Beings of Reason (Re-Post)

 A re-post from 2022.

*****

 An ens rationis or 'being of reason' is the traditional name for what is conceived on the model of a being but cannot actually exist as such. An obvious example of such a being of reason is a hole. Holes are things we conceived on the model of beings -- we count them as if they were beings, we can talk about them interacting as if they were beings -- but a hole, as such, is not an actually existing thing. The example of a hole gives us an important aspect of the concept that often throws people off. To say that something is a being of reason is not to say that it is illusory or simply nonexistent; quite the contrary, we treat beings of reason as existing, and we need to do so. Whether or not there is a hole in your roof is not entirely in the mind, nor is the hole an illusion, nor can it be dismissed as just nonexistent at all. You can point to holes. You can use holes. You can manipulate holes. They change the way actually existing things work. But you can also understand me entirely if I say that the hole in your roof is real but that a hole is not an actually existing thing.

Another example would be a crack. You can point to cracks, you can manipulate cracks, you can use cracks to perform some activity. There is even a branch of physics that studies the dynamics of cracks; as it happens, the physics of the motion of the leading edge of a crack in a substance is very similar to the physics of the motion of particles through a medium. But you can also make perfect sense of saying that a crack just doesn't and can't exist in the same way that the medium in which it is found exists.

Since beings of reason are conceived on the model of beings, some kind of being has to be the start of any conception of being of reason we might have. What makes these conceptions different from conceptions of the beings themselves is that beings of reason are organized by negations and rational relations. If I say, "There is a hole in the wall," I conceive the hole on the model of a section of wall, but instead of simply doing so (which would be incorrect, since a hole in a wall is not the substance of the wall), I conceived it under a negation: a section of the wall is not there, the hole is the not-section. In addition, we can think of the hole by relation to both the surrounding wall and to things that can pass through it -- it's not a bare lack-of-section-of-wall, but a lack-of-section-of-wall-such-that-through-it-something-can-pass. The wall really can have a hole in it, but the hole itself is identifiable only by negation of something (part of the wall) and by relation to other things (like the rest of the wall and moving objects).

Shadows are another example of how this works. A shadow is conceived as a shadow by relation to something -- a shadow is a shadow of something -- and by negation -- of the surrounding light. Actually, a shadow is conceived in relation to three different things -- a light source, a light-blocker, and a surface to which the shadow is attributed. A shadow is thus a negation on a surface of light from a light source due to something that intervenes between the light source and the surface. But we can point to shadows, and we can use them (as when find shade), and we can manipulate them (as when we do shadow-puppets). They are in some sense real, and you cannot develop an accurate understanding of the world without understanding them to be in some sense real. But they are beings of reason, things conceived with negations and relations on the model of beings that nonetheless cannot be actual things existing in their own right.

This is easily missed because as a matter of technical terms, the opposite of 'being of reason' is 'real being'; but the 'real' here means 'as a thing in its own right', and not real in a more expansive sense. Beings of reason are broadly real, but they are not things in their own right -- indeed, they couldn't be, because they always inherently involve negations of and relations to other things. At the level of objects of understanding, however, there is no fundamental difference between beings of reason and real beings. As noted above, we can do a physics of particle trajectories or a physics of crack movements in much the same way; that particles (understood a certain way) are real beings and leading edges of cracks are beings of reason doesn't actually affect much, beyond the fact that a leading edge of a crack can only ever be understood in terms of negations and relations. A hole or a center of gravity is a being of reason, but it has objective reality. 

In fact, beings of reason end up being quite important because a vast portion of our understanding of the world is based on them. Indeed, I think one can argue that physicists, for instance, almost exclusively study beings of reason. This does not imply idealism or anything like it; it mostly just indicates that physicists spend a lot of their investigations studying things wholly insofar as they are related to other things. And physicists are not particularly shy about use of beings of reasons; they will explain behavior of actual systems by idealized models that can't exist as such in the actual world, for instance. The ideal structures that are doing the explaining are beings of reason. But physics is in no way unique here. Objective reality is not as straightforward as one might have thought.

Sonnet Variations XXIV

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 87

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
insurance costs I cannot estimate;
but 'till the day of my heart's releasing
I will be paying debts determinate.
You were never one for freely granting,
nor gracing those with great deeds deserving;
instead you leave all in endless wanting,
never from your own interests swerving.
Perhaps I am better for the knowing;
we all may learn from foolish mistaking;
yet this feels like ruin, not like growing,
a lesson too costly in the making.
-- But hope of return my thoughts still flatter,
and if you did, I would, debts no matter.

