Here, via Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's "Jack-hammering":
Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)
My posts on Rand are collected here.
Liberals, whose love of political correctness gets the better of their intellects, typically object to the phrase 'illegal alien.' But why? Are these people not in our country illegally, as the result of breaking laws? And are they not aliens, people from another country?
"But you are labelling them!" Yes, of course. Label we must if we are not to lose our minds entirely. 'Feral cat' is a label. Do you propose that we not distinguish between feral and non-feral cats? Do you distinguish between the positive and the negative terminals on your car battery? You'd better! But 'positive terminal' and 'negative terminal' are labels.
Label we must. There is no getting around it if we are to think at all. There is a political outfit that calls itself 'No Labels.' But that too is a label. Those who eschew all labels label themselves 'idiots.'
Related to this is the injunction, 'Never generalize!' which is itself a generalization. Label we must and generalize we must. Making distinctions and labelling them, and constructing sound generalizations on their basis are activities essential to, thought not exhaustive of, the life of the intellect.
Liberals also object to 'illegal immigrant.' In fact, the AP has banned the phrase. But given that there are both legal and illegal immigrants, 'illegal immigrant' is a useful label. There is nothing derogatory about it. It is a descriptive term like 'hypertensive' or 'diabetic.'
One consideration adduced at the AP site is that actions are illegal, not persons. But suppose your doctor tells you that you are diabetic, and you protest, "Doc, not only are you labelling me, you are forgetting that diabetes is a medical condition and that no person is a medical condition." The good doctor would then have to explain that a diabetic is a person who has diabetes. Similarly, an illegal immigrant is one who is in the country illegally. There is the act of illegally crossing the border, but there is also the state of being here illegally.
Plain talk is an excellent antidote to liberal nonsense. When a liberal or a leftist misuses a word in an intellectually dishonest attempt at forwarding his agenda, a right-thinking person ought to protest. Whether you protest or not, you must not acquiesce in their pernicious misuse of language. Or, as I have said more than once in these pages,
If you are a conservative, don't talk like a liberal!
Bear in mind that many of the battles of the culture war are fought, won, and lost on linguistic ground. If we let our opponents destroy the common language in which alone reasonable debate can be conducted, then much more is lost than these particular debates. The liberal-left misuse of language is fueled by their determination to win politically at all costs and by any means, including linguistic hijacking.
Language matters!
"But how could I fail to be?" By not minding your being here now. The rocks on the trail are here now but they cannot attend to their being here now. They can't appreciate or appropriate or affirm their being here now.
As the existentialists rightly pointed out, to be for a human being is to be in a special mode: to be minding, if you will. In Heideggerian jargon, to be for a human being is to be the Da of Sein; it is to be the Lichtung in which the rest of what is is gelichtet and made manifest.
Appreciate what you have while you have it. An actual shack is better than a remembered or merely imagined or expected or merely possible palace. Do not allow the present and actual good to suffer diminution by comparison to the modally and temporally and spatially elsewhere.
This is it. This is your life. Right here and right now. If it is good, appreciate it. If it needs improving, act right here and right now to improve it, but without failing to appreciate the good that is here and now yours.
For the actualist, the actual alone exists: the unactual, whether merely possible or impossible, does not exist. The actualist is not pushing platitudes: he is not telling us that the actual alone is actual or that the merely possible is not actual. 'Merely possible' just means 'possible but not actual.' The actualist is saying something non-platitudinous, something that may be reasonably controverted, namely, that only the actual exists: the merely possible and the impossible do not exist.
Analogously for the presentist. For the presentist, the (temporally) present alone exists: the nonpresent, whether past or future, does not exist. The presentist is not pushing the platitude that the past is no longer. He is saying something stronger: the past is not at all.
For the actualist, then, the merely possible does not exist. There just is no such item as the merely possible fat man in my doorway. Nevertheless, it is true, actually true, that there might have been a fat man in my doorway. (My neighbor Ted from across the street is a corpulent fellow; surely he might have come over to pay me a visit. 'Might' as lately tokened is not to be read epistemically.) The just-mentioned truth cannot 'hang in the air'; it must be grounded in some reality. To put it another way, the merely possible — whether a merely possible individual or a merely possible state of affairs — has a 'reality' that we need somehow to accommodate. The merely possible is not nothing. That is a datum, a Moorean fact.
Similarly, it is true now that I hiked yesterday, even if presentism is true and the past does not exist. So there has to be some 'reality' to the past, and we need to find a way to accommodate it. Yesterday's gone, as Chad and Jeremy told us back in '64. Gone but not forgotten: veridically remembered (in part) hence not a mere nothing. That too is a datum.
