Jules Verne, Family Without a Name

Introduction

Opening Passage:

"What a sorry sight the human race is," remarked the philosophers at the end of the eighteenth century, "cutting each other's throats for the sake of a few ice-covered acres of land." It was not their wisest observation, for they were referring to Canada, over which the British and French were then at war.

Although France was unable to maintain her hold on this splendid North American colony, its population, by and large, has remained as French as ever, despite treaties and boundary changes. (p. 13)

Summary: Simon Morgaz sold out his fellow patriots for a fortune and, when discovered, insisted on his innocence so vehemently that his wife and two young sons believed him. They went into hiding. But after his death they discover clear proof that the rumor was true. The two boys, Jean and Johann, and their mother, Bridget, repudiate the name of Morgaz. Jean and Johann each in their own way set out to make amends, Johann going into the priesthood and Jean into fighting for the independence of Quebec; but it is hard when your father has left you a debt that cannot be repaid and a stain that cannot be washed out. Jean becomes known as Jean Sans-Nom, Jean Without-Name, a freedom fighter feared by the British, public enemy number one, and the British will stop at nothing to hunt him down and execute them. Jean is clever, but it is only a matter of time before either he is unmasked as the son of the infamous traitor, thus losing the love and respect of those around him, or caught and put in front of a firing squad. Can anything other than self-sacrifice wash away the traitor's stain of blood?

Verne is not really recounting history. The early rebellion, and the Simon Morgaz who sold it out, are entirely fictional, as is, of course, Jean Sans-Nom and most of the characters in the story; Verne deliberately depicts Huron Indians fighting for the patriotes, despite the fact that they did not actually do so; several events from the real rebellion are so fictionalized as to be hardly recognizable. This is a work of storm and fire, buffoonery and melodrama, designed not to characterize the course of a rebellion but to depict, in fictional form, the hope that burns inside the fight for independence from an oppressive government. Verne wrote the book after the Franco-Prussian War, during which France had lost the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany, and there is a real sense in which this book about an entirely different continent is about that more than anything else. It is a call to the people of Alsace-Lorraine not to surrender and not to lose hope; the sacrifices may be great but freedom from the oppressor can be obtained.

Favorite Passage:

In all the St. Lawrence Valley, Thomas Harcher could not have found a better companion than his wife Catherine. She was forty-five years old, as sturdily built as her husband and, like him, still young in mind and body. Although her face and general appearance were rather plain, she was good-hearted and not afraid of hard work. In short, she was the mother of the family, as he was the father. They made a fine couple, so hale and hearty that they looked as if they could live to be a hundred, as many do in the wholesome Canadian climate.

There was perhaps one criticism that could be made of Catherine Harcher, but it applied equally to every woman in the country, public opinion to the contrary. The fact is, Canadian women are good housekeepers because their husbands do the housework: they make the beds, set the table, pluck the chickens, milk the cows, churn the butter, peel the potatoes, light the fire, wash the dishes, dress the children, polish the furniture, hang out the laundry. Catherine, however, did not carry this domineering attitude to the point of making her husband a slave, as many Canadian housewives do. Far from it! To do her justice, it must be acknowledged that she did her share of the daily work. Yet Thomas willingly did her bidding and indulged her whims. And what a fine family Catherine had given him -- twenty-six children, from their first-born, Pierre, the skipper of the Champlain, to the youngest, only a few weeks old, whose christening was shortly to be celebrated. (pp. 130-131)

Recommendation: Recommended.

*****
Jules Verne, Family Without a Name, Edward Baxter, tr., NC Press Limited (Toronto: 1982).

Evening Note for Thursday, October 11

Thought for the Evening: Saturated Phenomena

Kant makes a distinction between intuition and concepts; both are thoughts present to the mind, but intuitions are singular, referring to objects as such, while concepts refer to objects indirectly by way of characteristics that they have in common. The intuition gives the object, and the concept thinks it. Thus the object cannot be linked to a concept except by intuition (which Kant associates with the senses and the imagination), but at the same time, we could not think about objects without concepts. In Kant's famous saying, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant also recognizes, however, that our concepts in some sense can be said to exceed our intuitions; we have concepts for which we have no intuitions, indeed, cannot possibly have intuitions. This raises the question: Is there some sense in which intuitions can be said to exceed concepts? And Kant gives some reason to think that this is so, as well: the aesthetic idea is one in which we have an imaginative intuition that cannot receive an adequate concept.

This serves as part of the background of Jean-Luc Marion's exploration of the saturated phenomenon, that which is experienced as being in a sort of excess of our ability to conceive it. Using Kant's categories, Marion gives an account of the saturated phenomenon as having four aspects:

(1) Quantity: It is invisable, beyond what can be pre-determined so as to be aimed at. You can reduce it to pre-established parts; there is always more to it. He gives the example of cubist painting, in which the painter tries to show you all at once all the sides of a thing, and thereby shows you that there is more to the thing than you would expect, and also that the sides proliferate perhaps uncontrollably when we try to capture a single thing from all points of view at once.

(2) Quality: It is unbearable. It is blinding or bedazzling; trying to capture it is overwhelming in some way. In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the person who stands up and turns from the shadows to the light is dazzled, confused and blinded, until he gets used to it.

(3) Relation: It is absolute, which means here that it goes beyond what can be captured by analogy to other experiences. It stands out with a sort of uniqueness, so that if we try to capture it by comparison with other experiences, we end up with an 'infinite hermeneutic' -- to capture it by its relation to other things, we in a sense have to make our comparisons in a never-ending variety of ways.

(4) Modality: It is irregardable: while we can experience it, we can't hold the experience. We can glance but not stare, so to speak.

It is important to grasp, and is often missed by Marion's critics, that Marion is not describing a kind of rare and special experience; his whole argument is that saturated phenomena are quite common. It is unsaturated phenomena that are rare, because most of them are artificial. When do our concepts completely capture the experience they cover, giving it in its parts and in such a way that it can be clearly recognized and exactly compared with other things, so that it can be carefully and thoroughly examined? Usually only in cases like mathematics, or rigorous scientific experiment, or precise taxonomic classification, where we have carefully restricted -- impoverished -- the experience so that it fits the concept exactly. Mathematics is indeed the preeminent case, in which we have attenuated experience so much that we can clearly and exactly capture it.

Saturated phenomena, on the other hand, are found throughout common experience and show up regularly in philosophy. We can touch but not comprehend the infinite, says Descartes; Kant discusses the experience of the sublime; Husserl looks at our internal consciousness of temporal flux as something eluding precise conceptualizing. Historical events, and in literature fictional events, are experienced as saturated phenomena; so are paintings and sculptures. We often experience faces this way. So too, our bodies are experienced in this way in many of our experiences, and likewise in erotic encounters the body of the other. The uncanny, the horrific, the numinous, the suspenseful, are all saturated, and so also are objects of religious experience. A common feature of all of these is that they are cases where it's not so much our acting so as to perceive things, but our being acted upon so as to be made witness to something. It is not so much that we grasp them as that we are in the grip of them, in one way or another. (Obviously, it is not all in the same way because they each exceed relation.)

