Fruitful Tensions

Mike Rand e-mails,

I was interested to see your recent correspondence and post on the radical vs the conservative. I couldn't help but notice that there is a potential parallel between this and a common interest of yours [ours?], the productive tension between Aristotle and Plato. A radical may be liable to point out that it because Plato is prepared to build a state upon rational rather than traditional grounds that he is prepared to consider women as equally well qualified to rule the state on meritocratic grounds (a la Mill), a thesis which is well supported in the contemporary world though unthinkable in ancient Greece. They may also contrast this against Aristotle’s impression of women which appears indefensible in the modern era but natural in his own time, and they may also draw attention to Aristotle’s defense of slavery. The conservative Aristotle on these points alone appears monstrous to a modern audience against the radical Plato. In accord with the recent post, we might very well conclude that the conservative is a reality-based thinker (within his own environment), whilst the radical is a utopian (prepared to look beyond his environment). The conservative in reply would of course draw attention to the realistic and practical view of Aristotle on running a state and compare this to the proto-communist authoritarian and elitist Plato who would construct a state, mentally at least, that would appear equally monstrous to a modern audience.

This is very perceptive.  Since I am first and foremost an aporetician keen to isolate and sharpen problems under suspension of the natural tendency to glom onto  quick solutions, it interests me and indeed worries me that there may be a tension between my tendency to give the palm to Plato over Aristotle and my conservative tendency.  As I said recently:

One cannot be a philosopher unless one believes that at least some important truths are attainable or at least approachable by dialectical and argumentative means.  Thus there is no place in philosophy for the misologist, the hater of reason, and his close relative the fideist.   Reasoning and argument loom large in philosophy . . . .

But now I must add that to the extent that I favor reason over experience and tradition, the universal over the particular, the global over the local, the impersonal over the personal, to that extent I am in some conflict with my conservative tendency.  One of the differences between conservatives and their liberal/left/radical brethren is that they are skeptical aqbout the value of reason in the ordering of political affairs.

Continue reading “Fruitful Tensions”

Antony Flew Dead at 87

Here.  ". . . it is clear that Flew’s repudiation of atheism was heartfelt and seems to have been largely rooted in his dislike of polemical atheism. His own atheism was always cautious, nuanced and respectful of Christian tradition.  [. . .] Professor Antony Flew, philosopher, was born on February 11, 1923. He died on April 8, 2010, aged 87."

Wrong Division of Philosophical Labor

The most important questions, the existential ones, should not be left to the sloppiest and least able thinkers. Equally, careful and rigorous thinkers should not confine themselves to unworthy or merely preliminary topics.

For example, some of the best heads in philosophy work exclusively in the philosophy of science. But for a philosopher to be a a mere handmaiden of positive science is an unworthy use of his abilities.  Better to be a handmaiden of theology. But best of all would be to be no handmaiden at all. Philosophy is ancillary to nothing, unless it be  truth herself.

Consciousness Without Self-Consciousness

Just over the transom:

A friend of mine and I have ongoing discussions about consciousness. Some of his beliefs I have a hard time accepting. He believes for example that his cat doesn't have conscious experience. I can't put my finger on why I have such a hard time accepting this, but I do. One issue that has come up is whether you can have consciousness without self-awareness. In the discussions he has brought up the issue of blindsight, and claimed its an example of perception without consciousness. This doesn't make any sense to me. It seems to me that talk of perception presupposes consciousness. I was curious as to your thoughts on this matter.

There appear to be two separate questions here.

Q1: Are animals such as cats conscious?  It would suffice for their being conscious that they experience pleasure or pain.  Do cats experience pain?  When I inadvertently step on my cat's foot, she exhibits pain-behavior (makes a certain characteristic sound, shrinks back, gives me a certain look, begins licking the foot.)  Now that pain-behavior is not identical to the felt pain, if there is one; but it is evidence for its existence.  Or so say I.  But now we are approaching the problem of other minds which is too intricate to be discussed in this post.  In any case, I don't believe this is what you are asking about.  For my part, I no more doubt that my cat is conscious than I doubt that my wife is.  Both are sentient beings!  But how do I KNOW that?  This, roughly, is the problem of other minds.  Here is an organism in my visual field.  I believe it has a mind  more or less similar to my own (less in the case of the cat, more in the case of the wife).  The problem is to provide the grounds for that belief.  The belief goes well beyond what is strictly evident to the senses; so what justifies it?  It is an epistemological problem.  Not to be confused with the ontological question whether wife or cat could be philosophical 'zombies.'

