tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84981490694727629862024-02-18T20:29:13.663-08:00Life's Private BookThe riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man. - G.K. ChestertonDavid T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.comBlogger360125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-82580455165566810602023-09-14T17:14:00.006-07:002023-09-14T17:14:51.949-07:00On Darwinian Positivism<p> Over at the <a href="https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=30730" target="_blank">ZMan blog</a>, the ZMan has a post concerning natural reason, specifically the ability of reason to answer the big questions of life: How should a man live his life? How should we organize our societies and to what end? The ZMan does not think these questions can be answered:</p><p><span face=""Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #373737; font-size: 15px;"></span></p><blockquote>The truth of it is, a truth Gregory Clark surely knows, is that nature is silent on those big questions about how we ought to live and organize our societies. Nature cares about one thing and that is fitness. Specifically, every living thing is driven by its gene’s desire to make it to the next round of the game. If your genes make even a partial copy of themselves in the form of your children, that is a win. How you make that happen is of no interest to your genes or Mother Nature.</blockquote><p></p><p>This position, which might be called Darwinian Positivism, has always struck me as manifestly absurd. Isn't it obvious that human behavior is deeper and more complex than anything that can be captured in a simple causal analysis like the "gene's desire to make it to the next round of the game?" Voluntary celibacy may be unusual but it is hardly unknown and in fact has historically been admired as a higher form of life. The ZMan himself, I understand, has no children. </p><p>In fact, the ubiquity of abortion and contraception in modern society would seem to clearly falsify any notion that human nature is "driven" by the gene's desire to reproduce. In fact, we indulge in those things to the point that we no longer reproduce at replacement rate. That is only possible if there is some other source of human behavior powerful enough to overcome any desire to reproduce.</p><p><br /></p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-61387905485486982212023-02-11T00:56:00.028-08:002023-02-11T01:02:41.870-08:00Comment on the ZMan<p><span style="font-family: arial;"> I've been following a blog from the "dissident right" written by someone using the pseudonym "ZMan." I just made a comment on <a href="https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29320" target="_blank">this post</a> of his. The ZMan likes to write a lot about "fitness" and has a philosophical view that might be characterized as a kind of Darwinian positivism. I push back on some of that with the following comment. The first quote is from the ZMan's post.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: arial;">“One does not logically follow the other, but the hallmark of Western thought since the late Middle Ages is the error of assuming that observations about nature or nature’s god lead to rules about human behavior.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.625em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #373737; font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It goes back much farther than that, at least to Aristotle and Plato. Is it really an error to develop rules for human behavior from nature? On what else would they be based? Perhaps the most basic observation about nature that leads to rules is that people who don’t reproduce themselves will disappear from the Earth. Another is that the education of the young will play a large role in determining the shape of the future. Plato observed both these things and spent a lot of space in his Republic developing rules concerning both reproduction and education.</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.625em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #373737; font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Aristotle further observed that the nature of man is such that he only flourishes if he develops virtue, including but not limited to the virtues of courage, self-control, justice and wisdom. A civilization that doesn’t take into account natural facts concerning reproduction, education and virtue isn’t going to last very long. A nation of sterile cowards will soon find itself It on the wrong side of the fitness to which the ZMan often refers.</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.625em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #373737; font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Now one may disagree with the rules Plato came up with concerning reproduction or Aristotle came up with for the development of virtue. But that doesn’t mean those facts of nature or their implications go away. Yet I don’t hear much on the dissident right about the most elementary rule of fitness, which is reproduction.</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.625em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #373737; font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">Whites aren’t reproducing themselves at anything close to replacement rate. Western Europeans are somewhere around 1.5 babies per woman, and a similar rate applies to whites in the U.S. That’s a demographic catastrophe. Meanwhile, black Africans have an exploding birth rate. It’s all well and good to limit or end immigration. But unless these numbers change, Africans can eventually walk into an empty continent. (And at that point, the last people here will be black or hispanic, as non-hispanic whites have a birth rate lower than either of them.)</span></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.625em; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #373737; font-size: 15px;"><span style="font-family: arial;">It’s often remarked that we can’t vote our way out of the situation we are in. We may not be able to reproduce our way out of it either. But not reproducing and educating the next generation is a guaranteed loser. You want a concrete way to help the future of the historic white people? Get married and have kids. A lot of them. Nothing else matters without it.</span></span></p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-1975098514016351002022-11-26T07:01:00.003-08:002022-11-26T07:01:43.457-08:00Kant, Doubt and Solipsism<p> In an <a href="http://lifesprivatebook.blogspot.com/2022/08/doubting-doubt.html" target="_blank">earlier post</a> I discussed my approach to solipsism. In brief, my approach is not to attempt to prove that solipsism is false, but to show that it is not the skeptical philosophy it claims to be. For to doubt the reality of the external world is at the same time to affirm that my own mind is responsible for everything that common sense attributes to the external world. Solipsism can only be true if my own mind is responsible for the discoveries of Newton, Maxwell and Einstein, the plays of Sophocles and Shakespeare, the novels of Dostoyevsky, and the art of Rembrandt and Michelangelo. </p><p>Now if instead of claiming that solipsism is doubt of the external world, the solipsist claimed that his own mind is in fact responsible for all the achievements of the individuals listed above, it would be immediately recognized that the position is not one of skepticism but of colossal intellectual arrogance. Yet the standard presentation of solipsism and my reformulation of it are logically equivalent.</p><p>I think a similar analysis holds with the philosophy of Kant. Kant's "Copernican revolution in philosophy", we will recall, holds that the forms the ancient philosophers found in nature are really constructions the human cognitive apparatus places on raw experience. So we can't know the true nature of things in themselves, but only those things as they appear filtered through human cognition. </p><p>Like solipsism, however, the Kantian Copernican revolution can be reformulated as a claim that the forms we find in experience are generated in the human mind. The beauty of the Grand Canyon, or the singing of a lark, the majesty of the lion - from the Kantian perspective we must affirm that these are creations of the human mind, not things that come from a reality greater than us. So just as the solipsist must believe he is a mathematician at least as great as Newton, the Kantian must believe he is a creator greater than whatever is responsible for nature; God perhaps. So Kantianism isn't really the skeptical philosophy it claims to be. It is rather a colossal affirmation of the self against anything greater than the self.</p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-28874081097917500262022-09-19T10:10:00.011-07:002022-09-19T10:25:20.943-07:00The Starting Point of Philosophy<p>There is an absolute starting point for geometry: It is the axioms of Euclid. There is an absolute starting point for Newtonian physics: It is Newton's Three Laws of Motion. There is an absolute starting point to legal theory: It is whatever constitution is in place.</p><p>There is no absolute starting point to philosophy. There are only subjective starting points to philosophy.</p><p>The reason is that philosophy, defined as the love of wisdom, is concerned with illuminating man's own life by reason. I use the phrase own life because in the act of philosophizing, I am not attempting to illuminate<i> your life</i> by reason, at least not primarily, but I am attempting to illuminate <i>my own life</i> by reason. The starting point of philosophy, then, is each man's own life. </p><p>Geometry and physics can have absolute starting points because their object is abstract, timeless knowledge that bears no necessary relationship to any individual's life. A man may get on well enough in life without ever knowing that the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, or that acceleration is proportional to force.</p><p>But philosophy just is that mode of thought that concerns man in his own concrete existence. That concrete existence is the starting point of philosophy. Philosophy degenerates when it loses touch with concrete existence and turns into an indifferent playing about with concepts, an ever present temptation in philosophy.</p><p>Consider Socrates in<a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/crito.html" target="_blank"> the <i>Crito</i></a>. Socrates is in prison awaiting his execution, and Crito visits him with news that his friends are willing to bribe officials to enable his escape. Crito provides an argument as to the rightness of escaping: By remaining, Socrates is playing into the hands of his enemies, and besides he has a duty to remain alive to nurture and educate his children. It is obvious, however, that Crito is offering rationalizations that are covering, and not very well, Crito's own desire not to lose his friend. Socrates responds to Crito with the following:</p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><blockquote>For I am <a name="138"></a>and always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason, <a name="139"></a>whatever the reason may be which upon reflection appears to me to be the <a name="140"></a>best; and now that this fortune has come upon me, I cannot put away the <a name="141"></a>reasons which I have before given: the principles which I have hitherto <a name="142"></a>honored and revered I still honor, and unless we can find other and better <a name="143"></a>principles on the instant, I am certain not to agree with you; no, not <a name="144"></a>even if the power of the multitude could inflict many more imprisonments, <a name="145"></a>confiscations, deaths, frightening us like children with hobgoblin terrors.</blockquote><p>The import of Socrates's response is that as a philosopher, his life is guided by reason, and that means he must submit to his reason in the here and now, when fortune has turned against him, just as he did in happier times discussing philosophy pleasantly in the agora. Were Socrates to rationalize an escape, he would falsity his own nature as a philosopher, a fate Socrates fears more than imprisonment or death.</p><p>The fact that there are only subjective starting points to philosophy, and not an absolute starting point, does not mean that philosophy is purely relative or can't gain a knowledge of the truth. The starting point of philosophy is not absolute, but the end point may very well be. We may start our travels in different cities, but it doesn't follow that our destinations must be different.</p><p>What is the absolute end point of philosophy? It is the Absolute Being Who is the Source of each of our individual, contingent beings. It is in the light of that Absolute Being that our own lives will finally become intelligible.</p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-65225348132749129742022-09-18T14:27:00.000-07:002022-09-18T14:27:52.376-07:00Cosmic Skeptic and the Moral Argument for the Existence of God<p> The Cosmic Skeptic (Alex) has an interesting video ranking the arguments for the existence of God <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cPfxjwAubY" target="_blank">here</a>. The video is a discussion between the Cosmic Skeptic and Joe Schmid, who we learn is an agnostic.</p><p>In this post I'd like to address the discussion of the Moral Argument for the existence of God. That occurs at 1:28:40 of the video. As presented, the Moral Argument is formulated this way:</p><p>P1: If God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist.</p><p>P2: Objective moral values do exist.</p><p>C: Therefore, God exists.</p><p>The conversation notes that P2 may be denied, but they leave this aside as they are more interested in whether the existence of God does in fact follow if moral values exist. Joe Schmid asks an interesting question: What does God add to the question? When God commands something, he either has a reason for the command or he doesn't. If God doesn't have a reason, then he is arbitrary. If God has a reason, then it is that reason that is significant, not the fact that God has commanded it (I am paraphrasing here.)</p><p>As they note, this is a version of the Euthyphro dilemma from Plato. Schmid thinks his version is stronger than Plato's, because Plato is concerned with what <i>makes</i> things right or wrong, whereas Schmid's argument just refers to whether God has a <i>reason</i> or not.</p><p>They then get into a discussion of God's relationship to goodness, and raise the idea that goodness just is being more like God. They raise some problems with it, for instance that if God is immaterial, then I am somehow better if I become immaterial, which doesn't seem to make sense. Schmid argues that God is simply acting as intermediary, because it is the loving, the kindness (as concepts) that are doing the heavy lifting, not God. It is the intellectual and moral virtues themselves, not God.</p><p>Alex then brings up a functional account of goodness. A chair, for example, is a good chair to the extent that it fulfills its designers function for which it was made. It seems odd, however, to speak of it as a bad table even if it can be used as a table. </p><p>They discuss the idea that moral values are doing what God designed us for, but they find that this is arbitrary as well, for God could have simply proclaimed the function of women is to be raped. Antecedent to God's design, there are no moral facts God is looking on in terms of which to structure his designs or define their functions. </p><p>Alex brings up what he considers an equivocation between the functional use of "good" and "bad", i.e. in describing a chair as good or bad depending on how well it serves as a chair, and "good" and "bad" as used in moral language with respect to people, which is not merely functional. The language of virtue used with respect to people is not used with respect to chairs.</p><p>------------------------------------------------------</p><p>The conversation could have used an exploration of a Thomistic understanding of good and evil. What happens in God's creative act? He gives a nature and existence to a being. Embedded in the nature of the being are formal and final causes that give substance to that nature. They implicitly define <i>good</i> and <i>evil</i> with respect to that being. Were God to then command something in contradiction to the natures he has created, he would simply be contradicting himself.</p><p>Suppose a piano maker builds a beautiful piano, paying attention to the smallest details to make the instrument easy to play and so it will produce a beautiful sound. He tunes it painstakingly so every string is in tune with every other. Then, when he is finished with it, he never plays it, but instead sleeps on top of it because he has declared the function of the piano to be a bed.</p><p>We would find the piano maker ridiculous. His construction of the piano was built under the obvious plan that the function of the piano would be as a musical instrument. To then use it as a bed is simply to contradict everything the piano maker implied in his construction of the instrument. We might argue that the piano maker's choice to use the piano as a bed is an act of "freedom", but whether we wish to call it free or not, it nonetheless contradicts everything the piano maker did in construction the piano. "Freedom" to frustrate your own designs is a degenerate form of freedom.</p><p>When God creates, he creates natures with embedded formal and final causes. A dog has a certain nature and a certain mode of being; his life is centered around scent and is naturally sociable. If God then commands that dogs should always be kept in isolation and live in water, this would contradict what God did in the creative act that established the nature of dogs in the first place. Contradicting himself is not a "power" that an omnipotent creator need have, because it is actually an expression of impotence, not power.