Boethius Contra Nietzsche on Time and Transition

Like Nietzsche, "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things."  (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 24 March 1887, quoted in R. Hayman,  Nietzsche: A Critical Life, Penguin, 1982, p. 304) Unlike Nietzsche, I
appreciate that the Eternal Recurrence of the Same is no solution.

Boethius The problem with time is not that it will end, but that its very mode of being is deficient. The problem is not that our time is short, but   that we are in time in the first place. For this reason, more time is no solution. Not even endlessly recurring time is any solution. Even if time were unending and I were omnitemporal, existing at every time, my life would still be strung out in moments outside of each other, with the diachronic identifications of memory and expectation no substitute for a true unity. To the moment I say, Verweile doch, du bist so schön (Goethe, Faust) but the beautiful moment will not abide, and abidance-in-memory is a sorry substitute, and a self diachronically constituted by such makeshifts is arguably no true self. Existing as we do temporally, we are never at one with ourselves: the past is no longer, the future not yet, and the present fleeting. We exist outside ourselves in temporal ec-stasis. We are strung out in temporal diaspora. The only Now we know is the nunc movens.

But we sense and can conceive a nunc stans, a standing now. This conception of a standing now, empty except for the rare and partial mystic fulfillment, is the standard relative to which the moving now is judged ontologically deficient. Time is but a moving and inadequate image of eternity.  So we of the tribe of Plato conceive of the divine life as the eternal life, not as the omnitemporal or everlasting life. Our spokesman is Boethius, inspired by Philosophia herself:

     Eternity is the simultaneous and complete possession of infinite
     life. This will appear more clearly if we compare it with temporal
     things. All that lives under the conditions of time moves through
     the present from the past to the future; there is nothing set in
     time which can at one moment grasp the whole space of its lifetime.
     It cannot yet comprehend tomorrow; yesterday it has already lost.
     And in this life of today your life is no more than a changing,
     passing moment. And as Aristotle said of the universe, so it is of
     all that is subject to time; though it never began to be, nor will
     ever cease, and its life is coextensive with the infinity of time,
     yet it is not such as can be held to be eternal. For though it
     apprehends and grasps a space of infinite lifetime, it does not
     embrace the whole simultaneously; it has not yet experienced the
     future. What we should rightly call eternal is that which grasps
     and possesses wholly and simultaneously the fullness of unending
     life, which lacks naught of the future, and has lost naught of the
     fleeting past; and such an existence must be ever present in itself
     to control and aid itself, and also must keep present with itself
     the infinity of changing time. (The Consolation of Philosophy, Book
     V; the Latin below the fold)

Continue reading “Boethius Contra Nietzsche on Time and Transition”

How Prevent a Proliferation of Modes of Being?

An astute reader comments:

Allowing for multiple modes of being may lead to too many or infinitely many modes. Using your own example and oversimplifying on purpose: if the mode of being of the house made of bricks is different from that of the bricks, what prevents us from claiming that there are different modes of being for all other structures that could be made from these bricks? I think there should be explicit arguments against this motivation.

A side note/question:  "no individual can be instantiated." You state this as a self evident truth. It would help if you elaborate on this point.

I have read your blog for over a year, mostly due to my interest in identity, existence and other basic notions that I consider fundamental. I respect your intellectual honesty and find your general reflections stimulating and deep but not dry.

1. My claim is not that a house, a corral, a wall, etc. made of the same bricks each has a different mode of being.  These wholes have the same mode of being as each other.  The claim is rather that certain types of whole — not necessarily every type of whole —  possess a different mode of being than their parts. 

In the argument I gave, I made the simplifying assumption that the bricks are simples.  But of course they are not and so the argument can be iterated in their case assuming that each brick is a whole of parts of the same type as the whole of bricks.  Iterating the argument 'all the way down' we come finally to simples which exist-independently while all the wholes 'on the way up' exist-dependently.

My concern is to legitimate the very idea of there being modes of being as against the analytical orthodoxy according to which there cannot be any such modes.  I grant, however,  that if the MOB doctrine led to an endless proliferation of modes then that upshot would strongly count against it. 

