Maverick Philosopher – Page 248 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

On Sentence Fragments

I was taught to avoid them. The teaching was sound. But rules of style admit of exceptions. That too is a rule of sorts. My rule anent sentence fragments hitherto has been that they are to be deployed, if deployed at all, sparingly. That's what I taught my students.

Does my rule admit of exceptions? Is it in need of revision? Take a gander at the opening three paragraphs of Charles Dickens' Bleak House:

Chapter 1 — In Chancery

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

Not one complete sentence in these three paragraphs. And yet this is great writing. The fourth paragraph shows that the man can write complete sentences.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Updated Divine Simplicity Entry Now Online

I am not entirely happy with it, but the updated version passed muster with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy philosophy of religion referees. If it is good enough for them, it is good enough for me, at least for the time being. The older I get, the higher my standards become. I have revised it twice so far.

If you are invited to submit an entry to SEP, it is not a one-off affair. You will be required to keep up with the literature and revise your entry periodically.

Ed Zalta tells me that my entry is scheduled for its next substantive update on or before Feb 27, 2023.

Journeys and Preparations

We plan our journeys long and short. We lay our plans for trips abroad well in advance. And those who leave their homeland and emigrate to another country take special care. Why then are we so careless about the journey on which all must embark and none return?

"Because it is a journey into sheer nonexistence. One needn't be concerned about a future self that won't exist!"

Are you sure about that? Perhaps you are right; but how do you know? Isn't this a question meriting some consideration?

CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA

nymag.com

Andrew Sullivan: The Corruption of the Vatican’s Gay Elite Has Been Exposed

Snow on Superstition Mountain

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Key Change Songs

Who, My Generation

Beatles, Strawberry Fields Forever

Derek and the Dominoes, Layla

Johnny Cash, I Walk the Line

Peggy Lee, Fever. One chord and (I think) three keys.

Thought, Action, Dogma, and De Maistre: The Infirmity of Reason

Human reason reduced to its own resources is perfectly worthless, not only for creating but also for preserving any political or religious association, because it only produces disputes, and, to conduct himself well, man needs not problems but beliefs. His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct. Nothing is so important to him as prejudices. Let us not take this word in a bad sense. It does not necessarily mean false ideas, but only, in the strict sense of the word, opinions adopted before any examination. Now these sorts of opinions are man’s greatest need, the true elements of his happiness, and the Palladium of empires. Without them there can be neither worship, nor morality, nor government . . . .

Joseph de Maistre, Against Rousseau: On the State of Nature and the Sovereignty of the People

De Maistre's statement above is extreme but it contains a kernel of insight. Let me see if I can isolate the kernel.

Thinking beyond the empirical is endless and leads to no fixed result. The conclusions of the philosophers are inconclusive. The strife of systems rages unabated across the centuries. Nothing is ever settled to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. In a Kierkegaardian figure, philosophizing without dogma is like sewing without a knot at the end of one's thread. Thoughts are never stayed. Considerations and counter-considerations multiply and ramify, leading to protracted disputes. The protraction is unto infinity. Dispute impedes decision and action, including decisions and actions at the level of thought.

Not only is thinking inconclusive, it entangles itself in contradictions when left to run without sensory or dogmatic input. Think of Nagarjuna's tetralemmae, Sextus Empiricus' mutually canceling arguments, Kant's antinomies, etc. Or just plunge into the arcana discussed in the technical philosophy journals on any topic. Forget the strife of systems; philosophers cannot come to agreement on even the most carefully and precisely defined questions. Can anyone honestly think that real progress is being made on the narrowly defined questions over which philosophers, including this one, obsess? What goes for precisely defined technical questions whose human importance is low or non-existent, goes all the more for the broad questions of great human relevance.

"Human reason reduced to its own resources," if not perfectly worthless, is not capable of establishing any of the substantive and humanly important propositions about God, the soul, the nature of justice, and so on, that we need to know to flourish, and establish them in a manner that secures agreement among well-intentioned and intelligent truth-seekers. We need the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, and we need agreement on it, but we can secure neither by our own efforts, whether individual or collective. Or at least that is a very good induction from past philosophical experience.

Human reason needs input from a source outside it. (One cannot argue without premises, and not all premises can be argued for.) With respect to the Big Questions, sensory input is obviously of no use. Nor is mathematics, set theory and other formal disciplines. Foundational questions cannot be decided by the will of the people. Do you really want to put the principle of presumption of innocence up for democratic grabs? Consensus does not constitute truth, and in any case uncoerced consensus is not to be had.

