. . . che la gallina domani.
Better the egg today than the chicken tomorrow.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
Abdication of Authority by University Admins? Or Something Worse?
Just over the transom by someone in the trenches of academe:
I wonder if it's true as you say that "the authorities abdicate." When I read things like this — they seem to come up about once a week now, or once a day — I don't think there are authorities just abdicating. No, it looks much more like the authorities are fully on board with whatever new moronic and evil thing the leftists want to do. They seem to be using their authority to legitimate and promote everything sick and evil, from transgenderist ideology to open violent hatred of white people. They stop just short of explicitly saying that these things are true and mandatory, because (I assume) they want some veil of plausible deniability. But I don't think they're abdicating anything. I think the situation is even worse than you think it is. If only they were just lazy or incompetent or weak.
It may well be worse than I think it is. You are closer to the action than I am.
First the word. Apart from monarchical applications, to abdicate is to fail to fulfill a responsibility or duty.
My line has been the following. The university administrators and faculty who tolerate the shouting down of conservative speakers, the rescinding of invitations to speak, attacks on people and property, and the rest of Antifa-type barbarism, are essentially cowards who love their high salaries, perquisites, and privileges. They are mostly unprincipled careerists who bend whichever way the wind blows. They are not, in the main, out to destroy the universities; they simply lack the courage to take a stand in defense of the traditional values of the university and accept the consequences of so doing. They fear being called 'racists' and the rest of the names. They are squishy liberals who hope the storm passes leaving them well-ensconced in their capacious and well-appointed offices. They understand that the Left eats its own and that if they make common cause with the destructive elements, they too may be destroyed in good old commie fashion.
To sum up your view: What is going on is not abdication of authority, but misuse of authority. I am willing to change my view, but I will need some solid evidence. You need to name names.
Academic Insanity at Boise State
The authorities abdicate and the collapse of the universities continues apace. Another example:
At Boise State University, in deep-red Idaho, a group of students is demanding that the university fire political scientist Scott Yenor for his scholarship on the intellectual history of feminism and the transgender movement. Even worse, some administrators are piling on.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Brown-Eyed Girls
Judy Collins, Cravings: How I Conquered Food, Doubleday 2017, pp. 112-113:
. . . and writing Albert Grossmann that no, I did not want to join a trio of women he was bent on calling the Brown-Eyed Girls. He had put Peter, Paul and Mary together, telling me that I was the fallback choice if Mary hadn't worked out. Albert saw how I was struggling and didn't think I could make it on my own, hence the trio idea. It was to be me, Judy Henske and Jo Mapes. He told me he would get me brown contacts, his idea of a joke — Henske had brown eyes and Mapes and I would have to get brown contacts. I had agreed hastily — after all, he had made Peter, Paul and Mary into an international franchise. Now I changed my yes to a no. I would go it on my own, no matter what. I was going to do it my way or die trying.
Way to go, Judy. You pulled it off and beat your addictions as well.
Judy Collins, Both Sides Now. Wonderful. My favorite version, however, is that of Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters.
Judy Collins, Someday Soon
Judy Collins, Amazing Grace
Judy Henske, High Flying Bird
Judy Henske, Any Day Now
Judy Henske, Till the Real Thing Comes Along
Jo Mapes, You Were on My Mind. Beautiful, but takes a little getting used to if you are coming at it from the We Five hit version. Ian Sylvia have a great version.
Jo Mapes, No One to Talk My Troubles To
Is There Any Stopping the Insanity Now?
Jonathan Haidt Defends Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values
Here.
But aren't such values racist by definition?
Musical Plagiarism?
Beverly Maher and Gordon Jenkins, Crescent City Blues. Does this 1953 tune remind you of something? How about Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues? 1955 version. Live San Quentin 1969 version.
Scientism, Underbelief, and Overbelief
The secular nail their colors to the mast of scientism. Or most of them do. Their attitude is an amalgam of underbelief and overbelief. Their underbelief is their belief that science alone is genuine knowledge. Their overbelief is that this is so – – when it is plain that it is not something known scientifically.
There is so much that we know that we do not know by means of the natural sciences. Some examples for you to think about.
- There is logical knowledge. How do you know that the A and O forms of the traditional square of opposition are convertible while the E and O forms are not? By empirical observation and experiment?
- There is mathematical knowledge.
- There is semantic knowledge.
- There is moral knowledge.
The Paradox of the Misanthropic Naturalist Animal Lover
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, man and man alone among living things has a higher origin and a higher destiny. Made in the image and likeness of God, and the only creature so made, he comes from God and is called to return to God for his ultimate felicity and fulfillment. He is, to be sure, an animal, but one called to theosis and thus an animal qualitatively different from every other type of animal.
