Zuckerman Unbound

Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), p. 58:

All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life. I stayed away because over the years I conquered a way of life that I (and not just I) would have thought impossible, and there's pride taken in that. I may have left New York because I was fearful, but by paring and paring and paring away, I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was to my liking much of the time. I shed the tyranny of my intensity — or, perhaps, by living apart for over a decade, merely reveled in its sternest mode.

Embarked as they are upon a life of exploration rather than representation, novelists, like philosophers, may find irksome, confining, and perhaps even impossible the playing of roles. Role-instantiation engenders a richness of relations, and with that comes fullness of life, but these relations are willingly renounced for a solitude austere, cold, but free.

Existence: A Contrast Argument Defeated

This is a post from the old blog.  It originally appeared on 27 May 2008 and appears now slightly redacted.

***********

In this blogging game you throw out your line and damned if you don't snag a good catch now and again. I dredged up Peter Lupu from the Internet's vasty deeps long about January [2008] and I'm glad I did. He's smart and has an admirable passion for philosophy, that highest and most beautiful of all human pursuits. Even more remarkable, perhaps, is his ability to keep his passion alive in the midst of the mundane quest for the buck that keeps the wolf from the door, the lupus from the Lupu.

Enough of cleverness and encomium. Back to work.

In a  comment [now lost in the ether], Peter mentions three points of difference between me and him on the topic of existence.

First, he denies my assertion that Frege and Russell are eliminativists about singular existence, though he agrees with me that for neither is existence attributable to individuals. Let's leave this topic for later. Second, Peter thinks that Kant denies that existence is a property of individuals and that Kant anticipates Frege and Russell on existence. This is a bad mistake that almost every analytic philosopher makes; Peter is in truly excellent company. It too deserves a separate discussion. [And receives it in a forthcoming article, "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis."]

Third, Peter seems to think that the fact that everything exists shows that existence cannot be a property of individuals. This is the question I propose to discuss in today's installment.

We agree:  everything exists, which is to say: there are no nonexistent items, pace Alexius von Meinong. Existence, then, is not classificatory: it does not divide a sum-total of items into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subgroups, the existent items and the nonexistent  items.  There are no nonexistent items.  Peter mentions rationality, weight, and temperature. Some things have weight, some things don't. And the same goes for the other properties. Because some things are rational and others are not, Peter  suggests that it makes sense to inquire into what it is for something to be rational. But since absolutely everything exists, it makes no sense, Peter suggests, to inquire into what it is for something to exist. Existence lacks content due to a failure of contrast. Peter seems to be offering us a

Contrast Argument

   1. If a term 'F' has an explicable content, then there must be items to
   which 'F' does not apply.
   2. There are no items to which 'being' or 'existent' does not apply.
   Ergo
   3. 'Being' or 'existent' does not have an explicable content..

In point of validity, this argument is unobjectionable: it is an instance of Modus Tollens. But it is unsound. The following consideration suffices to refute the first premise. Since everything is self-identical, it is true to say of any particular thing that it is self-identical. But 'self-identical' is not rendered either without sense or content by the plain fact that nothing is self-diverse. Or consider the proposition  that every event has a cause.  Suppose it is true.  (And suppose that everything at bottom is an event.)  Then every event has the property of being caused and no event lacks this property.  But it does not follow that we cannot ask what it is for an event to be caused.  The different theories of causation would be answers to this question.

I  don't think we need to waste any more words on the first premise. It is obviously false.
But even if you insist that (1) is true, there is still a problem with the argument. Although (2) is true, it does not have the implication one might think it to have. One might think that if everything exists,
then it is unintelligible to suppose that there is a difference between existence and nonexistence. But this is a non sequitur. For although it is true that there is nothing that does not exist, a contingent being that does exist is possibly such that it does not exist. So there is a contrast after all. It is the contrast between  existence and possible nonexistence.  Each contingent individual faces the contrast: existence versus possible nonexistence.  With apologies to the Bard, "To be or [possibly] not to be, that is the question."