The data I have just reviewed are expressed in the following two parallel aporetic tetrads, the first modal, the second temporal.
Modal Tetrad
1. The merely possible is not actual.
2. The merely possible is not nothing.
3. To exist = to be actual.
4. To exist = not to be nothing.
Temporal Tetrad
1t. The merely past is not present.
2t. The merely past is not nothing.
3t. To exist = to be present.
4. To exist = not to be nothing.
Each tetrad has limbs that are jointly inconsistent but individually plausible. Philosophical problems arise when plausibilities come into logical conflict. The tetrads motivate ersatzism since the first can be solved by adopting actualist ersatzism (also known simply as actualism) and the second by adopting presentist ersatzism. (Note that one could be a presentist without being an ersatzer.)
The ersatzer solution is to deny the first limb of each tetrad by introducing substitute items that 'go proxy' for the items which, on actualism and presentism, do not exist. These substitute items must of course exist while satisfying the strictures of actualism and presentism, respectively. The substitute items must actually exist and presently exist, respectively. So how does it work?
The actualist maintains, most plausibly, that everything is actual. But the merely possible must be accommodated: it is not nothing. The merely possible can be accommodated by introducing actually existent abstract states of affairs and abstract properties. Merely possible concrete states of affairs are actual abstract states of affairs that do not obtain. Merely possible concrete individuals are abstract properties that are not instantiated. Suppose there are n cats. There might have been n +1. The possibility of there being in concrete reality n + 1 cats is an abstract state of affairs that does not obtain, but might have obtained. Suppose you believe that before Socrates came into existence there was the de re possibility that Socrates, that very individual, come into existence. Then, if you are an actualist, you could accommodate the reality of this possibility by identifying the de re possibility of Socrates with an actually existent haecceity property, Socrateity. The actual existence in concrete reality of Socrates would then be the being-instantiated of this haecceity property.
Possible worlds can be accommodated by identifying them with maximal abstract states of affairs or maximal abstract propositions. Some identify worlds with maximally consistent abstract sets, but this proposal faces, I believe, Cantorian difficulties. The main idea, however, is that possible worlds for the actualist ersatzer are maximal abstract objects. Now one of the possible worlds is of course the actual world. It follows immediately that the actual world must not be confused with the concrete universe. It may sound strange, but for the actualist ersatzer, the actual world is an abstract object, a maximal proposition.
The actualist, then, rejects (1) and replaces it with
1*. A merely possible concrete item is an actual abstract object that possibly obtains or possibly is instantiated or possibly is true.
The presentist ersatzer does something similar with (1t). He replaces it with
1t*. A merely past concrete item is a temporally present abstract object that did obtain or was instantiated or was true or had a member.
An Argument Against Actualist Ersatzism
Let's examine the view that possible worlds are maximal abstract propositions. If so, the actual world is the true maximal proposition, and actuality is truth. Given that there is a plurality of worlds, whichever world is actual is contingently actual. So our world, call it 'Charley,' being the one and only (absolutely) actual world, is contingently actual, i.e., contingently true. Contingent affirmative truths, however, need truth-makers. So Charley needs a truth-maker. The truth-maker of Charley is the concrete universe as we know it and love it. Since actuality is truth, the concrete universe is not and cannot be actual.
So the concrete universe exists but is not actual! But this contradicts (3) above, according to which existence is actuality. The actualist ersatzer is committed to all of the following, but they cannot all be true:
5. Actuality is truth.
6. Truth is a property of propositions, not of concreta or merelogical sums of concreta.
7. The concrete universe is a concretum or a sum of concreta.
8. Everything that exists is actual: there are no mere possibilia or impossibilia.
9. The concrete universe exists.
This is an inconsistent pentad because any four of the limbs, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one. For example, the conjunction of the first four limbs entails the negation of (9).
Curiously, in attempting to solve the modal tetrad, the actualist embraces an inconsistent pentad. Not good!
An Argument Against Presentist Ersatzism
A parallel inconsistent pentad is easily constructed. The target here is the view that times are maximal propositions.
5t. Temporal presentness is truth.
6. Truth is a property of propositions, not of concreta or merelogical sums of concreta.
7. The concrete universe is a concretum or a sum of concreta.
8t. Everything that exists is present: there are no merely past or merely future items.
9. The concrete universe exists.
One sort of presentist erstazer is committed to all five propositions, but they obviously cannot all be true.
There are courageous souls who will say publically what others think but are afraid to say. True. But the courageousness of the saying does not underwrite the truth of what is said. Courage does not validate content.
