Goff on Taxation and Theft

Philip Goff has an absurd argument against the (often absurd) claim that taxation is theft at Aeon. Having first distinguished between legal and moral theft, he says:

If we wanted to say that tax is legal theft, then we would have to argue that people have a legal claim to their pre-tax income, and hence that the government commits legal theft when it takes the pre-tax income of its citizens. This idea can be quickly dismissed. Clearly if Ms Jones is legally obliged to pay a certain amount of tax on her gross income, then she is not legally entitled to keep all her pre-tax income. It follows logically that the state does not commit legal theft when it enforces the payment of this tax.

This is obvious nonsense. If by 'legally obliged' we mean that when a legitimate and licit proclamation of a legislature purports to obligate you to pay something, you are obligated to pay it, then Goff's response begs the question, even assuming that we are only talking about legal theft. There can be illegitimate and illicit laws, e.g., unconstitutional ones, and if someone is going around saying that taxation is legal theft, obviously they are denying that they are legally obliged to pay anything by any kind of legitimate and licit law. Nobody is claiming that if a tax law is legitimate and licit, taxation is theft; they are claiming that enforcing or executing the law in question is theft. Further, the very way Goff chooses to state the issue establishes that people have at last a default legal claim to their pre-tax income: if Ms Jones is legally obliged to pay a certain amount of tax on HER gross income (which is why she is obligated and not someone else, since it would be most unfortunate to be obligated to pay the tax on someone else's gross income), it must have some kind of legal status of being hers to begin with. Thus she has some kind of legal claim on it, depending on the exact legal status -- and since Goff hasn't examined that legal status, he has no way of saying whether the claim is relevant or not. So the gross income is legally hers in some way, and the only question then (if we are sticking with legal theft) is whether, granted that it is legally hers, there is any legitimate and licit law that can require her to pay a certain amount of it in tax. This is the very question at hand, and one that Goff begs.

There are many, many reasons not to take ordinary taxation, at least, to be legal theft; but it's a bad sign that, having argued against the easiest target, he has failed so badly.

So Goff moves on to the moral question. He starts out badly again by saying that gross or pre-tax income "is the money the market delivers to you". This is obviously not true; gross income is usually what the employer with whom you have a contract delivers to you. 'The market' does not deliver money to you; your employer is not 'the market'. 'The market' is what we call the system of exchange constituted by your employer, you, other employees, etc. It is an abstraction of your market-activity interacting other people's market-activity. One could let it slide as a figure of speech, if it weren't for the fact that the abstract character of the term clearly does work throughout Goff's argument. He goes on, in fact, to use it immediately to object to the argument that we are morally entitled to our gross income because we, having worked for it, deserve it. To this he says:

This is not a plausible view. For it implies that the market distributes to people exactly what they deserve for the work that they do. But nobody thinks a hedge-fund manager deserves many times more wealth than a scientist working on a cure for cancer, and few would think that current pay ratios in companies reflect what philosophers call desert claims. Probably you work very hard in your job, and you make an important contribution. But then so do most people, and the market distribution of wealth patently does not reward in proportion to how hard-working people are, or how much of a contribution they make to society.

The question, again, is not what the abstraction 'the market' does, because 'the market' is just a label for what we do in matters of exchange. So what we are really concerned with is usually something like this: You have an employer, of some kind, with whom you have a contract, of some kind. This employer has some money. There is at this point no legal or moral question that it is the employer's money; everybody, including the law and the employee, recognizes it as the employer's money. Under this contract, you are to do some work for the employer, and, also because of that contract, your doing that work obligates your employer to give you part of your employer's money. This money is your gross income, since this can all be done prior to any consideration of tax. So if it was morally and legally the employer's money, and it was the employer's moral and legal obligation under contract to give it to you; and if the employer did not give it to you, that would have involved violations of moral and legal obligations, how does your work not entitle you to that money? That is the question Goff jumps around -- he keeps denying that the rights involved are the kind his opponents think, but he never actually gives us a coherent (or any substantive) account of what rights actually are involved.

Goff's answer also makes a common error with regard to desert. In matters of talk about desert and merit, it has long been known that in some such talk the assumption is that the desert or merit is condign, and in some the assumption is that it is congruous. If something is deserved condignly, it is the reward required in strict justice simply by the action in and of itself. If something is deserved congruously, this means that one deserves it by equity rather than strict justice, because the action occupies a certain role or function in a conventional system of exchange. Thus, no one condignly deserves a trophy for running fact; in a running contest in which the prize is a trophy, one may nonetheless deserve it congruously by running fast enough. Congruous desert can be heavily dependent on liberality and generosity, but it can also be highly constrained by justice. Likewise here: contracts are constrained by expectations of fairness and mutual benefit, the employee condignly deserves to be given fair exchange in transaction, and the citizens condignly deserve to have their rights respected by the government. Whether they are getting the wages they congruously deserve with respect to the common good, however, is a distinct question. They should not be conflated.

This does not in itself salvage the desert argument from every objection, because the obvious next question is what is involved in deserving it -- if (as is not an uncommon view) the state is one part of it, the state may well have some kind of claim that can affect the nature of the desert, which could possibly give wiggle-room for taxes. But Goff's objection fails completely.

Goff goes on to recognize that another objection is that you are entitled to the gross income, and he is at least sensible enough to recognize that a major issue here is whether property has priority over property law, or vice versa. If property rights are purely legal, he is right that there are problems for one who would argue that taxation is theft, although he doesn't give a very good reason for thinking this, in part because he assumes the bad reasoning he has already given. But let's set this aside, since the most serious line of argument would be based on natural property rights. Goff argues that two things are required for this approach:

It requires accepting the general libertarian commitment to property being natural and not dependent on human laws or conventions. And it also requires denying the Left-wing libertarian claim that each of us has an equal moral claim on the resources of the natural world.

The first claim is not strictly correct, since to say that the right relevant to property is natural is not the same as saying that property is natural; one may have a natural moral claim with regard to things that are dependent on human laws or conventions, so that, for instance, we might say we have a natural right to just treatment by the law, even though treatment by the law, and indeed the law itself, is dependent on human laws and conventions. Thus the second is the key issue. With respect to the second, he goes on (rightly) to note that the usual right-libertarian approaches to the second leave open some perplexing questions, then says:

According to Right-wing libertarianism, the market distribution of wealth is morally significant because it is the distribution that respects the voluntary choices people have made with the property to which they have a natural right. But this is the case only if the market is perfectly free, ie if the state has no influence on the distribution of wealth. Yet there are very few countries in the world in which this is the case. In almost every country, there is a certain amount of taxation, at least to pay for roads and infrastructure, if not for education and healthcare. But even the smallest such state intervention entails that the market distribution of wealth no longer reflects the free choices of citizens, and hence by the lights of Right-wing libertarianism the citizens of these countries have no moral claim on their pre-tax income.

This is again a very bad argument. For right-libertarians, moral claims on property and income are not dependent on claims about the market distribution of wealth; the details differ somewhat from version to version, but the moral claims on property and income depend on labor and contractual exchange. What the right-libertarian thinks is not that government interference somehow negates the rights of labor and contract, but that it is interfering with the results of these rights, which would, without such interference, work things out in a more-or-less (i.e., to the extent possible given accidents and the like) morally fair distribution based on the supply and demand of labor and on contract negotiations. Right-libertarians are not people like Goff who think that claims to property and income depend on distribution, even a good distribution, at all; they are people who think that claims to property and income depend on work and personal interactions. The government has not replaced personal interactions; it is (on the hypothesis) involving itself in them in ways it has no right; the right-libertarian thinks that a result of this maldistribution; if rights were respected properly, over time the maldistribution would disappear. It is a bizarre argument to 'refute' right-libertarians by assuming that their view of distribution is that of progressive liberals. Thus the wrongness of Goff's conclusions:

In theory, Right-wing libertarianism does entail that people have a moral claim on their pre-tax income, and hence that taxation is theft, but only in hypothetical societies where there is zero or minimal state interference in the economy. In states in which the government intervenes in the economy through taxation – ie, in almost every developed state – market transactions are tainted and so are morally void.

But this is just blatantly false on any recognizable right-libertarian view; on such views, the government doesn't have any ability to make market transactions morally void, because the moral legitimacy of the transactions themselves depends on personal interaction. If the high school bully takes your lawnmowing money and then gives it to his grandmother to buy a movie ticket with, the moral problem is with a bully going around taking people's money, not with his grandmother's buying a movie ticket, and the fact that the bully is a bully doesn't mean that the grandmother's transaction is "morally void". Depending on the issues, and how, exactly our legal system handles issues of coercive takings, it is conceivable that there might be a legal problem with the transaction; but morally, the grandmother has the money, she herself did nothing wrong in getting it, nobody thinks she might have, the entire deal between her and the movie theater is an honest exchange, and there's nothing tainted about the transaction itself, any more than if the bully stole the money, then lost it on the sidewalk where the grandmother found it and thriftily picked it up and spent it. Now, this certainly raises questions. But it doesn't come near to making all market transactions "tainted" and "morally void".

