The Life of Riley is a formula sitcom whose formula has become common: a comedy centered on a well-meaning but bumbling father of a family. It was one of the most successful pioneers of this particular comedy formula, however; William Bendix's Chester A. Riley, with his endless malapropisms delivered with perfect seriousness, and his catchphrase, "What a revoltin' development this is!" became a very well known figure. The radio series ran from 1944 to 1951, and inspired a 1949 film (and, as was common, a radio adaptation of the film on Lux Radio Theater) and two television series.
"Roswell's a Guest for Christmas" is a solid Christmas episode. Roswell, the son of Riley's boss at the factory, is suddenly staying for Christmas -- although his father has not told him yet, his mother is in the hospital and it's uncertain whether she will make it. He doesn't want to be there, and he is intolerably self-important even on his best days. Nobody likes him. But Christmas is Christmas, and everybody has to find a way to get through while not sacrificing the Christmas spirit.
You can listen to "Roswell's a Guest for Christmas" at the Internet Archive (#29).
Saturday, December 22, 2018
Friday, December 21, 2018
Dashed Off XXX
"actus intellectus est imago objecti" Thomas Carleton Compton
"Libertas quadruplex est: a miseria, a peccato, a coactione, & a necessitate."
The apparent conservatism of old age generally consists in three thigns: more experience (and thus less surprise), more consistency (and thus less mutability), more caution (and thus a reluctance to venture without reason).
the kind of person who, without writing anything, generates a literature -- Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus
-- Note that there are several way sin which Jesus does this more completely than the others do -- a life, like Socrates, a doctrine, like Gautama, a form of teaching, like Confucius, but integrated together and placed in a larger context (Israel) that is not negated but absorbed, and (perhaps as significantly) contributes to organizing a literature-making community in myriad different ways.
"...though the fact of Selection does not make it harder to believe in design, it makes it easier to believe in accident...." Balfour
Things seem intelligent to the extent that they seem to set their own ends.
Metaphors mutually attract and repel, naturally organize into systems, mutate to produce other metaphors, die off to provide materials for other metaphors.
transworld, transtemporal, translocal identiy -- what is the analogue for deontic, epistemic, doxastic, provability?
Metaphors and the like sometimes arise out of slips of language, sometimes out of dreams, sometimes out of aesthetic experience, sometimes out of constructed analogy, sometimes out of social associations, sometimes out of the attempt to speak of something while avoiding direct speech about it.
Where some organ of government O properly belongs to government G and by nature exists for some end E that is required for G's ability to govern well, then it is a corruption for G to use O in a manner inconsistent with E.
Repentance is intrinsically ascetic.
Malebranche as giving a traditionary argument for the external world
Music is not just heard; it acts within us.
"the Christian is at one and the same time inseparably person and member" Maritain
-- all of Maritain's discussion on this is good for theology of redundantia.
The modern world continually tries to treat Limbo as higher than Purgatory.
Philosophy functions best when wisdom is seen as a divine gift in which we may participate.
To be a person is to be an echo of 'the Absolute'.
Luck is interest-relative.
Pfleiderer: We get the idea of causation from will as the corresponding original experience, and by analogical inference reason about causation in the world. "But our thinking is as essentially teleological as causal; both are grounded on the same original experience."
The Church does not get its identity through time either memoratively or by self-identification.
Athanasius's criticism of talk of the Holy Spirit as bond: Contra Arianos 3.24 (note that this is literally against the Eusebian notion of binding)
Note that there is a very wide variety of views on which there has to be some due process of public opinion (e.g., Mill's harm principle).
Human beings do not easily distinguish the historical and the normative, because it is not natural to distinguish them in narrative. This is not to say that the link between the two in narrative is straightforward, but in fact human beings tend to do better at tracking complicated and atypical linkages (irony, satire, etc.) than at making a sharp distinction.
Natural languages are term classifications with precedential templates for usage.
Any present- or future-tensed assertion with a subject term in second person address has an imperatival counterpart ('You are going to the store' can be an assertion or an imperative, sometimes indifferently).
"Where sexual morality is rooted in nothing but consent, sexual mores will be decided by nothing but power." C.C. Pecknold
Modern representative government is an attempt to have aristocracy based on artificial rather than natural relations.
Note that Pfleiderer interprets the Reformation as breaking away from the remnants of primitive Christianity, particularly its ascetic supernaturalism, in its break with Catholic Monasticism.
I wrote a word
and like a seed
the word from bounding husk was freed.
Blame is the most fluid thing in the world.
Spontaneous excellence arises from extensive preparation.
Every question proceeds from a division of possibilities.
Diamond and Question are related b division, but they seem to handle it differently.
Do X! Therefore, possibly there is an action X.
Do X! Therefore, there is a possible action X.
Do X! Therefore, possibly X can be done.
This shall be done. Therefore, this is possible.
This cannot be done. Therefore, do not do it.
An erotetic ontological argument: If one can ask whether God exists, God exists. One can ask, therefore etc.
possible lines in erotetic theistic argument:
(1) Idea of God (cp. Cartesians)
(2) division (cp Kant on disjunction)
(3) capacity to question
Definitions are always normative. The question is, for what?
loaded question // begging the question
raising questions as part of conclusion-construction
the method of imbrication: distinct but overlapping arguments in response to objections
the Zenonian argument (attributed to Zeno by Sextus Empiricus M9.133-6)
(1) One may with good reason honor the gods.
(2) One may not honor with good reason what does not exist.
(3) Therefore the gods exist.
-- The parabole in response places gods with sages, thus intersecting Stoic pessimism about the existence of sages.
-- note that the parabole does not really address the key point of the argument, that anything making reasonable the honoring of the gods ipso facto makes it reasonable to accept that they exist.
The ugly in a greater context is often beautiful; and genuinely understanding the ugly is itself beautiful.
The possibility of something ugly is not itself ugly.
an ecclesiological commentary on the book of Proverbs
-- already extensive discussion on Wisdom's house and the strong woman (Caesarius, Augustine, Albert)
-- the carrying on of tradition and exhortations to listen to father and mother
-- harlotry and the deviations from the faith (heresy, idolatry)
There is a story told of the greatest goldsmith in all of ancient Greece. He was a devotee of Aphrodite and once spent thirteen years making a necklace of extraordinary intricacy and beauty to dedicate to her temple. After he had done so, he had a dream in which the goddess herself appeared, stunning in her beauty, wearing her necklace.
"I am pleased with your gift," she said, "and in return I grant you one wish. You may ask of me anything, and if it is in my power, I will grant it. But think well; mortal men often do not choose their wishes well."
"O most beautiful of the gods," said the goldsmith, "I am no longer a young man, but I have never known love. Grant me this: to be sure not to die before I have been able to know a love that is pure and true."
"As you have asked, so shall it be," said the goddess. "You shall not die until you have known a true and pure love."
The goldsmith lived a very, very long time.
assertion-completing questions vs assertion-using questions
cooperative assertion
self-evident principles taken as self-evident
taken as guidelines for what is always reasonable to believe
taken as heuristic structures (topoi) for hypotheses
Baptism proper reflects death; baptism by blood, by desire, and by vicarious desire are all themselves kinds of death with Christ.
eternity in our hearts and never enough time for it
trustworthiness of testimony as part of common good
A world of thought comes together out of little bits, just as the physical world does.
The justification of scientific inquiry by its working well or working best is a folk-reasoning justification.
The Holy Church is the notary of grace.
One of the important discoveries of dadaism is that you get meaningful patterns just by pulling random words out of a hat.
Speculative truth does not necessarily lie in a mean, but a mean is relevant to it, namely the mean constituting reasonableness in the consideration of evidences and reasons.
the miracles of the saints as emblems of the properties of the Church
"Libertas quadruplex est: a miseria, a peccato, a coactione, & a necessitate."
The apparent conservatism of old age generally consists in three thigns: more experience (and thus less surprise), more consistency (and thus less mutability), more caution (and thus a reluctance to venture without reason).
the kind of person who, without writing anything, generates a literature -- Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus
-- Note that there are several way sin which Jesus does this more completely than the others do -- a life, like Socrates, a doctrine, like Gautama, a form of teaching, like Confucius, but integrated together and placed in a larger context (Israel) that is not negated but absorbed, and (perhaps as significantly) contributes to organizing a literature-making community in myriad different ways.
"...though the fact of Selection does not make it harder to believe in design, it makes it easier to believe in accident...." Balfour
Things seem intelligent to the extent that they seem to set their own ends.
Metaphors mutually attract and repel, naturally organize into systems, mutate to produce other metaphors, die off to provide materials for other metaphors.
transworld, transtemporal, translocal identiy -- what is the analogue for deontic, epistemic, doxastic, provability?
Metaphors and the like sometimes arise out of slips of language, sometimes out of dreams, sometimes out of aesthetic experience, sometimes out of constructed analogy, sometimes out of social associations, sometimes out of the attempt to speak of something while avoiding direct speech about it.
Where some organ of government O properly belongs to government G and by nature exists for some end E that is required for G's ability to govern well, then it is a corruption for G to use O in a manner inconsistent with E.
Repentance is intrinsically ascetic.
Malebranche as giving a traditionary argument for the external world
Music is not just heard; it acts within us.
"the Christian is at one and the same time inseparably person and member" Maritain
-- all of Maritain's discussion on this is good for theology of redundantia.
The modern world continually tries to treat Limbo as higher than Purgatory.
Philosophy functions best when wisdom is seen as a divine gift in which we may participate.
To be a person is to be an echo of 'the Absolute'.
Luck is interest-relative.
Pfleiderer: We get the idea of causation from will as the corresponding original experience, and by analogical inference reason about causation in the world. "But our thinking is as essentially teleological as causal; both are grounded on the same original experience."
The Church does not get its identity through time either memoratively or by self-identification.
Athanasius's criticism of talk of the Holy Spirit as bond: Contra Arianos 3.24 (note that this is literally against the Eusebian notion of binding)
Note that there is a very wide variety of views on which there has to be some due process of public opinion (e.g., Mill's harm principle).
Human beings do not easily distinguish the historical and the normative, because it is not natural to distinguish them in narrative. This is not to say that the link between the two in narrative is straightforward, but in fact human beings tend to do better at tracking complicated and atypical linkages (irony, satire, etc.) than at making a sharp distinction.
Natural languages are term classifications with precedential templates for usage.
Any present- or future-tensed assertion with a subject term in second person address has an imperatival counterpart ('You are going to the store' can be an assertion or an imperative, sometimes indifferently).
"Where sexual morality is rooted in nothing but consent, sexual mores will be decided by nothing but power." C.C. Pecknold
Modern representative government is an attempt to have aristocracy based on artificial rather than natural relations.
Note that Pfleiderer interprets the Reformation as breaking away from the remnants of primitive Christianity, particularly its ascetic supernaturalism, in its break with Catholic Monasticism.
I wrote a word
and like a seed
the word from bounding husk was freed.
Blame is the most fluid thing in the world.
Spontaneous excellence arises from extensive preparation.
Every question proceeds from a division of possibilities.
Diamond and Question are related b division, but they seem to handle it differently.
Do X! Therefore, possibly there is an action X.
Do X! Therefore, there is a possible action X.
Do X! Therefore, possibly X can be done.
This shall be done. Therefore, this is possible.
This cannot be done. Therefore, do not do it.
An erotetic ontological argument: If one can ask whether God exists, God exists. One can ask, therefore etc.
possible lines in erotetic theistic argument:
(1) Idea of God (cp. Cartesians)
(2) division (cp Kant on disjunction)
(3) capacity to question
Definitions are always normative. The question is, for what?
loaded question // begging the question
raising questions as part of conclusion-construction
the method of imbrication: distinct but overlapping arguments in response to objections
the Zenonian argument (attributed to Zeno by Sextus Empiricus M9.133-6)
(1) One may with good reason honor the gods.
(2) One may not honor with good reason what does not exist.
(3) Therefore the gods exist.
-- The parabole in response places gods with sages, thus intersecting Stoic pessimism about the existence of sages.
-- note that the parabole does not really address the key point of the argument, that anything making reasonable the honoring of the gods ipso facto makes it reasonable to accept that they exist.
The ugly in a greater context is often beautiful; and genuinely understanding the ugly is itself beautiful.
The possibility of something ugly is not itself ugly.
an ecclesiological commentary on the book of Proverbs
-- already extensive discussion on Wisdom's house and the strong woman (Caesarius, Augustine, Albert)
-- the carrying on of tradition and exhortations to listen to father and mother
-- harlotry and the deviations from the faith (heresy, idolatry)
There is a story told of the greatest goldsmith in all of ancient Greece. He was a devotee of Aphrodite and once spent thirteen years making a necklace of extraordinary intricacy and beauty to dedicate to her temple. After he had done so, he had a dream in which the goddess herself appeared, stunning in her beauty, wearing her necklace.
"I am pleased with your gift," she said, "and in return I grant you one wish. You may ask of me anything, and if it is in my power, I will grant it. But think well; mortal men often do not choose their wishes well."
"O most beautiful of the gods," said the goldsmith, "I am no longer a young man, but I have never known love. Grant me this: to be sure not to die before I have been able to know a love that is pure and true."
"As you have asked, so shall it be," said the goddess. "You shall not die until you have known a true and pure love."
The goldsmith lived a very, very long time.
assertion-completing questions vs assertion-using questions
cooperative assertion
self-evident principles taken as self-evident
taken as guidelines for what is always reasonable to believe
taken as heuristic structures (topoi) for hypotheses
Baptism proper reflects death; baptism by blood, by desire, and by vicarious desire are all themselves kinds of death with Christ.
eternity in our hearts and never enough time for it
trustworthiness of testimony as part of common good
A world of thought comes together out of little bits, just as the physical world does.
The justification of scientific inquiry by its working well or working best is a folk-reasoning justification.
The Holy Church is the notary of grace.
One of the important discoveries of dadaism is that you get meaningful patterns just by pulling random words out of a hat.
Speculative truth does not necessarily lie in a mean, but a mean is relevant to it, namely the mean constituting reasonableness in the consideration of evidences and reasons.
the miracles of the saints as emblems of the properties of the Church
Knowing Canisius
Today is the feast of St. Peter Canisius, Doctor of the Church. Here is a re-post of a post from 2011 discussing one of the things he is most famous for: catechisms.
*****
Catechetical instruction goes back to the earliest beginnings of Christian history; in its basic character it is simply the instruction of those being baptized. Several of the Church Fathers had catechetical lectures that were preserved; the most notable of these were those of Cyril of Jerusalem, whose Catechetical Lectures is one of the great theological classics of the fourth century. Likewise, Augustine wrote a manual on the subject of how to catechize. None of the catechetical works of the Church Fathers includes anything clearly and definitely identifiable as a catechism in our sense of the term, although some do occasionally approach it; but they are worth mentioning, because catechisms were an early modern attempt to get back to the patristic emphasis on catechesis in a form suitable for the day; both Cyril and Augustine, as well as some other Church Fathers, were highly influential for the development of the catechism.
One can find catechism-like fragments throughout Church history simply because catechesis is found throughout Church history. If you want a convenient point from which to identify the beginning of the catechism in the proper sense of the term, though, that is, a writing not consisting of lectures that systematically and topically arranges the foundational doctrines of the faith to serve as a guide to catechesis, it's useful to start with the fourteenth century, in which things recognizably what we would call a catechism appear. There tend to be two kinds, one in a simple question-and-answer format for the laity to learn, and another, more detailed, to assist the catechist, and both kinds continue until today.
