Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Leftism is not a Religion

    Leftism is not a religion, but it is importantly like a religion.*

    How so? Religions make a total claim on the lives of their adherents, and the committed latter live accordingly. The serious Buddhist, for example, does not merely meditate for an hour in the morning; he tries to bring the mindfulness of the meditation chamber into his whole day. He essays to live the Dharma. It is the same with serious Jews, Christians and Muslims despite their different beliefs and practices.  The serious religionist sees everything from the point of view of his religion. It is not just a Friday, or a Saturday, or a Sunday thing.

    It is the same with the serious leftist: his commitment is total to his totalitarian scheme. He politicizes everything — even the native flora of California — because, in his preternatural wrongheadedness, he thinks everything is political. Everything must be held hostage to the glorious Revolution at the secular, or immanent, eschaton to be brought about by the 'woke' who know and hate the true Devil whose name is 'Racism.'

    But of course the political is but a part of reality and not the whole of it. The leftist is an idolater of a piece of finitude, the political sphere within the realm of Finite Being. But if God exists, then the Absolute exists and to live with total devotion to the Absolute cannot be idolatry. Matthew 22:36-40 New International Version (NIV):

    36 “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

    37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[a] 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

    It should be easily understood, therefore, why the Left is violently and viciously opposed to religion, even to the point of working in cahoots with Islam to destroy Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity. The Left will brook no competition in the totalitarian sweepstakes.

    _________________

    *It is a logical error to suppose that if X is like Y, then X is a species of Y.  Dennis Prager makes this mistake. But then he is merely a talk jock, even if one of the very best. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Out of Self-Respect

    Be self-critical out of self-respect, not self-loathing.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Out-Foxing the Feculent Purveyors of Race Madness and Leftist Lunacy

    Fox News is destroying the opposition. Hats off to Tucker Carlson for his hard-hitting commentary and civil courage in the teeth of vicious opposition from Democrat-leftist scum. And note the demographic in which Carlson dominates. This is a good sign indeed.  True, the elderly, who tend to list in a conservative direction,  are dying off.  But their passing will not be the passing of conservatism and common sense: young 'uns will step up. And as they age they will grow in wisdom and become increasingly angry at how they have been cheated.

    As was the case in total viewership, Fox News led by Carlson, dwarfed the competition in the 25-54 demo.

    1. Tucker Carlson Tonight (791,000), Fox News
    2. Hannity (754,000), Fox News
    3. Special Report (668,00), Fox News
    4. The Five (655,000), Fox News
    5. The Ingraham Angle (655,000), Fox News
    6. The Story (603,000), Fox News
    7. Cuomo Prime Time (587,000), CNN
    8. Anderson Cooper 360 (568,000), CNN
    9. CNN Tonight (524,000), CNN
    10. Erin Burnett OutFront (502,00), CNN
    Bill Vallicella

  • A Philosopher’s Sign of the Cross

    In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.*

    "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." 

    In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.

    In the Principle was the Exemplary Expression, and the Exemplary Expression was with the Principle, and the Exemplary Expression was the Principle.

    …………………….

    *That unity-in-difference, and difference-in-unity, is a dialectical  difference.  It is an affront to the discursive intellect with its abrupt and frozen diremptions, but approximates the fluidity of life.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Bookman and the Rifleman

    You know things are getting bad when a bookman must also be a rifleman if he intends to keep his private library safe from the depredations of leftist thugs who are out to 'de-colonize' it. You cannot reach these evil-doers with arguments, for it is not the plane of reason that they inhabit; there are, however, other ways to each them. The gentle caress of sweet reason must sometimes give way to the hard fist of unreason.

    This raises an important moral question. Are there cultural artifacts so precious that violence against humans in their defense is justified?  I should think so. For those out to 'cancel' high culture have no qualms about 'cancelling,' i.e., murdering its creators.  That is one consideration. But also: haven't the barbarians forfeited their (normative) humanity to such an extent that they no longer deserve moral consideration? Do they form a moral community with us at all?

    I am just asking. Or is inquiry now verboten?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Chess is Racist!

    Chess is racist!Not only is chess racist, it is also sexist and patriarchal. The fact that the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board proves nothing to the contrary. The powers allowed to the Queen are in truth nothing more than so many sops thrown to the feminists to keep them quiet.

    The sexism and patriarchalism of chess is proven by the dignity afforded to the King. 

