Another Advantage of Old Age

The abandoning of your vices becomes easier as they abandon you.

The mechanism of flight of the vices of the flesh is powered by the mortal coil's decline, which is why the old man out for spiritual gain should rejoice, not rue, his libido on the wane. 

The old man, unlike the young, has a good shot at freedom from lust's subornation even in the decadent West if freedom he wants, the wanting standing in inverse relation to the subornation.

Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.  (St. Augustine, City of God)

Are You Clumsy? The Paradox of the Smashed Vase

I'm not, but you might be.

Suppose you inadvertently knock over a priceless vase, smashing it to pieces. You say to the owner, "There's no real harm done; after all it's all still there." And then you argue:

1) There is nothing to the vase over and above the ceramic material that constitutes it.

2) When the vase is smashed, all the ceramic material that constitutes it remains in existence.

Therefore

3) The vase remains in existence after it is smashed.

"I don't owe you a penny!"

Adapted from Nicholas Rescher, Aporetics, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2009, p. 91.

The above may serve as an introduction to the problem of the composition of material artifacts and to Peter van Inwagen's strange thesis that such items do not exist. See Van Inwagen's Denial of Artifacts.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some 1940’s Proto-Rock

Freddie Slack and Will Bradley Trio (1940), Down the Road A Piece.

If you like to boogie woogie, I know the place.
It's just an old piano and a knocked out bass.
The drummer man's a guy they call Eight Beat Mack.
And you remember Doc and old "Beat Me Daddy" Slack.

Man it's better than chicken fried in bacon grease
Come along with me, boys, it's just down the road a piece.

Ella Mae Morse (1945), The House of Blue Lights.  Shows that 'square' and 'daddy-o' and 'dig' were already in use in the '40s.  I had been laboring under the misapprehension that this patois first surfaced in Beat/Beatnik circles in the '50s.

The Meaning of ‘Liberal’ in South Africa

David Benatar, The Fall of the University of Capetown (Politicsweb Publishing, 2021, p. v, emphasis added):

Whereas in the United States it [the word 'liberal'] is often used as a term of opprobrium by those on the right to refer to those on the (or their!) left, in South Africa it is regularly used as a pejorative term by those on the far left in a way that connotes 'right-winger.' Real [classical] liberals are neither on the far right nor the far left of the political spectrum. They are liberals because they support (individual) liberty. This goes hand in hand with non-racialism, and tolerance of views one dislikes.  Liberalism also requires toleration of practices that are either harmless or which harm only those who consent to them. These liberal ideals tend to be antithetical  to those on the ends of the political spectrum. Indeed, both the right and the left have more in common with one another than either would like to admit. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish them.

I call my brand of conservatism American conservatism. I take it to include a sizable admixture of what Benatar calls real and what I call classical liberalism. American conservatism is neither a far right nor a far left position. As I envisage it, American conservatism rejects all of the following: integralism, and indeed any system that attempts to impose by state power a substantive conception of the good for man; alternative right race-based white nationalism; libertarianism with its overemphasis on the economic; all forms of socialism and leftism.

I have various posts that fill in some of the details. I'll find them later, perhaps.  It's Saturday night and time for a drink.  

What the Hell?

Just as Biden and his supporters are disasters for the USA, Bergoglio and his supporters are disasters for the RCC. 'Twould appear that all of the institutions of the West are in dire need of fumigation. See here:

But Pope Francis appears to have scotched that possibility. “No one can exclude themselves from the Church,” he insisted, “we are all saved sinners.” Even those, he adds, “who have denied the faith, who are apostates, who are the persecutors of the Church, who have denied their baptism.  

Yes, these too. All of them. The blasphemers, all of them. We are brothers. This is the communion of saints. The communion of saints holds together the community of believers on earth and in heaven…the saints, the sinners, all.

What are we to make of this? Surely, one asks, he cannot have meant to include unrepentant sinners in the Kingdom of Heaven? That those who deliberately take themselves to Hell, choosing an eternity of loss rather than the joys of Heaven, are nevertheless still members of the Communion of Saints? This is not Catholic doctrine, and no one, not even the Pope of Rome, can make it so by saying so.

