1. What was the artist attempting to do?
2. Were they successful?
3. Was it worth doing?
That there would be analogies between art evaluation and research evaluation is virtually inevitable; they are both concerned with skills of production, and thus naturally organized in means-end terms. This is precisely what is going on with the three questions: (1) is a determination of the specific ends of the work; (2) is an assessment of the fitting of means to those ends; and (3) is an assessment of how those ends relate to more general ends. Any account of how any practice is evaluated will be at least broadly analogous to the evaluation of art. So one would expect there to be such similarities to works of art if we focus on 'works of research' (which we arguably should).
But Andrew Gelman at the link suggests a possible problem with this:
There are many cases of successful art, and for that matter successful research, that were created by accident, where the artist or researcher was just mucking around, or maybe just trying to do something to pay the bills, and something great came out of it.
I’m not saying you’ll get much from completely random mucking around of the monkeys-at-a-typewriter variety. And in general I do believe in setting goals and working toward them. But artistic and research success often does seem to come in part by accident, or as a byproduct of some other goals.
One old phrase for this kind of situation, in which something progresses by fulfilling ends at which it did not aim, is 'heterogony of ends' (Heterogonie der Zwecke), due to the German moral philosopher and psychologist Wundt. As he puts it:
The resultants arising from united psychical processes include contents that were not present in the components, and these new contents may in turn enter into relation with the old components thus changing again the relations between these old components and consequently the new resultants that arise from them.
Thus, for instance, in the course of acting according to one set of motives, and by the very process of acting according to them, we develop another set of motives, which do not replace, but interact with, the motives we had before. The development of new goals is a natural side effect of pursuing goals.
There is, on the other hand, some reason to be cautious about the introduction of accident into the mix. Art (like research) is not something that happens unawares. If a dog shakes off water, the waterdrops may make a pleasing pattern; but the pattern is not art if nobody notices it. So the mere accident doesn't accomplish anything. But a photographer might present it artistically, or a painter might represent it artistically, and then we have art. Art (and research) involves skills, and it is the application of those skills that actually makes anything art (or research). Thus, one might say, the accidents one might name as contributing to art are in fact just vividly dramatic examples of what artists really are always doing -- take the contingent features of their material and the situation in which they find themselves, and use them artistically. But it is in fact the skill that makes the art, and skills are analyzed by means and ends.
We also have to keep in mind that accidents can be only partial and ends can be complex. Our ends are never simple monads, but have their own structure. A bare end (world peace) is nothing but a wish or velleity, if even that, but when we are actually doing something, we have hierarchies of ends. Even analyzing something as simple as deliberately tying one's shoes before a race turns up an entire structure: I make this loop to make this knot to keep my shoes cinched to keep them on to avoid tripping to run better to compete in the race, etc. Thus an accident may well be unexpected and even inconsistent with one end, but allowed for and consistent with a more general end -- for instance, I may be looking for Such-and-such Street to get to the park, but in the course of doing so come upon an easier route. Did I find the park by accident? Well, in a sense yes and in a sense no: I was looking for the park; I was trying to do it one way but discovered a better way; the better way came by accident, but would not have been discovered at all unless I had already been looking for the park.
Thus we have a sort of aporia here -- on one side heterogony of ends and on the other analysis of skill, each of which can be taken as suggesting an opposed view of the role of accident. But I think we can deal with it fairly easily, by asking the question: In terms of what is art (or research) successful? To be successful is to achieve ends or goals. In the case of the researcher mucking around just "trying to do something to pay the bills" it is nonetheless not a matter of sheer chance that the researcher was examining this rather than that, or that, having found it, they made this use of it rather than that. Even with the researcher just "mucking around", it's not chance that they were mucking around with this rather than that, or doing it in this way rather than that. There's already a rather robust structure of ends in place -- standing operational goals, so to speak. And non-chance this-rather-than-that means that we are still comfortably within the realm of evaluate by means and ends.
And what questions can we ask to evaluate by means and ends? Nothing other than: What were they? Were the means good? Were the ends good? And those are noticeably just more general forms of the three questions above.
ADDED LATER: I intended also to note, but forgot when actually writing the post, that often the contribution of accident to art (or research) can easily be accommodated by the third question -- sometimes an accident makes a line of research more worthwhile than one could have ever expected, because it put you in the right place at the right time with the right resources at hand.
Fifteenth Sunday of Pentecost 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Luke 7:36-50
O God, who formed us in Your image,
Your Son has brought us true salvation,
bringing divine gifts of compassion.
You came in power and the Spirit,
and yet in humility of form,
forgiving sins to those with true faith.
In a mercy of forgiveness, Lord,
You became for our sakes mortal man,
descending into darkness of tomb;
You freed the just held captive by death,
establishing peace in the dark realms,
assembling the people to praise You,
that from them Your word may go forth,
that nations may turn from their idols
and be delivered from coming wrath.
Today is the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, O. Cist., Doctor of the Church. He spent a great deal of his life trying, with a complete lack of success, to avoid conflict and controversy; he was a religious reformer, and thus inevitably became mired in controversy, and people kept thrusting him into responsibilities of arbitration and negotiation, with the result that he was continually criticized for meddling in matters that did not concern him. He established the Abbey of Clairvaux, helped to solidify the status of the Knights Templar, participated in the Second Lateran Council, and preached the Second Crusade. The most famous theological work of the Doctor Mellifluus is his Sermons on the Song of Songs, but he has a number of other works. The following is from the opening of his Life of St. Malachy:
It is indeed always worth while to portray the illustrious lives of the saints, that they may serve as a mirror and an example, and give, as it were, a relish to the life of men on earth. For by this means in some sort they live among us, even after death, and many of those who are dead while they live are challenged and recalled by them to true life. But now especially is there need for it because holiness is rare, and it is plain that our age is lacking in men. So greatly, in truth, do we perceive that lack to have increased in our day that none can doubt that we are smitten by that saying, Because iniquity shall abound the love of many shall wax cold; and, as I suppose, he has come or is at hand of whom it is written, Want shall go before his face. If I mistake not, Antichrist is he whom famine and sterility of all good both precedes and accompanies. Whether therefore it is the herald of one now present or the harbinger of one who shall come immediately, the want is evident. I speak not of the crowd, I speak not of the vile multitude of the children of this world: I would have you lift up your eyes upon the very pillars of the Church. Whom can you show me, even of the number of those who seem to be given for a light to the Gentiles, that in his lofty station is not rather a smoking wick than a blazing lamp? And, says One, if the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! Unless perchance, which I do not believe, you will say that they shine who suppose that gain is godliness; who in the Lord's inheritance seek not the things which are the Lord's, but rather their own.
fluid foil as seventh simple machine (Mitts0
rotation: axle, pulley, lever; slide: incline, wedge, screw, foil
the block or wall itself a sort of simple machine (press as moving blocks)
as well as link (Willis & Whewell)
the drunkenness of Noah as establishng that sin cannot be removed from the world by punishment alone
The more fundamental the particle, the less sense it makes to think of it as not a part of a larger system, i.e., the less sense it makes to think of it in abstraction from its context. This clearly starts to be true even before isolation becomes impossible.
the parallels between organisms and caves
Two substances become one substance. Either (1) there is only the one substance; or (2) the two substances are still complete substances but also incomplete substances; or (3) the two substances are now only incomplete substances.
Frankfurt examples all involve cooperative action of some kind;that is why they are outside a given power to choose.
Analytic philosophy seems throughout to have difficulty with reduplication.
virtual inexistence as a mereological parthood relation
Humean metaphysics as an attack on principiation (substance, cause, identity, rational primacy, sovereignty)
-- but as Shepherd notes, it requires one kind (impressions as principles of ideas) and regularly frames things in ways suggestive of principiation (mind/imagination expressed in principle terms is very common)
neutral mutations as shifting potential for future pathways (e.g., a mtuation that itself makes no difference might replace something that would have made some possible pathways nonviable or it might make some pathways reachable in the future, allowing for other conditions, being able to change survival/reproduction under different circumstances)
'Ockham's Razor' cannot be applied without consideration of causes; parsimony is an implicitly causal notion.
'X is explainable in terms of Y' does not suffice for 'X is reducible to Y'.
chemical reactions as parts of vital activities
the category of relatio as anti-reductionist 9A being related to B, categorically, implies that no reduction is possible without including B, and thus is locally resistant to reduction)
the relation between knowledge and intimacy
In an error-ridden world, understanding requires repentance.
Accounts in which nothing can be both sublime and beautiful are defective accounts of both sublimity and beauty.
diversifications of beauty
(1) according to how it is seen
(2) according to how it pleases
e.g., picturesque is what pleases on being seen with painter's eye; charm is what pleases with calm sensible pleasure on being seen; intelligible beauty is what pleases on being seen in the intellectual sense; harmony is what pleases on being 'seen' i.e., perceived, by ear, etc.