Thus human thought has a sort of double superabundance: concepts going beyond intuitions and intuitions going beyond concepts. But the Kantian dictum which I noted at the start is perhaps overly simplistic. Concepts ranging beyond intuitions are perhaps not wholly empty (e.g., flickering intuitions or connections to intuitions that, while very attenuated, are nonetheless real), and intuitions exceeding concepts are perhaps not wholly blind (e.g., if they have many concepts, or if there are intuitions that we can only sometimes and briefly grasp conceptually at the utmost wavering edge of our ability to conceive).

[Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, Kosky, tr., Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA: 2002).]

Various Links of Interest

* Dean McCartney, The Problem with Reinforced Concrete

* A letter by Galileo was recently discovered, but Thony Christie notes that it probably doesn't really affect much in our interpretation of events.

* Devon Zuegel, North American vs Japanese Zoning

* A fascinating summary of the problems local campaigns in the U.S. have to face (from a Democratic perspective).

* China is having problems with young Communists. They didn't learn that they were supposed to treat it as a symbolic way of saying, "Leave things to the state."

* Laura Booth interviews Donna Strickland, who recently won a Nobel Prize in Physics for her experimental work:

There's been a lot of attention on your position as an associate professor and not a full professor. What has been your response to that.

That I'm very sorry for the university because it's not their fault.

This is what people I don't think get, a full professor although it's a different name it doesn't carry necessarily a pay raise and I don't lose my job (if I don't apply to be a full professor). So I never filled out the paper work.

* Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Case Against Pope Francis. Dougherty is a bit harsh, but I think it is true that, if reform is the standard of success (and it was the success most people have been taking him to be trying to reach), the pontificate of Pope Francis is already a failure; there were warning signs in the fact that the people he was clearly trusting in the reform were all under various levels of suspicion for wrongdoing, and it became clear during the fiasco in Chile, when Pope Francis, ignoring the highly visible protests of the laity, installed a bishop widely recognized to have covered up child abuse, then sharply scolded people for 'calumny' when they continued to protest, then was forced by events to reverse course and investigate, through which it was discovered that the laity's accusations and protests had been mild and restrained as responses to the actual corruptions in the Chilean hierarchy. The McCarrick episode has established that he learned not a single thing from Chile, and that neither he nor his advisers really listen even now, so there does not seem to be a shift of policy in the foreseeable future. It looks very much like his tenure will turn out to be an endless series of squandered opportunities. So it goes; it's far from being an unprecedented thing in the history of the papacy.

* Ed Peters, The cerberus of clerical sexual misconduct: a canonical overview

* Michael Pakaluk, On Needing God -- and the Teaching on Hell

Currently Reading

Jules Verne, Family Without a Name
John W. O'Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council
G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention
Jules Verne, The Fur Country

Music on My Mind

Speak Low, "Thriller". A bit of instrumental for your day.

Radio Greats: Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris (Dr. Kildare)

Dr. James Kildare was a character invented in the mid 1930s by Max Brand. Brand was most famous for his Westerns, but the modern doctor Dr. Kildare has probably been his most enduring character. Shortly after the publication of the first Dr. Kildare short story, a movie was based on it, Internes Can't Take Money, which did well enough that a whole series of Dr. Kildare movies were made. Two characters in particular became associated with the series: the curmudgeonly Dr. Gillespie, played by Lionel Barrymore, and, of course, the idealistic Dr. Kildare himself, played by Lew Ayres.

In 1949, The Story of Dr. Kildare, often just known as Dr. Kildare, was put together by MGM, starrying both Barrymore and Ayres. It had an all-star cast, including the always-solid Virginia Gregg as Nurse Parker, with whom Dr. Gillespie has a perpetual (but still largely friendly) feud of words. The series did very, very well, but it was late in the Age of Radio, and it was cheaper and easier for radio stations to make their own radio series than to buy fancy packages from third parties, so it only lasted about two years, despite its popularity.

Each episode, Dr. Kildare handles crazy patients (or sometimes crazy administrators) while Dr. Gillespie makes curmudgeonly and sarcastic wisecracks; but he always wins through to heal the sickness or triumph over mere bureaucracy. A good one for October, as we gear up for Halloween, is "Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris", from July 1950. Medicine meets love meets ghosts meets butcher knives meets shenanigans about a will and testament. But Dr. Gillespie knows human nature and will bring everything to a happy ending. Well, perhaps Dr. Kildare will suffer a bit from a bruised heart, but, as Dr. Gillespie likes to point out, he's young yet and will certainly recover.

You can listen to "Mrs. Stanford's Angina Pectoris" online at the Internet Archive (number 24).

The Power to Prevent Bad Things

Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" [Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring, 1972), pp. 229-243] has been subjected to a number of common criticisms, for instance that it is too demanding (which has to be formulated very carefully in order not to be question-begging, although Singer does jump too quickly from reasonable to obligatory) or that there are problems with Singer's attempt to dismiss distance as relevant (which is right, although 'distance' here has to be at least partly concerned with difficulty and uncertainty of action rather than just geographical distance). But there is a problem with his argument that I have not seen anybody point out, one which I think is fairly significant: there is a significant gap between the principle to which Singer appeals and the supposed result of the application.

Singer's principle is (in the weaker form he gives), "if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it." Now, as I noted before, this moves too quickly to obligation -- that we can prevent something very bad from happening without sacrificing anything else morally significant is obviously in and of itself a reason to do it, but it is much less obvious that it is in and of itself a reason to treat it as morally obligatory -- and, indeed, this will depend on what theory of obligation you espouse. Most people would regard a principle like Singer's as true for certain kinds of domain, namely, domains for which you have direct responsibility, but would be more skeptical for other domains (domains for which you have only indirect responsibility and domains for which you are not generally regarded as responsible at all); if that is right, we need to add some principle(s) of responsibility to get it to work, but Singer wants and needs his principle both to be absolutely general and to yield obligation immediately. This is a tall order, but let's set this aside for the moment. A question that should be asked here is about the prevention.

Preventing evils requires making it so that they do not happen. Singer seems to hold that a lot of things count as prevention. Some of his examples are cases in which anyone could agree that you are preventing an evil -- for instance, saving a child from drowning in a pond. But for other examples (and, indeed, the cases to which Singer wants actually to apply his principle), the matter is not so clear, and sometimes it is not clear that there is any sort of power-to-prevent at all. Take the most obvious case: people starving to death in East Bengal is very bad. The action for which Singer argues is donating to the Bengal Relief Fund. But donating to the Bengal Fund is not, in fact, preventing people from starving in East Bengal. To be sure, some of the actions supported by money from the Bengal Relief Fund do (one hopes), but if I support the Bengal Relief Fund, I am not doing any of those things at all; I'm just giving the Bengal Relief Fund a bit of money so that (I am trusting) they will give it to people who (I am trusting) will do those things. Singer's principle is irrelevant to the case: the reason I'd be giving money to the Bengal Relief Fund (one would usually think) is that it is not, in fact, in my power to prevent the very bad thing at all; so I am transferring some of my power (buying power, in this case) to other people in the hope that, when it pools with power provided by other people, someone else will then have the power to prevent it. When you donate to prevent an evil, you are not, in general, preventing the evil; while there are exceptions, when you donate you are usually doing so precisely because you yourself don't have the power to prevent the evil; and the most common point of donation (besides, perhaps, showy appearance, which can be set aside here as irrelevant) is that we, lacking individually the power to prevent the evil, are trying collectively to create the power to prevent the evil.

