Wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson. There is precious little of it on the Left. We are awash in the deleterious consequences. Excerpt below the fold.
Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…
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Civilization Requires Deterrence
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Berdyaev on the Moral Source of Atheism
There are respectable forms of atheism. The atheist needn't be a rebellious punk stuck in intellectual adolescence, swamped by sensuality, and given to self-idolatry.
Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (Harper Torchbooks, 1960, tr. Natalie Duddington, p. 24):
It is precisely the traditional theology that leads good men, inspired by moral motives, to atheism. The ordinary theological conception of freedom in no way saves the Creator from the responsibility for pain and evil. Freedom itself is created by God and penetrable by Him down to its very depths. In His omniscience, ascribed to Him by positive theology, God foresaw from all eternity the fatal consequences of freedom with which He endowed man. He foresaw the evil and suffering of the world which has been called into being by His will and is wholly in His power; He foresaw everything, down to the perdition and everlasting torments of many. And yet He consented to create man and the world under those terrible conditions. This is the profound moral source of atheism.
I read Berdyaev's The Beginning and the End in the summer of 1970. The following autumn I committed myself to philosophy as my vocation. The Russian personalist moved me deeply at the time, but then other philosophical interests and concerns took over. It is wonderful to be reading him again some 50 years later. If this existentialist is a bit on the febrile side, he at least avoids the empty intellectual gamesmanship of the analytic logic choppers whose philosophical activity bespeaks their spiritual vacuity. The task of the true philosopher is to combine rigor and Wissenschaftlichkeit with spiritual depth. Plato and Spinoza come to mind. We lesser lights are not quite up to the task, but we ought to take such luminaries as guides and tutelary spirits.
Addendum 9/24
Some of us are old enough to remember seeing Bishop Fulton J. Sheen on television. His message below is effectively answered by Berdyaev above. The cause of theism is not well-served by the caricaturing of atheists as all of the same stripe. There are saints and scamps on both sides of the theological divide.
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Singular Concepts and Singular Negative Existentials
A re-post from 15 May 2012. Reproduced verbatim.
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London Ed seems to be suggesting that we need irreducibly singular concepts (properties, propositional functions) if we are properly to analyze grammatically singular negative existence statements such as
1. Vulcan does not exist.
But why do we need to take 'Vulcan' to express a singular concept or haecceity property? Why isn't the following an adequate analysis:
1A. The concept Small, intra-Mercurial planet whose existence explains the peculiarities of Mercury's orbit is not instantiated.
Note that the concept picked out by the italicized phrase is general, not singular. It is general even though only one individual instantiates it if any does. The fact that different individuals instantiate it at different possible worlds suffices to make the concept general, not irreducibly singular.
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Singular Concepts Again
Ed writes,
Your counter-arguments are very useful but I find some of them puzzling. One argument that repeatedly occurs is that a concept cannot contain the object that it is a concept of. Our concept of Venus (if we have one) cannot contain Venus, for example.
My difficulty is that I agree with this argument, indeed it’s a cornerstone of the thesis in the book. See e.g.
The standard theory is a development of Mill’s theory, and is attended by the same difficulties. It explains properness by a semantic connection between proper name and bearer whereby the name can only signify that thing, but this leads to all the well-known difficulties mentioned in the last chapter, for example (i) how a large planetary body like Jupiter could be a part of a meaning or a thought, (ii) how identity statements involving different names for the same thing, such as “Hesperus is Phosphorus” can sometimes be informative, and (iii) how negative existential statements, which apparently deny a meaning for the name, are possible at all.
My emphasis. So where are we disagreeing I wonder? Is it that I claim a singular term has a meaning or sense? But in other posts of yours, you seem to agree that singular terms have a sense.
Or is it that you think that the sense of a singular term is ‘general’?
BV: Yes, that is what I claim. A singular term such as a name has a sense, but its sense is general. But I note that you switched from 'concept' to 'sense.' They are closely related. We may have to examine whether they are equivalent.
If so, you need to define what ‘general’ means. I define it as repeatable. A repeatable concept is one that we can without contradiction suppose to be instantiated by more than one individual, perhaps by individuals in different possible worlds. A singular concept by contrast is one where we cannot suppose repeatability without contradicting ourselves. For example, I cannot rationally entertain the thought that there could have been someone else who was Boris Johnson in 2021. That is because ‘someone else’ in this context means ‘someone other than Boris Johnson’, but ‘who was Boris Johnson’ means ‘someone who was no other than Boris Johnson’.
