Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge

    Dwight Green writes,

    I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year. 
     
    A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here.  (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.) 
     
    The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.
    Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse.  Thanks for reminding me of the passage:
    So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.  Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)
    Big Sur gazing into the apeironI am a native Californian  who knows Jack's book and the coastal road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur.  Gazing out at the Pacific  nearly 50 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast. 
     
    Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity.  Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.
     
    The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:
    . . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.
    Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides.  You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser. 
     
    The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge.  I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth.  Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.
     
    Big Sur bridge
    Addendum:  At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.
     

  • William Lane Craig . . .

    . . . on the headwaters of the human race. A very intelligent article. I have had similar thoughts.  Here is an excerpt from an entry dated 30 August 2011:

    But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.

    Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)

    As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

    What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not  emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

    But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.

    This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
    spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain  Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.

    If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message.  Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other — but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

    Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall.  The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one  just given shows that the entailment fails.  Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way.  It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors.  Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.


  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Messages, Letters, etc.

    Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman

    Elvis Presley, Return to Sender

    Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails. "The letters you wrote me were written in shame/And I know that your conscience still echoes my name."

    Son House, Death Letter Blues

    Elvis Presley, The U. S. Male

    Larry Finnegan, Dear One. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a beer.

    Hank Williams, Dear John. "That's all she wrote. I sent your saddle home."

    Ricky Nelson, That's All She Wrote

    Joe Cocker, The Letter

     


  • Ontologically Serious and Unserious Uses of ‘Something’ and the Problem of Reference to the Nonexistent

    If Jane is friendly, then there is something Jane is, namely, friendly. But one hesitates to infer either

    1) There is (exists) such an object as friendly

    which is not even well-formed, or

    1*) There is (exists) such an object as friendliness

    which is well-formed but offensive to the nominalist sensibility. 'Jane is friendly' commits one to Jane but not obviously to the property of being friendly. 

    According to Sainsbury and Tye (Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to Solve Them, Oxford UP, 2012, p. 114), "'There is something' is not an object quantifier" in sentences like 'There is something that Jane is, namely, friendly.' In such cases, 

    The 'thing' in 'something' is not ontologically serious. By contrast, expressions like 'object' and 'entity are used in philosophical discourse  to mark ontological commitment; and words like 'dagger' and 'fountain of youth' are used by everyone in that way in extensional contexts. (ibid.)

    The idea is that there are two senses/uses of 'something.' One is ontologically serious because ontologically committal while the other is not.  If I kick a ball, then there is  something I kick. (Ontologically committal use of 'something' in an extensional context.) If Macbeth hallucinated a dagger, then there is something Macbeth hallucinated, namely, a dagger. (Ontologically noncommittal use of 'something' in an intensional/intentional context.)

    Do we have here the makings of a solution to the ancient problem of apparent reference to the nonexistent?  I don't think so. 

    Go back to Jane. Jane is friendly.  So there is something she is, namely, friendly. So far, so good. Everything is clear. But trouble starts and murk intrudes when we are told that the 'something' in play here is ontologically noncommittal: there is nothing in reality that Jane is, or is related to in virtue of which she is friendly. Thus there is no property, friendliness, that she instantiates, or any property that she has as a constituent, or anything like that. In reality there is just Jane.  But then what is the difference between Jane's being friendly and her being unfriendly?

    It is evident to me that there has to be something in reality that grounds that difference. If you deny this, I will not understand you. Suppose you say  that Jane's being friendly  is just the circumstance that someone attached or applied the predicate 'is friendly' to her.  I will say: So she needs to be called friendly to BE friendly? That is absurd.  If I called her unfriendly, would she then be unfriendly? What if I called her anorexic? IS she whatever I SAY she is? Has she no properties independently of my say-so? If no one called her anything, would she have no properties at all?  Before the evolution of languages was the Earth neither spheroid nor non-spheroid?  Is there no difference between a predicate's being true of an individual and its being applied to or predicated of an individual? 

    These considerations convince me that the distinction between ontologically serious and  unserious uses of 'something' has not been established.  Note that it needs to be established independently of the Macbeth problem.  To first introduce it as a solution to the Macbeth problem would be ad hoc.