In that now languishing tradition, man had a calling, a vocation.
But God is dead, culturally speaking, at least among the the elites of the West, and since 1859 the qualitative superiority of the human animal is no longer much believed in. Man is back among the animals, 'in series' with them, just another product of evolution, whose origin is measly and whose destiny is extinction. Man on a naturalist construal is at best quantitatively superior to his non-human progenitors.
Now consider a naturalist about the human species who is also a misanthrope and an animal lover. He hates man while loving animals even though he holds that man is just an animal. He hates man because he is destroying the earth and the flora and fauna upon it.
There is something paradoxically selective about our naturalist's misanthropic love of animals. He is out to save the whales but doesn't give a rat's ass about prenatal human animals . . . . He loves animals except for the species of animal of which he is a specimen.
The misanthropy goes together with nature idolatry.
Unable to worship God, and unable to appreciate man's greatness, he makes a god of nature and its irrational beasts.
You may recall the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out.
In an Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the unmistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or some other 'icon.'
Deny God, devalue man, and end up bear shit. Way to go 'man.'
Sympathy for Hillary
To be competitive and indeed successful in this world often demands a level of self-assurance and inner certainty that is incompatible with acknowledgment of the sober truth about oneself. This is especially the case in the upper reaches of the political game. So perhaps we should forgive Hillary her pathetic, self-serving book, What Happened. She is a leftist for whom the political is everything. How can one expect her, at the end of her career, to enter into the equanimity that permits a balanced view of things? She is no philosopher. Ever the activist, she is incapable of calming down sufficiently to see things in perspective.
The human predicament has its tragic sides. One is that success is too often predicated upon inordinate self-confidence and blindness to faults.
Strawson’s Vacuous Materialism
Jacques and Malcolm are currently fired up and doing battle over qualia. To stoke the fire further, here is post from a couple of years ago, from 15 September 2015, to be exact. It strikes me as beautifully written, rigorous, and true. (Surprise!)
……………….
In Does Matter Think? I wrote:
. . . I don't dogmatically claim that matter could not have occult or hidden powers. Maybe the meat between my ears does have the power to think. But then that meat is not matter in any sense we currently understand. And that is my point. You can posit occult powers if you like, and pin your hopes on a future science that will lay them bare; but then you are going well beyond the empirical evidence and engaging in high-flying speculations . . . .
I now add that I am using 'thinking' in the broad Cartesian sense that covers all intentional or object-directed experiences; but I also hold that non-intentional experiences are unintelligible to us on the basis of current physics. My thesis is that, given what we know about the physical world from current physics, it it unintelligible that the phenomena of mind, whether intentional or non-intentional, be wholly material in nature.
I grant that what is unintelligible to us might nevertheless be the case. But if such-and-such is unintelligible to us, then that is a fairly good reason to believe that it is not possibly the case. A theological example may help clarify the dialectical situation. Christians believe that God became man. Some will say that this is impossible in the strongest possible sense: logically impossible, i.e., in contravention of the Law of Non-Contradiction. For what the doctrine implies is that one person has both human and divine attributes, that one person is both passible and impassible, omniscient and non-omnisicent, etc. One response, a mysterian response, is to say that the doctrine of the Incarnation is true, and that therefore it is logically possible. The fact, if it is fact, that the Incarnation is unintelligible to us — where 'unintelligible' means: not understandable as possibly true in a broadly logical sense – does not show that the doctrine is impossible, but that it is a mystery: a true proposition that we, due to our limitations, cannot understand.
A materialist can make the same sort of move in one of two ways. He could say that our understanding of matter at present does not allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature, or he can say that our understanding of matter will never allow us to understand how conscious experience could be wholly material in nature. Either way, conscious experience, whether intentional or non-intentional, is wholly material in nature, and falls entirely within the subject-matter of physics, whether a future physics achievable by us, or a physics which, though not achievable by us, is perhaps achievable by organisms of a different constitution who study us.
If I understand Galen Strawson's view, it is the first. Conscious experience is fully real but wholly material in nature despite the fact that on current physics we cannot account for its reality: we cannot understand how it is possible. Here is a characteristic passage from Strawson:
Serious materialists have to be outright realists about the experiential. So they are obliged to hold that experiential phenomena just are physical phenomena, although current physics cannot account for them. As an acting materialist, I accept this, and assume that experiential phenomena are "based in" or "realized in" the brain (to stick to the human case). But this assumption does not solve any problems for materialists. Instead it obliges them to admit ignorance of the nature of the physical, to admit that they don't have a fully adequate idea of what the physical is, and hence of what the brain is. ("The Experiential and the Non-Experiential" in Warner and Szubka, p. 77)
Strawson and I agree on two important points. One is that what he calls experiential phenomena are as real as anything and cannot be eliminated or reduced to anything non-experiential. The other is that there is no accounting for experiential items in terms of current physics.
