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. 
 
Therefore
 
6) 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.   

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.)

Hartmann Nicolai

 

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.

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.

Camus est mort_combatSurely 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.

After MacIntyre: On Deriving Ought from Is

Are there any (non-trivial*) valid arguments that satisfy the following conditions:  (i) The premises are all purely factual  in the sense of purporting to state only what is the case; (ii) the conclusion is normative/evaluative?  Alasdair MacIntyre gives the following example (After Virtue, U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981, p. 55):

1. This watch is inaccurate.

Therefore

2. This is a bad watch.

MacIntyre claims that the premise is factual, the conclusion evaluative, and the argument valid.  (The argument is an enthymeme the formal validity of which is ensured by the auxiliary premise, 'Every inaccurate watch is a bad watch.') The validity is supposed to hinge on the functional character of the concept watch.  A watch is an artifact created by an artificer for a specific purpose: to tell time accurately.  It therefore has a proper function, one assigned by the artificer.  (Serving as a paperweight being an example of an improper function.)  A good watch does its job, serves its purpose, fulfills its proper function. MacIntyre tells us that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . ." and that "the criterion of something's being a watch and something's being a good watch . . . are not independent of each other." (ibid.)  MacIntyre goes on to say that both criteria are factual and that for this reason arguments like the one above validly move from a factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

Speaking as someone who has been more influenced by the moderns than by the ancients, I don't see it.  It is not the case that "the concept of a watch cannot be defined independently of the concept of a good watch . . . ."  A watch is "a portable timepiece designed to be worn (as on the wrist) or carried in the pocket." (Merriam-Webster)  This standard definition allows, as it should, for both good and bad watches.   Note that if chronometric goodness, i.e., accuracy, were built into the definition of 'watch,' then no watch would ever need repair.  Indeed, no watch could be repaired. For a watch needing repair would then not be a watch.

MacIntyre is playing the following game, to put it somewhat uncharitably.

He smuggles the evaluative attribute good into his definition of 'watch,' forgets that he has done so thereby generating the illusion that his definition is purely factual, and then pulls the evaluative rabbit out of the hat in his conclusion.  It is an illusion since the rabbit was already there in the premise.  In other words, both (1) and (2) are evaluative.  So, while the argument is valid, it is not a valid argument from a purely factual premise to an evaluative conclusion.

So if the precise question is whether one can validly move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, then MacIntyre's example fails to show that this is possible.

What MacIntyre needs is the idea that some statements are both factual and evaluative.  If (1) is both, then (2) — This is a bad watch — follows and  MacIntyre gets what he wants.  But if (1) is both, then (1) is not purely factual. The question, however, was whether there is a valid immediate inference from the purely factual to the normative/evaluative.  The answer to that, pace MacIntyre, is in the negative.

Is Man a Functional Concept?

But now suppose that, with respect to functional concepts, the move from fact to value is logically kosher because functional concepts embed criteria of evaluation.  Then this discussion is relevant to ethics, the normative study of human action,  only if man is a functional concept.  Aristotle maintains as much:  man qua man has a proper function, a proper role, a proper 'work' (ergon).  This proper function is one he has essentially, by his very nature, regardless of whatever contingent roles a particular human may instantiate, wife, father, sea captain.  Thus, " 'man' stands to 'good man' as 'watch' stands to 'good watch' . . . ." (56)  Now if man qua man has a proper and essential function, then to say of a particular man that he is good or bad is to imply that he has a proper and essential function.  But then to call a man good is also to make a factual statement.  (57)

The idea is that being human is a role that includes certain norms, a role that each of us necessarily instantiates whether like it or not.  There is a sort of coalescence of factual individual and norm in the case of each human being just as, in Aristotle's ontology, there is a sort of coalescence of individual and nature in each primary substance. 

But does man qua man have a proper role or function?  The moderns fight shy of this notion.  They tend to  think of all roles, jobs, and functions of humans as freely adopted and contingent.  Modern man likes to think of himself as a free and autonomous individual who exists prior to and apart from all roles.  This is what Sartre means when he says that existence precedes essence:  Man qua man has no pre-assigned nature or essence or proper function: man as existing individual makes himself what ever he becomes.  Man is not God's artifact, hence has no function other than one he freely adopts.

Although Aristotle did not believe in a creator God, it is an important question whether an Aristotle-style healing of the fact-value rift requires classical theism as underpinning. MacIntyre seems to think so. (Cf. p. 57)  Philippa Foot demurs.

Interim Conclusion

If the precise question is whether one can validly (but non-trivially) move from a purely factual or descriptive premise to an evaluative conclusion, I have yet to see a clear example of this.  But one ought to question the strict bifurcation of fact and value.  The failure of entailment is perhaps no surprise given the bifurcation.  The Aristotelian view, despite its murkiness, remains a contender.  But to be a contender is not to be a winner.

