Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Third Political Parties

    Third parties are discussion societies in political drag. Few are the exceptions, and they prove the rule. But feel free to join one, and talk, talk, talk. Just be sure that when it comes time to vote, you vote for electable candidates. Otherwise you throw away your vote. You say your vote is a protest? Few will know, and none will care. Politics is a practical game, not a futile exercise in virtue-signaling.  

    Bill Vallicella

  • Knocking and Waiting

    You can knock, knock, knock on heaven's door, or you can wait for God like Simone Weil.  But if man is on his own, to allude to a title by Ernst Bloch, then knocking and waiting are futile gestures.

    Bill Vallicella

  • This Morning’s Meditation: Notes with the Help of Poulain

    Today's sitting  ran from 3-3:45 am.  It was focused and intense, but dry, as most sessions are. The wayward mind was brought to heel, but discursive operations continued.  I was hard by the boundary that separates what Poulain calls the prayer of simplicity from what he calls the prayer of quiet.  But I remained this side of the border, and this side of the first stage of the mystical properly speaking.

    Poulain OraisonPoulain's definition is excellent: "We apply the word mystic to those supernatural acts or states which our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily." (Fr. Augustin Poulain, S.J., The Graces of Interior Prayer: a Treatise on Mystical Theology, Caritas Publishing, 2016, viii + 680 pp.  A translation of the French original first published in 1901. Emphasis in original.) Poulain's tome may well be the greatest secondary source on mystical theology ever written.  It is in the same league as The Three Ages [sic] of the Interior Life by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O. P.

    The main point here is that one cannot enter the mystical by one's own power.  Grace is needed. Herewith, a crucial difference between Christian and Buddhist meditation.  'Crucial' from L. crux, crucis, meaning 'cross,' has a special resonance in this context.

    A New Testament analogy occurs to me: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you."  (Matthew 7: 7-8, KJV.) If a door is locked from the inside, I cannot pass though it by my own power: I must knock.  The knocking is within my power, but the entry is due to the initiative of another who is not in my power. The prayer of simplicity, the fourth degree of ordinary prayer, is within my power and is like the knocking; the first degree of mystical prayer is not in my power and is like the allowance of entry.

    About the prayer of simplicity, Poulain says that "there is a thought or a sentiment that returns incessantly and easily (although with little or no development) among many other thoughts, whether useful or no." (8)  Here are three examples of my own that are either Christian or proto-Christian.

    The Jesus Prayer:  "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." 

    A favorite line of mine from Plotinus' Enneads: "It is by the One that all beings are beings." 

    An invention of mine with a Thomist flavor: "The Lord is Being itself."

    In each case, one runs through a short sentence. The run-through is discursive (from L. currere, to run) in that it constitutes an interior discourse. One does not develop these thoughts, but repeats them to oneself incessantly in a condition in which other thoughts obtrude either as distractions or further developments.  There is nothing mystical going on; one remains on the discursive plane even if one whittles longer phrases down to shorter ones.  One has not yet achieved inner quiet. One is merely knocking on the door. To use the Jesus mantram as an example:

    Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner –> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner –> Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me –>  Lord Jesus Christ have mercy –> Lord have mercy –> Lord, Lord, Lord.

    The whittling process may lead to one-pointed concentration on one word. This brings one to the edge of the discursive plane. Whether one goes over the edge into the mystic is not up to one. It is a matter of grace or divine initiative.

    Poulain, following The Interior Castle of the great Spanish mystic St. Theresa of Avila,  calls the first degree or stage of mystical union the prayer of quiet or "the incomplete mystic union." (48)  In this state, "the divine action is not strong enough to hinder distractions," and "the imagination still preserves its liberty." (49).

    The claim that God's action brings about the first degree of mystical union is a metaphysical claim that goes beyond the phenomenology of the situation. The same is true of the claim that the mystical state is one of union with God.  If we put God between the Husserlian brackets, and attend solely to the phenomenology, we can still ground a distinction between the fourth state of ordinary prayer, the prayer of simplicity, which remains on the discursive plane, and the first mystical state.  

