosophy in an attempt to understand change in the material world, to the problem of divine creation, given that God’s creating, though it has as one of its products the material world of space, time, and change, is not a material process.   In classical theism, the main representative of which I take to be Thomas Aquinas, divine creation is creatio ex nihilo, which implies, first of all, that creating is not the forming of a pre-existent matter.  But it also implies that divine creation is not ex possibilitate.  Accordingly, God creates out of nothing, not out of mere possibles.

Although Kerr is surely right that on classical theism God does not create out of mere possibles, he seems to hold, in line with traditional doctrine, that divine creating is an actuating of potencies.  This raises the question of the difference between the actuating of mere possibles and the actuating of potencies, which in turn raises the question of the difference between mere possibles and potencies.  It occurred to me that this might involve an illicit metabasis eis allo genos, which is something like a Rylean category mistake, where a term is transferred from a sphere where it belongs to a sphere where it doesn’t belong.  Can we legitimately speak of change, i.e., the conversion of potency  into act, with respect to a spiritual (and thus immaterial) process such as divine creating?  Again, the creating of a material world is not a material process.

The problem assumes an even sharper form when we consider that God creates not only  material things, but also immaterial spirits.  He creates angels  — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are unembodied — and he creates human beings — which in their ‘natural and proper state’ are embodied, but possibly such as to exist in a disembodied state between death and resurrection.

Angels are contingent beings, which is why they need creating.  Now if the creating of an angel is the actuating of a potency, and not the actuating of a pre-existent essence (a mere possible),  what and ‘where’ is the potency which, when actuated, becomes the angel Gabriel, say, or for that matter, the angel Lucifer, the light-bearer?  Don’t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?  And what might that be in the case of angels? Closer to the ground, what might that be in the case of material things?  If there are no ‘free-floating’ mere possibles, then how could there be ‘free-floating’ unactuated potencies?  Are we forced to say that these potencies are grounded in God? But then we are drifting toward the heretical view that divine creation is creatio ex Deo.

The orthodox — miniscule ‘o’ — position is creatio ex nihilo.  It aims to avoid three competing views: creatio ex Deo; demiurgic creation out of a pre-existent uncreated stuff; creatio ex possibilitate.

This is all  very tricky, but to a guy like me unutterably fascinating.  It lurks in the background of my conversation with Tom.  I will now address Tom’s first comment above. He is attempting to refute my suggestion — not a dogmatic pronunciamento — that the potency-act distinction is legitimately deployed only in the analysis of change in the material world and thus not in the analysis of divine creating which, again, is not a material process like the calcification of the aortic valve.

RESPONSE TO TOM CARROLL

First of all, is a boat an immaterial thing?  No, a boat, whether merely imagined or real, is a material thing.  I of course grant that there are immaterial things.  But a boat is not one of them. A merely imagined boat is not an immaterial thing, but a nonexistent material thing.  I do not grant that to exist is to be material. And so I do not grant that not to exist is to be immaterial.

Second, how does Tom know that the blue boat he imagines at time t* (t*> t) is numerically the same as the boat he imagined at t?  Suppose Tom owns a red boat, which he then paints blue.  In this case we naturally say that numerically one and the same boat that was red is now blue. A scholastic would call this a case of accidental (as opposed to substantial) change. I call it diachronic alterational change and distinguish it from diachronic existential change, as when a thing first comes into existence and then later passes out of existence. That too is change, but surely not an accidental or alterational change.  Before a thing comes to exist it is not there to undergo a change, and the same holds after it ceases to exist. On either end there is no substrate of alteration. No substrate, no alteration of a substrate. (This raises the difficult question of how to account for substantial/ existential change. I hold that the scholastic appeal to materia prima (prime matter) is unavailing.)

Back to Tom’s two boats. In the case of the merely imagined red boat and the merely imagined blue boat, the natural thing to say is that the two boats are numerically distinct. They are numerically distinct merely intentional objects. They are numerically distinct because they differ property-wise: one is red while the other is blue (and therefore not red).  I am assuming the Indiscernibility of Identicals, a principle than which no more luminous can be conceived. Roughly formulated, it states that if x = y, then x, y share all properties.  Contrapositively, if x, y are such that x has a property that y lacks, or vice versa, then it is not the case that x = y. Call it the Discernibility of the Diverse. The two principles are logically equivalent. And note that despite the traditional terminology, with its epistemic flavor, neither are epistemological principles.  Both are ontological.