</p><p>So with respect to Schmid, God does not reference some already existing values in his creative act. He establishes good and evil with respect to particular natures in the very definition of those natures; just as playing a piano well is defined with respect to the inherent potentialities of the piano as a musical instrument. To be <i>good</i> is simply to <i>be</i> in the best way with respect to individual nature. To be <i>evil</i> is to <i>not be</i> in some way that is appropriate for a given nature. God won't command that women should be raped because that would contradict the good for women that was defined by God in creating women in the first place. </p><p>Man is the particular subject of moral judgment because, unlike dogs and tables, he has an intellect and will that can perceive good and evil and act accordingly. So to be a good man involves having a good intellect and a good will, which is not involved in being a good dog.</p><p>And what about the Moral Argument for the Existence of God itself? I am not a fan of it, because it seems to assume a certain arbitrariness with respect to morality, as though morality is layered on to already existing being, rather than being embedded within natures themselves when they are created. The appropriate way to argue from morality to God is not to claim that the atheist can't know moral values without knowing God, but to argue what the knowledge of morality implies about the nature of being and its foundation, i.e. something like Aquinas's Argument from Perfection.</p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-19001181352969833212022-09-13T08:04:00.007-07:002022-09-13T08:15:46.771-07:00Common Sense Realism and Modern Philosophy<p><b>Common Sense Realism </b></p><p>I call "common sense realism" any philosophy that takes ordinary experience as generally reliable. I consider myself a common sense realist, and I will use CSR as a shorthand for "common sense realism."</p><p>The designation "common sense realism" has some use in the history of philosophy, particularly with respect to Scottish philosophers including Thomas Reid, but I'm using the term for my own purposes independent of that history.</p><p>We all follow CSR in everyday life. Everyone goes through life taking for granted, most of the time, that what is presented to his senses is the way things are. They see the sun and don't doubt it is the sun they are seeing, they hit a baseball and don't doubt that the bat caused the baseball to fly, and they greet their wife not doubting that she is the same woman they greeted yesterday. This holds true for modern philosophers of the skeptical, analytical or Kantian variety as much as it did for Aristotle. </p><p>The greatest advantage of CSR, an advantage I find nearly decisive, is that when reflecting philosophically on experience, CSR doesn't demand that the philosopher toss everyday certainties out the window. The philosophy he develops is the <i>same</i> philosophy by which he lives everyday. He avoids the fracturing between life and thought that inspired the title of this blog. </p><p>That fracturing was puzzling when I noticed it in college philosophy classes. We discussed what might be believed or doubted with respect to our experience and our morality, but those philosophical beliefs and doubts seemed to have little to do with how any of us, students or professors, actually conducted ourselves outside of class. This impression of philosophy proved enduring, and I developed the "private book" vs "public book" distinction to describe it. </p><p>Organized crime keeps two sets of accounting books, the public book it presents to the courts and investigators, and the private book it keeps hidden that is the true account of the organization's finances. Similarly, philosophers seemed to have a "public book" that reflected their "official" philosophy they presented in class and in journals, and a "private book" of beliefs by which they actually ran their lives. It was only many years later and after reading certain philosophers - especially Kierkegaard - that I began to understand that this fracturing was not accidental.</p><p>Prior to the modern era - which I will define with usual starting point of Descartes - the mainstream of the philosophical tradition followed CSR. But there were exceptions. The Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, noticing the constantly changing nature of the material world, concluded that flux was metaphysically basic and that CSR was mistaken. CSR says the river behind my house today is the same river it was yesterday, but Heraclitus would insist this is an illusion: You can't step into the same river twice. On the other hand, the philosopher Parmenides, seeing that nothing comes from nothing, and that being <i>is</i> and non-being <i>is not</i>, concluded that change is an illusion and that reality is static, since any change from non-being to being would be an instance of something coming from nothing. These philosophers did something that would become recurrent throughout history: They saw part of the truth but became so captured by it that they ignored the rest of the truth. </p><p>What distinguishes Heraclitus and Parmenides from CSR philosophers is that the former ended up insisting that ordinary experience is at bottom an illusion. We might <i>think</i> things endure through time, that the tree in my yard yesterday is the same tree that is there today, but Heraclitus would tell us that I'm naive to think so. I might<i> think</i> that tree grew from a sapling over the years, but Parmenides would deny that it had ever really changed at all. </p><p>The most famous and enduring CSR philosopher is Aristotle. Against Heraclitus, Aristotle noted that if everything was in flux, then there would be no possibility of knowing the truth. And since we manifestly <i>do</i> know some truth, that position cannot be correct. Against Parmenides, Aristotle pointed out that <i>change</i> is a manifest aspect of reality, which his position denies. His developed response to these philosophers resulted in the hylomorphic theory of being, the distinction between <i>matter</i> and <i>form</i>.</p><p>But what makes Aristotle a CSR philosopher is not his hylomorphism, however. Hylomorphism is just one way to develop a CSR philosophy. Aristotle was a CSR philosopher because he defended ordinary experience against radical skepticism. He gives an expression of CSR in his <i>Metaphysics</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote>There are, both among those who have these convictions and among those who merely profess these views, some who raise a difficulty by asking, who is to be the judge of the healthy man, and in general who is likely to judge rightly on each class of questions. But such inquiries are like puzzling over the question whether we are now asleep or awake. And all such questions have the same meaning. These people demand that a reason shall be given for everything; for they seek a starting-point, and they seek to get this by demonstration, while it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction. But their mistake is what we have stated it to be; they seek a reason for things for which no reason can be given; for the starting-point of demonstration is not demonstration. (<i>Metaphysics,</i> Book IV, Ch. 6)</blockquote><p></p><p>Aristotle criticizes his opponents by saying that "it is obvious from their actions that they have no conviction." How do we interpret this? Notice that he compares his opponents to those who wonder whether they are asleep or awake. Such people typically behave as though they know very well that they are awake. If they thought they truly might be in a dream then they would struggle to wake up. But they don't struggle. In fact, they behave as though they had no doubt they are awake. Their doubt has no <i>conviction</i> and need not be taken seriously.</p><p>For the CSR philosopher, the lack of conviction in such objections is enough to dismiss them. Philosophy for him is not a game, a hobby, or merely something to teach in the classroom, a way to make money. It is the penetration of life with reason, <i>this</i> life, the one I am <i>actually</i> living. He is always on guard to prevent the fracturing of his life with his thought. No one can get through life with the conviction that everything is in flux, or that change is impossible. The only way to hold such positions is to fracture life and thought, to live by one philosophy and think by another. </p><p><b>The Modern Philosophical Era</b></p><p>I noted earlier that prior to the modern era the mainstream of philosophers were CSR. What distinguishes the modern era is that philosophers are typically <i>not</i> CSR. In fact, very often a modern philosopher develops his philosophy specifically as a rejection of CSR. If for the CSR philosopher the greatest sin is to lack conviction (i.e. to allow a fracture between life and thought), for the modern philosopher the greatest sin is to be "naive", and CSR philosophers are at the top of the list of naive philosophers as far as modern philosophers are concerned. </p><p>Over the years the modern philosophical view has percolated through the culture, down to the level of the ordinary man. At that level it manifests itself in an impression that the business of the philosopher is to doubt everything, or to hold eccentric views that challenge the common sense of the ordinary man. The philosopher is the man who has "seen through" the naive dogmas and prejudices of the ordinary man to the truth beyond it.</p><p>Descartes established the pattern for modern philosophers and can be taken as the starting point for philosophy in its distinctively modern sense. Although subsequent philosophers rejected many of his specific conclusions, the general form Descartes gave to modern philosophy has persisted. </p><p>As a young man surveying the education he had received, the impression Descartes had was that the centuries of classical philosophy had produced nothing of any certainty. The philosophers were still arguing the same points they always had:</p><p></p><blockquote>Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that have ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful... I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false. (<i>Discourse on Method</i>, Part One)</blockquote><p></p><p> He conceived a way out of this (alleged) futility: He would embark on a campaign of radical doubt, not accepting anything unless it could be demonstrated with absolute certainty:</p><p></p><blockquote>,,, I thought it necessary that I do exactly the opposite, and that I reject as absolutely false everything in which I could imagine the least doubt, in order to see whether, after this process, something in my beliefs remained that was entirely indubitable. Thus, because our senses sometimes deceive us, I wanted to suppose that nothing was exactly as they led us to imagine... (<i>Discourse on Method</i>, Part 4)</blockquote><p></p><p>We may note that the campaign of doubt on which Descartes began may not be as straightforward as he imagined. Remember that Descartes was led to his radical doubt because he concluded from the history of classical philosophy that it was futile. Well, if he's going to doubt everything that might be doubted, should not his conclusions with respect to classical philosophy be doubted? Maybe classical philosophy wasn't as futile as he supposed. Perhaps his own understanding of it was worthy of doubt. We may recall the following passage from Plato's <i>Phaedo</i>, where Socrates addresses the frustration his friends felt at their inability to arrive at a conclusive argument with respect to the nature of the soul:</p><p></p><blockquote>Well, then, Phaedo, he [Socrates] said, supposing that there is an argument which is true and valid and capable of being discovered, if anyone nevertheless, through his experience of these arguments which seen to the same people to be sometimes true and sometimes false, attached no responsibility to himself and his lack of technical ability, but was finally content, in exasperation, to shift the blame from himself to the arguments, and spent the rest of his life loathing and decrying them, and so missed the chance of knowing the truth about reality - would it not be a deplorable thing? </blockquote><p></p><p>But Descartes chose to doubt the whole of the philosophical tradition rather than himself. We might also note that Descartes's assertion that "our senses sometimes deceive us" is not an expression of doubt but rather of knowledge, for an instance of deception that is known as such really isn't an instance of deception, and anyways witnesses to the more general case of the reliability of the senses. For instance, a straw seen in a glass of water appears bent to us due to the refraction of light at the boundary between air and the water. We take the straw out of of the water and we see that it is straight. We might classify the former case as an instance of our eyes "deceiving" us, but that conclusion only stands on a conviction that in the latter case our eyes are <i>not</i> deceiving us. </p><p>That all notwithstanding, Descartes's method of doubt eventually led him to the one proposition that he thought could withstand doubt: An assertion of his own existence. He must exist in order to be deceived, and so <i>I think therefore I am,</i> the famous <i>Cogito Ergo Sum</i>.</p><p>The Cogito is sometimes interpreted as the first proposition that Descartes "could not doubt." That is not quite correct. It is the first proposition that Descartes found could <i>withstand</i> doubt. For Descartes definitely doubted it. He just overcame that doubt with an argument: If he is deceived, he must exist to be deceived, therefore he exists. </p><p>Descartes congratulated himself on making a novel discovery with the Cogito, but in fact all he had done was rediscover a metaphysical principle well known to CSR philosophers: <i>Being</i> is prior to <i>act</i>. The assertion of an act implies the existence of the being for whom it is an act. <i>Flute playing</i> implies a <i>flute player</i>, <i>thinking</i> implies a <i>thinker</i>, <i>dancing</i> implies a <i>dancer</i>, and <i>deception</i> implies <i>one who is deceived</i>. </p><p>Where the CSR philosopher differs from Descartes is in recognizing that this metaphysical principle is something immediately known through experience, not something that is known only after surviving trial by doubt. As soon as someone sees and hears a flute player, he knows that the flute playing depends on the flute player and would not exist without him. He knows it so immediately that his mind ordinarily does not stop to reflect on the fact but moves on to other things. All the CSR philosopher does is slow the mind down to conscious reflection on the elements known through experience, elements that the mind normally glosses over in favor of more pressing things requiring attention. The fact that the mind normally glosses over basic metaphysical principles immediately known to it in no way makes them doubtful; Thinking it does is a mistake at the heart of modern philosophy.</p><p><b>Philosophy and Method</b></p><p>While subsequent philosophers rejected many of Descartes's specific conclusions, they embraced his basic approach. Specifically, that philosophy must begin with <i>method</i>. Thinkers at the time, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were understandably impressed with the successes of the new scientific approach that was unlocking the secrets of nature. The new science exploded many things thought to be true based on an Aristotelian approach and brought the Aristotelian tradition as a whole into question. Aristotle, for instance, taught that objects like stones fall toward the center of the Earth because that is their natural place to be as heavy objects, as opposed to light objects like fire that travel away from the center towards the periphery. The developing science of Newton, however, not only explained the motion of objects much more fruitfully and accurately than an Aristotelian approach, but did so in a way that seemed to dispense with Aristotelian notions, like final and formal causes, entirely.</p><p>Philosophers noticed the emphasis on method in the new science and, hoping to mimic science's success, made again the mistake that recurs in the history of philosophy: The mistake of absolutizing an aspect of the truth into the whole of the truth. In this case, they took the newly discovered truth concerning the methods of modern science, which does in fact provide a new and reliable way of interpreting empirical nature, to imply that <i>all</i> thought must start with method to be reliable.</p><p>This is where they agreed with Descartes. Where they disagreed is just what the appropriate method for philosophy should be. Descartes thought it was his method of "universal doubt." Locke proposed instead his "plain, historical method", which was highly influential and colored much of the discussion of method in philosophy after him, including the philosophy of David Hume. Ultimately there came the method of "critical philosophy" of Immanuel Kant, a monumental attempt to get at what might be described as a "method of methods" in thought.</p><p>It's understandable why there was such disagreement over what constituted the proper method of philosophy. For if we can only trust our thought when it is disciplined by method, then the thought that determines method is unreliable, since it is necessarily prior to method and therefore undisciplined. In one of the many ironies generated by modern philosophy, the method by which modern philosophy would transcend the alleged uncertainty of CSR could itself only be determined by thought in a gray zone that was, if anything, even more uncertain than CSR. Descartes, naturally, was the first to operate in the gray zone when he justified his adoption of the method of universal doubt by a biographical account of his subjective impression of classical philosophy. </p><p>The lesson subsequent philosophers took from Descartes was not to mimic his universal doubt, but that they were as free as Descartes to operate in the gray zone and establish philosophy on a method of their own invention. The most notable of these was John Locke and his empiricist "plain, historical method." Locke's selection of method became very influential, perhaps because it was explicitly developed to support the new science that had so impressed the 17th and 18th centuries.