2.  "No individual can be instantiated."  This follows if you accept the following definitions.

D1. X is an individual =df X has properties but is not itself a property.
D2. X is a property =df X is possibly such that it is instantiated. 

Since no individual is a property and only properties can be instantiated, no individual can be instantiated.  To be instantiated is to have an instance. 

3. "I respect your intellectual honesty and find your general reflections stimulating and deep but not dry."  I shall try to live up to that comment.  Thank you!

 

Kierkegaard on the Impotence of Earthly Power

Kierkegaard stamp  The following passage from Concluding Unscientific Postscript embodies a penetrating insight:

. . . the legal authority shows its impotence precisely when it shows its power: its power by giving permission, its impotence by not being able to make it permissible. (p. 460, tr. Swenson & Lowrie)

My permitting you to do X does not make X permissible.  My forbidding you to do X does not make X impermissible.  My permitting (forbidding) is justifed only if what I permit (forbid) is in itself permissible (impermissible).  And the same goes for any finite agent or collection of finite agents. A finite agent may have the power to permit and forbid, but it cannot have the power to make permissible or impermissible.  Finite agency, then, betrays its impotence in exercising its power.

For example, the moral permissibility of killing in self-defense is what it is independently of the State's power to permit or forbid via its laws.  The State cannot make morally permissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that permit it.  Nor can the State make morally impermissible what is morally permissible by passing and enforcing laws that proscribe it.

Here below Might and Right fall asunder: the powerful are not always just, and the just are not always powerful.  But it would be a mistake to think that the mighty cannot be right, or that the right cannot be mighty.  The falling asunder is consistent with a certain amount of overlap.

Power does not confer moral justification, but neither does impotence.  (For example,the relative weakness of the Palestinians relative to the Israelis does not confer justification on the Paestinian cause or its methods.)  See The Converse Callicles Principle: Weakness Does Not Justify.

The State is practically necessary and morally justifiable.  Or so I would argue against the anarchists.  But fear of the State is rational: its power is awesome and sometimes misused.  This is why the State's power must be hedged round with limits.

We don't know whether or not God exists.  But we do know that nothing is worthy of being called God unless it is the perfect harmonization and colaescence of Might and Right, of Power and Justice, of Will and Reason. 

Tough questions:  Could such a transcendental Ideal (in Kant's sense) be merely a transcendental Ideal impossible of existence in reality?  And could anything impossible count as an ideal?  But if God is possible would he not have to be actual?

Why the Resistance to Modes of Being?

Why do so many distinguished philosophers  fail to appreciate that a doctrine of modes of being (modes of existence) is a live option?  Perhaps in the back of their minds is some such argument as the following:

Existence is instantiation
There are no modes of instantiation
Ergo
There are no modes of existence.

I grant that there are no modes of instantiation: either a concept is instantiated or it is not.  But existence is not instantiation.  I have gone over this ground many times before on this blog and in my existence book and in journal articles, so I will be very brief. 

I exist.  That's certain.  It is also certain that I am an individual and that no individual can be instantiated.  So if existence is instantiation, then there must be something distinct from me, a  concept or property or cognate item, the instantiation of which is (identically) my existence.  But now three points. First, there is no such concept or property.  Such a property would have to be a haecceity property and there are none.   Second, even if there were such a property, I wouldn't be able to grasp it.  Individuum ineffabile est.  Equally ineffable is a property of the form identity-with-a, where 'a' denotes an individual.  Third, to account for the existence of an individual in terms of the instantiation of some concept or property is blatantly circular:  if a first-level property instantiated,then it is instantiated by something that exists. 

So the above argument is not sound. Let's try another:

'Exists(s)' is univocal
If there are modes of existence, then 'exist(s)' is not univocal
Ergo
There are no modes of existence.

I concede the minor, but not the major.  Compare

1. Philosophers exist
2. Peter exists.

Both sentences are true, hence both are meaningful.  But 'exist(s)' does not have the same meaning in both.  (1) makes an instantiation claim: it says that the concept philosopher or the property of being a philosopher is instantiated.  But (2), quite plainly, does NOT make an instantiation claim.  So 'exist(s)' in the two sentences cannot be univocal in sense.  But it is not equivocal in the way 'bank' is in

3. No Boston bank (financial instituiton) is situated on the bank of the river Charles.

We could say that the equivocity of 'exist(s)'as between (1)and (2) is a systematic equivocity in that the senses are connected. How? Well, if there are philosophers, if philosophers exist, then there must be at least one person, Peter say,  who exists and who is a philosopher.  And if Peter, who is a philosopher, exists, then we can straightaway infer that philosophers exist.

So is it not perfectly obvious that 'exist(s)' is not univocal?  Note the ambiguity of

4. Wisdom exists.

(4) could be taken to mean that wisdom has instances, that there are wise people.  But it could also be taken to mean that wisdom itself exists.  So from this one example it is clear that 'exist(s)' is not univocal.

The second argument, then, is as unsound as the first.  At this point the establishmentarians may try to ENFORCE univocity by stipulating that 'exist(s)' SHALL MEAN  'is instantiated.'  But that has all the advantages of theft over honest toil, and besides, two can play that game.  I could, with more justice, stipulate that there is no legitimate use of 'exist(s)' except as a first-level predicate.

Finally, they may argue as follows:

If there are modes of existence, then existence is a property of individuals.
Existence is not a property of individuals
Ergo
There are no modes of existence.

Whether this argument is sound depends on what is meant by 'property.'  Existence is obviously not a quidditative property of any individual.  And existence is not a property of individuals if that is taken to imply that existents instantiate existence. But surely existence belongs to individuals and is in this sense a property of them. Accordingly, I reject  this third argument by denying the minor.

So as far as I can see the case against modes of existence is extremely weak. 

Quentin Gibson (1913 – 2001)

I first became aware of the Australian philosopher Quentin Gibson when I discovered his book The Existence Principle. It was published in 1998, when Gibson was 85 years old, in the Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series, #75. My A Paradigm Theory of Existence appeared in the same series in 2002, #89. Our approaches are radically different:  I maintain what he denies, for one thing, that there are modes of existence. I discuss some of his ideas on pp. 15-22 of my book.

I learned here that Gibson is the son of W. R. Boyce Gibson  whose translation of Edmund Husserl's Ideen I studied as an undergraduate.  Small world.

Who Benefits From Public-Sector Unions?

An excellent piece by Michael Barone.  Excerpt:

The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party. (emphasis added)

Is that clear?  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?

The Solid Bourgeois

The solid bourgeois may dismiss as so much nonsense philosophy, poetry, and other products of questers and romantics — all the while subscribing to the socially sanctioned nonsense of some respectable established church.

Be neither bourgeois nor bohemian, the one to the exclusion of the other. The true maverick is that dialectical blend, the sublatedness (Aufgehobensein) of both, that blend known as the BoBo, the bourgeois bohemian.

Existence and Completeness

Marco Santambrogio, "Meinongian Theories of Generality," Nous, December 1990, p. 662:

. . . I take existence to mean just this: an entity, i, exists iff there is a determinate answer to every question concerning it or in other words, for every F(x) either F[x/i] or ~F[x/i] holds.  The Tertium Non Datur is the hallmark of existence of reality.  This is entirely in the Meinong-Twardowski tradition.

In other words, existence is completeness: Necessarily, for any x, x exists if and only if x is complete, i.e., satisfies the property version of the Law of Excluded Middle (Tertium Non Datur).  Now I have long maintained that whatever exists is complete, but I have never been tempted by the thesis that whatever is complete exists.

Why can't there be complete nonexistent objects?  Imagine the God of Leibniz, before the creation, contemplating an infinity of possible worlds, each of them determinate down to the last detail.  None of them exists or is actual.  But each of them is complete.  One of them God calls 'Charley.'  God says, Fiat Charley! And Charley exists.  It is exactly the same world which 'before' was merely possible, only 'now' it is actual.

So why should completeness entail existence?