I am making the following points against Tom. First, merely imagined material things are not immaterial but nonexistent. Second, there is no reason to think that a merely imagined red boat is numerically the same as a merely imagined blue boat, even if all the non-color properties of the boats are imagined to be the same. Third, no alteration of one and the same item has taken place in his example. Fourth, the view that alterational change is the conversion of potency into act is just one theory of such change among others and cannot just be assumed but must be argued for.  Fifth, the very notion of potency is unclear especially if thought to float free of an actual item in which it is grounded.

 

Choice-Worthy, Achievable Goals: Responses to Vohanka

Vlastimil Vohanka put three questions to me:
1) Would you agree with the claim, suggested in my “Boredom of the Gods” rant  that we live at times when people (esp.  white men)  find it hard to find overarching, dominant life-goals that would seem to them both (a) (viscerally) attractive and (b) realistically achievable?

(Maybe you know Bolitho’s quite famous book Twelve Against the Gods, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bolitho_Ryall, which, among other things, comments on the same problem. )

BV: I wasn’t aware of Bolitho, but the following excerpt from the Wikipedia article is relevant, especially inasmuch as I am now an old man who will no longer take the risks he took as an adventurous young man.
He [Bolitho] sees human endeavour as a duality between conformity and non-conformity. “We are born adventurers, and the love of adventures never leaves us till we are very old; old, timid men, in whose interest it is that adventure should quite die out. This is why all the poets are on one side, and all the laws on the other; for laws are made by, and usually for, old men.”[9] He points out that their lives [the lives of adventurers] show the difficulties involved, and the scant reward to be expected from such adventuring.[9]
Before I try to answer your question, one better put to a sociologist, I will ask you why the extensive quotation from that morally obtuse Andrew Tate? Your title suggests that you consider him a god. Do you really want to imply that? He better resembles a demon. He says, “Fucking women sucks cuz women are bad people.” False twice-over.  The second half is on a par with Rosie O’Donnell’s recent claim that “Men suck.” Why quote this defective specimen?
This Tate guys seems to be the very poster boy for toxic masculinity. My line on this, which you may be aware of,  is the only reasonable one. Neither masculinity as such, nor femininity as such are toxic; but there are cases that are well-described as cases of toxic masculinity.  See my Substack article, Masculinity. I give examples of toxic and non-toxic masculinity. There are specifically male virtues and specifically female virtues, a difference based in biology and perhaps also in metaphysics.  Men and women need each other’s virtues.  Related: Decent Man, Manly Man, Otherworldly Man.
As for V’s question #1, I disagree with his presupposition that the problem of finding a life-goal that is both attractive and achievable is a recent one. It’s age-old. It is not just V’s and younger generations that face it.  “Most men live lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Thoreau in the 19th century.  Ever since Adam was kicked out of the Garden, life for the majority has been drudgery and servitude.  The great affluence we enjoy in the West makes things easier than they used to be. But this affluence has also had the opposite effect by fueling the dissatisfaction of many of the young.  The affluence makes possible the leisure that breeds  dissatisfaction. The self-esteem movement plays a role. People brought up to have an excessively high opinion of themselves despite actual accomplishments will naturally kvetch when they find that it is hard to live large and heroically.
Despite what I said, the problem remains of finding a life-goal that is noble and inspiring but also  achievable.
What’s my advice? First off, you need to make a list of choice-worthy goals. Empty celebrity and the adulation of know-nothings ought not be on the list.  Nor should food and sex. Man does not live by bread alone, nor by bed alone. To live is to live in a way befitting a human being.  There is nothing wrong with doing well so long as you do well by doing good.
Once you have your list of choice-worthy goals, you need to determine which are achievable by you . This requires self-knowledge.  Do you have what it takes to be a Navy SEAL, a firefighter, a medical doctor, an astronaut, an engineer?
You then must sacrifice to attain your goals. “You have to pay your dues if you want play the blues.”
2) In https://otherlife.co/every-angel-is-terrifying-by-riva-tez-and-praxis-society, philosopher Riva Tez says:

“Nietzsche’s concept of the last man is a prophetic description of the world as it is today. You are basking in a fake glory. You are entertained and satiated. You are seemingly productive, but you are not great. If you feel this and aren’t bothered by it, look away. If you feel this and it bothers you, listen on.”
BV: Nietzsches Last Man “who has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night” is no role model. But then Nietzsche himself has nothing better to offer.
3) I am an elitist: most people can’t be great. And, relatedly, most people can’t do philosophy well. See https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/the-abyss-and-the-soy-latte

Q: Would you agree with both?
BV: Yes, I would agree to both, as long as you mean by ‘elitism’ the elitism of spirit and not that of social privilege and position.  Life is hierarchical.  Indeed, life is many hierarchies, the hierarchy of the spirit being one of them. Few are great. There are only a few great philosophers. The vast majority of philosophers, even if they are sincere truth-seekers,  have a much more humble role, that of striving upwards to the level of the greats.
We should all aspire to be great, but few will make the cut. And when we
write our more serious writing we should write for the ages even though we know we will be lucky to end up footnotes in forgotten books and journals.