What really makes the catechism take off, however, is the Protestant Reformation. Well before Luther, as early as the fourteenth century, it had regularly been recognized that catechesis was essential to reform of the Church. The Reformers carried this idea forward, and with them we find the beginnings of a process of refinement; taking the idea of a catechism, which had already developed, they began to improve upon it. This resulted in at least four major classic works, two of which were Luther's Small Catechism and his Large Catechism, both published in 1529. Luther placed extraordinary emphasis on the importance of catechesis, and devoted himself to it with a will; his exhortation at the beginning of the Large Catechism is well worth the reading. Starting with Calvin the Reformed tradition also produced catechisms regularly; the most notable in English were developed in the seventeenth century (1647-1648), namely, the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Longer Catechism. The beginning of the Westminster Shorter Catechism has achieved almost legendary status:
Q. Quis hominis finis est præcipuus? (What is the chief end of man?)
A. Præcipuus hominis finis est, Deum glorificare, eodemque frui in æternum. (The chief end of man is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.)
The publishing of catechisms was not a purely Protestant matter, however. And this brings us to the Jesuit, Peter Canisius, whose feastday is today. Canisius published three important Catholic catechisms: a long major form (1555), a very short minimus form (1556), and an intermediate minor form (1558). They quickly became the Catholic catechisms throughout the Catholic communities of Greater Germany, and then began to be translated into other languages all over Europe. "Knowing Canisius" became a common expression for being well-catechized, regardless of whether it was out of his books or not. Canisius's catechisms were a model for Bellarmine's catechisms at the end of the sixteenth century, and Bellarmine's catechisms in turn were raised up as a general model for Catholic catechisms.
Canisius was one of the most important theologians of his day. He attended the Council of Trent. He also attended the Diet of Worms and provided the primary Catholic responses to the arguments of Melanchthon -- and, indeed, it was his list of points that was actually under discussion when those attending discussed the Augsburg Confession. Canisius had the upper hand in the discussion, in part because (as he himself wrote in a letter to the Jesuit vicar in general) the Protestants were in complete disarray. One of Canisius's major points had been to note that there were divergences in the text of the Augsburg Confession, due to Melanchthon, who had both drawn up the original and also a later version that broadened the language of some of the clauses; and thus he and the other Catholic collocutors asked that the Protestants clarify what version they actually meant when they talked about it. The result was sheer confusion among the Protestants, who on the spur of the moment were unable to come to any agreement on the acceptability of Melanchthon's changes.
Nonetheless, Canisius was one of the more irenic voices of the Counter-Reformation, repeatedly insisting that polemical approaches should be avoided in dealing with Protestants; his letters to his superiors are full of complaints about the corruption of clergy, asking them to push for remedies, so he was well aware of the problems, and sympathetic to that extent. And he more than once insisted that the German people should be treated leniently because, decent and humble at heart, they could be brought about if treated with courtesy and if, instead of trying to force them into submission, someone just spoke honestly and plainly with them. A German himself (his name is Peter Kanis) he was very pro-German, a lover of German language and life. It is largely due to the work of Canisius, and his furthering of the Jesuits throughout the German provinces, that Bavarian and Austrian parts of greater Germany remained Catholic. His levelheadedness and generally irenic temper led him to be widely respected even by Protestants -- he was known as a man with whom, no matter how much you disagreed with him, you could always have a reasonable discussion. I say 'widely'; he was also criticized widely, in very sharp terms, because he was recognized as one of the major opponents of the Protestants, and his catechisms as a significant part of the Catholic response. But, opposed to polemic and ridicule to the very end, he refrained from attacking people and instead focused on arguments and claims. He stands as a testimony to the extraordinary power of intelligence combined with an ability not to take offense. Leo XIII described him as the Second Apostle to Germany, and Pius XI named him a Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:
*****
Catechetical instruction goes back to the earliest beginnings of Christian history; in its basic character it is simply the instruction of those being baptized. Several of the Church Fathers had catechetical lectures that were preserved; the most notable of these were those of Cyril of Jerusalem, whose Catechetical Lectures is one of the great theological classics of the fourth century. Likewise, Augustine wrote a manual on the subject of how to catechize. None of the catechetical works of the Church Fathers includes anything clearly and definitely identifiable as a catechism in our sense of the term, although some do occasionally approach it; but they are worth mentioning, because catechisms were an early modern attempt to get back to the patristic emphasis on catechesis in a form suitable for the day; both Cyril and Augustine, as well as some other Church Fathers, were highly influential for the development of the catechism.
One can find catechism-like fragments throughout Church history simply because catechesis is found throughout Church history. If you want a convenient point from which to identify the beginning of the catechism in the proper sense of the term, though, that is, a writing not consisting of lectures that systematically and topically arranges the foundational doctrines of the faith to serve as a guide to catechesis, it's useful to start with the fourteenth century, in which things recognizably what we would call a catechism appear. There tend to be two kinds, one in a simple question-and-answer format for the laity to learn, and another, more detailed, to assist the catechist, and both kinds continue until today.
What really makes the catechism take off, however, is the Protestant Reformation. Well before Luther, as early as the fourteenth century, it had regularly been recognized that catechesis was essential to reform of the Church. The Reformers carried this idea forward, and with them we find the beginnings of a process of refinement; taking the idea of a catechism, which had already developed, they began to improve upon it. This resulted in at least four major classic works, two of which were Luther's Small Catechism and his Large Catechism, both published in 1529. Luther placed extraordinary emphasis on the importance of catechesis, and devoted himself to it with a will; his exhortation at the beginning of the Large Catechism is well worth the reading. Starting with Calvin the Reformed tradition also produced catechisms regularly; the most notable in English were developed in the seventeenth century (1647-1648), namely, the Westminster Shorter Catechism and the Westminster Longer Catechism. The beginning of the Westminster Shorter Catechism has achieved almost legendary status:
Q. Quis hominis finis est præcipuus? (What is the chief end of man?)
A. Præcipuus hominis finis est, Deum glorificare, eodemque frui in æternum. (The chief end of man is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.)
The publishing of catechisms was not a purely Protestant matter, however. And this brings us to the Jesuit, Peter Canisius, whose feastday is today. Canisius published three important Catholic catechisms: a long major form (1555), a very short minimus form (1556), and an intermediate minor form (1558). They quickly became the Catholic catechisms throughout the Catholic communities of Greater Germany, and then began to be translated into other languages all over Europe. "Knowing Canisius" became a common expression for being well-catechized, regardless of whether it was out of his books or not. Canisius's catechisms were a model for Bellarmine's catechisms at the end of the sixteenth century, and Bellarmine's catechisms in turn were raised up as a general model for Catholic catechisms.
Canisius was one of the most important theologians of his day. He attended the Council of Trent. He also attended the Diet of Worms and provided the primary Catholic responses to the arguments of Melanchthon -- and, indeed, it was his list of points that was actually under discussion when those attending discussed the Augsburg Confession. Canisius had the upper hand in the discussion, in part because (as he himself wrote in a letter to the Jesuit vicar in general) the Protestants were in complete disarray. One of Canisius's major points had been to note that there were divergences in the text of the Augsburg Confession, due to Melanchthon, who had both drawn up the original and also a later version that broadened the language of some of the clauses; and thus he and the other Catholic collocutors asked that the Protestants clarify what version they actually meant when they talked about it. The result was sheer confusion among the Protestants, who on the spur of the moment were unable to come to any agreement on the acceptability of Melanchthon's changes.
Nonetheless, Canisius was one of the more irenic voices of the Counter-Reformation, repeatedly insisting that polemical approaches should be avoided in dealing with Protestants; his letters to his superiors are full of complaints about the corruption of clergy, asking them to push for remedies, so he was well aware of the problems, and sympathetic to that extent. And he more than once insisted that the German people should be treated leniently because, decent and humble at heart, they could be brought about if treated with courtesy and if, instead of trying to force them into submission, someone just spoke honestly and plainly with them. A German himself (his name is Peter Kanis) he was very pro-German, a lover of German language and life. It is largely due to the work of Canisius, and his furthering of the Jesuits throughout the German provinces, that Bavarian and Austrian parts of greater Germany remained Catholic. His levelheadedness and generally irenic temper led him to be widely respected even by Protestants -- he was known as a man with whom, no matter how much you disagreed with him, you could always have a reasonable discussion. I say 'widely'; he was also criticized widely, in very sharp terms, because he was recognized as one of the major opponents of the Protestants, and his catechisms as a significant part of the Catholic response. But, opposed to polemic and ridicule to the very end, he refrained from attacking people and instead focused on arguments and claims. He stands as a testimony to the extraordinary power of intelligence combined with an ability not to take offense. Leo XIII described him as the Second Apostle to Germany, and Pius XI named him a Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:
It is not enough for the Gospel-teacher to please the people with his speaking. He must also be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and so by his eloquence call many to the good life. He must not be a dumb dog, not even able to bark, as spoken of by the Prophet Isaiah. Yea, he should also burn in such a way that, equipped with good works and love, he may adorn his evangelical office, and follow the leadership of Paul....Those churchmen err who imagine that it is by brilliant preaching that they fulfil their office; rather, it is by holiness of life and all-embracing love.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
Voyages Extraordinaires #8: Une ville flottante
On the 18th of March, 1867, I arrived at Liverpool, it, tending to take a berth simply as an amateur traveller on board the "Great Eastern," which in a few days was to sail for New York. I had sometimes thought of paying a visit to North America, and was now tempted to cross the Atlantic on board this gigantic boat. First of all the "Great Eastern," then the country celebrated by Cooper.
This steam-ship is indeed a masterpiece of naval construction; more than a vessel, it is a floating city, part of the country, detached from English soil, which after having crossed the sea, unites itself to the American Continent. I pictured to myself this enormous bulk borne on the waves, her defiant struggle with the wind, her boldness before the powerless sea, her indifference to the billows, her stability in the midst of that element which tosses "Warriors" and "Solferinos" like ship's boats. But my imagination carried me no farther; all these things I did indeed see during the passage, and many others which do not exclusively belong to the maritime domain. If the "Great Eastern" is not merely a nautical engine, but rather a microcosm, and carries a small world with it, an observer will not be astonished to meet here, as on a larger theatre, all the instincts, follies, and passions of human nature.
The Great Eastern, launched in 1858, was a vast steamship, the largest of her day, designed to carry 4000 passengers from England to Australia without a stop. In that was her downfall; there really wasn't demand on the scale to make her original intended voyages to the East financially viable, and she was, really, too big for Atlantic routes where most of the money could be found. She made a number of voyages, but as steamship transportation became increasingly competitive, she could not compete, and she was so expensive to repair that she contributed heavily to the bankrupting of the company that owned her. She was bought, quite cheaply, and converted into a cable-laying ship, where she had what was perhaps her greatest success in helping to lay crucial telegraph cables. In the late 1860s and 1870s there were tentative attempts to see if she could be successful as a commercial liner, but none of it really amounted to much, and she was sold for scrap in 1888. Always stunningly impressive in idea, she never quite managed to fulfill that idea in practice.
In 1867, however, Jules Verne and his brother Paul had taken one of the trips that the owners were using to test out whether she could be succeed as a liner, and while aware of her difficulties, Verne was fully taken with her idea -- she was not so much a ship, he thought, as a floating city that had broken off from England and landed on the American shore. The Vernes used their trip to America for a brief visit to Niagara Falls and then returned. Given Verne's interest in the power of technology to expand our geographical experience of the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the trip would inform some of the Voyages Extraordinaires. One sees traces of the experience in a number of Verne's novels, but, of course, one sees it most in A Floating City, in which the narrator takes a trip across the Atlantic on the Great Eastern and visits Niagara Falls.
The story is a straightforward story, much taken with life aboard the 'floating city'. We become acquainted with various interesting characters, like the pessimistic yet constantly joking Doctor, or the romantic young man Fabian, or the strange weeping woman Emily and her ruthless husband. A centerpiece of the tale, in classic Verne melodramatic style, is a duel aboard ship. But all goes well in the end, even if it is only with the help of a bit of lightning.
Abyss & Sea 3
The house inside was a mess, as if a major brawl had broken out. A woman, old but far from frail, was sprawled out on the kitchen floor, broken crockery all around her and a massive wound on her head. Near the table an old man and a young man were gripping each other as if in a struggle; the young man had a knife in his side and and an eye gouged out, his hand gripped around the old man's throat. In the midst of it all, incongruously, the table was set as if for a family breakfast, which had apparently just been eaten; there were flies everywhere. The young man, clearly the son, favored his father but had his mother's chin. Baia shuddered a bit, and then, followed by a guard, went out the kitchen door; the pigsty was across a small yard. It was a less murderous, but more disturbing, since it was clear that this young man had been tearing apart the pigs with his bare hands -- and had been attacked in turn. He, and the dead pigs had been partly eaten. The dog, which she saw next, had clearly been attacked by the wolves.
"I still do not understand it," said Sosan. "Wolves are not friendly even under the pacts and covenants, but they would usually avoid people."
"I think they came after there were no more people to avoid," said Baia. "Attracted to the blood, perhaps; I do not know."
They returned to the kitchen. Baia looked at the scene soberly.
"It looks as if it all happened suddenly," she said, and walked around the table, avoiding the supine figures as much as she could, waving away the flies in order to look at each item on it. She stopped at an open honeypot, which she gingerly picked up and smelled. It smelled of honey, and of something almost too sweet that tingled in her nose. She put the lid on it and handed it to Sosan.
"There is something very wrong with this honey," she said.
"You think it was poisoned?"
"Perhaps," she said. "They would have eaten breakfast; one of the sons went out to feed the pigs; and then the effects began. Have you ever heard of anything like it?"
Sosan thought a moment. "I remember as a boy once hearing a story about a bandits in ancient days who had had difficulty finding food; they came upon trees, near a field of rhododendrons, filled with wild honey-hives. They ate the honey and became intoxicated and very ill. I cannot recall it causing any violent madness. And it is rare for honey to be poisonous; it is one of the safest things to eat. Surely anything that could end up in the honey and have such drastic effects would be more likely to kill the bees themselves."
"Perhaps," said Baia again. "Regardless, I would like you to make inquiries to find out whatever you can about where the people here get their honey."
"Certainly," said Sosan, "but I do not know how much we will learn."
"There has to be something; a situation this wrong cannot be an isolated event."
************
The High Porter met Disan and his guards at the gate. "The signal towers sent word of the coming of Your Highness," he said, "and I have been asked to bring you directly to the High King, once your horses and men have been given their proper care." The horses were taken to the stables, the men to their accommodations, and Disan was led through mazy passageways and half a dozen halls of the Khalkythra Palace. Pictures of extraordinary skill and craft were on every wall, in every vault, some painted, some in mosaic. Here was Castalan son of Atalan, fighting the khalkythra; there was Emdalan flying on the wooden horse, loaded with the gifts of blessing: the lotus and the honeybee, the rose and the silkworm. There Emdalan and Renan, one of Disan's ancestors, brought back the thousand vanished people from the night-world by threatening to hang a mouse. Here was a band of heroes Disan did not recognize, fighting a dragon; there was the dispute of Beran and Balan over the Stone of Night; here were the Powers of the world bestowing upon Atalan the rule of the realm. In one long hall, Castalan's son Ardalan performed the forty impossible tasks by which he won the hand of the beautiful Asaria, all forty laid out in one view along the walls and ceiling. Fountains plashed in the halls, the water running in artificial streams through rooms sheathed in finest marble, polished and white; the columns and pillars were highlighted with gold leaf in endless profusion; fresco and stucco and ivory veneer, semi-precious stones by the thousands, silk curtains draping around exedras filled with statues of cunning workmanship, round arches and great doors of mahogany and bronze framed by lampstands of finest gold; wonders met the eye in every direction.
The High King was at last found in a room plainer than the others, although still kingly by any standard, a practice or training hall for fighters. Weapons hung on the wall and on a side table; the floor was covered in bamboo mats. The High King's golden eyes lit up under his unruly blond hair on seeing him.
"Disan!" he shouted, coming forward and clasping Disan's arms, somewhat awkwardly since the High King was short and stocky, as Talans tend to be, and so was a good head and a half shorter than the tall Sorean king. "You are welcome, O Disan, son of Rezan, son of Belan, to all of my hospitality."
"I thank you, O Antaran, son of Emberan, son of Ardaran, and I account myself blessed to receive your hospitality."
