Hexeis Thesauron en Ourano

 And they were leading to him childlings, so that he might touch them. But the students censured them. 

And having seen this, Jesus was incensed, and answered them, Release the childlings to come to me; do not stop them, for the realm of God belongs to such as these. Amen, I say to you, whoever does not receive the realm of God as a childling shall absolutely not enter into it.

And having embraced them, he was blessing them, having laid hands on them.

And (as he was) going forth on his way, someone having run up and knelt to him said, Good teacher, what should I do that I might inherit perpetual life?

And Jesus said to him, Why call me good? None are good if the one God is not good. You know the laws. Don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't testify falsely, don't injure, revere your father and your mother. 

But he was saying to him, Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth.

And Jesus, having gazed at him, was devoted to him and said to him, One is missing to you. Depart, exchange as much as you have, and give to those in need, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come follow me.

But sobered by the word, he went off grieving, for he was one having many estates.

And having gazed around, Jesus says to his students, With what difficulty those having possessions will enter into the realm of God!

And the students were stupefied at his words. But Jesus, again responding, says to them, Children, how difficult is it to enter the realm of God! Those trusting in possessions -- easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than the wealthy to enter into the realm of God.

And they were greatly panicked, saying among themselves, Then who can be delivered? 

Having gazed at them, Jesus says, With men, 'can't', but not with God; for everything (is) 'can' with God.

The Rock began to say to him, See, we have released all and followed you. 

Jesus was saying, Amen, I say to you, there is no one who has released house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands on account of me and on account of the good news who shall not get a hundred times it now in this moment, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecution, and in the age that is coming, perpetual life. And many first will be last, and the last first.

[Mark 10:13-31, my very rough translation. These two stories are often treated apart, but it seems to me that in Mark they are clearly two parts of the same story. For instance, Peter (the name is clearly being used as a title here, ho Petros, the Rock) at the end uses a version of the same verb ('release, let go') from the children story and a version of the same verb ('follow') from the landed man story. Little children come having nothing; if you have possessions, you have to relax your grasp on them if you are to receive the kingdom as a little child.

The word we usually translate as 'disciples', of course, just means 'students'. I've used 'childling' because the Greek word is actually a diminutive form. It seems to me that all the translations tone down the word for Jesus's response to the disciples rebuking those leading the children to him. Eganaktesan literally means 'greatly grieved' or 'greatly burdened', but often has to do with anger; the word contains an emphatic element -- Jesus is super-upset.

Much has been said of the somewhat difficult "Why call me good?" exchange. In context, however, the point seems clear -- the man asked him a question, and Jesus's point is explicitly that he already knows the answer, because through the law, God, who is good, has already told him. Jesus is not claiming not to be good, which obviously would not make sense in the present discussion, but saying that if anyone is good, God is, and God has already answered the question. The word I've translated non-colloquially as 'injure' is more often translated as 'defraud' or 'despoil'; but it fundamentally means to take what rightfully is someone else's, which is what 'injure' technically means. The word I've translated as 'exchange' is usually translated 'sell', but I'm not sure that the money is precisely the point, rather than giving his possessions to those who need them more. The rich man has, justly, avoided taking what rightfully belongs to others; now he has to devote what rightfully belongs to him to those who need it.

