Ingredients of Happiness

What makes for happiness?

Acceptance is a good part of it: acceptance of self, of one's ineluctable  limitations, of others and their limitations, of one's lot in life, of one's place in the natural hierarchy of prowess and intellect and spiritual capacity, acceptance of the inevitable in the world at large. 

Gratitude is another ingredient in happiness: one cultivates gratitude for and appreciation of what one has here and now without comparisons to an idealized past, a feared future, or to the lots of others.  No regret, resentment, worry, or comparison.  Comparison breeds envy, one of the seven deadly sins. Be your incomparable self. If you are not yet incomparable, take up self-individuation as a life project. Realize yourself. Your life is more a task than a given, a task of transmuting givens into accomplishments.  It is the task of becoming actually the unique person you are potentially. But no hankering for what is out of reach. No false ideals. No consorting with the utopian.  No Lennon-esque imagining of the impossible. No dreaming impossible dreams. 

You were born somewhere in the natural hierarchy of physical endowment, moral and affective and aesthetic sensitivity, mental power, spiritual capacity, and strength of will. But your place in the hierarchy allows for development. Know your place but press against its upper limits.

But of course happiness is not just a matter of attitude and exertion but also rests on contingency and luck.  We need, but cannot command, the world's cooperation. Happenstance holds happiness hostage.  You were dealt a bad hand? Suck it up and play it the best you can for as long as you can.

Conservatives emphasize attitude and exertion, leftists happenstance. Both have a point.  "The harder I work, the luckier I become" is a conservative exaggeration, but a life-enhancing one.  It is however the foolish conservative who thinks he is self-made and not the beneficiary of a myriad of forces and factors far beyond his control.  There is truth in Phil Ochs' lament, "There but for fortune go you or I," but not such truth as to trump the conservative's exaggeration.  Weathering "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) he will slog on, per aspera ad astra.

Per aspera ad astra

 

Is the US Becoming the SU?

I've been warning of this for years. Ed West, America has become its own worst enemy. Excerpt:

Communists saw their political beliefs as so all-encompassing that even science was political: if science contradicted the goals of communism, it wasn’t science. In today’s United States the slow death of liberalism has resulted in the blatant politicisation of science, to the extent that as in Russia, scientists teach things which are obviously untrue because it supports the prevailing ideology. Then there is the media, much of which parrots the party line with almost embarrassing, “Comrade Stalin has driven pig iron to record production” levels of conformity. Once again, if you want to hear the truth, go to the BBC (until the young people who run the website take over).

America, once the most trusting of societies, is heading in the direction of Russia, one of the least trusting. Most disturbing of all is that, formerly the most demographically vibrant of western countries, today the United States has suffered a spectacular collapse in fertility. This is mostly down to stagnant wages among the middle class, who can no longer afford a family with one breadwinner, and a rapid decline of religious faith. But maybe people have also lost belief in themselves, and the ideals of their country.

The Soviet Union broke into 15 different pieces, and the transition was, as CNN might put it, mostly peaceful — although Gorbachev’s old dacha is now in Russia once again after some local unpleasantness.

Today it is the United States where people talk of secession, escaping a crumbling superpower ruled by geriatrics. This seems very unlikely to happen, more clickbait than reality, because why would you leave what has been for more than two centuries the richest, most impressive state on earth? But then a generation ago few would have foreseen the Soviet Union crumbling in a haze of alcoholic despair.

Commentary by Rod Dreher here.

The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonists

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied."  Aporia is not doubt.  Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding.  The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent to the meaningfulness of a claim and suspension of judgment as to the truth or falsity of a claim.  (Meaningfulness is a necessary condition of a claims's being either true or false.) One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies.  See Mates, p. 32.  A good distinction!  Add it to the list.

Trinity diagramConsider, for example, this statement of the doctrine of the Trinity: "There is one God in three divine persons." The epochist, to give him a name, takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal formulation makes sense.  He neither affirms nor denies that there is a proposition that the formula expresses.  Propositions are the vehicles of  the truth-values; so by practicing epoché our epochist takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal sentence expresses anything that is either true or false.  The suspender of judgment, by contrast, grants that the sentence expresses a proposition but takes no stand on its truth or falsity.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment.  Close but not the same.  One in the psychological state of aporia may or may not go on to practice epoché. Suppose I am stumped by what you say. I might just leave it at that and not take the further step of performing epoché.

The aporia Mates describes is an attitude. But there is another  sense of the term, a non-attitudinal sense, and I use it in this other propositional sense: an aporia is a propositional polyad, a set of two or more propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. 

