I've previously argued that 'ought' is a a problem-relative fact about practical options, or, to put it on other words, that saying "I ought to do X," (or "I should do X") tells us that, given some practical problem for me, X is a solution. I think, however, that we can clarify this more by considering three major kinds of 'oughts'.
(1) Ought-at-least: As in "You ought at least to call your friend." This is a minimal solution ought. It says that X (calling your friend, in this case) is the least complicated, elaborate, or difficult option that solves the presupposed problem, or, to be more exact, that it is the solution that satisfies the bare essential requirements of the problem.
(2) Ought-best: This is the optimal solution ought. It says that X is the solution that most completely fulfills what the problem requires.
Both of these are consistent with there being more than one possible 'ought'. Ought-at-least is consistent with there being better solutions; ought-best is consistent with there being less good solutions that are nonetheless adequate. We sometimes talk this way, taking there to be a spread of 'oughts', any of which are good enough. But sometimes, indeed, quite often, we do not. Then we need
(3) Ought-only: This is the unique solution ought. It says that X is the only solution that meets the problem requirements.
Of course, an ought-only occurs when there is no difference between ought-at-least and ought-best.
In reality, I think these are all, at the generic level, the same sort of ought, i.e., practical solution to a given problem. What actually distinguishes them is the particular problems to which they are solutions. Two problems can be broadly speaking of the same kind, but have precise details that narrow or broaden the practical options that can be considered. We often don't distinguish much among the three above merely because we often aren't identifying our problems very precisely. If I say, "I should go to the store," I may have only a hazy idea of the problem involved (e.g., I know that I need some things that would be helpful or necessary to have, but have no precise list, just a vague, 'milk, and tissues, and some other things probably', which will be filled out at the store itself). Kinds of solutions are categorizable according to the kinds of problems they solve; and some practical problems allow any number of courses of actions as solutions and some practical problems aren't solvable by any more than one course of action. But precisely because we are vague in specifying the problem it's useful to keep in mind that there are different kinds of solutions that could be meant by saying "You ought to do X" or "You should do Y".
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Friday, February 03, 2012
Notable Links
* An interesting news article on the White House garden, which is a working garden.
* Richard Beck recently finished a series of posts entitled, "Meditations on the Little Way," about St. Thérèse of Lisieux:
(1) Thérese of Lisieux and the Democratization of Holiness
(2) Story of a Soul
(3) "My Vocation is Love"
(4) The Elevator to Jesus: Practice of the Little Way
(5) Epilogue: The Dark Night of Faith and Love
* Thomas Storck has a good discussion of whether usury is still a sin.
* The SEP has an article on Hasdai Crescas. Hasdai Crescas was one of the truly great medieval Jewish philosophers, and the most important of the anti-Aristotelian Jewish philosophers after Maimonides, just as Gersonides was the most important Jewish philosopher in the Aristotelian camp after Maimonides.
* The IEP has an article on the complications of Lucas-Penrose anti-mechanism arguments.
* Udacity looks like an interesting new educational endeavor (devoted to computer science); I'm thinking about taking a course or two at some point myself.
* Jourdon Anderson was an emancipated slave who receive a letter from his former master asking him to come back to work for him. Anderson's letter in response is a perfect expression of wit and intelligence.
* History Carnival 106 is up at "Frog in a Well".
* An interesting discussion by John Meyendorff of Byzantine wedding customs (PDF).
* Jeremy Pierce has a really good post using the TV series Once Upon a Time as an example for explaining the distinction between externalism and internalism.
* Richard Beck recently finished a series of posts entitled, "Meditations on the Little Way," about St. Thérèse of Lisieux:
(1) Thérese of Lisieux and the Democratization of Holiness
(2) Story of a Soul
(3) "My Vocation is Love"
(4) The Elevator to Jesus: Practice of the Little Way
(5) Epilogue: The Dark Night of Faith and Love
* Thomas Storck has a good discussion of whether usury is still a sin.
* The SEP has an article on Hasdai Crescas. Hasdai Crescas was one of the truly great medieval Jewish philosophers, and the most important of the anti-Aristotelian Jewish philosophers after Maimonides, just as Gersonides was the most important Jewish philosopher in the Aristotelian camp after Maimonides.
* The IEP has an article on the complications of Lucas-Penrose anti-mechanism arguments.
* Udacity looks like an interesting new educational endeavor (devoted to computer science); I'm thinking about taking a course or two at some point myself.
* Jourdon Anderson was an emancipated slave who receive a letter from his former master asking him to come back to work for him. Anderson's letter in response is a perfect expression of wit and intelligence.
* History Carnival 106 is up at "Frog in a Well".
* An interesting discussion by John Meyendorff of Byzantine wedding customs (PDF).
* Jeremy Pierce has a really good post using the TV series Once Upon a Time as an example for explaining the distinction between externalism and internalism.
Midgley on Modern Autonomism
This inflated notion of autonomy is the mirror-image of Socrates's paradox that 'nobody does wrong willingly.' Socrates eliminated the will, making moral choice seem an entirely intellectual matter. Modern autonomism leaves nothing but the will, a pure, unbiassed power of choice, detached equally from the choosing subject's present characteristics and from all the objects it must choose between. In doing this it far outruns its distant ancestor Kant, more and more limited quotations from whom still appear as its warrant, and who still gets attacked for its excesses....Whatever his mistakes, Kant was always trying seriously to make sense of human life, and therefore to bring its two sides together in the end. By contrast, modern autonomism is embattled, and will have no truck with the opposition.[Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay. Routledge (New York: 1996) p. 54]
Thursday, February 02, 2012
Music on My Mind
And if you don't get that reference, you need to watch Groundhog Day today. Here's an attempt to estimate how many Groundhog Days the movie shows or refers to.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Autonomy and Dignity
Christopher Kaczor recently had an article on human dignity at "Public Discourse", addressing Steven Pinker's 2008 article on the same subject. When Pinker's article came out I blogged about it and was not impressed. But it's worth revisiting, and MrsDarwin asked my thoughts on the concept of autonomy in the article, which I hadn't really addressed at all before. So I'll throw out a few things on the subject.
Throughout his essay, which is titled, "The Stupidity of Dignity," Pinker attacks the notion of human dignity, arguing that the notion of autonomy is morally superior and more useful. This is at first glance a puzzle, since anyone who knows the history of the two concepts knows that they have always been pretty closely connected. What Pinker is actually doing is building on an argument in an article on bioethics by Ruth Macklin, called, "Dignity is a Useless Concept." To put the argument of that work very roughly, Macklin argued that dignity was a useless concept because everything significant that you could do with an appeal to human dignity could be better done simply by appeal to the principle of autonomy -- that, in fact, most of the work done by such appeals to human dignity were just obscure appeals to the principle of autonomy, anyway. If you can talk of autonomy, talk of dignity is redundant.
I don't know much about Macklin's other work, but I think the argument in that editorial is extremely poor. We see this in several ways. For one thing -- and this has been noted by bioethicists since Pinker wrote his essay -- Macklin doesn't really do justice to the possibility that 'dignity' is in fact a genus, of which autonomy is merely one species. There are other principles besides autonomy that come up when we talk about human dignity. To take just one, the principle of common human sympathy, that we should take into account not just people's capacity to choose but their feelings regardless of what they choose, is something that comes up in medical situations. It is not, however, a part of most common accounts of autonomy, which is about reason and choice, not about feeling. And it may not be as important as autonomy for bioethics. But it is something people do tend to think important, and when asked why it can't simply be cut out, people will talk about it in terms of the dignity, or worth, or value of the other person. But even if we don't consider such things, dignity is not a concept confined to bioethics; it is applied far more generally -- indeed, far more generally than autonomy -- to situations like the plight of the poor and oppressed. And it is clear in many of these cases that autonomy is not that the only thing on the table, e.g., solidarity is important, and so forth. At best Macklin's argument could only apply within the field of bioethics -- at best it can be an argument that the only dignity-concept to be considered in bioethics is autonomy. I think this is false, of course, but even at best Macklin's argument can't rule out the possibility that it is crucially necessary for discussing how bioethical issues relate to issues outside of bioethics -- as one might well need to do in popular work or for purposes of public policy.
And note: it doesn't even matter if autonomy is in fact the only dignity-concept useful for bioethics itself. It is clear that many people deny that it is, and argue that other things should be considered. These disputes can only be adjudicate in light of more general concepts than autonomy itself -- such as the concept of human dignity.
And human dignity is the more general concept. We can see this when we recognize that autonomy need not be taken as normative -- that is, you could simply go around identifying some things as autonomous without regarding this as particularly significant for anything. The concept as used in bioethics has greater weight, implications for practice. What makes the difference? That when we use it in the latter way, we are treating autonomous agents as having worth, value, precisely as autonomous agents: namely, dignity.
