Maverick Philosopher – Page 353 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

An Easter Sunday Meditation: Wittgenstein Contra St. Paul

1 Corinthians 15:14: "And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." (KJV)

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, U. of Chicago Press, 1980, tr. Peter Winch, p. 32e, entry from 1937:

Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however because it concerns 'universal truths of reason'! Rather because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else.

A believer's relation to these narratives is neither the relation to historical truth (probability), nor yet that to a theory consisting of 'truths of reason'. [ . . .]

Central to the Gospel accounts is that Christ was seen alive by numerous witnesses after his crucifixion and death. Assuming that 'faith' and 'belief' are interchangeable in this context, Paul is saying that belief in Christ as savior is vain (empty, without substance) if the Gospel accounts are false. Wittgenstein, however, is maintaining the exact opposite: Christian belief loses nothing of its substance even if the Gospel accounts could be proven to be false.

How can Wittgenstein maintain something so seemingly preposterous?

Christianity is a form of life, a language-game, self-contained, incommensurable with other language-games, under no threat from them, and to that extent insulated from logical, historical, and scientific objections, as well as from objections emanating from competing religious language-games.

This is why the "historical proof-game" is irrelevant to Christian belief. The two language games are not in competition.

But is the Christian belief system true? Evasion of this question strikes me as impossible.

Here is where the Wittgensteinian approach stops making sense for me. No doubt a religion practiced is a form of life; but is it a reality-based form of life? When Jesus told Pontius Pilate that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth, Pilate dismissed his claim with the skeptical, "What is truth?" I for one cannot likewise dismiss the question of the truth of Christianity in Pilate's world-weary way. (Pilate comes across to me like a Pyrrhonian skeptic who is tired of these deep questions and just doesn't care any more.) If Christianity is true, it is objectively true; it corresponds to the way things are; it is not merely a set of beliefs that a certain group of people internalize and live by, but has an objective reference beyond itself.

And no doubt religions can be usefully viewed as language games. But Schachspiel is also a Sprachspiel. What then is the difference between Christianity and chess? Chess does not, and does not purport to, refer to anything beyond itself. Christianity does so purport. This is why it is absurd when L. W claims, in other places, that Christianity is not a doctrine. Of course it is a doctrine. Its being much more than a doctrine does not show otherwise.

So I say the following. If it is demonstrable that the Resurrection did not occur, then Christian faith is in vain. Paul is right and Ludwig is wrong. Historical investigation cannot be wholly irrelevant to Christian belief. On the other hand, at some point one has to make a faith commitment. This involves a doxastic leap since one cannot prove that the Resurrection did occur. Will is superadded to intellect and one decides to believe. It may help to reflect that unbelief is also a decision and also involves a leap. Given the infirmity of reason, and the welter of conflicting considerations, it is impossible to know which leap is more likely to be a leap onto solid ground.

"Go on, believe! It does no harm." (CV, 45e)

Existentially, this may well be the decisive consideration. What, after all, does the believer lose if Christianity turns out to be false? Where is the harm in believing? On the other hand, should it prove to be true . . . .

So while Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, takes an extreme, and ultimately untenable view, he has existential insights that need accommodation.

Here is an extended post on Wittgensteinian fideism.

The Case for Christ

As cinema and story-telling, The Case for Christ leaves something to be desired. But if ideas are your thing, then this movie may hold your attention as it held mine. It will help if you are at least open to the possibility that Christ rose from the dead.

The review in Christianity Today is worth reading, but the anti-intellectual tenor of the following bit stuck in my craw:

Alas, all that goes out the window when it comes time for the portions of the film that actually make the case for Christ. It is beyond the scope of a film review to evaluate the specific arguments and assumptions articulated by the people whom Strobel interviews, but regardless of their rhetorical and historical merits, the apologetics sequences make for bad cinema and bad storytelling. Periodically, the domestic melodrama and character development come to a screeching halt, superseded by enormous chunks of exposition that work better on a page than on a screen.

Gunn does his best to stage the interviews in an interesting way, but the results are nonetheless stilted, sometimes comically so. (A conversation with a medical professional, for example, is set in a laboratory with lots of doctors milling about, doing vaguely science-y things while ignoring the reporter who is distracting their boss with questions about the Crucifixion.) The audience is left with little to do other than twiddle their thumbs while they wait for the story to start rolling again.

Twiddle their thumbs? Are you serious? That part of the flick raised in a graphic way the issue of whether the Swoon Hypothesis holds any water, and to my mind, showed that it doesn't. To hell with story-telling. The best parts of the movie were the apologetics sequences.

But if you are looking for entertainment, or think that a man's relation with his wife is of more importance that the question of the Resurrection, then you should stay away from this movie.