Thus to suppose that there could have been someone else who was Boris Johnson in 2021 is to suppose that there could have been someone who was both (1) other than Boris Johnson and (2) not other than Boris Johnson.
BV: I accept your definitions of 'general concept' and 'singular concept' pending some caveats to come. We agree that there are general concepts. We also agree that there are general terms and that there are singular terms. Presumably we also agree that a term is not the same as the concept the term expresses. The English word 'tree' and the German word 'Baum' are both token-distinct and type-distinct. But they express the same concept. Therefore, a word and the concept it expresses are not the same. And the same goes for sense: a word is not the same as its sense.
We disagree about whether there are singular concepts. You say that there are and I say that there aren't.
I think the onus is on you to establish that there cannot be unrepeatable concepts in the sense defined above.
BV: Why is the onus probandi on me rather than on you? Why is there a presumption in favor of your position that I must defeat, rather than the other way around? But let's not worry about where the burden of proof lies. We are not in a court room. You want an argument from me to the conclusion that there are no singular/individual/unrepeatable concepts. The demand is legitimate regardless of burden-of-proof considerations.
We agree that a first-level singular concept C, if instantiated, is instantiated by exactly one individual in the actual world and by the very same individual in every merely possible world in which C is instantiated. This is essentially your definition of 'singular concept.' I don't disagree with it but I say more.
I say that every concept is a mental grasping by the person who deploys the concept of the thing or things that instantiate (fall under, bear) the concept. A concept of an individual, then, would have to be a mental grasping of what makes that individual be the very individual it is and not some other actual or possible individual. So if there is the irreducibly singular concept Socrateity, then my deployment of that concept would allow we to grasp the haecceity (thisness) of Socrates which is precisely his and 'incommunicable' (as a schoolman might say) to any other individual actual or possible. But this is what minds of our type cannot grasp. Every concept we deploy is a general concept, and it doesn't matter how specific the concept is. Specificity no matter how far protracted never gets the length of singularity.
All of our concepts are mental representations of the repeatable features of things. It follows that all of our concepts are general. The individual, however, is essentially unrepeatable. For that very reason there cannot be a concept of the individual qua individual.
Consider Max Black's world in which there are exactly two iron spheres, alike in all monadic and relational respects, and nothing else. If there were an individual concept of the one sphere, then it would also be an individual concept of the other. But then it would not be an individual or singular concept: it would be general. It would be general because it would have two instances. The only way there could be two individual concepts is if each had as a constituent an iron sphere — which is absurd. Therefore, there cannot be any individual concepts.
9 responses to “Singular Concepts Again”
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A Part-Time Monk’s Solution to Suggestibility
Substack latest.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson on Prayer
From his magnificent essay, "Self Reliance":
Prayer that craves a particular commodity, — anything less than all good, — is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends.
While I do not confer upon this passage a plenary endorsement, I am sympathetic to it, as should be evident from Give Us this Day our Daily Bread.
See also Bernanos on Prayer which is mainly a long quotation from the great novelist. At the end of the quotation I offer:
The above needs no commentary from me. It needs thoughtful, open-minded rumination from you. I respect a person's right to remain a secularist and worldling, but a measure of contempt comes into the mix should the person's secular commitment be thoughtless and unexamined.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong (1931-2021)
Yes, I know, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, but I will make an exception in this case. This man filled his belly from Christianity while rejecting not only its specific tenets, but theism itself.
Spong in his final years belonged to the now largely defunct Jesus Seminar, which voted with marbles on which scriptures were authentic, always rejecting verses that claimed the supernatural. With those scholars, Spong rejected divine interventions, including Jesus’ deity, resurrection, virgin birth and miracles. In the end, Spong denounced theism itself. He also questioned Christian teachings about the afterlife and suggested that their primary purpose was control of human behavior in this life.
Instead of playing the termite in a bishop's regalia, Spong should have had the intellectual decency to get an honest job.