"Disan," said the High King again, "world traveler. It has been so long as you have been touring the world."
"'Touring' is a generous term for it."
"What was it like, being across the sea, fighting barbarians?"
"Mostly muddy," said Disan. "Entire days of tramping through the mud."
Antaran laughed, and with a look of mischief in his eyes, went over to the table and picked out a waster, which he threw to Disan. Disan waved it, catching a scent of linseed oil. It felt too light and oddly balanced in his hand. Antaran selected his own waster.
"A bit of child's play after barbarian-battles," said Antaran, "but let's see if you've learned any new tricks."
They swung-and-parried a few times, moving in a semicircle, then Antaran began in earnest. The High King was well practiced, and had had the best teachers in the Great Realm, but Disan had been taught by real battle, a far more serious teacher. Disan's strokes were less pretty than the High King's, but far more efficient, and his natural reach was considerably greater than Antaran's, to his unassailable advantage. It was not long before Disan had scored his third hit on the High King, so suddenly that the High King fell backward.
Antaran looked annoyed and then laughed. "You are my best teacher, Disan; none of the others would dare to make such a fool of me." He rose smoothly to his feet, waving off Disan's outstretched hand. He clasped Disan's shoulder.
"Everywhere in the Palace," he said, "you can see murals of the great deeds of our ancestors, forming the Great Realm. Our grandfathers went abroad to war against the Court of Night. But since then we have done nothing. You alone, of all the living kings, have seen the world and done the kind of great deed that is our birthright." He removed his hand. "I will let you make sure that your men are settled in and give you time to rest for your journey. All of the formal affairs we will have tomorrow, but this evening you and I should talk. I will send a guide to you after dinner."
"I will need a guide, I am sure; I wouldn't want to get lost."
Antaran laughed again. "Do you remember that time after we raided the kitchen when we threw the entire Palace into a panic because we got lost for almost two whole days?"
"It was a good thing we had just raided the kitchen. We eventually found that room with the shrine to Fath and the aeolian harp that was playing despite there being no wind. And we went through the door to which the statue of Fath was pointing and found our way back."
"Yes," said Antaran thoughtfully. "And you know, I have never found that room again. If it weren't for the fact that you remember it as well, I would have thought that I just imagined it."
"There are a great many strange things in the Mountain."
Antaran smiled a knowing smile. "Stranger than you know, my friend. Stranger than you know."
Disan made sure his men were properly cared for, and also made arrangements with the Palace steward to have a crate of strawberries sent to his men on the ship. He visited some of the rooms he remembered from his last stay in the Palace and then ate dinner. A servant came to take him to see the High King again. They went through a number of mazy passages and up several stairs, and finally came to sunlight and open breeze. It was an exedra opening to a balcony on the side of the Mountain, with an impluvium in the middle, half under the semi-dome and half beyond it in the open. The balcony looked over a breathtaking view. In the distance one could see the great gold-plated dome of the Oracle of the Sun, gleaming in the last sun rays of the day, and farther beyond it the orikhalh walls. Off to the right there were fountains and gardens down below, and an artificial creek with its musical waters plashing here and there across artfully laid stones. And if you moved to the balcony rail and looked over to the left, you could see in the distance a volor gliding down from the Khalad Mountains with supplies and docking at one of the Mountain towers. As Disan watched, one of the volors gave a long, low cry. Samaras falling down from some tree up above, went spinning and winding like keys through the air.
Antaran came out soon after. "I see you did not get lost," he said cheerfully. "We are waiting for one other."
As if almost on cue, the other came out. She was Tavran, and quite beautiful, pale of skin, with golden hair and bright blue eyes that were accentuated by the shimmering blue of her dress. She wore jewelry around her neck, almost too much, and a wide golden belt decorated with flowers. Disan knew her as Elea, Princess of Tavra; he had met her before, when they were both children, and although he had not seen her since, there was still a suggestion of the girl he had known in her woman's face. She gave a kind of curtsy toward him. "Your Highness," she said.
"Princess," he said in return. "How is your father?"
"As well as can be hoped," she said. "His mind is not well, but his body is whole."
Antaran gestured impatiently. "Let us get started."
Elea moved to the balcony rail and there held one of the pendants around her neck in both hands, lifting it high, muttering something under her breath. It was of strange and foreign make, and Disan thought for a moment that it glowed softly while she held it high. And suddenly the world became odd.
It was subtle. Perhaps there was a slight change in the quality of the sunlight, but the primary difference was not visible. The world just seemed unsettling, and it took Disan a moment to discover what it was: the breeze had died and so had all the sound from the waters below or the volors in the distance. The world became too quiet, as if everything outside the exedra and balcony had ceased to exist as more than a mirage.
"Now we can speak without eavesdropping," said Antaran. "Not even the Powers can hear us."
"How is that even possible?" asked Disan.
Elea pointed at the pendant. "My grandfather brought this back from the war against the Court of Night. It is a useful thing at times."
Disan looked at the High King. "That seems a great deal of trouble for an informal conversation."
"And all of it necessary. You and I and Elea -- today we are going to begin to change everything."
"I still do not understand it," said Sosan. "Wolves are not friendly even under the pacts and covenants, but they would usually avoid people."
"I think they came after there were no more people to avoid," said Baia. "Attracted to the blood, perhaps; I do not know."
They returned to the kitchen. Baia looked at the scene soberly.
"It looks as if it all happened suddenly," she said, and walked around the table, avoiding the supine figures as much as she could, waving away the flies in order to look at each item on it. She stopped at an open honeypot, which she gingerly picked up and smelled. It smelled of honey, and of something almost too sweet that tingled in her nose. She put the lid on it and handed it to Sosan.
"There is something very wrong with this honey," she said.
"You think it was poisoned?"
"Perhaps," she said. "They would have eaten breakfast; one of the sons went out to feed the pigs; and then the effects began. Have you ever heard of anything like it?"
Sosan thought a moment. "I remember as a boy once hearing a story about a bandits in ancient days who had had difficulty finding food; they came upon trees, near a field of rhododendrons, filled with wild honey-hives. They ate the honey and became intoxicated and very ill. I cannot recall it causing any violent madness. And it is rare for honey to be poisonous; it is one of the safest things to eat. Surely anything that could end up in the honey and have such drastic effects would be more likely to kill the bees themselves."
"Perhaps," said Baia again. "Regardless, I would like you to make inquiries to find out whatever you can about where the people here get their honey."
"Certainly," said Sosan, "but I do not know how much we will learn."
"There has to be something; a situation this wrong cannot be an isolated event."
************
The High Porter met Disan and his guards at the gate. "The signal towers sent word of the coming of Your Highness," he said, "and I have been asked to bring you directly to the High King, once your horses and men have been given their proper care." The horses were taken to the stables, the men to their accommodations, and Disan was led through mazy passageways and half a dozen halls of the Khalkythra Palace. Pictures of extraordinary skill and craft were on every wall, in every vault, some painted, some in mosaic. Here was Castalan son of Atalan, fighting the khalkythra; there was Emdalan flying on the wooden horse, loaded with the gifts of blessing: the lotus and the honeybee, the rose and the silkworm. There Emdalan and Renan, one of Disan's ancestors, brought back the thousand vanished people from the night-world by threatening to hang a mouse. Here was a band of heroes Disan did not recognize, fighting a dragon; there was the dispute of Beran and Balan over the Stone of Night; here were the Powers of the world bestowing upon Atalan the rule of the realm. In one long hall, Castalan's son Ardalan performed the forty impossible tasks by which he won the hand of the beautiful Asaria, all forty laid out in one view along the walls and ceiling. Fountains plashed in the halls, the water running in artificial streams through rooms sheathed in finest marble, polished and white; the columns and pillars were highlighted with gold leaf in endless profusion; fresco and stucco and ivory veneer, semi-precious stones by the thousands, silk curtains draping around exedras filled with statues of cunning workmanship, round arches and great doors of mahogany and bronze framed by lampstands of finest gold; wonders met the eye in every direction.
The High King was at last found in a room plainer than the others, although still kingly by any standard, a practice or training hall for fighters. Weapons hung on the wall and on a side table; the floor was covered in bamboo mats. The High King's golden eyes lit up under his unruly blond hair on seeing him.
"Disan!" he shouted, coming forward and clasping Disan's arms, somewhat awkwardly since the High King was short and stocky, as Talans tend to be, and so was a good head and a half shorter than the tall Sorean king. "You are welcome, O Disan, son of Rezan, son of Belan, to all of my hospitality."
"I thank you, O Antaran, son of Emberan, son of Ardaran, and I account myself blessed to receive your hospitality."
"Disan," said the High King again, "world traveler. It has been so long as you have been touring the world."
"'Touring' is a generous term for it."
"What was it like, being across the sea, fighting barbarians?"
"Mostly muddy," said Disan. "Entire days of tramping through the mud."
Antaran laughed, and with a look of mischief in his eyes, went over to the table and picked out a waster, which he threw to Disan. Disan waved it, catching a scent of linseed oil. It felt too light and oddly balanced in his hand. Antaran selected his own waster.
"A bit of child's play after barbarian-battles," said Antaran, "but let's see if you've learned any new tricks."
They swung-and-parried a few times, moving in a semicircle, then Antaran began in earnest. The High King was well practiced, and had had the best teachers in the Great Realm, but Disan had been taught by real battle, a far more serious teacher. Disan's strokes were less pretty than the High King's, but far more efficient, and his natural reach was considerably greater than Antaran's, to his unassailable advantage. It was not long before Disan had scored his third hit on the High King, so suddenly that the High King fell backward.
Antaran looked annoyed and then laughed. "You are my best teacher, Disan; none of the others would dare to make such a fool of me." He rose smoothly to his feet, waving off Disan's outstretched hand. He clasped Disan's shoulder.
"Everywhere in the Palace," he said, "you can see murals of the great deeds of our ancestors, forming the Great Realm. Our grandfathers went abroad to war against the Court of Night. But since then we have done nothing. You alone, of all the living kings, have seen the world and done the kind of great deed that is our birthright." He removed his hand. "I will let you make sure that your men are settled in and give you time to rest for your journey. All of the formal affairs we will have tomorrow, but this evening you and I should talk. I will send a guide to you after dinner."
"I will need a guide, I am sure; I wouldn't want to get lost."
Antaran laughed again. "Do you remember that time after we raided the kitchen when we threw the entire Palace into a panic because we got lost for almost two whole days?"
"It was a good thing we had just raided the kitchen. We eventually found that room with the shrine to Fath and the aeolian harp that was playing despite there being no wind. And we went through the door to which the statue of Fath was pointing and found our way back."
"Yes," said Antaran thoughtfully. "And you know, I have never found that room again. If it weren't for the fact that you remember it as well, I would have thought that I just imagined it."
"There are a great many strange things in the Mountain."
Antaran smiled a knowing smile. "Stranger than you know, my friend. Stranger than you know."
Disan made sure his men were properly cared for, and also made arrangements with the Palace steward to have a crate of strawberries sent to his men on the ship. He visited some of the rooms he remembered from his last stay in the Palace and then ate dinner. A servant came to take him to see the High King again. They went through a number of mazy passages and up several stairs, and finally came to sunlight and open breeze. It was an exedra opening to a balcony on the side of the Mountain, with an impluvium in the middle, half under the semi-dome and half beyond it in the open. The balcony looked over a breathtaking view. In the distance one could see the great gold-plated dome of the Oracle of the Sun, gleaming in the last sun rays of the day, and farther beyond it the orikhalh walls. Off to the right there were fountains and gardens down below, and an artificial creek with its musical waters plashing here and there across artfully laid stones. And if you moved to the balcony rail and looked over to the left, you could see in the distance a volor gliding down from the Khalad Mountains with supplies and docking at one of the Mountain towers. As Disan watched, one of the volors gave a long, low cry. Samaras falling down from some tree up above, went spinning and winding like keys through the air.
Antaran came out soon after. "I see you did not get lost," he said cheerfully. "We are waiting for one other."
As if almost on cue, the other came out. She was Tavran, and quite beautiful, pale of skin, with golden hair and bright blue eyes that were accentuated by the shimmering blue of her dress. She wore jewelry around her neck, almost too much, and a wide golden belt decorated with flowers. Disan knew her as Elea, Princess of Tavra; he had met her before, when they were both children, and although he had not seen her since, there was still a suggestion of the girl he had known in her woman's face. She gave a kind of curtsy toward him. "Your Highness," she said.
"Princess," he said in return. "How is your father?"
"As well as can be hoped," she said. "His mind is not well, but his body is whole."
Antaran gestured impatiently. "Let us get started."
Elea moved to the balcony rail and there held one of the pendants around her neck in both hands, lifting it high, muttering something under her breath. It was of strange and foreign make, and Disan thought for a moment that it glowed softly while she held it high. And suddenly the world became odd.
It was subtle. Perhaps there was a slight change in the quality of the sunlight, but the primary difference was not visible. The world just seemed unsettling, and it took Disan a moment to discover what it was: the breeze had died and so had all the sound from the waters below or the volors in the distance. The world became too quiet, as if everything outside the exedra and balcony had ceased to exist as more than a mirage.
"Now we can speak without eavesdropping," said Antaran. "Not even the Powers can hear us."
"How is that even possible?" asked Disan.
Elea pointed at the pendant. "My grandfather brought this back from the war against the Court of Night. It is a useful thing at times."
Disan looked at the High King. "That seems a great deal of trouble for an informal conversation."
"And all of it necessary. You and I and Elea -- today we are going to begin to change everything."
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
No, Kindness Is Not Everything
In every practical field, human beings have a craving for panaceas and a taste for nostrums; it satisfies both our desire to know and our desire to be in the know. Ethics is not any different in this respect; there are many ethical quackeries, and an endless number of people falling for ethical quackery in the attempt to have a simple answer. 'At least I'm not a hypocrite' is a perennial favorite, due to giving all the benefits of hypocrisy while passive-aggressively holding oneself to a minimal standard and putting everyone else on the defensive. There is a never-ending task in having to explain, as patiently as possible, to yet another person that 'consent' is not on its own a serious standard for ethical matters because it is met even by a bar brawl taken outside or a murder-suicide pact. And the form of ethical quackery that currently seems popular is boiling all of ethics down to kindness, as summed up in the advertising slogans (today, even ethical scams have them) Just Be Kind or Kindness Is Everything.
It's a clever scam because kindness is obviously good in its own way -- who is going to go around saying that kindness is bad? -- and because it tells people what they want to hear. There are endless numbers of reasons why kindness, important as it is, is nonetheless a secondary, and not a primary element of ethics, that it is a seal of excellence for an already substantive goodness and not the substantive goodness itself. We could go through Frederick Douglass's argument showing that kindness among slave owners actually made things worse for slaves, gilding the chain, or Philip Hallie's argument in "From Cruelty to Goodness" that kindness, despite superficial appearances, is not even the right kind of thing to nullify and oppose cruelty. These would be all correct. But they wouldn't deal with the essential problem, which is that people have an incentive to ignore such arguments.
'Kindness', etymologically, is the kind of affectionate good will you have toward family, and as used in modern English the word always concerns sympathy -- sympathetic generosity, sympathetic forbearance, warmth indicative of sympathy. There are all sorts of reasons why someone would want this to be the moral standard in everything that signal that it can't be the moral standard in everything.
(1) Kindness is mostly a matter of attitude, and thus can easily be faked. There is no particular form of action that is especially associated with kindness, because it's about the way you do things; when we say that someone is kind, we are saying that it is the sort of thing a kind person might do, done in the way a kind person might do it, and we see no reason why someone should not get credit for having done it in the right spirit rather than passive-aggressively or in a spirit of hypocrisy. This means that anything that involves any kind of benefit to anyone can be spun as kindness, and you can often convince people to give you the benefit of the doubt for it, because even if it went very bad, they will usually not have definite proof that your intentions weren't kind. Kind intentions can easily be faked because, while we sometimes have direct evidence of them (e.g., people seeming kind even at harm to themselves) and sometimes have indirect evidence of them (e.g., people doing things that seem kind consistently across time), most of the time we are just assuming that it was done with kind intentions. There are lots of good reasons why we do this, but it's a red flag when what is being proposed as a fundamental moral standard is a standard that can easily be faked.
