Thomas Merton: Attraction, Repulsion, Fascination

I am attracted by his openness to influence from diverse quarters, his Whitmanic "I am large; I contain multitudes," his Terentian "nothing human is foreign to me," and his relentless self-examination.

I am repulsed by his lack of mental rigor and and his liberal propensity for squish and gush in matters political. And then there was his need for attention. He was too much enamoured of name and fame, and too fearful of being forgotten. He would have liked to flee the world but was unable to achieve escape velocity and could only orbit around her. Her gravitational attraction was no match for the grace he was granted. I allude to Simone Weil's brilliant title, "Gravity and Grace." 

I am fascinated by his inner conflicts as I am by those of Julien Green, as revealed in his exceedingly rich diary, not to mention the inner conflicts I find in myself.  

Wer schreibt, der bleibt

I fondly recall my late German neighbor, Günter Scheer, from whom I learned this expression.   "He who writes, remains."

But for how long? Any mark you make will in the end be unmade by time, in time, for all time. We do not write in indelible ink. Old Will said it well:

We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep. (Prospero in The Tempest)

Heraclitus of Ephesus famously wept over the impermanence of things and the vanity of existence as did a certain latter-day Heraclitean. "I am grieved by the transitoriness of things," wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in a letter to Franz Overbeck, dated 24 March 1887.

Heraclitus Weeping

Addendum (8/9/2025):

In a letter from 1881, Nietzsche wrote to Overbeck:

My dear friend, what is this our life? A boat that swims in the sea, and all one knows for certain about it is that one day it will capsize. Here we are, two good old boats that have been faithful neighbors, and above all your hand has done its best to keep me from 'capsizing'! Let us then continue our voyage — each for the other's sake, for a long time yet, a long time! We should miss each other so much! Tolerably calm seas and good winds and above all sun — what I wish for myself, I wish for you, too, and am sorry that my gratitude can find expression only in such a wish and has no influence at all on wind or weather.[1]

From Wikipedia.

‘Pastime’

Whatever we are here for, we are not here to pass time. Our time is to be used and used well. You say it doesn't matter how we spend our time since nothing matters? That may or may not be so.  But it matters which.  If something does matter and you live as if nothing matters you may end up not only having wasted your time but  your eternity as well. So time  spent getting to the bottom of this question is time well spent. 

‘Per’ versus ‘As Per’

I have become annoyed recently by the increasing use of 'per' instead of 'as per' by journalists. Here is an example:

And that essentially was the end of her [Kamala's] campaign. Per Democratic strategist James Carville, “It’s the one question that you exist to answer, all right? That is it. That’s the money question. That’s the one you want. That’s the one that everybody wants to know the answer to. And you freeze, you literally freeze, and you say, ‘Well, I can’t think of anything,'” he said in a postelection analysis.

Is my annoyance misplaced?  I love the English language, my beloved mother tongue, and it angers me when people misuse and maltreat her. But in this case I may have overreacted.  Merriam Webster:

The fact is that both per and as per have existed in English in the sense “according to” for a very long time–since the 15th and 16th centuries, respectively. The choice of which to use (or avoid) is entirely a matter of taste. The more ponderous as per is often found in business and legal prose, or in writing that attempts to adopt a formal tone. It is not incorrect to use, but some find it overly legalistic and counsel avoiding it for that reason.

Butchvarov’s Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl’s Paradox of Human Subjectivity

Top o' the Stack.

UPDATE (8/4/2025). Matteo writes, "As for your latest post on Substack about the dehumanization of the ego, there is this Italian philosopher who holds a very similar view (consciousness and the world are the very same thing, we literally ARE the world etc." 

https://archive.org/details/spreadmindwhycon0000manz

 

Why Do the Dems Hate Us?

You can count on the inferior to hate the superior. It's human nature, and an eternal war.

Dio Cassius 38.39.2 (speech of Caesar; tr. Earnest Cary):

Against this prosperity many are plotting, since everything that lifts people above their fellows arouses both emulation and jealousy; and consequently an eternal warfare is waged by all inferiors against those who excel them in any way.

