Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Happy Thanksgiving!

    I am happy to retract last year's Thanksgiving post, reproduced below, if not in plenary fashion, then substantially.  Thanks to Donald J. Trump and his supporters, the mendacity-fueled forces of tyranny and totalitarianism have suffered a major setback. It is morning in America again. But our political enemies, bent on overturning our system of government, will not give up. So starting tomorrow, we must all get back to work in the great national sanitation project, one which may take  a generation or more.  

    HAPPY THANKSGIVING?

    The last four horrible years make my annual Thanksgiving homily ring somewhat hollow, especially the penultimate line:

    And don't forget the country that allows you to live your own kind of life in your own kind of way and say and write whatever you think in peace and safety.

    This is no longer true. We are no longer the "land of the free," let alone "the home of the brave." We are in steep decline. You are not free if you cannot express your thoughtful, fact-based, and heart-felt opinions without fear of reprisal. Step out of line and you run the risk of being destroyed, if not physically, then politically and economically. Examples are legion.  Here is one of an increasing many.

    Still and all, we have much something to be grateful for.  But we will have to redouble our efforts to preserve the objects of our gratitude, in particular, what remains of our liberty, and our "sweet land of liberty."  Patriots are waking up to the depredations of 'Woke' and there is reason to be hopeful.

    So be of good cheer, do your bit, and long live the Republic! Never give up, never give in, fight hard, and fight to win. There are a lot of us and we can win if we hang together which, to paraphrase a Founder, beats hanging separately.

    Happy Thanksgiving

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Happy Thanksgiving!”

  • An Appeal to Democrat Voters

    Righteously pissed off by the depredations of our political enemies and their long train of  outrageous lies,  abuses, and slanders, my tendency is to urge a girding of the loins for a long battle in which we give them a taste of their own 'medicine.'  But there is a complementary approach that may work with the less vicious and self-enstupidated among them.  After all, the majority of Dems are useful idiots who are, all things considered, not all that bad as people and somewhat open to a honeyed appeal. All avenues toward the betterment of our constitutional republic and the world as a whole must be explored. Hear Steve Cortes:

    In the aftermath of any big victory in life, there is a natural human tendency to gloat a bit…or maybe a lot. But in the wake of the amazing Trump and America First electoral success of November 5th, those of us in the patriotic populist movement should, instead, make a humble, thoughtful, and heartfelt appeal to our fellow citizens who voted for the Democrats, but are persuadable.

    Millions of them, no doubt, voted blue with the best of patriotic intentions. Many of them simply pursued the comfortable path of well-worn political behavior patterns. Others were surely misled by the constant barrage of propaganda from legacy media platforms. Still others live busy and complicated lives – especially in stressful times like these, created by Biden and Harris – and do not follow politics closely, for understandable reasons.

    For all of these voters, here are the three most compelling reasons to at least consider joining our America First cause — and to vote Republican into the future.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The New Yorker‘s Cavalcade of Ignorance

    The rag has high production values. I'll say that much for it. Otherwise, the current issue is a tsunami of folderol.  Sample:

    “American Fascist,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s contribution, uses some variation on the word “fascist” 44 times across two and a half pages, along with 15 combined mentions of Hitler, Mussolini, and Putin. One imagines the interior of Snyder’s brain as a scarcely endurable popcorn machine, a rhythm of repetitive hissing and clicking that produces buckets of nearly identical thought kernels. Perhaps silence would be even harder for Snyder to endure. He offers one accidental moment of reflection, which serves to frame the entire New Yorker feature: “A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meaning … When a fascist calls a liberal a ‘fascist,’ the term begins to work in a different way, as the servant of a particular person, rather than as a bearer of meaning.”

    Snyder believes himself a meaning-bearer in a landscape of lies. He is hardly alone. Exempted from the need to understand or even bother to describe the objects of their disdain, the magazine’s chosen blatherers accuse the invisible masses of the worst possible affronts to democratic order, language, and perhaps reality itself before an audience that is presumed to share their prejudices and to have uniformly voted the same way that they did. They are on one side, with “bad America” arrayed on the other. Snyder quotes the historian Robert Paxton, who warns that “the Trump phenomenon looks like it has a much more solid social base, which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have had.” This is a ludicrous, ahistorical, paranoid, self-discrediting, and of course convenient statement for Paxton and Snyder and The New Yorker. It allows them to stand bravely against an entire nation of monsters, and just sorta leave it at that.
    Read more if you can stomach it.
     