    Wherein resides the dignity of the King?  At every time in every possible game, the King is on the board. He cannot be captured: he never leaves the board while the game is on.  He may be checked and checkmated; he is never captured. His royal consort, however, must submit to sacrifice, and is sacrificed gladly in the most beautiful of games. She has no dignity unto herself; she is but a means, nothing more than an overgrown pawn, and in some cases an ambitious upstart who has clawed her way to the eighth rank with the determination of a Hillary. She must die, when called upon, for the glory of His Majesty.

    Another proof that chess is racist and oppressive and ought to be banned is that blacks are woefully under-represented among its players. This evil can have only one explanation: racist suppression of black players. For everyone knows that blacks as a group are the equals of whites as a group in respect of intelligence, interest in chess, and the sorts of virtues needed to play the undemocratic and reactionary 'Royal Game.' Among these are the ability to study hard, defer gratification, and keep calm in trying situations.

    For these and many other reasons, we must DEMAND that chess be banned.

    We must manifest solidarity with our oppressed Taliban brothers who have maintained, truly, that chess is an evil game of chance.

    It is therefore most heartening to read that chess has been banned in some places in America. May this trend continue as we march forward, ever stronger, together to the land of social justice where there are no winners and no losers. 

    RELATED: 'Cancel culture' out to cancel chess!

    Yet another proof that there is nothing so stupid and destructive that a 'liberal' won't support it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Can the Humanities be Saved?

    Excerpts from, and commentary on, John Gray, Why the Humanities Can't be Saved.  HT: Karl White.

    It is hard to see why any sensible person would enroll in a humanities degree at the present time. A common argument used to be that the humanities taught students how to think. [. . .]

    This is not an argument that can be made today. “Critical thinking” has become a cluster of progressive dogmas, which are handed down as if they were self-evident truths. Students learn an intra-academic argot – intersectionality, hetero-normativity and the like — that has zero utility in the world in which they will go on to live.

    They also learn that disagreement in ethics and politics is illegitimate. Anyone who departs from the prevailing progressive consensus is not just mistaken but malevolent. When enforced in universities, this is a prescription for censorship and conformism. What is being inculcated is not freedom of mind, but freedom from thought. Losing the ability to think while attending a university may be considered a misfortune. Incurring fifty or sixty thousand pounds of debt in order to do so looks like carelessness.

    It looks more like stupidity.

    The decline of the humanities is one of the defining facts of the age. Yet there has not been a great deal of serious discussion of its causes. In the Eighties and Nineties, an influential critique argued that universities had been co-opted by “tenured radicals”—the title of a provocative book published by the American art critic Roger Kimball in 1990.

    As Kimball saw it, an academic nomenklatura controlled sectors of higher education and used its position to attack the values of the societies that funded it. Any version of a western canon was discredited, and its origins in classical philosophy and Jewish and Christian religion disparaged.

    There is some truth in this critique. Though they remain ineffably redolent of the bourgeoisie at their most sanctimonious and self-deceiving, academic radicals define themselves by their opposition to the bourgeois civilisation that produced and now supports them. Kimball’s critique also identifies a key feature of tenured radicalism: it is self-reproducing. Through their powers of patronage, the nomenklatura decide the prospects of new entrants, and exclude anyone who deviates from the party line. No young scholar who fails to genuflect to it has any prospect of a future in academic life.

    So far, so good.

    What this analysis fails to explain is the appeal of the ideology this class has adopted. Marx may be worth re-reading in a time when capitalism is entering another of its recurrent crises. But how could a turgid mishmash of Heidegger, Derrida and Lacan have gained such a stranglehold on institutions of higher learning?

    The metamorphosis in liberalism that has occurred over the past generation has played a role. From being a philosophy of tolerance aiming at peaceful coexistence among divergent world-views, it has become a persecutory orthodoxy that tolerates no view of the world other than its own. If the contemporary academy is hostile to liberal values as they used to be understood, one reason is the rise of a new liberalism that dismisses these values as phony and repressive. But this only pushes the question one step back. Why has illiberal liberalism become so popular?

    Gray notes correctly that "persecutory orthodoxy" has replaced the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance and then asks a very important question. Why has this illiberal liberalism taken hold?   His answer follows.

    Part of the answer may be found in a short, strange and inexhaustibly interesting volume that was published nearly a century and a half ago. The chief subject of Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy(1872), is the nature of Greek tragedy, which he interpreted as an art-form that overcame the lack of meaning in human life by reframing it as an aesthetic spectacle.

    The most celebrated aspect of Nietzsche’s interpretation is his claim that Greek drama turns on an interaction between an Apollonian striving after reason and order, and a Dionysian yearning for chaos and frenzy. But the most important section of the book, to my mind, comes when he applies his account of Greek tragedy to the secular faith of modern times, which he calls “Socratism” — the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth.

