Peikoff on the Supernatural

Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Meridian 1993, p. 31:

"Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature.  "Nature," in turn denotes existence viewed from a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities.  What then is a "super-nature"?  It would have to be a form of existence beyond existence; a thing beyond entities; a something beyond identity.

The idea of the "supernatural" is an assault on everything man knows about reality.  It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics.  It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy . . . .

Is this a good argument? That alone is the question.

It is clear that that there cannot exist anything beyond existence: There exists an x such that x does not exist is a formal-logical or narrowly-logical contradiction.  So far, so good. And let us cheerfully acquiesce in Peikoff's definition of 'supernatural' as that which is beyond nature.  We also grant that the concept of existence is "the widest of all concepts," one that "subsumes everything." (p. 5)  We can even grant that nature is existing things regarded as a system of causally interacting entities governed by natural laws.

All of this granted, it still does not follow that a supernatural entity is an entity beyond entities or an existent beyond existents.  For if the concept of existence "subsumes everything" as we just quoted Peikoff as saying, then it subsumes any supernatural entities there might be, whether God or unexemplified universals, or Fregean propositions, or mathematical sets, or Cartesian thinking substances, or states of consciousness if they are naturalistically irreducible, or . . . .   All of these categories are categories of the supernatural given Peikoff's use of the term.  For the members of these categories, if any, do not belong to the natural world, the world of space-time-matter. Now these categories might be empty, but one cannot show them to be empty by intoning the formal-logical truth that nothing exists beyond existence.

I submit that anyone who carefully reads the above passage and thinks about it objectively will be able to see that Peikoff's argument is a blatant non sequitur.  He is making one or the other of the following mistakes.  He is either attempting to answer a substantive philosophical question by terminological fiat, or he is equivocating on 'existence.'  I will explain each of these in turn.

A.  It is illegitimate to attempt to answer a philosophical question by rigging one's terminology in such a way that the answer 'falls out' of the terminology.  One cannot legislate the supernatural out of existence by using 'existence' in such a way that only natural items exist.  Equally, one cannot legislate the supernatural into existence by a similar move.  For example, one cannot define God into existence by saying that God is by definition an existent being since a nonexistent God is not God, and God is God (A is A!).

B. If Peikoff is not making the first mistake, then he is equivocating on 'existence.'  That is, he using it in two different senses.  He is using it both as the "widest of all concepts" to cover everything that exists, but also in a narrow sense to cover only natural existents.

It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence.  But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously.  Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.

(Don't complain that I've 'taken Peikoff's argument out of context.'  It stands on its own, and if it is bad, no amount of further context will improve it. If I quoted Descartes' Meditation V ontological argument and showed why it is unconvincing would you complain that I had taken it out of context?)

Natural Evil and Fallen Angels

This is an old post from my first blog,  dated 3 January 2005, slightly redacted.

………………………………..

Keith Burgess-Jackson writes:

I have a question for my theistic readers. How do you reconcile the devastation wrought by the tsunami with your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being? If God could have prevented the tsunami but didn’t, then God’s omnibenevolence is called into question. If God wanted to prevent the tsunami but couldn’t, then God’s omniscience or omnipotence is called into question. You can’t explain away the evil by citing free will, for no human being brought about the tsunami. (Surely you don’t believe in fallen angels.) Do events like this shake your faith? If not, why not? If death and destruction on this scale don’t make you doubt the existence of your god, what would?

1. The parenthetical material is puzzling. If someone can see his way clear to accepting the existence of a purely spiritual being such as God, then the belief in angels, fallen or otherwise, will present no special problem. Given the existence of fallen angels, the Free Will Defense may be invoked to account for natural evils such as tsunamis: natural evils turn out to be a species of moral evils.

2. Of course, the argument can be turned around. If someone argues from the fact of evil to the nonexistence of God, that person assumes that there is indeed an objective fact of evil, and thus, an objective distinction between good and evil. A sophisticated theist can counterargue that there cannot be an objective distinction between good and evil unless God exists. I could make that argument as rigorous as you like. That is not to say that the argument would be compelling to every rational consumer of it, but only that it would logically impeccable, plausibly premised, and sufficiently strong to neutralize the atheist's argument from evil. I distinguish between refuting and neutralizing. It may be difficult to refute a sophisticated interlocutor since he will not be likely to blunder. But he can be neutralized by presenting counterarguments of equal but opposite probative force. The result is a stand-off: you battle the opponent to a draw.

3. In a separate argument, a theist could make the case that the very quantity and malevolence of the moral evil in the world — think of the 20th century and the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, the 100 million murdered by Communists, etc.) — cannot be explained naturalistically. This would be another way to argue from the fact of objective evil to supernatural agents of evil.  See my The Holocaust Argument for God's Existence.