It is quite clear that the difference between existence and nonexistence cannot be explained by giving examples of existents and examples of nonexistents. Pace Meinong and the Meinongians, there are no examples or instances of nonexistents. One could put this by saying that the existence/nonexistence contrast does not show up extensionally and indeed cannot.  But how it is supposed to follow from this that there is nothing real in things that grounds the application of 'exists' to them?  I exist.  I am not nothing.  But I might never have come to exist.  And given that I do exist now, I might not have existed now.  This 'property' of existing is of course no ordinary property.  It is not like the properties of being red, or ripe, or spheroid.  But I have it and I might not have.  And so there is a contrast, situated at the level of each contingent individual, between its existence and its possible nonexistence.

Peter claimed that  since absolutely everything exists, it makes no sense to inquire into what it is for something to exist.  I just rebutted his claim by pointing out that Contrast Arguments are in in general unsound and by pointing out that, with respect to existence there is after all a contrast, the contrast between the existence of a contingent individual and its possible nonexistence.

It seems to me that there is a rather obvious mistake that one ought to avoid. And that is to assume that existence or Being is a highest what-determination. The mistake is to think of 'being' as a maximally general term which, due to its all-inclusive extension, is virtually nil in intension. Here is an example of how the mistake is made:

     The distinction between 'being' and, for example, 'dog,' is then a
     distinction between the more general and the less general. This is
     a logical or cognitional distinction, which does not necessarily
     reflect anything in the nature of things. Nor does it necessarily
     point to any real composition within things. It is analogous to the
     distinction made between 'animal' and 'dog' when it is said that
     Rover is a dog and Rover is an animal, which distinction does not
     point to two distinct principles within Rover: dog and animal.
     Rover is a dog who is an animal, an animal who is a dog. His being
     a dog and his being an animal are the same in him, even though
     there are other animals. Similarly, Rover is both a being and a dog:
     there are other beings, but this does not change the fact that
     for him, to be a dog is to be a being, to be a being is to be a
     dog. (John N. Deck, "Metaphysics or Logic?" The New Scholasticism,
     Spring 1989, 232-233)

This passage shows that Deck is thinking of being as a highest genus.  Rover is a dog, an animal, a living thing, a physical thing . . . a  being. On this way of thinking, being is the most general
what-determination. You can arrive at it by climbing the tree of Porphyry to the very top. But if anything is clear, it should be that Being  or existence is not a summum genus  or genus generallisimum as Aristotle pointed out at 998b22  of the Metaphysics. And as Kant pointed out in his famous discussion,  Being or existence is not a reales Praedikat: Being or existence is no part of what a thing is. 

The Dalai Lama and the Self: An Anti-Buddhist Argument

A friend refers me to a rather poor article, "The Dalai Lama, the Pope, and Creation,"  in which the dubious claims of the Dalai Lama are ineptly rebutted by a Catholic journalist.  We read:

Beyond the complex world of nature, Buddhism asserts a fundamental “nothingness.”  Buddhist thought sees as illusory all distinction between beings.  As the Dalai Lama writes in The Universe in a Single Atom, “According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is untenable. All things and events, whether material, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence.” 

This is  one of the central pillars of Buddhism, the doctrine of anatta (Pali), anatman (Sanskrit), 'no self.'  The idea is that nothing, or at least nothing in the realm of samsara, has self-nature, substantiality, own-being, ontological independence, even relative ontological independence.  And that includes persons (selves).  You and I are not independent existents.  The distinction between us is illusory.  From the point of view of Christian metaphysics, this cannot be right.  God is an uncreated  self, and we are created selves.  Although we depend for our existence on God, this fact is thought to be compatible with our genuine (though dependent) existence as self-same individuals numerically distinct from other such individuals.