    “Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist,” Nietzsche writes, “who in his faith in the explicability of things, attributes the power of a panacea to knowledge and science, and sees error as the embodiment of evil.” [. . .]

    The end-result of Socratism for the West is “a resolute process of secularization, a break with the unconscious metaphysics of its previous existence”. In turn, the triumph of Socratism leads to a violent rebirth of mythic thinking, inspiring the frenzied totalitarian movements that Nietzsche saw coming and which, ironically, he was blamed for inspiring.

    Writing when Europe’s high bourgeois civilisation seemed unshakably secure, Nietzsche foresaw the present crisis of the humanities. Deconstruction is Socratism in an extravagant form, an all-out effort to subvert the myths and metaphysics that underpinned western civilisation — not least Socrates’s own faith in reason. [. . .]

    Like Plato, Socrates was the mouthpiece of a mystical faith. It was this—not any process of ratiocination—that allowed him to assert that the true and the good were one and the same. The ideology of deconstruction aims to demystify this Socratic faith, along with everything else. As Nietzsche understood, once Socratism knocks away its metaphysical foundations it becomes a type of nihilism.

    Gray is asking an important question. How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? This philosophy includes belief in free speech, open inquiry, and acceptance of dissent, all underpinned by the belief that at least partial insight into the truth is possible by dialectical means, that is, by dialog, discussion, and friendly competition in a 'free marketplace of ideas.'  On classical liberalism, dissent is not hate, as it for the persecutorily orthodox, but a goad to inquiry. If you disagree with me, I don't hate you for it; I try to see what I can learn from you. I take your disagreement as a reason to examine my beliefs more carefully.  I assume that there is a truth beyond both of us.

    The assumption, of course, is that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and that it is possible to know something about it as it is in itself.  Logos can and must supplant mythos as the guide to truth and to life.  There is an impersonal truth, a truth that is not perspectival and merely expressive of the interests and the will to power of individuals and tribes, but is instead objective and absolute.  And again, this truth is assumed to be knowable, to some extent at least.

    Gray, leaning on Nietzsche, is in effect telling us that these assumptions about intrinsic intelligibility, truth, and knowability are part of a "mystical faith," Socratism, according to which "the belief that the world becomes properly intelligible only when the human mind has rid itself of myth." This faith in reason, in the value of critical examination, and in its efficacy at getting at the truth, then gets turned upon the very project of rational inquiry.  The upshot is that the Enlightenment project, which begins with Socrates, undermines itself.  Skepticism and nihilism result.  Faith in reason wanes when reason cannot secure life-guiding results acceptable to all.

    The critical assault on the dogmatism of tribal traditions and myths having failed, new dogmatisms arise:  people need to have life-guiding beliefs.   Only the rare Pyrrhonian skeptic can live adoxastos, and even for him that is arguably only a rarely attained ideal. The vast majority cannot live belieflessly. Thus arise dogmatisms that persecute other dogmatisms. There is, for example, the dogmatism of the hate-America leftist with his slanderous talk of systemic racism.

    The question again, is: How did "persecutory orthodoxy" come to replace the classically liberal philosophy of tolerance? It is not clear to me what Gray's answer is.  He may be telling us that the "mystical faith" in reason is as groundless and mythical as any other myth, and that once this was appreciated suspected late in the history of the West by Nietzsche, it was just a matter of time before that the "mystical faith" was de-mystified and a sort of perspectivism arose that at once privileges its own tribal perspective while denying that there is any absolute 'perspective' (e.g. a God's eye point of view or that of an ideal spectator hovering above the flux and shove of history).

    This privileging of a mere perspective seems definatory of the contemporary culturally Marxist Left.  It is at once both relativistic and dogmatic. It denies that there is objective truth by holding that truth is relative to tribal interests while at the same time dogmatically asserting those interests as if they were absolutely valid.

    What is unclear to me is whether or not Gray agrees with Nietzsche that there are no facts, only interpretations; no truth, only power; that Being has no intelligible bottom, that, in the end, Die Welt is der Wille zur Macht und nichts anders! (From the eponymous and posthumous book.)  If such a view is accepted, then there is no saving the humanities.

    If Nietzsche’s diagnosis is even half-way sound, some awkward conclusions follow for the future of the humanities. Many lament the collapse of standards of truth and evidence in higher education. But what is their remedy? To restore rationality, no doubt. It seems not to have occurred to them that this may not be possible. For the most part, those who lament the condition of the humanities are evangelists for the Socratism that has led the humanities to where they are now.