Muhammad Atta and the 9/11 terrorists had the courage of their false and murderous convictions.
As a corollary, passion is not probative. The passion with which a proposition is propounded is no proof of it. It is scant praise of a person, and perhaps no praise at all, to say, as is often nowadays said, that so-and-so is passionate about his beliefs. So what? Hitler was passionate.
We have need of dispassion these days, not passion. William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, first stanza:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We patzers can sport with Caissa and her charms without too much harm. It is the very strong players, who yet fall short of the highest level, who run the greatest risk. Chess sucks them in then leaves them high and dry. The goddess Caissa becomes the she-devil Impecunia.
It doesn't bother me in the least that my neighbors and casual acquaintances do not engage me where I live. I expect such relations to be superficial and conventional. But I expect more from relatives even though this expectation is irrational.
I have no trouble accepting that propinquity is no guarantee of spiritual affinity. Why then do I suppose that consanguinity should be such a guarantee?
Blood is thicker than water, but for a Luftmensch, pneuma is what counts.
It was my good fortune to happen across Rosselini's Socrates the night before last, Good Friday night, on Turner Classic Movies. From 1971, in Italian with English subtitles. I tuned in about 15 minutes late, but it riveted my attention until the end. It is full of excellent, accurate dialog based on the texts of Plato that record Socrates' last sayings and doings. I was easily able to recognize material from the Platonic dialogues Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and the immortal Phaedo. The dialog moves fast, especially in Italian, and near the end it was difficult to read the fast moving subtitles through eyes filled with tears.
One ought to meditate on the fact that the two greatest teachers of the West, and two great teachers of humanity, Socrates and Jesus, were unjustly executed by the State. This is something contemporary liberals, uncritical in their belief in the benevolence of government, ought especially to consider.
My eyes glued to the TV, I was struck by how Socratic my own attitude toward life and death is. Death is not to be feared, but is to be prepared for and embraced as a portal to knowledge. It is the ultimate adventure for the truth seeker. It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is such a portal even though we cannot know it to be so in this life. There is no dogmatism in the Socratic wisdom: its incarnation does not claim to know here what can only be known, if it will be known, there. He is an inquirer, not an ideologue defending an institutional status quo. The point of the arguments recorded in the Phaedo, and partially rehearsed in the movie, is to persuade sincere truth seekers of the reasonableness of the philosopher's faith, not to prove what cannot be proven, and especially not to benighted worldlings who care little about truth, smug worldlings whose hearts and minds have been suborned by their love of power and money and the pleasures of the flesh.
His friends want the seventy-year-old philosopher to escape and have made preparations. But what could be the point of prolonging one's bodily life after one has done one's best and one's duty in a world of shadows and ignorance that can offer us really nothing in the end but more of the same? This vale of soul-making is for making souls: it cannot possibly be our permanent home. (Hence the moral absurdity of transhumanism which is absurd technologically as well.) Once the soul has exhausted the possibilties of life behind the veil of ignorance and has reached the end of the via dolorosa through this vale of tears then it is time to move on, to nothingness or to something better.
Or perchance to something worse? Here is where the care of the soul here and now comes in. Since the soul may live on, one must care for it: one must live justly and strive for the good. One must seek the knowledge of true being while there is still time lest death catch us unworthy, or worthy only of annihilation or worse.
Socrates' life was his best argument: he taught from his Existenz. He taught best while the hemlock was being poured and his back was to the wall. His dialectic was rooted in his life. His dialectic was not cleverness for the classroom but wisdom for the death chamber.
Whether his life speaks to you or not depends on the kind of person you are, in keeping with Fichte's famous remark to the effect that the philosophy one chooses depends on the sort of person one is.
Does it matter whether Socrates existed and did the things attributed to him in the Platonic writings? I don't see that it does. What alone matters is whether a person here and now can watch a movie like Rossellini's and be moved by it sufficiently to change his own life. What matters is the Idea and the Ideal.
What matters is whether one can appropriate the Socratic message for oneself as Johann Gottlieb Fichte did in this very Socratic passage from The Vocation of Man (LLA, 150):
Should I be visited by corporeal suffering, pain, or disease, I cannot avoid feeling them, for they are accidents of my nature ; and as long as I remain here below, I am a part of Nature. But they shall not grieve me. They can only touch the nature with which, in a wonderful manner, I am united, not my self, the being exalted above all Nature. The sure end of all pain, and of all sensibility to pain, is death; and of all things which the mere natural man is wont to regard as evils, this is to me the least. I shall not die to myself, but only to others ; to those who remain behind, from whose fellowship I am torn: for myself the hour of Death is the hour of Birth to a new, more excellent life.