“Heaven and Hell have got to go,” the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey retired bishop lectured at United Methodist-affiliated Drew Theological School after authoring his 2010 book Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell. “Nobody knows what the afterlife is all about; nobody even knows if there is one.”
This quotation shows the man to have been a fool. Of course nobody KNOWS what the afterlife is ALL about, or whether there is one. It is a matter of reasoned faith. A man without faith in God and Christ who postures as a Christian bishop is comparable to a pacifist who expects to learn a living as a high-ranking military officer.
Spong eventually described himself as a non-theist, rejecting not just historic Christian teachings in the Nicene Creed, but also the very idea of a personal God.
The Diocese of Newark tweeted:
May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
That's hilarious!
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Is Theism Empirically Refutable?
Consider the following passage from J. J. C. Smart:
It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)
Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.
So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I say that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:
1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
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3. It is not the case that God exists.The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omni-qualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. Such an evil would not be gratuitous. So it is just false to say, "If God exists, then there is no evil."
But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that — (2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. As for epistemic possibility, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).
But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? How does one know that there is gratuitous evil? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant arguendo that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from sensory experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?
Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?
To say that an evil is gratuitous is equivalent to saying that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omni-qualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil. Even if it is empirically obvious that there are evils such as the intense pain both physical and psychological of a fawn being incinerated in a forest fire, it is not empirically obvious that this evil is gratuitous.
The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils. At most, there would only seem to be such.
Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition — There is gratuitous evil — is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'
One last observation. There is something strange about referring as Smart does to theism as an empirical hypothesis. This is not the place to pursue this. I will merely suggest that the existence of God is more like the existence of truth than it is like the existence of something empirically confirmable or disconfirmable. It would be easy to show the absurdity of the question, Is the existence of truth empirically refutable? So too, perhaps, with the existence of God. The existence of truth is an ultimate presupposition of all inquiry and all assertion. The existence of God may be in the same logical boat.
If you are thinking of God along the lines of Russell's celestial teapot, you have missed the boat.
8 responses to “Is Theism Empirically Refutable?”
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia
A mixed bag for your enjoyment, but mainly mine. I post what I like and I like what I post. And I post what I've posted before. Links go bad, and even when they don't I never get tired of the old tunes I like. It's Saturday night, friends, pour yourself a stiff one and relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow. I am drinking the fermented juice of the agave cactus mixed with a little orange juice and ginger ale. What's your libation? Forget for a time the swine who have taken over our great country, and enjoy the moment.
Thelonious Monk, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
Wes Montgomery, 'Round Midnight
Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away. In 7/4 time.
Ry Cooder, I Think It's Going to to Work Out Fine
Jeff Beck, Sleepwalk. The old Santo and Johnny instrumental from 1959.
Danny Gatton, master of the Telecaster. Phenomenally good, practically unknown.
Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. When your name is 'Bob Dylan' you have your pick of sidemen. A great band. "The walls of pride, they're high and they're wide. You can't see over, to the other side."
Joe Brown, Sea of Heartbreak. Nothing touches Don Gibson's original effort, but Brown's is a very satisfying version.
Elvis Presley, Little Sister
Carole King, You've Got a Friend
Buddy Guy, et al., Sweet Home Chicago. Looks like everyone is playing a Strat except for Johnny Winter.
Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go. A fine, if quirky, cover of the old George Reeves hit from 1959.
Marty Robbins, El Paso. Great guitar work.
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C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil
In The Problem of Pain (Fontana 1957, pp. 203-204, first publ. in 1940), C. S. Lewis writes,
We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the 'unimaginable sum of human misery'. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.
I think that Lewis is right that felt pain is not additive across different subjects. Your pain and my pain cannot be summed. This holds for both physical and psychological pain. Pain is additive only in a given subject and not across subjects. "There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it."
So far, so good. It is equally true, however, that two people being tortured to death is worse than one person being tortured to death. Both states of affair are evil, but the first is more evil than the second. The quantity of felt pain is the same, but in the first there are twice as many evils than in the second.
I conclude that the question of the quantity of pain in the world is distinct from the question of the quantity of evil in the world. This is relevant to the problem of evil faced by theists. Lewis has shown that "the maximum that a single person can suffer" is "all the suffering that there ever can be in the universe." And that includes all the suffering of the non-human animals who suffer. But the problem of evil faced by the theist is precisely a problem of evil and not a problem of felt pain. And this despite the fact that many pains are evil (all those, I should think, the suffering of which does not lead to a greater good.)
