Mental Quiet and Enlightenment/Salvation

In yesterday's post I claimed that the proximate goal of meditation is the attainment of mental quiet, but listed as an ultimate goal the arrival at what is variously described as enlightenment, salvation, liberation, release. In a comment to the post (from the old blog), Jim Ryan raised a difficult but very important question about the connection between mental quiet and salvation. What exactly is the connection? I would like to pursue this question with Jim’s help. I believe he is is quite interested in it since he tells me that he has been thinking about this question for the last twenty years. One way to begin is by outlining the possible positions on the relation between mental quiet and salvation. There seem to be three main positions. On the first, mental quiet and salvation have nothing to do with one another. On the second, there is a positive (non-identity) relation between the two. On the third, the two are identified.

Meditation: What and Why

Here are some preliminary thoughts on the nature and purposes of meditation. Perhaps a later post will deal with methods of meditation.

Meditation Defined

We need to start with a working definition. The question of what meditation is is logically prior to the questions of why to do it and how to do it. The proximate goal of meditation is the attainment of mental quiet. I say ‘proximate’ to leave open the pursuit of further, more specific, goals, and so as not to prejudge the ultimate goal which will be differently conceived from within different metaphysical and religious perspectives. It would be tendentious to claim that the ultimate goal of meditation is entry into Nibbana/Nirvana, or union with the Godhead, or realization of the identity of Atman and Brahman. For these descriptions import metaphysical schemes acceptance of which is not necessary to do meditation. All the major religions have  their mystical branches in which meditation is cultivated despite differences in metaphysical schemes.  The meditating monks of Mt. Athos whose mantram is the Jesus Prayer subscribe to a Trinitarian metaphysics according to which Jesus Christ is the Son of God, a metaphysics incompatible with that of a Buddhist who nonetheless can employ a similar technique to achieve a similar result.

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Welcome to Maverick Philosopher

My name is William F. Vallicella, I have the doctorate in philosophy (Boston College, 1978), and I have published a couple of books and 70 or so articles in the professional journals. A confirmed blogger in the grip of cacoethes scribendi, I’ve been online since May 2004 on various platforms.  This is MavPhil Gen IV.  I publish online here, at Substack, on Facebook, and at X.  I began posting at Substack in early 2021 under the rubric “Philosophy in Progress.” The Substack entries are intended to assist educated non-philosophers in clarifying their thinking about matters of moment.  My PhilPeople page links to my Substack articles and provides a list of my professional publications. 

Two-line biography:  I taught philosophy at various universities in the USA and abroad. At the relatively young age of 41 I resigned from  a tenured position to live the eremitic life of the independent philosopher in the Sonoran desert. 

Interests: Everything. Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. (Terentius) “I am a man: I consider nothing human foreign to me.” 

Motto: “Study everything, join nothing.” (Paul Brunton)

Comment Policy: This site is not a discussion board.  Comments must address directly what the author says or what the commenters say.  Other comments will not be allowed to appear. Comments should be pithy and to the point. In these hyperkinetic times, the regnant abbreviation is TL;DR.  If you are a cyberpunk needing to take a data dump, please relieve yourself elsewhere.

My politics?  From Democrat to Dissident

Political Burden of Proof: As contemporary ‘liberals’ become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof. The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Much more below the fold. Best wishes to all men and women of good will who love truth, seek it, and strive to incorporate it in their lives.

 

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Ersatz Eternity

What has been, though it needn't have been, always will have been.  What time has mothered, no future time can touch.   What you were and that you were stands forever inscribed in the roster of being whether or not anyone will read the record.  You will die, but your having lived will never die.  But how paltry the ersatz eternity of time's progeny!  Time has made you and will unmake you.  In compensation, she allows your having been to rise above the reach of the flux.  Thanks a lot, bitch!  You are one mater dolorosa whose consolation is as petty as your penance is hard.

Divine Simplicity and Truthmakers: Notes on Brower

1. One of the entailments of the doctrine of divine simplicity (DDS) is that God is identical to: God's omniscience, God's omnipotence, and in general God's X-ness, where 'X' ranges over the divine attributes.  And it is easy to see that if God = God's F-ness, and God = God's G-ness, then (by transitivity of identity) God's F-ness = God's G-ness.  I suggest that we use 'divine attribute' to refer to those properties of God that are both essential and intrinsic.  The problem, of course, is to make sense of these identities given the fact that, prima facie, they do not make sense.  The pattern is the same as with Trinity and Incarnation.  These doctrines imply identities which, on the face of it, beggar understanding.  It thus falls to the philosopher of religion to try to render coherent that which, on the face of it, is incoherent.

2. One of the questions that arise when we try to make sense of DDS concerns which category of entity such phrases as 'God's omniscience' pick out.  One possibility is that such phrases pick out properties, whether universal (multiply exemplifiable) properties or particular (not multiply exemplifiable) properties, also known as tropes. But this leads to trouble as Brower points out.  For if God is identical either to omniscience or to his omniscience, then God is identical to a property — which sounds absurd: how can God, a person, be a property?  Properties are predicable entities, but God is an individual and so not predicable.  Properties are exemplifiable entities (whether multiply or non-multiply); but God is an individual and so not exemplifiable.  Properties are abstract (causally inert)  whereas God is concrete (causally active/passive).  No property is a person, but God is a person.  No property creates or knows or loves.  These are some hastily sketched reasons for thinking that God cannot be identical to his properties.

3. Jeffrey E. Brower forwards an interesting proposal.  He suggests that such phrases as 'God's nature,' 'God's goodness' and 'God's power' refer to "entities of a broadly functional type — namely, truthmakers." (Simplicity and Aseity, sec. 2)  The idea is that 'God's omniscience' refers to the trruthmaker of 'God is omniscient' or perhaps to the truthmaker of the proposition expressed by 'God is omniscient.'  If (Fregean) propositions are the primary truthbearers, then (tokenings of) declarative sentences that express such propositions can be said to be secondary truthbearers.  I trust that it is clear that truthbearers and truthmakers are not to be confused.  One key difference is that while some truthbearers are are false, no truthmaker is false.  Truth and falsity are properties of certain representations (propositions, declarative sentences, beliefs, judgments, etc.)  whereas truthmakers are the ontological grounds of some true truthbearers.  If I understand Brower's view, it is not only that truthmakers are neither true nor false — every TM theorist will hold this — but also that truthmakers are not at all proposition-like.  By contrast, I follow D. M. Arstrong in holding that truthmakers must have a proposition-like structure.  But more on this in a moment.

4. Roughly, a truthmaker is whatever plays a certain role or performs a certain function; it is whatever makes true a true truthbearer.  The 'truthmaker intuition' — which I share with Brower — is that a sentence such as 'Tom is blogging' cannot just be true; there is need of some worldly entity to 'make' it true, to serve as the ontological ground of its truth, to 'verify' it in an ontological, not epistemological, sense of this term.  To say that some or all truthbearers need truthmakers is not yet to specify which sort of entity plays the truthmaker role.  Among philosophers who accept the need for truthmakers there is disagreement about the ontological category to which they belong. 

 Brower says rather incautiously that the functional characterization of truthmakers "places no restriction on the specific nature or ontological category to which a truthmaker can belong." (sec 2.1)  That can't be right.  Surely there are some restrictions.  For one thing, a truthmaker cannot be a Fregean proposition for the simple reason that such items are among the items made true by truthmakers.  And the same goes for declarative sentences, beliefs, and judgments.  My belief that the cat is asleep is either true or false and as such is a truthbearer.  It is in need of a truthmaker but is not itself one.  Of course, the fact of my believing that the cat is asleep can serve as truthmaker for the sentence ' BV now believes that the cat is asleep'  if concrete facts are admitted as truthmakers – but that is something else again.  So not just anything can be a truthmaker.  Charitably interpreted, what Brower is telling us is that TM theorists are allowed some ontological latitude when it comes to specifying which category of entity is fit to play the truthmaker role. 

5. Let us note that if a true Fregean proposition p entails a Fregean proposition q, then one could say that the first 'makes true' the second.  And so one could speak of the first as a 'truthmaker' of the second.  But this is not what is meant  by 'truthmaking' in these discussions despite the fact that p broadly logically necessitates q.   What is intended is a relation of broadly logical necessitation that connects a nonpropositional entity (but on some theories a proposition-like entity) to a propositional entity, or more precisely, to an entity that can serves as the bearer or vehicle of a truth-value.  As I see it, the entailment relation and the truthmaking relation are species of broadly logical necessitation; but truthmaking is not entailment.  Entailment will never get you 'outside the circle of propositions'; but that is exactly what truthmaking is supposed to do.  A truthmaker is an ontological, not propositional or representational truth-ground.  Philosophers who are attracted to truthmakers typically have a realist sense that certain of our representations need to be anchored in reality.

Brower sees it a little differently.  He would agree with me that entailment and truthmaking cannot be identical, but he thinks of it as "a form of broadly logical necessitation or entailment" and says that entailment is necessary but not sufficient for truthmaking. (Sec. 2.1)  So Brower seems to be maintaining that while there is more to truthmaking than entailment, every truthmaker entails the truth it makes true.  But this makes little or no sense.  Entailment is a relation defined on propositions.  If x entails y, then you can be sure that x and y are propositions or at least proposition-like entities, whether these be sentences or judgments or beliefs or even concrete states of affairs such as the fact of (not the fact that) Peter's being tired, which concrete fact contains Peter himself as constituent, warts and all.  But for Brower, as we will see in a moment, concrete individuals such as Socrates, entities that are neither propositions nor proposition-like, can serve as truthmakers.  As far as I can see, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails a proposition.  It makes no sense because entailment is defined in terms of truth, and no individual can be true or false.  To say that p entails q is to say that it is impossible that p be true and q false.  Since it makes no sense to say of an individual that it is true, it makes no sense to say of an individual that it entails a proposition.  So truthmaking cannot be a type or species of entailment if individuals are truthmakers.

6.  But setting aside for the moment the above worry, if it makes sense to say that God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient,' and if 'God's omniscience' refers to this truthmaker, then it will be clear how God can be identical to God's omniscience.  For then 'God is identical to his omniscience' is no more problematic than 'God is God.' It will also be clear how God's omniscience can be identical to God's omnipotence. 

7.  But can it really be this easy to show that DDS is coherent? Although I agree with Brower that some truthbearers need truthmakers, I don't see how truthmakers could be ontologically structureless individuals or 'blobs' as opposed to 'layer-cakes' in Armstrong's terminology.  By 'ontologically structureless' I mean lacking in propositional or proposition-like structure.  Consider the following true intrinsic essential predicative sentences: 'Socrates is human,' 'Socrates is an animal,' Socrates is a material object,' 'Socrates exists,' and 'Socrates is self-identical.'  (It is not obvious that 'Socrates exists' is an essential predication inasmuch as Socrates exists contingently, but let's not enter into this thorny thicket just now.)

Brower's claim is that in each of these cases (which parallel the true intrinsic essential predications of divine attributes) the truthmaker is the concrete individual Socrates himself.  Thus Socrates is the truthmaker of 'Socrates is human' just as God is the truthmaker of 'God is omniscient.'  Unfortunately, no individual lacking propositional or proposition-like structure can serve as a truthmaker as I argued in #5 above.  Just as it makes no sense to say that Socrates is true, it makes no sense to say that Socrates entails the proposition expressed by 'Socrates is human.' 

There is more to say, but tomorrow's another day.  Time to punch the clock.

Philosophy is Inquiry not Ideology

(The following, composed 16 February 2005, is imported from the first incarnation of Maverick Philosopher.  It makes some important points that bear repeating.)

On the masthead of The Ivory Closet, now defunct: "Life as a Closet Conservative Inside Liberal Academia."

From the post Liberal Groupthink is My Cover:

My dissertation, which I'm still working on, focuses on a contemporary French philosopher who is known in academia primarily as a radical Leftist. Generally speaking, academics seem to just assume that you agree with and share the same views as the figure you focus on in your dissertation. So, everyone just assumes that since I'm writing on a radical Leftist that I must be a radical Leftist. I keep my mouth shut about my conservativism. Often I have to bite my tongue when I hear disparaging remarks about conservatives. But, so long as I manage to do that the liberal bias of academia makes it all too easy to stay in the closet. Everyone just assumes your [you're] a liberal.

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The Millenials: A Chump Generation?

Robert Samuelson, The Real Generation Gap.  Concluding paragraph:

Millennials could become the chump generation. They could suffer for their elders' economic sins, particularly the failure to confront the predictable costs of baby boomers' retirement. This poses a question. In 2008, millennials voted 2-1 for Barack Obama; in surveys, they say they're more disposed than older Americans to big and activist government. Their ardor for Obama is already cooling. Will higher taxes dim their enthusiasm for government?