Nothing can be an inference license unless it is also something else, which can then serve to license in whatever particular way it does.
We appear to learn what logical implications are by first thinking of them indirectly in causal terms.
Knowing how to use modal vocabulary requires knowing more than the modal vocabulary.
sensation belongs to intentional order
(1) aptness for judgment
(2) suitability for being treated as knowing in a broad sense
(3) sensation is naturally understood in the same structural way as intentional cognition
(4) the features of sensation Berkeley identifies as language-like
-- note that Sellars makes the 'intellect in the real order' what a Thomist would call an internal sense; indeed, Sellars' account ends up being a good account of internal sense, at least in human beings.
Beyond very narrow limits, reductionism seems to be mostly a set of excuses for not having to take seriously what everyone recognizes, including the reductionist in practice.
the problem of developing energy sources that are simultaneously safe, distributed, and dispatchable
Identifying a genuine trend requires identifying reasonable beginning and a reasonably expected end.
random variation = lots of varying reasons
blessing as intermediary between law and grace
Custody of religion is an ineliminable part of a complete society.
Bodily integrity is always with respect to our ends as rational animals, which make us whole as rational animal bodies.
People need a vocabulary to think at length of anything profound.
To appreciate a system of thought one must stroll around it as if it were a city.
constrained outlets for buffoonery as an important aspect of society-building
moral sentimentalism as perspectival approach to ethics (Hume recognizes this very well)
anticipatory signs as having a different structure from memorial signs
casuistics as ethics of reasonable doubt
Experimentation is equipment behavior analysis.
Angels are only known qua intermediate causes.
Marriage obligates more than the immediately involved parties.
Much rhetorical maneuver in argument is concerned with shifting the assumed domain; this is why avoiding ignoratio elenchi is often important.
title to heaven under claim of inheritance; title to heaven under claim of reward
the refreshing of intellectual systems
(1) by new examples
(2) by further extension
(3) by shift of perspective
(4) by practical use
(5) by historical rediscovery
knowledge of other minds as quasi-memory
Lk 1:45 & Lk 11:28 : we participate or share the faith of Mary; Mary's faith as model of ours
other minds & the sense of something as ours
The human person is that in which a world is known.
the act of writing as a full cognitive loop: idea - imagination - mechanical implementation - sensation - reflection on the written - idea
The mind needs an immense amount of pollination.
the historical books of the Bible & (1) the elusiveness of perfection (2) the importance of repentance (3) the possibility of restoration
The infinity of God requires that every revelation of Him be layered.
reason as the field of evangelism
prototyping, testing, & monitoring of experimental apparatus
the corporate liabilities of the human race
signative, pictorial, and perceptual intending
the structural beauty of well designed law
Mathematical consensus seems to be built on the basis of tiny problems linked together.
zero as universal part for natural numbers (successor function as mereological)
sanctioning authority as arising out of completeness of care
recognition as one of the fundamental principles of fine art
Historical dating is a thoroughly causal exercise (this is esp. clear with regard to testimonial evidence, such as Assyrian record of the 763 BC eclipse, but is also true of more complicated forms of dating, like the use of the Thera eruption, and methods used, like radiocarbon or tree rings).
synchronisms as common-cause effects (independent attestation)
condign vs congruous punishment
The loyalty of men arises from participation in what is great, and nothing saps it like refusing to recognize that participation (as when superiors take credit for the work of subordinates).
It is a common error to confuse 'All physical effects are part of a physical causal system' and 'All physical effects have physical causes'.
metaphors as activation keys for reasoning
If the Land symbolically represents Torah and the Church, 'be strong and of good courage' is also a hermeneutic principle, and a principle for dealing with heresy.
prayer of the saints for those on earth 2Macc 15;14
1 Macc and Aquinas' arguments for military religious order 2-2.188.3
metaphor as a means of compressing inference
How evidence is esteemed affects how it is weighed.
The 'desert base' is a constitutive cause of deserving (its form).
All experience is an experience of the potential become actual.
Mary as Queen of Courtesy
Oppression by taxation is not the most violent oppression; but history shows it to be one of the most devastating, because it does not cease.
One often finds people criticized for being otherworldly, but there is precious little evidence that thisworldly thinkers make less of a hash of things than otherworldly thinkers.
the Babbage principle: "The master manufacturer, by dividing the work to be executed into different processes, each requiring different degrees of skill or of force, can purchase exactly that precise quantity of both which is necessary for each process; whereas if the whole work were executed by one workman, that person must possess sufficient skill to perform the most difficult, and sufficient strength to execute the most laborious, of the operations into which the art is divided."
That is actually intelligible which is intellectually active.
The wise learn even from the foolish; the foolish do not learn even from the wise.
faith as the victory of justice (Is 42:6-7; 1 Jn 5:1-9)
If Christ intercedes with the Father, teh saints of His Body intercede with the Father in and through Him.
pain, pleasure, and natural desert
Effort alone is never a basis for desert. Desert is tied more closely to the ends of what is deserved than anything to do with the action of doing what deserves (which is not to say that the latter is always irrelevant -- that depends on the ends).
It's always worth remembering, as Stendhal indicates, that Italian is much more dialectally diverse than we usually remember; this is more true the farther back you go. As I've mentioned before, when Dante or Petrarch or Manzoni write in Italian, they have to brew up the version of Italian they think is appropriate to their task, and tend to draw on more than one dialect.
It's interesting that Stendhal is so acidic on the English class system, comparing it to Indian castes. I actually wonder if Stendhal's bite here is deliberately playing on English self-image and turning it upside-down -- the English, particularly in the nineteenth century, regarded candor as an essential part of their national character, so to contrast them unfavorably with the Milanese on precisely that point seems less than accidental.
Pierre Jean de Béranger was a poet who became famous as a songwriter, and in this period was writing pieces critical of the establishment. Jean François de Saint-Lambert, who wrote The Seasons, was in Voltaire's circle; his mistress was Emilie de Châum;telet -- she would become pregnant with his child and die from complications a few days afterward.
[25 octobre]
I confess that I was not expecting an account of the game of Tarot; but, as Stendhal says, apparently it was very fashionable in Milan at the time. Stendhal's description seems quite careful: a game of not less than fifty-two cards, three times the size of a standard playing-card, with a score or more cards with the function of an ace or trump, beautifully illustrated. The trumps he notes -- the Pope, the Papess Joan, the Fool, the Hanged Man, the Lovers, Fortune, Death -- are all recognizable, as are the suits of bastoni (staves), danari (coins), spade (swords), and coppe (cups). According to Daniel Muller's notes, Francesco Reina was a notable bibliophile of the time, although one could perhaps gather that from Stendhal's comment about the library. Stendhal's repeating of Reina's claim is the first I've heard of the idea that Michelangelo invented the game of tarocco itself, and as far as I know or have been able to discover, nobody else suggests it.
Regardless, the picture of Milanese Tarot players swearing at each other at the top of their lungs while playing, and yet not actually taking any offense, is priceless. And I think the better of Stendhal for being charmed by it, and his comment is worth quoting in full:
Dans ce siècle menteur et comédien (this age of cant, dit Lord Byron), cet excès de franchise et de bonhomie entre gens de plus riches et de plus nobles de Milan me frappe si fort, qu'il me donne l'idée de me fixer en ce pays. Le bonheur est contagieux.
And I also think the better of him for his rejection of the notion that this frankness and goodwill is unsophisticated or unrefined. Stendhal comes off as a bit of a pretentious snob sometimes; it's good to know he has another side.
[27 octobre]
The Milanese like a beautiful house; and, indeed, it does seem likely that architecture, at least in Milan, was a more thriving art than painting or sculpture. I did find the notion of architectural style as that physiognomy that «inspire un sentiment d'accord avec sa destination», as well as the idea that it is often connected with respect.
[28 octobre, á 5 heures du matin, en sortant du bal]
And here we have the statement that called my attention to this work in the first place: «La beauté n'est jamais, me semble, qu'une promesse du bonheur». And, of course, it turns out that Stendhal is talking about pretty girls at a dance; whenever you hear a profound statement from Stendhal and look it up, you always find that he said it in the most superficial way possible. I confess that I just skimmed some of the ballroom gossip.