(2) Kindness is mostly a matter of attitude, and thus can easily be ignored. On the other side, the fact that our inference that other people are being kind is only probable means that if you really want to be stubborn, you can treat someone as being unkind regardless of the evidence -- after all, we know they could always be faking. So if you're offended at what someone has done, you can easily brush off any attempt on their part to try to assure you that they meant it kindly. And what's more, since you can stubbornly treat anyone who offends you as being unkind, just by not giving them the benefit of the doubt, if you take kindness as the moral standard, you can treat their failure to accommodate you not just as a deficiency or error in moral action but as the gravest moral failing. Another warning sign: a proposed fundamental standard that can be used as a wax nose.
(3) Even when sincere, kindness is not a high standard. Being kind can be difficult, if it's a matter of being kind in a situation that is already morally difficult; this is why kindness can be seen as a sort of seal of excellence. But this is not true of kindness in general. Kindness has no particular action associated with it; being about the way you do things, it can cover all sorts of things. And because it is a matter of attitude, you can be kind even when you are obviously not really doing anything but having the right attitude. You can face a moral problem, make no serious effort to solve the problem, and still be kind. (This is precisely one of the things noted by both Douglass and Hallie.) And kindness often has immediate reward for yourself; people often talk about how doing something kind made them feel good. Another warning sign: a proposed fundamental standard that you can usually fulfill just by doing some minor token action in the right frame of mind, feeling good about yourself.
(4) If you are kind, people owe you. Kindness, to the extent that we can recognize it, has to be repaid with gratitude; failure to repay it is ingratitude. This is why doing something that could be regarded as kind is one of the standard ways confidence games are run. People are not easily persuaded just to give up things, so a con artist has to find a way to make them feel that they have to do it, that somehow they can't not do it. So a con game is usually ethical sophistry: I have done something obviously good for you, now you have to do something good for me, and I have arranged the terms so that it was easy for me to do that good thing but it's morally bad for you not to do the difficult thing I want you to do. So a con artist will trust you with secrets in order to get you to tell secrets -- after all, he gave you his trust, how can you not give him yours? Or he will do a purely symbolic goodness for you, out of the blue and as a pleasant surprise, in order to get you to do something substantial. One of the reasons ethics is a serious matter is that ethics is regularly used to manipulate people. It's not what it is for, to be sure, just as logic is not for the purpose of a sophist leading you to any conclusion he wants. But if someone wants to manipulate you, they will use something to do it that has an authority you recognize, whether that is logical principle or practical necessity or ethical obligation. Thus it is another red flag for quackery whenever you have a proposed fundamental standard that gives a significant set of advantages to the manipulative.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
In many ways, 'Be Kind' and 'Kindness Is Everything' are like 'Spiritual But Not Religious'; you could make perfect sense of them in a narrow area of human life, but 'Spiritual But Not Religious' usually means you are trying to have the benefits of being spiritual without the discipline and social burden that spirituality requires, and 'Kindness Is Everything' is an attempt to have the benefits of being moral without the hard-to-build, difficult-to-plan moral context that kindness really presupposes. (A recent "Pearls Before Swine" comic, I think, inadvertently gives away that parallel.) If you are boiling it all down to kindness, what that really means is that your standards are too low; you are jumping to the end, to a crowning virtue, and pretending that you don't need any of the completely different virtues that kindness is supposed to crown.
Of course, even ethical quackery in the Internet Age has to have a marketing website (as vague and inoffensive in patter as possible) and merchandising (and more merchandising). It's not for-profit, but fundraising for ethical and purportedly ethical causes is a natural context for ethical quackery. And I've no doubt that it is often quite sincere. Quackery of any kind only has sustainable success because it gives people something that is genuinely recognizable as good; that it is a good feeling or a good self-image doesn't change the fact that you can actually get something from it. And if just a small number of people are convinced that the good is substantial, you have real converts who will sincerely work to spread it. That's how health fads spread, for instance -- the kind that spread are always the kind that are easy but can deliver at least some apparent good for some small group of people by making them feel like they are making progress because of the fad. And it's how ethical fads spread, as well. Not all fads are bad or even wrong -- usually the only problem with them is that people are not recognizing their limits. But sometimes a fad is dangerous because it will look good to people while replacing things that are better. Kindness is a good thing indeed, but it presupposes a lot that you can't just will into existence. Kindness is a flourish that makes good things better, that takes other moral things and morally enriches them; it does not stand on its own and cannot substitute for these other things. You are better off recognizing that kindness is not enough, and that it certainly is not everything.
It's a clever scam because kindness is obviously good in its own way -- who is going to go around saying that kindness is bad? -- and because it tells people what they want to hear. There are endless numbers of reasons why kindness, important as it is, is nonetheless a secondary, and not a primary element of ethics, that it is a seal of excellence for an already substantive goodness and not the substantive goodness itself. We could go through Frederick Douglass's argument showing that kindness among slave owners actually made things worse for slaves, gilding the chain, or Philip Hallie's argument in "From Cruelty to Goodness" that kindness, despite superficial appearances, is not even the right kind of thing to nullify and oppose cruelty. These would be all correct. But they wouldn't deal with the essential problem, which is that people have an incentive to ignore such arguments.
'Kindness', etymologically, is the kind of affectionate good will you have toward family, and as used in modern English the word always concerns sympathy -- sympathetic generosity, sympathetic forbearance, warmth indicative of sympathy. There are all sorts of reasons why someone would want this to be the moral standard in everything that signal that it can't be the moral standard in everything.
(1) Kindness is mostly a matter of attitude, and thus can easily be faked. There is no particular form of action that is especially associated with kindness, because it's about the way you do things; when we say that someone is kind, we are saying that it is the sort of thing a kind person might do, done in the way a kind person might do it, and we see no reason why someone should not get credit for having done it in the right spirit rather than passive-aggressively or in a spirit of hypocrisy. This means that anything that involves any kind of benefit to anyone can be spun as kindness, and you can often convince people to give you the benefit of the doubt for it, because even if it went very bad, they will usually not have definite proof that your intentions weren't kind. Kind intentions can easily be faked because, while we sometimes have direct evidence of them (e.g., people seeming kind even at harm to themselves) and sometimes have indirect evidence of them (e.g., people doing things that seem kind consistently across time), most of the time we are just assuming that it was done with kind intentions. There are lots of good reasons why we do this, but it's a red flag when what is being proposed as a fundamental moral standard is a standard that can easily be faked.
(2) Kindness is mostly a matter of attitude, and thus can easily be ignored. On the other side, the fact that our inference that other people are being kind is only probable means that if you really want to be stubborn, you can treat someone as being unkind regardless of the evidence -- after all, we know they could always be faking. So if you're offended at what someone has done, you can easily brush off any attempt on their part to try to assure you that they meant it kindly. And what's more, since you can stubbornly treat anyone who offends you as being unkind, just by not giving them the benefit of the doubt, if you take kindness as the moral standard, you can treat their failure to accommodate you not just as a deficiency or error in moral action but as the gravest moral failing. Another warning sign: a proposed fundamental standard that can be used as a wax nose.
(3) Even when sincere, kindness is not a high standard. Being kind can be difficult, if it's a matter of being kind in a situation that is already morally difficult; this is why kindness can be seen as a sort of seal of excellence. But this is not true of kindness in general. Kindness has no particular action associated with it; being about the way you do things, it can cover all sorts of things. And because it is a matter of attitude, you can be kind even when you are obviously not really doing anything but having the right attitude. You can face a moral problem, make no serious effort to solve the problem, and still be kind. (This is precisely one of the things noted by both Douglass and Hallie.) And kindness often has immediate reward for yourself; people often talk about how doing something kind made them feel good. Another warning sign: a proposed fundamental standard that you can usually fulfill just by doing some minor token action in the right frame of mind, feeling good about yourself.
(4) If you are kind, people owe you. Kindness, to the extent that we can recognize it, has to be repaid with gratitude; failure to repay it is ingratitude. This is why doing something that could be regarded as kind is one of the standard ways confidence games are run. People are not easily persuaded just to give up things, so a con artist has to find a way to make them feel that they have to do it, that somehow they can't not do it. So a con game is usually ethical sophistry: I have done something obviously good for you, now you have to do something good for me, and I have arranged the terms so that it was easy for me to do that good thing but it's morally bad for you not to do the difficult thing I want you to do. So a con artist will trust you with secrets in order to get you to tell secrets -- after all, he gave you his trust, how can you not give him yours? Or he will do a purely symbolic goodness for you, out of the blue and as a pleasant surprise, in order to get you to do something substantial. One of the reasons ethics is a serious matter is that ethics is regularly used to manipulate people. It's not what it is for, to be sure, just as logic is not for the purpose of a sophist leading you to any conclusion he wants. But if someone wants to manipulate you, they will use something to do it that has an authority you recognize, whether that is logical principle or practical necessity or ethical obligation. Thus it is another red flag for quackery whenever you have a proposed fundamental standard that gives a significant set of advantages to the manipulative.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
In many ways, 'Be Kind' and 'Kindness Is Everything' are like 'Spiritual But Not Religious'; you could make perfect sense of them in a narrow area of human life, but 'Spiritual But Not Religious' usually means you are trying to have the benefits of being spiritual without the discipline and social burden that spirituality requires, and 'Kindness Is Everything' is an attempt to have the benefits of being moral without the hard-to-build, difficult-to-plan moral context that kindness really presupposes. (A recent "Pearls Before Swine" comic, I think, inadvertently gives away that parallel.) If you are boiling it all down to kindness, what that really means is that your standards are too low; you are jumping to the end, to a crowning virtue, and pretending that you don't need any of the completely different virtues that kindness is supposed to crown.
Of course, even ethical quackery in the Internet Age has to have a marketing website (as vague and inoffensive in patter as possible) and merchandising (and more merchandising). It's not for-profit, but fundraising for ethical and purportedly ethical causes is a natural context for ethical quackery. And I've no doubt that it is often quite sincere. Quackery of any kind only has sustainable success because it gives people something that is genuinely recognizable as good; that it is a good feeling or a good self-image doesn't change the fact that you can actually get something from it. And if just a small number of people are convinced that the good is substantial, you have real converts who will sincerely work to spread it. That's how health fads spread, for instance -- the kind that spread are always the kind that are easy but can deliver at least some apparent good for some small group of people by making them feel like they are making progress because of the fad. And it's how ethical fads spread, as well. Not all fads are bad or even wrong -- usually the only problem with them is that people are not recognizing their limits. But sometimes a fad is dangerous because it will look good to people while replacing things that are better. Kindness is a good thing indeed, but it presupposes a lot that you can't just will into existence. Kindness is a flourish that makes good things better, that takes other moral things and morally enriches them; it does not stand on its own and cannot substitute for these other things. You are better off recognizing that kindness is not enough, and that it certainly is not everything.
Monday, December 17, 2018
Leithart on Simplicity
I've talked before about Peter Leithart's incoherent comments on simplicity; I notice he's trying a slightly different tactic now:
The obvious answers that have been given for literally over a thousand years by Christians, Jews, and Muslims are, respectively, Yes (but you can also draw it between immutability and mutability, infinity and finitude, necessity and contingency, and the like, because these distinctions are interdefinable), No, and Because It Would Be Incoherent to Do the Latter (in part because of the previous point, that divine simplicity is interdefinable with a number of other doctrines) and Because It Would Also Be Pointless to Do the Latter (because it is natural and practically universal to point to composition as a reason for taking something to be created).
But Leithart is not giving up:
No, this is not how analogical predication works. Analogical predication requires that the term in question have a unity of meaning in both cases, but involving the reference of one to the other (or of both to a third). To use the word 'composite' analogically, we would have to be able to refer to God as first and most composite being, so that 'composite' applied to creatures would have a built-in reference to Him. But this is not how 'composite' works in any language, including English; the more composite a thing is, the more multitudinous and divided its parts. The less divided its parts, the simpler a thing is. Simplex means not multipliable into many, which is true of God; compositus, its opposite in this context, means built out of multiple things. That 'composite' means that something is built is not itself a fatal problem (e.g., simply considering it on its own, it could be parallel to perfectus, which means completed), but removing the 'built' component makes it a metaphor in particular, and when we look at how it would have to apply to God, it's quite clear that God would have to be more one than creatures, and thus more simple, not more composite. Everything Leithart says about how the divine composition would have to differ from creaturely composition simply underscores this very point.
What Leithart is proposing is not analogical predication but equivocal predication. You could, certainly, use the word 'composite' of God; you can use words like 'fire' and 'rock' of God, too. But it's not going to be in any sense inconsistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity, because it's not what anyone means when they are talking about the doctrine of divine simplicity; and, in addition, it's obviously going to confuse people when you just shuffle around the words everyone has been using for centuries, for no good reason. Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set, Leithart.
But why can’t we say this: God is composite, but composite in a way that doesn’t conflict with His aseity or unity. We can’t conceive of such a composite being, but then we can’t conceive of a wholly simple being either.
I’m not claiming God is composite. The question I’m raising is about the “location” of the Creator-creature distinction. Do we have to draw it between the simple being of God as opposed to the composite being of creatures? Or might we draw it between two different sorts of composite beings, one divine and one human? What difference would it make?
The obvious answers that have been given for literally over a thousand years by Christians, Jews, and Muslims are, respectively, Yes (but you can also draw it between immutability and mutability, infinity and finitude, necessity and contingency, and the like, because these distinctions are interdefinable), No, and Because It Would Be Incoherent to Do the Latter (in part because of the previous point, that divine simplicity is interdefinable with a number of other doctrines) and Because It Would Also Be Pointless to Do the Latter (because it is natural and practically universal to point to composition as a reason for taking something to be created).
But Leithart is not giving up:
The claim is now that “composite” means the same thing for God as for creatures. It seems that simplicity is needed if we’re going to describe God in terms of a metaphysics that’s drawn from created being. But if divine metaphysics are unlike created metaphysics, why can’t “composite” be used, differently, of each. Why can’t we say God is “composite,” understood analogically?
No, this is not how analogical predication works. Analogical predication requires that the term in question have a unity of meaning in both cases, but involving the reference of one to the other (or of both to a third). To use the word 'composite' analogically, we would have to be able to refer to God as first and most composite being, so that 'composite' applied to creatures would have a built-in reference to Him. But this is not how 'composite' works in any language, including English; the more composite a thing is, the more multitudinous and divided its parts. The less divided its parts, the simpler a thing is. Simplex means not multipliable into many, which is true of God; compositus, its opposite in this context, means built out of multiple things. That 'composite' means that something is built is not itself a fatal problem (e.g., simply considering it on its own, it could be parallel to perfectus, which means completed), but removing the 'built' component makes it a metaphor in particular, and when we look at how it would have to apply to God, it's quite clear that God would have to be more one than creatures, and thus more simple, not more composite. Everything Leithart says about how the divine composition would have to differ from creaturely composition simply underscores this very point.
What Leithart is proposing is not analogical predication but equivocal predication. You could, certainly, use the word 'composite' of God; you can use words like 'fire' and 'rock' of God, too. But it's not going to be in any sense inconsistent with the doctrine of divine simplicity, because it's not what anyone means when they are talking about the doctrine of divine simplicity; and, in addition, it's obviously going to confuse people when you just shuffle around the words everyone has been using for centuries, for no good reason. Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set, Leithart.
Sunday, December 16, 2018
The Defective Concept of the 'Introduction to Philosophy' Course (Re-Post)
As I've been grading, grading, grading, grading, grading, grading, it has brought to mind this post from 2015.
