We are pulled towards the world, towards property, progeny, position, power, popularity, pleasure. But in some of us the pull toward the spirit is stronger and will triumph — in the end. Meanwhile we are pulled apart, dis-tracted, torn between lust for the world and love of the spirit. This is 'par for the course' and 'it comes with the terrain.' There's no turning back now. We must advance.
Great Minds and Small Matters
A great mind is not upset by a small matter. But it is only with difficulty that we avoid the vexation of the petty. The inference that our minds are paltry seems inescapable. Those who have had a glimpse of the mind's depth-dimension know that there is something wrong with remaining on the plane of the paltry. What is to be done?
Daily meditation helps. An hour of meditating on 'A great mind is not upset by a small matter,' as upon a mantram, has its effect if the meditation is repeated daily. The trick, of course, is to take the thought with you when you quit the meditation chamber. It is easy to be a monk in a monastery; the challenge lies in comporting oneself like one outside it. Just as one does not venture onto the Internet without one's cybershields up to date and at the ready, one ought not go abroad into society without the equivalent mental prophylaxis. Unless, of course, you like mental disturbance.
But you won't learn about any of this in graduate school, not even in the Sage School of Philosophy. An academic inquiry into the logic, ethics, and physics of the Stoics is not the same as a practicing of their precepts. One needs both of course: theoretical inquiry and the exercitium spirituale.
Where does one find the time for meditation in our hyperkinetic age? Better question: How can one fail to perceive the need for meditation, re-collection, contemplatio, Versenkung, Besinnung, in an age as scattered and frenetic as ours has become?
Saturday Night at the Oldies: My Darling Clementine
Saw this 1946 movie once again last night. A heavily fictionalized version of the shootout at the O. K. Corral, it stars Victor Mature as Doc Holliday, Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp and Walter Brennan as Old Man Clanton. The Mexican cutie's name is 'Chihuahua.' They don't make 'em like this anymore.
Now enjoy the song from 1884 in both of its versions together with the lyrics. The second version features the oft-omitted last verse in which the singer, having lost his Clementine to a drowning, finds solace with her little sister.
Dennett’s Dismissal of Dualism
Daniel Dennett is a brilliant and flashy writer, but his brilliance borders on sophistry. (In this regard, he is like Richard Rorty, another writer who knows how to sell books.) As John Searle rightly complains, he is not above "bully[ing] the reader with abusive language and rhetorical questions. . . ." (The Mystery of Consciousness, p. 115) An excellent example of this is the way Dennett dismisses substance dualism in the philosophy of mind:
Dualism (the view that minds are composed of some nonphysical and utterly mysterious stuff) . . . [has]been relegated to the trash heap of history, along with alchemy and astrology. Unless you are also prepared to declare that the world is flat and the sun is a fiery chariot pulled by winged horses — unless, in other words, your defiance of modern science is quite complete — you won't find any place to stand and fight for these obsolete ideas. (Kinds of Mind, Basic Books, 1996, p. 24)
There is something intellectually dishonest about this passage since Dennett must know that it makes a travesty of the dualist's position. Yes, I know he studied under Gilbert Ryle and had phrases like "ghost in the machine" drummed into him at an impressionable age; but he is smart and well-connected and has had plenty of opportunity to be set straight. A substance dualist such as Descartes does not hold that minds are composed of some extraordinarily thin intangible stuff. The dualism is not a dualism of stuff-kinds, real stuff and spooky stuff. 'Substance' in 'substance dualism' does not refer to a special sort of ethereal stuff but to substances in the sense of individuals capable of independent existence whose whole essence consists in acts of thought, perception, imagination, feeling, and the like. Dennett is exploiting the equivocity of 'substance.'
Of course, it is very difficult for the materialistically minded to understand this because they cannot understand how anything could be real that is not material. This incapacity on their part leads them to construe the Cartesian dualist as talking about some sort of rarefied matter, some sort of spook stuff, a kind of immaterial matter if you will.
The incapacity in question also leads Dennett to the preposterous notion that a defender of dualism must stand in complete "defiance of modern science." (Note en passant that Descartes was among the founders of modern science.) But where in modern science is it established that everything that exists is material or physical in nature? Which branch of physics is competent to establish this meta-physical result? Observe the difference between the following two propositions:
1. Nothing in the physical world is in principle insusceptible of natural-scientific study.
2. Nothing is in principle insusceptible of natural-scientific study.
(1) is unobjectionable, but (2) presupposes that everything is physical. But that everything is physical is a metaphysical proposition that is neither entailed by any scientific result, nor presupposed by scientific investigation.
Since Dennett is the exact opposite of stupid, one has to conclude that he is either intellectually dishonest or simply in the grip of an ideology, the ideology of scientific naturalism. He seems to think that the substance dualist, with his supposed postulation of spook stuff, is in some sort of unscientific competition with a scientific approach to the mind. But he can make this blunder only by presupposing something obviously false, namely, that the progress of natural science has shown, or is showing, that everything is at bottom physical in nature.
Conceivability, Possibility and Per Impossibile Reasoning
Here is an example of per impossibile reasoning from Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 1, art. 2:
Even if there were no human intellects, things could be said to be true because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, by an impossible supposition [per impossibile], intellect did not exist and things did continue to exist, then the essentials of truth would in no way remain. (tr. Mulligan)
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The De Dicto Objection to Substance Dualism
The modal arguments for substance dualism in the philosophy of mind require a possibility premise, for example, 'It is possible that a person exist disembodied,' or 'Possibly, a person becomes disembodied.' One question concerns the support for such a premise. Does conceivability entail possibility? Does imaginability entail possibility? And if neither entail possibility, do they provide sufficient evidence for it? I'm not done with these questions, but there is another vexing question that I want to add to the mix. This concerns the validity of the inference from
1. It is possible that there exist disembodied persons
to
2. Some actual person can exist disembodied.
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Soul, Conceivability, and Possibility: An Aporetic Exercise
I am puzzling over the inferential move from X is conceivable to X is (metaphysically) possible. It would be very nice if this move were valid. But I am having trouble seeing how it could be valid.