I also distinguish broad and narrow sub-senses of aporia in the second, the propositional, sense.  What I just described is a propositional aporia in the broad sense. In the narrow, balls-to-the-wall sense, an aporia is an absolutely insoluble problem set forth as a set of collectively inconsistent propositions each of which makes such a strong claim on our acceptance that it cannot be given up.

Alles klar? No way!

The Third Way of the Ostrich

  In a comment, the Ostrich writes,

Some early analytic types, including Russell, tried to analyse proper names as disguised descriptions, but Kripke put a lid on that. Thus, on what Devitt calls the Semantic Presupposition, namely that there are no other possible candidates for a name’s meaning other than a descriptive meaning, or the bearer of the name itself, the mainstream analytic position is that the meaning of a proper name is the bearer of the name. The target of Reference and Identity is the Semantic Presupposition.

So far, so good. I agree that with respect to proper names, demonstratives, and indexicals, both description theories and direct reference theories fail.  So it makes sense to investigate whether the Semantic Presupposition is a false alternative. But the Third Way of the Ostrich raises questions of its own and they incline me to think that it too leads to an impasse and is in the end No Way, a-poria.  

Consider the proper name, 'Moses.' It does not refer to the expression 'the man who led the Israelites out of Egypt.'  It refers to a man, not an expression. (9) Thus "'Moses' refers to a man" is true. But what makes it true?  One might think that it is true in virtue of a relation that connects the name to a particular man, and thus to something extra-linguistic. But the Ostrich denies that there is an "external reference relation" that relates the name to something extra-linguistic.  (9)  What makes true the reference statement — "'Moses' refers to a man" — is "an internal relation between the reference statement and some textual or uttered antecedent." (9) It is not clear what this means since it is not clear how the reference statement can have an antecedent. I know what the antecedent of a pronoun is, but what is the antecedent of a sentence or statement?  I also know that a statement can be the antecedent of a term.  For example, "Snow is white.  This everyone agrees to."  In this example, the demonstrative 'this' has a statement as an antecedent. What I don't understand is how a statement can have an antecedent. But let that pass.

It is clear what the Ostrich wants to say:  there is reference but all reference is intra-linguistic.  That contrasts with what I am inclined to say, namely, that while some reference is intra-linguistic, not all reference is.  The reference of 'he' is parasitic on the reference of 'Tom' in 'Tom enjoyed the massage he received' and so there is a sense in which the reference of 'he' is intra-linguistic; but 'Tom,' if it refers at all, refers extra-linguistically. In which precise sense is the reference of 'he' in our sample sentence intra-linguistic? Surely the pronoun 'he' does not refer to the name 'Tom'; the pronoun refers to the same item to which 'Tom' refers. So to say that the reference of 'he' is intra-linguistic is just to say that it picks up the reference of its antecedent and would not refer otherwise.  Pronoun and noun are co-referential which is to say that they refer to the same item if they refer to anything. But the burden of objective reference is shouldered by the noun, not the pronoun.  Or so say I.

The Ostrich's idea here is that "the semantic value of a proper name consists SOLELY in its anaphoric co-reference with its antecedents in a chain of co-referring terms . . . ." (8, my emphasis)*  Interpreting, one could say that reference is constituted by co-reference which is always an intra-linguistic matter.  This would seem to issue in an objectionable linguistic idealism.

Asmodeus-380x240'Asmodeus,' we are told, refers to Asmodeus, so the name refers to something. It refers to a demon, not an expression, similarly as 'Moses' refers to a man, not an expression.   But from the fact that 'Asmodeus' refers to something it does not follow that something exists which is the referent of 'Asmodeus.' (10)  That is surely true. But it is also true that from the fact that 'Asmodeus' refers to something it does not follow that nothing exists which is the referent of 'Asmodeus.'  So the referent of 'Asmodeus' may or may not exist.  

I now put the question to the Ostrich: what is it for the referent to exist? We are assuming that there is no such demon as Asmodeus.  And yet 'Asmodeus' refers to something.   There is a difference between referring to something that does not exist and not referring to anything. Now the Ostrich told us that 'Asmodeus' refers to something.  But then something is such that it does not exist, and we are in Meinongian precincts — which is precisely where an ostrich will not stray if he can help it.

So the Ostrich cannot mean that 'Asmodeus' refers to something that does not exist; he must mean that 'Asmodeus'  is an empty/vacuous name, i.e., one that does not refer at all, one without a referent. Again, there is a plain difference between a term's having a non-existing referent and a term's  having no referent at all.   

The trouble with saying that 'Asmodeus' is an empty name, however, is that it conflicts with his theory according to which "the semantic value of a proper name consists SOLELY in its anaphoric co-reference with its antecedents in a chain of co-referring terms . . . ." (8, my emphasis)* There is a conflict with the theory because 'Asmodeus' is a member of a chain of co-referring terms, which implies that 'Asmodeus' has a semantic value, an object, an object which exists simply in virtue of being an object.  So Asmodeus exists after all.

