Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • You may look away . . .

    . . . but it won't make the madness go away. Still, "Out of sight, out of mind" is a way to peace of mind. But is such peace worth wanting if its price is ignorance of imminent threats to your life, liberty, and well-being? Can you afford to ignore the sheer suicidal insanity of the Left? Examples are legion.

    Here is a recent one: Illinois law requires landlords to sell or rent to illegal aliens.

    The Republic is on its last legs when law is used both to undermine the rule of law, and to punish productive citizens who accept the risk of buying properties, refurbishing them, and then putting them up for rent or sale. 

    Bill Vallicella

    One response to “You may look away . . .”

  • The Purpose of Kamala Harris

    Actually, she has two.

    The first is to make Joe Biden appear articulate by comparison. 

    Her main purpose, though, is to insure that Biden not be removed from office.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Underground Grammarian

    If you think that I am a language Nazi, then pay a visit to the Underground Grammarian. His stern visage reminds me of a passage near the beginning of Franz Kafka's Vor dem Gesetz, "Before the Law." The protagonist seeks entry into the Law, but at the door stands a guard who warns:

    Ich bin maechtig. Und ich bin nur der unterste Tuerhueter. Von Saal zu Saal stehn aber Tuerhueter, einer maechtiger als der andere. Schon den Anblick des dritten kann nicht einmal ich ertrage.

    I am powerful. And I am but the least of the gatekeepers. From room to room there are gatekeepers each stronger than the next. Not even I can bear so much as the glance of the third. (tr. BV)

    Related: Fellow Language Nazi William Sullivan reports on the case of Arizona Republican Eli Crane. Crane got into trouble with the 'woke' contingent when he inadvertently used 'colored people' instead  of 'people of color.'

    A point Sullivan did not make, but I will, is that the two phrases, while synonymous in objective intension, are semantically distinct in subjective intension. They differ in connotation despite sameness in denotation.   

    Bill Vallicella

  • Requite Good with Evil?

    Or with justice? And what is justice? 'Equity'?

    Substack latest. The short piece ends thusly:

    You absolutely must read old books to be in a position to assess justly the dreck and drivel pumped out by today's politically-correct quill drivers and so-called 'journalists' who wouldn't know a gerund from a participle if their colons depended on it.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Oriana Fallaci on Writing

    From The Rage and the Pride (New York: Rizzoli, 2003), pp. 23-24, emphases added:

    I must say that writing is a very serious matter for me: it is not an amusement or an outlet or a relief. It is not, because I never forget that written words can do a lot of good but also a lot of evil, they can heal as much as kill. Read History and you'll see that behind every event of Good or Evil there is a piece of writing. A book, an article, a manifesto, a poem, a song. . . . So I never write rapidly, I never cast away: I am a slow writer, a cautious writer. I'm also an unappeasable writer: I do not resemble those who are always satisfied with their product as if they urinated ambrosia. Moreover I have many manias. I care for the rhythm of the phrase, for the cadence of the page, for the sound of the words: the metrics. And woe betide the assonances, the rhymes, the unwanted repetitions. For the form is important as much as the substance, the content. It is the recipient inside which the substance rests like wine inside a glass, like flour inside a jar, and managing such symbiosis at times blocks my work.

    This is from a book in which Oriana speaks her mind on the events of 9/11. The passion of her ambrosial prose, the charm of her Italianate solecisms, kept me up last night. Move over Camille Paglia!

    Bill Vallicella

  • It Passes All the Same

    No matter how many times you remind yourself to seize the day, to enjoy the moment, to do what you are doing, to be here now, to live thoughtfully and deliberately, to appreciate what you have; no matter how assiduous the attempts to freeze the flow, fix the flux, stay the surge to dissolution, and contain the dissipation wrought by time's diaspora and the mind's incontinence — it passes all the same.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Are There Aptronymic Initials?

    I should think so. Bernie Sanders' initials are 'B. S.'

    The man is a destructive fool, though not as destructive or as foolish as Joey B.  Proof here.

    It's a funny world. In the private sector it is often the very best who rise to the top; in politics, the very worst.  Is there anyone in the Biden  (mal)Administration who does not illustrate my point?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Morality and Legality: Three Principles

    Bill Vallicella

  • Victor Davis Hanson on Tribalism

    Top o' the Stack

    Bill Vallicella

  • Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama

    In less than eight minutes.