We see this historically, as well. Human dignity was a big topic of discussion in the eighteenth century. There are a number of notable works that at least discuss the subject in this period, such as Georg Joachim Zollikofer's famous series of sermons on the dignity of man. (Worth reading, by the way; they are famously eloquent, and like a lot of eighteenth century sermons do at times get into serious philosophical questions, albeit in a popular way.) Zollikofer's actually pretty interesting; he lists autonomy-type things (freedom, etc.) as part of what constitutes human dignity, but his idea of it is not so narrow, since human dignity covers everything that is required for a fully human pursuit of happiness. Not only is autonomy important, but also virtue, the relation of a human being to his or her Creator, the capacity for moral and intellectual progress, all are mentioned. And I don't think Zollikofer is really arguing anything out of the ordinary for the time, either. Autonomy itself only becomes truly important as a moral concept with Kant, and closely reading the passages on autonomy in Kant shows clearly that he himself treats autonomy as equivalent to dignity. That human beings have autonomy is itself why human beings are beyond price. They have neither market price nor emotional price (merely sentimental value) but are truly priceless -- they have dignity. To treat autonomy itself as being of any special significance, Kant has to connect it with more general and common considerations of human dignity; and in the contrary direction, when Kantian-minded pastors (of whom there were quite a few in the late eighteenth century) wanted to speak to their congregations of Kantian moral questions, would do so in terms of human dignity, the more generic because less technical concept.
Both Macklin and Pinker, however, really gloss over the important fact that in this day and age, even if you confine yourself to autonomy, there is nothing that is the principle of autonomy. Rather, there are many different accounts of autonomy. And many of the ethical disputes that occur can be recognized to involve differing conceptions of autonomy. For instance, do children have autonomy. There is a pretty straightforward sense in which children are highly heteronomous: they are in the care of parents and guardians, and they are not generally regarded as competent for making major decisions on their own. That is what heteronomy is. But one could have a looser sense of autonomy in which they do count as autonomous, in the sense that they have capacity for actual autonomy. The same thing goes for people with serious mental deficiencies. Nobody is obviously autonomous if they are not making their own decisions; and, of course, it is simple nonsense to suggest that doctors never have to deal with patients who aren't making their own medical decisions -- can't, in fact, make their own medical decisions, whether legally or mentally. In order to hold that doctors have any obligations to children, if you are doing so not on the basis of something like dignity, some value children have regardless of their capacity for choice, you need a pretty broad and loose account of autonomy. And this is going to give you very different results than a stricter account of autonomy will.
What account of autonomy do we find in Pinker's essay? Here are some things he says about it:
Notable points here: autonomy is here reduced to "treating people in the way that they wish to be treated".
Notable points here: autonomy is here linked to noncoercion.
And we get some vague comments about freedom that are probably intended to link up with autonomy, too. Notice that, despite Pinker's loud proclamation of the lack of definition and the squishiness of the concept of dignity, we don't really get a definition of autonomy here, and it itself is very squishy. Treating others as they want to be treated is obviously something that has important limits. Noncoercion may be important, but obviously in medical situations you are often going to come into situations where it will be tricky to determine whether something is coercive. Doctors have to communicate with patients, for instance. How a doctor does so can have a big effect on the course of treatment; how far can a doctor go in presenting the case for a treatment before it starts to endanger this noncoercion requirement? Doctors have to make very quick judgment calls at times. How far can a doctor go in deciding on their own on a course of action in such situations before they are acting in a coercive way? And notice that it's completely unclear from anything Pinker says whether children are to be considered as autonomous. We don't in any strict way treat them as they want to be treated; we don't in any strict way avoid coercing them. They are, again, in a pretty straightforward sense heteronomous, and don't have a full slate of social freedoms. That would seem to rule them out. But Pinker never tells us. Like lots of autonomy theorists, he forgets that children exist (they are mentioned once in the essay, in a completely incidental way). The same thing again occurs with people who have significant mental disabilities (the only time Pinker mentions them in the essay it is simply to say that we read in discussions of dignity that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity). Again, Pinker, like many autonomy theorists, has completely left out adults who are in very obvious ways necessarily heteronomous. And yet we are told over and over again that autonomy doesn't leave anything out. At one point Pinker uses the phrase "autonomy and respect for persons". Is this a hendiadys? it must be, or Pinker has just introduced a second principle that is relevant to questions of dignity -- autonomy wouldn't be enough if you also have to appeal to a principle of respect for persons. But the two don't seem to be synonymous. For one thing, respect for persons obviously includes respect for heteronomous persons.
I actually suspect that Pinker's notion of autonomy has no opposite. Autonomy properly means that one is capable of legislating, making law, for oneself. But it simply does not seem to occur to Pinker that anyone could be in situations where they can't actually be treated as autonomous because they are not able to make their own decisions. Children and people with mental disabilities either don't exist in Pinker's world -- or autonomy becomes such a broad principle that it no longer means autonomy. Indeed, it is no longer clear what it means.
Throughout his essay, which is titled, "The Stupidity of Dignity," Pinker attacks the notion of human dignity, arguing that the notion of autonomy is morally superior and more useful. This is at first glance a puzzle, since anyone who knows the history of the two concepts knows that they have always been pretty closely connected. What Pinker is actually doing is building on an argument in an article on bioethics by Ruth Macklin, called, "Dignity is a Useless Concept." To put the argument of that work very roughly, Macklin argued that dignity was a useless concept because everything significant that you could do with an appeal to human dignity could be better done simply by appeal to the principle of autonomy -- that, in fact, most of the work done by such appeals to human dignity were just obscure appeals to the principle of autonomy, anyway. If you can talk of autonomy, talk of dignity is redundant.
I don't know much about Macklin's other work, but I think the argument in that editorial is extremely poor. We see this in several ways. For one thing -- and this has been noted by bioethicists since Pinker wrote his essay -- Macklin doesn't really do justice to the possibility that 'dignity' is in fact a genus, of which autonomy is merely one species. There are other principles besides autonomy that come up when we talk about human dignity. To take just one, the principle of common human sympathy, that we should take into account not just people's capacity to choose but their feelings regardless of what they choose, is something that comes up in medical situations. It is not, however, a part of most common accounts of autonomy, which is about reason and choice, not about feeling. And it may not be as important as autonomy for bioethics. But it is something people do tend to think important, and when asked why it can't simply be cut out, people will talk about it in terms of the dignity, or worth, or value of the other person. But even if we don't consider such things, dignity is not a concept confined to bioethics; it is applied far more generally -- indeed, far more generally than autonomy -- to situations like the plight of the poor and oppressed. And it is clear in many of these cases that autonomy is not that the only thing on the table, e.g., solidarity is important, and so forth. At best Macklin's argument could only apply within the field of bioethics -- at best it can be an argument that the only dignity-concept to be considered in bioethics is autonomy. I think this is false, of course, but even at best Macklin's argument can't rule out the possibility that it is crucially necessary for discussing how bioethical issues relate to issues outside of bioethics -- as one might well need to do in popular work or for purposes of public policy.
And note: it doesn't even matter if autonomy is in fact the only dignity-concept useful for bioethics itself. It is clear that many people deny that it is, and argue that other things should be considered. These disputes can only be adjudicate in light of more general concepts than autonomy itself -- such as the concept of human dignity.
And human dignity is the more general concept. We can see this when we recognize that autonomy need not be taken as normative -- that is, you could simply go around identifying some things as autonomous without regarding this as particularly significant for anything. The concept as used in bioethics has greater weight, implications for practice. What makes the difference? That when we use it in the latter way, we are treating autonomous agents as having worth, value, precisely as autonomous agents: namely, dignity.
We see this historically, as well. Human dignity was a big topic of discussion in the eighteenth century. There are a number of notable works that at least discuss the subject in this period, such as Georg Joachim Zollikofer's famous series of sermons on the dignity of man. (Worth reading, by the way; they are famously eloquent, and like a lot of eighteenth century sermons do at times get into serious philosophical questions, albeit in a popular way.) Zollikofer's actually pretty interesting; he lists autonomy-type things (freedom, etc.) as part of what constitutes human dignity, but his idea of it is not so narrow, since human dignity covers everything that is required for a fully human pursuit of happiness. Not only is autonomy important, but also virtue, the relation of a human being to his or her Creator, the capacity for moral and intellectual progress, all are mentioned. And I don't think Zollikofer is really arguing anything out of the ordinary for the time, either. Autonomy itself only becomes truly important as a moral concept with Kant, and closely reading the passages on autonomy in Kant shows clearly that he himself treats autonomy as equivalent to dignity. That human beings have autonomy is itself why human beings are beyond price. They have neither market price nor emotional price (merely sentimental value) but are truly priceless -- they have dignity. To treat autonomy itself as being of any special significance, Kant has to connect it with more general and common considerations of human dignity; and in the contrary direction, when Kantian-minded pastors (of whom there were quite a few in the late eighteenth century) wanted to speak to their congregations of Kantian moral questions, would do so in terms of human dignity, the more generic because less technical concept.
