Maverick Philosopher – Page 478 – Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Woody Allen on the Meaninglessness of Human Existence

Excerpts from an interview of Woody Allen by Robert E. Lauder (bolding added):

RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could you just say something about what you meant by “salvation”?

WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me . . . it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.

RL: Are you saying the humor in your films is a relief for you? Or are you sort of saying to the audience, “Here is an oasis, a couple of laughs”?

WA: I think what I’m saying is that I’m really impotent against the overwhelming bleakness of the universe and that the only thing I can do is my little gift and do it the best I can, and that is about the best I can do, which is cold comfort.

RL: In Everyone Says I Love You, the character you play gets divorced, and as he and his former wife review their relationship near the end of the film, she says, “You could always make me laugh,” and your character asks very sincerely, “Why is that important?” Do you think what you do is important?

WA: No, not so much. Whenever they ask women what they find appealing in men, a sense of humor is always one of the things they mention. Some women feel power is important, some women feel that looks are important, tenderness, intelligence…but sense of humor seems to permeate all of them. So I’m saying to that character played by Goldie Hawn, “Why is that so important?” But it is important apparently because women have said to us that that is very, very important to them. I also feel that humor, just like Fred Astaire dance numbers or these lightweight musicals, gives you a little oasis. You are in this horrible world and for an hour and a half you duck into a dark room and it’s air-conditioned and the sun is not blinding you and you leave the terror of the universe behind and you are completely transported into an escapist situation. The women are beautiful, the men are witty and heroic, nobody has terrible problems and this is a delightful escapist thing, and you leave the theatre refreshed. It’s like drinking a cool lemonade and then after a while you get worn down again and you need it again. It seems to me that making escapist films might be a better service to people than making intellectual ones and making films that deal with issues. It might be better to just make escapist comedies that don’t touch on any issues. The people just get a cool lemonade, and then they go out refreshed, they enjoy themselves, they forget how awful things are and it helps them—it strengthens them to get through the day. So I feel humor is important for those two reasons: that it is a little bit of refreshment like music, and that women have told me over the years that it is very, very important to them.

RL: At one point in Hannah and Her Sisters, your character, Mickey, is very disillusioned. He is thinking about becoming a Catholic and he sees Duck Soup. He seems to think, “Maybe in a world where there are the Marx Brothers and humor, maybe there is a God. Who knows.” And maybe Mickey can live with that. Am I interpreting this correctly?

WA: No. I think it should be interpreted to mean that there are these oases, and life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through. Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.

RL: That brings us to the end of Crimes and Misdemeanors. Your character and an ophthalmologist named Judah are having a conversation, and Judah pretends he’s talking about a screenplay but he’s really talking about his own life. He says people do commit crimes, they get away with it, and they don’t even have guilt feelings. And your character says this is horrible, this is terrible, and then you cut to a blind rabbi dancing with his daughter at her wedding, and we hear a voiceover from a philosopher your character admires. He says something like, “There is no ultimate meaning but somehow people have found that they can cope.” The philosopher didn’t really cope; he committed suicide. When I first saw the film I thought you were offering the audience several views of life and leaving it to them to decide which is closest to the truth—Judah’s, Cliff’s, the philosopher’s, or the rabbi’s. (He’s the one who seems to be the happiest and most fulfilled character in the film, despite his blindness.) But in an interview you said that really the ophthalmologist is basically right: there is no benevolent God watching over us at all, and we embrace whatever gets us through the night. Is that right?

WA: I feel that is true—that one can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it. There are people who commit all sorts of crimes and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren’t. They commit terrible crimes and they have wonderful lives, wonderful, happy lives, with families and children, and they have done unspeakably terrible things. There is no justice, there is no rational structure to it. That is just the way it is, and each person figures out some way to cope…. Some people cope better than others. I was with Billy Graham once, and he said that even if it turned out in the end that there is no God and the universe is empty, he would still have had a better life than me. I understand that. If you can delude yourself by believing that there is some kind of Santa Claus out there who is going to bail you out in the end, then it will help you get through. Even if you are proven wrong in the end, you would have had a better life.

RL: Seven or eight years ago the New York Times asked you to name a favorite film and you picked Shane. It seems to me that the character of Shane is a Christ figure. At one point, Chris Callaway, the guy Shane has beaten in a fistfight in the saloon, changes sides. He leaves the villains and joins Shane and the good guys. When Shane asks him why, he says something has come over him. Shane has had some mysterious impact on him. Shane does not ride off into the sunset as heroes usually do in old Westerns. He rides off into the sunrise, and as he does so the director does this strange thing: he holds a dissolve of a cross from the cemetery, and he keeps it on the screen for about five seconds. Do you remember that at all?

WA: I do remember it. Yes, now that you bring it up, I do.

RL: So the film seems to end with resurrection imagery.

