Dashed Off VI

 "...it is the function of feeling to act as a clue to something beyond itself." Pratima Bowes
"Metaphor is a tool for achieving economy in thought and expression and such economy is essential if we are not to lose our way in irrelevant wealth of detail."

Classification is how reasoning works back through judgment toward conception.

It seems common in ancient Middle Eastern literature to explore honestly a dark and difficult subject and then have an epilogue or close that makes clear that this honest discussion needs to be contextualized (Gilgamesh, Job, Ecclesiastes, etc.).

Burke's association of the sublime with terror is heavily focused on the sheer strength of the experience.

Ambrose, On Abraham 2.81,84, on infant baptism

Etiquette is a social power, both a tool and an armor, and one of the most accessible; thus the value of teaching it to children, as long as it is not done in an overly rigid way.

Many of our ideas of human beauty and attractiveness are organized (but not constituted) by signs of leisure.

Everything genius does is metaphor-like.

Prudence & art can both be externalized into other things; thus command and counsel for prudence and the work for art.

That someone is legally responsible, or guilty, or innocent, is both a matter of fact and a matter of value.

We know ourselves in great measure by triplex via.

We can be able to achieve a goal but not in a way that is relevant specifically to our being willing to do it, in the way we are willing to do it.

We treat as material causes not only material causes in the proper sense but also things that have as an end to provide a material cause, considered precisely insofar as they have this end. The same is true of formal causes (e.g., moulds).

The dust when raised / reveals the beam.

One important function of law is to establish default standards of equality for just action (i.e., what will we agree at least usually makes people 'even'?).

The Protevangelium represents Mary as symbolic Temple, and Joseph is chosen like Aaron to care for Mary.

Ex 26:31 & 2 Chr 3:14 -- the temple veil is woven from four colors (blue, scarlet, purple, linen)
-- Philo (Mos 2.88) and Josephus (BJ 5.5.4) interpret these as symbolic of the four elements

Protev 15:15 as a possible Trinitarian formula (cf. 1 Clem 58:2, Asc. Is. 3:13)

ens ut primum cognitum : intellectual experience :: ens inquantum ens : intellectual knowledge
quod quid est : intellectual experience :: causae : intellectual knowledge

Education is a drawing-out process.

definitional vs judicative concepts

Concepts are as it were the mediating coin of understanding, judgment, and reasoning.

The best times in life are draining, exhausting, sometimes impoverishing, sometimes exasperating or even frightening, and worth it all.

"He gave you the praanaa, the breath of life, and your mind and body." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 51

We imitate the Formless Lord by renouncing selfishness.

To improve flow of any kind, one must increase pressure or reduce impeding and resisting forces.

"You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God." CS Lewis

'X is imaginable in such aa way that we can expect it to continue to be imaginable without paradox the more we know' -> 'X is probably possible'
'X is imaginable in such a way that we can in a regular way imagine the causes that would be necessary for it' -> 'X is probably possible'
'X is imaginable in a way that adequately conforms to our actual experience' -> 'X is probably possible'
'X is imaginable and serious study can find no reason to think it impossible, without any reason to think our study inadequate' -> 'X is probably possible'
[It seems like all of these imaginability to probable-possibility inferences are getting us subtly different kinds of possibility.]

It's notable that across many contexts and cultures, human beings describe authoritative positions and offices metonymically.

Even instrumentalist theories require realism about their grounds.

Great art and literature integrates the world into human life in ways that bring out their value, both inherent and newly acquired.

"Although the sense of hearing concerns consonance, nevertheless reason is the final judge." Boethius

Music as it were creates an ecosystem in which we find ourselves.

NB the Problemata's conception of music as having a character like moral character

music as a liberal art // prudence
Like prudence, music coordinates and integrates other actions, both internal and external.

habits of aimlessness

Wisdom, as that which sets in order, is fundamentally exemplar, and the pinnacle of exemplar causes.