Both Macklin and Pinker, however, really gloss over the important fact that in this day and age, even if you confine yourself to autonomy, there is nothing that is the principle of autonomy. Rather, there are many different accounts of autonomy. And many of the ethical disputes that occur can be recognized to involve differing conceptions of autonomy. For instance, do children have autonomy. There is a pretty straightforward sense in which children are highly heteronomous: they are in the care of parents and guardians, and they are not generally regarded as competent for making major decisions on their own. That is what heteronomy is. But one could have a looser sense of autonomy in which they do count as autonomous, in the sense that they have capacity for actual autonomy. The same thing goes for people with serious mental deficiencies. Nobody is obviously autonomous if they are not making their own decisions; and, of course, it is simple nonsense to suggest that doctors never have to deal with patients who aren't making their own medical decisions -- can't, in fact, make their own medical decisions, whether legally or mentally. In order to hold that doctors have any obligations to children, if you are doing so not on the basis of something like dignity, some value children have regardless of their capacity for choice, you need a pretty broad and loose account of autonomy. And this is going to give you very different results than a stricter account of autonomy will.
What account of autonomy do we find in Pinker's essay? Here are some things he says about it:
The volume contains fine discussions by Pellegrino and by Rebecca Dresser on the avoidable humiliations that today's patients are often forced to endure (like those hideous hospital smocks that are open at the back). No one could object to valuing dignity in this sense, and that's the point. When the concept of dignity is precisely specified, it becomes a mundane matter of thoughtfulness pushing against callousness and bureaucratic inertia, not a contentious moral conundrum. And, because it amounts to treating people in the way that they wish to be treated, ultimately it's just another application of the principle of autonomy.
Notable points here: autonomy is here reduced to "treating people in the way that they wish to be treated".
Note, though, that all these cases involve coercion, so once again they are ruled out by autonomy and respect for persons.
Notable points here: autonomy is here linked to noncoercion.
And we get some vague comments about freedom that are probably intended to link up with autonomy, too. Notice that, despite Pinker's loud proclamation of the lack of definition and the squishiness of the concept of dignity, we don't really get a definition of autonomy here, and it itself is very squishy. Treating others as they want to be treated is obviously something that has important limits. Noncoercion may be important, but obviously in medical situations you are often going to come into situations where it will be tricky to determine whether something is coercive. Doctors have to communicate with patients, for instance. How a doctor does so can have a big effect on the course of treatment; how far can a doctor go in presenting the case for a treatment before it starts to endanger this noncoercion requirement? Doctors have to make very quick judgment calls at times. How far can a doctor go in deciding on their own on a course of action in such situations before they are acting in a coercive way? And notice that it's completely unclear from anything Pinker says whether children are to be considered as autonomous. We don't in any strict way treat them as they want to be treated; we don't in any strict way avoid coercing them. They are, again, in a pretty straightforward sense heteronomous, and don't have a full slate of social freedoms. That would seem to rule them out. But Pinker never tells us. Like lots of autonomy theorists, he forgets that children exist (they are mentioned once in the essay, in a completely incidental way). The same thing again occurs with people who have significant mental disabilities (the only time Pinker mentions them in the essay it is simply to say that we read in discussions of dignity that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity). Again, Pinker, like many autonomy theorists, has completely left out adults who are in very obvious ways necessarily heteronomous. And yet we are told over and over again that autonomy doesn't leave anything out. At one point Pinker uses the phrase "autonomy and respect for persons". Is this a hendiadys? it must be, or Pinker has just introduced a second principle that is relevant to questions of dignity -- autonomy wouldn't be enough if you also have to appeal to a principle of respect for persons. But the two don't seem to be synonymous. For one thing, respect for persons obviously includes respect for heteronomous persons.
I actually suspect that Pinker's notion of autonomy has no opposite. Autonomy properly means that one is capable of legislating, making law, for oneself. But it simply does not seem to occur to Pinker that anyone could be in situations where they can't actually be treated as autonomous because they are not able to make their own decisions. Children and people with mental disabilities either don't exist in Pinker's world -- or autonomy becomes such a broad principle that it no longer means autonomy. Indeed, it is no longer clear what it means.
The World as Alter Ego
A very interesting passage in Feuerbach (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, section 32):
An object, i.e., a real object, is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that it affects me, only if my own activity – when I proceed from the standpoint of thought – experiences the activity of another being as a limit or boundary to itself. The concept of the object is originally nothing else but the concept of another I – everything appears to man in childhood as a freely and arbitrarily acting being – which means that in principle the concept of the object is mediated through the, concept of You, the objective ego. To use the language of Fichte, an object or an alter ego is given not to the ego, but to the non-ego in me; for only where I am transformed from an ego into a You – that is, where I am passive – does the idea of an activity existing outside myself, the idea of objectivity, really originate. But it is only through the senses that the ego is also non-ego.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Three Poem Re-Drafts and Two New Poem Drafts
Cars
cars on the road
flurry by me
madly roaring
rushing past
in huff and hurry
like hell and fury
as though the world
were nearly ending
which it is
Farther Shore
Though every good thing passes, look for a farther shore!
The dying of the one good makes another to endure.
God is born in Bethlehem, and God is crucified;
but promise rises yet again when promise is denied.
The seed-husk falls away that sprouting stem may live:
so falls away the prior good, its very life to give.
You may call it dark evangel but this gospel does not lie:
the flower bursts to blossom -- and in its blossom dies.
But every flower's fading is fruition of a life
and mediating labor that births the fruit to light.
And in a dusty manger far beneath a Magi's star
a doom is writ and graven that no mortal hand can bar
in living proof of glory that the wise will not ignore:
though every good thing passes, there is a farther shore.
Absinthine
Weird with wild wormwood
lightly bitter in my taste
the triune in my body
is deeply interlaced
and I am green as glory
with bewitchment in my soul
as I wait inside the glass
for the God to make me whole
Wild and unruly
a danger to the sane
I stand upon the wasteland
as I wait for crystal rain
raindrops fall down slowly
as sweet and cold as ice
pure heaven interfuses
and I louche to paradise
A Woman Slew Me Yesterday
A woman slew me yesterday;
it happened in the usual way,
a noonday knock upon the door,
a word or two, a settled score,
a spear of ice to pierce me through.
You know it well, for she was you.
No, not a word of hot defense!
Every killer must repent
however justified the blow.
But sun still shines and rivers flow,
and though your insults shot me through,
every day we live anew.
Let us not be trapped by pride;
let us set the harm aside,
and let us love with zeal, not pain,
until you kill me once again.
Sooner or Later
Sooner or later we all have to face,
in the great competition of life's urgent chase,
there are really no winners. We all lose this race,
no matter our talent, no matter our pace.
Sooner or later: yes, but how long?
The race may not go to the swift or the strong,
but we think some may win. There we are wrong.
The bells in the steeple toll loss in their song.
But maybe the race is not meant to be won.
Time is the swiftest; no feet can outrun
the pace of its step. But look at the sun
and tell me it's pointless, this life and this fun.
Maybe the race is supposed to be lost.
Where is the worth in the work without cost?
And through endless storms our souls would be tossed,
our hearts be made hard by cold winter frost.
Or maybe the point is to learn how to lose,
how to let go the past, every wound, every bruise,
how to capture true joy, or better yet choose
a life with more colors than victory's hues.
cars on the road
flurry by me
madly roaring
rushing past
in huff and hurry
like hell and fury
as though the world
were nearly ending
which it is
Farther Shore
Though every good thing passes, look for a farther shore!
The dying of the one good makes another to endure.
God is born in Bethlehem, and God is crucified;
but promise rises yet again when promise is denied.
The seed-husk falls away that sprouting stem may live:
so falls away the prior good, its very life to give.
You may call it dark evangel but this gospel does not lie:
the flower bursts to blossom -- and in its blossom dies.
But every flower's fading is fruition of a life
and mediating labor that births the fruit to light.
And in a dusty manger far beneath a Magi's star
a doom is writ and graven that no mortal hand can bar
in living proof of glory that the wise will not ignore:
though every good thing passes, there is a farther shore.
Absinthine
Weird with wild wormwood
lightly bitter in my taste
the triune in my body
is deeply interlaced
and I am green as glory
with bewitchment in my soul
as I wait inside the glass
for the God to make me whole
Wild and unruly
a danger to the sane
I stand upon the wasteland
as I wait for crystal rain
raindrops fall down slowly
as sweet and cold as ice
pure heaven interfuses
and I louche to paradise
A Woman Slew Me Yesterday
A woman slew me yesterday;
it happened in the usual way,
a noonday knock upon the door,
a word or two, a settled score,
a spear of ice to pierce me through.
You know it well, for she was you.
No, not a word of hot defense!
Every killer must repent
however justified the blow.
But sun still shines and rivers flow,
and though your insults shot me through,
every day we live anew.
Let us not be trapped by pride;
let us set the harm aside,
and let us love with zeal, not pain,
until you kill me once again.