WA: I didn’t see him as a martyred figure, a persecuted figure. I saw him as quite a heroic figure who does a job that needs to be done, a practical matter. I saw him as a practical secular character. In this world there are just some people who need killing and that is just the way it is. It sounds terrible, but there is no other way to get around that, and most of us are not up to doing it, incapable for moral reasons or physically not up to it. And Shane is a person who saw what had to be done and went out and did it. He had the skill to do it, and that’s the way I feel about the world: there are certain problems that can only be dealt with that way. As ugly a truth as that is, I do think it’s the truth about the world.

Comment. I think things are actually worse than Woody Allen makes them out to be. According to him, we all know that human existence is meaningless and that it ends, utterly and meaninglessly, with death. We all know this, he thinks, but we hide the horrible reality from ourselves with all sorts of evasions and distractions. Worldly people, for example, imagine that they will live forever and lose themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, money, name and fame. Religious people console themselves with fairy tales about God and the soul and post-mortem bliss. Leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, having smoked the opium of the intellectuals, sacrifice their lives on the altar of activism. Ordinary folk live for their children and grandchildren as if procreation has redemptive power.

But it is worse than Woody Allen makes it out to be because we don't know that human existence is meaningless and that salvation from it is an illusion. We suspect that this is the case and we fear that it is the case, but surely we don't know that it is the case. And so our predicament is an uneasy and anxiety-ridden one. Maybe it does ultimately matter how I live. Perhaps something really is at stake in life beyond the petty, mundane, and ephemeral. If we knew that it is all "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," then we would enjoy a measure of peace and doxastic security. We could rest in this knowledge and commit suicide fearlessly and with a good conscience when and if it becomes necessary or desirable.

But as things are, we are left with the anxiety of Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.–Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember’d.

Act 3, Scene 1

Is it Coherently Conceivable that One Person Have Two Natures?

For Shaun Deegan, who 'inspired' a sloppy prototype of the following argument hashed out over Sunday breakfast at a Mesa, Arizona hash house.

…………….

The Question

More precisely: is it coherently conceivable that one person, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God, the Logos, have both an individual divine nature and an individual human nature? (A person, as per Boethius, is an individual substance of a rational nature.)

This is not the same as the question: Is the Incarnation coherently conceivable? For my concern is whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within a broadly Aristotelian ontological framework. My answer: I don't think so. My answer leaves open the question whether the Incarnation is coherently conceivable within some other ontological framework.

The Argument

1. If N is a nature of substance s, then s cannot exist without having N. Natures are essential to the things that have them. In possible worlds jargon: If N is a nature of s, then in every possible world in which s exists, s has N. (The modality in play here is broadly logical or metaphysical.)

2. The Logos L is a necessary being: L exists in every possible world.

3. The Logos has the individual divine nature DN.

4. The Logos has the individual divine nature in every possible world. (from 1, 2, 3)

5. The Logos has the individual human nature HN.

6. The Logos has the individual human nature HN in every possible world. (from 1, 2, 5)

7. The individual human nature HN exists in every possible world. (from 6)

8. No individual human nature exists in every possible world.

9. (7) and (8) are logical contradictories.

Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum,

10. One of the premises is false.

But which one? Let's examine the premises. No classical Trinitarian theist could reject (2) or (3). And no believer in the Incarnation could reject (5). No classical theist could reject (8) given that God might have refrained from creating a natural universe with human beings. So it seems that someone who adheres to each of these theological commitments must reject (1), which is a plank in the Aristotelian platform.

Or, if you adhere to Aristotelian principles, it seems you must abandon the orthodox Chalcedonian line on the Incarnation.

How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful

Mainstream media accounts of Michael Brown of Ferguson fame repeatedly refer to him as an "unarmed teenager." You may recall Rodney King and the repeated press references to him as a "motorist." Trayvon Martin, we were often told, was a "child." Was Brown an unarmed teenager, King a motorist, and Martin a child? Yes, but by the same token Hitler was a head of state and in that one respect no different from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

Here then is one of the more interesting modes of mendacity. One implements one's intention to deceive, not by stating a falsehood as is typical with lying, but by stating a truth, one that diverts attention from more important contextualizing truths. One exploits the belief that unarmed teenagers, motorists, and children are typically harmless in order to distract one's audience from such uncomfortable realities as that Brown attacked a police officer and tried to wrest his weapon away from him; King violated intersections at a high rate of speed, endangered his passenger, tried to outrun the police, and resisted a lawful arrest; Martin launched a vicious deadly attack on a man he believed to be unarmed after threatening him with death.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to hold journalists to that standard.

Bare Particulars versus Aristotelian Substances

In this entry I will attempt to explain the difference between a bare particular and an Aristotelian primary substance. A subsequent post will consider whether this difference is theologically relevant, in particular, whether it is relevant to the theology of the Incarnation.

What is a Particular?

Particulars in the sense relevant to understanding 'bare particular' may be understood in terms of impredicability. Some things can be predicated of other things. Thus being black can be predicated of my cat, and being a property can be predicated of being black; but my cat cannot be predicated of anything. My cat is in this sense 'impredicable.' Particulars are subjects of predication but cannot themselves be predicated. Particulars, then, are ultimate subjects of predication. Thus my cat is an ultimate subject of predication unlike being black which is a subject of predication, but not an ultimate subject of predication. Particulars have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties may be characterized as predicable entities.

