The Greatest Temptation

I am repeatedly visited by the thought that the greatest temptation is the temptation to see the world as nothing but a system of finitudes and relativities with nothing beyond it or behind it.  It is just a play of phenomena of no ultimate significance. There is the temptation to sink into a placid nihilism: nothing finite finally matters; there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not matter.  And since nothing finite finally matters, there is nothing to get hung up about:

Let me take you down
'Cause I'm going to Strawberry Fields
Nothing is real
And nothing to get hung about
Strawberry Fields forever.

This is not an angry nihilism, but something closer to the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.

How does this greatest temptation connect to ordinary temptation?

It is spring, a time of enhanced sexual temptation. One's resistance to temptation is resistance without yesteryear's assurance of the evil of acquiescence. Is there really a soul about whose care one ought to be concerned? Perhaps we die utterly and it just does not matter, finally or ultimately, whether we resist or indulge these paltry temptations.  Pleasure is here and now. It is concretely and undeniably real even if fleeting, unlike speculations and scruples about God and the soul and the moral law which are endlessly debatable.

You're able and she's willing. It's consensual.  In a while you will both be dead and it won't matter to anyone that you found an hour's pleasure in this way in violation of a monastic vow, or a marital vow, or a philosopher's vow to eschew the blandishments of the flesh the better to secure insight into the really real by keeping undimmed the eyes of the soul.

So you indulge, but not with the settled knowledge or firm belief that the act is wrong, but in a state of doubt whether it is wrong, or more radically, like a Pyrrhonist, in a state of aporia as to whether or not the whole moral question matters or even makes sense.

The greatest temptation, I said, is the temptation to think that nothing finite finally matters; that there is nothing that is not finite; and that this is so does not itself matter.  My suggestion is that acquiescence in this greatest of all temptations mightily aids and abets acquiescence in ordinary temptation.

It is a temptation so deep that I am 'tempted' to say that, compared to it, the temptation to which Adam and Eve succumbed is an ordinary temptation, a temptation that presupposes but does not question Ultimate Mattering and the nonrelative opposition of good and evil. 

Of Death and Detachment

St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, p. 11:

My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me.

I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different senses in this passage. The one sense is spiritual while the other is physical. 

The saint is praying that he be given the strength to detach himself spiritually from the transient objects of worldly desire before  death physically detaches him or his soul from his body.  The saint is not assuming that physical detachment will occasion spiritual detachment. To expect such a thing would be naive. It would be as if a man who spent his entire life 'on the make,' in hot pursuit of property and pelf, pleasure and power, were suddenly at death to renounce the earthly lures and to have a burning desire to meet his Maker.

The saint is assuming, though, that spiritual detachment can be achieved only while one is in the body, and that after one quits it one will be stuck with the spiritual attachments one has at the hour of death. 

Physical death does not have the power to detach me spiritually from worldliness with its vapours and follies. For this is possible: my body dies but my soul lives on fully attached to the objects of worldly desire. We may speculate that Hugh Hefner is presently still lusting after nubile females. It is just that he presently lacks the physical apparatus with which to realize his lusts.

This too is possible: I remain physically attached to my body while living spiritually detached from the bagatelles of this life.

This is a fertile field for further thought.  What exactly is spiritual attachment? How is it put in place, and how is it mitigated? One mode of mitigation is by meditation: one distances mentally from one's thoughts; one observes them as from a distance, refusing to live in or lose oneself in them.

And how can the soul be physically attached to the body if only one of them is physical?  Is perhaps the soul's physical attachment to the body reducible to a special sort of spiritual attachment whereby I become embodied by spiritually attaching myself to a chunk of the physical world, a particular animal organism? By taking a particular animal organism to be me?

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Race and America’s Soul

Myron Magnet – -Is he an attractive man? – - gets it right, or rather the author he is reviewing does:

What gives Gene Dattel’s Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure its special power is that, even after its bracingly original and thoroughly researched account of the racism of the abolitionist North from the late eighteenth century until long after the Civil War, the book nevertheless does not shrink from laying the ills of today’s black American underclass not at the door of a painful history, with ample blame for northern as well as southern whites, but squarely at the feet of black Americans themselves. Yes, shameful, deeply shameful, were slavery, Jim Crow, and northern racism, and who can doubt that they left grievous scars? Still, America fought a war to end the evil institution, had a civil rights movement to try to erase its malign remnants, and spent decades on affirmative action and other nostrums to expunge even the faintest remaining traces. Whatever white Americans could do to atone for and repair the damage they caused, they have done, as much as imperfect humans in an imperfect world can do. Now, Dattel argues, it’s up to black Americans to save themselves.

Exactly right. It is time for blacks to take responsibility for their lives and get off the plantation.  Will the Left let them?

Related: The Importance of Self-Control

Sunday Morning Sermon: Moral Failure

We fall back again and again into our old bad habits because of our weakness on all levels: the flesh, the heart, the will, and the intellect. Our minds are dark, our wills are weak, our hearts are foul. How do we know this? By honest self-examination and a refusal to evade the truth.  

The will is not strong enough to tame the animal in us and control its natural tendencies; but it is strong enough to suborn the intellect and persuade it to rationalize the free will's wrong decisions.

A will too weak to tame the flesh is yet strong enough to suborn the intellect.

Because we cannot significantly improve ourselves by our own efforts, we must seek help elsewhere, but obviously not from those who are as wretched as we are, which is to say, from fellow human beings.

A Philosopher’s Prayer

We are grateful for this quotidian bread, Lord, but it is not for it that we pray. Grant us the panem supersubstantialis, the bread supersubstantial, that nourishes the mind and heart. It is for this bread that we must beg, unable as we are to secure it by our own powers. The daily bread that nourishes the flesh we can gain for ourselves.

……………..

For the theology behind the prayer, see "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread."

The Value of Philosophy

What good is philosophy?

It teaches humility in point of knowledge and belief. It lays bare the infirmity of reason. It prompts us to seek other sources of insight, including mystical intuition and divine revelation, while supplying us with the tools for their evaluation and critique. Its problems, though insoluble, can serve as koans.

Good philosophy debunks bad philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, scientism, epistemic pretense, bad religion, and bad politics. It is a mighty curb on fanaticism of all sorts, that of the religionists as well as that of the anti-religionists. It keeps Jerusalem in check even while it is itself fed and enlivened by Hierosolymic themes and tropes. While serving as prophylaxis on excess and overreach, it yet makes possible a reasoned faith and a reasoned mysticism.

And it does all of this critically and skeptically in the best sense of the term: in the spirit of rational inquiry.  It is an enemy of the dogmatism of the religionists and that of politically correct leftist anti-religionists.

So philosophy, while in some ways miserable, is in many ways magnificent.

In any case it is necessary for the good life and worthy of spirited defense, with blood and iron if need be, against the anti-civilizational  forces of leftism and radical Islam which work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

The Misery of Philosophy II

One goes round and round on the dialectical merry-go-round. Thoughts lead to thoughts which lead to more thoughts, including inconclusive thoughts, semantically indeterminate thoughts, mutually contradictory thoughts. Words beget words unto endlessness. On the side of the subject one never penetrates to the source of thoughts. And on the side of the object one never arrives at the root of the real. 

I would understand subjectivity and existence. But I am stymied by the infirmity of reason.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Torch Songs

"A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, where one party is either oblivious to the existence of the other, or where one party has moved on." (Wikipedia)

Sarah Vaughn, Broken Hearted Melody.  Nostalgic video. Fine understated guitar work.

Timi Yuro, Hurt.  When I first heard her back in '61, I thought she had to be black. She's not black, but of Italian extraction: Rosemarie Timotea Auro. 

Billie Holliday, The Very Thought of You

Roy Orbison, In Dreams. "The best voice in the business," said E. P.  See how many of the sidemen you can identify.

Peggy Lee, Oh You Crazy Moon. 

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  

Etta James, At Last

Lenny Welch, Since I Fell For You

Elvis Presley, I Can't Help Falling in Love with You

Kay Starr, Stormy Weather

Julie London, When I Fall in Love

Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind. I've enjoyed this song since I was six years old. Ill take Lady Gogi over Lady Gaga any day.

Not a torch song, but the video is cute: 

Jay and the Americans, Come a Little Bit Closer

UPDATE (11/5)

Ed contributes:

You posted a very fine 1938 recording of ‘The Very Thought Of You’ by Billie Holiday. If I am not mistaken, the sax is Lester Young (‘prez’), who Kerouac worshipped, and who supposedly gave young Jack (in 1943) his first taste of the wacky baccy. See this.

There is a London connection here. The song was written by Ray Noble, and first recorded (with Al Bowlly, vocal) in London April 21, 1934. Noble was born in Brighton in 1903, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and become one of the great British band leaders of the 1930s. He later moved to New York. His well-known ‘Cherokee’ was an obsession of Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker, who made it the basis of his 1945 composition Ko-Ko. As I am sure you know.

Your musical catholicity amazes me, Ed. Rare is the hombre who can dig both Hank Williams and Charlie Parker, not to mention Robert Johnson and Robert Schumann.

It Speaks Volumes

Disgusting but true: Bush 41 (George H. W. Bush) voted for Hillary and his son Bush 43 (George W. Bush) for none of the above. Call them Cozy Little Club firsters.  These 'conservatives' seem to think that conserving their cozy cocoon trumps tackling real problems.  What these bow-tie boys value are their privileges and perquisites and their exclusive  little soirees in wood-paneled Beltway clubs.

Among Trump's many accomplishments, the three most significant so far are that he put paid to the Bush dynasty, brought about the fall of the corrupt House of Clinton, and nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court to succeed Antonin Scalia.

And that is just the start of the list. Illegal immigration is way down; the economy is way up; religious liberty has been defended . . . .

Trump is a rude and bracing blast of fresh air in American politics. He is not a lawyer in a profession lousy with lawyers. He is not a career politician. He doesn't need the job.  No one owns him. He is ready, willing, and able to fight. He doesn't give a rat's ass about being politically correct. He presents a new and healthy direction for the country: enlightened nationalism.

For the record, I did not support his nomination. But when he got the nod, I came around, like every sane conservative.

What Trump Could Say to Obama

"You didn't build that!"

We should never allow ourselves to forget all the stupid things Obama said, Obama, a man hailed as brilliant by that arbiter of intellect, the illustrious Chris Mathews.  Does the latter still get a thrill up his leg when he thinks of the man? Or maybe the thrill is gone.

Rejoice I say unto you, rejoice that Obama in a pant suit, "Felonia von Pant Suit" (Kurt Schlichter) was handed her walking papers by Donald J. Trump.

Related: Who Built the Internet? Obama's Straw Man Fallacy