The darkening of the world has this advantage: it inspires us to seek for light where it is more likely to be found.
Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…
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As the World Grows Dark
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Readings for Dark Times
When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America. But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go.
What was it like to live in the Third Reich? What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.
Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.
Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017
Related: Theodor Haecker entries
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Fruitful Disagreement
When there is an excess of agreement, discussions in politics and elsewhere are often tiresome and boring: the parties are as if in competition to see who can express the most outrage. One is preaching to the preachers. But an excess of agreement is better than a paucity thereof. The ideal discussion, however, is one in which broad agreement on fundamentals leaves room for disagreement on details. We are farther from that ideal than we have ever been in these no longer United States.
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A Contingent Self-Existent?
Tom asks,
Does it make sense to say that something could be contingently self-existent? I'm assuming that 'being self-existent' is not the same thing as 'existing necessarily', for then my question wouldn't make sense. Maybe I'm wrong to make this distinction. But if I'm not, can it be a contingent matter that x exists and has self-existence?
The answer depends on what 'self-existent' is taken to mean. If it doesn't mean necessarily existent, then the only other possibility that comes to mind is self-causing. Accordingly, if x is self-existent, then x is not caused by another to exist, but causes itself to exist. This, however, is inconceivable. For a thing cannot do any causing unless it already (logically speaking) exists. Therefore, nothing can cause its own existence. There is no 'existential bootstrapping.' Nothing can haul its (nonexistent) self out of the dreck of nonexistence by its own (nonexistent) bootstraps.
My answer, then, is that nothing is contingently self-existent.
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ADDENDUM (1/11)
After writing the above, I recalled that my late friend Quentin Smith had argued that the universe caused itself to exist, and that I responded in the pages of the British journal Philosophy 75 (2000), pp. 604-612.
ABSTRACT: This article responds to Quentin Smith's, "The Reason the Universe Exists is that it Caused Itself to Exist," Philosophy 74 (1999), 579-586. My rejoinder makes three main points. The first is that Smith's argument for a finitely old, but causally self-explanatory, universe fails from probative overkill: if sound, it also shows that all manner of paltry event-sequences are causally self-explanatory. The second point is that the refutation of Smith's argument extends to Hume's argument for an infinitely old causally self-explanatory universe, as well as to Smith's two 'causal loop' arguments. The problem with all four arguments is their reliance on Hume's principle that to explain the members of a collection is ipso facto to explain the collection. This principle succumbs to counterexamples. The third point is that, even if Hume's principle were true, Smith's argument could not succeed without the aid of a theory of causation according to which causation is production (causation of existence).
My article is here.
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The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation
God freely creates beings that are both (i) wholly dependent on God's creative activity at every moment for their existence, and yet (ii) beings in their own own right, not merely intentional objects of the divine mind. The extreme case of this is God's free creation of finite minds, finite subjects, finite unities of consciousness and self-consciousness, finite centers of inviolable inwardness, finite free agents, finite free agents with the power to refuse their own good, their own happiness, and to defy the nature of reality. God creates potential rebels. He creates Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. He creates Lucifer the light bearer who, blinded by his own light, refuses to acknowledge the source of his light, and would be that source even though the project of becoming the source of his own light is doomed to failure, and he knows it, but pursues it anyway. Lucifer as the father of all perversity.
God creates and sustains, moment by moment, other minds, like unto his own, made in his image, who are yet radically other in their inwardness and freedom. He creates subjects who exist in their own right and not merely as objects of divine thought. How is this conceivable?
We are not mere objects for the divine subject, but subjects in our own right. How can we understand creation ex nihilo, together with moment by moment conservation, of a genuine subject, a genuine mind with intellect and free will and autonomy and the power of self-determination even unto rebellion?
This is a mystery of divine creation. It is is above my pay grade. And yours too.
God can do it but we can't. We can't even understand how God could do it. A double infirmity. An infirmity that sires a doubt: Perhaps it can't be done, even by God. Perhaps the whole notion is incoherent and God does not exist. Perhaps it is not a mystery but an impossibility. Perhaps Christian creation is an Unbegriff.
Joseph Ratzinger accurately explains the Christian metaphysical position, and in so doing approaches what I am calling the ultimate paradox of divine creation, but he fails to confront, let alone solve, the problem:
The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [materialism and idealism]. To be sure, it, too, will say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God will say: Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely.