    During the session of 25 July 2019 I experienced a sudden, unanticipated, unwilled,  shut-down of all thoughts. Mental silence supervened all of a sudden, on its own.  It subsided soon enough, and the philosopher's attempt at analysis only speeded its departure. If one is granted a taste of this blissful quiet one must simply receive it, without analysis, and with gratitude. The experience of inner quiet, whether or it it is the effect of a transcendent Source, is undeniable and unmistakable.  

    On 7 December 2109 I sat from 3:30-4:22 am.  From my notes:

    Very good session. A touch of grace, hard to describe: a pacifying presence of something beyond my mental operations. Subtle, but unmistakable.

    On 18 February 2020, the experience was as of a subtle summons, a summoning away from mental chatter and the useless rehearsals of stale thoughts, toward silence, waiting, patient attention, interior listening and hearkening. Hearken, horchen, gehorsam, Gehorsamkeit.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Divine Simplicity, Modal Collapse, and the Difference Principle

    The question before us is whether the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) can be upheld without the collapse of modal distinctions. 

    In "Simply Impossible: A Case Against Divine Simplicity" (Journal of Reformed Theology 7, 2013, 181-203), R. T. Mullins asks (footnote omitted):

    Could God have refrained from creating the universe? If God is free then it seems that the answer is obviously ‘yes.’ He could have existed alone. Yet, God did create the universe. If there is a possible world in which God exists alone, God is not simple. He eternally has unactualized potential for He cannot undo His act of creation. He could cease to sustain the universe in existence, but that would not undo His act of creating. One could avoid this problem by allowing for a modal collapse. One could say that everything is absolutely necessary. Necessarily, there is only one possible world—this world. Necessarily, God must exist with creation. There is no other possibility. God must create the universe that we inhabit, and everything must occur exactly as it in fact does. There is no such thing as contingency when one allows a modal collapse. (195-196)

    The foregoing suggests to me one version of the problem.  There is a tension between divine simplicity and divine freedom.

    1) If God is simple, then he is purely actual (actus purus) and thus devoid of unexercised powers and unrealized potentialities. He is, from all eternity, all that he can be. This is true in every possible world because God exists in every possible world, and is pure act in every possible world.  As a necessary being, God exists in every possible world, and as a simple being, he is devoid of act-potency composition in every world in which he exists. 

    2) As it is, God freely created our universe from nothing; but he might have created a different universe, or no universe at all. This implies that any universe God creates contingently exists.

    The dyad seems logically inconsistent.   If (1) is true, then there is no possible world in which God has unexercised powers. But if (2) is true, there is at least one possible world in which God has unexercised powers. Had God created no universe, then his power to create would have gone unexercised.  Had God created a different universe than the one he did create, then his power to create our universe would have gone unexercised. So if God is both simple and (libertarianly) free, then we get a logical contradiction.

    In nuce, the problem is to explain how it can be true both that God is simple and that the universe which God created ex nihilo is contingent.  Clearly, the classical theist wants to uphold both. What is unclear, however, is whether he can uphold both.

    There are two main ways to solve an aporetic polyad. One is to show that the inconsistency alleged is at best apparent, but not real.  The other way is by rejection of one of the limbs. 

    Many if not most theists, and almost all Protestants, will simply (pun intended) deny the divine simplicity.  I myself think there are good reasons for embracing the latter.  But how then avoid modal collapse?

    Modal Collapse

    We have modal collapse just when the following proposition is true: For any x, x is possible iff x is actual iff x is necessary.  This implies that nothing is merely possible; nothing is contingent; nothing is impossible.  If nothing is merely possible, then there are no merely possible worlds, which implies that there is exactly one possible world, the actual world, which cannot fail to be actual, and is therefore necessary.  Modal collapse ushers in what I cill call modal Spinozism. 

    (The collapse is on the extensional, not the intensional or notional plane: the modal words retain their distinctive senses.)

