The Skeptic

The true skeptic does not deny truth. He is an inquirer who so loves truth that he will accept no substitutes, no easy answers, no comforting dogmatisms.  That some skeptics become Pyrrhonian slackers is no argument against skepticism properly understood. The true skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier.

At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

A Good Friday meditation at Substack.

Addendum 4/4/21. Vito Caiati writes,

I have been pondering the profound and poignant Good Friday meditation, “At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron,” that you just posted on Substack.  The Weil text that inspired your post leaves me, nevertheless, with a tormenting question, one which arises from her conviction that when an iron spike rips through the flesh of a human hand, “The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation.”  However, does the assumed equivalence between the overwhelming pain and suffering of human beings whose flesh is pierced by iron and that of Christ really hold, for it is the Second Person of the Trinity who is crucified and, as such, a Being who is omniscient? However the admixture of the divine and human natures of Christ are conjoined in his Person, we cannot assume, without falling in heresy, that one of those natures, with its inherent intellectual capacities, ceases to be operational at certain moments, so that on the Cross only the human nature is present. If both natures are present, than the divine nature of Christ faces death with the divine knowledge of those things that are hidden from other men, in particular the certainty of God’s existence and the knowledge of His nature,  the destiny of the soul after death, its relation to God, and so on.  Thus, while Christ’s physical suffering is comparable to ours, his emotional suffering is not: He is in a unique and privileged existential position, one that derives from his absolute knowledge of all things, which permits him to die without the terrors of the unknown that plagues us ordinary human beings. Thus, it would seem that the analogy of his suffering and ours holds but only to a certain point and not absolutely. Am I wrong on this?

Well, Vito, I can't say that you are wrong. Indeed, I think you are right about an implication of the orthodox and traditional "two natures, one person" understanding of the Incarnation.  If Christ is one person with two natures,  then both natures must be "operational" to use your word at all times during Christ's earthly sojourn. (What happens after the Ascension is a further question.) But if there is no 'switching off' of the divine nature during the Crucifixion, then how can Christ experience fully the human predicament in which the worst of suffering is not mere physical suffering but the latter together with the utter desolation of abandonment?  Recall that the traditional understanding, hammered out over a number of Church councils, was that Christ is fully man, and of course fully God as well.  And to experience fully the horror of the fallen human predicament, one would have to experience the spiritual and emotional agony of abandonment, and this to its highest degree.  "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

Who is speaking here?  Not the Second Person of the Trinity. A man is speaking, no ordinary man, of course, but a man nonetheless who came into the world in the usual way, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.   There is no satisfactory clarification of this state of affairs, at least none satisfactory to the discursive intellect.  This is because the Incarnation as traditionally understood is logically contradictory.  I have discussed this many times. (See Trinity and Incarnation category.) In the present context, the contradiction takes the following form. The man dying on the cross is the God-Man; he is one person (hypostasis) in two (individual) natures. Now who cries out in extremis to the Father? Not a nature, hence not Christ's human nature.  A nature can do no such thing. A person can. But there is only one person on the cross, the Logos Itself, the Word, God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. So the Second Person is crying to the First Person: Why have you forsaken me? That's absurd, i.e. logically impossible (given the background theological assumptions). God cannot forsake God. Don't forget: Trinity is not tritheism.  God is one.

I would say that that the absurdity of the Incarnation, which was recognized by Tertullian, Kierkegaard, Shestov, et al. is what allows the heresies to arise such as the one espoused by Simone Weil.  The heresies are attempts to make rational sense out of a combination of ideas unintelligible to the discursive intellect.  They have a logic to them.

Could it be that some contradictions are true, and that the Incarnation is one of them?  Call that the dialetheic way out. Or you might take the view that no contradictions are true, and that, in reality the Incarnation is non-contradictory; it is just that our cognitive architecture makes it impossible for such weak reeds as we are to understand how it is non-contradictory. Call that the mysterian way out. You could also ditch both Trinity and Incarnation (as traditionally understood) and go Unitarian.