On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter , as we have just established, explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, German original 1968, latest English version Ignatius Press, 2004, p. 157, emphasis added)
And that is where the good Cardinal (later Pope Benedict the XVI) leaves it. He then glides off onto another topic. Not satisfactory! What's the solution to the paradox?
If you tell me that God creates other minds, and then somehow releases them into ontological independence, my reply will be that makes hash of the doctrine of creatio continuans, moment-by-moment conservation. The Christian God is no mere cosmic starter-upper of what exists; his creating is ongoing. In fact, if the universe always existed, then all creation would be creatio continuans, and there would be no starting-up at all.
On Christian metaphysics, "The world is objective [objectified] mind . . . ." (155) This is what makes it intelligible. This intelligibility has its source in subjective mind: "Credo in Deum expresses the conviction that objective [objectified] mind is the product of subjective mind . . . ." (Ibid.) So what I call onto-theological idealism gets the nod. You don't understand classical theism unless you understand it to be a form of idealism. But creatures, and in particular other minds, exist on their own, in themselves, and their Being cannot be reduced to their Being-for-God. Therein lies the difficulty.
Is divine creation a mystery or an impossibility?
10 responses to “The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation”
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The Aporetics of Existence: Do Existing Things Have Existence?
A reader inquires,
I have been wondering about whether existing things have existence. This seems obvious to me, but Bradley's regress makes me think twice. For if existing things have existence, then given that existence exists, existence also has existence. And since this latter existence also exists, it also has existence. And so on.What do you make of this problem?There is a problem here, but since Bradley's regress concerns relations, we can leave Mr. Bradley out of it. And there is a problem even if there is no vicious infinite regress. (Not every infinite regress is vicious; some are, if not virtuous, at least benign.) Here is the problem as I see it. We start with a datum and we end with a paradox.1) This table in front of me exists.2) The table exists, but it might not have, which is to say that it exists contingently. There is no metaphysical necessity that it exist.3) What accounts for the contingency of the thing's existence? Equivalently, what accounts for the real possibility of the thing's nonexistence? (A real possibility is one that is not epistemic or factitious.)4) A classical answer is in terms of a distinction between the thing and its existence/existing. This distinction is not merely excogitated by us but corresponds to a difference in reality; it is therefore called a real distinction. 'Real' is from res, thing. A contingent being, then, is one in which essence and existence are really distinct in the sense that, in reality or extra-mentally, the existence/existing of the being is no part of what the thing is. A non-contingent being is one that is either impossible or necessary, and a necessary being is one whose existence is part of what the thing is. God is the prime example of a necessary being. In God essence and existence are one, which is to say: in God, there is no real distinction between essence and existence.5) Pace Giles of Rome, however, the real distinction between a thing and its existence is not a distinction between two things metaphysically capable of independent existence. A thing metaphysically capable of independent existence is by definition a substance. Clearly, my table is not a collection of two substances, one its essence, the other its existence. Hence the distinction between a thing and its existence is not at all like the distinction between my eye glasses and my head or that between my table and the chair in front of it. They are really distinct and separable. The table and its existence are really distinct but inseparable. The latter distinction is more like the distinction between the concavity and convexity of a lens. It is a real distinction, but neither term of the distinction can exist without the other.Therefore6) If the individual essence of the table (its whaness or quiddity in the broad sense) is the concrete table taken in abstraction from its existence, then, pace Avicenna and his latter-day colleague Alexius von Meinong, this essence does not itself exist. The same holds for the existence of the table: it does not itself exist. What exists is the concrete table which is composed of essence and existence as mutually dependent ontological factors. If you think otherwise, and think of essence and existence as substances in their own right, then you have committed the fallacy of hypostatization or reification. (The only difference is that between Greek and Latin.)7) If the existence of the table does not itself exist, is the existence of the table nothing at all? The existence of a thing is that in virtue of which it exists. If you say that the existence of a thing is nothing at all, then either (i) the table does not exist, contrary to fact, or (ii) the existence of the table is (identically) the table, in which case we have no account of the contingency of the thing. Argument for (i): the existence of my table is that in virtue of which my table exists; ergo, if the existence of my table is nothing at all, then my table is nothing at all and does not exist, which is contrary to our datanic