The War of the Rohirrim

 I recently went to see The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim in the theater. The reviews have been all over the place about it, and I think it has struggled because it is often seen as the test case for whether the 'franchise' can survive the general disaster that was The Rings of Power. This is unfortunate; it demands of the movie something that it probably could not have delivered anyway and I think that while it has a number of flaws, it mostly succeeds at what it was actually trying to do.

(1) In practice, everything Hollywood does with ideas from The Lord of the Rings is make prequels for Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies. Rings of Power, for instance, is clearly at times trying to be an unofficial prequel; the Hobbit movies were more LOTR movie prequels than they were adaptations of The Hobbit. War is not an exception to this tendency. On this front, however, it does very well. It is, without any doubt whatsoever, better as a prequel to the LOTR movies than Rings of Power is. It is also better as a prequel than the Hobbit movies, with the caveat that the highs of the Hobbit movies (usually when the movies bother to adapt the book directly) are higher highs than War manages to achieve.

(2) At times the animation is excellent, but at times it seems stiff, clumsy, and choppy. This is emblematic of the movie as a whole; it does some things very, very well, and then it will suddenly have a rough patch in which the story, or the character motivations, or the ideas seem clumsily put together.

(3) Helm Hammerhand, voiced by Bryan Cox, who seems really to commit to the larger-than-life aspect of his character, is almost on his own a reason to watch the movie. Literally every time he is on the screen, the story suddenly becomes more interesting. He is also the character who gives one the most sense of well-roundedness; the movie really sells the idea that this is an extraordinary man and exceptional king who is dealing with a new situation he does not fully know how to handle. 

(4) The script sometimes has a made-by-committee feel, which is probably due to an inability to work out the complications of having had two different writing teams as well as considerable input from the director. This means that sometimes even very good ideas are not adequately developed. One good idea that I think could have been done better is the focus on Eowyn, who narrates the story. This is not made adequately clear in the story -- if you don't recognize Miranda Otto's voice, nothing would alert you to the fact until the credits.  This is an idea that could have done much to bind the story together; it explains the focus on Hera rather than Helm; and it would appeal to members of the audience who would like what is effectively an Eowyn story that does not damage Eowyn's canonical story. Eowyn telling a tale of a heroine who inspired her is something that could have worked exceptionally well, if there had been more commitment to it and more emphasis on it in both marketing and narration.

(5) The main character is Hera, Helm's daughter (mentioned in a sentence but never named by Tolkien). She sometimes gets sharply criticized in reviews, but I actually liked Hera as a character, for the most part. She actually makes a very plausible princess, for the most part, which is increasingly uncommon on the screen, The primary difficulty is that we don't get a full sense of her motivations.

(6) Character motivations, in fact, seems to be one of the things with which this movie struggles. The strongest character usually aren't given any obvious motivations for their major actions. The weakest character -- Wulf, the antagonist, is the most obvious one -- have motivations that make remarkably little sense, and it gets irritating at how much of the plot is moved forward by Wulf repeatedly doing exactly the opposite of what General Targg's consistently accurate analysis of the situation indicates he should do. There are also broader motivations that are somewhat baffling. Rohan and Gondor seemed to be assumed to be entirely separate kingdoms, when in reality Rohan is effectively a vassal state, the Rohirrim having received Rohan as a grant from Gondor when they as a tribe allied themselves with Gondor against other tribes, and having received the grant on the condition that they guard Gondor's northern border and provide military assistance in friendship. Thus it makes no sense for any Rohirrim, however interested, to protest the king's daugther marrying a Gondorian prince, as if that were itself a problem. The relation of the Rohirrim to the Dunlendings is never made sufficiently clear for the particular story being told, either. In the books, the Dunlendings are separate tribes who are effectively kept under close watch by Rohirrim, and serve as one of the examples of how the Rohirrim's tendency to mistreat other tribes nearly results in disaster in the War of the Ring. In the movie, it is much less clear how the situation is being conceived.

(7) This is movie that does not shy away from the dark and the violent; it is the most gory of the big-screen presentations of Middle Earth. It generally handles this well, but audiences should know it beforehand.

(8) One of the weaknesses of the movie as a prequel to the LOTR movies is that it sometimes tries to shoehorn in allusions, either visual or narrative; only a few of these allusions work well at all, and a couple of them end up being cheesy. Others that most work well -- like the brief introduction of Saruman -- could have been set up better, and thus despite being nice additions end up feeling tacked on.

My overall recommendation is that it is worth seeing; it is mostly better than anything since the LOTR movies. It has definite flaws, and sometimes feels like it needed one more serious revision or editing run-through, but it mostly does well what it is actually trying to do, and I think it holds up well in comparison with a lot of what is on the screen these days.

PNC Christmas Price Index

 The PNC Christmas Price Index for 2024:

Total Christmas Price Index (CPI) 

Even with its small basket of goods and services, the PNC Christmas Price Index is not immune to the rising costs in the broader U.S. economy, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. 

$49,263.47 (+5.4%)

... 

True Cost of Christmas in Song
$209,272.00 (+3.6%) 

 This represents the total cost of all the gifts bestowed by True Love when you count each repetition of the song, totaling 364 presents. Spreading cheer throughout the year in 2024 costs 3.6% more than in 2023.

The Ten Lords-a-Leaping surpassed the Seven Swans-a-Swimming as the most expensive Day of Christmas last year and continued to rise this year, now standing at $15,579.65. The Partridge in a Pear Tree saw the sharpest percentage rise, entirely due to the increase of costs in pear trees.

When All the Stars Become a Memory

 When all the Stars become a Memory
by Joseph Mary Plunkett 

When all the stars become a memory
Hid in the heart of heaven: when the sun
At last is resting from his weary run
Sinking to glorious silence in the sea
Of God’s own glory: when the immensity
Of Nature’s universe its fate has won
And its reward: when death to death is done
And deathless Being’s all that is to be --

 Your praise shall ’scape the grinding of the mills:
My songs shall live to drive their blinding cars
Through fiery apocalypse to Heaven’s bars!
When God’s loosed might the prophet’s word fulfils,
My songs shall see the ruin of the hills,
My songs shall sing the dirges of the stars.

Dashed Off XXVIII

 Scientific evidence depending on the likeness of the universe to design (i.e., the experiment) and on the likeness of the universe to abstract intelligibles (i.e., theory), no scientific evidence could ever be such as to rule out an intelligent cause of the universe.

covenant as exemplate of Trinitarian procession

Everything truly personal is to some extent timeless.

A theory of modality can only be fully unified through positing necessary being, ie.., a case in which necessity, actuality, and possibility are mutually implying.

symbolic delomic legisign as communicable imitation of incommunicable person

Human beings use symbolic delomic legisigns to construct other signs.

"Son of God and of a human being, incapable of being violated by reason of the one state, capable of suffering by reason of the other, he renewed our mortal essence through his immortal one." Leo I (Sermon 65)
"We possess the sign of circumcision, the sanctification of anointing, the consecration of priests. We possess the purity of sacrifice, the truth of Baptism, the honor of the temple. Rightly should the messengers have ceased after the message had come to pass. Yet our reverence for these promises should not be diminished just because the fullness of grace has been shown."
"Rational souls should cling especially to those thoughts from which they gain an increase of faith."
"A double remedy has been prepared for us miserable people by the Almighty Physician, one of which is in the mystery, the other in his example. Through the one, divine grace is conferred, by virtue of the other, human response is required. As God is the author of justification so human beings are debtors of devotion."

"Christ, the primordial mystery, the primordial sacrament and the source of all sacramentality, gives to the Church the quality of being a sacrament." Dumitrus Staniloae
"The Church is constituted through sacraments, is nourished by and extends itself through them."

"El Derecho es una especial normatividad que descansa sobre dos nociones: La titularidad, y la de capacitación o potestad." (Leonardo Polo)
"La mentira destruye la organizazión, porque la organizació se basa en la communicación y la mentira la anula. Si el conectivo social es el lenguaje, corromper el lenguaje es disolvenete."
"Lo malo de la mentira es la incommunicación que introduce."

The human race has always lived in an age of wonders.

One thing that must be understood about progress is that an undeniable improvement may create an insoluble problem.

The saintly intrigues us but is also just out of reach; we find it only in reflections and flashes.

It is easy to assume that our task is to attain mature adulthood, and in the long run it is, but our primary task here and now is to be born.

Salt brings out the flavor of everything, and we are the salt of the world. Light brings out the color of everything, and we are the light of the world.

"Magic is the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will." John Michael Greer
"A symbol held in one mind, charged with will and desire, can affect another even when there's no obvious way for the effect to take place; that's the central thesis of magic."
"You win a magical struggle by formulating an ideal, as strongly, precisely, and vividly as possible, while completely ignoring the other guy."

Listening goes beyond letting people speak; one cannot listen without communicating.

