The Two Opposites of ‘Nothing’ and the Logical Irreducibility of Being (2018 Version)

NothingThis entry is part of the ongoing debate with the Opponent a. k. a. the Dark Ostrich.

It is interesting  that 'nothing' has two opposites.  One is 'something.'  Call it the logical opposite.  The other is 'being.'  Call it the ontological opposite.  Logically, 'nothing' and 'something' are interdefinable quantifiers:

D1. Nothing is F =df it is not the case that something is F.

D2. Something is F =df it is not the case that nothing is F.

These definitions, which are part of the articulation of the Discursive Framework (DF), give us no reason to think of one term as more basic than the other.  Logically, 'nothing' and 'something'  are on a par.  Logically, they are polar opposites.  Anything you can say with the one you can say with the other, and vice versa.

We also note that as quantifiers, as terms expressing logical quantity, 'nothing' and 'something' are not names or referring expressions.

So far I have said nothing controversial.

Ontologically, however, being and nothing are not on a par.  They are not polar opposites.  Being is primary, and nothing is derivative.  (Note the ambiguity of 'Nothing is derivative' as between 'It is not the case that something is derivative' and 'Nothingness is derivative.'  The second is meant.)

Now we enter the arena of controversy. For it might be maintained that there are no ontological uses of 'being,' and 'nothing,' that talk of being and nothing  is replaceable without remainder by use of the quantifiers defined in (D1) and (D2).

Quine said that "Existence is what existential quantification expresses."  (Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, p. 97)I deny it:  there is more to existence than what the existential quantifier expresses.  Quine's is a thin theory of existence; mine is a thick theory.  Metaphorically, existence possesses an ontological thickness.  This is very important for metaphysics if true.

I won't be able to prove my point because nothing in philosophy can be proven.  But I can argue for my point in a fallacy-free manner.  I am justified in holding my view so long as no one can convict me of a clear-cut error. 

Suppose we try to define the existential 'is' in terms of the misnamed because question-begging 'existential' quantifier.  (The proper moniker is 'particular quantifier.')  This is standardly done as follows.

D3. y is/exists =df for some x, y = x.

In plain English, for y to be or exist is for y to be identical to something. For Quine to be or exist is for Quine to be identical to something.  In general, to be is to be identical to something, not some one thing of course, but something or other.   This thing, however, must exist, and in a sense not captured by (D3).  Thus

Quine exists =df Quine is identical to something that exists

and

Pegasus does not exist =df nothing that exists is such that Pegasus is identical to it

or

Pegasus is diverse from everything that exists.

The point, which many find elusive, is that the items in the domain of quantification  must be there to be quantified over, where 'there' has not a locative but an existential sense.  For if the domain includes nonexistent objects, then, contrary to fact, Pegasus would exist in virtue of being identical to an item in this widened domain, namely, Pegasus.

The conclusion is (to me!) obvious: one cannot explicate the existential 'is' in terms of the particular quantifier without circularity, without presupposing that things exist in a sense of 'exist' that is not captured by (D3).

Mere logicians won't accept or perhaps even understand this since existence is "odious to the logician" as George Santayana observes. (Scepticism and Animal Faith, Dover, 1955, p. 48, orig. publ. 1923.) You have to have metaphysical aptitude to understand it. (But now I am tending toward the tendentious.)

Intellectual honesty requires that I admit that I am basing myself on an intuition, what J. Maritain calls the intuition of Being.  I find it self-evident that the existence of a concrete individual is an intrinsic determination that makes it be as opposed to not be. This implies a real distinction between x and the existence of x. Accordingly, the existence of an individual cannot be reduced to its self-identity: the existence of Quine does not reduce to Quine's being (identical to) Quine, as on the thin theory.  And the nonexistence of Pegasus does not reduce to its being diverse from everything.  (If to be is to be identical to something, then not to be is to be diverse from everything.)