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Render unto Caesar . . .

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's . . .

Have you stateside readers settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue Service? If yes, order up one scotch, one bourbon, and one beer and enjoy this live version of Taxman featuring Harrison and Clapton. Stevie Ray Vaughan's blistering version.

. . . and render unto God the things that are God's.

Herewith, five definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth. Lennon was the radical, McCartney the romantic, and Ringo the regular guy.

Good YouTuber comment: "Immortal song, even if all things must pass . . . "

Existence: A Challenge from a Reader

Tim Mosteller writes,

On page 2 of A Paradigm Theory of Existence when you state the "gist" of PT [The Paradigm Theory] you say,

"(PT) Necessarily, for any contingent individual x, x exists if and only if (i) there is a necessary y such that y is the paradigm existent, and (ii) y, as the external unifier of x's ontological constituents, directly produces the unity/existence of x." (p. 2).

I can't seem to square this with something that you say in chapter 2,

“Socrates cannot instantiate any property unless he is an existent, self-identical individual … Socrates must antecedently exist to instantiate the property of existence” (p. 48)

My question is this:

Q: If x must antecedently exist in order x to instantiate the property of existence (the instantiation relation) (see p. 48), musn't x exist in order for x to stand in any sort of relation (unifier relation, production relation) to a paradigm existent? (see p. 2)

At any rate, I'm not sure I'm understanding how these passages fit together, and hence my question.

The question is reasonable and worthy of a response.

First of all, I deny that existence is a property. It is neither a first-level property nor a higher-level property, pace Frege, Russell, and their numerous acolytes and fellow-travellers. Properties are instantiable items on my definition of 'property,' and I argue that it makes no sense to hold that an individual exists in virtue of instantiating existence. But it is nonetheless a datum, a Moorean fact, that individuals exist. Socrates, then, exists, but he does not exist in virtue of instantiating a supposed property of existence. This motivates one of the tasks of the book: to explain how existence can belong to a concrete, contingent individual without being a property of it.

My answer, roughly, is that the existence of an individual is a kind of unity of its ontological constituents. This of course assumes that some entities have ontological constituents. It assumes 'constituent ontology.' The latter profits from the liabilities of 'non-constituent ontology,' or what Nicholas Wolterstorff unhelpfully calls 'relation ontology.' But I cheerfully grant that constituent ontology has its own liabilities.

The existence of Socrates, then, is the unity or togetherness of his ontological constituents, but not their compresence as on a bundle theory. My version of constituent ontology in PTE is factualist, with roots in Gustav Bergmann, David M. Armstrong, and Armstrong's teacher, John Anderson. So the unity I am speaking of is the unity of the constituents of a concrete fact or state of affairs. It is a kind of unity that makes of non-truth-making items a truth-maker.

In sum, individuals exist pace the 'Fressellians.' But they don't exist in virtue of instantiating any property. (For example, it would be absurd to say that S. exists in virtue of instantiating (the property of) humanity. Exercise for the reader: explain why.) So I propose that for an individual to exist is for its ontological 'parts' to be unified in the fact-constituting and truth-making way.

But what about this unity or togetherness of constituents? Is it a further constituent? No, on pain of (something like) Bradley's Regress. Is it just the individual itself such that there is no difference between the existing of x and x? No, for reasons an entire chapter lays out.

And then, by reasoning whose complexity does not allow for quick summarization, I argue that concrete individuals would be contradictory structures were it not for a Unifier 'responsible' for the unity/existence of each contingent concretum. That is, the truth-making unity of each set of fact-friendly and compossible constituents derives from the Paradigm Existent, the Unifier. This external unifier is the ultimate ground of the existence of each contingent concretum.

Now what is Professor Mosteller's objection? I think what he is saying is something like the following:

On your scheme there is the manifold of unities and the one Unifier that serves as the metaphysical cause of the unity of each unity of constituents. But then the Unifier or Paradigm Existent is related to each contingent existent. Now if x stands in relation R to y, then both x and y exist. So if the Paradigm Existence stands in the unifying relation to each existent, then each existent must 'already' (logically if not temporally) exist in order to stand in the relation the standing in whcih is supposed to confer existence in the first place!

You're moving in a circle of embarrassingly diameter. In fact, you a doing what you said could not be done when you said that existence cannot be a property of individuals. One of your arguments was that, if existence were a property, then an existing individual would have 'already' to exist in order to to stand in the instantiation relation to the property, and that this circularity shows that the explanation of existence in terms of instantiation is bogus.