Sooner or Later
Sooner or later we all have to face,
in the great competition of life's urgent chase,
there are really no winners. We all lose this race,
no matter our talent, no matter our pace.
Sooner or later: yes, but how long?
The race may not go to the swift or the strong,
but we think some may win. There we are wrong.
The bells in the steeple toll loss in their song.
But maybe the race is not meant to be won.
Time is the swiftest; no feet can outrun
the pace of its step. But look at the sun
and tell me it's pointless, this life and this fun.
Maybe the race is supposed to be lost.
Where is the worth in the work without cost?
And through endless storms our souls would be tossed,
our hearts be made hard by cold winter frost.
Or maybe the point is to learn how to lose,
how to let go the past, every wound, every bruise,
how to capture true joy, or better yet choose
a life with more colors than victory's hues.
Google's View of Me
Age: 65+
Gender: Male
Apparently it thinks my primary interests are business and law. And there's a big web services component that comes, I think, from my use of StatCounter.
You should be able to find Google's view of yourself through the Ads Preferences Readout.
Gender: Male
Apparently it thinks my primary interests are business and law. And there's a big web services component that comes, I think, from my use of StatCounter.
You should be able to find Google's view of yourself through the Ads Preferences Readout.
To Step Aside Is Human
Yesterday we were moralistic with Kipling; today let's be moderate with Burns.
Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous
by Robert Burns
My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An' lump them aye thegither;
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight
May hae some pyles o' caff in;
So ne'er a fellow-creature slight
For random fits o' daffin.
Solomon.-Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.
O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' still the clap plays clatter.
Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door
For glaikit Folly's portals:
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences-
Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,
Their failings and mischances.
Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer;
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),
Your better art o' hidin.
Think, when your castigated pulse
Gies now and then a wallop!
What ragings must his veins convulse,
That still eternal gallop!
Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail,
Right on ye scud your sea-way;
But in the teeth o' baith to sail,
It maks a unco lee-way.
See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses!
Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Tied up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor Frailty names,
Suppose a change o' cases;
A dear-lov'd lad, convenience snug,
A treach'rous inclination-
But let me whisper i' your lug,
Ye're aiblins nae temptation.
Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.
Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Eight Functions of Money
Money has eight different purposes. The first three are the ones already mentioned [means of payment for buying and selling, means of barter for other money, currency trade]. The fourth is to display one's riches, showing it to everyone or putting it in the marketplace where it is dealt with or exchanged. The fifth is to use as medals and clothing decorations. The sixth use is to cheer with its presence. The seventh use is to cure some illnesses with its broth as, they say, is one of the properties of gold powder. The eight use is as security for a debt. For these last five purposes, it is possible not only to lend and exchange money but even to rent it out.
[Martín de Azpilcueta, Commentary on the Resolution of Money, Chapter 3 in Sourcebook in Late-Scholastic Monetary Theory, Grabill, ed. Lexington Books (New York: 2007) p. 34.]
This is why it's a delight to read the scholastics. The function of display has in past years become more commonly discussed by economists as they catch up to something that the Doctor Navarrus recognized as obvious in the 16th century. But I still have yet to come across an economist giving due credit to how our use of money to cheer ourselves up affects how we use it; and while we don't go around like bedouins with gold coins sewn to our veils and belts, it's clear from any look at how money functions in such a society that the jewelry use is clearly distinct from both display and storage of value, and also clearly operative. And I don't think it would cross any modern economist's mind to try to think through the complications that arise from renting money for use in folk remedies. Some of this, of course, is that these things are more obvious in a monetary system that is based on a precious metal standard. But part of it is that economists often don't consider all possible cases, and, without making it explicit, really confine themselves to carefully contrived artificial markets or assume rather substantial conditions that are not universal.
Wabbling Back to the Fire
Somehow it always has something relevant.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
Sunday, January 29, 2012
State of Probation
Arsen's mention of life as a reverberatory furnace reminded me of Butler's discussion of life as a state of trial and probation in the Analogy. Butler was the early eighteenth century's greatest moral philosopher -- and in the Anglophone world arguably the greatest moral philosopher of the early modern period. Some of his most important ideas are in the Fifteen Sermons, but the Analogy, an argument against a certain kind of Deism, is his masterwork. He discusses probation in chapters 4 and 5 of Part I.
If we consider the natural world and mere worldly prudence, we find that parts of our lives are natural trials or states of probation preparing us for greater goods later. Some of our actions bring pleasure, some of our actions bring pain, and we are capable, through experience, of developing the foresight to weigh these outcomes. Thus we find that in order to get what we really want we must often discipline ourselves when it comes to what is right in front of us. We subjugate our present interest to a greater future interest. Because of this, however, we clearly can make sense of the idea that our lives taken as a whole might well be probationary in themselves:
Butler argues that the analogy is quite strong, and that it gives to the notion of life as a state of moral and intellectual probation an antecedent credibility: it makes sense to see life in this way. Our life is a state of maturation and refinement in virtue, one with three aspects: trial or difficulty, opportunity for discipline, and the manifesting of our genuine moral character. And once we posit the idea that our life is probationary, we find a lot in our lives that fits it to be probationary; indeed, Butler argues, even more that makes it appropriate as a moral state of probation than makes parts of it appropriate as natural states of probation. He doesn't want to say that moral trial, a probationary period for building up virtue, is the whole of life; but it is a key part of life, and one of which we can make a remarkable amount of sense.
If we consider the natural world and mere worldly prudence, we find that parts of our lives are natural trials or states of probation preparing us for greater goods later. Some of our actions bring pleasure, some of our actions bring pain, and we are capable, through experience, of developing the foresight to weigh these outcomes. Thus we find that in order to get what we really want we must often discipline ourselves when it comes to what is right in front of us. We subjugate our present interest to a greater future interest. Because of this, however, we clearly can make sense of the idea that our lives taken as a whole might well be probationary in themselves:
Thus mankind having a temporal interest depending upon themselves, and a prudent course of behaviour being necessary to secure it, passions inordinately excited, whether by means of example, or by any other external circumstance, towards such objects, at such times, or in such degrees, as that they cannot be gratified consistently with worldly prudence, are temptations, dangerous and too often successful temptations, to forego a greater temporal good for a less; i.e. to forego what is, upon the whole, our temporal interest, for the sake of a present gratification. This is a description of our state of trial in our temporal capacity. Substitute now the word future for temporal, and virtue for prudence, and it will be just as proper a description of our state of trial in our religious capacity; so analogous are they to each other.
Butler argues that the analogy is quite strong, and that it gives to the notion of life as a state of moral and intellectual probation an antecedent credibility: it makes sense to see life in this way. Our life is a state of maturation and refinement in virtue, one with three aspects: trial or difficulty, opportunity for discipline, and the manifesting of our genuine moral character. And once we posit the idea that our life is probationary, we find a lot in our lives that fits it to be probationary; indeed, Butler argues, even more that makes it appropriate as a moral state of probation than makes parts of it appropriate as natural states of probation. He doesn't want to say that moral trial, a probationary period for building up virtue, is the whole of life; but it is a key part of life, and one of which we can make a remarkable amount of sense.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Students and the First Way III
I keep a sort of loose track of a number of things in my teaching to see what sort of questions and issues regularly come up among students. So, for instance, I look at what students in my ethics class choose for their virtue analysis paper, at some key questions in the discussion board, or their answers to how they would restructure the course if they had as much time or resources as they could want. One of the several things I've found handy in my intro course is keeping track of their responses to questions about the First Way. I've posted summaries of these here and here.
This past term things were a bit different than usual; I had no ordinary intro courses, just two hybrid format courses, which work rather differently. There was also a restructuring of the content that meant slightly more time was spent on Aquinas's First Way, although it was still just one class and the point was still just to give students a basic tour of how medieval, and particular scholastic, philosophers argued, rather than devoted to any close examination of the argument; and it has to be kept in mind that the hybrid format is in some ways a limiting format -- students have much more going on that has to be done on their own initiative. And as always, it's worth keeping in mind that virtually none of the students knew anything about it except for their reading -- assuming that they did, which is not always a safe bet -- and what they could remember from one class period. I gave them all at least partial credit if they (1) showed that they knew what argument was meant and (2) actually gave reasons of some kind; and full credit if they identified an actual premise and said either something genuinely creative or something that could be interpreted as at least a crude form of something that you occasionally find professional philosophers saying. The question was:
The answers were (and, as usual, since I'm only interested in answer types, these are just summary-paraphrases to get at the substance rather than exact quotations):
* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." It is weak because an infintie regress of movers is impossible.
* The one in which he says the first mover is God. It's like he can't think of anything else the first mover could be.
* (no premise explicitly identified). How can something be moved if it has no mover?
* (no premise explicitly identified). The world is moved around the sun by the force of the sun. This would make the sun the first mover.
* (no premise explicitly identified). He admits that some things are moved and some things are not, and it seems obvious that there can't really be a first mover if it doesn't move everything.
* That there could be a first mover. That is a contradiction in terms.