Bob Dylan, See That My Grave is Kept Clean
Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin'
Bob Dylan, Gospel Plow
Bob Dylan, Fixin' to Die
Johnny Cash, Ain't No Grave
Johnny Cash, Redemption
Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus
Johnny Cash, Hurt
Mississippi John Hurt, You Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley
Johnny Cash, Final Interview. He speaks of his faith starting at 5:15.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, p. 45e: "Go on, believe! It does no harm."
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:
The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of iron; such is the human condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is not more at least [at last?] than that of privation. This stage has to be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron is necessary.
'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)
Lawrence Auster died early this Good Friday morning. May he rest in peace and come to know what here below one can only believe. Here is Laura Wood's obituary. Auster's site will remain online and is well-worth reading. I must say, however, that I consider him an extremist and share Steve Burton's misgivings about his work. Auster's attacks on distinguished fellow conservatives are often wrongheaded and always tactically foolish, demonstrating as they do a failure to realize that politics is a practical business and that the best and the better are often the enemy of the good. We need a broad coalition to defeat leftists and Islamists. A certain amount of intramural squabbling is to be expected and may even be healthy, but not if it ramps up to internecine warfare. Dennis Prager is not the enemy because he is optimistic about e pluribus unum while you are not. Know who the enemy is.
With Auster and other ultra conservatives, however, it seems one can never be too far Right, and that one who grants the least scintilla of validity to any liberal notion is just as much an enemy as the hardest hard-core left-winger. From a practical point of view, such extremism is profoundly stupid. The ultras will end up talking to themselves in their narrow enclaves and have no effect on the wider culture all the while feeding their false sense of their own significance.
Ideological extremism is a fascinating topic. There are leftists for whom one cannot be too far Left, rightists for whom one cannot be too far Right, and, as we have recently observed in the case of Thomas Nagel and his latest book, atheistic naturalists for whom one cannot be too much of an atheist and too much of a naturalist.
Poor Nagel: atheist, naturalist, liberal. But still too reasonable and balanced and philosophical for the fanatics and hard-liners of scientistic ideology. Shunned by his own kind, Nagel must turn to theists, anti-naturalists, and conservatives for appreciation and serious discussion.
Here. There is also the issue of what I call 'misplaced moral enthusiasm.' Libruls get worked up over Pee-Cee non-issues while turning a blind eye to grave evils such as partial-birth abortions.
Related: Mel Gibson, Misplaced Moral Enthusiasm, and Real Threats
A good article, except for Roger Kimball's excessive admiration for the positivist David Stove who is himself a philistine, or to employ a neologism of mine, a 'philosophistine.'
See here which concludes:
4. The trouble with Stove is that he is a positivist, an anti-philosopher, someone with no inkling of what philosophy is about. He is very intelligent in a superficial sort of way, witty, erudite, a pleasure to read, and I am sure it would have been great fun to have a beer with him. But he is what I call a philosophistine. A philistine is someone with no appreciation of the fine arts; a philosophistine is one with no appreciation of philosophy. People like Stove and Paul Edwards and Rudolf Carnap just lack the faculty for philosophy, a faculty that is distinct from logical acumen.
5. My tone is harsh. What justifies it? The even harsher tone this two-bit positivist assumes in discussing great philosophers who will be read long after he is forgotten, great philosophers he must misunderstand because he cannot attain their level.
My harshness further justified here.
The notion that Stove was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century is risible.
It puzzles me why conservatives as opposed to libertarians should so admire this anti-metaphysical religion-basher. You don't have to be a theist to be a conservative, but a conservative who doesn't respect religion is no conservative at all. Here is what R. J. Stove says about his father:
Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and convinced beyond all reason that his announcement of this diagnosis to Mum had brought about her stroke, Dad simply unraveled. So, to a lesser extent, did those watching him.
All Dad's elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic…but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."
Already an alcoholic, he now made a regular practice of threatening violence to himself and others. In hospital he wept like a child (I had never before seen him weep). He denounced the nurses for their insufficient knowledge of Socrates and Descartes. From time to time he wandered around the ward naked, in the pit of confused despair. The last time I visited him I found him, to my complete amazement, reading a small bedside Gideon Bible. I voiced surprise at this. He fixed on me the largest, most protuberant, most frightened, and most frightening pair of eyes I have ever seen: "I'll try anything now."
(Years later, I discovered—and was absolutely pole-axed by —the following passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")
Eventually, through that gift for eloquence which seldom entirely deserted him, Dad convinced a psychiatrist that he should be released from the enforced hospital confinement which he had needed to endure ever since his threats had caused him to be scheduled. The psychiatrist defied the relevant magistrate's orders, and released my father.