[30 octobre]
John Scott was the editor who revived The London Magazine in 1820; the revival was an astounding success, and put the magazine at the heart of English literary life, as its contributors included the major Romantics and 'Cockney School' poets of the day -- Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and the like. The magazine's major rival was the powerhouse of literary critics, Blackwood's Magazine, and a literary feud developed between the two when John Gibson Lockhart began publishing articles critical of Keats and the rest for their working-class diction -- Gibson famously calling Keats a "vulgar cockney poetaster". Scott began an extended assault on Blackwood's and on Gibson; Gibson called Scott a liar and a scoundrel; Gibson's agent, Jonathan Henry Christie, insulted Scott to his face; and a duel was scheduled. It took place on February 16, 1821, and Scott died in the second round of the duel. Christie was tried for murder and acquitted. Those were the heroic days of literary criticism, of course, the days in which a man set to page criticism for which he was willing, if necessary, to put his life on the line.
And that is October of 1816. As I said above, I found this installment rough going, but the tarocco in Milan was worth it. We pick up in about two weeks or so on page 54, and finally with November Stendhal actually starts showing us around Milan, beginning with the Piazzo Reale and the Duomo.
Sacred places are the first places to be destroyed by invaders and iconoclasts, for whom nothing is more offensive than the enemy's gods. And we should recognize that much of the destruction of our environment today is deliberate, the result of a willed assault on old and despised forms of tranquillity. For there are two broad approaches to building: the way of settlement, and the way of disruption. Often when we settle we fit our lives into an existing and already consecrated pattern, strive to inherit the order established by those who have come before us, and to honor the spirit of the place: in this sense, as Heidegger points out in an important essay, to build is to dwell. But the iconoclast seeks to replace old gods with new, to disenchant the landscape and to mark the place with signs of his defiance.
Roger Scruton, The Face of God, Bloomsbury (New York: 2015), pp. 123-124.
My books I'd fain cast off, I cannot read,
'Twixt every page my thoughts go stray at large
Down in the meadow, where is richer feed,
And will not mind to hit their proper targe.
Plutarch was good, and so was Homer too,
Our Shakespeare's life were rich to live again,
What Plutarch read, that was not good nor true,
Nor Shakespeare's books, unless his books were men.
Here while I lie beneath this walnut bough,
What care I for the Greeks or for Troy town,
If juster battles are enacted now
Between the ants upon this hummock's crown?
Bid Homer wait till I the issue learn,
If red or black the gods will favor most,
Or yonder Ajax will the phalanx turn,
Struggling to heave some rock against the host.
Tell Shakespeare to attend some leisure hour,
For now I've business with this drop of dew,
And see you not, the clouds prepare a shower--
I'll meet him shortly when the sky is blue.
This bed of herd's grass and wild oats was spread
Last year with nicer skill than monarchs use.
A clover tuft is pillow for my head,
And violets quite overtop my shoes.
And now the cordial clouds have shut all in,
And gently swells the wind to say all's well;
The scattered drops are falling fast and thin,
Some in the pool, some in the flower-bell.
I am well drenched upon my bed of oats;
But see that globe come rolling down its stem,
Now like a lonely planet there it floats,
And now it sinks into my garment's hem.
Drip drip the trees for all the country round,
And richness rare distills from every bough;
The wind alone it is makes every sound,
Shaking down crystals on the leaves below.
For shame the sun will never show himself,
Who could not with his beams e'er melt me so;
My dripping locks--they would become an elf,
Who in a beaded coat does gayly go.
He said that such a statement as "That bass moves too much" is not a statement about human beings at all, but is more like a piece of Mathematics; and that, if I say of a face which I draw "It smiles too much," this says that it could be brought closer to some "ideal," not that it is not yet agreeable enough, and that to bring it closer to the "ideal" in question would be more like "solving a mathematical problem." Similarly, he said, when a painter tries to improve his picture, he is not making a psychological experiment on himself, and that to say of a door "It is top-heavy" is to say what is wrong with it, not what impression it gives you. The question of Aesthetics, he said, was not "Do you like this?" but "Why do you like it?"
What Aesthetics tries to do, he said, is to give reasons, e.g., for having this word rather than that in a particular place in a poem, or for having this musical phrase rather than that in a particular place in a piece of music.
G. E. Moore, "Wittgenstein's Lectures in 1930-1933," in Classics of Analytic Philosophy, Ammerman, ed., Hackett (Indianapolis: 1990) p. 278.
(Due to the end of term, I am running on a bit of a delayed schedule here, so this is a day late.)
I have been going back and forth about what to do for the next Fortnightly Book. I'll have a fair amount of time, but I'm also coming off a grueling end of summer term, so it makes sense to do either a re-read or something relatively easy. After some thought, I've decided to do Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which I haven't read for a bit.
P&P was Austen's second published novel, after Sense and Sensibility, and was originally published not under Austen's own name, but under the byline, "by the Author of Sense and Sensibility." The working title seems to have been First Impressions, and, if so, it failed to get a publisher in the late 1790s. Austen went back to it in 1811 to revise it, and this is usually thought to have involved changing it from an epistolary novel to its current form, but we don't know exactly what was involved in the revisions, since we lack the original. The reason for the title which became famous was probably just to have a distinctive parallel to the title of Sense and Sensibility, but could also be due to a passage in the last chapter of Fanny Burney's Cecilia, with which Austen was certainly well acquainted:
“The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE....Yet this, however, remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their termination....
...Thus the same passions, taking but different directions, do mischief and cure it alternately...."
Austen, who wasn't expecting a resounding success, sold the copyright outright to avoid taking on any risk (in publishing Sense and Sensibility she had indemnified the publisher from any loss); her total payment for what would become the greatest novel in the English language was £110. (The publisher made at least four times that on the first two editions alone.)
Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Romans 12:9-15; Luke 1:46-55
Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
giving goodness to those who seek His ways,
for He has mercy upon all nations
from generation to generation.
From Mary the Sun of justice has dawned:
He has showered His Mother with graces,
filling us with spiritual praises,
on this her feast of exaltation.
Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
and blessed is His Mother for all ages,
fountain of blessings, holy treasure-ship,
pure Mother of God and leaven of life,
sanctified censer and fragrant rose,
vessel of the forgiving ember,
shining temple of the Holy Spirit,
bridal chamber of the heavenly King.
Surely the Lord raises up the lowly,
so that You, O Mary, may pray for us:
beseech the Lord who has appeared from you
for pardon for sins, peace for our churches,
contemplation for our monasteries,
strength for the aged and wisdom for the young,
good education for all our children,
O fair Mother of the salvific Word.
Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake.
Summary: Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello are four young friends enjoying the artistic life of Rome. Miriam and Hilda are painters; Miriam does original pieces while Hilda paints copies of the great works of Rome. Kenyon is a sculptor in charge of a workshop. And Donatello is an Italian, the Count of Monte Beni; the book opens with the other three noting the remarkable resemblance of Donatello to the Faun of Praxiteles, and teasing him about whether he has a faun's ears under his curls:
Of the four, Kenyon is attracted to Hilda and Donatello to Miriam. In both cases, however, there is some distance -- Hilda is wholly devoted to her virginal life of art, studying the Great Masters, and Miriam, with her carefully hidden past, is reserved and fends off attentions with biting wit and sarcasm. But Miriam has some unknown connection with a stranger who shadows her and whose image haunts her painting, and the lives of the four friends will change fatefully when Donatello, jealous and protective, throws the man off a cliff to his death. The guilt of Donatello, and of Miriam who may have incited the deed with a glance, will hang heavily over them from this point.
Besides the Marble Faun itself, a work that repeatedly shows up in the story is this one, which Hilda has recently copied:
In Hawthorne's time it would have been known as The Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni, and it was one of the most famous paintings in the world, a continual fascination to artists of the Romantic movement. Beatrice Cenci was raped by her father, and with her mother and brothers plotted to assassinate him. They tried to poison him, but when this failed, they bludgeoned him to death and threw him off the balcony in the hope that it would look like an accident. The plot was uncovered, however, and Beatrice Cenci was executed at the age of 22. According to the legend, the portrait was painted the day before her execution. The tale became (and still to some extent is) famous, and the calm, ambiguous, possibly innocent expression of a figure who was both victim of awful crime and perpetrator of violent murder played a significant role in the painting's fame, and Hawthorne in his Italian notebooks reflected on the hard-to-define fascination of the work, wondering if it would exert the same fascination on someone who did not know the story behind it. (A worthwhile question, given that now it is widely thought that the painting is neither by Guido Reni nor of Beatrice Cenci.) The entire story of The Marble Faun is a layering of ambiguities in the same way. Miriam is an ambiguous figure much as Beatrice was -- in some sense murderess yet in some sense innocent. And yet it is Hilda who was fascinated by the painting and was able to copy it with faithfulness.