On the Consolations of Tense Logic

What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been.  What time has mothered, no future time can touch.   What you were and that you were stand forever inscribed in the roster of being in indelible ink whether or not anyone will read the record.  And all your deeds and misdeeds with you. You will die, but your having lived will never die.  But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny!  Time has made you and she will unmake you.  In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux.  Thanks a lot, bitch!  You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.

………………….

The entry above, posted 10 March 2010, caught the sharp eye of Alan Rhoda who isolated the animating tense-logical principle:

You here express the tense-logical idea that p–>FPp, that if something is the case, then it will thereafter always be the case that it has been the case. In Latin, facta infecta fieri non possunt.

Believe it or not, this has been denied, by the famous Polish logician Lukasiewicz, no less. He seems to have accepted a version of presentism according to which (1) all (contingent) truths depend for their truth on what presently exists, and (2) what presently exists need not include anything that suffices to pick out a unique prior sequence of events as "the" actual past. Accordingly, truths about the past may cease to be true as the passage of time obliterates the traces of past events. Lukasiewicz apparently found this a comforting thought:

"There are hard moments of suffering and still harder ones of guilt in everyone’s life. We should be glad to be able to erase them not only from our memory but also from existence. We may believe that when all the effects of those fateful moments are exhausted, even should that happen only after our death, then their causes too will be effaced from the world of actuality and pass into the realm of possibility. Time calms our cares and brings us forgiveness." (Jan Lukasiewicz, "On Determinism" in  Selected Works, ed. L. Borkowski, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1970, p. 128.)

This is an amazing passage from Lukasiewicz both because of his denial of what strikes me and Rhoda as a self-evident axiom of tense logic and because of the  consolation he derives from its denial. (Is it really consolation if that from which it derives is false?)

I myself find it very hard to believe that there wasn't a unique actual past. And I find it impossible to believe that, with the passage of enough time, past events will somehow go from being actual to being merely possible.  

What Lukasiewicz is maintaining is really quite preposterous. He is saying, in effect, that a past-tensed truth such as 'Poland was invaded by Hitler's Wehrmacht on 1 September 1939,' which is true now, and was true at every time after the event, will  cease to be true in the future when all of the presently existing traces of the invasion have been  obliterated.  And surely such a time will come. When our sun goes supernova . . . .

Lukasiewicz is assuming that (a) contingent past-tensed truths need truth-makers, but (b) the only available truth-makers are presently existing causal traces of the events recorded by the past-tensed truths. (B) is a consequence of presentism, roughly, the view in the philosophy of time according to which the temporally present alone exists simpliciter, which implies that wholly past and wholly future times and events do not exist, and are now nothing at all.  If so, actual past events and merely possible past events are on an equal ontological footing.

But to me it seems obvious, a plain datum, that there is an importance ontological difference between a past event such as Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, and a merely possible (past) event such as his marriage to her. Now that datum tells against presentism — unless you bring God into the picture.

This is what Rhoda does in an excellent article of his, Presentism, Truthmakers, and God.

Abstract: The truthmaker objection to presentism (the view that only what exists now exists simpliciter) is that it lacks sufficient metaphysical resources to ground truths about the past. In this paper I identify five constraints that an adequate presentist response must satisfy. [. . .] Consideration of how these responses fail, however, points toward a proposal that works, one that posits God’s memories as truthmakers for truths about the past. I conclude that presentists have, in the truthmaker objection, considerable incentive to endorse theism.

But if we don't put God to work, or find other ways to supply presently existing truth-makers for past-tensed truths, and want to hold to presentism, then we are stuck with the preposterous view that the passage of time will not only erase individual and collective memory of past events, but will also erase the events themselves, and, to add to the absurdity, transform their modal status from actual to merely possible.

The past is a realm of fact, not fiction, actuality, not mere possibility. What was. actually was, and will remain actual even though it is no longer present.  The passage of time cannot alter the past.  You may hope that your transgressions will be forgotten, but one cannot reasonably hope that they will cease to be. The waters of Lethe merely hide the past from view; they do not undo the past.

As for consolation, I hope we can agree that a view's being consoling or the opposite is irrelevant to the question whether it is true.  If Lukasiewicz found consolation in his doctrine, that is no indicator of its truth since a doctrine doesn't have to be true  to be consoling.  It merely has to be believed. And if consolation were the touchstone of truth, then, the contradictory consolation deriving from p–>FPp would would cancel it out.

