Slow Down and Accomplish Non-Accomplishment

Successfully resisting the hyperkineticism of one's society, saying No to it by  flânerie, studiousness, otium liberale, Thoreauvian stewardship of the moment, traipsing over mountain trails at sunrise and whatnot — this too is a sort of accomplishment.  You have to work at it a bit.  Part of the work is divesting oneself of the expectations of others and resisting their and the larger society's suggestions.  Eradicating one's suggestibility is actually a life-long task, and none too easy.

The world's a vast project of often useless neg-otiation. It is the enemy of otium, leisure, that basis of culture. (Josef Pieper) There is need of those who will 'otiate' it, enjoying "leisure with a good conscience" to cop a phrase from Nietzsche, that untimely saunterer. 

Slow down! You'll get to your grave soon enough.  Why rush?  Is the universe in a rush to get somewhere?  It already is everywhere. Are you any less cosmic, you microcosm?

Is There Such a Thing as Metaphysical Explanation?

M. L. writes,
 
I've been enjoying your critique of [Peter] van Inwagen. [The reader is presumably referring to  my "Van Inwagen on Fiction, Existence, Properties, Particulars, and Method" in Studia Neoaristotelica: A Journal of Analytical Scholasticism, 2015, vol. 12, no. 2, 99-125]  I was initially astonished at his claim that metaphysics/ontology doesn't explain, but it also got me curious about where the explanation is going on in ontological accounts (especially of properties, however construed).
 
I'm doing a Ph.D. in metaontology and I'm contrasting neo-Quinean (van Inwagen) and neo-Aristotelian (Lowe) approaches. 
 
Can you direct me to where you might have written about, if indeed you have, how it is ontology/metaphysics explains?
 
Well, I haven't discussed the issue head-on in a separate publication, but I have discussed it en passant in various contexts. Below is a re-do of a 2012 weblog entry that addresses the question and may spark discussion. Combox open.
 
………………………
 

Let 'Tom' name a particular tomato.  Let us agree that if a predicate applies to a particular, then the predicate is true of the particular.  Predicates are linguistic items.  Tomatoes are not. If Tom is red, then 'red' is true of Tom, and if 'red' is true of Tom, then Tom is red. This yields the material biconditional

1. Tom is red iff 'red' is true of Tom.

Now it seems to me that the following question is intelligible:  Is Tom red because 'red' is true of Tom, or is 'red' true of Tom because Tom is red?  'Because' here does not have a causal sense.  So the question is not whether Tom's being red causes 'red' to be true of Tom, or vice versa.  So I won't speak of causation in this context.  I will speak of metaphysical/ontological grounding.  The question then is what grounds what, not what causes what.   Does Tom's being red ground the application (the being-applied)  of 'red' to Tom, or does the application (the being-applied) of 'red' to Tom ground Tom's being red?

I am not primarily concerned with the correct answer to this question, but with meaningfulness/intelligibility of the question itself.

Grounding is asymmetrical: if x grounds y, then y does not ground x.  (It is also irreflexive and transitive.)  Now if there is such a relation as grounding, then there will be a distinctive form of explanation we can call metaphysical/ontological explanation.  (Grounding, even though it is not causation, is analogous to causation, and metaphysical explanation, even though distinct from causal explanation, is analogous to causal explanation.)

Explaining is something we do: in worlds without minds there is no explaining and there are no explanations, including metaphysical explanations.  But I assume that, if there are any metaphysical grounding relations, then  in every world metaphysical grounding relations obtain.  (Of course, there is no grounding of the application of predicates in a world without languages and predicates, but there are other grounding relations. For example, if propositions are abstract objects that necessarily exist, and some of the true ones need truth-makers, then truth-making, which is a grounding relation, exists in worlds in which there are no minds and no languages and hence no sentences.)

Grounding is not causation. It is not a relation between event tokens such as Jack's touching a live wire and Jack's death by electrocution.  Grounding is also not a relation between propositions.  It is not a logical relation that connects propositions to propositions.  It is not the relation of material implication, nor is it entailment (the necessitation of material implication), nor any other logical relation wholly situated at the level of propositions.  Propositions, let us assume, are the primary truth-bearers. 

In our example, grounding is not a relation between propositions — it is not a logical relation — since neither Tom nor 'red' are propositions. 

I want to say the following.  Tom's being red grounds the correctness of the application of 'red' to Tom.  'Red' is true of Tom because (metaphysically, not causally or logically) Tom is red, and not vice versa.  'Red' is true of Tom in virtue of  Tom's being red.  Tom's being red is metaphysically prior to the truth of 'Tom is red' where this metaphysical priority cannot be reduced to some ordinary type of priority, whether logical, causal, temporal, or what have you.  Tom's being red metaphysically accounts for the truth of 'Tom is red.' Tom's being red makes it the case the 'red' is true of Tom.  Tom's being red makes 'Tom is red' true.  

I conclude that there is at least one type of metaphysical grounding relation, and at least one form of irreducibly metaphysical explanation. 

We can ask similar questions with respect to normative properties.  Suppose Jesus commands us to love one another.  We distinguish among the commander, the act of commanding, the content of the command, and the normative property of the commanded content, in this case the obligatoriness of loving one another.  If Jesus is God, then whatever he commands is morally obligatory. Nevertheless, we can intelligibly ask whether the content is obligatory because Jesus/God commands it, or whether he (rightly) commands it because it is obligatory.  The 'because' here is neither causal not logical.  It is metaphysical/ontological.
 
