Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • The Pleasures of the Mountain Bike

    What follows is from my first weblog, and is dated 4 May 2004. The photo was taken this morning by Dennis Murray, fellow aficionado of strenuous pursuits.

    …………………

    Time was, when running was my exercise, the daily bread of my cardiovascular system. But then the injuries came: chondromalacia patellae in both knees, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, you name it. So I took up the bike, and eventually the mountain bike. Now I run just once a week, on Sunday mornings, for about 75 minutes. The other days I either hike or ride the mountain bike, mostly the latter. I like to be on the road before sunrise, and catch old Sol as he rises over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition Mountains. There is nothing like greeting the sun as he greets the mountains, bathing them in the serene light of daybreak. It is an appropriate moment for gratitude, gratitude for another day on which to bang my head against the riddle of existence. Riding into the rising sun, I sometimes recall Nietzsche’s words from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O you overrich star, what would you be except for those for whom you shine?”

    The beauty of the mountain bike is that you can get off the roads, away from cars and people, and onto trails and jeep tracks. I’d rather dodge rattlesnakes than cars any day. I have even been known to strike out cross-country across open desert. I’ve got kevlar-reinforced tires, with thick tubes, and a strip of plastic betwixt tube and tire as prophylaxis against cactus spines and other impregnators. No need for slime, and no flats for going on two years. My bike is an old Trek 930, a modest mid-range hard-tail – having been called a hard-ass, I suppose this is appropriate – with front-end suspension. As every Thoreauvian knows, one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun and live well.

    Still, nothing in my experience beats running for the endorphin kick. ‘Endorphin’ is a contraction of ‘endogenous morphine.’ The adjective means originating from within, in this case, from within the brain. You know what morphine is. The brain of a body under athletic stress seems to produce these endorphins the existence of which, I understand, is more scientific postulation than verified fact. Endorphins manifest themselves at the level of consciousness in rather delightful sensations. When conditions are auspicious, and I am about 45-50 minutes into a run, I enter a phase wherein I apperceive myself as merely riding in my body as a pure spectator of a pure spectacle. I become a transcendental onlooker, and the world becomes George Santayana’s realm of essence.

    “I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”)

    BVMTBike24Aug2020

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Nght at the Oldies: The Ten Most Violent Democrat-Run Cities

    New York, New York. "Start spreading the news . . ."

    L. A. Woman

    Born in Chicago

    Houston

    Streets of Philadelphia

    Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. "The post office has been stolen and the mail box is locked." Prescient!

    Detroit City

    Dallas Alice

    By the Time I Get to Phoenix

    Lady Came from Baltimore

    Like crime? Vote Democratic!

    Bill Vallicella

  • Trotsky’s Faith in Man

    On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky's skull. He died the next day.  The Left eats its own.

    Read the rest.

    The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.  His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron's. The latter species of opium I call utopium. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Who Am I? Personal Identity versus Political Identity

    Preliminary note: what has been exercising me lately is the question whether there is a deep common root to the political identitarianism of the Left and the Right, and if there is, what this root is. Nihilism, perhaps?

    I wrote:

    . . . my identity as a person trumps my identity as an animal. Part of what this means is that it would be a false self-identification were I to identify myself as a member of a racial or ethnic group or subgroup.  For if a person identifies himself as a white male or a black female, then he reduces himself to what fundamentally he is not, namely, an animal, when what he fundamentally and most truly is is a person.

    My right-wing identitarian sparring partner reasonably objects:

    This is puzzling to me.  If I 'identify' myself as a man, or a human being, I don't think I'm reducing myself to anything.  I'm just stating an obvious fact about myself or, if you prefer, myself qua mammal or living organism or something of the kind.  Is there some contradiction or tension between 'I am a human being' or 'I am an animal' and 'I am a person'? 

    Later on in his comments he says that "to defend an identitarian position in politics" it is not necessary to engage with the metaphysics of personhood.  I am inclined to disagree.

    No Escaping Metaphysics

    As I see it, practical politics presupposes political philosophy which presupposes normative ethics which presupposes philosophical anthropology which is a discipline of special metaphysics. Philosophical anthropology, in turn, finds its place within general metaphysics.  Rationally informed political action requires a theory of the human good that needs to be grounded in a theory of human nature which itself needs embedding in a comprehensive metaphysics.  And if the political action is to be truly ameliorative, then the theory of human nature had better be correct. For example, the terrible scourge on humanity that Communism has proven to be flows from the Left's false understanding of human nature.

    Concessions

    But before getting in too deep, let me concede some points to my interlocutor.  I concede that if he tells me he is a Caucasian male, then there is an innocuous  sense of 'identify' according to which he has identified himself as Causasian and male, and that in so doing he needn't be 'reducing' himself to anything in any pejorative sense. He is simply giving me information about his sex and his ancestry.  He is simply pointing out a couple of his attributes.