    But how does Gray know that there is an inevitable slide from "Socratism" to "persecutory orthodoxy"?  That the former must lead to the latter? It could be that the faith in reason is a true faith and nothing 'mythical' or 'mystical,' and that the loss of that faith was a grave mistake sired by decadence. Or better: Socratism was never a mere faith but a rational insight into the importance of reason and its power to lead us toward truth. Our falling away from that insight would then condemn us, not reason.

    The claim that the Enlightenment Project undermines itself is a mere claim from one perspective among others. Those who make the claim privilege their perspective for no good reason: that a belief enhances one's power over others is no good reason for believing it to be true.  Those who reject that perspective have been given no good reason to accept it. The defenders of "Socratism" are entitled to stand their ground and assert: You Nietzscheans are wrong, and indeed non-perspectivally wrong.

    For "Socratism" to undermine itself, it would have to be non-perspectivally true that it bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.  That is something a sort of inverted Hegelian could maintain, but not a Nietzschean.

    But suppose now that I assert that I have rational insight into the objective, non-perspectival, truth that the world is intrinsically intelligible, and knowable to some extent at least, and that what I know is true non-perspectivally  — what stops that claim from being a dogmatic assertion? I cannot prove it. I can of course presuppose it. My opponent, however, can presupposes the opposite. The specter of groundless and ungroundability arises.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Euthanizing Liberty

    Chad McIntosh sees an upside in the recent closures of philosophy programs.  I agree with him.

    In conclusion, I now see the closure of philosophy departments, along with others in the humanities, as a good thing, for three reasons. First, institutions of higher education have already devolved to the point that the humanities are a mere vestigial organ. Their removal helps clarify the image of these institutions as something other than true universities. Second, removing the humanities will help slow the spread of the insidious ideology destroying society that’s incubated there. Finally, it’s plausible that the future of the humanities is better off in the hands of independent lovers of wisdom. So, to all the institutional bureaucrats just thinking about the bottom dollar: cut the humanities! Slash, chop, dice, hack them into nothing. Leave thinking about the bigger picture to those who know what a real university is.

    Since the spirit of true philosophy has fled the leftist seminaries, a New Monasticism is needed to preserve and transmit high culture:

    I will end on a (slightly) more hopeful note. In his 2017 book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher says orthodox Christians should think of themselves as a people in exile, and that their best chance of preserving their faith and traditions is to form quasi-monastic communities within this increasingly hostile post-Christian culture. Those of us who still believe in the university, classically understood, would do well to consider adopting a similar strategy. Since we can no longer depend on modern institutions of higher education as places where the great classics of Western thought and tradition can be faithfully taught, learned, and engaged, we will have to do those things on our own. Thankfully, we are not in wholly untrodden territory. Homeschooling parents have been blazing these trails for a long time. As for aspiring academics, William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, is a model. True, few people have the means to support themselves as an independent scholar. But those who find a way will be precisely those seek knowledge for its own sake. The independent scholar will not have to continually debase himself by justifying his own field of study to some institutional bureaucrat or even to his colleagues. Furthermore, being unburdened by the duties of managing classes of disinterested students and time-consuming administrative tasks, he is in a position to do his best work.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Academic Job Market in the ‘Sixties

    Robert Paul Wolff tells it like it was:

    . . . I reflect on the ease and endless rewards of my career, moving from comfortable position to comfortable position, and compare it with the terrible struggles of young academics trying to gain some sort of security and time for their own scholarship in an increasingly hostile job market.  The 'sixties, when my career was being launched, was a time of explosive growth of higher education in America.  Spurred by the G. I. Bill and the post-war economic boom, and fed by an endless stream of young men avoiding the Viet Nam draft, colleges and universities virtually metastasized.  State universities, which had existed ever since the Land Grant Acts of the 1860's, suddenly sprouted satellite campuses.  State colleges plumped themselves up into universities, and Community Colleges became State Colleges.  [I will add that junior colleges were renamed 'community colleges.'] There were so many new teaching positions to be filled that in the sixties and seventies graduate students were being offered tenure track positions before they had become ABD [all but doctorate].

    BV: I'm  a generation younger than Professor Wolff.  By the time I began applying for jobs at the end of the '70s things had become grim and the gravy days of the '60s were a thing of the past.  But I lucked out and got a tenure track job in '78 right out of graduate  school at the University of Dayton.  Lucky me, I had no other offer.  I later learned that in the '60s there were four philosophy hires in one year at U.D., some of them sight unseen: no interview.  One of these gentlemen couldn't even speak English!  And of course the quality of the people hired was relatively low.