Cat Blogging!

I haven't done any cat blogging in a righteous spell. Call me a slacker. Friday is the official cat blogging day here at MavPhil and elsewhere in the blogosphere, but this Friday is Good Friday. Cat man Dave Bagwill sends this:

Schroedinger's feline

 

Could I Pass an Ideological Turing Test?

On 11 January 2017 I wrote a post that begins:

Could I present liberal-left ideas in such a way that the reader could not tell that I was not a liberal?  Let me take a stab at this with respect to a few 'hot' topics.  This won't be easy.  I will have to present liberal-left ideas as plausible while avoiding all mention of their flaws.  And all of this without sarcasm, parody, or irony.  Each of these subheadings could be expanded into a separate essay.  And of course there are many more subheadings that could be added.  

The post attracted some very good comments. The consensus was that I flunked.  

Four years have past since I made that entry. That is a long time in this age of social, political, and technological hyperkineticism. If I were to rewrite it today it would have to reflect the increasingly delusional quality of leftist 'thought' as we jerk, not merely accelerate, toward our cultural collapse. 

Jerk?

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating.  But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking.  After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven.  No need to name names.  You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration.  Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk.  (I am not joking; look it up.)  If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars.  Each has a magnitude and a direction.  This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction:  the end of civilization as we know it.

Jerkwad

 

Is it Wise to Speak Out?

To focus the question: is it prudent for conservative dissidents to speak out against 'woke' madness? That depends. This will help you think it through.  I wrote below:

In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it.  This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right.  For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated.  Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion.  Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list.  After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'

On the other hand, if you don't exercise your rights, you may as well not have them.

There are ways between the horns of this dilemma but they will vary from case to case.  

Try to become financially independent as soon as possible by a combination of hard work, frugal living, and wise saving and investing. Then the tyrants won't be able to 'cancel' your livelihood so easily.   They can, of course, still 'cancel' your life.  Would they? Well, if they have no problem stripping you of your livelihood because of the exercise of  your rights, what is likely to stop them from going all the way?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody.   YouTuber comment: "Late 1959. I was in 4th grade, listening to KFWB Los Angeles."  Same here. Same year, same grade, same station, KFWB, Channel 98! Color Radio! My favorite deejay was B. Mitchel Reed.  I learned 'semolian' and 'mishigas' from him. His real surname is 'Goldberg,' which means mountain of gold. I will say no more lest I provoke my alt-Right correspondents.  

Timi Yuro, Hurt. When I first heard this I was sure she was black. I was wrong. She's Italian, and her real name is Rosemarie Timotea Auro. What pipes!

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Roy Orbison, In Dreams

Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon 

Ketty Lester, Love Letters 

Etta James, At Last  

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell for You

Sentimental you say? What would life be without sentiment? You say it's overdone? You suffer from an excess of cool. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, and feel. Tonight we feel, tomorrow we think.  About sentimentality and everything else under the sun.

Is There a Political ‘Use it or Lose it’ Principle?

If you want to maintain your physical fitness, you must exercise regularly. Use it or lose it!  Not so long ago  I thought that the same principle had a political application: if you want to maintain your freedoms, you must exercise them.  Use 'em or lose 'em! But times have changed.  And when times change, the wise re-evaluate. I'll give two examples.

In the present political climate, if I exercise my right to free speech I may lose the right. Use it and lose it.  This is because vast numbers nowadays do not recognize any such right.  For these people, dissent is hate; so if your speech is dissenting speech it is hate speech, which cannot be tolerated.  Dissent is hate, and hate is violence, and violence is racism! Of course, dissent is not hate, and hate is not violence, etc. but these truths are irrelevant in an age of groupthink and mass delusion.  Truth is passé in the Age of Feeling. So if you speak your mind calmly, reasonably, and with attention to facts, but sail against the prevailing winds, you may find yourself de-platformed, 'cancelled,' and put on a watch list of dissidents, and perhaps a 'no fly' list.  After all, conservatives are 'potential terrorists.' And white conservatives are of course 'white supremacists.'

