Hale on Feminism

Tabitha Hale has an interesting post at "Pink Elephant Pundit" on conservatism and feminism:

Someone called me a "true feminist" last week in response to my articles regarding Playboy and Guy Cimbalo. At first, I was slightly taken back. Feminists generally don’t like me very much. It’s not a crowd I’ve ever considered running with. It did, however, make me think. What is a feminist? In my mind, it’s someone who embraces women for what they are.

Casanova's Fideism (Re-Post)

This is a re-post of a discussion of Casanova's philosophy from 2005, slightly edited to remove broken links.

In the Author's Preface to Casanova's memoirs we read:

I will begin with this confession: whatever I have done in the course of my life, whether it be good or evil, has been done freely; I am a free agent.

The doctrine of the Stoics or of any other sect as to the force of Destiny is a bubble engendered by the imagination of man, and is near akin to Atheism. I not only believe in one God, but my faith as a Christian is also grafted upon that tree of philosophy which has never spoiled anything.

As he notes, he writes his memoirs as a confession, but not in the style of a repentant sinner; he regards his indulgences as the follies of youth, and portrays them in that light. The Preface has what looks like a sharp rejection of Cartesianism:

A certain philosophy, full of consolation, and in perfect accord with religion, pretends that the state of dependence in which the soul stands in relation to the senses and to the organs, is only incidental and transient, and that it will reach a condition of freedom and happiness when the death of the body shall have delivered it from that state of tyrannic subjection. This is very fine, but, apart from religion, where is the proof of it all? Therefore, as I cannot, from my own information, have a perfect certainty of my being immortal until the dissolution of my body has actually taken place, people must kindly bear with me, if I am in no hurry to obtain that certain knowledge, for, in my estimation, a knowledge to be gained at the cost of life is a rather expensive piece of information.

He also laments over Spinoza:

Oh, blissful ignorance! Spinosa, the virtuous Spinosa, died before he could possess it. He would have died a learned man and with a right to the reward his virtue deserved, if he had only supposed his soul to be immortal!

It is not true that a wish for reward is unworthy of real virtue, and throws a blemish upon its purity. Such a pretension, on the contrary, helps to sustain virtue, man being himself too weak to consent to be virtuous only for his own 'gratification. I hold as a myth that Amphiaraus who preferred to be good than to seem good. In fact, I do not believe there is an honest man alive without some pretension, and here is mine.

Casanova also takes the trouble to distance himself from freethinkers:

A so-called free-thinker told me at one time that I could not consider myself a philosopher if I placed any faith in revelation. But when we accept it readily in physics, why should we reject it in religious matters? The form alone is the point in question. The spirit speaks to the spirit, and not to the ears. The principles of everything we are acquainted with must necessarily have been revealed o those from whom we have received them by the great, supreme principle, which contains them all. The bee erecting its hive, the swallow building its nest, the ant constructing its cave, and the spider warping its web, would never have done anything but for a previous and everlasting revelation. We must either believe that it is so, or admit that matter is endowed with thought. But as we dare not pay such a compliment to matter, let us stand by revelation.

I think that what he chiefly has in mind here is the immortality of the soul: Casanova is a skeptical fideist about the immortality of the soul. Reason cannot prove it (pace Descartes), it must be accepted on faith alone (pace an unnamed freethinker), and it is rational to hope for it (pace Spinoza).

He has an interesting discussion with a Muslim in chapter XIV, where he implicitly accepts the Incarnation, and gives a fideist response to the Muslim:

"My religion tells me to believe without arguing, and I shudder, my dear Yusuf, when I think that, through some specious reasoning, I might be led to renounce the creed of my fathers. I first must be convinced that they lived in error. Tell me whether, respecting my father's memory, I ought to have such a good opinion of myself as to sit in judgement over him, with the intention of giving my sentence against him?"

However, after the conversation, he allows that Yusuf might be right; but still says that it would be absurd to leave the creed of his fathers for Islam because even if Muhammed were right on this point, he was still an 'arrant imposter'. (The discussions with Yusuf are all fascinating, and well worth reading.) He is certainly a Catholic (goes to confession regularly, is certain that he is absolved of his sins in it, etc.) He is severely critical of the adoration of the Sacred Heart (which he thinks a bit disgusting), and is suspicious of Jesuits, but neither of those would have been all that uncommon for Catholics at the time. He reminds me in many ways of Montaigne: philosophically skeptical, fideistically Catholic. His memoirs are a great resource for those interested in early modern fideism.

Poem Draft and Two Re-Drafts

Flowing Clock

You turned into a flowing clock
dripping down the wall
which had a bulge and curvature
like a time-hued ball,
and I fled
down streets of jasmine scent
through catacombs of the dead
where thoughts were bent
around a singularity,
attractive, charming, strange,
a sublime focus of orbit
that time and space deranged
until they curled and flowed
like some mobius made of worlds
that hang like crystal globes
through free-fall hurled.
And you were still around
like the breezes in the air,
touching my thought and passing
in games of truth or dare,
and one point drew me on,
a magnet drawing steel,
and I, a pawn,
the check of life could feel
until that gentle point,
wild and sublime,
turned a clock into a flowing face
and turned back space and time.

Half Asleep in a Thunderstorm

I lie in bed at night,
a fan above my head;
my mind whirls round and round
and I dream that I am dead.

The darkness all around me
is a blanket on the brain,
my heartbeat in my ears
is the pounding of the rain,
and I watch the world go by,
autumn leaves upon the gale,
full of visions of lost time
and the lapse of every tale.

The darkness thunders softly
as I drift here in my bed,
half in the world and of it,
half out of it and dead.

Outside, It Is Night

Outside, it is night;
but I and the raccoons
are still going over accounts,
picking out the morsels
from cast-off residues.

Would I were a Pangur Bán
hunting for his mouse,
searching out the meaning
of these everlasting words!
Then there'd be a point.

Instead, I stare at the page.
I muse on the words.
I make a few revisions.
And all this little work
leaves me feeling exhausted.

Often I find something good;
that's hearteningly true.
But it amazes even me
how absurdly difficult
I can make writing a paper.

Academic writing, like poetry,
is proof that there is a Muse,
a source of inspiration;
it's there or it isn't,
but either way, you have to try.

One always suspects that others
are able to do better.
Some work more consistently,
without this mental stutter,
but I'm not sure it's worth it.

After all, never to be inspired
is never a consolation
for lacking the pangs of genius.
That sounds quite good--
this is labor before birth.

Or perhaps it's mental aridity.
Those monks in the desert knew
that springs sometimes go dry;
and what I have is just that,
aridity. That's good, too.

But then I always wonder
if I'm really just kidding myself.
After all, it sounds pretentious
to talk of Muses, pains of labor,
aridity of the mind.

I'm pulled both ways.
I can't shake the feeling
that I should be grateful
for this gift of stop-and-start
that shirks dull assiduity.

But I also can't shake the feeling
that it's all an excuse,
a self-indulgent pretense,
by which I justify a lack of work
and empty nighttime efforts.

Quick Note

I will be out of town until next Wednesday, visiting some college friends in Portland, Oregon, and I doubt I'll be online during that time. But I've arranged for a few small things to be automatically posted over the next few days, so it should be as if I were never even gone. See you Wednesday!

Cheers,
Brandon Watson

EA Fakes Christian Protest

An interesting development in the world of advertising:

Video game giant Electronic Arts has admitted it funded a group of fake protesters who pretended to be Christians as a publicity stunt to spur interest in its upcoming action game very loosely based on Dante’s “Inferno.”

The game company hired a group of almost 20 people to stand outside the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles on Wednesday, the Associated Press says. The phony protesters passed out amateurish material and held signs bearing slogans such as “Trade in Your PlayStation for a PrayStation,” “Hell is not a Game” and “EA = Electronic Anti-Christ.”

Holly Rockwood, an EA spokeswoman, said the charade was arranged by a viral marketing agency hired by the company.

A web page in the crude style of 1990s web design was also created in connection with the stunt. It depicted crosses crushing the word “sin” and placed images of the King James Bible among phony condemnations and thinly-veiled promotions of the game.

This sort of publicity stunt is likely to be more and more common as time goes on. Outrage, or just someone playing on your prejudice and accepted stereotypes to sway your opinion? There will be times that it will become difficult to tell.

Connaissances du Coeur

Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connaît point; on le sait en mille choses.
The heart has its reasons whereof reason knows nothing; one knows it in a thousand things.

It is sometimes difficult to convey how much modern people have a one-dimensional view of their own minds. Everything is jumbled and conflated together until we can hardly talk of 'belief' or 'intuition' or 'thought' or 'reason' without equivocating ourselves to high heaven. But it is possible to recognize that our thoughts have a texture to them, that they are not all the same kind of thing; and this pertains the maxim above, because Pascal is, in fact, arguing for precisely this sort of distinction.

I. Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a seventeenth-century prodigy, a pioneer in projective geometry and probability theory. He was early on a participant in the Jansenist movement, but entered what is often known as his 'worldly period', in which he distanced himself from religious matters, from 1648-1654; this period was brought to an end by a brush with death in 1654, which led to an intensified interest in religious topics. He took up the cause of Jansenism against the Jesuits with his Provinical Letters, an attack on Jesuit casuistry. As he was finishing up the Letters, his 10-year-old niece Marguerite Périer, ceased to suffer from a condition thought to be incurable when a relic, said to be a thorn from Christ's crown of thorns, was touched to her eye; this event, the Miracle of the Holy Thorn, took the already growing Jansenist movement and galvanized it, sparking it to new life. It was in this context that Pascal set out to write his life's masterwork, an Apologie de la religion Chrétienne (Defense of the Christian Religion). By the time of his death, however, the work still consisted only of scattered notes and fragments. These were collected together after his death as the Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets (Thoughts of Mr. Pascal on religion and on some other subjects). The Pensées, despite their fragmentary character, have become a world classic.

II. Pensées

Because it consists only of notes we always have to be very careful in interpreting claims we find in the Pensées. For instance, there are indications throughout the text that parts of the work were intended to be presented in dialogue form, or something like it, and therefore not every sentence in the notes may represent Pascal's own view, as opposed to a view that he thought he needed to consider. A good example of how this can affect interpretation is the most famous argument in the Pensées, Pascal's Wager. The notes related to the Wager are often read as if they were all part of a single argument; but there are indications in them that the Wager argument in its final form would have been dialogical, and that different parts of the argument are actually responses to very specific concerns by an interlocutor. (I've given a rough account of the way I think the Wager argument should be read here.)

Nonetheless we can get at least a rough idea of what Pascal intended for the work. The two major themes of the work, which would probably also have formed the two major divisions of the book, are the wretchedness of human beings with God and Jesus as the way for human beings to be united to God. Judging from the notes we have, it is very likely that the latter would also have included a defense of the Jansenist miracles, like the Holy Thorn, from their Jesuit detractors.

III. Reasons of the Heart

Traditionally, the 'heart' was seen as the seat of personhood. For instance, the scholastics often took the 'heart' to mean the intellect and will. It isn't clear whether Pascal had this specifically in mind, but Pascal's 'heart' is also the source of understanding and loving in the human person. The passage from which our dictum comes is the following note:

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point; on le sait en mille choses. Je dis que le coeur aime l’être universel naturellement, et soimême naturellement selon qu’il s’y adonne; et il se durcit contre l’un ou l’autre à son choix. Vous avez rejeté l’un et conservé l’autre: estce par raison que vous vous aimez? (#277)

The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing; one knows it in a thousand things. I say that the heart loves universal being naturally, and also itself naturally, insofar as it gives itself to them; and it hardens itself against one or the other at its own choice. You have rejected the one and kept the other; it is by reason that you love yourself?

Note that the emphasis here is not on our dictum but on the two kinds of love: love for universal being and love for one's self. And the point is that the latter is not girded by reasoning, calculating out the reasons for loving oneself: one simply does it, naturally, and one can only fail to do it by deliberately hardening your heart against yourself. Likewise with love of universal being. The heart involves instinctual impulses, fundamental principles of life; they are not reasoned out, but they are also not irrational. We see this when we ask what sort of things Pascal thinks the heart can know. And, mathematician that he is, he is very clear: one of the things we know by heart rather than reason is mathematics:

We know truth not only by reason but also by the heart; it is in this last way that we know first principles, and reason, having no part in it, tries in vain to combat them. Pyrrhonians, who have nothing else for their object, labor uselessly. We know we do not dream; however powerless we may be to prove it by reason, this poweressness shows nothing other than the weakness of our reason, not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as they claim. For knowledge of first principles, such as space, times, motions, numbers, are as sure as anything that our reasoning gives us. And this knowledge of the heart and of instinct are such that reason must trust it, and base all of its discourse on it. (The heart feels that there are three dimensions in space and that numbers are infinite and reason then shows that there are no two square numbers of which one is double the other. The principles are felt, the propositions are concluded, and all with certainty, although in different ways.) (#283)

If we had stronger and better minds, we would, in fact, know everything by heart, the way we know our first principles. But our minds are actually fairly weak. So some things we know by heart, such as the things without which we cannot even make sense of our own reasoning, and from these fundamental things reason draws its conclusions. If we did not have the heart to anchor our reasoning, all our reasoning would be purely hypothetical: it is the heart that, without having to reason, reasonably accepts some things as certainly true and some things as certinly false.

This ties into the theme of the Pensées in that Pascal argues throughout that God can only properly be known through the heart: it is by the heart, namely, through our love of universal being, that we know God, not by going through a step-by-step enumeration of reasons. This heart's knowledge of God is faith. Reasoning can have a role, in preparing the mind for faith; but the heart alone can sense God, and only when God draws it to love Himself. Pascal recognizes that there is a danger here: as he says elsewhere (#275), people often mistake their imagination for their heart -- they think they know and love when in fact all they are doing is imagining what it would be like to know and to love, just as, perhaps, some people confuse understanding mathematics with imagining that one understands it. But this danger does not show that there is no such thing as knowledge of the heart; rather, it shows the importance of finding true knowledge of the heart rather than merely imaginary knowledge.

This context perhaps gives a better idea of what Pascal means when he says the heart has its reasons whereof reason knows nothing; it's not about fuzzy sentiment but about fundamental understanding and love, the kind that makes reasoning possible in the first place. It is not based on reasoning; rather, it is that on which reasoning is based. And despite not being based on reasoning, it is also eminently reasonable, since reason gets its own reasonableness from it. The heart goes beyond reason because it is the very environment in which reason operates, without which it could not even exist. Some things are beyond our power to reason out; they must be simply understood.

The New York State Senate

has gone insane. Or, more probably, it was already insane and is slipping to a new level of craziness.