Maverick Philosopher – Page 445 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Infinite Desire and God as Being Itself

A reader from Portugal raised a question I hadn't thought of before: "Can God satisfy our infinite desire if God is a being among beings?" This question presupposes that our desire is in some sense infinite. I will explain and defend this presupposition in a moment. Now if our desire is infinite, then it is arguable that only a truly infinite object could satisfy it, and that such an object cannot be a being among beings, not even a being supreme among beings, but must be an absolute reality, that is, God as Being itself. To put it another way, the ultimate good for man cannot be a good thing among good things, not even the best of all good things, but must be Goodness itself. Anything less would be a sort of high-class idol. So let's start with an analysis of idolatry.

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite?

That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never fully satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions — say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

For thinkers of this stripe, all desire is ultimately desire for the Absolute. A desire that understood itself would understand this. But our deluded desire does not understand this. Our deluded desire is played for a fool by the trinkets and bagatelles of this fleeting world. It thinks it can find satisfaction in the finite. Therein lies the root of idolatry.

Buddha understood this very well: he saw that desire is infinite in that it desires its own ultimate quenching or extinguishing, its own nibbana, but that finite quenchings are unsatisfactory in that they only exacerbate desire by giving birth to new desires endlessly. No desire is finally sated; each is reborn in a later desire. Thus the enjoyment of virgin A does not put an end to lust; the next night or the next morning you are hot for virgin B, and so on, back to A or on to C, D, . . . and around and around on the wheel of Samsara. The more you dive into the flesh looking for the ultimate satisfaction, the more frustrated you become. You are looking for Love in all the wrong places.

So Buddha understood the nature of desire as infinite. But since he had convinced himself that there is no Absolute, no Atman, nothing possessing self-nature, he made a drastic move: he preached salvation through the extirpation of desire itself. Desire itself is at the root of suffering, dukkha, not desire for the wrong objects; so the way to salvation is not via redirection of desire upon the right Object, but via an uprooting of desire itself.

In Buddhist terms, we could say that idolatry is the treating of something that is anatta, devoid of self-nature, as if it were atta, possessive of self-nature. Idolatry arises when some finite foreground object, a man or a woman say, is falsely ascribed the power to provide ultimate satisfaction. This sort of delusion is betrayed in practically every love song ever written. Here are some typical lyrics (trivia question: name the song, the singer, the date):

You are my world, you're every move I make
You are my world, you're every breath I take.

There are thousands more lyrics like them, and anyone who has been in love knows that they capture the peculiar madness of the lover, the delectable madness of taking the finite for infinite.

Or will you deny that this is madness, a very deep philosophical and perhaps also religious mistake? I say it is madness whether or not an absolute good exists. Whether or not an absolute good exists, reason suggests that we should love the finite as finite, that our love should be ordered to, and commensurate with, its object. Finite love for finite objects, and for all objects if there is no infinite Object.

Suppose you accept what I just wrote about desire being infinite and ultimately unsatisfiable by any finite object. Would this show that God cannot be a being among beings? Not obviously! The supreme being theists could agree that infinite desire is ultimately satisfiable only by an infinite object, but that the omni-qualified supreme being fills the bill. Furthermore, they could argue, plausibly, that talk of Goodness itself and Being itself, which imply the divine simplicity, is just incoherent to the discursive intellect. To which one response is: so much the worse for the discursive intellect. The ultimate goal is attainable only by transcending it.

Modality, Possible Worlds, and the Accidental-Essential Distinction

This from a reader:

The Stanford Encyclopedia notes in its article on Essential vs. Accidental Properties, "A modal characterization of the distinction between essential and accidental properties is taken for granted in nearly all work in analytic metaphysics since the 1950s.” Personally, I find modal definitions of this type very hand wavy. Ed Feser states my objection more eloquently than I can:

From an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, the possible worlds analysis of essence has things backwards: we need to know what the essence of a thing is, before we can know what it would be like in various possible worlds; talk of possible worlds, if legitimate at all, must get explained in terms of essence, not essence in terms of possible worlds ( Aquinas, iBooks edition, page 90).

I think the modal characterization will be a dead end for us.

Response

Two points. First, I do not understand how one could characterize the essential versus accidental distinction except modally. Second, a modal characterization need not be in terms of so-called 'possible worlds.' One should not suppose that a characterization is modal if and only if it is in terms of possible worlds.

First point first. I am a blogger and a native Californian. I might not have been either. So being a blogger and being a native Californian are accidental properties of me. I could have existed without possessing these properties. But I could not have existed without being human. So being human is an essential property of me. Generalizing, if P is an essential property of x, then x must have P, it cannot not have P. If P is an accidental property of x, then x need not have P, it could lack P. And conversely in both cases.