The Opponent does not share my intuition.  In the past I have berated him for being 'existence-blind' but he might plausibly return the 'compliment' by accusing me of double vision:  I see Socrates but I also 'see' the existence of Socrates when there is no such 'thing.' 

So far, not good:  I can't refute the Opponent but he can't refute me.  Stand-off.  Impasse, a-poria.

Let me try a different tack.  Does the Opponent accept 

ENN. Ex nihilo nihil fit?

Out of nothing nothing comes.  Note that 'nothing' is used here in two different ways, ontologically and logically/quantificationally. For what the hallowed dictum states is that it is not the case that something arises from nothing/Nothingness.  

Now if the Opponent accepts the truth or even just the meaningfulness of (ENN), then he must (!) admit that there are two senses of 'nothing,' the logical and the ontological, and correspondingly, two senses of 'something.'  If so, then being and nothing cannot be exhaustively understood in terms of logical quantifiers and propositional negation, and then the thin theory bites the dust.

But if the thin theory succumbs, then there is more to existence than can be captured within the Discursive Framework.

Related articles
Maverick Philosopher: Singular Existence and Quantification
The Riddle of Evil and the Pyrrhonian 'Don't Care'
A Defense of David Benatar Against a Scurrilous <i>New Criterion</i> Attack

Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books, tr. R. J. Hollingdale, New York Review Books, 1990, p. 101:

Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists.

Lichtenberg's observation puts me in mind of anarchists who say that where there are no laws there are no criminals.  That is not much better than saying that where there are no chemists there are no chemicals. 

Just as there are chemicals whether or not there are any chemists, there are moral wrongs whether or not there are any positive laws* prohibiting them.  What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong.  And it is precisely the moral wrongness of murder that justifies having laws against it.

And yet there is a sense in which criminals are legislated into existence:  one cannot be a criminal in the eyes of the law unless there is the law.  And it is certainly true that to be a criminal in the eyes of the law does not entail being  guilty of any moral wrong-doing. There are senseless, incoherent, and unjust laws. 

But the anarchist goes off the deep end if he thinks that there is no moral justification for any legal prohibitions, or that the wrongness of every act is but an artifact of the law's prohibiting it.

As I like to say, anarchism is to political philosophy what eliminative materialism is to the philosophy of mind. Both are 'lunatic' positions. But 'lunacy' has its uses.  It is instructive in the way pathology is.  We study diseases not to spread them, but to contain them. We study diseases of the mind not to promote them, but to work out the principles of intellectual hygiene.

____________

*Positive laws are those posited by a legislature. See here:

In general, the term "positive law" connotes statutes, i.e., law that has been enacted by a duly authorized legislature.  As used in this sense, positive law is distinguishable from natural law. The term "natural law", especially as used generally in legal philosophy, refers to a set of universal principles and rules that properly govern moral human conduct. Unlike a statute, natural law is not created by human beings. Rather, natural law is thought to be the preexisting law of nature, which human beings can discover through their capacity for rational analysis.

 UPDATE (1/24). Tom Anger comments:

I agree with what you say in "Of Cats and Mice, Laws and Criminals"; specifically, this:
 
What makes murder wrong is not that there are positive laws prohibiting it; murder is wrong antecedently of the positive law.  It is morally wrong before (logically speaking) it is legally wrong.
 
But I have a problem with the quoted material in the footnote; specifically, this:
 
[N]atural law is not created by human beings. Rather, natural law is thought to be the preexisting law of nature, which human beings can discover through their capacity for rational analysis.
 
I have never been able to accept that view of natural law. Where does the preexisting law come from?
 
My view is that natural law consists of norms that arise from human nature. An example would be the Golden Rule, or ethic of reciprocity. It seems most likely to have arisen from experience and normalized through tacit agreement before it was enunciated by various "wise men" over the ages.
 
BV: Well, if natural law is grounded in human nature, then there might not be much or any difference between what you are maintaining and what the authors of the footnote say.  Both of you would then be saying that law cannot be wholly conventional.