    By the same token, he can identify himself as a citizen of this country or that, a member of this political party or that, an adherent of this religion or that, or an adherent of no religion at all.  And so on for a long list of essential and accidental attributes: military veteran? blood type? Social Security number?   Take larger and larger conjunctions of these attributes and you get closer and closer to zeroing  in on the individuating identity of a particular human animal in society, that which distinguishes him from every other human animal.

    Personalism and False Self-Identification

    But what I am getting at is something different. Not WHAT  I am objectively viewed in my animal and social features, but WHO I am as a person, as a unique conscious and self-conscious subject of experience and as a morally responsible free agent, as an I who can address a Thou and be addressed in turn by an I. (M. Buber)  I am a subject for whom there is a world and not merely an object in the physical and social worlds.

    The question concerns the 'true self,' WHO I am at the deepest level. Who am I? A mere token of a type? But that is all I would be if I were to identify myself in terms of my race.  This is one example of what I am calling a false self-identification.  A tribal black who identifies himself in his innermost ipseity as black has reduced himself to a mere token of a racial type, a mere instance of it, when being an interchangeable token cannot possibly be what makes him the unique person that he is.  After all, there are many tokens of the type, black human being. 

    Not only does he reduce himself to a mere instance of one of his attributes, he reduces himself to a mere instance of one of his animal attributes.  It is qua animal that he has a race, not qua person. But we are not mere animals; we are spiritual animals.   

    Such false self-identification is a form of spiritual self-degradation.

    And the same goes for whites who seek their true identity in their racial 'identity.' That is a false self-identification because who I am as this unique individual cannot be reduced to being a repeatable and interchangeable token of a type.  The reason, again, is that (i) there are indefinitely many tokens of the type, white human animal, but there is exactly one me, and (ii) a self-identification in terms of a bodily attribute pertains to my animality but not to my spirituality.  

    Suppose I address a black man or woman as a person. When I do that I am precisely not confronting an instance of black human animal with all the stereotypes that go with it. I am then attempting an I-Thou relation with the black man or woman and not an I-It relation with an instance of black human animal. I am showing respect for the person.

    There are many types of false self-identification and I oppose them all. On the present occasion I come out against racial self-identification. You cannot be in your innermost ipseity (selfhood) white or black, and any such self-identification is false. Now what does this have to do with identity politics?

    Connection with Identity Politics

    First of all, what is identity politics?  Logically prior question: What is politics? Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere. Human flourishing is not possible apart from social interaction and when that interaction is public, as opposed to private, we are in the political sphere. Such interaction is both cooperative and conflictual. So perhaps we can say that politics aims at maximizing cooperation and minimizing conflict within a given society for the benefit of all involved.

    Identity politics, however, is not concerned primarily with the promotion of the common human good within the public sphere but with the empowering of particular factions within it.  An oppressed group will seek power to alleviate its oppression. Think of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA in the '50s and '60s. The identity politics of that movement was understandable and probably necessary for blacks to make the progress they did.  Blacks exhorted each other to stand tall and take pride in being black.  Some of us are old enough to remember the "Black is beautiful" bumper stickers of that era.

    Before long the Civil Rights movement turned into a hustle with race-hustlers such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton leading the pack. Long story short, the instrumentally necessary identity politics of the Civil Rights movement came to displace politics in its proper sense which has to aim at comity and the common good and not at the appeasing of aggrieved parties.  No surprise, then, at the rise of white resistance to the excesses and absurdities of Affirmative Action with its reverse discrimination, minority set-asides, and race-norming.

    But tribalism  is tribalism whether black or white. Our only hope is to get beyond tribalism.  (I am not sanguine that we can get beyond it.) But when I pointed this out to my interlocutor and some of his fellow travellers some years ago in these pages,  I was shocked, SHOCKED (well, not really) to find them disagreeing with me. They apparently think that whites need their own tribalism, their own White Pride, their own consciousness-raising.

    This makes no ultimate sense to me. (It makes some proximate and pro tempore sense as a reactive gesture of self-defense.) How can you take legitimate pride in what is merely an element of your facticity (in Sartre's Being and Nothingness sense of 'facticity.')  You had to be born somewhere, to some pair of parents or other, of some race or other, of some sex, and so on.  You're stuck with that. If you need to feel pride, feel pride in what you have done with your facticity, with what you have made of yourself, with the free accomplishments of yourself as a person, as an individual.

    Common Human Good?

    I wrote, "Politics is the art of achieving the common human good in the public sphere." But can we agree on what the common human good is? Not if we are identity-political in our approach.  Can we even agree that there is such a thing as the common human good? Not if we are identity-political. 

    If who I am at the deepest level of the self is a white man, if my race is constitutive of my very innermost ipseity, then I have nothing fundamentally in common with blacks. But then conflict can be avoided only by racial segregation.

    It is worth noting that one could be a white-identitarian without being a white-supremacist.  One could hold that one's innermost identity as a person is racially constituted without holding that white identity is any better than black identity.