    Suppose divine simplicity entails modal collapse (modal Spinozism). So what? What is so bad about the latter?  Well, it comports none too well with God's sovereignty. If God is absolutely sovereign, then he cannot be under a metaphysical necessity to create. Connected with this is the fact that if God must create, then his aseity would be compromised. He cannot be wholly from himself, a se, if his existence necessarily requires a realm of creatures.  Finally, creaturely (libertarian) freedom would go by the boards if reality is one big block of Spinozistic necessity.

    Steven Nemes' Solution

    If God created our universe U, and U is contingent, then it is quite natural to suppose that God's creative act is as contingent as what it brings into existence, namely, U. But this is impossible on DDS. For on DDS, God is identical to his creative causing.  This being so, U — the creatively caused — exists with the same metaphysical necessity as does God.  The reasoning that leads to this unacceptable conclusion, however, rests on an assumption:

    DP. A difference in effect presupposes a difference in the cause. (Nemes, 109)

    For example, the difference between U existing and no universe existing entails a difference in God between his actualized power to create U and his unactualized, but actualizable, power to refrain from creating anything. 

    Nemes proposes that we reject (DP), at least with respect to divine causality.  (110) Accordingly, the contingency of U's existence does not reflect any contingency in God, even though U is wholly dependent on God for its existence at every moment at which it exists.  So if we reject the Difference Principle, then we can maintain both that the created universe is contingent and that there are no unrealized potentialities in God.  But if we don't reject (DP), then "the argument from modal collapse [against the divine simpicity] is successful." (111)

    Is the Nemes Solution Satisfactory?

    I say it isn't.  It strikes me as problematic as the problem it is proposed to solve. 

    Consider an analogy. In a dark room I turn on a flashlight that causes a circular white spot to appear on a wall. When I turn off the light the spot disappears.  Clearly, the beam of light from the flashlight is the cause and the spot on the wall is the effect. We also note that the beam is not only the originating cause of the spot, but a continuing cause of the spot: the spot depends on the beam at every moment at which the spot exists. In this respect beam-spot is analogous to divine creating- universe existing.  Finally, we note that, just as the spot depends for its existence on the  existence of the beam, and not vice versa, the contingency of the spot depends on the contingency of the beam.   If the spot is contingent, then so must be its cause. Suppose that at time t, the light is on and the spot appears.  To say that the spot is contingent is to say that, at t, t might not have existed. But had the spot not existed at t, then the light would not have been on at t.  Surely it would be absurd to say both that the light is on at t and the spot does not exist at t

    Similarly, it seems absurd to say both that the creative causing of U is occurring in every possible world and that U does not exist in every possible world.  Bear in mind that divine causing is necessarily efficacious: it cannot fail to bring about its effect. The divine Fiat lux! cannot be followed by darkness (or no light).   

    But of course arguments from analogy prove nothing (assuming the rigorous standards of proof that I favor), and so Nemes would be within his rights were he simply to reject my analogy.  He might insist that just as God is sui generis, the creative relation between God and creatures is sui generis and cannot be modeled in any way.  He might insist that divine causality is unique. In this one case, a causal 'process' that occurs in every possible world — because said process is identical to God who exists in every world — has an effect that exists in only some possible worlds.

    We are now in the following dialectical situation. Nemes would have us accept DDS and reject DP.  But I see no reason to think that this is any better than accepting DP and rejecting DDS.  Either way, the exigencies of the discursive intellect are flouted. 

    An Aporia?

    It seems that the proponent of divine simplicity faces a nasty problem.  At the moment, I see no satisfactory solution.

    The aporetician in me is open to the thought that what we have here is a genuine aporia, a conceptual impasse, a puzzle  that we cannot solve. God must be simple to be God; the created universe is really contingent. We cannot, however, see how both limbs of the dyad can be true and so we must see them as contradictory, even though they are presumably not contradictory in reality.  

