Existence, Time, Property-Possession, and the Dead

Here are four propositions that are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent. 

1) For any x, temporal or atemporal, if x has a property, then x exists.

2) For any temporal x, if x exists, then x exists at present.

3) Frege, a temporal item, does not exist at present.

4) Frege has properties at present.

(1) is plausible: how could anything have a property if it is not 'there' to have it? This use of 'there' is non-locative.  I assume that to exist = to be, and that Meinongian nonentities, "beyond being and nonbeing," are unintelligible.

(2) is plausible: the past is no longer, the future not yet; the present alone is real/existent!  It is important to note, however, that the plausibility of (2) is not that of a tautology. Tautologies are plausible in excelsis; substantive metaphysical claims are not. One cannot reasonably controvert a tautology; one can reasonably controvert a substantive metaphysical claim. What (2) formulates, call it 'presentism,' is somewhat plausible but surely not logically true. So the senses of 'exist(s)' and 'exist(s) at present' are distinct. If I say that a thing exists, I say nothing about when it exists; I say only that it is 'there' in the non-locative sense among the 'furniture of the world.' Indeed, 'x exists' leaves open whether the thing is in time at all. 'God exists' is noncommittal on the question whether God is temporal or atemporal. 

(3) is plausible: (a) Frege is temporal in that he cannot exist without existing in time; (b) Frege does not now exist.

(4) is plausible: Frege is now famous and he is dead. Those predicates are true of him: he has (instantiates) the properties they express. 

The tetrad is collectively inconsistent. One way to solve the problem is by rejecting the least plausible proposition. By my lights, that proposition is (2). To reject (2) is to reject presentism. But if presentism is false, it does not follow that eternalism is true!  

Wife and Life, Truth and Practice

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

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

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

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

James and Royce circa 1910

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

**Pygmies now rule.

Memory and Existence: An Aporetic Tetrad

Try this  foursome on for size:

1) Memory is a source of knowledge.

2) Whatever is known, exists.

3) Memory includes memory of wholly past individuals and events.

4) Whatever exists, is temporally present.

The limbs of the tetrad are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  To appreciate the logical inconsistency, note that 'exists' in (2) and in (4) have exactly the same sense, and that this is not the present-tensed sense.  It is the tense-neutral and time-independent sense. Something that exists in this sense simply exists: it is one of the things listed in the ontological inventory.  Hence talk in the literature of existence simpliciter.  In both of its occurrences above, 'exists' means: existence simpliciter.

The limbs are individually plausible. But they are not equally plausible. (4) is the least plausible, and thus the most rejectable, i.e., the most rejection-worthy. Rejecting it, we arrive at an argument against presentism given that (4) is a version of presentism, which it is.

1*) Some of what is remembered is known.

2*) All that is known, exists.

Therefore

2.5) Some of what is remembered exists.

3*) All of what is remembered is wholly past.

Therefore

3.5) Some of what exists is wholly past.

Therefore 

~4*) It is not the case that whatever exists, is temporally present. (Presentism is false.)

Salman Rushdie, the Left, and Free Speech

Last week's Sunday CBS Morning Show featured a segment on Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, who was recently attacked in an apparent assassination attempt by a Muslim living in New Jersey.  You may recall that the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Rushdie in 1989 in which the ayatollah called for Rushdie's death because of his depiction of Muhammad in the above-mentioned book.  Here are some observations and questions.

1) Muslims have a long memory for anything they consider an attack on them or their religion. 33 years have passed since the issuing of the fatwa calling for the author's death. They neither  forgive nor  forget.  I note in passing that a fatwa is a high-level edict that need not include a call for anyone's death.

2) True-believing, sharia-supporting Muslims have values antithetical to the Enlightenment values of our constitutional Republic, a central one of which is the value of free speech. So one might naturally wonder  what  the Muslim assailant was doing living in New Jersey. How did he get there? Did he arrive legally or illegally? Either way there are serious questions that need to be asked, but are never asked by leftists, whose ostensible aim is "fundamental transformation" (Obama), which amounts to destruction of the USA as she was founded to be. You might think that after the events of 9/11, the importance of border security would be well understood, even by leftists.  But for them open borders offer them an opportunity to so alter the demographics of the country that the Democrat Party can be expected to achieve permanent hegemony. To attain this glorious result they are willing to risk further terrorist attacks.

