A Point of Logic

Jouni Lappi, having read the Substack article on Heidegger and Carnap, writes:

One thing I cannot get my head around is this part:
’Nothing is F’ => ’Everything is not F’
Maybe there is some syntactic agreement behind the ’Everything is not F’, that I do not understand. In my layman ears it sounds strange and wrong. I would understand ’it is true for every thing, that it is not F’. Say in my universe there is A, B and F.
’Nothing is F’ is false, ’Everything is not F’ is true.
This is probably some newbie error in thinking. And especially because of that,  I would appreciate if you could explain this to me and point out where I think wrong.
First of all, what you express as a conditional is really a biconditional. Thus
1) Nothing is F <=> Everything is not F. 
Bear in mind that ‘F’ is a predicate. If it names anything, it names a property, not an individual. (Properties, by definition, are instantiable items; individuals are not.)  So an instance of (1) is 
2)  Nothing is fragile if and only if everything is not fragile.  
Surely (2) is true; indeed it is necessarily true.  In a universe U in which there are exactly two individuals, a and b, and one property F-ness, if neither a nor b instantiates F-ness, then every/each  individual in U does not instantiate F-ness, and vice versa. 
Are you perhaps  confusing individuals and properties?  Or perhaps you do not appreciate that ‘everything’ is being used above as a distributive, not a collective term? ‘Everything’ means each thing; it does not mean the collection of things.  

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Perils of Pleasure Along the Lost Highway

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis:

The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.

Compare the words Plato puts in the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedo:

. . . every pleasure and pain has a kind of nail, and nails and pins her [the soul] to the body, and gives her a bodily nature, making her think that whatever the body says is true. (tr. F. J. Church St. 83)

Oscar Wilde

From Oscar Wilde to Plato to Hank Williams here channeled hauntingly through Kurt Nilsen and Willie Nelson:

I’m a rollin’ stone all alone and lost
For a life of sin I have paid the cost
When I pass by all the people say
Just another guy on the lost highway

Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine
And a woman’s lies make a life like mine
On the day we met, I went astray
I started rollin’ down that lost highway

I was just a lad, nearly 22
Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you
And now I’m lost, too late to pray
Lord I paid the cost, on the lost highway

Now boys don’t start your ramblin’ ’round
On this road of sin are you sorrow bound
Take my advice or you’ll curse the day.
You started rollin’ down that lost highway.

Tom Petty version.

The Byrds, Life in Prison

Warren Zevon, Carmelita

Nina Simone, House of the Rising Sun

Doc Watson, Tom Dooley.  The Kingston Trio’s ‘collegiate folk’  version from 1958.

Merle Haggard, The Fugitive

Marty Robbins, Devil Woman

Heidegger, Carnap, and Das Nichts

A Substack entry wherein I diagnose Rudolf Carnap’s Heidegger Derangement Syndrome. Rudi was down with a very bad case of it. Thanks to him it spread to a crapload of analytic bigots. Excerpt:

One of the reasons I gave my weblog the title Maverick Philosopher is because I align neither with the analytic nor with the Continental camp. Study everything, I say, and drink from every stream. “Nothing human is foreign to me.” (Terence)

Reverting to the camp metaphor, when did the camps become two? In dead earnest this occurred when Heidegger burst onto the scene in 1927 with Being and Time. I agree with Peter Simons: “Probably no individual was more responsible for the schism in philosophy than Heidegger.” (Quoted in Overgaard, et al., An Introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge UP, 2013, 110.) It is not as if Heidegger set out to split the mainstream whose headwaters were in Franz Brentano into two tributaries; it is just that he started publishing things that the analytic types, who had some sympathy for Heidegger’s main teacher Husserl, could not relate to at all.

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger’s 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap’s 1932 response, “On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language.” (In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics.)

