Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Michael Bloomberg Again

    The former mayor of New York City would make a better president than any of the following: Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders.  But that is not saying much. In any case it is moot. The billionaire won't get the Dem nomination. It will go to either Biden or Warren.  Still and all, we shouldn't forget the foolish things Bloomberg has said and done.

    Herewith, an edited  re-post from 18 June 2012.

    Michael Bloomberg on the Purpose of Government

    (CBS News) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shrugged off criticism of his controversial public health initiatives, saying that "if government's purpose isn't to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don't know what its purpose is." [emphasis added.]

     Bloomberg most recently put forth a plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces from the city's eateries, street carts and stadiums. The proposal has been sharply criticized, in some cases by beverage and fast food companies as a case of government overreach.

    He's also been criticized for previous efforts to, among other things, ban smoking in public places and the use of trans-fats in restaurant foods. Some have gone so far as to mock has as being like a "nanny."

     But on "CBS This Morning," Bloomberg fired back, saying, "We're not here to tell anybody what to do. But we certainly have an obligation to tell them what's the best science and best medicine says is in their interest.

    Bloomberg TrumpIn this startlingly incoherent outburst, Bloomberg betrays the liberal nanny-state mentality in as direct a way as one could wish.  And it is incoherent.  He wants to ban large drinks, pop corn, milk shakes and what all else while assuring us that "we're not here to tell anybody what to do."  He blatantly contradicts himself.  Does the man think before he speaks?

    But the deeper problem is that he has no notion of the legitimate functions of government.  Apparently he has never heard of limited government.  Border control is a legitimate constitutionally-grounded function of government.  One reason the borders must be controlled is to impede the spread of contagious diseases.  So government does have some role to play in the health and longevity of citizens.  Defense of the country against foreign aggressors is also a legitimate function  of government and it too bears upon health and longevity: it is hard to live a long and healthy life when bombs are raining down.

    Beyond this, it is up to the individual to live in ways that insure health and longevity if those are values for him.  But they might not be.  Some value intensity of life over longevity of life.  Rod Serling, for example, lived an extremely intense and productive life.  Born in 1925, he died in 1975 at age 50.  His Type A behavior and four-pack a day cigarette habit did him in, but was also quite possibly a necessary condition of his productivity.  That was his free choice.  No government has the right to dictate that one value longevity over intensity.

    A government big enough and powerful enough to provide one with ‘free’ health care will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat.  A government that pays for the treatment of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activities under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’

    But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 250 cc.  In the same way that governments levy arbitrary punitive taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.

    The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland. 

    This is why we shouldn't surrender our country to nanny-state, gun-grabbing,  liberty-bashing  soda jerks like Bloomberg and Hillary.

    The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not?  How much?  Over nanny-state security?

    Does Bloomberg even see the issue? 

    Bill Vallicella

  • Bergoglio the Benighted Aims to End Latin Mass Permission

    There was and is something profoundly stupid about the Vatican II 'reforms' even if we view matters from a purely immanent 'sociological' point of view.

    Suppose Roman Catholicism is, metaphysically, buncombe to its core, nothing but an elaborate  human construction in the face of a meaningless universe, a construction  kept going by human needs and desires noble and base. Suppose there is no God, no soul, no post-mortem reward or punishment, no moral world order.  Suppose we are nothing but a species of clever land mammal thrown up on the shores of life by blind evolutionary processes, and that everything that makes us normatively human and thus persons (consciousness, self-consciousness, conscience, reason, and the rest) are nothing but cosmic accidents.  Suppose all that.

    Still, religion would have  its immanent life-enhancing  role to play, and one would have to be as superficial and ignorant of the human heart as a New Atheist to think it would ever wither away: it inspires and guides, comforts and consoles; it provides our noble impulses with an outlet while giving suffering a meaning.  Suffering can be borne, Nietzsche says somewhere, if it has a meaning; what is unbearable is meaningless suffering.  Now the deep meaning that the Roman church provides, or rather provided, is tied to its profundity, mystery, and reference to the Transcendent all expressed in the richness of its traditional Latin liturgy. 