None of this, of course, supports the notion that taxation is theft, and it is certainly the case that in passing Goff does raise genuine problems for it. But the particular ground on which he is trying to build the argument, the claim that when an employer pays you, you have no moral claim to the money prior to taxes, is a nonstarter. For one thing, as noted above, even to formulate the position coherently requires already recognizing some kind of moral claim to pre-income tax -- it's quite clearly the case that the government is not taxing Jane's employer but Jane, and it is taxing her for income that's hers and not someone else's. It is easily recognizable that people can cut fair deals where there is no government regulation or taxation at all, and that people have the right and moral authority make contracts for their benefit and the benefit of others, simply in themselves. So the right-libertarian is going to say that while honest dealings don't require any special justification, any intervention of the government into this must be justified; that, in fact, where the government is not protecting Jane from fraud or violence, or others from Jane's fraud or violence, it has no right or moral authority to intervene, especially against consent; and that when it does in the form of taxes, it is violating the rights of the parties involved.

We can see part of the problem if we look at the matter in terms of labor rights. If we set up a system in which people worked for employers, but employers paid the government rather than the worker (which by Goff's account would be perfectly just), and then the worker was paid whatever the government thought appropriate, this would be widely regarded as a violation of the rights of workers to pay: workers have a right to pay, even if the government has a right to taxes. But on Goff's account there can't be a labor right to pay: you don't have any moral or legal claim to your pre-tax income, so if the government taxes 100% of it, it hasn't violated your rights. And this is exactly how right-libertarians would tend to regard Goff's proposal: as an attack on the rights of workers. Similarly, Goff seems completely oblivious to the ways in which governments have historically used taxation as a tool of oppression, even though any right-libertarian would continually be thinking of these things. And this seems to be the fundamental problem: Goff treats his opponents as inconsistent upholders of his own view of how society should work, not as what they are, people who would naturally see his view as a defense of totalitarian oppression, and therefore he seems not to have any idea of how they actually see things. He thinks he is arguing for justice; he has no idea how to interpret accurately people who see him as arguing for injustice.

There are broader issues. Goff notes that "Almost all politicians and voters start from the assumption that each citizen has some kind of moral claim on her gross income." He has done other articles (much less bad) on the subject, and he always ends up saying something like this. He wants to say it is incoherent -- he certainly hasn't done this, since he never considers the possibility of defeasible moral claims, and his arguments involve several equivocations or at least controvertible assumptions. But the fact of that matter is that this very concession is a problem: it means that our social norms presuppose it, that our laws are expected to uphold it, that citizens elect officials expecting to uphold it, that politicians expect it to be understood when making laws, that, in short, the societies we have are societies in which it is posited to be true, and that our ways of doing things depend on this assumption, and that is is so even if it in practice must be taken as a rough-and-dirty, defeasible claim. Thus what is Goff actually describing when he says one has no moral claim to gross income? Not the way income works in the society we actually have.

Clifford's Island Agitators

If Clifford's sea captain example is problematic, this raises the question of whether his other major example, that of the island agitators, suffers similar problems. Clifford says:

There was once an island in which some of the inhabitants professed a religion teaching neither the doctrine of original sin nor that of eternal punishment. A suspicion got abroad that the professors of this religion had made use of unfair means to get their doctrines taught to children. They were accused of wresting the laws of their country in such a way as to remove children from the care of their natural and legal guardians; and even of stealing them away and keeping them concealed from their friends and relations. A certain number of men formed themselves into a society for the purpose of agitating the public about this matter. They published grave accusations against individual citizens of the highest position and character, and did all in their power to injure these citizens in their exercise of their professions. So great was the noise they made, that a Commission was appointed to investigate the facts; but after the Commission had carefully inquired into all the evidence that could be got, it appeared that the accused were innocent. Not only had they been accused of insufficient evidence, but the evidence of their innocence was such as the agitators might easily have obtained, if they had attempted a fair inquiry. After these disclosures the inhabitants of that country looked upon the members of the agitating society, not only as persons whose judgment was to be distrusted, but also as no longer to be counted honourable men. For although they had sincerely and conscientiously believed in the charges they had made, yet they had no right to believe on such evidence as was before them. Their sincere convictions, instead of being honestly earned by patient inquiring, were stolen by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion.

The introduction of the Commission means that this case does not suffer from the problem the sea captain case had with its failure to make actual evidence central to the scenario; while we do not know the evidence (on either side), we have evidence of evidence, and the question of evidence ends up being central to the case. So there's certainly an improvement. The mention of original sin and eternal punishment probably indicates that Clifford is thinking of the actual treatment of the so-called Rational Dissenters, or similar groups, in England. If we look at the timeline, we get:

(1) A suspicion gets abroad that these people are (legally or illegally) taking children from their families in order to indoctrinate them.
(2) Some islanders form a society to agitate about the matter.
(3) The society actively accuses and tries to injure the livelihoods and reputations of the people in question.
(4) A commission is appointed to inquire into the matter.
(5) The commission concludes: "Not only had they been accused of insufficient evidence, but the evidence of their innocence was such as the agitators might easily have obtained, if they had attempted a fair inquiry."
(6) The inhabitants conclude that the members of the society are not only to be distrusted but not to be counted as honorable.

The moral failure of the society in question arises in leaping to action ahead of inquiry, in (2)-(3), which is confirmed by the commission's judgment that if they had inquired, the evidence that they were wrong was easily available. Indeed, all of (4)-(6) is not more than confirmation of what can be determined by stage (3). This is why Clifford is surely right that it would not, ethically speaking, be much different if the Commission had happened to vindicate their conclusion but not their inquiry.

The obvious question (which Clifford recognizes) is why this situation should be characterized as "no right to believe" rather than "no right to act". Consider, for example, the following timeline of a different scenario:

(1) A suspicion gets abroad that the religious are taking children from their families in order to indoctrinate them.
(2) Some islanders, believing the suspicion, form a society to agitate for a commission to investigate the matter, and do nothing else but try to get a commission set up.
(3) A commission is appointed to inquire into the matter.

If the belief were really the linchpin of moral judgment here, one would expect these islanders, too, to be condemned as having "no right to believe". But this is certainly not what most people would say. Most people would not condemn these agitators at all. What really draws condemnation from the actual case is trying to destroy people socially; it's this that people would be most likely to say they had no right to do. One can ignore the common reaction, of course, although Clifford's own view of morality was that it gets its general authority from being an internalization of tribal agency (in the form of actions that help the tribe survive), so I don't think he himself could dismiss the question of what the actual tribal response would be. But we can perhaps give him a little wiggle-room here, since there are cases in which people do have a real "no right to believe" response -- for instance, if I believed you were a pathological liar on no real grounds, you would likely be indignant, and many responses to prejudice are at least sufficiently like "no right to believe" responses that we can grant that he is not seriously distorting things. But it's noticeable that you can massively affect the kind of moral judgment people would usually be expected to make without changing the belief, or how it was obtained, at all.

When Clifford addresses the question of why it should be "no right to believe" rather than "no right to act", however, he makes what I think is a fatal mistake. After conceding that it's right that, even given the belief, we have some power of choice, he says:

But this being premised as necessary, it becomes clear that it is not sufficient, and that our previous judgment is required to supplement it. For it is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other. No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.

He then says a bit later:

And no one man's belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone. Our lives our guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes. Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handled on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork. Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows.

Let us concede for the moment that if you condemn acting in a certain way, you condemn believing in such a way that tends to lead you to act in that way. Most people would think this, like most of what we find in Clifford's essay, is exaggerated, but granting it doesn't really help Clifford at all. Likewise, most people would regard "no one man's belief is in any case a private matter" as an obvious exaggeration, as well. Clifford himself takes it quite seriously; since Clifford doesn't believe there are any self-regarding virtues, he can only get the strong moral conclusion he wants to draw about all beliefs by insisting that all beliefs are relevant to other-regarding virtues, and thus that every belief whatsoever is of moral significance for our social relations. But we can concede it for the moment, as well, because it also doesn't avoid the major problem.

The major problem is this. In order to avoid the objection that the ethical analysis should be "no right to act" rather than "no right to believe", Clifford has responded by saying that every belief has at least an indirect effect on action, and thus the condemnation of the action gives one the ground for condemning the belief. But the conclusion he wishes to draw on this basis is that it is always wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, and he cannot get it. Because the conclusion that follows is that beliefs are to be condemned not on how they were reached, but that they are to be condemned on the basis of the wrongness of the actions to which they tend. The principle this argument supports is that it is always wrong to believe things that tend toward doing morally bad things or having morally bad habits. This is not the same principle as Clifford's principle at all. This is a particularly serious problem given Clifford's own conception of morality as based on tribal survival, since there is no reason whatsoever to think that literally every kind of belief without evidence is dangerous for the tribe. I suspect this is why Clifford ends up emphasizing the importance of not getting into the habit of believing without evidence; although, of course, one can have develop more sophisticated habits than that. But even if we try to substitute some other morality, there is no serious candidate for ethics that takes believing only with sufficient evidence as so important that it overrides every other moral consideration; and given that, the question will always be, "Why don't some of these higher moral considerations sometimes allow or even require belief in advance of the evidence?" We get no answer on this ground from Clifford himself, despite his high-toned, exaggeratedly moralistic preaching. Ironically, he argues for his principle not on the basis of sufficient evidence but on the insufficiently supported ground that it is bad for society if we don't accept it. (This is, incidentally, part of why James argues against him the way he does in The Will to Believe; and it is the entire reason that Ward takes the approach he does against Clifford in The Reasonable Basis of Certitude.) It's notable, in any case, that in at least one case in the essay he slides between talking about believing on "unworthy reasons" and believing on "insufficient evidence", as if they were the same thing; his argument commits him to thinking they are, despite the fact that this is never established.