In the Comments, Vlastimil V. asked:
But, what exactly, according to you, is matter in the sense we currently understand? And does matter so conceived really exclude, a priori, that it thinks? About this the physicalist would love to hear more details.
It is matter as understood by current physics. And yes, one can know a priori that matter so conceived cannot think or feel. Note that I am not saying that matter anyhow conceived can be known a priori to be such that it cannot think or feel. I admit the very vague, very abstract, epistemic (and perhaps only epistemic) possibility that God or some super-intelligent extraterrestrial or even human being far in the future could get to the point of understanding how an experiential item like a twinge of pain could be purely material or purely physical. But this is really nothing more than an empty gesturing towards a 'possibility' that cannot be described except in the vaguest terms. It is nothing but faith, hope, and hand-waving.
An experiential item such as a twinge of pain or a rush of elation is essentially subjective; it is something whose appearing just is its reality. For qualia, esse = percipi. If I am told that someday items like this will be exhaustively understood from a third-person point of view as objects of physics, I have no idea what this means. The notion strikes me as absurd. We are being told in effect that what is essentially subjective will one day be exhaustively understood as both essentially subjective and wholly objective. If you tell me that understanding in physics need not be objectifying understanding, I don't know what that means either.
As Strawson clearly appreciates, one cannot reduce a twinge of pain to a pattern of neuron firings, for such a reduction eliminates the what-it-is-like-ness of the experience. And so he inflates the concept of the physical to cover both the physical and the irreducibly mental. But by doing this he drains the physical of definite meaning. His materialism is a vacuous materialism.
Strawson frankly confesses, "I am by faith a materialist." (p. 69) Given this faith, experiential items, precisely as experiential, must be wholly material in nature. This faith engenders the hope that future science will unlock the secret. Strawson must pin his hope on future science because of his clear recognition that experiential items are incomprehensible in terms of current physics.
But what do faith and hope have to do with sober inquiry? It doesn't strike me as particularly intellectually honest to insist that materialism just has to be true and to uphold it by widening the concept of the physical to embrace what is irreducibly mental. It would be more honest just to admit that the mind-body problem is insoluble.
The Nihilism of the Left
Leftists are so far gone that they are willing to protract their nihilism unto the destruction of the very secular values that they supposedly champion. Pascal Bruckner:
Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they [have] transferred their hopes to the Islamists.
The Muslim as the new proletarian.
The worst of the great religions, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) is defended when a defining project of the Left was the cleansing of the earth of the "opium of the people." (Karl Marx, full quotation here.)
Add to that the absurdity that the Left, whose own secular values are secularizations of Christian notions, attacks Christianity viciously while cozying up to Islamists.
It's insane, but then the Left is insane in any case.
Warning to Liberals: Beware of Undermining Christianity
Liberals who undermine Christianity undermine the foundations of their own values. Chief among them is the value of equality as enunciated in the American Declaration of Independence. As a matter of empirical fact, however, people are obviously not equal either as individuals or as groups. Equality-of-persons as presented in the Declaration is a normative principle the metaphysical ground of which is in Christian theology.
Liberals who undermine Christianity and seek to exclude its practitioners from public life are unwittingly lending support to their enemies on the far Right, those who take the fact of empirical inequality as justification for the denial of civil/political rights to inferior groups. Given the plain fact of inequality, why shouldn't the strong dominate the weak even unto enslaving them?
"You don't need Christian metaphysics to support normative equality; there are other ways of supporting it."
I doubt it, but suppose you are right. That wouldn't change the fact that Christian metaphysical belief, even if false, functions to support the liberal value of equality for all. Anything that undermines Christian belief undermines the liberal value.
A further consideration. To undermine Christianity is to empower Islam which is a major threat to the secularism of liberals. If there is some threat of theocracy from the side of Christianity, it is as nothing compared to the clear and present threat (and reality) of theocracy from Islam. Islam is a hybrid religious-political ideology in a way that Christianity is not.
Liberals need to wise up, including the deplorable Dianne Feinstein.
The Existence of Consciousness: An Aporetic Tetrad
I tend to the view that all philosophical problems can be represented as aporetic polyads. What's more, I maintain that philosophical problems ought to be so represented. You haven't begun to philosophize until you have a well-defined puzzle, a putative inconsistency of plausibilities. When you have an aporetic polyad on the table you have something to think your teeth into. (An interesting and auspicious typo, that; I shall let it stand.)