The Aristotelian view is murky because it seems to imply that a bad man is not a man, just as a bad watch is not a watch.  If it is built into the concept watch that it tell time accurately, then a watch that is either slow or fast is not  watch, which is plainly false if not absurd, implying as it does that no watch could ever need repair.  Clearly, there is nothing in the concept watch to require that a watch be accurate.  There are good watches and bad watches. Similarly, there are good men and bad men. If to be a man is to exercise the proper function of a man, then there would be no need for correctional institutions.

___________________

*A trivial argument from 'is' to 'ought' exploits the explosion principle, i.e., ex contradictione quodlibet.  If anything follows from a contradiction, then from a contradictory premise set of factual claims any normative claim follows.

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? 

Nemes Binity

On Profitable Study of Philosophy

One needs to work through a text slowly, pondering, comparing, re-reading, reconstructing and evaluating the arguments, raising objections, imagining possible replies and all of this while animated by a burning need to get to the bottom of some pressing existential question.  You must bring to your reading questions if you expect study to be profitable.

If one fails to enter into the dialectic of the problems and issues one will come away with little more than a vague literary impression. But real study is hard work demanding aptitude, time, peace, and quiet, a commodity in short supply in these hyperkinetic and cacaphonous times.  Back in the day,  Arthur Schopenhauer was much exercised by "the infernal cracking of whips" as he he complained in his classic "On Noise."  What would he say today?  Could he survive in the contemporary crapstorm of   cacaphony?

So turn off that cell phone before I smash it to pieces!

New Year’s Eve at the Oldies: ‘Last’ Songs for the Last Night of the Year

Happy New Year, everybody.  

Last Night, 1961, The Mar-Keys.

Last Date, 1960, Floyd Cramer. It was bliss while it lasted. You were so in love with her you couldn't see straight. But she didn't feel the same. You shuffle home, enter your lonely apartment, pour yourself a stiff one, and put Floyd Cramer on the box.

Save the Last Dance for Me, 1960, The Drifters.

At Last, Etta James.

Last Thing on My Mind, Doc Watson sings the Tom Paxton tune. A very fine version.

Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, Simon and Garfunkel. 

Last Call, Dave van Ronk.  "If I'd been drunk when I was born, I'd be ignorant of sorrow."

(Last night I had) A Wonderful Dream, The Majors. The trick is to find in the flesh one of those dream girls. Some of us got lucky.

This night in 1985 was Rick Nelson's last: the Travelin' Man died in a plane crash.  Wikipedia:

Nelson dreaded flying but refused to travel by bus. In May 1985, he decided he needed a private plane and leased a luxurious, fourteen-seat, 1944 Douglas DC-3 that had once belonged to the DuPont family and later to Jerry Lee Lewis. The plane had been plagued by a history of mechanical problems.[104] In one incident, the band was forced to push the plane off the runway after an engine blew, and in another incident, a malfunctioning magneto prevented Nelson from participating in the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois.

On December 26, 1985, Nelson and the band left for a three-stop tour of the Southern United States. Following shows in Orlando, Florida, and Guntersville, Alabama, Nelson and band members took off from Guntersville for a New Year's Eve extravaganza in Dallas, Texas.[105] The plane crash-landed northeast of Dallas in De Kalb, Texas, less than two miles from a landing strip, at approximately 5:14 p.m. CST on December 31, 1985, hitting trees as it came to earth. Seven of the nine occupants were killed: Nelson and his companion, Helen Blair; bass guitarist Patrick Woodward, drummer Rick Intveld, keyboardist Andy Chapin, guitarist Bobby Neal, and road manager/soundman Donald Clark Russell. Pilots Ken Ferguson and Brad Rank escaped via cockpit windows, though Ferguson was severely burned.

It's Up to You.

Bonus: Last Chance Harvey.

Last but not least: Auld Lang Syne.

Wokespeak and Wokespoke

Here:

“Equity.” Equity has now replaced the Civil Rights–era goal of “equality” — a word relegated to vestigial Wokespoke. After 60 years, equality apparently was exposed as a retrograde bourgeois synonym for the loaded “equality of opportunity” rather than a necessary, mandated “equality of result.”

And rightly so, since any and every inequality of outcome can only be explained by something nefarious such as racism or sexism.

Related: The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom

A Conversion Story

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in her own words.

An important part of what opened me to Catholicism—and to the peerless gift of faith in Christ Jesus—was my growing horror at the pride of too many in the secular academy. The sin is all the more pernicious because it is so rarely experienced as sin. Educated and enjoined to rely upon our reason and cultivate our autonomy, countless perfectly decent and honorable professors devote their best efforts to making sense of thorny intellectual problems, which everything in their environment encourages them to believe they can solve. Postmodernism has challenged the philosophical presuppositions of the modernists’ intellectual hubris, but, with the same stroke, it has pretended to discredit what it calls “logocentrism,” namely, the centrality of the Word. In the postmodernist universe, all claims of universal certainty must be exposed as delusions, leaving the individual as authoritative arbiter of the meaning that pertains to his or her situation. Thus, what originated as a struggle to discredit pretensions to intellectual authority has ended, at least in the American academy, in a validation of personal prejudice and desire.