    It is also worth pointing out that the '60s and early '70s were also a time when what William James in 1903 called the "Ph.D Octopus"  acquired many more tentacled arms.  New graduate programs started up and new philosophy journals as well.  Another Harvard man, Willard van Orman Quine, cast a jaundiced eye on the proliferation of journals in his delightful "Paradoxes of Plenty" in Theories and Things (Harvard UP, 1981):

    Certainly, then, new journals were needed: they were needed by authors of articles too poor to be accepted by existing journals.  The journals that were thus called into existence met the need to a degree, but they in turn preserved, curiously, certain minimal standards; and so a need was felt for further journals still, to help to accommodate the double rejects.  The series invites extrapolation and has had it. (196)

    At the same time, the Cold War and the Sputnik scare triggered a flood of federal money into universities. Most of it, of course, funded defense-related research or studies of parts of the world that America considered inimical to its interests [Russian Research Institutes, East Asia Programs, language programs of all sorts], but some of the money slopped over into the Humanities, and even into libraries and university presses.  For a time, commercial publishers found that they could not lose money on an academic book, since enough copies would be sold to newly flush university libraries to enable them to break even.  Those were the days when a philosopher willing to sell his soul (and who among us was not?) could get a contract on an outline, a Preface, or just an idea and a title.  The professor introducing me at one speech I gave said, "Professor Wolff joined the Book of the Month Club, but he didn't realize he was supposed to read a book a month.  He thought he was supposed to publish a book a month."  Well, we all thought we were brilliant, of course.

    Then the bubble burst.  First the good jobs disappeared.  Then even jobs we would never have deigned to notice started drying up.  Universities adopted the corporate model, and like good, sensible business leaders, started cutting salaries, destroying job security, and reducing decent, hard-working academics to the status of itinerant peddlers.  Today, two-thirds of the people teaching in higher education are contract employees without good benefits or an assured future.  Scientists do pretty well, thanks to federal support for research, but the Humanities and non-defense related Social Sciences languish.  The arts are going the way of high school bands and poetry societies.

    The truth is that I fell off the cart onto a nice big dung heap, and waxed fat and happy, as any self-respecting cockroach would.  My career happened to fit neatly into the half century that will, in future generations, be looked back on as the Golden Age of the American University.  There is precious little I can do for those unfortunate enough to come after me.  But at least, I can assure them that their bad luck is not a judgment on the quality of their work.  And, of course, I can write increasingly lavish letters of recommendation in a desperate attempt to launch them into the few remaining decent teaching jobs.  I would have liked to do better by them.  They deserve it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Some Responses to Tim Mosteller re: Existence

    The following is from a work in progress by Tim Mosteller, posted with his permission.  I thank him for his critical engagement with my work. Here are some responses.  My corrections in red; my comments in blue.

    (more…)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Politically Incorrect Tunes

    No day without political incorrectness! And no night either.

    But I suppose I should issue a TRIGGER WARNING to the 'safe space' girly-girls and pajama boys.  

    Do not click on any of these links!  I am not responsible  for your psychic meltdown.

    Ray Stevens, Ahab the Arab.  Here is the original from 1962. 

    In the lyrics there are references to two hits from the same era, Chubby Checker's The Twist (1960) and Lonnie Donegan's British skiffle number  Does Your Chewing Gum Lose its Flavor?  On second thought, the reference is to Checker's Let's Twist Again Like We Did Last Summer (1960).

    Larry Verne, Mr. Custer (1960). "What am I doin' here?"

    And now a trio of feminist anthems.

    Marcie Blaine, Bobby's Girl.  "And if I was Bobby's girl, what a faithful, thankful girl I'd be." 

    Carol Deene, Johnny Get Angry.   Joanie Sommers did it first.  "I want a cave man!"  Nice kazoo work.  k. d. lang's parody. 

    Little Peggy March, I Will Follow Him.  "From now until forever."

    Meanwhile the guys were bragging of having a girl in every port of call.  Dion, The Wanderer (1961). Ricky Nelson, Travelin' Man. (1961)

    Addendum:  I forgot to link to two Ray Stevens numbers that are sure to rankle the sorry sensibilities of  our liberal pals: Come to the USA, God Save Arizona.  If you are a liberal shithead do not click on these links!  But if  if you have any sense you will enjoy them.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Twilight Zone from A to Z

    A NYRB review of a book I will have to purchase. In fact, after I post this, I will head to Amazon.com to look it up. Your humble correspondent is a Twilight Zone aficionado from way back. The original series ran from 1959-1964. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • On J. P. Moreland’s Theory of Existence

    A re-post from February of 2016 with corrections and addenda.