    Anything that degrades it into a namby-pamby secular humanism, just another brand of liberal feel-goodism and do-goodism, destroys it, making of it just another piece of dubious cultural junk.  Degrading factors: switching from Latin to the vernacular; the introduction of sappy pseudo-folk music sung by pimply-faced adolescents strumming gut-stringed guitars; leftist politics and political correctness; the priest facing the congregation; the '60s obsession with 'relevance.'  And then there was the refusal to teach hard-core doctrine and the lessening of requirements, one example being the no-meat-on-Friday rule.  Why re-name confession 'reconciliation?  What is the point of such a stupid change?  

    A religion that makes no demands fails to provide the structure that people, especially the young, want and need.  Have you ever wondered what makes Islam is so attractive to young people? (One prominent example is John 'Jihad Johnny' Walker Lindh who was baptized Catholic.)

    In its zeal to become 'relevant,' the Roman church succeeded only in making itself irrelevant.  Its cultural relevance is now practically nil. Is any Catholic today dissuaded from contraception or abortion or divorce by Catholic teaching? Do priests have the authority that they still had in the '50s and early '60s? Are any of them now taken seriously as they once were?  And who can take seriously an ancient church that allows its teaching to be tampered with by a leftist jackass such as Bergoglio?

    People who take religion seriously tend to be conservatives and traditionalists; they are not change-for-the-sake-of-change leftist utopians out to submerge the Transcendent in the secular.  The stupidity of the Vatican II 'reforms,' therefore, consists in estranging its very clientele, the conservatives and traditionalists.  

    The church should be a 'liberal'-free zone.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment

    Merton and his hermitageThomas Merton and Jean van Heijenoort were both studies in youthful idealism. Both made drastic life decisions early on, and both sacrificed much for their respective ideals. Van joined Leon Trotsky to save the world rather than attend the prestigious Ecole Normale in pursuit of a bourgeois career. While Van was motivated by a desire to save the world, Tom was driven by contemptus mundi to flee the world and retreat to a monastery, which is what he did in 1941 at the age of 26 when he joined the Trappists. A convert to Catholicism, with the zeal of the convert, he took it to the limit the old-time doctrine implied: if the temporal order is but a vanishing quantity, then one should live with eternity ever before one's mind.

    Both became disillusioned,* but in different ways. Van lost his secular faith, broke with Marxism, and went back to the serene but lifeless precincts of mathematics to become a distinguished bourgeois professor of the subject.  Tom remained a monk but dropped the contemptus mundi. Van abandoned activism for mathematical logic and romantic affairs. Tom dropped his quietism — not entirely, however — and became active in human affairs, the peace movement in particular, during that heady period of ferment inside and outside of the Church, the 1960s.

    Van and TrotskyBoth met their ends in foreign venues by unusual means. Unable to stay put like a good monk in Gethsemani, Tom flew to Bangkok for a theological conference where he died of accidental electrocution in December of 1968 at the relatively young age of 53. Van's addiction to sexual love and 'romance' led to his destruction, and in the same Mexico City where the long arm of Stalin, extended by Ramon Mercader's ice axe,  finally slew his erstwhile mentor, Trotsky. Van couldn't stay away from Anne-Marie Zamora even though he believed she would kill him. Drawn like a moth to the flame he flew from Boston to Mexico City.  And kill him she did. While he was asleep, Zamora pumped a couple of rounds from her .38 Special into his head.  Trotsky was done in by the madness of politics; Van by the madness of love. 

    What is the moral of this comparison?

    Superior individuals feel the lure of the Higher. They seek something more from human existence than a jejune bourgeois life in pursuit of property, pelf, and social status.  They seek transcendence, and sometimes, like Marxist activists, in the wrong places.  No secular eschaton is "right around the corner" to borrow from the prevalent lingo of the 1950s CPUSA.  Man cannot save himself by social praxis. The question as to how we should live remains live. Tom chose a better and nobler path than Van. But can any church be the final repository of all truth? 

    For sources, see articles below.

    Related:

    Like a Moth to the Flame

    Trotsky's Faith in Man

    A Monk and his Political Silence

    ___________________________

    *Is 'disillusioned' a  predicate adjective of success? If a person becomes disillusioned about X, does it follow that X really is an illusion? Or can one be wrongly disillusioned about X, i.e. come to believe falsely that X is an illusion?  I would say that 'disillusioned' is not a predicate adjective of success.  

