Ambitious enough to secure the platform from which to reach beyond ambition.
Lotte Lenya sings September song, very smokily: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdc4oBnu_fw&list=RDrdc4oBnu_fw&start_radio=1
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How Ambitious Ought One Be?
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Private Life
Lost in her private life, she woke up one morning to find that the private life was no more.
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Why Is Cambridge Afraid of Jordan Peterson?
Filed under: Academia. Perhaps the category should be retitled: Academentia.
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Mary Warnock Obituary
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Immortality and Meaning
Here at Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical. Is the brevity of life an argument against its ultimate meaningfulness? Or is rather that case that brevity is necessary for meaning, and that eternal life would be an eternal drag? I draw upon a neglected and no-longer-read philosopher, A. E. Taylor.
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Soteriology for Brutes?
Vito Caiati writes,
I have gone back and read your post “Are the Souls of Brute Animals Subsistent? Considerations Anent the Unity of Consciousness” many times since it first appeared in December of 2009. In conclusion to the post, you write:Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases “sensitive soul” and “intellective soul” are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.Assuming that you are correct, and I believe that you are, does it not follow that a broader Christian soteriology than that proffered by Aquinas and other scholastics should be open to discussion? For if the souls of animals are subsistent, might they too not survive death and be worthy of salvation of some kind, especially since they are free from the stain of sin?I raise these questions as someone who has been profoundly troubled for many years by animal suffering from earliest times. I have always carried a sense that there is something rather too narrow in a doctrine of salvation that is restricted to mankind. I do not for a moment wish to conflate the ontological status of humans and animals, but is rationality a sufficient reason to exclude so many living, non-rational beings—especially the higher mammals–that have so often suffered terribly and died violently or in great pain to mere extinction?RESPONSEThese are important questions about which I have little say at the moment. But my friend Ed Feser weighs in in David Bentley Hart Jumps the Shark: Why Dogs Don't Go to Heaven. It is delightfully polemical in the inimitable Feserian style as he takes on David Bentley Hart whose very name suggests a certain pomposity waiting to be punctured. Now why does Feser think that cats and dogs do not survive their bodily deaths?The reason is that non-human animals are entirely corporeal creatures, all matter and no spirit. To be sure, the matter of which they are composed is not the bloodlessly mechanical, mathematical Cartesian kind. Non-human animals are not machines; they really are conscious, really do feel pain and pleasure, really do show affection and anger. But these conscious states are nevertheless entirely dependent on bodily organs, as is everything else non-human animals do. Hence, when their bodies die, there is nothing left that might carry on into an afterlife. Fido’s death is thus the end of Fido.
If human beings were entirely corporeal creatures, the same would be true of us. But, the Thomist argues, human beings are not entirely corporeal. We are largely corporeal—as with Fido, our ability to take in nutrients, to grow and reproduce, to see, hear, imagine, and move about, depends on our having bodily organs. But our distinctively intellectual activities—our capacity to grasp abstract concepts, to reason logically, and so forth—are different. They could not be entirely corporeal.
[. . .]
If human beings do have, in addition to their bodily or corporeal activities, an activity that is essentially incorporeal—namely, intellectual activity or thought in the strict sense—then when the corporeal side of human nature is destroyed, it doesn’t follow that the human being as a whole is destroyed. There is an aspect to our nature—the intellect—that can carry on beyond the death of the body, precisely because even before death it was never entirely dependent on the body. This is why there is such a thing as an afterlife for human beings, as there is not for non-human animals.
Hart, like so many people these days, seems to have an excessively sentimental attachment to non-human animals. Perhaps he simply can’t imagine Heaven being a very happy place without a resurrected Fido to share it with.
Consider this. Christ tells us that there will not be marriage in Heaven, and the clear implication is that there will not be romance or sexual intercourse, either. Young people find it difficult to understand how we could fail to miss all of this, and anyone with an amorous disposition can sympathize. But, in fact, we will not miss it. That’s the thing about the beatific vision: it rather leaves everything else in its dust. And I submit that if you won’t miss sex when you’re in Heaven, it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to give much thought to Fido either.
Feser's answer in a nutshell is that non-human animals are all matter and no spirit; we, however, are matter and spirit. We are spiritual beings in virtue of our capacity for such intellectual activities as grasping concepts, forming judgments, and reasoning from the judgments formed. Despite being wholly corporeal, non-human animals enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also, Feser seems to admit, intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger. I have observed a cat expressing anger at another cat's behavior at the food bowl. The one cat was not merely angry, but angry at something, the second cat's howling and 'acting up.' So the first cat, a big maternal tabby bopped the little noisy cat on the head with her paw. What we have in this example, I think, is intentionality together with a primitive conceptualization of the second cat's behavior as 'offensive' or 'inappropriate' and not just 'kitty kat kwalia.'Does this prove that cats are in some measure 'intellectual' and thus not wholly corporeal? Of course not. But it gives us a reason to doubt the hard-and-fast Thomist distinction between non-human and human animals. Vito Caiati quoted me as saying, "It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility." I did not properly expand upon this thought at the time, so I will add something now. Suppose the sensing is not just a qualitative state but an intentional state, a sensing that, a sensing that the cat treats in the bowl are stale, for example. The cat cannot articulate the content of his sensing in an explicit judgment either in thought or in language, but it seems reasonable to ascribe a proto-propositional content to the cat's consciousness.There are also considerations anent the unity of consciousness that tend to blur the distinction between non-human and human animal minds. After a cat has defecated, he sees where the scat is which he then 'decides' to bury or not, and then smells whether he has buried it sufficiently, a smelling which involves intentionality and something like judgment. It is something like what I do when I smell a shirt to see if it is too stinky to wear in public. At the same time the cat is listening to the circumambient noise. If it is normal, he continues his job; if not he breaks it off, and jumps out of the box. What we have here is a unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of representations, to employ some Kantian jargon: a unity of seeing, smelling, and hearing. This unity is arguably of a spiritual, non-corporeal, nature since it cannot be located in any part of the cat's body or brain.My interim conclusion is that Feser is not obviously right as against Hart, and that the question remains open. It has not been definitively shown that such critters as cats cannot survive their bodily deaths. If they do, and there is a sort of salvation for them, then this would amount to a sort of redemption of the horror of animal existence in a fallen world in which nature is red in tooth and claw and animals eat each other alive.Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.
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On ‘Illegal Alien’ and ‘Illegal Immigrant’
Liberals, whose love of political correctness gets the better of their intellects, typically object to the phrase 'illegal alien.' But why? Are these people not in our country illegally, as the result of breaking laws? And are they not aliens, people from another country?
"But you are labeling them!" Yes, of course. Label we must if we are not to lose our minds entirely. 'Feral cat' is a label. Do you propose that we not distinguish between feral and non-feral cats? Do you distinguish between the positive and the negative terminals on your car battery? You'd better! But 'positive terminal' and 'negative terminal' are labels.
Label we must. There is no getting around it if we are to think at all. There is a political outfit that calls itself "No Labels." But that too is a label. Those who eschew all labels label themselves 'idiots.'
Related to this is the injunction, 'Never generalize!' which is itself a generalization. Label we must and generalize we must. Making distinctions and labeling them, and constructing sound generalizations on their basis are activities essential to, thought not exhaustive of, the life of the intellect.
Liberals also object to 'illegal immigrant.' In fact, the AP has banned the phrase. But given that there are both legal and illegal immigrants, 'illegal immigrant' is a useful label. There is nothing derogatory about it. It is a descriptive term like 'hypertensive' or 'diabetic.'
One consideration adduced at the AP site is that actions are illegal, not persons. But suppose your doctor tells you that you are diabetic, and you protest, "Doc, not only are you labelling me, you are forgetting that diabetes is a medical condition and that no person is a medical condition." The good doctor would then have to explain that a diabetic is a person who has diabetes. Similarly, an illegal immigrant is one who is in the country illegally. There is the act of illegally crossing the border, but there is also the state of being here illegally.
Plain talk is an excellent antidote to liberal nonsense. When a liberal or a leftist misuses a word in an intellectually dishonest attempt at forwarding his agenda, a right-thinking person ought to protest. Whether you protest or not, you must not acquiesce in their pernicious misuse of language. Or, as I have said more than once in these pages,
If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!
Bear in mind that many of the battles of the culture war are fought, won, and lost on linguistic ground. If we let our opponents destroy the common language in which alone reasonable debate can be conducted, then much more is lost than these particular debates. The liberal-left misuse of language is fueled by their determination to win politically at all costs and by any means, including linguistic hijacking.
Language matters!
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More on Economic Inequality
Just in from Anthony Benvin:In What's Wrong with Economic Inequality? you write:"The economy is not a zero-sum game. If I "mix my labour" (Locke) with the soil and grow tomatoes, I have caused new food to come into existence; I haven't taken from an existing stock . . . ."You may find interesting a short essay I wrote several years ago at American Thinker. It was intended as an economic primer of sorts to distinguish between the workings of government economic interference and less fettered economies.At the risk of self-promotion I just wanted to bring it to your attention because it dovetails with the points you make here today.Thanks for your continuing blog. Along with Neonecon you are one of my of my daily cyber visits.