It is not enough to pit worldviews against one another.  You have to get down to the nitty-gritty of trying to resolve the dispute by careful analysis and argument.  There is no reason to be sanguine about the success of such an enterprise, but you are no philosopher if you do not make the attempt.

I will now argue against the anatta doctrine by arguing that the conscious self cannot be a Heraclitean flux of instantaneous  entities but must be an individual that remains self-same through the flux of its conscious states.

I

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly  perceived. It is not as if
there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states); there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these are taken distributively or collectively.

II

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of
Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But
now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

 
For the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  But this
implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of
them.  This unitary self is given whenever one hears a melody.

III

Now consider a synchronic example, the hearing of a chord.  Hearing the major chord C-E-G, I hear that it is major, and hearing the minor chord C-E flat-G, I hear that it is minor.  How is this possible?  The hearing of the major chord cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But
this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  Once again the unitary self is given: it is given whenever we hear a chord.

IV

There is also this consideration.  Phenomenologically, mental change is not existential change, but
alterational change, or in a word, alteration.  Existential change, as when something comes into being or passes away, is not a change in something, or at least it is not a change in the thing that suffers the change: a thing that ceases to exist is no longer available to be that in which  this change occurs, and a thing that comes to exist is not available prior to its coming to exist to be that in which this change occurs.  We express this by saying that there is no substratum of existential change. Alteration, however, requires a substratum: alteration occurs when numerically one and the same individual is in different states at different times.

Pali Buddhism, with its interconnected doctrines of radical impermanence and universal selflessness,
implies that that ultimately there is no alteration, that all change is existential change.  For alteration requires substrata of alteration, and substrata are incompatible with anatta.  But if mental change were existential change, there could be no consciousness of it.  If the pleasant visual sensation simply passes out of existence to be replaced by the painful auditory sensation, then there is a change all right – a change in the way things are – but not a change of which there could be any consciousness in the one in whom the change occurs.  Furthermore, there would be no awareness of
dukkha – the starting point of Buddhist soteriology – because there would be no possibility of a perceived contrast of the dukkha-state with the earlier sukha-state (the pleasant awareness of the sunset).

To be aware of the change from the pleasurable state to the painful one, I must endure through the change. Therefore, since there is consciousness of mental change, mental change is alteration and thus requires a substratum that is numerically identical across the change.  The point was appreciated by Kant, who wrote that “A coming to be or a ceasing to be . . . can never be a possible [object of] perception.” (CPR A 188 = B 231)

What this shows is that there is direct awareness of the self as that in which the two distinct states are united.  The fact of experienced mental change refutes the anatta doctrine. There is not just an awareness of one state followed by an awareness of a second; I am aware of myself as the transtemporal unity of the two states.  Unity, of course, is not identity: so talk of the unity of the pleasurable and painful states is consistent with their numerical distinctness.  The self, therefore, is directly given in the experience of mental change; but it is of course not given as a separate object wholly distinct from its states.  It is given in and through these states as their transtemporal unity. The self is not one of its states, nor the sum of all of them, nor  something wholly distinct from all of them; the self is their self-unifying unity.  Thus one must not think of the substratum of mental change as wholly distinct from its states.  It is not like a pin cushion into which pins are stuck.  A pin cushion without pins is conceivable; a self without conscious states is not.  The self is not an unconscious something that supports consciousness; it itself has the nature of consciousness.   Consciousness/self-consciousness is a sui generis reality that cannot be understood in terms of crude  models from the physical world. 

George F. Will and the Beach Boys Meet Alexius Meinong

"The Beach Boys Still Get Around." Excellent sociocultural analysis by George Will.  Opening paragraph:

Three hours before showtime, Brian Wilson says: “There is no Rhonda.” Sitting backstage at Merriweather Post Pavilion, gathering strength for the evening’s 48-song, 150-minute concert, Wilson was not asked about her, he just volunteered this fact. The other members of the Beach Boys seem mildly surprised to learn that the 1965 song “Help Me, Rhonda” was about no one in particular.