* "For moving is nothing other than drawing forth something from potency into act" Couldn't moving also be moving from no energy to potential energy? For instance, by placing a ball on a tabletop?
* "What is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot." This seems right, but I say it is the weakest because Aquinas wants to use it to argue that something cannot be both moved and mover, which is a leap.
* "What is moved is moved by another." There are some motions that are caused by physics, not by another, like centrifugal force or gravity. He also needs to explain what the first mover actually moves in order to make the argument plausible.
* "There is a first mover, unmoved by any prior mover." This doesn't seem wrong, but it seems like the argument is made just to lead the reader to God rather than consider other options.
* "For moving is nothing other than drawing forth something from potency into act, for something cannot be reduced from potency into act, save through some actual being; thus actual heat (as fire) makes wood (which is potential fire) to be actually hot, and thereby moves and alters it." How is moving that only draws something from potential making it actual. Is it only parts within the potential that completes it to become actual?
* "This is the sort of thing people understand when they talk about God". I think this is the weakest because not everyone believes in God.
* "An infinite regress of movers is impossible." Some things are moved and whatever is moved, is moved by another; this seems to show that the movers are also being moved, without end.
* Without a first mover there are no other movers. I personally agree with this but it comes back to the age old question of "if God was the first mover, who was his mover?"
* The impossibility of an infinite regress and that there must be an unmoved mover. Who's to say where the unmoved mover starts? Theologically you can say God is an an umoved mover but what made "God"? [This student added a number of other things that were not relevant to the immediate question, but, interestingly, he argued that there would have to be a material cause for any change and thus that there could not be anything merely making something actual.]
* "Either there is a first cause/first mover or else nothing needs a cause to move it." Aquinas seems to assume that any force in motion had to be put in motion by another, and drawing that out infers that if you trace it back all the way to the beginning there has to be one force that put in motion all others. But what put that first mover in motion, and why do the movements have to be traced back to only one original mover?
* "Every event has a cause." This requires an infinite regress, which he wants to deny.
* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers," because it contradicts the next premise, which says an infinite regress of movers is impossible.
* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." I know he's actually ruling out that there should be an infinite regress, but this makes it sound as if an infinite regress was possible. Also, the word 'infinite' is hard to understand.
* "There is either a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." This is contradicted when it goes on to say that an infinite regress of movers is impossible.
One of the summaries of the First Way they had available put the argument in disjunctive form; notice the problem students had with interpreting the disjunction. This is an implicature problem, I think; they have difficulty seeing why one would mention infinite regress in a disjunction at all if you were not suggesting that it is a real possibility. I'll have to keep this in mind in both this unit and the logic unit of future courses. (And actually one of the reasons I keep track of this is to identify logical problems that need to be addressed more carefully, as well as how I can tighten this particular unit up.)
This past term things were a bit different than usual; I had no ordinary intro courses, just two hybrid format courses, which work rather differently. There was also a restructuring of the content that meant slightly more time was spent on Aquinas's First Way, although it was still just one class and the point was still just to give students a basic tour of how medieval, and particular scholastic, philosophers argued, rather than devoted to any close examination of the argument; and it has to be kept in mind that the hybrid format is in some ways a limiting format -- students have much more going on that has to be done on their own initiative. And as always, it's worth keeping in mind that virtually none of the students knew anything about it except for their reading -- assuming that they did, which is not always a safe bet -- and what they could remember from one class period. I gave them all at least partial credit if they (1) showed that they knew what argument was meant and (2) actually gave reasons of some kind; and full credit if they identified an actual premise and said either something genuinely creative or something that could be interpreted as at least a crude form of something that you occasionally find professional philosophers saying. The question was:
We discussed Thomas Aquinas's First Way. (1) Identify the premise of the First Way that you think is weakest. By 'weakest' I mean the one that would require the most work to defend (whether you think it actually defensible or not). (2) Explain why you think this premise is the weakest premise of the argument.
The answers were (and, as usual, since I'm only interested in answer types, these are just summary-paraphrases to get at the substance rather than exact quotations):
* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." It is weak because an infintie regress of movers is impossible.
* The one in which he says the first mover is God. It's like he can't think of anything else the first mover could be.
* (no premise explicitly identified). How can something be moved if it has no mover?
* (no premise explicitly identified). The world is moved around the sun by the force of the sun. This would make the sun the first mover.
* (no premise explicitly identified). He admits that some things are moved and some things are not, and it seems obvious that there can't really be a first mover if it doesn't move everything.
* That there could be a first mover. That is a contradiction in terms.
* "For moving is nothing other than drawing forth something from potency into act" Couldn't moving also be moving from no energy to potential energy? For instance, by placing a ball on a tabletop?
* "What is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot." This seems right, but I say it is the weakest because Aquinas wants to use it to argue that something cannot be both moved and mover, which is a leap.
* "What is moved is moved by another." There are some motions that are caused by physics, not by another, like centrifugal force or gravity. He also needs to explain what the first mover actually moves in order to make the argument plausible.
* "There is a first mover, unmoved by any prior mover." This doesn't seem wrong, but it seems like the argument is made just to lead the reader to God rather than consider other options.
* "For moving is nothing other than drawing forth something from potency into act, for something cannot be reduced from potency into act, save through some actual being; thus actual heat (as fire) makes wood (which is potential fire) to be actually hot, and thereby moves and alters it." How is moving that only draws something from potential making it actual. Is it only parts within the potential that completes it to become actual?
* "This is the sort of thing people understand when they talk about God". I think this is the weakest because not everyone believes in God.
* "An infinite regress of movers is impossible." Some things are moved and whatever is moved, is moved by another; this seems to show that the movers are also being moved, without end.
* Without a first mover there are no other movers. I personally agree with this but it comes back to the age old question of "if God was the first mover, who was his mover?"
* The impossibility of an infinite regress and that there must be an unmoved mover. Who's to say where the unmoved mover starts? Theologically you can say God is an an umoved mover but what made "God"? [This student added a number of other things that were not relevant to the immediate question, but, interestingly, he argued that there would have to be a material cause for any change and thus that there could not be anything merely making something actual.]
* "Either there is a first cause/first mover or else nothing needs a cause to move it." Aquinas seems to assume that any force in motion had to be put in motion by another, and drawing that out infers that if you trace it back all the way to the beginning there has to be one force that put in motion all others. But what put that first mover in motion, and why do the movements have to be traced back to only one original mover?
* "Every event has a cause." This requires an infinite regress, which he wants to deny.
* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers," because it contradicts the next premise, which says an infinite regress of movers is impossible.
* "Either there is a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." I know he's actually ruling out that there should be an infinite regress, but this makes it sound as if an infinite regress was possible. Also, the word 'infinite' is hard to understand.
* "There is either a first mover or an infinite regress of movers." This is contradicted when it goes on to say that an infinite regress of movers is impossible.
One of the summaries of the First Way they had available put the argument in disjunctive form; notice the problem students had with interpreting the disjunction. This is an implicature problem, I think; they have difficulty seeing why one would mention infinite regress in a disjunction at all if you were not suggesting that it is a real possibility. I'll have to keep this in mind in both this unit and the logic unit of future courses. (And actually one of the reasons I keep track of this is to identify logical problems that need to be addressed more carefully, as well as how I can tighten this particular unit up.)
Feast of Thomas Aquinas IV
Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.
Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God's Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth himself speaks truly or there's nothing true.
On the cross thy Godhead made no sign to men,
Here thy very manhood steals from human ken:
Both are my confession, both are my belief,
And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.
I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see,
But can plainly call thee Lord and God as he;
Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move,
Daily make me harder hope and dearer love.
O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.
Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what thy bosom ran---
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.
Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,
I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so,
Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light
And be blest for ever with thy glory's sight. Amen.
This, of course, is a translation of Aquinas's hymn, "Adoro Te Devote". The translation, which I think is very likely the best poetic translation, is by none other than Gerard Manley Hopkins; it is, if I recall, one of several versions he attempted, and is one of his fairly early poems. As all poetic translations tend to be, it's a bit loose in parts, but (1) it is remarkable how close it actually is, particularly given the verbal gymnastics of the original, and (2) every license taken is justifiable poetic license for the target language. The result is much wordier than the original, though. The literal translation of the first stanza would be something very roughly like:
Devoutly I adore you, hidden Deity [or Truth, depending on the reading]
who these figures [or appearances, or forms] truly underlies;
all my heart submits itself to you,
for in contemplating you it all subsides [or fails].
Caswall's slightly tighter translation of the same stanza:
O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore Thee,
Who truly art within the forms before me;
To Thee my heart I bow with bended knee,
As failing quite in contemplating Thee.
There are a number of hymns attributed to Aquinas. This and the hymns from the Mass of Corpus Christi universally attributed to Aquinas are the ones most widely accepted as really Thomistic; it would be genuinely surprising if they were not.