Title to rights is always membership in a class (sometimes a class with no or one member).

reasons for the eminence of Shakespearean plays
-- development in an era of fruitful interchange between 'high brow' and 'low brow' culture
-- competent reworking of material already proven popular
-- balance in guiding and in giving freedom to the actors
-- richness of tehcnique used, suitable for teaching various aspects of dramatic art
-- balance in actability and in readability on the page
-- flood of memorable metaphors and expressions

Spatial and temporal coincidence should derive from constitution, not vice versa.

Visiblity plays a larger role in successful law enforcement than is usually recognized.

All bodies are located in various places at once; it's just that these places are usually overlapping. However, since place depends on boundary, and boundary can be relative, it does not seem absolutely imposssible for one body to be in two places that are from a particular perspective not overlapping.

The modern world has increased the extent to which people become entangled in prisons of words.

The degree to which one uses profanity is in general the degree to which one uses language primarily as an expressive medium rather than an instrument of reason.

Language rules us unless we domesticate it for ourselves.

To treat material objects as constituted in terms of space and time is to treat them as being relative to measurement.

proper semi-parts: like proper parts, but imperfectly distinguishable from other proper parts; thus supplementation does not strictly apply, because a whole may consist of one proper part and at least one proper semi-part. --> borders/boundaries may be an example

procrastination as a sign of boredom

'Whatever is moved is moved by another' as required for linking dreaming and waking

Moralizing is often not the moral course of action.

The Eucharist exhibits the maximum unity of sign, i.e., the maximal unity of representamen, object, and interpretant, that a sign can have and still be a genuine sign having all three.

Dreaming is arguably several distinct phenomena that are loosely grouped together.

-- the question of how much of what we call 'the dream' is actually the interpretation of a chaos, like an internal pareidolia, or story-association over a gibberish process

dreams as having only relative coherence

Some things are changed in a regular way; what is changed in a regular way has a separate cause of its being changed in a regular way; an infinite regress of such causes is not psosible; therefore we reach a first cause of regular change.

Empathy does not easily generalize.

The abstract specification of an experiment, being the relating of boundary values by experimental means, is in itself temporally and spatially indifferent. (This is important for replicability.)

the making of an artifact as selection of contingent possibilities of natural things

A legal system requires not merely laws but institutions (which may or may not have their origin in laws). 

The immediate object of a sign is that to which it refers in use. This use is always part of a broader process, whether inquisitive or practical, within which the sign reaches toward the object as it is at the end of the progress; this is the dynamic object. Every such process is part of an intellectual life whose end is the Beatific Vision, and the sign has in this context the relevant divine ideas as its final object.

dividing the representamen
Diamond: immediate representamen : what we primarily think of as the sign-vehicle 'itself'
Null: dynamic representamen : what the sign-vehicle is in its relevant context
Box: final representamen : what the sign-vehicle is in context of all creation

"Signum est quod se ipsum sensui et praeter se aliquid animo ostendit." Augustine (De dial.)
"Loqui est articulata voce signum dare."
"Omnis doctrina vel rerum est vel signorum, sed res per signa disuntur." (De doct.)

"Figures came first so that their fulfillment could follow." Leo I

Human societies have a tendency to fracture along lines of stress, but some such societies have compensating elements.

People often underestimate the extent to which interpretation of our sensory epxeriences is affected and refined by testimony.

Vices shut us into the prison of our own character; virtues, on the other hand, open toward the fullness of human potential.

Maxims of Taste

 The following maxims of common human understanding do not properly come in here, as parts of the Critique of Taste, but yet they may serve to elucidate its fundamental propositions. They are: (1) to think for oneself; (2) to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else; (3) always to think consistently. The first is the maxim of unprejudiced thought; the second of enlarged thought; the third of consecutive thought. The first is the maxim of a never passive reason. The tendency to such passivity, and therefore to heteronomy of the reason, is called prejudice.... As regards the second maxim of the mind, we are otherwise wont to call him limited (borné, the opposite of enlarged) whose talents attain to no great use (especially as regards intensity). But here we are not speaking of the faculty of cognition, but of the mode of thought which makes a purposive use thereof. However small may be the area or the degree to which a man's natural gifts reach, yet it indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others). The third maxim, viz. that of consecutive thought, is the most difficult to attain, and can only be attained by the combination of both the former and after the constant observance of them has grown into a habit. We may say that the first of these maxims is the maxim of understanding, the second of judgment, and the third of reason. 

[Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, J. H. Bernard, tr. Hafner Publishing Co. (New York: 1964), pp. 136-137.]

Admin Note

 The last few weeks have been fairly grueling, and the end of term even more grueling, and frankly my brain is a bit fried at this point. Things will continue to be light, for the most part.

The Fortnightly Book (Diu Crone, or The Crown) is mostly done, but the circumstances under which it had to be done were less than ideal, and I actually want to refresh my memory about parts. Given holiday scheduling, it therefore makes sense just to make it the first Fortnightly Book of 2025, so I should have it up January 4. That's the longest delay ever for a Fortnightly Book, but it was not practically avoidable.

Music on My Mind

 

We Are Messengers, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel".

One Hope, One End, All Others Sacrificed

 The Martyrs
by Archibald Lampman

Oh ye, who found in men's brief ways no sign
Of strength or help, so cast them forth, and threw
Your whole souls up to one ye deemed most true,
Nor failed nor doubted but held fast your line,
Seeing before you that divine face shine;
Shall we not mourn, when yours are now so few,
Those sterner days, when all men yearned to you,
White souls whose beauty made their world divine:
Yet still across life's tangled storms we see,
Following the cross, your pale procession led,
One hope, one end, all others sacrificed,
Self-abnegation, love, humility,
Your faces shining toward the bended head,
The wounded hands and patient feet of Christ.

Not Merely Intellectual

 Man sees meaning in the universe, but it is not merely intellectual. The symmetry and order and grace he observes in a rose or in a galaxy of stars is more than just intelligible; it is enjoyable. The symbols he uses to communicate meaning to others are not mere intellectual tools, but pleasurable ones also. He uses poetry and drama, painting and sculpture, music, all the various art and literary forms to express meaning in ways that are truly beautiful. In both nature and art we see unity in diversity, harmony and rhythm in the concrete, the splendor of order manifesting the truth and goodness and unity of material things, and symbolizing thereby man's search for Truth, Goodness, Beauty Itself.

[James Royce, Man and Meaning, McGraw-Hill (New York: 1969) p, 222.]

An Unexhausted Cup of Day

 Love’s Lantern
(For Aline) 
by Joyce Kilmer

 Because the road was steep and long
 And through a dark and lonely land,
God set upon my lips a song
 And put a lantern in my hand. 

 Through miles on weary miles of night
 That stretch relentless in my way
My lantern burns serene and white,
 An unexhausted cup of day. 

 O golden lights and lights like wine,
 How dim your boasted splendors are.
Behold this little lamp of mine;
 It is more starlike than a star!

HAIAFE

 Carlo Alvaro has recently argued for what he calls the "Heaven Ab Initio" Argument from Evil (HAIAFE):

1. As a perfect being, God’s goal is to create free-willed creatures that choose to love God and forever exist with him in a state of eternal bliss. 
2. An omnibenevolent God would want to create free-willed beings in a state of eternal bliss devoid of evil if he could and if evil and suffering were unnecessary. 
3. An omnipotent God can create free-willed beings directly in a spiritual state of eternal bliss devoid of evil.
4. However, God created physical creatures in a physical world that is full of unnecessary evil and suffering.
5. Therefore, God is either not omnipotent, not omniscient, or not perfectly good.

A minor problem with the argument as stated is that the conclusion includes omniscience despite the fact that the argument has no premise that requires it; perhaps it is taken to be assumed in (3). A more serious problem is that (1) tells us that God intends to create free-willed beings that choose to love God and forever exist with him in a state of eternal bliss, but choice drops out of the rest of the argument. That God can create free-willed beings directly in a spiritual state of eternal bliss does not necessarily imply that doing so is consistent with creating free-willed beings whose love of God is a choice. And, in fact, it's not difficult to find people who would deny it. 

It's easy enough to see where the main problem in the argument is, however; (1) is highly equivocal. To say that something is "God's goal" has the implicature of its being His only goal; and this is indeed how it has to be understood for the rest of the argument to work (it is necessary for the "if he could" in (2) and the "unnecessary" in (2) and (3)). But there is no particular reason to think that God has only one goal; almost no theist, perhaps no theist at all, thinks this is true. God is not an eternal-bliss-maximizing machine.  And the concept of "perfect being" certainly doesn't entail single-mindedness of goal, either. Thus the sense in which (1) works in the argument is not a sense that anyone thinks plausible; the sense in which it seems plausible is too weak for the argument.

