I opened an account yesterday. Only one entry so far, and less than ten subscribers. It's free. Go here and do a search on my name.
If you are a good writer and impecunious, you can turn a buck on this site. On second thought, you can do so whether or not you are impecunious. The quality of the writing on Substack and the standing of many of the authors suggests to me that the latter-day book burners will probably keep their hands off of it.
Some philosophers write so obscurely that the problems they purport to discuss are occluded by the problems they cause the reader. One has to waste time figuring out what the author is saying, time that ought to be spent on assessing whether what is being said is true. The French are prime offenders, allergic as they are to plain talk and clarity of expression with their pseudo-literary pirouettes and their overuse of universal quantifiers. The French Continental style draws attention away from the substance so much so that one wonders whether there is any substance beneath the stylistic flummery. And yet I sense that Michel Henry has something interesting to say about Husserl and Heidegger and so I will continue to plough through the turgid prose of Material Phenomenology.
Worse than obscurantism in the French style, however, is the attitude of a certain sort of analytic philosopher who dismisses as meaningless what does not instantly make sense to his shallow pate. And among these benighted souls, the nadir is reached in a positivist like David Stove.
I coined a name for people like him: 'philosophistine.' A philistine out of his depth among real philosophers.
The maverick philosopher, avoiding both camps, strives for clarity with content with a fidelity to reality that tolerates such obscurity as is unavoidable.
Old memories dressed in the rags of too many rehearsals
Block the light of a dawn that would be new
And not merely another.
Like many conservatives, I didn't start out as one. My background is working class, my parents were Democrats, and so was I until the age of 41. I came of age in the '60s. One of my heroes was John F. Kennedy, "the intrepid skipper of the PT 109" as I described him in a school essay written in the fifth grade. I was all for the Civil Rights movement. Musically my heroes were Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. I thrilled to his Blowin' in the Wind and his other civil rights anthems.
As I see it, those civil rights battles were fought and they were won. But then the rot set in as the party of JFK liberals became the extremists and the destructive leftists that they are today. For example, Affirmative Action in its original sense gave way to reverse discrimination, race-norming, minority set-asides, identity politics and the betrayal of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that people be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." To judge people by the content of their character is to judge them as individuals which is precisely the opposite of what tribalists and identity politicians do.
As liberals have become extremists, people with moderate views such as myself have become conservatives.
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, a good day to read his Letter from a Birmingham Jail and reflect on how the race-delusional totalitarians who now infest the Democrat Party have strayed from King's ideas and vision.
Given the extreme polarization in the political sphere, the Left's totalitarian crack-down on free speech gives aid and comfort to the opposite extreme and the notion that all speech must be tolerated. One finds this extremism in John Stuart Mill. I show what it wrong with it in a penetrating entry enshrined at MavPhil: Strictly Philosophical.
I am all for intellectual hygiene. But it can be taken to an extreme by a certain sort of analytic philosopher who is afraid to touch anything that might in the least be infected with the murk and messiness of life as she is lived. Such types remind me of neurotic hand-washers and those who, fearful of the Chinese flu, walk around in the open air, alone, in masks.
To be human is to be flawed; to be conservative is to know this.
The darkening of the world has this advantage: it inspires us to seek for light where it is more likely to be found.
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
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.
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.
………………………………..
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.
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?
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?
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.)
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.