     

    Moreland J. P.What follows is largely a summary and restatement of points I make in "The Moreland-Willard-Lotze Thesis on Being," Philosophia Christi, vol. 6, no. 1, 2004, pp. 27-58.  It is a 'popular' or 'bloggity-blog' version of a part of that lengthy technical article.  First I summarize my agreements with J. P. Moreland.   Then I explain and raise two objections to his theory.  The Moreland text I have under my logical microscope is pp. 134-139 of his 2001 Universals (McGill-Queen's University Press). 

     

    Common Ground with Moreland on Existence

    We agree on the following five points (which is not to say that Moreland will agree with every detail of my explanation of these five points):

    1) Existence is attributable to individuals.  The cat that just jumped into my lap exists.  This very cat, Manny, exists.  Existence belongs to it and is meaningfully attributable to it.  Pace Frege and Russell, 'Manny exists' is a meaningful sentence, and it is meaningful as it stands, as predicating existence of an individual.  It is nothing like 'Manny is numerous.' To argue that since cats are numerous, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny is numerous is to commit the fallacy of division.  Russell held that the same fallacy is committed by someone who thinks that since cats exist, and Manny is a cat, that therefore Manny exists.  But Russell was mistaken: there is no fallacy of division; there is an equivocation on 'exists.'  It has a general or second-level use and a singular or first-level  use.

    There are admissible first-level uses of '. . .exist(s).'  It is not the case that only second-level uses are admissible. And it is only because Manny, or some other individual cat, exists that the concept cat is instantiated.  The existence of an individual cannot be reduced to the being-instantiated of a property or concept.  If you like, you can say that the existence of a concept is its being instantiated.  We sometimes speak like that.  A typical utterance of 'Beauty exists,' say, is not intended to convey that Beauty itself exists, but is intended to convey that Beauty is exemplified, that there are beautiful things.  But then one is speaking of general existence, not of singular existence. 

    Clearly, general existence presupposes singular existence in the following sense:  if a first-level concept or property is instantiated, then it is instantiated by an individual, and this individual must exist in order to stand in the instantiation nexus to a concept or property.  From here on out, by 'existence' I mean 'singular existence.'  There is really no need for 'general existence' inasmuch as we can speak of instantiation or of someness, as when we say that cats exist if and only something is a cat. The fundamental error of what Peter van Inwagen calls the 'thin theory' of existence is to imagine that existence can be reduced to the purely logical notion of someness.  That would be to suppose, falsely, that singular existence can be dispensed with in favor of general existence.  Existence is not a merely logical topic ; existence is a metaphysical topic.

    2) Existence cannot be an ordinary property of individuals.  While existence is attributable to individuals, it is no ordinary property of them, and if one were to define properties as instantiable entities,  it is no property at all.   There are several reasons for this, but I will mention only one:  you cannot add to a thing's description by saying of it that it exists. Nothing is added to the description of a tomato if one adds 'exists' to its descriptors: 'red,' round,' ripe,' etc.   As Kant famously observed, "Being is not a real predicate," i.e., being or existence adds nothing to the realitas or whatness of a thing. Contrary to popular scholarly opinion, Kant did not anticipate the Frege-Russell theory.  He does not deny that 'exist(s)' is an admissible first-level predicate.  (See my "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak, eds. Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, pp. 45-75, esp. 48-50.)

    3) Existence is not a classificatory concept or property.  The reason is simple: there is no logically prior domain of items classifiable as either existent or nonexistent.  Pace Meinong, everything exists.  There are no nonexistent items.  On Meinong's view, some items actually have properties despite having no Being at all.

    4) Existence makes a real difference to a thing that exists.  In one sense existence adds nothing to a thing.  It adds nothing quidditative.  In another sense it adds everything:  if a thing does not exist, it is nothing at all! To be or not to be — not just a question, but the most 'abysmal' difference conceivable.    In this connection, Moreland rightly speaks of a "real difference between existence and non-existence." (137)

    5) Existence itself exists.  This is not the trivial claim that existing things exist.  It is the momentous claim that that in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists.  It is a logical consequence of (4) in conjunction with (3). As Moreland puts it, "[i]f existence itself does not exist, then nothing else could exist in virtue of having existence." (135)

    The above five points are criteria of adequacy for a theory of existence: any adequate theory must include or entail each of these points.   Most philosophers nowadays will not agree, but  I think Moreland will.  So he and I stand on common ground.  I should think that the only fruitful disputes are those that play out over a large chunk of common ground. 