Thus Clifford's island agitators example is in some ways a better case than the sea captain scenario, but it also makes clear an overall problem with the way Clifford attempts to establish his principle, by raising even more forcefully and obvious the objection that our moral judgments seem concerned with the actions rather than the beliefs.

Value-Apprehension and Attitude

The apprehending of a value and the attitude appropriate to it mutually require one another, and while the required attitude is not being experienced, the value isn't being apprehended completely vividly. So in a certain way it's correct to say that love is based upon the apprehended value of the beloved person, but on the other hand, the worth of a person is fully and completely accessible only to the lover.

She adds a footnote:

Consider the parallel with religious experience. "In trust we experience a community which in itself is the highest knowledge of that which we trust." Theodor Haering, Der christliche Glaube: Dogmatik (Stuttgart: Verlag der Vereinsbuchhandlung, 1912, p. 160).

[Edith Stein, "Individual and Community", Philosophy of Psychology and the Humanities, Baseheart & Sawicki, trs. ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2000), p. 213.]

Fortnightly Books, September 24

All shall find the Light at last, silver on the tree.

I have a large number of papers to grade heading my way over the next weeks, so an easier read seems to be called for when it comes to the next fortnightly book(s). So I will be doing Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence, which are five short books:

Over Sea, Under Stone
The Dark Is Rising
Greenwitch
The Grey King
Silver on the Tree

Over Sea, Under Stone was published in 1965; the rest in the 1970s. While I've read them all, this is the first time to read straight through the series, rather than here and there, so we'll see if that draws out anything new.



Julia Ecklar, "The Dark is Rising". I'm not sure I quite like some of the artistic choices here, but it handily pulls together the rhyming prophecies that structure the books.

Alexandre Dumas (and Auguste Maquet), The Three Musketeers

Introduction

Opening Passage:

On the first Monday of April, 1625, the market town of Meung, birthplace of the author of the Roman de la Rose, seemed to be in as great a turmoil as if the Huguenots had come to turn it into a second La Rochelle. A number of townmen, seeing women running in the direction of the main street and hearing children shouting on doorsteps, hastened to put on their breatsplates, and, steadying their rather uncertain self-assurance with a musket or a halberd, made their way toward the inn, the Hötellerie du Franc Meunier, in front of which a noisy, dense, and curious through was growing larger by the minute. (p. 1)

Summary: The opening of the book, of course, is famous: D'Artagnan, a Gascon hoping to make his fortune and be a musketeer, comes to Paris and happens to get challenged to duels by Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, three of the King's musketeers; their attempt to duel gets interrupted by some of Cardinal Richilieu's guards, who attempt to arrest them. Together, they fight the Cardinal's guards, and, of course, inevitably become the closest of friends, and work together to try to help make each other's fortunes. And indeed, much of the charm of the book is in its depiction of male friendship; there is a reason why the phrase most remembered from the book is "one for all and all for one". The kind of loyalty in which you have your buddy's back regardless of the scrapes he gets you into -- as when d'Artagnan has to deal with the fact that a drunk and depressed Athos gambled away not only the horse d'Artagnan had given him, but d'Artagnan's horse, as well -- is admirable in itself.

Re-reading this after such a long time, a number of things jumped out at me, all of which I think contribute to the excellence of the work. The servants had a much more important part to play in the story than I had remember; rather than being background, as they usually would have been, they end up being important secondary characters in their own right. I had forgotten how the opposition between d'Artagnan and the man from Meung ended; a surprising end, but suitable for a book that puts so much emphasis on friendship between men. The work also unfolds very nicely -- it gets bigger and bigger as the tale goes on, and all very smoothly.

The humor, of course, is a major part of the work. I remember it being somewhat humorous, but in fact it is hilariously funny; entire stretches are joke after joke. What is more, they are jokes on our heroes themselves, some absurdity about them or their handling of a situation into which they have stumbled. They are well balanced, however -- they never descend merely into farce. This also is a strength. Because we laugh about the four friends, we see their faults, and they are often miles wide, but as it is never just a farce, they stand out as truly heroic nonetheless.

Milady, of course, also makes her contribution by being one of the great villains of literature. I had remembered the Felton episode as a rather minor one, almost a digression, but reading it this time around I see that it is actually essential. Up to that point we had only brief glimpses of Milady and her evil. We knew she was treacherous, murderous, manipulative. With the Felton episode, however, we get a sustained look at her, and learn that all of this understates the case. She is not a mere murderess and liar; she is a destroyer of souls. And because we have seen it firsthand, looked a little bit insider her head and seen her ruin a good man, we can accept the history of her wickedness that gradually unfolds from there, we can accept the sense of danger that the heroes have: we know it must be true, because we have seen her in action. What is more, as I noted, the book's stage is an ever-expanding one. But how do you get bigger than war between England and France? It is Milady who makes it possible, for with her we get a battle not of swords but of souls, and one that is, if not exactly between Heaven and Hell, or Good and Evil, yet nonetheless between good, if flawed, heroes and a villain who has no qualms about endangering the salvation of someone's soul if it will serve her petty and vindictive ends. There is no bigger stage for human life, and no background that could do more to bring into bright relief a story of friendship.

Favorite Passage:

His Eminence was standing, leaning against the fireplace, with at able between him and d'Artagnan.

"Monsieur d'Artagnan, you've been arrested on my order."

"So I was told, Monseigneur."

"Do you know why?"

"No, Monseigneur, because there's only one thing I could have been arrested for, and you don't yet know about it." (pp. 538-539)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

Music on My Mind

Ngọc Lan, "Niệm Khúc Cuối". A very popular love song. Like a lot of older Vietnamese songs, it has a nice almost-French sound to it without sounding derivative.

Dashed Off XX

A sustained assault on Kant's philosophy of religion in this batch of dashed off notes.

if A:B::C:D
(1) B:A::D:C (invertendo)
(2) A:C::B:D (alternando)
(3) A:A-B::C:C-D (dividendo)
(4) A+B:B::C+D:D (componendo)
- (3) & (4) seem to require that the analogy operate within a classification

"The Spirit is the teacher; Scripture is the doctrine which He teaches us." Turretin

the marks that the teaching of the Church is divine
(1) origin
(2) duration
(3) instruments and amanuenses
(4) adjuncts (martyrs)
--
(5) the sublimity of its mysteries, holiness of its doctrine, and excellence of its examples
(6) style and beauty
(7) internal coherence
(8) end
(9) effects (the gates of hell cannot stand against it)
These marks do not shine out equally in everything the Church does, but considered corporately as a whole.
- This, of course, is taking Turretin on Scripture and applying it to the Church; and lest anyone cry foul at that, note that Turretin quite clearly takes the tradition conversion of the world argument about the Church and applies it to Scripture, and that there are signs he does this in other ways.

the Mencian shoots taken to the cosmic limit

the Syriac 'Book of Women': Judith, Tobit, Esther, Ruth

the gaze of contemplative love between spouses

The almost inevitable flaw in almost every neopagan movement is treating gods as something in which one may dabble.

"Crime is an exacting, inflexible master, against which no one can be strong unless he rebels completely." Manzoni

Some become Catholic from a drive for solidary integrity, some from luring holiness that calls to them, some (like myself) from a mind or will tending to universality, some by intervention of providence or from a direct call.

Who cannot care of the things of the past cannot be trusted with the things of the future.

"Truth is essentially coexistent with the gods, as light is coexistent with the Sun." Iamblichus

The life of Christ is the plot of holy liturgy.

awe as an act of faith

Even in mere bathing we do not merely put water on ourselves: we throw off worry, care, trouble; we make a break in time; we start anew.

our body's physical response to the sublime
- note that this is where the old terror theories come closest to getting things right

conserved quantities & necessity ab alio
conserved quantities // necessary truths // necessary goods (Chastek)

poem as perfect sensible speech (Baumgarten)
poetry as tending toward ideas that are clear and confused (the clarity is a unity of variety)

Christ's Session // Mary's Intercession

beauty of measure, beauty of kind, beauty of tendency

The papacy is not an indelible character but an office with a function, and its authority depends in part on the fulfillment of that function.

Conceptual clarification is a kind of unification.

Hayek's knowledge argument and imperial government

Analects 12:11 -- "Jun jun, chen chen, fu fu, zi zi."

xin & rectification of names (xin combines the person radical and the character for speech)

Good politics is in great measure about rational classification.

Notations encapsulate methods.