One Nation? A Pessimistic Prognosis

Some say that a multi-racial society is possible while  a multi-cultural one is not. This is true as far as it goes but it presupposes that the several races in a society accept or can be brought to accept the same culture. Is the presupposition true? I don’t think so.

Traditional American culture is built on what the Smithsonian has tendentiously called “white values.” These include self-reliance,  “objective, rational linear thinking” [as opposed to what? subjective circular thinking?], hard work, respect for legitimate authority, ability to defer gratification, civility, and control of emotions.  Here is the Smithsonian’s full list.

These values and virtues are universal, not ‘white.’ When I say  that they are universal I mean that they are good for everyone, regardless of race. They are genuine values and virtues the implementation of which will lead to human flourishing.  The values on the Smithsonian list are universal in that everyone can profit from them. They  are ‘white’ only in that whites have excelled in their discovery, articulation, and implementation.

For example, whites are better at deferring or delaying gratification than blacks, which largely explains why, as a group, they do better economically than blacks as a group.  “A growing body of literature has linked the ability to delay gratification to a host of other positive outcomes, including academic success, physical health, psychological health, and social competence.” (Wikipedia) Social competence consists of the skills needed successfully to adapt to social situations. Lack of impulse control is one sort of social incompetence. Disproportionately more blacks than whites are shot by police in routine traffic stops, not because of ‘racism,’ but  because disproportionately more blacks than  whites ‘blow their cool’ in such tense interactions and engage in threatening behavior which elicits predictable responses from law enforcement officers.  This is not to deny that there are LEOs who commit murder under color of law. There are.  But they are a small fraction of the cases in which LEOs legally shoot and sometimes justifiably kill black  and other ‘motorists’ in self-defense.

The opening question was whether a multi-racial society can survive over the long term. It can, but only if the different racial, ethnic, and religious groups can be brought to accept a common culture.  This will not happen unless all illegal immigration is stopped, illegal aliens are deported, and legal immigration is structured so as to (i) prevent certain groups from entering, e.g., sharia-supporting Muslims, and (ii) gives preference, as used to be the case, to the entry of assimilable groups who share our values, broadly speaking.  For example, U.K. and other English speakers over Europeans, Europeans over Asians,  Asians over Africans.

There is no right to immigrate and every nation has the the right to insist that immigration work to the benefit of the host country and the preservation of its culture.

In the USA that common culture is Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman, and classically liberal, with the classically liberal values of the Enlightenment and the Founders (our greatest generation)  mitigating  the excesses and correcting the mistakes of the Greeks (slavery), the Romans (cruel and unusual punishment), and Christianity (ostracism and murdering of ‘heretics’).

Do we have the will to preserve our civilization and to to mitigate its decadence (due in large part to our great but corrupting affluence and to certain extreme forms of liberalism)?

The prognosis is not good.  A good half of the country now comprises an Internal Enemy that has hijacked the Democrat Party and is working to overturn the Constitution and the founding principles  But it ain’t over ’til it’s over, and we fight on to the end.

Is the World Inconceivable Apart from Consciousness? (Version 2.0)

That depends. It depends on what ‘world’ means.

Steven Nemes quotes Dermot Moran on the former’s Facebook page:

[1] In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. [2] Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. [3] For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness.  [4] The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. [5] Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness’s foundational, disclosive role. (Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, p. 144.)

This strikes me as confused. I will go through it line by line. I have added numbers in brackets for ease of reference.

Ad [1]. I basically agree.  But while conscious acts cannot be properly understood from within die natürliche  Einstellung, it doesn’t follow that they cannot be understood “at all” from within the natural attitude or what Moran is calling the natural outlook. So I would strike the “at all.” I will return to this issue at the end.

Ad [2].  Here the trouble begins. I grant that conscious acts cannot be properly understood in wholly materialistic or naturalistic terms. They cannot be understood merely as events in the natural world. For example, my thinking about Boston cannot be reduced to anything going in my brain or body when I am thinking about Boston. Conscious acts are object-directed. They have the property philosophers call ‘intentionality.’  Intentionality resists naturalistic reduction.