    I hope it is becoming clear that we cannot avoid in these discussions what my sparring partner calls "heavy-duty metaphysics." Whether you affirm or deny a common human good, you are doing metaphysics.  And if metaphysics gets in, theology is sure to follow. Justin Dean Lee in his review of Mark Lilla writes, 

    . . . any serious — that is, internally coherent — movement away from identity politics and toward a robust discourse of the common good requires that we reintroduce metaphysics into our politics. This entails granting theology a privileged place in the public square at a time when most of the left and the far right are loath to grant it any place at all.

    Nihilism as the Common Root of Left and Right Identity Politics

    Rod Dreher:

    So, to recap: Justin Dean Lee rightly says we cannot have a politics of the common good without substantive agreement on what the Good is, or how it might be known. Liberalism, in both its classical and progressivist forms, is agnostic on that question, or at most assumes things (“all men are created equal”) that cannot be sustained absent a shared commitment to a metaphysical ideal. Last week in Paris, talking about these things with Alain Finkielkraut, the philosopher said that he sees no exit for the French, because they have concluded as a society that there is no realm beyond the material. Most Americans would deny that they believe this, but that’s not the way we live, not even Christians. It is true that we Americans are not as far gone into atheism as the French are, so we still have time to recover. But to recover, you first have to recognize the problem. You first have to recognize that the way you are living as a Christian is not going to survive the prolonged encounter with liquid modernity.

    Ta-Nehisi Coates and Richard Spencer are both atheists who have found a strong source of belief in their respective races. Spencer, a Nietzschean, has said that Christianity is a religion of the weak. They have drawn the line between good and evil not down the middle of every human heart, as that great Christian prophet Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did, but between their race and the Other. There is immense power in that kind of tribalism, and it lies in large part because it denies the fallenness of one’s own people. Where in contemporary American Christianity can we find the resources to resist falling prey to the malign power of racialism, in all its versions?

    [. . .]

    Only a strong Christianity can counter this nihilistic tribal religion. But this we do not have today. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Most Remarkable Prophecy

    The Question

    Suppose there had been a prophet among the ancient Athenians who prophesied the birth among them of a most remarkable man, a man having the properties we associate with Socrates, including the property of being named 'Socrates.'  Suppose this prophet, now exceedingly old, is asked after having followed Socrates' career and having witnessed his execution: Was that the man whom you prophesied?

    Does this question make sense?  Suppose the prophet had answered, "Yes, that very man, the one who just now drank the hemlock, is the very man whose birth I prophesied long ago before he was born!"  Does this answer make sense?  

    An Assumption

    To focus the question, let us assume that there is no pre-existence of the souls of creatures.  Let us assume that Socrates, body and soul, came into existence at or near the time of his conception.  For our problem is not whether we can name something that already exists, but whether we can name something that does not yet exist.

    Thesis 

    I say that neither the question nor the answer make sense.  (Of course they both make semantic sense; my claim is that they make no metaphysical or broadly logical sense.)  What the prophet prophesied was the coming of some man or other with the properties that Socrates subsequently came to possess.  What he could not have prophesied was the very man that subsequently came to possess the properties in question.  This is equivalent to saying that there was no individual Socrates before he came into existence. Before he came into existence there was no merely possible Socrates.

    What the prophet prophesied was general, not singular:  he prophesied that a certain definite description would come to be satisfied by some man or other. Equivalently, what the prophet prophesied was that a certain conjunctive property would come in the fullness of time to be instantiated, a property among whose conjuncts are such properties as being snubnosed, being married to a shrewish woman, being a master dialectician, being  accused of being a corrupter of youth, etc.  Even if the prophet had been omniscient and had been operating with a complete description, a description such that only one person in the actual world satisfies it if anything satisfies it, the prophecy would still be general. 

    Why would the complete description, satisfied uniquely if satisfied at all, still be general?  Because of the possibility that some other individual, call him 'Schmocrates,' satisfy the description.  For such a complete description, uniquely satisfied if satisfied at all, could not capture the very haecceity and ipseity and identity of a concrete individual.

    We can call this view I am espousing anti-haecceitist:  the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual cannot antedate the individual's existence.  Opposing this view is that of the haecceitist who holds that temporally prior to the coming into existence of a concrete individual such as Socrates, the non-qualitative thisness of the individual is already part of the furniture of the universe.

    My terminology is perhaps not felicitous.  I am not denying that concrete individuals possess haecceity.  I grant that haecceity is a factor in an individual's  ontological 'assay' or analysis.  What I am denying is that the haecceity of an individual can exist apart from the individual whose haecceity it is.  From this it follows that the haecceity of an individual cannot exist before the individual exists.

    But how could the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual be thought to antedate the individual whose thisness it is?  We might try transforming the non-qualitative thisness of a concrete individual into an abstract object, a property that exists in every possible world, and thus at every time in those worlds having time.

    Consider the putative property, identity-with-Socrates.  Call it Socrateity.   Suppose our Athenian prophet has the power to 'grasp' (conceive, understand) this non-qualitative property long before it is instantiated. Suppose he can grasp it just as well as he can grasp the conjunctive property mentioned above.    Then, in prophesying the coming of Socrates, the prophet would be prophesying the coming of Socrates himself.  His prophecy would be singular, or, if you prefer, de re: it would involve Socrates himself.  