Every indelible character gives the capacity to act in some way in the person of Christ, but only the presbyterate and the episcopacy do so in precisely the way Christ is Head of the Church.

our capacity to recognize the sublime in nature as a sign of the union of mind and body

the oscillation of good philosophy between solitary reflection and collaboration

experimentalist, populist, and classicalist axes in language change

the nation as analogized panhellenizing

the major legitimate ends of money-making: support of self and family, productive effects that are needed, self-discipline, and almsgiving

"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." Chesterton

generalize, specialize, analogize, aporeticize

the Golden Rule and beautiful action

the importance of timeline-building in HoP
timeline + communication geography -> diffusion of ideas (contiguity and resemblance in tracing influences)

Kantian philosophy of religion is fundamentally anti-Incarnational.

By means of grace we become means of grace.

There is no way to advance from virtue to grace; there are ways to advance from grace to virtue.

Misperception of X is not a failure to perceive X. Likewise, miscommunication is not a failure to receive testimony.

truth-validating vs truth-suggesting cognitions

impressional, semiotic, and comparative aspects of perception

Faith comes by hearing because what is heard is analogous to what is believed.

"Mathematical truths, as soon as we realise them, are seen to be necessary, and we seem to have known them always." Pringle-Pattison

triputisamvit (Prabhakara Mimamsa): each cognition manifests subject, object, and itself

means of knowledge combining with things other than means of knowledge to function in new ways

signs as working like middle terms

Princess Elisabeth's famous set of objections is concerned more with the limits of Cartesian physics than with mind/body union.

(A) pervasion of sign and signified -- Box(s-o)
(B) presence of thing that is sign -- T(t-s)

We may practically employ the ideas of effects of grace by not erring in a certain way -- that is, it is not a matter of doing nothing but a matter of doing only what does not presuppose the adequacy of one's own power or independence of God. It is manifestly obvious that we may have practically employable negative rules of this sort. And we may cognize these effects theoretically by causation, remotion, and eminence, because it is illegitimate to restrict causal reasoning arbitrarily.

Every regulative principle implies constitutive principles.

One may simply adapt Kant's moral postulation of God's existence to a moral postulation of the occasional happening of miracles, i.e., one may argue that it is rational on basis of moral reason to hope that miracles will be done to make it possible to follow the moral law (either individually, or communally a la Cohen). It requires no more than recognizing that God has freedom as well as we, and that to postulate reconciliation of the moral and the physical, as Kant does, is as much to postulate that events can occur for moral reasons as well as physical. This suffices for at least a Babbage-style account of miracles.

The laws of virtue ground all juridical laws.

Kant's 'church' is literally a church without creeds, without hierarchy, without distinctiveness; it is a ghost of a church.

Fulfilling one's duties to oneself and others requires distinctive service to God, both to express symbolically the meaning of these duties and to communicate and even share this meaning with others.

As sons do not relate to their fathers in terms of pure moral duty, which is rather what one would expect of new servants, but instead do so on the basis of historical contingencies shared with their father, so a free, filial faith must be a historical faith.

If holy tradition is a 'leading-string', it is necessary yet; for compared to what we should be, we are not adults, but merely children, however quickly we have grown, and however much we preen ourselves on having grown.

Without shared profession and discipline, human beings inevitably begin to treat morality as purely subjective.

The phenomenon participates the noumenon.

the logic of sweepings clauses & analogy vs available classification

frozen accidents and spandrels in the history of philosophy

By 'information' people often mean nothing more than 'specification of effect'.

apostolic succession
(1) sacramental (of person)
(2) jurisdictional (of see)

similarity as indistinguishability at some level of precision

Chatterjees ordering of priority among the pramanas: perception, memory, nonperception, inference, comparison, testimony, postulation

Social justice means nothing unless it is justice with others.

that exemplar causation in the wide sense implies the existence of exemplar cuases in the strict sense (i.e. productive ideas)

Even for natural reason, standing in the stead of another in matters of virtue is a common thing; for instance, it is common in both good parenting and good marriage. It does, to be sure, require conditions, for parents do not answer for children or spouses for each other in every case; but it does occur.

Confucian five relations as cases of vicariousness

Need is sometimes insight, or the beginning of it, in the same sense that attention is.

Reason must always go further in understanding, or it betrays itself.

To do one's duty properly requires cultivation of an admiration for virtuous actions, especially when they go beyond duty.

miracles as models of artistic creation

artistic inspiration as intuitive schema for grace
the sense of something working through one in one's free act

Timaeus as an account of artisanship

A humanity pleasing to God must be an artistic, or at least productive, as well as ethical humanity.

the principles of mediation and vicariousness in artistic creation

All artistic creation is a surplus over merit.

Salvation cannot be merely moral; it must be sublime, exalting those who receive it.

The Election of Israel is a precondition for understanding the marks of the Church.

Modern Biblical scholarship has, through its history, been an investigation of hypotheses. Some of these have not been unreasonable; but the problem is that there are always more hypotheses.

the Shema as making a claim on moral disposition

(1) the nobility of many hermits, monks, and consecrated virgins
(2) the freedoms granted by celibacy, if given the right context
(3) the miracles of the saints as pedagogical
(4) the ecclesiastical hierarchy as a limit on despots
(5) the often political nature of schism
(6) the quasi-hieratic nature of the Byzantine empire and the ways this aspect helped to preserve it
(7) the constant attempt of secular powers to manipulate the Church for their own ends, e.g., the Avignon papacy
(8) the role of the papacy in negotiations of peace
(9) the benefits arising from the Church even despite the sins of its members

faith giving rise to productive, and not merely practical, works
faith-informed genius and taste

"Taste alone brings harmony into society, because it fosters harmony in the individual." Schiller

the subtle truths in the twilight of obscure ideas

festivity as an appropriate manifestation of hope

church buildings as mirrors of the whole circumambient world

"Once there is religion, it must necessarily also be social." Schleiermacher

'Spirituality without religion' is for disembodied spirits; the ghost of a religion, suitable for ghosts.

ritual as mediating intuition and conception

religion exponentiated
the divine image exponentiated

Intellectual consistency requires a purity of discipline academia does not easily accommodate.

One often finds that a single perhaps is implausible whereas a system of perhapses, at least given the right connection to some evidence, is quite plausible. A story often makes more sense to us than a fragment.

communicating the value of virtue without mere virtue-signaling (i.e., without trying to convince people that one has the virtue by a peacockish display)

Purely formal sciences are heavily dependent on analogical reasoning (for extension, consilience, etc.).

measurement as a method for classifying, where tehre are preestablished mathematical relationships within the scheme of classification
- measurements leading to classifications seem to work by specifying more general relations already in play

'Encounter'

One of my pet peeves is people misusing the word 'encounter' in theological and religious contexts. 'Encounter' in English means one of two things:

(1) A casual meeting, usually brief and usually by chance
(2) A direct hostile interaction between disputants or enemy forces

If you are focused on 'encounter with Jesus', your standards are too low. What people mean when they such things is not 'encounter' but friendship or charity or love. If you mean that, say that.

The problem has become worse recently because Pope Francis likes to talk about encuentro and it gets translated by 'encounter', which in this context is a false cognate; the Pope uses the Spanish word to indicate deliberate acts of solidarity, which is not what the word 'encounter' describes (and by experience talking with people, I am very certain is not what is conveyed to most English speakers by that word, since they can tell from context that it is supposed to be more than a casual meeting but they have no idea what). Deliberate acts of solidarity. That is what the English translations should convey.

ADDED LATER: Incidentally, if you want to translate encuentro as literally as possible, 'finding' is infinitely better than 'encounter'. Not 'encounter with Jesus' -- finding Jesus. Not 'encounter with your neighbor' -- finding your neighbor. Better than that, 'going out and finding', both sides of which the Pope often explicitly emphasizes. Encuentro used of persons is still capable of being stronger and more active than 'finding', but the gap is far less, because 'finding' is a much stronger and more active word than 'encounter'.

Blackstone on Pursuit of Happiness

As therefore the creator is a being, not only of infinite power, and wisdom, but also of infinite goodness, he has been pleased so to contrive the constitution and frame of humanity, that we should want no other prompter to inquire after and pursue the rule of right, but only our own self-love, that universal principle of action. For he has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former; and, if the former be punctually obeyed, it cannot but induce the latter. In consequence of which mutual connection of justice and human felicity, he has not perplexed the law of nature with a multitude of abstracted rules and precepts, referring merely to the fitness or unfitness of things, as some have vainly surmised; but has graciously reduced the rule of obedience to this one paternal precept, "that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness." This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law.

Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book I, Part I, Section II.

Natural law theories can diverge from each other in a number of ways, and one of them is what they take to be the fundamental precept. Aquinas, of course, because he takes the fundamental precept to be to reasoning about obligation what the principle of noncontradiction is to theoretical reasoning, holds that it is "Good is to be done and sought, bad to be avoided" when it is applied to the common good of the human race. Suarez follows him in this, although I'm inclined to think he has a narrower understanding of it -- he qualifies it by saying that good should be understood as honestas and the bad as turpitude, which is maybe a way of saying with Aquinas that we get the precept when we apply the principle to common good in particular, but I'm not really sure. Scotus, if I don't misunderstand him, takes the first precept to be "God (as infinite good) is to be loved". Blackstone's "Man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness" is a very different one. It need not be said that all parties would in fact agree with all of these as truths; Aquinas holds that God should be loved, and Scotus that good is to be done and sought, and both that our true and substantial happiness is to be pursued. But recognizing these as true and recognizing them as law are different things (as Aquinas makes quite clear), and you get a rather different view depending on which of these you take as the root precept.

