John Henry Newman and the Problem of Private Judgment

Onsi A. Kamel (First Things, October 2019):

The issue of ecclesiastical authority was trickier for me. I recognized the absurdity of a twenty-year-old presuming to adjudicate claims about the Scriptures and two thousand years of history. Newman’s arguments against private judgment therefore had a prima facie plausibility for me. In his Apologia, Newman argues that man’s rebellion against God introduced an “anarchical condition of things,” leading human thought toward “suicidal excesses.” Hence, the fittingness of a divinely established living voice infallibly proclaiming supernatural truths. In his discourse on “Faith and Private Judgment,” Newman castigates Protestants for refusing to “surrender” reason in matters religious. The implication is that reason is unreliable in matters of revelation. Faith is assent to the incontestable, self-evident truth of God’s revelation, and reasoning becomes an excuse to refuse to bend the knee.

The more I internalized ­Newman’s claims about private judgment, however, the more I descended into skepticism. I could not reliably interpret the Scriptures, history, or God’s Word preached and given in the sacraments. But if I could not do these things, if my reason was unfit in matters religious, how was I to assess Newman’s arguments for Roman Catholicism? Newman himself had once recognized this dilemma, writing in a pre-conversion letter, “We have too great a horror of the principle of private judgment to trust it in so immense a matter as that of changing from one communion to another.” Did he expect me to forfeit the faculty by which I adjudicate truth claims, because that faculty is fallible? My ­conversion would have to be rooted in my private ­judgment—but, because of Rome’s claim of infallibility, conversion would forbid me from exercising that faculty ever again on doctrinal questions.

MavPhil comment: Here is one problem. I must exercise my private judgment in order to decide whether to accept Rome's authority and thereby surrender my private judgment. But if my private judgment is trustworthy up to that point, then it will be trustworthy beyond that point in the evaluation of the pronouncements of say, Pope Francis.  It is also important to note that my private judgment is not merely private inasmuch as it is informed and tempered and corrected by a lifetime of  wide and diligent study and by the opinions of many others who have exercised their private judgments carefully and responsibly.

A second problem is that it is the private judgments  of powerful and influential intellects driven by resolute commitment  that have shaped Rome's teaching. St. Augustine is a prime example. Imagine being at a theological conference or council and squaring off with the formidable Augustinus. Whom do you think would carry the day? The magisterial teaching does not come directly from the Holy Spirit but is mediated by these intellectually powerful and willful drivers of doctrine. They were not mere conduits even if they were divinely inspired.

Finally, the infighting among traditionalist, conservative, and liberal Catholics made plain that Catholics did not gain by their magisterium a clear, living voice of divine authority. They received from the past a set of magisterial documents that had to be weighed and interpreted, often over against living prelates. The ­magisterium of prior ages only multiplied the texts one had to interpret for oneself, for living bishops, it turns out, are as bad at reading as the rest of us.

Thomas Merton on Newman and Chesterton

The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Three (1952-1960), p. 374, an excerpt from the entry of 3 February 1960:

I have to begin reading Newman, whom without cause I have neglected as though he were, say Chesterton. There is all the difference in the world. At the moment I am much more akin to the vanity and absurdity of Chesterton than I am to the solidity and brilliance of Newman. Brilliancy is a bad word — for me to desire that is always fatal!

I share Merton's low opinion of Chesterton.

For a long thread on Chesterton featuring Brian Bosse, Elliot, and me, go here. The question is whether sin is a fact.

Holes, Hosts, and Guests

Some of you are confusing holes with 'guests.'  You have to be able distinguish them on the notional or intensional plane to be able  to identify them on the real or extensional plane should you find reasons to do so.

I gave the example of a piece of Swiss cheese. It has holes in it. I argued that (i) holes are spatiotemporal particulars and that (ii) holes exist. I then asked whether holes are material or immaterial. My motive for posing this strange question was to see if there are any decisive (discussion-ending, philosophically dispositive) counterexamples to the materialist thesis  that all and only material items exist. Holes are candidate counterexamples: they exist and they are apparently immaterial. To understand how a hole could be a counterexample to materialism, however, you must not confuse a hole with its 'guest.' 

Let H be a hole in a piece of Swiss cheese. The piece of cheese is the host. Without it, that very piece of cheese, H, that very hole, cannot exist. (This is a much stronger claim than the claim that Swiss cheese holes cannot exist without Swiss cheese.) That makes the hole an 'ontological parasite' of the host entity, and thus analogous to an Aristotelian accident inhering in an Aristotelian primary substance.  The guest is the contingent occupant or filling of the hole, the air in H for example. 