The broader diagnosis for the argument, however, is the usual one with analytic arguments from evil; it violates the principle of remotion. How are we supposed to know any of these premises? It has to be by something like direct intuitive perception, or causal inference from effects, or trustworthy testimony (like divine revelation). Do we have direct intuitive perception of (1), (2), or (3)? We do not have it by direct intuitive perception of God, because if we did, God would have to be a perfect being who is omnipotent and 'omnibenevolent', and we would already know the argument is wrong. We do not have it by direct examination of our ideas of perfection, omnipotence, or 'omnibenevolence'; if the ideas were so adequate and trustworthy as to ground the premises, the most plausible explanation of this would again be God existing with these qualities. So do we get (1), (2), or (3) by causal inference? We do not; the argument from evil is itself an argument that the effects do not allow the kind of inference to a cause described by those premises. Do we then get (1), (2), or (3) by testimony? We don't get it directly; where is the alleged divine revelation that directly gives us (1), (2), or (3) without any qualification? One would have to argue that we get it indirectly from testimony, by inference, but we would need to know the particular testimony and the particular inferences in question; and it is pretty clear that most people are not inferring (1), (2), and (3), without any qualification or nuanced contextualization at all, as the most obvious interpretation of the Bible or the Koran. The premises look probable, but they are in fact pulled out of air, either by saying something like what theists might say but without the qualifications or outside of the specific context in which they might say it, or by saying something that sounds good but that we could not possibly know. Beyond some very generic claims that might be made on the basis of some causal inferences and some specific but very narrow and limited claims that might be made on the basis of divine testimony, we don't really know anything about divine motivations or plans, for the obvious reason that we are not 'omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent' beings, and therefore have only the haziest idea how such a being would view the world.

No Morality Without Metaphysics

 James Lenman, Morality without metaphysics, at "OUPblog":

This is the everyday world of moral common sense but there are always sceptical voices: perhaps it’s just nonsense. Can there really be truths, proper objective truths about what is and isn’t okay just the way there are objective truths about chemistry and geology? Some people argue that it makes no sense to suppose there are moral truths somehow baked into the constitution of the universe, radically independent of human beings and our moral experience, and so morality is nonsense. 

 I argue that while that rather grandiose metaphysical picture is indeed false, the best way of understanding our moral common sense presupposes nothing so fancy nor so fanciful. There need only be human beings jointly committed to a shared enterprise of living together in peaceful and orderly moral community regulated by norms of justice and civility that we can justify to each other in a shared currency of reasons shaped by and expressive of our passionate natures. It is not so complicated. For many good reasons, I don’t want to live in a world where we say it is okay to beat someone to death because you do not like the way they dress. Neither do you. So let’s not.

Oh, is that all it takes?  We don't need moral truths baked into the constution of the universe independent of us; instead, all we need baked into the universe independent of us is:

the conditions for the existence of human beings capable of justifying norms by reasons shaped by passions;
the conditions for the possibility of joint commitments to shared enterprises of living together;
the conditions for the possibility of peaceful and orderly moral community;
the conditions for the possibility of norms of justice and civility that are capable of being justified by reasons;
and the conditions for the ability of norms to regulate communities in some way.

I have to say, though, that that is starting to look an awful lot like "moral truths somehow baked into the constitution of the universe, radically independent of human beings and our moral experience." Whatever way you run things, either this is a universe structured so that moral and immoral behavior is really possible, or it is not. Carl Sagan famously said that if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Likewise, if you want to have a morality, you first must have the metaphysics for it. You need "baked into the constitution of the universe" moral agents capable of moral thinking about the possibility of moral community in light of moral norms in a way that can be rationally evaluated. A universe that allows these things is a universe that has at least some moral truths 'baked in', even if for some reason you want to insist that they are very general. And, of course, moral common sense tells us that we do in fact experience the universe to have these things, so your account of the universe had better allow it to do so -- not that the universe had to wait for your permission, of course.

The weird thing is that this is literally what Lenman goes on to say, in different words, since he thinks he's determined by the universe to value morality, and apparently all or most of the human race, too; apparently determined purely contingently, which gets a little confusing. But regardless, it's a universe that makes morality possible and in our case actual; and that's a metaphysical point worthy of some reflection.

Links of Note

 Currently a bit crushed under end-of-term grading; things will continue to be light, for the most part.

*Wen Chen & Xiaoxing Zhang, Perceiving God Like an Angel (PDF)

* Charles Journet, Palamism and Thomism, translated by Matthew Minerd.

* Ryan Miller, Aquinas's Science of Sacra Doctrina as a Platonic Techne (PDF)

* David Bannon, Mary Shelley's Grief, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Guoxiang Peng, Spiritual and Bodily Exercise: The Religious Significance of Zhu Xi's Reading Methods (PDF)

* Lydia Walker, What is decolonisation?, at "Aeon"

* Mark T. Nelson, Paley Before Hume: How Not to Teach the Design Argument (PDF)

* John Baez, Martianus Capella, at "Azimuth"

* Daniel J. Smith, How Is an Illusion of Reason Possible? The Division of Nothing in the Critique of Pure Reason

* Dan Williams, What is misinformation, anyway?, at "Conspicuous Cognition"

* David S. Oderberg, Action, passion, power

* Gregory B. Sadler, Anselm of Canterbury on Divine Power and What God Can't Do, at "Gregory B. Sadler -- That Philosophy Guy"

Music on My Mind

 

Life in 3d, "What Child Is This?"

The Quest that Was Fruitless and Long

 Apology
(For Eleanor Rogers Cox)
by Joyce Kilmer 

For blows on the fort of evil
 That never shows a breach,
For terrible life-long races
 To a goal no foot can reach,
For reckless leaps into darkness
 With hands outstretched to a star,
There is jubilation in Heaven
 Where the great dead poets are. 

 There is joy over disappointment
 And delight in hopes that were vain.
Each poet is glad there was no cure
 To stop his lonely pain.
For nothing keeps a poet
 In his high singing mood
Like unappeasable hunger
 For unattainable food. 

 So fools are glad of the folly
 That made them weep and sing,
And Keats is thankful for Fanny Brawne
 And Drummond for his king.
They know that on flinty sorrow
 And failure and desire
The steel of their souls was hammered
 To bring forth the lyric fire. 

 Lord Byron and Shelley and Plunkett,
 McDonough and Hunt and Pearse
See now why their hatred of tyrants
 Was so insistently fierce.
Is Freedom only a Will-o’-the-wisp
 To cheat a poet’s eye?
Be it phantom or fact, it’s a noble cause
 In which to sing and to die! 

 So not for the Rainbow taken
 And the magical White Bird snared
The poets sing grateful carols
 In the place to which they have fared;
But for their lifetime’s passion,
 The quest that was fruitless and long,
They chorus their loud thanksgiving
 To the thorn-crowned Master of Song.

Taste, Good and Bad

 Scott at "Astral Codex Ten" recently had a skeptically tending discussion of taste (in the good taste and bad taste sense), Friendly and Hostile Analogies for Taste. As the title suggests, it is mostly about analogies, which is very ironic -- I assume unintentionally -- since historically one of the roles that has often been assigned to taste is sorting out whether analogies are good or bad. That is, analogical reasoning has often been regarded as involving a component requiring judgments of good taste about the fittingness of the analogy -- you need good taste in analogies to reason well with them. And the argument of the post arguably fails from the starting gate because there seems no objective sense for 'friendly' and 'hostile' here. As has been recognized at least since Hume, almost everything is analogous to almost everything, just in different ways and in different degrees, so obviously taste is analogous to all of the analogues given here, and its being so has in itself no relevance to any evaluation ('friendly' or 'hostile') of taste itself. But the post does do a helpful job of raising some important questions for the subject. 

The post and the comments discussion jump around too much to say anything very unified about them, and actually giving my own view from scratch would be a rather more complex work than I presently have the time for. But a few points are worth noting that are relevant to improving not merely this discussion of taste but a lot of others as well; so take what follows to be just using this case as an example for points that are in fact worth considering in many other discussions.

(1) The discussion (not just in the post) suffers greatly from failing to distinguish at least three different senses of 'taste', which historically are usually distinguished as 'subjective taste', 'objective taste', and the 'faculty of taste' (sometimes called the 'sense of taste'). The 'faculty of taste' is our ability to sort things into categories like beautiful and ugly, reasonable and unreasonable, elegant and inelegant, striking and dull, funny and unfunny, and other such evaluative labels that are determined not by abstract proof but by judgment based on perception. 'Objective taste' is about things so evaluated (the 'objective' here has an old-fashioned meaning of  'having to do with the object of the faculty of taste, whatever that may be' rather than 'real') -- e.g., Jane Austen is a great novelist, sunsets are beautiful, such-and-such design is clumsy. 'Subjective taste' in this sense is concerned with indivudal use of the faculty of taste; it is related to personal preferences, but in practice people do not treat subjective taste as private in the way that some personal preferences are -- matters of taste are pretty much always shareable things.