Reading this passage in context, it seems undeniable that Jefferson's use in the Declaration of Independence is ultimately from Blackstone. Jefferson himself does not seem to have liked Blackstone very much at all, but there are too many similarities to be accidental. It's sometimes said to have been an indirect influence; Jefferson is thought to have been influenced by the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which was written up by George Mason. This influence is pretty obvious if you look at the first article of the Virginia Declaration. But I'm not sure this completely closes the lid; there are other echoes in the Declaration suggestive of Blackstone, so maybe it's not all through Mason. I don't know.

ADDED LATER: I should have also remarked on Blackstone's rejection of moral rationalism -- the "abstracted rules and precepts, referring merely to the fitness or unfitness of things". This is an approach to ethics that begins with Malebranche; Hume, complaining about it in the footnote for Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Section III, Part II, calls it an "abstract theory of morals".

Clifford's Sea Captain

In his Ethics of Belief, W. K. Clifford gives his famous example of the negligent sea captain:

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

Clifford from this draws the conclusion that we would recognize the ship captain as responsible for the deaths of those who died and that, in particular, we would say that "the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him."

The example is often quoted or alluded to in discussions of the ethics of belief, due to Clifford; but always uncritically, I think. More careful reasoners should pause here, because Clifford's ethical analysis is just obviously bad. First, like everything in the essay, the condemnation is stated in an exaggerated manner; on most ethical theories we could not say "that he was verily guilty of the death of those men" without qualification. Negligent omission, even egregiously culpable negligent omission, does not work like deliberate commission, and does not interact with guilt in the same way. Further, Clifford is playing a rhetorical game in his parting shot at the sea captain; told that someone "got his insurance-money...and told no tales", we would usually take this to suggest that the matter was in fact more deliberate than the sea captain's actions are actually presented as being -- that, in fact, he was at least half-angling toward the insurance money to begin with, particularly given the prior emphasis on expense. But what Clifford needs for his argument is really a clean case -- someone believing badly without the additional unsavory suggestion of things like greed. He needs a sea captain who is, as he previously said, genuinely benevolent, and whose only flaw is this. Otherwise you get cross-interference that blunts the usefulness of the example for the purpose of showing that there are obligations of belief in particular, and not just obligations not to be greedy.

Worse, the ship captain's belief is simply irrelevant here. The sea captain's sincerity of belief does not help him, to be sure, but it is not because "he had no right to believe", but because the belief in question doesn't matter. We condemn the sea captain not because he believed badly; we condemn the sea captain because, given his doubts, he had responsibilities regardless. Likewise, this is why it doesn't matter whether his belief turns out to be right or not: not because he had no right to belief, but because his responsibilities didn't depend on that belief at all. His responsibilities are based on the warning-flags that had been raised; it didn't matter what he in fact believed about the ship.

What is more, if we look at the timeline here, we find that it is poorly suited for Clifford's ultimate point. The timeline is as follows:

(1) The shipowner is preparing to send the ship, knowing that it is old, flawed, and often in need of repair.
(2) He has doubts that the ship is not seaworthy.
(3) He thinks that perhaps he has an obligation to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted.
(4) He tries to talk himself out of this and tries to dismiss some of his worries.
(5) He comes to have a sincere and comfortable conviction that the vessel is seaworthy.
(6) He sends the ship off with light heart and benevolent wishes.

The first thing to note is that the sea captain starts out believing that he might have an obligation, and then actively tries to talk himself out of that until he succeeds at (5). This is important because his actual obligation as a sea captain begins at (2), at which point he still suspects there might be a problem. All that the rest of the case shows, as far as the ethics of it, is that (3)-(6) don't affect this obligation at all -- he still has the same obligation throughout. Further, the real problem with the sea captain's final belief is not that he fails to believe in accordance with the evidence; it is that, thinking he had an obligation, one he actually had, he deliberately tried to convince himself that he didn't. This is where the appearance of the case being one of 'ethics of belief' comes from; it is the unethical nature of the motivation on which he is trying to convince himself not to believe what he does. But this is not about the belief; this is about trying to give yourself a belief with a motivation that is already and independently unethical.

And if we needed another reason to be skeptical of this commonly repeated case, the case is poorly suited just in itself for showing that Clifford's principle (it is wrong to believe on insufficient evidence) is true, because very little evidence is actually mentioned -- the ship is old, not all that well built, and has needed repairs before, and, on the other side, that she has gone safely through a lot of voyages and weathered a lot of storms. Everything else is just referred to as doubt and suspicion. Evidence doesn't play much of a role at all in our assessment of the moral situation -- indeed, once the sea captain has significant doubts, he already has at least some responsibility to double-check and take precautionary steps, even if he's nervously overreading the evidence and a more reasonable assessment of the ship would judge it to be just fine.

Thus the belief, as such, is irrelevant to the moral judgment; the evidence is not given much of a role in the scenario; and the ethical features of the scenario are not strongly tied to either. It's just a poor case.

A Moment's Monument

The Sonnet
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A sonnet is a moment's monument, —
Memorial from the soul's eternity
To one dead, deathless hour. Look that it be,
Whether for lustral rite or dire portent,
Of its own arduous fullness reverent;
Carve it in ivory or in ebony,
As Day or Night may rule; and let Time see
Its flowering crest impearled and orient.

A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals
The soul, — its converse to what Power 'tis due, —
Whether for tribute to the august appeals
Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue,
It serve; or, 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath,
In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death.

Neuroscience and the Microprocessor

A very interesting paper: Eric Jonas & Konrad Paul Kording, Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? (PDF).

Neuroscience is held back by the fact that it is hard to evaluate if a conclusion is correct; the complexity of the systems under study and their experimental inaccessability make the assessment of algorithmic and data analytic technqiues challenging at best. We thus argue for testing approaches using known artifacts, where the correct interpretation is known. Here we present a microprocessor platform as one such test case. We find that many approaches in neuroscience, when used naïvely, fall short of producing a meaningful understanding.

The Lady Mary Shepherd Philosophy Salon

I recently came across a blog by Liba Kaucky called The Lady Mary Shepherd Philosophy Salon, which is devoted to discussion of Shepherd's philosophy. Definitely worth checking out if you are interested in various aspects of Shepherd's work.

Poetry and Prose

Freedom is fullness, especially fullness of life; and a full vessel is more rounded and complete than an empty one, and not less so. To vary Browning's phrase, we find in prose the broken arcs, in poetry the perfect round. Prose is not the freedom of poetry; rather prose is the fragments of poetry. Prose, at least in the prosaic sense, is poetry interrupted, held up and cut off from its course; the chariot of Phoebus stopped by a block in the Strand. But when it begins to move again at all, I think we shall find certain old-fashioned things move with it, such as repetition and even measure, rhythm and even rhyme.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Slavery of Free Verse", Fancies Versus Fads.

Rainbow in the Sky

In addition to being the memorial of St. Robert Bellarmine, it is also the memorial of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Doctor of the Church, the Sibyl of the Rhine.

From her work explaining the Athanasian Creed (as translated by Nathaniel Campbell):

But God was mindful of the oath he made by the rainbow that he placed in the clouds of the sky (cf. Gen. 9:13-17) when he willed his Son—signified by the rainbow—to be born of untainted virginal nature. He overcame all of his enemies with a powerful assault, as those humans were destroyed by the water of the flood (cf. Gen. 7)—but to a new age of humankind, restored by the water of baptism, Christ appeared like a rainbow in the clouds to reign within the Church. Indeed, the Church of God was joined to the Son of God as circumcision was to the law, whose keeping was a forerunner and prefiguration of the Church. But the new age, gilded by the Church’s ornament, shall never be chided for any fault at all. Moreover, like the rainbow it will never fade from the sky, and when it will be suppressed with fear to the point that it can scarcely see through a single eye, it will again be restored in the Son of God, just as it will also be restored at the time of the son of perdition (II Thess. 2:3). The various colors of the rainbow also signify the powers and virtues of the thousands of saints—in fire’s heat chastity and continence, in purple the martyrs’ martyrdom, in hyacinth-blue the teaching of our ancestors, and in green the virtues of the saints’ good works, which come forth as beams breathed forth by the Son of God like rays from the sun.

Bellarmine

Today is the memorial of St. Roberto Bellarmino, S.J., Doctor of the Church, the great polemicist of the Counter-Reformation.

He has an interesting passage in the Controversies in which he summarizes the travails of the Church using the Apostles' Creed. I'm not sure how hard it should be pressed as an intended historical thesis of how things have to unfold (since he clearly thinks there is overlap, and does regard all points as being under continual attack to varying degrees), rather than as an account of the thoroughness with which the Church is attacked on points of doctrine, which has its own natural order, but it does a good job of giving a sense of his sense of the spiritual war. It helps to know first the ordering of the articles, in their traditional enumeration.