    It could be like this: the limbs are both true, but our cognitive limitations make it impossible for us to understand how they could both be true.  Mysterianism may be the way to go.  This shouldn't trouble a theologian too much. After all, Trinity, Incarnation, etc. are mysteries in the end, are they not?  Of course, I am not suggesting the doctrine of divine simplicity can be found in the Bible. 

    An Exchange with Lukas Novak

    In an earlier thread, I wrote:

    At best, a cosmological argument takes us from the contingent universe U to a divine creative act that explains the existence of U. Now this creative act is itself contingent: God might not have created anything. If God is simple, then he is identical to the creative act. Since the act is contingent, God is contingent, and therefore not God by the Anselmian criterion. On the other hand, if God is necessary, then the creative act and U are necessary, which is unacceptable. The following cannot all be true:

    1) God is simple. 
    2) God is noncontingent.
    3) God's creative act is contingent. 

    Dr. Novak responded:

    God's creative act need not be contingent. It only needs to contingently bring about its effect.

    God's efficiency is distinct from created efficiency. A created cause is itself changed by causing (by eliciting de novo the productive act as its accidental form), God is not changed by causing (being for eternity identical to any of its timeless creative acts). God would be the same in all respects had He not caused the world into existence. This is the requirement of His perfection.

    Novak's first two sentences makes no sense. If the effect is contingent, then the creative act which is its cause must also be contingent. There is a three-fold distinction on the notional plane among God (the agent of the creative act or action), the creative act itself, and the effect of the creative act.  God is a necessary being. Now if God is identical in reality  to the creative act whereby he creates U, as per DDS, then the creative act must also  be necessary, in which case the created universe cannot be contingent.

    One source of confusion here is that 'act' can be used in two ways. To say that God is pure act (actus purus) is not to say that God is pure action; it is merely to say that he is devoid of all potency.  Note also that God is not the cause of the existence of U; the cause is God's creative action.

    I can agree with the rest of what Novak says, except for the penultimate sentence, but only if he draws the conclusion that follows from it, namely, that the created universe exists of metaphysical necessity.

    REFERENCE: Steven Nemes, "Divine Simplicity Does Not Entail Modal Collapse" in Carlos Frederico, et al. eds., Rose and Reasons: Philosophical Essays, Bucharest: Eikon, 2020, 101-119.

     

    Bill Vallicella

    7 responses to “Divine Simplicity, Modal Collapse, and the Difference Principle”

  • Is There Such a Thing as Racial Profiling?

    A re-post from 5 December 2014

    ……………………………

    One of the tactics of leftists is to manipulate and misuse language for their own purposes.  Thus they make up words and phrases and hijack existing ones. 'Islamophobe' is an example of the former, 'disenfranchise' an example of the latter.    'Racial profiling' is a second example of the former.  It is a meaningless phrase apart from its use as a semantic bludgeon.  Race is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  A profile cannot consist of just one characteristic.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense racially to profile you.  Apparel is an element in a profile; it cannot be a profile.  I can profile you, but it makes no sense sartorially to profile you.

    Let's think about this.

    I profile you if I subsume you under a profile.  A profile is a list of several descriptors.  You fit the profile if you satisfy all or most of the descriptors.  Here is an example of a profile:

    1. Race:  black
    2. Age: 16-21 years
    3. Sex: male
    4. Apparel: wearing a hoodie, with the hood pulled up over the head
    5. Demeanor: sullen, alienated
    6. Behavior: walking aimlessly, trespassing, cutting across yards, looking into windows and garages, hostile and disrespectful when questioned; uses racial epithets such as 'creepy-assed cracker.'
    7. Physical condition: robust, muscular
    8. Location:  place where numerous burglaries and home invasions had occurred, the perpetrators being black
    9. Resident status: not a resident.

    Now suppose I spot someone who fits the above profile.  Would I have reason to be suspicious of him?  Of course.  As suspicious as if the fellow were of Italian extraction but fit the profile mutatis mutandis.  But that's not my point.  My point is that I have not racially profiled the individual; I have profiled him, with race being one element in the profile.