The demon cannot both exist and not exist.  One might say that that the demon does not exist in reality (outside language) but that it does exist in a language-immanent, 'internal' way as an object constituted by "its anaphoric co-reference with its antecedents in a chain of co-referring terms . . . ." But if the demon does not exist in reality, then Moses does, in which case the reference statement — "'Moses' refers to a man" — must have an external reference relation as part of its truth maker.

If that is denied and reference is intra-linguistic only, then how account for the difference between the existent Moses and the nonexistent Asmodeus? After all, both names belong to chains of co-referring terms.  Each name belongs to a narrative.

Is our Ostrich a POMO bird in the end?

 

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*I suspect that the Ostrich is using 'semantic value' in the way Gareth Evans uses it, namely, as equivalent to Frege's Bedeutung. Accordingly, the semantic value of  a proper name is an object, that of a concept-word (Begriffswort) is a function, and that of a sentence (Satz) is a truth value (Wahrheitswert).

Every Generation Faces a Barbarian Threat in its Own Children

David Horowitz, Radical Son:

Irving Kristol, who had second thoughts before me, has observed that every generation faces a barbarian threat in its own children, who need to be civilized. This is the challenge perennially before us: to re-teach the young the conditions of being human, of managing life's tasks in a world that is and must remain forever imperfect. The refusal to come to terms with this reality is the heart of the radical impulse and accounts for its destructiveness, and thus for much of the bloody history of our age. (Emphasis added)

The world is imperfect, and it cannot be perfected by us either individually or collectively. This is a defining truth of conservatism. The conservative stands on the terra firma of a reality antecedent to his hopes, dreams, and desires, a reality from which he must learn what is possible and what is not. The conservative is not opposed to such  piecemeal ameliorations as are possible, but he does not conflate the possible with what he can dream up or imagine.  He is rightly unmoved by the utopian imaginings of a leftist like John Lennon in his song Imagine, imaginings that presuppose human perfectibility and the possibility of a quasi-religious immanentization of the eschaton. But of course Lennon's leftist imaginings are not mere imaginings but veiled prescriptions for such destructive actions as the suppression and ultimate eradication of religion together with the eradication of the belief that we as individuals have a spiritual origin and destiny; the spread of a smiley-faced half-way nihilism, that of Nietzsche's Last Man ("noting to kill or die for") which, while denying genuine transcendence does not reject this life but degrades it to a life of self-indulgence; the levelling of all differences and the ultimately futile assault on natural hierarchies which of course reassert themselves in the end. In short:

  • Humans are imperfect. They are structurally flawed and in such a way as to disallow any possibility of perfection.
  • Being imperfectible, they cannot be improved in any fundamental ways by human effort whether individual or collective.
  • The failure of leftists to understand these truths and their consequent misguided attempts at perfecting the imperfectible have led to an over-all worsening of the human condition. And that is to put it mildly: in the 20th century alone communist governments murdered over 100 million. That is a lot of eggs to break for an impossible omelet.
  • Leftists are reality-deniers who refuse the tutelage of experience.

 

True For and True

There are expressions that should be avoided by those who aim to think clearly and to promote clear thinking in others. Expressions of the form, ‘true for X’ are prime examples. In a logically sanitized world, the following would be verboten: ‘true for me,’ ‘true for you,’ ‘true for Jews,’ ‘true for Arabs,’ ‘true for the proletariat,’ ‘true for the bourgeoisie,’ ‘true for our historical epoch,’ and the like. Such semantic prophylaxis would disallow such sentences as ‘That may be true for you but it is not true for me.’

The trouble with expressions like these is that they blur the distinction between truth and belief. To say that a proposition p is true for S is just to say that S believes or accepts or affirms that p. This is because one cannot believe a proposition without believing it to be true. Of course, S’s believing that p, and thus S’s believing that p is true, does not entail that p is true. This is obvious if anything is. There are true beliefs and false beliefs, and a person’s holding a belief does not make it true. If you want to say that S believes that p, then say that. But don’t say that p is true for S unless you want to give aid and comfort to alethic relativism, the false and pernicious doctrine that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative.  'Woke' folk love such obfuscatory expressions, but you don't want to give aid and comfort to them, do you?