1. I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
2. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
3. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary.
4. Under Pontius Pilate, He was crucified, died, and was buried.
5. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again.
6. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
7. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
8. I believe in the Holy Spirit,
9. the holy catholic Church, the communion of saints,
10. the forgiveness of sins,
11. the resurrection of the body,
12. and the life everlasting.

The enemy of the human race, although otherwise he is wont to be totally perverse and a disturber of good order, still he wishes to attack the truth of the Catholic Church not without a certain orderly procedure. Therefore, in the first two centuries from the foundation of the Christian Church, he was totally occupied in trying to destroy the first article in the Apostles' Creed. For what else did they want--the Simonians, the Menandrians, the Basilidians, the Valentinists, the Marcionists, the Manichaeans, and the whole school of the Gnostics--except that there is not one God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth? But when he did not succeed in that, again at a later time about 200 years after the Lord, the devil established a new front, and he began to attack the second article of the Creed in which the divinity of Christ our Lord is explained....

...But since even then the gates of hell could not prevail against the Church, the devil, now taking a new third approach, began to oppose with even greater strength the third and at the same time the fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh articles, because they have a certain connection and relationship with each other.

Therefore he stirred up Nestorius and Theodore of Mopsuestia after the year 400....

All of these, even though different among themselves and using contrary tactics and tricks, strove to destroy and overturn the last five articles of the Apostolic Creed concerning the one and the same mystery of the divine Incarnation, and also of the passion, of the resurrection and of his coming to judge the living and the dead.

He then assigns the schism between East and West to the attack on the eighth article, on the Holy Spirit, and then continues:

But certainly, when our cunning enemy realized that he was accomplishing very little by attacking those articles of faith, which pertain to the divine persons, he then dedicated himself completely to upset and destroy the truths concerning the Church and the sacraments. These two articles -- I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints and the forgiveness of sins, with all of his tricks and efforts, with the power of hell he has tried to pervert, and he is still trying even to this day; this has been his strategy since the year one thousand down to the present day; his forces have often been changed, increased and renewed -- by the Berengarians, Petrohrussians, Waldensians, Albigensians, Wycliffites, Hussites, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Confessionists and Anabaptists.

And here we still are, I suppose, still fighting the Battle over the Forgiveness of Sins in the longest and most subtle war.

[St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, S. J., Controversies of the Christian Faith, Baker, tr. Keep the Faith Inc., pp. 17-19.]

The Dilemma of All Human Philosophizing

It is a bold undertaking to pick out a single pair of concepts from a closed system in order to get to the bottom of them. For the "organon" of philosophy is one, and the individual concepts that we may isolate are so intertwined that each sheds light on the others and none can be treated exhaustively outside of its context.

Such is the dilemma of all human philosophizing: truth is but one, yet for us it falls into truths (plural) that we must master step by step. At some point we must plunge in to discover a greater expanse; yet when this broader horizon does appear, a new depth will open up at our point of entry.

[Edith Stein, Potency and Act, Redmond, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2009) p. 5.]

Vehement Fire of Charity

Today is the feast of St. Catherine of Genoa, who devoted her life to the sick and ran a hospital. She died in 1510. Her most famous and lasting work, however, is her Treatise on Purgatory, which is probably the most important early modern discussion of the doctrine. It appeared, four decades after her death, in a book about her life; the authenticity of the attribution to her has occasionally been denied, but the evidence, such as it is, tends to favor it, and there is no particular reason other than the work's late public appearance to reject it. It is usually thought, however, to have had some redaction by others, probably at least organizational. From the Treatise on Purgatory, chapter III:

And because there is no good except by participation with God, who, to the irrational creatures imparts Himself as He wills and in accordance with His divine decree, and never withdraws from them, but to the rational soul He imparts Himself more or less, according as He finds her more or less freed from the hindrances of sin, it follows that when he finds a soul that is returning to the purity and simplicity in which she was created, He increases in her the beatific instinct and kindles in her a fire of charity so powerful and vehement that it is insupportable to the soul to find any obstacle between her and her final end; and the clearer vision she has of these obstacles the greater is her pain.

Since the souls in Purgatory are freed from the guilt of sin, there is no barrier between them and God save only the pains they suffer, which delay the satisfaction of their desire.

[St. Catherine of Genoa and Don Cattaneo Marabotto, The Spiritual Doctrine of Saint Catherine of Genoa, TAN (Rockford, IL: 1989) pp. 303-304.]

Opinio Copiae inter Maximas Causas Inopiae Est

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Chapter 1:

I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women, because in this as in so many other things "opinio copiae inter maximas causas inopiae est"; and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on the matter while people flatter themselves that they perfectly understand a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing, and of which it is at present impossible that any man, or all men taken together, should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay down the law to women as to what is, or is not, their vocation. Happily, no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected with the position of women is relation to society and life. For, according to all the principles involved in modern society, the question rests with women themselves — to be decided by their own experience, and by the use of their own faculties. There are no means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying — and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone.

Opinio copiae inter maximas causas inopiae est means 'One of the biggest reasons for being impoverished is thinking you have a lot' (literally, 'belief in abundance is among the greatest causes for scarcity', or 'the idea that one is wealthy is one of the major causes of poverty'). It is a quotation of Francis Bacon, in particular from the preface of the Instauratio Magna; Bacon is talking about knowledge, which is why it comes up here; what Mill says immediately after this is entirely in line with the meaning of the saying. It's worth quoting in context, since Mill is likely assuming that the whole passage would be called to mind by his quotation of the key part:

It seems to me that men do not rightly understand either their store or their strength, but overrate the one and underrate the other. Hence it follows that either from an extravagant estimate of the value of the arts which they possess they seek no further, or else from too mean an estimate of their own powers they spend their strength in small matters and never put it fairly to the trial in those which go to the main. These are as the pillars of fate set in the path of knowledge, for men have neither desire nor hope to encourage them to penetrate further. And since opinion of store is one of the chief causes of want, and satisfaction with the present induces neglect of provision for the future, it becomes a thing not only useful, but absolutely necessary, that the excess of honor and admiration with which our existing stock of inventions is regarded be in the very entrance and threshold of the work, and that frankly and without circumlocution stripped off, and men be duly warned not to exaggerate or make too much of them.

Bacon is concerned with arguing for the importance of doing more along the line of what we call scientific inquiry; this, of course, is not the kind of argument Mill is making. But Mill would see less of a division between what we call scientific matters and political or ethical matters than most people would today; political progress would not be sharply divided by him from scientific progress. Thus it's probably not just incidental that he is quoting philosophy of science in a discussion of government. And the basic line of thought has parallel -- before you could have reasonable thought, men would have to recognize that they really know nothing, and therefore need to learn. But in the political context there is an option that does not exist in the context Bacon is discussing: it is not actually necessary for men to learn all they need to know in order to lay down the law for how women should be women -- they can let the experts decide, namely, the women themselves.

David J. Riesbeck has a very nice little paper on the fact that the Latin quotation has often been mistranslated in notes to editions of The Subjection of Women, and why that matters for interpretation of Mill's argument.

Music on My Mind

Clamavi De Profundis, "The Fall of Gil-Galad".

Χρυσόστομος

Today is the feast of St. John Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, Doctor of the Church. A bold and charismatic speaker, he was both popular and controversial, and died in exile because of it; he is best known today for his homiletic commentaries on Scripture.

From his Homily VIII on Philippians:

Taking these things to heart, let us do everything “without murmuring and disputing.” Is it some good work that thou hast before thee, and dost thou murmur? wherefore? art thou then forced? for that there are many about you who force you to murmur, I know well, says he. This he intimated by saying, “in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation”; but it is this that deserves admiration, that we admit no such feeling when under galling provocation. For the stars too give light in the night, they shine in the dark, and receive no blemish to their own beauty, yea they even shine the brighter; but when light returns, they no longer shine so. Thus thou too dost appear with the greater lustre, whilst thou holdest straight in the midst of the crooked. This it is which deserves our admiration, the being “blameless”; for that they might not urge this plea, he himself set it down by anticipation.

Berkeley and the Adventures of Gaudentio (Re-Post)

This is a lightly revised re-post of a post from 2014.

In 1737 a work was published in London, Memoirs of Sgr. Gaudentio di Lucca (in later editions it was sometimes published as The Adventures of Sgr. Gaudentio di Lucca). It was a runaway bestseller; it would be reprinted many times and translated into many languages. Since it was published in the eighteenth century when subtitles do the work of blurbs, you can get some idea of the substance of the work from its subtitle (the humor of its length is probably deliberate): taken from his confession and examination before the fathers of the Inquisition at Bologna in Italy. Making a discovery of an unknown country in the midst of the vast deserts of Africa, as ancient, populous, and civilized, as the Chinese ... Copied from the original manuscript kept in St. Mark's library at Venice; with critical notes of the learned Signor Rhedi, late library-keeper of the said library. To which is prefix'd, a letter of the secretary of the Inquisition, to the same Signor Rhedi, giving an account of the manner and causes of his being seized. Faithfully translated from the Italian by E. T. Gent.. It is a work of fiction originally written in English, and telegraphs that fact fairly clearly. It's quite a good book, relatively fast-moving and surprisingly funny, using intricate layers of narration in a highly effective way despite not being all that long; it's not surprising that it became so popular. Historically, it's of significance in part for being a major part of the transition between Utopia novels and Lost World/Dark Continent adventure stories, a precursor of H. Rider Haggard, and one of the works that, because of its popularity, established some of the genre conventions and possibilities for it.