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There is an interesting exercise that I think is valuable for every philosophy professor at some point in his or her career to try: try to pin down exactly what an 'Introduction to Philosophy' course is, using the different standards to which we actually hold such courses. What can easily be found when one does this is that Intro courses are in reality jumbles. If you were to take typical Department-mandated objectives for Intro courses and design a course specifically to meet those objectives, then another standard, like the typical prerequisite structure of a philosophy major, and design a course specifically to contribute in an optimal way to preparing for the courses for which it is a prerequisite, then another standard, like actually introducing people to philosophy, and design a course specifically with that in view -- if, I say, you were to do this through all the different standards to which Introduction to Philosophy courses are held, I think you would quickly find that none of the courses would obviously be the same course.
There are a number of different functions an 'Introduction to Philosophy' course could have. It could be the kind of course that used to be called Philosophical Encyclopedia, which was basically what the title says: it was a tour of philosophy, involving a very brief historical survey, a look at some of the major positions of some of the major philosophical disciplines, and, often, a guide to students as to what might be worth reading on their own. Nothing about the course particularly required that students do philosophy, beyond what was required to follow the basic ideas in very broad outline, but it wasn't intended to do so: it was intended, like a logic course, to give students basic tools (distinctions, classifications, general concepts required for historical comparison), and perhaps also to give them a sense of where they might head next. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to have a course for. There's a perfectly straightforward sense in which, done properly, it would be a solid and useful 'Introduction to Philosophy' course. Intro courses tend not to fulfill this function particularly well, but if you look at a lot of course objectives for them, it's pretty clear that they are, at least in principle, supposed to fulfill it.
Another possible approach might be to treat it as a course in philosophical writing. That there is often a need for something like such a course is usually quite obvious to those who have to grade student papers. Philosophical writing takes certain skills of analysis and organization, and it is really not fair to students to expect that they will already have them or will just pick them up on the fly or will somehow gain them through 'feedback' from the professor, particularly since assignments and feedback are often not particularly well designed for doing this. (I could write another post entirely about peculiarities and defects in how people seem to think of and handle feedback to students, and the difficult problems of doing 'feedback' in a way that could seriously be considered useful for students themselves.) But most Intro courses are not set up with a focus on writing.
A different kind of approach might be to focus on philosophy majors, making the Intro course a gateway to the major. It is quite clear that Intro courses are often treated as fulfilling this function. To fulfill this function properly, however, the course should set students up to succeed in future philosophy courses. This is arguably the function that Intro courses usually fulfill best, but I would argue that they often don't fulfill it very well, either, not so much from lack of trying as from the limits on our ability to anticipate what students would actually find useful in future courses. Philosophy is an immense field; in one way or another it covers everything. And if you start asking specific questions about how these courses set students up for success, you often find that there is no obvious answer to the question. If, for instance, the Intro course is supposed to set up for courses like Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, and so forth, why don't more Intro courses have extensive discussion of actual Stoic and Neoplatonist figures and ideas? If it is supposed to prepare for courses more focused on analytic-style problems, Philosophy of Mind, for instance, why don't more Intro courses have a significant logic component? There are lots that don't.
Many philosophy professors really want their Intro courses to be introductions to doing philosophy. Ich habe nicht die Absicht die Philosophie zu lehren sondern philosophiren zu lehren. But if you look at course descriptions, course objectives, prerequisite structures, and the like, it's often less than clear how these fit with how teachers often go about trying to get their students to think through philosophical issues in philosophical ways.
The list, of course, could be extended indefinitely, using things like actual methods of evaluating teaching, or departmental policies, or even the practical fact that Intro courses tend to function as 'advertising' by which departments recruit philosophy majors in the first place. The real point here, of course, is that it's difficult for Intro to be a good introduction because there are so many conflicting ways to be an introduction, all of which are on the table and none of which are easy to exclude given all the standard pressures that go into designing and teaching an Intro course in the first place. If you go through all the course objectives, department policies, things that come up in the evaluation process that professors need to show that they do in order to have a proper evaluation portfolio, there is too much expectation put on the table. No matter what anyone does, something is going to be shortchanged. You can get some amusing confirmations of this if you get a bunch of philosophy professors together to talk about Intro courses; they rarely have the same idea of what an Introduction to Philosophy course should be and are often aghast at how other philosophy professors run their Intro courses, despite the fact that those others can virtually always justify their approaches by one of the jillion different standards on the table.
Ideally, I think, there would be an Intro course qua Philosophical Encyclopedia, and an Intro course qua Philosophical Writing, and an Intro course qua teacher and students trying to think through philosophical questions together, and so forth. There's no obvious reason why all of this should be stuffed into the same course; when you try to do it, it's easy for one to crowd out the others. The problem, of course, is how to make something like this practicable given common administrative expectations and the sheer inertia in how faculty tend to handle basic courses in the first place.
**************
There is an interesting exercise that I think is valuable for every philosophy professor at some point in his or her career to try: try to pin down exactly what an 'Introduction to Philosophy' course is, using the different standards to which we actually hold such courses. What can easily be found when one does this is that Intro courses are in reality jumbles. If you were to take typical Department-mandated objectives for Intro courses and design a course specifically to meet those objectives, then another standard, like the typical prerequisite structure of a philosophy major, and design a course specifically to contribute in an optimal way to preparing for the courses for which it is a prerequisite, then another standard, like actually introducing people to philosophy, and design a course specifically with that in view -- if, I say, you were to do this through all the different standards to which Introduction to Philosophy courses are held, I think you would quickly find that none of the courses would obviously be the same course.
There are a number of different functions an 'Introduction to Philosophy' course could have. It could be the kind of course that used to be called Philosophical Encyclopedia, which was basically what the title says: it was a tour of philosophy, involving a very brief historical survey, a look at some of the major positions of some of the major philosophical disciplines, and, often, a guide to students as to what might be worth reading on their own. Nothing about the course particularly required that students do philosophy, beyond what was required to follow the basic ideas in very broad outline, but it wasn't intended to do so: it was intended, like a logic course, to give students basic tools (distinctions, classifications, general concepts required for historical comparison), and perhaps also to give them a sense of where they might head next. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to have a course for. There's a perfectly straightforward sense in which, done properly, it would be a solid and useful 'Introduction to Philosophy' course. Intro courses tend not to fulfill this function particularly well, but if you look at a lot of course objectives for them, it's pretty clear that they are, at least in principle, supposed to fulfill it.
Another possible approach might be to treat it as a course in philosophical writing. That there is often a need for something like such a course is usually quite obvious to those who have to grade student papers. Philosophical writing takes certain skills of analysis and organization, and it is really not fair to students to expect that they will already have them or will just pick them up on the fly or will somehow gain them through 'feedback' from the professor, particularly since assignments and feedback are often not particularly well designed for doing this. (I could write another post entirely about peculiarities and defects in how people seem to think of and handle feedback to students, and the difficult problems of doing 'feedback' in a way that could seriously be considered useful for students themselves.) But most Intro courses are not set up with a focus on writing.
A different kind of approach might be to focus on philosophy majors, making the Intro course a gateway to the major. It is quite clear that Intro courses are often treated as fulfilling this function. To fulfill this function properly, however, the course should set students up to succeed in future philosophy courses. This is arguably the function that Intro courses usually fulfill best, but I would argue that they often don't fulfill it very well, either, not so much from lack of trying as from the limits on our ability to anticipate what students would actually find useful in future courses. Philosophy is an immense field; in one way or another it covers everything. And if you start asking specific questions about how these courses set students up for success, you often find that there is no obvious answer to the question. If, for instance, the Intro course is supposed to set up for courses like Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, and so forth, why don't more Intro courses have extensive discussion of actual Stoic and Neoplatonist figures and ideas? If it is supposed to prepare for courses more focused on analytic-style problems, Philosophy of Mind, for instance, why don't more Intro courses have a significant logic component? There are lots that don't.
Many philosophy professors really want their Intro courses to be introductions to doing philosophy. Ich habe nicht die Absicht die Philosophie zu lehren sondern philosophiren zu lehren. But if you look at course descriptions, course objectives, prerequisite structures, and the like, it's often less than clear how these fit with how teachers often go about trying to get their students to think through philosophical issues in philosophical ways.
The list, of course, could be extended indefinitely, using things like actual methods of evaluating teaching, or departmental policies, or even the practical fact that Intro courses tend to function as 'advertising' by which departments recruit philosophy majors in the first place. The real point here, of course, is that it's difficult for Intro to be a good introduction because there are so many conflicting ways to be an introduction, all of which are on the table and none of which are easy to exclude given all the standard pressures that go into designing and teaching an Intro course in the first place. If you go through all the course objectives, department policies, things that come up in the evaluation process that professors need to show that they do in order to have a proper evaluation portfolio, there is too much expectation put on the table. No matter what anyone does, something is going to be shortchanged. You can get some amusing confirmations of this if you get a bunch of philosophy professors together to talk about Intro courses; they rarely have the same idea of what an Introduction to Philosophy course should be and are often aghast at how other philosophy professors run their Intro courses, despite the fact that those others can virtually always justify their approaches by one of the jillion different standards on the table.
Ideally, I think, there would be an Intro course qua Philosophical Encyclopedia, and an Intro course qua Philosophical Writing, and an Intro course qua teacher and students trying to think through philosophical questions together, and so forth. There's no obvious reason why all of this should be stuffed into the same course; when you try to do it, it's easy for one to crowd out the others. The problem, of course, is how to make something like this practicable given common administrative expectations and the sheer inertia in how faculty tend to handle basic courses in the first place.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
Music on My Mind
Steeleye Span, "Gower Wassail".
It's we poor wassail boys, so weary and cold!
Please drop some small silver into our bowl.
And if we survive for another new year
Perhaps we may call and see who does live here.
Friday, December 14, 2018
Dashed Off XXIX
This ends the notebook that was finished on November 8, 2017.
"The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." Hart Crane
"The whole of the external cultus of God is preeminently ordered to this: that people may hold God in reverence." Aquinas ST 2-1.102.4 (ut homines Deum in reverentia habeant)
"Thinking is, as it were, talking to oneself." Erasmus
The kingly authority of Confirmation begins with self-rule.
From good that has been given by those who came before us, to make new good, that more good may be given to those who come after us.
God as producer (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as conserver (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as governor (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
exemplar : possible :: final : actual
"No being is completely self-actualized [autenergeton], since it is not self-caused, and whatever is not self-caused is necessarily moved by a cause, which is to say that it is actualized by being naturally moved by its cause, for which and to which it continues to move. For nothing that moves does so in any way independently of a cause." Maximos, Amb 15
Maximos Confessor
fire -- prudence -- John
air -- fortitude -- Luke
water -- temperance -- Mark
earth -- justice -- Matthew
-- It is surely odd that fortitude is not assigned to earth, but Maximos is thinking of the earth not as stable so much as he is thinking of it as life-giving, and air not so much as fluid as a stable atmosphere. John, of course, is the natural candidate for fire & prudence, beginning as it does with Logos.
The senses function in our mental life not merely in themselves but as symbols of higher things.
love as theopoetic virtue
divine wisdom, philosophy, reasoning in play, sophistry
The notion that Exodus 34:11-26 represents a distinctive 'Ritual Decalogue' has always rested on a false view of progress, and especially a false view of the relation of ethics and ritual with respect to progress.
The character of a political movement is never constituted by its promises.
"To withstand anyone in public exceeds the mode of fraternal correction." ST 2-2.33.4ad2
(the point is, public correction requires in addition some relevant ground of authority)
-- but note that public correction may also be justified by things like imminent danger
Part of our color terminology clearly arises from manipulability, colors as within our causal domain.
The defeasible requires the indefeasible. Suppose 'X is defeasible'. Either this is indefeasible or it is defeasible; if it is defeasible, there are conditions under which 'X is defeasible' is false.
real separation, real separability, relative distinction, intentional distinction, distinction of reason
No one has a right to insert themselves into a community arbitrarily, because communities are formed by common good; they have a moral responsibility to be sure they can in good faith engage in the cooperative venture of seeking and upholding that common good. And the community has the responsibility to make sure, to the extent that it can, that they come to do so, because all right and responsibility in the community as such derives from common good.
Colleges and universities present themselves as middlemen, but give themselves liberties (with both students and faculty) that middlemen usually wouldn't.
Sometimes you have proof,
sometimes only prayer;
either way, you proceed
one foot after another.
Every philosophical system faces the problem of rhetorical fouling -- the slow encrustation of associations and attributions, some of them quite foreign.
The acts of the virtue of religion are subordinations to God:
(1) of intellect: prayer
(2) of will: devotion
(3) of body: adoration
(4) of possessions
:::: (a) by renunciation
:::::::: (1) to God directly: sacrifice
:::::::: (2) to support ministers: offerings and tithes
:::: (b) by promise: vow
Each thing subordinated to God in religion can be unfittingly subordinated in superstition: divination, fanaticism, desecration of body, and so forth.
potential parts of justice
(1) rigorous debt without equality: religion, piety, observance
(2) equality without rigorous debt
:::: (a) to preserve honestas of virtue in society: gratitude, vindication, veracity
:::: (b) to preserve debt better: affability, liberality
money-related virtues
(1) to use moderately: thrift
(2) to give: liberality
(3) to do great things: magnificence
Whether something is warranted is always relative to an end.
testing arguments by: parity, retorsion, challenge (search-based, aporia-based), diagnostic, interrogating the grounds
We apply a term like 'being' to God and to creatures as we apply a term like 'man' to a man and his reflection in the mirror.
To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality as transfiguring what is sensuous, even things like desire for reward and self-love.
Instead of talking about an internal morality of medicine, we should think more specifically in terms of an internal morality of treatment, an internal morality of diagnosis, etc.
Nothing can be an error without being inconsistent with a norm.
Human beings are implementations of Turing machines; we can perform all Turing machine operations in principle. The question of significance is: What else are we?
Note Kant's claim in One Possible Basis that 'Nothing exists but something is possible' is contradictory.
For anything to be possible, something must exist; for anything to exist, something must be necessary.
We can infer from anything that can be a sign.
"All building naturally divides into two classes, the architecture of the beam and that of the arch." WPP Longfellow
Propositional inference is composed out of terminal inference.
relation of noumenal & phenomenal (By relation to mind-body)
monist
:::: materialism -- empiricism
:::: idealism -- intellectualism
dualist -- Platonism, Kantianism
hylomorphist -- Aristotelianism
the inherent militia powers of the people
We infer from a footprint that a foot has been there; we don't need to articulate this in a proposition: the footprint, understood as such, suffices.
Atheistic superfluity arguments violate the principle of remotion. (Chastek)
Philosophy will not get you to heaven, but saints in heaven philosophize.
Virtually no conclusion of the highest mathematical certainty can be achieved in only one way.
Existence is not a purely empirical concept.
A theory of inference must recognize that we can infer 2 from 1+1, and 3 from x+1=4, and 2+2 from 4. Given an incomplete assertion one can infer the element of completion.
The potential is in the same genus as the actual, in the way in which it is potential to the actual.
We only ever know what would have happened by causal reasoning.
cats & meal-enrichment (i.e., the practice of making food something the cat obtains by solving a problem or performing a task rather than just being given it -- some kinds of cat species are more likely to eat properly if they are given the food in the context of problem-solving)
Filangieri on the need for a censorial chamber
chief-and-council structures in government
timing considerations in inquiry (patience in waiting for adequate evidence, coordination of lines of inquiry, inquiry ordering, ethical considerations about appropriate timing)
We can draw an inference from: the universe of discourse, a physical sign, a definition, a classificatory scheme, a resemblance, and so forth. All of these are in fact quite common.
"Designated matter is nothing but matter with a capacity for this quantity, and not that quantity." Cajetan
sacrifice as part of the aesthetics of the sublimity of morality (Kant)
the Fall of the devil: power :: the Fall of man : wisdom
Faith is a light not purely of intellect but of intellect-moved-by-will.
The body is included in the proper definition of the human soul.