Note that I had to use modal words to characterize the distinction: 'might,' 'could,' 'must,' 'need not,' 'cannot.' I conclude that the accidental-essential distinction is irreducibly modal: it cannot be made except modally. It is indeed essentially modal!

To appreciate this, consider the first two accidental properties I mentioned. I was not always a blogger: speaking tenselessly, there are times at which I am not a blogger. But I was always and will always be a native Californian. Speaking tenselessly again, there are no times at which I am not a native Californian.* It follows that we cannot define an essential (accidental) property of x as a property x has (does not have) at every time at which it exists. The distinction cannot be made in temporal terms; one needs to employ modal language.

If a thing has a property essentially, then it has the property at every time at which it exists. But not conversely: if a thing has a property at every time at which it exists, it does not follow that it has the property essentially. So again it should be clear that the distinction in question is ineliminably modal.

I should make it clear that the modality in question here is non-epistemic/non-doxastic. Suppose Tom died an hour ago, unbeknownst to me. I ask you, "Is Tom teaching now?" You say, "Could be!" But of course it can't be that he is teaching now if he is dead now. You are not saying that it is (really) possible that he be teaching now; you are saying that his teaching now is logically consistent with what you know or believe, that it is not ruled out by what you know/believe.

Second point second. From what I have written it should be clear that we don't need the jargon of possible worlds to talk modally. But it is a very useful and graphic way of talking. Accordingly,

D1. P is an accidental property of x =_df there are possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

D2. P is an essential property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P.

We can add a third definition:

D3. P is a necessary property of x =_df there are no possible worlds in which x exists but does not instantiate P, and x exists in every possible world. Example: Omniscience is a necessary property of God: he has it in every world in which he exists, and, since he is a necessary being, he exists in every world. Non-theological example: Being prime is a necessary property of the number 7: 7 has it in every metaphysically possible world in which it exists, and it exists in every such world.

The above definitions do not sanction the reduction of the modal to the non-modal. For modal terms appear on both sides of the biconditionals. Nor could we say that the right-hand sides explicates or analyzes the left-hand sides. So I agree with Feser as quoted above. What is first in the order of metaphysical explanation is a thing's being essentially thus and so or accidentally thus and so. We can then go on to represent these states of affairs in possible worlds terms, but we need not do so.

Jenner and Dolezal. Is Jenner essentially male? I should think so. Being male is a biological determination. It can be spelled out in terms of sex chromosomes. They are different in males and females. Jenner as he is today is a sort of super-transvestite: he is not just a male in women's clothing, but a male who has had his body surgically altered to have female anatomical features. But he is still male. How could he be a woman? You can't be a woman without first being a girl, and he was never a girl.

If you deny that Jenner is essentially biologically male, will you also deny that he is essentially biologically human? If not, why not? If literal sex change is possible, is species change possible?

Is Rachel Dolezal essentially Caucasian? Well, of course. Race, like sex, is biologically based. It is not something you choose. Nor is it a social construct. Barack Obama thinks that we Americans have racism in our DNA. That's bullshit, of course. There is nothing biological about being a racist. But there is something biological about race. You can be a traitor to your country, but not to your race.

Biology matters! And so does clear thinking and honest talk. Obama take note.

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*Ignoring the fact, if it is a fact, that I existed pre-natally. If this wrinkle troubles you, I can change my example.

A Question About God and Existence

A reader asks:

You seem to hold that, if God is identical to his existence, then God is Existence itself. Why think that? Why not think instead that, if God is identical to his existence, then he is identical to his 'parcel' of existence, as it were?

This is an entirely reasonable question. I will try to answer it.

First of all, when we say that God is identical to his existence, we mean that there is no real distinction in God between essence (nature) and existence in the way in which there is a real distinction in Socrates (our representative creature) between essence (nature) and existence. It is the real distinction in Socrates that grounds his metaphysical contingency, while it is the lack of such a distinction in God that grounds his metaphysical necessity.

This is to say that God, unlike creatures, is ontologically simple. In a slogan of St Augustine, God is what he has. Thus he has his existence by being his existence. Why must God be simple? Because he is the absolute reality. If your god is not the absolute reality, then your god is not God but an idol. The absolute cannot depend on anything else for its nature or existence on pain of ceasing to be the absolute. It must possess aseity, from-itself-ness.

Now Existence is in some way common to everything that exists, though it is not common in the manner of a property or a concept. Thus God and Socrates have Existence in common. If God is not identical to Existence, then he is like Socrates and must depend on Existence as something other than himself to exist. But this violates the divine aseity.

Therefore, God is not only identical to his existence, he is identical to Existence itself.