Singer's argument proceeds as if the power to prevent bad things were an easy thing to find in the world and easy to use when you had it. But neither of these is true. Even for things within our immediate and ordinary sphere of action, for instance, many bad things are hard to prevent. A good example is keeping young children out of trouble, since a lot of things that for older children and adults would not be a problem can turn very bad for very young children; parents and caretakers have to put a lot of time and investment to preventing bad things from happening. While it is very difficult for us to accept it, a lot of bad things that happen to young children were not preventable given what was actually known and feasible at the time. And the more people we end up having to watch over, and the more evils we end up having to prevent, the less and less we ourselves could actually prevent. To be sure, there might always hypothetically have been someone who could have known the right things, or someone who could have been in the right place at the right time to prevent it, but hypothetically is sometimes merely hypothetically. If we are talking about ourselves, we are remarkably limited in the range of evils we have the actual power to prevent.

And even when we have the power, we might only just barely have the power, or might have it only maybe. Even if we might technically in fact have the power to prevent an evil, it might be close enough to the boundaries of what we know that we can do that it might be more reasonable to say that we have the power to do something that would be worth trying, which might prevent it.

Most of the time when we deal with bad things, we do not have the power to prevent them. Indeed, an immense amount of our time, money, and effort goes into just trying to create the power to prevent bad things, because we don't have it in the first place. Donating to a charity is not usually preventing bad things; it is trying to work with other people to create a power to prevent bad things. Volunteering time and effort is often the same. Most bad things are not like the child in the pond; the power to prevent them is not already in place to use. It has to be made, and that itself is not always easy.

Because of this, Singer's principle has a far narrower scope than he assumes (and, for that matter, than most of those reading him have tended to assume).

Newman

Today is the memorial for Bl. John Henry Newman, and the anniversary of his conversion from Anglicanism. A few brief passages from An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent to celebrate:

(Chapter 5)

Religion has to do with the real, and the real is the particular; theology has to do with what is notional, and the notional is the general and systematic. Hence theology has to do with the Dogma of the Holy Trinity as a whole made up of many propositions; but Religion has to do with each of those separate propositions which compose it, and lives and thrives in the contemplation of them. In them it finds the motives for devotion and faithful obedience; while theology on the other hand forms and protects them by virtue of its function of regarding them, not merely one by one, but as a system of truth.

****

(Chapter 9)

There are those, who, arguing à priori, maintain, that, since experience leads by syllogism only to probabilities, certitude is ever a mistake. There are others, who, while they deny this conclusion, grant the à priori principle assumed in the argument, and in consequence are obliged, in order to vindicate the certainty of our knowledge, to have recourse to the hypothesis of intuitions, intellectual forms, and the like, which belong to us by nature, and may be considered to elevate our experience into something more than it is in itself. Earnestly maintaining, as I would, with this latter school of philosophers, the certainty of knowledge, I think it enough to appeal to the common voice of mankind in proof of it. That is to be accounted a normal operation of our nature, which men in general do actually instance. That is a law of our minds, which is exemplified in action on a large scale, whether à priori it ought to be a law or no. Our hoping is a proof that hope, as such, is not an extravagance; and our possession of certitude is a proof that it is not a weakness or an absurdity to be certain.

****
(Chapter 10, Section 1)

Conscience is a personal guide, and I use it because I must use myself; I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe with another's lungs. Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge. And as it is given to me, so also is it given to others; and being carried about by every individual in his own breast, and requiring nothing besides itself, it is thus adapted for the communication to each separately of that knowledge which is most momentous to him individually,—adapted for the use of all classes and conditions of men, for high and low, young and old, men and women, independently of books, of educated reasoning, of physical knowledge, or of philosophy. Conscience, too, teaches us, not only that God is, but what He is; it provides for the mind a real image of Him, as a medium of worship; it gives us a rule of right and wrong, as being His rule, and a code of moral duties. Moreover, it is so constituted that, if obeyed, it becomes clearer in its injunctions, and wider in their range, and corrects and completes the accidental feebleness of its initial teachings. Conscience, then, considered as our guide, is fully furnished for its office. I say all this without entering into the question how far external assistances are in all cases necessary to the action of the mind, because in fact man does not live in isolation, but is everywhere found as a member of society; I am not concerned here with abstract questions.

Thou Seest the Gardener of the Stars

A Dead Astronomer
(Father Perry, S.J.)
by Francis Thompson

Starry amorist, starward gone,
Thou art—what thou didst gaze upon!
Passed through thy golden garden’s bars,
Thou seest the Gardener of the Stars.

She, about whose moonèd brows
Seven stars make seven glows,
Seven lights for seven woes;
She, like thine own Galaxy,
All lustres in one purity:—
What said’st thou, Astronomer,
When thou did’st discover her?
When thy hand its tube let fall,
Thou found’st the fairest Star of all!

Protector de Indios

Helen Andrews has an interesting article on Bartolomé de las Casas, at "First Things":

The Controversy of Valladolid of 1550 was one of the great dramatic set pieces of the Spanish Conquest. For six days straight, two men debated the morality of Spain’s treatment of the Indians in the New World. On one side was Bartolomé de las Casas, age sixty-five, then at the climax of a lifetime of humanitarian advocacy on behalf of the Indians. On the other was Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, former history tutor to the heir to the throne and a staunch defender of the conquistadors. Judging their arguments was a panel of Spain’s most distinguished minds, and behind them loomed the figure of Charles V, ruler of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. The emperor had put a moratorium on all new expeditions in America while the morality of the conquest was being settled. Whether that moratorium would be lifted, and under what terms, was to be decided by this titanic battle.

Amazingly, the outcome of the debate is unknown....

As Andrews notes, Las Casas was a complicated man in a complicated situation, and, an immensely and sometimes irrationally stubborn man, did not always show himself a shining paragon; but he is a fascinating figure, for all that.

This Deed of Peerless Valor's Highest Strain

Sonnet on Lepanto
by Fernando de Herrera
tr. by E. Churton

Deep sea, whose thundering waves in tumult roar,
Call forth thy troubled spirit, — bid him rise,
And gaze, with terror pale, and hollow eyes,
On floods all flashing fire, and red with gore.
Lo! as in lists enclosed, on battle-floor
Christian and Sarzan, life and death the prize,
Join conflict: lo! the battered Paynim flies;
The din, the smouldering flames, he braves no more.
Go, bid thy deep-toned bass with voice of power
Tell of this mightiest victory under sky,
This deed of peerless valor's highest strain;
And say a youth achieved the glorious hour,
Hallowing thy gulf with praise that ne'er shall die, —
The youth of Austria, and the might of Spain.