The young Martin Heidegger

 

The Existential versus the Merely Theoretical: Some Responses to a Reader

A young Brazilian reader, Vini, refers to an article of mine, Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove? and asks me some questions about it. He is clearly one of those whose interest in philosophy is deeply existential and not merely theoretical or academic.  ‘Existential’ has several meanings both inside and outside of philosophy.  I am using it roughly in the way it is used by such so-called existentialists as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Marcel, early Sartre, and many others.  For such as these, philosophy is not an academic game. It is not about solving intellectual puzzles, or about achieving a merely theoretical, and thus impersonal view of the world that abstracts from the lived life of the individual truth-seeker who seeks a truth  that is subjectively appropriable and personally transformative. On an existential understanding of philosophy’s task and goal it cannot be science given that science aims at a wholly  impersonal, or third-personal, or objective view of things, as if Being could be wholly objectified.  Being cannot be wholly objectified  because, in Jaspersian terms, Being is das Umgreifende, the Encompassing, which includes both subject and objects  

Now either you understand what I am driving at with these sketchy remarks or you don’t. If what I have just written doesn’t resonate with you, if you have no idea what I am getting at, then you are wasting your time reading my work. For everything I write, no matter how tediously technical or politically polemical, is oriented toward One Thing, the achieving of my  individual, personal, intellectual-cum-spiritual salvation, even if such salvation requires the dissolution of the ego or separative self and its absorption into the eternal Atman or a Buddhist or Christian equivalent or near-equivalent thereof. Sounds paradoxical doesn’t it?  How could the salvation of the self require the dissolution of the self? But paradox, contradiction, absurdity and mystery are endemic to our predicament and must be addressed by the philosopher who knows what he is about and is serious about penetrating to the truth of our predicament.  Science, by contrast, seeks to banish mystery.

Again, you either catch my drift or you don’t.  Young Vini, I suspect, does. He comes across as vexed and tormented by questions that to the superficial are merely academic puzzles.  What he has written strikes me as a cri de coeur, and so I feel I ought to be of what little assistance I can be.  My years of Sturm und Drang lie 50 years in the past, but their animating spirit remains for me tutelary, guarding and guiding, daimonic in the Socratic sense.   

Vini writes,

4) On your post “Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?”, you said: “3.  I exist.  The thought that I do not exist is unthinkable salva veritate.  Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if ‘I’ picks out merely a momentary self.  (I am not committed by this to a substantial self.)  So we have performative inconsistency.  Unfortunately, this does not show that I exist apart from my thinking.” So, I must ask: do you think that the self is a substance, or have you changed your mind? This got me a little bit confused, since I may have missed the context.

BV:  I think you have missed the context. What I am asking in the post is whether retorsion/retortion is a philosophical procedure or tool that can secure metaphysical results.  I wrote:

To be a successful metaphysical tool, a retorsive argument must establish the target proposition as true unconditionally and not merely on condition that there exist contingent beings like us who occasionally and contingently engage in such intellectual operations as affirmation and denial.    Otherwise, it would have no metaphysical significance, but merely a transcendental one.  (‘Transcendental’ is here being used in roughly the Kantian way.)

I am not addressing the question whether the self is a substance as opposed to a bundle of experiences. The point I am making is that retorsion does not establish the existence of the self on either conception.  The argument I gave commits me neither to a substantial self nor to a momentary self.  When you ask whether I changed my mind, you are assuming that in my “Chariot” article and the other posts directed against the Pali Buddhist ‘no self’ doctrine I am affirming a substance view of the self. But please note that if propositions P, Q are logically contradictory (i.e., cannot both be true and cannot both be false), and I show that the arguments for P are not rationally coercive, it does not follow that (a) I must find the arguments for Q rationally coercive, or (b) that I accept Q.  After all, the problem may be insoluble by us. In the anti-Buddhist articles and entries I was showing that there are good reasons for rejecting the Buddhist anatta/anatman doctrine. A good reason needn’t be rationally coercive or rationally compelling or philosophically dispositive. (I am using these phrases interchangeably.)