Another Theological Conundrum: Hypostatic Union and the Contingency of the Incarnation

In the immediately preceding theological thread, Dr. Caiati reminded me of Fr. Thomas Joseph White's The Incarnate Lord: A Thomistic Study in Christology (CUA Press, 2017). So I cracked open my copy and found some notes from October 2018, one batch of which I will now turn into a weblog entry.

'Hypostatic Union' ". . . refers to the divine person of the Word uniting a human nature to himself  in his own person." (113, emphasis in original) This is the familiar one person (hypostasis)- two natures doctrine.  The one person is the Word (Logos), the second person of the Trinity.  The union is called hypostatic because it is the union of two natures in one hypostasis. The two natures are divine nature and human nature. Both natures are to be understood as individualized, not as universals. They are natures of one and the same self-subsistent individual, the Word. There is no "confusion of natures," which is to say that the  two natures are really distinct, distinct in reality and not merely in our thought, though not separable in reality.  These two natures are nonetheless essentially together: neither can exist without the other.  It is not as if there is "merely an accidental association of two beings, the man Jesus and the Word of God." (113) There is only one being, the Word, which possesses two distinct but really inseparable natures.  Fr. White then concludes:

Consequently, Jesus's concrete body and soul are the subsistent body and soul of the person of the Word. The person of Jesus simply is the person of the Son [the Word or Logos or second person of the Trinity] existing as man.

I have two questions.

First, is human nature conjoined to the Word at every time? It would have to be given that the two natures are essentially, and not merely accidentally, united. The Word is essentially divine. So if the two natures are essentially united, then the Word is essentially human: it possesses essentially a human nature.  That implies that at no time is the Word not in possession of a human nature. Now the Incarnation is the acquisition by the Word of a human nature. The Incarnation is an event — call it the Christ event — that occurred at a particular time in a particular place.  Before that time, the Incarnation was at best prophesied.  A contradiction would seem to ensue:

1) The Word possesses human nature at every time;

2) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature at every time.

How do we negotiate this aporetic dyad? More simply, how remove the contradiction? Can it be removed without adding 'epicycles' to the theory that raise problems of their own?

My second question is a modal counterpart of the first. The Incarnation is a contingent event. There was no necessity that it occur.   Had Adam not sinned there would have been no need for a Redeemer. Man would have continued blissfully in his paradisiacal, prelapsarian state. The soteriological significance of the Incarnation is that only by the Son's becoming man and suffering the ultimate penalty could man be restored to fellowship with God.  For the offense against God was so great that only God could expiate it. But if the divine and human natures are united essentially in one person, the Word, then, given that the Word is a necessary being, it follows that the Incarnation is a necessary event. A second contradiction seems to ensue:

3) The Word possesses human nature in every possible world;

4) It is not the case that the Word possesses human nature in every possible world.

(4) is true because there are worlds in which there is no Fall and thus no need for Incarnation. For those who don't understand Leibnizian 'possible worlds' jargon, the contradiction amounts  to saying both that the Word is and is not human necessarily. Bear in mind that if x has a property essentially, and x is a necessary being, then x has the property necessarily.

There is a third question the 'exfoliation' (unwrapping) of which I will save for later, namely, if the Word has a human soul in virtue of having human nature, how does that human soul integrate with the conscious and self-conscious life of the second divine person? A person is not merely an hypostasis or substratum, but one that is conscious and self-conscious.  A person is not an object but a subject or a subject-object. A number of further difficult questions spin off from here. Time to hit 'post.'

Neither Piety nor Polemic

Neither piety nor polemic belong in philosophy proper.

……………………………..

Commentary:

0) No proper aphorism is an aphorism if it explains itself  or gives reasons for its own truth. And yet a good aphorism is the tip of an iceberg of thought susceptible of commentary.