Three Senses of 'Bare Particular'

1. The first sense I mention only to set aside. It is a complete misunderstanding to suppose that philosophers who speak of bare or thin particulars, philosophers as otherwise different in their views as Gustav Bergmann, David Armstrong, and J. P. Moreland, mean to suggest that there are particulars that have no properties and stand in no relations. There is no such montrosity as a bare particular in this sense.

In order to explain the two legitimate senses of 'bare particular' I will first provide a general characterization that covers them both. A bare particular is a particular that lacks a nature or (real) essence. It is therefore quite unlike an Aristotelian primary substance. Every such substance has or rather is an individual nature. But while lacking a nature, a bare particular has properties. This 'having' is understood in terms of the asymmetrical external nexus of exemplification. A bare particular is thus tied to its properties by the external nexus of exemplification. To say that the nexus that ties a to F-ness is external is to say that there is nothing in the nature of a, and nothing in the nature of F-ness to require that a exemplify F-ness. After all, a, as bare, lacks a nature, and F-ness, while it has a nature, is not such that there is anything in it to necessitate its being exemplified by a. In this sense a bare particular and its properties are external to each other.

This mutual externality of property to bearer entails what I call promiscuous combinability: any bare particular can exemplify any property, and any property can be exemplified by any bare particular. (A restriction has to be placed on 'property' but we needn't worry about this in the present entry.)

David Armstrong holds that (i) there are conjunctive properties and that (ii) for each bare or thin particular there is the conjunctive property that is the conjunction of all of the particular's non-relational properties. He calls this the particular's nature. But I will avoid this broad use of 'nature.' What I mean by 'nature' is essence. Bare particulars lack essences, but not properties. Therefore, no property or conjunction of properties on a bare-particularist scheme is an essence. Note that it is given or at least not controversial that particulars have properties; it is neither given nor uncontroversial that particulars have essences.

I should also point out that talk of Aristotelian natures or essences would seem to make sense only within a constituent ontology such as Aristotle's.

From the foregoing it should be clear that to speak of a particular as bare is not to deny that it has properties but to speak of the manner in which it has properties. It is to say that it exemplifies them, where exemplification is an asymmetrical external tie. To speak of a particular as an Aristotelian substance is also to speak of the manner in which it has properties.

Consider the dog Fido. Could Fido have been a jellyfish? If Fido is a bare particular, then this is broadly logically possible. Why not, given promiscuous combinability? Any particular can 'hook up' with any property. But if Fido is an Aristotelian substance this is not broadly logically possible. For if Fido is a substance, then he is essentially canine. In 'possible worlds' jargon, Fido, if a substance, is canine in every possible world in which he exists. What's more, his accidental properties are not such as to be exemplified by Fido — where exemplification is an external tie — but are rather "rooted in" and "caused" by the substance which is Fido. (See J. P. Moreland who quotes Richard Connell in Moreland's Universals, McGill-Queen's UP, 2001, p. 93) The idea is that if Fido is an Aristotelian substance, then he has ingredient in his nature various potentialities which, when realized, are manifestations of that nature. The dog's accidental properties are "expressions" of his "inner nature." They flow from that nature. Thus being angry, an accident of Fido as substance, flows from his irascibility which is a capacity ingredient in his nature. If Fido is a bare particular, however, he would be externally tied to the property of being angry. And he would also be externally tied to the property of being a dog.

It follows that if particulars are bare, then all of their properties are had accidentally, and none essentially.

We now come to the two legitimate senses of 'bare particular.'

2. The second sense of 'bare particular' and the first legitimate sense is the constituent-ontological sense. We find this in Bergmann and Armstrong. Accordingly, a bare particular is not an ordinary particular such as a cat or the tail of a cat or a hair or hairball of cat, but is an ontological factor, ingredient, or constituent of an ordinary particular. Let A and B be round red spots that share all qualitative features. For Bergmann there must be something in the spots that grounds their numerical difference. They are two, not one, but nothing qualitative distinguishes them. This ground of numerical difference is the bare particular in each, a in A, and b in B. Thus the numerical difference of A and B is grounded in the numerical (bare) difference of a and b. In one passage, Bergmann states that the sole job of a bare particular is to individuate, i.e., to serve as the ontological ground of numerical difference.

Particulars, unlike universals, are unrepeatable. If F-ness is a universal, F-ness is repeated in each F. But if a is F, a is unrepeatable: it is the very particular it is and no other. One of the jobs of a Bergmannian bare particular is to serve as the ontological ground of an ordinary particular's particularity or thisness. A Bergmannian bare particular is that ontological constituent in an ordinary particular that accounts for its particularity. But note the ambiguity of 'particularity.' We are not now talking about the categorial feature common to all particulars as particulars. We are talking about the 'incommunicable' thisness of any given particular.