The rich man is very rich -- the text is clear that he doesn't just have money, he has many productive lands, which is as rich as you can get in the ancient world. But what throws the disciples into consternation is that when Jesus comments on it, he doesn't merely say (as one might sometimes assume from translations and homilies) that it is difficult to get into the kingdom of God if you are rich; he says that it is difficult to get into the kingdom of God if you possess things. Chremata, the word usually translated 'riches', are any kind of useful or needful possessions. The word used in the camel saying, on the other hand, is plousios, which is literally 'wealthy man'. That is to say: How hard it is to enter the kingdom if you have possessions; having a lot of possessions, it is like threading a camel through a needle. (Some manuscripts have not kamelos but kamilos, which is a relatively rare word that in later days means the sort of rope or cable you use for a ship; the Aramaic word, gamla, can also mean either a camel or a large rope, and apparently there are other languages, like Armenian and Arabic, that have similar homonyms. Contrary to the suggestion of some, saying you are going to pass a ship's hawser through an eye of the needle doesn't 'soften' the comparison; camel or cable, it's impossible. The point does not change. And, of course, a number of Jesus' disciples are fishermen. Nonetheless, I think an argument can be made that 'camel' actually fits better. Early Christians quite clearly took it to be 'camel'. Camels are big animals, yes, but they are also associated with wealth and are famously obstinate animals; a camel is not just physically unable to fit through the eye of a needle, it will actively resist going, like the wealthy will actively resist releasing their possessions. And hyperbole is not just about exaggeration but absurdity; and it's notable that later rabbis occasionally use a similar expression but with elephants rather than camels. He could also very well be deliberately using a word that means both. Of course, there are people who will, like camels, balk at the idea of Jesus telling a joke by making a pun, however serious and grave the purpose, and however much this is a common practice of memorable teachers everywhere.)

It's very easy to read the story as a rebuke of people who have more than us, but the point of the story is that relying on possessions at all is a problem, and the disciples are clearly not shocked (and the words for their reaction are quite strong here) at commentary on rich men but about the implications for themselves. If you read the story and say, "Yah, rich people, am I right!", you have, unlike the disciples, not heard what Jesus actually said, because the point, and the thing that astonished them (the word, ekplesso, literally means 'struck, hit, slammed, smote', and, having the implication that you are knocked out of your senses, is used to indicate fright, panic, intoxication, or any sort of overwhelming passion) is that it is difficult for you also to enter the kingdom of God, as long as you are putting your trust in possessions.]

Dashed Off VIII

This finishes the notebook that was completed in January 2024.

*** 

"Through taste we strive to realize the implied community which gives sense to the aesthetic experience: our matching of thought to thought and image to image is also a matching of person to person, the active creation of the first-person plural to which we aspire." Scruton
"Wit propagates the sense of membership."
"True musical constraint depends not on intellectual systems, but on custom, habit, and tradition -- on the forms of a common musical culture which create the currency of allusion."
"The aesthetic impulse is latent in irrational nature, arising from the need to complete and instrumental reasoning with a conception of the end."
"A musical culture arises whenever music enters into the life of the tribe, to become a system of allusion, and a way of 'joining in'."
"Cliche involves a stereotype, an unthinking bid for effect which falls short of meaning anything."
"Through melody, harmony, and rhythm, we enter a world where others exist besides the self, a world that is full of feeling but also ordered, disciplined but free."
"The avant-garde persists only as a state-funded priesthood, ministering to a dying congregation."

Ramsey's definition of subjective probability can only apply to cases in which outcomes allow for continuous gradations of value.

It is better to think of utilities as presupposing probabilities than vice versa.

possibility -> probability -> utility

Determining probabilities requires a testing of possibilities.

Living things carry part of the context for their actions within themselves.

What benevolence is possible often depends on what order already obtains.

Actual forensic justification even in human cases does not merely declare one just but in so doing give s a status as justified; it is not a mere recognition or certification but a bestowal of at least a juridical status.

past necessity : faith :: future possibility : hope :: the finality that unifies both : charity

When important truths are scattered to the wind, one can hardly avoid being eclectic.

"Move far away from deceit." Ex 23:7

"The image of God is the active mutuality possible only between God and humans." David Novak
"To be sure, unlike creation, the covenant does have historical antecedents, but like creation, its existence comes from nowhere (ex nihilo)."

Noah is justified by being recognized as righteous before God and brough to the ark to be saved (Gn 7:1).

Ex 24:7 -- "we shall do and we shall hear" (i.e., we shall obey and we shall learn in obeying and having obeyed)

"One's agent is like oneself." M. Berakhot 5.5

B. Sanhedrin 74b on Lv 22:32: martyrdom as hallowing the Lord in the midst of the people

"Although she has sinned, Israel is still Israel." B. Sanhedrin 44a, on Jos 7:11

Reality itself is an external reason on which we regularly rely.