On Taking Pleasure in the Death of Enemies

Is it Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy? Only if it is bad to be dead. But it is not clear that it is bad to be dead. On the other hand, if it is bad to be dead, it might still not be Schadenfreude to take pleasure in the death of an enemy. 

For I might take satisfaction, not in the fact that my enemy is dead, but that he can no longer cause me trouble.

But you want to know what Schadenfreude is.  This is from an earlier post:

If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another's injuries (Schaden).

The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical. Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not also a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.

“But that’s not Who We are!”

Well, who are we then?  That piece of liberal misdirection and obfuscation, the vacuous phrase, 'Who we are,' is in need of sober critique. Paul Gottfried provides it. Here is a chunk of his text:

It seems statements can only contradict “who we are” if they’re expressed past the point in time that the media decided they were no longer allowed. So President Clinton was not being homophobic when he pushed successfully for the Defense of Marriage Act. That’s because he did that in 1996, before gay marriage became an integral part of “who we are.” And Richard Durbin was not being un-American when he called for ending “chain migration” on the floor of the Senate in 2010, since the Left had not yet made the term and the policy it refers to incompatible with “who we are.” Durbin would later go after President Trump for using that exact same expression because it offends black citizens whose ancestors “were brought here in chains.” Ditto when the very liberal Senator Edward Kennedy assured critics of the 1965 immigration reform bill that the legislation would not “upset the ethnic mix” in the United States and would “not inundate America with immigrants from…the most populated and economically deprived nations of Africa and Asia.” Back then, the left could say such things without being in violation of “who we are.” That’s because it was not yet going after Donald Trump.

I would add that when such stealth ideologues as Bill and Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Obama, Durbin and the rest seemed to have changed their views, that was not what was really going on. They were leftists all along. They merely mouthed sane positions on marriage and immigration because it was politically advantageous for them to do so at the time.

Benatar, Death, and Deprivation

This is the seventh entry in a series on David Benatar's The Human Predicament (Oxford UP, 2017). We are still in Chapter 5 and will be here for some time. This entry covers pp. 98-102.

Recall the Issue

If one is a mortalist, but also holds that human life is objectively bad, then one might naturally view death as escape or release, and therefore as good, or at least as not bad. This is the view I would hold if I were a mortalist. I am not in fact a mortalist: I believe in God, (libertarian) freedom, and immortality. I also hold that no one can establish with certainty the existence of these three great Objects of human concern. People who think there are proofs hereabouts are engaged in metaphysical bluster. There are good arguments for the Kantian trio, but no proofs. So I might be wrong. If I am wrong, then I welcome death as release from this world of misery, malevolence, ignorance, and strife. The Grim Reaper is, in truth, a Benign Releaser. 

Death, where is thy sting? 

Either I move on in the hope of further moral and intellectual growth on a higher plane, or I become nothing, in which case nothing can matter to me. For in the second case there won't be any 'me.' The only nasty part is the transition, the dying; for broadly Epicurean reasons I do not consider the 'state' of being dead bad. It is not bad if I survive and it is not bad if I am annihilated.

We have seen, however, that Benatar holds that not only is life bad, but being dead is also bad.   But then he faces the Epicurean challenge according to which death is nothing to us, and thus nothing bad.   The Epicurean challenge comes in different forms. I judged in our last installment that he met the challenge in its hedonist variant. A little review can't hurt. The hedonist variant can be put like this (my formulation, not Benatar's):

Hedonism: Only conscious states are intrinsically either good or bad states.
Mortalism: No dead person is in a conscious state. 
Therefore
No dead person is in an intrinsically bad state.

Hedonism is dubious if not untenable.  The major is not obvious. Here is an example of my own. Consider the fact that there are painful conscious states. This is an intrinsically bad state of affairs. But it is not a conscious state. We now consider the deprivation response to the Epicurean challenge.