One might turn to divine revelation. That would solve the problem if it were available. But revelation cannot be accepted at face value because there are competing revelations that cannot all be true. One is forced to distinguish putative and genuine revelation and to worry about the criteria of genuine revelation. Even if God gave us all the answers in a book, he didn't tell us which book it is.

But then we are back to the dialectic of endless consideration and counter-consideration. We have to think about which Scripture to credit and what any bit of it means. Sola scriptura leaves us in the lurch, and what, pray tell, is its Biblical basis? Theology must be brought in, but what is that if not applied philosophy, philosophy applied to the putative data of revelation. And so we are brought back to philosophy and the disagreement endemic thereto. To take but one example, the Christian and Muslim differ bitterly, and unto bloodshed, about the nature of God: radically One, or triune? And in each major and minor religion there are sectarian splits, and meta-splits on how to heal the various splits and whether it is even necessary to do so. You may be latitudinarian and inclusive, but not unto inclusion of those who are neither.

One can always wax dogmatic, but that is no satisfactory solution for a thoughtful person. Dogmas are decisions at the level of thought. The dogmatic pronunciamento cuts off thought, which is endlessly self-perpetuating, and there is something satisfying about bringing endless talk to a halt. Basta! Enough! We value decisiveness in people, despite the arbitrarity and willfulness of decision. Therein lies the appeal of the dictator who puts an end to parliamentary mewling and hand-wringing. We note in passing the bivalence of these words: 'strong-willed' has a positive, 'willful' a pejorative, connotation. Our very language reflects our predicament.

Action uninformed by thought is willful and one-sided. It is blind. Thought without action is effete and epicene. So we are in a fine pickle indeed, one of the many 'pickles' that make up our miserable but also exhilarating predicament. (And our condition is indeed a predicament: something is deeply wrong and we need to find a way out without the assurance that there is a way out.)

The problem, or part of it, is that considerations of the intellect alone cannot determine action. Will and de-cision come into it. At some point thinking needs abruptly to be cut off by free, hence undetermined, decision. Can the cut-off be achieved by a will that is not merely willful? Or is a free decision necessarily arbitrary in a bad sense?

Both thought and action breed disagreement, often bitter and protracted, and sometimes bloody. In the precincts of theoria there is the strife of systems. In the precincts of praxis, the strife of blood and iron. The conflicts in either sphere feed the conflicts in the other. Conflicts among minds and ideas stoke conflicts among bodies and interests, and conversely. Intra-spheric conflict drives inter-spheric conflict.

So the problem cannot be solved within either sphere. The spheres need to be bridged or mediated. Dogmas are one kind of mediating principle.

Dogmas are decisions at the level of thought. One takes action, or a group takes action, at the level of thought by enforcing a view that must be accepted with no further questions. Dogmas are attempts to stop thought and knot the thread on pain of something dire such as perdition or excommunication or the gulag. But these congealed thoughts are still thoughts and so will be questioned, doubted, and denied. Even if it is granted that the thread must be knotted somewhere, why here?

Dogmas are delivered by indoctrination, by inculcating them. The word is exactly right, its etymology suggesting a stamping in, as with the heel (calx, calcis). Inculcation is most effective with the young and defenseless, those still in de Maistre's cradle: "His cradle should be surrounded by dogmas, and when his reason is awakened, it should find all his opinions ready-made, at least all those relating to his conduct."

But whose dogmas should line the cradle and be stamped into the young? No doubt there are good dogmas and good prejudices, but could a dogmatic method sort the good from the bad? One needs a critical method.

Human actions are embodied thoughts, thoughts made flesh. But if the thoughts are false or pernicious, then the actions will not be good.

What then should we say about the de Maistre quotation above? I believe I have laid bare the kernel of insight it contains: human reason is weak and needs guidance from without whether or not any such guidance is available. Reason is a very poor guide to life. Appeals to 'reason' are useless when not absurd. Whose 'reason'? How applied? And what exactly is this vaunted faculty anyway? And what is its reach? How reasonable was Kant's mapping of its limits in his Critique of Pure Reason? The "Come now, and let us reason together . . ." of Isaiah 1:18 has little application among men, whatever application it has between a man and God.

But what I have written above tenders no aid and comfort to the reactionary extremism of de Maistre. He sees what is wrong with the appeal to reason, but not what is wrong with its opposite, appeal to tradition and unexamined prejudices. The predicament we are in cannot be solved, if it can be solved, by veering off to either extreme.