Bro Joe comments,

Holes in Swiss cheese are CO2 gas bubbles; after you cut the cheese, they are air pockets. So, they qualify as "things." This discussion eventually involves the question of vacuums; but even outer space is not empty, there is a low density of hydrogen and helium out there, and that is even before the consideration of fields; the magnetic field, and the electrical field extend there as well. (There is one of each field in the entire universe as far as we know).

If Joe means 'material things' by 'things,' then he illustrates the confusion I mentioned. The hole in a doughnut has the doughnut as the host and air (or water or coffee, etc.) as the guest.  

So the hole is not the same as the 'guest.' The hole is what it is whatever the filling. The holes in a piece of cheese submerged in water are filled with water, not air. Since a hole is what it is whatever the filling or guest, the hole is not identical to its filling.  It is at least conceivable that the hole have no filling whatsoever. If that is possible, then the hole is 'no thing,' nothing, a particular 'piece' of nonbeing. (This possibility, please note, does not straightaway follow from the conceivability.)

I suppose one could argue that while it is contingent which type of occupant  a hole has, it must as a matter of metaphysical necessity have some occupant or other.  Holes are spatiotemporal particulars; such particulars are in spacetime; there are fields in every region of spacetime (electromagnetic, gravitational, and what all else); ergo, every hole is occupied or filled or has a guest, which is to say, every hole is material. 

Is the argument I just gave rationally coercive? It is assuming that time can be assimilated to space so as to form the four-dimensional manifold, spacetime. Reasonable objections can be raised against this construct, useful as it is in physics. And what about the premise that there are fields in every region of spacetime? Is that objectively self-evident? Is it not conceivable that there are holes in fields, and thus regions of spacetime without fields?

Now we are in deep, and it's time for a nap.  I leave you to ponder Lao Tzu:

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 11

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there.

(translation by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English)

Note the tacit identification of holes with ('pieces' of) nonbeing. 

Aporetic dyad:

Holes exist.

Holes are 'pieces' of nonbeing.

Are Holes Material Items?

Here is a version of materialism:

1) All and only material things exist.

My question: are there decisive (philosophically dispositive) counterexamples to (1)? I hold that (1) is very reasonably rejected. But what I want to know is whether it can be 'blown clean out of the water,' i.e., refuted beyond the shadow of any intelligent person's doubt. A commenter suggests holes as counterexamples to (1) His idea, I take it, is that holes exist but are not material items. Let's think about this.  I will first argue that holes exist and then inquire whether they are material in nature.

Consider a particular hole H in a piece of Swiss cheese.  H is not nothing.  It has properties.  It has, for example, a shape: it is circular.  The circular hole has a definite radius, diameter, and circumference.  It has a definite area equal to pi times the radius squared: A=πr2  If the piece of cheese is 1/16th of an inch thick, then the hole is a disk having a definite volume.  H has a definite location relative to the edges of the piece of cheese and relative to the other holes. The hole is subject to locomotion: move the cheese and you move the hole. The hole is also subject to substantial and accidental change. Melt the cheese and the hole ceases to exist; stretch the cheese and the hole undergoes alterational or accidental change.

What's more, H has causal properties: it affects the texture and flexibility of the cheese and its resistance to the tooth.  H is perceivable by the senses: you can see it and touch it. If you can't literally see holes, how would you know that the piece of cheese is a piece of Swiss cheese? You touch a hole by putting a finger or other appendage into it and experiencing no resistance.

Now if anything has properties, then it exists.  H has properties; so H exists. What holds for H holds for any hole.

But are holes material in nature? The answer to this obviously depends on what exactly it is to be material in nature. We have seen that holes are in space: they have definite locations and are subject to change of spatial location. We have also seen that, because they are subject to both substantial and accidental change,  holes are in time. So holes are both in space and in time. But they are neither abstract objects nor spiritual substances. Holes are plausibly taken to be existing spatiotemporal particulars.

But are  holes material substances? Presumably not: substances are logically capable of independent existence; holes are not capable of independent existence. Holes are ontological parasites: they depend for their existence on the existence of the things in which they exist.  Holes are more like Aristotelian accidents than like Aristotelian substances.

The view that holes are material items cannot be definitively excluded.  According to the SEP article on our topic, this line was taken by David Lewis and his wife Stephanie:

One might also hold that holes are ordinary material beings: they are neither more nor less than superficial parts of what, on the naive view, are their material hosts (Lewis & Lewis 1970; Mollica 2022). For every hole there is a hole-lining and for every hole-lining there is a hole; on this conception, the hole is the hole-lining.