Objection: "If God is identical to Existence, then God alone exists, which flies in the face of the evident fact that there is a plurality of non-divine existents."

Reply: The objection succeeds only if there are no different ways of existing. But if God exists-underivatively and creatures exist-derivatively, then God's identity with Existence does not entail that God alone exists; it entails that God alone exists-underivatively.

The picture is this. Existence is that which makes derivative existents exist. If Existence did not itself exist, then nothing would exist. So Existence itself exists. It is identical to God. God is the unsourced Source of everything distinct from God. God, as Existence itself, is the Paradigm Existent. God is at once both Existence and the prime case of Existence.

In this respect, God is like a Platonic Form in which all else participates. (It is worth recalling in this connection that Aquinas speaks of God as forma formarum, the form of all forms.) God is self-existent Existence; creatures are not self-existent, but derive their existence from self-existent Existence.

Objection: "This scheme issues in something like the dreaded Third Man Regress. If Socrates and Plato both exist by participating in Existence, which exists, then there are three things that exist, Socrates, Plato, and Existence, each of which exists by participation. If so, there must be a second Existence, Existence-2 that Socrates, Plato and Existence-1 participate in. But then an infinite regress is up and running, one that is, moreover, vicious."

Response: The Third Man Regress is easily blocked by distinguishing the way Existence exists and the way derivative existents exist. Socrates exists by participating in Existence; Existence exists, not by participation, but by being (identical to) Existence.

There is exactly one case in which existence = self-identity. This is the case of the Paradigm Existent, which is Existence itself, which is God. In every other case, existence is not self-identity. No doubt Socrates is self-identical; but his self-identity is not the ground of his existence.

More Liberal Insanity: ‘Trigger Warning’ for Kant’s Critiques

A tip of the hat to London Karl for bringing the following to my attention. Karl writes, "I love your country, but it gets more absurd by the day."

It does indeed. Contemporary liberals are engaged in a project of "willful enstupidation," to borrow a fine phrase from John Derbyshire. Every day there are multiple new examples, a tsunami of folderol most deserving of a Critique of POOR Reason.

Here is a little consideration that would of course escape the shallow pate of your typical emotion-driven liberal: If Kant's great works can be denigrated as products of their time, and as expressive of values different from present day values, then of course the same can be said a fortiori of the drivel and dreck that oozes from the mephitic orifices of contemporary liberals.

For my use of 'contemporary liberals,' see here.

Addendum: These scumbags have attached the same warning to the U. S. Constitution.

Keith Burgess-Jackson on the SCOTUS ObamaCare Decision

Professor Burgess-Jackson is better qualified to comment on this topic than I am.

I would now like to thank Keith publicly for all his help, advice, linkage, and support over the years. Our friendship goes back to the early days of the blogosphere. He came on line in the fall of 2003; I made my debut in the spring of 2004.

Where Are the Honest Atheists?

Damon Linker:

Does the world really need another "new atheist" manifesto? Another attack on the ludicrousness of religion and the childishness of belief in God? Another paean to the spiritual and intellectual satisfactions of secularism, materialism, and humanism? Do the efforts of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, the late Christopher Hitchens, and their many lesser imitators really require further reinforcement? British philosopher A.C. Grayling must think so, since that is precisely what his latest book (The God Argument, which will be published on March 26) aims to provide.

A. C. Grayling is quite a piece of work. To get a taste of just what an extremist he is, see my Is Religious Instruction Child Abuse?

Gasthaus Blut und Boden

Imagine a German restaurant so named. Blood and Soil. My astute readers needn't be reminded of the provenience of this phrase. "Best blood sausage in the East Valley!" Or MOM's Diner of Mesa. "Fine Aryan cuisine served up right by members of the militia of Montana." Would you be offended? I just made up those examples.

But this is a real example: La Raza Steak and Ribs, a Mexican joint in Apache Junction, Arizona. When I mentioned this to a friend, he replied, "That would be like naming a German restaurant Die Rasse, The Race."

Once again, the double standard. So once again I ask: what would be left of the Left were leftists disembarrassed of every single one of their double standards?

The use of La Raza in the private sector as part of the name of a business is offensive, but tolerable. But it is a different story when state sponsorship is involved.

It is arguable that there ought not be any state sponsorship of divisive symbols such as the Confederate flag. But, as Victor Davis Hanson points out in an important column,

There are plenty of other overt racialist symbols that separate Americans. One is the prominent use of La Raza, “The Race” — seen most prominently in the National Council of La Raza, an ethnic lobbying organization that has been and is currently a recipient of federal funds. The National Council of La Raza should be free to use any title it wishes, but it should not expect the federal government to subsidize its separatist nomenclature.