</p><p><b>Science and Philosophy</b></p><p>In their haste to learn lessons from the newly developing science, philosophers overlooked a few important features of science. The most important of these is that scientists themselves, in conducting science, operated in the common sense world of CSR. When Galileo looked through his telescope at the moons of Jupiter, he took for granted that his telescope was what his common sense thought it was, that the dots of light he observed in the sky represented celestial objects that were the same objects he had observed the night before, and that various other common sense notions of cause and effect were reliable. He did not think that his vision of Jupiter was actually a blob of color organized by his mind into something resembling a planet, and having only a dubious relationship to external reality,</p><p>To doubt CSR is to doubt the basis on which science is actually conducted. The skeptical arguments of David Hume were most devastating in this regard. Hume argued that from a strictly empirical perspective, we see through our eyes colors and shapes, but we do not see causes that link one thing to another, nor do we see the substance that is claimed to be the basis of enduring identity. I see a tree in my yard today and remember seeing a tree there yesterday, but what I do not see is the principle that <i>this is the same tree as yesterday</i>. I see the brick thrown at the window and the window shatter, but I do not see <i>the brick caused the window to shatter</i>. The enduring identity of the tree on the one hand, and the causal link between the thrown brick and the shattered glass on the other were, Hume claimed, but "habits of the mind" developed through repetition rather than empirical principles read off sense data.</p><p>The response of CSR to Hume is that while empirical data comes through the senses, it doesn't follow that everything in that data is<i> grasped</i> by the senses, any more than your mailman knows the contents of all (or any) of your packages. The senses themselves grasp being in its material particularity; the intellect grasps the universal nature of being encountered through the senses. It is the intellect that knows that the same tree I see today is the same as yesterday, not the senses. </p><p>Hume's skeptical empiricism pulls the rug out from empirical science, as was recognized by perhaps the greatest of Enlightenment philosophers, Immanuel Kant. Kant wanted to preserve the certainty of science, as well as establish philosophy on a permanently firm foundation. Rather than propose yet another philosophical method developed more or less arbitrarily, the variety of which proved that philosophers had yet to penetrate to the depths of the problem, Kant took the analysis to another level with what he called the <i>a priori </i>in his "critical philosophy.<i>" </i>The <i>a priori </i>seeks to get behind experience to explore the conditions that make experience itself possible in the first place. The endurance of identity over time, for instance, which we might give the name <i>substance</i>, isn't a concept our minds draw from experience already given to us, whether legitimately (as CSR holds) or illegitimately (as Hume held.) Kant argues that it is a condition we must presuppose for there to be <i>any experience at all</i>. In that sense it is far more certain than Hume imagined. </p><p><b>Thought and Being</b></p><p>What is fascinating about Kant is that in developing his critical philosophy, he reconstructs much of the Aristotelian infrastructure, only instead of basing it in <i>being</i>, he bases it in presuppositions of <i>thought</i>. In other words, instead of being out there in the world, it is only inside our heads as something we must assume. This is the result of denying the reality of the human intellect's relationship to being.</p><p>We might ask why we should go through the arduous journey of critical philosophy (Kant's <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i> is no easy read) only to arrive back at Aristotle, and an Aristotle that is imprisoned in our own minds. Kant's answer was that the limits of reason had now been firmly established and philosophers were no longer in danger of making the metaphysical mistakes of the classical philosophers. Philosophers were no longer "naive."</p><p>Looking at philosophical history post-Kant however, that basis wasn't established nearly as solidly as Kant thought. From an even loftier "meta" level, Kant's efforts look like just another attempt to find an absolute starting point to philosophy, not essentially different from Descartes's. </p><p>This brings full circle the philosophical project begun by Descartes. The basic mistake Descartes made, putting <i>thought</i> prior to <i>being</i>, became the fundamental move of modern philosophy. It remains to ask why such a mistake is so tempting. Since being is in truth prior to thought, the answer should be an answer in terms of being, and being's implications for thought.</p><p>Man's being is that of a<i> rational animal</i>. He is <i>animal</i> insofar as he is a material being existing in time and space. He is <i>rational</i> insofar as he has an intellect capable of knowing universal being. Your dog encounters this tree and that tree in its life, but does not know each tree as expressing the universal nature of <i>tree</i> that your intellect grasps.</p><p>The incarnate aspect of man's rationality has significant consequences. Through his senses his intellect grasps being, but it is only<i> this</i> or <i>that</i> being of the contingent objects encountered in experience. The mind grasps the being of this tree as one tree among many, true, and as the same tree as yesterday. But it also sees that the being of the tree does not account for itself. There are mysteries at the heart of contingent being: Why do this tree and that tree share the mutual nature of <i>tree</i>? Just what is the universal nature of <i>tree</i>? The tree yesterday and today persists in its being, but there is nothing in the nature of <i>tree</i> as such that seems to make it so.</p><p>The classical philosopher does not see these questions as reasons to doubt the intuition of being itself, i.e. common sense is not overthrown simply because it is not perfectly transparent. Instead he uses these intuitions of being to demonstrate the reality of Absolute Being (i.e. God) that underwrites the contingent beings of our experience. The proofs in this regard are relatively straightforward and pretty much unassailable given CSR. That is why atheist philosophies since the early modern era find that in attacking the existence of God, they must first attack the existence of common sense.</p><p>Be that as it may, the temptation to which modern philosophies succumb when faced with the opacity in contingent being is to fall back on the clarity the mind has in its own ideas. It may be mysterious why the tree yesterday continues to be the same tree today, but it is no longer mysterious if I assume that my mind generated the persistent identity; there is nothing more in the idea than what my mind put there. Problem solved.</p><p>Only it isn't solved, only denied, and at the cost of destroying common sense and fracturing life and thought. </p><p></p><blockquote>Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depths of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognized instantly, what so many modern skeptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. - G.K. Chesterton, <i>Saint Thomas Aquinas</i></blockquote><p></p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-55588377606181252592022-09-05T12:55:00.005-07:002022-09-05T14:00:52.545-07:00Commentary on Jay Dyer / Trent Horn Debate<p>Jay Dyer's opening is a "kitchen sink" approach. There seemed to be no overarching argument, but a mass of references to history and philosophers cited as skeptics of natural theology. Trent Horn's seemed more tightly organized and structured.</p><p>The one thing Dyer did put a lot of stock in was that the word "God" is not a "rigid designator", which means that not everyone uses the word God to refer to exactly the same thing. He uses this to dismiss Horn's numerous references to saints and theologians throughout history who apparently argued from natural facts to God. But it doesn't matter if the theologians throughout history didn't agree on the precise meaning of "God." What they <i>did</i> agree on is that knowledge of a transcendent, "first principle of all things" could in some measure be obtained by reflection on the natural world. In other words, they thought it possible to go from natural facts about the world to facts transcending the world. Disagreement with regard to the precise conclusions of that investigation doesn't invalidate the process any more than disagreement about the facts with respect to the Battle of Hastings invalidates history as a legitimate project of research. </p><p>48:00: Horn refers to the statement "I exist" as a self-evident truth. </p><p>49:31: Dyer references Horn's submission of "I exist" as self-evident and interprets Horn in a Cartesian manner. He then subjects the Cartesian Cogito to all the skeptical arguments from modern philosophers. Horn should have objected to this and pointed out that medievals like Thomas Aquinas meant something quite different than moderns do about self-evident propositions, and that Horn meant it Thomistically and not in the manner of Descartes. </p><p>Descartes did not think his own existence was self-evident in the manner of Thomas Aquinas. He doubted it like everything else in his method of "universal doubt." It was only<i> after</i> arguing through his doubts that Descartes was able to affirm his own existence. This is what Dyer jumps on. He thinks that Descartes was unsuccessful in dispelling all doubts concerning the proposition "I exist", and since Descartes failed, Horn must fail as well.</p><p>But for classical philosophers like Aquinas, a self-evident truth is a truth that is immediately known and stands as its own witness, not one that can only be affirmed after surviving skeptical scrutiny. The classical philosophers were aware that it was possible, in an artificial way, to doubt propositions like "I exist." Where they differ from modern philosophers is that even if such a proposition <i>could</i> be doubted, they didn't think it <i>should</i> be doubted. In other words, they did not think doubt self-justifying (which is a modern conceit.) Doubt can be doubted like anything else. The classical philosophers did not doubt their own existence because no one in his right mind does so.</p><p>Consider the Dyer/Horn debate itself. Trent Horn and Jay Dyer go online, engage a moderater, and argue with each other for almost two hours. Now suppose after two hours of debate one of them criticizes the other's position on the grounds that he hasn't justified his belief that either one of them exists. The modern philosopher furrows his brow at this devastating rejoinder, and starts flipping through his Descartes and Kant to find an answer. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, bursts out laughing. For what greater comedy could there be than two philosophers debating whether they exist to hold the debate?</p><p>For the uninitiated, these are the lengths needed to avoid Natural Theological conclusions. The unwary clicks on a debate concerning Natural Theology and thinks it will involve doubting the existence of God. That seems like something that might be doubted. I can't see God, after all, like I can see tables and chairs or myself in a mirror, and it can't be proven like the law of gravity. But he discovers that necessary to the case against natural theology is not just doubt of God's existence, but his own existence as well, something he never considered doubtful or in need of justification. If he persists, he might also discover that the tables and chairs he thinks are self-evidently there are no longer solid. They may just be constructions his mind puts on sense data, which itself bears only a dubious relationship to external reality. They might only be <i>presuppositions</i> he needs to get on with life. </p><p>After all this, it might seem to the individual that the pummeling of the world of common sense is an awfully high price to pay to avoid Natural Theology. It was a price, however, that the early modern philosophers were willing to pay. People with no education in philosophy have a general impression that the modern world "disproved" the arguments of the classical philosophers. That never happened. The early modern philosophers did not engage the classical philosophers and refute them, but instead dismissed them for their own varied reasons. Descartes, for example, in Part One of his <i>Discourse on Method</i>, dismisses classical philosophy in these words:</p><p></p><blockquote>Concerning philosophy I shall say only that, seeing that it has been cultivated for many centuries by the most excellent minds that haver ever lived and that, nevertheless, there still is nothing in it about which there is not some dispute, and consequently nothing that is not doubtful... I deemed everything that was merely probable to be well-nigh false.</blockquote><p></p><p>This "argument from dispute" is an obvious non-sequitur, for arguments stand on their own merits and do not become more or less reasonable for being disputed. But it <i>does</i> relieve Descartes from the long and laborious task of actually reading and understanding the philosophers before dismissing them.</p><p>Whatever their motives, the early modern philosophers were united in restarting philosophy on a basis that would exclude the classical "dialog of opinion" they were convinced was fruitless. Their philosophy was <i>designed</i> to preclude the Natural Theology that Horn is advocating. So Jay Dyer is correct to point out that, under modern philosophical assumptions, Natural Theology is a non-starter. It couldn't be otherwise. Trent Horn should not allow Dyer to recast his arguments into modernist terms. </p><p>52 minutes: "I exist" presupposes that language has meaning, presupposes time determination". "The business of philosophy is to question assumptions." Is that one of the assumptions we can question? Classically, philosophy is the "love of wisdom", and part of wisdom is knowing when to doubt and when not to doubt.</p><p>1:00. Sense data. properly basic beliefs. Horn allows Dyer to recast his position into modernist terms. </p><p>1:01:56 Dyer: "that rests on the assumption that the external world is properly caused to impress on your sense organs"</p><p>Here we have the basic modernist position on human nature. Compare it with the classical understanding. The ordinary individual, looking out his window, sees a tree. Thomas Aquinas analyzes this occurrence philosophically. He doesn't doubt that the person actually saw a tree. He asks, what is implied about reality in the fact of his seeing a tree? He notes that this isn't the only tree the person has seen, there are other beings encountered that are also trees. What about reality answers to the fact that we can call both these things trees? The analysis of being into form and matter follows. </p><p>The modern philosopher thinks this is all terribly naive because Aquinas didn't start by doubting whether the man was actually seeing a tree at all. The modern thinks that the only thing we can safely say is that the man is seeing "sense data", i.e. blobs of color that his mind organizes into shapes and then he names. This opens a gap between the mind and reality that the modern philosopher uses to reject classical Natural Theology, but then hopes to cross himself for other purposes. The attempt is futile since he burned the bridge in his first step, and so is only left with <i>presupposing</i> rather than <i>knowing</i> that one thing or another has any basis in reality.</p><p>The difference with Thomas Aquinas is that Aquinas refused to burn the bridge in the first place. When the man looks out his window he sees a <i>tree</i>, not a blob of colors his mind turns into a tree. This is the philosophical truth of what is going on regardless of the biomechanics underlying the process. This is why the man can know metaphysical first principles, because he <i>knows</i> things through his senses.</p><p>Now someone may dispute with Aquinas on this. But Dyer seems to take modern skepticism as self-justifying. Simply because Hume doubted the relationship of cause to effect we must ourselves doubt the relationship of cause to effect. We do not. The classical philosopher is perfectly justified in rejecting such skepticism until the modernist makes a positive case for it. This is what Dyer needs to do if he is to provide an argument against Natural Theology, rather than simply assuming modernist philosophical assumptions that were designed to undermine it.