To take a different example, if I reject every version of presentism in the philosophy of time, it does not follow that I must accept some version of anti-presentism.

5) I think this question is one of the most important ones: Can I really rest assured that the self does exist, and it is like a Substance? To be completely honest with you, Bill, one thing that this whole 6-year experience showed me is that I know nothing or almost nothing about the world. I never thought in my life that we could even doubt about the reality of things such as the self. Back in the day, this shocked me. I was (and still somehow am) very afraid of things that I don’t know, like “what if there is a hidden argument that I don’t know,” “what if they are right,” and so on. I’m 27 years old, and I got a lot of things wrong in my life — but this is one I don’t want to be wrong about. You know, there are a lot of things with an intellect far, far superior to mine, such as Butchvarov, Husserl, and so on, that you are well aware of, that may have found arguments that I couldn’t even imagine in my lifetime. But, at the same time, I think that philosophy, above all else, can give definitive and satisfactory answers to life. It’s not an empirical science ‘guessing game,’ where things can flip from right to wrong in the bat of an eye (like, if someone got something wrong, he will be wrong no matter what, and that’s what I think about Buddhists, Harris and Co. on these matters). But, at the same time, I have this insecurity of getting things wrong, of something that might not be “sufficient” to show what I want to understand (in that case, the self), since I know so little of philosophy. So how could I rest assured that, no matter the hard work, they will be wrong? The self can’t be a guessing game. I think that there must be a way to establish the truth of this, regardless of the endless discussions that philosophers may have in the future (if he’s right, he’s right; if wrong, he’s wrong). I’m very afraid of being wrong, getting something wrong, and that there is an “unknown argument” that may tumble down what I think is right, but, at the same time, if I had all these dialectical worries since 2019, how could I possibly not exist (as a Substance)? I’m confused, since I also lend more value to what others said rather than my own experience… I don’t know how to think this through. Can you share your thoughts about this? A word of experience from someone who saw a lot more in life than I ever had would be very comforting to hear, especially from a philosopher. Even though your motto is “study everything, join nothing,” I really think that you can have a definitive answer on that matter. 

In all of that, sorry for the gigantic, torah-like email. I tried my best to express my worries as quickly as possible and tell you all of them in one shot. As I said, I really hope God touches your heart to help me with these questions. I really, really hope you could spare or find some time to answer me this. Even though for some people these questions are trivial, for me, I think they are life-changing and something that we live up to. I know I sound a little bit platonic (maybe I am), but I think the same centelha [scintilla, see here]of philosophy that resides in you will find and understand the questions in mine. 

May God bless you, Bill.

BV:  There are different types of philosopher. In another place in your Torah-like e-mail, you say you like Ed Feser’s work.  Ed is an ultra-competent expositor and defender of the metaphysics underpinning traditional Roman Catholicism. For him the ultimate truth, which is a salvific truth, is housed in the (trad) RCC.  He believes that he found the Answer there, his Answer, but also the Answer, the Answer for everyone whether they accept it or not.   I classify him as a dogmatic affirmer. The polar opposite is the dogmatic denier. I am neither. I am a critical inquirer in the Socratic tradition. Feser thinks the existence of God can be proven.  I deny that the existence of God can be proven, but I also deny that the existence of God can be disproven.  What holds for God, holds for the soul, and all the rest of our highest concerns.

You want to know (with objective certainty) whether the self is a substance that persists, numerically self-same over time, an immaterial substance, capable of existing whether or not it is embodied.  This burning desire to know is what distinguishes the true philosopher from the academic hacks and functionaries who dominate our universities. Many of them are clever, and some are brilliant, but they suffer from existentielle Bodenlosigkeit (Karl Jaspers).   Their work is a game, a job, a way of filling their bellies. It does not well up from their Existenz.  Their real lives are elsewhere.  They don’t live for philosophy, but from it, and they would drop it like a hot potato if they could no longer fill their bellies from it. The great Augustine said he wanted to know, more than anything else, two things:, God and the soul: deum et animam scire cupio.  So, Vini, you and I are in good company.