πολλοὶ γὰρ ἐπιβουλεύουσιν αὐτῇ· πᾶν γὰρ τὸ ὑπεραῖρόν τινας καὶ ζηλοῦται καὶ φθονεῖται, κἀκ τούτου πόλεμος ἀίδιός ἐστιν ἅπασι τοῖς καταδεεστέροις πρὸς τοὺς ἔν τινι αὐτῶν ὑπερέχοντας.

Addendum (8/2/2025)

Let's apply the thought I found at Michael Gilleland's erudite site to current events.

Against the prosperity, peace, and manifold accomplishments of the Trump administration that lift people up, both here and abroad, many are plotting, belittling, denigrating, and refusing to acknowledge. The successes of the current administration arouse both emulation and jealousy, or rather envy.  The Democrat attempts at emulation are pathetic and childish consisting of such merely performative stunts as throwing F-bombs (Hunter Biden), working out with weights (Swalwell) and waving around a baseball bat while howling in rage  (Cory Booker, a.k.a. 'Spartacus').  It is merely performative when a pussy postures as a tough guy.

And let's not forget the self-deportation of  such powerhouse intellects as Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres.  Rosie, expecting the grass to be greener on the Emerald Isle, discovered that it is illegal there whereas her supply was assured in LaLaLand (Los Angeles) whence she came. And driven mad by the big bad Orange Man's rent-free residence in her narrow and shallow pate, she can't sleep at night, Zanax, like marijuana, being hard to find in Ireland.  Her spatial translation has not abated her ire which continues to be regularly displayed on TikTok as Jesse Watters is wont to report.

As for Democrat envy of Trump, it is perhaps the main source of their mindless hatred of the man, a hatred so intense and unhinged as to warrant a quasi-psychiatric appellation, 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' (TDS).  The Dems are in such disarray that they are reduced to trotting  out their discredited bromides and tired bullshit, and as for the various cards they play, race, white supremacy, Hitler, and the rest, they haven't noticed that they are played out.  People who ought to know better such as Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) claim with a straight face that the Dems failed to get their message across. Kelly, a former astronaut, is an intelligent man, but such people sometimes say stupid things.  The Dems have no message and they have no messenger.  A message both salutary and sellable cannot consist of an embrace of 80-20 issues such as allowing biological males to compete in women's sporting events, and a 90-10 issue such as allowing the nation's border to remain wide open.  And who might be their messenger in 2028? Kamala the clown?  Did you hear the airhead's latest inanities?  Are you paying attention?

What we have here is a war for the soul of America. That was one of the few intelligent things Traitor Joe said. The current Dems are a pack of inferiors who hate us because of our superiority morally and intellectually.

"An eternal warfare is waged by all inferiors against those who excel them in any way."

Addendum 2 (8/3/2025). "It is merely performative when a pussy postures as a tough guy."  Replete with trademark MavPhil alliteration. Corroboration:

A highly theatrical Sen. Cory Booker screamed a series of false justifications for his obstructionism on the Senate floor. “For us to move forward as a body is to be complicit in what Donald Trump is doing. I say, ‘no.’”

The New Jersey Democrat asserted the administration was rounding up people “with a right to be in this country,” unaware the Kilmar Abrego-Garcia “Maryland Man” story has been exposed as a hoax. Far from being a sympathetic citizen, Abrego-Garcia is an illegal alien facing human trafficking charges.

Mr. Booker also pretends that CBS didn’t fire Stephen Colbert because of his rock-bottom television ratings. “I see businesses taking late night talk show hosts off the air because they dare to insult a president,” Mr. Booker said. “That is complicity with an authoritarian leader who is trashing our constitution. It’s time for Democrats to have a backbone, it’s time for us to fight, it’s time to draw a line.”

One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism

This morning's mail brought a longish letter from philosophy student Ryan Peterson.  He would like some comments and I will try to oblige him as time permits, but time is short. So for now I will confine my comments to the postscript of his letter:

P.S. Just as crazy as one category trope bundle theory is to me, is the later Brentano’s attempt at a different one category ontology, ‘reism’, where “For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)” (from Uriah Kriegel’s Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism). I like to rigorously understand all the different views put forth by intelligent philosophers on a topic but I do like to spend the most time understanding the more plausible seeming views first.