    Blacks are more criminally prone than whites.*  But that fact means little by itself.  It becomes important only in conjunction with the other characteristics.  An 80-year-old black female is no threat to anyone.  But someone who fits all or most of the above descriptors is someone I am justified in being suspicious of.

    There is no such thing as racial profiling.  The phrase is pure obfuscation manufactured by liberals to  forward their destructive agenda.  The leftist script requires that race be injected into everything.  Hence 'profiling' becomes 'racial profiling.'  If you are a conservative and you use the phrase, you are foolish, as foolish as if you were to use the phrase 'social justice.'  Social justice is not justice.  But that's a separate post. 

    Addendum.  There is also the liberal-left tendency to drop qualifiers.  Thus 'male' in 'male chauvinism' is dropped, and 'chauvinism' comes to mean male chauvinism, which is precisely what it doesn't mean.    So one can expect the following to happen.  'Racial' in 'racial profiling' will be dropped, and 'profiling' will come to mean racial profiling, which, in reality, means nothing. 

    ___________________

    * See here:

    Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. [. . .]

    "High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

    Bill Vallicella

  • Solzhenitsyn on Gulag Interrogation

    Here are some passages from The Gulag Archipelago that everyone should read.  A sample:

    If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the "secret brand"); that a man's genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov's plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

    Do you say that it can't happen here? Are you quite sure? Are you aware of how extreme in its hard-Leftism the Democrat party has become? Are you paying attention? Or are you lost in your private life?  If you value your private life you are well-advised to pay attention lest you wake up some morning to find that the private life is no more.

    Now read this Dreher article to see that I am not exaggerating: Post Card from Pre-Totalitarian America.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Lure of the Good

    GoodSome of us hear the call to perfect ourselves morally, or at least to better ourselves. Whence the call? The Whence is cloud-hidden, and what is hidden may be doubted. And yet conscience intimates a reality absolute and complete that sustains and envelops this vale of transience.  The love of truth and the love of beauty do the same.  One is free to ignore these intimations of an Order Unseen, but this mysterious freedom is itself a pointer beyond. For the one who seeks a way out from behind the veil of Ignorance,  the Good cannot be on a par with Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

    …………………..

    "Was für eine Philosophie man wähle, hängt sonach davon ab, was für ein Mensch man ist." Johann Gottlieb Fichte.  Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre, 1794 §5

    "The kind of philosophy a man chooses depends on the kind of man he is."

    In Mitte der Ewigkeit

    Ein Traum, ein Traum ist unser Leben
    auf Erden hier.
    Wie Schatten auf den Wegen schweben
    und schwinden wir.
    Und messen unsre trägen Tritte
    nach Raum und Zeit;
    und sind (und wissen’s nicht) in Mitte
    der Ewigkeit …
    Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803)
    Bill Vallicella

  • The Lure of the Trail

    IMG_0154It astonishes me that there are able-bodied people who cannot appreciate the joy of movement in nature. I don't expect people to share my pleasure in solo wilderness adventures. Most people are incorrigibly social: it's as if they feel their ontological status diminished when on their own. With me it is the other way around. But I can easily understand how many would feel differently about this.

    I once proposed to a woman that she and her husband accompany me and my wife on a little hike. She reacted as if I had proposed that she have all her teeth extracted without benefit of anaesthetic. She   seemed shocked that anyone would suggest such a thing. Finally she said, "Well, maybe, if there's a destination."

    A destination? Each footfall, each handhold, each bracing breath of cold mountain air is the destination. Did John Muir have a destination when he roamed the Range of Light? Was Henry Thoreau trying to get somewhere during his cross country rambles?

    Modern man, a busy little hustler, doesn't know how to live. Surrounded by beauty, he is yet oblivious to it, rushing to his destination. If one does not have the time to meditate on the moon set, celebrate the sunrise, or marvel at a stately Saguaro standing sentinel on a distant ridge line, it is a serious question whether one is alive in any human sense at all.