3. The third sense of 'bare particular' and the second legitimate sense is the nonconstituent-ontological sense. Summing up the above general characterization, we can say that

A bare particular is a particular that (i) lacks a nature (in the narrow sense lately explained); (ii) has all of its properties by exemplification where exemplification is an asymmetrical external nexus; and as a consequence (iii) has all of its properties accidentally, where P is an accidental property of x iff x exemplifies P but can exist without exemplifying P.

Note that this characterization is neutral as between constituent and nonconstituent ontology. If one is a C-ontologist, then bare particulars are constituents of ordinary particulars. If one is an NC ontologist who rejects the very notion of an ontological constituent, then bare particulars are ordinary particulars.

Conclusion

I have explained the difference between a bare particular and an Aristotelian substance. In a subsequent post I will address the question of how this deep ontological difference bears upon the possibility of a coherent formulation of the Incarnation doctrine.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Third-Person Singular Feminine Pronoun

Elvis Presley, She's Not You

Patsy Cline, She's Got You

Bob Dylan, She Belongs to Me. Bootleg version, 5/7/65. YouTuber comment:

Hazy, warm memories of listening to this on the Bringing It All Back Home album . . . with my sweet girl at an after-party in some guy's pad following a night at the Sink on the Hill in Boulder, 1965 . . . filtered, rosy light . . . youthful bliss before Vietnam . . .

Beatles, She's a Woman

Jefferson Airplane, She Has Funny Cars

Johnny Cash, She Used to Love Me a Lot

Beatles, She Said She Said

Lesley Gore, She's a Fool

Beatles, She's Leaving Home

Zombies, She's Not There

Eric Clapton, She's Waiting

Substance, Supposit, Incarnation, Trinity, and the Heresy of Nestorius

I need to answer three questions. This post addresses only the first.

1. What is the difference between an Aristotelian primary substance and a supposit (hypostasis, suppositum)?

2. Is there any non-theological basis for this distinction?

3. If the answer to (2) is negative, is the addition of suppposita to one's Aristotelian ontology a case of legitimate metaphysical revision or a case of an ad hoc theoretical patch job? According to Marilyn McCord Adams, "Metaphysical revision differs from ad hoc theoretical patching insofar as it attempts to make the new data systematically unsurprising in a wider theoretical context." ("Substance and Supposits," p. 40)

The First Question

By 'substance' I mean an Aristotelian primary substance, an individual or singular complete concrete entity. Among the characteristics of substances are the following: substances, unlike universal properties, cannot be exemplified or instantiated; substances, unlike accidents, cannot inhere in anything; substances, unlike heaps and aggregates, are per se unities. Thus Socrates and his donkey are each a substance, but the classical mereological sum of the two is not a substance.

Now what is a supposit? Experts in medieval philosophy — and I am not one of them, nota bene — sometimes write as if there is no distinction between a substance and a supposit. Thus Richard Cross: "Basically a supposit is a complete being that is neither instantiated or exemplified, nor inherent in another." ("Relations, Universals, and the Abuse of Tropes," PAS 79, 2005, p. 53.) And Marilyn McCord Adams speaks of Socrates and Plato as "substance individuals" and then puts "hypostases or supposits" in apposition to the first phrase. (PAS 79, 2005, p. 15)

My first question, then, is: Is there any more-than-verbal difference between a substance and a supposit, and if so, what is it?

One answer that suggests itself is that, while every substance has a supposit, some substances have alien supposits. That is, some substances are their own supposits, while others are not their own supposits, but have alien supposits. (I take the phrase 'alien supposit' from Adams, p. 31 et passim.) A substance has an alien supposit if and only if it is not its own supposit. I understand Aristotle to maintain or at least be committed to the proposition that every (primary) substance is essentially its own supposit. (I rather doubt that the Stagirite ever raised the question of alien supposition.) If so, then no substance is possibly such as to have an alien supposit. If alien supposition is metaphysically or broadly logically possible, however, then we have a ground for a more-than-terminological distinction between substances and supposits. Whether the converse of this conditional holds is a further question. For it may be that there is a ground for the distinction even if alien supposition is not possible.

Incarnation, Trinity, and the separated soul's survival between death and resurrection are theological examples of alien supposition. Whether there are non-theological examples is a further, and very important question, one the answer to which has consequences for questions (2) and (3) above.

The Incarnation is an example of alien supposition as I will now try to explain.

The orthodox view is that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, the Word, becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth. Although the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as we read in the NT, the Word does not merely assume a human body, nor does it acquire a universal property, humanity; the Word assumes a particularized human nature, body and soul. The eternal Word assumes or 'takes on' a man, an individual man, with an intellectual soul and and animal body. But now a problem looms, one that can be articulated in terms of the following aporetic tetrad:

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)

b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)

c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

The tetrad is logically inconsistent: any three limbs taken in conjunction entail the negation of the remaining one. Thus the conjunction (a) & (c) & (d) entails the negation of (b). For if there are two primary substances of a rational nature, the Word and Christ, then there are two persons each with his own individualized nature, contra Chalcedonian orthodoxy, according to whch there is exactly one person in two natures. The solution to the tetrad is to deny (d), the very natural Aristotelian assumption that every substance is its own supposit. One does this by maintaining that, while the individualized human nature of Christ is a substance, it is not a substance that supports itself: it has an alien supposit, namely, the Second Person of the Trinity.