Politics and Ridicule in a Post-Consensus Age

Dennis Prager was complaining one day about how the Left ridicules the Right. He sounded a bit indignant. He went on to say that he does not employ ridicule. But why doesn't he? He didn't say why, but I will for him: Because he is a gentleman who exemplifies the good old conservative virtue of civility. And because he is a bit naive.

Prager's behavior, in one way laudable, in another way is not, resting as it does on an assumption that I doubt is true at the present time. Prager assumes that political differences are more like intellectual differences among gentlemanly interlocutors than they are like the differences among warring parties. He assumes that there is a large measure of common ground and the real possibility of mutually beneficial compromise, the sort of compromise that serves the common good by mitigating the extremism of the differing factions, as opposed to that form of compromise, entered into merely to survive, whereby one side knuckles under to the extremism of the other.

But if we are now in the age of post-consensus politics, if politics is war by another name, then it is just foolish not to use the Left's tactics against them.

And that includes ridicule. As Saul Alinksy's Rule #5 has it:

Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

It is not enough to be right, or have the facts on your side, or to have the better arguments. That won't cut it in a war. Did the Allies prevail over the Axis Powers in virtue of having truth and right on their side? It was might that won the day, and, to be honest, the employing of morally dubious means (e.g., the firebombing of Dresden, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), the same sort of means that the Axis would have employed had they been able to. One hopes that the current civil war doesn't turn bloody. But no good purpose is served by failing to understand that what we have here is a war and not minor disagreements about means within the common horizon of agreed-upon assumptions, values, and goals.

Have we entered the age of post-consensus politics? I think so. We should catalog our irreconcilable differences. For now a quick incomplete list. We disagree radically about: the purpose of government; crime and punishment; race; marriage; abortion; drugs; pornography; gun rights; the interpretation of the Constitution; religion; economics.

Take religion. I have no common ground with you if you think every vestige of the Judeo-Christian heritage should be removed from the public square, or take the sort of extremist line represented by people like Dawkins and A. C. Grayling. If, however, you are an atheist who gives the Establishment Clause a reasonable interpretation, then we have some common ground.

Is the Enlightenment the Problem?

Malcolm Pollack laments via e-mail:

Don't things seem to be coming apart faster and faster now? Or am I just getting old, and so the distance between this madding world and my reference frame for 'normal life' is just making it seem that way?

No, I don't think it's just geezerism. The more rotten something becomes, the faster it falls apart. We have crossed the event horizon, and are accelerating toward the singularity. The tidal forces are already doing their work.

Serious question for you: has this been inevitable since the Enlightenment? Here's what I'm getting at (from another recent post):

"Given that what gives a culture its form is essentially 'memetic' — an aggregation of ideas, lore, mythos, history, music, religion, duties, obligations, affinities, and aversions shared by a common people — an advanced civilization is subject to corrosion and decomposition by ideas. And the most corrosive of all such reagents in the modern world is one that our own culture bequeathed to itself in the Enlightenment: the elevation of skepsis to our highest intellectual principle.

Radical doubt, as it turns out, is a “universal acid”; given enough time, there is no container that can hold it. Once doubt is in control, there is no premise, no tradition, nor even any God that it cannot dissolve. Once it has burned its way through theism, telos, and the intrinsic holiness of the sacred, leaving behind a only a dessicated naturalism, its action on the foundations of culture accelerates briskly, as there is little left to resist it.

Because it is in the nature of doubt to dissolve axioms, the consequence of the Enlightenment is that all of a civilization’s theorems ultimately become unprovable. This is happening before our eyes. The result is chaos, and collapse."

Response

This is a very large cluster of themes; I approach it and them with trepidation.

First, we do seem to be accelerating, or perhaps jerking, toward some sort of sociocultural collapse or break-up. And to point this out is not the mere grumbling of geezers or the wheezing of dinosaurs; we really are losing it as a culture, with the older among us simply better positioned to see what we are losing. The old have a temporal perspective the young lack. So if you owls of Minerva seek understanding, I recommend that you live as long as possible in possession of your faculties. As for the litany of what we have lost, there is no need to rehearse it. Malcolm and I are in broad agreement about the items on the list.

But is the Enlightenment the problem? Malcolm seems to be maintaining that our current woes are the inevitable consequence of Enlightened modes of thought that first arose in the 18th century.

The first two points I would make in response is that enlightenment did not begin with the Enlightenment, and that enlightenment is in many respects good even if in some respects bad.