I conclude that holes are not decisive counterexamples to (1) above.

Where to Send Illegal Immigrants

Send them to 'sanctuary' jurisdictions.

Eric Adams, mayor of NYC, would be happy to show his hospitality and humanity. I am using 'jurisdiction' to cover cities, counties, and states.  Here is a nifty map and a list brought to you from the fine folks over at the Center for Immigration Studies. I am proud to report that no city or county in Arizona is on the list. 

Note the clustering of 'sanctuary'  counties. The nastiest such cluster appears to be in the Pacific Northwest in Washington and Oregon with an increase in the density of clustering as you 'migrate' toward the Left Coast.  

From the map, I judge that the majority of the 'sanctuary' jurisdictions are coastal with most of the 'fly-over' jurisdictions in THC-rich Colorado.

A state is composed of counties, and counties are composed of cities (towns, etc.).  Would I be wrong to infer that if a state is a 'sanctuary' state (Illinois, e.g.), that every county  in that state has the same status, and every city in every county? OR can counties and cities in a 'sanctuary' state retain non-'sanctuary' status? I don't know, which is why I am asking.

(By the way, it annoys me when I ask someone a question of the form 'Do you know why ___?' and he responds, 'Why?')

Now for a trio of polemically-intended witticisms:

There  is more of sanctimony than of sanctuary in a 'sanctuary' jurisdiction.

It is easy to be sanctimonious if you have no skin in the game.

Only the inmates of an asylum could confuse an illegal immigrant with an asylum-seeker.

Mockery is a weapon not to be sneered at in our battle with our political enemies. And throw in a little contumely for good measure.

 

Back to Kant! The Aporetics of Appearance

Ed Buckner writes and I respond in blue:

1) The expression “this table” refers to something, i.e. has a referent.

BV: Yes.

2) What it refers to is extended in space and persists through time.

BV: No doubt. (1) and (2) are 'datanic claims' in my terminology. They simply must be accommodated by any theory worth its salt.

A Kantian will sum up (1) and (2) by saying that 'this table' refers to something empirically real. 'Empirically' means via the senses. To say that the table is empirically real is to say that it exists independently of any particular perceiver such as Ed and his mental states, and is given via the outer senses (sight, touch, etc.).  It follows, of course, that the table is not an object of inner sense. For if it were an object of inner sense, it could not be in space. Ed's perceivings, which he can become aware of by inner sense, are in time, but not in space. Because the table is in space, it is not in Ed's mind, i.e., it is not one of his mental states.

3) Kant claims that a thing in itself is not extended in space and does not persist through time.

BV: Kant does indeed say that, but what does it mean? On one interpretation, what Kant means by the above claim is that a thing such as a table, when considered as a thing in itself, and thus not as it appears to us under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us, is not extended in space and does not appear in time.

On this interpretation, promoted by such noted Kant scholars as Gerold Prauss and Henry Allison, there are not two tables, a phenomenal table and a noumenal table; there is one table considered in two ways. Phenomena and things in themselves are not two types of thing, but two different ways of considering the same things. It is not as if, 'behind' the phenomenal table, there is a 'table in itself': there is only one table  viewed either from the human (finite) point of view or from the absolute point of view of an intellectus archetypus.

One advantage of this interpretation is that it allows the accommodation of  Kant's repeated insistent claim that he is not a Berkeleyan idealist. For Berkeley, spatial things such as tables are in the mind. For Kant, they are not in the mind, for the following reason. What is in the mind is accessible to inner sense, but not to outer sense. Tables and such, however, are accessible only to outer sense. So tables and spatial things generally are not in the mind. They are in space outside the mind.  It must be understood, of course, that for Kant space is a mere a priori form of our sensibility, and thus one of the epistemic conditions above mentioned.

4) Therefore what “this table” refers to is not a thing in  itself.

BV: The validity of the inference is questionable. On the above interpretation, what "this table" refers to is not a thing as it would be when considered apart from the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us. It refers to a thing under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us. It could therefore be said that what "this table" refers to is indeed that table itself, albeit under the epistemic conditions under which alone it can appear to us.  These conditions include space and time, the a priori conditions of our sensibility (Sinnlichkeit), and the categories, the a priori forms of our understanding (Verstand).

I cannot fault these. In which case, what does “this table” refer to, for a Kantian?