I exist, and I have a body. But it is conceivable that I exist without a body. 'Conceivable' in this context means thinkable without broadly logical contradiction. I distinguish between narrowly and broadly logical contradiction. 'Some cats are not cats' is NL-contradictory: it cannot be true in virtue of its very logical form. (It is necessarily false, and its being necessarily false is grounded solely in its logical form.) 'Some colors are sounds' is not NL-contradictory: the logical form of this sentence is such that some sentences of this form are true. And yet 'Some colors are sounds' is contradictory in a broad sense of the term since it is necessarily the case that no color is a sound, where the necessity in question does not have a merely formal-logical ground but a 'material' one.
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Hume on Belief and Existence
Section VII of Book I of David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature is relevant to recent investigations of ours into belief, existence, assertion, and the unity of the proposition. In this section of the Treatise, Hume anticipates Kant's thesis that 'exists' is not a real predicate, and Brentano's claim that the essence of judgment cannot consist in the combining of distinct concepts.
On Belief
I have been thinking about belief and whether it is under the control of the will. This question is important since it lies at the foundation of the very possibility of an 'ethics of belief.' People believe all sorts of things, and it is quite natural to suppose that some of the things they believe they are not entitled to believe, they have no right to believe, they are not justified in believing, they ought not believe. The characteristic beliefs of Holocaust deniers, for example, are not only demonstrably false, but also such that their holding by these nimrods is morally censurable. One has the strong sense that these people are flouting their epistemic duties.
Knowledge Without Belief: A Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection
A commenter on the Pieper post notes that Dallas Willard has a understanding of the belief-knowledge relation (or lack of relation) similar to that of Pieper. A little searching brought me to the following passage in Willard's Knowledge and Naturalism which substantiates the commenter's suggestion (I have bolded the parts relevant to my current concerns):
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A Pieperian Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is a 20th century German Thomist. I read his Belief and Faith as an undergraduate and am now [December 2007] re-reading it very carefully. It is an excellent counterbalance to a lot of the current analytic stuff on belief and doxastic voluntarism. What follows is my reconstruction of Pieper's argument for doxastic voluntarism in Belief and Faith. His thesis, to be found in Augustine and Aquinas, is that "Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27. Augustine, De praedestinatione Sanctorum, cap. 5, 10: [Fides] quae in voluntate est . . . .) I shall first present the argument in outline, and then comment on the premises and inferences.
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Against William Alston Against Doxastic Voluntarism
The following remarks are based on the first two sections of Chapter Four, "Deontological Desiderata," of William P. Alston's Beyond "Justification": Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Cornell UP, 2005), pp. 58-67.
1. It makes sense to apply deontological predicates to actions. Thus it makes sense to say of a voluntary action that it is obligatory or permissible or impermissible. But does it make sense to apply such predicates to beliefs and related propositional attitudes? If I withhold my assent to proposition p, does it make sense to say that the withholding is obligatory or permissible or impermissible? Suppose someone passes on a nasty unsubstantiated rumor concerning a mutual acquaintance. Is believing it blameworthy? Is suspending judgment required? Or is deontological evaluation simply out of place in a case like this?
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Locke, James, Doxastic Voluntarism and Two Bases of Toleration
The topic of doxastic voluntarism is proving to be fascinating indeed. It is interestingly related to the topic of toleration about which I have something to say in On Toleration: With a Little Help from Kolakowski, in The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant, and in Toleration and its Limits.
Let us begin today's meditation with a passage from John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration:
The articles of religion are some of them practical and some speculative. Now, though both sorts consist in the knowledge of truth, yet these terminate simply in the understanding, those influence will and manners. Speculative opinions, therefore, and articles of faith (as they are called) which are required only to be believed, cannot be imposed on any Church by the law of the land. For it is absurd that things should be enjoined by laws which are not in men's power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true does not depend on our will. (Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Sherman, p. 204, emphasis added.)
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Toleration and its Limits
Henry V. e-mails:
I have a question. Is there a technical philosophical term for the case when a principle, applied consistently, leads to its own negation? I have in mind the example of the principle of civic tolerance, that when consistently applied to groups such as Muslims who wish to see Sharia law instituted in the West, would lead to the destruction of tolerance. Many other examples can be found in contemporary politics.
This is a good question, Henry, and while I thank you for it, I am not sure of the answer, though 'fallacy of accident' is in the ball park as I explain below. You don't tell me what you mean by 'civic tolerance,' or how the principle of civic tolerance should read, and without a statement of the principle, it is hard to have a disciplined discussion. So let me extract a principle from the following UNESCO paragraph:
Tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world's cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human. It is fostered by knowledge, openness, communication, and freedom of thought, conscience and belief. Tolerance is harmony in difference. It is not only a moral duty, it is also a political and legal requirement. Tolerance, the virtue that makes peace possible, contributes to the replacement of the culture of war by a culture of peace.
PT. It is morally obligatory, and ought everywhere to be legally obligatory, that everyone respect, accept, and appreciate the diversity of the world's cultures, forms of expression, and ways of being human.
The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant
Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,
. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)