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.

In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

Substance and AccidentThe 'thin' conception of being or existence entails that there are no modes of being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-being doctrine, the MOB doctrine if you will, is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics, although I won't argue for the stronger claim here.

My task is not to specify what the modes of being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of being. So I plan to look at a range of examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of being they involve.

This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of being, and not merely in their respective natures.