A Reason to Try to ‘Make it’

One  reason to try to 'make it' is to come to appreciate, by succeeding, that worldly success is not a worthy final goal of human striving. 'Making it' frees one psychologically and allows one to turn one's attention to worthier matters.  He who fails is dogged by a sense of failure whereas he who succeeds is in a position to appreciate the ultimate insignificance of both worldly success and worldly failure, not that most of the successful ever do. 

Their success traps them.  Hence the sad spectacle of the old coot, a good flight of stairs from a major coronary event, scheming and angling for more loot and land when in the end a man needs only — six feet.

They Have No Views

My cats eat, sleep, play, and sleep some more. They have no views. But the value of being adoxastos is lost on them.  I do not envy them.  I am glad that I am a man. Man alone among the animals is more than an animal.  Man's distinction consists both in his having views and in his ability to examine them like Socrates, to suspend them like the Pyrrhonian skeptic and to transcend them like the mystic. 

Man is also distinguished by his wretchedness. No mere animal, strictly speaking, is wretched.  Animal suffering never gets the length of wretchedness. Man is wretched because he is great. Therein lies the Pascalian paradox of the human predicament.

Ostrich Presentism

The following remark in Wittgenstein's Zettel seems to fit my sparring partner, Bad Ostrich, to a T.

456. Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called "loss of problems." (Problemverlust) Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world become broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.

Here is a problem, or rather a question, that seems genuine and 'deep.'  Do only present items exist, or do wholly past and wholly future items also exist?  For this question to make sense, 'exist' in both occurrences cannot be in the present tense. If it were, 'Only present items exist' would be logically true and 'Past and present and future items all exist' would be logically false. The presentist claim would then be non-substantive (trivial), and the 'eternalist' claim would be substantive, but necessarily false.

Well, maybe the question just doesn't make sense.  This seems to be the Ostrich's view. He seems to think that logical as opposed to metaphysical presentism is the only game in town: 'Only the present exists' is susceptible of only one reading, the logical reading, whereas I think it is susceptible of two readings, the logical one and a metaphysical one.  In one of his earlier comments, the Ostrich writes:

He [the logical presentist] is putting forward not a substantive metaphysical thesis, but rather a substantive thesis about language, a thesis about the meaning of ‘exists’ and ‘at present’.

The thesis, I take it, is that 'exists' can only be used correctly in the present-tensed way.  If so, 'Boethius exists' is nonsense, if it is a stand-alone, as opposed to an embedded, sentence. ('It was the case that Boethius exists' is not nonsense.) In other words, 'exists' has no correct tenseless use.

Now if there are timeless entities, then 'exists' can be used both tenselessly and correctly. But I expect the Ostrich will have no truck with the timeless.  His claim will then presumably be that 'exists' has no correct tenseless use in respect of any temporal item, and that temporal items are the only ones on offer.

What about the disjunctively omnitemporal use that I have already explained? Surely it is true to say that Boethius exists in that he either existed or exists or will exist, where each disjunct is tensed.  This is true because the first disjunct is true.  The Ostrich could say that the disjunctively omnitemporal use is not genuinely tenseless since it is parasitic upon tensed expresssions.

The Ostrich bids us consider

. . . the question of whether a thing could exist without existing in the present. The logical presentist might then question what is meant by ‘no longer exists’. The natural interpretation is ‘existed, but does not exist’. But then the thing doesn’t exist, period. 

Using tensed language we can say, truly, that Boethius existed, but does not exist.  Why not be satisfied with this?  

The past-tensed 'Boethius existed' is true. It is true now.  What makes it true? The Ostrich will presumably say that nothing makes it true, and there is no need for anything to make it true; it is just true!  I expect the Ostrich to adopt A. N. Prior's redundancy theory of the present according to which everything that is presently true is simply true. (Cf. C. Bourne, 2006, 42 f.)  Just as 'It is true that ____' is redundant. 'It is now the case that ___' is redundant.

For Prior, all tensed sentences are present-tensed.  Thus the past-tensed 'Boethius existed' MEANS that it is now the case that Boethius existed.  Given the redundancy of 'It is now the case that ____,' we are left with 'Boethius existed.'  And that is all!  There is no need or room for a metaphysics of time.  There is nothing more to say about the nature of time than what is said in a perspicuous tense logic.

Thus the Ostrich. I am not satisfied. Past-tensed contingent truths need truth-makers.   'BV exists' is true. It can't just be true. It needs a truth-maker.  A plausible candidate is the 200 lb animal who wears my clothes. It will be the case that BV no longer exists. When that time comes, 'BV existed' will be true. If 'BV exists' needs a truth-maker, then so will 'BV existed.'