    There is also this question: what is the difference between saying that there is something — in the ontologically unserious sense — that Macbeth hallucinated and saying that Macbeth hallucinated a Meinongian nonexistent object?  How does the Sainsbury and Tye solution differ from a Meinongian one?


    8 responses to “Ontologically Serious and Unserious Uses of ‘Something’ and the Problem of Reference to the Nonexistent”

  • BEATific October Again

    Kerouac barIt's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

    I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

    Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

    You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

    And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman who will enjoy Jack and Frank.


  • Polarization and Flotation in Politics

    Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield.  A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is.   A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen.  He will know that, in the end, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no time left for 'penmanship.'


  • Opponents or Enemies?

    If you shrink back from regarding your political opponents as enemies, you do not appreciate the threat they pose. You are not taking them seriously enough. They pose an existential threat. Such a threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence; it is a threat to one's way of life, to one's cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage.   Human life is not merely biological. 


  • How Strange!

    How strange it would be if death were to leave us all in the dark as to the ultimate why and wherefore!  How strange if no one knows, no one ever knew, and no one will ever know what it's all about.  And not because the Answer is hidden, but because there is none.

    If you say that it could be like that, I won't disagree. There is presumably and prima vista no presumption in favor of point, purpose, intelligibility and sense. But if you find nothing strange about this putative state of affairs, then I will view you and your spiritual vacancy with a mixture of pity and contempt.


  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Messages, Letters, Epistles, Novels and such

    Bob Dylan,  Take a Message to Mary. I prefer it to the Everly Bros. effort. 

    Boxtops, The Letter

    R. B. Greaves, Take a Letter, Maria

    Beatles, Paperback Writer

    Dinah Washington, I Could Write a Book

    Donovan, Epistle to Dippy

    10,000 Maniacs, Hey Jack Kerouac

    Simon and Garfunkel, I am a Rock. "I have my books and my poetry to protect me." 1960's teenage alienation at its finest.

    Ketty Lester, Love Letters

    Paul McCartney, I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Original by Fats Waller.

    How could I fail to include . . .

    Monotones, The Book of Love.  I never did find out who wrote it.


  • “My Conscience is Clear”

    You deceive yourself : you cleared it when you should have borne its burden and bite, the just tax for your wrongdoing.


  • The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism with Bread and Circuses

    Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption. A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.
     
    Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of Big Government and its leftist enablers.
     
    The totalitarianism of bread and circuses is more insidious, and more conducive to social control, than that of gulag and Vernichtungslager.
     
    The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left omni-invasive government by 'woke' global elites. There is nothing democratic about them.

  • The Monk and the Worldling

    Monk: The world you love cannot last  and betrays its vanity thereby. Its impermanence argues its unreality. It is unworthy of your love, noble soul!

    Worldling: The God you love is worthy of your love should he exist, but he does not, or at least you have no proof that he does; no proof sufficient to render reasonable your rejection  of  this passing world and its finite satisfactions for a possibility merely believed in.  


  • An Advantage of Childlessness

    Our parents and relatives cared about us enough to judge us, sometimes justly, sometimes unjustly. They understood us and they didn't. Their intentions were mainly good, but their misunderstanding was a burden. They were wrapped up in their own lives and troubles; ours were relatively unreal to them. "What do you have to worry about?" a parent may say to a child drifting in the horse latitudes of teenage alienation, aimlessness, and cognitive dissonance. With their passing our burden of their misunderstanding was lifted. And they too were lifted — beyond the reach of our critical judgments. 

    Childlessness has this advantage: there is no one left to judge us. We are free. I am not an anti-natalist. I am merely pointing out an advantage to having reached a temporal 'space' in which some of us are safe from being boxed-in by the judgments of  well-meaning but uncomprehending kith and kin.  


  • Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

    "Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

    Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

    When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

    It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

    In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

    [. . .]

    It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

    Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

    Story here.


  • Enemies Have Their Uses

    You may do your level best to hide your faults and defects, but others will expose them. Even if they do so maliciously they perform a service to those who are open to correction. An enemy is sometimes to be preferred to a friend in tacit collusion with one's moral complacency.



Latest Comments


  1. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

  2. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology

  3. It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…

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  5. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  6. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  7. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  8. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…



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