"Man is not only a political but a speculative animal; and where he is left to himself he will fashion for himself a philosophy of life, never quite in harmony with his neighbours." Ronald Knox

"What is good is the fulfillment of being." John Wild

When Paul describes his argument with Peter, he clearly is implying that the matter was of such importance that he *even* argued with Peter, *even* to his face.

It is important for laity to be gracious to clergy and for clergy to be gracious to laity, and it is remarkable how often this breaks down in one or the other direction, and also how often it degenerates into a mere formality. It seems to be a point on which balance is difficult -- perhaps because clergy and laity alike are often careless about acting in ways with respect to which it would be easy to be gracious.

The moral hierarchy in episcopal office
(1) learned, competent, and holy
(2) competent and holy
(3) learned and holy
(4) holy, though neither learned nor competent
(5) learned and competent
(6) competent
(7) learned
(8) neither learned, nor competent, nor holy

the importance of presumptive rights in preserving liberties

"Valentinus came to Rome under Hyginus, flourished under Pius, and remained until the time of Anicetus." Irenaeus

The last definite historical evidence of the Valentinians is from 388, where we have evidence in Callinicum of an accidental fire that destroyed a Valentinian church. [Ambrose, Letter 40.16]

"multitudo est quoddam unum, et malum est quoddam bonum, et non ens est quoddam ens." Aquinas ST 1.11.2 ad 1

"Truth consists in being and falsehoold only in non-being, so that the idea of the infinite, which includes all being, includes all that there is of truth things." Descartes to Clerselier 23 April 1649 (AT V 356)

It is acting therefore it is // cogito ergo sum

The nunc ut primum cognitum is not a point and extends pastward and futureward.

"Each thing, insofar as it is simple and undivided, always remains in the same state, as far as it can, and never changes except from an external cause." Descartes, Principia Phil II sect. 37
-- NB that he takes motus to be relevantly simplex in sect. 41, and thus as the foundation of conservation of motion.

ens amplissimum

ens ut primum cognitum -> ens ut causatum -> ens ut causans -> ens ut primum

Evil exists because limited good exists; limited good exists because unlimited good exists.

In a virtuous society, the principle of utility would be a fairly good approximation; in a very vicious society, it is often not. The more vice, the more perverse our preferences and pleasures.

The earliest modern evidence for atoms were from chemistry (Dalton's ratios) and botany (Brown's microscopic studies of Clarkia pulchella, i.e., Brownian motion); the latter became clear evidence, however, only with Einstein.

"Assuredly all the just from the beginning of the world have Christ for their head." Augustine

"Clock time requires that we hold two motions together, the motion that is easily numbered and the one we wish to measure." Sokolowski
"For the motion to be involved clock timing, it has to be placed against some other motion, at least against some vague, undifferentiated process."
"Skills, virtues, and the ability to handle risk are required because there is imprecision and indeterminacy in being."
"Intelligence in discourse does not involve just saying and understanding a lot of things: it also involves being able to sustain a reference through a long period of disclosure, that is, being able to bring out a lot about the *same* issue, or being able to let the same issue present itself through many manifestations. Allowing a reference to slip out of place, not being able to hold onto a single theme, is a form of failure in thinking."
"The first principles of naturla law are not a beginning for deductions but a perpetual engagement that we can never circumvent."

clocks & changes articulatable into distinct similars (articulatable self-similar changes)

sources of indeterminacy in measurement (Sokolowski)
(1) measuring interferes with measured
(2) measuring cannot be guaranteed adequately invariant (for level of precision)
(3) measured is not wholly stable or distinguishable

The Decalogue is given in a context in which the ethical and the cultic overlap.

As time passes, the written word becomes more and not less important.