1) So when I, as a philosopher, speak of God, I never use the pious 'He' but only 'he.' Of course I hold no brief against piety as such. Indeed, our society is in steep decline in part because of a lack of piety, reverence, respect, and cognate virtues.  A sign of decline is the widespread use of 'irreverent' as a term of praise. The hard Left's erasure of collective historical memory via the destruction of monuments and memorials is premised on a dangerous lack of respect for our forebears and what they bequeathed to us and and has stood the test of time. 

2) Philosophy is a conversation among friends who seek the truth together and who love the truth more than they love one another. There is simply no place for the polemic of deeds or the polemic of words among friends. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.  The Latin saying is often taken as a gloss on Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a10-20, where the Stagirite distances himself from the theory of Forms. But one finds the thought already in Plato's Republic at 595b-c and 607c.

3) That philosophy is a conversation among friends holds for political philosophy as well, since it too is philosophy and is not to be confused with politics. Whether or not Carl Schmitt is right that the essence of the political resides in the opposition Freund (friend) – Feind (enemy),  political action and discourse is almost always, even if only accidentally, polemical. It is a mistake to confuse politics with political philosophy.

4) I tend to alliterate. Is this a stylistic defect? I don't think so, but in matters literary as in matters of the palate, de gustibus non est disputandum. You have a right to your contrary opinion if contrary it is.

5) Philosophy proper is not to be confused with what passes for philosophy among the paid professors of the subject. To know what it is and what it is capable of you must not merely consult but work through the works of the great philosophers appropriating their mindset as you proceed. Ralph Waldo Emerson exaggerates with his "Plato is philosophy and philosophy Plato," but it is an exaggeration in the right direction.

Philosophers in dialogue

Secular Arguments against Abortion

Substack latest.

A question rarely asked is the one I raise in this article:  

Is the abortion question tied to religion in such a way that opposition to abortion can be based only on religious premises?

Or are there good reasons to oppose abortion that are nor religiously based, reasons that secularists could accept?  The answer to the last question is plainly in the affirmative.  The following argument contains no religious premises.

1) Infanticide is morally wrong.
2) There is no morally relevant difference between (late-term) abortion and  infanticide.
Therefore
3) (Late-term) abortion is morally wrong.

Would it be Heaven for a Mother Whose Child is in Hell?

Vito Caiati raises an interesting theological question.

This week, I again read your post of 08/24/2019 On the Specificity of Traditional Catholic Claims, in which you question the certainty assumed by the Catholic doctrine of the [moral] immutability of the soul, and hence its fate, after death.  My interest in your thoughts on this matter arises from my pondering the question of the doctrine of immutability in relation to those of salvation, either immediate (Heaven) or eventual (Purgatory) or damnation (Hell) as these concern the loved ones of departed persons. Specifically, I am thinking, for example, of the deep love of a mother for her children. If it is the case that the soul of a loving mother finds, through the meritorious life that she has led, immediate salvation in Heaven after death, but that of her child, lacking in such virtue, ends up in Hell, is it rational to belief that the former soul is happy or at peace? In following up this question, I turned to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which has an entry on “Heaven and Hell in Christian Thought,” which, assuming the inclusive nature of love, “especially in the form of wishing the best for another” (Section 4.1), poses the question in the following way: “How could anyone remain happy knowing that a genuine loved one, however corrupted, is destined to be miserable forever”? (Section 5.2)  More generally, how is it just to allow souls to become embodied and to form loving relationships if such an end awaits so many of those who are loved?

One answer could be along the lines of what I say in Soteriology for Brutes? which ends as follows:

[Edward] Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

One might speculate that the saintly loving mother who goes straight to heaven upon death will be so swept up in the ecstasy of the Beatific Vision as to give her children no thought at all.  All sublunary concerns will fall away in the presence of the infinite reality of the divine life.  She will no more think of her children than I will think of my cats after I have served my 'time' in purgatory.  Ed Feser, however, would not and could not give this answer given his strict Thomism. Thomas famously states that “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.” So we get the curious and indeed horrifying result that the saintly loving mother who loved her child in time will experience schadenfreude at the child's unending torment in eternity.