    Dems urge Biden to sabotage Trump.
     
    Debunking the Debunkers. That reminds me of Joe and Mika who paid a visit to Hitler in his bunker.  Did they make it out alive?
    Bill Vallicella

    4 responses to “The New Yorker‘s Cavalcade of Ignorance”

  • Does Matter Think?

    I think not. Substack latest.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs

    J FuchsThat philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge.  

    The contemporary Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs begins his book Illusions of Sceptics (2016) by considering this question.  He grants that the "cognitive potential of philosophy" is called into question by the "embarrassing fact that there is not a single thing that philosophers would agree on." (13) Nevertheless, Fuchs insists that we have no good reason to be skeptical about the possibility of philosophical knowledge. His view is that "Discord among philosophers can . . . be sufficiently explained by the frequent prejudices of philosophers . . . Consequently, the existence of discord among philosophers does not imply that their work is of fundamentally unscientific character." (16)

    Besides the prejudices of philosophers, the lack of consensus among philosophers may also be attributed to philosophy's difficulty: "the discord may just be a consequence of the specific challenging character of philosophy."(19)

    Fuchs maintains that "consensus has no relation to the core of scientific quality. . . ." (24). The core of scientific quality is constituted by "proof or demonstration." (24)  His claim is that interminable and widespread disagreement or lack of consensus has no tendency to show that philosophy is incapable of achieving genuine knowledge, where such knowledge involves apodictic insight into the truth of some philosophical propositions. 

    There are two main issues we need to discuss. One concerns the relation of consensus and truth; the other the relation of consensus and knowledge. My impression is that Fuchs conflates the two issues. I will argue, contra Fuchs, that while it is obvious that consensus and truth are logically independent, it is not obvious that consensus and knowledge are logically independent.  My view, tentatively held, is that the lack of consensus in philosophy does tend to undermine philosophy's claim to be knowledge.

    Consensus and Truth

    I maintain, and Fuchs will agree, that the following propositions are true if not platitudinous.

    1) Truth does not entail consensus. If a proposition is true, it is true whether or not there is consensus with respect to its truth.

    2) Consensus does not entail truth. If most or all experts agree that p, it does not follow that p is true.

    3) Consensus and truth are logically independent. This follows from (1) in conjunction with (2). One can have truth without consensus and consensus without truth. 

    Lack of consensus, therefore, does not demonstrate lack of truth. Even if no philosophical proposition wins the agreement of a majority of competent practitioners, it is possible that some such propositions are true. But it doesn't follow that some philosophical propositions have 'scientific quality.'  To have this quality they have to be true, but they also have to be knowable by us.  But what is knowability and how does it relate to consensus? To answer this question we must first clarify some other notions.

    Truth, Knowledge, Knowability, Cognitivity, Justification, and Certainty

    I add to our growing list the following  propositions, perhaps not all platitudinous and perhaps not all agreeable to Fuchs:

    4) Knowledge entails truth. If S knows that p, it follows that p is true. There is no false knowledge. There are false beliefs, and indeed  justified false beliefs; but there is no false knowledge. You could think of this as an conceptual truth, or as a truth about the essence of knowledge. These are different because a concept is not the same as an essence.

    5) Truth does not entail knowledge. If p is true, it does not follow that someone (some finite mind or ectypal intellect) knows that p.  If an omniscient being, an archetypal intellect, exists, then of course every true proposition p is known by the omniscient being.

    6) Truth does not entail knowability by us. If, for any proposition p,  p is true, it does not follow that there is any finite subject S such that S has the power to know p. There may be truths which, though knowable 'in principle,' or knowable by the archetypal intellect, are not knowable by us.

    7) Cognitivity does not entail knowability. Let us say that a proposition is cognitive just in case it has a truth value. Assuming bivalence, a proposition is cognitive if and only if it is either true, or if not true, then false. Clearly, cognitivity is insufficient for knowability. For if a proposition is false, then it is cognitive but cannot be known because it is false. And if a proposition is true, then it is cognitive but may not be knowable because beyond our ken.