The symbolic complexity of this work is extraordinary. The tale is told as a reenactment of the Fall of Man, with the four friends in the garden of innocent youth are cast out by complicity in a terrible crime. Each of the four friends expresses most fully one of the elements of human personality. Donatello is continually associated with passion, the natural participation in the world. Miriam, on the other hand, expresses imagination, continually haunted by other possibilities. Miriam and Donatello, of course, have the most serious involvement in the actual crime, but there is an odd innocence to them both even in the commission -- Donatello is too natural and primal and passionate a creature fully to understand what he has done, and Miriam's role was inciting the murder with a transient pleading glance to Donatello, a very detached way of causing a human death. And although Donatello and Miriam are both directly involved, Hilda, too, is caught up by it, for she witnesses the act. Nor is this a mere witnessing. Hilda expresses sympathetic aspiration; it is her intense sympathy with what she sees that makes it possible for her to accomplish her ingenious copies. And she sees the murder as if it were a painting, through the frame of a doorway; it is not something merely seen, it is something that enters her, disrupting her entirely. The imagination, by a glance, incites the passions to do wrong, and moral sentiment, witnessing, is tangled up in the deed: it could almost be an allegory for how sin is really committed. Kenyon might seem to escape the doom, since he only becomes aware of the cause of the darkness cast over the friendship relatively late, and is the least disrupted by it, but I think even this is not quite so. Kenyon as a sculptor deals with the embodiment of ideas in unchanging marble; he spends almost the entire work turning works of art into allegories. Dealing with eternal verities, it is not surprising that Kenyon in his intellectuality shows the least obvious signs of disruption, but there are signs that even he is not free of it. When he suggests to Hilda that perhaps the sin was allowed by Providence for good, she reacts with horror at the thought. I'm not convinced that we should take this as solely telling us about Hilda herself, with her high moral sympathies. Rather, this is exactly how intellect is shadowed by wrongdoing: it writes it down as felix culpa in some abstract scheme of things. This makes sense in its own terms, but Hilda is right that there is in it a lack of any sense of the awfulness of evil. Donatello and Hilda, passion and moral sympathy, directly participate in the world (and notably have symbolic links in several ways, with, for instance Donatello living in a Tower with owls and Hilda in a Tower with doves; Miriam and Kenyon, imagination and intellect, are distanced from it, with Miriam haunted by a past that shows up perpetually in her imaginings and by dark possibilities of what could be, and Kenyon constantly placing things in a framework of ideas. In innocence, they work together; but in wrongdoing they are split apart, trying to navigate the shadows in their own, very limited terms. And their responses to it are different, as well; Donatello and Miriam are haunted by guilt of involvement, each in their own way, while Kenyon and Hilda struggle to deal with the very fact of the wrongdoing itself.
Or one could see the four as each expressing some aspect of art, and this is not necessarily exclusive of the first interpretation. In Donatello, we see the primal impulse of art, participation in the world around us; in Miriam with her reserve and distance from the world around her, the imagination of other possibilities; in Hilda, moral sympathy; in Kenyon with his allegories, intellectual ideation. All art expresses all four, albeit in different mixes. But artistic endeavor also exists in a fallen world; the complicity of art in sin, and the sorrow with which one must struggle as a result, throws everything off balance. But, of course, our response to art works much the same way, and this allegorization, while certainly drawing out things in the work that are there, is also an over-Kenyonized reading on its own. One may also participate in the Romance of the tale, which is about four friends rather than abstract concepts, or be intrigued in imagination with the ambiguities of it, or sympathize with its moral ideals and guilts, and in some Eden of reading we would do all four, and all four well; but we, alas, poor fallen readers, have tilting structures that almost guarantee that some of the richness of the work will elude our reading.
When the work was first published, readers protested the ambiguities of the ending, and so, reluctantly, Hawthorne put in an epilogue giving further information about what happened. I think his first instinct was in fact correct: the additional information, about what happened to Hilda when she disappeared, or what happened to Donatello, weakens the tale considerably. It makes an object of description what should be an object of allusion, and reduces the complexity of the work. Hawthorne's early readers had difficulty with the ambivalent character of the work itself -- it is finely balanced so that it can be read either as a realistic tale in romantic, fantastic Italy, or a fantastic tale set in real-world Italy, and rather than maintain a consistent style, it gives us now a painted scene, now a sculptured composition, now an allusion to other works, now a travelogue, now a psychological tale, now an allegory, thus increasing both the realism and the romanticism of the tale. The balance throughout the work is beautifully done; only the epilogue unbalances it, despite Hawthorne's attempt to preserve some ambiguity still.
But even with the epilogue, we never learn the answer to the key question: Is Donatello faun or man?
Favorite Passage:
A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical, instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.
(Because it's the end of term, I'm a bit delayed in getting the Fortnightly Book post done, and it turned out to be easier just to switch it with this one, which would usually be scheduled for tomorrow morning.)
Fourteenth Sunday of Pentecost 1 Thessalonians 2:1-13; Luke 10:38-42
On Crucifixion-day, the sword pierced Your side;
You were crowned with thorns and darkness crowned the earth;
Your disciples were scattered and fled in fear.
Today baptism pours forth in grace from Your side;
You crown the Church with Your immortality;
You gather Your disciples and give them hope;
You make the world radiant by resurrection.
Today is a day of victory and joy;
our Savior has sealed us with His endless light;
reward comes to the honest lovers of God.
O Craftsman of life, You have made our lives whole,
renewing our minds, long marred by corruption,
inviting us into Your kingdom's glory:
You make the world radiant by resurrection.
August, I welcome thee and all thy hours,
The sun-burnt hours, that dance about thy car,
Thy genial breezes, and refreshing showers,
Thy morning pageantry, and evening star.
Bright are thy smiles, and blithe thy votaries are,
For thou dost bring them harvests, fruits, and flowers,
Enlivening gifts, and more enlivening far,
The laughing vine to glad their clustering bowers.
Yet, August, though these various gifts be dear,
'Tis not for these I time my thankful strain;
No; but for Phyllis! (fye, why drops this tear?)
Whom thou hast sent o'er my fond heart to reign;
Oh! may she live to pleasure many a year,
Although she live to give her minstrel pain.
The phrase 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' is a fairly widespread one, but its history is very difficult to trace. You can find the principle being used here and there in reasoning, of course, but the actual phrase doesn't seem to pop up before the 1990s -- and its popularity is almost certainly due to Carl Sagan (although he got it from Martin Rees). From him it spread quickly, and it tends to come up quite often in certain fields. It's fairly easy to find in geology, medicine, and criminology, in particular. Discussion for and against also shows up a lot in apologetical circles, whether the apologetics is of Christians or of skeptics out to convince the masses -- I'm fairly sure that this is just because both of these groups have read a lot of Carl Sagan.
Both groups are mixed, but the Christians tend generally to be for it and the skeptics against it, if you're interested. Reading some of the skeptical discussions makes for hilarity, at times, because they are so often vehemently committed to the phrase encapsulating a fallacy, often calling it the fallacy of appeal to ignorance, or the argument from ignorance, because they associate it with UFOers, that they cannot believe that he endorses it, even though anyone with basic reading skills can see that he does.
A distinction is sometimes made between 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' and 'Absence of proof is not proof of absence'. This is a post-Sagan distinction (Sagan uses 'evidence' and 'proof' interchangeably when the phrase comes up), and has come about very certainly because of the spread of accounts of evidence based on interpretations of probability theory (rather than on practices of inquiry), which as generally proposed require that absence of evidence be evidence of absence. And in fact the distinction doesn't salvage anything unless one has a very specific kind of account of proof in mind; in a lot of areas what is called 'proof' just is clear preponderance of evidence, and (on the other side) it's not actually difficult to find or rig situations in which an absence of proof would indeed be a proof of absence.
There's little serious philosophical examination of the maxim, although one can find some. Elliott Sober has argued (in "Absence of evidence and evidence of absence: evidential transitivity in connection with fossils, fishing, fine-tuning and firing squads") that while the Absence Maxim can be true if it just means that not looking for evidence is not evidence of evidence, it is not strictly true in general, although it is often close to true: in such cases the maxim should in strictness be 'Absence of evidence often only very weakly provides evidence of absence', but we often treat very weak evidence as if it were nonevidence. (Contrary to Michael Strevens's response (PDF), I don't think it is quite accurate to treat this as conveying "an underlying meaning that contradicts its apparent meaning". Sober is certainly right that we often treat making a very small difference as making no difference; and it is undeniable, I think, that most of the time when people say, "There is no evidence for p," what they mean is, "Any evidence for p is so weak as to be negligible." On Sober's account, we could add 'for practical purposes' to the Absence Maxim and get something at least in the neighborhood of right; and this seems very different from an actual contradiction.)