Leaving trope theory to one side for the moment, I am happy to agree with Peterson's assessment of Brentano. While not literally  a product of insanity, Brentano's view  I find to be incomprehensible.  (And I don't mean that to be a merely autobiographical remark.) 

I assume what to me seems to be well-nigh self-evident: some, but not all, truths need truth-makers.  (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) A truth is a true truth-bearer. The primary truth-bearers — the primary vehicles of the truth-values — are propositions.  An assertive utterance at a particular time by a particular person of the declarative sentence 'Socrates is wise' expresses the proposition Socrates is wise.  I will assume that propositions are abstract in the Quinean, not the trope-theoretic, sense of 'abstract.'  (You can hear an asserted sentence and see a written sentence; you cannot hear or see a proposition.)  A truth-bearer is not a truth-maker, except in some recherché cases I won't mention.  (And don't confuse a truth-maker with a truth condition.)

There has to be something in the world of concreta (the spatiotemporal realm of causal reality) that makes it true that Socrates exists. To avoid the word 'makes,' we can say that the sentence and the proposition it expresses need an ontological ground of their being-true. Now you either get it or you don't. There are those who don't have a clue as to what I am talking about. Such people have no philosophical aptitude, and must simply be shown the door. A contingent truth cannot just be true, nor can it be true in virtue of someone's say-s0: a contingent truth requires something  in reality external to the truth-bearer and its verbal expression that 'makes' it true, where this 'making' or grounding is neither narrowly logical nor causal.   (Its not being either the one nor the other sensu stricto is what  prejudices some against it. I kick them off my stoa as lacking philosophical aptitude.)

Now what in the world could function as the ontological ground of the contingent truth of 'Socrates exists'?  The obvious answer is: the concrete particular Socrates.  (Aristotle makes this very point somewhere in The Categories.)  A particular may be defined as an unrepeatable entity by contrast with universals (if such there be) that are by definition repeatable.

There is an obvious difference between 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is Greek,' on the one hand, and 'Socrates exists' on the other. It is the difference between predicative and existential sentences. Now we come to the nub of the issue. It seems blindingly evident to me that the two predicative sentences (and the propositions they express), if they need truth-makers at all,  need concrete states of affairs (STOAs)  as truth-makers, and that these truth-making states of affairs must be numerically distinct. I have no objection to saying that wise-Socrates makes true the first sentence and Greek-Socrates the second if 'wise-Socrates' and 'Greek-Socrates' refer to concrete states of affairs (not to be confused with Chisholmian abstract states of affairs).

But that is not what Brentano is saying.  His reism cannot allow for concrete states of affairs of the form a's being F.  For the predicate 'F' either picks out an abstract particular, a trope, or it picks out a universal. But on reism, all you've got are things, concrete particulars, which, moreover, cannot be assayed as concrete states of affairs along either Bergmannian or Armstrongian lines.  

On reism one must therefore swallow the absurdity that "wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)." So they are one and the same and yet numerically different?? A question for Peterson: Is Kriegel defending truth-maker nominalism?  I hope not. For it makes no bloody sense.  For one thing it implies that the putatively two but at the same time one concrete particular(s) are property-less and are thus 'bare,' though not in Gustav Bergmann's precise sense.  They are property-less if there are no properties, and there are no properties if there are no tropes nor any universals. A predicate is not a property.   

'Red,' 'rot,' 'rouge,' and 'rosso' are four different predicates in four different languages. If Tom the tomato is red, as we say in English, he is not red only in English or rosso only in Italian. That way lies an absurd linguistic idealism. The predicates are true of Tom because there is something in or related to Tom that makes the predicates true of him, that grounds their applicability to him.  This something in Tom is either the trope in him (assuming he is a complete bundle of tropes) or a universal that he instantiates.  Nominalism makes no sense. The reality of properties is non-negotiable. But of course they needn't be universals. Trope-nominalism makes sense.  'Ostrich' nominalism does not.  The same goes for van Inwagen's 'ostrich realism.'

Here is another argument. Socrates, while essentially Greek (Cf. Kripke's essentiality of origin), is only accidentally wise: had he lived long enough he might have gone 'Biden.'  At every time at which he exists, our man is Greek, but only at some times is he wise.  (He wasn't wise when he peeped his head out from between the legs of his mother, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.) So if he is one and the same concrete individual over time, then there has to be a distinction between him and real properties (not predicates!) that are either in him as tropes or related to him as universals.