"The creation of the world is a moral act (p'ula musarit) that finds its perfection in the Sinaitic revelation. The materialization of the revelational-ethics command constitutes a creative act. Mending reality constitutes a moral act (ma'aseh musari). In creating the world, the Creator materialized the highest ethical purpose (tachlit musarit). The source of morality (makor hamusari) is God, and its revelation is the creation." R. Joseph Dov Soloveitchik
"Man is destined by God to rule and be victorious. In the most important sense of sovereignty, it is an ethical purpose and man's efforts to acquire it is an ethical effort so long as he will be supplied with the appropriate tools."
"The peak of religious ethical perfection to which Judaism aspires is man as creator."
"The craving for beauty is nothing but the eternal longing for eternal noumeanl Being."
"The creation of the world is the materialization of God's kindness."

Gen 1:26 shows that the intention is to create man in God's image (tzelem) & likeness (demut); the actual creation in Gn 1:27 is explicitly of man in God's image.

Ta'anit 2:a -- "And what is that service which is of the heart? It is prayer." (on Dt 11:13)
-- the importance of prayer *as service*

"If a work fo music means something, then, this is a fact about the way it sounds." Roger Scruton
"Musical communication is possible only because certain sounds are heard as music -- are heard as exhibiting the 'intentional order' of rhythm, melody and harmony. This order is not a material property fo the physical world; it resides in the perceptual experience of those who hear with understanding."
"...music is not sound, it is sound understood in response. To aim to produce music is to aim to produce a musical response."

Dewey claims that teaching & learning are necessary complementary opposites like selling and buying, but fails to recognize the senses in which one may sell before and during the period no one is buying. The merchant booth sells things before the buyer buys them; the selling is only completed in the buying, but exists distinctly and dispositively.

Zen teachers often teach with the expectation that the student will not yet learn, may never learn, and indeed may teach with the expectation that the sutdent will not and cannot learn directly. For such a teacher, teaching is often seen as a provoking rather than itself a source of learning.

In general, good teachers do not teach to make students learn but to dispose students to learning. This is a matter of broad agreement between Platonism and Confucianism, for instance.

Pedagogical neutrality is not a matter of restraining the teacher (who may be frank and still exhibit it) but a matter of not restraining the student.

"The Church teaches us that God is a Being who has His cause in Himself and Who, apart from Himself, has no being that is independent and parallel to Him. She speaks to us of the perfect, living God Who is, consequently, 'pure act'. But when our understanding stops before this Being, He appears as a 'pure fact' on account of His primordial and absolute perfection." Sophrony Sakharov

Dietrich von Hildebrand claims that every good possessing a value imposes a sort of obligation to give it an adequate response, but this is certainly not true of most values. (It would be different if the claim were about *essential/integral* values and *common good*.)

Emergencies by their nature require prudence.

Attacks on marriage seem inevitably to become attacks on motherhood.

Consciousness as cognitive presence to the presentness of what is present to us. (NB the distinction of our presence and what is present to us.)

Consciousness is inherently reduplicative.

The freedom of every free society is home-brewed and custom-built.

More Light! More Light!

 Primacy of Mind
by Alfred Austin 

Mens agitat molem. Aeneidos Lib. vi. 

 I.  Above the glow of molten steel,
 The roar of furnace, forge, and shed,
 Protectress of the City's weal,
 Now, Learning rears her loftier head; 

 II.  That Progress may at length descry
 It lacks the clue to guide aright,
 And, conscious of its blindness, cry
 Unto the Muse, "More light! More light!" 

 III.  That Wealth may fitly yield the throne
 To Letters, Science, artist-skill,
 And Matter, willing subject, own
 Mind must be lord and master still. 