I am tempted to say what Heidegger said in his Spiegel interview in 1966, the years before his death: Nur ein Gott kann uns retten.

Two Assurances of Religion and the Case of the Philosophically Sophisticated Rapist

Karl Britton, Philosophy and the Meaning of Life, Cambridge UP, 1969, p. 192:

Religion tries to provide two great assurances: that there is an absolute good and bad in the world at large, and that the absolute good has power.

I agree that religion does attempt to provide these two great assurances.

The first assurance might be thought to be not specifically religious, or at least not theistically-religious. There might be — it is epistemically possible that there are — objective and absolute moral distinctions without God. I hope we can agree that the wanton slaughter of human beings for one's sexual gratification is absolutely wrong: wrong always and everywhere and in every possible circumstance in which there are human beings. Take that as an example of an objectively true moral proposition. Think of propositions in a Platonic or quasi-Platonic sort of way, as subsisting independently of minds, including God's mind if a divine mind there be, and thus as belonging to a realm unto themselves apart from the realm of space, time and matter. It might then be thought that the indicative proposition just stated suffices to ground the imperative, "Thou shalt not wantonly slaughter, etc."

Is there a Platonic realm of agential oughts and ought-nots that subsist independently of mind and matter and that suffice to make it morally impermissible to, say, rape and murder for pleasure and morally obligatory to, say, feed and care for one's children? And all of this without a foundation in a divine intellect and will?

Perhaps; I can't prove the opposite. My metaphysical hunch, however, is that such Platonic moral propositions, and not just moral propositions, cannot 'hang in the air': they need support in a mind. That's my hunch, and I can articulate it rigorously in argumentative form. No argument in metaphysics in support of a substantive proposition, however, no matter how rigorously deployed, is rationally compelling. So none of my arguments will be rationally compelling. I can render my hunch reasonable, but I cannot force you to accept it on pain of your being taxed with irrationality should you not accept it.

Nevertheless, I say we need God to ground the existence of moral absolutes. Britton says as much when he says that the absolute good has power. For if the absolute good has power, then the absolute good is God.

Suppose you disagree. Free-floating Platonica suffice, you say. It is enough that there subsist in Plato's topos ouranos an entire system of such propositions as Wanton slaughter of innocents for sexual gratification is wrong and Caring for one's offspring is morally obligatory. The latter prescribes an ought-to-do, a moral must. Who enforces it? If no one does, then it is an entirely impotent ought. If we mortals sometimes enforce it, then the ought is not wholly impotent: we provide the power to enforce the moral imperatives that follow from moral declaratives.

Could a moral ought be wholly powerless? Could it be true that one ought to X and oufht to refrain from Y even if there are no consequences in the realm of fact when the prescriptions and proscriptions are violated? Could the Ideal and the Real, the Normative and the Factual subsist in such separation? Could Being be so bifurcated?

Would the moral law be the moral law were it never enforced? Enforcement is the bringing to bear of the Ideal upon the Real.

Consider the case of a philosophically sophisticated rapist. It is his pleasure to hunt women and have his way with them. He finds one in an isolated place where she cannot summon help. She pleads and protests: Rape is wrong! He admits that it is wrong. He gives a little speech:

Yes, it is true, absolutely true, that rape is objectively morally wrong. It is wrong in Plato's heaven, but here we are on earth where there is nothing to prevent me from raping you. I am strong and you are weak. I can and will satisfy my raging desire. I have no reason not to. For my raping you will entail no negative consequences for me. I will make sure of that by strangling you while I rape you. The dead tell no tales. I will not offer the pseudo-justification that might makes right, that what I am about to do to you is morally permissible because I have the power to do it. A right that might makes is no right at all. Might cannot make right. 'Might makes right' is eliminativism about right, not an identification of its essence. No such Thrasymachean sophistry for me. What I am about to do to you is not right, but wrong. But the wrongness of the deeds I am about to do has no relevance to what actually happens in this material world of fact where we find ourselves. It is a wrongness that subsists in Plato's heaven, but not here in the sublunary. The wrongness is neither here nor there.

Why should I care that rape and murder are wrong? I am not saying that they are not wrong; I am admitting that they are. I am saying that it doesn't matter in the real world. Why should I act morally in circumstances in which there are no negative consequences for me if I act immorally? Will you tell me that I must act morally because it is the morally right thing to do? That I ought to do right because it is right? Why? There is no God and no post-mortem regard or punishment. There is no enforcer of the right and there will be no one upon whom to enforce it. I grant you your Platonic moral absolutes, but they hang in the air, and in a tw0-fold sense: no God supports them in their existence, and no God enforces them in the phenomenal order. My final happiness does not depend on doing the morally right thing in those circumstances in which I can get away with doing the wrong thereby satisfying my lust for power, pleasure, and domination. Now take off your clothes!