(2) These distinctions are connected to what is generally called the paradox of taste -- people treat taste as non disputandum but very obviously dispute it, sometimes in the same breath. Subjective taste seems not disputable; but a very large portion of actual disputes people ever have are clearly about matters of objective taste. Indeed, there is an argument that could be made that almost all disputes that are not purely concerned with matters of memory or direct observation are about objective taste. We never stop disputing matters of taste; Scott can't even write a post skeptical of good taste and bad taste without arguing it as a matter of taste.

(3) That point is worth (a taste word) a little expansion. The arguments Scott gives in the post are in fact arguments based on judgments of taste. Here are some of the phrases that suggest that Scott uses:

mysterious
especially helpful
fraught
seems perverse
pointless
find it hard to believe
vaguely reasonable-sounding
fake
semi-fake
mostly be suspicious of

All of these are terms that can be associated with judgments of taste; some of them can be associated with other things, too, of course, but I think it can reasonably be argued that they are all in Scott's post capturing judgments of taste, either his own or, in some cases, of other people that his argument requires that we all be able to understand. The mysteriousness that Scott keeps accusing other accounts of taste as having, for instance, is not a structural feature of the accounts, but a negative judgment on the basis of his personal experience of adequacy and inadequacy in explanation. Obviously people who accept such accounts do not judge them to be mysterious in this way at all; Scott is effectively accusing people who put forward such accounts of having bad taste in explanations, just without using the words 'bad taste'. 

(4) It is somewhat peculiar (a taste-word) -- given some of the points made -- that there is no discussion of scientific taste (to use Alexander Gerard's term from An Essay on Taste). It is a common view that there is an essential taste-component to both experimental design and theoretical development. For instance, people will argue that becoming a competent experimentalist requires getting a feel for elegance of experimental design; people will argue similar things for mathematical theorizing in physics or reasoning in scientific inquiry. And these are clearly concerned with objective taste. I would suggest that Scott and his particular readers would find it easier to navigate these issues by actually looking at matters of taste that directly impinge on their own interests. One does not expect most readers of Astral Codex Ten to be usually very informed about how fashion designers and avant-garde architects actually cultivate their sense of taste and how they communicate and argue their judgments of taste with others of similar background. It seems more reasonable (i.e. it is in better taste with regard to reasoning) to start with kinds of taste about which one is more likely to be informed.

(5) Several of the arguments in the post and in the comments on the post seem clearly to suggest that taste is actually a social sense. This fits quite well with a major strand in historical theories of taste. For instance, John Stuart Mill holds that good taste is the cultivated ability to make usually accurate justifications about what people with the relevant background and familiarity with the experiences would generally prefer. As a utilitarian, Mill holds that the standard of taste is the greatest happiness principle -- beautiful objects, for instance, are those the experience of which increase overall happiness -- so it's not surprising that he thinks it has the social element, but he's not the only one. Kant, for instance, holds that judgments of taste are judgments of what is valid for human experience in general, requiring the sort of free play of imagination that makes it possible for us to take a higher stance than a selfish point of view.

But it's odd (another taste-word) to describe what are in fact very common and ordinary social interactions but to use derogatory terms like 'priesthood of semi-fake justifications'. This at least needs much more exploration if it's not to be mysterious (another taste word). If it's about how things are 'landing' in the general experience of a given social group, how are the justifications fake or semi-fake, rather than the way things are actually justified in this case? How is it a 'priesthood' in the derogatory sense to be a member of one's own social circle? Because that's what many of the descriptions would then amount to -- the 'friendly' and 'hostile' analogies are really then just positive and negative descriptions of 'being a member of a particular social group with its own shared interests and experiences'. 

An example. One could very well call Bay Area rationalists a 'priesthood covering themselves with a fig leaf of semi-fake justifications', and it would in fact describe how many people regard them, i.e., as faddish people trying to justify their taste in fads as rigorously rational. But the negativeness of the description would be purely rhetorical if it reduced to meaning that they were members of a particular social circle who often had a good sense of how other people in that social circle would judge things. Well, of course: that's how social interaction in a social circle tends to go. You would expect Bay Area rationalists often to have a good sense of how Bay Area rationalists would experience and judge things if they experienced them in a certain way; you would not find it surprising that this would change over time if the social structure and social interactions of Bay Area rationalists also changed over time; you would not be surprised to discover that some Bay Area rationalists were better at correctly anticipating what Bay Area rationalists in general would regard as good or bad, although you probably would be surprised if someone regarded as himself as a Bay Area rationalist and had no sense of how Bay Area rationalists in general would see things. 

And so on with any other social circle. Avant garde circles, for instance, arise when people who share intensive interest and familiarity with artistic techniques begin focusing on art that is specifically trying to express those techniques as means of originality. This is one reason why avant garde circles tend to denigrate 'kitsch', because 'kitsch' is the farthest pole from avant garde -- kitsch is art that wholly subordinates considerations of technique to the creation of typical (i.e., unoriginal) sentimental experiences like 'uplift' or 'excitement' or 'coziness'. Social circles with a taste for kitsch are social circles in which people don't really care about artistic techniques in themselves; thus they tend to denigrate the avant garde. But if taste is a matter of how a social circle experiences things, then when people make these kinds of judgments, there's nothing fake or semi-fake about them; they are describing how things actually are evaluatively received by the social circle. Their justifications are tendentious, but they are correct in their context: kitschy things rarely express technical originality very well; avant garde things are usually very poor sources of typical sentimental experiences. These are facts about human experience.

Of course, one might hold that taste is not about how things are received in the experiences of a social group. But then it would seem that you could only assess things like fakeness and semi-fakeness by looking at the reasoning people use in particular cases, not in the very general and generic way the post does. And it seems that one's assessment of accounts of taste is not going to be very good (another taste word) until one first determines this point. (Which is why historically people have usually started here, rather than trying to start with an overall assessment of all of taste on a general level in the Astral Codex Ten manner.)

Music on My Mind

 

Don McLean, "Oh My, What a Shame".

Links of Note

 * Matthew Minerd, The Providential Structuring of Humanity through the Spiritual Soul's Relation to the Body, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Carl Olsen interviews Bishop Erik Varden, at "Catholic World Report"

* Hui-Chieh Loy & Daryl Ooi, Conceptions of Knowledge in Classical Chinese Philosophy (PDF)

* James Ungureanu, Sir Isaac Newton as Religious Prophet, Heretic, and Reformer, "Church Life Journal"

* Ariel Melamedoff, Shepherd's Metaphysics of Emergence (PDF); I'm not sure emergence is the right concept to use here, but it's an interesting argument.

* Edward Feser, Hume's Trojan Horse, reviews Aaron Alexander Zubia's The Political Thought of David Hume, at "Claremont Review of Books"

* Caleb Cohoe, To What Extent Must Creatures Return to the One? (PDF)

* Cheryl Misak, The underground university, at "Aeon"

* Edith Hall, Who can claim Aristotle?, at "Aeon"

* Ben Page, Dis-positioning Euthyphro (PDF)

* Peter Mommsen, Educating for Freedom, at "Plough"

* Ryan Miller, Artifacts: Ontology as Easy as It Gets (PDF)

* Ed Condon, What if the Vatican actually goes broke?, at "The Pillar". At some point I think it has to be recognized that you can't have a globalized version of the kinds of services the Holy See began to provide in the late medieval period and Renaissance while doing it on the budget of a regional grocery store chain; either you need massively greater revenue or you just have to start admitting that you can't provide the services, however nice they might be. But this seems something that people have severe difficulty understanding; they demand that the Holy See do vast numbers of costly things and also that it have no money to do them. But the problem is in some sense baked in, and continues from its beginning -- most of what we think of as corruption of the Church in the Renaissance is a byproduct of people doing the same thing then. If you increase demands and but do not increase revenue concomitantly, you are incentivizing cheating on one or the other or both.

* Benjamin Randolph, ‘When will the wickedness of man have an end?’ The Problem of Divine Providence in Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments (PDF)

* Henrik Karlsson, Authenticity as Dialogue, at "Escaping Flatland"

* Seyyed Jaaber Mousavirad, Is Knowledge a Justified Belief? (PDF)

* David Yaffe, In Love We Disappear, on Leonard Cohen, at "Tablet"

Chrysorroas

 Today is the feast of St. Yanah ibn Sarjun, more commonly known as St. John Damascene, Doctor of the Church, who was sometimes nicknamed Chrysorroas, the Stream of Gold. From the De Fide (Book IV, Chapter 11):

Every action, therefore, and performance of miracles by Christ are most great and divine and marvellous: but the most marvellous of all is His precious Cross. For no other thing has subdued death, expiated the sin of the first parent , despoiled Hades, bestowed the resurrection, granted the power to us of contemning the present and even death itself, prepared the return to our former blessedness, opened the gates of Paradise , given our nature a seat at the right hand of God, and made us the children and heirs of God , save the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. For by the Cross all things have been made right. So many of us, the apostle says, as were baptized into Christ, were baptized into His death, and as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ. Further Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.  Lo! The death of Christ, that is, the Cross, clothed us with the enhypostatic wisdom and power of God. And the power of God is the Word of the Cross, either because God's might, that is, the victory over death, has been revealed to us by it, or because, just as the four extremities of the Cross are held fast and bound together by the bolt in the middle, so also by God's power the height and the depth, the length and the breadth, that is, every creature visible and invisible, is maintained. 