    ADDENDUM (11/13): WAS THOMAS MERTON ASSASSINATED? 

    This just over the transom from Hugh Turley:

    Dear Mr. Vallicella,

    In your article “Tom and Van: A Tale of Two Idealists and their Disillusionment” you repeated a popular error when you wrote that Thomas Merton "died of accidental electrocution.”
     
    It is understandable that you could repeat this mistake because there was deliberate deception to conceal the truth about Merton’s death and the falsehoods have been repeated for over 50 years.  In 2018 I co-authored The Martyrdom of Thomas Merton: An Investigation with David Martin.
     
    There is absolutely no evidence to support the accidental electrocution story.
     
    I invite you to visit our website and look at the official documents from Thailand concerning Merton’s death and find more information.  http://www.themartyrdomofthomasmerton.com
     
    There is also a video of a presentation that I gave in New York City in September.
    https://153news.net/watch_video.php?v=9O1A7KHOUY2X
     
    Yours for the truth,
     
    Hugh Turley
    I confess to not having considered, until now, the possibility that Merton was assassinated. So this is news to me and I take no position on the matter. The reviews of Turley's book I have so far located are all positive. If there has been an attempt to rebut his (and his co-author's) claims, I would like someone to let me know.  
     
    Here is one of the favorable reviews. And here is a June 2019 article by the authors on the ongoing cover-up of what they take to be the truth.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Postscript to Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation: Reply to Dr. Caiati

    Vito Caiati writes,

     . . . while I see the wisdom in your assertion “no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of grace, a certain free granting ab extra,” I am troubled about the soteriological implications of such a view. I find it troubling that the necessary grace would be restricted to a relatively small portion of humanity, while the rest of us remain “lost in the diaspora of sense objects.” Is it your assessment that few are called to a higher state of consciousness, or is it that the call is more generally available but drowned out by the distraction fits to which the human mind inevitably falls prey?

    What I want to say is that no one is likely to commit himself to a serious meditation practice with all that it entails unless he has had certain experiences which, phenomenologically, exhibit a gift-character and that point to a depth-dimension below or beyond surface mind. By that I mean experiences that seem as if granted by a Grantor external to the consciousness of the meditator whether or not, in reality, they are grantings or vouchsafings of such a Grantor.  (One example of such an experience is that of a sudden, unintended, descent into a blissful state of mental silence.) This formulation is neutral as between the Pali Buddhist denial of divine grace and the Christian affirmation of it.

    But even on this neutral formulation, Caiati's problem arises. Small is the number of those who are capable of having these experiences, and smaller still the number of those who actually have them. And among those who actually have them, still smaller is the number of those who set foot on the spiritual path and keep it up.  And among the latter only some of them, and maybe none of them, attain the Goal. We cannot be sure that Prince Siddartha attained it.  It would seem to be a very bad arrangement indeed if salvation were to be available only to a tiny number of people.  

    I think that this is a really serious problem for Buddhism. I have met met many a Buddhist meditator, but none of them struck me as enlightened. And the same goes for the Stoics and Skeptics I have met: none of them struck me as having attained ataraxia. The vast, vast majority of Buddhist meditators will die unenlightened. Unless you believe in rebirth, that's it for them.  

    The same problem does not arise for Christianity.  In Christianity, unlike in Buddhism, there is no salvation without a divine Savior, the agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The Savior doesn't do all the work, but the work that remains to be done can be done by any ordinary person who sincerely accepts Jesus Christ as his savior and who lives in accordance with that acceptance.  Faith is the main thing, not knowledge, insight, or realization.  There is no need for special experiences.  Perhaps we can say that the soteriology  of the East is noetic, that of the Middle East pistic.  But I should immediately add that contemplative practices and mystical theology play a large role in Christianity with the exception of Protestant Christianity.

    As I see it, faith is inferior to knowledge and any knowledge of spiritual things we can acquire here below can only serve to bolster our faith. Speaking for myself, given my skeptical mind, philosophical aptitude, and scientific education, I would probably not take theism seriously at all if it were not for a range of mystical, religious, and paranormal experiences that I have had.  They, together with arguments for theism and arguments against metaphysical naturalism, incline me toward theism to such an extent that that I live as if it is true. 'As if it is true' does not imply that it is not true; it signals my not knowing whether or not it is true.  