The Deprivation Response

On this response, death is bad for the one who dies because it deprives him of the intrinsic goods that he would otherwise have enjoyed.  This response is consistent with different theories of the intrinsic good. Interesting, a hedonist could make this response. He could hold that what makes death bad is that it deprives the dead person of the pleasures that he otherwise would have enjoyed.

I don't think the deprivation response is compelling.  Here are a couple of examples of my own.

Suppose a happy, healthy, well-situated 20-year-old full of life and promise dies suddenly and painlessly in a freak accident.  Almost all will agree that in cases like this being dead (which we distinguish from both the process and the event of dying) is an evil, and therefore neither good nor axiologically neutral.  It is an evil for the person who is dead whether or not it is an evil for anyone else.  It is an evil because it deprives him of all the intrinsic goods he would have enjoyed had he not met an untimely end.

On the other hand, if the dead person is not, how can he be deprived of anything? Don't you have to be, to be deprived? If you are missing (nonexistent), how can you miss out? This strikes me as the crux of the matter to which we will come in later entries.

It is not quite the same for the 90-year-old.  One cannot be deprived of the impossible (as a matter of conceptual necessity), and the older one gets the closer the approach to the nomologically impossible.  (I assume that there is some age — 150? — at which it become nomologically impossible for what could reasonably count as a human being to continue to live.) So one cannot employ the same reasoning in the two cases.  If we say that the being dead of the 20-year-old is bad because it deprives him of future goods, we cannot give the same reason for the badness ( if it is badness) of the being dead of the 90-year-old.  Someone who lives a life that is on balance happy and healthy and productive and then dies of natural causes at 90 or 100 is arguably not deprived of anything by his being dead. 

So it is not clear to me that the deprivation response shows that being dead is bad for one who dies. 

In our next episode we discuss annihilation! Stay tuned.

Who Will Hire You?

Mr Google

Time was when leftist termites were found mainly in government, the media, schools and universities, Hollywood, and the churches,  Now they have come to infest huge corporations that control the flow of information. The times they are a'changin.' 

Here is another reason why the libertarian notion of a minimal  'night watchman state' is untenable. The Federal government has to have power sufficient to punish rogue corporations.

President Trump’s Considerable Achievements

The following ought to convince you if you don't wear a pussyhat or suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Daniel McCarthy:

He won states in 2016 that had been out of reach for Republican presidential candidates for 25 years or more: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. For all that the people who now criticize Trump had talked about broadening the Republican Party’s appeal, it was Trump who actually broadened the party in the way that counts—by winning elections rather than by scoring meaningless diversity points with the priesthood of multiculturalism.

As President, Trump has delivered relief to some 80 percent of taxpayers. The tax law just passed has also taken the teeth out of Obamacare, removing the feature most philosophically objectionable to conservatives—the individual mandate, which forced citizens to buy a private product (or at least a product whose profits lined politically connected private pockets) as a condition of living. If Obamacare truly is the great service that Democrats insist it is, now the public can freely choose to purchase it.

The economy has been performing well under President Trump, and there is no reason to be stingy about crediting him for what he has not done. After all, if free-market economics is correct, the best course a government can take is usually to leave well enough alone. Trump has done that and something more: He has sent businesses a powerful signal. Job-creation and entrepreneurship were choked during the Obama years by what Robert Higgs has called “regime uncertainty,” the fear that at any moment unexpected new regulations could make new ventures hazardous. That fear has been dispelled under Trump, who has made a start at dismantling old regulations and—even more importantly—is trusted not to impose capricious new ones.

The character of an administration—as distinct from the personal character of the President—is of the utmost consequence not only in domestic policy but also for foreign policy. Under Trump, ISIS has been smashed militarily. But the spirit that animates ISIS has also received blow after blow. Instead of Americans being cowed and timid, more worried about giving offense than asserting the justice of our civilization, there is a new vigor in the country’s words and deeds.