starting point. Argument for (ii): For the table to be contingent, it must be really distinct from its existence: if its essence were identical to its existence it would be a necessary being. (God is a necessary being precisely because there is no distinction in him between essence and existence. Of course, we cannot think about God without distinguishing God's essence or nature and God's existence; but this distinction finds no purchase in God: it is a necessary makeshift in the sense that without it we cannot think of God.)8) The paradox is now upon us. With respect to contingent beings, we seem forced to say that the existence of such a being both is (exists) and is not (does not exist). Both limbs of this aporetic dyad are reasonably asserted. But of course a contradiction cannot be true. Of course. That is why the dyad is an aporia, an impasse that the discursive intellect cannot negotiate. No way, man!Limb One. To explain the contingency of the table we have to distinguish the (individual) essence of the concrete table from its existence. It would avail nothing to bring in talk of possible worlds and say that a contingent being is one that exists in some but not all possible worlds. For 'possible worlds' are merely a representational device to render graphic modal relationships. (I cannot explain this any further now. See my Modality category.) So if we want to explain the contingency of concrete particulars and not leave it unexplained, then it seems we must distinguish between the thing (or the essence of the thing) and the thing's existence. Therefore, the thing's existence/existing cannot be nothing. It must exist.Limb Two. There are no bare existents: necessarily, whatever exists has a nature or at least some quidditative properties. So if the existence of my table itself exists, then it has a nature. The nature it would have, presumably would be that of a table, not that of a turnip or a valve-lifter. But then we have two tables, which is absurd. The pressure is on to say that the existing of the thing is nothing at all.The paradox is that both halves of the contradiction are rationally defensible.Is there a solution?If there is a solution, I'd like to know what it is. Please don't say that the existence of the table is one of its properties, a property that does not exist on its own, and is therefore not a substance, but only in the table in the manner of an accident or in the manner of an immanent universal. If S is a substance, and A is an accident of S, then A cannot be the existence of S for the simple reason that S must already (logically speaking) exist if it is to support any accident, including the putative accident of existence. Similarly if you try to assay existence as an immanent first-level universal. If a property is defined as an instantiable entity, then existence cannot be understood as a property of existing particulars. This is because the particular must already exist to be in a position to instantiate any properties including the putative property of existence. (Bear in mind what I said above about Avicenna and Meinong.) Existence is not a first-level property. I have given just one argument among several.And please don't say that existence is a property of properties, the property of being instantiated. This is the Frege-Russell theory which I have subjected to thorough critique many times on this blog and in print. Here is one very simple argument. If the existence of a concrete particular a is some property's being instantiated, the only property that could fill the bill is the haecceity property a-ness. But there are no haecceity properties. Ergo, etc.We are stuck with our paradox: The existence/existing of an existing thing neither is (exists) nor is not (does not exist).A bowl of menudo and a Corona if you can solve it.
20 responses to “The Aporetics of Existence: Do Existing Things Have Existence?”
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Crises There Always Will Be
So buck up and fight on. Philosophy is a great consolation. We lesser lights ought to look up to the luminaries, and their example. Boethius wrote in prison, Nicolai Hartmann in Berlin in 1945 in the midst of the Allied assault.
In February 1945, the university building in which Hartmann used to lecture was destroyed in an aerial bombing and all his classes were suspended. He was then living in Berlin, which had been transformed into a real-life inferno. Without teaching obligations, Hartmann decided to write his aesthetics book, completing the first draft in the period from March to September 1945. Perhaps the most fascinating book in his entire opus [corpus], there is no despair in it over war and violence, maimed bodies, and destroyed buildings. As a boy he learned to measure the movement of the stars against the objects on earth, and now he measured the events of the day against the eternal beauty of Bach's music, the portraits of Rembrandt, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the novels of Dostoevsky. He delivers a remarkable message:wherever we are and whatever events pull us into their currents, we should not lose sight [of] and cease to strive toward the highest and most sublime. (Predrag Cicovacki, The Analysis of Wonder: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann, Bloomsbury, 2014, p. 159.)
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On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’
A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept. Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance.
1) In the planetary sense, the world is the planet Earth or some other planet such as Mars, as in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds.