    What do I mean by "involve Socrates himself"?  Before Socrates comes to be there is no Socrates.  But there is, on the haecceitist view I reject, Socrateity.  This property 'deputizes' for Socrates at times and in possible worlds at which our man does not exist.  It cannot be instantiated without being instantiated by Socrates.  And it cannot be instantiated by anything other than Socrates in the actual world or in any possible world.  By conceiving of Socrateity before Socrates comes to be, the Athenian prophet is conceiving of Socrates before he comes to be, Socrates himself, not a mere instance of a conjunctive property or a mere satisfier of a description.  Our Athenian prophet is mentally grabbing onto the very haecceity or thisness of Socrates which is unique to him and 'incommunicable' (as a Medieval philosopher might say) to any other in the actual world or in any possible world.

    But what do I mean by "a mere instance" or a "mere satisfier"?

    Let us say that the conjunctive property of Socrates mentioned above is a qualitative essence of Socrates if it entails every qualitative or pure property of Socrates whether essential, accidental, monadic, or relational.  If Socrates has an indiscernible twin, Schmocrates, then both individuals instantiate the same qualitative essence.  It follows that, qua instances of this qualitative essence, they are indistinguishable.  This implies that, if the prophet thinks of Socrates in terms of his qualitative essence, then his prophetic thought does not reach Socrates himself, but only a mere instance of his qualitative essence.  

    My claim, then, is that one cannot conceive of an individual that has not yet come into existence.  Not even God can do it.  For until an individual comes into existence it is not a genuine individual.  Before Socrates came into existence, there was no possibility that he, that very man, come into existence.  (In general, there are no de re possibilities involving future, not-yet-existent, individuals.)  At best there was the possibility that some man or other come into existence possessing the properties that Socrates subsequently came to possess.  To conceive of some man or other is to think a general thought: it is not to think a singular thought that somehow reaches an individual in its individuality.

    To conceive of a complete description's being satisfied uniquely by some individual or other it not to conceive of a particular individual that satisfies it.  If this is right, then one cannot name an individual before it exists.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Existence, Unity, Possibility, and Actuality: Are There Merely Possible Individuals?

    Steven Nemes by e-mail:

    Here’s a question for you about existence, perhaps one you could discuss on the blog.

    In your book, you argue that existence is ontological unity. I think that’s right. But a merely possible this-such is a unity as much as an actual this-such. What then distinguishes merely possible existence from actual existence?

    To put it precisely, the existence of a contingent being is the contingent unity of its ontological constituents.  Such a being is appropriately referred to as a this-such or as a concrete individual.  I assume that existence and actuality are the same: to exist = to be actual. I also assume that existence and Being are the same: to exist = to be.  Thus I reject the quasi-Meinongian thesis forwarded by Bertrand Russell in his 1903 Principles of Mathematics (449) according to which there ARE items that do not EXIST. 

    It follows from these two assumptions that there are no individuals that are merely possible. For if there were merely possible individuals, they would have Being, but not existence.

    Objection.   "This very table that I just finished building, was, before I built it, a merely possible table.  One and the same table went from being merely possible to being actual.  No temporal individual becomes actual unless it, that very individual, was previously possible.  Now the table is actual; hence it, that very individual, had to have been previously a merely possible table. A merely possible table is a table, but one that does not exist."

    Reply. "I deny that a merely possible table is a table.  'Merely possible' here functions as an alienans adjective like 'decoy' in 'decoy duck.'  A decoy duck is not a duck, but a hunk of wood made to appear, to a duck, as a duck. A merely possible table is not a table, but the possibility that there come to exist a table that satisfies a certain description. 

    The possibility of there coming to exist a table of such-and-such a description could be understood as a set of properties, or as perhaps a big conjunctive property. Either way, the possibility would not be a possible individual.

    I deny the presupposition of your question, Steven, namely, that "a merely possible this-such is a unity as much as an actual this-such."  What you are assuming is that there are merely possible individuals. A merely possible individual is a nonexistent individual, and on the view I take in my existence book, there are no nonexistent individuals. 

    The next post — scroll up — will help you understand the subtlety of this problematic.

    Bill Vallicella

    11 responses to “Existence, Unity, Possibility, and Actuality: Are There Merely Possible Individuals?”

  • Maximilian Kolbe

    Today is the feast of Maximilian Kolbe.

    Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness.  One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible. And this even after adjusting for a certain amount of hagiographic embellishment. 

    Is there a good naturalistic explanation for Kolbe's self-sacrifice?

    Wikipedia:

    At the end of July 1941, ten prisoners disappeared from the camp, prompting SS–Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick ten men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!", Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

    According to an eyewitness, who was an assistant janitor at that time, in his prison cell, Kolbe led the prisoners in prayer. Each time the guards checked on him, he was standing or kneeling in the middle of the cell and looking calmly at those who entered. After they had been starved and deprived of water for two weeks, only Kolbe remained alive. The guards wanted the bunker emptied, so they gave Kolbe a lethal injection of carbolic acid. Kolbe is said to have raised his left arm and calmly waited for the deadly injection.[13] He died on 14 August. His remains were cremated on 15 August, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary.[20]

     

    Maximilian-camps2

    Bill Vallicella

  • Is the Left Out for Power Alone?