Part of the problem here is that we quite naturally tend to waffle between two very different conceptions of the afterlife. I call them Life 2.0 and Beatific Vision.  I explore the difference in considerable detail in  Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?

Thomas himself may be waffling. If the souls of the blessed in heaven are wholly absorbed in the infinitely rich and endlessly variegated, and thus not possibly boring, absolute life of the Supreme Reality, how could they continue to be distracted by finite concerns? How could they continue to care about other finite persons, whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or on earth? How could the blessed take satisfaction in the torment of the damned? But insofar as we think of survival of bodily death as personal survival, as opposed to an absorption into the Absolute that effaces personal individuality, we will tend to think of finite persons as preserved in their individuality together with their sublunary interests. 

This sort of attitude which disallows a clean break with the finite and an ascent to the Absolute is reflected in the popular song from 1941,  I Remember You. The version I remember from my boyhood is Frank Ifield's 1962 effort which features the lines (written by Johnny Mercer):

When my life is through
And the angels ask me 
To recall the thrill of them all
Then I will tell them I remember you.

The singer goes on to remember two distant bells and stars that fell like the rain from the blue. So the singer in heaven, presumably in the divine presence, is thinking about bells, shooting stars, and a woman! Now a woman for a (heterosexual) man is the highest finite object, but still a rather paltry bit of finitude as compared to to the stupendous transcendent reality that is the Godhead.  The things of finitude and flesh are next-to-nothing in comparison, and one's ultimate felicity could not possibly be thought of as attainable by way of loving and being loved by a mere mortal.  One wants to love and be loved by eternal Love Itself.  This is the sort of attitude one finds in Aquinas and such first-rate expositors as Pierre Rousselot and Etienne Gilson. I quote Gilson in World + God = God? See also Again on 'God + World = God.'

The sort of heavenly retrospective on one's earthly tenure found in the sentimental old tune from the '40s can also be found in serious religious writers such as Kierkegaard and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik. See the latter's Halakhic Man, tr. Lawrence Kaplan, Jewish Publication Society, 1983, pp. 38-39:

When the righteous sit in the world to come, where there is neither eating nor drinking, with their crowns on their heads, and enjoy the radiance of the divine presence . . . they occupy themselves with the study of the Torah, which treats of bodily life in our lowly world.

[. . .]

The creator of worlds, revealed and unrevealed, the heavenly hosts, the souls of the righteous all grapple with halakhic problems that are bound up with the empirical world — the red cow, the heifer whose neck is to be broken, leprosy, and similar issues. They do not concern themselves with transcendence, with questions that are above space and time, but with the problems of earthly life in all its details and particulars.

[. . .]

The universal homo religiosus proclaims: The lower yearns for the higher. But halakhic man, with his unique mode of understanding, declares: The higher longs and pines for the lower. 

Thus the waffling may be inevitable, even for the doctor angelicus, given the ineluctably discursive nature of finite mind.  We think in opposites and cannot do otherwise. So we think: either the individual soul is extinguished in the Godhead thereby losing its individuality — which would make hash of the notion of personal immortality — or individuality is retained together with finite concerns for other persons and things from one's sublunary tenure.  

Back to Vito's question. He asked how it could be rational to view the saintly mother in heaven as happy or at peace given the mother's loving concern for her child who she knows is in hell. The problem is exacerbated by the Aquinate asseveration, “The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them.”  My suggested answer was that the blessed, wholly absorbed by the visio beata, will have lost all memory of the finite, including the persons they loved in the sublunary. The trouble with this suggestion is that it does not comport well with the orthodox view that individual souls are never wholly absorbed into the Godhead, but retain their individuality. But if so, the deepest sublunary loves could nor be wholly effaced or forgotten in the way the old man forgets the toys he fooled with as a young boy. So I have no good answer for Vito.

One again we see that the philosopher's forte is not the answering of questions but the questioning of answers.