So here is my thought: The exercise of a right in a society in which that right  is no longer widely recognized but is instead perceived as hurtful, hateful, 'racist,' etc. has no tendency to secure that right; on the contrary, the exercise of the right endangers both the right and the exerciser thereof.  The same goes for the mere invocation or mention of the right. 

Here we may have the makings of an argument against speaking out. But we will have to think about this some more.  Civil courage is a beautiful virtue but it is sometimes trumped by that of prudence.

My second example is the right to keep and bear arms, an individual right, one that is protected and secured, but not conferred, by the Second Amendment to the U. S. Constitution.  To exercise this right openly, as by 'open carry,' is inadvisable.  You may think that you are standing on your rights, and by exercising them securing them,  but in a society dominated by group-thinking leftists, your constitutionally-guaranteed rights are not respected or even acknowledged. You are arguably undermining your rights and their exercise.  You are reinforcing their mindless fears and fantasies. After all, prominent progressive politicians view the NRA as a domestic terrorist organization! What then will they think of you if they see you packing heat? It would be best to conceal both your weapons and your views.

The practice of ketman is advisable. Rod Dreher:

Ketman is the strategy that everyone in our society who isn’t a true believer in “social justice” and identity politics has to adopt to stay out of trouble. On Sunday, I heard about a professor in a large state university in a state that yesterday went for Trump, who is filled with constant anxiety. He believes that his interactions with colleagues and students are filled with the potential to destroy his career. Why? Because all it takes is an accusation of racism, sexism, or some other form of bigotry to wreck a lifetime of work. This is the world that the identity politics left has created for us. 

More on ketman later.

Another ‘Too Late’ Story: Elizabeth Wolgast

Long-time reader Dave Bagwill wrote to tell me that he tried to contact  his old professor at Cal State, Hayward, Elizabeth Wolgast, but was too late. "She was  a very fine woman with a penetrating intellect and a warm heart," Dave recalls.  From Wolgast's obituary:

Elizabeth H. Wolgast
Feb 27, 1929 – Oct 13, 2020
Elizabeth Wolgast, died October 13 from complications following a stroke on October 1: she was 91. Elizabeth was born in Dunellen, NJ in February 1929. In 1936 her family moved to a farm outside Philadelphia run by her mother (a degreed nutritionist) while her father worked in business. She studied water-color painting as a young woman which became a life-long passion for her. She met her husband, Richard, at a drawing class at Cornell University and they married in 1949. Elizabeth went on to earn a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Washington and had a long, distinguished career teaching at the Cal State University at Hayward. She was a trailblazer in her profession being the first tenured female professor in that department. She was still the only one there when she retired. She enjoyed visiting professorships at Dartmouth College, Cambridge (England), West Point, and Abo (Finland). She authored four philosophy texts and numerous journal articles.

Read the rest. Here is her PhilPapers page.

I just now ordered a used copy of  Wolgast's Paradoxes of Knowledge for a paltry $8.34.  You may wish to spring for a new copy for a mere 529 semolians.  

We best honor a philosopher by reading his work and thinking his thoughts, sympathetically, but critically.

As a general rule, you should never buy a book you haven't read. (That sounds like a bit of a paradox itself.) But the Wolgast volume appeared under the Cornell imprint, so it is probably worth reading in part if not in toto. I sense that it will be heavily Wittgensteinian. But a little Wittgenstein never hurt anybody.

Time was, when I had space for books but no money. Now it is the other way around.  I may have to buy a bigger house. Without books would life be worth living?

In these trying times, we who value high culture need to build vast private libraries that cannot be easily marauded by the totalitarian agents of leftist destruction. We also need to lay in righteous supplies of Pb to protect them. 

Theme music: It's Too Late, She's Gone

Wolgast

 

In Praise of a Lowly Adjunct

The entry below was written on 18 May 2009 and posted the same day.  I had meant to send it to Dr. Loretta Morris, Richard's widow, but couldn't find her e-mail address.  The other day I discovered her obituary. So here is another case of too late again.

………………………………….