    The following is a sample of (some of) what I post at my Facebook page.  I swore off Facebook for July, but I have been back in the groove since 1 August doing my humble bit to beat back the forces of darkness.  They have sicced their censor bots on me, so I have to be careful how I say things lest I get de-platformed.  My obscurity affords me some cover.  Obscurity has its uses and compensations.  The value of fame, on the other hand, may be gauged by the quality of those who confer it.

    …………………….

    Tucker Carlson and many other conservatives say that leftists are out for power alone, but it is not true. I grant, of course, that leftists love power and will do anything to gain it and maintain it. But why do they want it? They want it in order to implement their agenda which they believe will be good for them and their clients. It is for the sake of the agenda — the things to be done — that leftists want power.

    With their hands on the levers of power, the Democrats can keep the borders open, empty the prisons, defund the police, confiscate firearms, do away with the filibuster, give felons the right to vote while in prison, outlaw home schooling, alter curricula to promote the 'progressive' worldview (by among other things injecting 1619 project fabrications into said curricula), infiltrate and ultimately destroy the institutions of civil society, erase history by the destruction of monuments, remove every vestige of Christinaity from the public square, pass 'hate speech' laws to squelch dissent, and so on into the abyss.

    Bill Vallicella

  • God and Our Rights

    Conservatives regularly say that our rights come from God, not from the state. It is true that they do not come from the state. But if they come from God, then their existence is as questionable as the existence of God. Now discussions with leftists are not likely to lead anywhere; but they certainly won't lead anywhere if we invoke premises leftists are sure to reject.  The  Left has always been reliably anti-religion and atheist, and so there is no chance of reaching them if we insist that rights come from God. So from a practical point of view, we should not bring up God in attempts to find common ground with leftists.  It suffices to say that our rights are natural, not conventional.  We could say that the right to life, say, is just there, inscribed in the nature of things, and leave it at that.  Why wave a red flag before a leftist bull who suspects theists of being closet theocrats? 

    Now I am not sanguine about the prospects of fruitful discussion with leftists, but we ought to make the effort since talking with is better than shooting at. Apart from our practical interests, the topic is theoretically fascinating.

    The following aporetic tetrad is a partial map of the conceptual terrain:

    1) Unalienable rights, and the duties they generate, have an absolute character incompatible with their being conferred or withheld arbitrarily by  those who happen to control the state apparatus.

    2) Rights and duties cannot have this absolute character unless their source is God.

    3) There are unalienable rights.

    4) There is no God.

    Although individually plausible, the members of this foursome are collectively inconsistent.  So something has to give. (1) is a conceptual truth and so is not up for rejection.

    Suppose you endorse (1), (2), and (3).  You would then have a valid argument for the rejection of (4) and thus for the existence of God. 

    But (2) is not self-evident. And so the argument to God is not rationally compelling. It is epistemically possible that moral absolutes 'hang in the air' with no need of support by an Infinite Mind. An atheist could validly argue from (1), (3), and (4) to the negation of (2).

    More drastically, one could validly argue that there are no unalienable rights via the acceptance of (1), (2), and (4).  Imagine a naturalist who argues that if there were unalienable rights, they would have to have the absolute character that only God could ground, but that, since there is no God, there are no unalienable rights.

    From a logical point of view, that argument is as good as the other two.

    I have reasons to not be a metaphysical naturalist, and I have a strong intuition that some rights are absolute and unalienable; I am therefore within my epistemic rights in accepting the argument to God, despite its not being rationally compelling. But then no argument for any substantive thesis in a subject like this is rationally compelling.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia

    I have only recently come to appreciate what a great song this Jackson Browne number from 1976 is. After the 'sixties faded, I gave myself an education in classical and jazz and lost touch with the rock scene. The video presents the thoughtful lyrics.   The Gary U. S. Bonds cover from 1981 is also unbelievably good.

    The Weight. Robertson sat down one day to write a song and peering into his Martin guitar read, "Martin Guitars, Nazareth, Pennslylvania." This inspired the line, "I pulled into Nazareth, feelin' about half-past dead."

    The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. Nothing hippy-trippy or psychedelic about these '60s musicians. Pure Americana. Rooted, autochthonic.

    I Shall Be Released. The synergy benefited both the Bard and the Band. They helped him move farther from the mind and closer to the earth.

    I post what I like, and I like what I post. It's a nostalgia trip, and a generational thing. There's no point in disputing taste or sensibility, or much of anything else. It's Saturday night, punch the clock, pour yourself a stiff one, stop thinking, and FEEL!

    Traveling Wilburys, End of Line, Extended Version

    Who, Won't Get Fooled Again. Lyrics! 

    Gary U. S. Bonds, From a Buick Six. Sorry, Bob, but not even you can touch this version.