Extraordinary Mortifications

 Today is the feast of St. Rose of Lima, a Third Order Dominican who was the first person from the Americas to be canonized. She was born Isabel Flores de Oliva in Lima, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, in 1586. She was known most of her life, however, by her nickname, 'Rosa', which she also took as her confirmation name.

The General Calendar has many, many saints, and it is inevitable that patterns arise among them allowing us to give some loose classification to them; obviously there are Martyrs, Virgins, Doctors, and Widows, which are all old categories that go back pretty much to the beginning of sanctoral commemoration. But there are other categories that noticeably begin to show up as history has proceeded. St. Rose is often unsettling to many today, because of the class of saint to which she belongs. She is a saint whose life was a life of what is called Extraordinary Mortification. From a very early age, and consistently through her entire life, she engaged in extreme, and sometimes life-threatening ascetic disciplines. As a girl, she began fasting three times a week and stopped eating meat. She was extremely pretty, and once, having overheard people commenting on the fact, she cut off her hair and rubbed her face with pepper juice until it blistered. For long periods she would only sleep two hours a night, spending the rest of the night in prayer. She had a crown made with spikes that would bite into the flesh of her head. She died in 1617, thirty-one years of age, after a long illness probably in part caused by malnutrition from her fasting practices.

There are a number of saints in the calendar who practiced Extraordinary Mortification, which is interesting in and of itself, because the Catholic Church discourages such practices, and always has. Ascetic practices are good insofar as they aid in cultivation of virtue, but merely increasing the intensity of them does little toward that end, and most Catholic saints who were spiritual directors and advisors have counseled moderation when it comes to them. This goes back to Christ, who criticized the Pharisees for substituting strict practices in place of substantively good actions. And there have been many who have practiced Extraordinary Mortifications who have been condemned for it rather than being placed on the calendar of saints. And yet saints like Rose of Lima are found scattered throughout the calendar.

It is easy to think of the calendar of saints as a list of people to admire and imitate, and this is not entirely wrong, but we naturally tend to understand this in a way that certainly is wrong. Any serious look at the lives of saints will uncover many who would have been utterly exasperating to deal with, and whose lives are simply not of a kind that one would ever choose to hold them up for direct imitation. In reality, people don't end up commemorated at the altar because we like them, or even because we want to be like them. They are commemorated because their lives are lives of manifest victories in seeking to follow Christ. Some of the saints were quite flawed and rough-and-tumble; some were failures, whose lives were nothing but failure; some chose very strange hills to die on; some almost seem to have fallen into sainthood by sheer accident of happening to do one right thing at one right time; some spent their entire lives making life harder for other saints; some seem frankly to have been completely lacking in basic common sense. None of this is admirable or imitable, as such. To be sure, we like our saints flawed, for the same reasons we like heroes in stories to have flaws, but this is irrelevant to the calendar of saints, beyond perhaps capturing the old adage that it takes all kinds to make a Heaven. The one thing all the saints of the calendar have in common is that they wholeheartedly sought to follow Christ, and in some public and obvious way greatly succeeded. We do not put the saints on the calendar because we admire them and want to imitate them. They end up on the calendar because they were publicly victorious; we give them credit for it and seek their intercession, and it is the victoriousness in following Christ that we admire and seek to imitate, not the human, and sometimes all too human, details of it.

Why are there saints like St. Rosa of Lima on the calendar? She is not purely there for Extraordinary Mortification -- she worked extensively with the poor for about a decade, for instance. But there's no doubt whatsoever that Extraordinary Mortification is one of the reasons for it. But she practiced Extraordinary Mortification in such a way as is appropriate to a saint -- however extreme she was at it, she always tried to do it for Christ, and she succeeded at that. That would be enough of an answer. But I think we can also say that it is salutary for such saints to be on the calendar. We all have to engage in some kinds of ascetic practice, some kinds of special, deliberate self-discipline, because developing virtue and cultivating a resistance to temptation requires such things. It is often very difficult. But then you look at St. Rose of Lima. You aren't called to Extraordinary Mortification, but the thing about it is, if St. Rose can go to extraordinary extreme, you can certainly go to moderation. The saints who practiced Extraordinary Mortifications show how far we could actually go, and it is they -- more than any other saints -- who make clear to us how small the obstacles are that we ourselves have to face. They are the saints that show us that the things we have to overcome are hills, not mountains. What could possibly show us better that we have only a little hill to climb, one that is well within our power, than someone who chose to climb a mountain that boggles the mind, not out of necessity but because it was there to be climbed? We are not called to be Rosa de Lima; but Rosa de Lima shows us that we can surely by the grace of God rise to anything that our own call may require of us.