(1) that which is ours because we are possessed by it
(2) that which is ours because we are given possession of it
(3) that which is ours because we take possession of it

Architecture involves the interrelation of three structures, the mereological, the perspectival, and the affordant.

Music and language arguably branch off different aspects of maternal communication with child.

architecture as an organization of suitabilities

"Style ennobles choices, giving them a significance that otherwise they have." Scruton
"The institutions of courtship (and the kind of self-reflection which they require) transform passion into a kind of rational entreprise, through which the subject is in some measure distanced from his present need, and comes to see his self-fulfillment as equally involved."

the sense of design as a sense of solvedness

An essential part of sincerity is the attempt at consistency.

To have rational hope that something is true posits that reasons and evidences supporting its truth may be found.

"The most important rights I exercise as a whole person before someone else, are rooted in duties to others, which when we fulfill them are good for us as well." Novak
"My right is a means to a dutiful end. That is why these rights are to be exercised for us when, for whatever reason, we are unable or unwilling to do so by ourselves."

Dt 16::20
Tsedeq tsedeq you shall pursue [Justice/Justly Justice you shall pursue]
To dikaion you shall pursue dikaios (LXX) [The just/right you shall pursue justly/rightly]

Laws as applied are not laws as on the page but laws as living rules in reason.

the Noachide commandments as the laws for the basic rights of a civilized society

"Human sexuality is inseparable from family." Novak
"A coherent balancing of the rights of the community and the rights of individuals is possible only when both sets of rights are relative to the absolute rights of God."

Children are owed parents whom they can honor.

Rigor is inherently instrumental & only has value insofar as it contributes to reasoning and the ends of reasoning.

Association, commutation, and distribution are logical properties of operational notations.

NB Poincare takes proof by recurrence to correspond to the synthetic a priori (as opposed to analytical proof, experiment, or postulation/convention)

analogues of reasoning by recurrence (finite -> infinite) for possibility/necessity, permissibility/obligatory, etc.

The space we experience is not three-dimensional but an interrelation of many different ways of sensing space, on the basis of which we localize things three-dimensionally. Our experience of *location in space* is three-dimensional; our experience of space is much richer (which is one of the things that allows us to do our 3D localizing).

mathematical equality as a zeroing relation

To investigate requires recognizing a hierarchy of facts.

Descriptions of that at which one aims are normative; this is in fact one of our normal ways of constructing normative statements.

Relevance is position in a hierarchy of facts.

genus/species as res, as function, as cognitive object

Rv 7:17 as Trinitarian: the Lamb on the Throne leading to the Fountanins of the Waters of Life

Ps 111:4-5 on the Eucharist (cf Sir 38:11)
Ps 4:7 on the sacraments

the right hand of the Father Ps 16:11

Pr 30:18-19 -- The eagle in flight, the serpent winding its way through crags, the ship navigating the sea, and the man in youth can only do so by continual adjustment, improvisation, adaptation in light of circumstances: there is no strict rule or method.

Pr 11:30 on the Church

"That charity is called genuine which admits of nothing corruptible." Albert

Experiences are analyzed into causal components.

Even purely at the level of self-love, we see ourselves reflected in other people.

There is a natural sanctity to the devoted pursuit of transcendental perfections (truth, goodness, beauty, nobility), and even failing to recognize this is often a grave error.

We know substances through acquaintance with their accidents, but we know accidents themselves by how they express the substances known through them.

We understand the essential principles of Scripture to the extent we are united to Christ.

allusive continuities in traditions
(distinct from continuities based on preservation or reconstruction)

Discussions of political representation are often ambiguous between behalfness and resemblance as teh key element in representation.

Living things in changing themselves give ends to other things; every living things is the center of a system of extrinsic teleology, which interlocks with other systems in complex way s(symbiosis, parasitism, predation, habitat-building, etc.). The early modern period took this relativity of extrinsic teleology to be evidence of its nonreality, but in truth what it means is that real nature has many, many systems of extrinsic teleology.