2) In the cosmological sense, the world is the cosmos, the physical universe, the object of cosmology, a branch of physics. It is space-time together with whatever physicists discover within it: particles, fields, strings, vacuum fluctuations . . . .
3) In the theological sense, the world is the totality of creatures, where a creature is anything created ex nihilo by God, anything dependent on God for its existence (and presumably also dependent on God for its nature, intelligibility, and value). This includes all contingent beings and arguably also all necessary beings with the exception of God. I am alluding to Aquinas' distinction between God, the necessary being whose necessity is from himself, and the rest of the necessary beings that have their necessity from another, namely, from God. The latter are creatures, as strange as that might sound. They are creatures in that they depend on God for their existence despite the impossibility of their non-existence. For if, per impossibile, God did not exist, they would not exist either.
4) In the referential sense, for want of a better name, the world is the totality of extra-linguistic and extra-mental items. Thus daggers are 'in the world' in this sense, but not Macbeth's dagger or any other objects of hallucination, all such items being 'in the mind.' 'World' in the referential sense is a contrastive term and denotes what exists in itself, in reality, as opposed to what exists only in and for minds. For example, philosophers of language typically tell us that reference is a word-world relation. The world in the referential sense is the totality of objects of primary reference, whether the reference be what Hector-Neri Castaneda calls thinking reference, which does not require linguistic expression, or linguistic reference via proper names, indexicals, demonstratives, definite descriptions, etc.
NOTE: Although 'world' carries a suggestion of maximality and all-inclusiveness, (2), (3) and (4) describe senses of 'world' which are non-maximal and contrastive. Thus in (2) the world does not include so-called abstract objects or purely spiritual beings such as God, angels, and unembodied souls. In (3) the world does not encompass or contain or include God, and is thus other than God, but it does include abstract objects if there are any. Similarly with (4): the objects of primary reference form a totality that excludes the semantic and intentional apparatus in the mind whereby the items in the world are referenced, although the items in the referential apparatus exist and can be referred to in reflection and therefore can also claim to be in the world in a wider sense. For example, consider the intentional or object-directed state one is in when one veridically sees a tree. Is this state not in the world? Or what about the words, whether tokens or types, used to refer to things in the world and to the world itself? Are they not in the world in a suitably maximalist sense of the term? John Searle is in the world, but a token of the proper name 'John Searle' is not? This is a problem for (4), but not one that can detain us. There are in fact a number of gnarly problems one can pose about (2), (3) and (4), but they are not my problems, at least not now when I am merely cataloging the different philosophically relevant senses of 'world.'
5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:
But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they speak of could not be reduced to the world of black holes and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.
To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it. They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.
I seem to have strayed from description to evaluation. In any case:
6) In the all-inclusive tenselessly ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract), whether past, present, or future, whether in time or outside of time.
7) In the presentist ontological sense, the world is the totality of everything that is or exists, at temporal present, of whatever category, whether mental, material, or ideal (abstract). This is close to Quentin Smith's (may peace be upon him) notion of the world-whole in The Felt Meanings of the World (Purdue 1986).
8) In the Tractarianly factualist sense, the world is all that is the case; it it is the totality of facts, not of things. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, 1, 1.1:
Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist. Die Welt is die Gesamtheit der Tatsachen, nicht der Dinge.
9) On Armstrongian naturalistic factualism, there is only the space-time world and it "is a huge and organized net of states of affairs [concrete facts]" (Sketch for a Systematic Metaphysics, Oxford 2010, p. 26). Since thin particulars, properties, and relations are constituents of states of affairs, the world for Armstrong is a totality of facts AND of things .
David Armstrong offers a useful comment on Wittgenstein (ibid., p. 34):
Wittgenstein said at 1.1 in his Tractatus that the world is the totality of facts, not of things. I think he was echoing here (in a striking way) Russell's idea that the world is a world of facts. I put the same point by saying that the world is a world of states of affairs. To say that the world is a world of things seems to leave out an obvious point: how these things hang together, which must be part of reality. Interestingly, my own teacher in Sydney, John Anderson, used to argue that reality was 'propositional' and appeared to mean much the same as Russell and Wittgenstein. One could say metaphorically that reality was best grasped as sentence-like rather than list-like. (Hyperlink added!)