    You may end up at your destination all right — in a box, never having lived.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Abstracta: Omnitemporal or Timeless?

    Is everything in time? Or are there timeless entities? 

    So-called abstracta are held by many to be timeless.  Among abstracta we find numbers, (abstract as opposed to concrete) states of affairs, mathematical (as opposed to commonsense) sets, and Fregean (as opposed to Russellian) propositions, where a Fregean proposition (Gedanke) is the sense (Sinn) of a  sentence (Satz) in the indicative mood  from which all indexical elements, including the tenses of verbs, have been removed.  The following items are neither in space, nor causally active/passive, but some say that they exist in time at every time: 7, 7's being prime, {7}, that 7 is prime.  If an item exists in time at every time, then it is omnitemporal.  If an item is 'outside' time, then it is timeless or eternal or, to be helpfully pleonastic in the manner of the late Hugh McCann, timelessly eternal.

    Let us agree that a temporalist is one for whom everything is in time, while an eternalist is one for whom some things are not in time. This is a correct use of 'eternalist' as opposed to the misuse of those who use 'eternalism' to oppose presentism by maintaining that temporal items such as Socrates and his drinking of the hemlock exist tenselessly. Temporal items that exist tenselessly are precisely temporal items and not eternal items. It is perhaps for this reason that McCann's pleonasm is justified.  The tenselessly 'eternal' is in time and therefore not timelessly eternal. 

    On p. 55 of his Creation and the Sovereignty of God (Indiana University Press 2012), Hugh McCann argues that the temporalist, who maintains that everything is in time, cannot formulate his thesis without presupposing that there are timeless states of affairs, at least of the negative sort.  Here is how I see the argument. 

    Part of what the temporalist says is that

    1. There are no timeless states of affairs.

    How is 'there are no' in (1) to be understood?  The temporalist must intend it to be taken in a way consistent with temporalism, thus:

    2. There never have been, are not now, and never will be any timeless states of affairs.

    Unfortunately, the eternalist, who maintains that some things are not in time,  will agree with the temporalist on the truth of (2).  Consider 7's being prime.  Both agree that at no time does this state of affairs exist.  It does not exist at any time because it exists outside of time. The agreement is unfortunate because it shows that the bone of contention cannot be formulated in terms of (2).  The bone of contention must be formulated in terms of (1) taken tenselessly.  Thus

    1.* It is tenselessly true that there are no timeless states of affairs.

    But (1.*) entails

    3. It is timelessly true that there are no timeless states of affairs.

    But (3) is self-refuting. Temporalism, when properly formulated, i.e., when formulated in a way that permits disagreement between temporalist and eternalist, refutes itself by implying its own negation.

    So not everything can be in time. Abstracta are timeless, not tenseless.

    A Parallel with the Problem of Formulating Presentism

    We have seen in previous posts that to avoid tautology the presentist, according to whom the temporally present alone exists, must reach for a tenseless sense of 'exists.'  He cannot say, tautologically, that whatever exists (present tense) exists now.  For that is not metaphysical 'news.'  It is nothing to fight over, and fight we must.  He has to say: Whatever tenselessly exists, exists now.  But then he seems to presuppose that there are times, as real as the present time, at which temporal individuals such as Socrates tenselessly exist.  The upshot is that when presentism is given a non-tautological formulation, a formulation that permits disagreement beween presentist and anti-presentist, it refutes itself.  For if there are non-present times as real as the present time, then it is not the case that only present items exist. 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Love Untranslated

    Love untranslated into action remains an emotion and in many case a mere self-indulgence.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

    It is a decidedly unpopular thing to say these days, but I'll say it anyway, echoing a conviction of William James: Much profit comes from avoiding sensory indulgence.