And I grant that there is a sense in which there would not be a world for us in the first place if there were no consciousness. A world for us is a world that appears to us as conscious beings.

But note the equivocation on ‘world.’ It is first used to refer to nature itself, and then used to refer to the openness or apparentness of nature, nature as it appears to us and has meaning for us.  Obviously, without consciousness, nature would not appear, but this is not to say that consciousness is the reason why there is a natural world in the first place.  To say that would be to embrace a form of idealism.

Ad [3] We are now told that this is not “a subjective idealism.” I agree.  But note that the world that is disclosed and made meaningful is not the world that is inconceivable without consciousness.  The equivocation on ‘world’ persists.  There is world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense as the ‘space’ within which things are disclosed and become manifest, and there is world as the things disclosed.  These are plainly different even if there is no epistemic access to the latter except via the former.

Ad [4] Therefore, to be precise, we should say that the world as the ‘space of disclosure’ is inconceivable without consciousness. But this ‘space of disclosure’ is not the same as the natural world, which is not inconceivable without consciousness.  If you say that it is, then you are adopting a form of metaphysical idealism, which is what Husserl in the end does.

In the end, he reduces Being to Meaning (Sein to Seinsinn) or Being (Sein) to ontic validity (Seinsgeltung).  Accordingly, beings in the world are constituted (a piece of Husserlian jargon) as beings by transcendental consciousness.  This is the upshot of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. What we naively take in the natural attitude to exist in themselves, on their ontological own, so to speak, things like rocks and planets and galaxies, are in truth intentional objectivities constituted in transcendental consciousness.

Ad [5] In the final sentence, ‘world’ clearly refers to the physical realm, nature. I agree that it would be a mistake to reify consciousness, to identify it with any physical thing or process. Consciousness plays a disclosive role. It is pre-mundane, transcendental.  As OF the world — genitivus objectivus — consciousness is not IN the world. But the world in this sense, the world that consciousness is not IN, is conceivable apart from consciousness.  If it were not, then Roman Ingarden’s realism and Thomist realism, and other types, would not be conceivable, which they plainly are.

And so the confusion remains.  The world in the specifically phenomenological sense, the world as the ‘space’ within which things are disclosed — compare Heidegger’s Lichtung or clearing — is inconceivable without consciousness. But the world as that which is disclosed, opened up, gelichtet, made manifest and meaningful, is NOT inconceivable apart from consciousness. If you maintain otherwise, then you are embracing a form of metaphysical idealism.

So I’d say that Moran and plenty of others are doing the ‘Continental Shuffle’ as I call it: they are sliding back and forth between two senses  of ‘world.’  Equivalently, they are conflating the ontic and the broadly epistemic.  I appreciate their brave attempt at undercutting the subject-object dichotomy and the idealism-realism problematic.  But the brave attempt does not succeed.  A mental act of outer perception, say, is intrinsically intentional or object-directed: by its very sense it purports to be of or about something that exists apart from any and all mental acts to which it appears.  To speak like a Continental, the purport is ‘inscribed in the very essence of the act.’  But there remains the question whether the intentional object really does exist independently of the act. There remains the question whether the intentional object really exists or is merely intentional.  Does it enjoy esse reale, or only esse intentionale?

I recommend to my friend Nemes that he read Roman Ingarden’s critique of Husserl’s idealism.  I also recommend that he read Husserl himself (in German if possible) rather than the secondary sources he has been citing, sources some of which are not only secondary, but second-rate.

To return to what I said at the outset: Conscious acts cannot be properly understood naturalistically.  But surely a full understanding of them must explain how they relate to the goings-on in the physical organisms in nature that support them.  A satisfactory philosophy cannot ignore this. And so, to end on an autobiographical note, this was one of the motives that lead me beyond phenomenology.

Interior Locutions: Criteria of Genuineness in Teresa of Avila

This article sets forth three signs or criteria for the evaluation of  interior locutions according to the great Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582),  as found in her Interior Castle, Sixth Mansion, Chapter Three, pp. 138-148 in the E. Allison Peers translation.  Such locutions are variously called inner, interior, spiritual, and  intellectual.   I will call them interior.  They are to be distinguished both from exterior locutions heard by the ears and from exterior locutions imagined to be heard by the ears. All locutions, whether exterior or interior, are verbal, not visual: they are words or composed of words. Etymology of ‘locution’ here.  Interior locutions are sometimes called interior words. They convey a message that appears to come from without, and in many if not most cases, one that appears to come from God.