4. There is no denying that evil presents a serious challenge to theism. Should it shake the theist's faith? Only if the objections to atheism/naturalism shake the atheist's/naturalist's faith. We seem to have doxastic parity. There are reasons both for and against theism. But there are also reasons both for and against atheism/naturalism. It would be special pleading to suppose that the reasons against theism are much more weighty that the reasons against atheism/naturalism. See my companion post on the naturalist's version of fides quaerens intellectum.

5. At the end of the day, after all the dialectical smoke has cleared, you simply have to decide what you are going to believe and how you are going to live. The decision is not a mere decision, but rationally informed, and subject to revision after the consideration of further arguments; but at some point ratiocination must cease and a position must be taken.

Note: Most atheists are naturalists, hence my conflation of them in this post. But one could be an anti-naturalist and an atheist (McTaggart) and I suppose one could be a theist and a naturalist.

Facebook

I'm on a roll. Daily punch-back against leftist loons on a wide variety of topics. Culture critique in the bowels of the Zuckerbergian beast.  No lefties need apply. I am looking for a few good men and women to join me in the fight for sense and sanity and the defense of the Republic. 

I received 'friend' requests from a couple of hotties the other day who proudly strut their stuff and sport their 'racks' on pages including links to their 'nude pics.'  Sorry girls, you are not MavPhil material.  

The State under Leftism: Totalitarianism cum pane et circensibus

Although the state under contemporary leftism is totalitarian and demands conformity and submission in matters of moment, it tolerates and indeed encourages the cultivation of a politically inconsequential individualism of private self-absorption.  A people given bread (food stamps and other forms of infantilizing dependency), circuses (mass sporting events), dope (legalization of marijuana), HollyWeird pornography and violence, politically correct propaganda, and such weapons of mass distraction as Twitter and Facebook is kept distracted, enervated, and submissive.

Nowadays it is not religion that is the opiate of the masses, but the dope of  Big Government and its leftist enablers.

The Democrats have long been the party of Big Government; they are now the party of hard-Left Big Government by 'woke' elites. There is nothing democratic about them.  Damn these Demo Rats!

Memory Anchors

Journal entries can serve to anchor memories. Memories anchored are less likely to be embellished or suppressed. 

"I couldn't have done that!"

"But it says right here that you did, and you wrote it!"

How Much Value Do You Attach to This Life?

The hour of death has arrived.  You are informed by an utterly reliable source that you have exactly two options.  You can either accept death and with it utter annihilation of the self, or you can repeat your life with every last detail the same.  But if every last detail is to be the same, and you decide to sign up for another round on the wheel of becoming, you realize that you are signing up for an infinity of rounds.

So which will it be?  Has your life been so valuable that you would be willing to repeat it, and indeed repeat it endlessly? 

For me, one samsaric cycle is quite enough.  "I hope never to return." (Frida Kahlo)  

Roger Kimball on Elias Canetti on Death

An excerpt from Roger Kimball, Becoming Elias Canetti:

. . . . Canetti’s response to the fact of death—“the only fact,” as he sometimes puts it—is a tragic stance of rebellion against an ineluctable fate. The overriding question for every individual, he writes in The Torch in My Ear, is “whether he should put up with the fact that a death is imminent for him.”

Canetti has never worked out his thoughts on death in any systematic fashion. His basic message would seem to be the unexceptionable admonition not to go gentle into that good night. Yet he also uses the rejection of death as the starting point for other, often more questionable, sorts of statements. At one point, for example, his insistence that the individual take a stand against death leads him to the pious declaration that “I care about the life of every human being and not just that of my neighbor.” And in one of his essays, he goes beyond the posture of stoically resisting death to tell us that “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” We must of course be grateful that Canetti cares about the lives of all of us, even if the word “cares” is rendered practically empty in this context. But as for the relation between death and beauty and death and goodness—well, here I think we must question Canetti’s dictum. For it seems at least equally plausible that beauty and goodness can emerge as compelling forces in our lives only against the background of mortality; in this sense, death, as Wallace Stevens put it, is the mother of beauty. Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever. Now, I do not doubt that Canetti’s meditations on death betray a core of genuine pathos. But in the end I’m afraid that they amount to little more than a collection of sentimental exhortations; their chief function would seem to be to perpetuate the atmosphere of intellectual melodrama within which Canetti prefers to operate. Indeed, they would hardly be worth scrutiny, except that Canetti insists on placing them at the very center of his thought.

Canetti quoted: “So long as death exists, no beauty is beautiful, no goodness is good.” Canetti paraphrased:  To those who live free of illusions, nothing ultimately matters if neither we nor they last forever. Kimball quoted:  "Things matter to us precisely because neither we nor they last forever."