    A much more difficult practice is to enter into it with cool detachment. Coitus reservatus, for example. But it is no more difficult than playing blindfold chess, which is not that difficult. One experiences the sensations attendant upon sexual intercourse while remaining indifferent to them: one regards them as mere sensations. (In my lexicon, coitus reservatus requires non-ejaculation, whereas coitus interruptus allows it, but outside the partner.)

    Bill Vallicella

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

    We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

    Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

    [. . .]

    The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

    The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

    Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

    And now for some love songs.

    Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

    Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

    Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

    Addenda:

    1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs  — is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

    2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

    Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
    She's sleeping here right by my side
    And in her right hand a silver dagger,
    She says that I can't be your bride.

    All men are false, says my mother,
    They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
    The very next evening, they'll court another,
    Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

    My daddy is a handsome devil
    He's got a chain five miles long,
    And on every link a heart does dangle
    Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

    Go court another tender maiden,
    And hope that she will be your wife,
    For I've been warned, and I've decided
    To sleep alone all of my life.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Friendships

    Some are of propinquity, others of affinity. The best are both.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Given Anselm’s Insight, How is Empirical Evidence Relevant to the Existence/Nonexistence of God?

    ANSELM'S INSIGHT

    I take what I call Anselm's Insight to be non-negotiable.  St. Anselm appreciated, presumably for the first time in the history of thought, that a divine being, one worthy of worship, must be non-contingent.  If your god is contingent, then your god is not God. For if your god is contingent, and he exists, then his nonexistence is possible, and nothing like that could count as God. God, by definition, is that than which no greater can be conceived, to use use Anselm's signature phrase, and necessity is a greater or higher modal status than contingency. Contingency in an existing thing is an ontological defect. God is an absolute, and no absolute worth its salt is contingent.  If, on the other hand, your god is contingent and he doesn't exist, then it is worse still: your god is impossible. 

    Anselm's point, expressed with the help of Leibniz, is that the concept of God is the concept of a being that either exists in every metaphysically possible world, or in no metaphysically possible world.  This formulation has the advantage of not presupposing the existence of God by the use of 'God.' For it may be that the concept is not instantiated, as it would not be if God is impossible.

    Anselm's Insight rests on the assumption that the necessarily existent is 'better' than the contingently existent, which in turn rests on the Platonic sense that the immutable is higher in value than the mutable. This assumption can be reasonably questioned but also reasonably defended. But I won't go into that now. For present purposes I endorse both the Insight and the Assumption upon which it rests.

    ANSELM'S ARGUMENT

    But it does not follow from Anselm's Insight that Anselm's Argument is probative. I am referring to the modal ontological argument found in Proslogion III. One cannot validly infer from God's non-contingent status alone that he exists.  For it is epistemically possible — possible for all we know — that God is modally impossible. 'Non-contingent' does not mean 'necessary.' It means 'either necessary or impossible.'  To arrive at God's existence, one needs a possibility premise to the effect that God  is possible.  But how would you know that the premise is true? Conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility. 

    For more on the Argument see here. Today's topic is different.

    IS EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE RELEVANT TO THE EXISTENCE/NON-EXISTENCE OF A NON-CONTINGENT GOD?

    A question posed to me by a reader requires only Anselm's Insight although he thinks it requires the probativity of Anselm's Argument. I take him to be asking how empirical evidence could be relevant to the existence of a non-contingent God.  

    Suppose God does not exist.  Then, by the Insight, he is impossible.  But no amount of empirical evidence could show that what is impossible is actual.  So no miraculous event could show that God exists. If God is impossible, any putative empirical evidence to the contrary could be legitimately dismissed a priori.  Compare round squares and colored sounds. They are impossible. The claims of anyone who said he had empirical evidence to the contrary would be legitimately dismissed a priori.  We know that there  cannot be any round squares or colored sounds. We do not know that God is impossible. But we do know (given Anselm's Insight) that either God necessarily exists or God is impossible.  

    If, on the other hand, God does exist, then he cannot fail to exist and no empirical evidence is needed or could be relevant.  Suppose that someone demanded empirical evidence of the truth of 7 is prime or the existence of 7 or the existence of the proposition, 7 is prime.   You would show that person the door.