Let's call 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' the Absence Maxim to simplify things. There are a number of distinct but related issues tangled up with the Absence Maxim that have never really been untangled; I don't hope to do so here, but it might be worthwhile to point out a few things that do seem constantly to arise.
(1) The first and most obvious thing is that the Absence Maxim gets its plausibility from the way it is structured. To be absent is simply to be not present, presence has to be presence of something, and evidence is always evidence for soemthing, so we could rephrase it as 'Evidence-for-X is not present' is not 'There is evidence for X-is-not-present'. If one were to deny this, there would be obvious questions, since the kind of shifting around of operators and scope that this involves usually suggests an equivocation. One would at least need a principled reason for denying the Maxim that shows that you aren't just trading on ambiguity. One obvious worry is how you get the existence of something (evidence for X-is-not-present) entirely from the nonexistence of something else (evidence for X). Where does the existential operator pop out from?
This, I take it is related to the issue raised in the following video by Ian Goddard, which argues that it is important to make a distinction between absence of evidence and negative evidence:
There is little doubt that you can have logical systems in which denial of the Absence Maxim is required under some interpretation (Bayesian interpretations of probability theory are common examples); but, as one can make all sorts of formal systems with all sorts of arbitrary assumptions, and interpret them all sorts of different ways, this does not get us very far on its own. The point is that any formal representation of a denial of the Absence Maxim raises questions that would require principled answers, and that these answers are not necessarily immediately obvious. And they will not fall out of the formalism itself at all.
(2) We do clearly recognize cases where absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence -- call these negation-as-failure cases. If I thoroughly search my room for a dog and discover no evidence at all that there is a dog, then that is indeed evidence that there is no dog in my room.
One of the things that characterizes obvious negation-as-failure cases is that they are cases in which either (A) we can reasonably guarantee that our search has been exhaustive (the closed world assumption), or (B) we can reasonably conclude that further search is increasingly unlikely to turn up anything fundamentally different from what we have already discovered, so that we can discount as unpromising whatever we have not yet searched (which is a practical closed world assumption). There are many cases, however, in which we cannot guarantee any kind of closed world assumption -- for instance, if I have been searching for a dog in the city for two minutes and have not yet found it, this search was neither exhaustive nor reasonably extensive, and most people, I imagine, would regard someone as an idiot if they concluded from such a cursory search that there was no dog in the city. And as with cursory searches, so with searches that are incomplete for other reasons than merely trying.
We are sometimes in situations in which we already know that our bank of available evidence is missing a lot. Indeed, we are often in these situations -- they are the norm in most historical contexts. We already know that our fossil record does not record everything; it also does not provide a representative sample, because it only gives us things that were in fact in situations in which they, in particular, could be fossilized. Happily, there is more than one way a thing can be fossilized, but each way has its own specific conditions, and if they are not met, we don't get the fossil. Let's suppose that our fossil record is indeed very, very patchy. One way to interpret this kind of situation is to say that the fossil record, considered on its own, only provides us any evidence at all about organisms actually showing up in it, because we already know that the field of organisms and organism-types that won't show up can be massive in comparison to the field of those that do. Unless you were independently trying to fit evidence to a principle like Bayes' Theorem, there doesn't seem to be any specific reason to take an organism's not showing up in the record as evidence that it didn't exist -- most organisms that existed don't, so there's nothing about the fossil record itself that requires that you take things it doesn't show not to exist. In general this will be the case with patchy evidence; by the very fact of its being patchy, there's nothing about the collection of evidence itself that licenses taking absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The license would have to come from elsewhere.
This perhaps is connected with Sagan's own diagnosis of the problem to which the Absence Maxim is proposed as a solution -- what Sagan calls 'impatience with ambiguity'. 'Ambiguity' is a term Sagan elsewhere uses to describe the situation of not having an answer to a question. Sagan does not, as far as I am aware, explain his use of the word 'impatience' in this precise context, and Sagan is usually quite sloppy when it comes to supporting his claims about critical thinking, but I think one can argue that the term is genuinely appropriate in this context: in cases of cursory search, it is absurd to hold that not having a clear preponderance of evidence for one side is a reason to conclude it false, because you should exercise the patience required to make your investigation reasonably thorough before drawing such a conclusion rather than hurrying to draw a conclusion. There will be times in many kinds of investigation in which it will be unclear or debatable what the evidence actually shows; this is not on its own a good reason to cut short the investigation. Thus the Absence Maxim could perhaps be regarded, and sometimes seems to be used, as a non-stopping rule for inquiry -- we should not stop inquiry (even temporarily) on nothing more than the ground that we have found no evidence yet. This raises the question of how to assess the thoroughness of an inquiry. It also raises the question of the exact relation between evidence and warrant to draw a conclusion.
(3) In general, if one models inquiry as a search, it would seem to make very little sense to deny the Absence Maxim for search in general; one has to justify a negation-as-failure rule, by establishing that one's search would have picked up the evidence for something if it were there. Thus, someone who claimed that there was no extraterrestrial life because they didn't see any evidence of it when they glanced at the sky has not done the kind of search appropriate to the conclusion they are drawing. And this seems to hold even if we say that glancing at the sky would be at least a minor part of a genuinely appropriate search.
Searches are organized for different ends and can be very different in character; you cannot assume that every search is a negation-as-failure kind of search. Thus if one models inquiry as a search, there seems some reason to take the Absence Maxim to be true as a default -- one has to set up a search of the right sort to get a case in which one can conclude No X from No Evidence of X. (And note that if you relativize Bayesianism to a given kind of inquiry -- so your probability measures are always only relative to a given inquiry -- then this at least qualifies any rejection of the Absence Maxim on Bayesian grounds.) In general, if one treats the nature of the inquiry in which the evidence is being used as important to the evaluation of evidence, this seems to favor something like the Absence Maxim.
I think there does seem to be a divide in approaches to evidence, one that has not been adequately examined -- namely, between inquiry-focused and general-measure-focused accounts of evidence. There is a lot of variation within the two approaches, but the former tends to see evidence as something constructed or formed in light of an inquiry that is limited by particular ends, tends to be favorable to the idea that what counts as evidence in one field of inquiry may not always do so in another, and tends to be pluralist about how evidence supports claims (i.e., it tends not to assume that all evidential support is of the same kind), whereas the the latter tends to reject all of these things. These differences can obviously lead to some significant oppositions in how evidence is evaluated.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God
Stephen Blackwood, The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics
2. What book did you just finish?
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Volume I
I have also been reading over the past three weeks The History of Middle-Earth, which is Christopher Tolkien's study of the drafting stages of his father's works; I have finished up to Volume 10, and so have just two more volumes to go.
3. What do you plan to read next?
I don't know about next, but I'll be doing some plays by Ibsen and re-reading George Eliot's Romola at some point in the next few months. I'll be finishing Bulgakov's and Staniloae's series at some point, but that's probably a longer-term project.
I also keep meaning to get to Half Price Books, so that will doubtless turn up a few.
4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?
The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night; I am done with two out of three volumes, 2650 pages, and just need find a time to power through the last 1300 or so pages.
5. What book do you keep meaning to start?
Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys
6. What is your current reading trend?
I read too many books to be keeping track of reading trends.
Feasting and fasting alike are for the sake of the beautiful and the good.
rationality, order, stability, integrity
Pleasure and pain are such as to be signs by nature; distinction between intrinsic and instrumental good does not work here as elsewhere.
A "brute fact" is only brute relative to a model; otherwise there is no way to identify bruteness.
The effectiveness of an argument depends in part on the habitus of the one who receives it.
charity as what makes satispassion possible
Grand Rounds as humanitarian ritual
The virtue of charity is required in order to assess divine love's actions properly.
to consider: the extent to which conservation laws imply simultaneity of causation (momentum has historically explicitly been taken to do so)
Accuracy conditions are causal conditions.
wu wei and honesty
People will generally tend to press their rhetorical advantages rather than their dialectical advantages.
the 'splendid models of the Holy Family' -- (1) domestic virtues (2) bonds of charity (3) joy of household
Moral law cannot be harmed, and yet one can offend against it.
National churches necessarily presuppose that the government bodies and agencies concerned with the church are legitimate representatives within the liturgical commonwealth.
homiletics as concerned with living and not merely hearing doctrine
the confusion of intellectual or volitional numbness with the doubt of genuine inquiry
Leading questions and rhetorical questions make obvious that questions can have assumptions, but that all questions have assumptions is made clear (1) by the fact that they make sense in some contexts and not others; and (2) by the fact that they distinguish relevant and irrelevant answer-candidates. (Assumptions are determined by analysis of possibilities.)