Two Guises of Religion

Religion can appear under the guise of a childish refusal to face the supposed truth that we are but a species of clever land mammal with no higher origin or destiny. It can also appear under the guise of transcendence and maturity: the religious seek to transcend the childish and the merely human whereas worldlings wallow in it.

Religion must remain a riddle here below, as much of a riddle as the predicament it is supposed to cure.  If religion wants a symbol, let it be:

Rx_symbol

And if anyone should say that only the sick need medicine, then let the reply be:  We are all sick.

A Rule for Reading the Bible

What we know to be the case constrains Biblical interpretation. For example, we know that an individual human life does not begin with its first breath. If any passage in the Bible states or implies otherwise, that passage may and indeed must be dismissed and cannot count as divine revelation. So much for Biblical inerrancy, at least on one reading of that phrase.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Philosophical Justification for a Drink or Two

From time to time  it is perhaps appropriate that we should relax a little the bonds that tether us to the straight and narrow.  A fitting apologia for a bit of indulgence and even overindulgence  is found in Seneca, On Tranquillity of Mind, XVII, 8-9, tr. Basore:

At times we ought to reach even the point of intoxication, not drowning ourselves in drink, yet succumbing to it; for it washes away troubles, and stirs the mind from its very depths and heals its sorrow just as it does certain ills of the body; and the inventor of wine is not called the Releaser [Liber, Bacchus] on account of the license it gives to the tongue, but because it frees the mind from bondage to cares and emancipates it and gives it new life and makes it bolder in all that it attempts. But, as in freedom, so in wine there is a wholesome moderation.

Sed ut libertatis ita vini salubris moderatio est.

. . .

Yet we ought not to do this often, for fear that the mind may contract an evil habit; nevertheless there are times when it must be drawn into rejoicing and freedom, and gloomy sobriety must be banished for a while.

Scotch bourbon beerAmos Milburn, One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer

The Champs, Tequila.  Arguably unique in that its lyrics consist of exactly one trisyllabic word.

Electric Flag, Wine.  Great video of the late Mike Bloomfield and his Gibson Les Paul in their prime, at the Monterey Pop Festival, 1967.  Definitive proof that a Jew can play the blues. Cultural appropriation at its finest. We all could profit from more cultural appropriation, blacks especially. Think what they could learn from the kike, the chink, and the honkey, not to mention the dago, the guinea, the greaseball, and the wop. 

Canned Heat, Whisky-Headed Woman.

Tommy McClennan, Whisky-Headed Woman, 1939

Doors, Whisky Bar

Buck Owens, Cigarettes, Whisky, and Wild, Wild Women

Cigarettes are a blot on the whole human race
A man is a monkey with one in his face
So gather 'round friends and listen to your brother
A fire on one end, a fool on the other.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot's version

What are you drinking? I'm having me a Whisky Highball, classic, and simplicity itself: ginger ale and your favorite whisky. Mine tonight is Canada Dry ginger ale and Jim Beam bourbon.  

Addendum 9/16

David G. writes,

Back when I was working for Google and making crap loads of money, I started sampling high-end bourbon and scotch. Maybe I'm just not a connoisseur, but in my judgement, although some of the 12-year-old Glen's were marginally better than Jack Daniels, none of the bourbons were, and there were several high-end whiskeys that were noticeably worse than Jack, so now that I'm poor, I really don't mind going back to my old friend Jack.

Also, as I'm sure you are aware, you can't post a list of songs on the internet and not have someone tell you you missed some. One you probably know:

EmmyLou Harris, Two More Bottles of Wine

and one you probably don't, unless you follow local Arizona bands:

Roger Clyne and the Peacemakers, Jack vs. Jose.

Jack is good enough for me, too, and so is Jose Cuervo Gold, and if you are mixing these bad boys, not with each other mind you, but with, say, ginger ale or tonic water respectively, then there is no call to shell out for the top-shelf hooch which is outrageously overpriced. You don't always get what you pay for.  If a snob challlenges your judgment, Dave, arrange a blind taste test.

Fratello Pepito recommends The Four Deuces, White Port Lemon Juice, 1956.

Old and Jaded

The trick is to get old without becoming jaded.

My valued colleague H. N. couldn't pull it off. He had a certain depth and a certain wisdom, and we were on good terms. He knew how to take my intensity and he wasn't threatened by my intelligence: his was a healthy self-confidence. But he had become lazy and complacent among unstimulating colleagues. I couldn't engage him. An idea of mine might be dismissed with "That's already in Spinoza." Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn't. "But what do you think of the idea?" No answer. Didn't care. Tired, jaded.  

He was dead wood on the path to petrification. Jaded, he was turning to stone.

What I didn't say to him out of affection and because it would have done no good:  What are you doing here? You have the wherewithal to retire. Why do you continue to draw a salary?