3) It is of course hypocritical, though typical,  for a left-leaning media outlet such as CBS to stand up for Salman Rushdie and his right to freedom of expression while uttering nary a word of criticism of the regime's suppression of conservative dissent. By the  regime I mean the deep-state apparatus in cahoots with its woke-capitalist enablers and adjuncts.  Among the latter I include Big Tech, Big Pharma, the universities, and such mainstream media outlets  as CBS.

ARs and Cattle Cars

Those who wield the former are less likely to be forced into the latter.

Arbeit macht frei

Orwellianisms come naturally to totalitarians. Arbeit macht frei reads the inscription over the Auschwitz concentration camp.  "Work makes one free." So you are most truly free when you are worked to death as a slave.

The unarmed man is a defensively naked man.

Now I defend your right to go around (defensively) naked, but only on condition that you defend, or at least not interfere with, my right to go around 'clothed.'

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Facebook comment:

Paraphrasing Machiavelli: Why should a man who is wrong pay any attention at all to a man who is right, and not armed?

Just so. In the world as it is, appeals to what is right carry no weight unless backed by might.  Suppose you are hiking in the wild. You come across a girl being raped by some brute. If you are unarmed, all you can do is appeal to the brute's conscience. "Sir, don't you see that what you are doing is both morally and legally impermissible? Please stop!" If, on the other hand, you are armed, then then you have the means to intervene effectively should you decide to do so. Whether you should intervene is a difficult decision that depends on the exact circumstances. I am making just one very simple and indisputable point: an unarmed man lacks the means to defend himself or anyone else.

Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option

A re-post from 20 July 2015.  Things are falling apart so fast that July 2015 seems  like a long time ago, even to an old man for whom tempus fugit is an understatement. The original posting occurred roughly four and a half years before the annus horribilis of 2020. And here we are more than half-way through 2022. The Amerikan police state is metastasizing as we speak. 87,000 new IRS agents armed with semi-automatic pistols and carbines to persuade the hyper-lawyered billionaire fat cats to 'pay their fair share' — to ape the idiom of Fauxcahontas Warren? Think again you of the ovine and bovine and usefully-idiotic persuasion. It is one of the several modes of what I am now calling the Assault on the Middle. More on this, anon.

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Excerpt:

You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula.

I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality. There will be no “take back our country” moment, because we have lost, and lost decisively. We are rapidly de-Christianizing. True, we have a long way to go before we get to European rates of secularization and religious indifference, but the trajectory is the same. Rather than change the world, the world is changing the churches. The power of popular culture is overwhelming, and in ways that many Christians scarcely grasp — and this, as MacIntyre says, is part of our predicament.

Granted, there is no formula:  there are different ways of implementing the Benedict Option.  But there ought to be discussion — not provided by Dreher in the above-referenced piece — of a potential problem with one form of the Option's implementation.  

Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that marvellous admonition of Goethe in Faust:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!
 
What from your fathers you  received as heir,
Acquire if  you would possess it. (tr. W. Kaufmann)

So now you are out in the desert or the forest or in some isolated place free of the toxic influences of a society in collapse.  The problem is that you are now a very easy target for the fascists of the Left.  You and yours are all in one place, far away from the rest of society and its infrastructure.  All the fascists have to do is trump up some charges, of child-abuse, of gun violations, whatever.  The rest of society considers you kooks and benighted bigots and religious fanatics and won't be bothered if you are wiped off the face of the earth.  You might go the way of the Branch Davidians.

Is this an alarmist scenario?  I hope it is.  But the way things are going, one ought to give careful thought to one's various withdrawal options. 

It might be better to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.  A sort of subversive engagement from within may in the long run be better than spatial withdrawal.  One can withdraw spiritually without withdrawing spatially.  One the other hand, we are spatial beings, and perhaps not merely accidentally, so the question is a serious one:  how well can one withdraw spiritually while in the midst of towns and cities and morally corrupt and spiritually dead people?

And then there is the vexed and vexing question of armed resistance.  This is especially vexing for Christians.  Should we meet violence with violence, or let ourselves and our culture be destroyed?  On Christian metaphysics, this world is not an illusion.  It is not a dream one can hope to wake up from.  On the other hand, it is not ultimately real: it, and we who sojourn through it, are in statu viae. What then should be the measure and mode of our defense of it?

If you think violence is to be met with violence, then I advise you to remain in diaspora in the cities and towns, spread out, in the midst of people and infrastructure the fascists of the Left will not target.

We are indeed living in very interesting times.  How can one be bored?