My tentative conclusion is that the considerations adduced in the passage quoted above do little to alleviate the severity of the problem of evil faced by traditional theists.
3 responses to “C. S. Lewis on the (Non) Additivity of Pain in Relation to the Problem of Evil”
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Suffering Pleasure
We suffer pain, but we also suffer pleasure. Fundamentally, to suffer is to be passive, to be patient rather than agent, to be acted upon, to be in the thrall of another, to be at the mercy of what is not oneself. Excessive pleasure and pain should both be avoided as one avoids heteronomy, the heteronomy of the not-self. Compare Plato, Timaeus 86c:
. . . excessive pains and pleasures are justly to be regarded as the greatest diseases to which the soul is liable. For a man who is in great joy or in great pain, in his unreasonable eagerness to attain the one and to avoid the other, is not able to see or hear anything rightly, but he is mad and is at the same time utterly incapable of any participation in reason.
It is useful to practice distancing oneself from one’s sensations in order to study them objectively. To sensations good and bad, say: “You are only a sensation, an external occurrence whose effect on me, for good or ill, is partly due to my cooperation and is therefore partly under my control.” The worldling seeks pleasure (‘excitement,’ ‘thrills’) and shuns pain. The sage accepts both as byproducts of worthwhile activities.
The mastery of desire and aversion is not easy, and it is a good bet that one won't advance far in it; but any advance is better than none.
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On the Suffering of Non-Human Animals
Animal life is “poor, solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.” But this gloomy Hobbesian description must be balanced by the recognition that a suffering animal is not a man suffering as an animal suffers. We must discipline our tendency to project and imagine. To imagine that a cat dying of cancer suffers as a man dying of cancer suffers is to engage in anthropomorphic projection. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is perhaps less horrible than we imagine it to be. This is not to deny that animals suffer, let alone to embrace the Cartesian absurdity that animals are machines. The point is to not make things worse than they are through inept mental moves.
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Generic and Specific Problems of Evil
Substack latest.
The nature and tractability of the problem depends on the type of theism espoused.
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Vito Caiati comments:
I very much profited from the short essay “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil” that you posted on Substack yesterday. I have read it several times, and, if viewed from the perspective of the ultimate destiny of the members of our species alone, I see the merit of your claim that “It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A, . . . [those who regard] this world [as] a ‘vale of soul-making’ (the phrase is from John Keats) in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil.”
However, what about non-human animals, who “Despite being wholly corporeal, . . . enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also . . . intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger” (Maverick Philosopher, “Soteriology for Brutes,”3/21/2019)?
It seems to me, who, as you know, is a philosophic neophyte in these matters, that the theist-A operates with too narrow a perspective on sentience, for ultimate value is placed only on those sentient beings that are rational and hence capable to abstract thought and moral judgments. The suffering of all the others, including the highest mammals, counts very little or not at all; it certainly does not figure in the soteriology of, say, Christianity, which is obsessively centered on human sin and the need for salvation from it, rather than on the agony and death that permeates the natural world. Perhaps “death is the wages of sin” for mankind, but what explains the agonizing deaths of our fellow sentient creatures that have not sinned? Only by remaining in his sin/redemption theory of salvation, which is necessarily restricted to human beings, can theist-A be more reconciled to the existence of evil.
None of these may be worth your time, but I wanted to share it with you, since it is one of the central concerns of my intellectual and emotional life.
You have pointed out a serious lacuna in my discussion, Vito. I focused on moral and natural evil as it pertains to human animals but left out of account the natural evil, including both physical and mental suffering, that besets non-human animals. I will now try to formulate your objection to me as trenchantly as I can. 'You' in what follows refers to me!
1) You maintain that the problem of reconciling the existence of evil with the existence of God is considerably more tractable if we humans survive our bodily deaths and come to enjoy (after a period of purgation) eternal bliss.
2) You also argue that "It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when . . . some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come."
3) You are presenting a sort of "All's well that ends well" response to moral and natural evil. You are arguing that the evils of this life are far outweighed and almost completely made up for by the unending bliss of the world to come, so much so that the the 'problem' of evil vanishes for those who subscribe to the specific theism that you call Theism-A.