    But you may be of a different opinion and perhaps you have reasons that justify your opinion. No one KNOWS the ultimate answer. Toleration, therefore, is needed, the toleration of those who respect the principle of toleration, and therefore, not Sharia-supporting Muslims or other anti-Enlightenment types such as throne-and-altar reactionaries. What is needed are toleration and the defense of religious liberty which along with free speech and other sacred American rights are under assault by the Democrat Party in the USA.  This hard-Left party needs to taste bitter defeat.  And so, as strange as it may sound, if you cherish the free life of the mind and the free life of the spirit, you must vote for Donald J. Trump in 2020.  

    Bill Vallicella

  • Night Thoughts

    Night thoughts are the specters that haunt the philosopher in the twilight zone between sleeping and waking. Recent examples:

    • Man is noble in that he thinks the thought and raises the question of the Absolute while questioning the question.
    • Man is noble in that he is wretched. Only a spiritual animal can be wretched.
    • Man is spirit in that he is capable of self-degradation.  His nobility manifests itself in his self-abasement.
    • Man is flesh and yet free.
    • Man is a question he poses to himself.
    Bill Vallicella

  • Is ‘Again’ a Racist ‘Dog Whistle’?

    We must never forget the contemptibly vile things that regressive 'progressives' and illiberal 'liberals' say about us. This is a repost from 25 May 2016.

    ……………..

    Some liberal-left idiot is arguing that 'again' in Donald Trump's 'Make America Great Again' is a racist 'dog whistle.'  The suggestion is that Trump wants to bring back slavery and Jim Crow.  This is yet another proof that there is nothing so vile and contemptible and fundamentally stupid that some liberal won't embrace it.  If you think I go too far when I refer to contemporary liberals as moral scum, it is incidents like this that are part of  my justification. 

    Mark Steyn supplies some other 'dog whistles' for your delectation:

    On MSNBC, Chris Matthews declared this week that Republicans use "Chicago" as a racist code word. Not to be outdone, his colleague Lawrence O'Donnell pronounced "golf" a racist code word. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell observed that Obama was "working to earn a spot on the PGA tour," O'Donnell brilliantly perceived that subliminally associating Obama with golf is racist, because the word "golf" is subliminally associated with "Tiger Woods," and the word "Tiger" is not-so-subliminally associated with cocktail waitress Jamie Grubbs, nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel, lingerie model Jamie Jungers, former porn star Holly Sampson, etc, etc. So by using the word "golf" you're sending a racist dog whistle that Obama is a sex addict who reverses over fire hydrants.

    I must reiterate my principle of the Political Burden of Proof:

    As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

    Bill Vallicella

  • ‘Quickies’ on Free Speech from my Facebook Page

    Dissent is not hate. If I dissent from your VIEWS, it does not follow that I hate YOU.
     
    Can a contemporary 'liberal' distinguish between a person and the proposition he asserts? If he can, but he doesn't, then he ought to be morally condemned.
     
    Don't make Dennis Prager's mistake of saying that the the First Amendment protects 'hate speech.' That formulation is a foolish concession to the Left's notion that conservative speech is hate speech. The First Amendment protects DISSENT. Hate, like love, is in the eye of the beholder.
     
    The trouble with 'liberals' is that they are ruled by their emotions. That is why they hear dissent as hate.
     
    The growing feminarchy within the Democrat Party will only exacerbate the party's governance by emotion. Is that a 'sexist' thing to say? Not if it is true; it is true; ergo, it is not 'sexist.'
     
    Dissent is not hate. But even if dissent is couched in (what someone takes to be) harsh and hurtful or even hateful language, it still must be protected.
     
    I apologize for repeating all of these obvious points. But in these benighted times, they need to be stated time and time again.

    THE DEMS NO LONGER SUPPORT FREE SPEECH. And you are STILL a Democrat? Jonathan Turley:

    Yet recently, the Democratic Party seems to have abandoned its historic fealty to free speech. Democratic writers and leaders are publicly calling for everything from censorship to the criminalization of free speech. The latest such clarion call appeared in The Washington Post by a column from MSNBC analyst and former Obama official Richard Stengel.