Assertion and Grammatical Mood

Assertion has both a pragmatic and a semantic aspect. First and foremost, assertion is a speech act. As such, assertion or asserting is a different type of speech act from commanding, asking a question, or expressing a wish. But if we consider the language system in abstraction from the uses to which it is put by speakers, we can distinguish among different types of sentence. We can distinguish among the grammatical moods: indicative or declarative, imperative, interrogative, and optative, among others. The mood distinctions belong on the side of semantics, on the side of linguistic meaning. Linguistic meaning is the meaning a sentence type has in virtue of the conventions of the language system to which it belongs.  Speech acts, however, involve the tokening of sentence types.

So on the pragmatic side we have the distinctions among speech acts, and on the semantic side, the distinctions among moods. One question that arises is whether the speech acts map neatly onto the moods. When I make an assertion, must I use an indicative sentence? Or can I make an assertion using a non-indicative sentence? And can I utter an indicative sentence and not make an assertion? Can I make assertions using interrogative sentences?  Can I make assertions using imperative sentences?  Can one ask a question using an optative sentence?  Here are five  theses that seem true. Examples follow.

Our Humble Port of Entry

We humans are surprisingly proud given our lowly and inauspicious entrance into the world. In a line often attributed to St. Augustine, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: we are born between feces and urine. And we revert soon enough to something of equal value: dust and ashes.   Entry through a vagina, exit through a smokestack. On and off the  stage in a manner most unbecoming and most unlike our proud strut upon  it.

The Islamic Car and Some Parodies

According to this source,

Malaysia, Iran and Turkey plan to build an "Islamic car" fitted with a compass to find the direction of Mecca, and a compartment to keep the Koran in, the Malaysian state news agency said.

This invites parody.

Islamic Car, Turkish kismet model: Very economical inasmuch as it is devoid of all safety features. Reflects the popular belief that "when  your number is up, your number is up." But the Nazar Boncuk comes  standard.

Buddhist car: This amphibious vehicle is specially equipped to transport its passengers across the river of Samsara.

Mahayana model: This Buddhist SUV is known as the "Greater Vehicle" because of its superior cargo capacity.

Hinayana model: This Buddhist subcompact, popularly known as the "Lesser Vehicle," conducts to the same ultimate destination as the Greater Vehicle but with greater fuel economy.

Hezbollah Hummer: Specially designed to explode upon impact.

Luther's Lemon: The attempt to power this baby on faith alone (sola fide) resulted in a vehicle that works not.

Commie Car: Designed for "people not profits," this unreliable  contraption delivers neither.

Catholic car: This vehicle features an onboard navigation system  premised on the truth that "all roads lead to Rome."

Mao's Maserati: This sports car, produced by slave labor under the watchful eye of Italian designers, is available only to high Party officials. It makes a "great leap forward" in under ten seconds.

Gorbachev's Covertible: This vehicle featured plenty of glasnost, but  like the Edsel, was soon out of production.

The Mormon Machine: Features a special jump seat for spare wives, but the beverage holders are conspicuous by their absence.

The Race Car: A liberal favorite, the Race Car conducts one to a racial destination no matter what the starting point.

The Bright Car: Dan Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and their fellow 'brights' drive these. They exhibit a marvelous design that came about through the marvel of blind engineering.

Trotsky’s Faith

Trotsky The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who guarded him, and their failure ultimately to protect him from an agent of the GPU/NKVD sent by Stalin to murder him.  Contrary to some accounts, it was not an ice pick that Ramon Mercader drove into Trotsky's skull, but an ice axe.  Here is how Trotsky ends his last testament, written in 1940, the year of his death:

For forty-three years of my conscious life I have been a revolutionary; and for forty-two I have fought under the banner of Marxism . . . I will die a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist.  My faith in the communist future of mankind is no less ardent, indeed it is even stronger now than it was in the days of my youth. [. . .] Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air might enter more freely into my room.  I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight is everywhere.  Life is beautiful.  Let the future generations cleanse it of evil, oppression, and violence, and enjoy it to the full. (Patenaude, pp. 234-235)

No pie-in-the-sky for old Trotsky, but pie-in-the-future.  Those of us who take religion seriously needn't deny that it can serve as opium for some.  But if one can see that, then one should also be able to see that secular substitutes for religion can be just as narcotic.   Why is utopian opium less narcotic than the religious variety?  Why is a faith in Man and his future more worthy of credence than faith in God?