Malcolm is a student of science and thinks it a high cultural value indeed. Now science brings enlightenment and the enlightenment it brings had its origin with the ancient nature philosophers of Ionia. Logical thinking, in a broad sense of 'logical,' began in the West with a break-away from mythical modes of thought. (Ernst Cassirer is worth reading on this.) Logical thinking began with doubts about the tales and legends that had been handed down. The cosmogonic myths were called into question. Doubt, as I like to say, is the engine of inquiry. Doubt is a driver, a motor. Inquiry aims to shed light on what is dark and hidden. Science aims to banish the occult and the mysterious. But it cannot do this without doubting the myths and lore and whatnot that had been handed down, a lot of which was obscurantist nonsense. In an obvious sense, inquiry is in the service of enlightenment. Doubt, its motor, is therefore good.

Skepsis need not be destructive or corrosive. The very word skepsis is translatable as inquiry, and Malcolm will allow that inquiry is good, ceteris paribus. But Malcolm seems to be using skepsis to mean doubt. If so, the Enlightenment did not elevate skepsis or doubt to our highest intellectual principle. I would suggest that the Enlightenment elevated Reason to our highest principle, the reason of the autonomous individual who "dares to be wise." (See Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" with its slogan, sapere aude, dare to be wise.) I think it would be accurate to say that the Enlightenment involved a faith in Reason and in the power of Reason to get at the truth, banish superstition, purify religion (cf. Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone) and improve the human lot.*

Doubt is the engine of rational inquiry, where 'rational' does not exclude the empirical. (A reasonable person is not one who relies on reason alone but one who also consults the senses.) Doubt is good. But good things can be taken too far. So doubt can ramp up to what Malcolm calls radical doubt: an all-corrosive acid that cannot be contained. Using 'axiom' in the old-fashioned way, Malcolm tells us that it is the nature of doubt to dissolve all axioms, with the result that all theorems become unprovable. Malcolm's point is that doubt has the natural tendency to destroy the self-evidence or objective certainty of everything that hitherto counted as self-evident or objectively certain.

I think this is right. But it is one-sided. The power to doubt is in one way a god-like power, and as such good: it is the power spiritually to distance oneself from a thing or proposition and examine it critically. It is the salutary power to pose such questions as the following: is it real as people say? Is it truly valuable? Is it true? Is it worth doing? Does it even make sense? Is the explanation truly explanatory? Is a certain hypthesis necessary (e.g., the ether hypothesis)? Is there evidence for it? Does the earth really rest on a turtle? Is it turtles all the way down? Does it function merely to legitimate the power of the oppressor? Isn't this talk of 'structural racism' just obscurantist bullshit promulgated by losers and race-baiters who seek power by political means and intimidation because they are incapable of achieving it by making worthwhile contributions to human flourishing? Is it really the case that climate change skeptics are anti-science know-nothings?

So doubt is a god-like power. But is is also diabolical. Lucifer the light-bearer becomes drunk on his own power and blinded by his own light. He will not obey. He will not recognize any authority other than his own will. His mind is not for minding any antecedent reality. He will not submit in piety to a Power outside of himself. He would be auto-nomous and give the law to himself as opposed to accepting it, hetero-nomously, from Another. In the same vein, Goethe in Faust speaks of Mephistopheles as "the spirit that always negates." I am struck by the similarity of the German Zweifel (doubt) to the German Teufel (devil) — not that that proves anything by itself. (Nor am I claiming a genuine etymological connection.) Zwei –> zwo –> two –> duplicity. Doubt as splitting in two of an antecedent wholeness or integrity.

Doubt is good insofar as it is in the service of cognition. How do we keep it in the service of cognition, and prevent it from becoming an all-corrosive end in itself and to that extent a disease of cognition and an underminer of all 'axioms,' especially those on which our civilization rests?

I don't know. I do know that Islam is not the answer. And I do know that barbaric, world-darkening systems such as Islam (or radical Islam, if that is different) can only be kept in check with the tools and attitudes of the Enlightenment.

The power to doubt and question and critically examine may lead some to become rudderless decadents, but it will prevent others from becoming Muhammad Attas. What the Muslim world needs is precisely a healthy dose of doubt-driven open inquiry. It needs skepticism. It needs philosophy. What we in the West need, perhaps, is less philosophy, more openness to the possibility of divine revelation, more prayerful Bible study.

There was no Enlightenment in the Muslim world. This is part of the explanation of its misery and inanition.

To answer Malcolm's question: the Enlightenment is not at the root of our current malaise, though I grant that elements of it, taken to extremes, are contributory to our present mess. Perhaps Kant's "Copernican revolution" 'paved the way for' conceptual relativism despite Kant's not being a conceptual relativist. That's one example.