If the Incarnation as Chalcedonian orthodoxy understands it is actual, then it is possible. If so, alien supposition is possible, which straightaway entails a distinction between substance and supposit: while every substance has or is a supposit, not every substance has or is its own supposit. The individualized human nature of Christ is a supposited substance but is not itself a supposit.

Let me now say a bit about the Trinity. Here too a problem looms that can be cast in the mold of an aporetic tetrad.

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)

e. There are exactly three divine persons, Father, Son, Holy Ghost . (Rejection of 'Quaternity')

f. The individualized nature of God is a primary substance of a rational nature.

d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

Again, the tetrad is inconsistent, and again the solution is to reject (d) by saying that, while the individualized divine nature is a primary substance, it is not one that supposits itself: it has three alien supposits, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The Son is thus the alien supposit of both God's divine nature and Christ's human nature.

My first question concerned the difference between a substance and supposit. My tentative answer is that while only substances can be supposits, there are substances that are not their own supposits nor are they supposits for anything else, an example being the individualized human nature of Christ.

Is there a non-theological basis for the distinction? if not, then the suspicion arises that the distinction is purely ad hoc, crafted to save tenets of orthodox Christian theology. But this is a question for another occasion.

What's wrong with ad-hocery?

Is Anything Real Self-Identical?

I am sometimes tempted by the following line of thought. But I am also deeply suspicious of it.

Are the 'laws of thought' 'laws of reality' as well? Since such laws are necessities of thought, the question can also be put by asking whether or not the necessities of thought are also necessities of being. It is surely not self-evident that principles that govern how we must think if we are to make sense to ourselves and to others must also apply to mind-independent reality. One cannot invoke self-evidence since such philosophers as Nagarjuna and Hegel and Nietzsche have denied (in different ways) that the laws of thought apply to the real.

Consider, for example, the Law of Identity:

Id. Necessarily, for any x, x = x.

(Id) seems harmless enough and indisputable. Everything, absolutely everything, is identical to itself, and this doesn't just happen to be the case. But what does 'x' range over? Thought-accusatives? Or reals? Or both? What I single out in an act of mind, as so singled out, cannot be thought of as self-diverse. No object of thought, qua object of thought, is self-diverse. And no object of thought, as such, is both F and not F at the same time, in the same respect, and in the same sense. So there is no question but that Identity and Non-Contradiction apply to objects of thought, and are aptly described as laws of thought. (Excluded Middle is trickier and so I leave it to one side.) What's more, these laws of thought hold for all possible finite, discursive, ectypal intellects. Thus what we have here is a transcendental principle, at least, not one grounded in the contingent empirical psychology or physiology of the type of animals we happen to be. Transcendentalism maybe, but no psychologism or physiologism!

But do Identity and Non-Contradiction apply to 'reals,' i.e., to entities whose existence is independent of their being objects of thought? Are these transcendental principles also ontological principles? Is the necessity of such principles as (Id) grounded in the transcendental structure of the finite intellect, or in being itself? Are the principles merely transcendental or are they also transcendent? (It goes without saying that I am using these 't' words in the Kantian way.)

The answer is not obvious.

Consider a pile of leaves. If I refer to something using the phrase, 'that pile of leaves,' I thereby refer to one self-identical pile; as so referred to, the pile cannot be self-diverse. But is the pile self-identical in itself (apart from my referring to it, whether in thought or in overt speech)?

In itself, in its full concrete extramental reality, the pile is not self-identical in that it is composed of many numerically different leaves, and has many different properties. In itself, the pile is both one and many. As both one and many, it is both self-identical and self-diverse. It is self-identical in that it is one pile; it is self-diverse in that this one pile is composed of many numerically different parts and has many different properties. Since the parts and properties are diverse from each other, and these parts and properties make up the pile, the pile is just as much self-diverse as it is self-identical. The pile is of course not a pure diversity; it is a diversity that constitutes one thing. So, in concrete reality, the pile of leaves is both self-identical and self-diverse.

If you insist that the pile's being self-identical excludes its being self-diverse, then you are abstracting from its having many parts and properties. So abstracting, you are no longer viewing the pile as it is in concrete mind-independent reality, but considering it as an object of thought merely. You are simply leaving out of consideration its plurality of parts and of properties. For the pile to be self-identical in a manner to exclude self-diversity, the pile would have to be simple as opposed to complex. But it is not simple in that it has many parts and many properties.

The upshot is that the pile of leaves, in concrete reality, is both one and many and therefore both self-identical and self-diverse. But this is a contradiction. Or is the contradiction merely apparent? Now the time-honored way to defuse a contradiction is by making a distinction.