Truth ScrutonA belief is always someone’s belief. This relativity of beliefs to believers explains why one person’s believing that p and another person’s believing that ~p is unproblematic. But truth is non-relative, or absolute. This is why it cannot be the case that both p and ~p. If you have truth, you have something absolute. There is no such thing as relative truth. Relative truth is not truth any more than negative growth is growth or a decoy duck is a duck or artificial leather is leather or faux marble is marble. In the expression, ‘relative truth,’ ‘relative’ functions as an alienans (as opposed to a specifying) adjective: it alienates or shifts the sense of ‘truth.’ Just as it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of leather, real and artificial, it makes no sense to say that there are two kinds of truth, relative and absolute. Suppose someone sets out to list the kinds of leather. “Well, you got your horse leather, cow leather, alligator leather, artificial leather, real leather, artificially real leather, naugahyde, Barcalounger covering . . . .” One can see what is wrong with this.

The word ‘absolute’ scares some people. But the only reason I use it is to undo the semantic mischief caused by ‘relative truth’ and ‘true for X.’ In a logically perfect world, it would suffice to say ‘true’ or ‘leather.’ There would be no need to say ‘absolutely true’ or ‘real leather’ – “This here jacket a mahn is REAL leather, boy . . . .” If ‘relative’ and ‘artificial’ are (in the above examples) alienating adjectives, then ‘absolute’ and ‘real’ could be called de-alienating: they restore their rightful senses to words that semantic bandits divested them of.

One reason ‘absolute’ scares people is that it suggests dogmatism and infallibilism. Thus if I say that truth is absolute, some people think I am saying that the propositions I affirm as true I affirm as unquestionably or undeniably true. But that’s to confuse an ontological statement about the nature of truth with an epistemological statement about the way in which I accept the propositions I accept. It is consistent to maintain that truth is absolute while being a fallibilist, where a fallibilist holds that either no proposition held to be true, or no member of some restricted class of propositions held to be true, is known with certainty.

In sum, my point is that ‘true for X’ should be avoided since it gives aid and comfort to the illusion that truth is relative. But why exactly is that an illusion? I’ll leave that question for a separate post.

Could Scollay Square be a Meinongian Nonexistent Object?

Scollay Square novelBill, newly arrived in Boston,  believes falsely that Scollay Square exists and he wants to visit it. Bill asks Kathleen where it is. Kathleen tells him truly that it no longer exists, and Bill believes her. Both use 'Scollay Square' to refer to the same thing, a physical place, one that does not exist. To exist is to exist in reality.  'In reality' means outside the mind; it does not mean in the physical world.  

So both Bill and Kathleen use 'Scollay Square' to refer to a physical place that does not exist. The two are not using (tokens of) 'Scollay Square' to refer to Fregean senses or to any similar abstract/ideal item.* Scollay Square is not such an item.  It is concrete, i.e., causally active/passive.  After all, it was demolished. 

Now it could be that reference is routed through sense as Frege maintained. Perhaps there is no road to Bedeutung except through Sinn. Whether or not that is so, when Bill and Kathleen think and talk about Scollay Square, they are not thinking and talking about an abstract object that mediates reference, whether it be thinking reference or linguistic reference.  They are thinking and talking about a concrete, physical thing that does not exist.

 

We also note that Bill and Kathleen are not thinking or talking about anything immanent to consciousness such as a mental content or a mental act. They are referring to a transcendent physical thing that does not exist.  Scollay Square is not in the head or in the mind; if it were, it would exist! If memory serves, it was the illustrious Kasimir Twardowski who first made this point, leastways, the first in the post-Brentano discussion. 

Therefore, some transcendent physical things do not exist. Copley Square is an example of a transcendent physical thing that does exist.

But you don't buy it do you? Explain why. (I don't buy it either.)

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*Anglosophers use 'abstract'; Eurosophers sometimes use 'ideal.' Same difference (as a redneck student of mine used to say.)

Against Ostrich Nominalism (2021 Update)

Cyrus asked me whether being an ostrich indicates a moral defect. He is invited to repeat his question in his own words in the Comments. Logically prior question: what is an ostrich? The entry below is a redacted version of one from January 2013.

………………………………………..

As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility any other human pursuit, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners.  (This is true of other disciplines as well, but in philosophy it is true in excelsis.) Suppose I say, as I have in various places:

That things have properties and stand in relations is a plain Moorean fact beyond the reach of reasonable controversy. After all, my cat is black and he is sleeping next to my blue coffee cup.  ‘Black’ picks out a property, an extralinguistic feature of my cat.

Is that obvious?  Not to some.  Not to the ornery and recalcitrant critter known as the ostrich nominalist.  My cat, Max Black, is black.  That, surely, is a Moorean fact. Now consider the following biconditional and consider whether it too is a Moorean fact:

1. Max is black iff Max has the property of being black.

As I see it, there are three main ways of construing a biconditional such as (1):

A.  Ostrich Nominalism.  The right-hand side (RHS) says exactly what the left-hand side (LHS) says, but in a verbose and high-falutin' and dispensable way.  Thus the use of 'property' on the RHS does not commit one ontologically to properties beyond predicates.  (By definition, predicates are linguistic items while properties are extralinguistic and extramental.)  For the ostrich nominalist, predication is primitive and in no need of  philosophical explanation.  On this approach, (1) is trivially true.  One needn't posit properties, and in consequence one needn't worry about the nature of property-possession. (Is Max related to his blackness, or does Max have his blackness quasi-mereologically  by having it as an ontological constituent of him?) And if one needn't posit properties, no questions need arise about what they are: sets? universals? tropes? mereological sums? and so on.