 This was given to us as a sign on our forehead, just as the circumcision was given to Israel: for by it we believers are separated and distinguished from unbelievers. This is the shield and weapon against, and trophy over, the devil. This is the seal that the destroyer may not touch you, as says the Scripture. This is the resurrection of those lying in death, the support of the standing, the staff of the weak, the rod of the flock, the safe conduct of the earnest, the perfection of those that press forwards, the salvation of soul and body, the aversion of all things evil, the patron of all things good, the taking away of sin, the plant of resurrection, the tree of eternal life.

The Glory of Celestial Mirth

 As Winds That Blow Against a Star
(For Aline)
by Joyce Kilmer 

Now by what whim of wanton chance
 Do radiant eyes know sombre days?
And feet that shod in light should dance 
 Walk weary and laborious ways? 

 But rays from Heaven, white and whole,
 May penetrate the gloom of earth;
And tears but nourish, in your soul,
 The glory of celestial mirth. 

 The darts of toil and sorrow, sent
 Against your peaceful beauty, are
As foolish and as impotent
 As winds that blow against a star.

Joyce Kilmer is best known for his poem, "Trees" ("I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree...."), perhaps the most extraordinarily popular poem to be intensely (and, I think, understandably but nonetheless unfairly) hated by many poets, but in fact he has a wide and diverse poetic oeuvre, usually characterized by deliberate restraint in the use of poetic devices that gives his work an almost conversational, straight-to-the-point feel even when he is being quite clever. His poetry is often an excellent lesson in just how much you can do with the simple. For about five years -- from the publication of "Trees" to his death by a German sniper's bullet on July 30, 1918 at the age of 31-- he was arguably the most popular Catholic poet writing in English in the entire world, and certainly the most popular in America. During World War I, he was known for volunteering for dangerous military intelligence assignments and was highly respected for his coolness under pressure; he is buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery in Picardy, France.

The Disposition to Love Something Apart from Intention to Use It

 A propensity to wanton destruction of what is beautiful in inanimate nature (spiritus destructionis) is opposed to a human being's duty to himself; for it weakens or uproots that feeling in him which, though not of itself moral, is still a disposition of sensibility that greatly promotes morality or at least prepares the way for it: the disposition, namely, to love something (e.g., beautiful crystal formations, the indescribable beauty of plants) even apart from any intention to use it. 

 [Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, Book I, Chapter II, Episodic Section, sect. 17, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, Gregor, tr. & ed. Cambridge University Press (New York: 1996) p. 564.]

Two Modes of Sacramental Efficacy

 The sacraments work in two ways. One way is by actually being administered. The other way is by being desired. The reason for this is that the sacraments are instruments of God's justifying mercy, and God sees the human heart....Hence, even though natural things have no effect without being presently employed, the sacraments have an effect just by being desired. But they have their fullest effect when the sacraments are actually administered.

[Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet IV, Question 7, Article 1, from Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions, Nevitt & Davies, trs., Oxford University Press (New York: 2020) p. 352. While the immediate topics are baptism and penance, Aquinas explicitly states later that this applies to the other major sacraments.]

In Longest, Darkest Nights Take Rest and Ease

 December
by Helen Hunt Jackson

The lakes of ice gleam bluer than the lakes
Of water 'neath the summer sunshine gleamed:
 Far fairer than when placidly it streamed,
 The brook its frozen architecture makes,
 And under bridges white its swift way takes.
 Snow comes and goes as messenger who dreamed
 Might linger on the road; or one who deemed
 His message hostile gently for their sakes
 Who listened might reveal it by degrees.
 We gird against the cold of winter wind
 Our loins now with mighty bands of sleep,
 In longest, darkest nights take rest and ease,
 And every shortening day, as shadows creep
 O'er the brief noontide, fresh surprises find.

Dashed Off XXVII

This begins the notebook that was begun in September 2023.

***

 You should never discard the teachings of your forebears, although you may find new context that sheds a different light on them and in learning from them you may develop them in different and unexpected directions.

John 8:25 Vulgate: "Dicebant ergo et tu quis es dixit eis Iesus principium quia et loquor vobis."
-- "They therefore said to him, Who are you? Jesus said to them, The beginning, who also speak to you."

"To be at ease is to be unsafe." Newman

Serious dialogue presupposes either extensive experience or study; this is often forgotten in calls for 'dialogue'. 

All in the Church are called to holiness and many in the Church will often be corrupt.

"The infinite of the human mind is its dominion over the totality of abstractible quantity, i.e., whatever quantity is abstractible, is abstractible by mind. This dominion of the human mind is itself embraced in a large, divine intellectual order in which it participates." Chastek

A fact is a feat; establishing a fact involves accomplishing a feat.

facts as things that show truths (sometimes defeasibly or erroneously)
'fact' as rhetorically presupposing a kind of trust
shared facts as elements of common ground of discourse
facts as truths relative to an agent's framing of them by means reliable for discovering truth

To live your authentic self you must first have an authentic self, a self that is genuinely capable of an authenticity appropriate to living.

Ethos is a more powerful persuader than logos.

"Everything that changes does so in some respect, and by something, and into something, and out of something." Aristotle

"Only a being who loves man and desires his happiness is an object of human worship, of religion." Feuerbach --- This is certainly false as an anthropological claim.

In the long run, art is always driven by sex, aggression, or contemplation.

the alchemical laboratory of argument

Much of the work of love consists in mending.

"An eristic argument is a deduction from premises which seem to be endoxa, but are not really, as well as merely apparent deduction from real and apparent endoxa." Aristotle
-- Alexander takes this seeming-but-not endoxa to be an indication of a premise that is in some sense not thought through -- stopping to think about them easily shows them false, whereas real endoxa are not easily rejected even when false.

endoxa as playing a key role in the cooperative nature of reason

The parts of a system are somethings with habitudes or modes of being appropriate to systemic composition, namely, information and materialization.

Counterfactual conditionals as statemetns about systems of causes.

Knowledge is power in teh sense that lack of knowledge undermines power.

Aurvandilsta
-- Aurvandil in the Prose Edda was carried by Thor in a basket out of the north, the sign of which is that one of Aurvandil's toes, sticking out of the basket, froze and was thrown by Thor into the sky.
-- in OE there is a gloss associating earendel with Latin 'jubar' = radiance, heavenly beam
-- one of the few cases in which a star definitely has a mythic role in Norse myth (as opposed to incidental mentions)

Propaganda is more effective with people suspicious of everything, not less.

One point at which aesthetics and ethics converge is the badness of desecration.

Graveness, primarily and simply speaking, depends primarily on intended object, whereas secondary graveness depends primarily on harm; but are to be considered in asssessing sins and their gravity. Both blasphemy and murder are grave, both need punishment, but blasphemy is more grave in itself, and murder causes more actual harm.

the imitation of saints as a form of the imitation of Christ (1 Cor 11:1-2)

The world thinks it is being magnanimous in letting Christians act according to their principles as long as doing so is consistent with the world's principles.

When there is a trade-off, it does not always follow that the trade-off is one-for-one.

"All knowledge of real being is an interpretation of action." W. Norris Clarke

"The world recognizes God only in order to be able to kill him -- and God renders the world even this ultimate service." Marion
"Hell imprisons the soul in itself."

A flaw in many theories of knowledge is that they do not plausibly capture the notion of coming to know something better.

Every profession has active, contemplative, and mixed modes.

"The advantages which are derived from machinery and manufactures seem to arise principally from three sources: *The addition which they make to human power.--The economy they produce of human time.--The conversion of substances apparently common and worthless into valuable products.*" Babbage
"Nothing is more remarkable, and yet less uenxpected, than the perfect identity of things manufactured by the same tool."

In certain matters, like sex and worship, people often have difficulty distinguishing aesthetics and ethics.

language as an instrument for making intelligible

Every kind of apprehension is an apprehension of being.

"Freedom renders possible all that is possible as the horizon of possibilization." Marion
"Only love, 'which bears all' (1 Corinthians 13:7), can bear with its gaze Love's excess."

The purpose of apologetics is not persuasion but provision of argued defense for those who demand an account.

Natural love by its nature yearns for divine love.

All genuine lived experience is of something not itself.

The development of a human person always presupposes other people.

intentionality as the possibility of love

We first learn about others through experiencing them as needed and as necessitating.

the Church as a divine society within which a human society forms

object tracking --> subitizing --> groupings of up to four elements --> sliding counting
object tracking + numerosity estimation --> (by adduction) basic arithmetic

currency : money :: grammar : language :: state : civil society

Free societies cannot be imposed from above; they must be grown and inherited.

person as universal vantage point

the divine image participating in the divine society within the divine providence

communication as the intelligibility of active power

If it's not worth having more like it, more inspired by it, it is not great art.