So Winged, So Vortical

To A Modern Poet
by G. K. Chesterton

Well,
What
about it?

I am sorry
if you have
a green pain
gnawing your brain away.
I suppose
quite a lot of it is
gnawed away
by this time.

I did not give you
a green pain
or even
a grey powder.
It is rather you, so winged, so vortical,
Who give me a pain.

When I have a pain
I never notice
the colour.

But I am very unobservant.
I cannot say
I ever noticed that the pillar-box
was like a baby
skinned alive and screaming.
I have not
a Poet's
Eye
which can see Beauty
everywhere.

Now you mention it,
Of course, the sky
is like a large mouth
shown to a dentist,
and I never noticed
a little thing
like that.

But I can't help wishing
You got more fun out of it;
you seem to have taken
quite a dislike
to things
They seem to make you jump
And double up unexpectedly -

And when you write
like other poets,
on subjects
not entirely
novel,
such as, for instance,
the Sea,
it is mostly about
Sea-sickness.
As you say -
It is the New Movement,
The Emetic Ecstasy.

A relatively rare bit of Chestertonian free verse -- to make fun of free-versifiers, of course. 'Vortical' is a mocking reference to Vorticism, an artistic movement that in poetry is most closely associated with Ezra Pound.

Dashed Off XXIII

"If we do not know what we receive, we shall never wake into love." Teresa of Avila

Catholic citizens should be integralist about their own political power as citizens; it is another question whether this always requires, or is even always benefited by, this or that form of large-scale integralism.

Partisanship puts pressure on the mind to conflate ends and means.

Hope is a power of repair.

Note that Hume ends the History with the moral that the English constitution is not particularly rooted in ancient tradition, and that its excellence is in great measure happenstance.

The proud may be broken; the humble never.

already = not-still-not

reductio ad absurdum as a limit to doubt

"...humility has this excellent quality, that no work which is done in a humble state leaves any distaste in the soul." Teresa

The infused virtue of humility involves having a glimpse of how one looks from the divine perspective.

Liberalism, as generally practiced, trains people to see no higher goals in religion than emotional comfort and fulfillment of spirit. People too mired in its democratization lose their ability to make sense of people who see in religious practice absolute submission, or infinite compassion, or union with God, as someone used to thinking only in finites has difficulty making sense of the thought of those concerned with the infinite. This is a symptom of a broader problem with liberalism, its tendency to finitize all values.

NB that while Hume argues that the use of organs indicates mind-dependence of perceptions, Shepherd argues that it establishes the dependence of the perception on mind-independent objects.

taking subject-object to have primacy over act-potency leaves us with no real change, only differences (difference of object under difference of notice)

blasphemy laws based on offense vs blasphemy laws based on sublimity
-- Whatever one's view of the latter, the former is an abominable mongrel that consists of trivializing something while still being punitive about it, as if one made human dignity to be nothing more than a subjective preference while still putting people in jail for murder, treating murder as nothing but a violation of preferences. It turns solemn justice into petty malice.

Reproducibility is important for experiment because it allows one to move from talking about this physical event to an abstract object. Reproducible events can, qua reproducible, be treated abstractly as having a single structure and character across reproductions.

Rhetoric uses logical ideas under relative qualification.

People have no motivation or incentive to be active citizens if their power keeps being infringed. Other things can be relevant factors, but civic apathy or quietism is often linked to how unstable and uncertain people take their power to be.

The best pedagogy requires seeing things at once more abstractly and more concretely.

God as 'that true Virtue, from which all virtues spring'

How often the evidence is there before us and we do not even recognize it as evidence!

There can no more be a sharp separation between ethics and metaphysics than there can be one between practical and speculative understanding; whatever the distinction, there must be perichoresis.

while, when, and where as binary modal operators (symmetric)

squares of opposition for all of Llull's dignitates

the eclectic as intermediary between the occasional and the systematic
-- the occasional as our normal mode of philosophizing

popular consent as material ground of positive authority, reason as formal ground of authority, God as exemplar ground of authority

"Because God is the creator of the natural simplicities in minds and bodies, He has the simplicity which belongs to Him by nature as an activity." Palamas

quarantine rules // conflict of interest rules

A hypothesis: where (a) Box and Diamond are D-modalities; (b) the square of opposition is exhaustive in its order, such that its elements are disjunctively convertible with being; and (c) there is a dependency of some kind of Diamond on Box; then one may use Diamond to argue for the existence of God as the ground, principle, or prime of Box.
examples:
uncaused, opposing conditions existing, opposing conditions not existing, causable
necessary, impossible, possible, possible-not
intrinsic good, privation of good, admitting of good, admitting of privation of good
intrinsically true, intrinsically false, able to be true, able to be untrue

God as counter-skeptical guarantee // God as conserving cause

One may always move from an exclusive Diamond to an inclusive Diamond by disjunction with Box.

existence proofs: infinite regress, Diamond to Box, reduction to contradiction, accumulation of diagnostic marks

It seems that atheistic arguments from evil can only be ad hominem (in Locke's sense), never ad judicium. Are there exceptions? (An ad jud argument would need a way to ground knowledge of what God would do, even though the argued-for is that there is no God.)

All good we know in our everyday experience permits evil of some kind.

the problem of curial cliques
-- one element to this is that curial positions are basically spoils system (contrast with patriarchs and bishops), with both the advantages and disadvantages that follow from that.
-- this is perhaps intensified by the fact that cardinals, as electors, endure, thus giving a stable body of people competing, in a broad sense, for key positions and whose projects depend on position capture; this leads to networks and thus cliques.

An effect of separation of powers is sequester of faction (functional decentralization).

Conjecture and refutation is effective only to the extent one has relevant accessible invariances.

Increasingly I think any discussion of modal logic should begin with the principle of noncontradiction.

the illative and aspirative aspects of worship

"the Church prolongs the priestly mission of Jesus mainly by means of the sacred liturgy" (Mediator Dei)

Sexual shame is rooted in the fact that sex involves much more than reproduction. Stripping it away requires treating sex as nothing but the physical process of reproduction, whether one thinks of it under the label 'reproduction' or not.

One of the greatest mistakes you can make is to assume that the world's critique of Christianity is coherent to begin with.

perception of signs as precondition for inference

the involution of moral life

Practices and procedures in politics adapt to accommodate regular and widespread responses of shame, pity, and reverence, where these responses lead t, or threaten to lead to, focused protest.

By perception we have an evidential point of view on which we can draw; by inference we draw on possible points of view related in definite ways to our own; by testimony we draw on the points of view of other people.

"our Reason is akin to the Reason that governs the Universe; we must assume that or despair of finding out anything." Peirce EP2:502

NB Peirce criticizes Hegel for not properly recognizing the distinction between essence and existence, leading to a kind of nominalism -- while the project of a phenomenology is an important one, Hegel conflates what actually forces itself on the mind with all that can be available to consciousness.