As the work was published pseudonymously, speculation about its author sprang up immediately, and one name seems to have spread most widely: George Berkeley, the philosopher and Bishop of Cloyne. For most of the late eighteenth century most people regarded it as Berkeley's work. I first came across the name of the novel when reading Sir William Forbes's An Account of the Life and Writing of James Beattie; in a letter to the Duchess of Gordon in 1780, Beattie mentions (toward the end) that he is sending her a parcel of books, one of which is Gaudentio; he praises the description of the African deserts, and says, "The author is no less a person than the famous Bishop Berkeley."

Alas, the work is almost certainly not by Berkeley. Indeed, it's difficult to say why it would have been attributed to Berkeley in the first place. It likely lies in a complex set of associations. The humor is (very) broadly of the sort that would have been associated with Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver's Travels had been published a few years before it, and is probably an influence, although Gaudentio is much subtler and strives to be more realistic than Gulliver (not that that is difficult). The earliest attribution I've been able to trace was a review in Gentleman's Magazine not long after it came out; it's vague, but the sense of it seems to be that the reviewer thought that it was by Swift. However, at some point it became associated with Berkeley. And it is true that if you assume that the work originated in Swift's circle, Berkeley is actually the best candidate, particularly give the relative popularity of Alciphron. He was a close friend of Swift and all his circle, and we know from some of his essays and occasional touches in his published works, especially Alciphron, that he is capable of writing broadly Swiftian humor; Berkeley was a Platonist, so might be thought attracted to the idea of writing a Utopia (this was explicitly given as a reason for attributing the work to him in at least one case); he had considerable erudition, including some knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians, which plays a role here; and perhaps more obviously, Gaudentio has a satirical portrait of a freethinker that would likely remind people of the satirical portrait of freethinkers in Alciphron. In addition, Berkeley was known to have traveled in Europe, particularly Italy, and he was famous for his idealistic plan for a school in Bermuda, giving him an association with exotic travel, even though he never visited Africa or even made it to Bermuda. And it has to be admitted that Berkeley has the writing ability for it; he has a knack for description of scenery and can easily blend philosophical and narrative elements.

On the opposing side, however, is the fact that Berkeley's son denied that Berkeley wrote it, or even read it, and if you don't assume that it originated in Swift's circle, there's not much reason to attribute it to Berkeley. It was hardly the first Utopian novel; it was a genre that sold very well at the time. The humor is perhaps harsher and, occasionally, edges up to risqué (an occasional joke is that the narrator pretends that pages got lost right at the moment the narrative gets into discussion of some sexual topic) a bit more than you might expect of Berkeley beforehand. If there's any connection between the satire on freethinkers in Alciphron and the satire on them in Gaudentio, the former had been published in 1735, so it could easily have been an influence on the latter in just the ordinary way. The question was investigated quite well in Notes and Queries, and the argument against Berkeley's authorship seems fairly probable. After the Berkeley attribution began to collapse, people looked around for whomever could be a possible alternative candidate. One suggestion, derived from a later close investigation published in Notes and Queries, was a certain Simon Berington, about whom we know relatively little, but who was probably a Catholic priest, and certainly from an old Catholic family. Later investigation did seem to show that it was a local family tradition that Berington had written the work. And if we compare Gaudentio to other things we're fairly sure Berington wrote, such as A Popish Pagan, a biting and thorough satire of the controversial work of Conyers Middleton, or the work that James Crossley, the second Notes and Queries researcher, used, Dissertations on the Mosaical Creation, there does seem to be some at least broad kinship of humor ideas between the works, and Crossley points out that when one compares the authors quoted or alluded to in the works, there is a fair amount of overlap. It does seem fairly certain, then.

In any case, if you've never read it, it is worth reading, and it is a book that is good enough that it probably should not be allowed to fall into oblivion. As I mentioned before, for a Utopia novel, it is fast-paced, in an H. Rider Haggard sort of way. There is a lot of humor in the work, ranging from the subtle to the blatantly sarcastic. And Berington's use of narrative layering borders on genius -- reading the story, we are reading a supposed translation and edition of a supposed commentary by an Italian scholar of an account by Gaudentio of his adventures, including stories told to him by natives, as recorded in the transcript of an Inquisition investigation, and each layer gets some good use in the story. We travel with Gaudentio to Egypt, where he meets a man called the Pophar, who takes him to his homeland, the forgotten but mighty, wise, and prosperous civilization of Mezzorania, deep in the heart of Africa, and its glorious capital city of Phor, also called No-om or No-Ammon, in which the long-lost civilization of the Ancient Egyptians has had its greatest flowering.

Ad Baculum

Ad baculum is a popular entry on fallacy lists. It originally began as a joke -- argument by beating someone into submission -- but, in a pattern that is surprisingly common in the intellectual matters, the joke began to be treated as serious at some point, and thus ad baculum moved from being a joke-argument to being listed as a real fallacy on fallacy lists. But, of course, this raises the question, what is the fallacy in the fallacy of the cudgel? And this is not a straightforward question, either. Seeking something that goes with the name, people have tended to conflate argument ad baculum with threat. The obvious problem with this, of course, is that threats are not generally arguments. Don Levi in 1999 had a nice paper, "The Fallacy of Treating Ad Baculum as a Fallacy", in which he argued that these kinds of analyses typically founder on a failure to recognize the actual goals of threat and intimidation; he proposed that typically the point is to shut down or prevent argument -- it is not an argumentative move at all.

It is, however, a mistake to conflate ad baculum with threat and intimidation. The original point, of course, was just a joke -- 'Here's my argument, the stick' -- but Isaac Watts had recognized that these kinds of labels, like ad verecundiam, were topoi or commonplaces, strategies for picking a middle term for an argument, and for the same reason, it is certainly the case that if we are to take ad baculum as a serious label, it has to cover something like this. There is indeed a kind of argument that has occasionally been called ad baculum that fits the bill. Three examples I have noted before;

Brian Magee on free will (Confessions of a Philosopher, Random House [1990] p. 152):

I am entirely confident that if you subjected any determinist who is not a psychopath, however amoral his life, to outrageous and cruel ill-treatment, he would become indignant with you and protest that you ought not to treat him in that way. Ought and ought not would spring to life for him then, and he would insist on attributing to you the ability to behave otherwise.

Scotus on contingency (Reportatio IA prol. q. iii art. i; in Philosophical Writings, Wolter, tr., Hackett [1993] p. 9):

And so too, those who deny that some being is contingent should be exposed to torments until they concede that it is possible for them not to be tormented.

And, of course Scotus is adapting Avicenna on noncontradiction (ibid., with a minor change):

Those who deny a first principle should be beaten or exposed to fire until they concede that to burn and not to burn, or to be beaten and not to be beaten, are not [the same].

None of these, incidentally, are fallacious -- the baculine link in each case is relevant and appropriate, providing a legitimate way to reach the conclusion drawn (in all of these cases, that a particular position is not something anyone can consistently accept). Any number of other things could in principle work in the same way, and be recognized as nonfallacious; the baculinism is a rhetorical choice that does not affect the basic functioning of the argument.

This relates to the second conflation that has often confused matters in discussing ad baculum arguments; namely, the failure to make a proper distinction between the argumentative move and the rhetorical approach taken in making that move. Ad baculum, like ad verecundiam and similar labels, designates a rhetorical approach exemplified by the link that constitutes the argument; as with those other labels, there is nothing intrinsically fallacious about it. One gets an ad baculum fallacy when one commits an argumentative fallacy that happens to be in ad baculum rhetorical dress. The actual fallacy will be something distinct -- ignoratio elenchi, in fact, which is why ad baculum, when classified as a fallacy, is always classified as a fallacy of irrelevance.

The Educational Machine

...the pupil is now far more defenceless in the hands of his teachers. He comes increasingly from businessmen's flats or workmen's cottages in which there are few books or none. He has hardly ever been alone. The educational machine seizes him very early and organises his whole life, to the exclusion of all unsuperintended solitude or leisure. The hours of unsponsored, uninspected, perhaps even forbidden, reading, the ramblings, and the 'long, long thoughts' in which those of luckier generations first discovered literature and nature and themselves are a thing of the past. If a Traherne or a Wordsworth were born today he would be 'cured' before he was twelve.

C. S. Lewis, The World's Last Night and Other Essays, HarperOne (San Francisco: 2017) p. 43.

Fortnightly Book, September 10

Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, born in 1802, generally went by Alexandre Dumas, Dumas being the maiden name of his Haitian grandmother; his father, who did not get along with his own father, had often used it as well. Dumas worked as a scribe for the Duc d'Orleans, who would later become King Louis-Philippe, and while doing that began to write extensively in a wide variety of genres for extra money. He first became famous for his plays. It was his serialized novels more than anything, however, that solidified his name.