As with BV, so with Boethius.

If 'Boethius existed' needs a truth-maker, and nothing at present can serve as truth-maker, then the pressure is on to resist the Ostrich thesis that 'exists' can only be correctly used in the present-tensed way.

Animal Suffering and the Problem of Evil

A Catholic reader of this blog is deeply troubled by the problem of animal suffering. He reports his painful recollection of a YouTube video that depicts

. . . the killing of a baby elephant by 13 lions. They first attacked the little elephant in the open, but he was saved when several water buffalo intervened and drove the lions off. The baby then ran to two large bull elephants nearby, but rather than protecting him from the lions, they were indifferent. The lions, seeing this, rushed the baby, which helplessly ran off into the bush, where the lions, 13 in all, caught him, and began to devour him. You probably know that because of an elephant’s trunk, a lion’s bite to the neck does not kill, so I assume that the baby was eaten alive.

I find the thought of this killing and the myriad other killings like it very hard to accept. How does a theist explain such acts in nature? I know something of the various theodicies and defenses of theistic philosophers, but when confronted with this scene of terror and horrendous death, I find them all unconvincing. Something in the depths of my being rejects them all as over-sophisticated attempts to mask what is truly terrible so as to defend at all costs the first of Hume’s four options, that of a perfectly good first cause. I am not saying that I am abandoning my theistic beliefs, but I think that for too long, theists have not taken the matter of animal pain and suffering seriously enough.

Leaving philosophic theism aside, there is glaring indifference to this matter in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, where the fixation on humanity’s fall, faults, and need for salvation. Without denying whatever truth may be found in this long theological reflection on human misery, what of the animals, those here millions of years before man walked on the earth, and all those who have shared and do share the earth with him? (Your posts on animal sentience, from which I have greatly profited, form part of the background to this question.)

[. . .]  You often speak of choosing, and I agree that we must choose what we believe, but there is something at the very heart of reality that undermines our choices, and we find ourselves, if we are honest, doubting what we have chosen and thrown back on uncertainty, or if perhaps less honest and more fearful, falling into elaborate intellectual defenses to fend off what is unpalatable. As I wrote to you last year, I still believe that our ignorance is perhaps the greatest evil that we must confront.

Again, I had to share this with you, since I have no one here who would understand what is troubling me . . .

The horrors of nature "red in tooth and claw" cannot be denied.  Sensitive souls have been driven by their contemplation to the depths of pessimism and anti-natalism. (See my Anti-natalism and Benatar categories).  The notion that this awful world could be the creation of an all-powerful and loving deity who providentially cares about his creatures can strike one as either a sick joke, a feel-good fairy tale, or something equally intellectually disreputable.  As my old atheist friend Quentin Smith once put it to me, "If you were God, would you have created this world?"  To express it in the form of an understatement,  a world in which sentient beings eat each other alive, and must do so to survive, and lack the ability to commit suicide, does not seem to be a world optimally arranged.  If you were the architect of the world, would you design it as a slaughter house?

If one suffers from the problem of (natural) evil, there is little a philosopher qua philosopher can do.  Pastoral care is not his forte. But if one can gain some intellectual light on the philosophical problem, that light might  help with the existential-psychological problem.  I will now suggest how a theist who is also inclined toward skepticism can find some peace of mind.

Here is an argument from evil:

Theological Premise: Necessarily, if there is a God, there are no pointless evils.

Empirical Premise: There are pointless evils.

Conclusion: There is no God.

A pointless evil is one that is unjustified or gratuitous. Suppose there is an evil that is necessary for a greater good. God could allow such an evil without prejudice to his omnibenevolence. So it it not the case that evils as such tell against the existence of God, but only pointless evils.  

Now the lions' eating alive of the baby elephant would seem to be a pointless evil: why couldn't an omnipotent God have created a world in which all animals are herbivores?

But — and here the skeptic inserts his blade — how do we know this? in general, how do we know that the empirical premise is true? Even if it is obvious that an event is evil, it is not obvious that it is pointlessly evil.   One can also ask, more radically, whether it is empirically obvious that an event is evil.  It is empirically obvious to me that the savagery of nature is not to my liking, nor to the liking of the animals being savaged, but it does not follow that said savagery is objectively evil.  But if an event or state of affairs is not objectively evil, then it cannot be objectively pointlessly evil.

So how do we know that the so-called empirical premise above is true or even empirical? Do we just see or intuit that an instance of animal savagery is both evil and pointless?  Suppose St. Paul tells us (Romans 1:18-20) that one can just see that the universe is a divine artifact, and that God exists from the the things that have been made, and that therefore atheism is morally culpable! I say: Sorry, sir, but you cannot read off the createdness-by-God of nature from its empirical attributes. Createdness is not an empirical attribute; it is an ontological status. But neither is being evil or being pointlessly evil.

So both the theist and the atheist make it too easy for themselves when they appeal to some supposed empirical fact. We ought to be skeptical both about Paul's argument for God and the atheist's argument against God.  Paul begs the question when he assumes that the natural world is a divine artifact.  The atheist too begs the question when he assumes that all or some evils are pointless evils.

Will you say that the pointlessness of some evils is not a direct deliverance but an inference? From which proposition or propositions?  From the proposition that these evils are inscrutable in the sense that we can discern no sufficient reasons for God's allowing them?  But that is too flimsy a premise to allow such a weighty inference.

The dialectical lay of the land seems to be as follows. If there are pointless evils, then God does not exist, and if God exists, then there are no pointless evils. But we don't know that there are pointless evils, and so we are within our epistemic rights in continuing to affirm the existence of God. After all, we have a couple dozen good, but not compelling, arguments for the existence of God.  One cannot prove the existence of God. By the same token, one cannot prove the nonexistence of God.  One can bluster, of course, and one can beg the question. And one can do this both as a theist and as an atheist. But if you are intellectually honest, you will agree with me that there are no proofs and no objective certainties in these sublunary precincts.

This is why I say that, in the end, one must decide what one will believe and how one will live. And of course belief and action go together: what one believes informs how one lives, and how one lives shows what one believes. If I believe in God and the soul, then those beliefs will be attested in my behavior, and if I live as if God and the soul are real, then that is what it is to believe these things.

If you seek objective certainty in these matters, you will not find it. That is why free decision comes into it.  But there is nothing willful about the decision since years of examination of arguments and counterarguments are behind it all. The investigation must continue if the faith is to be authentic.  Again, there is no objective certainty in this life. There is only subjective certainty which many people confuse with objective certainty.  We don't KNOW. This, our deep ignorance, is another aspect of the problem of evil.

Making these assertions, I do not make them dogmatically. I make them tentatively and I expose them to ongoing investigation. In this life we are in statu viae: we are ever on the road. If rest there is, it is at the end of the road.

My correspondent seems to think that I think that deciding what to believe and how to live generates objective certainty. That is not my view.  There is no objective certainty here below. It lies on the Other Side if it lies anywhere. And there is no objective certainty here below that there is anything beyond the grave.  One simply has to accept that one is in a Cave-like condition, to allude to Plato's great allegory, and that, while one is not entirely in the dark, one is not entirely in the light either, but is muddling around in a chiaroscuro of ignorance and insight.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sounds of the Southwest

IMG_0338Calexico, Alone Again Or

A great cover of Love's version from '67.

Ry Cooder, Paris, Texas

Ry Cooder, He'll Have to Go

A curiously satisfying Tex-Mex re-do of the old Jim Reeves crossover hit

Ry Cooder, Yellow Roses

Spade Cooley, Detour

'Spade Cooley' has got to be one of the most politically incorrect names of all time.  I remember seeing his Western swing show on KTLA, Channel 5, in the late '50s, early '60s' at my Uncle Ray's place.  Cooley was a real piece of work.  

Above, a view of the Arizona open road from the cockpit of my 2013 Jeep Wrangler. 

Old Crow Medicine Show, Sweet Amarillo.  Dylan wrote it.

Marty Robbins messes with the wicked Felina in El Paso and comes to an untimely end.

Dean Martin is down and out in Houston. 

A lonely soldier cleans his gun and dreams of Galveston. 

A slacker standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona spies a girl in a flatbed Ford.

Johnny Rivers heads East via Phoenix and Albuquerque.

IMG_0336From Tucson to Tucumcari, Tehachapi to Tonopah, this sojourner of the American night has driven every kind of rig that's ever been made.

Ed Farrell writes, "The Little Feat version of I'm Willin is a good one.  But my favorite version will probably remain the one done by Seatrain circa 1970–which was the standard road song for Sierra climbing trips in late high school/college.  Seatrain never really took off as a band but their musicianship was quite good though their style was difficult to pigeonhole."

That is a good version, indeed better than Little Feat's.  There were a lot of great bands back in the day that never really made it.  Another is Fever Tree.  I remember hearing them circa '68 live at a club called The Kaleidoscope  in Hollywood or West L. A.  Give a careful listen to The Sun Also Rises.

Ed also recommends Seatrain's version of the Carole King composition, Creepin' Midnight.  Produced by George Martin.

