Metaphysics at Cindy’s: The Ontological Stucture of Contingent Conreta

Over Sunday breakfast at Cindy's, a hardscrabble Mesa, Arizona eatery not unwelcoming to metaphysicians and motorcyclists alike, Peter  Lupu fired a double-barreled objection at my solution to Deck's Paradox.  The target, however, was not hit.  My solution requires that (a) concrete particulars can be coherently 'assayed' (to use a favorite word of Gustav Bergmann), or given an ontological analysis in terms of constituents some or all of which are universals, and (b) modally contingent concrete particulars can be coherently assayed as composed of necessary beings.

Peter denies both of (a) and (b), without good reason as it seems to me.  Let's begin with some definitions pithily presented.

Definitions

Abstract =df causally inert.

Concrete =df not abstract.

Universal =df repeatable (multiply exemplifiable).

Particular =df unrepeatable.

Modally contingent=df existent in some but not all broadly-logically possible worlds.

Modally necessary =df not modally contingent and not modally impossible.

Ad (a).  One form of the question is:  Could a concrete particular be coherently construed as a bundle universals?  Peter thinks not: "But the unification of two universals U and V is another universal W, not a particular." (From a two page handout he brought to breakfast.  How many people that you know bring handouts to breakfast?!)  Now bundle-of-universals theories of particulars face various standard objections, but as far as I know no one in the literature has made Peter's objection.  Presumably for good reason: it is a bad objection that confuses conjunction with the bundling relation.

We understand conjunction as a propositional connective.  Given the propositions a is red and b is round we understand that the conjunction a is red & b is round is true iff both conjuncts are true.  It is clear that a conjunction of propositions is itself a proposition.  By a slight extension we can speak meaningfully of a conjunction of propositional functions, and from there we can move to talk of conjunctions of properties.  Assuming that properties are universals, we can speak of conjunctions of universals.  It is clear that a conjunction of universals is itself a universal.  Thus the conjunction of Redness and Roundness is itself a universal, a multiply exemplifiable entity.  I will use 'Konjunction'  to single out conjunction of universals.

Now it should be obvious that a bundle of universals is not a conjunction of universals.  Let K be the Konjunction operator: it operates upon  universals to form universals.  Let B be the bundling operator: it operates upon universals to form particulars.  Bundling is not Konjunction.  So far, then, Peter seems to have failed to make an elementary distinction.

Now suppose Peter objects that nothing could operate upon universals to form a particular.  Universals in, universals out.  Then I say that he is just wrong: the set-theoretical braces — { } — denote an operator that operates upon items of any category to form sets of those items.  Now it should be obvious that a set of universals is not itself a universal, but a particular.  A Konjunction of universals is a universal, but a set of universals is not a universal, but a particular.  The Konjunction of Redness and Roundness is exemplifiable; but no set is exemplifiable.

Am I saying that a bundle of universals is a set of universals?  No.  I am saying that it is false to assume that any operation upon universals will result in a universal.  What I have said so far suffices to refute Peter's first objection, which was that the unification of two universals yields a third universal. You can see that to be false by noting that the unification into a set of two or more universals does not yield a universal but a particular.

Ad (b).  Our second question is whether a contingent particular could have as ontological constituents necessary beings.  Peter thinks not.  He thinks that anything composed of necessary beings will itself be a necessary being.  And so, given that universals are necessary beings, and that concrete particulars are composed of universals, no concrete particular can be modally contingent.

This objection fares no better than the first.  Suppose Redness and Roundness are compresent.  (You will recall that Russell took the bundling relation to be the compresence relation.  See An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, 1940, Chapter 6.)  Each of these universals, we are assuming, is a necessary being.  But it doesn't follow that their compresence is necessary; it could easily be contingent.  Here and now I see a complete complex of compresence two of whose constituent universals are Redness and Roundness.  But surely there is no necessity that these two universals co-occur or be com-present.  After all, Redness is often encountered compresent with shapes that are logically incompatible with Roundness.  Compresence, then, is a contingent relation.  It follows that complexes of compresence are contingent.  Necessarily, Rednessexists.  Necessarily, Roundness exists.  But it does not follow that, necessarily, Redness and Roundness are compresent: surely there are possible worlds in which they are not.