</p><p><br /></p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-79451892086851629092022-08-23T18:08:00.002-07:002022-08-23T18:09:34.440-07:00Aquinas's Second Way<p> Aquinas's Second Way to prove the existence of God (<a href="https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm" target="_blank">from newadvent.org</a>):</p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">The second way is from the </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10715a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">nature</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> of the efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">. In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">causes</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">. There is no case </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08673a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">known</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> of itself; for so it would be prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">causes</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> it is not possible to go on to </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08004a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">infinity</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, because in all efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">causes</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> following in order, the first is the </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> of the intermediate </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, and the intermediate is the </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> of the ultimate </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, whether the intermediate </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> be several, or only one. Now to take away the </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> is to take away the effect. Therefore, if there be no first </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> among efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">causes</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, there will be no ultimate, nor any intermediate </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">. But if in efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">causes</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> it is possible to go on to </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08004a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">infinity</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, there will be no first efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">causes</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">; all of which is plainly </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05781a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">false</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">. Therefore it is </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10733a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">necessary</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;"> to admit a first efficient </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03459a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">cause</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">, to which everyone gives the name of </span><a href="https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06608a.htm" style="color: darkblue; font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-decoration: none;">God</a><span color="rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87)" face="verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif" style="caret-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.87); font-size: 14px;">.</span></span></p><p>A common way to interpret this passage is to claim that Aquinas is talking about <i>per se</i> causal series in this argument, not <i>per accidens</i> causal series. A <i>per se</i> causal series is one in which the later causes depend on the prior causes essentially; that is, the later causes stop causing when the prior causes stop causing. The standard example is an arm pushing a stick pushing a rock. When the arm stops pushing, the stick stops pushing the rock. </p><p>This is contrasted with the <i>per accidens</i> causal series, in which the later causes can continue causing even when the prior causes cease. The example here is Abraham begetting Isaac. Isaac himself can beget even if Abraham dies. He doesn't cease being causal when his own cause ceases.</p><p>The reason Aquinas is generally interpreted as speaking of <i>per</i> <i>se </i>causal series in this argument is that he also famously held that <i>per accidens</i> efficient causal series could in fact be infinite. He thought the world in principle could be eternal, although he thought it in fact had a beginning because of Scripture. </p><p>But I'm not sure we have to interpret Aquinas this way. Consider a series of dominos knocking themselves down. We can ask of any particular domino: What caused it to fall? And we answer: The domino prior to it in the series. And we can ask of <i>that </i>domino what caused <i>it </i>to fall, and again we get the answer: The domino prior to it in the series.</p><p>Suppose the row of dominos only consists of one domino. What is the answer to the question What caused the domino to fall? Since there is only one domino, the answer is: Something external to the row of dominos itself. Suppose the row of dominos consists of two dominos. The second domino falls as a consequence of the first domino falling, and with that first domino, we are left in exactly the same place as we were with the row consisting of a single domino. Something outside of the row of dominos itself must have caused it to fall. The only thing the additional domino did in the row of two dominos vs the single domino is simply to displace the question to another domino. It did nothing to answer the essential question.</p><p>Now consider a row of dominos of arbitrary length. What do all those extra dominos do as far as answering the essential causal question? They do nothing other than displace the question from one domino to the next. Even were the row of dominos infinite, all that would do is displace the question an infinite distance. It wouldn't get us one inch closer to answering the question of what caused the dominos to fall than we were with the one or two domino series. So the fact that a <i>per accidens</i> causal series might be infinite in length is irrelevant to the causal question asked in Aquinas's Second Way.</p><p>Suppose God created a world with an infinite series of dominos in it, that is in the process of falling. In the act of creation, he would have to pick one or more dominos somewhere in the series to get the falling process rolling. Call that domino D1. God creates D1 in the state of falling. Now God could create all dominos prior to D1 in the fallen state, and all dominos after D1 in the standing state. Were he to create <i>all </i>the dominos in a standing state, then the row of dominos would remain in the standing state eternally, whatever its length. Looking at the series after the fact of creation, we see an infinite series of fallen dominos disappearing in the distance in one direction, and an infinite series of standing dominos in the other direction, with the dominos in front of us in the process of falling. This might give us the illusion that the dominos were falling forever and therefore had no need of an exterior cause to get the process of falling going. But that is a distraction. Whether they were falling forever or not, <i>something</i> external to the row of dominos itself was the ultimate origin of the state of falling.</p><p>I think it is important to note that the "first efficient cause" in the series can't be just another efficient cause. If it were, then it would need the same prior causal explanation that all the other efficient causes did. The "first efficient cause" must be something over and beyond the causes in the series in question. The point of Aquinas's proofs, after all, is to show that nature points beyond itself to a supernatural origin. In this case, the series of efficient causes in nature points beyond itself to a "first efficient cause" that jumpstarts the efficient causal series that we experience in nature.</p><p><br /></p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-47568109586550186982022-08-21T18:27:00.000-07:002022-08-21T18:27:10.962-07:00Doubting doubt<p>The thing about doubt is that it never stands alone. <i>Doubt</i> of one thing inevitably involves <i>affirmation</i> of something else. Often the doubter doesn't acknowledge the implied affirmation or is simply unaware of it.</p><p>Take solipsism for example. I can doubt that there is an external world and that I am the only thing in existence. No one can prove that I'm wrong because any evidence submitted might simply be a creation of my own mind. </p><p>Instead of trying to prove the solipsist wrong, let's see what is implied in his view if taken seriously. I now know calculus, but there was a time when I didn't. I remember being a freshman in high school and looking through my elder brother's calculus book. It contained a lot of funny symbols and complicated math I didn't understand. A few years later, I took calculus myself and the symbols and math became clear.</p><p>If solipsism is true, then everything in this history is a creation of my own mind. The book with the symbols I didn't understand as a freshman was a creation of my mind. So were my later calculus teacher, my calculus homework, and my calculus tests. Indeed, calculus itself is a creation of my own mind. </p><p>So at one point my mind created a book with funny symbols that I didn't understand, which I only later understood through calculus class. Yet the symbols only make sense in light of calculus, which I didn't understand at the time my mind (supposedly) created the calculus book. Was calculus then a creation of my subconscious mind, and calculus class but a devious way my mind tricks itself into thinking it learned something which it really knew all along? We have to believe something like this if we are to take solipsism seriously. </p><p>Beyond the bizarre stories implied concerning personal history, there is the simple fact that solipsism implies that I was the creator of calculus. Calculus is among the greatest mathematical achievements in history and is generally credited to the geniuses Newton and Leibniz. But on the solipsistic hypothesis these gentlemen are fictions of my mind, and in fact I am the inventor of calculus. </p><p>And it's not just his calculus that I'm claiming from Newton. I've got his physics as well. Also the electrodynamics of Maxwell, the relativity of Einstein, and the quantum mechanics of Heisenberg - even though I barely made it through QM in college. They are all creations of my mind.</p><p>We don't need to stop with science, either. I also wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the symphonies of Bach and Beethoven, and painted the Sistine Chapel. Not really, of course, only in my mind, but it seems all the more impressive to execute a classical painting purely in the imagination. </p><p>So what are we left with? Solipsism implies doubt of the external world, which means the external world is a creation of my mind, which means my mind is greater than the sum of all the geniuses in history.</p><p>Is that possible? Perhaps. Is it something we can doubt? I would hope so; in fact, any sane person should doubt it. </p><p>Solipsism is <i>doubt </i>of the external world coupled with a <i>titanic affirmation</i> of the self.</p><p>All doubt operates like this. So when we consider doubting something, we should bring into consideration the affirmations implied in the doubt.</p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-35758467785512349852022-03-28T19:15:00.000-07:002022-03-28T19:15:02.615-07:00An Interpretation of John 8:1-11<p>This is the famous story of the woman caught in adultery.</p><p>Of enduring interest in the interpretation of this passage is what Jesus wrote on the ground in John 8:6 and 8:8. The verses only tell us that he wrote; they don't indicate what was written.</p><p>So then what was written? Ultimately we can only speculate. There are two popular suggestions (at least these are the most common I have heard). The first is that Jesus wasn't writing anything in particular. He was doodling, an indication of his disinterest, even boredom, in the Pharisees' zeal to condemn the woman. The second is that Jesus was writing down the sins of the individual Pharisees present. With his challenge in John 8:7 ("He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her"), and on seeing their sins manifest in the writing, they departed.</p><p>It occurs to me that there is another interpretation. I haven't read this interpretation anywhere, but I don't claim originality for it, as I'm sure some saint somewhere has already thought of it.</p><p>The Pharisees mention the Mosaic Law in John 8:5: "Now Moses in the law commanded us to stone such a one. But what sayest thou?" The Pharisees are referring to the written law of the Old Testament. It is immediately after this in John 8:6 that Jesus begins writing on the ground. We are not told what he is writing. The fact that we are not told what is written is a clue that what is important is the <i>act </i>of writing and not the <i>physical product</i> of the writing. In the act of writing, Jesus is indicating that He is writing the New Law that transcends the Old Law quoted by the Pharisees.</p><p>This New Law is not written in the manner of the Old Law. It is written in the Life and Acts of Jesus Christ Himself. This is why we are not told what Jesus wrote on the ground; it doesn't matter. What matters is what Jesus <i>does</i>, for that is the content of the New Law. The New Law consists in conforming ourselves to the Person of Jesus Christ.</p><p>Jesus challenges the Pharisees in John 8:7 (and implicitly the Old Law) and in John 8:8 continues to write on the ground. This is an indication that His Act, His writing of the New Law, continues uninterrupted. In John 8:9, the Pharisees depart, leaving Jesus alone with the woman. John 8:10 then tells us that Jesus lifts Himself up. He is done writing as His Act in writing the New Law is finished and he has demonstrated the superiority of the New over the Old by the departure of the Pharisees. He then applies the New Law to the woman in John 8:11 in an act of mercy.</p><p>What we have here is a revolutionary approach to the Law. The Law is not a list of commands and proscriptions; at least, it is not primarily that. The Law is a Person; it is in uniting and conforming ourselves to that Person that we truly fulfill the Law. It is because we didn't know that Person that we needed the list of commands; in knowing Him, the list becomes unnecessary. If we conform ourselves to Jesus Christ, we will follow the Law more faithfully than any zealous adherence to a list of commandments could achieve. </p><p><br /></p>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-85960082723647355612020-07-25T16:49:00.002-07:002020-07-25T16:51:33.160-07:00The Big Historical Cycle George Friedman MissesA big problem with <i>The Storm Before the Calm </i>is that it ignores the most significant historical cycle driving the current crisis: The monetary cycle.<br />
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The monetary cycle consists of the transition from sound to unsound money, eventually resulting in a monetary crisis and a reset of the system. The transition is sometimes driven by external events like a war, other times by the seemingly irresistable temptation of governments to fund themselves through the printing press.</div>
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The current monetary cycle is unprecedented insofar as every currency in the world has been a pure fiat currency since 1971. Historically, monetary cycles end and begin when the market displaces a debased currency with a sound one. The two World Wars, for example, put a severe strain on the British Pound, which had been the world's reserve currency for more than one hundred years. The debt accumulated, and the fact that Britain had sent all its gold to the United States in payment for food and arms, made the Pound an unsound currency by the end of WW2. At the Bretton Woods Conference held in 1944, based on the fact that the United States at that point owned 70% of the world's gold, it was agreed that the U.S. Dollar would replace the Pound as the world's reserve currency. Furthermore, all other currencies would peg themselves to the dollar rather than be backed by gold. The Dollar remained the sole currency redeemable for gold.</div>
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This system persisted into the 1960s, by which time the U.S. could not resist printing more money than it could back with gold to fund the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs. Foreigners were trading in their dollars for gold, at the rate that the 20,000 tons of gold owned by the U.S. at the end of WW2 had been reduced to 8,000 tons. To prevent the rest of U.S. gold reserves from fleeing the country, Nixon "temporarily" suspended the redemption of dollars for gold on August 15, 1971, a suspension that persists to this day. </div>
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This has resulted in the unprecedented fiat monetary system noted above. The dollar continues to be the world's reserve currency, if for no other reason than that there is no suitable alternative. Furthermore, since 1980 we have been in a debt bull market of falling interest rates. See below.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Federal Funds Rate since 1950</td></tr>
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The falling interest rate regime is not an accident or a result of the free market, but has been a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. This isn't a conspiracy theory; it is part of the Fed's charter to manage interest rates. Falling interest rates support the dollar (and the accumulation of dollar debt) because it makes the purchase of debt more attractive. If I anticipate that the interest rate on the U.S. 10 year treasury bond will drop, then if I buy a 10 year treasury carrying a 5% interest, I will be able to sell it at a profit when the interest rate on new 10 year treasuries drops to 4%, since the higher interest rate on my bond represents greater value.</div>