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More on the Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam
Just over the transom from Kai Frederik Lorentzen:
The French writer Pascal Bruckner, adding a historical dimension, traces the issue back not only to the Iranian revolution of 1979 but even to early Bolshevism:
" … And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.
The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.
This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?
It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists … "
In autumn, Bruckner published a book where he elaborates the theses of his essay. I haven't read it yet, but the table of contents looks promising. While I have doubts that the political fight against the Sharia can still be won in Western Europe, things may take a turn for the better on your side of the big water. At least I hope so.
Mit besten Wünschen!
Kai
https://www.city-journal.org/html/theres-no-such-thing-islamophobia-15324.html
https://www.wiley.com/en-ax/An+Imaginary+Racism%3A+Islamophobia+and+Guilt-p-9781509530663
https://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2019/03/what-explains-the-lefts-toleration-of-militant-islam.html
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David Horowitz on the War Against Christianity
David Horowitz argues in his new book "Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America," that secularists and leftists want to turn the nation into a godless, heathen society where religion has absolutely no role.
Horowitz, who heads the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, is used to taking controversial positions. He is the New York Times best-selling author of "Radical Son and Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America."
“The war on Christianity is real, and it’s right on our doorstep,” Horowitz says.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax magazine, Horowitz details the perils facing our nation’s religious freedoms and the efforts by conservatives of all faiths to save them.
Newsmax: Many people think of the persecution of Christians as being limited to the Mideast, Far East, and Africa, far away from the United States. But that’s not true?
David Horowitz: No, it’s very bad in the U.S. This war against Christianity is a war of the left, which is the Democratic Party, because Christian values are incompatible with the social justice delusions of the left. Everything about Christianity — the sanctity of the individual, the individual soul, individual accountability and equality — all these things are anathema to the left. Efforts to keep religion out of daily life continue to grow, such as school prayers and public displays of faith.
But you argue that’s not what our founding fathers intended.
Horowitz: That’s right. The First Amendment prevents the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but the left has attacked that clause. Jefferson acknowledged a wall of church-state separation, but all that meant was the state won’t make one religion like Anglicanism the official religion and persecute the other religions. The American Civil Liberties Union stood that reassurance on its head with “wall of separation between church and state” becoming a bumper-sticker slogan for leftists and secularists who want to silence religious people and marginalize their beliefs. You describe yourself as an atheist Jew.
Why would a Jewish skeptic write a book coming to the defense of Christians in America?
Horowitz: It was prompted by the murder in 1974 of a friend of mine, Betty Van Patter, a dedicated leftist and mother of three who was a bookkeeper at the New Left magazine Ramparts, which I edited. I had raised money to buy a Baptist church and turn it into a school for the Black Panthers; after Betty discovered the Panthers had doctored their books, she was raped, tortured, and beaten to death. I investigated and found the Panther Party was a criminal gang engaging in extortion, arson, drug trafficking, and murder. Still, their leaders received the support of the American left which defended the killers because they were the voices of the oppressed and champions of the progressive clause.
How does President Donald Trump fit into the fabric of American Christianity today?
Horowitz: He’s terrific for America. He’s a great patriot, and I think that’s what inspired the Evangelicals to support him. He wouldn’t have been elected without them.
What is your view of the Democratic Party?
Horowitz: It no longer respects equality. It’s a racist party. White people, males, and straight males are guilty before the fact, and people of color, women, and gays are innocent, even if the facts show they’re guilty.
Will the persecution of Christians be a big issue in the upcoming 2020 presidential election?
Horowitz: Oh, totally! It’s going to be a huge issue. Once either [Supreme Court Justices] Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Clarence Thomas retire, and Trump nominates this Catholic woman [believed to be U.S. Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett] there’s going to be a battle.
Do you believe Roe v. Wade will be overturned?
Horowitz: I hope so. This is a war. The left wants to kill babies outside the womb; they’re baby killers. Their slogan “pro-choice” is completely fraudulent, because they make choices. You have to choose to have sex, you have to choose who to have sex with, you have to choose whether to use contraception or not . . . or if something goes awry you have to choose not to use the morning-after pill, or to give birth to the baby and find it an adoptive mother, or kill it. It’s not about choice or reproductive freedom B.S.You say the catalyst for writing the book was the intolerance of the left. Can you explain?
Horowitz: Before I began writing the book and was becoming acquainted with all of the issues, I thought the persecution of Christians was a somewhat parochial issue. I [began having] sympathy for this community because the left is being so intolerant . . . Now I see it as a central battle. The country is at stake. The left wants a one-party state, you can see that. How can you have a resistance to a dually elected president? It’s sedition. It’s treason, in the normal sense of the word, to obstruct a president. Everything that’s running the Democratic Party today is obstructionism. You can’t have a democracy if you don’t accept the legitimacy of an election. I mean, that is fundamental.