My view is that something like God is necessary both to explain the existence of the Platonic moral absolutes and their relevance to our animal life here below. We need God both as support and as enforcer. Being is One. It is not so bifurcated that the Ideal and the Real are poles apart without communication. God bridges the gap and mediates the opposites. He brings about the mutual adjustment of virtue and happiness, to borrow a Kantian formulation. But why do we need God to do this job? Because we cannot do it all by ourselves. A truly just adjustment of virtue and happiness cannot occur for most in this life.

If the absolute good does not have (absolute) power, then the absolute good is 'neither here nor there' in both senses of this phrase.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Welcome to the delusional world of Ta-Nehisi Coates, that darling of 'liberal' elitists and winner of numerous awards and accolades. I read his Between the World and Me a while back. Here are a couple of quotations:

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies, Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, "white people" would cease to exist for want of reasons.

[. . .]

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But because they believe themselves to be white, they would rather countenance a man choked to death on film under their laws. And they would rather subscribe to the myth of Trayvon Martin, slight teenager, hands full of candy and soft drinks, transforming into a murderous juggernaut. And they would rather see Prince Jones followed through three jurisdictions and shot down for acting like a human.

Who is sicker, Coates, or the 'liberals' who fete him?

You say I should respond to the above? Why? In his case quotation is refutation.

Jeopardy! The TV Show

Starring Alex Trebek!

One observes very bright people displaying their cleverness and mental agility via recall of isolated facts. Meanwhile the horrors of life continue unabated. Now surely there is nothing wrong with some escapist entertainment. Right? The other night the trivia questions were about the First World War. And the clever contestants had all the answers. But as Jack Kerouac asked:

How can you be clever in a meatgrinder?

Avoid the Near Occasion . . .

. . . of physical altercation. But be prepared should such be unavoidable. My Smith and Wesson tactical pen arrived yesterday.

Or should one "resist not the evil doer" and "turn the other cheek" even unto one's personal destruction? For a partial exploration of this theme, see Machiavelli, Arendt, and the Important Difference between Private and Public Morality.

Equanimity

It is quite a moral challenge these days to maintain one's equanimity while doing one's quotidian bit to battle the lunacy of the destructive Left. It's easy to be a monk in a monastery. It is rather more difficult to be one in the world.

On the Dutchman’s Trail to Parker Pass

My e-mail to Jeff and Dennis:

Weather forecast looks favorable. The Sage of the Superstitions will take you boys on a pussy cat hike and introduce you to Parker Pass. I don't believe you two have been out this way. Out and back, 4. 6 miles. Little elevation change, but a number of creek crossings. If we feel like it we can explore an unmarked side trail.

Sunrise at 7:06. Please be at my house at 6:30. No hike if rain.

https://hikearizona.com/decoder.php?ZTN=201

Weather proved more than favorable. Cold but clear after a few days of rain. Distant ridges flecked with snow. Ethereal wisps of cloud wreathed some peaks. Streams running strong; one even babbled in a language indecipherable. Numerous stream crossings tested our agility. Not too much mud and dreck, just enough to add interest and texture. The hike commenced at the First Water trailhead at 7:15 AM. A leisurely climb brought us to the pass at the stroke of 9:00. A half-hour at the pass for coffee and snacks, and then we mosied on down, making it back to the Jeep at 10:45. I calculated our pace to be about 1 and 1/2 miles per hour. Nothing to crow about, of course, but not bad for old men in rugged country.

Access road in very good shape despite all the rain. Didn't even need the four-wheel drive, but used it anyway to give it some exercise and keep the fluids viscous and happy.

A Good Summary of the Political Thinking of Carl Schmitt

Carl Schmitt on Political Power by Jürgen Braungardt. Excerpt:

Political existentialism?