"Action, by the very fact that we do not originate or control it, but receive it to some degree passively, 'suffer' its influence, and are controlled or determined by it willy-nilly, is the natural sign of the real presence of another-than-self. It then at the same time, because it is structured action, reveals to us the essence or nature of the agent precisely as *this kind of actor on me* (and subsequently on others, as our observation widens)." W. Norris Clarke
"To be is to self-communicate; to know is to pick up within oneself the self-communication of being."

Phenomena can only be conceived as phenomena by being conceived as manifesting something more fundamental.

The key question whenever anyone talks about "loving, committed relationship" is "committed to what?" In general, one should never stop at "commitment"; in the specifics, people too often are committed to very different things.

the desert adorns the cactus with charm

The legal system participates the real world, receiving reality in a partial manner, one that does not capture every aspect of the real but that involves aspects of the real.

The common ground on which legal system meets legal system is reason itself.

Baptism presupposes the charity of Christ and the Church in such a way that through baptism we participate that charity.

In argument as in chess, when you see a good move, look for a better one.

Fatherhood and motherhood are not constituted deontically, although they have deontic implications for us, and are rooted more deeply than the obligations associated with them. Likewise, parental love is not adequately or even primarily characterized by any parental obligations being more fundamental in importance than they are.

Human beings are remarkable in that we are always figthing ourselves.

personation (significance) of another (object) to another (interpretant)
-- personation as a specialized form of sign-relation
-- agency as instrumental (ministerial) causation presupposing personation
-- personation is a case of symbolic delomic legisign

"The true body of Christ, and those things that are done in it, are figures of the mystical body of Christ, and of the things that are done in that." Aquinas (QQ 7.6.2 ad 5)

"The chance occurrence is remarkable, when it appears to happen by design." Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

a tree is a river-country flowing up to the sky

Every word is in a way all of language.

"Genuine mediation is the character of a Sign." Peirce
"Every triadic relationship involves three dyadic relationship and three monadic characters; just as every dyadic action involves two monadic characters."

Corruption of the best being the worst, rule of law corrupts into something very nasty.

The Grateful-That Kind of Gratitude (Re-Post)

 As today is Thanksgiving, here is a (slightly revised) re-post from 2019.

*****************

One kind of expression we find when people talk about gratitude is the grateful-to kind of expression, sometimes called prepositional gratitude:

John is grateful to Mary for her song.

Another kind of expression about gratitude is the grateful-that kind of expression, sometimes called propositional gratitude:

John is grateful that things went so well.

In his SEP article on Gratitude, Tony Manela gives the consensus on which philosophers discussing gratitude have converged:

A consensus is emerging that analyses of the concept of gratitude should be concerned only with the phenomenon expressed by the prepositional sense of the term (Carr 2013; Gulliford, Morgan et al. 2013; Manela 2016a; Roberts and Telech 2019). The consensus is based on the observation that the propositional sense of “gratitude” is more or less identical to another concept: the concept called appreciation or gladness. To say that I am grateful that it did not rain on my wedding day, for instance, is just to say that I am glad it did not. To say that I am grateful that my cancer went into remission is just to say I am glad that it did and that I appreciate the extra life and health that state of affairs entails.

This does indeed seem to be the current consensus, but a consensus of philosophers is not a flock of homing pigeons, and I think this is a case in which consensus has converged on the wrong idea, for wrong reasons, to the detriment of the field. Gratitude-that is a form of gratitude. It is not equivalent to appreciation or gladness, which is an identifiably distinct response. Propositional gratitude is related to prepositional gratitude as indefinite to definite, or incomplete to complete. Obviously these get into a number of different issues; here I only give a few points related to them.

I. To say that I am grateful that it did not rain on my wedding day is very different from saying that I am glad that it did not rain on my wedding day, and what is more to the point, feeling grateful that it did not rain is a distinct feeling from feeling glad that it did not rain. One way we distinguish feelings of this sort is by their families of characteristic acts, and the characteristic acts of gratefulness and gladness are different. If I am glad it did not rain, the natural and normal way to express this is well known to everyone -- smiling, or laughing, or celebrating. Gladness disposes to celebration, in a broad sense of the term, even if this remains somewhat inchoate or does not fully develop. But if I am grateful it did not rain, I am saying that the feeling I have is disposing me to act graciously in a way that culminates when developed in thanking, and my expressions of being grateful that it did not rain will be related to thanking, even if they do not result in full-blown giving of thanks; for instance, I might take on myself a special responsibility to make sure this good fortune does not go to waste. We don't generally think of gladness or appreciation as themselves generating responsibilities, but being grateful that something has happened is very often associated with at least a basic kind of responsibility-taking. Being glad that you are alive is a great thing; but being grateful that you are alive calls for responsibility and action.I may be glad that a rock is in a given location, but this does not suggest any particular course of action with respect to the rock; if the rock is about to be destroyed I may be disappointed, but any protest will be based on the feeling the rock's being there is giving me. If I am grateful that the rock is in that location and the rock is about to be destroyed, however, I will have greater motivation to do something to stop its destruction; my protest, moreover, will not be based on my feeling of gratitude but on the reason why I am grateful for its being there.

We may say the same of appreciation. I can appreciate the trees being colorful, but if I am grateful that the trees are colorful, this suggests some deeper reason than talk of appreciation suggests.

Further, suppose that I say I am glad or appreciate that such-and-such happened, and then discover that someone arranged it. I might then be grateful to them, but I also might not; it depends on what it is. Appreciation or being glad about something may be a reason to be grateful to someone who arranges it, but it is not always so. But if I am grateful that such-and-such happened, and discover that someone arranged it, this in and of itself is always at least some reason to be grateful to them; my gratefulness seems then to find an object, my disposition to thank now has an occasion to become active in thanking specifically. There might be something impeding, it might not be universal -- but the move from one seems more straightforward with propositional gratitude than with appreciation.

There are, of course, relations among these things. For instance, one of the responsibilities that the gratefulness-that kind of gratitude might lead me to take on is deliberate appreciation; that something regularly makes me glad may be a reason to be grateful that it does so. But they are not the same; even at first glance there seems room to make a distinction between them.

II. Manela argues the identity of propositional gratitude and appreciation at greater length in his article, "Gratitude and Appreciation". He does consider there the proposal that being grateful that something happened involves a tendency to return just like being grateful to someone for something. ('Tendency to return' is perhaps not the right phrase for the thankful tendency actually associated with gratitude, but whether or not there is some better phrase will likely not change much.) His response to it is that while being grateful to someone for something entails some such tendency to return, but cases of being grateful that something occurred do not. If, to take a somewhat simpler example than he uses, John is not grateful that it did not rain on his wedding day, we would not call him an ingrate. I'm not sure that this would always be true, but let's assume it. How is it really different from many cases of being grateful to someone for something? We are benefited by people all the time; in many of these cases we would take gratitude to be a good response but not necessarily regard someone as an ingrate if they did not feel grateful. (Indeed, many of our gratitude practices are designed to function even if they are not backed by feelings, but only the abstract recognition of the value of a properly grateful response.) 

Likewise, if we say that John is grateful that it did not rain on his wedding day, but never makes a return, we would not say he was an ingrate. But it's been noted since Seneca writing on benefits that gratitude does not always require return in a robust sense; sometimes a thankful spirit ready for an opportunity (which depending on the circumstances may not ever come) suffices. And there are many circumstances in which we might be grateful to someone but have no way to render return. For instance, I might really need some kind of information, and find that someone did it a hundred years ago, and feel gratitude toward them for doing it. No return directly to them is possible. We might then as a substitute simply appreciate them in memory, or, recognizing that no direct return is possible, we might just leave it at our thankful feeling toward them. When we render grateful returns, we often decide what is an appropriate return on the basis of features of the benefactor or their situation; sometimes those features render return impossible or moot or merely mental. This is particularly relevant here. Since being grateful that something occurred does not have a benefactor directly in view, the kind of thing that would normally specify a particular way to render return is not there, so you often wouldn't expect anything definite. The obvious way to think of it is to think that gratitude-that is generally a sort of gratitude that lacks what is required for a complete grateful expression.