Feast of Thomas Aquinas III
Reason employs anger for its action, not as seeking its assistance, but because it uses the sensitive appetite as an instrument, just as it uses the members of the body. Nor is it unbecoming for the instrument to be more imperfect than the principal agent, even as the hammer is more imperfect than the smith.
Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.123.10 ad 2
Feast of Thomas Aquinas II
Now it is one thing to say: "I believe God" (credere Deum), for this indicates the object. It is another thing to say: "I believe God" (credere Deo), for this indicates the one who testifies. And it is still another thing to say: "I believe in God" (in Deum), for this indicates the end. Thus God can be regarded as the object of faith, as the one who testifies, and as the end, but in different ways. For the object of faith can be a creature, as when I believe in the creation of the heavens. Again, a creature can be one who testifies, for I believe Paul (credo Paulo) or any of the saints. But only God can be the end of faith, for our mind is directed to God alone as its end. Now the end, since it has the character of a good, is the object of love. Thus to believe in God (in Deum) as in an end is proper to faith living through the love of charity.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John: Chapters 6-12, 901, The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2010) p. 21
Feast of Thomas Aquinas I
Beyond the life of assimilation and of sense experience there remains only the life that functions according to reason. This life is proper to man, fo rhe receives his specific classification from the fact that he is rational. Now the rational has two parts. One is rational by participation insofar as it is obedient to and is regulated by reason. The other is rational by nature as it can of itself reason and understand. The rational by nature is more properly called rational because a thing possessed intrinsically is always more proper than a thing received from another. Since, therefore, happiness is the most proper good of man, it more likely consists in the rational by nature than in the rational by participation. From this we can see that happiness will more properly be found in the life of thought than in a life of activity, and in an act of reason or intellect than in an act of the appetitive power controlled by reason.
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, 126, Litzinger, tr., Dumb Ox Books (Notre Dame, IN: 1993) p. 42.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Baggini, "Subjective Experiences," and Suspicion
Julian Baggini has an article up at CiF Belief responding to some arguments by Mark Vernon. I think the article sums up nicely the extraordinary confusions about psychology that typically plague Baggini's discussions of religion, and they are common enough to be worth pointing out. We see the confusions early on:
It's not difficult to show, however, that this involves an extraordinarily simplistic understanding of the psychology of belief. The most notable thing about it is that this line of thought makes no proper distinction between causal factors leading to belief and causal factors supporting or maintaining belief. Let's take a simple case. Johnny is a physicist; he believes black holes really exist. However, he orginally came to believe that black holes really exist because someone happened to mention them when he was in the sixth grade and he felt at the time that the universe was so awesome that something like black holes had to exist. As he goes on, this same feeling motivates him to study physics; and as he does so he comes into contact with the arguments of actual physicists, based on both observations and mathematical theory, for the existence of black holes. Like any reasonable person interested in black holes, he takes these seriously; they become part of the structure that supports his belief in black holes. At no point does he take black-hole denialists seriously; he does, at times, think their arguments need to be addressed, either because he is worried about how they might mislead the public, or because he thinks they really do raise important issues on their own, and he responds in such cases either by summarizing the scientific arguments for black holes or by coming up with new arguments that are appropriate. Of course, you can replace black holes with any scientific issue you please. Now, we have here a case where belief leads understanding and where, if challenged in rational discussion, the arguments put forward all postdate the origin of the belief. Baggini, if we took his argument here seriously, would be committed to saying that all the appeals to scientific argument are in this case dishonest, because they are post facto defenses or rationalizations. This is clearly nonsense, however. Merely because something wasn't originally a reason for belief doesn't mean it never becomes one. If you want to explain the support for Johnny's belief in say, his later career as a physics professor, it would be a sign of stupidity to explain it by his middle-school feeling of what the universe's awesomeness requires. By that point, while it still may motivate him in his study of black holes, the original feeling that solidified the belief is likely one of the least of the real psychological supports of his belief.
We can take a rather different kind of case. Suppose Lisa one day becomes convinced that her husband Scott is cheating on her. She can't point to anything very definite, or even articulate very well why the things she can point to make her feel so strongly about the matter; there are just a few little things here and there that could be explained in other ways, but she can't shake the feeling that the best explanation is that he's cheating on her, although she can't really give an account of events under which it definitely would be the best explanation. She confides in her mother; and as it happens, her mother thinks it's all in her head, and raises some objections. So Lisa goes out to see if she can collect information that meets her mother's objections -- still no smoking gun, but when she comes back to her mother she has additional evidence, mostly circumstantial about his patterns of behavior, and has arguments that she's pretty sure show that her mother's objections don't apply in this case. Now, if we were to say what supports Lisa's belief at this juncture, it would be nonsense to say that "really" it's just that original sense that he must be cheating on her and that she doesn't believe on the basis of her new information "at all". This is not the way belief works. When we find new supporting information or new supporting arguments, the mere fact of their being new doesn't rule out their being grounds for belief. Quite the contrary; we add new supports for our beliefs all the time.
The problem, again, is that Baggini's argument fails to recognize that there can be any other supports for belief than the original ones. This remains a problem even if you put a great deal of emphasis on the phrase 'post facto defenses and rationalizations'. Most defenses, of course, are post facto; people often find their beliefs faced with objections they had not originally considered, and they naturally defend their beliefs. But even if the arguments in question are purely rationalizations -- we are simply making up an argument to go with our belief, one to which we have no particular prior commitment -- the quality of that argument is itself determined not by its psychological origin but by rational standards. And it can happen -- indeed, it is, I think, a common occurrence -- that what starts out as a rationalization becomes viewed by the rationalizer as a good argument and an important part of the supporting structure for their belief. Trying to say that something is not a real support for a belief because it started out as a rationalization simply shows a failure to understand how reasoning actually interacts with belief.
I also find it interesting that Baggini brings out the old trope that hardly anyone on this topic believes on the basis of the arguments. This is in fact true for most topics; the overwhelming majority of people who believe black holes exist do not do so because they have rigorously thought through the physics. Most probably have no better reason than that they heard it somewhere. We cannot tell from this, however, how significant the number of people believing precisely on the basis of rigorous physical argument may be. It could be almost nonexistent, or it could be that it's a sizable minority. People certainly are on occasion persuaded by arguments. There are plenty of testimonies of people claiming that they became theists because of this or that argument, or claiming that they became atheists when they came to the conclusion that this or that argument failed. Perhaps such people are lying or deluded, but that would have to be proven. And we simply cannot assume that they are best described as "hardly anyone". Nor can we assume, if "hardly anyone" does fit, that the arguments have no important role at all.
The muddled psychologizing continues in Baggini's later discussion:
I find it rather amusing that he castigates believers for doing something he then goes on immediately to do. But there is a more immediate problem. The question he raises, "How reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth?" is in fact not "rightly asked" for the reason that it is not directly relevant. Reliability is a statistical measure; it has to do with probability distribution in a population of cases. But reliability, although it can be important for assessing how strong certain kinds of inferences are, is not directly relevant here, because even if the statistical performance of a "cognitive mechanism" is very poor, if it ever, even in only one in a million cases, gives a true positive, that suffices. We would certainly want to know that it is unreliable, since it would help us to determine what we would also have to do to rule out, to a reasonable degree, that it is yielding its usual false positive, but that is all. A veridical experience is a veridical experience however rarely that kind of experience is veridical. (As a side note, it may be worth pointing out that recognition of this truth was one of the major insights that made possible the foundation of probability theory. A lot of early probability theorists originally began thinking of probability in terms of the proportion between how often, in an ideal series of cases, a given inference would turn out to be right and the total series of cases. A lot of refinements and improvements beyond this needed to be discovered, but it's not a minor point.)
Possibly what's tripping Baggini up is that we use the word 'unreliable' in an equivocal way. Sometimes when we call something unreliable we mean the normative claim that it should never be trusted because it is so rarely right that using it defeats our ends. At other times we mean it is never right. At yet other times we mean it is only occasionally right. There are sense of reliability corresponding to each of these. But it is only in this third sense, the primary sense, that it can be used in Baggini's question: the scientific evidence Baggini points to does not establish the first sense, and the second sense would make the rest of his argument question-begging at best.
Let me put the point again: drawing conclusions about veridicality from reliability alone is not itself very reliable, as a general matter. And this is for the clearest of reasons, namely, that one has to do with the properties of the population and the other has to do with the properties of individual cases. There are cases and conclusions, for instance, in which one only has to establish that something is at least sometimes veridical, however unreliably so. Likewise, one may have good reason to think something veridical in a given case even if this is often illusory; mirages may happen often in the desert, but you may still have good reason to think that you aren't seeing one despite being in the desert. The two issues are simply not the same. Reliability is important for assessing the further course of inquiry; and where we have already established very high reliability or very low reliability this can be useful for determining whether we should proceed on the assumption that any given case is veridical, where other evidence is lacking. But very general considerations of reliability -- which is all we get here -- tell us almost nothing.