In the same way that the socialists and liberals who thought communism half-correct were not the men and women to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end, liberals and give-no-offense Republicans are not the ones who will annihilate the morale of Islamist radicalism. President Trump can be crude in how he expresses the will to win the war of confidence. But for too long we have had leaders who refused to speak in the language of America First and Western Civilization First, even as they invaded Iraq and brought regime change to Libya—violent actions that were spectacularly counterproductive. To see liberals now claim that President Trump’s intemperate tweets might make us more enemies—as if our bombs and nation-building escapades had not been doing that for 15 years—is telling.

Trump may go too far; others refused to go far enough. Not violent language but clarion language, in place of violent but strategically impotent actions, is what we need. That was what Ronald Reagan gave us at the end of the Cold War, in place of the futile hot wars and weak language of the administrations that preceded him. He won on the battlefield of morale. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a masterstroke in this regard. It merely acknowledges an on-the-ground reality, but its symbolic importance is vast. It shows Islamists and their sympathizers that their cause is losing ground, and it puts pressure on regimes such as Saudi Arabia to choose between clinging to Islamist ideology or accepting differences with the United States in a diplomatic fashion.

And these are only some of Trump's accomplishments in just one year in office. The entire article is excellent. Read it!

Don’t Get Fooled Again

A little ditty from The Who to stiffen the spines of Republicans and inspire them in their stand against the filthy, mendacious Dems. Politics is war, and if you don't have it in you to fight, then get off the battlefield.  Too long have you believed that politics is gentlemanly conversation, even while absorbing blow after blow from the Alinskyite Dems.  But a leader has emerged to teach you otherwise by his example. Now learn the lesson.

Hang Tough, Republicans!

Lyrics below the fold. 

Continue reading “Don’t Get Fooled Again”

More on Meditation: Worldling and Quester

The New Zealander to whom I replied in Impediments to Meditation responds:

. . . you rightly sense that there was a certain selfish ambition in my turning to meditation. Though following your post Meditation: What and Why, my stated ambition was to achieve what you called "tranquility". To use your terminology from the article, I grew quite tired of suffering from a chaotic mind (depression seems to have a fondness for assaulting me with un-invited negative emotional impulses). So I thought it only necessary to turn to meditation as a means of re-gaining sovereign self discipline.

A few questions arise. Being fairly new to this, I don't expect to have a very thorough understanding of the underlying philosophy, so please correct me where I go wrong. Specifically, you say that the ego is necessary for worldly life. So it seems that to let go of the ego is also to let go of worldly life? 

Assuming I've got that right, two further questions arise. Firstly, what do you mean by "worldly life?" and secondly, what does it mean to "let go of it?" I take it after all, that one feature of the Doctrine of Creation, is a commitment to the great goodness of creation. I have some anxieties about about saying that only the spiritual is worthwhile; that creation is merely expendable. 

Within a Christian framework it is certainly true that whatever God creates is good.  I use 'creature' to refer to anything that is a product of divine creative activity, whether animate, inanimate, concrete, or abstract.  So creatures are good.  If we use 'world' to refer to the sum-total of creatures, then the world is good. But 'world' has perhaps a dozen different meanings. I am using it in a different sense.

So let me introduce 'worldly person' or  'worldling' as the opposite of a spiritual seeker. The worldling  lives for this passing world alone. But he doesn't appreciate its transient and ontologically substandard nature. Or if he does, he is not moved to seek the truly real. For the worldling, the passing scene  it is as real as it gets, and as good as it gets, and he thinks its ephemeral goods have the power to make him happy. It's not that he thinks about this in any depth, or formulates to himself anything like what I have just written; being a world-immersed fellow, it it s not an issue for him. So he pursues money, power, sex, recognition and all the rest as if they are ends in themselves. He loves creatures, but not as creatures, for he does not relate them back to their Source. He loves them idolatrously.

He is a Cave man if you will; he doesn't appreciate that our predicament is classically and profoundly depicted in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. He lives for his ego, to advance himself and distinguish himself in an ultimately futile project to become somebody when he knows deep down that his ego and all its adjuncts will soon be annihilated by death. But he avoids the thought of death and cultivates  the illusion that he will live forever. He loses himself in the diaspora of sense objects and social suggestions. To answer my reader's first question, this is what I mean by a worldly life.  It is an attitude according to which this passing world is ultimate both in being and in value.  Someone with that attitude is a worldling. 