The best undergraduate philosophy teacher I had was a lowly adjunct, one Richard Morris, M.A. (Glasgow).  I thought of him the other day in connection with John Hospers whose An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis (2nd ed.) he had assigned for a course entitled "Linguistic Philosophy."  I also took a course in logic from him.  The text was Irving Copi's Symbolic Logic (3rd ed.) You will not be surprised to hear that I still have both books.  And I'll be damned if I will part with either one of them, despite the fact that I have a later edition of the Copi text, an edition I used in a logic course I myself taught.

I don't believe Morris ever published anything.  The Philosopher's Index shows a few citations for one or more Richard Morrises none of whom I have reason to believe is the adjunct in question.  But without publications or doctorate Morris was more of a philosopher than many of his quondam colleagues.

The moral of the story?  Real philosophers can be found anywhere in the academic hierarchy.  So judge each case by its merits and be not too impressed by credentials and trappings.

I contacted Morris ten years ago or so and thanked him for his efforts way back when.  The thanking of old teachers who have had a positive influence is a practice I recommend.  I've done it a number of times.  I even tracked down an unforgettable and dedicated and inspiring third-grade teacher.  I asked her if anyone else had ever thanked her, and she said no.  What ingrates we  are!

So if you have something to say to someone you'd better say it now while you both draw breath.  

Heute rot, morgen tot.

Hypocrisy? Double-Standardization?

BeefitswhatsfordinnerAccusing a leftist of being a hypocrite is like accusing a meat-eating Texas cattle rancher of being a carnivore.

The concerns of bourgeois morality find as little purchase with leftists as the concerns of vegetarians with meat-eaters. 

A curious 'disconnect' is therefore displayed by earnest Fox commentators who upbraid leftists for their hypocrisy and double standards when, preaching the need for draconian measures to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, they support Joe Biden's opening up the Southern border to a flood of unvetted and untested illegal aliens among whom are human traffickers, drug smugglers, gun runners, and carriers of a variety of diseases including COVID-19.  

The naïve Tucker Carlson, for example, appears shocked and surprised at leftist hypocrisy and double-standardization. He hasn't yet fully grasped, although he is learning, that for leftists, the (apparent) issue is not the (real) issue.  In this case the apparent issue is public health while the real issues is the expansion of power for leftists who, in U. S. politics, are Democrats. Not the expansion of power for its own sake, mind you, but for the sake of the fundamental transformation of America that Barack Obama announced. (Tucker seems to think that the Dems just want power for the sake of power. Not so.)

Objectively, it is absurdly counterproductive to open the borders during a public health crisis, especially when the invaders are from a country like Mexico, as opposed to, say, Canada.  But that is so only if the paramount concern is public health.  When the paramount concern is to gain permanent power for leftist ends, then it all makes sense.  Lives are worth sacrificing for the glorious end, which justifies the disreputable means.

Repeat this a few times until it sinks in: Leftists are not constrained by our values and norms. They use our values and norms  against us. You can read all about it in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.  Truth, for example, is normative for us, but not for them. That is not to say that they won't tell the truth; they will when it serves their purposes. Otherwise they lie, repeatedly and brazenly.  Their purpose trumps the norm, which is to say: they are not bound by the norm. It has no deontic hold on them, they being of the tribe of Lucifer. Alinsky dedicated his Rules to the fallen light-bearer.

We are bound by the norm of truth. This is why, when we violate it, the charge of hypocrisy reaches us and is a concern for us and an occasion for us to examine our consciences. 

What Tucker and Co. need to come to understand is that our political opponents are political enemies: They cannot be reached by appeals to reason or to conscience, by admonitions or accusations of hypocrisy and double-standardization.  We and they do not live in the same moral universe. To invoke a rather more terrestrial metaphor: we and they do not stand on common ground. Ours is the terra firma of reality. Theirs is a swamp of illusion abutting a gulag overlain by a utopian fog, mephitic and Mephistophelean.

I appear to be warming to my rhetoric. Time to pack it in. But one more thing, a bit of self-criticism.

I once said that if you removed from leftists all of their double standards, they would have no standards at all.  Not quite right! For there would be one standard left standing:

Win at all costs and by any means!