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Fall of the Wall

    Thirty years ago, today.

    Here we come face to face with the fundamental reason for the collapse of European Communism. For all of the sophisticated “structural” and “materialist” analyses of the Communist world, it comes down to the simple fact that the European Communist rulers—most of them anyway—lost the will to shoot their own people in large numbers. (Not so the Chinese.) This might seem an inevitable consequence of the loss of belief in the Marxist ideology of class struggle, but the will to power of rulers has never been dependent on ideology, and it might have turned out differently.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Would a Cut in the Capital-Gains Tax be Racist?

    But of course:

    Most of us think of the capital-gains tax, if we think about it at all, as a policy that is neutral as regards questions of race or racism. But given that blacks are underrepresented among stockowners, Klein asked, would it be racist to support a capital-gains tax cut? “Yes,” Kendi answered, without hesitation.

    I will leave the logical analysis to my readers.

    First step: scrutinize 'underrepresented.' What does it mean? Is it perhaps ambiguous? Does it paper over an important distinction?

    Second step: find other arguments of the same logical form and see if they have true premises and a false conclusion.

    The purpose of such an exercise is to convince oneself that leftists have lost their minds. There is no point in trying to change their minds. They have vacated the plane of reason. 'Dialog' with them is pointless. They simply have to be defeated or 'quarantined.' Let us hope that their defeat or 'quarantine' can be achieved politically.  

    We will have to think further about political quarantine.  That may sound ominous, but the contemporary hard Left, as represented in the USA by the Democrat Party, is a cesspool of political pathogens inimical to the health of the body politic.

    Bill Vallicella

  • On the Illicit Use of ‘By Definition’

    This is an old entry from 2010. It makes a very important point well worth repeating. The battle against language abusers is never-ending.

    …………………………………….

    What is wrong with the following sentence:  "Excellent health care is by definition redistributional"?  It is from a speech by Donald Berwick,  President Obama's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, speaking to a British audience about why he favors government-run health care.

    I have no objection to someone arguing that health care ought to be redistributional.  Argue away, and good luck! But I object strenuously to an argumentative procedure whereby one proves that X is Y by illicit importation of the predicate Y into the definition of X.  But that is exactly what Berwick is doing.  Obviously, it is no part of the definition of 'health care' or 'excellent health care' that it should be redistributional.  Similarly, it is no part of the definition of 'illegal alien' that illegal aliens are Hispanic.  It is true that most of them are, but it does not fall out of the definition.

    This is the sort of intellectual slovenliness (or is it mendacity?) that one finds not only in leftists but also in Randians like Leonard Peikoff.  In one place, he defines 'existence' in such a way that nothing supernatural exists, and then triumphantly 'proves' that God cannot exist! See here.

    This has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Bertrand Russell remarked in a different connection.

    One more example.  Bill Maher was arguing with Bill O'Reilly one night on The O'Reilly Factor.  O'Reilly came out against wealth redistribution via taxation, to which Maher responded in effect that that is just what taxation is.  The benighted Maher apparently believes that taxation by definition is redistributional. 

    Now that is plainly idiotic: there is nothing in the nature of taxation to require that it redistribute wealth.  Taxation is the coercive taking of monies from citizens in order to fund the functions of government.  One can of course argue for progressive taxation and wealth redistribution via taxation.  But those are further ideas not contained in the very notion of taxation.

    Leftists are intellectual cheaters.  They will try to bamboozle you.  Listen carefully when they bandy about phrases like 'by definition.'  Don't let yourself be fooled.

    "But are Berwick, Peikoff, and Maher really trying to fool people, or are they merely confused?"  I cannot be sure about those specific individuals, but it doesn't much matter.  The main thing is not to be taken in by their linguistic sleight-of-hand whether intentional or unintentional.

    Woman by definition

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • Minimal Metaphysics for Meditation

    There is a certain minimal metaphysics one needs to assume if one is to pursue meditation as a spiritual practice, as opposed to, say, a relaxation technique.  You have to assume that mind is not exhausted by 'surface mind,' that there are depths below the surface and that they are accessible here and now.  You have to assume something like what St Augustine assumes when he writes, 

    Noli foras ire, in te redi, in interiore homine habitat veritas. Do not wish to go outside, return into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.