The philosopher of language in London Ed should find the above intriguing.  The song was about no one in particular in that Brian Wilson had no actual person in mind as Rhonda.  But surely the song was about three people, one named 'Rhonda,' another girl referred to only by an antecedent-less 'she,' and the singer.  "Since she put me down, I was out doin' in my head."  There is a sense in which these are three particular, numerically distinct, persons. 

If you deny that, aren't you saying that the song is not about anybody?  And wouldn't that be wrong?

Of course, the persons in  question are incomplete objects.  They violate the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle.  We know some of Rhonda's properties but not all of them.  We know that she looked "so fine" to the singer.  And we know that she caught the singer's eye.  But we don't know her height, the color of her eyes or her blood pressure.  With respect to those properties she is indeterminate.  Same with the other girl.  We know she was going to be the singer's wife, and he was going to be her man, but not much else.

Now nothing incomplete can exist.  So the three persons are three particular nonexistent objects, and the song is about three persons in particular.

I wrote this just to get London Ed's goat.  The record will show that I myself eschew Meinongianism.

On Begging the Question

I just now heard Dennis Prager on his nationally-syndicated radio show use 'beg the question' when what he meant was 'raise the question.'

To raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used
interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.

Suppose A poses the question, 'Does Allah exist?' B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his
existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists.

The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.

Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If
you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto.  The battle has already been lost.  So why do I write
things like the above?  Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises.

SCOTUS Rules Against SEIU

Not all news is bad.

I have nothing against unions as such.  My father was a rank-and-file member, all his working life, of the Boilermakers' Union.  SEIU, however, is a public-sector union, a horse of a different color.  So what's the problem with public-sector unions?  Briefly, this.

You pay taxes.  Some of your tax dollars go to pay the salaries of so-called 'civil servants.'  Some of these 'civil servants' belong to unions that automatically deduct union dues from their salaries and funnel this cash to the union bosses and lobbyists who pressure Democrat Party legislators to do their bidding.  Legislators, being human, love their power and perquisities, and do whatever they can to hold onto them.  To stay in power they need votes which they get from the union members who vote as a block for the Dems to get as many goodies as they can.

So we the people are forced via taxation to support the fiscally irresponsible and unsustainable Democrat Big Government agenda. Would you say that that smacks of corruption?

Suppose you object that that the Dems are not fiscally irresponsible.  Well, then you are wrong, but you have a right to your opinion.  That's not the issue, however.  The issue is whether it is legitimate to force people to support political parties whose ideas they oppose.

Mass Media and Spiritual Deterioration

Sardonicus here explains why he left Facebook.  Briefly, he left it because it had become for him an impediment to spiritual growth.  I concur and generalize:  inordinate consumption of any and all mass communications media militates against spiritual health for all of us.  Mass media content is a bit like whisky: a little, from time to time, will not hurt you, and my even do some good; but more is not better!

But why, exactly?  Here is one answer.  The attainment of mental quiet is a very high and choice-worthy goal of human striving.  Anything that scatters or dis-tracts (literally: pulls apart) the mind makes it impossible to attain mental quiet as well as such lower attainments as ordinary concentration.  Now the mass media have the tendency to scatter and distract.  Therefore, if you value the attainment of mental quiet and such cognate states as tranquillitas animi, ataraxia, peace of mind, samadhi, concentration, 'personal presence,' etc., then you are well-advised to limit consumption of media dreck and cultivate the disciplines that lead to these states.

Of course, the quick answer I just gave presupposes a metaphysics, a philosophical anthopology and a soteriology that cannot be laid out briefly.    So here are some links to related posts that fill in some of the details.