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So the increased printing of dollars did not cause a crisis in the dollar as long as interest rates have had room to drop. The accumulation of debt in response to lowering interest rates happened accordingly.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC2BZgmcxoXOCkl7DZkPpORpEHyDpAL3mVe4yk72kXYy53XUl0ImlAz2Eb34XQkYyqykchRSaVQe1eigqle_vlPW42M6Jubk6tib_1_DJ4cirOqTQRooHYrAYX7LiJD-tZBoWRGvRftkgg/s1600/Screen+Shot+2020-07-24+at+7.59.29+PM.png" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="965" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC2BZgmcxoXOCkl7DZkPpORpEHyDpAL3mVe4yk72kXYy53XUl0ImlAz2Eb34XQkYyqykchRSaVQe1eigqle_vlPW42M6Jubk6tib_1_DJ4cirOqTQRooHYrAYX7LiJD-tZBoWRGvRftkgg/s400/Screen+Shot+2020-07-24+at+7.59.29+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">U.S. Debt to GDP ratio</td></tr>
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But notice that since 2008 interest rates have been close to 0. What happens when there is no more room for interest rates to drop? Then the debt cycle would naturally reverse, interest rates rise, and there is a major financial crisis, likely much worse than 2008 and on a global basis (since most other countries are running up debt and printing currency as fast as we are).</div>
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But that hasn't happened. Debt is still being bought despite tiny interest rates. Who is buying debt now that interest rates aren't going lower? The answer is the Federal Reserve:</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgalLs9Uu4pIzTQEHTtqmICpSerKAWJXmXSQsakL_EN1gObbfACtRQoRA-YIZuqcktr4gRqLS4114OgB7LbTC0zL-2Ntsjsy5hw5pQ8m8gsU-BZMRmcg6ZkCYVHhvNfoNosTtbHw0DedTiC/s1438/Screen+Shot+2020-07-25+at+1.29.12+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Federal Reserve Balance Sheet in Millions" border="0" data-original-height="758" data-original-width="1438" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgalLs9Uu4pIzTQEHTtqmICpSerKAWJXmXSQsakL_EN1gObbfACtRQoRA-YIZuqcktr4gRqLS4114OgB7LbTC0zL-2Ntsjsy5hw5pQ8m8gsU-BZMRmcg6ZkCYVHhvNfoNosTtbHw0DedTiC/w640-h338/Screen+Shot+2020-07-25+at+1.29.12+PM.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Federal Reserve Balance Sheet in Millions</td></tr>
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This has gone into hyperdrive since the COVID crisis hit. Since we were already running a deficit before the COVID pandemic, all the trillion dollar "stimulus packages" since then are financed purely through Federal Reserve money printing - that is the spike at the far right. Just in the last couple of months the Federal Reserve has bought up $3 trillion in government debt. This signals the end phase of the monetary cycle, which will result in the demise of the dollar and its replacement as the worlds reserve currency.</div>
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Friedman misses all this. He interprets the drop in interest rates over the last 30 years as an indication of capital accumulation. It would be in a regime of free market interest rates. But we don't have that: Interest rates are manipulated through Fed policy. As debt increased over the years, interest rates should have risen as well, incentivizing savings as a balance to debt accumulation. By forcing interest rates lower, the Fed has short-circuited these market forces and put us in a situation where a catastrophic financial crisis can only be put off by ever more furious money printing.</div>
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David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-51932874477101556672020-07-21T18:02:00.000-07:002020-07-21T18:02:49.701-07:00Comments on "The Storm Before the Calm" by George FriedmanIn this book George Friedman argues that we are experiencing the convergence of two historical cycles: A socioeconomic cycle and an institutional cycle. The present time is unusual insofar as the two cycles are coming into crisis at the same time, and will result in an unusual period of upheaval, disorder and, in Friedman's optimistic view, the reinvention of the American experiment in an as yet unidentified form that will nonetheless be a positive development and represent civilizational advancement.<br />
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I broadly agree with Friedman's thesis on the cyclical nature of history, and that the present moment represents an unusual convergence of cycles. I don't agree with him completely on the nature of the cycles, and think that he doesn't appreciate a historical cycle that is more significant that the ones he identifies. I will say more about that in another post.<br />
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Here I would like to make a skeptical argument concerning Friedman's optimistic view of the future, and argue why the present crisis is different than prior American crises. I am not necessarily pessimistic, but I imagine the future very differently than Friedman does.<br />
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The basis of my skepticism is the role natural resources, and in particular energy, play in American history. It is only recently that the United States has come to fully exploit the natural resources of the continent it claimed in Manifest Destiny. The North American continent and the exploitation of its resources shaped the history of the United States.<br />
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Consider the Civil War. At the time of the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution was just getting underway. The Industrial Revolution embodied a transition from a civilization founded on wood based energy to a civilization founded on coal based energy. Coal is a more dense form of energy than wood; it is essentially wood energy compacted over thousands of years into a much smaller space. This makes the use of coal more cost effective to gather as energy and more efficient as an energy source: A coal-fired train can travel farther than a wood-fired train before it has to restock its coal car, and coal burns hotter. It also costs less energy to harvest energy, in terms of the "energy return on investment." The consequence is that a wood-based energy civilization can never achieve the complexity or technological sophistication of a coal-based civilization. Its low efficiency energy limits its development. This is precisely the reason why major civilizational transformations are accompanied by a change in the energy foundation of the civilization.<br />
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Also at the time of the Civil War, large-scale Western migration was just beginning. In fact it was stalled prior to the war as the North and the South squabbled about the legal status of slavery in the new territories.<br />
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With the secession of the Southern states, the political roadblocks to full-scale Western migration disappeared and the migration West accelerated even during the war. The demands of the war accelerated the already nascent industrial revolution, fueled by the new energy, cheap and abundant coal, to transform the nation into a continental and industrial power very different from the nation that existed just a few years before. By 1870 the United States was a major industrial world power and had steam locomotives running from coast to coast.<br />
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Now consider the Second World War. Like the Civil War, this crisis occurred as the world was transitioning from a less dense to a more dense source of energy: From coal to oil. The United States was just beginning to exploit its oil resources in the 1930s. Those were the days when a Jed Clampett, in <i>Beverly Hillbillies</i> style, could shoot his gun and up from the ground came a bubbling crude. The war accelerated this change, especially as the U.S. industrial base and energy sources were not subject to attack like the rest of the world's were. As the war went on, it became clear that access to oil was the crucial factor. We sank Japan's merchant fleet denying them oil, and destroyed Germany's oil refineries through bombing, grounding the Luftwaffe.<br />
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The crucial factor about the current crisis is that it does not occur during an ongoing transition from a less dense to a more dense energy source. So-called "green energy" may or not be feasible, and perhaps is even necessary, but one thing it definitely is not is a more dense source of energy than oil. If it were, the transition would occur on its own rather than being subsidized by governments and forced through regulation. Towards the end of the book, Friedman speculates about space-based solar power. If possible, such power will require a massive infrastructure development and it is hard to believe it would be a more dense source of energy than oil. Coal and oil fueled their respective civilization transformations because they were sitting there, ready to hand, waiting to be exploited. There is no such new energy source available.<br />
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This is a misunderstanding people sometimes have concerning technology and energy. They believe our technology will solve the energy crisis. This gets the causality backwards. It is the energy that fuels the technological revolution, not technology that drives the energy revolution. It's true that civilization must be advanced to a certain point before it can exploit coal and then oil usefully. We didn't jump directly from wood-based energy to oil-based energy; it took a period of coal-based energy to develop the technology to exploit oil usefully. The key point is that the technology necessary is the technology to <i>exploit </i>the energy, not to <i>harvest</i> the energy. Civilization was capable of mining coal for thousands of years; it just had no special use for it until industrial civilization advanced enough. Similarly, early oil exploitation involved no special technological breakthroughs as the oil was near the surface. Doing not much more than poking a hole in the ground was good enough.<br />
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The difference today is people are imagining technological breakthroughs to <i>harvest</i> the energy, not <i>exploit</i> it. The energy harvested - electricity in the case of space-based solar power - we already exploit. The energy it takes to develop and use additional technology to harvest energy is an energy <i>cost</i>, not a <i>gain</i>. This is the Achilles heel of shale oil; exploiting technology to harvest these heretofore unreachable reserves is an energy cost that makes shale oil more expensive than conventional oil.<br />
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In any case, shale oil is rapidly depleting, and conventional oil has also peaked. What's going to happen in the next crisis is something that hasn't happened before: The transition to a civilization based on a<i> less</i> dense form of energy than the last. Whether it is "green" or not, this energy will not have the density of oil.<br />
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The United States is fortunate that we still have unexploited natural resources, in particular massive coal reserves that can fuel our nation for many decades. I suspect that as things start to get truly difficult, all the "climate change" rhetoric and "green energy" initiatives will be rapidly forgotten as people see their civilization crumbling around them (as might even be starting now). We will be happy to turn back to coal.<br />
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But the result must be a simpler civilization than the one now, not a more complex civilization as after the Civil War and WW2. We will still have our iPhones and Netflix, but you won't be able to get fresh vegetables in the supermarket year round. The oil-based civilization that can grow vegetables in California's Central Valley, then truck them all over the country at any time, will be gone. Instead, food will be more locally grown. People will not take as many or as exotic vacations as they once did, maybe going camping instead of Disney World. People will get used to living in some heat rather than blasting air conditioning anytime it gets warm. We will miss some of the things that are gone, like always available air conditioning, but appreciate some things that are rediscovered, like playing board games with the family or playing outside if you are a kid. They hyper-scheduled childhood of the recent past of carting kids from soccer to piano lessons to boy scouts will be gone. Childhood will be simpler and, as far as that goes, more healthy.<br />
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<br />David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-46773023460553010792018-10-14T13:17:00.001-07:002018-10-14T13:17:09.102-07:00Wisdom 7:7-11 and Philosophy<span style="background-color: #fff2cc; font-family: inherit;"><div class="verse font-helvetica" id="v-7" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: 1.3em !important; outline: 0px !important;">
"<span class="verse-7" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me; I called upon God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me. </span></div>
<div class="verse font-helvetica" id="v-8" style="box-sizing: border-box; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); cursor: pointer; display: inline; font-size: 1.3em !important; outline: 0px !important;">
<span class="verse-8" style="box-sizing: border-box;">I preferred her to scepters and thrones, and I accounted wealth as nothing in comparison with her. </span></div>
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<span class="verse-9" style="box-sizing: border-box;">Neither did I liken to her any priceless gem, because all gold is but a little sand in her sight, and silver will be accounted as clay before her. </span></div>
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<span class="verse-10" style="box-sizing: border-box;">I loved her more than health and beauty, and I chose to have her rather than light, because her radiance never ceases. </span></div>
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<span class="verse-11" style="box-sizing: border-box;">All good things came to me along with her, and in her hands uncounted wealth."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our modern understanding of morality sees it as a matter of figuring out abstract rules of behavior. A philosophy class in ethics might devote its time to pondering artificial circumstances as a way to tease out such rules: What </span>should<span style="font-family: inherit;"> one do, for example, if you happen to be standing next to a railway switch with a train bearing down which will run over 5 people, and you could switch it onto a side track where it will only run over 1 person? Do you do nothing and allow the five to die? Or do you switch the track and condemn to </span>death<span style="font-family: inherit;"> the one, who would have survived without your intervention?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This approach is quite foreign to the ancient approach to morality. The ancient approach did not concern itself with rules so much, as </span>with<span style="font-family: inherit;"> describing and creating the character of a man who would show good judgment in any circumstance. Good judgment was known as the virtue of <i>phronesis</i> to the Greeks and we understand it under the name of<i> prudence </i>or<i> wisdom</i>, although our understanding of prudence is a more timid version of what the Greeks meant by phronesis. Our prudent man is the sort of man who avoids taking chances, whereas the Greek wiseman was fully prepared to take chances if the situation truly called for it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The quote from Wisdom that starts this post summarizes the ancient view of wisdom nicely. Wisdom is more valuable than gold, silver, scepters or thrones, because the man who is not wise (i.e. the fool) will not use such wealth in a manner that is truly to his advantage. On the other hand, the wise man who is not rich will nonetheless possess the character virtues that will </span>allow him to become rich; or, better yet, acquire those things that truly make a fulfilled life (which might be other than thrones or riches). So wisdom is a far more valuable thing to have than any earthly possession or title.</div>
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The author of the Book of Wisdom would not be surprised by modern studies that show that the lives of winners of large lottery prizes are, after a few years, indistinguishable from what they were before they got lucky. They may now have a rusting snowmobile in their backyard and drive a 10 year old Mercedes, and have travelled to Vegas a few times, but as the years go by they end up pretty much where they would have otherwise. The reason, according to ancient wisdom, is that their original circumstances had more to do with their character than luck; and without a change of character, a little luck will not make a lasting difference. Instead of saving and investing the money they've won, they buy a boat and a trip to the Caymans. Instead of spending the money on more education, they spend it on buying Cristal for their friends at the bar. In a few years, the money is gone and they are back where they were.</div>