My response is that the the Unifier is not related to what it unifies. Equivalently, metaphysical production/causation/unification is not a relation. The Unifier's unifying is sui generis, as sui generis as the Unifier itself. The category of relations is an extant category. Neither the Unifier nor its activity of unifying are members of any extant category. Categores are the categories of beings. The Unifier is not a being among beings, but Being itself. And its activity is not an activity among activities in the world, but the Activity that makes there be a world in the first place. This Making, clearly, is itself sui generis. The Paradigm Existent is the Maker of those entities that serve as the truth-makers of truth-bearers or truth-vehicles.

I think we are standing on familiar theological ground. Is God related to creatures? What could that mean? If creation is a relation, then both God and Socrates would both have to exist for the relation to hold. That is absurd in that God creates Socrates ex nihilo. Divine creating is not an acting upon something that already exists. The Absolute Reality cannot be a demiurge.

Similarly with the Unifier; it is the metaphysical cause of the existence of contingent concreta when 'before' (logically speaking) they did not exist. It therefore cannot be related to them.

Now what I say in PTE is problematic in various ways. But I see no inconsistency in what Tim quotes me as saying.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute. But we are also, undeniably, animals. Our human condition is thus a predicament, that of a spiritual animal. As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought. As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth. As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes. As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh? Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery? That is Weil's point. The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated be tortured to death. For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all, define being human.

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis. His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment. He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional.

The darkest hour. And then dawn.

Ralph Waldo Emerson on the Trumpian ‘Flip-Flop’

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. Or else they quote only the first sentence, or the first two sentences. An example by someone who really ought to know better is provided by Robert Fogelin in his book, Walking the Tightrope of Reason (Oxford UP, 2001). Chapter One, "Why Obey the Laws of Logic?," has among its mottoes (p. 14) the first two sentences of the Emerson quotation above. The other three mottoes, from Whitman, Nietzsche, and Aristotle, are plainly about logical consistency.

It should be clear to anyone who reads the entire passage quoted above in the context of Emerson's essay 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 change 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*, then there is no time at which I hold logically inconsistent beliefs.

Doxastic alteration, like alteration in general, is noncontradictory 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.

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 the flibbertigibbet. 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. But confuse them is precisely what Fogelin does when he places the Emerson and Whitman quotations cheek-by-jowl on p. 14 of his book.

That being said, Professor Fogelin is a very good philosopher, and the book I refer to above is well worth your time.

A Funny World

It's a funny world in which Donald J. Trump does more to save Christians and Christianity than the current Pope. I suppose you could say that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Ten Impediments to Religious Belief

Why is religious belief so hard to accept? Why is it so much harder to accept today than in past centuries?

Herewith, some notes toward a list of the impedimenta, the stumbling blocks, that litter the path of the would-be believer of the present day. Whether the following ought to be impediments is a further question, a normative question. The following taxonomy is merely descriptive. And probably incomplete. This is a blog. This is only a blog.

1. There is first of all the obtrusiveness and constancy and coherence of the deliverances of the senses, outer and inner. The "unseen order" (William James), if such there be, is no match for the 'seen order.' The massive assault upon the sense organs has never been greater than at the present time given the high technology of distraction: radio, television, portable telephony, e-mail, Facebook and other social media, not to mention Twitter, perhaps the ultimate weapon of mass distraction.

Here is some advice on how to avoid God from C. S. Lewis, "The Seeing Eye" in Christian Reflections (Eeerdmans, 1967), pp. 168-167:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

If Lewis could only see us now.

2. The fact that there are many competing systems of religious belief and practice. They overlap, but they also contradict. The extant contradictory systems cannot all be true, though they could all be false. The fact that one's own system is contradicted by others doesn't make it false, but it does raise reasonable doubts as to whether it is true. For a thinking person, this is a stumbling block to the naive and unthinking acceptance of the religion in which one has been brought up.

3. The specificity of religious belief systems and their excessively detailed dogmatic contents. One is put off by the presumptuousness of those who claim to know what they cannot, or are not likely, to know. For example, overconfident assurances as to the natures of heaven, hell, and purgatory together with asseverations as to who went where. Stalin in hell? How do you know? How do you even know that there is a place of everlasting punishment as opposed to such other options as simple annihilation of unrepentant miscreants?

There is the presumptuousness of those who fancy that they understand the economics of salvation to such a degree that they can confidently assert that so many Hail Mary's will remove so many years in purgatory. For many, such presumptuousness is an abomination, though not as bad as the sale of indulgences.

The human mind, driven by doxastic security needs, is naturally dogmatic and naturally tends to make certainties of uncertainties. (It also does the opposite when in skeptical mode: it makes uncertainties of (practical) certainties.)