    Bob Dylan, It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes  a Train to Cry.  Cutting Edge Bootleg version.

    Bob Dylan, Just Like a Woman.  This Cutting Edge take may be the best version, even with the mistakes. I'll say no more, lest I gush.

    Bob Dylan, Cold Irons Bound. The Bard never loses his touch. May he die with his boots on.

    Bob Dylan, Corrina, Corrina. And you say he can't sing in a conventional way?

    Bob Seger, Old-Time Rock and Roll

    But does it really "soothe the soul"? Is it supposed to?  For soul-soothing, I recommend the Adagio movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Adagio molto e cantabile.

    The Flying Burrito Brothers, To Ramona.  A beautiful cover of a song from Dylan's fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan.  

    YouTuber comment: "I'd hate to think where we would be without Mr. Zimmerman's songwriting. So many covers done by so many great artists." And I say that if it weren't for Zimmi the Great American Boomer Soundtrack would have a huge, gaping hole in it.

    John Fogerty and the Blue Ridge Rangers, You're the Reason

    The Springfields, Silver Threads and Golden Needles

    Dusty Springfield before she was Dusty Springfield.

    Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Roving Gambler.  'Ramblin' Charles Adnopoz' lacking the requisite resonance for a follower of Woody Guthrie, this Jewish son of a New York M.D. wisely changed his name. 

    Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails

    Patsy Cline, She's Got You

    Marianne Faithfull,  Ruby Tuesday.  Moodier than the Stones' original.  She does a great version of Dylan's Visions of Johanna. But nothing touches the original. It moves me as much as it did back in '66.  YouTuber comment: "An early morning cup of coffee, smoking a fattie, listening to this insane genius . . . does it get any better? And if so, how?"

    Tom Waits, The Ghosts of Saturday Night.  One of the best by this latter-day quasi-Kerouac.

    Marlene Dietrich, Die Fesche Lola. 'Fesche' means something like smart, snazzy.

    Ich bin die fesche Lola, der Liebling der Saison!
    Ich hab' ein Pianola zu Haus' in mein' Salon
    Ich bin die fesche Lola, mich liebt ein jeder Mann
    doch an mein Pianola, da laß ich keinen ran!

    Kinks, Lola. From the days when 'tranny' meant transmission.  

    Marlene Dietrich, Muss I Denn

    Elvis Presley, Wooden Heart 

    Lotte Lenya, September Song

    Lotte Lenya, Moon of Alabama

    Doors, Roadhouse Blues

    Bette Midler, Mambo Italiano.  Video of Sophia Loren.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Should Firearms Manufacturers be Civilly Liable for Gun Crimes?

    Joe Biden thinks so:

    Hold gun manufacturers accountable. In 2005, then-Senator Biden voted against the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, but gun manufacturers successfully lobbied Congress to secure its passage. This law protects these manufacturers from being held civilly liable for their products – a protection granted to no other industry. Biden will prioritize repealing this protection.

    The sentence I italicized is false, as you can see from the following summary of the Act. It is a willful, politically-motivated misrepresentation. The manufacturers remain civilly liable for product defects, just like other industries.  What the act prevents is solely their being held liable for "criminal or unlawful misuse of a firearm."

    Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act – (Sec. 3) Prohibits a qualified civil liability action from being brought in any state or federal court against a manufacturer or seller of a firearm, ammunition, or a component of a firearm that has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce, or against a trade association of such manufacturers or sellers, for damages, punitive damages, injunctive or declaratory relief, abatement, restitution, fines, penalties, or other relief resulting from the criminal or unlawful misuse of a firearm. Requires pending actions to be dismissed. [emphasis added.]

    The Act is reasonable and Democrat opposition to it is the opposite, as I now argue.

    Suppose I sell you my car, transferring title to you in a manner that accords with all the relevant statutes. It is a good-faith  transaction and I have no reason to suspect you of harboring any  criminal intent. But later you use the car I sold you to mow down  children on a school yard, or to violate the Mann Act, or to commit  some other crime. Would it be right to hold me  morally responsible for your wrongdoing? Of course not. No doubt, had I not sold you that particular car, that particular criminal event would not have occurred: as a philosopher might put it, the event is individuated by its constituents, one of them being the car I sold you. That very event could not have occurred without that very car.  But that does not show that I am responsible for your crime. I am no more  responsible than the owner of the gas station who sold you the fuel that you used for your spree.

    Suppose I open a cheesecake emporium, and you decide to make cheesecake your main dietary item. Am I responsible for your ensuing  health difficulties? Of course not. Being a nice guy, I will most likely warn you that a diet consisting chiefly of cheesecake is contraindicated. But in the end, the responsibility for your ill health lies with you.

    The same goes for tobacco products, cheeseburgers, and so on down the line. The responsibility for your drunk driving resides with you, not with auto manufacturers or distilleries. Is this hard to understand?  Not unless you are morally obtuse or a liberal, terms that in the end may be coextensive.