The fortnightly book is The Three Musketeers, the first book in his D'Artagnan Romances, originally serialized in 1844. I once read them all, but it has been quite a few years since I last picked this tale of the Gascon and his three friends in the King's Musketeers, from the 'days of less freedom but more independence'. D'Artagnan himself is actual Dumas's free adaptation of a previous d'Artagnan, that of Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras's Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan, who was himself fictionalizing the real-life Charles de Batz de Castelmore d'Artagnan. The real d'Artagnan provides the most basic features of the d'Artagnan story -- he became captain of the Musketeers of the Guard under Louis XIV and died at the Siege of Maastricht -- but Dumas does not really draw on the real d'Artagnan's life. What seemed to have struck him was instead was Courtilz de Sandras's very heavily fictionalized story of d'Artagnan's early life, on which he then built.

A point that does not seem widely to be known is that Dumas co-wrote a lot of his works, and several of Dumas's most famous works were collaborations of this sort with Auguste Maquet, including The Three Musketeers itself. Dumas did the actual detail-work; Maquet functioned as a plot-designer, researcher, and secretary. This approach seems to have been developed by Dumas in the course of writing plays, since it was standard to pass scripts around for modification. In any case, it was because of the fame he developed in theater-work that Dumas became the big-name draw, and publishers did not want to dilute that with a less-known name. By an agreement Maquet's name was left off the title page, but he was paid very well in exchange. Being also a less profligate man than Dumas himself, Maquet died quite wealthy and Dumas poor and heavily in debt, so one can judge for oneself whether it was a good deal. Dumas's own contribution was not slight; he was not merely touching up another author's work but writing the actual vivid, engaging scenes on the basis of someone else's sketch of a story, and there seems good reason to think that he did this with quite a free hand. Some of his contemporaries accused him of running a novel factory and industrializing literature; but no one, I think, can deny that his own literary talents made a significant contribution to the result.

The edition I am using is the complete and unabridged Bantam Classics edition, translated by Lowell Bair.

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

Introduction

Opening Passage:

In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty's Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor. Those others who had always assumed that pride of place was properly theirs despised her as a dreadful woman, while the lesser Intimates were unhappier still. The way she waited on him day after day only stirred up feeling against her, and perhaps this growing burden of resentment was what affected her health and obliged her often to withdraw in misery to her home; but His Majesty, who could less and less do without her, ignored his critics until his behavior seemed bound to be the talk of all. (p. 3)

Summary: One may be begotten by an Emperor and yet not be a prince; in Imperial Japan, Princes must be designated. The hero of the Tale is the son of a lower-born Intimate; being beautiful and intelligent, his father favors him for the throne, but it is impossible for political reasons, and thus the Emperor, rather than putting him in the line of succession, grants him a surname, Minamoto, making him simply a high-born commoner; thus he is called throughout the work, 'Genji', which means, more or less, Minamoto Name. Genji will later fall in love with one of the Emperor's wives, Fujitsubo; Genji, frustrated by the difficulties of this forbidden love, goes through a series of love affairs which always fail in one way or another. An indiscretion leads to Genji and Fujitsubo having a child, whom everyone thinks is the Emperor's younger son. The Heir Apparent, Genji's half brother, becomes Emperor, and Genji is caught in an indiscretion again, with one of his half-brother's concubines. While the Emperor does not hold it against him, the discovery having been made, he has no choice but to punish Genji, particularly given how much the Emperor's mother hates Genji. Genji is exiled, and while exiled, he has another affair, which results in a daughter. When the Emperor's mother grows ill, the Emperor pardons Genji; and in time, the throne passes to a new Emperor: the son of Genji and Fujitsubo. As the new Emperor knows that Genji is his real father, he raises Genji to the highest rank.

But, as so often happens, Genji's attainment of the heights is also the beginning of a decline. Having been raised so high, he requires an appropriate marriage, but (as also often happens) the marriage purely to correspond to social status is an utter disaster. They have nothing in common and do not get along particularly well. Genji is really in love with a girl know throughout the work as Murasaki, who reminds him of Fujitsubo; when she becomes sick, he abandons his wife for an extended period of time in order to nurse her back to health. Genji's nephew seduces her, and she has a son with him, Kaoru, who is thought by everyone to be Genji's. Murasaki becomes a nun and eventually dies, and Genji fades away shortly thereafter. We learn something of the next generation, in the last chapters, as we follow Kaoru and the prince Niou, who is Genji's grandson by his daughter, and their rivalry for a beautiful princess. The book ends abruptly in the midst of this story, for reasons unknown, but it is clear enough that, for all the mistakes Genji had made, the new generation does not seem to live up to his greatness.

Such is the basic plot, but it is somewhat misleading to summarize a book like this by its plot, because, while well plotted, it is not a plot-driven book. It is common to call The Tale of Genji 'the world's first novel', and it is true that many of the techniques that would later be common among novel-writers are already found here. But I think this fails to do justice to the work, which is a far more ambitious thing than a novel. It is more like a Scandinavian saga, except, instead of warriors and genealogies, it is structured by courtiers and bureaucratic offices. But even sagas are more interested in the narrative movement than we find here. The story gets told, but that's not where the focus is found.

I think the best analogy for thinking about The Tale of Genji is to think of a vast gallery of paintings. The paintings have an order to them, and you can walk through and get a story. But the paintings are really bound more by theme than by story, and to look at the painting only for what it contributes to the story is not actually to look at the painting. Nor would things really suffer by just wandering around the gallery without much worry about the story itself. And the best way to read the book is arguably not to worry much about the story; just look at the paintings. Perhaps this one will strike today, and another one will strike you when you read it again, but there's no need -- fortunately, because there is no possibility -- to take it all in here and now.

The comparison to painting is not accidental. It is difficult to convey how much, and in how many ways, the picturesque dominates the tale. Perhaps the best way to convey it is to quote an extended passage from "The Bluebell" (Chapter 20):

The snow was very deep by now, and more was falling. The waning light set off pine and bamboo prettily from one another, and Genji's face took on a clearer glow. "More than the glory of flowers and fall leaves that season by season capture everyone's heart, it is the night sky in winter, with snow aglitter beneath a brilliant moon, that in the absence of all color speaks to me strangely and carries my thoughts beyond this world; there is no higher wonder or delight. Whoever called it dreary understood nothing."

He had the blinds rolled up. The moon illumined all before them in its single color, while the garden shivered under the weight of snow, the brook uttered pathetic sobs, and desolate ice lay across the lake. Genji had the page girls go down and roll a snowball. Their charming figures and hair gleamed in the moonlight, while the bigger, more knowing ones were lovely in their varied, loosely worn gowns and their night service wear with the sashes half undone; meanwhile their hair, far longer than their gowns, stood out strikingly against the white of the snow. The little ones were a pleasure to watch running about happily, dropping their fans and showing their excited faces. They wanted to roll their snowball even bigger, but for all their struggles it would not budge. Some of them sat on the east end of the veranda, laughing nervously. (p. 373)

This is perhaps more explicit in description than some others, but virtually the entire book consists of paintable scenes. To a great degree, this picturesque character contributes to the book's pervading sense of nostalgia for lost perfections, which gives everything a sort of thematic unity. Everything is written as if it were a scene painted by the memory long after the events depicted.

The work is very poetic, and a number of things converge to make it so. The first is its picturesque character, already mentioned. Another is that the culture it depicts is built entirely on conventions of indirectness. We see part of this in the convention of never naming anyone directly, out of politeness, but it goes much farther than that. As a rule, men and women do not interact face to face, but through screens and fans -- the page girls dropping their fans and showing their faces in excitement over the snow show their youth by doing so. For a man to see a woman is an extraordinary intimacy, and often indicates something sexual. In addition, there are many things that simply cannot be said directly, so instead of saying them directly, they are constantly alluding to them with impromptu verse or writing poems that are intended to suggest -- by word, by allusion, by penstroke, and by carefully crafted paper -- what they cannot say directly. One of the best characters in the book is the one known as Omi no Kami, the Omi daughter, the lost-and-then-rediscovered daughter of Genji's best friend. She was raised in the country, so when she is brought to court, she does not fit in well at all, in part because she simply does not grasp that there are things you are not supposed to say outright. This leads to several scenes that are utterly hilarious in context.

What we find in The Tale of Genji is a story of beautiful life; it depicts a culture of aristocrats whose lives are almost purely aesthetic. Everyone is very human, with very human failings, including Genji himself; but they take being a flawed human being to a high art, and in this much of the attraction of the story lies.

Favorite Passage: A quick scene with the Omi daughter:

"He's the one, he's the one!" she whispered enthusiastically, loud and clear, on the subject of that most exceptionally stalwart young gentleman. It was very painful.

"Boat upon the sea, if you know not where to go, lost among the waves, let me then row out to you, but tell what port is yours!"

her voice rang out. "You always row your little boat back to the same girl! It isn't fair!"

The shocked Captain was wondering who on earth at the Consort's would ever express herself so crudely when he realized with amusement that this must be the young lady of whom he had heard.

"The boatman you see, though uncertain where to go, plaything of the winds, disdains to approach a shore where he has no wish to go."

he replied. That, they say, silenced her. (p. 543)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, but you should be aware that this is not only a long work, it is a work that cannot be read quickly.

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Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, Royall Tyler, tr. Penguin (New York: 2001).