BV: "This table," in line with the above interpretation, refers to a table under the epistemic conditions (space, time, and categories) under which alone it can appear to us. It thus refers to a phenomenon or appearance (Erscheinung). But this phenomenon is not a private mental content of a particular perceiver.  It is an intersubjectively accessible thing, the table in our example.  

So, from a Kantian point of view, 'this table' refers to a table which to employ a signature Kantian phrase, is "empirically real but transcendentally ideal." 

Pace Ed Buckner, and other English commentators, Kant is not a Berkeleyan idealist. This is not to say that that Kant's transcendental idealism is in the the clear. It remains problematic for reasons we cannot go into now.

On ‘Materialize’ and Materialism

 

Mind no matter

It is interesting that 'materialize' is often used in ordinary English as an intransitive verb to mean: come to be real.  "Rain clouds materialized on the horizon." "The Hezbollah counterattack never materialized." A thing or state of affairs is real if and only if it exists independently of (finite) mind. To be real is to exist outside the mind and outside its causes. The last two sentences may need some tweaking and some commentary, but let's move on to the question of the relation of materiality and existence.  Is the following true?

1) Necessarily, for any x, x exists iff x is a material thing.

(1) formulates a version of materialism: everything that exists is a material thing, and everything that is material exists. If true, (1) necessarily true. We surely don't want to say that (1) just happens to be true. The type of necessity? Not analytic and not narrowly logical. And of course not nomological: (1) is not a law of nature given that the laws of nature are logically contingent.  (1), if true, formulates a law of metaphysics. So I'll say it is metaphysically necessary. 

Are there counterexamples to (1)? Are there existing things that are not material? Are there material things that do not exist?

Wanted are nice clean  counterexamples that are not as questionable as (1) itself. I want to refute (1) if I can. Bear in mind that 'refute' is a verb of success. So angels won't do. How about numbers? Numbers are more credible than angels; numbers presumably exist; numbers are so-called 'abstract' objects outside of space and time and thus not material.  Hartry Field and other nominalists, however, will argue with some plausibility that numbers and other abstracta either do not exist or that there is no good reason to posit them.  Field wrote a book entitled Science Without Numbers.  (And of course he was not proposing that one could do physics without mathematics.) 

What is left by way of counterexamples to (1) if we exclude spiritual substances (God, gods, angels, demons, unembodied and disembodied souls) and so-called abstract objects (numbers, mathematical sets, Fregean-Bolzanian propositions, Chisholmian-Plantingian states of affairs, etc.)? 

Well, consider my present occurrent visual awareness of my lamp.  (Better yet: you consider your present occurrent awareness of anything .) This awareness of the lamp (genitivus obiectivus) is not the lamp; it exists, and it cannot be material in nature. The awareness is not a state of my body or brain, even if correlated with some such state. If it were a state of my body or brain, it would be material which is precisely what it cannot be. Why not? Because the awareness is an intentional or object-directed state and no material/physical state can exhibit intentionality.

This is as clean a counterexample as I can muster.  The awareness of material things is not itself a material thing. Less clean, but still a contender, is the subject of (genitivus subiectivus) the object-directed state , the mind, ego, self that is in the state.  If there is a self along the lines of a Cartesian res cogitans that is aware of a lamp when BV is aware of his lamp, then that self exists but is not material.

Have these considerations refuted (1)?  You tell me. What I will say is that they make the rejection of (1) reasonable.

The other class of putative counterexamples to (1) are items that are material but do not exist.  Unicorns and flying horses come to mind. Suppose that there are four categories of entity  item:  (i) immaterial minds, (ii) occurrent and dispositional states of minds, whether intentional or non-intentional; (iii) so-called 'abstract' objects; (iv) material things.  Where do such Meinongian nonentities as unicorns belong?  Obviously they belong in the fourth category.  They are material things even though they don't exist!

Has this second set of considerations refuted (1)? You tell me. 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs from a Passage in Thomas McGuane

Here is a passage from Thomas McGuane, Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton-Mifflin, 1992, pp. 201-202, to which I have added hyperlinks.

He [Frank Copenhaver] turned on the radio and listened to an old song called "Big John": everybody falls down a mine shaft; nobody can get them out because of something too big to pry; Big John comes along and pries everybody loose but ends up getting stuck himself; end of Big John.  Frank guessed it was a story of what can happen to those on the top of the food chain.