One will be tempted to say that the respect in which the pile is self-identical is distinct from the respect in which it is self-diverse. The pile is self-identical in that it is one pile; the pile is self-diverse in that it has many parts and properties. No doubt.

But 'it has many parts and properties' already contains a contradiction. For what does 'it' refer to? 'It' refers to the pile which does not have parts and properties, but is its parts and properties. The pile is not something distinct from its parts and properties. The pile is a unity in and through a diversity of parts and properties. As such, the pile is both self-identical and self-diverse.

What the above reasoning suggests is that such 'laws of thought' as Identity and Non-Contradiction do not apply to extramental reality. No partite thing, such as a pile of leaves, is self-identical in a manner to exclude self-diversity. Such things are as self-diverse as they are self-identical. So partite things are self-contradictory.

From here we can proceed in two ways.

The contradictoriness of partite entities can be taken to argue their relative unreality. For nothing that truly exists can be self-contradictory. This is the way of F. H. Bradley. One takes the laws of thought as criterial for what is ultimately real, shows that partite entities are not up to this exacting standard, and concludes that partite entities belong to Appearance.

The other way takes the lack of fit between logic and reality as reflecting poorly on logic: partite entities are taken to be fully real, and logic as a falsification. One can find this theme in Nietzsche and in Hegel.

Christology, Reduplicatives, and Qua-Entities

For Dave Bagwill, who is trying to understand the Chalcedonian definition.

…………….

Consider this triad, and whether it is logically consistent:

1. The man Jesus = the 2nd Person of the Trinity.
2. The 2nd Person of the Trinity exists necessarily.
3. The man Jesus does not exist necessarily.

Each of these propositions is one that a Christian who understands his doctrine ought to accept. But how can they all be true? In the presence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, according to which, roughly, if two things are identical, then they share all properties, the above triad appears inconsistent: The conjunction of (1) and (2) entails the negation of (3). Can this apparent inconsistency be shown to be merely apparent?

Reduplicatives to the rescue. Say this:

4. Jesus qua 2nd Person exists necessarily while Jesus qua man does not exist necessarily.

(The stylistically elegant ‘while’ may be replaced for truth-functional purposes with the logician's ampersand.) Now one might object that reduplicative formulations are not helpful unto salvation from inconsistency since in the crucial cases they entail outright contradictions. They merely hide and postpone the difficulty. Thus, given that being a Person of the Trinity entails existing necessarily, and being a human animal entails existing contingently, (4) entails

5. Jesus exists necessarily & Jesus does not exist necessarily.

And that is a plain contradiction. But this assumes that reduplicative constructions need not be taken with full ontological seriousness as requiring reduplicative truth-makers. It assumes that what we say with reduplicatives can be said without them, and that, out in the world, there is nothing that corresponds to them, or at least that we have no compelling reason to commit ourselves to reduplicative entities, qua-entities, one might call them. That assumption now needs to be examined. Suppose we parse (4) as

6. Jesus-qua-2nd Person exists necessarily & Jesus-qua-man does not exist necessarily

where the hyphenated expressions function as nouns, qua-nouns (to give them a name) that denote qua-entities. It is easy to see that (6) avoids contradiction for the simple reason that the two qua-entities are non-identical. But what is non-identical may nonetheless be the same if we have a principled way of distinguishing between identity and sameness. (Hector-Neri Castaneda is one philosopher who distinguishes between identity and a number of sameness relations.) Essentially what I have just done is made a distinction in respects while taking respects with full ontological seriousness. This sort of move is nothing new. Consider a cognate case.

Suppose I have a red boat that I paint blue. Then we can say that there are distinct times, t1 and t2, such that b is red at t1 and blue at t2. That can be formulated as a reduplicative: b qua existing at t1 is red and b qua existing at t2 is blue. One could take that as just a funny way of talking, or one could take it as a perspicuous representation of the ontological structure of the world. Suppose the latter. Then, adding hyphens, one could take oneself to be ontologically committed to temporal parts, which are a species of qua-entity. Thus b-at-t1 is a temporal part that is distinct from b-at-t2. These temporal parts are distinct since they differ property-wise: one is red the other blue. Nevertheless, they are the same in that they are parts of the same whole, the temporally extended boat.

The conceptual move we are making here is analogous to the move we make when we say that a ball is green in its northern hemisphere and red in its southern hemisphere in order to defuse the apparent contradiction of saying that it is red and green at the same time. Here different spatial parts have different properties, whereas in the boat example, different temporal parts have different properties.

Can we apply this to the Incarnation and say that Jesus-qua-God is F (immortal, impassible, necessarily existent, etc.) while Jesus-qua-man is not F? That would avoid the contradiction while upholding such obvious truths as that divinity entails immortality while humanity entails mortality. We could then say, borrowing a term from the late Hector-Neri Castaneda (1924-1991), that Jesus-qua-God is consubstantiated with Jesus-qua-man. (Hector the atheist is now rolling around in his grave.) The two are the same, contingently the same. They are ontological parts of the same substance, and are, in that sense, consubstantiated. Jesus is God the Son where ‘is’ expresses a contingent sameness relation, rather than strict identity (which is governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals and the Necessity of Identity).