We all are inclined to turn goodness into a flat, saccharine sweetness; everyone, including even moral philosophers and theologians, are tempted to that very grave error. The result is that we consistently underestimate the varied nature of the moral life, and the sheer extremes that moral lives often display, and, trying to fit everything into a small, convenient box, we lose our sense of the actual moral capabilities of a human being. You only maintain the latter by seeing the extremes, all of them, the utter boundaries of what we really can do. People don't want to do that because the extremes are often not pretty. But prettiness is not a moral standard. And one of the great virtues of saints like St. Rose is that if you ever start thinking that the life of a saint is a life of prettiness, she is a saint who does not hesitate to bring out the pepper juice, applied blisteringly to her own life, to disabuse you of such a ridiculous and harmful notion.

Sonnet Variations XXIII

 Sonnet Variation: Alfred Austin's "Here, Where the Vine and Fig Bask Hand in Hand"

Here, where the vine and fig bask hand in hand
and luxury vines across the stone wall,
where rain of a sudden makes its fall
and nothing in earth or heaven is bland,
the days are self-building, and are not planned,
and as the bright insects here and there crawl,
we here and there move in our ways withal
across the face of the verdant land.
The sun peeks through trees in its morning rise,
no cloud to mar the cerulean blue,
no crowd to block out the light from my eyes,
yet none is more bright than brightness of you.
-- With you and the sun to lighten my skies,
my morn is as fresh as new-fallen dew.

Links of Note

 * Elizabeth Jackson, Pascal's Wager for Christianity (PDF)

* Stephen D'Arcy, Frege's Ambiguous Legacy, a guest post at "Daily Nous"

* Leona Mollica, The Logic of Action and Control (PDF)

* Jason T. Eberl, Defining and Determining Human Death, at "APABlog"

* Adam Hogan, Leibniz Did Not State Leibniz's Law (PDF)

* Cynthia L. Haven, C. S. Lewis's advice to writers, at "The Book Haven" (Added Later: link corrected)

* Andreas Brekke Carlsson, Debt and Desert (PDF)

* Connie Goddard, Manual Training for All, at "The Front Porch Republic"

* Chris Dorst & Marc Lange, The Necessity of Accidents (PDF)

* Stella Sandford, Seeing plants anew, at "Aeon"

* Sebastián Murgueitio Ramírez, Galileo's Ship and the Relativity Principle (PDF)

* Jonathan Marc Gribetz, The Origins of Anti-Zionism, at "Tablet"

* Miguel García-Valdecasas & Terrence W. Deacon, Origins of Biological Teleology: How Constraints Represent Ends (PDF)

Sonnet Variations XXII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 53

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
that by magnetic force I to you tend?
With what subtle fluid cast you a shade
that I by my heart from your heart lend,
not by simulacrum or counterfeit,
but truly something that is wholly you?
As the wax by the signet ring is set,
my form by your form is informed a-new.
Nor does its shape fade by day or by year,
but forever something of you does show,
and a hundred years hence will still appear,
as in the soul appear the things we know.
-- Whatever the way, I take from you part
and carry forever you in my heart.

Sonnet Variations XXI

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 38

How can my Muse want subject to invent
when words themselves burst up in nearly-verse?
Though some are poor, yet some are excellent;
some excellences need me to rehearse,
but some like sudden breezes come to me.
Yet there are glories hidden to the sight,
just like the spirit hidden inside thee,
and poetry is tasked with bringing light
to things of purer depths and higher worth.
Thus, Muses, words I lift to invocate;
let gates of heaven, flooding, issue forth
with graces lasting beyond ev'ry date.
-- And, as for me, my soul shall spend its days
in giving to each glory rightful praise.

The Juridical Realm

 I. Three Modes of Natural Law

Natural law is that law which is natural to practical reason; it consists in a rational, and rationally recognizable, ordering of action to good shared in common, and thus is the intrinsic human potential for forming reason-structured communities. As such, it is not merely a disparate set of precepts, but what might be called a legal system. As a legal system, I would suggest that natural law has three aspects, which might very roughly be called the moral, the judicial, and the ceremonial modes of natural law.

Most discussions of natural law focus on the moral mode, which is in a sense the foundational mode. The moral mode is concerned with what is required to be good as a rational person, and as such requires virtue and requires what is required for virtue. We could also think of this as natural law seen in light of the virtue of prudence, or, perhaps more exactly, seen immediately in light of the virtue of prudence.

However, one of those virtues required by and regulated by natural law is justice, the virtue that involves rendering adequately to others what is due to them. In light of justice, therefore, natural law has a second mode, the judicial mode, in which natural law is the measure specifically of what is rationally due to a person. Natural law in the judicial mode is what measures and regulates the 'due'. While natural law in its moral mode is reasoned out through deduction and derivation of principles, natural law in its judicial mode is reasoned out through determination and application to cases.