Meditation: What and Why

Modern Media and the Deterioration of Spiritual Life

Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

Meditation: Three Baby Steps

Soul Food

How to Avoid God

William James on Self-Denial

How Not to Begin the Day

Sertillanges on Reading

The erudite Sardonicus kindly sends this to supplement my earlier remarks on reading:

We want to develop breadth of mind, to practice comparative study, to keep the horizon before us; these things cannot be done without much reading. But much and little are opposites only in the same domain. . . [M]uch is necessary in the absolute sense, because the work to be done is vast; but little, relatively to the deluge of writing that . . . floods our libraries and our minds nowadays.
[. . .]
What we are proscribing is the passion for reading, the uncontrolled habit, the poisoning of the mind by excess of mental food, the laziness in disguise which prefers easy familiarity with others’ thought to personal effort. The passion for reading which many pride themselves on as a precious intellectual quality is in reality a defect; it differs in no wise from other passions that monopolize the soul, keep it in a state of disturbance, set it in uncertain currents and cross-currents, and exhaust its powers.
[. . .]
The mind is dulled, not fed, by inordinate reading, it is made gradually incapable of reflection and concentration, and therefore of production; it grows inwardly extroverted, if one can so express oneself, becomes the slave of its mental images, of the ebb and flow of ideas on which it has eagerly fastened its attention. This uncontrolled delight is an escape from self; it ousts the intelligence from its function and allows it merely to follow point for point the thoughts of others, to be carried along in the stream of words, developments, chapters, volumes.
[. . .]
[N]ever read when you can reflect; read only, except in moments of recreation, what concerns the purpose you are pursuing; and read little, so as not to eat up your interior silence.

A.G. Sertillanges,  The Intellectual Life:  Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods ( Catholic University Press, 1998), pp. 145 – 149.

I agree with the above, except for the extreme statement, "Never read when you can reflect."   

Are the Laws of Logic Empirical Generalizations?

London Ed raises the question whether logic is empirical.  

That puts me in mind of  the old idea of John Stuart Mill and others that the laws of logic are empirical generalizations from what we do and do not perceive. Thus we never perceive rain and its absence in the same place at the same time. The temptation is to construe such logic laws as the Law of Non-Contradiction — ~(p & ~p) — as generalizations from psychological facts like these. If this is right, then logical laws lack the a priori character and epistemic ‘dignity’ that some of us are wont to see in them. They rest on psychological facts that might have been otherwise and that are known a posteriori.

London Ed might want consider this reductio ad absurdum:

1. The laws of logic are empirical generalizations. (Assumption for
reductio)
2. Empirical generalizations, if true, are merely contingently
true. (By definition of ‘empirical generalization’: empirical generalizations
record what happens to be the case, but might not have been the case.)
Therefore,
3. The laws of logic, if true, are merely contingently true.
(From 1 and 2)
4. If proposition p is contingently true, then it is possible
that p be false. (Def. of ‘contingently true.’)Therefore,
5. The laws of logic, if true, are possibly false. (From 3 and 4)Therefore,
6. LNC is possibly false: there are logically possible worlds in which ‘p&~p’ is true.
(From 5 and the fact that LNC is a law of logic.)
7. But (6) is absurd (self-contradictory): it amounts to saying that it is logically possible that the very criterion of logical possibility, namely LNC, be false. Corollary: if
laws of logic were empirical generalizations, we would be incapable of defining ‘empirical generalization’: this definition requires the notion of what is the case but (logically) might not have been the case.

Milton Praises the Strenuous Life

Near the end of Richard Weaver's essay, "Life Without Prejudice,"  he quotes Milton:

     I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and
     unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but
     slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run
     for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence
     into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies
     us is trial, and trial is by that which is contrary.

The passage bears comparison with Theodore Roosevelt's remarks about being in the arena.

I like especially the last sentence of the Milton quotation.  We are born corrupt, not innocent.  We are not here (mainly) to improve the world, but (mainly) to be improved by it.  The world's a vale of soul-making.  Since this world is a vanishing quantity, it makes little sense to expend energy trying to improve it: when your house is burning down, you don't spruce up the facade.  You don't swab the decks of a sinking ship.  It makes more sense to spend time and effort  on what has a chance of outlasting the transitory.  This world's use is to build something that outlasts it.

