. . . is well-explained by Edward Feser in Drunk Stoned Perverted Dead.
Courage Under Fire
Pratityasamutpada
Claude Boissons writes to express puzzlement over the following quotation pulled from a Buddhism site:
Everything exists dependently upon everything else. Nothing exists independently in and of itself. Therefore, everything is empty of inherent existence. Every phenomenon is empty of true existence, therefore emptiness is the ultimate nature of everything that exists.
Professor Boisson remarks:
I don’t understand how the second "therefore'' is used. Is it true that if nothing exists independently, the consequence is that nothing exists, period? And so I feel there is a play on words in moving from "empty of inherent existence" to "empty of true existence."Maybe some day you might tell us what you think about this?
How about right now?
Charitably understood, the Buddhist claim is not that nothing exists, period. For that would fly in the face of what we all know to be the case. The claim is not that nothing exists, but that what exists lacks self-nature. This is the famous doctrine of 'no self' or anatta, which, along with anicca (impermanence) and dukkha (suffering), make up the three pillars of Pali Buddhism.
The anatta (Sanskrit: anatman) doctrine lies at the center of Buddhist thought and practice. The Pali and Sanskrit words translate literally as 'no self'; but the doctrine applies not only to persons but to non-persons as well. On the 'no self' theory, nothing possesses selfhood or self-nature or 'own-being,' perhaps not even nibbana 'itself.' We can explain this in Western terms as follows.
If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then we can interpret the anatta doctrine as a denial of the existence of substances. The 'no self' theory would then imply that in ultimate reality there are no substances: what we ordinarily take to be such are wrongly so taken. The world is a Heraclitean flux of momentary items, dharmas, each of which is insubstantial, impermanent, and something which breeds suffering among the ignorant who try to cling to what in itself cannot be clung to.
Causation in such a system is understood as paticcasamuppada (Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada) usually translated as dependent origination or dependent arising according to which all dharmas arise in dependence upon other dharmas.
What is puzzling you is the move from 'empty of inherent existence' to empty of 'true existence.'
There is no puzzle if you understand 'empty of inherent' existence to mean 'empty of substantial existence' and 'true existence' to refer to a mode of existence that Buddhists claim nothing has.
Let me know if this makes sense to you. Of course, I am not endorsing it.
Guns and Rights
Do you have a right to life? Yes. If you have a right to life, do you have a right to defend your life? Yes. If you have a right to defend your life, do you have the right to acquire adequate means to self-defense? Yes. Do you understand that this implies that the law-abiding citizen has a right to keep and bear arms for personal and home defense? Yes. Does this include the right to keep and bear tactical nukes? No.
Very good. You passed the test. You are worth talking to about this issue.
I go into details here.
Has Benatar Refuted the Epicurean Argument?
This is the tenth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in the very rich Chapter 5, "Death." Herewith, commentary on pp. 123-128. My answer to the title question is No, but our author has very effectively shown that the Epicurean argument is not compelling, and perhaps even that it is more reasonably rejected than accepted.
It may smack of sophistry, but the Epicurean argument is one of the great arguments of philosophy, forcing us as it does to think hard about ultimates. That's what philosophy is: thinking as hard as we can, and as honestly as we can, at the very margins of intelligibility, about great questions that tax our paltry minds to their limits. It is sobering to realize that not even the greats got very far in this enterprise. How far, then, can we lesser lights expect to get? But it is noble to strive, and as St Augustine says,
Maximae res, cum parvis quaeruntur, magnos eos solent efficere.
Matters of the greatest importance, when they are investigated by little men, tend to make those men great. (Augustine, Contra Academicos 1. 2. 6.)
So much for the sermon. Now let's get to work.
The Epicurean argument proceeds from two premises, both of them highly plausible:
1) Mortalism: Death ends a person's existence.
2) Existence Requirement: For something to be bad for somebody, he must exist at the time it is bad for him.
Given these assumptions, how can being dead be bad for the one who dies? When we are, death is not; When death is, we are not. Death is therefore nothing to us, and nothing to fear.
If being dead cannot be bad for the deceased, it cannot be good either. But surely we sometimes without sarcasm or malice say of a person who has died, 'He's better off dead.' What we say makes sense, and it is sometimes true. Suppose Jack is in excruciating pain from a terminal illness and then dies. It is true of him after he dies that he is better off dead than he would have been had he lived longer and suffered more.
But how is this possible if Jack no longer exists? How can it be true of him that he is better off at a time when he no longer exists? The puzzle is generated by the conjunction of (1) and (2). If both are true, then it cannot be true of Jack that he is better off dead. But it is either obvious or extremely plausible that he is better off dead. Given that Benatar, as a metaphysical naturalist, assumes the truth of (1), it is off the table.
Now which is more credible, that Jack is better off dead, or that (2) is true? The former according to Benatar. (p. 123) So while the Epicurean cannot be decisively refuted, there are good reasons to hold that a person who is dead and therefore no longer existent can be the subject of goods and bad. This strikes me as a reasonable position to hold. Whether or not we can make sense of how something could be good or bad for a person at a time when he doesn't exist, it is evident, if not quite self-evident, that Jack is better off dead.
How Bad is Painless Murder?
Here is a another consideration that casts doubt on the Epicurean view.
To be murdered is bad, but how bad is painless murder? If one is an Epicurean, it seems one would have to 'dial down' one's assessment of the evil of murder. What follows is my example, but it is based on Benatar's discussion. Suppose Henry the hermit, about whom no one cares except Henry, is murdered while in a deep sleep by an injection that he doesn't even feel. Suppose Henry has no enemies and does not fear for his life.
If our Epicurean holds that conscious states alone are either intrinsically good or intrinsically bad, then it would seem that there is nothing bad about Henry's being murdered. If it is held that there are non-experiential goods and bads, then it would presumably be bad for Henry at the moment of his being murdered, but only then.
These counterintuitive consequences may not refute the Epicurean, but Benatar is on solid ground with his claim that death is part of the human predicament. (127)
School Shootings: It’s the Culture, Stupid
It is not guns that are the problem, but the culture that liberals and leftists have created. We've got plenty of gun control; what we need now is liberal control. The contributors to the piss-poor pages of the NYT's Op-Ed section need to STFU and listen to someone with sense such as Andrew Klavan (emphasis added):
. . . rap music with its hateful, violent and misogynistic lyrics, and video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you can have sex with a prostitute then strangle her or pull an innocent person out of a car, beat him, then steal his vehicle.
. . . a culture in which those in authority approve of and argue for things like gangsta rap and GTA — and indeed for the use of violence to silence speech that offends them — well, such a culture becomes a machine for transforming madness into murder.
[. . .]
The left wants to defend gangstas and "transgressive" art and antifa thugs — but when the shooting starts, they blame the guns.
The left wants to get rid of feminine modesty and masculine protectiveness and social restrictions on sex — but when the abuse and rape and harassment rise to the surface, they start whining about toxic manhood. Perhaps they should have listened to the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton, who wrote about the difference between reforming society and deforming it — a passage that was neatly paraphrased by John F. Kennedy: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."
Now the left wants to legitimize disrespect for the flag and for Christianity. They want to ignore the rule of law at the border and silence protests against Islamic ideas that are antithetical to every good thing the west stands for. They should look to Europe where all that's been accomplished. And now, when European women are molested in the public square, the gormless authorities advise them to behave more modestly lest immigrants get the wrong idea. When Islamic knives come out and Islamic bombs go off, the police rush to harass — who? Those who question the dictates of the Koran.
[. . .]
For fifteen years and more, I have been complaining that the right is silenced in our culture — blacklisted and excluded and ignored in entertainment, mainstream news outlets, and the universities. But the flip side of that is this: the degradation of our culture is almost entirely a leftist achievement. Over the last fifty years, it's the left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.
The left owns the dismal tide. They don't like the results? They're looking for someone or something to blame? Maybe they should start by hunting up a mirror.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Sorts of One-Hit Wonders
There are one-hit wonders whose hits have endured and one hit wonders whose hits have pretty much sunk into oblivion, which is why you need me to prowl the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies for these moth-eaten memories.
Norma Tanega and her Walkin' My Cat Named Dog belong to the latter category. If you remember this curious tune from 1966 I'll buy you a beer.
Another example is Larry Verne's politically incorrect, and therefore good, Mr. Custer from 1960. This one goes out to that Cherokee maiden formerly of the Harvard Lore School, Elizabeth Fauxcohantas Warren.
Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, Stay, 1960. "Woops, la-di-da." Under two minutes!
Ernie K-Doe, Mother-in-Law, 1961. "Sent from down below."
Bruce Channel, Hey! Baby, 1962
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore, 1962. If you don't remember this lovely tune, you dropped too much acid.
David Rose, The Stripper, 1962. An instrumental from an age of instrumentals, with footage and 'leggage' of a period stripper. Tame stuff.
Vangelis, Chariots of Fire Theme, 1982
An example of a one-hit wonder whose hit gets plenty of play is Curtis Lee's Pretty Little Angel Eyes from 1961. This one goes out to wifey.
Land of a Thousand Dances was Cannibal and the Head Hunters' one hit. Its obscurity lies perhaps midway between the Tanega and Lee efforts. This one goes out to my old friend Tom Coleman whose hometown is Whittier, California. He most likely listened to this song some Saturday night while cruising Whittier Blvd. in his beat-to-shit old Chevy, or else while enroute to a dance at the El Monte Legion Stadium. "Be there or be square."
Will the ‘Collusionistas’ Now Apologize to Donald Trump?
Fat chance.
Being a leftist means never having to say you're sorry. Did the Left ever apologize for its support of 'Uncle Joe' Stalin? Did they ever admit that the Rosenbergs were, in 'fifties parlance, 'atomic spies' for the Soviet Union? My astute readers are equipped to supply further examples.
The Mueller indictment finds no wrongdoing by Trump or members of his administration:
Despite a 37-page indictment with a long narrative on a coordinated Russian campaign of interference, the most newsworthy fact comes from the carefully placed adjective “unwitting.” It confirms that the special counsel has found no knowing coordination or collusion between these hackers and Trump officials.
Leftists will not admit that they were wrong. What I expect them to do is to change the subject without making any admission that they have changed the subject.
They will shift from the charge that Trump and Co. colluded with the Russians to swing the election in his favor to the entirely different charge that Putin and the boys tried to interfere with the internal politics of the USA.
The attempt by the Left to smear Trump stank from the very beginning. Many of us asked an obvious question at the outset, a question to which no good answer was ever given: Why on earth would Putin want the alpha male Donald Trump in office rather than the feckless Hillary? And given that all the pollsters were predicting that Trump would be crushed, why would Putin think he had any chance of aiding Trump?
Another thing some of us noted right at the beginning was the use of the meaningless phrase, 'hack the election.' You can hack into an e-mail account, but how do you hack an election? It makes no bloody sense unless you inflate the phrase to mean 'influence the election.' But then every political blogger, every commentator, and indeed every voter was attempting to 'hack the election.'
Language matters.
Jordan Peterson on Why Marxism is So Attractive
A six-minute video. Peterson makes a very important point starting around 4:10 on the transmutation of Marxism. It is taking a new strategic tack, which no one really envisioned, namely, taking over mid-level bureaucracies everywhere, school boards being one sort of mid-level bureaucracy.
If you voted for Hillary, you aided and abetted this destructive tendency. If you voted for Trump, you did something to thwart it.
Fake News: 18 School Shootings Since January 1, 2018. The Importance of Definition
The question of how many school shootings have occurred in a given place over a given period of time is an empirical question. But to answer the empirical question, one must first have answered a logically prior question, which is non-empirical. This is the conceptual question as to the definition of 'school shooting.'
What counts as a school shooting? The supervised, safe, Saturday morning on-campus firing of BB guns at targets? The 'discharge' of a pea shooter? The shotgunning of ducks in a pond on a school's grounds? The killing of a stray deer with bow and arrow?
Suppose some punk fires a .223 round at a window of a school in the middle of the night when no one is there from an off-campus position. That could be called a school shooting too. A physical part of the school was shot at.
Or let us say that a distraught person commits suicide by shooting himself while seated in a car parked in a lot of what was formerly a school. This is an a actual case that was cited as a 'school shooting'! See linked article infra. Does this count as a school shooting? Not to someone who is intellectually honest.
Clearly, what most people mean by a school shooting is an attempted mass shooting in a school or on the premises of a school by one or more assailants armed with deadly weapons, a shooting of students or teachers or administrative personnel that causes death or injury.