Retribution and Psycho-Political Projection

'Retribution' has two main senses in English, and they are importantly different. The word can refer to revenge or to a form of justice, retributive justice. Do I have to explain that justice is not revenge? Conflating the two, journalistic shills for deep-state malefactors try to dismiss as revenge what is a quest for justice to right the wrongs perpetrated against Donald Trump by said malefactors.  

Tulsi Gabbard's exposure of the Russia Collusion Hoax has leftists in our government sweating. Jonathan Turley names names: John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe.

But of course one cannot expect our political enemies to play fair in what they take to be a war.  So this comes as no surprise:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC on Sunday morning that the Justice Department is being politicized to attack enemies of the Trump administration and "put at risk the lives and well-being" of people who oppose the president.

Talk about projection!  What Holder & Co. are accusing our side of doing is precisely what they have been doing all along. 

There is also the underhanded ploy of accusing us of putting lives at risk when our side rightly responds to their illegal actions.  We are supposed to accept the injury meekly, lest our legitimate objections to their outrages inspire some lunatic to go on a rampage. Yet another application of the Left's double-standard 'principle.' 

We should never forget what sort of sorry specimen this Holder was and is. See Photo ID: Eric Holder's Assault on Common Sense.

Travel: More Than Ever a Fool’s Paradise

Kim du Toit:

I’m not sure I want to travel internationally again.

Me too. Been there, done that.  One of his reasons:

. . . we all know how the Filth in Britishland regard the matter of self-defense Over There.  Nothing puts a damper on the travel experience like having to explain to some judge why you didn’t want to just let the little choirboy take your property and shake your head sorrowfully at your loss.  That you applied your walking-stick to the little shit’s cranium (in lieu of having the old 1911 at hand) would no doubt land you in Serious Trouble, just as your attitude to the cops being more or less on the criminal’s side rather than on yours might also result in the cop’s uniform being ruined by the flow of blood (his).

To which he adds:

And then there’s this little nugget, from one of my most-favored places on the planet:

Most famous districts in Vienna are in the heart of the city and during summer or at Christmas season they become overcrowded, which can lead to pickpocketing, mugging and even terrorist attacks.  In these areas frequented by tourists, bus and train stations, people around you need to be carefully watched and your possessions should be kept close to you.

WTF?  Now add to that the chance that some “migrant” takes offense that your female companion doesn’t have her head covered to his satisfaction… do you see where I’m going with this?

I suggest that we aging patriots who have done our fair share of international travel add to our MAGA lists homeland travel and blowing our excess bucks here. Can one ever get sick of Route 66?

To the young, however, I say: get out there and take the risks.  See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won't regret your adventures. Then you can gloat, "Been there, done that." Forever after you will enjoy the having done what you now longer would want to do.

I dilate further in Three Reasons to Stay Home at Substack.  The reasons? One's Emersonian, the second's Pascalian, and the third is of my own invention.

Julien Green’s Diary, 1928-1957

It arrived yesterday evening, and I am already 32 pages into it.  Why keep a journal? Green gives an answer on page one in the entry from 4 December 1928.  He tells of "the incomprehensible desire to bring the past to a standstill that makes one keep a diary." Reading that, I knew I would read the whole 306 page translation of selections from this author's  sprawling diary.  He nailed it.

In '66 I started my journal scribbling. I didn't want that summer to pass away unrecorded. A life unrecorded, like a life unexamined, is not worth living. So I felt then, so I feel now.  Such a life lacks diachronic unity and internal cohesion.  I love cats, but a man is not cat, nor should he live like one.

I'll pull some quotations from Green's diary as the spirit moves me.

This First Things article will provide some background on Green and includes translations of some journal entries written around the time of, and about, the 'reforms' of  Vatican II.

AI and Demons

You may remember our 'demonic' discussion from last summer. See  Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.

Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.

Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems. 

According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., "The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the 'soul' or will') of a person by one or more evil spirits." (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic.  Might they then host demons?

Gallagher's book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions.