The thinker, because he is a thinker, cannot naively live his life of thought, but must be tormented by doubts regarding it. The doer, because he is not a thinker, can naively live his life of action.
The Vital Imperative: Live Well, Live Now
This is it. This is your life, right here and right now. The present is as real as it gets. If you are not doing with your life right now what you think you ought to be doing with it, then you are doing something wrong.
After the 2001 attack on the World Trade Towers, The New York Times published short pieces on those who had perished. The story of one fellow in particular remains in memory. He was a bond trader whose office was high up in one of the towers. A man in his late thirties, early forties, his dream was to live in a small town in the Rockies and operate a bait and tackle shop. But first he had to earn his grubstake, or so he thought. So he slaved away in the certain present for an uncertain future. He did what he did not love so that he might do what he did love. He did what he did not love for a present that never came.
His living was not a true living, but a postponing, a placing after. He placed his real life after his present life, forgetting that the present alone is real and that the present, not the future, is in one's secure possession.
When St Augustine was asked what he would do if he knew he would die in the next hour, he replied, "Nothing other than what I am now doing." He was living as he thought he ought to be living, realizing rather than postponing his Ideal.
From these lessons we may infer a Vital Imperative: As far as possible, live in the present as if the next hour were to be the hour of your death. How do you want death to find you? Living self-sufficiently in the riches of the moment? Or standing on tip-toe craning your head toward a nonexistent future?
Freud or James? Wish-Fulfillment or Inducement to Strenuous Living?
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), The Future of an Illusion:
It would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral world order and a future life. But at the same time it is
very odd that this is all just as we should wish it for ourselves.
William James (1842-1910), "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life":
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.
Both of these passages support the view that God is a posit, a postulate, a projection. But there is a striking difference. Freud, seeing the origin of the God-projection in weakness, takes this as
discrediting the God-idea. Having its genesis in our neediness, the God-idea is false or at least unworthy of belief. James, however, viewing the God-idea as an expression of our robustness, takes this fact as a verification of the idea of God.
Of course, there are two different notions of truth in play. I don't know whether Freud ever discussed theories of truth, but I'd guess he is a correspondence-theorist: an idea is true if it corresponds to reality. But James is a pragmatist: an idea is true if it works, if it is something good for us to believe in the long run. For James, we get more out of the game of existence when we believe in God and all that entails: a moral world order that places an ethical demand on us; an ultimate explanation of why anything exists and why we exist; a final guarantor of the veridicality of our ideas; a provider of sense and purpose; a repository of hope; a securer of immortality and adjustor of happiness and virtue. Believing in God, we live better, richer, fuller lives; we wring from existence its "keenest possibilities of zest."
To resolve the debate between Freud and James one would have to get clear about the nature of truth and its connection to human flourishing. The problems are deep and perhaps insoluble. But that doesn't stop them from being fascinating and worth pursuing. And we don't know they are insoluble. If we believe that they are soluble, that truth about ultimates is attainable, and we strive for it, then too we will wring from "the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest."
Companion post: Freud on Illusion, Delusion, Error, and Religion
The Losertarian Party
Politics is a practical business: it is about the gaining and maintaining of power for the purpose of implementing programs and policies that one believes to be beneficial, and for opposing those whose policies one believes to be deleterious. As the Converse Clausewitz Principle has it, it is war conducted by other means. For this very reason, I stay clear of it except for voting and blogging: I am by inclination and aptitude a theoretician, a "spectator of all time and existence" to borrow a marvellous phrase from the Plato's Republic. But part of the theoretician's task is to understand the political. And if I understand it, I understand that the Libertarian Party, though it might be a nice debating society, is a waste of time practically speaking. That's why I approve of and borrow Michael Medved's moniker, 'Losertarian Party.' These adolescents will never get power, so what's the point? It's a party of computer geeks, sci-fi freaks, and adolescents of all ages, the sort that never outgrow Ayn Rand. Open borders, legal dope, ACLU-type extremism about freedom of expression. Out of the mainstream and rightly so.
So Ron Paul made a smart move when he joined the Republicans, and his son Rand seems more conservative than libertarian.
As I said, politics is a practical business. It's about winning, not talking. It's not about ideological purity or having the supposedly best ideas; it's about gaining the power to implement good ideas. The practical politician understands that quite often Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien, the best is the enemy of the good.
A Day on the Salt River
Mike Valle and I spent four and a half hours floating down the Rio Salado on truck tire inner tubes yesterday. That's Mike and a bit of my left knee in the first shot. The second depicts some thirsty wild horses. The third offers a fine view of Red Mountain.