On to an oldies station and the joy of finding Bob Dylan: "You've gotta lot of nerve to say you are my friend." No one compares with this guy, thought Frank.  I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it.  Frank paused in his thinking , then realized he was suiting up for his arrival in Missoula.  In a hurricane of logging trucks, he heard, out of a hole in the sky the voice of Sam Cooke: "But I do know that I love you." Frank began to sweat.  "And I know that if you love me too, what a wonderful world this would be."

[. . .]

All the little questions. Will they lose interest when you go broke? Sam Cooke: "Give me water, my work is so hard."  What work? Tough to believe both Sam Cooke and Otis Redding are dead.

Wandering the Sam Cooke wing of the musty mausoleum of moldy oldies, we may as well cue up Bring It On Home to Me and Cupid.

Literary Addendum

My go-to literary guys, one dead, the other alive, D. G. Myers and Patrick Kurp respectively,  have little to say about McGuane. Myers says nothing while Kurp reports, "I do remember reading the early novels of Thomas McGuane but I couldn’t tell you a thing about them."

Well, there are novels like that. I am now thinking of a novel I read a few years ago by a female, competently done, but I can't remember her name, or the title: forgettable and forgotten. To tell the truth, most of us will soon be forgotten no matter what we write or how well we write it: we're lucky if a few read us now. But if you are writing in the right spirit, it ought to be a matter of indifference to you whether you are read or not. Kerouac at one point spoke of "self-ultimacy." 

One novel I've never forgotten I read well over a half-century ago while an undergraduate. It made the cut at Myers' place, where we find:

Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (Serbo-Croatian, 1945; English, 1959). Anyone still interested in the former Yugoslavia must read two books—Rebecca West’s magisterial two-volume travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) and the masterpiece of Serbian literature, published four years later. Compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude for its multi-generational sweep, Andrić’s novel is a hundred pages shorter, scrupulously avoids the magic in magical realism, and might be more accurately described as The Painted Bird with a conscience.

Another Reason to Pity Leftists

Leftists lack self-awareness. (That is what is called a generic statement.) They claim, against the evidence of his first term, that Donald J. Trump is a 'fascist,' a dictator, etc.  This is pure projection. Projection is a psychological defense mechanism. Not willing to admit their own totalitarian tendencies, lefties block them from view by projecting them into Trump, thereby displaying a remarkable lack of psychological self-transparency. A member of the MavPhil commentariat nails it:

Memo to the Left:

DJT will be a dictator? You don't say ! 

Maybe Donald Trump will: forbid me to use tungsten light bulbs, take away my gas stove, force me to drive an electric car, outlaw my propane-fired forced air house heater, and make me rewire my house for electric heat, to the tune of thousands of dollars, and force me to use [invented] "pronouns," and thus unwillingly participate in another's mental illness ! [As when a confused teenage girl, under peer-group pressure, lacking critical-thinking skills, allows herself to be surgically mutilated so as to change her 'gender.']

You mean Trump will be a dictator like that?

Really ?

Further question: should we pity leftist fools or hate them? Hate has its uses. It energizes and inspires ameliorative action in a way that pity does not. Is there not such a thing as righteous anger? That's a rhetorical question, a declarative in the guise of an interrogative. It declares: there is such a thing as righteous anger!

Pity or hate? If they are projecting, then perhaps pity is the appropriate response. But many if not most of these bastards are lying. Truth, we know, is not a leftist value. Ergo, etc.

Another School Shooting

And so, predictably, the gun-grabbers will howl. Their howling is music to my ears and your signal to buy more guns, ammo, supplies, to pay range fees, training fees, and so on and so forth.  

This is something concrete that you can easily do and it makes a difference.  It puts money in the hands of firearms manufacturers (and their suppliers and subsidiaries) entities which fund the NRA and other lobbying groups who defend 2A against the totalitarian shites of Swamp Land. 

You cannot reason with gun-grabbing fools. They do not inhabit the plane of reason.  We of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable  have all the best arguments; they don't have jack. 'Jack' is elliptical for 'jack shit,' an urban quantifier if you will. It means 'anything.'  A curious linguistic bagatelle: 'squat,' 'diddly squat,' 'shit,' 'jack shit,' 'jack' — all have uses as 'urban quantifiers,' a phrase I just now coined.  But you won't find these quantifiers in any logic book, which is yet another reason why you need my blog.

As for the school and other shootings, we of the aforementioned coalition are against them, and recommend that existing laws be enforced, something that won't happen as long as Dementocrats have power.

Start with Hunter Biden.  But see this Reason piece for a contrary view.