Finally, please take a look at Ed's spectacular photography.

Two Senses of ‘Tenseless’

The first sense I mention only to set aside. Timeless entities, if there are any, exist tenselessly and have their intrinsic properties  and some of their relational properties tenselessly.  The 'exists' in '7 exists' is tenseless, and so is the 'is' in '7 is prime.' And please note that the tenselessness is not a result of a de-tensing operation or an abstraction from tense: the tenseless terms are inherently tenseless because the entity in question is inherently timeless.  So far, no problem.  Talk of tenselessness with respect to timeless entities, if any,  is wholly intelligible.

Problems arise when we ask whether temporal objects, items in time, can be intelligibly described as tenselessly existing or tenselessly propertied.   Is it intelligible to say that Boethius tenselessly exists and is tenselessly a philosopher?  In one sense it is; but the  sense in which it is gives no aid and comfort to presentism.  That is what I will rehearse in this post. 

TENSELESSNESS AS DISJUNCTIVE OMNITEMPORALITY

We consider the disjunctively omnitemporal sense according to which 'x tenselessly exists' means 'x existed or x exists or x will exist' where each disjunct is tensed, and 'x is tenselessly F' means that 'x was F or x is F or x will be F' where each disjunct is tensed. This sense of 'tenseless' is not properly tenseless: tensed expressions must be used to formulate it. But while improper, it is has the virtue of being wholly intelligible. Thus Julius Caesar tenselessly exists in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense in that he either existed, or exists (present tense), or will exist. He tenselessly exists because the first of these tensed disjuncts is true. When we say that he tenselessly exists we are simply abstracting from when he existed. We are leaving the 'when' out of consideration. We are not thereby attributing to the man some non-disjunctive property of tenseless existence, whatever that might be.

And similarly with 'Julius Caesar is a Roman emperor.' We all understand the sentence to be true despite Caesar's having ceased to exist long ago. We take the sentence to be tenselessly true because we read the copula in the disjunctively omnitemporal sense.  The same goes for 'Hume is an empiricist,' a sentence one might find in a history of philosophy. Although Hume does not now exist, we can say, intelligibly, that he IS an empiricist because we are using 'is' in a disjunctive omnitemporal way.  

DOES DISJUNCTIVELY OMNITEMPORAL TENSELESSNESS HELP US UNDERSTAND THE PRESENTIST V. ETERNALIST DEBATE?

Unfortunately, it doesn't.  The presentist tells us that only present items exist, whereas the eternalist says that past, present, and future items all exist.  To engage each other they have to be using 'exist' in the same sense: their disagreement is predicated upon an agreement as to the sense of 'exists.' Now  it it is clear that this cannot be the present-tensed sense of 'exists.'   Nor can it be the timelessly tenseless sense of 'exists.'  And not the disjunctively omnitemporal sense either.  Why not?

Everyone agrees that Boethius no longer exists. But 'no longer exists' can be understood in two ways. The eternalist (B-eternalist) holds that what no longer exists exists all right, but in the past. The presentist, however, holds that what no longer exists does not exist.  For the eternalist, Boethius tenselessly exists.  For the presentist, Boethius does not tenselessly exist. Therefore, for the presentist, it is not the case that Boethius either did exist or does exist or will exist.  But this is plainly false, since Boethius did exist. Therefore, the sense of 'exists' that allows presentist and eternalist to engage each other cannot be the disjunctively omnitemporal sense of 'tenseless.'

So what the hell sense of 'tenseless' is it?  

More later. It's Saturday night. Time for a stiff one and Uncle Wild Bill's Saturday Night at the Oldies.

What, Me Worry?

What me worryThe evil event will either occur or it will not.  If it occurs, and one worries beforehand, then one suffers twice, from the event and from the worry.  If the evil event does not occur, and one worries beforehand, one suffers once, but needlessly.  If the event does not occur, and one does not worry beforehand, then one suffers not at all.  Therefore, worry is irrational.  Don't worry, be happy.

Am I saying that that one ought not take reasonable precautions and exercise what is pleonastically called 'due diligence'?  Of course not.  Rational concern is not worry.  I never drive without my seat belt fastened.  Never! But I have never been in an accident and I never worry about it.  And if one day it happens, I will suffer only once:  from the accident.

Worry is a worthless emotion, a wastebasket emotion.  So self-apply some cognitive therapy and send it packing. You say you can't help but worry?  Then I say you are making no attempt to get your mind under control.  It's your mind, control it!  It's within your power.  Suppose what I have just said is false.  No matter: it is useful to believe it.  The proof  is in the pragmatics.