    Bill Vallicella

    2 responses to “Victor Davis Hanson on Barack Obama”

  • To Write Well, Read Well

    The example of William James.  Excerpt:

    But what makes James' writing good? It has a property I call muscular elegance. The elegance has to do in good measure with the cadence, which rests in part on punctuation and sentence structure. Note the use of the semi-colon and the dash. These punctuation marks are falling into disuse, but I say we should dig in our heels and resist this decadence especially since it is perpetrated by many of the very same politically correct or ‘woke’ ignoramuses who are mangling the language in other ways I won't bother to list. There is no necessity that linguistic degeneration continue. We make the culture what it is, and we get the culture or unculture we deserve.

    As for the muscularity of James' muscular elegance, it comes though in his vivid examples and his use of words like 'pinch' and 'butchered.' His is a magisterial interweaving of the abstract and the concrete, the universal and the particular. Bare of flab, this is writing with pith and punch. And James is no slouch on content, either.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Age Quod Agis: Agent and Awareness

    Too much attention is wasted on what we did do and what we will do, and not enough on what we are doing. Age quod agis. "Do what you are doing."  A excellent maxim. A non-philosopher will take it as such and then move on. The philosopher lingers and goes deeper.

    Verbally a tautology, the admonition expresses a non-tautological truth: attend to what you are doing.  I cannot fail to do what I am doing, but I can fail to attend to what I am doing. The admonition is in the same logical boat with "Be here now!" and "Live in the present!"

    How could I fail to be here now? Where else would I be? And when else would I be? But that would be to miss the point. The tautological form of words expresses a non-tautological thought: Attend to the moment and be aware of your situation.

    For a human being, to be is not merely to exist as a thing among things, but to be aware. The Being of a human being involves an element of material facticity — you are this indigent material thing right here — but also an element of transcendence in that, as aware, you are way beyond the miserable chunk of matter your awareness inhabits. You are way beyond it by being aware of the not-self. The not-self includes not only everything other than your body, but also your body inasmuch as your body and its parts are objects of awareness and thus not identical to you as subject of awareness. You are not merely a thing in the world, but also, as the subject of awareness,  a being  for whom there is a world.

    As for living in the present, this is not a mere biological living. As a bit of nature's fauna, how could you biologically live other in the temporal present? To live in the present, as per the admonition, is to attend to the present, to impede the outward scatter of your thoughts, to bend back the outward intentionality (object-directedness) of mind to the present moment and its contents. You draw in your thoughts from the diaspora of the past and the future and the elsewhere in space and the elsewhere in general and bring them home. You could call it 'bringing it all back home.'  You could call it spiritual intro-version, or swimming upstream to the Source of thought's river. ("Man is a stream whose source is hidden" (Ralph Waldo Emerson).

    The Being of the human being is a living, but not a merely biological living, not a mere living as understood by the objectifying natural science of biology. The ineluctable subjectivity ingredient in the Being of human beings cannot be understood from the point of view of biology.

    Consider now the sentence 'I am hungry' asserted by BV.  It is true now at 12:45 PM.  What is it about? It is about BV, a publicly identifiable person. What does it predicate of BV? It predicates the property of being hungry. The predicational tie is signified by the copula 'am.' Does this copula express merely the object BV's instantiation of the property? No, it also expresses the speaker's awareness that he himself is hungry. Property-possession in a human being is more than a merely objective relation. This fact complements the earlier one about the ineluctable subjectivity of the Being of human beings. Both the Being and the Being-propertied of human beings is unlike anything else in the world.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Political Action

    Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien

    The French saying is attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good."  The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

    Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark alliteration:  Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

    Read more at Substack.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Destructive Bergoglio

    At a time when we need our most venerable institutions to stand as bulwarks against the rising tide of wokery, what we find instead is capitulation.  When the head of the ancient Roman church abdicates, we are surely in for it. Corruptio optimi pessima.

    Cardinal Pell vents his righteous fury at the Vatican's theological direction here.

    What explains the stampede toward wokery? One causal factor is groupthink.

    Horribile dictu: the Girl Scouts have joined the mad rush, offering a merit badge for LGBTQ+ awareness. 

    'Wokeassery,' a coinage of mine, is another word for wokery, a word to be found in reputable dictionaries. It brings in the donkey theme, the jackass being the symbol of the Dementocrats.

    Related: Heather Mac Donald on cultural survival and the Left's new default setting. Brilliant and deep analysis. But again just more analysis with nary a concrete suggestion as to what to do to restore sanity.

    UPDATE (7/13)

    Rod Dreher on Bergoglio's consolidation of his 'progressive' revolution.

    Bill Vallicella

    15 responses to “The Destructive Bergoglio”

  • Notes on Kierkegaard and Truth

    From a December, 1985 journal entry.