There are many justice-like virtues besides justice in the proper sense, however; Aquinas calls these potential parts of justice, but we could consider them satellite virtues of justice. These are virtues like respectfulness, filial piety, honesty, generosity, and so forth. In light of these, and in particular in light of these insofar as they concern persons, I think that natural law has a third mode, the ceremonial mode. The ceremonial mode is specifically concerned with natural law as the measure for what is appropriate for respect or deference toward persons, in light of both obligation (moral) and right (judicial). Like the judicial, it is reasoned out through determination and application to cases, but in a much looser way than we find with the judicial mode, in somewhat like the way that showing someone respect involves a looser standard than respecting someone's rights. This difference arises because the potential parts of justice are like but not entirely like the virtue of justice itself.

The last of the three is interesting and under-considered, but the judicial mode of natural law is what concerns me here.

II. Judicial Natural Law and Jural Good

While not all particular precepts of natural law specifically concern particular interactions between people, any particular precept can have applications that affect such interactions. Of the kinds of interactions to which precepts of natural law can be applied, some are such that we can identify a standard of equality in goodness, so that the interaction is 'equal' or 'even' or 'on the level' or 'not crooked'. For instance, if I take something from you, that benefits me, but leaves you worse off unless we determine a way to do it in which you also benefit in a sufficiently appropriate way. Of these kinds of interactions the 'sufficiently appropriate way' sometimes has a well-defined character that allows for the completion of the interaction according to a recognizable standard. In such interactions, there is some kind of good exchanged to keep the interaction level or even. Natural law in judicial mode concerns this kind of good, because justice concerns this kind of interaction. This kind of good we can call jural good.

Jural good has had many names throughout the years. Justice is rendering to each what is due to them, the jural good is what is due (in Latin: debitum) in light of justice. What is due one is in some way one's own (in Latin: suum). Since it is the kind of good with which justice is concerned, the jural good is the just or the just thing (in Greek: dikaion; in Latin: justum). It is also concerned with making right; we talk about jural good as 'making things right' because it has also been called the right or what is one's right (in Latin: ius). Because this latter is somewhat different from the sense in which we say that people 'have rights' (you have rights to what is your right), this last has sometimes also been called objective right, i.e., right as an object of justice, in contrast to subjective right, which is right in the sense of 'having right to something'.

Jural goods arise because natural law in judicial mode provides a standard of what is due to a person, and under what conditions. For something to be your own, you need both rule and title. We need, in other words, a standard, an obligation or system of obligations telling us that something can be due to something, and a fact of some kind telling us that the rule is applicable to your particular case, which we call a 'title'. Titles can be either intrinsic or extrinsic, based on whether the possession of the title is necessary to a situation or not. The title to basic respect as a person is just being a person; every person has such title intrinsically. On the other side, no one has intrinsic title to another person's labor; title to another person's labor has to arise from some extrinsic condition like punishment or restitution or contract. There are important aspects to this distinction, but my point here is simply that whether title is intrinsic or extrinsic does not fundamentally change the shape of the situation. To deny someone a jural good to which they are entitled is harm, or, more strictly, juridical injury (which is in injury in the strict sense -- the Latin iniuria literally means 'deprivation of right').

III. The Juridical Realm

Natural law therefore requires us to recognize the world in which we live as not merely an arena for practical and moral action but a juridical realm consisting of potential and actual jural goods and titles to them, with respect to natural law. It is literally part of practical reason to see the world in terms of persons, as something capable of being mine and yours and his and hers -- meum, tuum, suum. This juridical aspect of the world is not separate from it; the juridical realm is not a separate realm, but literally the realm in which we live as rational beings. It is the world as relevant to practice under natural law in its judicial mode, the world as providing cases to which moral principles must be applied for us to act morally within it, the world in light of obligations of justice.

This natural juridical realm is itself the context in which human beings construct institutions and community offices and legal/juridical statuses and the like; that is to say, the natural juridical realm is what makes possible the juridical artifacts, the positive juridical elements, that play such a large role in our societies. We construct these in exactly the way you would expect: we make our own laws, including positive judicial laws, to protect, maintain, or develop the common goods in light of which we form communities. But the whole point of such juridical artifacts is that they are supposed to construct a specific order of justice within a more general order of justice. Our juridical artifacts are instruments we use more easily to situate ourselves within the natural juridical realm in ways that let justice be done; they may be better or worse as such instruments, but they still have to be structured as instrumental in this way.