B. Ostrich Realism.  The RHS commits one ontologically to properties, but in no sense does the RHS serve to ground or explain the LHS.  On this approach, (1) is false if there are no properties.  For the ostrich realist, (1) is true, indeed necessarily true, but it is not the case that the LHS is true because the RHS is true.  Such notions as metaphysical grounding and philosophical explanation are foreign to the ostrich realist, but not in virtue of his being a realist, but  in virtue of his being an ostrich. Peter van Inwagen is an ostrich realist.

C. Non-Ostrich Realism.  On this approach, the RHS both commits one to properties, but also proffers a metaphysical ground of the truth of the LHS: the LHS is true because (ontologically or metaphysically speaking, not causally)  the concrete particular Max has the property of being black, and not vice versa.

Note 1: Explanation is asymmetrical; biconditionality is symmetrical.

Note 2: Properties needn't be universals.  They might be (abstract) particulars (unrepeatables) such as the tropes of D. C. Williams and the abstract particulars of Keith Campbell.  Properties must, however, be extralinguistic and extramental,  by definition.

Note 3: Property-possession needn't be understood in terms of instantiation or exemplification or Fregean 'falling-under'; it might be construed quasi-mereologically as constituency: a thing has a property by having it as a proper ontological part.

Against Ostrich Nominalism

OstrichOn (A) there are neither properties, nor do properties enter into any explanation of predication.  Predication is primitive and in need of no explanation.  In virtue of what does 'black' correctly apply to Max? In virtue of nothing.  It just applies to him and does so correctly.  Max is black, but there is no feature of reality that explains why 'black' is true of Max, or why 'Max is black' is true.  It is just true!  There is nothing in reality that serves as the ontological ground of this contingent truth.  Nothing 'makes' it true.  There are no truth-makers and no need for any.

I find ostrich nominalism preposterous.  'Black' is true of Max, 'white' is not, but there is no feature of reality, nothing in or at or about Max that explains why the one predicate is true of him and the other is not!?  This is not really an argument but more an expression of incomprehension or incredulity, an autobiographical comment, if you will.  I may just be petering out, pace  Peter van Inwagen.

Can I do better than peter?  'Black' is a predicate of English.  Schwarz is a predicate of German.  If there are no properties,  then Max is black relative to English, schwarz relative to German, noir relative to French, and thus no one color.  But this is absurd.  Max is not three different colors, but one color, the color we use 'black' to pick out, and the Germans use schwarz to pick out. When Karl, Pierre, and I look at Max we see the same color.  So there is one color we both see — which would not be the case if there were no properties beyond predicates.  It is not as if I see the color black while Karl sees the color schwarz.  We see the same color.  And we see it at the cat.  This is not a visio intellectualis whereby we peer into some Platonic topos ouranios.  Therefore, there is something in, at, or about the cat, something extralinguistic, that grounds the correctness of the application of the predicate to the cat.

A related argument.  I say, 'Max is black.'  Karl says, Max ist schwarz.  'Is' and ist are token-distinct and type-distinct words of different languages.  If there is nothing in reality (no relation whether of instantiation or of constituency, no non-relational tie, Bergmannian nexus, etc.) that the copula picks out, then it is only relative to German that Max ist schwarz, and only relative to English that Max is black.  But this is absurd.  There are not two different facts here but one.  Max is the same color for Karl and me, and his being black is the same fact for Karl and me. Copulae as bits of language belonging to different languages are token-distinct and type-distinct. But they pick out the copulative tie that is logically and metaphysically antecedent to language.  Or will you say that reality is language all the way down? That way lies the madness of an absurd linguistic idealism.

Finally, 'Max is black' is true.  Is it true ex vi terminorum?  Of course not.  It is contingently true.  Is it just contingently true?  Of course not.  It is true because of the way extralinguistic reality is arranged. It is modally contingent (possibly false if true; possibly true if false), but also contingent upon the way the world is.  There's this cat that exists whether or not any language exists, and it is black whether or not any language exists.

Therefore, I say that for a predicate to be contingently true of an individual, (i) there must be individuals independently of language; (ii) there must be properties independently of language; and there must be facts or truth-making states of affairs independently of language.  Otherwise, you end up with (i) total linguistic idealism, which is absurd; or (ii) linguistic idealism about properties which is absurd; or (iii) a chaos, a world of disconnected particulars and properties.