Torah is a symbol and as it were a vestment of the Word of God.
bindingness-preserving & obedience preserving in imperative inferences (Peter B. M. Vranas)
It makes very little sense to treat all imperatives as available for imperatival inference.
Act (in some way)! as a categorical imperative
Take the true as true!/Act in a way consistent with what is true being true as a self-evident imperative
Kantian ethics requires a logic of imperatives; the entire ethics is structured according to principles in such a logic.
remotion transcendentals (one)
relation transcendentals (good, true)
correlation transcendentals (potency/act, infinite/finite)
God as principal unifier of: possibility, truth, necessity, space, time, cosmos, intellection, sensation, volition, laws of nature, moral laws, possibility of civil laws
(all of these have been proposed)
(my mind -> other minds) -> exemplar mind
vague something accounts of the external world
add supposition -> something that could be such-and-such
add pragmatic conflation -> somethign that appears to be such-and-such
add both -> broadly Humean accounts of external world
Only the Christian faith has explored the whole range of the notion of sacrifice.
The actions of bishops should be such as are consistent with willing the apostolic faith to be catholic, that is, universal.
the internal subsidiarity of the human person
NB Maximos's argument that the doctrine of the preexistence of souls is analogous to Manicheanism.
NB Maximos's argument that we have rational souls from first conception (Amb 42).
It is remarkably difficult to discover from ethical expressivists what they mean by expression.
Something can only be considered an expression if it is considered as a sign that is a possible means of communication.
"The sacrament of matrimony can be regarded in two ways: first, in the making, and then in its permanent state. For it is a sacrament like the eucharist, which not only when it is being conferred, but also while it remains, is a sacrament; for as long as married parties are alive, so long is their union a sacrament of Christ and the Church." Bellarmine
the robur of confirmation
If we take past and future to be modal operators, presentism denies the legitimacy of a kind of subalternation.
Approximate truth is a causal concept, for approximation is a causal process.
Three elements of a limit according to Whewell:
(1) hypothetical construction
(2) indefinite extension
(3) limiting property
various virtue vocabularies as artificial classifications -> convergence on the natural classification of the virtuous -> exemplar cause of virtu emaking the knowledge of the virtuous possible
God turns our very mutability into a way to save us from the failing that arose from that same mutability.
Every inference occurs within a system of classifications.
Official statements of Church doctrine are verdictives, not effectives.
A polarity (in Whewell's sense) defines a dimension.
Formalized schooling seems to arise to prevent youths in cities with free time from becoming a disaster.
"But to a language three things are necessary: it must express reason, contain reason, and speak to reason." Fairbairn
Ruth as an allegory of the 'Church of the Gentiles'
The earth is riven by the river
roving over land and hill,
roaming through the vale and forest,
never ending, ever reaching,
down to ocean's shore forever,
down to end and all fulfilled.
To say that marriage is a life-partnership is like saying that military service is a bit of adventure -- not exactly wrong, but not particularly insightful.
Sexual customs are often like jungle palaces beginning to rot.
It was three in the afternoon on Friday. In the distance, the bell of Our Lady of Shadows rang out one long, low tone.
I wished you well
by the wishing well;
it was an age and a half ago.
A wish cannot save
and your lonely grave
is draped in the fallen snow.
at times a man must whisper,
or else he blows away
the fundamental need for states of defeasible but presumptive consent
anti-natalism and the problem of evil for consequentialist atheists
half-belief as (a) belief with cautions versus as (b) nonbelief with inclinations
Halfheartedness cannot be a mere deficiency in motivation,b ecaus enot all deficiencies in motivation are halfhearted. Halfheartedness seems to require a deficiency in consent.
Belief by its nature is something that can be shared.
While belief does not come in degrees, its role in decision does, and almost all that is salvageable from the literature on the rationality of belief is due to the latter.
Rights only exist within a hierarchy capable of structuring them.
Prior probabilities should always only be set by a method of inquiry.
Note that Hilary in his commentary on Mt. 8 links justification to absolution (remission of sins): the Law cannot justify because it cannot itself absolve; faith can absolve sins. The reason is that God alone absolves, and in faith the Word of God abides in us so that our sins may be absolved.
Note that at Jericho and Ai, some non-Israelites are saved and some Israelites are condemned; the distinction between Israelite and Canaanite is not the locus of condemnation.
the lunar movement of myth, the solar movement of rational account
Our confidence with respect to a belief presupposes the belief and does not constitute it.
arguments from evil involving direct attribution (God would be author of evil) vs those that are indirect (the evil outweighs the good)
- the latter // antinatalist arguments
PSR denial is a denial that everything is either necessary or made possible; it is the claim that there are things not necessary that are not made possible by anything.
science fiction & Margaret Cavendish's three elements: romancical, philosophical, fantastical
It is remarkable how often in religious contexts 'being welcoming is in fact just an excuse for not going out to people.
We infer that arguments are valid directly from their logical structures, not by mediation of propositions.
In mercy, something good is always sacrificed for something better. There is no mercy without such a sacrifice.
Experiments are optimally described in four-cause terms: What materials are used? How are they given experimental form, and for what end? Who organizes these materials by that form for that end?
John Case: A polity is ineffectual without virtue, as seen in
(a) matter
:::: (1) of which it consists: multitude of men united by rule of virtue
:::: (2) about which it revolves: introduction of virtue in accordance with laws
(b) form: prudent administration involving justice
(c) efficient
:::: (1) remote: God, to whom virtue is referred
:::: (2) proximate: nature with virtue's bond
(d) end
:::: (1) external: peace, honor, and prosperity due to virtue
:::: (2) internal: happiness and peace arising from virtue
Plausibility seems always relative to a universe of discourse.
fine-tuning problems for physics, ethics, epistemology, and semantics (Pruss)
postmodern-ism vs post-modernism
A philosophical movement, to endure, must adapt while cohering together; thus philosophical movements vanish by either stagnating or simplifying into an inability to adapt or else by either diffusing or factionalizing into an inability to cohere.
face-structures // phonemes
Good writing should be as polytropic as Odysseus, traveling widely, figuring cleverly.
To live in the body is to live in a symbol.
Pallavicino's topics of inductive reasoning (see Knebel) and Hume's rules by which to judge of cause and effect
co-redemptrix principle (Frangipane): Mary merits congruously what Christ merits condignly.
Christ merits for us in Himself and through His Mother.
"...it is easy to say whatever you want, if you say it without arguments." Thomas Compton Carlton
Le Grand's three unions
mind-mind: love
body-body: local presence
mind-body: mutually dependent action
topics: dialectical enthymeme
rhetoric: rhetorical enthymeme
poetics: metaphor
A people without heroes cannot easily be free.
Charity orders the acquired virtues by means of the infused virtues.
"The logic of metaphor is so organically entrenched in pure sensibility that it can't be thoroughly traced or explained outside of historical sciences, like philology and anthropology." Hart Crane
"The whole of the external cultus of God is preeminently ordered to this: that people may hold God in reverence." Aquinas ST 2-1.102.4 (ut homines Deum in reverentia habeant)
"Thinking is, as it were, talking to oneself." Erasmus
The kingly authority of Confirmation begins with self-rule.
From good that has been given by those who came before us, to make new good, that more good may be given to those who come after us.
God as producer (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as conserver (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
God as governor (1) with respect to possibility (2) with respect to actuality
exemplar : possible :: final : actual
"No being is completely self-actualized [autenergeton], since it is not self-caused, and whatever is not self-caused is necessarily moved by a cause, which is to say that it is actualized by being naturally moved by its cause, for which and to which it continues to move. For nothing that moves does so in any way independently of a cause." Maximos, Amb 15
Maximos Confessor
fire -- prudence -- John
air -- fortitude -- Luke
water -- temperance -- Mark
earth -- justice -- Matthew
-- It is surely odd that fortitude is not assigned to earth, but Maximos is thinking of the earth not as stable so much as he is thinking of it as life-giving, and air not so much as fluid as a stable atmosphere. John, of course, is the natural candidate for fire & prudence, beginning as it does with Logos.
The senses function in our mental life not merely in themselves but as symbols of higher things.
love as theopoetic virtue
divine wisdom, philosophy, reasoning in play, sophistry
The notion that Exodus 34:11-26 represents a distinctive 'Ritual Decalogue' has always rested on a false view of progress, and especially a false view of the relation of ethics and ritual with respect to progress.
The character of a political movement is never constituted by its promises.
"To withstand anyone in public exceeds the mode of fraternal correction." ST 2-2.33.4ad2
(the point is, public correction requires in addition some relevant ground of authority)
-- but note that public correction may also be justified by things like imminent danger
Part of our color terminology clearly arises from manipulability, colors as within our causal domain.
The defeasible requires the indefeasible. Suppose 'X is defeasible'. Either this is indefeasible or it is defeasible; if it is defeasible, there are conditions under which 'X is defeasible' is false.
real separation, real separability, relative distinction, intentional distinction, distinction of reason
No one has a right to insert themselves into a community arbitrarily, because communities are formed by common good; they have a moral responsibility to be sure they can in good faith engage in the cooperative venture of seeking and upholding that common good. And the community has the responsibility to make sure, to the extent that it can, that they come to do so, because all right and responsibility in the community as such derives from common good.
Colleges and universities present themselves as middlemen, but give themselves liberties (with both students and faculty) that middlemen usually wouldn't.
Sometimes you have proof,
sometimes only prayer;
either way, you proceed
one foot after another.
Every philosophical system faces the problem of rhetorical fouling -- the slow encrustation of associations and attributions, some of them quite foreign.
The acts of the virtue of religion are subordinations to God:
(1) of intellect: prayer
(2) of will: devotion
(3) of body: adoration
(4) of possessions
:::: (a) by renunciation
:::::::: (1) to God directly: sacrifice
:::::::: (2) to support ministers: offerings and tithes
:::: (b) by promise: vow
Each thing subordinated to God in religion can be unfittingly subordinated in superstition: divination, fanaticism, desecration of body, and so forth.
potential parts of justice
(1) rigorous debt without equality: religion, piety, observance
(2) equality without rigorous debt
:::: (a) to preserve honestas of virtue in society: gratitude, vindication, veracity
:::: (b) to preserve debt better: affability, liberality
money-related virtues
(1) to use moderately: thrift
(2) to give: liberality
(3) to do great things: magnificence
Whether something is warranted is always relative to an end.
testing arguments by: parity, retorsion, challenge (search-based, aporia-based), diagnostic, interrogating the grounds
We apply a term like 'being' to God and to creatures as we apply a term like 'man' to a man and his reflection in the mirror.
To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing other than to present morality as transfiguring what is sensuous, even things like desire for reward and self-love.
Instead of talking about an internal morality of medicine, we should think more specifically in terms of an internal morality of treatment, an internal morality of diagnosis, etc.
Nothing can be an error without being inconsistent with a norm.
Human beings are implementations of Turing machines; we can perform all Turing machine operations in principle. The question of significance is: What else are we?
Note Kant's claim in One Possible Basis that 'Nothing exists but something is possible' is contradictory.
For anything to be possible, something must exist; for anything to exist, something must be necessary.
We can infer from anything that can be a sign.
"All building naturally divides into two classes, the architecture of the beam and that of the arch." WPP Longfellow
Propositional inference is composed out of terminal inference.
relation of noumenal & phenomenal (By relation to mind-body)
monist
:::: materialism -- empiricism
:::: idealism -- intellectualism
dualist -- Platonism, Kantianism
hylomorphist -- Aristotelianism
the inherent militia powers of the people
We infer from a footprint that a foot has been there; we don't need to articulate this in a proposition: the footprint, understood as such, suffices.
Atheistic superfluity arguments violate the principle of remotion. (Chastek)
Philosophy will not get you to heaven, but saints in heaven philosophize.
Virtually no conclusion of the highest mathematical certainty can be achieved in only one way.
Existence is not a purely empirical concept.
A theory of inference must recognize that we can infer 2 from 1+1, and 3 from x+1=4, and 2+2 from 4. Given an incomplete assertion one can infer the element of completion.
The potential is in the same genus as the actual, in the way in which it is potential to the actual.
We only ever know what would have happened by causal reasoning.
cats & meal-enrichment (i.e., the practice of making food something the cat obtains by solving a problem or performing a task rather than just being given it -- some kinds of cat species are more likely to eat properly if they are given the food in the context of problem-solving)
Filangieri on the need for a censorial chamber
chief-and-council structures in government
timing considerations in inquiry (patience in waiting for adequate evidence, coordination of lines of inquiry, inquiry ordering, ethical considerations about appropriate timing)
We can draw an inference from: the universe of discourse, a physical sign, a definition, a classificatory scheme, a resemblance, and so forth. All of these are in fact quite common.
"Designated matter is nothing but matter with a capacity for this quantity, and not that quantity." Cajetan
sacrifice as part of the aesthetics of the sublimity of morality (Kant)
the Fall of the devil: power :: the Fall of man : wisdom
Faith is a light not purely of intellect but of intellect-moved-by-will.
The body is included in the proper definition of the human soul.
Torah is a symbol and as it were a vestment of the Word of God.
bindingness-preserving & obedience preserving in imperative inferences (Peter B. M. Vranas)
It makes very little sense to treat all imperatives as available for imperatival inference.
Act (in some way)! as a categorical imperative
Take the true as true!/Act in a way consistent with what is true being true as a self-evident imperative
Kantian ethics requires a logic of imperatives; the entire ethics is structured according to principles in such a logic.
remotion transcendentals (one)
relation transcendentals (good, true)
correlation transcendentals (potency/act, infinite/finite)
God as principal unifier of: possibility, truth, necessity, space, time, cosmos, intellection, sensation, volition, laws of nature, moral laws, possibility of civil laws
(all of these have been proposed)
(my mind -> other minds) -> exemplar mind
vague something accounts of the external world
add supposition -> something that could be such-and-such
add pragmatic conflation -> somethign that appears to be such-and-such
add both -> broadly Humean accounts of external world
Only the Christian faith has explored the whole range of the notion of sacrifice.
The actions of bishops should be such as are consistent with willing the apostolic faith to be catholic, that is, universal.
the internal subsidiarity of the human person
NB Maximos's argument that the doctrine of the preexistence of souls is analogous to Manicheanism.
NB Maximos's argument that we have rational souls from first conception (Amb 42).
It is remarkably difficult to discover from ethical expressivists what they mean by expression.
Something can only be considered an expression if it is considered as a sign that is a possible means of communication.
"The sacrament of matrimony can be regarded in two ways: first, in the making, and then in its permanent state. For it is a sacrament like the eucharist, which not only when it is being conferred, but also while it remains, is a sacrament; for as long as married parties are alive, so long is their union a sacrament of Christ and the Church." Bellarmine
the robur of confirmation
If we take past and future to be modal operators, presentism denies the legitimacy of a kind of subalternation.
Approximate truth is a causal concept, for approximation is a causal process.
Three elements of a limit according to Whewell:
(1) hypothetical construction
(2) indefinite extension
(3) limiting property
various virtue vocabularies as artificial classifications -> convergence on the natural classification of the virtuous -> exemplar cause of virtu emaking the knowledge of the virtuous possible
God turns our very mutability into a way to save us from the failing that arose from that same mutability.
Every inference occurs within a system of classifications.
Official statements of Church doctrine are verdictives, not effectives.
A polarity (in Whewell's sense) defines a dimension.
Formalized schooling seems to arise to prevent youths in cities with free time from becoming a disaster.
"But to a language three things are necessary: it must express reason, contain reason, and speak to reason." Fairbairn
Ruth as an allegory of the 'Church of the Gentiles'
The earth is riven by the river
roving over land and hill,
roaming through the vale and forest,
never ending, ever reaching,
down to ocean's shore forever,
down to end and all fulfilled.
To say that marriage is a life-partnership is like saying that military service is a bit of adventure -- not exactly wrong, but not particularly insightful.