So are God and the soul (immaterial substantial self) real or not?  Can we KNOW the answer to that question? You say it can’t be a guessing game. You are right about that.  It can’t be a matter of flipping a coin or making a guess. That way of talking trivializes the question, as does, I am afraid, Pascal’s talk of a wager.  The great Pascal betrays the depth and seriousness of his thought with talk like that, though one understands how a great mathematician and contributor to probability theory would think like that.  Be that as it may.

It’s not a guessing game, but nonetheless in the end you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. There are no objective certainties and no knock-down proofs  in this life with respect to the Big Questions and the Ultimate Objects.  Genuine knowledge in these precincts is unattainable by us here below. Our cognitive architecture is not up to the task. Our reason is weak and merely discursive. And the noetic consequences of sin may have to be factored in.

“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” wrote Kant in the preface to the 2nd edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. The great Kant was on the right track. Reason is dialectical in his sense and simply not up to the task of laying bare the nature of the ultimate.

You say, “I think that there must be a way to establish the truth of this.” That is precisely what I deny assuming by ‘establish’ you mean conclusively prove.  Reasoned belief is as far as we can go. Th  dogmatic affirmers, driven by overpowering doxastic security needs, fool themselves when they pass off arguments that are objectively inconclusive as proofs. I am not saying that they are intellectually dishonest; I am saying that they are in the grip of an overpowering need to be secure in their beliefs.

But more on this later, if you like. I welcome your objections, Vini.  Please respond here on this blog, the latest version of Maverick Philosopher. If you do so you will have the honor of being the first to anoint my combox with comments.

The Concept of Standoff in Philosophy

Substack latest.

A second example:

3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.

4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.

By ‘concrete’ I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true. And yet one can argue plausibly for each.

This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is “that than which no greater can be conceived”; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.

In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being. (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility — if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility — is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us. (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive/dianoetic intellects. It is God’s nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God’s existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God’s nature entails his existence; God’s nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.

If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being. If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary. You have also faied to distinguish God from such ‘garden variety’ necessary beings as numbers and sets.

Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be. Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum. Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).

So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.

Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won’t).

Sartorial Incongruity and TDS

There’s President Trump in his expensive bespoke suit with a ridiculous red cap on his head, a “prole cap” — one size fits all! — emblazoned with “Trump was right about everything.” Gaucherie, braggadocio, exaggeration. Lefties and never-Trumping righties are ‘triggered,’ albeit in different ways, by these low-class characteristics and hate him in consequence. Their mindless hatred blinds them to the great things Mr. Trump has done for the USA and the world. Wittingly or unwittingly he drives our political enemies crazy while we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable enjoy the show. You won’t find TDS in the DSM, but it is undeniably real. How else do you explain the puerile histrionics of “Tampon Tim” Walz and the rest of his clownish colleagues?

Let me mention just two great things Trump has accomplished. He sealed the U. S. border and he set back the Iranian nuclear program for years to come. Both of these accomplishments, neither of which any Democrat could pull off, have benefited both us and the world. How does the securing of our borders benefit the world? It should be obvious: the survival of Western civilization, resting as it does on two main pillars, one Judeo-Christian, the other Graeco-Roman, depends on the USA. If we fall, it falls. No other Anglospheric nation is up to the job.  The mother country, in particular, is fast becoming a woke joke.

 

The Ersatz Religion of Transhumanism

Matt Taibbi interviews Dr. Aaron Kheriaty:

“I think it’s an ersatz religion,” says Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, of a transhumanist movement that is suddenly very relevant, in the age of people falling in love with their AIs, making radical changes to their bodies, and letting AIs counsel them toward suicide. “I think it’s a religious substitute for people living in a secular age.”