Probabilities and Just-So Stories

The notion of a 'just-so story' goes back to Rudyard Kipling's 1902 book, based on the fact that his daughter kept demanding that he tell stories 'just so', in exactly the right way; Just So Stories are fanciful stories about how the leopard got its spots, how the elephant got its trunk, and so forth. The phrase 'just-so story' became popular in the late 1970s when Stephen Jay Gould used it to criticize some of the explanations used in evolutionary psychology. Of course, as with all such labels, people have tried at various times to claim both that just-so stories are good and that just-so stories don't really exist. But of course, they do, and they fail as explanations. I saw one just recently, in which someone on Substack, I think, argued that people have difficulty with critical thinking because it takes up so much energy. It's the sort of thing that has a narrative plausibility but is completely unfounded. Current views of the brain all indicate that thinking takes very little energy (so little, in fact, that neuroscientists struggle sometimes even to estimate it with the methods available to them). Having a brain is immensely energy-expensive; but, given that, thinking hard costs almost nothing in comparison. The human brain is like an extremely powerful engine; just keeping it running consumes fuel like crazy. But this energy is all used to make it possible to do a lot of things with only just a little extra, so the difference between the engine idling and the engine applying its power this way or that is relatively tiny. It's a lot of work to have a brain; it's not a lot of work to use it. But it makes a good story, particularly since we've all had the experience of being tired after a lot of thinking (which is not, contrary to what one might think, due to your brain but due mostly to the fact that you use a lot more muscles when you are concentrating than you usually realize, combined with the fact that we often concentrate hardest when we are already stressed about something). Note that it's not the bare fact of explaining by a story that's the problem here; it's that the story, however plausible it may sound, is just a story despite the pretense that it is more. It's not even, in Plato's sense, a 'likely story', a story that is not a closely reasoned account but might be true, more or less, in some sense or other, because it captures things that are known to be true and that can be given a closely reasoned account. It's not a likely story; it just looks like one.

While the notion of a just-so story developed in the context of philosophy of biology, broadly construed, there are many other fields in which just-so stories are found. And I think they have been spreading like weeds in philosophy, in part due to uncritical and careless uses of broadly Bayesian kinds of reasoning -- uncritical, because the reasoning often goes with a failure to think through what the probabilities involved actually are, and careless, because there are often no serious safeguards. We're led through a story about how one might reason, but the story hangs in air and doesn't connect to anything. 

Probabilities are not random numbers, nor do we have direct insight into them, on any account of probability. Strictly speaking, a probability is a comparison of a subset of possibilities (like the ways five dice can land on 2) to the larger set of possibilities (like the ways five dice can land on any number). There are lots of different ways one can interpret these sets of possibilities, and preferred ways become elaborated in various philosophical accounts of probability, but to have any probability in any interpretation of probability, you have to know something about the possibilities on the table, and you have to be able to measure those possibilities in such a way as to compare the relevant subset to the total. If you significantly change the possibilities or how they are measured (for instance, if we switch from five dice to twelve dice, or from dice to coins), your probabilities stop being straightforwardly comparable -- you have shifted the comparison on which the numerical probability is based. The short of it is that, for a probability to mean anything, you have to have some way of knowing what possibilities are on the table, and some method of measurement.

People will argue like this. Suppose, just to take one example, naturalism, N, and suppose some particular evidence, E, and our background evidence, R. Then we can find the probability of E given N&R, and let us suppose it is much, much lower than the probability of E given ~N&R. Thus E is evidence against N, at least with respect to R. All well and good if the numbers, even handled algebraically mean anything. But there are problems right at the beginning in this particular case, because N doesn't really predict things. Naturalism is not a predictive hypothesis; it doesn't tell you what will be the case, but it is rather an incomplete framework fitting entire families of hypothesis -- it tells you (if true) what kind of hypothesis could possibly tell you what will be the case. Suppose we take something like, the existence of the human mind, and claim on the basis of some version or other, however modified, of the above argument that it is evidence against naturalism. The problem, though, is that naturalism on its own doesn't predict anything about the human mind; whether or not the human mind exists, naturalism purports to describe what kind of explanation you'll need to look for in order to explain that fact. It does, of course, rule out some things, namely, those things that are inconsistent with its assumptions or constituent features, but it tells us nothing either way about most things.