The above is a shoot-from-the hip, bloggity-blog exposition of ideas that can be put more rigorously, but it seems to to me to show that ostrich nominalism and ostrich realism for that matter are untenable — and this despite the fact that a positive theory invoking facts has its own very serious problems.

Metaphilosophical Coda: If a theory has insurmountable problems, these problems are not removed by the fact that every other theory has problems.  For it might be that no theory is tenable, while the problem itself is genuine.  If I argue against a position, that does not make me for its opposite. So when I argue against presentism in the philosophy of time that does not make me for eternalism, even if eternalism is the contradictory opposite of presentism.

One cannot exclude a priori the existence of genuine  aporiai or insolubilia.  Curators of logic museums take note.

More on the Riddle of Intentionality with the Help of Molnar

  According to George Molnar,

The fundamental feature of an intentional state or property is that it is directed to something beyond itself . . . All mental states and processes have an internal reference to an object. The identity of the intentional state is defined in terms of this intentional object. . . . Since intentionality constitutes the identity of mental phenomena, it follows that the nexus between the mental state or process in question and its intentional object is non-contingent. (Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, Oxford, 2003, p. 62, second and third emphases added.)

Molnar is right: the directedness beyond itself to an object is an internal feature of the intentional state. Consider an act (intentional state) of seeing a particular green paloverde tree. What makes the mental act a consciousness of that very object? Some will be tempted to say that the tree in reality, outside the mind, causes the mental state both to be directed and to be directed  to the very object  to which it is directed.  But then the object-directedness would not be an internal feature of the intentional state.  The curious thing about the nexus of intentionality is that mental acts are intrinsically directed to their objects.  They refer beyond themselves by their very nature. So it is not in virtue of an external relation to an external thing that a mental state is object-directed.  As I argued earlier, object-directedness is not to be confused with object-dependence. One should not allow the prevalence of various forms of externalism over the last 35 years or so to blind one to the predominance of internalism in intentionality theory from Brentano on.  (This is not to say that there are no object-directed states  whose identity does not require the existence of an external referent.)

If one were to suppose that the object-directedness of every act requires the existence of external things, then (i) there would no object-directedness in the case of acts directed to nonexistent objects such as the merely possible golden mountain and the impossible round square, and (ii) an intentional state would lose its intentionality should the external thing to which it is directed cease to exist.  In the case of (i), what either does not or cannot exist cannot do any causing, and in the case of (ii), what no longer exists cannot do any causing either.

Consider again my Washington Monument (WM) example. If, unbeknownst to me, it ceases to exist while I am merely thinking about it, but not sense-perceiving it either directly by ordinary vision or indirectly via television, the directedness (intentionality) of my thinking is in no way affected by the WM's ceasing to exist: my conscious state remains directed, and it remains directed to the very object to which it was directed, and indeed in exactly the same way, say, under the incomplete description 'monolithic marble obelisk.' But what object is that? Which object is the intentional object? Is it the transcendent WM itself? Or is it an immanent object? There is a puzzle here that cannot be solved  by stipulative definition of 'intentional object.' Two possibilities.

P1. One possibility is that the intentional object (IO) is the WM itself.  There is good phenomenological reason to maintain this. After all, when I think of the Washington Monument, my thinking is directed beyond itself to something other than itself: I am not thinking about some intermediary item or epistemic deputy or surrogate such as a sense datum, idea, image, way of being appeared to, representation, guise, noema, or whatnot.  My thinking goes straight to the transcendent thing itself; it does not stop short at some immanent item that plays a mediating role.  It seems we ought to say that the IO is the transcendent thing itself.  

If so, the WM is my act's IO both while the WM exists and after it ceases to exist.  Don't forget that it is a phenomenological datum that the IO remains self-same over the interval despite the fact that during that interval the WM ceases to exist. Now the WM is in no way immanent to consciousness; it is neither a real content thereof in Husserl's sense of  reeller Inhalt, nor is it immanent in the manner of an Husserlian noema.  No wholly determinate 550-foot-tall marble obelisk resides in my head or in my mind. It cannot be in or before my mind because my mind, and yours too, is finite: it cannot 'wrap itself around' the entirety of the massive monolith. Only a tiny fraction of the WM's parts, properties, and relations are before my mind when I think of it.  That would also be the case were I standing in front of the monument looking at it.

So on (P1), the WM is the IO of my act, and the WM, both before and after it ceases to exist, is one and the same transcendent  item.  After it ceases to exist, however, it is a nonexistent transcendent item without ceasing to be the IO of my act of thinking.  That is to say: my ongoing thinking  of the WM has available to it an IO over the entire interval, an IO that has and then loses the property of existence.  Note the difference between 'My thinking has no object' and 'My thinking has an object that lacks existence.'