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What Explains the Left’s Toleration of Militant Islam?
From 1789 on, a defining characteristic of the Left has been hostility to religion, especially in its institutionalized forms. This goes together with a commitment to such Enlightenment values as individual liberty, belief in reason, and equality, including equality among the races and between the sexes. Thus the last thing one would expect from the Left is an alignment with militant Islam given the latter’s philosophically unsophisticated religiosity bordering on rank superstition, its totalitarian moralism, its voluntaristic suppression of reason, and its opposition to gender equality.
So why is the radical Left soft on militant Islam? The values of the progressive creed are antithetic to those of the Islamists, and it is quite clear that if the Islamists got everything they wanted, namely, the imposition of Islamic law on the entire world, our dear progressives would soon find themselves headless. I don’t imagine that they long to live under Sharia, where ‘getting stoned’ would have more than metaphorical meaning. So what explains this bizarre alignment?
1. One point of similarity between radical leftists and Islamists is that both are totalitarians. As David Horowitz writes in Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left (Regnery, 2004) , "Both movements are totalitarian in their desire to extend the revolutionary law into the sphere of private life, and both are exacting in the justice they administer and the loyalty they demand." (p. 124)
2. Horowitz points to another similarity when he writes, "The radical Islamist believes that by conquering nations and instituting sharia, he can redeem the world for Allah. The socialist’s faith is in using state power and violent means to eliminate private property and thereby usher in the millenium." (129)
Perhaps we could say that the utopianism of the Left is a quasi-religion with a sort of secular eschatology. The leftist dreams of an eschaton ushered in by human effort alone, a millenial state that could be described as pie-in-the-future as opposed to pie-in-the-sky. When this millenial state is achieved, religion in its traditional form will disappear. Its narcotic satisfactions will no longer be in demand. Religion is the "sigh of the oppressed creature," (Marx) a sigh that arises within a contingent socioeconomic arrangement that can be overturned. When it is overturned, religion will disappear.
3. This allows us to explain why the secular radical does not take seriously the religious pathology of radical Islam. "The secular radical believes that religion itself is merely an expression of real-world misery, for which capitalist property is ultimately responsible." (129) The overthrow of capitalist America will eliminate the need for religion. This "will liberate Islamic fanatics from the need to be Islamic and fanatic." (130)
Building on Horowitz’s point, I would say the leftist in his naïveté fails to grasp that religion, however we finally resolve the question of its validity or lack thereof, is deeply rooted in human nature. As Schopenhauer points out, man is a metaphysical animal, and religion is one expression of the metaphysical urge. Every temple, church, and mosque is evidence of man's being an animal metaphysicum. As such, religion is not a merely contingent expression of a contingent misery produced by a contingent state of society. On the contrary, as grounded in human nature, religion answers to a misery, sense of abandonment, and need for meaning essential to the human predicament as such, a predicament the amelioration of which cannot be brought about by any merely human effort, whether individual or collective. Whether or not religion can deliver what it promises, it answers to real and ineradicable human needs for meaning and purpose, needs that only a utopian could imagine being satisfied in a state of society brought about by human effort alone.
In their dangerous naïveté, leftists thinks that they can use radical Islam to help destroy the capitalist USA, and, once that is accomplished, radical Islam will ‘wither away.’ But they will ‘wither away’ before Islamo-fanaticism does. They think they can use genuine fascist theocracy to defeat the ‘fascist theocracy’ of the USA. They are deluding themselves.
Residing in their utopian Wolkenskukuheim — a wonderful word I found in Schopenhauer translatable as 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' — radical leftists are wrong about religion, wrong about human nature, wrong about the terrorist threat, wrong about the ‘fascist theocracy’ of conservatives, wrong about economics; in short, they are wrong about reality.
Leftists are delusional reality-deniers. Now that they are in our government, we are in grave danger. I sincerely hope that people do not need a 'nuclear event' to wake them up. Political Correctness can get you killed.
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Prandial and Post-Prandial Pleasures
With Brian B. and Mike V. at Los Locos Gringos, my favorite local Mexican eatery. There is nothing better than a good meal and good conversation with like-minded friends. After Mike sped away on his iron horse, Brian and I spent the rest of the afternoon playing chess at Gecko Espresso. Mike, on the right, is one sharp-dressed man these days. Me? I am still of the '60s sartorially speaking.
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The Trump Friendship Criterion
If you are still friends with X after November 2016, X is a true friend. If not, not.
Trump has proven to be quite the catalyst of clarification. Preternatural is his power to cause people and parties to show their true colors.
3 responses to “Soteriology for Brutes?”