Q2:  Can there be consciousness without self-consciousness?  This may be what you are really asking about.  Can one be conscious of an object without being conscious of being conscious of it?  I would say yes.  The following sometimes happens to some people.  They have been driving for some time, negotiating curves, braking, accelerating, etc.  But then they suddenly realize that for the last few miles they haven't been conscious of doing these things.  They've been 'blanked out.' And yet they were conscious of the road, the cars in front of them, etc., else they would have crashed.  We could say that they were conscious of their environment and of the objects in its without being conscious of being conscious of all these things.

In a famous passage Kant says that "The 'I think' must be able to accompany all my representations."  That is a good way of putting it.   It must be possible for me to say 'I am now aware that the light is red' when I see that the light is red, but there needn't be this self-awareness for there to be the conscious perception that the light is red.  So I suggest we say this:  every consciousness is potentially self-conscious, but not every consciousness is actually self-conscious.

This is a murky topic due to the murkiness of the phenomenology.  It is made even more murky when the first-person POV of phenomenology is blended with the third-person POV of neuroscience.

Walter Morris: Bourgeois Bohemian

Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks.  Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal.

I have already presented his thoughts on solitude.  That post also provided some information on the man and his writings. What follows is part of an entry from 8 February 1947. (Notebook 2: Black
River, limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood NJ, 1949. It contains journal entries from 25 June 1942 to 3 August 1947.)

The Bohemian way of living has its points, but I am unable to appreciate Bohemia at full tilt. I have never had it that way and, except for a very youthful period, I have never much wanted it that way. I like cleanliness of body and living quarters, not a fanatical 100% cleanliness, not a sterile and perfect order, but such cleanliness as is compatible with normal comfortable living. I dislike messy emotional relationships and all kinds of exhibitionism. I dislike vomiting drunks, people with the monkey on their backs, flaunting homosexuality, financial dishonesty, irresponsibility, and puerile minds posing as advanced and liberated. This is the measure of my Respectability and middle-classness. Otherwise — in being devoted to my own pattern, in quietly ignoring some White Cows instead of ostentatiously mounting a rebellion — I don't mind at all being called Bohemian. Our family dish, as a matter of [f]act, could stand a dash of that kind of sauce. (p. 206)

I recall a quotation from Gustave Flaubert along similar lines: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

Why I Like Parties

I like parties. I derive considerable satisfaction from not attending them. There is such a thing as the pleasure of conscious avoidance, of knowing that one has wisely escaped a situation likely to be frustrating and unpleasant.  If others are offended by my nonattendance, that I regret.  But peace of mind is a higher value than social dissipation — which is no value at all.

The Conservative Versus the Radical

The following excerpts are from Richard Weaver's 1960 essay, "Conservatism and Libertarianism," reprinted in Life Without Prejudice and Other Essays (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965), pp.
157-167:

It is my contention that that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not by just his sufferance, and which will be here after he's gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things. (158-159, italicized in the original.)

 [. . .]

The attitude of the radical toward the real order is contemptuous, not to say contumacious. It is a very pervasive idea in radical thinking that nothing can be superior to man. This accounts, of course, for his usual indifference or hostility toward religion and it accounts also for his impatience with existing human institutions. His attitude is that anything man wants he both can and shall have, and impediments in the way are regarded as either
accidents or affronts.

This is very easy to show from the language he habitually uses. He is a great scorner of the past and is always living in or for the future. Now since the future can never be anything more than one's
subjective projection and since he affirmed that he believes only in the future, we are quite justified in saying that the radical lives in a world of fancy. Whatever of the present does not accord with his notions he classifies as "belonging to the past," and this will be done away with as soon as he and his party can get around to it. Whereas the conservative takes his lesson from a past that has objectified itself, the radical takes his cues out of a future that is really the product of wishful thinking.

Compressing both passages into one sentence: The conservative is a reality-based thinker, whereas the radical is a utopian.

More on Scriptural Revelation

Joshua Orsak e-mails,

I really enjoyed your recent post on various ways to approach revelation. I, too, opt for something like option C. It is similar to Karl Barth's position: that the Bible is NOT the revelation of God, but a record of God's revelation to mankind. I find that shift to be vital. Many Christians engage in a kind of biblolatry, they seek to have a relationship with a book. I don't want to have a relationship with a book, I want to have a relationship with God. I am a minister, I love the Bible, I study it every day and I find it to be an important part OF my relationship with God, but it is NOT the sum total of that relationship.