This of course a variation on the old Euthyphro Dilemma in the eponymous Platonic dialog.
 
I freely admit that there is something obscure about a grounding relation that is neither causal nor logical. But of course logical and causal relations too are problematic when subjected to squinty-eyed scrutiny. 
 
I conclude with a dogmatic slogan. Metaphysics without metaphysical explanation is not metaphysics at all.  

What the 2020 Election is About

"More than anything, this election is about President Trump." (Mara Liasson, NPR, 2/2/2020)

Not so! The election is a key engagement in the battle for the soul of America. It is not so much about Trump as it is about the defense of our constitutional republic. The Democrat party, in the control of the hard Left, aims to subvert our constitutional order.  They are taking aim at the Electoral College, the Second Amendment, and the First as well. For a leftist, dissent from their positions is 'hate speech.'  The Democrats have become illiberal. Mirabile dictu, conservatives are now the new (classical) liberals! We stand for individual liberty; they for an ever-more invasive State apparatus.

The Constitution herself is at risk. For despite their mendacious invocations, the Democrats do not care at all about the Constitution, as is evident from their vicious attempts at blocking the Kavanaugh appointment. They oppose the originalism that alone honors our great founding document. The Democrats are also assaulting bedrock American commitments such as limited government, the presumption of innocence, national sovereignty, the rule of law, the very notion of a citizen and the related distinction between legal and illegal immigration. The political weaponization of the impeachment provision of the Constitution is a spectacularly clear example of their destructive leftism. The Democrats embrace such outrages as sanctuary jurisdictions. I could go on.

So 2020 is not about Trump the man but about the preservation of the Republic. Trump is 'merely' carrying the fight to the Democrats, exposing them for what they are, and teaching fellow Republicans how to develop their political cojones and fight as they must if we of the Coalition of the Sane are to prevail.

Metaphysical Joy and Sadness

There is a rare form of joy that some of us have experienced, a joy that suggests that at the back of this life is something marvellous and that one day this life may open out onto it.  It goes together with a kind of sadness, call it metaphysical nostalgia, a sort of longing for a lost homeland, so far back in time that it is outside of time. This is the joy that C. S. Lewis describes in Surprised by Joy, and that Nietzsche may have had in mind when he had his Zarathustra exclaim, "All joy wants eternity, deep, deep eternity!"

Coming Together and Moving Apart

Is it an unalloyed good that people be 'brought together'? I rather doubt it. Mark Zuckerberg would seem to agree by his actions if not by his words. The man who touts his Facebook as bringing people together has had a huge wall built around his Hawaiian compound. Apparently, those who engineer 'bringing together' think of themselves as very special people who have every right not to be brought together with those they bring together.

The Infirmity of Truth

Having the truth is no defense in the court of the politically correct. For that court lies in the precincts of power, and here below truth is no match for power unless those who are truthful also have power.  But the paths to power are often paved with lies and their necessity. Rare then is the truthful one who attains power with his truthfulness intact.  

Idolatry without God

"I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me."

If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater.  But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater.  Or so say I. For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God (or some other Absolute such as the Plotinian One) does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship. 

Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.'  Thus they typically say to the Christian,  "You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything without falling into idolatry.  He cannot esteem anything absolutely. If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, the revolution, humanity, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.

A consistent atheism, one that eschews all gods, may prove to be  a difficult row to hoe.  The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the Enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally.  If there is no Absolute, then nothing may be legitimately viewed as absolute. Our atheist must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment or ultimate concern.  Nice work if you can get it.

Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols?  Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative?  I doubt it.  I suspect the atheist must fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or the defeat of superstition or something else obviously unworthy of worship.  Why must he? Because we are all naturally inclined to find life worth living in pursuit of values that transcend us, values that are not transient, contingent, and parasitic on our flickering wishes and desires. Thus I conjecture that atheists and metaphysical naturalists who do not succumb to nihilism live in a state of self-deception in which they attach absolute value to things that their theory tells them cannot have absolute value.  Perhaps they should acquiesce in the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.

Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur.  In  "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," we read:

The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.

Schlick’s Scientism: An Antilogism

Remember Moritz Schlick?  He wrote, "All real problems are scientific  questions; there are no others." ("The Future of Philosophy" in The Linguistic Turn, ed. R. Rorty).  The Schlickian dictum sires an antilogism.

1) All real problems are scientific.

2) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is real.

3) The problem whether all real problems are scientific is not scientific.

Each of these propositions is plausible, but they are collectively inconsistent: they cannot all be true.  Which member of the trio should we reject?

I reject (1). There are real (genuine) problems that are not scientific  in the way that the natural sciences are scientific.  Scientific problems are amenable in principle to solution by empirical observation and experiment. This is not so for (1). So I must disagree with Schlick the positivist.  

Related: The Death of Moritz Schlick

Exercise for the reader: Is the meaning of the proposition below the method of its verification? If yes, then what method might that be?

Schlick

Climate Bluster

He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology.

What drives the ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property.  Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda. 

The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis.

They mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth.  It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-immanent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity.  The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.  

Now ask yourself: how plausible is this conjunction of claims?  Bear in mind that a conjunctive proposition is true if and only if each of its conjuncts is true.  

I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.