4) You ignore, however, the problem of animal pain which is certainly real. (We both reject as preposterous the Cartesian view that non-human animals are insensate or non-sentient.) Given that non-human animals are not spiritual beings as we are, and do not survive their bodily deaths, there is no redemption for them: their horrific suffering — imagine the physical pain and mental terror of being eaten alive! — is in no way recompensed or outweighed. And given how many species of non-human critter there are, and how many specimens per species, and how long these animals existed before man made the scene, there is a VAST amount of evil that goes unredeemed.
5) Your argument therefore fails to get God off the hook.
I take this objection seriously and I thank Dr. Caiati for raising it. At the moment, three possible lines of response occur to me, assuming that there is no Cartesian way out.
A. We can take something like the line that David Bentley Hart champions against Edward Feser, which I briefly discussed in "Soteriology for Brutes?" (linked above) namely, that animals do survive their bodily deaths and 'go to heaven.' (Lacking as they do free will, I see no reason to posit purgatory or hell for them. The savagery of a tiger devouring its prey alive is amoral unlike the savagery of humans. No homo is literally homini lupus.)
B. Without embracing Cartesianism, one might argue that we are engaging in illicit anthropomorphic projection when we project into animals our terrors and physical pains. One might to try to argue that their sufferings, while real, are next to nothing as compared to ours and don't really count very much or at all when it comes to the problem of evil.
C. One might take a mysterian tack. God exists and evil exists. Therefore, they co-exist, whence it follows that it is possible that they co-exist. The fact that we cannot understand how it possible reflects poorly on our cognitive architecture but has no tendency to show that God and evil do not co-exist. Of course, if one took a line like this, one could evade the particulars of my Substack proposal.
While (B) strikes me as lame, (A) and (C) show promise, (A) more than (C).
ComBox now open.
ADDENDUM (9/17)
This morning I found a passage in Berdyaev that supports Dr. Caiati's intuitions about animal suffering from a broadly Christian perspective.
The death of the least and most miserable creature is unendurable, and if it is irremediable, the world cannot be accepted and justified. All and everything must be raised to eternal life. This means that the principle of eternal being must be affirmed in relation to human beings, animals, plants and even inanimate things. [. . .] Christ's love of the world and for man is victory over the powers of death and the gift of abundant life. (Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, tr. Natalie Duddington, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 253.)
The (febrile) Russian existentialist is making a surprisingly radical claim here. He is maintaining that the existence of the world is justified and our lives in it are affirmable as worth living only if absolutely everything is redeemed and preserved in the end, not only everything living, but the inanimate as well. Somehow everything temporal must be somehow cancelled and preserved — aufgehoben in Hegel's sense — in eternity. How the inanimate could be brought to eternal life is of course a thought transgressive of the discursive and hard by the boundary of the mystical.
In Berdyaev as in Simone Weil, we are at the outer limits of the religious sensibility.
16 responses to “Generic and Specific Problems of Evil”
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Recently Dead and Gone
As a sort of intro, The Who, My Generation. "I hope I die before I get old." My English readers will enjoy the video.
Charlie Watts at 80, 1941-2021. Rolling Stones, Sittin' on a Fence. A lovely tune. Trigger warning! Under My Thumb. Eerily appropriate these days: Gimme Shelter
Don Everly at 84, 1937-2021. When Will I Be Loved?
Nanci Griffith at 68, 1953-2021. Boots of Spanish Leather. Bob would be proud.
B. J. Thomas at 78, 1942-2021. I Just Can't Help Believing
Lloyd Price at 88, 1933-2021. Stagger Lee. Personality
Chick Corea at 79, 1941-2021. Armando's Rhumba
Mary Wilson at 76, 1944-2021. Our Day Will Come
Jimmie Rodgers at 87. 1933-2021. Honeycomb
Phil Spector at 81, 1939-2021. The Wall of Sound
Charley Pride at 82, 1938-2021.
Len Barry at 78, 1942-2020. You Can't Sit Down
Jerry Jeff Walker at 78, 1942-2020. Mr. Bojangles
Spencer Davis at 81, 1939-2020. Gimme Some Lovin'
One response to “Singular Concepts and Singular Negative Existentials”