Seven mental qualifications of a philosopher (C. S. Peirce, CP 1.521-39)
(1) The ability to discern what is before one's consciousness
(2) Inventive originality
(3) Generalizing power
(4) subtlety
(5) Critical severity and sense of fact
(6) Systematic procedure
(7) Energy, diligence, persistency, and exclusive devotion to philosophy


rootedness in experience, rigor, and organization as the three features of system; systems as characterized by the modes and manners of these three features

Sanctity in this life is always partly aspirational.

An important and too often forgotten aspect of music is its tactile character: vibrations through the body, bodily responses like jolts, etc.

All complete explanation is in terms of something not more limited.

Tribute and homage to others is an essential part of the actual aesthetics of life.

"In all the things that so great and wise a God has created, there must be many beneficial secrets, and those who understand them do benefit, although I believe that in each little thing created by God there is more than what is understood, even if it is a little ant." Teresa

Love is a prerequisite for genuine stillness of mind.

The practice of prayer is fundamentally a matter of putting one's mind on God and coming to see all other things in light of Him, so that this becomes the normal course of thought.

Moral progress is possible only relative to a tradition.

If all earthly things may be a glass to see heaven through, so too may the saints and saintesses; they are not less glass than trees and mountains.

"It is the mark of a noble nature to be more shocked with the unjust condemnation of a bad man than of a virtuous one." Coleridge

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind." Livy

What are called the 'gray areas' of consent are in fact just the cases in which consent is operating normally -- to get more than this, consent must be sharpened by special procedures.

Aristotle was more thoroughly empirical than many modern philosophers who consider themselves empirically minded; the latter often have endless tissues of assumptions they cannot empirically justify.

plain truth and figured truth and riddled truth

diffusion of powers of governance

humor as a means of denaturing wickedness

Liberal Christianity often seems like Cain, wishing to offer grains and fruits rather than a bloody lamb, and not always the best and finest.

miracle as divine riddle

Faith proposes to reason a richer principle, a greater happiness, and a more universal society than reason can see clearly on its own.

Human beings are a species much given to trophy-taking and trophy-giving.

Of all the gifts brought by faith, to be able to be free of the shackles of worldly politics, to be able to see outside its walls, is not a small one.

facts as beings of reason

introspection // organizational auditing

Descartes's 'primitive notions' are kinds of perceptible.

perception that X is like something previously experienced vs. perception that X is something previously experienced

each potential part of justice as grounding a distinct region of rights (although these regions are capable of overly due to interaction of virtues)

To say that Christ disclaimed all civil power is like saying the Emperor declines to take up the office of Headman of the Village; why would an Emperor insist on being a mayor?

The meaning of ritual is determined by its structure and the meaning of its constituents.

evidence as a reason for assigning a modal status

The course of government in the post-medieval era makes clear that there needs to be an eleemosynary branch of government, in check and balance with executive, legislative, and judicial branches. (Note, for instance, the tendency of republics to become dictatorships by way of executives pushing populist welfare expansions in exchange for increase of power, as in Venezuela and elsewhere.)

Poem Re-Draft and New Poem Draft

Ecclesiology

The human heart we know right well,
a bit of heaven, a bit of hell;
we are taught it in the psalter.

The Church must suffer death and lies
that Christian hearts may sympathize
with every sinner's falter.

They who pray by work and rest
find Church all places east and west,
the heart itself their altar.

A soul restored upon the Cross
must preach the truth, no thought of loss,
though heretics will palter.

The Church that lives by faith and love
is ruled by none but God above;
our law is not its halter.


Wilting Rose

I saw a wilting rose.
Its petals, almost closed, were curled,
half open and half furled,
and every petal pearled with dew --

and thus I thought of you,
whose trouble deep and true has formed
in weeping and in storm
a sadness still informed with grace.

Jottings on Evaluating Philosophical Systems and Schools

Philosophers usually spend their time evaluating arguments, but arguments link up to other arguments to form systems, and systems themselves come in families of systems ('schools' we could call them, without too much abuse of a term that is already used for something loosely like what is meant here) and it's an interesting question of how one can evaluate an entire philosophical system, and beyond that, an entire school of systems. One would, of course, want to avoid the temptation into which people often fall of assuming there is one line of evaluation ('Thomism is better than Scotism'; 'Analytic philosophy is better than continental philosophy'; or whatever else, for which the obvious next question is, 'For what sense of 'better', as measured by what standard?').

It's difficult to do this in more than a rough way, but it seems reasonable to identify both internal and external standards of evaluation.

Internal standards of evaluation are about how arguments and positions in the system relate to each other, and there seem to be two key issues here: consistency and tightness. Consistency is obvious, of course, but tightness of system seems often to be admired. Very few people are Spinozists, for instance, but many people admire how each part is linked to every other part by clear and definite steps -- there aren't parts that are there by mere speculation or guesswork or rough analogy. This contrasts with something like Romanticism, whose very nature guarantees that it is loose -- unsystematic, we might even say, although one can detect some rather elaborate system-building even in the most aphoristic Romantic. The Romantics are system-builders, undeniably, but one part relates to another part often only by analogy or by speculation; we are left with a bunch of fragments that clearly have connection to each other, but the connection is often loose and sometimes rather uncertain. Another example is comparing phenomenology and Thomism. When St. Edith Stein, who had studied under Husserl, started her study of Thomism, she found that it took quite a bit of adjustment, because in phenomenology one uses, over and over, the same method for everything, whereas St. Thomas just uses whatever method will make progress with the problem he's looking at. Because of its unity of method, phenomenology is tighter than Thomism.

People tend to assume, I think, that consistency and tightness go together, but this does not particularly seem to be true. Logical positivism is much tighter than ordinary language philosophy, but has consistency problems that the latter does not have. Locke is tighter than Novalis, but Novalis has a consistency of his own. Spinoza is much tighter than Leibniz, but arguably not more consistent; trying to catch Leibniz out in a contradiction is bold and likely to fail, and even if you succeeded it probably wouldn't much affect Leibniz's overall approach. Tightness of system makes consistency more shiningly clear; but it can also propagate inconsistency through the system. Most people are inconsistent sometimes; in a very tight system, inconsistency sometimes easily turns into inconsistency all the time. Looseness of connection isolates failures of consistency.

External standards can be of various kinds, but pragmatic value is one that comes up often -- how useful is it for some other field or area of human life? Obviously, the question of importance is 'useful for what', but if you ask these questions, you often get interesting results. For instance, most philosophers of mind today would probably, in the abstract, take usefulness to neuroscience to be a sign of quality for an account of mind. But if we ask what school in philosophy of mind has contributed most, and contributed the most important things, to neuroscience, there is no doubt whatsoever: the answer is substance dualism. Tell a materialist philosopher of mind that and he will think you are joking, so you have to grab them by the neck and drag them through the actual historical evidence, but there's no real room for doubt. Hylomorphists contributed a few things, particularly early on; materialists have supplemented, particularly in recent decades; but modern neuroscience owes its existence primarily to substance dualists from Descartes and Steno to Sherrington and Eccles. It was they who did the major early work on the structure of the brain, it was they who did most of the foundational work on nerves, neurons, and synapses. And it is not difficult to see why -- if you are a substance dualist, you take brain events to be related to mental events, but since you don't identify them, you are not under any pressure to interpret this brain event as that mental event, and can just follow the neural evidence wherever it goes. It allows the inquiry to have full importance while minimizing the temptation to pre-impose interpretations on the evidence. Substance dualism is structured in a nearly ideal way for the study of the brain, as Platonism is structured in a nearly ideal way for the study of mathematical structures, as Romanticism is structured in a nearly ideal way for thinking about artists. Depending on what you were doing, you could probably find a school that would be more useful for this or that particular purpose; but it would be hard to find one that was more flexibly useful for a wide variety of related purposes.

