To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.
Notes After a Meditation Session
The discursive mind loves the dust it kicks up. We love distraction, diversion, dissipation, and diremption, even as we sense their nullity and the need to attain interior silence. This is one reason why meditation is so hard. We love to ride the wild horse of the mind. It is much easier than swimming upstream to the Source.
Or to unmix the metaphors, it is much easier to ride than rein in that crazy horse. But we have the reins in our hands, and it is just a matter of having the will to yank back on them. (10 September 1997)
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Water High, Wide, Dirty, Troubled, and Moody
In Dispatch from Houston, our friend Patrick Kurp of Anecdotal Evidence reports:
Power out. Car flooded. Books dry.
So all is well. But I don't reckon Dean Martin will be returning to Houston for a spell even if he could, he being dead and all.
Not to make light of the suffering of those sorely afflicted. Pray, send benevolent thoughts, fork over some serious money for relief efforts, but don't blog about it. Your charitable contribution, that is.
Bob Dylan, High Water. This is a late-career Dylan gem from Love and Theft (2001). A tribute to Charley Patton. Demonstrates Dylan's mastery of the arcana of Americana. Our greatest and deepest singer-songwriter.
My favorite verse:
Well, George Lewis told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew
You can't open up your mind, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, "I want them dead or alive"
Either one, I don't care, high water everywhere.
Nosiree, Bob, you can't open up your mind to every conceivable point of view, especially when it's not dark yet, but getting there.
Charley Patton, High Water Everywhere. Nice slide show.
The Band, Up on Cripple Creek
Jimi Hendrix, May This Be Love. I had forgotten the wonderful guitar solo.
Karla Bonoff, The Water is Wide. I listened to a lot of Bonoff in the early '80s. She does a great job with this traditional song.
Bill Monroe and Doc Watson, Banks of the Ohio. Joan Baez's version from an obscure 1959 album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.
Similar theme though not water-related: Doc Watson, Tom Dooley. Doc and family in a BBC clip.
Standells, Dirty Water. Boston and the River Charles. My mecca in the '70s, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe, etc. A great town to be young in. But when it comes time to own property and pay taxes, then a right-thinking man high tails it for the West.
Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water. A beautiful song.
Henry Mancini, Moon River. This was Jack Kerouac's favorite song. Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:
One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonica, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.
Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveller, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of mist, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. Here is another version of the tune with some beautiful images.
Doc Watson, Moody River. A moodier version than the Pat Boone hit which was based on the Chase Webster effort.
Clever YouTube comment: "It might be a little early in the day for an Am7." But this here's Saturday night and I'm working on my second wine spodiodi. Chords minor and melancholy go good 'long about now.
Academic Criminology Little More than Leftist Ideology that Gets Almost Everything Wrong
Here. Excerpts:
Evidence of the liberal tilt in criminology is widespread. Surveys show a 30:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives within the field, a spread comparable with that in other social sciences. The largest group of criminologists self-identify as radical or “critical.” These designations include many leftist intellectual orientations, from radical feminism to Marxism to postmodernism. Themes of injustice, oppression, disparity, marginalization, economic and social justice, racial discrimination, and state-sanctioned violence dominate criminological teaching and scholarship, as represented in books with titles like Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal Justice System, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, and Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse.
[. . .]
When it comes to disciplinary biases, however, none is so strong or as corrupting as liberal views on race. Disproportionate black involvement in violent crime represents the elephant in the room amid the current controversy over policing in the United States. Homicide numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Supplementary Homicide Reports, 1976–2005 indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are ten to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between ten to one and 15 to one. Even in forms of crime that are allegedly the province of white males—such as serial murder—blacks are overrepresented as offenders by a factor of two. For all racial groups, violent crime is strongly intraracial, and the intraracial dynamic is most pronounced among blacks. In more than 90 percent of cases, the killer of a black victim is a black perpetrator. (emphasis added)
The Wise Live by the Probable, not the Possible
The worldly wise live by the probable and not by the merely possible. It is possible that you will reform the person you want to marry. But it is not probable.