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*The greatest figure in the German Enlightenment was Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). He famously remarks in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787, first ed. 1781), "I have found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith." Now how does that jive with what I wrote in the preceding paragraph? I can't explain this now; it is just too complicated! This is what i call the invocation of blogospheric privilege. Brevity is the soul of blog. This being so, I am justified in this venue of just stopping.

In Defense of Modes of Being: Substance and Accident

The following entry, first posted on February 20, 2011, is relevant to the question whether God is a being among beings. My rejection of this claim requires that there be modes of Being. If talk of modes of Being is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake, then the claim that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself, is unintelligible, or based on an obvious mistake. Herewith, something in defense of the MOB doctrine.

To ward off misunderstanding, I am not saying that the 'relation' of God to the world of creatures is the 'relation' of a substance to its accidents or modes. Creatures do not inhere in God. They are not accidents. They are derivative substances in their own right, difficult as it may be to make sense of this. Christian metaphysics must somehow navigate between the Scylla of Spinozism and Charybdis of the sort of radical ontological pluralism to which my friend Dale Tuggy 'succumbs' (to put it tendentiously).

On second thought, since Spinozism sucks everything into itself, I should have written 'Charybdis of Spinozism.' Charybdis was a sea nymph transmogrified by Zeus into a whirlpool.

In his History of Philosophy Hegel jokes that due to the all-consumptiveness of the Spinozistic Absolute, it is in some sense fitting that Spinoza should die of consumption. As the story goes, Spinoza the lens-grinder died of what used to be called consumption (tuberculosis) from breathing in the glass dust.

……………….

The 'thin' conception of Being or existence, lately explained, entails that there are no modes of Being. Most analytic philosophers accept the thin conception and reject modes of Being. Flying in the face of analytic orthodoxy, I maintain that the modes-of-Being doctrine is defensible. Indeed, I should like to say something stronger, namely, that it is indispensable for metaphysics.

My task in this series of posts is not to specify what the modes of Being are, but the preliminary one of defending the very idea of there being different modes of Being. So I plan to look at a range of examples without necessarily endorsing the modes of Being they involve. Against van Inwagen (see post linked above), I maintain that no mistake is made by partisans of the thick conception. They do not, pace van Inwagen, illicitly transfer what properly belongs to the nature of a thing to its existence.

This post focuses on substances and accidents and argues that an accident and a substance of which it is the accident differ in their very mode of Being, and not merely in their respective natures.

1. Intuitively, some items exist on their own while others are dependent in their existence on items that exist on their own. Smiles, grimaces, frowns, white caps, and carpet bulges are items that exist, but not on their own. They need — as a matter of metaphysical necessity — faces, waves, and carpets to exist in. This suggests some definitions:

D1. S is a (primary) substance =_df S is metaphysically capable of independent existence.

D2. A is an accident =_df A is not metaphysically capable of independent existence, but exists, if it exists, in a substance.

By 'metaphysically' I mean broadly logically in Plantinga's sense. So if a particular statue is a substance, then it is broadly logically possible that it exist even if nothing else exists. And if the smoothness or color of the statue are accidents, then it is broadly logically impossible that they exist (i) apart from some substance or other and indeed (ii) apart from the very substance of which they are the accidents.

The second point implies that accidents are particulars, not universals. Accidents cannot be shared. They are not 'repeatable' in the manner of universals. Nor can they 'migrate' from one substance to another. You can't catch my cold if my cold is an accident of me as substance. Your cold is your numerically distinct cold. Socrates' whiteness is his whiteness and is as such numerically distinct from Plato's whiteness. The connection between a substance and its accidents is a peculiarly intimate one.

2. Now suppose there is a substance S and an accident A of S. I do not deny that there is a sense of 'exist' according to which both S and A exist. There is a sense — the quantificational sense — in which both items exist and exist univocally: each is something and not nothing. Both are there to be talked about and referred to. We can write '(∃x)(x = S)' and '(∃x)(x = A)': 'Something is (identically) S' and 'Something is (identically) A.' The symbol for the particular quantifier — '(∃x)(. . . x . . .)' — has exactly the same sense in both occurrences.

3. The issue, however, is this: Does what I said in #2 exhaust what there is to be said about the Being or existence of S and A? On the thin conception, that is all there is to it. To be is to be something or other. If there are substances and accidents then both are in the same sense and in the same mode. ('Sense' is a semantic term; 'mode' is an ontological term.) Since S and A both exist in the same way on the thin conception, they are not distinguished by their mode of Being. They are distinguished by their respective natures alone.