    8) Knowledge entails justification. If S believes that p, and p is true, it does not follow that S knows that p. For knowledge, justification is also required. This is a bit of epistemological boilerplate that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus.

    9) Knowledge entails objective certainty.  Knowledge implies the sure possession, by the subject of knowledge, the knower, of the object of knowledge; if the subject is uncertain, then the subject does not have knowledge strictly speaking.  Objective certainty is not to be confused with subjective certitude.

    Consensus and Knowledge

    Fuchs and I will agree that consensus is not necessary for truth: a true proposition need not be one that enjoys the consensus of experts. But consensus may well be necessary for knowledge.  Fuchs, however, seems to conflate truth and certainty, and thus truth with knowledge.  A truth can be true without being known by us; indeed, without even being knowable by us. But, necessarily, whatever is known is true.  On p. 30 we read:

    By denying that the thought processes of philosophers can exhibit a scientific quality simply because of the existence of discord among philosophers, we make consensus a necessary condition for the general validity and potential certainty of scientific knowledge, which is the attribute of science. (Emphasis added.)

    On the following page we find the same thought but with a replacement of 'potential certainty' by 'certainty':

    . . . the necessary question of whether the consensus of experts is really such an essential and indispensable condition for the certainty and general validity of scientific knowledge. (31, emphasis added.)

    When one speaks of the validity of a proposition, one means its truth. ('Valid' as a terminus technicus in formal logic is not in play here.) So it seems clear that Fuchs is maintaining that consensus is necessary neither for the truth of propositions nor for their certainty.  He seems to be maintaining that one can have certain knowledge of a proposition even if the consensus of experts goes against one. This is not obvious. Why not?

    Knowledge requires justification. Now suppose I accept the proposition that God exists and that my justification takes the form of various arguments for the existence of God.   Those arguments will be faulted by an army of competent practitioners, not all of them atheists, on a variety of grounds. What's more, the members of the atheist divisions will marshal their own positive arguments, the strongest of them being arguments from evil. Now if just one of my theistic arguments is sound, then God exists.

    But I do not, by giving a sound argument for God, know that God exists unless I know that the argument I have given is sound.  (A sound argument is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true.) But how do I know that even one of my theistic arguments is sound? How can I legitimately claim to know that when a chorus of my epistemic peers rises up against me?  

    If what I maintain is true, then it is true no matter how many epistemic peers oppose me: they are just wrong! Truth is absolute: it is not sensitive to the vagaries of agreement and disagreement. Justification, however, is sensitive to agreement and disagreement. My justification for considering a certain argument sound is undermined by your disagreement assuming that we are both competent in the subject matter of the argument and we are epistemic peers.  

    In a situation in which my justification for believing that p is undermined by the disagreement of competent peers, there is no objective certainty that p. If knowledge logically requires objective certainty, and objective certainty is destroyed by the disagreement of competent epistemic peers, then I can no longer legitimately claim to know that p. So, while truth has nothing to fear from lack of agreement, knowledge does. For knowledge requires justification, and justification can be augmented or diminished by agreement or disagreement, respectively.

    Interim Conclusion

    Fuchs makes things too easy for himself by conflating truth and knowledge. We can agree that consensus is logically irrelevant to truth.  Protracted disagreement by the (morally) best and the (intellectually) brightest over the truth value of some proposition  p has no tendency to show either deductively or inductively that p is not either true or false. Truth is absolute by its very nature and thus insulated from the vagaries of opinion. But truths (true propositions) do not do us any good unless we can know them.  It is not enough to know that some truths are known; what we need is to know of a given truth that it is true. But disagreement inserts a skeptical blade between the truth and our knowledge of it.

    Disagreement in philosophy undermines her claims to knowledge.  As I see it, Fuchs has done nothing to undermine this undermining.

    Bill Vallicella

    23 responses to “Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs”

  • Saturday Night at the Oldies: Women, Devils, and Angels

    Marlene Dietrich DevilThe tormenting question Devil or Angel? was posed by the Clovers in 1956.  But perhaps you are more familiar with the Bobby Vee cover. 