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There is an assumption lurking behind the modern understanding of morality that is not always acknowledged. The assumption is that the difficult part of morality is finding out exactly what the moral rules are; once they are known, it is assumed, following them is not such a difficult thing. The ancients had the opposite view: The basics of morality are not difficult to know - don't lie, cheat or steal, kill your neighbor or covet his wife. The hard part was <i>following</i> morality once it was known. </div>
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Even more difficult from the ancient view was how, beyond merely avoiding doing evil, to construct your life so that it is as fulfilling as possible. This is something that requires much more than just rule following. It means discovering what human life is really about, and acquiring the virtues necessary to attain it.</div>
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Modern morality has nothing to say about this. It views "freedom" as the greatest good, and is indifferent to what one does with that freedom, as long those abstract moral rules are followed. The great modern moral crusades, then, concern themselves with defending the rights of individuals to be or to do what they want with their freedom- change from a boy to a girl, for instance, or call themselves a girl when they look exactly like a boy.</div>
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For the average person, who is basically of good character and is wondering what to do with his life, the modern answer of "whatever you want" is disappointingly empty. For those so disappointed, the ancients stand ready to listen and answer.</div>
David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-8340139059409773152018-06-03T05:10:00.000-07:002018-06-03T05:10:17.496-07:00Living in the PresentThe present is the point at which the past is recollected and the future anticipated.<br />
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It is often urged on us to live in the <i>now</i>. That is, to live in the present. It is thought that this involves forgetting the past and avoiding paying attention to the future, for both the past and the future make us anxious. Instead, it is advised that one exist in the moment, what is happening <i>right now</i>.<br />
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This is a misunderstanding. For someone who does not recollect himself in the moment, or anticipate the future in the moment, is living <i>nowhere</i> rather than in the moment. It is true that he may be free of anxiety because he is not remembering the past or anticipating the future, but then animals live this sort of anxiety-free life. But to live as a <i>human being</i> means to live in relation to the past and the future.<br />
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And even when, for a time, he has this sort of anxiety-free existence (as, for instance, when he loses himself in a hobby in his basement, or becomes lost in the excitement of a championship game) he is not really experiencing the anxiety-free life of the animal; for, at any moment, the spell might be broken and his distinctively human recollection of the past and anticipation of the future will come rushing back in. He will suddenly find himself existing <i>somewhere</i> rather than <i>nowhere</i>, with all the anxiety that entails.<br />
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Truly living in the present is the most difficult of art forms. It means recollecting the past and anticipating the future in such a way that it has immediate decisive significance. Man acts in the <i>now</i>, but only as a bridge uniting his recollection of the past with his anticipation of the future. It is an art form because no science of living in such a manner is possible; for science of its nature abstracts from the decisive significance of the present in relation to the past and future.<br />
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Kierkegaard, in the<i> Concluding Unscientific Postscript</i>, takes monks to task for their distinctive dress. The mistake, according to Kierkegaard, is that it is a false attempt to represent the inner determination of the spirit via an outward material sign. But the "knight of the spirit" is not so easily recognized; in fact, he is not immediately recognizable at all, for the inner determination of spirit may be married to any outward material circumstance.<br />
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SK is wrong, I think, in his understanding of the meaning of the monk's simple robe. For us, the robe is simply a witness to the <i>vow </i>the monk has made to a life of simplicity in the following of Christ. The inner state of his spirit is something else entirely; it may wax and wane in its dedication to that vow. It is similar to the ring of the married man, which symbolizes a vow the man has made, not the state of his success in living up to it.<br />
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More to the point of this post, for the monk the robe is a continual reminder of his vow, and his uniting of the past with the future in his vow of the simple life for Christ. It is an aid to the art of living in the moment, of giving every moment its due not by forgetting the past and the future, but by a unification of the past with the future in a blossoming of immediate decisive action.<br />
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For most of us, such immediately decisive action occurs only rarely. We make a decision on which college to attend, or to propose to our girlfriend, or to move to another city. In such moments we feel truly <i>alive</i>, as we see our past come together in a decisive determination of our future. And we are right, for in such moments we are truly living as distinctively <i>human</i> beings.<br />
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The task for our lives is to make more of the unfolding present alive with such decisiveness. This does not mean continually making the decision to move to another city; for that would only rob any particular decision of its decisiveness for the future. No, like the monk, we must find a way to unite all our actions, even the small ones, in the present and in light of the past and in anticipation of the future.<br />
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<br />David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-41999314535663156512018-05-20T12:37:00.003-07:002018-05-20T12:37:45.644-07:00Suicide of the West: Ideas Are Not EnoughThis is also posted at <a href="https://ricochet.com/518256/suicide-of-the-west-ideas-are-not-enough/">Ricochet.com</a><br />
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Jonah Goldberg summarizes the argument of his recent book this way:<br />
<blockquote>
It is my argument that capitalism and liberal democracy are unnatural. We stumbled into them in a process of trial and error but also blind luck, contingency, and happenstance a blink of an eye ago. The market system depends on bourgeois values, i.e. principles, ideas, habits, and sentiments that it did not create and cannot restore once lost. These values can only be transmitted two ways: showing and telling... Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude - and the effort that gratitude demands -- all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. (p. 277)</blockquote>
Jonah wants to stay away from arguments about God -- the very first sentence of the book is "There is no God in this book." But he <em>does</em>spend considerable time acknowledging the extent to which Christianity is responsible for putting the circumstances in place that allowed the Miracle to occur. ("The Miracle" for Jonah is our modern systems of constitutional democracy and capitalism that have unleashed prosperity since the 18th century.) He even allows that Christianity was a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the Miracle to happen:<br />
<blockquote>
Despite all this, the case is often made that Christianity gets the credit for the Miracle. And, in broad strokes, I am open to the idea that without Christianity, the Miracle may never have happened. But that is not quite the same argument as Christianity caused the Miracle (and it certainly did not intend it). However, the lesser claim, that Christianity was a necessary ingredient, certainly seems likely. (p. 109)</blockquote>
For Jonah, it is far more important <em>that</em>the Miracle happened than <em>why</em>it happened. But this inclination to avoid drawing conclusions concerning the causal origins of the Miracle has implications for his prescription for sustaining the Miracle. For then the only thing we can do is maintain those circumstances as best we can, as we have no way of knowing what other circumstances might also support the Miracle. That is the price of an ignorance of causal origins. (There is irony here insofar as the hallmark of Western civilization, and perhaps necessary to the Miracle itself, is the Western determination to not remain satisfied with material circumstance but seek and find the causal origins of those circumstances.)<br />
Jonah's solution for what ails us is:<br />
<blockquote>
Just as any civilization that was created by ideas can be destroyed by ideas, so can the conservative movement. That is why the cure for what ails us is dogma. The only solution to our woes is for the West to re-embrace the core ideas that made the Miracle possible, not just as a set of policies, but as a tribal attachment, a dogmatic commitment. (p. 344)</blockquote>
The problem is that, unlike our forebears, Jonah is a fideist with respect to liberal principles:<br />
<blockquote>
We tell ourselves that humans have natural or God-given rights. Where is the proof -- the physical, tangible, visible proof? Don't tell me a story; show me the evidence. The fact is we have rights because some believe they are in fact God-given, but far more people believe we should act <em>as if</em>they are God-given or in some other way "real." (p. 83)</blockquote>
and<br />
<blockquote>
The simple fact is that the existence of natural rights, like the existence of God Himself, requires a leap of faith. (p. 142)</blockquote>
The Founders did not hold the existence of rights as a matter of faith. They either offered arguments for their existence (that's the whole point of Locke's exploration of the state of nature), or took those rights to be self-evidently true (as in the Declaration of Independence). To hold something self-evidently is not to hold it on faith; quite the opposite. It is to hold it as so obviously true that it is in no need of argumentation.<br />
Jonah misunderstands the role of dogma. The object of dogma is not <em>ideas</em>but<em>facts</em>. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights..." are not proposed as useful ideas to support a liberal dispensation, but as significant facts about the world that must be respected - and from which various ideas about the proper relationship of man to his government may be drawn, among other ideas.<br />
The point is that Jonah's prescription does not recreate the circumstances under which the Miracle was born: Those circumstances involved holding things like natural rights as facts, not as the useful fictions Jonah proposes. Since Jonah denies knowledge of the causal origins of the Miracle, he owes us an explanation of why the circumstances he proposes will support the Miracle as well as did the original circumstances under which it occurred.<br />
This question extends to the cultural background of the Miracle. Jonah lists many of the cultural legacies of Christianity that contributed to the Miracle:<br />
<blockquote>
I have tried to keep God out of this book, but, as a sociological entity, God can't be removed from it. I start the story of the Miracle in the 1700s, because that is where prosperity started to take off like a rocket. But a rocket doesn't materialize from thin air on a launchpad. The liftoff is actually the climax of a very long story. (p. 331)<br />
Christianity, in other words, introduced the idea that we are born into a state of natural equality (p. 332)<br />
Christianity performed another vital service. It created the idea of the secular. (p. 332)</blockquote>
But Christians do not hold natural equality and the division of the sacred from the secular on the grounds that they are really good ideas. They hold them because God Himself walked this Earth and showed that He is no respecter of persons, and this same God ordered us to give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's. How will those ideas be sustained absent the convictions that made them historically relevant? Jonah recounts the famous account of Henry IV and his penitential trek to Canossa, but would Henry have submitted if he thought the secular/sacred division merely an historically useful fiction rather than the command of the living God? Jonah calls on us to close our eyes, grit our teeth, and simply believe really hard in liberal principles. It's unlikely such a will to believe can successfully replace historic Christian faith (or the Deistic faith of the Founders).<br />
There is evidence of this in <em>Suicide of the West</em>itself. Jonah recognizes the benefits of the traditional family:<br />
<blockquote>
Our problems today can be traced to the fact that we no longer have gratitude for the Miracle and for the institutions and customs that made it possible. Where there is no gratitude - and the effort that gratitude demands - all manner of resentments and hostilities flood back in. Few actually <em>hate</em>the traditional nuclear family or the role it plays. But many are indifferent to it. And indifference alone is enough to invite the rust of human nature back in. (p. 277)</blockquote>
But of what use is Jonah's gratitude for the traditional nuclear family? His support for gay marriage -- "marriage equality" -- is well known. But if two mommies are as good as a mommy and a daddy, then fathers are dispensable to the family. And if they are, indifference to the traditional family structure seems entirely appropriate. Jonah's gratitude for the traditional family offers no resistance to the most basic attacks on that family. How different it is for those who hold that the family, composed of a mother, father, and children, is an institution ordained by God, one that is prior to the state and that does not depend on the fickle will to believe of man for its existence.<br />
Jonah ends the book with a declaration of the choice before us:<br />
<blockquote>
Decline is a choice. Principles, like gods, die when no one believes in them anymore. p. 351</blockquote>
I prefer: Principles die when no one believes anymore in the God who sustains them.David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/12465166826152433002noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-44423194440251473992018-02-27T12:26:00.000-08:002018-02-27T12:53:49.648-08:00Random Notes on Steven Pinker's Enlightenment NowI'm reading Steven Pinker's<i> Enlightenment Now</i>. Herewith are some random notes:<br />
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p. 234 - Pinker is discussing knowledge and sociology:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Do better-educated countries get richer, or can richer countries afford more education? One way to cut the knot is to take advantage of the fact that <i>a cause must precede its effect</i>. (emphasis mine)</blockquote>
It's clear from earlier in the book that Pinker has no brief for metaphysics as classically conceived. The thing about classical metaphysics is that it is necessary whether you like it or not. The consequence is that metaphysics-haters cannot avoid metaphysics no matter how much they try, and must eventually let metaphysical concepts slip in, consciously or not. <i>A cause must precede its effect</i> is a 100 proof metaphysical concept. And as Pinker's example inadvertently admits, it is more surely known than any scientific conclusions because it is part of the intellectual framework that makes science possible in the first place.<br />
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A metaphysical analysis might reflect on <i>a cause must precede its effect</i> and note that it is not precisely articulated. Causes and effects are actually simultaneous. The effect of education is an educated person and it happens at the moment of education. Later on, an educated person may be the cause of riches, so we may loosely talk about education causing riches.<br />
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p. 235 - "Better educated girls grow up to have fewer babies, and so are less likely to beget youth bulges with their surfeit of troublemaking young men."<br />
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The thrust of Pinker's book is that Enlightenment values and methods have contributed to unprecedented progress over the last few hundred years. And that is certainly true. But, as Chesterton has pointed out, the only way to measure "progress" is to have a stable measure of progress over time. In Chesterton's example, if we decided the world would be better if it was painted green, and we all began to splash green paint everywhere, what would happen if we then decided the world would be better if it were blue? Then all our work painting it green was wasted and we had really made no progress at all.<br />
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Up to the time of the Enlightenment (and actually, until very recently) , there was universal agreement that children were a blessing, and indeed among the greatest of blessings. God promised Abraham that his descendants would be as numerous of the stars, and Abraham didn't think it a burden. One of the great achievements of the modern era (one that Pinker emphasizes) is the massive reduction in child mortality over the past 200 years.<br />