The first minimal level of making amends is simply accepting, and thus bearing and enduring, one's being responsible.
the desire to impart something genuinely precious to the world
general culture of mind as a requirement for professional life
nonmaleficence and gentlemanliness (Newman)
notional and real as poles of assent
spontaneously grown arguments vs deliberately synthesized arguments
the role of Catholic Marian piety in supporting the doctrine of papal infallibility (e.g., Lourdes)
the royal prerogatives of the Church
the problem of corruption of supplementary institutions as the primary problem of the liturgical commonwealth
Mere reason cannot overcome apathy.
assessment of conceptual analysis
(1) explains an array of paradigmatic cases
(2) makes sense of history of concept
(3) clarifies marginal cases without violence
(4) exhibits consilience
(5) survives aporetic/dialectic inquiry
Human rituals are rational communications, just as much as language is.
physical equations as summations of relevance among measurements
Style is not a uniform thing but a pattern of effects requiring causal analysis.
Humean causal theory as stylistic analysis of the world
humanity as a system of loyalties
It is quite clear that we often think of the necessity of the principle of noncontradiction in practical terms.
While law works itself out systematically, one should not overestimate the systematicity of law.
Every Is is an Ought to Be Regarded as True.
Positive law is relative to the formation of a community standpoint.
The assessment of evidence cannot occur independently of all practical reasons (cost of inquiry, promising character of evidence, etc.).
Classification requires abstraction from corruptions and contaminations.
In law one must start not with concepts used by the ends for which they are used.
the obsessive patience of genius
motherhood as paradigmatic friendship in Aristotle (it is his typical case of asymmetric friendship, and plays a key role in several arguments about the nature of friendship in general)
Fear of ridicule often distorts assessment of evidence, since it interferes with commitment to recognizing probabilities.
causation by diffusion (Shepherd is perhaps a very good start here, given her concept of causal mixing)
a common fallacy: the conditions for X came together gradually; therefore X emerged gradually (quite obviously it in fact depends on the relation between X and its conditions)
Most of what is called politics is an excuse for not attending to politics.
true romance as involving honestas and verecundia
the wish for truth as remedy against some biases (cp. Ward)
People in assessing their own characteristics tend to try to focus not on what they do but on what they do not do.
fruitful virginity of Mary expressed in being (1) Mother of God; (2) intercessor; (3) Mother of Church
mortification and eliminating mismatch between fantasy and reality
books that are pleasure-friends, utility-friends, or virtue-friends
ordered structures anticipatory of rational inference
relation between self-evidence and goodness
Modern generations describe computing in ways similar to the way former generations described literacy; computers are the gramarye of our day.
Arguments like characters in stories must be seen from many angles.
Much of what we call misfortune is just leaving a womb, or growing out of a childhood, in which prior props and supports are taken away.
orders as the sacrament of the unity of the sacramental economy
Darwin's argument for sexual selection is partly teleological: without sexual selection, display would be purposeless, which is incredible.
the role of integrity of body in cognition
baptized : foundations :: confirmed : major means :: ordained : ends
Isaiah 60, temporal prosperity, and liturgical commonwealth
human dignity & capacity for communion with God: the infinity implicit in our
(1) openness to Truth Itself
(2) openness to Good Itself
(3) openness to Beauty Itself
(4) capacity for attending to the Infinite Sublime
rejections of God arise from
(1) bad example of believers
(2) hostile philosophies
(3) trauma of evil
(4) preference for vice
(5) poor handling of perplexity
(6) excessive attachment to the sensible world
The capacity for theistic reasoning is a precondition for receiving revelation.
good as 'fit for purpose' vs good as 'precondition for fitness and purpose'
All measurement requires memory of at least an elementary kind.
Common sense can be recognized as rigorously certain when it is also recognized as (1) experiential (2) practical (3) perspectival and (4) approximate.
He that hes gold and grit richess,
And may be into mirryness,
And dois glaidness fra him expell,
And levis in to wretchitnefs,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.
He that may be but sturt or stryfe,
And leif ane lusty plesand lyfe,
And syne with mariege dois him mell,
And bindis him with ane wicket wyfe,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.
He that hes for his awin genyie
Ane plesand prop, bot mank or menyie,
And schuttis syne at ane uncow schell,
And is forsairn with the fleis of Spenyie,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.
And he that with gud lyfe and trewth,
But varians or uder slewth,
Dois evir mair with ane maister dwell,
That nevir of him will haif no rewth,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.
Now all this tyme lat us be mirry,
And set nocht by this warld a chirry:
Now quhill thair is gude wyne to sell,
He that dois on dry breid wirry,
I gif him to the Devill of Hell.
William Dunbar (c. 1459- c. 1530) was perhaps the greatest Scottish poet of the sixteenth century.
Thought experiments in science are generally illuminating or, at the least, benign. It is not so with thought experiments in philosophy. They are a locus of misdirection and deception. We are supposed to derive important conclusions about fundamental matters from bizarre imaginings of zombies, who behave exactly like conscious humans, but are not conscious; or of substances that share exactly all the physical properties of water, but are not water. The narrative conventions of a thought experiment authorizes us to contemplate hokum that would otherwise never survive scrutiny.
John D. Norton, "The Worst Thought Experiment" (p. 11n). (Despite this footnote, the article is actually a criticism of Szilard's thought experiment in thermodynamics adapting Maxwell's Demon -- the worst thought experiment in science, according to Norton. As with all of Norton's philosophy of science work, the article is well worth reading.)
I think the 'important conclusions' is important here. Thought experiments in philosophy are benign, and sometimes illuminating, if they are of modest aim -- to illustrate a purely logical point, or to identify a conceptual distinction, or to exhibit a similarity between two fields of thought, or to summarize a more complicated response to a very specific point. More than this they cannot really bear. But, of course, they are made to bear more than this all the time -- when people use zombie experiments, they aren't merely sharpening the conceputal distinction between conscious experience and behavior indicative of it but treating the stories they are telling as establishing truths about consciousness itself. When you come across a philosophical thought experiment with major conclusions, always ask: What is the rational account that authorizes the inferences required by this story or description? And I think this is where they so often go wrong -- they are taken as establishing things when, at best, they can usually be doing no more than gesturing at a more sophisticated account. And, of course, very often there is no sophisticated account at all, in which case they can at best suggest a line or two of further inquiry in the same way that any metaphor or analogy might.
This is remarkably difficult to get across to some people. Just as even ordinary counterexamples must be analyzed to determine (1) that they are not merely apparent; and (2) that they are not more limited in scope than they might seem, the interior logic of a thought experiment also requires analysis, and each assumption made in building it requires examination -- it is a scaffold for further inquiry, not a primary result in its own right. But people have a weird tendency to throw out alleged counterexamples and move on, or to take thought experiments to establish things on their own. When people do this, I often just start asking the ordinary questions any sort of reader or writer of stories might reasonably ask about the logic of a tale; over and over again, one finds that the proposers of these thought experiments haven't even thought through the basic story-logic of their example, much less started working out any rigorous argument. It's a case of scaffoldings being confused with cathedrals, and means being confused with ends.
Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost 1 Corinthians 3:1-11; Luke 8:1-15
Parode
O Christ, You cast Your truth and grace abroad;
the apostles' preaching flies through the world,
their message to the far ends of the earth.
One plants, another waters, but they serve:
God does the work and God gives the increase.
The Church is the field of God's own tilling,
and all others are but His ministers.
Let us remember the sower of seed,
for seeds of truth fall on good and bad soil.
Strophe
A sower went out to sow his seed.
Some of his seed fell by the wayside,
to be trod and eaten by the birds.
Others fell on the rocks, dry and hot;
they were withered in the noonday sun.
Some fell among the thorny briars,
to be smothered by those violent weeds.
But others fell on soil of rich loam,
yielding a harvest one hundredfold.
Antistrophe
The seed is God's holy word, broadcast.
Some by the path have the seed stolen,
the devil snatching away their faith.
Some receive with joy but have no roots,
and in tribulation they wither.
Others hear but never grow to fruit,
stifled by worldly care and pleasure.
But some with bright, noble heart endure:
receiving some truth, they yield much truth.
Exode
O Lord, show your boundless mercy to us;
with Your Spirit, open our hearts to truth.
May we be pure, enlightened, forgiving,
receiving your truth with joy and honor,
nourished by the grace of living waters,
growing in love, in truth, and in mercy,
never distracted by this world's darkness,
but noble and generous in our hearts,
to yield by Your hand a harvest of grace.
Every election cycle, there are junk arguments about the Electoral College that get thrown around. This cycle, like the the last, has been more quiet than the more contentious cycles before, but 'quiet' and 'silent' are not the same. Here is Jim Galloway at AJC:
The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution feared (small “d”) democracy, which they often associated with mob rule. The Electoral College was the awkward device imposed between voters and the power of the presidency — just in case the hoi polloi got carried away.