Don't imagine that you can change a person in any significant way. What you see now in your partner is what you will get from here on out. People don't change. They are what they are. The few exceptions prove the rule. The wise live by rules, not exceptions, by probabilities, not possibilities. "Probability is the very guide to life." (Bishop Butler quoting Cicero, De Natura, 5, 12)
It is foolish to gamble with your happiness. We gamble with what is inconsequential, what we can afford to lose. So if there is anything about your potential spouse that is unacceptable, don't foolishly suppose that you will change her. You won't. You must take her as she is, warts and all, as she must take you.
The principle applies not only to marriage but across the board.
Antifa are the Moral Equivalent of Neo-Nazis
Here:
Neo-Nazis are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that killed 25 million people last century. Antifa members are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that, according to “The Black Book of Communism,” killed between 85 million and 100 million people last century. Both practice violence and preach hate. They are morally indistinguishable. There is no difference between those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Hitler and Himmler and those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.
Mitt Romney Defends Antifa!
You already knew this, but just in case you missed it. Disgusting. TDS is claiming some distinguished victims. The Kristol Crack-up and the Mitt Meltdown. And let's not forget Milque-toast McCain.
Antifa Thugs Ignorant of Contradiction?
At Berkeley and other universities, protesters have held up signs saying “F–k Free Speech” and have threatened to beat up anyone taking their pictures, including journalists. They seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction in using fascistic tactics as anti-fascist protesters. After all, a leading definition of fascism is “a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.”
If there is a 'contradiction' involved here it is not logical but practical/pragmatic. In the terminology of the preceding entry, it is not an instance of logical inconsistency, but of inconsistency in the application of a principle or standard. If the principle is "It is wrong to employ fascist tactics," then the practical contradiction consists in the Antifa thugs' application of the principle to their enemies but not to themselves.
But then it dawned on me (thanks to some comments by Malcolm Pollack and 'Jacques' who cannot go by his real name because of the leftist thugs in the academic world) that there is no practical/pragmatic contradiction or double standard here. The Antifa thugs and their ilk operate with a single standard: do whatever it takes to win.
They don't give a rat's ass about consistency of any kind or the related 'bourgeois' values that we conservatives cherish such a truth. These values are nothing but bourgeois ideology the function of which is to legitimate the 'oppressive' institutional structures that the Marxist punks battle against.
When Turley says that the thugs "seem blissfully ignorant of the contradiction" he assumes that they accept the principle but have somehow failed to realize that they are applying it inconsistently. But that is not what is going on here. They don't accept the principle! They have nothing against fascist tactics if they can be employed as means to their destructive ends. But if the political authorities arrest them and punish them, as they must to maintain civil order, then they scream Fascism! and dishonestly invoke the principle.
Besides, they don't accept the meta-principle that one ought to be consistent in the application of principles.
It is a mistake to think that one can reach these people by appealing to some values we all supposedly share. "Don't you see, you are doing the very thing you protest against!" You can't reach these evil-doers in this way. You reach them by enforcing the law. At some point you have to start breaking heads. But that is not 'fascism,' it is law enforcement.
If the authorities abdicate, if the police stand idly by while crimes against persons and property are committed, then you invite a vigilante response. Is that what you want?
The "Fuck Free Speech" signs make it clear that the Antifa thugs do not value what we value. And because they do not share this classically liberal value, it is a mistake to say that they operate with a double standard: Free speech for me, but not for thee. They don't value free speech at all; what they value is winning by any means. If there are times and places where upholding free speech is a means to their ends, then they uphold it. But at times and in places where shutting down free speech is instrumentally useful, then they will shut it down.
It is right out of the Commie playbook. And just as a Nazi is not the cure for a Commie, a Commie is not the cure for a Nazi. The cure for both is an American steeped in American values.
Why Be Consistent? Three Types of Consistency
A reader inquires:
This idea of the necessity to be consistent seems to be the logician's "absolute," as though being inconsistent was the most painful accusation one could endure. [. . .] What rule of life says that one must be absolutely consistent in how one evaluates truth? It is good to argue from first principles but it can also lead one down a rat hole.
Before we can discuss whether one ought to be consistent, we need to know which type of consistency is at issue. There are at least three types of consistency that people often confuse and that need to be kept distinct. I'll call them 'logical,' 'pragmatic,' and 'diachronic.' But it doesn't matter how we label them as long as we keep them separate.
1. Logical or Propositional Consistency. To say of two propositions that they are consistent is to to say that they can both be true, where 'can' expresses logical or broadly logical possibility. To say of two propositions that they are inconsistent is to say that they cannot both be true, where 'cannot' expresses logical or broadly logical impossibility.
I am blogging but not wearing a hat. My blogging is obviously consistent with my not wearing a hat since both propositions are true. But my blogging is also consistent with my wearing a hat since it is possible that I both be blogging and wearing a hat. But I am blogging now and I am not writing now are inconsistent since they cannot both be true. The first proposition entails the second, which implies the impossibility of the first being true and the second false.
Liberals often say that support for fetal rights is 'inconsistent' with support for the death penalty. But surely the following propositions are not logically inconsistent:
P1. Human fetuses have a right to life which cannot be overridden except in rare cases (e.g. threat to the life of the mother).
P2. Capital punishment for certain offences is morally justified.
Where is the inconsistency? I see none. Indeed, they are plainly logically consistent. Suppose that the right to life is grounded in the potentiality to develop into something to which one accords person-status. This is a possible view, and indeed one actually held by many. Any Aristotelian worth his salt will be able to spell it out coherently and perhaps even persuasively. Suppose also that a similarly coherent case is made for P2. One will then have made a case for the possibility of each. Joint possibility does not straightaway follow from the possibility of each, but if there is no reason to think of them as jointly impossible, then we should consider them jointly possible. On the face of it, P1 and P2 are logically consistent. They can both be true.
2. Pragmatic Consistency. By this I mean consistency in the application of a principle. Consistency in this sense is not a relation between or among propositions, but involves a relation among a person, a principle, and cases to which the person applies the principle.
To apply a principle consistently is to apply it to all like cases in a like manner. So if the principle is to cherish, value, and uphold human life, then perhaps the thought of those who see inconsistency in support of both fetal rights and capital punishment is that to apply this principle to the unborn but not to certain criminals is to apply it inconsistently. "How can you oppose the killing of the unborn, when you favor the killing of certain criminals? Be consistent!"
The answer to this should be obvious. The cases are dissimilar. The unborn are innocent while criminals are not. This is a difference that makes a moral difference; it is a difference that justifies a difference in treatment. No doubt principles should be applied to like cases in a like manner. But there is no inconsistency in refusing to apply a principle to cases that are relevantly dissimilar.
Principles obviously allow of exceptions. A person who fancies himself 'consistent' in opposing both abortion and capital punishment on the ground that all human life is worthy of respect will in almost all cases make an exception when it comes to killing in self-defense or killing in a just war. Now wouldn't it be churlish and absurd to accuse such a person of being 'inconsistent'? "If you were consistent in your valuing of human life, you would value the life of the jihadi who has come to decapitate you and your family, and you would not lift a finger against him."
3. Diachronic or 'Emersonian' Consistency. Here is a famous passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" rarely quoted in full:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.(Ziff, 183)
People routinely rip the initial clause of this passage out of its context and take Emerson to be attacking logical consistency. But he is doing no such thing. It should be clear that Emerson’s dictum has nothing to do with logical consistency and everything to do with consistency of beliefs over time. The consistency in question is diachronic rather than synchronic. A “little mind” is “foolishly consistent” if it refuses to changes its beliefs when change is needed due to changing circumstances, further experience, or clearer thinking.
It should be clear that if I believe that p at time t, but believe that ~p at later time t*, it does not follow that I hold logically inconsistent beliefs. Doxastic alteration, like alteration in general, is non-contradictory for the simple reason that properties which are contradictory when taken in abstracto are had at different times. My coffee changes from hot to non-hot, and thus has contradictory attributes when we abstract from the time of their instantiation. But since the coffee instantiates them at different times, there is no contradiction such as would cause us to join Parmenides in denying the reality of the changeful world.
Belief change is just a special case of this. Suppose a politician changes her position for some good reason. There is not only nothing wrong with this, it shows an admirable openness. She goes from believing in a progressive tax scheme to believing in a flat tax, say. Surely there is no logical contradiction involved, and for two reasons. First, the property of believing that a progressive tax is warranted is not the contradictory, but merely the contrary, of the property of believing that a flat tax is warranted. (They cannot both be instantiated at the same time, but it is possible that neither be instantiated.) Second, the properties are had at different times. A logical contradiction ensues only when one simultaneously maintains both that p and that ~p.
Emerson’s sound point, then, is that one should not make a fetish out of doxastic stasis: there is nothing wrong with being ‘inconsistent’ in the sense of changing one’s beliefs when circumstances change and as one gains in experience and insight. But this is not to say that one should adopt the antics of a John Kerry or a Hillary Clinton. Relative stability of views over time is an indicator of character.
Before leaving this topic, let's consider what Walt Whitman has to say in the penultimate section 51 of “Song of Myself” in Leaves of Grass:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Here it appears that Whitman is thumbing his nose at logical consistency. If so, the Emersonic and Whitmanic dicta ought not be confused.
4. Why be consistent? Ought one be consistent in any of these three senses? I should say it is self-evident that one ought to strive to be logically consistent. For if one's beliefs are inconsistent, then they cannot all be true, which implies that one or more of them are false. The ideal doxastic set would consist of beliefs that are both true and consistent. Logical consistency by itself is not enough since false beliefs can be consistent. But consistency is necessary for doxastic perfection and thus a goal worthy of pursuit.
As for pragmatic consistency, consistency in the application of principles to like cases, this too seems to be a goal that ought to be pursued, although I don't know how I would argue for it. More on this later.
Diachronic (Emersonian) consistency, however, is not an epistemic desideratum. On the contrary, one ought to change one's beliefs when new facts and arguments so warrant.
Leftist Barbarians at the University of Nebraska
Is It Epistemically Certain That There are Substances?
Herewith, another episode in my ongoing discussion with Lukas Novak. Here again is his list of propositions that he claims are not only true, but knowable with (epistemic as opposed to psychological) certainty:
a) God exists.
b) There are substances.
c) There are some necessary truths, even some de re necessary truths.
d) Human cognition is capable of truth and certainty.
e) There are no contradictions in reality.
I have already explained why I do not consider God exists to be certainly knowable. I now consider whether it is certainly knowable that there are (Aristotelian primary) substances.
We begin with the Moorean fact that there are tables and chairs, rocks and trees, cats and dogs. We may refer to such things generally as spatiotemporal meso-particulars. My work table, for example, is at a definite location in space; it has existed uninterruptedly for a long time; and it is a middle-sized object. Our question is not whether there are things like my table; our question is whether things like my table must be 'assayed' — this useful term is from Gustav Bergmann — as substances in the Aristotelian sense of the term. Thus I am not using 'substance' as a stylistic variant of 'spatiotemporal meso-particular.' Such a use would be a misuse by my standards of rigor and would paper over the legitimate question whether tables and cats and such must be understood in terms of an ontology of substances.
It might be that there are tables and cats, but no substances. But if there are substances, then tables and cats are paradigm examples of them.
My thesis is not that there are no substances, but that it is not epistemically certain that there are. Here is one consideration among several.
Persistence
My beautiful oak table has been around a long time. I reckon it came into existence in the early '80s. It will surely outlast me before passing out of existence. Numerical sameness over the temporal interval of its existence is a Moorean fact. Its diachronic identity is a datum. Let us say that the table has persisted for a long time. This word is 'datanic' as I like to say and thus theoretically neutral. I use it simply to record the datum, the Moorean fact, about which there can be no reasonable dispute, that the table has remained in existence, numerically one and the same, over a long period of time.
So far, I have been doing 'proto-philosophy.' I have been collecting and commenting upon some obvious data. I have not yet asked a specifically philosophical question or made a specifically philosophical assertion.
Perdurance or Endurance?
We get to philosophical questions when we ask: In what way does my table persist? How exactly is persistence to be understood? What is the nature of persistence? The question is not whether tables and cats persist; the question is what it is to persist. The question is not whether there are persistents; of course there are. The question is: What is persistence?
Now we come to a fork in the road. Two very different theories obtrude themselves upon our attention. Does a thing persist by being wholly present at each time at which it exists, or does a thing persist by merely having a proper part that is present at each time at which the thing exists?
Perdurance
Suppose the latter. Then we say that the table persists by perduring, where the latter term is theoretical unlike the pre-theoretical or datanic persists. If the table persists by perduring, then it is a whole of temporal parts with different such parts at different times. This implies that at no time during its existence is the whole table temporally present. On the perdurance scheme, tables and cats and such are four-dimensional entities, space-time worms if you will. If this is right, then the difference between a table and a process such as a fire is not categorially deep but superficial and a matter of how we conceptualize things.
Our natural tendency is to think of a house and a fire that consumes a house as very different, so different as to constitute a categorial difference. We are not inclined to call a house a process or an extended event; but we do not hesitate to call a fire a process or an extended event. A fire has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It unfolds over time and can be said to have temporal parts. It is not wholly present at each time at which it exists. It becomes present bit by bit. It is spread out in time as well as in space. When we observe a fire we are not observing the whole of it but only its present phase. It is natural to speak of fires and storms and wars and plays as having phases. It is not natural to speak of houses and soldiers as having phases.
On the perdurance view, however, there is no fundamental categorial difference between the house and the fire. Both persist in the same way, by perduring with different temporal parts present at different times. Both have both spatial and temporal parts. Both are 4-D objects.
Endurance
On the other theory, the table persists by enduring, where the latter term is also theoretical. If my table is an endurant, then it is not a whole of temporal parts. It does not have temporal parts at all. It is wholly present at each time at which it exists. It is nothing like a process. When I look at my table I see the whole of it, not the current phase of it.
What is it for a thing to be wholly present at each moment of its existence? One can understand it negatively: it means that the thing is not a whole of temporal parts. What does it mean positively?
Persons may provide a clue. I regret things I did long ago, things that I did, not things some earlier self or earlier person-slice of me did. I cannot shake the thought that I am numerically the same as the person who did those regrettable things. Connected with this is my conviction that my guilt is in no way diminished by the passage of time as it would be if I were a diachronic collection of person-slices as on a perdurantist view. My conviction is that I have persisted by enduring, not by perduring.
Of course, my psychological conviction does not prove that endurantism is true of persons, but it does help explain what it means for persons to be endurants as opposed to perdurants.
In the case of persons we can say that to be wholly present at every time at which the person exists is to be a substance that is 'there' at every moment beneath the flux of experiences and the flux of bodily changes as the self-same substrate of these psychological and physical changes.
If there are substances, then perdurantism is false, and endurantism is true
I have just sketched two theories of the persistence of material meso-particulars. Both theories go well beyond the Moorean fact of persistence. Each has its arguments pro et contra. We needn't worry about these arguments here. The fact of persistence is such that if you deny it then you are legitimately labelled 'crazy.' But there is nothing crazy about questioning the perdurance and endurance theories.
The important point for present purposes is that theose who claim that there are Aristotelian primary substance are opting for endurantism. Finally, my argument against Dr. Novak.
My Argument
a) It is epistemically certain that there are substances if and only if it is epistemically certain that endurantism is true.
b) It is not epistemically certain that endurantism is true.
Therefore
c) It is not epistemically certain that there are substances.
Welcome to the Age of Feeling
A Question about Use and Mention
Here is a curious sentence suggested to me by London Ed:
1) The last word in this sentence refers to cats.
(1) is part of a larger puzzle the discussion which we leave for later.
My question is this: Can a word be both used and mentioned in the same sentence? It would seem so. (1) is no doubt an unusual sentence. But it is grammatical, makes sense, and is true.
It seems that the last word in (1) is being both used and mentioned. (Assume someone is uttering a token of (1).) The last word in the sentence is 'cats' and 'cats' refers to cats. So the last word in (1) is being used. But it is also being mentioned. It is mentioned by 'the last word in this sentence.'
So it seems that one and the same word can be both used and mentioned in one and the same sentence.
What say you, London Ed?
Trump Haters, Supporters, Neither, and Both
Another brilliant column by VDH. I am tempted to quote, but it's all good.
Scandal Erupts over Promotion of ‘Bourgeois’ Behavior
More proof that 'liberals' are insane:
Were you planning to instruct your child about the value of hard work and civility? Not so fast! According to a current uproar at the University of Pennsylvania, advocacy of such bourgeois virtues is “hate speech.” The controversy, sparked by an op-ed written by two law professors, illustrates the rapidly shrinking boundaries of acceptable thought on college campuses and the use of racial victimology to police those boundaries.