What is Philosophy?
I found the following on Keith's blog. It is so good I simply must reproduce it here.
The nearest thing to a safe definition of the word "philosophy", if we wish to include all that has been and will be correctly so called, is that it means the activity of Plato in his dialogues and every activity that has arisen or will arise out of that.
(Richard Robinson, "Is Psychical Research Relevant to Philosophy?" The Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 24 [1950]: 189-206, at 192.)
This is in line with my masthead motto which alludes to the famous observation of Alfred North Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. [. . .] Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. (Process and Reality, Corrected Edition, The Free Press, 1978, p. 39)
John Pepples Wants a New Left
During our lazy float down the Rio Salado today, Mike Valle and I had a lot to talk about. He mentioned a new blog he had come across entitled I Want a New Left. The author, John Pepples, aims to develop a self-critical leftism. Now, having read quickly through most of his posts, I am a bit puzzled by the same thing that puzzles Mike: why does Pepples hang on to the 'leftism' label?
But labels aren't that important. What is important are the issues and one's stances on them. On that score, conservatives like me and Mike share common ground with Pepples. In his biographical statement he says that in college he majored in mathematics and took a lot of physics courses. "But this was during the late 60s and early 70s, when much questioning was occurring, and I ended up as a grad student in philosophy." Sounds very familiar! The 'sixties were a heady time, a time of ferment, during which indeed "much questioning was occurring." I started out in Electrical Engineering but also "ended up as a grad student in philosophy." I did, however, have a bit more luck career-wise and didn't experience the same difficulties getting into print.
Why did so many of us 60s types end up in philosophy? Because we were lost in a strange land, traditional understandings and forms of world-orientation having left us without guidance, and we needed to ascend to a vantage point to reconnoiter the terrain, the vantage point that philosophy alone provides.
Political change, a species of the genus doxastic change, is a fascinating topic. I recently stumbled upon an effort by a distaff blogger who documents her transition from a comfortable enclave of mutually reinforcing Democrats to the more open world of contemporary conservatism, and the hostility with which her turncoat behavior was rewarded. She calls her blog Neo-Neocon.
Fruitful Conversation
E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, p. 163:
Conversation is fruitful only between minds given to consolidating their perplexities.
A brilliant aphorism. Philosophy, as Plato remarks (Theaetetus 155) and Aristotle repeats (Metaphysics 982b10), has its origin in wonder or perplexity. Fruitful philosophical conversation, rare as it is and must be given the state of humanity, is therefore a consolidation and appreciation of problems and aporiai, much more than an attempt to convince one's interlocutor of something. Herein lies a key difference between philosophy and ideology.
NASA Then and Now
In the '60s, under the leadership of JFK, NASA put a man on the moon. Forty years later, under the 'leadership' of BHO, 'NASA' has become an acronym for
Nurturing Arab Self Awareness. (From an e-mailer to the O'Reilly Factor) Image found here.
On second thought, the e-mailer's suggestion can be improved upon: Nurturing Arab Self Acceptance.
As for the cartoon below, I needn't point out to my astute readership that the Arabs did not invent mathematics.
From the Mailbag: Faith and Modality
An astute reader e-mails,
First, sometime ago I recommended John Bishop's Believing by Faith: An Essay in the Epistemology
and Ethics of Religious Belief . If you have yet to read the book, I would recommend his new article
on Faith in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. You may be particularly interested in
sections 7-10.
Second, I do not know a great deal about possible worlds semantics, and am taking a great risk of embarrassing myself in questioning your argument that "Necessarily, something exists" – but I think
that I will take a stab at it!
I am assuming that "Necessarily something exists" = "In at least one possible world, at least one
thing exists." Is this correct?
No. The first sentence is equivalent to 'In every possible world, at least one thing exists.' In other words, there is no possible world that is empty: every world has at least one item in it. But this is consistent with there being no one item that exists in every possible world. Suppose every being is contingent, where a contingent being is one that exists in some but not all possible worlds. Then there would be no one being that exists in all worlds, and 'Necessarily something exists' would be made true by the fact that each world has something or other in it. But if there is a necessary being (defined as a being that exists in all worlds), then of course the sentence in question is also true.
1. Does not your argument depend upon the assumption of 'modal realism' – that all possible worlds
actually exist, a highly questionable assumption?
No, because I am using the 'possible worlds' language only as a façon de parler, a graphic and intuitive way of representing modal relationships which I find helpful. (Unfortunately, most of my readers are completely 'thrown' by it!) In other words, I could have stated the argument without mentioning possible worlds. Here is a partial schedule of intertranslation, where 'world' is short for 'broadly logically possible world':
X is a necessary being =df X exists in all worlds
X is a contingent being =df X exists in some but not all worlds
X is an impossible being =df X exists in no world
X is an actual being =df X exists in the actual world
(Note that if x is contingent, it doesn't follow that x is actual, nor conversely)
X is a possible being =df X exists in some world
X is essentially F =df X instantiates F-ness in every world in which X exists.
X is accidentally F =df X instantiates F-ness in some but not all worlds in which X exists
X is necessarily F =df X instantiates F-ness in every world in which X exists, and X exists in every world.
(Example: God is necessarily, not just essentially, omnipotent.)
Proposition p is necessarily true =df p is true in all worlds
P is contingently true =df p is true in some but not all worlds
And so on.
Now isn't that neat? The modal notions are explicated in terms of the familiar quantifiers of predicate logic. The schema facilitates modal reasoning. For example, if x is necessary, does it follow that x is possible? Yes, because if x exists in all worlds, then it exists in some worlds. If x is possible, does it follow that x is contingent? No, because if x exists in some worlds, that leaves it open that it exists in all worlds. If x is noncontingent, does it follow that x is necessary? No, because if it is not the case that x exists in some but not all worlds, it does not follow that x exists in all worlds: x might exist in no world.
You characterize modal realism as the doctrine that "all possible worlds actually exist." No philosopher maintains that every world is absolutely actual. There is only one possible world that is absolutely actual: all the rest are merely possible. Now there is a philosopher, David K. Lewis, who maintains that there is a plurality of worlds, all on an ontological par, and thus all equally real; but he denies that there is such a property as absolute actuality. For him each world is actual at itself, but no world is actual simpliciter or absolutely. I reject Lewis's view which could be called extreme modal realism. Almost everyone rejects it. Lewis's idea, which is both brilliant and crazy at the same time, is that modality can be reduced to purely extensional terms via definitions like the ones I gave above. But few follow him in that. The above definitions do not allow one to eliminate modality by quantifying over worlds, because the worlds in question are possible, and 'possible' is a modal term.
So, to answer what I take to be your question, my argument does not presuppose extreme modal realism. In fact, it does not require that we take any stand at all on what exactly possible worlds are. But I do presuppose realism to this extent: I asssume that modality is not merely epistemic. Thus the possibility that I be sleeping now instead of blogging is a 'real possibility' in that it is subsists independently of what I or anyone know or believe. It is not possible merely in the epistemic sense of 'possible for all I know,' but possible independently of what I know.
2. Does not your use of 'exists' in premises 4 and 5 treat it as, or assume that it can be used as, a
'real predicate' rather than merely a 'grammatical predicate' (B. Russell) – again a questionable if
not false assumption?
I discuss this is various articles and in my 2002 book A Paradigm Theory of Existence. I argue, among other things, that Russell's theory of existence, which is closely related to Frege's, is a complete nonstarter, wrong from the ground up. There is something on Russell's theory in Paul Edwards' Heidegger's Confusions: A Two-Fold Ripoff.
In 'possible worlds' lingo, we say things like this: There are possible worlds in which Socrates exists but is not the teacher of Plato. Now of course those worlds are all merely possible because we know (or reasonably believe) that in the actual world Socrates is the teacher of Plato. So what does it mean to say that Socrates exists in those worlds? Let W be a merely possible world. To say that x exists in W is to say that, had W been actual, x would have existed. A merely possible world in which Socrates is not the teacher of Plato is a world which is such that, had it been actual, then Socrates would have existed without being the teacher of Plato.
My correspondent continues with several more questions/objections which I don't understand. In any case the above gives us plenty to discuss.
Kerouaciana
A page of links of interest to the Kerouac aficionado. And if you haven't seen Bill Buckley's Kerouac interview, here it is, featuring a drunken Kerouac with interspersed commentary by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Steve Allen, Gregory Corso, and John Clellon Holmes.
The ‘Stickiness’ Metric
'Stickiness' is a measure of the average length of time a reader remains at a website. Personally, I am more impressed by the 'stickiness' of a site than its raw traffic (measured in unique visitors and page views). Here at TaxProf Blog is a ranking of the 'stickiest' law prof blogs. (Via Legal Insurrection.) Ladder Man will no doubt gnash his teeth over the fact that Volokh Conspiracy is in the number one slot handily beating out his two blogs. It comes as no surprise that Instapundit is first in traffic but last in 'stickiness.'
Why is Ladder Man so-called? Because he is a status-obsessed careerist, a social climber, given to ranking things. You won't find much by way of content at his academic gossip site.
A Cantorian Argument Why Possible Worlds Cannot be Maximally Consistent Sets of Propositions
A commenter in the 'Nothing' thread spoke of possible worlds as sets. What follows is a reposting from 1 March 2009 which opposes that notion.
…………….
In a recent comment, Peter Lupu bids us construe possible worlds as maximally consistent sets of propositions. If this is right, then the actual world, which is of course one of the possible worlds, is the maximally consistent set of true propositions. But Cantor's Theorem implies that there cannot be a set of all true propositions. Therefore, Cantor's theorem implies that possible worlds cannot be maximally consistent sets of propositions.
1. Cantor's Theorem states that for any set S, the cardinality of the power set P(S) of S > the cardinality of S. The power set of a set S is the set whose elements (members) are all of S's subsets. Recall the difference between a member and a subset. The set {Socrates, Plato} has exactly two elements, neither of which is a set. Since neither is a set, neither is a subset of this or any set. {Socrates, Plato} has four subsets: the set itself, the null set, {Socrates}, {Plato}. Note that none of the four sets just listed are elements of {Socrates, Plato}. The power set of {Socrates, Plato}, then, is {{Socrates, Plato}, { }, {Socrates}, {Plato}}.
In general, if a set S has n members, then P(S) has 2n members. Hence the name power set. Cantor's Theorem that the power set of a set S is always strictly larger that S is easily proven. But the proof needn't concern us. It is available in any standard book on set theory.
2. Suppose there is a set T of all truths, {t1, . . . , ti, ti + 1, . . .}. Consider the power set P(T) of T. The truth t1 in T will be a member of some of T's subsets but not of others. Thus, t1 is an element of {t1, t2}, but is not an element of { }. In general, for each subset s in the power set P(T) there will be a truth of the form t1 belongs to s or t1 does not belong to s. But according to Cantor's Theorem, the power set of T is strictly larger than T. So there will be more of those truths than there are truths in T. It follows that T cannot be the set of all truths.
3. Given that there cannot be a set of all truths, the actual world cannot be the set of all truths. This implies that possible worlds cannot be maximally consistent sets of propositions. I learned the Cantorian argument that there is no set of all truths from Patrick Grim. I don't know whether he applies it to the question whether worlds are sets.
4. As far as I can see, the fact that possible worlds cannot be maximally consistent sets does not prevent them from from being maximally consistent conjunctive propositions.
Is Rhode Island in Violation of the Supremacy Clause?
Rhode Island is already doing what Arizona is fixin' to do come the end of this month. As William A. Jacobson, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School, reports over at Legal Insurrection, ". . . Rhode Island already has implemented the critical piece of the Arizona law [S.B. 1070], checking the immigration status of people stopped for traffic violations where there is a reasonable suspicion, and reporting all illegals to federal authorities for deportation."
Will Eric Holder and colleagues at the DOJ be going after Rhode Island? If not, why not? I'm not legally trained, but isn't there supposed to be something wrong with selective enforcement? Isn't there something objectionable about suing Arizona for a violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U. S. Constitution while turning a blind eye to Rhode Island, not to mention those sanctuary cities such as Los Angeles which are, because of their sanctuary laws, really in violation of the Clause in question?
One gets the impression that the reasons adduced in the complaint are just a smokescreen to hide venal and 'political' motives. A need to curry favor with Hispanics in order to stay in office? A desire to flood the country with potential Democrats so as to secure a permanent victory for the Left?
Actually, the latter is what this is all about to anyone astute enough to penetrate the thick veil of liberal-left mendacity. Obama and the boys have no desire to control the border or solve the problem of illegal immigration. This is why they mouth and hide behind the vacuous phrase 'comprehensive immigation reform.' Like 'change,' it means nothing definite. To them, that is a virtue allowing as it does for maximal obfuscation.
Gallup Poll: Americans Oppose Federal Suit Against AZ Immigration Law
Here. The notion that the Obama Justice Department would waste millions suing a state for passing a law that mirrors the content of a Federal law is absurd on the face of it, especially when the same Justice Department turns a blind eye to sanctuary laws which actually do violate the Supremacy Clause; but also from a purely political standpoint the suit is idotic harming as it does the Dems' chances in the November elections and beyond.
By the way, did you see Sarah Palin on The O'Reilly Factor tonight? Mr. Bill did a good job grilling her and exposing the shallowness of her thinking about illegal immigration. She has obviously given little thought to the problem of the 12 or so million illegals already in the country, many of whom stay out of trouble, have jobs, and have children who are U. S. citizens.