(P1) thus lands us in the Meinongian predicament of having to affirm that some items are both transcendent of consciousness and thus in no way mind-dependent, and without existence. (I am assuming the untenability of any distinction between being and existence; hence there is no escape by this route.)  I will say that an item that has neither existence nor being of any sort is 'beingless.' It is a pure 'what,' a pure Sosein bereft of Sein. It is ausserseiend. 

I myself find the notion that some items are beingless unintelligible although I do understand how the notion is arrived at. Some will dismiss my finding of unintelligibility as a merely autobiographical remark, but by my lights it is more than that.  It just makes no sense to say that there are, in an ontically unloaded or non-committal sense of 'there are,' definite items actually possessing properties and thus numerically different from one another that are both transcendent of consciousness and jenseits von Sein und Nichtsein, "beyond being and nonbeing." 

Therefore, while there is good phenomenological reason to maintain that the intentional nexus puts us in touch with  the thing itself and thus that the intentional object of an act is the thing itself, this plausible view entangles us in seemingly  insuperable Meinongian difficulties.  My thinking of the WM does not become objectless  half-way through the interval. That is phenomenologically obvious. Therefore, if the WM  is the IO of my act, then the WM becomes a nonexistent object by the end of the interval.  As I noted earlier, Husserl in the 'Jupiter' passage in the Logical Investigations seems headed in a Meinongian direction.

We face a serious problem if Meinongianism is to be avoided. We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries.  We want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.'  But the problem of nonexistence (not inexistence! pace so many historically ignorant analytic philosophers) throws a spanner in the works.  One could say, and it has been said, that when the IO exists, the act gets at it directly; when the IO doesn't exist, the act terminates at a representation in a mind.  This is an option that needs discussing in a separate post.  For now I am assuming that in every case, the IO is either a transcendent item or an immanent item. I have argued that on the first alternative the upshot is Meinongianism, an upshot that by my lights is unacceptable. 

P2. The other possibility (theoretical option) given the assumption just stated is that the IO of my ongoing act  of thinking of the WM during an interval in which it passes from existence to nonexistence is not a transcendent item, but an immanent item.  Two sub-possibilities (theoretical sub-options) suggest themselves.

P2a.  On the first sub-option, the IO is a representation R in the mind.  To say that the IO exists is to say that R represents something in the external world. To say that the IO does not exist is to say that R does not represent anything in the external world.  So when I am thinking about the WM, during the entire time I am thinking about it, what I have before my mind is a representation Rwm which at first represents something and then ceases to represent anything but without prejudice to its being one and the same representation during the entire interval. This suggestion accommodates the fact that, phenomenologically, nothing changes during the interval.  But it succumbs to other objections. Husserl fulminates against representationalism and its notion that consciousness is like a box with pictures in it of things outside the box.  See Husserl's Critique of the Image-Theory of Consciousness.If an intentional state is directed to what is beyond itself, as Molnar rightly states above, then it is not representations to which consciousness is directed, but the  things themselves.

P2b. On the second sub-option, the IO is an immanent item, but not  a representation. It is an ontological 'part' of the thing itself.  Suppose the tree I see is a synthetic unity of noemata.  The transcendence of the tree is constituted in the potential infinity of the series of noemata, but each noema is inseparable from a noesis. This leads to idealism which is arguably untenable. But I cannot say more about this now. 

The intentional nexus as non-contingent

Molnar tells us above that the link between act and object is non-contingent. The reason is that acts are individuated by their objects: every act has an object, and what makes an act the act it is is its object.  Since an act cannot be without an object, an object that makes it the very act it is, the nexus between act and object is non-contingent.

But if in every case an act cannot exist and be the very act it is without an object, then, if the external thing does not exist,  as in the case of the Roman god Jupiter, the object must  be a Meinongian nonexistent object.

The intentional object may or may not exist

"The intentional object can be existent or non-existent." (Molnar, 62) He infers from this that the intentional relation cannot be a genuine relation given that a genuine relation cannot obtain unless all its relata exist.

But we should note an ambiguity in Molnar's formulation. The formulation uses the modal word 'can.' But is the point non-modal or modal? Are we being told that some IOs exist and some do not? Or that every IO is such that, if existent, then possibly nonexistent, and if nonexistent, the possibly existent?   I should address this in a separate post.

We should also note the following. If the intentional nexus is not a relation (because some IOs exist and some do not), and the act-object nexus is non-contingent such that, necessarily, every act has an intentional object,  then in the cases where the IO does not exist, and Meinongianism is false, the IO must be an immanent object.  So at least some IOs are immanent objects given the internality and non-contingency criteria cited by Molnar.  But if some IOs are immanent, then the pressure is on to say that they all are, which leads us either to representationalism or to transcendental idealism, both of which are deeply problematic.