Julian Green on Manna

Diary 1928-1957, entry of 6 October 1941:

The story of the manna gathered and set aside by the Hebrews is deeply significant. It so happened that the manna rotted when it was kept. And perhaps that means that all spiritual reading which is not consumed — by prayer and by works — ends by causing a sort of rotting inside us. You die with a head full of fine sayings and a perfectly empty heart.

The consumption of a comestible is its physiological appropriation. To appropriate is to make one’s own. Green is referring to spiritual appropriation, the making one’s own of spiritual sayings by prayer and practice.

Did edible bread once fall from the sky? I don’t deny it, but must I affirm it? Would it not be enough to take the Old Testament passage in its spiritual sense and bracket the question of its literal truth?

 

Left and Right Opposition to Trump

The Left’s opposition to Trump is at bottom opposition to our system of government. Trump stands for the preservation of our republican form of government; the Left stands for its “fundamental transformation” (Obama), which is to say, its abolition. The never-trumping Right’s opposition to Trump is mainly to the man himself and his style which at once mesmerizes and disgusts them, so much so, that they cannot see past his style to his substance, which is in no way radical but traditional, restorative, and commonsensical.

Mamdani and the Elimination of Misdemeanor Enforcement in NYC

I'm back on the rant at Facebook.  Latest:

Madman Mamdani, the Islamo-Commie, wants to eliminate misdemeanor enforcement in NYC. Why not? It worked so well in California:
This incident could happen at any Walgreens in San Francisco: A man strolls into the store walks over to the hair display, grabs an armful of shampoo bottles, and simply walks out the door. He felt no need to rush, had no fear, and didn't bother looking back.
Instead of actually doing something, people stood by and recorded the scene on their phones, shaking their heads; they knew nothing would happen, as he'd simply disappear into the crowd. There's no point in calling the police; they wouldn't come, store clerks wouldn't bother, and the DA wouldn't prosecute.
In California, petty thefts valued at less than $950 are typically not worth the paperwork involved.
It's this future that mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is dangling in front of New York City.
Article here.

Calvinball, Big Balls, and the Age of Balls

A couple of ballsy articles for your cojonic delectation.

Jonathan Turley, The Judicial Calvinball of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

An excellent piece that ends on a weak and decidedly unmanly note: "I truly believe that Jackson can leave a lasting legacy and bring an important voice to the court." I'm guessing that the erudite and distinguished Professor Turley is afraid of being called a racist and a sexist.

Mike Solana, Age of Balls

It's an 'interesting' time to be alive. Who could be bored?

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Solitary, Alone, Lonely, Lonesome

Neil Diamond, Solitary Man.  His first song, his best song. The only one of his I really like. Johnny Cash does it better.  There is nothing better than the sound of an acoustic guitar, well-made, well-played, steel-stringed, with fresh strings. This one goes out to Dave Bagwill, Oregon luthier. 

Calexico, Alone Again Or. 

Original (1967) by Love, an underrated '60s psychedelic band.

Roy Orbison, Only the Lonely

Roy's last recorded tune: You Got It.

Bob Dylan, I am a Lonesome Hobo

Stay free from petty jealousy
Live by no man's code
Save your judgment for yourself
Lest you wind up on this road.

Bob Dylan, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.  Young Bob from his topical days. Whatever happened to William Zantzinger?  Well, he died at 69 in 2009.  NYT obituary here.

A couple of bonus cuts for a NYC friend:

Lovin' Spoonful, Summer in the City. Great song, great video.

Barrett Strong, Money (1959)  There won't be much left there after madman Mandami, the Islamo-Commie, become mayor. New Yorkers have shown themselves stupid enough to vote for the worthless and incompetent. The smart money is already heading south.  Florida has a great governor in Ron DeSantis, unlike the incompetent leftards 'governing' California and New York, Newsom and Hochul.