    Elvis Presley learned the hard way  that appearances can deceive. 

    Marty Robbins succumbs to the temptations of a Devil Woman  and begs his Mary for forgiveness.  Angel that she is, she forgives him. But his grip on custodia cordis is weak and so he succumbs once again in El Paso where the charms of the wicked Felina prove irresistible.  This time the upshot is rather less favorable. 

    Jay the American risks an encounter with a fickle she-devil but has the good sense to high-tail it in the nick of time.

    An aging Mitch Ryder gets it up one more time in this rousing version of Devil with the Blue Dress.

    But not all women are devils.  The Peguins, 1955, sing about an earth angel.  Is this a case of angelic possession?

    When I first saw the woman I married, I fell in love with her on the spot, no lie. It was her angel eyes that did it.

     
    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Women, Devils, and Angels”

  • Kamala Gets an ‘F’

    Flip, flop, flounder, flail, fake.  And yet, despite all the gyrations and page-turnings of her and "Tampon Tim" and Mrs. Tim, the fatuous fool failed.

    But how on earth could she be beaten in an electoral college landslide by a freaking fascist?  Explanation here, with a tip of the hat to a blogger buddy from way, way back, Kevin Kim.  Happy Thanksgiving, Kevin. Blog on!

    Bill Vallicella

  • Emma Goldman on Anarchism

    The topic of anarchism surfaced in an earlier thread. Dmitri and Hector introduced us to David Graeber.  But let's go back a century or so for a bit of historical perspective. Herewith, a brief examination of Emma Goldman's definition of anarchism. 

    ANARCHISM: the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. ("Anarchism: What it Really Stands For" in Anarchism and Other Essays, Dover, 1969. p. 50. The Dover edition is a republication of the third revised edition originally published in 1917)

    Goldman is advancing  five claims, either explicitly or tacitly.  By 'government' she means "the State." (p. 52) That's what I mean by it too. She does not mean a mutually beneficial form of social order that arises spontaneously and thus without coercion or authoritarian regulation.  One could mean that by 'government.' The word is ambiguous as between those two meanings. (See Richard Sylvan, "Anarchism" in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, Blackwell 1993, pp. 216-217.)  

    I will now state and comment on five assertions I extract from the passage quoted:

    1) Anarchism aspires to promotes the liberty of the individual.

    So far, so good. I'm all in! Liberty is a very high value. "Give me liberty, or give me death!" (Patrick Henry) 

    2) Liberty is unrestricted by man-made law.

    Our anarchist is telling us that liberty cannot exist under man-made law, that  liberty and law are mutually exclusive.   Here is where she begins to go off the rails.  What she is saying would  be true only in an ideal world, which is to say, a world that does not actually exist. In the world that actually exists, with human being as they actually are, (2) is false. It is blindingly evident that her ideal world does not exist, which is not to say that it cannot exist. But if her ideal world cannot exist, then her (2) is impossible. Now I cannot prove (demonstrate, conclusively establish) that her ideal world is impossible,  but there is nothing in our past experience to show that it is possible.  In fact, all of our past experience suggests the opposite. 

    I say that liberty, to be liberty, must be (i) attainable, and (ii) attainable for all.  Attainable liberty is possible society-wide, or for all, only under man-made laws.  This is because people inevitably come into conflict, for all sorts of reasons (scarcity of resources, innate bellicosity, etc.) and there can be no conflict resolution without laws. Now laws are laws only if they are enforceable and enforced.  (The mere possibility of enforcement is insufficient.)  There is therefore need for agents of enforcement. The practical necessity of the state follows from the need for agents of enforcement who will equitably enforce the laws.  

    3) All forms of government rest on violence. 

    This is in the vicinity of a truth, but one better expressed as follows: there cannot be government without coercion. What this means is that to countenance government is to countenance situations in which some people will  be compelled to do things  they don't want to do, and  compelled to desist from doing things that they want to do.  This coercion, without which there cannot be government (a state), will involve either violence or the credible threat of violence, violence which in many if not most cases will  be physical, e.g., throwing a man to the ground and handcuffing him.  