 

Wholes, Parts, and Modes of Being

Do wholes and their parts exist in different ways?  The analytic establishment is hostile to modes of being, but its case is weak.  Indeed some establishmentarians make no case at all; they simply bluster and asseverate and beg the question.  I wonder how a member of the establishment would counter the following argument.  Consider a house made of bricks and nothing but bricks, and let's list some pertinent truths and see what follows.

1. The house exists.
2. The bricks exist.
3. The house is composed of the bricks, all of them, and of nothing else, and is not something wholly distinct from them or in addition to them.
4. The bricks can exist without the house, but the house cannot exist without the bricks.
5. The relation between the house and the bricks is neither causal nor logical.
Therefore
6. The house has a dependent mode of existence unlike the bricks. 

Peter van Inwagen, one of those establishmentarians who is hostile to the very idea of there being modes of being, will deny (1) as part of his general denial of artifacts.  If artifacts do not exist at all, then questions about how they exist, or in what way or mode, obviously lapse.  But it is evident to me that if we have to choose between denying artifacts and accepting modes of being, then we should accept modes of being!

(2) is undeniable as is (3):  it would obviously be absurd to think of the house as something over and above its constituents, as if it could exist even if they didn't.  The house is just the bricks arranged house-wise.  This is consistent with the truth of (1).  The fact that the house is just the bricks arranged house-wise does not entail that the house does not exist. 

(4) is equally evident and is just a consequence of (3).  I put the point modally but I could also make it temporally: before the Wise Pig assembled the bricks into a house fit to repel the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf, there was no house, but there were the bricks.

(5)  is also obviously true.  The bricks, taken individually or collectively, do not cause the house.  Now an Aristotelian may want to speak of the bricks as the 'material cause' of the house, but that is not the issue.  The issue is whether the bricks are the efficient cause of the cause.  The answer to that is obviously in the negative.  Nor are the bricks the cause of the house in the Humean sense of 'cause,' or in any modern sense of 'cause.'  For one thing, causation is standardly taken to relate events and neither a house nor a set or sum of its constituents is an event.

Could we say that the relation between bricks and house is logical? No. Logical relations relate propositions and neither the bricks nor the house is a proposition.  It is not a relation of supervenience either since supervenience relates properties and neither bricks nor house is a property.

But I hear an objection. 

I agree with you that the house is not identical to the bricks and that the former depends on the latter but not vice versa.  Why not just say that the two are related counterfactually?  Had the bricks not existed, the house would not have existed either.  Why not  say that and be done with it?  The house depends on the bricks but not conversely.  But the dependence of one existent on another does not seem to require that there are different modes of existence.

True, had the bricks not existed, the house would not have existed.    But what is the truth-maker of this counterfactual?  Your objection is superficial.  Obviously the house is not the bricks.  Obviously the house is dependent on the bricks.  I say that the house, as a whole of parts, exists-dependently.  You said nothing that refutes this.

We should also ask whether it makes sense to speak of a relation between bricks and house. It is certainly not an external relation if an external relation is one whose holding is accidental to the existence of its terms.  If brick A is on top of brick B, then they stand in a dyadic external relation: each can exist without standing in the relation, which is to say that their being related in this way is accidental to both of them.  But a house and its bricks are not externally related: the house cannot exist apart from its 'relation' to the bricks. 

The best thing to say here is that the house has a dependent mode of existence.  The house exists and the bricks exist, but the house exists in a different way than the bricks do.  If you deny this, then you are saying that the house and the bricks exist in the same way.  And what way is that?  Independently.  But it is obvious that the house does not exist independently of the bricks.

I will end by suggesting that van Inwagen's strange denial of artifacts is motivated by his failure to appreciate that there are modes of being.  For if there are no modes of being, and everything that exists exists in the same way, then one is forced to choose between saying either that the house exists independently of its constituent bricks or that the house does not exist at all.  Since van Inwagen perceives that it is absurd to say that the house exists independently of its constituent bricks, he is forced to say that it does not exist at all.

But if there are modes of being we can maintain, rather more sensibly, both that the house exists and that it does not exist independently of its constituent bricks.