10) In the modal-abstractist sense, a possible world is a maximal Fregean proposition where a maximal such proposition is one that entails every proposition with which it is consistent; the actual world is the true maximal proposition; a merely possible world is a maximal proposition that is false, but contingently so. Note that while the worlds in question are maximal, this conception of worlds is not maximalist. For on this scheme, the possible world that happens to be actual is the maximal proposition that happens to be true. True of what? True of the concrete universe that serves as its truthmaker. The actual world is an abstract object that excludes the concrete universe.
11) In the modal-concretist sense, a possible world is a maximal mereological sum of concreta; every world is actual at itself, which implies that no world is actual absolutely or simpliciter; there are no merely possible worlds given that every world is actual at itself. This is a maximalist conception of worlds. (See David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, Basil Blackwell, 1986) Finally,
12) In the transcendental-phenomenological sense, the world is, first of all, none of the above. Let's take a stroll down the via negativa. The world is not the planet Earth, and not just because there are other physical entities: Earth appears within the world and is therefore not the same as the world. The world is not the physical cosmos; the cosmos appears within the world, and is therefore not the same as the world. Creatures are not the world; they too appear within the world. God is not the world; if God is, then God is either a being (a being among beings) or the being, the one and only being. Either way, God is seiend, ens, being, not reines Sein, esse, pure Be-ing (To Be). Now the world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is the ultimate context within which alone beings appear or show themselves as beings. It follows that God, if he is ein Seiendes (a being) or das Seiende (the being), is not the world but is within the world.
The world is not itself a being as if it were a sort of ontic container, but the ultimate transcendental condition — although 'condition' is not quite the right word — that allows beings to be. So if God is either a being or the being, then he is within the world, in which case God cannot be the world. The world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is transcendentally prior to every being including God who, despite his marvellous attributes, is but the highest being. God may be ontically that than which no greater can be conceived (Anselm), but transcendentally there is a greater, namely, the clearing or Lichtung (Heidegger) within which alone beings show themselves as beings. Every being, including the highest being, God, is subject to the ultimate transcendental condition of manifestation.
And of course the world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is not the realm of primary referents or the attitude of worldly people that Christians qua Christians oppose. Nor is the world a totality in any innerworldly (intramundane) sense of 'totality.' The world is not an ontic whole. It cannot be pieced together out of parts. It is not a collection the existence of which presupposes the items collected. It is not a set, or the extension of a set, a mereological sum or the extension of a mereological sum — if you care to distinguish a sum from its membership/extension. The world is not a scattered object, an aggregate of any kind, a maximal conjunction of propositions, a maximal conjunctive fact. The world has no adequate ontic model. It is not an instance of a category instantiated within the world. It cannot be assimilated to any abstract item such as a set or a proposition. It cannot be assimilated to any concrete items such as a concrete fact or a concrete individual or an aggregate.
The world is unique. "The world . . . does not exist as an entity, as an object, but exists with such uniqueness that the plural makes no sense when applied to it. Every plural, and every singular drawn from it, presupposes the world-horizon." (Crisis, Carr tr. 143) I'll have more to say later.
One response to “On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’”
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Camus, Virtue, and its Exhortation
Albert Camus died on this date in 1960.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, tr. Ryan Bloom, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010, p. 72:
Virtue is not hateful. But speeches on virtue are. Without a doubt, no mouth in the world, much less mine, can utter them. Likewise, every time somebody interjects to speak of my honesty . . . there is someone who quivers inside me.
This entry betrays something of the mind of the leftist. Leftists are deeply suspicious of anything that smacks of 'preaching.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. Too much enamored of the insights of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, leftists failed to achieve a critical stance toward them where a critical stance allows for a separation (krinein) of the true from the false, the coherent from the incoherent.
Surely Camus goes entirely too far in the above entry. If speeches are hateful, then so are sermons and exhortations. Civilization and its transmission are impossible, however, without appeals to our higher natures.
To a leftist, preaching can only be 'moralizing' and 'being judgmental.' It can only be the phony posturing of someone who judges others only to elevate himself. The very fact of preaching shows one to be a hypocrite. Of course, leftists have no problem with being judgmental and moralizing about the evil of hypocrisy. When they make moral judgments, however, it is, magically, not hypocritical.