The idea is that God the Son and Jesus are, or are analogous to, ontological parts of one and the same whole. This is an admittedly bizarre idea, and probably cannot be made to work. But it is useful to canvass all theoretical possibilities.

Mail Voting and Civic Ritual

The latest NRO column from Spencer Case, our man 'on the ground' in Boulder. Excerpt:

A voter, no less than a judge or a juror, has the ability and obligation to transcend personal desires and to think in terms of the general good when he votes. There is thus a distinction between the private citizens who are voting and the public office of voter which each individual voter briefly occupies on Election Day. The distinction between the two is psychologically reinforced when citizens are expected to cast their ballots in a public space as opposed to from their living-room sofa.

First-Order and Second-Order Voter Fraud

Here:

One of the biggest voter frauds may be the idea promoted by Attorney General Eric Holder and others that there is no voter fraud, that laws requiring voters to have a photo identification are just attempts to suppress black voting.

Upon leaving the polling place this morning I joked that there ought to be two receptacles for ballots, the usual one for Republican and Libertarian ballots, and a second one for Democrat ballots — a shredder. This elicited a hearty laugh. That would be real vote suppression.

But be careful with the jokes in these politically correct times. What you can get away with depends on your precinct. Mine, though populated with plenty of geezers who cherish an irrational and wholly sentimental attachment to the Dems, as if the year is still 1960, is essentially conservative and right-thinking. Besides, I was in full hiking regalia and armed with a big stick.

Vote the Party, Not the Candidate

Here’s why. Whatever party takes over the Senate will not only be able to appoint the body’s Majority Leader, it will control the committee chairmanships, which in turn will determine what types of legislation will be entertained by the Senate. Because the Senate has the power of advise and consent when the president appoints judges and justices to the federal bench, the partisan composition of the Senate will shape the development of the courts’ jurisprudence for many decades to come. Thus, it is of little consequence what one or two dissenting Senators may have said on the campaign trail.

Those who utter the “vote for the man, not the party” slogan, though undoubtedly offering it as a sincere call to “rise above” partisan politics, do not really understand that partisanship is embedded in the very nature of our political institutions. To lament partisanship is to lament one of the consequences of being a free people. So, if you don’t like partisanship, you should move to Cuba.

One Person, Two Natures

A reader inquires,

The Creed of Chalcedon (A.D 451) set forth the following dogma, among others: (my emphasis)

".. one and the same Christ ….to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son . . ."

The deliberate language of 'two natures' in 'one Person' is really remarkable. When you find some time, can you give me a bit of direction in determining, first – what it is for a person to 'have a human nature' and second – depending on that answer, is there any way to explain the concept of a person having two 'natures'? I even find the statement that human persons have both an 'animal nature' and a 'human nature' troublesome. There is a category mistake that I sense but cannot yet explain.

The reader poses three questions. After answering them, I will pose a fourth question that the reader doesn't explicitly ask.

Q1. How can a human person have both an animal nature and a human nature? I don't see much of a difficulty here. If man is a rational animal (Aristotle), then Socrates, in virtue of being human, is an animal. Now he is both animal and human essentially as opposed to accidentally. Thus Socrates could not have existed without being an animal: he could not have been inanimate, say a statue or a valve-lifter in a '57 Chevy. And he could not have existed without being human: he could not have been nonhuman like a cat or a jelly fish. Whether or not every essential feature of a thing is part of its nature, every nature is essential to a thing that has it. So I see no problem in saying that Socrates has both an animal nature and human nature, where the latter includes the former, though not conversely. Nature N1 includes nature N2 just in case it is impossible that something have N1 but not have N2.

Q2. How can a person have two natures? This is answered above. Humanity and animality are distinct — the first includes the second, but not conversely — but there is nothing to prevent one and the same individual substance from having both of them.

Q3. What is it for a person to have a human nature? On the Boethian definition, a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. So the question might be: How can a rational individual — an individual being that has the capacity to reason — also be human? Well, I don't see much difficulty here. Not every person is a human being, but every human being is a person. So humanity includes personhood.

Q4. How can one and the same person have two seemingly incompatible natures? I suspect that this is the question the reader really wants to pose. There is no obvious problem about one person having two natures if they are logically compatible as they are if one includes the other. The problem is that while humanity includes animality, humanity appears to exclude divinity. Among the marks of humanity: animality, mortality, mutability, passibility; among the marks of divinity: spirituality (non-animality), immortality, immutability, impassibility.

According to Chalcedon, one and the same person is both fully human and fully divine. Now, necessarily, anything human is passible, thus capable of suffering. But, necessarily, nothing divine is passible; hence nothing divine is capable of suffering. So if one and the same person is both human and divine, then one and the same person is both capable of suffering and not capable of suffering. This is a contradiction. Herein lies the difficulty.