4. In order to see what is wrong with the thin conception, let us ask how the two entities S and A are related. Indeed, can one speak of a relation at all? Traditionally, one speaks of inherence: A inheres in S. Inherence cannot be an external relation since if a and b are externally related, then a and b can each exist apart from the relation. But A cannot exist apart from the inherence 'relation' to S. The whiteness of Socrates cannot exist apart from Socrates. On the other hand, if S and A were internally related, then neither could exist without the other. But S can exist without A. Socrates' needn't be white. Since S can exist without A, but A cannot exist without S, A is existentially dependent on S, dependent on S for its very existence, while S is capable of independent existence. But this is just to say that A exists in a different way than S exists. Thus S and A differ in their modes of Being. One cannot make sense of inherence without distinguishing substantial and accidental modes of Being.

5. In sum: Talk of substances and their accidents is intelligible. But it is intelligible only if there are two modes of Being, substantial and accidental. Therefore, talk of modes of being is intelligible. Since the thin conception of Being entails that there cannot be modes of Being, because the very idea is unintelligible, the thin conception ought to be rejected.

Again on ‘God + World = God’

The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: "The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone." Is this a defensible position? Let's consider both sides of the question.

A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.

Consider two possible scenarios. In the first, God alone exists. In the second, God exists and creates a world. On a classical view of God, according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible. There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the 'could have done otherwise' sense. Clearly, the scenarios are different. But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios. For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios. Therefore,it is not the case that God + World = God.

To extend the argument:

If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else? If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any 'ontological room' for anything else? How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself? Isn't the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?

After all, it is evident to the senses (though not self-evident, cf. Descartes' Dream Argument) that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing. Nor it is a dream or an illusion. Clearly, it is 'better known' that this material world of multiplicity exists than that God exists. But suppose God does exist. Then both the world (creatures) and God exist. Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone?

B. Now let's consider what could be said in favor of the view.

Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to 'God + world = God' in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being. For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct, then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.

So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence. To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy. I am standing before a mirror looking at my image. How many men? One, not two. I'm a man; my mirror image is not a man. An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man. And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists. I exist and my image exists. Both exist, but in different ways. I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist. Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture. (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.)

It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image. (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.) Now we cannot say that the seen man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not. But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man. There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the 'of' is an an objective genitive.

Man and image both exist. Yet there is an important difference. I say it is a difference in mode of existence. The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property. This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.

So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence.

Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man. This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it. If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image = Man.

Accordingly, 'God + World = God' could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it.

C. Aporetic Conclusion

The argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling. But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling. If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong. One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being. But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong. In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.

I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of 'exists,' a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.

My interim conclusion is aporetic: both positions on our question are reasonably maintained. They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.

I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the 'supreme (miniscule) being theists' would agree with me and other '(majuscule) Being theists' that it is a stand-off.

Dolezal, Knowledge, and Belief

R. C. writes,

I hadn't heard of the Dolezal case until reading your blog post. It occurred to me that this case might serve as a counterexample to the standard epistemological position that belief is necessary for knowledge.

I don't know Dolezal's psychological/epistemic state. But suppose she knows that she isn't African-American by race, but she has convinced herself to believe she is so. Would she have knowledge without belief?

Perhaps yes. Or perhaps she doesn't really believe she is African-American by race. Or, perhaps she is double minded: one mind knows and thus believes she isn't, and the other lacks knowledge on the matter but believes she is.

Anyway, I'd be interested in your take.

As I construe his example, the loyal reader is offering a case in which a subject knows that p without believing that p. Thus he is supposing that Dolezal knows that she is Caucasian, but does not believe that she is. If so, we have a counterexample to the standard view that, necessarily, if S knows that p, then S believes that p. On the standard analysis, believing that p is necessary for knowing that p. What the example suggests is that believing that p is not necessary for knowing that p.

We should distinguish between a weaker and a stronger thesis:

1. It is not the case that knowledge entails belief. (Some cases of knowledge are not cases of belief.)

2. Knowledge entails disbelief. (No cases of knowledge are cases of belief.)

I read the following passage from Dallas Willard as supporting (1):

Belief I understand to be some degree of readiness to act as if such and such (the content believed) were the case. Everyone concedes that one can believe where one does not know. But it is now widely assumed that you cannot know what you do not believe. Hence the well known analysis of knowledge as "justified, true belief." But this seems to me, as it has to numerous others, to be a mistake. Belief is, as Hume correctly held, a passion. It is something that happens to us. Thought, observation and testing, even knowledge itself, can be sources of belief, and indeed should be. But one may actually know (dispositionally, occurrently) without believing what one knows.

Whether or not one believes what one represents truly and has an appropriate basis for so representing, depends on factors that are irrelevant to truth, understanding and evidence. It depends, one might simply say, on how rational one is. Now I do not think that this point about belief in relation to knowledge is essential to the rest of this paper, but I mention it to indicate that the absence of any reference to belief in my general description of knowledge is not an oversight. Belief is not, I think, a necessary component of knowledge, though one would like to believe that knowledge would have some influence upon belief, and no doubt it often does.