The indeterminacy of intentional objects

Finally, among the non-linguistic criteria of intentionality, Molnar mentions the fuzziness or indeterminacy of intentional objects (p. 62). It is clear that some intentional objects are, as Molnar says, "seriously indeterminate." Suppose that I am expecting a phone call soon.  To expect is to expect something. The object expected, the phone call,  is indeterminate with respect to the exact time of its arrival. It is indeterminate with respect to other properties as well. But is every intentional object indeterminate?  The WM exists, and whatever exists is wholly determinate.  But when I think of it or remember it or expect to see it or perceive it, what is before my mind is not the WM with all of its parts, properties, and relations. Given the finitude of our minds, it would be impossible to have the whole of it before my mind. The WM, precisely as presented, cannot be the WM itself.  The former is indeterminate in many but not all respects whereas this is not true of the latter.  What this suggests, given the internality and non-contingency criteria is that the intentional object is not the thing itself, but an immanent object.  

Aporetic conclusion

We want to say that in every case intentional states are directed to things themselves and not to immanent intermediaries.  It is a phenomenological feature of intentional states that they purport to reveal things that do not depend for their existence on consciousness.  My visual perception of  the tree in my backyard purports to make manifest a thing in nature that exists and has many of the properties it has whether or I or anyone ever perceives it.  That purport is built into the phenomenology of the situation. We therefore want to say that the IO is the real thing 'out there in the world.'  But then we bang up against the problem of intentional nonexistence.  

We seem to face a dilemma. Either the IO  is the thing itself or it is not. To hold to the identity of the IO and the thing itself, we must enter Meinong's jungle. We have to embrace the unintelligible notion that there are transcendent nonexistent items in those cases in which the IO does not exist. On the other hand, if we hold that the IO is an immanent item, then the problem of its relation to the thing itself arises. Is the IO a representation of the thing itself? Or is it an ontological part of the thing itself? Either way there is trouble.

 

For the Kerouac File

Black Like Kerouac

I was awfully naïve once, but never so naïve as Kerouac/Paradise, who understands so little about the lives of black Americans that he wishes he “were a Negro [because] the best the white world could offer was not enough ecstasy, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” It is passages like that—about, for instance, the “happy, true-heart ecstatic Negroes of America”—that inspired me to pull from the shelf another book that expresses much the same desire. It did so, however, with greater honesty and courage than On the Road. It also conveys more pleasure, in large part because it makes far fewer claims for itself.

This was Really the Blues, the autobiography of an endearing oddball named Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. Born in Chicago in 1899 to Russian Jewish parents, Mezzrow fell under the spell of Bix Beiderbecke, Sidney Bechet, and other early jazz musicians. He learned to play the clarinet, recorded with many of these better known musicians, including Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and—here’s where things get fun—decided he too wanted to be black. Mezzrow determined that he “was going to be a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can.”

On the Fear of Death

Heute roth, morgen todt.

I woke up from a dream an hour ago. I was staying with Philip Roth in his New York City apartment where I noticed that my beard had been shaved off. I said to myself, "You look good even without it." The vanity was cover for the fear that I am losing my power.  I made coffee to wake up and to read the final pages of Everyman, Roth's 2006 meditation on mortality. At novel's end, Everyman's lamentations and self-excoriations give way to a certain buoyancy of spirit. Conferring with the bones of his parents at the Jewish cemetery bucked him up. That and a conversation with a black grave digger. Everyman was starting to feel indestructible again.  We are, after all, born to live, not to die.

On the last page, the 71 year old Everyman, a sort of post-modern Adam, though never named, accepts a general anaesthetic for surgery on his right carotid artery.  And here Everyman and the eponymous novel come to their end:

He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

……………………………………………

This morning, at a monkish hour, I penned the following on the fear of death.

What it reveals, perhaps, is that it is an illusion to suppose that one will be a detached spectator of one's demise. The spectator himself will cease to exist! The fear reveals the inevitability of a catastrophic loss. The  fear, whose visitation is rare and typically nocturnal, is hard to recapture for analysis in the light of day because the transcendental spectator re-asserts himself. He would view death as an event in one's life, not as the end of one's life.  

But it may be that such viewership is no illusion. It may be that the fear of death is not revelatory but a groundless fear and that the sense of spectatorship is revelatory. Fearing death, I fear a ghost: I am at my core immortal, and as an individual, not as the universal Atman or the like.  The questions arise: Who am I finally? Who dies? What is death? Can you tell me what consciousness is? You can't. Might it then be presumptuous to suppose that you understand its absolute cessation?

Roth Philip