The reader needs to tell me whether this is the problem that is exercising him. (Note that the problem can be developed using attributes other than passibility.)

I wonder whether the reader would be satisfied with the following strategy and the following analogy. Christ qua human is capable of suffering, but Christ qua divine is not. This removes the contradiction. Analogy: Obama qua president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but Obama qua citizen is not.

I am not endorsing either the reduplicative strategy or the analogy.

Malcolm Pollack, Introvert

Here.

The New Threats to Free Speech

Here.

Ad Ignorantiam and the Law

The day before yesterday I wrote,

In a criminal case the probative bar is set very high: the accused has to be shown guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Here too there seems to be a legitimate appeal to ignorance: if it has not been shown that the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, the conclusion to be drawn is that he is not guilty.

We will have to examine this more carefully in a separate post.

Herewith, the separate post. Plainly, the following is an invalid argument:

1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.

ergo

2. Smith did not kill Jones.

Examples like this appear to support the idea that some appeals to ignorance (or arguments from ignorance) are reasonable and non-fallacious. According to Douglas N. Walton,

. . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument, but it can be reasonable in the context of the rules of argument in the criminal law. (Informal Logic: A Handbook for Critical Argumentation, Cambridge UP, 2007, 20th ed., p. 47)

I wonder if this is right. Which better represents a criminal process that terminates in an acquittal? Is it the above argument or the following argument?

1. It was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that it was Smith who killed Jones.

ergo

3. The presumption of Jones' innocence has not been defeated and Jones is in the eyes of the law not guilty.

I now think it is the second argument. But note that (i) the second argument is valid, and (ii) there is no appeal to ignorance in the second argument. The validity of the second, enthymematic, argument is obvious when we make explicit the tacit assumption, namely, that

4. If the accused in a criminal proceeding has not been proven to be guilty of the crime with which he is charged beyond a reasonable doubt, then the presumption of innocence has not been defeated and the accused is in the eyes of the law not guilty.

So the second argument is (formally) valid. It also does not represent an appeal to ignorance. One is not arguing that: Jones is not guilty in reality (as opposed to in the eyes of the law) because it has not been proven that he is not guilty. One is arguing that the presumption of innocence has not been defeated. The following are different propositions:

a. Jones is not guilty

b. Jones' presumption of innocence (POI) has not been defeated.

It ought to be obvious that they are different. They are logically independent. Each is consistent with the negation of the other. Thus the following sets are consistent dyads: {Jones is guilty; Jones' POI has not been defeated}, {Jones is not guilty; Jones' POI has been defeated}.

Conclusion

According to Walton, ". . . the criminal law presumes that a person is not guilty if he has not been shown to be guilty. This is an ad ignorantiam form of argument . . ." I think this betrays a misunderstanding of the notion of presumption, and in particular, presumption of innocence.

The presumption is not that a person is not guilty if he has not be shown to be guilty; the presumption is that he is to be treated as if not guilty, if he has not been shown to be guilty. In the case of O. J. Simpson, almost everyone agrees that he is guilty of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Yet he was found not guilty. Obviously, there is a difference between being not guilty (being not guilty in fact) and being found not guilty (being not guilty in the eyes of the law). The presumption of innocence was not defeated in that trial. But that is consistent, as I argued above, with the accused's being guilty.

It is therefore a mistake to think that the POI procedural rule embodies an appeal to ignorance. And since there is no appeal to ignorance here, there is no reasonable or non-fallacious appeal to ignorance.

UPDATE: Dave Bagwill writes,

My grand-dad did not mince words, nor did he suffer fools. When I tried to trick him with verbal technicalities, he would accuse me of "trying to pick the fly shit out of the pepper".

He would have said that about your latest post 'On Ad Ignorantiam and the Law', but he would have been wrong. You made some very fine, fine distinctions in that post that really cut to the heart of the matter. Thanks, and well done. (I've used that book by Walton for years and generally found it useful.)

You're welcome, Dave. My response to your grandfather would be to make yet another distinction, one between hairsplitting and the drawing of necessary distinctions, and then distinguish different kinds of hairsplitting.

One sort of hairsplitting is to make distinctions that correspond to nothing real, distinctions that are merely verbal. The 'distinction' between a glow bug and a fire fly, for example, is merely verbal: there is no distinction in reality. A glow bug just is a firefly. Similarly there is no distinction in reality between a bottle's being half-full and being half-empty. The only possible difference is in the attitude of someone, a drunk perhaps, who is elated at the bottle's being half-full and depressed at its being half-empty.

But this is not what people usually mean by the charge of hairsplitting. What they seem to mean is the drawing of distinctions that don't make a practical difference. But whether a distinction makes a practical difference depends on the context and on one's purposes. The truth of the matter is that there are very few occasions on which the charge of hairsplitting is justly made. On almost all occasions, the accuser is simply advertising his inability to grasp a distinction that the subject-matter requires.

Walton may be the premier writer on informal logic. His book is apparently well-thought-of. 2007 saw the 20th edition. I'd guess there have been editions since then.