Vows

Vows make for stability of life in a changeful world. But change is sometimes improvement, and this includes change in belief. The vows that stabilized can come to cramp and confine. Doubt sets in and commitment wanes. Fervent belief becomes lukewarm. A monk like Merton can come to wonder whether he has thrown his life away in world-flight.

And so we bang up against another 'interesting ' problem. To live well one must have firm beliefs and fixed commitments. But one must also avoid rigidity and dogmatism. One must see to it that rigor mentis does not become rigor mortis. One must find the middle course between rudderless drift on the high seas of uncertainty and blinkered fixation on a 'safe harbor' the attainment of which would be shipwreck on a reef.

This Platonizing Owl Feels a Little Guilty . . .

. . . at deriving so much intellectual stimulation from the events of the day.  It is fascinating to watch the country fall apart. What is a calamity for the citizen, however, is grist for the philosopher's mill. Before he is a citizen, the philosopher is a "spectator of all time and existence" in a marvellous phrase that comes down to us from Plato's Republic (486a).  And if the philosopher is an old Platonist who has nearly had his fill of the Cave and its chiaroscuro, he is ever looking beyond this life, and while in no rush to bid it a bittersweet adieu, he is not affrighted at the coming transition either.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk.  The old Platonist owl lives by the hope  that the dusk of death will lead to the Light, a light unmixed with darkness.

National decline is not just grist for the philosopher's mill, however; it is also perhaps a condition of understanding as Hegel suggests in the penultimate paragraph of the preface to  The Philosophy of Right:

When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old.  By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.  The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.

Daughter of Jupiter, Minerva in the mythology of the Greeks is the goddess of wisdom.  And the nocturnal owl is one of its ancient symbols.  The meaning of the Hegelian trope is that understanding, insight, wisdom  arise when the object to be understood has played itself out, when it has actualized and thus exhausted its potentialities, and now faces only decline.

When a shape of life has grown old, philosophy paints its grey on grey.  The allusion is to Goethe's Faust wherein Mephisto says

Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, 
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

Grey, dear friend, is all theory
And green the golden tree of life.

Philosophy is grey, a "bloodless ballet of categories" (F. H. Bradley) and its object is grey — no longer green and full of life.  And so philosophy paints its grey concepts on the grey object, in this case America on the wane.   The object must be either dead or moribund before it can be fully understood.  Hegel in his famous saying re-animates and gives a new meaning to the Platonic "To philosophize is to learn how to die."

In these waning days of a great republic, the owl of Minerva takes flight.  What we lose in vitality we gain in wisdom.

The consolations of philosophy are many.

On the other hand, it ain't over 'til it's over, and as citizens we must fight on, lest our spectatorship of all time and existence suffer a premature earthly termination.  The joys if not the  consolations of philosophy are possible only in certain political conditions.  We are not made of the stern stuff of Boethius though we are inspired by his example.

And so, as citizens we arm ourselves in every sense of the phrase, hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

Word of the Day: ‘Perseverate’

Merriam-Webster: "continuation of something (such as repetition of a word) usually to an exceptional degree or beyond a desired point."  

Example:

Now the media and other anti-Trump partisans are going to perseverate on whether or not Trump obstructed justice during the Mueller probe. They should leave this alone. Having bet so heavily on the collusion narrative, and lost, nobody wants to listen to them bang on about collusion for two more years.

Filed under: Vocabulary

Must God Become Man to Know the Human Lot?

Vito Caiati, commenting on Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron:

In yesterday’s Good Friday post, you write, “The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.”

Why is the full scope and content of the human experience, including the most extreme pain and death itself, not known by God, who is omniscient, without the Incarnation? Why should the flesh, enmeshed in and limited by human sensory perception, be a necessary, supplementary mode by which such experience is conveyed to and hence shared by the Deity?

The question is why an omniscient God would have to enter the material world to know the full scope and content of human experience. If God is omniscient, then he knows everything. And if he knows everything, then he knows what it is like  to be a man undergoing torture and bodily death.  Why then must God compromise his purely spiritual status by Incarnation? Why can't God know what it is like to be a man without becoming a man?

To answer directly, one could know everything it is possible to know about a sentient organism without knowing what it is like to be that organism.  And so God, who knows everything it is possible to know about every type of sentient organism, and is therefore objectively omniscient with respect to every type of organism, is nonetheless subjectively nescient in that he does not and cannot know what it is like to be an organism of any type.  This is because he is not an organism of any type; he is a pure spirit.

Consider an ethologist who studies bats. Suppose he comes to know every objective fact about bats including exactly how they locate and perceive objects in their environment using echolocation, or 'bat sonar.'  Knowing all these objective facts, our scientist would still not know what it is like to be a bat. He would not know the subjective experiences that bats have when they detect, pursue, etc. objects in their environment.  He could know everything about the objective correlates in the bat's brain of the bat's experience, but he would not be able to know the subjective character of those experiences.  To know bat qualia, our scientist would have to be a bat.

Same with God: he would have to be a man to know what it is like to be a man, that is, to know 'from the inside'  the subjective character of human experience, its highs, lows, and doldrums.

These ruminations give rise to a number of further questions. But it is Saturday night, time to punch the clock, pour myself a drink, and rustle up some grub.

Aficionados will know that I am borrowing from Thomas Nagel, What is like to be a bat?  Here is a short video that treats of some of his ideas.

Leftist ‘Logic’

The Mueller report found no wrongdoing on the part of Donald Trump or his team. The long investigation, prosecuted with pit-bull intensity by enemies of the president, failed to establish that he colluded with the Russians to influence the 2016 election.

THEREFORE, reason key Democrats and the boys and girls of  MSNBC and other leftist media outlets, Trump must be impeached!

The Gospel of John, at 18:28 and 19:4, reports that Pontius Pilate found no fault with Jesus. "I find no basis for a charge against him."

When the high priests saw Jesus, they shouted "Crucify him!" (John 19:6)

A witty comparison, no?  The leftist dumb ass will not be impressed. "So you think Trump is Jesus?" No, you idiot, but you think he is  Hitler!

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the hum an condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute.  But we are also, undeniably, animals.  Our human condition is thus a  predicament, that of a spiritual animal.  As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought.  As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth.  As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes.  As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals. In the extremity of suffering, the body that served us as vehicle becomes a burden and a cross, and our way through the vale becomes a via dolorosa.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh?  Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?  That is Weil's point.  The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all,  define being human. 

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis.  His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed  to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament.  He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional. 

The darkest hour.  And then dawn.