His opposite number, the seeker or quester, appreciates the vanity or emptiness of the worldling's life and the worldling's world. He senses that there has to be Something More. He is aware that things are not as they ought to be, and that he is not as he ought to be. He is oppressed by the ignorance, misery, strife, and senselessness all around him. He experiences life as a predicament, and seeks a way out. What's more, he doesn't believe that man, individually or collectively, can bring about his redemption by his own efforts.  This distinguishes him from the 'progressive.' He thinks that 

. . .there is for man some sort of highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this danger . . . (Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, Scribners, 1912, p. 12)

Meditation is one among several spiritual practices the seeker cultivates in his quest to transcend the worldly attitude.  This involves letting go of the worldly life.  The quester may remain in the world, but he will not be of the world, to invoke something like the NT sense of 'world.'  The quester needn't flee the world and join a monastic order.  But if he remains in the world he will find it very difficult not to be swamped and thrown off course by worldly suggestions.  

I will end by saying that to pursue meditation fruitfully one has to reform one's way of life. A certain amount of moral ascesis is sine qua non. If you intend to spend your early mornings thinking and trancing, you cannot spend your late evenings drinking and dancing.  Re-collection is incompatible with dissipation. But this is a large topic. More later, perhaps.

Catholic Higher Education is a Joke

Here is yet another example:

The College of the Holy Cross [Worcester, Mass.] is mulling whether to shed its century-old sports symbol the “Crusader” out of concerns the image of a Christian warrior might be offensive to Muslims.

Why not go all the way and remove the crucifixes as well? More proof that there is no more supine a chickenshit than a university administrator. 

What can you do? Verbal protest won't get you anywhere. And you can't reason with the Pee Cee. You have to defund them. That will get their attention. When they call you for a contribution, tell them why you will not give them a red cent. And don't send your kids there. You are wasting your money and contributing to their trashing of Western and Catholic culture.

But don't vent your righteous anger at the poor student or worker who is on the phone. 

For a good long discussion, see 'We Cannot Save Them' over at Dreher's place.  Read it!

Another academic 'Catholic' craphole is DePaul 'University.' See DePaul University Bans "Unborn Lives Matter"

Ditto Gonzaga: See Defunding the Left

Cigarettes, Rationality, and Hitchens

Hitchens shirtless smokingLet's talk about cigarettes. Suppose you smoke one pack per day. Is that irrational? I hope all will agree that no one who is concerned to be optimally healthy as long as possible should smoke 20 cigarettes a day, let alone 80 like Rod Serling who died at age 50 on the operating table. But long-term health is only one value among many. Would Serling have been as productive without the weed? Maybe not.

Suppose one genuinely enjoys smoking and is willing to run the risk of disease and perhaps shorten one's life by say five or ten years in order to secure certain benefits in the present. There is nothing irrational about such a course of action. One acts rationally — in one sense of 'rational' — if one chooses means conducive to the ends one has in view. If your end in view is to live as long as possible, then don't smoke. If that is not your end, if you are willing to trade some highly uncertain future years of life for some certain pleasures here and now, and if you enjoy smoking, then smoke.

The epithet 'irrational' is attached with more justice to the fascists of the Left, the loon-brained tobacco wackos, who, in the grip of their misplaced moral enthusiasm, demonize the acolytes of the noble weed. The church of liberalism must have its demon, and his name is tobacco. I should also point out that smoking, like keeping and bearing arms, is a liberty issue. Is liberty a value? I'd say it is. Yet another reason to oppose the liberty-bashing loons of the Left and the abomination of Obamacare with its individual mandate. [This entry is a repost from 28 December 2011. One of President Trump's many accomplishments has been to put an end to the mandate.]