Even if we set this aside, though, there is no "simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality." For one thing, this claim is radically hyperbolic. Take, for instance, your subjective experience of there being a world external to you, or your subjective experience that your wife or children are real people. We know for a fact that there are such subjective experiences because there are psychological conditions in which people don't have them. We also can be quite certain that almost everyone believes that there is an external world, or that their wives or children are real people, almost entirely on the basis of these subjective experiences. One of the most important factors leading almost any one of us to believe that there is an external world or that the humaniforms we meet are real people is that these things feel right. You will search in vain, of course, for any cognitive science research that shows that your feeling of the reality of the world around you is "very unreliable" or that you are usually wrong when you think, on the basis of your subjective experience of them, that your family members are real people. And these are hardly the only things we believe on the basis of subjective experience that either have never been shown to be unreliable or that, if unreliable at all, have never been studied adequately. The whole category is just too big to make such an irresponsible claim as Baggini is making here.
What we actually find in cognitive science research is more limited. A lot of external factors that we hardly notice can affect our judgment -- smells, for instance, or words we happened to have heard. Quite a few kinds of things that we might call 'intuitive judgments' have at least a sharply restricted range of reliability. Things that we might think closely connected -- for instance, our intuitive judgments about what is probable and probability theory -- turn out to come apart a lot. Given psychological complexity, experiments have to be very sharply defined and very precisely oriented, and so any general conclusions require interpreting a whole battery of tests -- no crucial experiments in cognition research, only experiments more or less valuable for clarification. No cognitive scientist will claim that they have rigorously studied the reliability of the whole field of intuitions, cognitive mechanisms, or subjective experiences, both in precise tests and in the wild, so as to be able to determine whether they are reliable as actually used or, with any precision, how reliable. And what we really get in the research is what you'd expect: some of these things are very reliable under some conditions and very unreliable under other conditions, and in some cases the conditions for reliability are fairly narrow. I can't avoid making an analogy here. It's rather like testing animal performance at cognitive tasks. Some animals, like border collies or dolphins are whiz-bang at all sorts of cognitive tasks. Others, like zebras, come across as utter morons at most of them. Zebras, unless there's been new research I'm not aware of, perform badly at most cognitive tasks. It's hard to say how much this indicates stupidity, since zebras are notoriously obstinate and bad-tempered. But give zebras a cognitive task requiring them to distinguish elaborate patterns of black and white stripes and it's suddenly like they're geniuses, massively outperforming animals that do better at almost everything else. And so here; a "cognitive mechanism" that doesn't track truth generally may do so extraordinarily well if certain other conditions are met. Precise specification of contextual conditions is extremely important; something may be very good at "truth-tracking" here and very poor at it there. And, indeed, if we are considering the full scope of possible situations, it is very, very dangerous to talk about truth-tracking. For the same reason, whether something is "truth-tracking" in a particular domain has to be established, not extrapolated.
Baggini ends:
I don't think, however, that modern skepticism can be put so vaguely. Most skeptics I know don't have general suspicions about "subjective convictions" even if they are suspicious of large classes of them. This is, again, the point about there being too many kinds of things that fall under such a label. Moreover, it is at least as irrational to be suspicious of something for no good reason as it is to accept it for no good reason; and at least in principle they want their suspicions as well as their beliefs to be well-grounded. And the only skeptic I've ever come across who appealed to such a ridiculously broad consideration as Baggini has here is Julian Baggini. And suspicion is as much a subjective experience as anything else: it's one of the kinds of ways we feel that something might not be right.
But if we were to use the word 'suspicious' somewhat sloppily to mean 'engaging in critical examination', instead, I fully agree that most modern believers should engage in more critical examination this way. I also think that most modern skeptics should, too. Except for where genuine practical limitations (time, resources, etc.) say otherwise, you can never have too much.
Traditional arguments for the existence of God and contemporary attempts to use fine-tuning and cosmology to back up the case for his existence always strike me as kinds of games, since hardly anyone believes on the basis of these arguments at all. Rather, they gain faith some other way and the arguments are post facto defences or rationalisations, attempts to reply to the rationalist atheist on her own terms, when the reality is the rules of engagement have never been accepted as fair. So I much prefer it when people come out and say honestly that their reasons for belief are not the kinds of reasons atheists accept as admissible, and for them to then make the case for why atheists are wrong about this.
It's not difficult to show, however, that this involves an extraordinarily simplistic understanding of the psychology of belief. The most notable thing about it is that this line of thought makes no proper distinction between causal factors leading to belief and causal factors supporting or maintaining belief. Let's take a simple case. Johnny is a physicist; he believes black holes really exist. However, he orginally came to believe that black holes really exist because someone happened to mention them when he was in the sixth grade and he felt at the time that the universe was so awesome that something like black holes had to exist. As he goes on, this same feeling motivates him to study physics; and as he does so he comes into contact with the arguments of actual physicists, based on both observations and mathematical theory, for the existence of black holes. Like any reasonable person interested in black holes, he takes these seriously; they become part of the structure that supports his belief in black holes. At no point does he take black-hole denialists seriously; he does, at times, think their arguments need to be addressed, either because he is worried about how they might mislead the public, or because he thinks they really do raise important issues on their own, and he responds in such cases either by summarizing the scientific arguments for black holes or by coming up with new arguments that are appropriate. Of course, you can replace black holes with any scientific issue you please. Now, we have here a case where belief leads understanding and where, if challenged in rational discussion, the arguments put forward all postdate the origin of the belief. Baggini, if we took his argument here seriously, would be committed to saying that all the appeals to scientific argument are in this case dishonest, because they are post facto defenses or rationalizations. This is clearly nonsense, however. Merely because something wasn't originally a reason for belief doesn't mean it never becomes one. If you want to explain the support for Johnny's belief in say, his later career as a physics professor, it would be a sign of stupidity to explain it by his middle-school feeling of what the universe's awesomeness requires. By that point, while it still may motivate him in his study of black holes, the original feeling that solidified the belief is likely one of the least of the real psychological supports of his belief.
We can take a rather different kind of case. Suppose Lisa one day becomes convinced that her husband Scott is cheating on her. She can't point to anything very definite, or even articulate very well why the things she can point to make her feel so strongly about the matter; there are just a few little things here and there that could be explained in other ways, but she can't shake the feeling that the best explanation is that he's cheating on her, although she can't really give an account of events under which it definitely would be the best explanation. She confides in her mother; and as it happens, her mother thinks it's all in her head, and raises some objections. So Lisa goes out to see if she can collect information that meets her mother's objections -- still no smoking gun, but when she comes back to her mother she has additional evidence, mostly circumstantial about his patterns of behavior, and has arguments that she's pretty sure show that her mother's objections don't apply in this case. Now, if we were to say what supports Lisa's belief at this juncture, it would be nonsense to say that "really" it's just that original sense that he must be cheating on her and that she doesn't believe on the basis of her new information "at all". This is not the way belief works. When we find new supporting information or new supporting arguments, the mere fact of their being new doesn't rule out their being grounds for belief. Quite the contrary; we add new supports for our beliefs all the time.
The problem, again, is that Baggini's argument fails to recognize that there can be any other supports for belief than the original ones. This remains a problem even if you put a great deal of emphasis on the phrase 'post facto defenses and rationalizations'. Most defenses, of course, are post facto; people often find their beliefs faced with objections they had not originally considered, and they naturally defend their beliefs. But even if the arguments in question are purely rationalizations -- we are simply making up an argument to go with our belief, one to which we have no particular prior commitment -- the quality of that argument is itself determined not by its psychological origin but by rational standards. And it can happen -- indeed, it is, I think, a common occurrence -- that what starts out as a rationalization becomes viewed by the rationalizer as a good argument and an important part of the supporting structure for their belief. Trying to say that something is not a real support for a belief because it started out as a rationalization simply shows a failure to understand how reasoning actually interacts with belief.
I also find it interesting that Baggini brings out the old trope that hardly anyone on this topic believes on the basis of the arguments. This is in fact true for most topics; the overwhelming majority of people who believe black holes exist do not do so because they have rigorously thought through the physics. Most probably have no better reason than that they heard it somewhere. We cannot tell from this, however, how significant the number of people believing precisely on the basis of rigorous physical argument may be. It could be almost nonexistent, or it could be that it's a sizable minority. People certainly are on occasion persuaded by arguments. There are plenty of testimonies of people claiming that they became theists because of this or that argument, or claiming that they became atheists when they came to the conclusion that this or that argument failed. Perhaps such people are lying or deluded, but that would have to be proven. And we simply cannot assume that they are best described as "hardly anyone". Nor can we assume, if "hardly anyone" does fit, that the arguments have no important role at all.
The muddled psychologizing continues in Baggini's later discussion:
I'm afraid it's all too common for defenders of faith to start off by piling up a whole load of interesting scientific findings, only to follow up with a plethora of non sequiturs.
The question rightly asked, however, is how reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth? And there seems to be no escaping the simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality. Despite the comfort Vernon draws from recent research, there is no escaping the fact that the vast bulk of it points in exactly the opposite direction, undermining any confidence we might feel that our intuitive judgments are effective truth-trackers.