I should think that it is less credible.  Note first that there is no Man, only men.  And we human beings are a cussedly diverse and polyglot lot, a motley assortment of ornery sons-of-bitches riven by tribalisms and untold other factors of division.  The notion that we are all going to work together to create a workers' paradise or any sort of earthly paradise is a notion too absurd to swallow given what we know about human nature, and in particular, what we know of the crimes of communism.  In the 20th century, communists  murdered 100 million to achieve their utopia without achieving it.

We know Man does not exist, but we do not know that God does not exist. Religious faith, therefore, has a bit more to recommend it than secular faith.  You say God does not exist? That may be so. But the present question is not whether God exists or not, but whether belief in Man makes any sense and can substitute for belief in God. I say it doesn't and can’t, that it is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. We need help that we cannot provide for ourselves, either individually or collectively. The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, which, refusing the tutelage of tradition and experience, and having thrown overboard every moral standard,  is ever ready to spill oceans of blood in pursuit of their utopian fantasies.

There may be no source of the help we need. Then the conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid.

Trotsky, as you can see from the quotation, believed in a redemptive future.  Life in this world is beautiful and will be cleansed by future generations of evil, oppression, and violence.  But even if this fantasy future were achieved, it could not possibly redeem the countless millions who have suffered and died in the most horrible ways since time beyond memory.  Marxist redemption-in-the-future would be a pseudo-redemption even if it were possible, which it isn't. 

There is also the moral and practical absurdity of a social programme that employs present evil, oppression, and violence in order to extirpate future evil, oppression, and violence.  Once the totalitarian State is empowered to do absolutely anything in furtherance of its means-justifying ends it will turn on its own creators as it did on Trotsky.  Because there is no such thing as The People, 'power to the people'  is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator.  The same goes for 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'  What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator.

The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana.

It is interesting to compare Edith Stein and Lev Davidovich Bronstein.  Each renounced the present world and both set out in quest of a Not-Yet, one via contemplation, the other via  revolution.  Which chose the path of truth, which that of illusion?  it is of course possible that both quests were illusory.

How strange the stage of this life and the characters that pass upon it, their words and gestures resounding for a time before fading away.

John Gardner and Mannered Prose

Over lunch yesterday I showed a writer friend the first page of John C. Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts (Vintage 1985).  I asked him whether the opening paragraphs made him want to read on.  He didn't answer that question, though his handing of the book back to me without a request to borrow it hinted in the negative direction.  But he did describe Gardner's writing as "mannered."  This morning I opened Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist (Harper & Row, 1983) and stumbled by chance on this passage:

If a writer cares more for his language than for other elements of ficition, if he continually calls our attention away from the story to himself, we call him "mannered" and eventually we tire of him.  (Smart editors tire of him quickly and reject him.)  (p. 11)

Here are the first three sentences of MG:

Sometimes the sordidness of his present existence, not to mention the stifling, clammy heat of the apartment his finances forced him to take, on the third floor of an ugly old house in Binghamton's West Side — "the nice part of town," everybody said (God have mercy on those who had to live in the bad parts) — made Peter Mickelsson clench his square yellow teeth in anger and once, in a moment of rage and frustration greater than usual, bring down the heel of his fist on the heavy old Goodwill oak table where his typewriter, papers, and books were laid out, or rather strewn.  He'd intended to split the thing in two, though perhaps the intent was not quite conscious.  In any case, no such luck.

Is that "mannered" writing?  My friend and I will agree that that writing like this won't  make you any money.  So perhaps the writing is mannered by the standards of the trash that sells.  But I'd say it is good writing, in part because of and not despite the elaborate syntax.  I shudder to think what some contemporary bonehead of a thirty-something editor would do to the opening sentence — assuming he had the attention span to get through it.  Back in 1985, those three sentences drew me into the novel, all 590 pages of which I read. And I dip into it again from time to time, rereading marked passages.

A curious bit of trivia: on page 486 there is a reference to "Castaneda — Carlos not Hector — . . . ."  Sic transit gloria mundi: Hector is as little read today as Gardner.  I don't know whether anyone still reads Carlos.  But I do know he is less worth reading than the other two.