4. The fact that the religions of the world, over millenia, haven't done much to improve us individually or collectively. Even if one sets aside the intemperate fulminations of the New Atheists, that benighted crew uniquely blind to the good religion has done, there is the fact that religious belief and practice, even if protracted and sincere, do little toward the moral improvement of people. To some this is an impediment to acceptance of a religion.

Related point: the corruption of the churches.

Again, my task here is merely descriptive. I am not claiming that one ought to be dissuaded from religion by its failure to improve people much or to maintain itself in institutional form without corruption. One can always argue that we would have been much, much worse without religion. Even Islam, "The saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) has arguably improved the lot of the denizens of the lands in which it has held sway, civilizing them, and providing moral guidance.

5. The putative conflict between science and religion. Competing magisteria each with a loud claim to be the proper guide to life. Thinking people are bothered by this.

6. The tension between Athens (philosophy) and Jerusalem (religion). The battle between faith and reason. So many of the contents of religion are either absurd (logically contradictory) or else difficult to show to be rationally acceptable.

7. The weight of concupiscence. We are sexual beings naturally, and oversexualized beings socially, and so largely unable to control our drives. The thrust of desire valorizes the phenomenal thus conferring plenary reality upon the objects of the senses while occluding one's spiritual sight into the noumenal. See Simone Weil in the Light of Plato. Is it any surprise that the atheist Russell, even in old age, refused to be faithful to his wife? It is reasonable to conjecture that his lust and his pride — intellectuals tend to be very proud with outsized egos– blinded him to spiritual realities. Jean-Paul Sartre is another case in point.

8. Suggestibility. We are highly sensitive and responsive to social suggestions as to what is real and important and what is not. In a society awash with secular suggestions, people find it hard to take religion seriously.

9. The apparent moral absurdities of some religious doctrines. See Kant on Abraham and Isaac.

10. The rise of life-extending technology. For some of us at least, life is a lot less nasty, brutish, and short than it used to be. This aids and abets the illusion that this material life suffices and will continue indefinitely. The worst illusion sired by advanced technology, however, is the transhumanist fantasy which I discuss here.

Is Civility Still Possible?

James Schall appears to return a negative answer. In the course of so doing he clarifies the concepts of the civil, the uncivil, and uncivilized.

Do You Speak English?

Then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation' unless you are English.

Addendum 4/12:

A philosophy professor comments:

The claim in your post today, strikes me as clearly false.

Just because someone speaks a language (even as a primary language) doesn't mean they are cultural appropriators guilty of something. Imagine the English colonize your land and people and force English upon you. Then this conditional, which is what I think you are claiming, is false: "If you speak English and you are not English, then you are guilty of 'cultural appropriation'.

The good professor has found a counterexample to my conditional claim. But he misses the point of my pithy little poke. My intention was to ridicule the politically correct silliness of those who see something reprehensible in, say, donning a sombrero when one is not a Mexican. Aphorisms, maxims, and other sayings derive their punch from their pith. You have heard it said, briefly, and with wit, that "Brevity is the soul of wit."

Let us note en passant and in defiance of the content of the witticism that it can be found in William Shakespeare in Hamlet, Act II wherein the Bard has Polonius say:

Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

Was this beautiful coinage first put into circulation by Shakespeare? I have no idea. But I digress.

Consider the following piece of folk wisdom,

He who hesitates is lost.

Counterexamples abound. And the same goes for the competing maxim,

Look before you leap.

If one were to rewrite them to make them proof against the punctilios of philosophers and logicians, the result would be something clunky and not particularly memorable. For example,

It is often, but not always, the case that one who hesitates before acting misses his opportunity and in consequence of such hesitancy either loses his life or suffers some lesser, but nonetheless regrettable, loss.

But then one has traded the lawyerly for the literary.

Catholic Enablers of Islam

William Kilpatrick

Anything

People will say anything, which is why one should not let oneself become upset over (almost) anything anyone says.

Do you know the word bushwa? We ought to raise it from its desuetude.

‘Religion of Peace’ Update

Here:

Suspected suicide bombers struck two [Coptic Christian] Egyptian churches on Palm Sunday, killing more than 40 people in the deadliest assault on civilians since President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi’s election nearly three years ago.

Islamic State claimed the attacks on the St. George church in the Nile Delta city of Tanta and St. Mark’s cathedral in Alexandria . . .

Abdication of Authority in Academe

Heather MacDonald recounts her experiences at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California and at UCLA:

The Rose Institute for State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna had invited me to meet with students to talk about my book, The War on Cops, on April 6. Several calls went out on Facebook to “shut down” this “notorious white supremacist fascist Heather Mac Donald.”

Time was, when university faculty and administrators stood in loco parentis. Now their posture is supine while the students go loco.