I find it rather amusing that he castigates believers for doing something he then goes on immediately to do. But there is a more immediate problem. The question he raises, "How reliable are the various cognitive mechanisms we use for establishing different kinds of truth?" is in fact not "rightly asked" for the reason that it is not directly relevant. Reliability is a statistical measure; it has to do with probability distribution in a population of cases. But reliability, although it can be important for assessing how strong certain kinds of inferences are, is not directly relevant here, because even if the statistical performance of a "cognitive mechanism" is very poor, if it ever, even in only one in a million cases, gives a true positive, that suffices. We would certainly want to know that it is unreliable, since it would help us to determine what we would also have to do to rule out, to a reasonable degree, that it is yielding its usual false positive, but that is all. A veridical experience is a veridical experience however rarely that kind of experience is veridical. (As a side note, it may be worth pointing out that recognition of this truth was one of the major insights that made possible the foundation of probability theory. A lot of early probability theorists originally began thinking of probability in terms of the proportion between how often, in an ideal series of cases, a given inference would turn out to be right and the total series of cases. A lot of refinements and improvements beyond this needed to be discovered, but it's not a minor point.)
Possibly what's tripping Baggini up is that we use the word 'unreliable' in an equivocal way. Sometimes when we call something unreliable we mean the normative claim that it should never be trusted because it is so rarely right that using it defeats our ends. At other times we mean it is never right. At yet other times we mean it is only occasionally right. There are sense of reliability corresponding to each of these. But it is only in this third sense, the primary sense, that it can be used in Baggini's question: the scientific evidence Baggini points to does not establish the first sense, and the second sense would make the rest of his argument question-begging at best.
Let me put the point again: drawing conclusions about veridicality from reliability alone is not itself very reliable, as a general matter. And this is for the clearest of reasons, namely, that one has to do with the properties of the population and the other has to do with the properties of individual cases. There are cases and conclusions, for instance, in which one only has to establish that something is at least sometimes veridical, however unreliably so. Likewise, one may have good reason to think something veridical in a given case even if this is often illusory; mirages may happen often in the desert, but you may still have good reason to think that you aren't seeing one despite being in the desert. The two issues are simply not the same. Reliability is important for assessing the further course of inquiry; and where we have already established very high reliability or very low reliability this can be useful for determining whether we should proceed on the assumption that any given case is veridical, where other evidence is lacking. But very general considerations of reliability -- which is all we get here -- tell us almost nothing.
Even if we set this aside, though, there is no "simple fact that subjective experience, in all its forms, is a very unreliable detector of objective reality." For one thing, this claim is radically hyperbolic. Take, for instance, your subjective experience of there being a world external to you, or your subjective experience that your wife or children are real people. We know for a fact that there are such subjective experiences because there are psychological conditions in which people don't have them. We also can be quite certain that almost everyone believes that there is an external world, or that their wives or children are real people, almost entirely on the basis of these subjective experiences. One of the most important factors leading almost any one of us to believe that there is an external world or that the humaniforms we meet are real people is that these things feel right. You will search in vain, of course, for any cognitive science research that shows that your feeling of the reality of the world around you is "very unreliable" or that you are usually wrong when you think, on the basis of your subjective experience of them, that your family members are real people. And these are hardly the only things we believe on the basis of subjective experience that either have never been shown to be unreliable or that, if unreliable at all, have never been studied adequately. The whole category is just too big to make such an irresponsible claim as Baggini is making here.
What we actually find in cognitive science research is more limited. A lot of external factors that we hardly notice can affect our judgment -- smells, for instance, or words we happened to have heard. Quite a few kinds of things that we might call 'intuitive judgments' have at least a sharply restricted range of reliability. Things that we might think closely connected -- for instance, our intuitive judgments about what is probable and probability theory -- turn out to come apart a lot. Given psychological complexity, experiments have to be very sharply defined and very precisely oriented, and so any general conclusions require interpreting a whole battery of tests -- no crucial experiments in cognition research, only experiments more or less valuable for clarification. No cognitive scientist will claim that they have rigorously studied the reliability of the whole field of intuitions, cognitive mechanisms, or subjective experiences, both in precise tests and in the wild, so as to be able to determine whether they are reliable as actually used or, with any precision, how reliable. And what we really get in the research is what you'd expect: some of these things are very reliable under some conditions and very unreliable under other conditions, and in some cases the conditions for reliability are fairly narrow. I can't avoid making an analogy here. It's rather like testing animal performance at cognitive tasks. Some animals, like border collies or dolphins are whiz-bang at all sorts of cognitive tasks. Others, like zebras, come across as utter morons at most of them. Zebras, unless there's been new research I'm not aware of, perform badly at most cognitive tasks. It's hard to say how much this indicates stupidity, since zebras are notoriously obstinate and bad-tempered. But give zebras a cognitive task requiring them to distinguish elaborate patterns of black and white stripes and it's suddenly like they're geniuses, massively outperforming animals that do better at almost everything else. And so here; a "cognitive mechanism" that doesn't track truth generally may do so extraordinarily well if certain other conditions are met. Precise specification of contextual conditions is extremely important; something may be very good at "truth-tracking" here and very poor at it there. And, indeed, if we are considering the full scope of possible situations, it is very, very dangerous to talk about truth-tracking. For the same reason, whether something is "truth-tracking" in a particular domain has to be established, not extrapolated.
Baggini ends:
The modern sceptic is indeed suspicious of subjective convictions, which is not to say they dismiss them completely. The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
I don't think, however, that modern skepticism can be put so vaguely. Most skeptics I know don't have general suspicions about "subjective convictions" even if they are suspicious of large classes of them. This is, again, the point about there being too many kinds of things that fall under such a label. Moreover, it is at least as irrational to be suspicious of something for no good reason as it is to accept it for no good reason; and at least in principle they want their suspicions as well as their beliefs to be well-grounded. And the only skeptic I've ever come across who appealed to such a ridiculously broad consideration as Baggini has here is Julian Baggini. And suspicion is as much a subjective experience as anything else: it's one of the kinds of ways we feel that something might not be right.
But if we were to use the word 'suspicious' somewhat sloppily to mean 'engaging in critical examination', instead, I fully agree that most modern believers should engage in more critical examination this way. I also think that most modern skeptics should, too. Except for where genuine practical limitations (time, resources, etc.) say otherwise, you can never have too much.
Stein on Husserl
I am not at all worried about my dear Master. It has always been far from me to think that God's mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church's boundaries. God is truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.
Edith Stein, from the Letter to Sr. Adelgundis Jaegerschmid, OSB, Freiburg Gunterstal (#259), Self-Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Gelber and Leuven, eds., ICS Publications (Washington DC: 1993) p. 272.
Here she's talking in particular about Edmund Husserl, her teacher. Like Stein, Husserl was Jewish by birth, but raised in a family that was largely secular; like her, he later was baptized, although he was baptized as a Lutheran rather than a Catholic; and like her he had problems with the Nazis due to being Jewish. He, however, died of natural causes in April of 1938, about a month after this letter was written.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Long Generations
The Daily Mail has an interesting article on President John Tyler's two grandsons, who are still alive despite the fact that Tyler was born in 1790. (ht) Normally I would trust the Daily Mail about as far as I can throw the British Isles, but confirmation for this is easy to find, and they have the handiest article of it, complete with pictures and family tree. Basically the timeline is:
1790 John Tyler was born
1841 Tyler becomes Vice President and then becomes President on the death of William Henry Harrison
1844 Tyler marries Julia Gardiner Tyler, his second wife, who was thirty years his junior
1853 Lyon Gardiner Tyler born
1923 Lyon Gardiner Tyler marries Sue Ruffin, his second wife, who was twenty-six years his junior
1925 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. born
1928 Harrison Ruffin Tyler born
1935 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Sr. dies
And Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler are both still alive; their grandfather had started his political career on the eve of the War of 1812.
1790 John Tyler was born
1841 Tyler becomes Vice President and then becomes President on the death of William Henry Harrison
1844 Tyler marries Julia Gardiner Tyler, his second wife, who was thirty years his junior
1853 Lyon Gardiner Tyler born
1923 Lyon Gardiner Tyler marries Sue Ruffin, his second wife, who was twenty-six years his junior
1925 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. born
1928 Harrison Ruffin Tyler born
1935 Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Sr. dies
And Lyon Gardiner Tyler, Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler are both still alive; their grandfather had started his political career on the eve of the War of 1812.
I, Child of Process
“I am the Way”
by Alice Meynell
Thou art the Way.
Hadst Thou been nothing but the goal,
I cannot say
If Thou hadst ever met my soul.
I cannot see—
I, child of process—if there lies
An end for me,
Full of repose, full of replies.
I’ll not reproach
The road that winds, my feet that err.
Access, Approach
Art Thou, Time, Way, and Wayfarer.
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