We have developed a friendlier attitude toward the popular vote in the centuries since, though it isn’t complete. Legislation to encourage a push toward the direct election of the president, introduced by Republicans, died a quiet death this year — at the hands of the most conservative elements in the state Capitol.
As to the point in the last sentence, I've talked about the sheer spam-scam nonsense of the (falsely named) 'National Popular Vote' movement before, about which I will only say here: good riddance and may its rotting corpse no longer lurch like a zombie out of its grave in search of idiot minds to devour. But over and over again, one hears this falsehood about the Founding Fathers creating the Electoral College to limit the power of the people. Indeed, this makes no sense historically. The system that the Electoral College replaced only allowed the people power over offices through their legislatures; the Electoral College gave them a new power that they didn't have before. The Electoral College was deliberately introduced for the purpose of guaranteeing that the people themselves would be brought into the election process for the Presidency, which was, in the form given in the proposed Constitution, a new and extraordinarily powerful office.
If you look at Hamilton, for instance, this is quite explicit, since Hamilton's defense of the Electoral College repeatedly connects it to guaranteeing a popular safeguard in the election of the President:
It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture....
...Another and no less important desideratum was, that the Executive should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves. He might otherwise be tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence. This advantage will also be secured, by making his re-election to depend on a special body of representatives, deputed by the society for the single purpose of making the important choice.
To be sure, this sense of the people was not the only concern that had to be addressed by the constitutional system for electing the President; this is because the Presidency as it existed in the U.S. Constitution was the single most controversial part of the entire proposal -- a great many people thought that there was too much power concentrated by the Constitution into one office, so those defending the Constitution, like Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had to allay worries about the possible tending of this "energetic magistrate" toward tyranny. So, for instance, Hamilton thinks that the Electoral College will provide a space for deliberative investigation of "all the reasons and inducements" for making a choice for the office. (The absurdity of electing the Electors so that they can rubber-stamp an already decided result is completely foreign to how Hamilton expected the Electoral College to work.) The means of election needed to be orderly and to allow for diversity in the election -- the Electoral College was intended to avoid a free-for-all every four years. (And here, at least, it works more or less as it was intended -- it makes it easier for people to keep track of the election given the huge population, and by breaking the election into chunks it makes more clear that everyone has to take into account more than just the view that happens at the moment to have the majority.) It needs relative immunity from corruption, as well -- which, people forget, is difficult to guarantee in a straight popular vote.
Thus there were other things that were thought important to consider. But the Electoral College was not put forward to reduce the power of hoi polloi but to increase it by guaranteeing them a say in the single most powerful federal office, which they did not have before, and as a way of guaranteeing that they would be one of the checks on the massively increased power that would be wielded by the President under the proposed Constitution. To be sure, one can find complaints about the Electoral College as an intermediary even in the anti-Federalist movement (Antifederalist no. 72, for instance); but the real target then was the sheer power of the Presidency in the new system. The Electoral College itself was designed to link the President to the people in a system already organized according to states, not to serve as a limit on the power of the people.
Of course, there is a legitimate question as to whether the Electoral College in practice lives up to the promise of the Electoral College in its original intent. But there's no question that the Electoral College as it was originally conceived involved a considerable expansion of the power of the people over the government.
Thanks to our upright posture, our liberated forearms, and our all-seizing hands we are able to face things not merely with our eyes but with our whole being. This posture penetrates our intentional understanding in subtle ways that have been in part clarified by Merleau-Ponty. The human face announces the human body and precedes it like an ensign. And our reading of the face reflects this. The face occurs in the world of objects as though lit from behind.
Roger Scruton, The Face of God, Bloomsbury (New York: 2015), pp. 80-81.
Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord 2 Corinthians 3:7-17; Mark 9:1-7
You, O Christ, assumed our human nature,
undiminished in Yourself and Your glory,
and yet like us in all things except sin.
You shone brightly before Peter, James, and John,
a foretaste of the happiness You bring.
Shine on our minds that we may be enlightened;
allow us to taste the sweetness of light.
How good it is that we may dwell in Your grace,
for You are resplendent on the mountain!
One in nature with Father and Spirit,
to exalt servants You became a servant,
and yet in serving You were not severed:
there is one Power, one Kingship, and one Light.
Because of You, we heard the Father's voice,
and You have shown us the way of salvation.
Before the glory upon Golgotha,
You revealed Your majesty on Mount Tabor,
in beauty resplendent on the mountain.
On Tabor You showed us You are God's Son,
for the Father confirmed it with splendid love.
You gave us a taste of heavenly life
and showed us the beauty of Your Father's light,
the bright blazing in which You will return,
in the body but glorious in Godhead.
May our bishops, Lord, remember their task,
to show the brilliance of Your divinity,
bright, unending, resplendent on the mountain.
Today we hear the voice of the Father,
saying, "This is my beloved Son; hear him."
Today the Church cries out with rejoicing,
for this is the Son who has come to save us.
May all be touched by Your light and transformed;
may we carry Your name to all the nations,
revealing the light You revealed to us,
that we may contemplate Your face forever,
radiant, resplendent on the mountain.
I am the only man on earth and maybe there is neither earth nor man.
Maybe a god deceives me.
Maybe a god condemned me to time, that long illusion.
I dream the moon and I dream my eyes that perceive the moon.
I have dreamed the evening and morning of the first day.
I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that ravaged Carthage.
I have dreamed Lucan.
I have dreamed the hill of Golgotha and the crosses of Rome.
I have dreamed geometry.
I have dreamed point, line, plane, and volume.
I have dreamed yellow, blue, and red.
I have dreamed my sickly childhood.
I have dreamed maps and kingdoms and the duel at dawn.
I have dreamed inconceivable sorrow.
I have dreamed my sword.
I have dreamed Elisabeth of Bohemia.
I have dreamed doubt and certitude.
I have dreamed all of yesterday.
Perhaps I had no yesterday, perhaps I was not born.
Maybe I dream having dreamed.
I feel a little cold, a little fear.
Above the Danube, it is night.
I will continue dreaming Descartes and the faith of his fathers.
We cannot indeed say a thing is probably true upon one very slight presumption for it; because, as there may be probabilities on both sides of a question, there may be some against it; and though there be not, yet a slight presumption does not beget that degree of conviction, which is implied in saying a thing is probably true. But that the slightest possible presumption is of the nature of a probability, appears from hence; that such low presumption often repeated, will amount even to moral certainty. Thus a man’s having observed the ebb and flow of the tide to-day, affords some sort of presumption, though the lowest imaginable, that it may happen again to-morrow: but the observation of this event for so many days, and months, and ages together, as it has been observed by mankind, gives us a full assurance that it will.
This is fairly interesting, since Butler is arguing that "the slightest possible presumption" must be a kind of probability for what is presumed because by accumulation it can reach even full assurance. Butler takes moral certainty to come in degrees, and "full assurance", I take it, is what he calls "the highest moral certainty".
Beattie very clearly draws on Butler's argument in his account of probable reasoning in the Essay on Truth, even using the same example of the ebb and flow of tides. However, Beattie's probability only concerns the future, e.g., our expectation that the tide will keep ebbing and flowing, whereas it is quite clear that Butler is only using it as just one kind of example for a much larger phenomenon.
Assent on reasonings not demonstrative is too widely recognized an act to be irrational, unless man's nature is irrational, too familiar to the prudent and clear-minded to be an infirmity or an extravagance. None of us can think or act without the acceptance of truths, not intuitive, not demonstrated, yet sovereign. If our nature has any constitution, any laws, one of them is this absolute reception of propositions as true, which lie outside the narrow range of conclusions to which logic, formal or virtual, is tethered; nor has any philosophical theory the power to force on us a rule which will not work for a day.
John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Chapter 6. In the sense Newman means, 'assent' is unconditional and does not admit of degrees; if you assent to something, you simply take it to be true, period. (You can still have a reason for assenting, of course; but the assent itself is not provisional or tentative or partial or something that comes in any kind of degree at all.) Examples of things that Newman thinks all reasonable people, however much they love truth, take to be simply true, despite not having perfect proof of it, are: that we exist, that there are things we do not know, that there are other minds, that there is an external world, that the earth is round, that there are lots of cities on it and that they do not disappear when we leave them, that we have parents, that we will die. The idea is that whether or not one can have a rigorous proof of these conclusions, in fact every reasonable person accepts some things like these as simply true despite having nothing more than a probable -- and sometimes even only a weakly probable -- argument in hand for them; therefore it can be reasonable to believe something certainly on reasoning that itself is only probable.