Sexual customs are often like jungle palaces beginning to rot.
It was three in the afternoon on Friday. In the distance, the bell of Our Lady of Shadows rang out one long, low tone.
I wished you well
by the wishing well;
it was an age and a half ago.
A wish cannot save
and your lonely grave
is draped in the fallen snow.
at times a man must whisper,
or else he blows away
the fundamental need for states of defeasible but presumptive consent
anti-natalism and the problem of evil for consequentialist atheists
half-belief as (a) belief with cautions versus as (b) nonbelief with inclinations
Halfheartedness cannot be a mere deficiency in motivation,b ecaus enot all deficiencies in motivation are halfhearted. Halfheartedness seems to require a deficiency in consent.
Belief by its nature is something that can be shared.
While belief does not come in degrees, its role in decision does, and almost all that is salvageable from the literature on the rationality of belief is due to the latter.
Rights only exist within a hierarchy capable of structuring them.
Prior probabilities should always only be set by a method of inquiry.
Note that Hilary in his commentary on Mt. 8 links justification to absolution (remission of sins): the Law cannot justify because it cannot itself absolve; faith can absolve sins. The reason is that God alone absolves, and in faith the Word of God abides in us so that our sins may be absolved.
Note that at Jericho and Ai, some non-Israelites are saved and some Israelites are condemned; the distinction between Israelite and Canaanite is not the locus of condemnation.
the lunar movement of myth, the solar movement of rational account
Our confidence with respect to a belief presupposes the belief and does not constitute it.
arguments from evil involving direct attribution (God would be author of evil) vs those that are indirect (the evil outweighs the good)
- the latter // antinatalist arguments
PSR denial is a denial that everything is either necessary or made possible; it is the claim that there are things not necessary that are not made possible by anything.
science fiction & Margaret Cavendish's three elements: romancical, philosophical, fantastical
It is remarkable how often in religious contexts 'being welcoming is in fact just an excuse for not going out to people.
We infer that arguments are valid directly from their logical structures, not by mediation of propositions.
In mercy, something good is always sacrificed for something better. There is no mercy without such a sacrifice.
Experiments are optimally described in four-cause terms: What materials are used? How are they given experimental form, and for what end? Who organizes these materials by that form for that end?
John Case: A polity is ineffectual without virtue, as seen in
(a) matter
:::: (1) of which it consists: multitude of men united by rule of virtue
:::: (2) about which it revolves: introduction of virtue in accordance with laws
(b) form: prudent administration involving justice
(c) efficient
:::: (1) remote: God, to whom virtue is referred
:::: (2) proximate: nature with virtue's bond
(d) end
:::: (1) external: peace, honor, and prosperity due to virtue
:::: (2) internal: happiness and peace arising from virtue
Plausibility seems always relative to a universe of discourse.
fine-tuning problems for physics, ethics, epistemology, and semantics (Pruss)
postmodern-ism vs post-modernism
A philosophical movement, to endure, must adapt while cohering together; thus philosophical movements vanish by either stagnating or simplifying into an inability to adapt or else by either diffusing or factionalizing into an inability to cohere.
face-structures // phonemes
Good writing should be as polytropic as Odysseus, traveling widely, figuring cleverly.
To live in the body is to live in a symbol.
Pallavicino's topics of inductive reasoning (see Knebel) and Hume's rules by which to judge of cause and effect
co-redemptrix principle (Frangipane): Mary merits congruously what Christ merits condignly.
Christ merits for us in Himself and through His Mother.
"...it is easy to say whatever you want, if you say it without arguments." Thomas Compton Carlton
Le Grand's three unions
mind-mind: love
body-body: local presence
mind-body: mutually dependent action
topics: dialectical enthymeme
rhetoric: rhetorical enthymeme
poetics: metaphor
A people without heroes cannot easily be free.
Charity orders the acquired virtues by means of the infused virtues.
On Mount Carmel
Today is the feast of St. Juan de Yepes y Álvarez, better known in English as St. John of the Cross, Doctor of the Church. St. John was a Carmelite who, not quite satisfied with the Order, considered becoming a Carthusian -- until one fateful day he met St. Teresa of Ávila, who was trying to get support for Carmelite convents based on the original rather than the modified and mitigated rule that the Carmelites had come to follow; she was just started her second, and it was in the course of doing this that she happened by chance to meet St. John, who just happened by chance to have taken a trip to the town in which she was doing it. It shows what a chance meeting between saints can do. St. John was taken with the idea and after studying how it worked, founded the first monastery in St. Teresa's reform, and the Discalced Carmelites began to grow at a rapid pace from there. It would be a rocky road -- St. Teresa had to face the Inquisition and St. John was arrested several times, due to the instigations of Carmelites who were opposed to the reforms. But they survived all the trials and did not stop. St. John died of infection on December 14, 1591.
From St. John's Ascent of Mount Carmel (Book I, Chapter IV):
St. Edith Stein on reading St. John of the Cross:
[Edith Stein, Self Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Koeppel, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 1993) Letter 311 (to Sr. Agnella Stadtmüller), p. 318.]
From St. John's Ascent of Mount Carmel (Book I, Chapter IV):
All the wisdom of the world and all human ability, compared with the infinite wisdom of God, are pure and supreme ignorance, even as Saint Paul writes ad Corinthios, saying: Sapientia hujus mundi stultitia est apud Deum. ‘The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.’ Wherefore any soul that makes account of all its knowledge and ability in order to come to union with the wisdom of God is supremely ignorant in the eyes of God and will remain far removed from that wisdom; for ignorance knows not what wisdom is, even as Saint Paul says that this wisdom seems foolishness to God; since, in the eyes of God, those who consider themselves to be persons with a certain amount of knowledge are very ignorant, so that the Apostle, writing to the Romans, says of them: Dicentes enim se esse sapientes, stulti facti sunt. That is: Professing themselves to be wise, they became foolish. And those alone acquire wisdom of God who are like ignorant children, and, laying aside their knowledge, walk in His service with love. This manner of wisdom Saint Paul taught likewise ad Corinthios: Si quis videtur inter vos sapiens esse in hoc soeculo, stultus fiat ut sit sapiens. Sapientia enim hujus mundi stultitia est apud Deum. That is: If any man among you seem to be wise, let him become ignorant that he may be wise; for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. So that, in order to come to union with the wisdom of God, the soul has to proceed rather by unknowing than by knowing; and all the dominion and liberty of the world, compared with the liberty and dominion of the Spirit of God, is the most abject slavery, affliction and captivity.
St. Edith Stein on reading St. John of the Cross:
"Pure love" for our holy Father John of the Cross means loving God for his own sake, with a heart that is free form all attachment to anything created: to itself and to other creatures, but also to all consolations and the like which God can grant the soul, to all particular forms of devotion, etc.; with a heart that wants nothing more than that God's will be done, that allows itself to be led by God without any resistance. What one can do oneself to attain this goal is treated in detail in the Ascent of Mount Carmel. How God purifies the soul, in the Dark Night. The result, in the Living Flame and the Spiritual Canticle. (Basically, the whole way is to be found in each of the volumes, but each time one or the other of the stages is predominant.)
[Edith Stein, Self Portrait in Letters, 1916-1942, Koeppel, tr., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 1993) Letter 311 (to Sr. Agnella Stadtmüller), p. 318.]
Thursday, December 13, 2018
The World's Whole Sap Is Sunk
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day
by John Donne
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.
But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.
But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night's festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's, and the day's deep midnight is.
St. Lucy's Day, which is today, is a fair way from the shortest day of the year in the Gregorian calendar, but in the Julian calendar it was always around the Winter Solstice. Because of St. Lucy's name, her feast was always a feast of light amid the winter darkness. In modern times Christmas, which exerts an irresistible gravitational attraction on celebrations in its vicinity, has assimilated some of St. Lucy's celebratory customs just as it has assimilated customs associated with St. Nicholas, Advent, St. Stephen, and Epiphany, but St. Lucy's Day is still quite important in its own right in Scandinavia, among both Catholics and Lutherans.
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Violence and Respect
What is the exact linguistic opposite of the word "violence" if not "respect"? And everybody knows what a large role "respect" plays in the two most important works of moral philosophy of the modern age, Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Rosmini's Principles of Ethics. Do we need to recall that according to Kant respect is a very special sentiment, because on the one hand it is awareness of our subordination to the absolute authority of the law, and on the other it is awareness of our participation in the absolute value of the law, and therefore it is what makes us recognize our own dignity? Thus, we can say that respect for the law prevents my will from becoming an absolute, and respect for the other person prevents my action from becoming violent. Likewise, do we need to recall the first principle of Rosmini's ethics, which is respect for the order of being?
Augusto Del Noce, "Violence and Modern Gnosticism", The Crisis of Modernity, Lancellotti, ed. & tr. McGill-Queen's University Press (Chicago: 2014) pp. 26-27.
Monday, December 10, 2018
Res and Aliquid
Being (ens in Latin) is a transcendental, not confinable to any single category, and a common tradition takes there to be five primary transcendental attributes of being that apply to every being in some way. The medievals used the mnemonic reubau to capture them all: res, ens, unum, bonum, aliquid, verum. (If you wanted an English mnemonic to remember the Latin words, you could use bureau instead.) Ens, of course, is being, unum is one, bonum is good, and verum is true. The usual translations for res and aliquid are 'thing' and 'something', respectively, which is how we would usually translate them in other contexts. But in this context, this is probably wrong.
Take Aquinas's account of the six. Being (ens) is first and most fundamental. We can then add the other attributes by considering being absolutely or in relation to another. Good (bonum) and true (verum) are being relative to another, good as being relative to desiring and true as being relative to knowing. These are both, however, based on correspondence -- desiring and knowing are acts that can in principle cover any kind of being. There is a different way in which being can be considered relative to another, and that is by being distinguished from another. This is aliquid, which Aquinas (and most other medieval scholastics) relates to aliud quid, more or less 'another what', i.e., something that is other than what something else is. Note that it's quite important that aliquid convey the notion of distinction or otherness, and that aliquid be related to aliud. Quite clearly neither of these are captured by 'something' as a translation. Something is aliquid insofar as it is distinct from something else.
If we take being absolutely, in itself, we can do so affirmatively or negatively. If we take it negatively, we get one (unum), that is being undivided. Res is what we get when we take being in itself affirmatively, that is, in terms of its positive content. Aquinas follows Avicenna in taking this transcendental to capture the essence or quiddity (whatness) of being. When res is a transcendental attribute of being, it is supposed to capture the quidditas, the whatness, of a thing. Now, the English word 'thing' is very flexible, which is why it's able to keep up with the very flexible res, but it does not capture the essential element here, which is the notion of positive content. And whenever you look at important uses of res in Latin, they always convey something more robust than the English word 'thing' can convey. 'Thing' captures the generality, but not the suggestion of content, the idea that we are talking about something, however generally, in a way that emphasizes what it is. Res publica is not so bland and vague as 'the public thing' makes it sound; it indicates the very content that is public, the substantively public, which is why you need something like 'the common weal' to capture it. The title of the encyclical, Rerum novarum, could be translated as 'of new things', but this anemic translation does not convey the point. It indicates the very substance of things being innovated; the correct translation of the encyclical is more like "Of Revolution(s)" or "Of Upheavals". (The first words of the encyclical, from which the title comes, are Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, which I would crudely translate as something like 'the now-stimulated craving for upheavals'.) Not just 'new things' but substantive novelties. And so it is with other things. Res emphasizes the very character or nature that makes it whatever it is. 'Thing', while general enough, is so general as to lose this, the key element that makes res an important concept.
Obviously we have in English no exact correspondence to res and to aliquid. But I would suggest that we would at least get closer if we translated, in discussion of transcendentals, aliquid as 'another', and res, not aliquid, as 'something'. 'Another' has the connection to otherness that aliquid has. And 'something', through the 'some', comes closer to capturing a positive notion of content. ('Substance', in the broad sense, would work better in some ways, but obviously it's always already being used in a narrower sense in these discussions from something that is not transcendental.) Possibly there are better translations, but it's certainly the case that 'thing' for res and 'something' for aliquid don't really cut it.
Take Aquinas's account of the six. Being (ens) is first and most fundamental. We can then add the other attributes by considering being absolutely or in relation to another. Good (bonum) and true (verum) are being relative to another, good as being relative to desiring and true as being relative to knowing. These are both, however, based on correspondence -- desiring and knowing are acts that can in principle cover any kind of being. There is a different way in which being can be considered relative to another, and that is by being distinguished from another. This is aliquid, which Aquinas (and most other medieval scholastics) relates to aliud quid, more or less 'another what', i.e., something that is other than what something else is. Note that it's quite important that aliquid convey the notion of distinction or otherness, and that aliquid be related to aliud. Quite clearly neither of these are captured by 'something' as a translation. Something is aliquid insofar as it is distinct from something else.
If we take being absolutely, in itself, we can do so affirmatively or negatively. If we take it negatively, we get one (unum), that is being undivided. Res is what we get when we take being in itself affirmatively, that is, in terms of its positive content. Aquinas follows Avicenna in taking this transcendental to capture the essence or quiddity (whatness) of being. When res is a transcendental attribute of being, it is supposed to capture the quidditas, the whatness, of a thing. Now, the English word 'thing' is very flexible, which is why it's able to keep up with the very flexible res, but it does not capture the essential element here, which is the notion of positive content. And whenever you look at important uses of res in Latin, they always convey something more robust than the English word 'thing' can convey. 'Thing' captures the generality, but not the suggestion of content, the idea that we are talking about something, however generally, in a way that emphasizes what it is. Res publica is not so bland and vague as 'the public thing' makes it sound; it indicates the very content that is public, the substantively public, which is why you need something like 'the common weal' to capture it. The title of the encyclical, Rerum novarum, could be translated as 'of new things', but this anemic translation does not convey the point. It indicates the very substance of things being innovated; the correct translation of the encyclical is more like "Of Revolution(s)" or "Of Upheavals". (The first words of the encyclical, from which the title comes, are Rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine, which I would crudely translate as something like 'the now-stimulated craving for upheavals'.) Not just 'new things' but substantive novelties. And so it is with other things. Res emphasizes the very character or nature that makes it whatever it is. 'Thing', while general enough, is so general as to lose this, the key element that makes res an important concept.
Obviously we have in English no exact correspondence to res and to aliquid. But I would suggest that we would at least get closer if we translated, in discussion of transcendentals, aliquid as 'another', and res, not aliquid, as 'something'. 'Another' has the connection to otherness that aliquid has. And 'something', through the 'some', comes closer to capturing a positive notion of content. ('Substance', in the broad sense, would work better in some ways, but obviously it's always already being used in a narrower sense in these discussions from something that is not transcendental.) Possibly there are better translations, but it's certainly the case that 'thing' for res and 'something' for aliquid don't really cut it.
Sunday, December 09, 2018
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century; (with Michel Verne) The Lighthouse at the End of the World
Introduction
Opening Passages: From Paris in the Twentieth Century:
From The Lighthouse at the End of the World:
Summary: It is always dangerous to treat novels as reflecting their author's lives, particularly when the novelist is as imaginative as Jules Verne. However, in understanding Paris in the Twentieth Century, it is perhaps relevant to know that while Jules Verne wanted to write plays, his father pressured him heavily to become a lawyer, and while he was a law student, the woman he wanted to marry was married off by her family to a wealthy landowner because her family did not think it acceptable for a young woman to marry a young student without a significant income. When Verne began collaborating with the younger Dumas, he began to pursue a literary rather than a legal career, against his father's protests. However, when he began again to consider marriage, he recognized that he would need a steadier income, and became a stock broker. He was competent enough at it, and the job got him his marriage -- but he continued to aim for his literary career. Verne knew very well the difficulty of literary ambitions in a society obsessed with practicality and profit.