    The principle extends to gun manufacturers and retailers. They have their legal responsibilities, of course. They are sometimes the legitimate targets of product liability suits.  But once a weapon has been  legally purchased or otherwise acquired, the owner alone is responsible for any crimes he commits using it.

    But many liberals don't see it this way. What they cannot achieve through gun control  legislation, they hope to achieve through frivolous lawsuits.  The haven't had much success recently.  Good.  But the fact that they try shows how bereft of common sense and basic decency they are.

    Don't expect them to give up.  Hillary was in full-fury mode on this one.  According to the BBC, "She proposes abolishing legislation that protects gun makers and dealers from being sued by shooting victims." Biden follows in her footsteps.

    There is no wisdom on the Left.  The very fact that there is any discussion at all of what ought to be a non-issue shows how far we've sunk in this country.

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Part-Time Monk’s Solution to Suggestibility

    We are too open to social suggestions.  We uncritically imbibe dubious and outright wrong views and attitudes and valuations and habits of speech from our environment.  They don't appear wrong because they are in step with what most believe and say.  'Normal' beliefs and patterns of speech become normative for people.  This is the way of the world.  We are too suggestible.

    Thus nowadays people cannot see that lust and gluttony are deadly vices.  The weight of suggestion  is too onerous.  The counter-suggestions from a religious upbringing are no match for the relentless stuff emanating from the mass media of a sex-saturated, hedonistic society.  For spiritual health a partial withdrawal from society is advisable.  It needn't be physical: one can be in the world but not of it. 

    MonkA partial withdrawal can take the form of a holding free of the early morning hours from any contamination by media dreck.  Thus no reading of newspapers, no checking of e-mail, no electronics of any sort.  Electricity is fine: you don't have to sit in the dark or burn candles.  No talking or other socializing. Instead: prayer, meditation, spiritual reading and writing, in silence, and alone.

    So for a few pre-dawn hours each day you are a part-time monk.

     

    But society and technology are in conspiracy against you.  Have you noticed that the newer modems are not equipped with on/off switches?  A bad omen for the life of the soul and the care thereof.  I cannot abide a wi-fi signal during my sleeping and monkish hours.  So I bought an extra power strip and put it in series with the modem and the main power strip.  Wife is instructed to turn it off before she goes to bed.  And of course all computers and cell phones are off during the night and during the hours of monkishness.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Advice on Study and the Improvement of the Mind

    Reader M.L.P. inquires,

    I was wondering what habits one should acquire to study philosophy profitably. I read philosophy books but I tend to forget most of what I read. I also find it hard to come up with my own ideas.

    Roughly how many books or articles should one read in a day? Or is this the wrong way to approach the issue?

    Should one start by reading ancient philosophy or by familiarizing oneself with current philosophical debates?

    And finally, how crucial is it to study philosophy with a mentor? Is it possible to be a good philosopher by studying alone?

    A great deal could be said on this topic. Here are a few thoughts that may be helpful. Test them against your own experience. First some general points, then to your specific questions.

    1)  Make good use of the morning, which is an excellent time for such  activities  as reading, writing, study, and meditation.  But to put the morning to good use, one must arise early.  I get up at 1:30, but you needn't be so monkish.  Try arising one or two hours earlier than you presently do. That will provide you with a block of quiet time.  Fruitful mornings are of course impossible if one's evenings are spent dissipating.  You won't be able to spend the early morning thinking and trancing if you spent the night before drinking and dancing. The quality of the morning is directly affected by the quality of the previous evening.

    2)  Abstain from all mass media dreck in the early morning.  Read no newspapers.  "Read not The Times, read the eternities." (Thoreau)   No electronics. No computer use, telephony, TV, e-mail, etc.  Just as you wouldn't pollute your body with whisky and cigarettes upon arising, so too you ought not pollute your pristine morning mind with the irritant dust of useless facts, the palaver of groundless opinions, and every manner of distraction.    There is time for that stuff later in the day if you must have it.  (And it is a good idea to keep an eye on the passing scene.) The mornings should be kept free and clear for study that promises long-term profit.

    3) Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan.  Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them.  I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading.  Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a fine cigar . . . .

    4) If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad?

    The forming of the mind is the name of the game.  This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.  The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it.  Here is where blogging can be useful.  Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.

    5) You say that you forget what you read. 

    Well, there is little  point in learning something that you will forget.  The partial cure for this is to read in an active way, with pen in hand. I use pens of different colors for underlining and note-taking. Write key words on the top of the page.  Isolate and mark the key passages. Make a glossary on the book's fly leaves.  When a book arrives, I note the date of its arrival so that I an track my intellectual biography. At the end of a chapter I note the time and date of my first and subsequent readings of it.  Reconstruct the author's arguments in a notebook in your own words.  Look up reviews online, print them out, then insert them into the book.  A properly annotated book is easy to review, and of course review is essential. Review fixes the material in your mind.

    You ask how many books or articles should one read in a day.