Teresa gives “Be not troubled” as an example of an interior locution that appears to come from God.  But how does one know that this locution does in fact come from God, either directly or via one of his appointed messengers such as an angel? What are the criteria whereby we judge the source, and thereby the veridicality, of the message conveyed?

The first and truest [sign] is the sense of power and authority which they bear with them, both in themselves and in the actions which follow them. I will explain myself further. A soul is experiencing all the interior disturbances and tribulations which have been described, and all the aridity and darkness of the understanding. A single word of this kind — just a “Be not troubled” — is sufficient to calm it. No other word need be spoken; a great light comes to it; and all its trouble is lifted from it, although it had been thinking that, if the whole world, and all the learned men in the world, were to combine to give it reasons for not being troubled, they could not relieve it from its distress, however hard they might strive to do so. (141) [. . .]

The second sign is that a great tranquillity dwells in the soul, which becomes peacefully and devoutly recollected, and ready to sing praises to God. (141) [. . .]

The third sign is that these words do not vanish from the memory for a very long time: some, indeed, never vanish at all. Words which we hear on earth — I mean, from men, however weighty and learned they may be — we do not bear so deeply engraven upon our memory, nor, if they refer to the future, do we give credence to them as we do to these locutions. For these last impress us by their complete certainty, in such a way that, although sometimes they seem quite impossible of fulfilment, and we cannot help wondering if they will come true or not, and although our understanding may hesitate about it, yet within the soul itself there is a certainty which cannot be overcome. (142) [. . .]

Suppose a putative message ab extra passes these tests. Does it follow that the message is from God either directly or indirectly via a divinely appointed emissary?  No.  But by the same token it does not follow from  the visual and tactile perceptions as of a cat on my lap, that there is a cat on my lap.  And yet the evidence of the senses in normal to optimal conditions, good light for example, is pretty good evidence!  It is evident, though not self-evident (in the way it is self-evident that I seem to see and feel  a cat on my lap) that there is a cat on my lap.  What is evident needn’t be self-evident.  One could question this distinction, but it is one  that lays strong claim on our acceptance.

Now if the evidence of the outer senses is good enough to render reasonable  our belief in the reality of material things, is the evidence of interior locutions good enough to render reasonable the belief that some of these locutions have a divine source?  I answer in the affirmative.

There are, however,  important differences between outer perception (via the five outer senses) and the inner perception of the Interior Word. They need to be considered. One difference is that the outer perception of material particulars and events is repeatable ad libitum.  I see a mountain, and the sun setting behind it, turn away, then look at both again.  I see the same mountain and the  same event.  This repeatability  confirms my belief that the material objects of outer perception are ‘really there.’

A second difference is that one and same material thing can be seen from many different angles.

A third is that my perceptions as of mountains and cats are easily corroborated by my companions.  Intersubjective agreement is  a major source of support of trust in the outer senses.

A fourth difference is that the occasional misperception is correctable by further perception.  “See that cat? It’s a bobcat!” “No it isn’t. Look more closely. It’s just a big ornery domestic cat.  Bobcats in the wild don’t wear collars.”

Ad (1). By contrast with outer sense perceptions, mystical deliverances are not repeatable ad libitum:  I cannot bring them about by my own effort.  They are not under the control of my will. Their phenomenological quality is that of something  gratuitous, granted, gifted.   And only rarely are they granted.  The rarity  of mystical deliverances aids and abets the thought that they are illusory.  Whereas material objects confront us every waking moment,  messages from the Unseen Order arrive only a few times in a lifetime. And when these putative messages do arrive, they don’t last long. This makes them easy to discount and dismiss.

Be not troubled! The message is vouchsafed and then it is over. I cannot request the messenger to repeat himself, let alone display his credentials.  The messenger does not appear, only his message.  The tests of outer perception (repeatability, corroborability by others, correctability) are not applicable.

Ad (2).  I can walk around a tree and see it from different sides.  The Interior Word cannot be ‘heard’ from different positions in space.

Ad (3).  You and I and indefinitely many others can view one and the same tree. Our perceptions are mutually corroborative.  But your Interior Word experience is numerically different from mine even if the content is the same, such as Be not troubled!

Ad(4) The transiency of the experience of the Interior Word renders irrelevant any correctability by further perception.