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And yet, if you had told an Enlightenment philosopher in the year 1770 that one of the great achievements of Western society in the year 2018 would be that many people desired few or no descendants, he'd be puzzled. How is that progress? And if you further told him that mothers would regularly kill their unborn children in order to avoid having a child, he'd be even further puzzled. And he would be positively flabbergasted if you told him the replacement rate of France, Spain and Italy was such that in a few generations Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians would disappear altogether.<br />
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The thing is, the notion of <i>progress</i> is a philosophical one, and those who refuse to reason philosophically end up in places they never dreamed of.<br />
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------------David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-41371092329006316822017-11-23T03:00:00.002-08:002017-11-23T03:00:39.791-08:00Sam Harris Free Will Thought Experiment<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Tooling around youtube I came along<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5ebjk319Wg" target="_blank"> this video</a> of a an exercise Sam Harris offered as a practical refutation of free will.<br />
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The exercise Harris advocates is essentially this: He asks you to think of a city, any city, in the world, without any constraints. Once you have done so, Harris claims that this choice, if anything, would be an example of the exercise of free will. He then proceeds to debunk the choice as free by arguing that it wasn't really free. I won't rehearse all the reasons he provides (the video is only about 6 minutes), but his arguments all boil down to showing that the choice must have had a cause, even if we are unaware of the cause. For instance, you may have chosen Paris as your city because it happened to bubble up out of your subconscious, and that bubbling was a function of the fact that you once travelled to Paris and have fond memories. The point is that we mistakenly think the choice was "free" because we think we chose it arbitrarily, when in actuality the cause was driven by psychological factors of which we were simply unaware.<br />
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Harris's exercise involves a typical misunderstanding of what is meant by "free will", or rather, what the classical philosophers meant by calling man free. They did not mean that human will is an <i>uncaused caused</i>, which is what Harris seems to think it must mean. That would simply be to mistake man for God, Who is the only possible uncaused cause.<br />
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Man's will is classically understood to be free not because it is uncaused, but because it can have<i> rational</i> causes rather than <i>irrational</i> ones. Specifically, man can rationally judge means and the relationship of means to ends, and choose a course of action based on that judgement. (This is what Plato meant by saying "the truth shall make you free.") It is in the exercise of rationally considered action that man's freedom is manifest, not in the allegedly arbitrary choice of a meaningless selection as in Harris's exercise. A classical philosopher would not dispute that the choice made by a person in Harris's exercise is not free - in that sense, Harris is not showing anything new. But they would point out that they never thought such a choice was free in a significant sense in any case.<br />
<br />
To flesh these points out, consider the difference between a beaver building a dam and a man building a dam.<a href="http://mentalfloss.com/article/67662/sound-running-water-puts-beavers-mood-build" target="_blank"> The beaver builds a dam by instinct</a>. When it hears the sound of running water, it attempts to stop the sound by piling sticks and mud on it - even in cases where it makes no sense to do so. (For example, playing the sound of running water beneath a concrete floor will cause beavers to pile mud and sticks over the sound on the dry concrete). The beaver builds the dam the same way every time, by piling up sticks and mud, and will keep building them the same way. <br />
<br />
The beaver is not free in its dam building. It's not free when it builds the dam (the end), because it simply starts building a dam at the sound of running water, nor is it free in how it builds (the means), for it does it the same way every time by piling up mud and sticks.<br />
<br />
Now consider man building a dam, for example Hoover Dam. Man did not build this dam because he happened to hear the sound of running water once and automatically started piling sticks on it. The dam was built after a long, rational consideration of ends that might be achieved with the dam - hydroelectricity and the recreational possibilities of Lake Mead among others. Once the end was selected, the means were then considered. The dam could be build out of a variety of materials and in a variety of places. Concrete for the material was selected and a particular spot on the Colorado river was chosen - and not because an engineer picked the location "freely" by just letting a location pop into his head, but as the result of a detailed investigation of hydrology and the anticipated consequences of various locations.<br />
<br />
Eventually the construction began and the Hoover Dam was built and it stands as a monument to the freedom of man, which means the <i>freedom to know the truth </i>and <i>to act </i>according to it. It doesn't mean to act in some purely arbitrary manner. That is the degenerate freedom that has unfortunately become the vision of freedom of that has captured the imagination of modern man.<br />
<br />
Know the truth and it shall make you free.David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-694361504150234452017-03-11T04:33:00.000-08:002017-03-11T04:33:45.589-08:00Daniel Dennett's LatestThomas Nagel reviews Daniel Dennett's latest book <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-dennett-evolution/" target="_blank">here</a> in the New York Review of Books. I've read most of what Dennett has written and this book doesn't seem to break much new ground, so I don't think I'll plunk down the $15 for it.<br />
<br />
Dennett references Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image", which correspond to the everyday view of the world and the scientific view of the world. Nagel quotes Dennett describing the manifest image as:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things” that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or even create…. It’s the world according to us.</blockquote>
while the scientific image is:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">
is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).</blockquote>
According to Dennett, the scientific image describes what the world is really like, while the manifest image is just how the world appears to us, a set of "user illusions" evolution has equipped us with to get on with the world. Nagel doesn't mention him but Kant is lurking behind here, as he always is with Dennett.<br /><br />As is typical with Dennett, what is most important is not what he says but what he leaves out. In his description of the manifest image, in particular, we can include not just homeruns and haircuts, but also telescopes, microscopes, voltmeters, scientific conferences and the scientific method. In other words, it's only through the manifest image that the scientific image is even possible or has meaning. The relationship between them is not that of equals, but of priority: The manifest image is prior to the scientific image both logically and temporally. Thinking you can undermine the manifest image with the scientific image is like thinking you can observe real bacteria with a fake microscope.David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-23399361979570161582017-01-28T11:44:00.000-08:002017-01-28T11:44:47.428-08:00Harari on Polytheism vs MonotheismI've been reading <i>Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind</i> by Yuval Noah Harari. It's a "hot" book: #434 on Amazon overall and #3 in general anthropology. It's also a laughably tendentious treatment of human history from a secular perspective. Christianity and monotheism in general is bad, bad, bad and polytheism good, good, good. The author even has a problem with civilization itself, the early chapters arguing that the transition from a simple hunter gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one was a disaster for all concerned. It's very much Rousseau in spirit although the venerable Swiss is given no credit for originating this line of thought.<br />
<br />
In this post I'd like to focus on what Harari has to say concerning polytheism. He first notes (correctly) that polytheists, although they believe in many gods, nonetheless generally believe in a single, unified power behind the gods. It is the nature of this supreme power that is the essence of polytheism:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interest and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses, whether a particular city prospers or withers, whether a particular person recuperates or dies. The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and the Hindus built no temples to Atman.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good - to embrace even defeat, poverty, sickness and death. Thus some Hindus, known as Sadhus or Sannyasis, devote their lives to uniting with Atman, thereby achieving enlightenment. They strive to see the world from the viewpoint of this fundamental principle, to realize that from its eternal perspective all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Most Hindus, however, are not Sadhus. They are sunk deep in the morass of mundane concerns, where Atman is not much help. For assistance in such matters, Hindus approach the gods with their partial powers. Precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win wars and recuperate from illness. There are necessarily many of these smaller powers, since once you start dividing up the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle, you'll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality of gods. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.</blockquote>
<br />
The first thing to say about this treatment is that it is entirely reasonable; in fact, we might go so far as to say that what has been described is the 'natural' religion of mankind - the way man would almost inevitably think about religion if left to his own devices. And, indeed, as Harari points out, it is the way most men have thought about religion in most times and places, from the ancient Egyptians to the Chinese, to the Indians, to the Aztecs and the Romans.<br />
<br />
Jews and Christians do not disagree with the logic of polytheism, and probably would have followed the natural inclinations and reasoning of everyone else - except that the polytheist position contains a small hole in it: "The supreme power governing the world is devoid of interest and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans." Suppose that the supreme power, although devoid of interests and biases, nonetheless takes an interest in men? An interest men never asked for, expected, or even wanted, but that nonetheless occurs? Suppose this supreme power keeps pestering man even though we'd rather be left alone? That story, the story of the supreme power pestering an obscure ancient people into a relationship with Him, for reasons mysterious to us, is the real story of the Old Testament.<br />
<br />
Suppose further that the supreme power not only pesters man from afar, but does the unthinkable and takes on the form of man and appears among us as a man among men - not because of any interest or biases He might have, but because He loves us. In other words, the supreme power pestered the ancient Jews and appeared in the form of Christ for <i>our sakes, not His own</i>.<br />
<br />
This is an idea "unnatural" to man, and its unnaturalness is one reason I believe it. The fact that the supreme power, Atman or Jehovah or Fate, would act purely in<i> our interest</i> rather than His own is a thought that simply doesn't occur to us. That He would appear among us, voluntarily suffer, die and be buried by us, is also another idea that wouldn't occur to us. The only way the idea entered into human history is <i>because it happened</i>.<br />
<br />
Harari doesn't get this in his explanation for the origin of Christianity:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. However, one of the sect's first leaders, Paul of Tarsus, reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interest and biases, and if He had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and to die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just the Jews. It was thus necessary to spread the good word - the gospel - about Jesus throughout the world.</blockquote>
But we've already learned that the supreme power of the universe <i>doesn't </i>have interests and biases. At least this is what people always and everywhere naturally think. And why would Paul believe that this supreme power would, even if he did have interests and biases, humiliate himself by becoming a man and suffering and dying at our hands? That conditional is the crux of history - but Harari glides over it and onto the unexceptional point that if in fact one believes this happened, it's something the rest of humanity should hear about. There is a glimmer of insight at the end of the quoted text that Christianity is not fundamentally a view of the world, or a deduction based on the nature of the supreme power or the possibility that lesser deities might be open to influence, but <i>news</i>, i.e. an unexpected irruption of the supreme power into history. This news spreads within decades across the Roman Empire and within a few centuries captures the hearts and minds of Western Civilization, a massive upending of history that Harari can only remark is one of the "strangest twists" in history. It is indeed the strangest twist in history; perhaps because in it there was more going on than mere history?<br />
<br />
Finally, Harari seems to embrace the contemporary conviction that tolerance is the highest virtue, and prefers polytheists like the Aztecs or Hindus to intolerant monotheists like Jews and Christians. Tolerance seems admirable in the abstract, but perhaps not so much up close when we examine what polytheistic tolerance actually involves. As Harari notes, "In the Aztec Empire, subject peoples were obliged to build a temple for Huitzilopochtli, but these temples were built alongside those of local gods, rather than in their stead." He leaves unsaid that the subject peoples were also obliged to regularly send to the Aztec capital not only food and other goods, but also captives destined to suffer ritual human sacrifice. One reason Cortez was able to conquer the mighty Aztec Empire with a few hundred conquistadors is that the subject peoples were more than happy to join him in overthrowing the Aztecs, their "tolerance" notwithstanding. And in India, polytheists tolerated suttee (the burning of widows on the pyre of their husbands) for centuries until it was finally outlawed by the intolerant British.<br />
<br />
The tolerant polytheist tolerates everything, the good and the bad. And nothing ever really changes, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. The intolerant monotheist, in the name of the supreme power, decisively intervenes in history in response to the supreme power's own decisive intervention in history: The result is the uniquely dynamic history of Western Civilization since the time of Christ.<br />
<br />David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-62537805437526511762017-01-15T18:13:00.003-08:002017-01-15T18:13:26.567-08:00UniversalismBy Universalism I mean the position that all are eventually saved; in other words, that the population of Hell will be zero.<br />
<br />
Edward Feser has had <a href="http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/01/a-hartless-god.html#more" target="_blank">several back and forths</a> with David Bentley Hart on the issue. My point here is not to enter the debate between Feser and Hart but to consider Universalism from a different perspective.<br />
<br />
Let us suppose that Universalism is true, and that we know it is true. Then we know that everyone will eventually enjoy eternal bliss; in particular, <i>I </i>will eventually enjoy eternal bliss no matter what I do on this Earth. For me, at least, this is a very dangerous thing to believe, for I am always looking for reasons to remain in my sins, which I find quite comfortable even if I know intellectually that they are essentially bad for me.<br />
<br />
I almost wrote "ultimately" bad for me, but that isn't quite right if universalism is true, for in that case no sin is ultimately bad for me, since I will ultimately enjoy eternal bliss. But even if that is ultimately true, it is nonetheless true that I know I would be objectively happier if I were not sinning rather than sinning.<br />
<br />
There is no hurry, though, is there, if universalism is true? I might be more perfectly happy if I shed some of my sins, but I am not unhappy and in fact I'm quite comfortable as I am. So why stress out about confronting and conquering sin? Christ in the New Testament exhorts us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. That's nice advice for someone with ambitions to be a saint, but I have no such ambitions. If I'm ultimately destined for eternal bliss, why go through all the hassle? As the Five Man Electrical Band sang - "Thank you Lord for thinkin' bout me, I'm alive and doin fine."<br />
<br />
Sure, I might have to go through some pain in the next life before experiencing that eternal bliss, but that's all a little vague compared to the very real suffering and inconvenience involved with confronting sin in this life. I've never been one to seek out the hard road when the easy road is available - especially when I'm assured they both end up in the same place.<br />