Peter's argument for his conclusion commits the fallacy of composition:

1. Every universal necessarily exists.

2. Every concrete particular is composed of universals. Therefore,

3. Every concrete particular is composed of things that necessarily exist. Therefore,

4. Every concrete particular necessarily exists.

The move from (3) to(4) is the fallacy of composition.  One cannot assume that if the parts of a whole have a certain property, then the whole has those properties.

 

Literary Kicks

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mailed me to say that he has a response to a recent Buddhism post of mine. Please do check it out, and if you are a Beat Generation aficionado, you will find plenty of material on the Beats at Asher's place. 

In his response to me, Asher points out something I wouldn't dream of denying, namely, that Siddartha Gautama recommended a middle path between extreme asceticism and indulgence.  That's true, but pertains only to the means whereby desire as such is to be conquered.  The fact remains that for Buddhism desire as such is the problem, as opposed to misdirected desire, desire for unworthy of objects.

Report from Afghanistan and More on Religious Zealotry

Spencer Case reports from Afghanistan, and I comment in blue (older comments of mine in dark orange):

Greetings again from Afghanistan. I've been reading your blog regularly although I haven't written in a while, so I hope you'll forgive a few preliminaries. Things are winding down in my tour, despite an attack on my base by a few Taliban last week (of which my report can be found here: http://www.cjtf101.com/en/regional-command-east-news-mainmenu-401/3362-us-afghan-servicemembers-respond-during-attack.html).

Also, I became interested in Robert Reilly's book The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis because of your pointer. I reviewed it in the Idaho State Journal and on my Dateline Afghanistan blog. Imagine my delight when none other than Reilly himself posted
a comment to my review! (online at: http://www.pocatelloshops.com/new_blogs/afghanistan/?p=99)

By the time this month expires I will be drinking my much awaited first post-deployment beer. Speaking of worldly pleasures, I'd like to make a second stab at an unresolved argument we had a couple of months ago. I am still convinced  that sincere conviction in a religious afterlife commits one to zealotry. After all, given a sincere conviction in Christian  salvation, how could the pursuit of any finite good be justified? And who could be more of a paradigm case of zealotry than the person who thinks all worldly goods are completely overridden by some one eternal Good?

In your response to my argument, you write:

Continue reading “Report from Afghanistan and More on Religious Zealotry”

Kerouac October Quotation #4: Resolutions Made and Broken

Sweet gone Jack made such an effort to be a good boy, but failed so utterly as to break one's heart.  Here is a Some of the Dharma entry (p. 127) written sometime between July and October 1954, before success and fame and alcohol undid him:

RESOLVED

One meal a day

No drinking of intoxicants

No maintaining of friendships

That, if I break any of these elementary rules of Buddhism, which have been my biggest obstacles, hindrances t othe attainment of contemplative happiness and joy of will, I will give up Buddhism forever. [He did break them and did give up Buddhism.]

Agreed, that I may finish the literary work I began, by the age of 40, after which my only work is to be in the Dharma Teaching, to be followed  by all cessation of work, striving or mental effort when Nirvana is nigh and signs indicate there is no more to write and teach.

One meal a day means, the mind not to be taunted and tempted by the senses. (Sensation of taste left uncultivated.) No intoxicants means, the heart not to be deranged, beaten in, (as in excessive drinking), nor the brain hystericalized and over-filled with anxious drug-thoughts and irrelevant images.  No maintaining of friendships means, no relations whatever to contaminate the good of contemplation, no pleasure-seeking, no ego-personality activity, no Co-Ignorance.

Quand tu t'ennui souffre . . .

Not drinking  preserves contemplative strength

Eating once a day, contemplative sensitivity

No friends or lusts, contemplative serenity

Strength, Sensitivity, Serenity = Joy

Kerouac October Quotation #3: This World, the Palpable Thought of God

Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (G. P. Putnam 1965), p. 48:

Outside it's October night in Manhattan and on the waterfront wholesale markets there are barrels with fires left burning in them by the longshoremen where I stop and warm my hands and take a nip two nips from the bottle and hear the bvoom of ships in the channel and I look up and there, the same stars as over Lowell, October, old melancholy October, tender and loving and sad, and it will all tie up eventually into a perfect posy of love I think and I shall present it to Tathagata, my Lord, to God, saying "Lord Thou didst exult — and praise be You for showing me how You did it — Lord now I'm ready for more — And this time I won't whine — This time I'll keep my mind clear on the fact that it is Thy Empty Forms."

. . . This world, the palpable thought of God . . . [ellipsis in original]

 

Total Dependence and Essence/Existence Composition

Anthony Flood has done metaphysicians a service by making available John N. Deck’s excellent, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Language of Total Dependence. This is an essay that Anthony Kenny, no slouch of a philosopher, saw fit to include in his anthology, Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).

Mr. Flood finds Deck’s argument to be "unanswerable" to such an extent that it broke the hold of Thomism on him. Although I am not a Thomist, I believe I can show that Deck’s argument is not compelling.

This essay divides into two parts. In the first, I state what I take to be Deck’s argument; in the second, I show how it can be answered from the position worked out in my A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated (Kluwer Philosophical Studies Series #89, 2002).

Deck’s Argument Entdeckt

Continue reading “Total Dependence and Essence/Existence Composition”

Kerouac to Whalen on Buddhism

It's October again, Kerouac month at MavPhil.  Perhaps I will post a quotation a day throughout this wonderful month that always passes too quickly — as if bent on proving the vain and visionary nature of phenomenal existence.

Jack Kerouac finished Some of the Dharma on 15 March 1956.  The Dharma Bums was published in 1958.  By 1959, Kerouac was moving away from Buddhism.  On 10 June 1959 he wrote to Philip Whalen:

Myself, the dharma is slipping away from my consciousness and I cant think of anything to say about it anymore. I still read the diamond sutra but as in a dream now.  Don't know what to do.  Cant see the purpose of human or terrestrial or any kinda life without heaven to reward the poor suffering fucks. The Buddhist notion that Ignorance caused the world leaves me cold now, because I feel the presence of angels. (Some of the Dharma, Viking 1997, editor's introduction.)

Buddhism on Suffering and One Reason I am Not a Buddhist

(This entry touches upon some themes discussed with greater rigor, thoroughness, and scholarliness in my "No Self? A Look at a Buddhist Argument," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 453-466.)

For Buddhism, all is dukkha, suffering.  All is unsatisfactory.  This, the First Noble Truth, runs contrary to ordinary modes of thinking:  doesn't life routinely offer us, besides pain and misery and disappointment, intense pleasures and deep satisfactions?  How then can it be true that sarvam dukkham?  For the Buddhist, however, what is ordinarily taken by the unenlightened worldling  to be sukha (pleasure) is at bottom dukkha.  Why?  Because no pleasure, mental or physical, gives permanent and plenary satisfaction.  Each satisfaction leaves us in the lurch, wanting more.  A desire satisfied is a desire entrenched. Masturbate once, and you will do it a thousand times, with the need for repetition testifying to the unsatisfactoriness of the initial satisfaction.   Each pleasure promises more that it can possibly deliver, and so refers you to the next and the next and the next, none of them finally satisfactory.  It's a sort of Hegelian schlechte Unendlichkeit.  Desire satisfied becomes craving, and craving is an instance of dukkha.  One becomes attached to the paltry and impermanent and one suffers when it cannot be had. 

There is more to it than this, but this is the essence of it.  The thing to note is that the claim in the First Noble Truth is not the triviality that there is a lot of suffering in this life, but that life itself, as insatiable desiring and craving for what is unattainable to it, is ill, pain-inducing, profoundly unsatisfactory, and something to be escaped from if possible. It is a radical diagnosis of the human predicament, and the proposed cure is equally radical: extirpation of desire.  The problem for the Buddhist is not that some of our desires are misdirected; the problem is desire itself.  The soulution, then, is not rightly-ordered desire, as in Christianity, but the eradication of desire.  The root of suffering is desire and that root must be uprooted (e-radi-cated). 

Although Buddhism appears in some ways to be a sort of 'empirical religion' — to hazard an oxymoron — the claim that all is suffering involves an interpretation of our experience that goes well beyond the empirically given.  Buddhism, as a development from Hinduism, judges the given by the standard of the permanent.  Permanence is the standard against which the  ordinary satisfactions of life are judged deficient.  Absolute permanence sets the ontological and axiological standard.  The operative presupposition is that only that which is permanent is truly real and truly important.  But if, as Buddhism also maintains, all is impermanent, then one wonders whence the standard of permanence derives its validity. If all is impermanent, and nothing has self-nature, then the standard is illusory.  If so, then we have no good reason to reject all ordinary satisfactions.

For Buddhism, the fundamental problem is suffering in the radical sense above explained, and the solution is entry into nibbana by the extirpation of desire, all desire (including even the desire for nibbana), as opposed to the moderation of desire and its redirection to worthy objects.  I reject both the diagnosis and the cure.  The diagnosis is faulty because incoherent: it presupposes while denying the exstence of an absolute ontological and axiological standard.  The cure is faulty because it issues in nihilism, as if the goal of life could be nonexistence.

I am talking about primitive Buddhism, that of the Pali canon.  Attention to the Mahayana would require some qualifications.

So one reason I am not a Buddhist is that I reject the doctrine of suffering.  But I also reject the doctrines of impermanence and 'no self.'  That gives me two more reasons.

But I should say that I take Buddhism very seriously indeed.  It is deep and sophisticated with a rich tradition of philosophical commentary.  Apart from its mystical branch, Sufism, I cannot take Islam seriously –except as a grave threat to other religions and indeed to civilization itself.  But perhaps I have been too much influenced by Schopenhauer on this point.

 

Armor Against Superlatives

Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pp.  98-99:

As we circled over Casablanca for landing, I saw below an enormous
swimming pool or reservoir. I turned to the man sitting next to me,
a grizzled old army colonel, and said to him, "That has to be the
biggest swimming pool in the world."

"The second biggest," he said.

"And where's the biggest?"

"Sonny," he said to me, "whatever it is, wherever it is, there's
something bigger or something better."

That stayed with me — one of several observations that cut into me
and stayed — and I passed it on to my children as armor against
superlatives.

Time and Tense: A Note on the B-Theory

What is time?  Don't ask me, and I know.  Ask me, and I don't know. (Augustine)  This post sketches, without defending, one theory of time.

On the B-Theory of time, real or objective time is exhausted by what J. M. E. McTaggart called the B-series, the series of times, events, and individuals ordered by the B-relations (earlier than, later than, simultaneous with). If the B-theory is correct, then our ordinary sense that events approach us from the future, arrive at the present, and then recede into the past is at best a mind-dependent phenomenon. For on the B-theory, there are no such irreducible  monadic A-properties as futurity, presentness and pastness. There is just a manifold of tenselessly existing events ordered by the B-relations. Time does not pass or flow, let alone fly. There is no temporal becoming.  My birth is not sinking into the past, becoming ever more past, nor is my death  approaching from the future, getting closer and closer.  Tempus fugit does not express a truth about reality.  At best, it picks out a truth about our experience of reality.

Employing a political metaphor, one could say that a B-theorist is an egalitarian about times and the events at times: they are all equal in point of reality.  Accordingly, my blogging now is no more real (but also no less real) than Socrates' drinking the hemlock millenia ago.  Nor is it more real than my death which, needless to say,  lies in the future.  Each time is present at itself, but no time is present, period.  And each time (and the events at it) exists relative to itself, but no time exists absolutely.

This is not to say that the B-theorist does not have uses for 'past,' 'present,' and 'future.'  He can speak with the vulgar while thinking with the learned.  Thus a B-theorist can hold that an utterance at time t of 'E is past' expresses the fact that E is earlier than t.  An old objection is that this does not capture the meaning of 'E is past.' For the fact that E is earlier than t, if true, is always true; while 'E is past' is true only after E. This difference in truth conditions shows a difference in meaning. The B-theorist can respond by saying that his concern is not with semantics but with ontology. His concern is with the reality, or rather the lack of reality, of tense, and not with the meanings of tensed sentences or sentences featuring A-expressions. The B-theorist can say that, regardless of meaning, what makes it true that E is past at t is that E is earlier than t, and that, in mind-independent reality, nothing else is needed to make 'E is past' uttered at t true.

Compare 'BV is hungry' and 'I am hungry' said by BV. The one is true if and only if the other is.  But the two sentences differ in meaning. The first, if true, is true no matter who says it; but the second is true only if asserted by someone who is hungry. Despite the difference in meaning, what makes it true that I am hungry (assertively uttered by BV) is that BV is hungry. In sum, the B-theorist need not be committed to the insupportable contention that A-statements are translatable salva significatione into B-statements.

The B-theorist, then, denies that the present moment enjoys any temporal or existential privilege.  Every time is temporally present to itself such that no time is temporally present simpliciter.  This temporal egalitarianism entails a decoupling of existence and temporal presentness.  There just is no irreducible property of temporal presentness; hence existence cannot be identified with it.  To exist is to exist tenselessly.  The opposite view is that of the presentist: there is a genuine property of temporal presentness and existence is either identical or logically equivalent to this property.  Presentism implies that only the temporally present is real or existent.  If to exist is to exist now, then the past and future do not exist.

Why be a B-theorist?  McTaggart has a famous argument according to which the monadic A-properties lead to contradiction.  We should examine that argument in a separate post.

 

No Provision in Islam for Mosque-State Separation

John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Yale UP, 1989, pp. 48-49):

From the point of view of the understanding of this state of islam [submission to Allah] the Muslim sees no distinction between the religious and the secular.  The whole of life is to be lived in the presence of Allah and is the sphere of God's absolute claim and limitless compassion and mercy.  And so islam, God-centredness, is not only an inner submission to the sole Lord of the universe but also a pattern of corporate life in accordance with God's will.  It involves both salat, worship, and falah, the good embodied in behaviour.  Through the five appointed moments of prayer each day is linked to God. Indeed almost any activity may be begun with Bismillah ('in the name of Allah'); and plans and hopes for the future are qualified by Inshallah ('if Allah wills').  Thus life is constantly punctuated by the remembrance of God.  It is a symptom of this that almsgiving ranks with prayer, fasting, pilgrimage and confession of faith as one of the five 'pillars' of Islam.  Within this holistic conception the 'secular' spheres of politics, government, law, commerce, science and the arts all come within the scope of religious obedience.

What Hick calls a "holistic conception," I would call totalitarian.  Islam is totalitarian in a two-fold sense.  It aims to regulate every aspect and every moment of the individual believer's life. (And if you are not a believer, you must either convert or accept dhimmitude.)   But it is also totalitarian in a corporate sense in that it aims to control every aspect of society in all its spheres, just as Hick points out supra.

Islam, therefore, is profoundly at odds with the values of the West.  For we in the West, whether liberals or conservatives, accept church(mosque)-state separation.  We no doubt argue heatedly over what exactly it entails, but we are agreed on the main principle.  I regularly criticize the shysters of the ACLU for their extremist positions on this question; but I agree with them that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . ."

This raises a very serious question.  Is Islam –  pure, unEnlightened, un-watered-down, fundamentalist, theocratic Islam — deserving of First Amendment protection?  We read in the First Amendment that Congress shall not prohibit the free exercise of religion.  Should that be understood to mean that the Federal government shall not prohibit the  establishment and  free exercise of a  totalitarian, fundamentalist  theocratic religion in a particular state, say Michigan? 

The USA is a Christian nation with a secular government.  Suppose there was a religion whose aim was to subvert our secular government.  Does commitment to freedom of religion enjoin toleration of such a religion?