    Now either God exists or he does not. Either way, empirical evidence is irrelevant to the existence of God.

    What then of natural and moral evil? Are they evidence of the nonexistence of Anselm's God?  No, and to think otherwise is to assume that God is a contingent being.

    The above is my interpretation of my reader's reasoning.  I am inclined to accept it as I interpret it.

    Bill Vallicella

    12 responses to “Given Anselm’s Insight, How is Empirical Evidence Relevant to the Existence/Nonexistence of God?”

  • Metaphysical Explanation Again

    One question I am discussing with Micheal Lacey is whether any sense can be attached to the notion of metaphysical explanation. I answer in the affirmative. Perhaps he can tell me whether he agrees with the following, and if not, then why not.

    Tom is a tomato of my acquaintance. The predicate 'red' is true of Tom. Equivalently, 'Tom is  red' is true.  Now the sentence just mentioned is contingently true. (It is obviously not necessarily true in any of the ways a sentence, or the proposition it expresses, could be necessarily true. For example, it is not true ex vi terminorum.)  

    Now ask: could a contingently true sentence such as 'Tom is red' just be true?  "Look man, the sentence is just true; that is all that can be said, what more do you want?"  This response is no good. It cannot be a brute fact that our sample sentence is true.  By 'brute fact' I mean a fact that neither has nor needs an explanation.  So the fact that 'Tom is red' is true needs an explanation.  And since the fact is not self-explanatory, the explanation must invoke something external to the sentence.

    This strikes me as a non-negotiable datum, especially if we confine our attention to present-tensed contingently true sentences.

    I hope it is clear that what is wanted is not a causal explanation of why a particular tomato is red as opposed to green. Such an explanation would make mention of such factors as exposure to light, temperature, etc.  What is wanted is not a causal explanation of Tom's being ripe and red as opposed to unripe and green, but an explanation of a sentential/propositional representation's being actually true as opposed to possibly true.  The question, then, is this: WHAT MAKES A CONTINGENTLY TRUE PRESENT-TENSED SENTENCE/PROPOSITION TRUE?

    Our contingently true sentence is about something, something in particular, namely Tom, and not about Tim. And what the sentence is about is not part of the sentence or the (Fregean) proposition it expresses.  It is external to both, not internal to either.  And it is not an item in the speaker's mind either.  Tom, then, is in the extralinguistic and extramental world.  Now I will assume, pace Meinong, that everything exists, that there are no nonexistent items.  Given that assumption I say: VERITAS SEQUITUR ESSE (VSE).  Truth follows being. Truth supervenes on being if we are talking about contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearers.

    That is to say: every contingently true, present-tensed, truth-bearer has need of at least one thing in the extralinguistic world for its truth.  Thus 'Tom is red' cannot be true unless there is at least one thing external to the sentence on which its truth depends. What I have just said lays down a necessary condition for a contingent sentence's being true.

    But VSE is not sufficient for an adequate explanation of the truth of 'Tom is red.'  If Tom alone was all one needed for the explanation, then we wouldn't be able to account for the difference between the true 'Tom is red' and the false 'Tom is green.'  In short, the truth-maker must have a proposition-like structure, but without being a proposition. The truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is not Tom, not is it any proposition; the truth-maker of 'Tom is red' is the state of affairs, Tom's being red.  (I am sketching the Armstrong line; there are other ways to go.)

    The state of affairs Tom's being red is the ontological ground of the truth of the corresponding sentence/proposition.  It is not a logical ground because it is not a proposition.  Nor is it a cause.  

    It seems to me that I have just attached a tolerably clear sense to the notion of a metaphysical explanation. I have explained the truth of the sentence 'Tom is red' by invoking the state of affairs, Tom's being red.  The explanation is not causal, nor is it logical. And so we can call it metaphysical or ontological.

    Have I convinced you, Micheal?

    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Metaphysical Explanation Again”

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