    In sum: No attainable liberty for the greatest number without man-made (positive) laws that are both enforceable and enforced. No enforcement without enforcers. No enforcers without a state apparatus. No state apparatus without allowance of the possibility of coercion. No possibility of coercion without the credible threat  of violence, which, given the stupidity, ignorance, selfishness, and bellicosity of human beings in the state of nature, will inevitable result in the actual use of violence against malefactors.

    4) Governments, since they "rest on violence" are "wrong and harmful."

    Goldman thinks they  are "wrong and harmful" presumably because governments cannot exist without coercion, and thus cannot exist without the threat if not the execution of violence, where all violence, whether threatened or actual, is deemed morally wrong.  

    To my way of thinking, however, (4) is obviously false. While is is true that governments "rest on violence," the violence that they sometimes mete out is not "wrong and harmful," but right and helpful.  The state is a  'necessary evil.'  A necessary (needed) evil is not something evil, full stop, but something that it would be better not to need, but something we do need given the actual state of things. For example, a cancer treatment consisting of chemotherapy and radiation that partially destroys one's salivary glands and taste buds is a necessary evil. That partial destruction is evil, but it is necessary (needed) to prevent a worse evil, namely, death. A rational man,  such as your humble correspondent, will in such a predicament choose to undergo the nasty protocol despite its being nasty.  He is rational in the means-ends sense: he chooses means conducive to his end in view, namely, to live a few more years. This is all predicated upon the actual state of things which a rational man takes into account.

    5) Government is unnecessary, which is to say, not needed for human flourishing.

    This too is plainly false.  It would be true if men were angels. But men are not angels. They are not demons either. They are beings capable of great good and of great evil.  And some are better than others, both intellectually and morally (and in other ways too).   And the same goes for governments: some are better than others, both in their form and in their matter (the people who wield power). Formally, the U.S. system of government is the best the mind of man has yet devised, but materially, the current regime, headed by Biden and Harris and their appointees and hidden puppet-masters is arguably the worst in the history of our great republic.  But the times they are  a'changin.

    So we need the state. We need government, limited government. For we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable, who love liberty and hate tyranny, want only as much government as is necessary to secure ordered liberty, domestic tranquillity, and international peace.  And note: we need government whether or not we can solve the problem of its moral justifiability.  The state is practically necessary whether or not anyone can show on the theoretical plane that it is morally justifiable.

    To understand the justifiability question,  see my Substack articles on Robert Paul Wolff:

    Notes on Anarchism I

    Notes on Anarchism II

    Notes on Anarchism III

    Robert Paul Wolff on Anarchism and Marxism

     

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable

    I have been using the title phrase for some time now to refer to Trump-supporting conservatives. But what makes us sane and reasonable? Victor Davis Hanson compiles a list in The Trump Counterrevolution is a Return to Sanity.

    In an earlier post I referred to the take-back of our country as a National Sanitation Project, opining  that it might take a generation or two.  But what does sanity have to do with sanitation? The words are in fact connected etymologically, sharing as they do a common root in the Latin sanus,  meaning healthy or sane or sound, as in the Latin saying mens sana in corpore sano, "a sound mind in a sound body." We Trumpians are of sound mind, and some of us inhabit sound bodies.

    We need to return the nation to health by draining swamps, enforcing laws, erecting barriers both territorial and  moral, and by fumigating institutions. Leftists want to tear down our institutions; we of sound mind want to fumigate them, removing therefrom the termites who presently infest them. 

    You need to get with the program and do your bit. Don't be  slacker, a defeatist, an ingrate. But if you are on the wrong side of this struggle, understand that we consider you enemies.

    A threat? No, a warning. Are you wise enough to heed a warning? I can't resist yet another reference to 'Biblical Bob':

    Come senators, congressmen
    Please heed the call
    Don’t stand in the doorway
    Don’t block up the hall
    For he that gets hurt
    Will be he who has stalled
    There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
    It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
    For the times they are a-changin’

    The line it is drawn
    The curse it is cast
    The slow one now
    Will later be fast
    As the present now
    Will later be past
    The order is rapidly fadin’
    And the first one now will later be last
    For the times they are a-changin’

    Bill Vallicella

  • A Strange Experience

    A Substack tale haunting but true. 

    Bill Vallicella

    12 responses to “A Strange Experience”

  • Joe Scarborough and his Sidekick Mika

    Megyn Kelly steals my thunder. Brace yourself.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Rod Dreher on Fr. Carlos Martins, Spiritual Warrior

    Dreher quotes Martins:

    Between these two goals—tempting man and gaining him for eternity—there is another evil desire that the Devil aims to satisfy: the possession of his victim. Possession is the state where the victim is under demonic control from the inside. The demon takes over the body of the one he possesses. During possession, a victim’s consciousness is suppressed, and the demon animates his body as his own. 

    Given that demons exist outside of time and space, how can a demon be “inside” someone during demonic possession? While a demon’s lack of physicality frees him of the limitations to which physical objects are subject and gives him access to everything in the physical universe simultaneously, he does not have power over all things equally. When the Devil possesses a victim—and is now “inside” him—the Devil has gained legal jurisdiction over him in such a manner that he can bully and manipulate the victim from the inside. The legal control a possessing spirit has is so great that the body he possesses appears to be his own. 

    I'd like to hear more about this legal jurisdiction. If the possessing demon has a legal right to occupy and use the body of the human being who is possessed, from where does the demon get this right? Suppose some children are quite innocently fooling around with a Ouija board. Are they thereby inviting demons into their lives, and granting them the legal right to oppress or possess them?  Would a good God allow these kids to be ensnared in this way? I should think not.  Is there the makings here of an anti-theistic argument from evil? My Ouija board example is quite different in obvious ways from the Faust legend or the story of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, a variant of which is here.

    Dreher too is intrigued by the the legal aspect of possession, oppression, and the milder forms of demonic influence. "To me, the most fascinating aspect of this phenomenon is the legalistic one. Every experienced exorcist will tell you that the demons are extremely effective lawyers."  From 'Demons are effective lawyers' it does not follow that effective lawyers are demons, though many will be 'tempted' to embrace that non sequitur. Remember Michael Avenatti? But I digress.

    Dreher quotes some more:

    An exorcist must focus not on the demon but on why the demon is present. Stated differently, if a demon inhabits someone, he has been granted the right. Demons live and breathe legalism. As long as the demon enjoys the legal right to possess, he is not required to leave because he is inside a dwelling that is his. Just as someone who owns a deed to a property cannot be evicted from it, an exorcist cannot evict a demon from a victim over whom he has gained the right to possess. 

    Uncovering demonic rights is challenging and can be the most difficult part of an exorcist’s work. A victim himself often does not know how he has acquired demons. In the case of Jeremy, this was not the case. He knew exactly why he had a demon: he had agreed to a pact with him. But it is often not that easy. An exorcist will probe a victim’s experience, personal history, and psyche to locate the legal claims a demon may have. The demon will do everything he can to remain hidden. 

    I plan to return to these questions after I read the book by Martins which I expect to arrive in early December.

    Bill Vallicella

    18 responses to “Rod Dreher on Fr. Carlos Martins, Spiritual Warrior”

  • Nunc Stans

    image from www.newyorker.com

    “I want to be in the moment, just not this moment.”
    Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Nunc Stans”

  • Was St. Paul an Anti-Natalist? (Updated 2024 Version)

    I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017):

    Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

    Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

    The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

    To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist.

    I still consider what I wrote above to be basically correct: Christianity is not, or at least is not obviously, anti-natalist. But now I want to consider a much more specific question: Is Paul an anti-natalist? To narrow the question still further: Is Paul advocating an anti-natalist position at 1 Corinthians 7? My correspondent, Karl White, thinks so:

    Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity. I simply cannot see how anyone can dispute this. 

    I shall now dispute it.

    We cannot sensibly discuss the question whether Paul is an anti-natalist without first answering the logically prior question: What is an anti-natalist? David Benatar, the premier contemporary spokesman for the view, summarizes his position when he writes, "all procreation is wrong." (Benatar and Wassermann, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford UP 2015, 12) He means, of course, that it is morally wrong or morally impermissible to reproduce.  The claim, then, is a normative one. It is therefore not a statement about what is factually the case or a prediction as to what is likely to happen.  It is a claim to the effect that we humans ought not reproduce.  (If you are curious about Benatar's reasons for his unpopular view, I refer you to my Benatar category.)

    The question, then, is precisely this: Does Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7, maintain that all procreation is wrong and that we ought not reproduce?  I answer in the negative.

    Karl White is certainly right that Paul "promotes celibacy as the highest ideal."  The passage begins, "It is good for a man not to marry," i.e., good for a man not to have sexual intercourse with a woman.  The issue here is not marriage as such, since there can be celibate marriages; the issue is sexual intercourse, and not just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but also homosexual and bestial intercourse. And let's not leave out sexual intracourse (to coin a word), i.e., masturbation. (There are Catholic priests who, horribile dictu, actually maintain that their vows of celibacy do not rule out sodomy and masturbation.)*

    And there is no doubt that Paul wishes all men to be like him, celibate. (verse 7) But he goes on (verse 9) to say that each has his own gift from God, with different gifts for different men. His gift is the power to be celibate. But others are not so gifted as to be able to attain this lofty standard. For those lacking Pauline self-control  it is better to marry than to burn with lust and fall into a cesspool of immorality.

    Paul does not say that it is morally impermissible to reproduce or that it is morally obligatory to refrain from sexual intercourse. In fact, he is saying the opposite: it is morally permissible for a man to marry and have sex with a woman.  It is also a prudent thing to do inasmuch as it forces a man who takes his vows seriously to channel his sexual energy in a way which, even if not productive of offspring, keeps him from immoral behavior.

    Paul does not affirm anti-natalism as defined above. He can be plausibly read as saying that sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation (and presumably only for this purpose)  is morally permissible, but that there is a higher calling, celibacy, one which is not demanded of all.  (It can't be demanded of all, because it is not possible for all: 'Ought' implies 'can.' Only some have been granted Pauline self-control.)

    Karl White said, "Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity." But it is not a logical consequence of Paul's preaching that either a) procreation will cease — no chance of that! — or b) that procreation ought to cease.  For he is not saying that all ought to be celibate. He is saying that celibacy is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty or the demands of moral obligation.  It is only for those we are specially called to it.

    Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatar sense. He is not maintaining that procreation is morally wrong. But I grant to Karl that there is a sort of anti-natalist flavor to Paul's preaching, perhaps along the following lines.

    Procreation is not immoral, contra Benatar. But it nevertheless would be better if people did not engage in it.  This is an ideal that is unattainable except in rare cases and so cannot be prescribed as a moral requirement for all of humanity.  But if it is an ideal, then ideally it would be better if procreation cease and the human race come to an end.

    _________________________

    *Well, we are all given to self-deception. The weight of concupiscence makes it hard to avoid. Raw desire suborns intellect and conscience.  As a young man, before I was married, I rationalized an affair I had with a married woman by telling myself that I was not committing adultery; she was. It is extremely important for the moral life to observe carefully, and in one's own case, how reason in its infirmity can be so easily suborned by the passions.  Is reason then a whore, as Luther said? No, that goes too far. She's more like a wayward wife. Reason is weak, but not utterly infirm or utterly depraved. If she were either of these, the reasoning of this weblog entry could not be correct when, as it seems to me, it is!

    ADDENDUM (3/4/19)

    Karl White responds:

    To clarify, I should have been more precise in my wording.
     
    What I meant to say was something along the lines of "If everyone became celibate, then humanity would end within a generation. Presumably if celibacy is the highest ideal, then Paul could not morally protest at this outcome."
     
    Also, Paul is not for a total end of humanity. He believes its highest manifestation is in the guise of the 'spiritual bodies' he describes in his one of his letters and to which he desires all humans will come.
     
    So I agree that Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatarian sense, but that he would have little problem with humanity in its current manifestation coming to an end seems fairly clear to me.
     
    BV:  Now we agree!
     
    Dave Bagwill writes,
    Some thoughts on Paul and celibacy. I think it is probably the case that Paul thinks of celibacy not as the highest ideal at all, but rather as a vocation, a calling. To contend otherwise would be to ignore Paul's saturation in Jewish thought and worldview. That worldview, shaped by the Jewish scriptures, encourages, admonishes, and praises married life from the very beginning, and children are part and parcel of that state. I think that any interpretation of Paul that disregards this fundamental imperative must be suspect; conversely, his statements are most fruitfully understood in the over-arching Creation imperatives.
     
    The case can also be made that biblically, man + woman = Man. Certainly, from experience, married life is the only way (excepting a special call to celibacy) that I could be 'complete', to the extent that I am. The 'classroom' of marriage is where I've learned and am learning that "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." – C.S. Lewis
     
    It is also prudent to consider not just the words that Paul spoke, but , as Miles Coverdale advised: "“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. ” "At what time, to what intent, with what circumstances" – if I were a competent exegete, I think an investigation into Paul's writing about celibacy would clear up any notion of a 'higher life' to be had as a result of celibacy alone. I in fact tend to distrust any purported 'spiritual' or 'higher-life' proponent that begins with a disparagement of the married estate.
     
    ADDENDUM (3/5/19) Karl White responds to Dave Bagwill:
     
    . . . I politely disagree with Dave Bagwill's comments. Paul is famous/infamous for his breaking with Jewish thought – in many ways that is the essence of Paul and why he is credited as the 'founder' of Christianity. His placing of celibacy as the highest ideal seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Also, merely because an individual has found personal contentment in marriage does not somehow invalidate Paul's espousal of celibacy – many have found contentment in celibacy and solitude and Jesus seemed to have little time for the family as an institution.
     
    ADDENDUM (11/19/24) Max Cooler responds to Karl White:
     
    I came across your article from five years ago, and I'd like to respond to Karl White (with the hope of my response being added in just beneath Karl's comments). I'd like to offer a plausible way of thinking why St. Paul should not be interpreted as an antinatalist, even in a weaker sense. For this response, I would explain Paul's words taking into account the historical context.
     
    In Paul's times, Christians were already dealing with a lot. Life for early Christians wasn’t easy, and a lot of it had to do with tension with both the Jewish leaders and the Roman authorities.
     
    For one thing, the early Christians, faced a lot of heat from Jewish leaders who saw the new movement as a threat to their traditions. Paul himself got chased out of several cities—places like Antioch and Thessalonica—just because of his preaching (Acts 13:50, Acts 14:5-6, Acts 17:5). Christians were getting kicked out of synagogues, and sometimes they were beaten or even stoned by angry mobs. It wasn’t a good time to be a Christian believer, especially when you were trying to keep your faith while also facing public ridicule or violence.
     
    On top of that, there was growing suspicion from Roman authorities. Their refusal to participate in Roman religious practices—like worshipping the emperor—made them look like troublemakers. Later on, Tacitus (a Roman historian) would talk about how Christians were hated by the wider public, calling them “haters of humanity,” mostly because they refused to take part in traditional Roman rituals.
     
    The early church also had to deal with some tough circumstances like famines. For instance, during Emperor Claudius’s reign in the 40s AD, there was a serious famine that hit places like Judea (Acts 11:28). Christians, many of whom were poor to begin with, felt the effects of that hardship pretty hard.
     
    This historical view is also supported by a few later verses. (1 Corinthians 7:26) starts with "Because of the present crisis…". (1 Corinthians 15:30-32) says "And as for us, why do we endanger ourselves every hour? I face death every day—yes, just as surely as I glory over you in Christ Jesus our Lord." So it seems that in later verses Paul seems to confirm that they are indeed living through dangerous times.
     
    So, with all these pressures—religious opposition, economic hardship, and natural disasters—it makes sense why Paul might suggest that it could be a good idea to avoid the extra complications of marriage and family. It had little to do with philosophical musings and a lot to do with material conditions at the time.
     
     
    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “Was St. Paul an Anti-Natalist? (Updated 2024 Version)”

  • A Salutary Spiritual Exercise for the Month of Gratitude

    November is gratitude month around here. One way to start the day right is by finding five things to be grateful for. Example:

    • I slept well.
    • All household systems are fully operational.
    • The cats are happy and healthy.
    • And so is the wife. ("Happy wife, happy life.")
    • Nature is regular and reliable: coffee goes down, thoughts percolate up, this day, every day. The sun also rises.
    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “A Salutary Spiritual Exercise for the Month of Gratitude”

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