Let me see if I understand the shift.  You seem to be distinguishing between the (human) record of God's revelation of certain truths to man and God's revelation of these truths.  That is a good distinction and I accept it.  You may also be distinguishing between God's revelation of certain truths to mankind and God's revelation of himself.  It could be that God reveals little or nothing about himself while revealing certain truths to mankind. (In the same way that an anonymous caller to the police could reveal the whereabouts of a bank robber without revealing anything about himself.) The phrase 'revelation of God' can be interpreted as either an objective or a subjective genitive.  Thus one could deny that the Bible is the revelation of God (objective genitive) while maintaining that the Bible is the revelation of God (subjective genitive).  Putting the two distinctions together, I interpret you to be saying that the Bible is the human record of the revelation by God to mankind of certain truths.  If that is what you mean, then I agree.  This allows us to rule out two notions that ought to be ruled out, namely, scriptural inerrancy and the notion that the Biblical revelation is final. Once we admit that the Bible is a human product, though not merely a human product, we will give up preposterous claims to inerrancy.  And if we grant that God does not primarily reveal himself in the Bible, then we will have much less reason to think that there cannot be any further divine-to-human communications.

I think that 'finding God' within scripture takes place because we have access to revelation that is outside scripture. We find some passage, some moment that 'links up' to an experience we have in our own lives, and we say 'yes, this matches, this fits'. It is because the Bible deepens and enlightens my own encounter with God's revelation that it has the weight it does with me. Peter Berger talks about a 'nexus' forming between our own experiences and scripture.

So thank you for your thoughts on this matter. I think they are spot on.  Peace and Blessings.

Writing as Religion

Here is quotation by way of an addendum to my last post.  John Gardner, On Writers and Writing, Addison-Wesley, 1994, p. 227:

What the writers I care most about do is to take fiction as the single most important thing in life after life itself — life itself being both their raw material and the object of their celebration. They do it not for ego but simply to make something singularly beautiful. Fiction is their religion and comfort: when they are depressed they go not to church or psychoanalysis but to Salinger or Joyce, early Malamud, parts of Faulkner, Tolstoy, or the Bible as book.

There are all sorts of false gods.

Poetry as a God Substitute?

From the mail:

Thanks for your blog. It deals with matters of real interest (…using the word 'interest' in its original sense of 'it matters').  [From Latin inter esse, which is suggestive.]

Perhaps you could elaborate on something you mentioned in your (very funny) post on some aphorisms of Wallace Stevens:

After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption. What a paltry redemption! It would be better to say that there is no redemption than to say something as silly as this. Learn to live with the death of God, my friend! Don't insert a sorry substitute into the gap. Don't try to make a religion of what is only a dabbling in subjective impressions. Compare John Gardner, "Fiction is the only religion I have . . . ." (On Writers and Writing, p. xii.)

I doubt you are saying that poetry, perhaps even all art, ‘is only a dabbling in subjective impressions’ because to say that Greek tragedy, for example, is only a dabbling in subjective impressions would surely be saying something even sillier than what Wallace Stevens says. Moreover, you mention that you have ‘nothing against art properly chastened and subordinated to the ultimate dominatrix, Philosophia’. So what did you mean?

Lastly, are there any books of literary criticism/aesthetics you think are especially worthwhile? It seems that apart from Plato and Aristotle, the best treatment of it outside of poets’ letters and journals is Jacques Maritain’s ‘Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry’.

Best wishes, and keep up the great work.

Thanks for the response.  It would indeed be absurdly silly to maintain that all of poetry is "only a dabbling in subjective impressions."  But note that the context is critical commentary on certain aesthetic aphorisms of the distinguished American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).  Wallace is the focus of my interest in that post and no one else.  And my focus is not on his poetry but on certain aesthetic (and thus philosophical) observations of his about poetry and art in general.

What I am objecting to in the passage you quote above, and quite strenuously, is the notion that poetry, especially Stevens' sort of poetry, could be an adequate substitute for God, or that belief in poetry could adequately substitute for belief in God.  To my mind that is silly, absurdly silly.  And Wallace's talk of redemption in this context makes a joke of the quest for genuine redemption. No one who understands what the religious yearning for redemption and salvation is all about could trivialize it in such a way as to suggest that the writing or reading of poetry could satisfy it.  That's ridiculous.  Imagine a naked Jew standing before a grave he was forced to dig himself, about to be shot down by a Nazi SS officer.  Imagine telling him that redemption from meaningless suffering is to be had from the poems of Wallace Stevens.

What I'm saying is: be honest and don't misuse words.  You cannot plug the gap caused by the death of God (Nietzsche) by putting some paltry idol in its place.  Poetry in Stevens' style would be such a paltry ersatz.  Better nihilism than idolatry.  The death of God is an 'event' of rather more significance than the discovery that Russell's celestial teapot has been destroyed by an asteroid.  The death of God, as Nietzsche well understood, has grave and far-reaching consequences.  Knock out the celestial teapot and nothing of moment changes. The death of God is the death of truth and meaning.  Everything changes.

As for your question about lit crit recommendations, I'd have to think about it.