And therein lies the contradiction. They would morally condemn all moral condemnation as hypocritical. But in so doing they condemn themselves as hypocrites.
We cannot jettison the moral point of view. Marx tried, putting forth his theories as 'science.' But if you have read him you know that he moralized like an Old Testament prophet.
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Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions
The review is a well written and very fair summary of von Hildebrand's book. (I read portions of the latter in graduate school days but I do not currently have it in my library.) Here is the review's main critical passage together with my remarks.
[Von] Hildebrand’s arguments for the objectivity of value therefore seem unsuccessful. It is true that one experiences an object as possessing some value which motivates a particular form of response to it. But it is another matter whether one has grasped a value in the object on its own or in the object as it is related to oneself in experience. Food is experienced as delicious, but there is no property of gustatory value inhering objectively in chicken tikka masala. It can be appetizing to one but not to another. Or consider that human beings love fruit, but dogs and cats generally do not.
BV: Nemes invokes the fact that for beings capable of gustatory experience, what is appetizing/delicious/tasty can vary across individuals in a species, and across species. This is because the property of being appetizing is not an intrinsic property of the edible or potable item, but involves a relation to the consumer. I have been called 'Old Asbestos Tongue' on account of the pleasure I derive from fiery comestibles. The positive or negative gustatory value resides not in the comestible itself, but in the relation between consumer and comestible between, say, 'Old Asbestos Tongue' and the jalapeno pepper. My constitution is such as to allow for the enjoyment of what others will find highly disagreeable. Hence, de gustibus non est disputandum. There is nothing to dispute since there is no fact of the matter. It is 'subjective' in one sense of this polysemous term.
But how negotiate the inferential move from
1) That which has the value of tasting good often varies from individual to individual and from species to species
to
2) The value of tasting good is subjective, not objective.
This looks to be an illicit slide. (1), which is plainly true, is consistent with the negation of (2). For it could be that the value of tasting good is objectively the same for all despite different edibles being tasty to different people or animals.
That is to say: tasting good could be an objective value despite the fact that different edible items have this value for different people. The perceiver-relativity of taste, which makes taste subjective, is consistent with the objectivity of gustatory values.
If values are essences and essences are ideal objects that subsist independently of our value responses (Wertantworten), as von Hildebrand maintains, then, while different perceivers find different things appetizing/delicious/tasty, this needn't affect the value itself. The tasting of an incendiary comestible involves a physical transaction; the intellectual intuition of the value does not. One does not taste the value, one tastes the jalapeno-laden enchilada; and one does not intellectually intuit the enchilada, one tastes it.
SN: Similarly, a purported moral value can be “noble” in the eyes of the “virtuous” but repellent to the “profligate.” It could well be that the difference in perception is accounted for merely in terms of the different structures of the persons involved.
BV: It is not the value as ideal object that is noble, but a person who has the value. The person is noble in virtue of instantiating the value. The base are value-blind (wertblind): they cannot 'see' or appreciate the value that noble people instantiate. But that fact is consistent with the value's objective existence in itself apart both from anyone's appreciating it and anything's instantiating it.
My point is that von Hildebrand has the resources to turn aside Nemes' objections. The latter are not rationally compelling. Give von Hildebrand's Platonism about values, Nemes' arguments are non sequiturs. This is not to say that von Hildebrand's axiology is true; it is to say that Nemes hasn't refuted it.
His review raises for me a fascinating question: does phenomenology by its very nature, and given that intentionality is its central motif, support realism or idealism? For von Hildebrand and J-P Sartre the former; for Husserl the latter. I should take this up in a separate entry.
For now I recommend that Nemes study chapter V, "Objectivity and Independence," in von Hildebrand's What is Philosophy?
4 responses to “Steven Nemes’ Review of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Ethics: Some Questions”
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Husserl and Heidegger
Husserl seems to think that everything can be brought into the light of adequate, indeed apodictic, evidence. The dark and hidden get their revenge in his most distinguished student, Heidegger.
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Double Pleasure
He who writes enjoys a double pleasure, that of writing, and that of reading what he has written.
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The Old Soul
The old soul sees, while his body is yet young, that this world has nothing to offer us that is finally satisfactory.
8 responses to “A Contingent Self-Existent?”