    ……………………

    Why does Søren Kierkegaard maintain that truth is subjectivity, and in the Danish equivalents of those very words? What could he mean by such a strange assertion?

    To rehearse the obvious: S. K. does not mean that truth is subjective or relative, varying with persons, places, times, perspectives, or any other index. The Dane presupposes that truth is objective. But then what could the central claim of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, "truth is subjectivity," mean?

    Since Kierkegaard assumes the objective truth of Christianity, and does so without question or caveat, the only issue for him is the subjective appropriation of Christian truth. To appropriate is to make one's own, and the one in question is not the abstract one in general, but in every case the concrete existing individual. S. K.'s greatness is his honesty in expounding the demands that genuine Christianity makes on the would-be Christian and in exposing the state-sponsored Christianity Inc. of his day. Given the tacit presupposition of Christianity's truth, it makes sense for S. K. to say that truth is subjectivity. For it is not the objective truth of Christianity that is an issue for him, but the individual, and thus necessarily subjective, task of becoming a Christian. That is my charitable reading of the famous dictum.

    But to be precise in our use of terms, truth is by its very nature objective, not subjective; what is subjective is truthfulness. Only a person can correctly be said to be truthful in the primary sense of the term. It would make no sense to describe propositions as truthful any more than it would make sense to say that persons have truth-values or stand in entailment relations or correspond to reality.

    Objective truth and subjective truthfulness, though distinct,  are related. (It is worth noting that 'objective and 'subjective' in the immediately preceding sentence are redundant qualifiers: truth would not be what it is if it were not objective, and truthfulness would not be what it is if if were not a personal attribute.) They are related in that one can be truthful only by respecting the truth, by living in accordance with it, by refraining from lying, deceit, and deception, by telling the truth.

    Subjective, lived, existential truth is entirely vacuous if disengaged from objective truth; at the limit subjective truth thus disengaged is indistinguishable from vicious self-will. It then becomes what in contemporary parlance is called 'my truth.' But there is no such thing as my truth; truth by its very nature is objective. What is mine can only be my appropriation or non-appropriation of the truth, truth that cannot be mine. One cannot appropriate and live the truth unless there is truth to be appropriated.

    I said that truth and truthfulness are related. But I don't want to give the impression that while truthfulness requires truth, truth can subsist without truthfulness. That may be, but it is not obvious and may be reasonably controverted. So I now take a further step by stating that truth and truthfulness are mutually implicative. They are, if you will,  'dialectically related:' no one without the other, and no other without the one. It is clear that truthfulness implies truth; less clear, but arguable is that truth implies truthfulness. That is to say: there cannot be objective truth without subjectivity, without a truthful subject.  Can I prove it? No. But I can make a case for it, a case that renders the thesis reasonable to believe.

    Truth is made for the mind at least in this sense: Objective truth is necessarily such that is it possibly recognized by someone. Truth mediates between mind and reality.  Truth is the truth of reality in both the objective and subjective senses of the genitive. Truth is about reality, but it is also reality's truth. Reality's truth is reality's intelligibility, its aptness to be understood. So if it is objectively true that Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, then that truth, that true proposition, is necessarily such that it is possibly recognized or known by someone.  But it cannot be possibly known unless there actually exists someone who can know it. Now what is really possible must be grounded in the abilities and powers of actual agents. But there are many truths that are not possibly known by any finite agent. And yet they too are possibly known because knowability is an essential property of every truth. Therefore, their knowability is grounded in the actual power to know of an actual being. "And this all men call God."

    Now that was rather quick, wasn't it? But I meant it merely as a sketch for an argument to be laid out rigorously. (The modal moves I made invite close scrutiny.) So laid out, the argument still won't be rationally compelling, but then no substantive argument in philosophy or theology for that matter is rationally compelling.  But many such arguments do supply grounds for reasoned belief which all that is available to us here below.

    So suppose God exists. He is the truthful subjective source of all objective truth. In God, truthfulness and truth are one, the subjective and the objective coalesce. The mutually implicative relation of truthfulness and truth is as tightly grounded as could be. This is exactly what we should expect give the divine simplicity for which there many arguments. 

    To sum up. Truthfulness for us here below is a matter of the subjective appropriation of objective truth. Read in this sense, S. K. 's dictum is defensible. It is not truth that is subjective, but truthfulness. 

    There is no truthfulness without truth. This is well-nigh evident if not self-evident. That there is no truth without truthfulness is less clear but arguable as above.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  3. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  4. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

  5. Just a little correction, since I wrote somewhat hastily. I meant to say enemies of the truth (not from the…

  6. You touched on very, very important points, Bill. First, I agree that people nowadays simply want to believe whatever the…

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