<br />
These points are not meant to be rhetorical or flip. I abandoned the Catholic faith after high school because I found it entirely irrelevant to my life. The upshot of my 70's Catholic education was that sin wasn't really a big deal, Jesus wanted to be my friend, and he was always willing to forgive anything - which, I presumed, would include ignoring him. So why not get on with the business of this world and then get back to Jesus sometime later?<br />
<br />
It was only later when I began to understand that my Catholic "education" was no education at all that I began to rethink things. For me, the reality of sin and its eternal implications is the only reason to take Christianity seriously in the first place. If universalism is true, then sin is not (in Kierkegaard's terms) "eternally decisive." Neither is our relationship to Christ in this life decisive. Follow him, reject him, ignore him, twice-a-year Catholic him, what does it matter? Ultimately, it won't.<br />
<br />
I wonder if there is a mode of existence in hell that is universalist (this is NOT to claim that anyone believing in universalism is going to hell). But if universalism implies that there are no decisive eternal implications for a lack of a relationship with Christ in this life, why not in the next? Perhaps there are individuals in hell who recognize their sins but are comfortable in them, and tell themselves they will repent tomorrow, with tomorrow (naturally) never arriving. Maybe C.S. Lewis treated this idea in<i> The Great Divorce</i>. It's been a long time since I read that book.<br />
<br />
I'm in danger of being one of those eternally procrastinating guys - which is why I find the idea of universalism a temptation to be rejected.David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-61396419971887898102016-12-22T05:01:00.002-08:002017-01-28T11:47:56.431-08:00Dalrymple on "Spiritual But Not Religious"In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Berlin, Theodore Dalrymple has an interesting take at<a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/candle-berlin-14910.html" target="_blank"> City Journal</a>.<br />
<br />
The money quote:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: , "palatinolt" , serif; font-size: 18px;">The reason (I surmise) that so many people claim to be spiritual rather than religious is that being spiritual imposes no discipline upon them, at least none that they do not choose themselves. Being religious, on the other hand, implies an obligation to observe rules and rituals that may interfere awkwardly with daily life. Being spiritual-but-not-religious gives you that warm, inner feeling, a bit like whiskey on a cold day, and reassures you that there is more to life—or, at least, to </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: CJ-PalatinoLT, PalatinoLT, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">your</em><span style="font-family: , "palatinolt" , serif; font-size: 18px;"> life—than meets the eye, without actually having to interrupt the flux of everyday existence. It is the gratification of religion without the inconvenience of religion. Unfortunately, like many highly diluted solutions, it has no taste.</span></blockquote>
David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-14320954863784883382016-08-07T13:20:00.000-07:002017-01-28T11:48:20.411-08:00Pierre Manent on Western Civilization<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #4d4e4e; font-family: "sorts mill goudy" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.18000000715255737px;">From an<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2016/08/does-french-culture-have-a-future" target="_blank"> interview</a> quoted at First Things:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #4d4e4e; font-family: "sorts mill goudy" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.18000000715255737px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fcfcfc; color: #4d4e4e; font-family: "sorts mill goudy" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "times" , serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: 0.18000000715255737px;">"We do not know when the trumpet will sound. I cannot answer you in the name of some “expertise”; I can only answer “by hope.” Christian hope is based on faith. I believe that, amid the crumbling of Western civilization, which has begun, the supernatural character of the Church will become, paradoxically, more and more visible. The hatred of the world will turn against it more and more clearly. More clearly than ever the fate of all will depend on the “little flock” of Christians."</span>David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-39621882142558303902016-07-04T05:16:00.000-07:002016-07-04T05:16:20.057-07:00On the Need for Socrates<i>That's what I do. I drink and I know things.</i><br />
- Tyrion Lannister<br />
<br />
There is always a need for Socrates. But at some times he is needed more than others.<br />
<br />
Now is one of those times.<br />
<br />
How can you tell? Because there is very little of a true philosophical spirit about.<br />
<br />
The philosopher is a lover of wisdom. As Socrates teaches us, this doesn't mean the philosopher is a wise man. The philosopher is a <i>pursuer </i>of wisdom, and you don't pursue what you already have. So the philosopher is a man not wise who is driven in the attempt to become wise.<br />
<br />
The man who is already wise is not a philosopher because he is not driven to pursue wisdom - he's got it already. The man not interested in wisdom is also not a philosopher - he is not wise but doesn't care to become so, and so he does not pursue it.<br />
<br />
Both of these latter types are prevalent today. And both hate the philosopher, whom they (ironically) condemn as arrogant and useless.<br />
<br />
It is part of received "wisdom" today that the great philosophical questions cannot be definitively answered. Does God exist? If so, what is His nature? What is the nature and content of true morality? What is justice? Is there life after death? Is man really free or just a slave of nature and its laws? What is the best way to organize society? And many others. The futility of philosophy.<br />
<br />
The philosopher, allegedly, is the man who thinks he has answers to some or all of these questions. And if he has those answers, then those who disagree with him are <i>wrong</i>. And that is the substance of the charge of arrogance. How can he be so sure he's right and everyone else is wrong? What makes him so special? Shouldn't he be a little more humble? The arrogance of the philosopher.<br />
<br />
And while he is out pretending to know what others don't, he could be doing something useful to actually contribute to society. Instead he whiles away his time contemplating questions that can never be really answered, and never producing anything of value. The uselessness of philosophy.<br />
<br />
Anyone concerned that these charges might be leveled at him may be consoled that they were the same charges leveled at Socrates. They are the <i>perennial </i>charges against philosophers, and will always be leveled against him as long as man persists. And yet philosophers persist.<br />
<br />
The philosophical spirit never quite dies out. For there is always someone, when the received wisdom concerning the futility of philosophy is proclaimed, who asks the question - how do you know that? How do you know that the great questions cannot be answered? Isn't the dogma that they cannot be answered itself a Great Answer, an arrogant assertion that unjustifiably claims to know that every great thinker throughout history failed? Isn't it possible that <i>someone</i>, somewhere along the way, found at least <i>some </i>answers? How can I dismiss a great philosopher, a Plato, Aristotle, or Aquinas, without ever understanding anything of what he thought?<br />
<br />
It's rather the philosopher who is humble, isn't it? For he proclaims himself to be ignorant, but doesn't have the gall to assert that <i>everyone else</i> - including everyone throughout history - must have been ignorant as well. How can one possibly come to this latter conclusion?<br />
<br />
The one feeble argument made on its behalf is that philosophers still argue about the same questions they always have, and haven't produced any "results" the way science has, or any definitive answers settled once and for all. This is often thought to be a distinctively modern argument, but of course it was made in Socrates's day against him as well. One might call it the <a href="http://lifesprivatebook.blogspot.com/2008/03/argument-from-disagreement-part-i.html" target="_blank">Argument from Disagreement</a>, and it has a peculiar nature.<br />
<br />
For one thing, it is self-fulfilling. Merely by disagreeing with a philosophical result, for whatever reason good or bad, I create disagreement and therefore evidence against the result. That certain philosophical results are still debated may only mean that some people are incapable of understanding them or be unwilling to accept them. And that incapacity and/or unwillingness surely can't prove itself merely by existing. It's not enough merely to note disagreement; it is necessary to show that any particular disagreement has a reasonable basis, and that means doing the work of actually understanding the arguments. But then the whole point of the Argument from Disagreement is to dismiss philosophers without having to go through the work of actually understanding them.<br />
<br />
For another thing, there <i>hasn't </i>always been disagreement among philosophers, and there <i>are</i> answers that have received general and enduring agreement. For instance, that harm to another may only be done in self-defense or through civil processes (i.e. a trial) is not something seriously questioned anymore (whereas one of the questions Socrates debated was whether morality consists in doing good to ones friends and evil to ones enemies, a live question at the time. It doesn't, Socrates answered, and his answers form the basis of much of what we take for granted with respect to morality, whether we know it or not).<br />
<br />
Instead of the manifestly unsupportable conclusion that everyone in history must have been ignorant concerning the great questions, the philosopher only knows that <i>he himself</i> is ignorant. Whether others are ignorant as well is an open question, and he eagerly learns all he can from the greatest thinkers in the hope that maybe they actually <i>did </i>know something. (Spoiler: They did.)<br />
<br />
Something Aristotle taught is that the truth is generally found between two extreme and opposing errors. And when the truth is lost, both the opposing errors become manifest. One of the errors, it seems, is thinking that the truth cannot ever really be found (and if we think about it, we could never reasonably believe this, because then it would constitute the truth we said we couldn't find.) The other extreme is thinking that the truth is found easily and without effort.<br />
<br />
These extremes seem opposed, and they are, but they circle around and meet each other. For if we think the truth can never really be found, then all particular attempts to do so are necessarily futile, and we arrive at modern cultural relativism. I don't need to understand Confucius or Lao Tzu, Avicenna or the Bhagavad Vita because they must ultimately be as futile as Socrates and Aristotle. Justice and peace result from an acknowledgement of the relativity of culture, which masquerades as respect for all cultures, but is really a universal disrespect. If everyone would acknowledge that they can't know the truth, and that their way of knowing it is not and cannot be any more successful or legitimate than others, then the source of conflict would disappear. This degenerate form of humanitarian universalism is now culturally dominant, and it's easy to see it's appeal: It's a ready excuse to get out of the hard work of learning. The old Socratic way offered nothing but a lifetime of learning with no promise of result; the new degenerate universalism lets you do what you want without a guilty conscience.<br />
<br />
But not really. Ultimately, that guilty conscience is why the philosopher is hated and why he is necessary. For man is a <i>rational </i>animal, meaning his nature is to <i>know.</i> The philosopher, merely by existing, reminds man of that basic fact of his nature and embarrasses him. The philosopher would not embarrass men if they did not already know, in a deep and hidden place, that they are meant to know yet they do not know. And he is hated because he exposes the easy answers that men have constructed to console themselves rather than face the truly terrifying fact that <i>they don't have any idea who they are or what they are doing</i>.<br />
<br />
The modern existential philosopher might leave it at that, but he's a degenerate form. The best philosophers - starting with Socrates - offer hope that you <i>might</i> come to know what you are doing.<br />
<br />
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Let us, then, in the first place, he [Socrates] said, be careful of admitting
into our souls the notion that there is no truth or health or soundness
in any arguments at all; but let us rather say that there is as yet
no health in us, and that we must quit ourselves like men and do our
best to gain health-you and all other men with a view to the whole
of your future life, and I myself with a view to death.</i></span></pre>
<pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> - Plato, <i>Phaedo</i></span></pre>
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<br />David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-55443181700184983772015-12-25T07:17:00.004-08:002015-12-25T07:17:58.446-08:00Aristotle on ChristmasWonderful use of Aristotle to understand the meaning of Christmas. Through Front Porch Republic:<br />
<br />
<a href="https://ethikapolitika.org/2015/12/23/aristotles-key-to-christmas/" target="_blank">Aristotle on Christmas</a>.David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8498149069472762986.post-46923872361109708992015-12-25T04:42:00.000-08:002015-12-25T04:42:23.117-08:00On Twice A Year Catholics"Judge not, that ye be not judged."<br />
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But does that mean I cannot think? I find it impossible not to think of twice a year Catholics when I am at Christmas Mass, and it is obvious that many of the congregants are unfamiliar with the Mass; and that many of them obviously have no respect for the Mass. Standing with their hands in their pockets, surreptitiously checking their iPhones, chatting with each other like they are at a pub. And of course everyone goes to Communion, during which it is best to keep one's head down in prayer so as at least to avoid seeing how they take Communion.<br />
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Do not judge. I think that does not mean I must pretend I do not approve of such behavior. It means that it is not my place to condemn anyone for their behavior. That is the prerogative of God.<br />
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We are all sinners. Discovering the reality and nature of our own particular sins is a necessary process on the way to becoming closer to God. Although we are not to condemn others for their sins, it is generally easier to see sins in others rather than ourselves. But in seeing those sins, perhaps we can recognize the same sins in ourselves.<br />
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Consider a man, a father, who is divorced and sees his daughter at Christmas. At that time he gives her gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her. He tells her how much he loves her. But after Christmas and into the New Year, the daughter calls and emails her father but gets no response. In fact this continues throughout the rest of the year; she regularly calls, leaves messages and gets no answer. Then at Christmastime the next year, her father again shows up with gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her and tells her he loves her. He says he is sorry he didn't return her messages but he was very busy. But he is here now. Surely she understands. And this goes on year after year.<br />
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What is the daughter to make of this? Might she think her father is simply a liar and is using and cheating her, showing up once a year to get good feelings about pretending to be the father he is not? Might she not demand that he at least show her enough respect to be honest about their relationship? Instead he forces her to be complicit in the lies he tells himself. This is worse than indifference, for were he indifferent they would at least understand each other in their lack of a relationship. Her dignity would not suffer annual humiliation at his contrived intimacy.<br />
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What is Communion but a particular and deep form of intimacy that God has granted us? To take Communion indifferently or by rote or merely as just another part of the Christmas season, is to hug your daughter once a year at Christmas. Traditionally the Church has demanded of us that we make ourselves worthy of the Sacrament of the Mass through prayer and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Like all the Church's rules, this is for our own benefit so we don't find ourselves taking hugs from God without the prior respect for God that makes such intimacy true rather than a lie.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. (1 Cor. 11:27)</blockquote>
It is not for me to condemn once or twice a year Catholics. But I can learn from them the danger of taking Communion lightly, and renew my resolve to prepare myself properly for Mass.David T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14828502773466162990noreply@blogger.com2