That definition no doubt needs tweaking, but if we adopt something like it, then, since January 1st we have in these United States more like three, count 'em, three school shootings. Three too many, but even a liberal gun-grabber knows that 3 < 18.
Across the board, lying leftists bandy about terms without explicit definitions, or with over-broad definitions. They do this willfully to further their destructive agendas. If you are a decent human being you will do your bit to oppose them.
Now go read the Politifact article.
Advice for Introverts
Relations with extroverts should be left at the superficial level. Never seek a deep relation with a person who is surface all the way down.
Is the Problem Gun Culture or Liberal Culture?
Why Lie?
Why lie when the facts are easily established and indeed well known? Hillary is famous for this, but Elizabeth Warren, the 'Cherokee' Pinocchio, takes the cake. See also Elizabeth Warren Went Native.
Related: Hillary the Fabulist. It begins:
It has been said of Bill Clinton that he'd rather climb a tree and tell a lie than stand on the ground and tell the truth. Hillary continues the family tradition. One of her latest untruths is that all four of her grandparents came to the U.S. as immigrants when only one of them did. She lied, brazenly, about something easily checked. To prolong the arboreal metaphor, why would she perch herself far out on a limb so easily sawn off? Beats me.
Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.
How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes?
The typical secularist is a reality denier who hides from the unalterable facts of death and impermanence. This is shown by his self-deceptive behavior: he lives as if he will live forever and as if his projects are ultimately meaningful even though he knows that he won't and that they aren't. If he were to face reality he would have to be a nihilist. That he isn't shows that he is fooling himself.
More here.
Benatar on the Lucretian Symmetry Argument
This is the ninth installment in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017).
We now take up the Lucretian symmetry argument insofar as it bears upon the question whether being dead is bad. That is what Benatar maintains. Being dead is bad for the one who is dead even though to be dead is to be nonexistent. Our predicament is not Silenian. Death does not liberate us from our predicament; it is part of our predicament. Our predicament is an existential vise: we are squeezed between life which is objectively bad for all, no matter how fortunate they are, and death which is also objectively bad for all.
The symmetry argument, roughly, is that if it wasn't bad for us before we were born, then it won't be bad for us after we are dead. But we need to be a bit more precise since it is obvious that we existed before we were born. Each of us had a pre-natal existence, but none of us on naturalist assumptions had a pre-vital existence. So "the argument claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was not bad, neither is our post-mortem nonexistence." (118) The crucial assumption is that the two periods of nonexistence, the pre-vital and the post-mortem, are axiologically or evaluatively symmetrical.
One way to reject the argument is highly implausible. One accepts the symmetry but claims that because our pre-vital nonexistence was bad for us, so is our post-mortem nonexistence. The other way to reject the argument is by rejecting the symmetry thesis. This is the tack Benatar takes.
His view is that a person's pre-vital nonexistence and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical, and that only the latter is bad. One might think, however, that if the deprivation argument works for one's post-mortem nonexistence, then it should also work for one's pre-vital nonexistence. According to the deprivation argument, being dead is bad for a dead person because it deprives him of goods he would otherwise have had. Why then doesn't one's pre-vital nonexistence deprive one of goods one would have had had one been alive earlier?
The following example is mine, not Benatar's. Plato knew Socrates. Some of Plato's disciples, however, were too young to have known Socrates. They missed out on the experience of a lifetime. Was it bad for those disciples, in the pre-vital period of their nonexistence, not to have known Socrates?
Benatar makes a plausible case that the answer is in the negative. One argument makes use of Frederik Kaufman's distinction beyween 'thin' and 'thick' persons. I won't discuss this argument. The second argument is that death is bad for the one who dies not merely because it deprives but because it annihilates. Pre-vital nonexistence, however, cannot possibly be the product of annihilation. Correspondingly, while one who exists has an interest in continuing to exist, one who has not yet come into existence has no interest in coming into existence. Therefore, pre-vital and post-mortem nonexistence are axiologically asymmetrical. One who has died and has been annihilated is in a bad way because of his annihilation. But one who has not yet come into existence is not and cannot be a subject of the bad of annihilation.
The Lucretian symmetry argument therefore fails. So while it wasn't bad for us during the pre-vital phase of our nonexistence, this fact has no tendency to show that it will not be bad for us during the post-mortem phase of our nonexistence.