Beauty in nature is the breath of the Holy Spirit over the world. Beauty is immanent to creation and clothes it. Beauty is paradise in nature, whose traces are preserved in nature's memory as a reflection of heaven, although in the fallen world beauty finds itself torn away from holiness. This natural beauty is revealed to man, who is called to receive its revelation not only naturally but also spiritually, in teh entirety and fullness of his spiritual being, directed at God. For man, therefore, beauty is inseparable from holiness; it is not only natural but also "spiritual" beauty.
Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, Jakim, tr., Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI: 2008) p. 155.
Gary Gutting has a post on religious intolerance at "The Stone"; Gutting is usually vague to the point of being almost vapid, but this is even worse than usual. When people try to make these kinds of arguments without being clear about what is supposed to be meant by 'tolerance' and 'intolerance', the result is inevitably going to be dubious at best. Without knowing precisely what one means, it's not clear what it means to say that there was achieved "a widespread attitude of religious toleration in Europe and the United States"; prejudices against religious groups are certainly common both places, as (to take one example) the history of Mormonism shows in spades, and continue up to the present day. If one means legal regimes of toleration (as Gutting occasionally seems to mean), they have a checkered history and are sometimes tolerant only by technicalities, and it's not really clear what this would have to do with a young man slitting a priest's throat in a European country, anyway. No doubt there's some meaning of 'tolerance' in which one can say that Gutting's claim is true -- the word can mean almost anything outside of active attempts to destroy -- but then the question would be, is this really the sense relevant to his comments about Islam? And it's impossible to say without knowing the sense.
Part of the reason this is worth noting is that there is not, contrary to popular conflations, an obvious relation between violence and most things called intolerance. A lot of things that get called by the name are intrinsically conflict-avoiding -- strong prejudices against external foreigners are one possible ground for isolationism, prejudices by a minority within a nation not uncommonly lead to enclave formation, and prejudices by a majority in power most commonly lead to 'slow strangling' of the outgroup by laws because the people holding the power don't usually need to resort to direct violence unless they are facing a rebellion. By plenty of standards, the Amish are highly intolerant of other religious groups, and nobody is worried about Amish violence. Stable Islamic governments that have actively attempted to limit non-Islamic religious movements have not historically been very violent, in the sense of initiating active physical force; it's much more efficient to tax the opposition out of existence or make it very difficult for them to earn a living. (That's one of the major reasons why modern England is Protestant rather than Catholic, and it took hardly more than a generation.) The violence in such cases is usually started by the people being taxed or restricted out of jobs, and has nothing to do with whether they are religiously intolerant or not. (Unstable governments, of course, tend to be violent toward any perceived threat, whatever it might be.)
Where we are confining ourselves to talking about violence, it is arguably, in any case, a mistake to think of these matters in terms of tolerance and intolerance at all; it ultimately does not clarify anything to discuss how tolerant or intolerant Islam is considered to be, because 'intolerance', like 'hate' or 'fear', tends not to do any explanatory work. It is usually used as a pseudo-explanation, a label for a result that happens to be put in causal terms, rather than something that is genuinely capable of being a cause of anything. It's like saying that war is caused by aggressiveness -- setting aside all the kinds of aggressiveness that don't result in war, usually what you're doing is simply classifying someone as aggressive because they are engaging in an act we classify as aggressive, without a hint of a real cause of the act itself anywhere in sight. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not a real explanation of anything -- just at best a description of what needs to be explained. More and more I am inclined to regard dragging in 'intolerance' as a concession of not understanding the situation, because it often doesn't contribute anything at all.
None of this, of course, is to say that one can't have an argument of the sort that Gutting's argument purports to be -- only that Gutting, like most people, is not doing any of the work, or critical thinking, required for it.
And, incidentally, on this:
As President Obama recently said, “Some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.”
If there's anything that's certainly true about ISIS, it's that it is reforming religion to adapt to modernity. Within its means, it is using all the methods and tools of modernity it can, and it was built to reform the entire religion in light of them. Of course, what President Obama means (and what Gutting means by quoting him) is that some currents of Islam have not grown so wise (as he sees it) as to agree with his main preferences for how to live; that's what people in the First World always mean by 'modernity': adaptation to their own convenience and liking. This, of course, is merely conceptual gerrymandering. Totalitarianism is as modern as religious toleration and has as good an Enlightenment and secular pedigree; bombing people is as modern and secular a way of getting results as letting people run for office. Terrorist groups and aggressively oppressive regimes are adaptations to modernity. It's time for people to stop lying to themselves about this: this is modernity.
'What is hope?' she said. 'An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none.'
'That is one thing that Men call "hope",' said Finrod. 'Amdir we call it, "looking up". But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is "trust". It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children's joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?'
[J. R. R. Tolkien, "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth" in Morgoth's Ring, Christopher Tolkien, ed., HarperCollins (London: 2015) p. 320.]
You might remember that Estel was the name Aragorn had when growing up in Rivendell, before he was told about his heritage.
MrsD a while back mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and that's the next fortnightly book. In high school I loved Nathaniel Hawthorne, and read almost everything I could get my hands on (I particularly liked The House of the Seven Gables and "The Celestial Railroad"). But I don't think I ever got round to reading this one, or, if I did, I don't recall anything about it.
1852 was an election year, and Hawthorne was friends with Franklin Pierce. Pierce was a dark horse candidate, having squeaked by in the nominations due to a tactical mistake by the supporters of Buchanan. Hawthorne contributed to his campaign by writing a political biography of his rather unexciting career that made the case that this was actually an advantage. When Pierce won the election, he named Hawthorne consul to Liverpool, England. That's a sign of how appreciative Pierce was, because it was not just a plum position, but one of the very most important foreign service positions, very well paid and very prestigious. As the Pierce administration drew to a close and Hawthorne resigned from his position, he and his family went on an extended holiday to Italy for over a year and a half. While there, Hawthorne kept detailed notes, and they became the basis for The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni, which was published in 1860. (The British edition was published with the title, Transformation, against Hawthorne's wishes.) It had a very curious reception -- critics were ambivalent about it, since it was a mixture of genres that were usually kept distinct, and a lot of people seem not to have liked the ending. However, as it happened it came out at the right time -- Americans were increasingly going to Italy, and they started using Hawthorne's tale as a sort of guidebook. The places Hawthorne talked about in The Marble Faun became the must-see sites in Rome. There was even an edition made at one point with blank pages where tourists could paste their own photographs as illustrations in the book. In the book, Italy is a kind of fantasy locale, built not just out of monuments and natural scenes but out of layers of history and legend and myth; The Marble Faun gave Americans an atmosphere for their tours.
And to get us started, here is the statue that inspired the name and story of the book, known variously as the Capitoline Faun, the Faun of Praxiteles, and the Resting Satyr, which is a Roman copy of a Greek statue supposedly by the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles:
The Maronite Catholic Church began, of course, as a religious movement, heavily focused on ascetic life, inspired by St. Maron (or Maroun), who was an open-air hermit in the mountains. One of the major centers for this movement was the monastery of Bet Maroun, which grew to have several hundred monks. Given the nature of the region in which the movement thrived, it is difficult to get any precise historical information about it. However, apparently in the early sixth century, the monks of the region had a brief correspondence with Pope St. Hormisdas. The primary struggle of Hormisdas's papacy was over the Acacian schism, which had been caused by the Emperor Zeno's issuing of a document, the Henoticon, attempting to force a compromise between the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians. Decades later, when Hormisdas came to the papal throne, the schism was still a problem, and Hormisdas himself strongly advocated a noncompromising position, and he asked for public declarations in the East in favor of the Council of Chalcedon and the letters of Pope St. Leo I. This seems to have been the occasion for the correspondence; the monks wrote a letter affirming their support of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, in which they told of monasteries having been burned and three hundred and fifty monks martyred by Monophysites, requesting his assistance and protection.
The Feast of the 350 Martyrs, Disciples of St. Maron Romans 16:17-20; Luke 11:49-54
For the sake of Your holy name, the martyrs fought,
Lord, not with sword but with grace and holy patience,
and in all places You exalt their victory.
Beneath their feet You will crush the Adversary;
faith, hope, and love guided them to the paths of life,
for they were loyal to truth and did not waver.
As their death was pleasing sacrifice in Your sight,
may their memory be protection to Your flock,
and their prayers a shield for Your chosen people.
Through them, the unfathomable riches of Christ,
the treasuries of divine wisdom, rain on us,
according to the eternal purpose of God.
O Three Hundred Fifty martyrs! Great is your faith!
When our Lord Christ called you to follow, you followed,
and God's grace, like a mother, sustained you in death.
Pray for us, O martyrs, that we may be worthy
to celebrate your feast and join your holy choir,
giving great honor with you to Christ the martyr.