Now we can't get into Dolezal's (crazy) head, but the following is plausibly ascribed to her. She knows who her biological parents are; she knows that they are both Caucasian; she knows that Caucasian parents have Caucasian children; hence she knows that she is biologically Caucasian. Could she nonetheless really believe that she is not Caucasian?

Perhaps. Belief is tied to action. It is tied to what one does and leaves undone and what one is disposed to do and leave undone. Dolezal's NAACP activities and her verbal avowals among other behaviors suggest that she really believes that she is racially black.

But if Dolezal really believes that she is racially black, when she knows that she is racially white, then she is irrational. Why not say the following by way of breaking the link between belief and knowledge:

D1. S knows that p =_df S justifiably accepts that p, and p is true.

D2. S believes that p =_df S accepts that p and S either acts as if p is true or is prepared to act as if p is true.

These definitions allow that there are cases of knowledge that are not cases of belief without excluding cases of knowledge that are cases of belief. What is common to knowledge and belief is not belief, but acceptance.

Jerking Toward Social Collapse

Thanks to 'progressives,' our 'progress' toward social and cultural collapse seems not be proceeding at a constant speed, but to be accelerating. But perhaps a better metaphor from the lexicon of physics is jerking. After all, our 'progress' is jerkwad-driven. No need to name names. You know who they are.

From your college physics you may recall that the first derivative of position with respect to time is velocity, while the second derivative is acceleration. Lesser known is the third derivative: jerk. (I am not joking; look it up.) If acceleration is the rate of change of velocity, jerk, also known as jolt, is the rate of change of acceleration.

If you were studying something in college, and not majoring in, say, Grievance Studies, then you probably know that all three, velocity, acceleration, and jerk are vectors, not scalars. Each has a magnitude and a direction. This is why a satellite orbiting the earth is constantly changing its velocity despite its constant speed.

The 'progressive' jerk too has its direction: the end of civilization as we know it.

Micro-Totalitarianism

Thomas Sowell on 'micro-aggression.' Two examples of 'micro-aggression':

If you just sit in a room where all the people are white, you are considered to be guilty of "micro-aggression" against people who are not white, who will supposedly feel uncomfortable when they enter such a room.

At UCLA, a professor who changed the capitalization of the word "indigenous" to lower case in a student's dissertation was accused of "micro-aggression," apparently because he preferred to follow the University of Chicago Manual of Style, rather than the student's attempt to enhance the importance of being indigenous.

Next stop: The Twilight Zone. Sowell's analysis:

The concept of "micro-aggression" is just one of many tactics used to stifle differences of opinion by declaring some opinions to be "hate speech," instead of debating those differences in a marketplace of ideas. To accuse people of aggression for not marching in lockstep with political correctness is to set the stage for justifying real aggression against them.

This tactic reaches far beyond academia and far beyond the United States. France's Jean-Paul Sartre has been credited — if that is the word — with calling social conditions he didn't like "violence," as a prelude to justifying real violence as a response to those conditions. Sartre's American imitators have used the same verbal tactic to justify ghetto riots.

Word games are just one of the ways of silencing politically incorrect ideas, instead of debating them. Demands that various conservative organizations be forced to reveal the names of their donors are another way of silencing ideas by intimidating people who facilitate the spread of those ideas. Whatever the rationale for wanting those names, the implicit threat is retaliation.

This same tactic was used, decades ago, by Southern segregationists who tried to force black civil rights organizations to reveal the names of their donors, in a situation where retaliation might have included violence as well as economic losses.

In a sense, the political left's attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. But this is just one of the left's ever-increasing restrictions on other people's freedom to live their lives as they see fit, rather than as their betters tell them.

Current attempts by the Obama administration to force low-income housing to be built in middle class and upscale communities are on a par with forcing people to buy the kind of health insurance the government wants them to buy — ObamaCare — rather than leaving them free to buy whatever suits their own situation and preferences.

The left is not necessarily aiming at totalitarianism. But their know-it-all mindset leads repeatedly and pervasively in that direction, even if by small steps, each of which might be called "micro-totalitarianism."

Sexbots and Sublunary Arts

This just in from D. B.:

Apropos of fairly recent usage of the word 'sublunary' on the MavPhil  blog,
and the entry on sexbots, I offer you C.S. Lewis' take on both in this
paragraph from That Hideous Strength.
"On this side (of the moon, facing the earth - DB), the womb is barren
and the marriages are cold. There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. 
There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each 
lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by 
devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in 
their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”
(First Scribners Classics ed., 1996, p. 271)