    But these criteria of adequacy also pose a problem:  How can existence belong to individuals without being a property of them?  Existence belongs to individuals as it would not belong to them if it were a property of properties or concepts; but it is not a property of individuals.  How can we uphold both of these insights?

    Moreland's Theory

    Moreland's theory gets off to a good start:  "existence is not a property which belongs, but is the belonging of a property." (137)  This insight nicely accommodates points (1) and (2) above:  existence is attributable to individuals without being an ordinary property of them.  Indeed, it is not a property at all. I infer from this that existence is not the property of having properties. It is rather the mutual belongingness of a thing and its properties.  Moreland continues:

    Existence is the entering into the exemplification nexus . . . . In the case of Tony the tiger, the fact [that] the property of being a tiger belongs to something and that something has this property belonging to it is what confers existence. (137)

    I take this to mean that existence is the mutual belonging together of individual and property.   It is 'between' a thing and its properties as that which unifies them, thereby tying them into a concrete fact or state of affairs.  The existence of Tony is not one of his properties; nor is the existence of Tony identical to  Tony.   And of course the existence of Tony is not the being-exemplified of some such haecceity property as identity-with-Tony.  Rather, the existence of Tony, of that very individual, is his exemplifying of his properties. The existence of a (thick) individual in general is then the exemplification relation itself insofar as this relation actually relates (thin) individual and properties.  Existence is not a first-level property, or a second-level property, but a very special relation, the exemplification relation.

    Moreland implies as much.  In answer to the question how existence itself exists, he explains that "The belonging-to (exemplification, predication) relation is itself exemplified . . ." (137)  Thus the asymmetrical exemplification relation x exemplifies P is exemplified by Tony and the property of being a tiger (in that order). Existence itself exists because existence itself is the universal exemplification relation which is itself exemplified.  It exists in that it is exemplified by a and F-ness, a and G-ness, a and H-ness, b and F-ness, b and G-ness, b and H-ness, and so on.  An individual existent exists in that its ontological constituents (thin particular and properties) exemplify the dyadic exemplification relation which is existence itself.

    The basic idea is this.  The existence of a thick particular such as Tony, that is, a particular taken together with all its monadic properties, is the unity of its ontological constituents.  (This is not just any old kind of unity, of course, but a type of unity that ties items that are not facts into a fact.)  This unity is brought about by the dyadic exemplification relation within the thick particular.   The terms of this relation are the thin particular on the one hand and the properties on the other. 

    Moreland's theory accommodates all five of the desiderata listed above which in my book is a strong point in its favor.

    A Bradleyan Difficulty

    A sentence such as 'Al is fat' is not a list of its constituent words.  The sentence is either true or false, but neither the corresponding list, nor any item on the list, is either true or false.  So there is something more to a declarative sentence than its constituent words.  Something very similar holds for the fact that makes the sentence true, if it is true.  I mean the extralinguistic fact of Al's being fat.  The primary constituents of this fact, Al and fatness, can exist without the fact existing. The fact, therefore, cannot be identified with its primary constituents, taken either singly, or collectively.    A fact is more than its primary constituents.  But how are we to account for this 'more'? 

    On Moreland's theory, as I understand it, this problem is solved by adding a secondary constituent, the exemplification relation, call it EX, whose task is to connect the primary constituents.  This relation ties the primary constituents into a fact.  It is what makes a fact more than its primary constituents.  Unfortunately, this proposal leads to Bradley's Regress. For if Al + fatness do not add up to the fact of Al's being fat, then Al + fatness + EX won't either.  If Al and fatness can exist without forming the fact of Al's being fat, then Al and fatness and EX can all exist without forming the fact in question.  How can adding a constituent to the primary constituents bring about the fact-constituting unity of all constituents?  EX has not only to connect a and F-ness, but also to connect itself to a and to F-ness.  How can it do the latter?  The answer to this, presumably, will be that EX is a relation and the business of a relation is to relate. EX, relating itself to a and to F-ness, relates them to each other.  EX is an active ingredient in the fact, not an inert ingredient.  It is a relating relation, and not just one more constituent that needs relating to the others by something distinct from itself.  For this reason, Bradley's regress can't get started.  This is a stock response one can find in Brand Blanshard and others, but it is not a good one.

