If the senses could speak, they would claim that they alone provide access to truth. Why then should we take seriously intellect's claim that there is nothing beyond it?
The Proximate Goal of Meditation
To bring the soul into the field of awareness and not merely to believe in it like the religionist or reason about it like the philosopher.
Living Beyond Praise
St. Augustine, Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 37:
But to be without any praise whatsoever, and to test ourselves in this condition, how can we manage it?
A Big Ego
One associates loud, domineering, and aggressive behavior with a 'big ego.' But a long memory for wrongs done one, a fine sensitivity to slights and slurs real and imagined are also signs of a 'big ego.'
Suggestibility
People lack an inner compass; or rather the compass they possess is easily deflected by the surrounding 'socio-magnetic' fields.
Our Curious Ongoing Collapse
Another indication thereof being the increasing number of well-placed and influential individuals, some of them well-meaning, who now believe that it is morally justifiable to use state power to violate the consciences of individuals by forcing them to do that to which they are morally opposed on grounds that are well-articulated, thoroughly reasoned, and supported by distinguished traditions and authorities.
Desiderata
To live beyond society, beyond the need for recognition and status. To live in truth, alone with nature and nature's God and the great problems and questions. There are the ancient dead ones for companionship. They speak across the centuries. With them we form a community of the like-minded in nomine scientiae.
An Old Entry on Thomas Merton
I wrote this on 4 July 1997:
I'm reading volume 5 of T. Merton's journal. He's a flabby liberal both politically and theologically, but there is a good line here and there. "When will I learn to go without leaving footprints? Along way from that: I still love recognition . . . ." (p. 33)
Those who crave recognition would do well to consider the moral and intellectual quality of those destined to do the recognizing.
Three Kinds of Idle Talk
Intellectual talk can be as bad as mundane trivial talk, an empty posturing, a vain showmanship without roots or results. But worst of all is ‘spiritual talk’ when it distracts us from action and (what is better) contemplative inaction.
Corruptio optimi pessima. The wonderful pithiness of Latin! "The corruption of the best is the worst of all."
Atheist Ireland Outfit Dissociates Itself from PZ Myers
This is good news. (HT: Mike Valle) People on one's side will tolerate a little scumbaggery, but not a lot, as both Brian Leiter and PZ Myers are learning the hard way.
Here is one of the articles in which Michael Nugent of Atheist Ireland documents Myers' viciousness.
After reading through the examples Nugent adduces, I wonder whether Myers is quite sane. In the case of Leiter, his mad attack on Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins raises similar doubts.
In the Vicinity of Hackberry Spring, Superstition Wilderness
Dale Tuggy has a good eye. Here is a shot from our Good Friday hike, 3 April, 2015. We are headed back to the trail head via the First Water Creek bed.
Philosophy as High Ground
Philosophy is the high ground from which to survey the dismal and contentious scene, the bellum omnium contra omnes. One retreats to the high ground for three reasons. To contemplate and understand the passing scene, to escape from it, and to be in a position to transcend toward what is neither passing nor a scene.
Society and Solitude
Solitude does not guarantee elevation, but society almost always insures the opposite.
A ‘No’ to ‘No Self’
Dale Tuggy is in town and we met up on Thursday and Friday. On Good Friday morning I took him on a fine looping traipse in the Western Superstitions out of First Water trail head to Second Water trail to Garden Valley, down to Hackberry Spring, and then back to the Second Water trail via the First Water creek bed. We were four hours on the trail, 6:55 – 10:55, both of us wired up (in both senses of that term) for one of Dale's famous podcasts. One of the topics discussed was the Buddhist anatta/anatman doctrine which we both respectfully reject. I believe that Dale concurred with all of the following points I made and with some others as well:
1. The nonexistence of what one fails to find does not logically follow from one's failing to find it. So the failure to find in experience an object called 'self' does not entail the nonexistence of the self.
2. So failure to find the self as an object of experience is at least logically consistent with the existence of a self.
3. What's more, the positing of a self seems rationally required even though the self is not experienceable. For someone or something is doing the searching and coming up 'empty-handed.'
4. There are also considerations re: diachronic personal identity. Suppose I decide to investigate the question of the self. A moment later I begin the investigation by carefully examining the objects of inner and outer experience to see if any one of them is the self. After some searching I come to the conclusion that the self is not to be located among the objects of experience. I then entertain the thought that perhaps there is no self. But then it occurs to me that failure to find X is not proof of X's nonexistence. I then consider whether it is perhaps the very nature of the subject of experience to be unobjectifiable. And so I conclude that the self exists but is not objectifiable, or at least not isolable as a separate object of experience among others.
This reasoning may or may not be sound. The point, however, is that the reasoning, which plays out over a period of time, would not be possible at all if there were no one self — no one unity of consciousness and self-consciousness — that maintained its strict numerical identity over the period of time in question. For what we have in the reasoning process is not merely a succession of conscious states, but also a consciousness of their succession in one and the same conscious subject. Without the consciousness of succession, without the retention of the earlier states in the present state, no conclusion could be arrived at.
All reasoning presupposes the diachronic unity of consciousness. Or do you think that the task of thinking through a syllogism could be divided up? Suppose Manny says, All men are mortal! Moe then pipes up, Socrates is a man! Could Jack conclude that Socrates is mortal? No. He could say it but not conclude it. (This assumes that Jack does not hear what the other two Pep Boys say. Imagine each in a separate room.)
The hearing of a melody supplies a second example.
To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi. For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody. (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence, or that of inferring a conclusion from premises.) But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3. When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap. In which act is the hearing of the melody? A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody. For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal) intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1. Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody. But this implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention. The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion. This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them. Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them. This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.
The unitary self is phenomenologically given, but not as a separate object. Herein, perhaps, resides the error of Hume and some Buddhists: they think that if there is a self, it must exist as a separate object of experience.
Merton Quotes Evdokimov
Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, p. 308:
Evdokimov demands a virile ascesis, not simply gentlemanly retirement into leisure. The monk does not build his monastic city 'on the margin' of the world, but instead of it.
[. . .]
He frankly regards monastic chastity as a refusal to procreate and to continue the existence of a society that has reached its term . . . .
These quotations are relevant to the theme of Christian anti-natalism, a topic to which I hope to return. But first I need to lay my hands on Evdokimov's books.