Consider the problem of the existence of consciousness. Nicholas Maxwell formulates it as follows: "Why does sentience or consciousness exist at all?" The trouble with this formulation is that it invites the retort: Why not? Why shouldn't it exist? The question smacks of gratuitousness. Why raise it? To remove the felt gratuitousness a motive has to be supplied for posing the question. Now a most excellent motive is contradiction-avoidance. If a set of plausibilities form an inconsistent set, then we have a problem. For we cannot abide a contradiction. Philosophers love a paradox, but they hate a contradiction. So I suggest we put the problem of the existence of consciousness as follows:
1. Consciousness (sentience) exists.
2. Consciousness is contingent: given that it exists it might not have.
3. If x contingently exists, then x has an explanation of its existence in terms of a y distinct from x.
4. Consciousness has no explanation in terms of anything distinct from it.
A tetrad of plausibilities. Each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. Unfortunately, this foursome is logically inconsistent: the conjunction of any three limbs entails the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction of (1) and (2) and (3) entails the negation of (4). So the limbs cannot all be true. But they are all very plausible. Therein lies the problem. Which one ought we reject to remove the contradiction?
Note the superiority of my aporetic formulation over Maxwell's formulation. On my formulation we have a very clear problem that cries out for a solution. But if I merely ask, 'Why does consciousness exist?' there is no clear problem. You could retort, 'Why shouldn't it exist?' 'What's the problem?' There is a problem because the existence of consciousness conflicts with other things we take for granted.
(1) is absolutely datanic and so undeniable. If some crazy eliminativist were to deny (1) I would show him the door and give him the boot. (Life is too short for discussions with lunatics.)
(4) is exceedingly plausible. To explain consciousness in terms of itself would be circular, hence no explanation. So it has to be explained, if it can be explained, in terms of something distinct from it. Since abstract objects cannot be invoked to explain concrete consciousness, consciousness, if it can be explained, must be explained in physical and physiological and chemical and biological terms. But this is also impossible as Maxwell makes clear using a version of the 'knowledge argument' made popular by T. Nagel and F. Jackson:
But physics, and that part of natural science in principle re-ducible to physics, cannot conceivably predict and explain fully the mental, or experiential, aspect of brain processes. Being blind from birth—or being deprived of ever having oneself experienced visual sensations—cannot in itself prevent one from understanding any part of physics. It cannot prevent one from understanding the physics of colour, light, physiology of colour perception and discrimination, just as well as any nor-mally sighted person. In order to understand physical concepts, such as mass, force, wavelength, energy, spin, charge, it is not necessary to have had the experience of any particular kind of sensation, such as the visual sensation of colour. All predictions of physics must also have this feature. In order to understand what it is for a poppy to be red, however, it is necessary to have experienced a special kind of sensation at some time in one’s life, namely the visual sensation of redness. A person blind from birth, who has never experienced any visual sensation, cannot know what redness is, where redness is the perceptual property, what we (normally sighted) see and experience, and not some physical correlate of this, light of such and wave-lengths, or the molecular structure of the surface of an object which causes it to absorb and reflect light of such and such wavelengths. It follows that no set of physical statements, however comprehensive, can predict that a poppy is red, or that a person has the visual experience of redness. Associated with neurological processes going on in our brains, there are mental or experiential features which lie irredeemably beyond the scope of physical description and explanation.
(2) is also exceedingly plausible: how could our consciousness (sentience) exist necessarily? But (3), which is a version of the principle of sufficient reason, is also very plausible despite the glib asseverations of those who think quantum mechanics provides counterexamples to it.
So what will it be? Which of the four limbs will you reject?
(1) and (2) are not reasonably rejected. One might reject (3) and hold that consciousness is a brute fact. Or one might reject (4) and hold that consciousness in us does have an explanation, a divine explanation: the source of consciousness in us is God's consciousness.
But it might be that the problem is genuine but insoluble, that the problem is an aporia in the strongest sense of the term: a conceptual impasse, an intellectual knot that our paltry minds cannot untie. Accordingly, all four limbs are true, but we cannot understand how they could all be true.
But this invites the metaphilosophical rejoinder that all genuine problems are soluble. An insoluble problem would then be a pseudo-problem. Thus arises a metaphilosophical puzzle that can be set forth as an aporetic triad or antilogism:
5. Only soluble problems are genuine.
6. The problem of the existence of consciousness is not soluble.
7. The problem of the existence of consciousness is genuine.
This too is an inconsistent set. But each limb is plausible. Which will you reject? I would reject (5): a problem needn't be soluble to be genuine.
There is no easy answer, ragazzi.
The Hardening of Consciousness
I read some of it but then decided it wasn't worth my effort. Your mileage may vary.