    The problem, of course, is that few if any will assume that truth dwells in the inner man unless they have already experienced or sensed the self's interiority.  For the intentionality of mind, its outer-directedness, conspires against the experience.  Ordinary mind is centri-fugal: in flight towards objects and away from its source and center.  This is so much so that it led Jean-Paul Sartre to the view that there is no self as source, that conscious mind just is this "wind blowing towards objects," a wind from nowhere.  Seeking itself as an object among objects, centrifugal mind comes up with nothing.  The failure of David Hume's quest should come as no surprise.  A contemporary re-play of this problematic is found in the work of Panayot Butchvarov.  The Bulgarian philosopher takes the side of Hume and Sartre. See my Butchvarov category.

    Ordinary mind is fallen mind: it falls against its objects, losing itself in their multiplicity and scattering itself in the process.  The unity of mind is lost in the diaspora of sense objects. To recuperate from this self alienation one needs to re-collect and re-member. Anamnesis! The need for remembrance, however, cannot be self-generated: the call to at-one-ment has to come from beyond the horizon of centrifugal mind.  One has to have already some sense of the Unseen Order, a natural and innate sense, not an intellectual opinion, a sense of "the existence of a reality superior to that of the senses." (Julius Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening: The Attainment of Self-Mastery According to the Earliest Buddhist Texts, p. 43.)

    My conclusion is that no one is likely to take up, and stick with, serious meditation, meditation as part of a spiritual quest, unless he is the recipient of a certain grace, a certain free granting ab extra.  (Here I go beyond Pali Buddhism which leaves no place for grace.)  He must be granted a glimpse of the inner depth of the self. But not only this.  He must also be granted a willingness to honor and not dismiss this fleeting intimation, but instead center his life around the quest for that which it reveals.  

    I would say that this also holds for the Buddhist whose official doctrine disallows grace and 'other-power.' Supposedly, the Tathagata's last injunction as he lay dying was that we should be lamps unto ourselves. Unfortunately, we are not the source of our own light.

    Bodhi-tree-blueI conjecture that what  Buddha was driving toward in a negative way with his denials of self, permanence, and the possibility of the ultimate satisfaction of desire (anatta, anicca, dukkha) is the same as what Augustine was driving at in a positive way with his affirmations of God and the soul. Doctrinally, there is of course deep difference: doctrines display on the discursive plane where difference and diremption rule. But doctrines are "necessary makeshifts" (F. H. Bradley) that point toward the transdiscursive. Buddhists are famously open to the provisional and makeshift nature of doctrines, likening them to rafts useful for crossing the river of Samsara but useless on the far side.  Christians not so much.  But even Christians grant that the Word in its ineffable unity is not a verbal formulation.  The unity of a sentence without which  it would be a mere list of words points us back to the ineffable unity of the Word which, I am suggesting, is somehow mystically one with what the Buddha was striving for.

    The depth of Buddha is toto caelo different from the superficiality of Hume and Sartre. For one thing, there was no soteriological/therapeutic intent behind Hume's reduction of the self to a mere bundle of perceptions. Secondly, it is arguable that the denial of a substantial self on the samsaric plane presupposes the Atma of the Upanishads, as Evola convincingly argues. More on this later.


    Bill Vallicella

  • Double Cultural Appropriation!

    Before this morning's session on the black mat, I read from the Dhammapada. I own two copies. The copy I read from this morning has the Pali on the left and an English translation by Harischandra Kaviratna on the right. I don't know Pali grammar but I have swotted up plenty of Pali vocabulary over the years.  

    My point, however, is that I was feasting on insights from a tradition not my own. I am not now, and never have been, Indian. I am of Northern Italian extraction, 100%, and that makes me European. So what am I doing appropriating insights from a foreign tradition? I am feeding my soul and doing no wrong. 