Within the juridical realm, we can be said to 'have rights', i.e., to have particular title to particular jural goods under particular precepts of law, whether natural or positive. To have rights is to be situated within the juridical realm, to have relations of particular kinds to particular kinds of jural goods as in some way yours. Natural rights in this sense are natural entitlements to jural goods appropriate to human nature, by virtue of human nature itself as the title. Civil rights in this strict and proper sense are entitlements under positive law to jural goods appropriate to civil society, by virtue of citzenship (constitutive membership in civil society) as title; but we also sometimes use 'civil rights' to include natural rights of citizens or positive rights of citizens where the titles are something other than citizenship itself, or even any rights of people, whether citizens or not, within the context of civil society. In the strictest sense, my rights and yours cannot conflict; but in an accidental way, they can, when distinct jural goods end up linked -- for instance, when the only ways available to render what is due to you happen to make it more difficult to render what is due to me. One of the major things we need civil society for is to work out how to handle such cases. But 'conflict of rights' in this sense is only possible because the suum in my case is clearly distinguishable from the suum in yours, and thus each clearly identifiable; if that were not the case, we could not give any clear content to saying that there is a conflict. But the juridical realm itself cannot be incoherent; it's given unity by justice, and treating the juridical realm as something that can be incoherent is tantamount to holding that there is no real right and wrong in interactions with other people.

Immensum Infinitumque

 Ever stirring in the depths of the heart is the desire for Well-being, for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness—the aspiration after some, thing more blessed, true, beautiful, and good than can be realized here below. This is that longing after something absolute and sufficient—the immensum, infinitumque—which is so often breathed forth with passionate earnestness in the pages of the thoughtful men of every age of the world. With nothing finite can this longing after blessedness be quenched; restless and unsatisfied, we turn from every good which this world, which this life, can yield. We aspire; we seek; we gain the objects in which we hoped to find full repose and contentment; but ever with their possession we fail to find that perfect rest of heart.

[William Whewell, "The Moral Argument for the Existence of God", On the Foundations of Morals, (pp. 147-148).]

Sonnet Variations XX

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 33

Full many a glorious morning have I seen,
a rush of creek and blush of dawn to eye,
and all of nature graced with living green
as blooms begin to blow by alchemy;
one longs at times on swiftest steed to ride
to see the greatest portion of earth's face,
that no fair thing or beauty may hide.
But human heart is mired in such disgrace
it does not see the bright things as they shine;
it lets the heaviness upon its brow
replace the fairest things with talk of 'mine',
and for future use kills the lovely now.
-- The world is light-filled, but who disdaineth
its brilliant glow, his own soul thus staineth.

Sonnet Variations XIX

 Sonnet Variation: Anna Seward's Sonnet XVIII ("An Evening in November, which Had Been Stormy, Gradually Clearing Up, in a Mountainous Country")

Ceas'd is the rain; but heavy drops yet fall
as dog-like trees shake off their leaves in wind;
The muddy lands I view, and do not find
a dry spot at all on road or stone wall.
The puddles are many and might appall
the mind that wants each in place and with kind;
they scatter chaos and mess, large and small.
Yet an unseen order may stand behind
the calming scenes, which all worries remove;
to see it is to feel an ease in brow.
The trees against sky form a wooden cove,
like a window, and looking through it, lo!
I see myself, and I with you there rove
on grasses wet and paths where trickles flow.

Fortnightly Book, August 18

 Hartmann von Aue is perhaps the greatest poet of the twelfth century writing in Middle High German; famous for his 'crystalline language' and his vivid descriptions, he exerted a major influence on German literature after him. We know very little about his life. He was born somewhere around 1170 and died somewhere between 1210 and 1220; he seems to have participated in the German Crusade (1197). He was a ministerialis (dienstmann), so he was legally something like a serf but socially a knight and a member of the lower nobility. Beyond that, we only know his authorship: two major Arthurian romances (Erec and Iwein, adaptations of the work of Chretien de Troyes), two non-Arthurian knightly romances (Gregorius and Poor Heinrich), a poetic dialogue (The Lament), and a number of other lyrics.

The next fortnightly book is Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, translated by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson.

Sonnet Variations XVIII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 27

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
eyes drifting downward, limbs heavy and tired,
on satin pillow to lay down my head
with final glimpses of daylight expired.
Now settling in dreams I rest and abide,
perhaps making conversation with thee
while walking the dreamlands spacious and wide.
What sights in that land shall our journey see!
There colors more fair than any of sight
cast out their rays in peripheral view
and shadows are found more jet-black than night,
and every half-step uncovers the new.
-- Our ways go together in dreaming mind;
alas, much less so in waking, we find.