One reason all of this is interesting to consider is that it touches directly on the question of what one builds philosophical systems for -- what kinds of systematicity in philosophy are desirable, and why?

Voyages Extraordinaires #5: Les Enfants du capitaine Grant

On the 26th of July, 1864, a magnificent yacht was steaming along the North Channel at full speed, with a strong breeze blowing from the N. E. The Union Jack was flying at the mizzen-mast, and a blue standard bearing the initials E. G., embroidered in gold, and surmounted by a ducal coronet, floated from the topgallant head of the main-mast. The name of the yacht was the DUNCAN, and the owner was Lord Glenarvan, one of the sixteen Scotch peers who sit in the Upper House, and the most distinguished member of the Royal Thames Yacht Club, so famous throughout the United Kingdom.

Lord Edward Glenarvan was on board with his young wife, Lady Helena, and one of his cousins, Major McNabbs.

The DUNCAN was newly built, and had been making a trial trip a few miles outside the Firth of Clyde. She was returning to Glasgow, and the Isle of Arran already loomed in the distance, when the sailor on watch caught sight of an enormous fish sporting in the wake of the ship. Lord Edward, who was immediately apprised of the fact, came up on the poop a few minutes after with his cousin, and asked John Mangles, the captain, what sort of an animal he thought it was.

Captain Harry Grant, with his ship Britannia, has vanished, but a message in a bottle has been recovered. The message is heavily water-damaged, but Captain Grant's family and friends decide to do whatever they can to find him. It is an adventure that will take them, and the hapless geographer, Jacques Paganel, to South America, then to Australia, then to New Zealand, in a desperate attempt to decipher the message correctly and find Captain Grant before it is too late.

In English, The Children of Captain Grant is often title In Search of the Castaways, but is also often called Voyage Round the World. As is often the case with Verne, translations are a bit hit and miss, often being abridgements and modifications as well as translations. The best translation online is the three-volume George Routledge and Sons Voyage Round the World; Alexander Pruss has hunted down the three volumes and given the links here.

Evening Note for Tuesday, October 2

Thought for the Evening: Cockburn on Space

The early modern period saw a great interest in trying to give an explanation of space. Probably the most famous are those of Descartes (a continuum of physical extension or body), of Newton (presentation in the immobile divine sensorium), and of Leibniz (a system of relations between substances), and of partisans on different sides of the dispute, but there are quite a few attempts to look at the topic in a different way. One interesting one that has not been looked at in any detail is that Catharine Trotter Cockburn, who is unusual in that she is a rationalist with a strong Lockean influence.

Cockburn's suggestion for understanding space starts with Locke in a place that you might not expect. In the Essay (Book III, Chapter VI, Section 12), Locke has an argument for angels: "in all the visible corporeal world, we see no chasms or gaps" so that "we shall find everywhere that the several species are linked together, and differ but in almost insensible degrees", so we have reason to think there are probably numerous kinds of minds more perfect than our own:

And when we consider the infinite power and wisdom of the Maker, we have reason to think that it is suitable to the magnificent harmony of the universe, and the great design and infinite goodness of the Architect, that the species of creatures should also, by gentle degrees, ascend upward from us toward his infinite perfection, as we see they gradually descend from us downwards: which if it be probable, we have reason then to be persuaded that there are far more species of creatures above us than there are beneath; we being, in degrees of perfection, much more remote from the infinite being of GOD than we are from the lowest state of being, and that which approaches nearest to nothing. And yet of all those distinct species, for the reasons above said, we have no clear distinct ideas.

Cockburn takes the underlying idea of a "great chain of beings" (her phrase) and adapts it in a different direction. We have reason to think there are bodies, i.e., material substances, and minds, i.e., immaterial substances, and there are obvious obstacles (as noted by Descartes and others) to reducing one to the other. But this is quite a sharp division -- there appears to be a chasm between senseless material substance and intelligent immaterial substance, and if we do not find chasms in nature, then we would expect some spectrum of gradation between them -- which would have to be something like each. This is Cockburn's suggestion for the nature of space: "an immaterial unintelligent substance, the place of bodies, and of spirits, having some of the properties of both" (p. 97). However, as with Locke's gradation argument, Cockburn's gradation argument on its own gets us something for which we don't have a clear idea.

Obviously a major concern with understanding this proposal is what Cockburn means by 'substance' and, unsurprisingly given the rest of her argument, what she has in mind is a Lockean notion of substance as an unknown something to which qualities may be attributed; as Locke says (Essay Book II, Chapter XXIII, Section 2):

The idea then we have, to which we give the general name substance, being nothing but the supposed, but unknown, support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist sine re substante, without something to support them, we call that support substantia; which, according to the true import of the word, is, in plain English, standing under or upholding.

This is, Locke says, an "obscure and relative" idea; we know that there has to be something to which we are attributing the qualities, but as we only know of this something indirectly, by knowing that we can attribute these qualities to it but can't just be the qualities themselves, it is a we-know-not-what. It's this that Cockburn has in mind. That might seem very weak, but in fact one of her concerns is to deny the view that space is nothing at all, or else just something in the mind; on the contrary, she argues, space is real and has qualities attributable to it. We don't know much more about it than this, but the qualities it does have would make it fit right into the gap between mind and body, as a real thing that is not material (and thus not a body) and yet not intelligent (and thus not a mind).

To argue this she needs more than just the argument from gradation, because a very common position historically is that any immaterial substance would ipso facto be an intelligent substance. (Of course, historically, most of the people who held this had a much more robust conception of substance than Locke does.) Cockburn thinks that the standard (broadly Cartesian) arguments that all thinking substances are immaterial are probably right, although like Locke she holds that we can't rule out that God could create thinking matter, but she denies that immateriality implies thinking. This makes sense given the Lockean conception of substance: immateriality just tells you the kind of qualities not attributable to the unknown something that is mind (it's not a shape, it has no length, it has no resistance, etc.); nothing requires that this implies that the only qualities that can be attributed to an immaterial substance are cogitative.