    To appropriate is to make one's own. To appropriate is not to steal, although stealing is a form of appropriation, an illicit form.  If I appropriate what you own by stealing it, then I do wrong. If I appropriate what you own by buying it from you in a mutually consensual transaction, I do no wrong.  Libertarians speak of capitalist acts among consenting adults. I am not a libertarian. I merely appropriate their sound insights while rejecting their foolish notions. Critical appropriation is the name of the game. 'Critical' from Gr. krinein, to separate, distinguish, discriminate the true from the false, the prudent from the imprudent, the meaningful from the meaningless, the real from unreal, that which is conducive unto enlightenment from that which is not, and so on. 

    One can also appropriate, make one's own, what no one owns.  I appropriate oxygen with every breath I take.  I make it my own; it enters my blood; it fuels my brain; it is part and parcel of the physical substratum of spiritual production. Who owns the air? Who owns the oxygen in the air?

    Who owns sunlight? I appropriate some every day.  Who owns the sky, "the daily bread of the eyes"? (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

    Before the session on the black mat and after my reading I walked out into the Arizona early November pre-dawn darkness to gaze with wonder at "the starry skies above me" (Kant). Who owns Orion or Ursus Major? 

    Who owns truth?

    Some races are better at finding it and expressing it, but no one owns it.

    There are truths in the Dhammapada and no one owns them. Since no one owns them, they belong to all. Belonging to all, they are no one's property. They cannot be stolen.  Their appropriation cannot be illicit.

    My appropriation of Asian wisdom — which is Asian in that it is from the East, not Asian in that its essence is Eastern — is made possible by a SECOND form of licit cultural appropriation, namely translation.  Translation is cultural appropriation! If done well, it is good. 

    ONE WAY TO MEDITATE. Start discursively with a verse from some noble scripture from the East or from the West, for example, verse 150 from the Dhammapada:

    Here is a citadel built of bones, plastered with flesh and blood, wherein are concealed decay, death, vanity, and deceit.

    Run through it, but then whittle it down to one word, death, for example, and than ask yourself; Who dies? Answer: I die! And then inquire: who or what is this 'I'?

    Anicca

    Bill Vallicella

  • ‘Knowingly Lied’

    'Knowingly lied' is a pleonastic expression. One cannot lie without intending to deceive. And one cannot intend to do X without knowing that one intends to do X. So one cannot lie without lying knowingly: there is no such thing as an unknowing or unwitting lie. It follows that 'knowingly lied' is a pleonastic or redundant expression.  Good writers avoid pleonasm.

    Good writers also know when to break rules in the service of what they want to say.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Illegal Aliens and Black Reparations

    Here is another problem for the ill-starred notion of black reparations. Should those who reside illegally in the U. S. pay them? Why not? Don't they benefit from the putative legacy of slavery like everyone else?  On the  other hand, if you think that only the  descendants of slave-holders should pay reparations, then we citizens who are are not descended from slave-holders are off the hook. And what about the blacks who are descended from blacks who held slaves? Do they get reparations too? And who is black anyway? Rachel Dolezal?  If race is just a social construct, can I re-identify as black and get in on the goodies? If I can identify as a girl and then compete in an all-female athletic event, why can't I identify as black?

    There will never be black reparations for slavery. The idea is just too incoherent for implementation. And it perpetuates the victim mentality that keeps blacks on the bottom. Nor should there be reparations for slavery. See the following. Trigger warning! They are exercises in reasoned discourse.

    David Horowitz on Black Reparations

    On Black Reparations

    Bill Vallicella

  • Virile Ascesis

    Julius Evola (Doctrine of Awakening, 233) preaches a virile ascesis which is neither renunciation, nor worldflight, nor inaction, nor quietism, nor mortification. 

    Ascesis requires detachment, but one can be both detached and active in the world. The vita activa is possible without contemptus mundi. One can even be a warrior like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita whom Lord Krishna commands to do his duty and slay the enemy but with detachment from the fruits of action. Imagine slaughtering a fellow human being with equanimity!  An impossible ideal? (An ideal impossible of realization is of course no ideal at all.)

    In the world but not of it. In the thick of it, but without anything sticking to you, like the lotus flower that floats on the water without getting wet.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. And then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Here is a list of 12 different interpretations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon_on_the_Mount

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

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

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

Categories

Philosophy Weblogs

Other Websites