(It is not especially relevant to my argument here, but Manela also has some responses to positions arguing that some of the features he attributes to prepositional gratitude are not strictly required; for instance, the idea that perhaps you can be grateful to inanimate objects. He tries to dismiss this as being due to anthropomorphism, but as far as I can see, this is simply irrelevant. OK, suppose it's due to anthropomorphism; it's still the case that someone is grateful to an inanimate object. Manela tries to conclude that it needs to be an agent to be warranted, but warranted or not, it's still an actual case of being grateful to an inanimate object -- and he doesn't actually establish that it is unwarranted, because he has not established that anthropomorphism is unwarranted. There is in fact a case of undeniable prepositional gratitude that almost always involves some degree of anthropomorphism already -- for instance, if you are grateful to a dog for saving you from a fire. Since this is an animate case, I take it that Manela would allow it, but we can hardly help anthropomorphizing animals, and there seems to be no problem with that, at least to a moderate degree, for most practical purposes. And, as I've noted before, on some quite respectable account of emotional expression in art, the natural world, even inanimate objects and scenes are rationally counted as genuinely expressive even though we know that no actual emotion is expressed, due to sharing features with human expressions, so some things that would likely be counted by Manela as anthropomorphism would on those views be rational and warranted. Manela seems to think that there is some fact about gratefulness that floats away from our actual cases of gratefulness, so that we can dismiss some of the latter as not 'real' gratefulness. But this seems entirely arbitrary,and runs the risk of falsifying the real responses of people by pretending their responses are some abstract scheme of what he assumes to be a more rational way to respond.)

All of this is just Manela arguing that there are significant differences between the two, but he also argues specifically that gratefulness-that is just appreciation. His argument mostly just consists of him identifying general similarities and doubting that there could be a distinction between the two. I've already questioned whether propositional gratitude is really unconnected to a tendency to return in the way appreciation is, but let's assume that Manela is right here. There are others, as I've also noted: Being grateful that something is the case is often in practice associated with responsibility in ways that mere appreciation is not; they seem to be related to motivation differently; gratitude-that seems to flow immediately into gratitude-to when a benefactor is discovered, whereas appreciation does not seem to have the same natural flow. And most importantly, we regularly express it in terms more appropriate to gratitude than mere appreciation.

III. Manela tells a number of stories to try to motivate his account of the differences between prepositional and propositional gratitude. Of course, in a sense all that anyone does when they tell stories like this is to try to convince someone that an idea makes a kind of narrative sense, which is a weak, albeit sometimes important, foundation. We can point to a number of things in actual practice that need to be taken seriously. For instance, the fact that we use the word 'grateful' at all in this context is relevant. Nor is it the only gratitude-relevant word we use. Consider the word 'thankfully': "I went to his house and, thankfully, he was there." That's very definitely a gratitude-expression, and that's very definitely describing propositional, not prepositional, gratitude. People who are expressing propositional gratitude will sometimes say things like, "It was a gift from the gods", despite not believing in gods, or "The fates have looked kindly on me", despite not thinking that there are fates. And people expressing propositional gratitude will sometimes verbalize it with nothing more than "Thank you!" despite not speaking to anyone particular. Now some of these may be linguistic relics of cases where people were actually expressing prepositional gratitude (to gods or God), and Manela in fact attempts to say precisely this, but it again is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that people who are definitely not expressing prepositional gratitude still take these comments and interjections to be appropriate verbal expressions of their experience. And there are lots of them. This in itself suggests that people are recognizing some close kinship between prepositional and propositional gratitude, one that they do not necessarily associate with gladness or appreciation.

Manela wants to say that all of this is conflation; this response should be seen as what it is -- an attempt to take a vast quantity of evidence against his view and pretend that it is not really there, as if vast portions of the human race were unable to use the word 'gratitude', and indeed most other gratitude-expressions, correctly. It's entirely reasonable for people to respond to his arguments with nothing more than, "We know what we mean, and we are using the word because it is appropriate; stop calling us liars or fools."

IV. It is widely recognized that we can have a spontaneous impulse to gratitude in the face of some things that we find beneficial, prior to consideration of a benefactor. William Whewell, for instance, says, "While enjoying the bounties of nature, the sentiment of gratitude spontaneously rises up in the unperverted heart." He is very clear that this sentiment is prior to concluding that there is any benefactor. And, as he notes, this is insisted upon by Kant, too: Kant holds that, in a moral state of mind, faced with beauty, we can naturally feel a need to be grateful, which becomes gratitude. That is, the origin of the gratitude is not direct consideration of benefactors, but a spontaneous feeling, perhaps arising from another feeling (like moral sentiment) or a recognition of an analogy (the world seems like a gift), and this in itself results in gratitude. Both Whewell and Kant hold that there is a relation to benefactors here, but it lies in the fact that when we feel gratitude, we look for a benefactor. The gratitude comes first; and then in light of that we recognize someone as benefactor, or else suppose or posit that there is a benefactor. Both Whewell and Kant think this is a reasonable way to follow through on our spontaneous impulse of gratitude. But the gratitude would be there even if the situation were more like that depicted by Marvin Gardner in The Flight of Peter Fromm, i.e., feeling gratitude even while concluding that there was no benefactor at all, because it did not first depend on identifying a benefactor.

V. It makes sense to hold that gratitude-that is an inchoate or incompletely formed version of the kind of gratitude that we get in gratitude-to. I've already noted the ease with which gratitude-that often flows into gratitude-to. Manela focuses on cases where you can have gratitude-that without gratitude-to, but this would not be surprising; nothing requires that the process always complete. Indeed, in some of Manela's cases it would be common for people to assume that the character is deliberately blocking or impeding, or at least not removing an impediment, to completion, and thus is blameworthy. It would make sense of why Whewell and Kant think being grateful that something is the case leads us naturally to look for a benefactor to which we could be grateful, and why Gardner thinks that it could raise that temptation even if it is resistible. It would make sense of people who don't believe in gods, or fates, or God, still think it natural to express their gratitude-that in these terms, and the durability of that language. It would make sense of the occasional cases in which people do try to render some kind of return, even if purely symbolic or by a kind of role-playing, given their propositional gratitude.

Whewell on the Spontaneous Impulse to Gratitude

 It may be observed in the second place, that the natural sentiment of Gratitude conducts us to God. To be grateful for benefits is the instinctive prompting of our nature. To receive kindness, favors, benefits from our fellow-beings, and yet to feel no emotion of gratitude, is by common consent to be a monster. 

 Now we are surrounded with blessings which we cannot refer to our fellow-beings. Existence, with innumerable capacities and sources of good, is and must be felt by us to be a gift. While enjoying the bounties of nature, the sentiment of gratitude spontaneously rises up in the unperverted heart. "In moments when the sensibility of our moral feelings is most acute and active; when we are surrounded by nature arrayed in all her beauties, and feel the calm, serene enjoyment of existence; we feel within us the conviction that we ought to be grateful to some being for these blessings." 

 [William Whewell, "The Moral Argument for the Existence of God", On the Foundations of Morals, (pp. 140-141). The quotation is from a somewhat paraphrastic translation of part of the Kant passage in the previous post, found in S. S. Schmucker's translation of An Elementary Course of Biblical Theology (Book II, Part 1) by T. C. Storr and C. C. Flatt; Whewell's entire discussion of the moral argument, of which the sentiment of gratitude is only one part, seems heavily influenced by the broadly Kantian arguments of Storr and Flatt, which in turn derive from broader Lutheran discussions of Kantian philosophy.]

Kant on Sentiments of Gratitude, Obedience, and Submission to God

 Suppose the case of a man at the moment when his mind is disposed to a moral sensation. If surrounded by the beauties of nature, he is in a state of restful, serene enjoyment of his being, he feels a want, viz. to be grateful for this to some being or other. Or if another time he finds himself in the same state of mind when pressed by duties that he can and will only adequately discharge by a voluntary sacrifice, he again feels in himself a want, viz. to have thus executed a command and obeyed a Supreme Lord. Or, again; if he has in some heedless way transgressed his duty, but without becoming answerable to men, his severe self-reproach will speak to him with the voice of a judge to whom he has to give account. In a word, he needs a moral Intelligence, in order to have a Being for the purpose of his existence, which may be, conformably to this purpose, the cause of himself and of the world. It is vain to assign motives behind these feelings, for they are immediately connected with the purest moral sentiment, because gratitude, obedience, and humiliation (submission to deserved chastisement) are mental dispositions that make for duty; and the mind which is inclined towards a widening of its moral sentiment here only voluntarily conceives an object that is not in the world in order where possible to render its duty before such an one.

[Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, section 86, Remark.]

Like a Majestic River

 The only true basis of national prosperity lies in a constitution founded on just principles -- in just laws -- in an educated, moral people, who will do and defend the right -- in good magistrates, who will do justly at any expense; who will flee a bribe as they would the coiled reptile. When, with these, the people are educated into simple, prudent, temperate habits, the prosperity of a nation will flow on like a majestic river, which gathers strength and depth as it flows. A nation with such a constitution -- with such laws and magistrates -- with an intelligent, moral, simple people, will be united at home -- will be respected abroad. It knows its rights, and will assert them; it is just, and will withhold no right from others. Doing justly by all nations, it will be respected by all. There will be no cause of resorting to the last argument of kings; and when that argument is rendered necessary, it will have the sympathy of the world, and will be sustained by the united energies of its citizens. The very things that tend to the prosperity of an individual, or a family, are those which form the true basis of national prosperity. 