But this will, pace Milton, require some flight from the world into the cloister where perhaps alone the virtues can be developed that will need testing later in the world.

Self-Effacement and Self-Importance

To what extent is it a sign of self-importance that one regularly draws attention to one's own insignificance?  I am thinking of Simone Weil.   In self-effacement the ego may find a way to assert itself.  "Do you see how pure and penetrating is my love of truth that I am able to realize and admit my own personal nothingness face to face with Truth?"

The ego, wily 'structure' that it is, usually (always?) finds a way to affirm itself.

Regulating Political Speech

A good article by John Stossel.  Punch line: 

It is shameful that leftists let their hatred of corporations lead them to throw free speech under the bus. There is a smarter way to get corporate money out of politics: Shrink the state. If government has fewer favors to sell, citizens will spend less money trying to win them.

Or as one of my aphorisms has it: The bigger the government, the more to fight over!

Widely-Read or Well-Read?

This from a reader:

Mortimer Adler, in How to Read a Book, pointed out that being widely-read does not mean one is well-read. I've enjoyed reading some of your old posts about reading and studying, so I wanted to know your opinion on this matter.

Should I aim to read a lot of books? Or is it better to read and reread a few good books? I know some people say one should read widely but read good books deeply. But I've found that a hard balance to maintain. For example, deeply reading an 800-page selection of Aquinas's writings several times would consume almost all of my reading for the next 1-2 months. Also, it's hard for me to switch gears, you might say. If I'm accustomed to reading most of my books through quickly without pausing much to think, then I easily fall into that mode of reading when I'm trying to read deeply.

I imagine you would have some interesting thoughts on this topic, since you have a few decades of reading behind you. Which type of reading benefited you the most? If you could go back and change what you read and how you read during your decades of scholarship, what would you change?

Thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

I will begin by reproducing a couple of the paragraphs from A Method of Study:

Although desultory reading is enjoyable, it is best to have a plan.  Pick one or a small number of topics that strike you as interesting and important and focus on them.  I distinguish between bed reading and desk reading.  Such lighter reading as biography and history can be done in bed, but hard-core materials require a desk and such other accessories as pens of various colors for different sorts of annotations and underlinings, notebooks, a cup of coffee, a fine cigar . . . .

 If you read books of lasting value, you ought to study what you read, and if you study, you ought
to take notes. And if you take notes, you owe it to yourself to assemble them into some sort of coherent commentary. What is the point of studious reading if not to evaluate critically what you read, assimilating the good while rejecting the bad? The forming of the mind is the name of the game.  This won't occur from passive reading, but only by an active engagement with the material.  The best way to do this is by writing up your own take on it.  Here is where blogging can be useful.  Since blog posts are made public, your self-respect will give you an incentive to work at saying something intelligent.                          

To the foregoing, I would add, first of all, the magnificent observation of Schopenhauer: "Forever reading, never read."  If you want to be read, then you must write.  And even if you don't want to be read, you must write — for the reason supplied in the preceding paragraph.

Now on to your questions.  

Widely-read or well-read?  You can be both. And you should be both.  Switching gears can be difficult, but it can be done.

As for time that could have been better spent, I do not regret reading vast quantities of Continental philosophy, but some of the time spent on the more extreme representatives of that tradition, such as Derrida, was time wasted. 

Re-reading these remarks, I realize they are rather trite.  But they may be of some use nonetheless.

Mayor Bloomberg on the Purpose of Government

(CBS News) New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg shrugged off criticism of his controversial public health initiatives, saying that "if government's purpose isn't to improve the health and longevity of its citizens, I don't know what its purpose is." [emphasis added.]

 Bloomberg most recently put forth a plan to ban the sale of sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces from the city's eateries, street carts and stadiums. The proposal has been sharply criticized, in some cases by beverage and fast food companies as a case of government overreach.