Smoking and drinking can bring you to death's door betimes. Ask Humphrey Bogart who died at 56 of the synergistic effects of weed and hooch. Life's a gamble. A crap shoot no matter how you slice it. Hear the Hitch:

Writing is what's important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me. So I was knowingly taking a risk. I wouldn't recommend it to others.

Exactly right.

And like Bogie before him, Hitch paid the price for his boozing and smoking in the coin of an early death at age 62 on 15 December, 2011.  Had he taken care of himself he might have kept up his high-toned ranting and raving for another ten years at least.

So why don't I smoke and drink? The main reason is that smoking and drinking are inconsistent with the sorts of activities that  provide satisfactions of a much higher grade than smoking and drinking. I mean: running, hiking, backpacking and the like. When you wake up with a hangover, are you proud of the way you spent the night before? Are you a better man in any sense? Do you really feel better after a night of physical and spiritual dissipation? Would you feel a higher degree of satisfaction if the day before you had completed a 26.2 mile foot race?

Health and fitness in the moment is a short-term reason. A long-term reason is that I want to live as long as possible so as to finish the projects I have in mind. It is hard to write philosophy when you are sick or dead.

And here below is where the philosophy has to be written. Where I hope to go there will be no need for philosophy.

Pakistani Humanist Denied UK Asylum . . .

. . . after failing to identify Plato! Holy Guacamole! (HT: Karl White)

A Pakistani man who renounced his Muslim faith and became a humanist has had his application for asylum in the UK rejected after failing to correctly answer questions about ancient Greek philosophers.

The Home Office said Hamza bin Walayat’s failure to identify Plato and Aristotle as humanist philosophers indicated his knowledge of humanism was “rudimentary at best”.

This is very strange in several ways. For one thing, how could anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the divine Plato call him a humanist? Later in the piece we get a definition that is on the right track:

In a letter in support of Walayat’s asylum application, Bob Churchill, of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, said: “For many, the broad descriptive ‘humanist’ is just a softer way of saying atheist, especially if you come from a place where identifying as atheist may be regarded as a deeply offensive statement.”

My astute readers don't need it explained to them why Plato is not a humanist by this definition.

Perhaps the Pakistani man should be given asylum. But there is a far more important, an 'existential,' issue:

If the Brits had any sense they would curtail the influx of Muslims into their homeland, at least for the time being, until the Muslim world reforms itself.  (This assumes that Brits still care about their wonderful culture which is parent to our American culture.) Far too many Muslims, not having gone through the Enlightenment, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, retain their backward fanaticism, a fanaticism and 'true belief' that makes them extremely dangerous to civilized and skeptical and sometimes decadent Brits who are prone to doubt and therefore not inclined to defend their superior culture.  As we read:

Apostates are subject to discrimination, persecution and violence in Pakistan. In March last year, a student who had stated he was a humanist on his Facebook page was murdered at his university. 

Blasphemy is punishable by death under Pakistani law. In August, 24 British politicians wrote to the Pakistani government urging it to repeal its draconian blasphemy law, which has been used against religious minorities and humanists.

Immigrants bring their culture with them. If those with antithetical values are allowed to immigrate in huge numbers they will not assimilate, even if a few of them are willing and able to assimilate.  And then the Brits will have in their midst subversive elements who believe the evil nonsense described in the quotation immediately preceding. Eventually, the invaders will take over the host country.

Now how stupid is that?  No comity without commonality. Do the U. K. and Europe have a death wish?

Think about it. You have a superior culture that allows itself to be destroyed by an inferior culture that exploits features of the superior culture that make it superior. I am thinking of such classically liberal Western values as tolerance, religious liberty (which includes the liberty to be irreligious), and free speech. 

We must not allow our virtues to vitiate us. For then our virtues become vices. The values mentioned have limits. For example, does religious toleration extend to a religion which is also, and indissolubly, a destructive political ideology antithetical to Western values?

This is a crucial question, but have you ever heard anyone raise it? Now you have.