Within twenty-four hours Dad had hanged himself in his own garden.
This was in June 1994. I cannot hope to convey the horror of this event. It dealt a mortal blow to the whole atheistic house of cards which constituted my own outlook.
1. Here are three temporal platitudes: The wholly past is no longer present; the wholly future is not yet present; the present alone is present. Here are three closely related controversial metaphysical theses: the wholly past, being no longer is not; the wholly future, being not yet, is not; the present alone is. The second trio is one version of presentism. I grant that presentism is appealing, though it would be a mistake to take it to be common sense or immediate fallout from common sense. The platitudes are Moorean; deny them on pain of being an idiot. Not so with the heavy-duty metaphysical theses about time and existence advanced by the presentist. We can reasonably ask what they mean and whether they are true.
2. Now even presentists will admit that the past is not a mere nothing. Last Sunday's hike has some sort of reality that cries out for accommodation. After all it is now true that I hiked eight hours on Sunday. Even if there are no truth-makers, there still must be something that the true past-tensed sentence is about. Here I distinguish between two principles, Truth-Maker and Veritas Sequitur Esse.
3. We should also keep in mind that past times and events do not have the status of the merely possible. When Sunday's hike was over it did not change its modal status from actual to merely possible. It remained an actual event, albeit a past actual event. Soren Kierkegaard WAS engaged to Regine Olsen, but he was never married to her. Intuitively, the engagement belongs to the sphere of the actual whereas the marriage belongs to the sphere of the merely possible, not that it is possible now. Neither event is a mere nothing. Furthermore, the engagement has, intuitively, 'more reality' than the marriage. What was is more real than what might have been. Historians attempt to determine what the actual facts were. They are constrained by the reality of the past, whence it follows that past has some sort of reality. Historians are neither fiction writers nor students of mere possibilia.
4. I take it to be a Moorean datum that past events and times are not nothing and also not merely possible. Hence a theory of time that cannot accommodate these data is worthless. How can the presentist accommodate them? He has to do it in a manner consistent with his claim that past and future items do not exist at all, that only temporally present items exist.
5. One approach is the 'ersatzer' approach: one looks for substitutes for nonpresent times. Let's consider the view that times are maximal propositions. A proposition is maximal just in case it entails every proposition with which it is broadly logically consistent. Accordingly, past and future times are contingently false maximal propositions. But then the present time is the sole true maximal proposition, and temporal presentness is identical to truth.
This scheme seems to allow us to uphold the Moorean data mentioned in #s 2-4 while holding a version of presentism. If each time is a proposition, and propositions exist omnitemporally, then all times are always available to be referred to. Sunday's hike is a wholly past event. Hence, on presentism, it does not exist at all. But the maximal propositions that were true during the hike all exist and exist now. It is just that they are now false. Sunday's hike is not nothing because those maximal propositions are not nothing and each entails *BV hikes,* a proposition that is not nothing. Sunday's hike is not merely possible because those maximal propositions, though now false, were true.
What we have done is to substitute for nonexistent past events and times, existent and present but false propositions.
6. One problem I have with this approach is as follows. If nonpresent times are false maximal propositions, then the present time is the sole true maximal proposition. If the present time is the sole true maximal proposition, then presentness is truth. The concrete universe cannot, however, be said to be true. It follows that the concrete universe cannot be said to be temporally present. But surely this is false: it anythiingis temporally present the concrete universe is. For the presentist, whatever exists, exists at present. The concrete universe exists, ergo, it is present.
Here is a second argument. If a contingent, singular, affirmative proposition is true, then it is made true by an existing non-proposition. If the present time is the sole maximal true proposition, then it has a truth-maker. That truth-maker is the concrete universe in its present state. So the concrete universe must have the property of being temporally present to serve as the truth-maker of the present time. For only the present universe could make true the maximal proposition that alone is presently true.
The ersatzer approach puts Descartes before the whores the cart before the horse: it is the presentness of the concrete universe that explains the present truth of the maximal proposition with which the present time has been identified, and not the other way around. Temporal presentness cannot be truth. It cannot be 'kicked upstairs' to the level of abstracta.
7. In sum, the presentist must somehow account for the reality of the past since the past is not nothing and not something merely possible. But the above ersatzer approach fails. So what makes it true now that I hiked eight hours on Sunday? If I understood Rhoda's suggestion it is that God's veridical memory of my hiking on Sunday is the truth-maker of 'I hiked last Sunday.' We will have to consider Rhoda's suggestion in a separate post. Deus ex machina?