Schmitt is a political existentialist in the following sense: ‘The political’, that mode of human experience that expresses itself in interpersonal relations of power and struggle, is logically and temporally prior to all political institutions. It is expressed in the distinction between friend and enemy, which is from Schmitt’s point of view a fact of human psychology. We are naturally hostile not only to strangers, but to others. In this regard, his position is close to Thomas Hobbes. [Walter] Benjamin subverts this idea by adding a perspective of compassion: We may be hostile to strangers, but most of us are also strangers, aliens, immigrants, or refugees. We live in times of global migration, and nation states have lost their importance for the definition of political identity. But Schmitt would counter that any call for an inclusion of the “tradition of the oppressed” never brought us closer to a humanitarian turn in history. Instead, Marxist, anarchist, or liberal progress thinkers have several traits in common: they dream of a better future, but by doing so they instrumentalize the present. In reality, they attempt to overcome the political dimension, because for them the struggle for political power is dirty, and fundamentally, they want to abolish political power altogether. But politics with utopian aims often culminates in the creation of a Leviathan – an uncontrollable and powerful sovereign entity that forces us to abandon our humanity in exchange for the membership in a system that tends to become totalitarian.

That's a good insight on the part of Schmitt. Anarchists and 'progressives' try to "instrumentalize the present," that is, to make of it a means to achieve a utopian state (condition) that will justify the violent and by bourgeois standards immoral means necessary in the present to reach the political eschaton in which the political as such will be aufgehoben. But the quest for 'pie in the future' reliably results in the creation of a totalizing monster state complete with gulag and Vernichtungslager in which our humanity is extinguished.

Carl Schmitt is eerily relevant at the present moment in American politics. And the unlikely Donald J. Trump has unwittingly made political philosophy come alive like never before. Read this:

The sovereign and the state of emergency

In his book “Political Theology” (1922), Schmitt famously declares that the sovereign is he who determines the state of emergency, and thus has the political power to act outside the boundaries of the law in times of crisis. With this definition of the sovereign, Schmitt distinguishes between the rule of the law, and the rule of people. Should we allow society to be ruled only by a system of by laws, which means that the actions of rulers also have to be law-abiding? Or should we accept that we need people to be in control of the system, who can at times override or disable the law in order to deal with an emergency, or with a situation for which the law has no provision? According to Schmitt, the essence of political power is the ability to suspend normal law and assume special powers, just like the ancient dictators did. In his definition, the exception defines the limit, and this boundary constitutes what politics is. The answer to “Who decides the exception?” is the precondition of the law being obligatory and being, in fact, obeyed. Even proto-liberals such as John Locke, admitted that the executive must be permitted the power to suspend the laws if necessary for the good of society. The conflict between executive and legislative branches of the government plays itself out in US constitutional law in the different interpretations of the power of the President, or in cases where the President overrides or evades congressional authority.

I am not suggesting that President Trump, in declaring a national emergency anent the southern border, is operating outside the law. But some whom I respect are claiming just that. I am simply drawing attention to Schmitt's relevance to the question.

We are living in exciting times, philosophical times! If I were a young man I would be worried, but I am not, and "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings at dusk."

Addendum. Heather MacDonald needs to read Schmitt. Here is how her A Threat to the Constitutional Order ends:

For centuries, Western political theory has struggled with the problem of how to free individuals from the yoke of capricious power. Humanity’s greatest minds conceived of a government constrained by neutral principles. The ground rules in a constitutional polity are set in advance; they cannot be gamed to give one side of a political struggle an unfair and possibly insuperable advantage. The United States does need a wall on its southern border, accompanied by a radical revision of the legal-immigration system to prioritize skills, language, and assimilability. But if we remove the constitutional boundaries around each branch of government, as Trump’s emergency funding appropriation threatens to do, we will have lost the very thing that makes Western democracies so attractive to the rest of the world. The Supreme Court, when the inevitable legal challenges reach it, should strike Trump’s declaration down.

Heather Mac is telling us that the ground rules cannot be gamed to give one side an advantage. Well, if she means that they ought not be gamed, then she is right. But they are gamed, and so they can be. If SCOTUS is dominated by leftists who think of the Constitution as a 'living document,' then their rulings will constitute serious 'gaming' in the form of legislating from the bench. How is that for a removal of constitutional boundaries between branches of government? Besides, the law has to be enforced to count as law in any serious sense. If the Congress does not provide the funding necessary for proper enforcement of the immigration laws, then that too is a serious 'gaming' of the system. If the Left does not respect the rule of law, then why is the chief executive not justified in declaring a national emergency?

It is all very well to speak of "the rule of law not of men," but when Congress refuses to uphold the rule of law then we may have a Schmittian state of exception wherein the chief executive may and perhaps must override the Congress. I say "may have" because it is not clear to me that Trump's declaration of a state of emergency is illegal or extralegal.