On the basis of this, Cockburn is inclined to be skeptical of the common view at the time that space is infinite -- the only infinity that could be relevant is a negative infinity of having no bounds, and this seems to be the sort of thing that only applies to things that are abstract (number, mathematical extension, etc.), not something that can be attributed to a "real actual complete existence" (p. 105). What leads people to call space infinite, Cockburn thinks, is that it is indefinite -- we don't know what could be setting bounds to space itself. But this is a claim about what we can conceive, not about space:

As I cannot conclude space to be nothing, because we know not what it is, neither can I conclude it to be infinite, because we are ignorant what can set bounds to it. May there not be many ways of setting bounds to space, that we know nothing of? It may be bounded by its own nature, or by the will of God, or by some kind of beings, that we are not acquainted with. (p. 105)

Thus, since there may be things that can bound space, and negative infinity seems only to apply to abstract objects like number, not real particular existences, she thinks we have no reason to call space infinite. She notes, though, with some amusement, how much out of our depth we are in discussing it, given that some people have claimed that space is nothing, others that it is infinite, and yet others that it is divine; it is certainly a remarkable thing that some have argued that it is not real and others that it is supremely so!

[Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Philosophical Writings, Sheridan, ed. Broadview (Peterborough, ON: 2006).]

Various Links of Interest

* Sabine Hossenfielder, Hawking temperature of black holes measured in fluid analogue, explains an interesting example of experiment-through-analogy.

* Edward Conze: A Study in Contradiction, at "Jayarava's Raves"

* Catarina Dutilh Novaes has an interview on the radio program, "The Philosopher's Zone", on mathematical proof and beauty.

* James V. Schall, Understanding Law with Thomas Aquinas

* Dan Hitchens, Ex-FBI agents to help investigate Cardinals on abuse and corruption. Something like this is certainly necessary; it has to be done properly, but something like it is needed. There were some people claiming that this would be in violation of article 80 of Universi Dominici Gregis; but this is obviously absurd -- the relevant section only addresses people involved in papal elections, and only prevents them from actions that suggest that civil authorities have the right to exercise some kind of veto in papal elections, so it is not even remotely relevant. Nor, contrary to some reporting elsewhere, does the explicitly stated plan seem to be to try to influence papal elections to begin with: the planned report is supposed to be on voting members of the College in general. But if this does manage to get off the ground, I suppose we can expect some bishops trying to claim it is a canonical violation. I would prefer something with more oversight than this seems likely to have, though.

* David Oderberg, Opting Out: Conscience and Cooperation in a Pluralistic Society

Currently Reading

Jules Verne, Family without a Name
Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given
Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Philosophical Writings
Lloyd Humberstone, Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic
Jules Verne, In Search of the Castaways

Sensible, Rational, Social

Let man be allowed as a sensible being, to choose natural or sensible good, and even to be under a moral obligation of so doing; but let him likewise be allowed in his other capacities to have other views, and to be under other obligations. A rational being ought to act suitably to the reason and nature of things: a social being ought to promote the good of others: an approbation of these ends is unavoidable, a regard to them implied in the very nature of such beings, which must therefore bring on them the strongest moral obligations. To ask, why a rational being should choose to act according to reason, or why a social being should desire the good of others, is full as absurd, as to ask why a sensible being should choose pleasure rather than pain.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn, "Remarks upon an Essay on Moral Obligation", Philosophical Writings, Sheridan, ed. Broadview (Peterborough, ON: 2006) p. 119

Little Flower

(Reposted from 2017.)

Today is the memorial of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church, also known as The Little Flower. She was the youngest daughter of Ss. Louis Martin and Zélie Guérin, born in 1873. She had something of a troubled childhood; her mother died when she was 4, she was heavily bullied at school, she was often sick. However, she improved greatly as she grew older and eventually entered the Carmelite order in 1888. She died at the age of 24, on September 30, 1897, and was canonized by Pius XI in 1925. I find it a somewhat amusing irony that her feast follows immediately after St. Jerome's; they are personality-wise direct opposites in many ways. But they are both Doctors of the Church, and have more in common than one might think.

From a letter to her sister Céline:

October 20, 1888.

MY DEAREST SISTER,—Do not let your weakness make you unhappy. When, in the morning, we feel no courage or strength for the practice of virtue, it is really a grace: it is the time to "lay the axe to the root of the tree," relying upon Jesus alone. If we fall, an act of love will set all right, and Jesus smiles. He helps us without seeming to do so; and the tears which sinners cause Him to shed are wiped away by our poor weak love. Love can do all things. The most impossible tasks seem to it easy and sweet. You know well that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them. What, then, have we to fear?

You wish to become a Saint, and you ask me if this is not attempting too much. Céline, I will not tell you to aim at the seraphic holiness of the most privileged souls, but rather to be "perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." You see that your dream—that our dreams and our desires—are not fancies, since Jesus Himself has laid their realisation upon us as a commandment.

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus

(Reposted from 2017.)

Today is the feast of St. Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, better known as St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church. An ascetic who apparently only became a priest because he was forced to by his bishop, Paulinus II of Antioch, he spent time in Constantinople with St. Gregory of Nazianzen before going with Paulinus to a synod in Rome under Pope St. Damasus I. His brilliance was recognized immediately, and Damasus arranged for him to stay at Rome. There he got along quite well with women and no one else; as he encouraged women to become ascetics, the Romans became quite hostile to him. It doubtless did not help that he was frank, caustic, and abrasive. He was eventually forced to return to Antioch, at which point he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Egypt. He spent the last, long phase of his life in a cave near Bethlehem, a small community of ascetics gathering around him, and died September 30, 420.

From his famous Helmeted Introduction to the Book of Kings:

While these things may be so, I implore you, reader, that you might not consider my work a rebuke of the ancients. Each one offers to the Tabernacle of God what he is able. Some offer gold and silver and precious stones; others, linen and purple, scarlet and blue. It will go well with us, if we offer the skins and hair of goats. For the Apostle still judges our more contemptible parts more necessary. From which both the whole of the beauty of the Tabernacle and each individual kind, a distinction of the present and future Church, is covered with skins and goat-hair coverings, and the heat of the sun and the harmful rain are kept off by those things which are of lesser value. Therefore, first read my Samuel and Kings; mine, I say, mine. For whatever we have learned and know by often translating and carefully correcting is ours. And when you come to understand what you did not know before, either consider me a translator, if you are grateful, or a paraphraser, if ungrateful, although I am truly not at all aware of anything of the Hebrew to have been changed by me....

But I also ask you, handmaidens of Christ, who have anointed the head of your reclining Lord with the most precious myrrh of faith, who have in no way sought the Savior in the tomb, for whom Christ has now ascended to the Father, that you might oppose the shields of your prayers against the barking dogs which rage against me with rabid mouth and go around the city, and in it they are considered educated if slandering others. I, knowing my humility, will always remember these sentences: "I will guard my ways, so I will not offend with my tongue; I have placed a guard on my mouth, while the sinner stands against me; I was mute, and humiliated, and silent because of good things."

Dion, "The Thunderer". The lyrics are from a poem by Phyllis McGinley. Jerome was indeed no "plaster sort of saint", but he gave people's minds a "godly leaven", and by his very existence shows that "it takes all kinds to make a Heaven."