Nicholas Murray, American Principles on National Prosperity: A Thanksgiving Sermon Preached in the First Presbyterian Church, Elizabethtown, November 23, 1854.

Studiousness

 The act of a cognitive power is commanded by the appetitive power, which moves all the powers, as stated above (I-II:09:1). Wherefore knowledge regards a twofold good. One is connected with the act of knowledge itself; and this good pertains to the intellectual virtues, and consists in man having a true estimate about each thing. The other good pertains to the act of the appetitive power, and consists in man's appetite being directed aright in applying the cognitive power in this or that way to this or that thing. And this belongs to the virtue of studiousness. Wherefore it is reckoned among the moral virtues.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.166.2 ad 2.]

Clemens Romanus

 Today is the feast of St. Clement I of Rome, Bishop and Apostolic Father. He is traditionally thought to be the Clement mentioned by Paul in Philippians 4:3 and was the third bishop of Rome after Peter, but sometimes is treated as the first; at least according to one way of reading the tradition, while he was the third bishop of Rome assisting under Peter, he was the first bishop of Rome to be the actual successor of Peter, by Peter's own wishes. In any case, he is an important figure for the transition from first-century to second-century Christianity.

From 1 Clement 55:3-56:2 (perhaps worth noting that 'manly' in ancient Greek is exactly the same word as 'courageous'):

Many women being strengthened through the grace of God have performed many manly deeds. The blessed Judith, when the city was beleaguered, asked of the elders that she might be suffered to go forth into the camp of the aliens. So she exposed herself to peril and went forth for love of her country and of her people which were beleaguered; and the Lord delivered Holophernes into the hand of a woman. To no less peril did Esther also, who was perfect in faith, expose herself, that she might deliver the twelve tribes of Israel, when they were on the point to perish. For through her fasting and her humiliation she entreated the all seeing Master, the God of the ages; and He, seeing the humility of her soul, delivered the people for whose sake she encountered the peril. Therefore let us also make intercession for them that are in any transgression, that forbearance and humility may be given them, to the end that they may yield not unto us, but unto the will of God. For so shall the compassionate remembrance of them with God and the saints be fruitful unto them, and perfect. Let us accept chastisement, whereat no man ought to be vexed, dearly beloved. The admonition which we give one to another is good and exceeding useful; for it joineth us unto the will of God.

Praise and Thanks and Love

Thanksgiving, 1863
by Mary Elizabeth Blake 

God of the day and night!
 Whose presence dwells, serene and lovely still,
Above all waves of human good or ill,
 In darkness as in light! 

When summer skies are fair,
 When Peace and Plenty reign above the land,
The weakest soul can feel Thy guiding hand,
 And read Thy mercy there; 

 But when the tempest's might
 Sullenly bursts above the faded flowers,
 And all that smiled upon this earth of ours
 Is dashed from vale and height, --

It needs a stronger trust,
 Beyond the wrecks of hope and light to see
 A purer life made beautiful by Thee,
 Whose ways are ever just! 

We do not weakly fear
 Beneath the roughest blast of Winter's breath,
 Nor shrink before his icy calm of death
 When all is dark and sere; 

 We know he holds the Spring;
 Till flinging back its robe of ice and showers
The sunshine laughs on bees and buds and flowers,
 And bids its wild birds sing. 

 Yet do our spirits faint,
 When, rolling on the blood-stained cloud of war,
 We catch the shadow of the strife afar,
 And smell the battle taint, 

 Forgetting, in our pain,
 The Lord of Hosts, who strikes from scenes like these
 The grandest chords of human destinies,
 And makes all bright again! 

 Teach us O Lord! to see
 With the same faith that laughs the clouds to scorn, 
Past the dark night, and to the coming morn
Made glad and fresh by Thee! 

 So shall our anthem sweet,
 Of Praise and Thanks and Love, swell glad on high,
 And pierce beyond the clouds of soul and sky
To seek Thy blessèd feet.

Parresian eis ten Eisodon ton Hagion

 Therefore, brothers, having boldness with respect to entering the holy places in the blood of Jesus, by which he consecrated for us a newly-made and living way through the veil, which is his flesh, as well as a great priest over God's house, we should approach with true heart in complete confidence of faith, hearts aspersed away from wicked conscience and body washed with pure water. We should hold tight the profession of hope, for faithful is the promised one. And we should consider one another so as to stimulate devotion and fine work, not deserting our assembly, according to the habit of some, but encouraging, and much the more as you see the day draw near.

If we willingly sin after receiving discernment of truth, sacrifice for sins no longer remains, but only a frightful waiting for judgment and fiery heat about to devour those who are opposed. Anyone violating the law of Moses dies without compassion on two or three witnesses; how much worse do you think will he deserve punishment, that one who has trampled down the Son of God and who has thought common the blood of the contract, by which he was consecrated, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace? For we remember the one who said, Mine the vindication, I will repay; and again, The Lord will judge his people. Frightful, falling into the living God's hands.

Remember the former days in which, having been illuminated, you survived a great, tormenting struggle; yes, through both reproaches and afflictions having been exposed to view, and having become comrades of those who endured. For you sympathized with those who were bound, and the robbing of your possessions you received with joy, knowing that you had nobler and lasting property. Therefore do not throw overboard your boldness, which has a great repayment. For you have need of steadfastness so that, God's will being done, you may carry off the promise.

[Hebrews 10:19-35, my rough translation. The word for 'boldness' usually means 'outspokenness', but here certainly means something broader. As with the previous passage, 'approach' has the suggestion of approaching an altar for sacrifice, i.e., worship. 'Contract', of course, is usually translated as 'covenant', and rightly so, but it's worth sometimes preventing the idea from being encrusted with the sacred tones of the latter word, which can make us forget that a covenant is in fact literally a contract, albeit in this case one sealed by sanctifying blood and enforced by divine authority.

One important feature of this whole passage is that it insists, quite strongly, that God is terrifying (phoberon); this point is presented as essential, in fact, to understanding the significance of the boldness with which we can approach through the blood of Christ and baptism. Anyone who denies the former will not understand or properly appreciate the latter.

This passage is one of the several passages in the New Testament that discusses what later became known as the theological virtues: faith (v. 22), hope (v. 23), and love (v. 24, here translated as 'devotion'). (The other passages are from the Paul's letters, making this one of the things that the epistle to the Hebrews shares with the Pauline works with which it has historically often been associated.) Note that the way they are presented here, they capture essentially the whole structure of Christian life: we approach God in faith, we hope in Christ who is faithful, and we come together to excite each other to love and beautiful deeds.]

Links of Note

 * Matthew K. Minerd, The Influence of John of St. Thomas Upon the Thought of Jacques Maritain (PDF)

* Gregory DiPippo, The Feast of St. Brice, St. Martin's Bad Disciple, at "New Liturgical Movement"

* Ryan Miller, Looking for Levels (PDF)

* Mario Hubert, The Nature of Natural Laws, on different conceptions of the laws of nature, at "Aeon"

* David Bannon, Joan of Arc's Grief, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Robert Reimer, Play as an Autotelic Activity: A Defense (PDF)

* Max Wade, The Dance of Reality: Plotinus and the Activity of the Whole, at the JHI Blog

* Ruth Boeker, Thomas Reid on Promises and Social Operations of the Human Mind

* Brendan de Kenessey, Ethics and the Limits of Armchair Sociology (PDF)

* Kevin Schmiesing, Cause for Conflict: The Catholic Church and Property Rights in American Law, at "Catholic World Report"

* Nico Fassino, The surprising history of the Children's Mass, at "The Pillar"

* Tyler Colby Re, The Art of Work in Kant's Critique of Judgment (PDF)

* Matthew Miller, Empty Words: Against Artificial Language, at "Mere Orthodoxy"

* Christopher Shannon, Etienne Gilson and post-conciliar theology, reviews Florian Michel's recent biography of Gilson, at "Catholic World Report"

Tracking, Tramping Soft and Low

 The Wolf-Tamer
by Elizabeth Stoddard 

Through the gorge of snow we go,
 Tracking, tramping soft and slow,
 With our paws and sheathed claws,
 So we swing along the snow,
 Crowding, crouching to your pipes -- 
Shining serpents! Well you know,
 When your lips shall cease to blow
 Airs that lure us through the snow,
 We shall fall upon your race
 Who do wear a different face.
 Who were spared in yonder vale?
 Not a man to tell the tale!
 Blow, blow, serpent pipes,
 Slow we follow:-- all our troop
 Every wolf of wooded France,
 Down from all the Pyrenees -- 
Shall they follow, follow you,
 In your dreadful music-trance?
 Mark it by our tramping paws,
 Hidden fangs, and sheathèd claws?
 You have seen the robber bands
 Tear men's tongues and cut their hands,
 For ransom we ask none -- begone,
 For the tramping of our paws,
 Marking all your music's laws,
 Numbs the lust of ear and eye;
 Or -- let us go beneath the snow,
 And silent die -- as wolves should die!