    The problem is that EX can exist without relating the relata that it happens to relate in a given case.  This is because EX is a universal.  If it were a relation-instance as on D. W. Mertz's theory, then it would be a particular, an unrepeatable, and could not exist apart from the very items it relates.   Bradley's regress could not then arise.  But if EX is a universal, then it can exist without relating any specific relata that it does relate, even though, as an immanent universal, it must relate some relata or other.  This implies that a relation's relating what it relates is contingent to its being the relation it is.  For example, x loves y contingently relates Al and Barbara, which implies that the relation is distinct from its relating.  The same goes for EX: it is distinct from its relating.  It is more than just a constituent of any fact into which it enters; it is a constituent that does something to the other constituents, and in so doing does something to itself, namely, connect itself to the other constituents.  Relating relations are active ingredients in facts, not inert ingredients.  Or we could say that a relating relation is ontologically participial in addition to its being ontologically substantival.  And since the relating is contingent in any given case, the relating in any given case requires a ground.  What could this ground be? 

    My claim is that it cannot be any relation, including the relation, Exemplification.  No relation, by itself, is ontologically participial. More generally, no constituent of a fact can serve as ontological ground of the unity of a fact's constituents.  For any such putatively unifying constituent will either need a further really unifying constituent to connect it to what it connects, in which case Bradley's regress is up and running, or the unifying constituent will have to be ascribed a 'magical' power, a power no abstract object could possess, namely, the power to unify itself with what it unifies.  Such an item would be a self-grounding ground: a ground of unity that grounds its unity with that which it unifies.  The synthetic unity at the heart of each contingent fact needs to be grounded in an act of synthesis that cannot be brought about by any constituent of a fact, or by the fact itself. 

    My first objection to Moreland's theory may be put as follows.  The existence of a thick particular (which we are assaying as a concrete fact along the lines of Gustav Bergmann and David Armstrong) cannot be the fact's constituents' standing in the exemplification relation.  And existence itself, existence in its difference from existents, cannot be identified with the exemplification relation.

    Can Existence Exist Without Being Uniquely Self-Existent?

    I agree with Moreland that existence itself exists.  One reason was supplied by Reinhardt Grossmann: "If existence did not exist, then nothing would exist." (Categorial Structure of the World, 405) But I have trouble with the notion that existence itself is the exemplification relation.  Existence as that which is common to all that exists, and as that in virtue of which everything exists cannot be just one more thing that exists.  Existence cannot be a member of an extant category that admits of multiple membership, such as the category of relations.  For reasons like these such penetrating minds as Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden, and Panayot Butchvarov have denied that existence itself exists. 

    In my 2002 existence book I proposed a synthesis of these competing theses:  Existence exists as a paradigm existent, one whose mode of existence is radically different from the mode of existence of the beings ontologically dependent on it.  From this point of view, Moreland has a genuine insight, but he has not taken it far enough: he stops short at the dubious view that existence is the relation of exemplification.  But if you drive all the way down the road with me you end up at Divine Simplicity, which Moreland has  good reasons for rejecting.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Owl of Minerva and the Consolations of Philosophy

    It appears that a tipping point has been reached in America's decline. Our descent into twilight and beyond is probably now irreversible.  Collective race madness blankets the land, the dogs of destruction have been set loose, and the authorities have abdicated.

    Should any of this trouble the philosopher?

    Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes to us from Plato's Republic (486a).  The rise and fall of great nations is just more grist for the philosopher's mill.  His true homeland is nothing so paltry as a particular nation, even one as exceptional as the USA, and his fate as a truth-seeker cannot be tied to its fate.  Like the heavenly Jerusalem, the heavenly Athens is not bound to a geographical location.

    National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however, it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

    When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

    Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, wisdom  arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

    When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

    Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
    Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

    Grey, dear friend, is all theory
    And green the golden tree of life.

    Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey — no longer green and full of life.  And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane.   The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood.  Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

    In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight.  What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.

    Some of us, those of the tribe of Plato, not that of Hegel, look beyond time's horizon to the topos ouranos where the heavenly Jerusalem and the heavenly Athens are one. We see this world as a vanishing quantity whose very nature is to vanish as all things vain must vanish.

    The consolations of philosophy are many.

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Country Not Salvageable

    As a philosophic emollient one may reflect that all empires and civilizations must end, and ours is. America will remain as a place, a military bastion, a large if declining economic force. It will never again be, even by the low standards of humanity in such things, a relatively free and vigorous society. The world will not again credit its charades of moral leadership. The rot, the tens of thousands of derelict people living on the sidewalks, the looting and fire setting, the censorship, are now visible to the entire earth. Oh well. It was a good thing while it lasted.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  10. 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

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