Michel Dufrénoy, sixteen years old, gets a degree in Classics, and everyone thinks him a fool for it, because what can you do with Latin composition? After his graduation, Michel's uncle tells him that he must have a practical job, and gets him a position as a clerk in a banking company, where he can work his way up. Unfortunately, Michel is hopelessly impractical and turns out to have no skills useful for any clerical tasks, until he is finally assigned to The Ledger. It is exactly what the name suggests: a huge ledger in which the company's financial statement is displayed to the world in gorgeous calligraphic style; Michel will be dictating for the calligrapher, Quinsonnas, an artist of thirty years old who, like Michel, has difficulty fitting in because of his artistic ambitions. They are both barely holding on in a society that sees no value except monetary value. Michel falls in love with a girl, Lucy, and Quinsonnas sourly tells him that there are no women anymore, just female careerists; unfortunately, Quinsonnas gets so caught up in his diatribe that he spills ink on The Ledger, and just like that, the last job that either could have is gone. Michel becomes a starving artist, writing his book of poetry, which is then rejected by every publisher in Paris. And then a winter comes that is so cold that there are food shortages everywhere, and little hope becomes no hope.
The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is a city of wonders. There are electric lights everywhere, trains that run on magnets and compressed air, synthetic food, calculating machines, flexible and comfortable clothes woven out of metal, and more. However, it is also dominated by money above all other things. People have sometimes suggested that The Ledger is a sign of Verne's prophetic prowess having failed, but I think this is not true in the sense that is usually meant. Large and wealthy companies have always wasted money in gaudy and conspicuous things done primarily to impress; you have only to look at some of the more successful tech companies today to see similar things, and in the actual 1960s they were likely more brazen. If anything, the implausibility of The Ledger today is not in some company paying an artist to decorate a book in larger-than-life public view but in being that transparent about its finances. The company at which Michel works, being a monopoly in its own right, is very confident of its ability to turn a profit each day. But that just underlines the point, and makes The Ledger a memorable symbol. You learn a lot about a society from what it will devote its artistic resources to, whatever those resources might be; and what captures the attention even of Paris in the twentieth century, enough to inspire them to art, is a record of financial victories. Everything else -- including entertainment, as Michel tries, and fails, to write plays according to formula -- is industrialized; but The Ledger is alone treated as a thing of beauty and value in its own right.
Michel is over-the-top impractical; he fails at literally everything except Latin nobody cares about and poetry that will never sell. It's not surprising that Hetzel, Verne's publisher, found him exasperating and asked why he couldn't get a job delivering packages or something. But part of Verne's point, I take it, is that in a society that was more balanced, Michel would find at least some place; it's the ruthlessness of society's practicality that chases him away, its unwillingness to tolerate any inefficiency and its refusal to allow that there is anything more important than what is profitable. The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is indeed a city of wonders. But it is not a city that fulfills all of human potential, and none of those wonders prevent Michel's story from being a tragedy.
The Lighthouse at the End of the World, revised and published posthumously by Michel Verne shortly after Jules Verne's death, is a different sort of tale entirely. A new lighthouse has been built by the Argentine navy at the far south reaches of the South American continent, thus opening up passages and bays that previously were too dangerous for regular use. Vasquez, Moriz, and Felipe have been assigned as the first lighthouse keepers. Unbeknownst to them, however, the island on which the lighthouse has been built is also sheltering shipwrecked pirates who are trying to find a way to leave that does not result in their capture by the navy. Their plan involves the seizure of the lighthouse once the lighthouse keepers no longer have their naval support. They put out the light, leading to the shipwreck of the American ship, The Century, from which only one sailor survivors, John Davis. Together Vasquez and Davis will have to play a dangerous game of keeping the pirates from leaving before the Argentine dispatch ship returns with soldiers who can bring the pirates to justice. It makes a solid no-frills adventure story that lays the scene slowly in the first half so that it can be fast-paced in the second half.
Verne tends to draw on two sources for his literary effects -- the romance of geography and the romance of scientific frontiers. While both are present in both of these works to some extent, Paris is very much more focused on the scientific frontiers kind; the geography is basically just that of Paris and its environs, although it plays a substantial role at important points in the novel. Lighthouse is more focused on the geographical kind, although it does get into state-of-the-art (for the early 1900s) lighthouse technology. Likewise, Verne tends to make use of two kinds of story-interest: satire and adventure. Paris is definitely on the satire side and Lighthouse is definitely on the adventure side. Between them, these two works just outside of the ordinary Voyages Extraordinaires -- the first having been turned down for the series and the second a draft manuscript published only after Verne's death with his son's revisions -- do a good job of capturing the range of Verne's overall work.
Favorite Passages: From Paris:
From Lighthouse:
Recommendation: Recommended, both. Paris is very good if you like the more technological side of Verne, and Lighthouse is quite enjoyable if you like the more adventurous side.
*****
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, Howard, tr., Ballantine (New York: 1996).
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, Metcalfe, tr., Fredonia Books (Amsterdam: 2001).
Opening Passages: From Paris in the Twentieth Century:
On August 13, 1960, a portion of the Parisian populace headed for the many Métro stations from which various local trains would take them to what had once been the Champ-de-Mars. It was Prize Day at the Academic Credit Union, the vast institution of public education, and over this solemn ceremony His Excellency the Minister of Improvements of the City of Paris was to preside.
The Academic Credit Union and the age's industrial aims were in perfect harmony: what the previous century called Progress had undergone enormous developments. Monopoly, that ne plus ultra of perfection, held the entire country in its talons; unions were founded, organized, the unexpected results of their proliferation would certainly have amazed our fathers. (p. 3)
From The Lighthouse at the End of the World:
The sun was setting behind the hills which bounded the view to the west. The weather was fine. On the other side, over the sea, which to the north-east and east was indistinguishable from the sky, a few tiny clouds reflected the sun's last rays, soon to be extinguished in the shades of the twilight, which lasts for a considerable time in this high latitude of the fifty-fifth degree of the southern hemisphere. (p. 1)
Summary: It is always dangerous to treat novels as reflecting their author's lives, particularly when the novelist is as imaginative as Jules Verne. However, in understanding Paris in the Twentieth Century, it is perhaps relevant to know that while Jules Verne wanted to write plays, his father pressured him heavily to become a lawyer, and while he was a law student, the woman he wanted to marry was married off by her family to a wealthy landowner because her family did not think it acceptable for a young woman to marry a young student without a significant income. When Verne began collaborating with the younger Dumas, he began to pursue a literary rather than a legal career, against his father's protests. However, when he began again to consider marriage, he recognized that he would need a steadier income, and became a stock broker. He was competent enough at it, and the job got him his marriage -- but he continued to aim for his literary career. Verne knew very well the difficulty of literary ambitions in a society obsessed with practicality and profit.
Michel Dufrénoy, sixteen years old, gets a degree in Classics, and everyone thinks him a fool for it, because what can you do with Latin composition? After his graduation, Michel's uncle tells him that he must have a practical job, and gets him a position as a clerk in a banking company, where he can work his way up. Unfortunately, Michel is hopelessly impractical and turns out to have no skills useful for any clerical tasks, until he is finally assigned to The Ledger. It is exactly what the name suggests: a huge ledger in which the company's financial statement is displayed to the world in gorgeous calligraphic style; Michel will be dictating for the calligrapher, Quinsonnas, an artist of thirty years old who, like Michel, has difficulty fitting in because of his artistic ambitions. They are both barely holding on in a society that sees no value except monetary value. Michel falls in love with a girl, Lucy, and Quinsonnas sourly tells him that there are no women anymore, just female careerists; unfortunately, Quinsonnas gets so caught up in his diatribe that he spills ink on The Ledger, and just like that, the last job that either could have is gone. Michel becomes a starving artist, writing his book of poetry, which is then rejected by every publisher in Paris. And then a winter comes that is so cold that there are food shortages everywhere, and little hope becomes no hope.
The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is a city of wonders. There are electric lights everywhere, trains that run on magnets and compressed air, synthetic food, calculating machines, flexible and comfortable clothes woven out of metal, and more. However, it is also dominated by money above all other things. People have sometimes suggested that The Ledger is a sign of Verne's prophetic prowess having failed, but I think this is not true in the sense that is usually meant. Large and wealthy companies have always wasted money in gaudy and conspicuous things done primarily to impress; you have only to look at some of the more successful tech companies today to see similar things, and in the actual 1960s they were likely more brazen. If anything, the implausibility of The Ledger today is not in some company paying an artist to decorate a book in larger-than-life public view but in being that transparent about its finances. The company at which Michel works, being a monopoly in its own right, is very confident of its ability to turn a profit each day. But that just underlines the point, and makes The Ledger a memorable symbol. You learn a lot about a society from what it will devote its artistic resources to, whatever those resources might be; and what captures the attention even of Paris in the twentieth century, enough to inspire them to art, is a record of financial victories. Everything else -- including entertainment, as Michel tries, and fails, to write plays according to formula -- is industrialized; but The Ledger is alone treated as a thing of beauty and value in its own right.
Michel is over-the-top impractical; he fails at literally everything except Latin nobody cares about and poetry that will never sell. It's not surprising that Hetzel, Verne's publisher, found him exasperating and asked why he couldn't get a job delivering packages or something. But part of Verne's point, I take it, is that in a society that was more balanced, Michel would find at least some place; it's the ruthlessness of society's practicality that chases him away, its unwillingness to tolerate any inefficiency and its refusal to allow that there is anything more important than what is profitable. The Paris in which Michel Dufrénoy lives is indeed a city of wonders. But it is not a city that fulfills all of human potential, and none of those wonders prevent Michel's story from being a tragedy.
The Lighthouse at the End of the World, revised and published posthumously by Michel Verne shortly after Jules Verne's death, is a different sort of tale entirely. A new lighthouse has been built by the Argentine navy at the far south reaches of the South American continent, thus opening up passages and bays that previously were too dangerous for regular use. Vasquez, Moriz, and Felipe have been assigned as the first lighthouse keepers. Unbeknownst to them, however, the island on which the lighthouse has been built is also sheltering shipwrecked pirates who are trying to find a way to leave that does not result in their capture by the navy. Their plan involves the seizure of the lighthouse once the lighthouse keepers no longer have their naval support. They put out the light, leading to the shipwreck of the American ship, The Century, from which only one sailor survivors, John Davis. Together Vasquez and Davis will have to play a dangerous game of keeping the pirates from leaving before the Argentine dispatch ship returns with soldiers who can bring the pirates to justice. It makes a solid no-frills adventure story that lays the scene slowly in the first half so that it can be fast-paced in the second half.
Verne tends to draw on two sources for his literary effects -- the romance of geography and the romance of scientific frontiers. While both are present in both of these works to some extent, Paris is very much more focused on the scientific frontiers kind; the geography is basically just that of Paris and its environs, although it plays a substantial role at important points in the novel. Lighthouse is more focused on the geographical kind, although it does get into state-of-the-art (for the early 1900s) lighthouse technology. Likewise, Verne tends to make use of two kinds of story-interest: satire and adventure. Paris is definitely on the satire side and Lighthouse is definitely on the adventure side. Between them, these two works just outside of the ordinary Voyages Extraordinaires -- the first having been turned down for the series and the second a draft manuscript published only after Verne's death with his son's revisions -- do a good job of capturing the range of Verne's overall work.
Favorite Passages: From Paris:
"If I were absolutely free, Uncle," the young man replied, "I'd like to put into practice that definition of happiness I once read somewhere, and which involves four conditions."
"And what, without being too inquisitive, might they be?" asked Quinsonnas.
"Life in the open air," answered Michel, "the love of a woman, detachment from all ambition, and the creation of a new form of beauty."
"Well then!" exclaimed the pianist with a laugh, Michel's already achieved half his program."
"How's that?" asked Uncle Huguenin.
""Life in the open air--he's already been thrown onto the street!" (pp. 162-163)
From Lighthouse:
Without a moment's hesitation Vasquez left the watch room and hurried down the staircase into the quarters of the ground floor.
There was not a second to lose. Already the sound of the boat sheering off from the schooner to bring some of the crew ashore could be heard.
Vasquez seized a couple of revolvers, which he slipped into his belt, crammed a few provisions into a bag, which he threw over his shoulder. He then came out of the quarters and ran rapidly down the slope of the enclosure, to disappear into the darkness undetected. (p. 95)
Recommendation: Recommended, both. Paris is very good if you like the more technological side of Verne, and Lighthouse is quite enjoyable if you like the more adventurous side.
*****
Jules Verne, Paris in the Twentieth Century, Howard, tr., Ballantine (New York: 1996).
Jules Verne, The Lighthouse at the End of the World, Metcalfe, tr., Fredonia Books (Amsterdam: 2001).
Friday, December 07, 2018
Music on My Mind
Peter Hollens ft. The Hound + The Fox, "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen".
Currently crushed under a mix of grading and not feeling well; there are things in the pipeline, but things may also be slow around here a bit.
Roman of Romans
Today is the feast of St. Ambrose of Milan, Doctor of the Church. He is unusual in having been baptized, confirmed, ordained, and consecrated a bishop all in the same week. The most Roman of the Church Fathers had been an imperial administrator in Milan. He was Christian, but still a catechumen, when Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan (Mediolanum), died. The Arian controversy was threatening to split Milan, so he went in person to the church to make sure that order was kept. He got up in front of everybody to give a speech about how it was important to keep the peace as a successor for Auxentius was chosen, and the crowd started shouting, "Ambrosius Episcopus!" Ambrose had to flee to a friend's house, but word had gotten back to Emperor Gratian about it and he, naturally assuming that Ambrose had actually had been chosen bishop, sent an official letter to Milan congratulating them on such an excellent choice. So he gave in and became bishop of the second most important see in the West. But Roman in his sense of duty, once he was in office, he gave away his wealth and threw himself with a will into learning everything about his role.
From his work De officiis ministrorum (Book II, Chapter IV):
From a letter to Ambrose by St. Basil the Great:
From his work De officiis ministrorum (Book II, Chapter IV):
There is, then, a blessedness even in pains and griefs. All which virtue with its sweetness checks and restrains, abounding as it does in natural resources for either soothing conscience or increasing grace. For Moses was blessed in no small degree when, surrounded by the Egyptians and shut in by the sea, he found by his merits a way for himself and the people to go through the waters. When was he ever braver than at the moment when, surrounded by the greatest dangers, he gave not up the hope of safety, but besought a triumph?
What of Aaron? When did he ever think himself more blessed than when he stood between the living and the dead, and by his presence stayed death from passing from the bodies of the dead to the lines of the living? What shall I say of the youth Daniel, who was so wise that, when in the midst of the lions enraged with hunger, he was by no means overcome with terror at the fierceness of the beasts. So free from fear was he, that he could eat, and was not afraid he might by his example excite the animals to feed on him.
There is, then, in pain a virtue that can display the sweetness of a good conscience, and therefore it serves as a proof that pain does not lessen the pleasure of virtue. As, then, there is no loss of blessedness to virtue through pain, so also the pleasures of the body and the enjoyment that benefits give add nothing to it. On this the Apostle says well: “What things to me were gain, those I counted loss for Christ,” and he added: “Wherefore I count all things but loss, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”
From a letter to Ambrose by St. Basil the Great:
I have given glory to God, Who in every generation selects those who are well-pleasing to Him; Who of old indeed chose from the sheepfold a prince for His people; Who through the Spirit gifted Amos the herdman with power and raised him up to be a prophet; Who now has drawn forth for the care of Christ’s flock a man from the imperial city, entrusted with the government of a whole nation, exalted in character, in lineage, in position, in eloquence, in all that this world admires. This same man has flung away all the advantages of the world, counting them all loss that he may gain Christ, and has taken in his hand the helm of the ship, great and famous for its faith in God, the Church of Christ. Come, then, O man of God; not from men have you received or been taught the Gospel of Christ; it is the Lord Himself who has transferred you from the judges of the earth to the throne of the Apostles; fight the good fight; heal the infirmity of the people, if any are infected by the disease of Arian madness; renew the ancient footprints of the Fathers.
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