He's also been criticized for previous efforts to, among other things, ban smoking in public places and the use of trans-fats in restaurant foods. Some have gone so far as to mock has as being like a "nanny."

 But on "CBS This Morning," Bloomberg fired back, saying, "We're not here to tell anybody what to do. But we certainly have an obligation to tell them what's the best science and best medicine says is in their interest.

In this startlingly incoherent outburst, Bloomberg betrays the liberal nanny-state mentality in as direct a way as one could wish.  And it is incoherent.  He wants to ban large drinks, pop corn, milk shakes and what all else while assuring us that "we're not here to tell anybody what to do."  He blatantly contradicts himself.  Does the man think before he speaks?

But the deeper problem is that he has no notion of the legitimate functions of government.  Apparently he has never heard of limited government.  Border control is a legitimate constitutionally grounded function of government.  One reason the borders must be controlled is to impede the spread of contagious diseases.  So government does have some role to play in the health and longevity of citizens.  Defense of the country against foreign aggressors is also a legitimate function  of government and it too bears upon health and longevity: it is hard to live a long and healthy life when bombs are raining down.

Beyond this, it is up to the individual to live in ways that insure health and longevity if those are values for him.  But they might not be.  Some value intensity of life over longevity of life.  Rod Serling, for example, lived an extremely intense and productive life.  Born in 1925, he died in 1975 at age 50.  His Type A behavior and four-pack a day cigarette habit did him in, but was also quite possibly a necessary condition of his productivity.  That was his free choice.  No government has the right to dictate that one value longevity over intensity.

A government big enough and powerful enough to provide one with ‘free’ health care will be in an excellent position to demand ‘appropriate’ behavior from its citizens – and to enforce its demand. Suppose you enjoy risky sports such as motorcycling, hang gliding, mountain climbing and the like. Or perhaps you just like to drink or smoke or eat red meat. A government that pays for the treatment
of your injuries and ailments can easily decide, on economic grounds alone, to forbid such activites under the bogus justification, ‘for your own good.’

But even if the government does not outlaw motorcycling, say, they can put a severe dent in your liberty to enjoy such a sport, say, by demanding that a 30% sales tax be slapped on all motorcycle purchases, or by outlawing bikes whose engines exceed a certain displacement, say 250 cc.  In the same way that governments levy arbitrary punitive taxes on tobacco products, they can do the same for anything they deem risky or unhealthy.

The situation is analogous to living with one’s parents. It is entirely appropriate for parents to say to a child: ‘As long as you live under our roof, eat at our table, and we pay the bills, then you must abide by our rules. When you are on your own, you may do as you please.’ The difference, of course, is that it is
relatively easy to move out on one’s own, but difficult to forsake one’s homeland. 

The nub of the issue is liberty. Do you value it or not?

Does Bloomberg even see the issue? 

Saturday Night at the Oldies Deferred: Dick Dale, King of the Surf Guitar

Last night's desert storm knocked out my Internet connection . . . .

Before the Beach Boys, who debuted 50 years ago in '62, there was Dick Dale, the father of surf music and my first guitar hero.  He took a Fender Stratocaster and played it upside down and backwards, fretting with this right hand and plucking with his left.  The first surf song was his 1961

Let's Go Trippin. But what really got me practicing on my Fender Mustang, my first electric guitar, was

Misirlou.  The Del-Tones in this video ought to be renamed 'The Soporific Sidemen.'  Here is the "Pulp Fiction" version. Continuing in the Middle Eastern vein:

Hava Nagila.  Surfing, So Cal, and hot rods naturally go together.  So surf music gradually morphed into car music, e.g.,

Nitro.  Dale teams up with the rather more versatile and technically proficient Stevie Ray Vaughan (who merely plays his guitar without raping it) for absolutely the best version of The Chantay's

Pipeline.  Psychedelia put an end to surf music.  The epitaph "You will never hear surf music again" is delivered by Jimi Hendrix at 4:33 of

Third Stone From the Sun.