Creatures not only receive an intrinsic teleology in creation; they, and the whole cosmos, have an extrinsic teleology relative to God in eschatological consummation. Providence is what ties together created destiny and final glory.

(1) The standard that arises from the will's ultimate relation to its final end is not heteronomous to it.
(2) The final end of the will is union with God.

God chooses Israel so as to give his Torah to Israel.
-- choice contrasts withneed; it is free, not necessary; it is historical, not natural.
-- it is a choice of a specific people, contrasted with other people (the nations)
-- it is initiated by God
-- the giving of Torah occurs within the context of this choice.

Jesus' promise to His apostles of judging the tribes establishes that Israel will continue to exist as a distinguishable people in the world to come.

Covenant is how law is both received and self-given.

Dt. 17:11 as the foundation of rabbinical authority in Judaism

A significant portion of quantum mechanics consists entirely in discussing that models of probabilities for physical processes have to be constructed from complex-number amplitudes.

We know actions by knowing substances through them.

Two definitions of circle:
(a) set of points p with fixed distance to fixed point
(b) set of points p such that, given a fixed line segment ab, the angle formed by apb is a right angle.
-- With infinite divisibility these are equivalent; in discrete geometry, they come apart.

the duty of civil self-governance
-- requires moral responsibility : rights of conscience
-- requries cooperation and coordiantion with other citizens : rights of speech and peaceable assembly
-- requires input into broader government (to maintain and make effective self-governance) : rights of direct voice/election, petition, etc.

Citizenship postulates:
(a) civilization as human destiny (possibility of civil society)
(b) a moral order (under which the citizen is responsible)
(c) a hierarchy of governance (within which the citizen has a role)

claims on profit
retensive: payment of debt
protensive: sustainign of enterprise into future
distributive: sharing of profit

Thin normative expressions seem to have an obviously unsaturated relativity -- ie.., to say something is 'obligatory' doesn't tell us relative to what (obligator, domain, end), whereas telling us that it is compassionate gives us a lot of this information. Saying something is obligatory is like saying that something is a part or that something is relevant, as opposed to being a vital organ or being a distinct individual of this same particular species, exactly resembling on the point under discussion.

'I ought to take X as true' as creating a subargument ('Suppose X to be true') within which X is true. ['conditional subdomain' might be better]

God as the cause of sufficiency to effect

If truth were not a rule for what we ought to take as true, we could justify nothing.

free will as the manner in which human capacity for good is nonfinite

The intellect, like the will, is an end-setting power.

The value of the activity of end-setting necessarily depends on the value of the ends set.

Always use one's intellect in such a way as is consistent with the person as an end.

The existence of the intellect in itself establishes the world, and particularly the self, as noumenal.

moral heroism, spontaneity of thought, experience of sublime, and pursuit of beautiful as expressions of human transcendence

co-purposiveness as an essential element of reason and thus of human nature

That which is in itself inconsisent with being purposive in a way consistent with the purposiveness of others, is irrational in itself. Kant is correct so far; but he treats the conditional as biconditional, and is somewhat muddled about how to understand the purposiveness.

The intellect must think of itself in terms of the harmony of intellects.

To think according to local principles that are consistent with universal principles.
(1) To think according to the local principles that can be applied with those principles that apply to everything.
(2) To think according to the local principles that are consistent with the end and nature of the intellect.
(3) To think according to the local principles that all intellects can apply in a manner consistent with all other intellects.

free will & moral life as mutually and reciprocally implying each other and each otehr's implication of the other

The intellect in pursuing the real also waits for the real to give itself.

Things that can be believed or not presuppose what must be known. Things that can be known or not presuppose what must be understood. Things that can be understood or not also presuppose what must be understood. What must be understood presupposes what is necessarily true.

natural rights, artificial rights that are based on natural rights, fictional rights (artificial rights that are formed purely for practical convenience), illusory rights (things that seem like rights but are not)

The union of happiness and morality in Kant is aunion of empirical self and noumenal self, the latter being the summum bonum in which we are fully able to live as human and as moral agents; this requires some cause or ground that makes the union itself possible.

Our capacity to think of ends is proof that there are ends (although not always those particular ones that we think there are).

The actuality operator privileges a given possible world, making it a reference world; 'actually' in both colloquial and metaphysical contexts indicates 'with respect tothat which all possible worlds together model or describe.'

The revelation on Sinai is expressed and communicated not merely by the written Torah but by the Jewish people themselves.

"The great innovation of the covenant with Israel is that both the community and the individual are granted the power to make claims upon God." Novak

Act in such a way as to treat eternal reason, and humanity insofar as it participates eternal reason, always as an end in itself. 

Freedom only exists where divine action overflows.

Practical reason must postulate moral freedom as given, and this freedom can only be so if given by freedom, and therefore if it is gift.

Kant seems to recognize that his accounts of freedom is apparently inconsistent with the principle that human persons are creatures.

intellectual first principles as divine gifts reflecting the divine

Free will is a participation of divine creation, and thus inherently subcreative.

rational life as prudence in intellect and prudentness in will

Moral life requires recognizing ourselves as participants in a moral system; that is to say, as not being involved in a quixotic individual venture but an orderly and harmonious co-venture.

God is the first principle of both the noumenal and the phenomenal, and their unity; Kant's inability to recognize this transcendence of the distinction is an uncritical weakness.

The moral world is only cognizable as personal.
The only world adequate to a moral world is that whose principle of coordination is commensurate with the universality of the moral world.

the Kantian practical postulates as moves against determinism, annihilationism, and nihilism as obstacle to a robust and meaningful moral life

Whewell's Five Virtues as reflections of the Divine Word (the Word as the Benevolence, Purity, Order, etc., of God)

In human beings, understanding and sensibility must cooperate, but this does not imply the strict one-to-one correspondence that Kant tends to assume. We cannot have intuitions without concepts *of some kind* or concepts without intuitions *of some kind* in human cognition, but there are myriad possible ways this can happen. And intuition does not fall wholly one the sensibility side nor (in Kant's sense) concepts wholly on the understanding side. (Both Leibniz and Locke, as interpreted by Kant, are more correct than Kant on this, and Leibniz more correct than Locke.)

One of the functions of the Book of Revelation is to prevent Christian doctrine from over-intellectualizing.

"The Christological heresies are a reflection of tendencies to make pagan the Christian sense of the divine." Sokolowski

"Marriage is an act of will that signifies and involves a mutual gift, which unites the spouses and binds them to their eventual souls, with whom they make up a sole family -- a domestic church." Wojtyla

Fighting evil requires finding the positive good that is lacking.

We often seem to will in a way inconsistent with our actual preferences.

Much of fine art is concerned with love of means precisely as means.

To say that something is false always implies that there is a greater truth with respect to which its falseness is identifiable as falseness, and its relationship to the truth it falsifies is established.

Covnenant is inherently tied to memory; its effects are extended by way of memory.

"Kingship wants to be paternal." Aristotle

"No one by nature is a slave." Philo

"The body is the first human manifestation, which precedes in time the emergence of man's intellectual faculties." David Novak

It is fundamentally important to see the human body as an integral expression of the human person.

While we tend to classify feelings of joy and grief as 'mental', we actually experience them as 'tinging' the world around us, as well.

We do not usually experience pain as such but painful things as painful.

memory as a kind of self-knowledge

Money does not get its value merely from attitudes of valuing but from actual practical exchanges and means of exchange. The attitudes are dispositional to the means and ends that actually make things valuable; something could be valuable even though someone never thought about it in terms of value.

Links of Note

 * Alessandro Bertinetto, Body and Soul...and the Artifact: The Aesthetically Extended Self (PDF)

* Nicole A. Hall, How to Think about the Sublime, at "Psyche"

* Kenneth Walden, Creativity as a higher agency (PDF)

* Sam Mills, Requeering Oscar Wilde, at "Aeon" -- this is much less academic, and much more interesting, than the title makes it sound.

* Kathrin Koslicki & Olivier Massin, Artifact-Functions: A Capacity-Based Approach (PDF)

* Victoria, A possible new poem by Robert Southwell (with a bonus smidgen of Shakespeare and Erasmus), at "Horace & friends"

* Markos Valaris, Knowledge Out of Control (PDF)

* Ben Klustey, Pluralist Points: Virtue and the Pursuit of Happiness, at "Discourse"

* Jessica Gordon-Roth, Tracing Reid's 'Brave Officer Objection' Back to Berkeley -- and Beyond (PDF)

* David Montgomery, Violent, dark, and dirty: What Americans think about the Middle Ages, at "YouGov". This gets further discussion in David M. Perry & Matthew Gabriele, Americans still believe in "The Dark Ages", at "Modern Medieval"

* Michael D. Ramsey, The Originalist Case Against the Insular Cases (PDF)

* Curt Jaimungal, What is energy, actually?

* Matthew Wills, A Short Course in Justice: the Freedmen's Bureau Courts, at "JSTOR Daily"

* Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, Sakes Exist (PDF)

* Edward Feser, Scholastic regress arguments

* Jared Henderson, Taking your education into your own hands, at "Commonplace Philosophy"

* Mark K. Spencer, Aristotelian Substance and Personlistic Subjectivity (PDF)

* João Pinheiro da Silva, Three Theories of Happiness, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Brian Potter, Understanding US Power Outages, at "Construction Physics"

* John Wilkins, No, it's not a dire wolf, at "Evolving Thoughts"

Moral Intuitionism

 A number of philosophical accounts on Substack have recently been talking a bit about moral intuitionism. It is a reminder of why I'm not on Substack -- philosophy Substack is generally not all that good. Don't get me wrong, there's still good work on there, but there is a lot of fairly verbose and pretentious trash. In any case, I thought I would say a thing or two about moral intuitionism. I will start by clearing away a number of the obvious errors I have seen people on Substack making about the subject.

(1) Moral intuitionists are not committed to moral truths being self-evident. 

(2) Moral intuitionists are not committed to moral truths being easy to discern.

(3) Moral intuitionists are not committed to snap judgments in moral matters being generally trustworthy.

(4) Moral intuitionists do not necessarily build their intuitionism on the concept of intuition.

(5) Moral intuitionists are not committed to basic moral judgments being indefeasible or incorrigible.

There is a very common, but very bad, habit of basing one's assessments of a position or family of positions not on any definition or survey of the position(s), but on what one imaginatively associates with the label that came to be attached to them. Moral intuitionism is in fact a very large family of philosophical positions; it's only called 'moral intuitionism' because of some of the things that 'intuition' meant in the nineteenth century, and it is for purely contingent historical reasons that it was the label that stuck to the whole family. You should not assume that any moral intuitionist is necessarily committed to any baggage that your imagination, in the twenty-first century, happens to pile on top of the word 'intuition'. In the case of (1), I allow some leeway; the SEP article, Intuitionism in Ethics, gets this (somewhat) wrong, claiming that all classical intuitionists hold that basic moral propositions are self-evident; this is certainly not strictly true, even with the qualifications the author makes (although it would cover a considerable amount of the historical ground). It would be more accurate to say that all classical intuitionists take some basic moral classifications to be reasonably evident in human experience. But even the SEP article is explicit that it is using 'self-evident' to cover things that we would not usually label as self-evident and confines itself to 'classical' intuitionism, recognizing that you can have intuitionisms with somewhat weaker positions.

Moral intuitionism is a very large family of positions in moral epistemology whose general position we might put colloquially as (1) at least some moral matters are, as such, naturally recognizable in experience of some kind and (2) this natural recognition plays an important role, of some kind, in calibrating moral judgments generally. It's generally contrasted with its major historical enemy, utilitarianism (considered as a position in moral epistemology), for which moral matters properly speaking are calculated, and sometimes with various kinds of conventionalism, for which moral matters are things that are invented or created, although there are lots of other positions that are potentially inconsistent with it.

Charles Darwin, who was a moral intuitionist, has an interesting argument against utilitarianism and for intuitionism in The Descent of Man. Darwin's own form of intuitionism is a moral sense theory, which in turn is one of the classical intuitionisms that does not require moral foundations to be self-evident.  Darwin's argument is that we have extensive evidence that morality, moral assessment, and moral behavior predates anything on which utilitarianism is based. In particular, Darwin argues that the biological evidence indicates that moral assessment existed long before any ability to rationally calculate or even estimate something like overall happiness, and against Mill, Darwin argues that the social feelings that Mill thinks are acquired in the course of moral development are clearly found innate and instinctive in animals closely related to human beings. Thus, Darwin says, the general theory of evolution makes utilitarian accounts of moral epistemology extremely improbable, but is very consistent with the idea that moral assessment is a natural capacity that does not need to be acquired by calculation or anything like it. Darwin's argument, if accepted, would also work against many forms of moral conventionalism and constructionism. Note, incidentally, that Darwin is not committed in any way to the human moral sense (or any animal's moral sense) being infallible or perfectly reliable, or its deliverances being self-evident or necessarily true or indefeasible. Indeed, it's quite clear that Darwin does not hold any of this. But in this sense, it's just like all our cognitive and perceptual systems; the fact that our visual system is not absolutely perfect does not mean that we don't have it, and in fact, significant portions of our reasoning necessarily presuppose a human natural ability to perceive things visually, even if human eyesight turned out to be comparatively poor -- indeed, even if this or that individual happens to be blind.

Darwin's kind of moral sense theory is very far from being the most popular form of intuitionism, but it is genuinely a form of intuitionism. Another kind of argument that is very common, with variations, among many different kinds of intuitionists is one we find in William Whewell (who, like Darwin, is arguing against John Stuart Mill). Whewell holds that we could very well create a utilitarian system of calculation that could deliver correct moral judgments. But, paraphrasing heavily,

(1) human beings in general do not learn to make correct moral judgments by learning such a system;

(2) there are infinitely many possible and mutually exclusive utilitarianisms, some of which are obviously insane and others which are subtly wrong, and the only way to find the kind of utilitarian system that does not at some point go wrong is repeatedly to check it against reasonable moral assessments that we already have;

(3) and utilitarian systems are complicated to use correctly (even committed utilitarians regularly take shortcuts by just assuming things that a strict utilitarian would have to calculate), so while such systems might be useful for particular technical purposes, there will be many situations in which they will not be the best way to make moral assessments.

Whewell is much nicer to utilitarians than intuitionists have often been, but the argument that a moral system, of whatever kind, requires calibration in light of moral experience, and therefore always presupposes that we are already capable of some moral judgment independently of the system, is a common intuitionist idea. That is, we are capable of moral assessment prior to being utilitarian, or whatever, and utilitarianism, or whatever, can only be established, if at all, by reference to such pre-existing capability for moral assessment.

Hidden Wounds

"Who is the doctor who can cleanse my hidden wounds? O, will he be able to heal and to cure them? O who will be able to deliver me from the fire?" thus cried the adulteress. "I will unravel the tangles of sin, and draw near to the Lord and Savior." For indeed, he did not cast the tax collector away from him, and with his speech, he converted the Samaritan woman.... 

[From the Basilica Hymn for the Sixth Week of Lent, in The Book of Before and After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East, Fr. Andrew Younan, ed. and tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024), p. 485.]

Two Poem Drafts

 On Bornholm Island

On Bornholm Island
the sorrows never die
but are cleansed by sunshine
to become new joys
that grow like diamonds
next to the post-mill windmill.

As Gods

You shall be as gods, and it will be hell;
you shall do all things and no things well.
You shall smile and smile, afraid to frown,
you shall wear a gold and shiny crown,
as drop by drop your life runs down
and ends.

Maurice LeBlanc, Arsene Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes

 Introduction

Opening Passage: 

On the eighth day of last December, Mon. Gerbois, professor of mathematics at the College of Versailles, while rummaging in an old curiosity-shop, unearthed a small mahogany writing-desk which pleased him very much on account of the multiplicity of its drawers. (p. 1)

Summary: Mon. Gerbois buys a writing desk for his daughter. It is soon stolen by Arsène Lupin, and Mon. Gerbois shortly afterward realizes that he had accidentally left a lottery ticket in the desk that turns out to have the winning numbers. Lupin offers to return it if he gets half the winnings, and, partly at the instigation of the detective Ganimard, Gerbois agrees so that Ganimard can lay a trap. Lupin, however, gets away scot-free by escaping with a blonde lady. When the blonde lady becomes associated with a later theft of a blue diamond, Ganimard deduces that Lupin was involved. The victims of the theft in the meantime make an appeal to the greatest detective in Europe, Herlock Sholmes. Quite by accident, in a restaurant Lupin and his biographer happen to meet Herlock Sholmes and his enthusiastic biographer Dr. Wilson; they agree that the case will be resolved one way or another within ten days. There is quite a bit of back-and-forth, as the detective who always solves the case tracks down everything he needs to reclaim the blue diamond and get Lupin arrested. Sholmes does in fact succeed. But if he is the detective who always solves the case, Lupin is the thief who always gets away, and despite being arrested, as Sholmes and Wilson are heading back home, Lupin, having escaped the French police, stops by to wish them farewell, and it is clear that they will face off again.

The opportunity comes along a bit later when Sholmes receives a letter from France asking for his help in recovering a Jewish lamp, and at the same time a letter from Lupin telling him not to get involved. This, of course, guarantees that Sholmes makes the trip to France again, and again they face off against each other. But Sholmes is perhaps forgetting that there can be collateral damage in his pursuit of criminals.

This is a delightfully funny book. I think the blue diamond case is much more interesting in some ways than the Jewish lamp case, but both have great moments. I particularly liked the ingenuity with which Lupin lays traps for Sholmes, at one point locking him in a house for a night (but courteously providing him with a picnic) and at another getting him tied up and put on a boat for Southampton (which, however, will not be as successful as he hoped). They easily put Lupin in the heady circle of foes genuinely fit for Sherlock Holmes (and despite the transparent legal cover of 'Herlock Sholmes', there is no question that LeBlanc's intent is to write a plausible Sherlock Holmes, at least as to cleverness of reasoning). In Lupin's case, he's not exactly a nemesis. Unlike Moriarty, say, he's never a danger to the detective himself, and Holmes actually succeeds every time he squares off against Lupin -- albeit never in quite the way he wants to succeed. Rather he is an equal opposite, a rival of sorts. 

Of course, LeBlanc also doesn't hesitate at times to use Herlock Sholmes both to poke fun at the English and at the original Doyle stories. There is a running joke of Dr. Wilson being dense but admiring of Sholmes while Sholmes repeatedly puts Wilson in danger without any qualms, at one point remarking that it's lucky that Wilson's arm was broken rather than his own. And Sholmes has a continual inability to acknowledge his own emotions; my very favorite example of this, below, is when he says that nothing disturbs him while his voice is literally trembling with rage. But the fun is good fun, not malicious, and LeBlanc also at times uses Sholmes as a foil to make fun of the famous French sentimentalism and tendency to love affairs, which certainly characterize Europe's greatest thief.

Favorite Passage:

"Ah! Sholmes, you are a wonderful man! You have such a command over your temper. Nothing ever disturbs you."

"No, nothing disturbs me," replied Sholmes, in a voice that trembled from rage; "besides, what's the use of losing my temper?...I am quite confident of the final result; I shall have the last word." (p. 85)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Maurice LeBlanc, Arsène Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).