    I'll use myself as an example. Yesterday, N. Rescher's Aporetics arrived.  I read and annotated the first chapter this morning slowly and carefully. Then I sketched a blog post in my handwritten journal that was inspired by Rescher's chapter.  Then I went back to Palle Yourgrau's Death and Nonexistence which I am working through and mulled over a few pages of that.  These activities took me from 2:00 am to 3:35. Then 45 minutes of formal meditation. Then I logged on and put up a couple or three Facebook posts.  Around 5:20 I was out the door for an hour on the mountain bike.  The main thing is to read and write every single day.

    You ask whether one should start by reading  the ancients or by studying current debates. 

    You could do either, as long as you do the other.   You need to have some issue, problem, or question that you need to get clear about.  Perhaps you want to understand knowledge in its relation to truth, belief, and justification.  Contemporary sources will give you some idea of the relevant questions. Armed with these, you can profitably read Plato's Theaetetus.

    You ask whether you need a mentor. 

    No, but it helps to find one or more intelligent individuals with whom you can interact productively.  But even this is not necessary, and in any case, these individuals may be hard to find.  To exaggerate somewhat, all real learning is via autodidacticism.

    Scholar

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Political Equivalent of Divorce?

    You've heard me say that we need to find the political equivalent of divorce if we are to reduce the animosity that threatens to destroy us as a nation. But the marital analogy limps badly. Although I don't think much of Damon Linker, he talks sense here:

    Part of me gravitates to a fantasy of divorce. Maybe both sides would be happier if we just separated and went our separate ways, like unhappy spouses who call it quits after a few-too-many wounding arguments and rounds of couples therapy.

    But of course that's delusional. A nation isn't like a marriage — certainly not companionate marriage based on individual choice. But it's not even a more traditional arranged marriage where there is a period of youthful independence before the union is announced and formalized. Unless you're an immigrant, your country is where you find ourselves at birth. It's a given — like a family in which you are born and raised before you even come to complete self-awareness. It shapes your outlook on the world in more ways than you can ever fully grasp.

    Families can break up, tear themselves asunder, but it usually isn't pretty. Neither are divorces. But at least a divorce takes places within a legal and moral frame that persists outside the marriage. Certain rules abide and apply to both parties, guiding the division of marital assets and looking out for the welfare of any children, with an impartial judge overseeing and enforcing it all. There is no such external structure when an extended family breaks apart into feuding factions.

    Linker ends on this encouraging note:

    Do we hate each other? And if we do, what are our viable options as a polity? I don't know how to answer those questions.

    Me neither.  There are options, of course, but I don't see any as particularly viable.  Perhaps a long hot civil war that spills an ocean of blood might bring leftists to their senses, but the prospect of a couple of decades of extreme civil disorder is not an appetizing one.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Democrat Extremism Has Deep Roots

    Issues and Insights:

    While the Democrats’ lurch to port looks like a recent event, it’s been decades in the making. The party has been a comfortable home to closeted authoritarians for decades. Its big government agenda is a safe harbor for socialists, statists, coercionists, and sworn enemies of liberty.

    Democrats have a history of rejecting civil society in favor of political society. They have long believed all ills, both the real and imagined, can and should be resolved by government intervention. The party has rejected freedom and individualism and adopted a collectivist mindset that needs a fortune (always someone else’s) in tax revenues to function.

    A man is known by the company he keeps and this is true of political parties. Long before anyone was wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt, Democrats were supporting some of history’s worst tyrants. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is a Sandinista devotee, as is Sanders, who made a “sympathizer” trip to the Soviet Union in 1988, and believed that Fidel Castro was just a prince of a fellow who generously kept “his” people fed, housed, and schooled.

    [. . .]

    The roots of today’s Democratic Party reach deep into the red soil of socialism and anchor the real and implied violence of extremism. The dense and twisted forest is nearly grown now, with more than three-fourths of Democrats saying they would vote for a socialist presidential candidate, according to a Gallup poll taken earlier this year. Anyone wondering why many of our big cities are under siege from rioters can quickly figure out why just by looking at that poll.

    Civil society and its institutions form the buffer zone between the individual and the State. As the Democrats lurch ever leftward, they hollow out ever more of the buffer zone with the goal of eliminating it entirely. The Obama-Biden administration’s wildly radical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule is a prime example. Fortunately, President Trump put a stop to it.  But the Left never rests in its quest to quash liberty and empower an omni-invasive State apparatus.  It is undeniable that the Democrat Party is now a hard-Left party.  This is not the party of your father or even of your older brother.   If you are still a Democrat, I ask that you make sure you understand what this party now stands for.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. Bill, One final complicating observation: The pacifist interpretation of Matt 5:38-42 has been contested in light of Lk 22: 36-38…

  2. The Kant-Swedenborg relation is more complicated than I thought. https://philarchive.org/archive/THOTRO-12

  3. Ed, Just now read the two topmost articles on your Substack. I’m a Kant scholar of sorts and I recall…

  4. Hi Ed, Thanks for dropping by my new cyber pad. I like your phrase, “chic ennui.” It supplies part of…

  5. Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was…

  6. Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…

  7. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

  9. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology

  10. It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…

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