But, Brandon, you might say, surely it makes some of those other things more or less probable? No, not necessarily. For one thing, naturalism doesn't identify a well-defined set of possibilities; it is an open-ended framework and we don't know, even in a general way, all the possibilities consistent with it. We can, again, definitely rule some things out, based on what we can show to be inconsistent with its assumptions and definition, but that's hard work and we certainly have not plumbed the complete depths of that inquiry, which involves entirely different kinds of argument than the above argument. But it's also the case that these kinds of arguments involve no method of measurement that lets us compare one set of possibilities with another. How are we getting these numbers (or ranges, as the case may be)? Are we taking field surveys of possible worlds? Are we drawing on metaphysical experiments about the nature of reality? No, the numbers and ranges are made up. They are completely made up. Does naturalism or theism better predict the existence of a rational animal suffering? Show me the analysis of the possibilities on the table, and the method you are using to measure predictiveness, and the model you are using to put numbers to it all, and then maybe I will regard you as not just telling a Bayesian version of a just-so story. Otherwise, all you are telling me is a story based on narrative plausibilities, or what you think are narrative plausibilities, about the journey of discovery; that you throw some fictitious numbers into it doesn't change that.

It is probably impossible to break analytic philosophers of the superstitious habit of assuming that they have direct mystical insight into the probabilistic structure of reality, but that doesn't mean that nay of the rest of us have to treat it as more than a charming fictional story about how an elephant's nose got stretched into a trunk.

In the broad, traditional sense of 'probable', you can do probable inferences without any numbers even implied; all you need to know is that something is possible, that there are causal tendencies for it, and that the things that can prevent it are missing, or else you establish what is required for demonstrative argument for a conclusion and show that, while you can't fully deliver on all of them, you can deliver enough to make extrapolation of the rest reasonable. Nothing prevents these traditional kinds of probable inference still being available. But once you start using numbers, as in Bayesian arguments, you have to justify the numbers. (This is true, although there are subjective Bayesians who might try to deny it, even on the most subjective of subjective Bayesianisms, because in an argument for something you need to have something connecting the argument to reality.)

A different kind of case. I recently came across another argument (unfortunately I cannot find it again) on a different subject. The argument went something like,

(1) On moral realism, we would expect morality to robustly make sense in a unified way.
(2) Morality does not robustly make sense in a unified way, but in fact is very patchwork.
(3) Therefore, moral realism is wrong.

Whatever might be said of moral realism, this is an obviously bad argument. We have the same attempt to tell a story about "what we would expect" from moral realism. In this case, though, it's not just a matter of our not having done the work of measurement, it's that (1) is just wrong, and in the most glaring way. Moral realism is a position in which moral facts can't be merely assumed to depend on what makes sense to us; therefore, it's false that we would expect morality to make sense given moral realism on its own, at least if we are going on the definition of moral realism rather than associations in our imagination. It's a just-so story about how an inquiry might possibly reach a particular, pre-selected conclusion, and floats free of anything that is necessary to deliver the conclusion. It is not moral realism but moral anti-realism, or at least some forms of it, which would have a problem if it turned out that (2) is true, because in some forms of moral anti-realism, morality would in fact just be a byproduct or outgrowth of our own sense-making capacities. Moral realism, on the other hand, is consistent with the moral world being quite baroque and surprising, in need of extensive exploration and discovery in order to know what it even involves. It is also consistent with that other expectation, to be sure; here again, we have a situation in which, short of going through all the possibilities, we have no way of getting any definite probabilistic numbers or ranges, so there's no way to say which is more probable -- they are just possibilities on the table, and we don't have the means to compare them to the totality of all the relevant possibilities. If we try to get more specific, all we get is another just-so story. 

Winning with a Low Pair

 One of the most famous and recognizable series of paintings in the entire world is one that does not come to mind when one thinks of high art. The painter, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, began the series without, I think, realizing that it would be a series, in 1894. He later did some work for an advertising firm, Brown & Bigelow (which still exists today), involving paintings using anthropomorphic dogs for advertising calendars. Several of those were variations of the original 1894 theme, and thus the series was born, known now as Dogs Playing Poker. (There's a story that Coolidge actually liked cats much more than dogs, but thought that dogs seemed more the poker-playing type.) The 1894 painting, Poker Game, that started it all:

If I recall correctly, my grandmother (who really loved card games) had a print of another in the series, usually known as A Waterloo (a 'waterloo' is a very large pot), although Coolidge's original title was Judge St. Bernard Wins on a Bluff:

In many ways, I think this is the best in the series. When I was younger, I never really appreciated the expressions on the dogs' faces at St. Bernard taking a huge pile of chips with a pair of deuces (I mostly just remember the collie), but they are great, especially the dog who had folded with a pair of Jacks. So goes the game of poker, in which anything might happen. The painting is actually a sequel to another painting, A Bold Bluff, in which we see Judge St. Bernard call with just the deuces and all the other dogs are looking suspiciously at him, trying to figure out how far he is bluffing. He just coolly stares them down.

Dogs Playing Poker is often classified as 'kitsch', but I'm not convinced that this is right. Kitsch, I've noted before, is the quasi-art of treating the art-work as wholly devoted to achieving an effect in the audience; it treats the end of the artwork as the whole point of the artistic making. This is not in the strictest sense possible, so kitsch attempts to cause an emotional effect by stereotyped and sometimes manipulative means; this is why kitsch is inferior to art in the proper sense. But, of course, having a work of art that has an effect in the audience is not necessarily kitsch; you don't do art in the proper sense just to get an effect, but that doesn't mean you don't aim for one at all. 

The Dogs Playing Poker series are comic paintings that became popular due to their use in advertisement. They are therefore in some sense 'low brow'. But it would be absurd to assume that any of the three are in themselves evidence of kitsch. The Mona Lisa is not made kitsch by being so popular that people hang prints of it around the house or put it on shirts or use it in advertisements (even if some of the uses are definitely kitsch); Renaissance paintings are not kitsch just because they were done on patronage, often as part of public relations, to proclaim the value of this or that noble house. Card games are a historically common theme for paintings; Coolidge just did a comic version of the theme (most of his work is comic and has a surreal quality). There's no reason why comic material would make a painting any more kitsch than tragic material does. This is not to say, of course, that Dogs Playing Poker has not spawned a lot of kitsch; but any good painting does, because people like to try to capture the mood, the feel, of the original in all sorts of different contexts. Painting has a reputation for being a somewhat more humorless field of art than, say, poetry, and perhaps this is what is really behind treating the series itself as kitsch. But the paintings work on their own terms, and they meet the most basic test of taste: people like them and keep liking them for reasons that are due to their artistic elements. And if we did insist on regarding them as kitsch, that does not in itself mean that they aren't worth having in the world. Puns are not high humor, but we dismiss them at our peril; if the pun is pictorial, the same is true. Either way, sometimes one wins a grand pot with a low pair, and sometimes one enters the heavenly hall of immortal painters with Dogs Playing Poker. 

Explorers

 These great philosophers are explorers. Those who are great are those who have discovered continents. Those who are not great are those who have only thought of being solemnly accepted at the Sorbonne.

 There is a certain world, a universe of thought. On the face of this world geographies can be drawn. In the depth of this world geologies can make deeper engravings. The public, so to speak, always believes, and the philosophers almost always believe, that they are quarreling over the the same terrain. Neither sees that they are plunging into different continents. 

[Charles Péguy, Notes on Bergson and Descartes, Ward, tr., Cascade Books (Eugene, OR: 2019) p. 58.]

As from Sheol

If you enter into judgment with your servant, O Lord God, what excuse will I find? And where can I beg for forgiveness? For I have rejected and broken all your laws, and have become a dead man in the greatness of my sins. As from Sheol, from the sea of sin draw me out, in your mercy: O Christ the King, have mercy on me!

[From the Basilica hymn for the Third Week of Lent, in The Book of Before and After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East, Fr. Andrew Younan, ed. and tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024), p. 479.]

To Show a Heart Grief-Rent

 To Keep a True Lent
by Robert Herrick 

 Is this a fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep? 

 Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?

 Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look and sour? 

 No; ‘tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat,
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul. 

 It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate;
To circumcise thy life. 

 To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.