Fortnightly Book, September 30

In the early nineteenth century, trouble was brewing in Quebec, as Francophones increasingly protested the Anglophone-heavy representation of the colonial government. The upper echelons were appointed by the Crown, but as there was no native nobility, the inevitable result was the capture of most of the government by wealthy trade-oligarchs. When a major economic downturn occurred in 1836, the underlying resentments against the colonial government began to heat up, and when a number of reform proposals were shot down, the leader of the reformers (known as Patriotes), Louis-Joseph Papineau, began organizing a paramilitary resistance. Revolution began in earnest in 1837. The Patriote militias were soon crushed by the British army, but the events would have a formative influence on the character of Quebec.

The next fortnightly book is Edward Baxter's 1982 translation of Jules Verne's Family Without a Name, Voyages Extraordinaires #33, published in 1889. A summary from the cover:

Even amongst his closest friends, only a few known that the man they call, simply, "Jean" is really the elusive and charismatic Jean-sans-nom, the Patriote leader with a price on his head. Only two people -- his mother and his brother -- know the terrible secret of his true identity and why it must go with him to the grave. And the woman he loves must never learn that the money he uses to buy weapons for the underground Patriote cells is bloodmoney.

As Baxter notes in the introduction, Verne never visited Canada except briefly on a visit to Niagara Falls, and everything in the work is based on impressions Verne got from reading books and the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. As a result, this is a work of historical fiction that is much more fiction than historical, with very little more drawn from the history than the historical frame and some of the geography (with which Verne also takes liberties). But Verne was very interested in independence movements, and especially in those movements that involved heroic self-sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds, and there is no question that La Guerre des patriotes had plenty of that.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin

Introduction

Opening Passage:

Late in the afternoon of a chilly day in February, two gentlemen were sitting alone over their wine, in a well-furnished dining parlor, in the town of P——, in Kentucky. There were no servants present, and the gentlemen, with chairs closely approaching, seemed to be discussing some subject with great earnestness.

For convenience sake, we have said, hitherto, two gentlemen. One of the parties, however, when critically examined, did not seem, strictly speaking, to come under the species. He was a short, thick-set man, with coarse, commonplace features, and that swaggering air of pretension which marks a low man who is trying to elbow his way upward in the world. He was much over-dressed, in a gaudy vest of many colors, a blue neckerchief, bedropped gayly with yellow spots, and arranged with a flaunting tie, quite in keeping with the general air of the man. His hands, large and coarse, were plentifully bedecked with rings; and he wore a heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors, attached to it,—which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray’s Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.

Summary: Uncle Tom's Cabin is intended to show slavery "in a living dramatic reality", on the principle that there are many who would be more likely to oppose slavery, or to oppose it more vehemently, if they could somehow see the real character of it. Because of this, Stowe is very careful not to load the deck in her favor; her people are each of a type, and she tries to show that kind of person in the best light that she can -- even, it should be noted, the wicked Simon Legree, with his lost daughter and the obvious fact that some of his cruelty is obviously his attempting to counterbalance a conscience that, though not guilty, is quite clearly unsettled. Legree is evil, but humanly so, hard as it sometimes is to read what he does. Most of the rest are often decent and at worst selfish or vulgar. And this is, I think, effective for Stowe's purposes, since it makes vivid the running theme of the work: that slavery runs against every impulse of nature and grace. It tears mother from child, husband from wife, sibling from sibling; it leaves rational beings uneducated and gives human beings corrupting power; defenses of it are purely abstract rationalizations that require reason to be divorced from human sympathy; it treats physical matters as more important than matters of virtue; it sits poorly with a vivid recognition that Christ died for all alike; it is clear and obvious that it sometimes puts the holy entirely in the power of the wicked; it batters faith and leaves souls unsaved.

There is another running theme of the work, I think, and one closely associated with Stowe's desire to present slavery "in a living dramatic reality": that the overcoming of slavery is something that can only happen by the influence of person on person. There are many decent people in the book who do nothing, or who are actively complicit, not because they see nothing wrong but because they see themselves essentially as powerless. They don't know what to do, or they don't see how they could survive the sacrifice it would take to do something, or they rationalize that their complicity is itself a kind of sacrifice for a greater good, or they (like Miss Ophelia, and, indeed, like many of Stowe's readers) know but don't realize what is going on. What is necessary for those people is good example that shows that they are not, in fact, so powerless; the Quakers, or Eva, or Uncle Tom do good not just in their own right but by example, showing what can be done. To be sure, not everyone can be moved to good by example; some are too locked in their own patterns of thought to see it, and some, like Legree, are outraged by it.

Moral luck is a concept much discussed in recent philosophical work, and it's a matter of interest to Stowe, as well. Much of the stability of slavery is due to the inertia of custom and education in the South; the people of New England are not inherently better -- they have better ideas, but they don't have better temperaments and often not even better characters. People who would never have to worry much about complicity in slavery elsewhere can hardly avoid it in the South -- but they were born and raised in the South, and so have been entangled in it all their lives, while people elsewhere never had that problem. It seems very much a matter of luck -- luck of birth, luck of education, luck of whom they have met in their lives. But this does not make the moral judgment against slavery vanish; it involves things that are wrong in themselves, whatever explains one's being involved in it, and whatever one's precise level of complicity and culpability. And we are responsible regardless. As Tom says to Cassy, "If I get to be as hard-hearted as that ar’ Sambo, and as wicked, it won’t make much odds to me how I come so; it’s the bein’ so,—that ar’s what I’m a dreadin’." Moral luck tends to be a puzzle if we are only talking about one's personal guilt; but guilt is not the primary issue in moral responsibility -- right and wrong are.

I'm always struck, reading this work, by how reminiscent of Platonic ideas are its general themes. It might be a little strong to apply the Platonic notion that nothing bad happens to the just person here, but in fact Uncle Tom's victory is precisely that while Legree can harm his body, his soul is entirely out of reach because it is virtuous, and Tom who, like the Neoplatonists said of Socrates, has the victory of an unjust death, is not lessened by it. And when he pities the wicked people around him, it is not a sign of weakness but the ultimate defiance, in exactly the way a Platonist would say: the wicked are more to be pitied than the oppressed, because the former have the life that is objectively worse. Any other view of the situation in the end concedes that might makes right. It is, I think, a line of reasoning that people do not like to hear today; but this does not make the Platonic arguments less cogent, nor does it make the literary depiction of it "in living dramatic reality" a less powerful and magnetic example.

Favorite Passage:

Tom’s Methodist hymn-book, which, in his hurry, he had forgotten, he now held up and turned over.

"Humph! pious, to be sure. So, what’s yer name,—you belong to the church, eh?”

“Yes, Mas’r,” said Tom, firmly.

“Well, I’ll soon have that out of you. I have none o’ yer bawling, praying, singing niggers on my place; so remember. Now, mind yourself,” he said, with a stamp and a fierce glance of his gray eye, directed at Tom, “I’m your church now! You understand,—you’ve got to be as I say.”

Something within the silent black man answered No! and, as if repeated by an invisible voice, came the words of an old prophetic scroll, as Eva had often read them to him,—“Fear not! for I have redeemed thee. I have called thee by name. Thou art MINE!”

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.