The question is now: are these undeniable differences reasons to discount or even dismiss interior locutions as divine revelations? I say No. The differences are what we should expect given the nature of mystical deliverances as compared to the nature of ordinary perceptual deliverances.  The fact that interior locutions are unrepeatable at will, had by few and by these few only rarely,  is no argument against their veridicality. To think otherwise is to judge them by an inappropriate standard, one that is ruled out by their very nature.

To conclude. Interior locutions that pass Teresa’s tests are evidence of God’s existence and his concern for us. Coercive evidence? Proof? No. But evidence sufficient to render reasonable our taking of such mystical deliverances as revelatory.  So go ahead, believe! What harm can it do? (Wittgenstein)  There is light enough for those who wish to see, and darkness enough for the contrary-minded. (Pascal)  Evidence enough for those who are disposed to believe, but not enough for those who are disposed to disbelieve.

There is a story told about Bertrand Russell.  Russell dies and enters the divine presence. God says, “Why didn’t you believe in me?” “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence!”

I’d say that Lord Russell was constitutionally indisposed to believe.  Some of us, however, are so disposed. It is a further question whether this disposition to believe is itself a divine gift.  Whether or not it is, you are within your epistemic/doxastic rights to believe that it is.

Julian Green on Manna

Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:

The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.

The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.

Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?

 

NPR and PBS Finally Defunded

This is great news, and we have Trump to thank for this and for so many other things. In May of this year, I wrote over at Substack:

If you like NPR programming, write them a check! Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support. We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made. If such inessentials as NPR and PBS cannot be defunded, which programs can be defunded?

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship. But that is foolishness pure and simple and duly refuted here.

So one reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it. But there is a much better reason.

Even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support. And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left.* If you deny the increasingly leftward tilt of NPR, even unto 'wokery,' then you are delusional and not worth talking to. So I'll charitably assume that you are sane and admit the bias. The next question I will put to you is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view and policies that half if not most of us in this land find deeply objectionable on moral grounds such as the policy of allowing biological males to compete in women’s sporting events. I say that it it is not morally right that the government take our money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates our beliefs.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty. But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons. But contemporary liberals are not particularly liberal in the classical sense, and the Democrat Party has been hijacked by the Left. I am not arguing that the federal government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected with the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad). I am arguing that present fiscal facts and facts pertaining to NPR content dictate that defunding NPR is something that ought to be done.

Finally, you may enjoy watching the current NPR boss squirm and back track in the teeth of Congressional grilling.

_________________

*I stand not only for the separation of church and state, but also for the separation of leftism and state. Leftocracy is as antithetical to the founding principles of our constitutionally-based republic as is theocracy.

The Awesome Power of TDS . . .

. . . is demonstrated by the fact that George F. Will, horribile dictu,  voted for Kamala Harris. The bow-tied, yap-and-scribble pussy-wussy is hard at work destroying whatever legacy he might have enjoyed had he not gone bonkers over DJT, something he has in common with the rest of the Bulwark bunch. Staunch conservative and constitutional scholar that he is, Will voted for four more years of a wide-open border, with all that that brings in its train, including Tren de Aragua, drug smuggling, human trafficking and slavery, gun running,  not to mention the other outrages Kamala would have continued, such as the trashing of the Constitution.

You won't find an entry for TDS in DSM-IV, but it is real, and it has no counterpart on the Right.

So Racism and Misogyny Explain Kamala’s Loss?

Why did Kamala lose?  Here:

One answer has to do with race and gender. Too many Americans, especially white men, were still not willing to vote for a woman, even less a Black woman. 

Only a leftist scumbag could spew such slanderous garbage.  The vast majority of conservatives don't care about a candidate's race or sex. We care about ideas and policies.  If the contest were between Joe Biden and Tulsi Gabbard, most conservatives would vote for Tulsi Gabbard.

UPDATE (11/8)

Speaking of Tulsi Gabbard, on one of the talk shows last night she pointed out that Biden and Harris never once showed any concern about the very real threat of WW3 whereas Trump repeatedly demonstrated awareness of the grave danger we and the world are in under the 'leadership' of Biden and Harris.  I would add that one of the many reasons why the Clown got crushed was because of her insouciance regarding this genuine existential threat to humanity as opposed to the fake 'threats' cooked up by the Dementocrat tag team.

Two More on Politics

It may be a bit OTT in places, but I agree in the main with Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano's Open Letter to the American People on the eve of the 2024 presidential election. (HT: Catacomb Joe)

And here's Tucker Carlson to get your blood up. (HT: Vito Caiati)

WARNING:  Should our side win, expect violence from our political enemies. Never underestimate the depths of the Left's depravity.