Surnames and Academic Etiquette

David Benatar recently published an article in the Times Higher Education, of which a longer version was recently posted at "What's Wrong?":

Why do academics, in their professional writings, refer to their scholarly predecessors and one another by their surnames only? It may be tempting to answer that that is the convention – “everybody does it”. However, while that is a compelling explanation, it does not constitute a good justification.

Yet it seems that the practice does require a justification because, on the face of it, it appears impolite to refer to people in this way.

Of course, to most people it does not "on the face of it" appear impolite to do this; it's generally regarded as a polite act, which is why people do it. The whole argument is flawed because whether something is polite is in fact a matter of convention; if it's a genuine convention, it's not impolite to do it. If there's a further moral problem, there might be a reason to change the etiquette. But it's utterly, utterly absurd to say that some common practice appears to violate etiquette while refusing to listen to people who point out that, in fact, the etiquette currently involves an expectation of, by and large, engaging in that practice. If everybody does it, it's not rude to do it -- it may be any number of other things, but it is not impolite.

He goes on to say:

Of course there are contexts in which people do address one another in precisely this fashion. The military, as well as traditional British public schools come to mind. However, while these are environments of formality (which explains the more respectful ways in which “superiors” are addressed in those contexts), they are also de-individualising and harsh cultures. They are thus not the touchstone of politeness.

Whether anyone thinks the lives of an entire segment of the population is "de-individualising and harsh" is, of course, utterly irrelevant to whether something is polite and courteous in an entirely different domain. Courtesies are not something any one person can arbitrarily dictate to other people; they are something we are doing together, and thus they are culture-relative. The culture within which you are operating matters. Academia is a culture in which the expectation for politeness is that you will, by and large, refer to living people by last name in formal writing, and in informal writing where reputational or professional concerns are relevant. Using first names in a journal article, for instance, will often be read as patronizing or condescending. Using professional titles in such a case is usually acceptable, but in most situations not regarded as necessary for showing professional respect, and contrary to the argument given at the link, people do often find a consistent use of titles distracting, as overformalizing the discussion; you would usually only do it when you had reason to emphasize their credentials explicitly. Something like that is the usual practice, although people are not usually bothered by occasional deviations and different contexts may allow wider and more common deviations; but, regardless of what is usual, the usual practice is the standard by which we assess whether something is too informal or overly formal.

It was just last year that I discussed a fairly widely shared post that insisted that Princess Elisabeth should be referred to by her last name because referring to her by her first name was disrespectful, and that referring to her by her title made it sound like she wasn't a real philosopher; as I noted then, neither was true of actual practice, and making these things a general rule for historical figures would be insufficiently flexible. Some philosophers have a tendency, one fears, to try to universalize their private preferences; here we have two people universalizing their preferences in different directions, and both absurdly. What we learn from the article is that David Benatar has an opinion, and not really anything more; what we learn from the usual practice is that most people do not in fact share that opinion. And it is frankly a bit arrogant for him to think that everyone does. I'm from an area of the U.S., for instance, in which his preferred practices, using someone's first and last name, or their title and their last name, in a context in which you are criticizing them often sounds like you regard yourself as having a right to reprimand them -- the former is what parents do when their children are in trouble and what teachers do when students misbehave, and the latter is what you do when regard yourself as having the right to rebuke someone over whom you don't have authority. (It's not usually a problem where there's no criticism at all, although it will sometimes sound stilted.) If there are situations where it's obviously the custom, that custom overrides in those situations. On an individual basis, you can come to a mutually accepted result, and people will usually try to accommodate revealed preferences if they aren't too troublesome to accommodate. And, of course, different customs prevail elsewhere. Probably no one would have a problem with David Benatar doing it if they knew why, regardless of their usual way of doing things. But it's not an a priori truth that his preferred way of doing things is more polite than what other people actually do, and he doesn't really have the right just to assume that it is.

It's entirely right, of course, that we could do things differently. We could do things any number of ways differently. That's why no one is likely to be very bothered by Dr. Benatar's highly presumptuous way of arguing -- we could indeed do it his way, and one could very well be of his opinion that it would be a better way. But the possibility of having a different etiquette is not relevant to determining what the etiquette is. As I pointed out above, we may have reason to think that some other way of expressing courtesy and politeness would be better for some more fundamental moral reason, but if you want to know what's polite, you ask what people of good will usually in fact do, and when you know that, your question is answered. And if you feel that it is impolite, if you mean that literally and not as shorthand for simply saying that it would be regarded as impolite in a morally better system, you are provably wrong. If you want to know whether something is legal, you look at the code and precedent; if you want to know whether something is polite, you look at common rules of thumb and customs. It's a very serious error to confuse what's legal with what you think should be legal, and it's at least something of an error to confuse what's actually polite with what you would prefer to be counted as polite.

Whewell on Austen

I recently quoted a passage by Viriginia Woolf in which she mentions William Whewell's opinion of Jane Austen's Persuasion. I like finding nonstandard traces of philosophers I study, so I wondered if I could trace down the source, and I have (I was afraid it would be difficult, but it turned out to be quite easy). It's from A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew, J.E. Austen-Leigh; Chapter IX to be precise:

My brother-in-law, Sir Denis Le Marchant, has supplied me with the following anecdotes from his own recollections:

When I was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr Whewell, then a Fellow and afterwards Master of the College, often spoke to me with admiration of Miss Austen's novels. On one occasion I said that I had found Persuasion rather dull. He quite fired up in defence of it, insisting that it was the most beautiful of her works. This accomplished philosopher was deeply versed in works of fiction. I recollect his writing to me from Caernarvon, where he had the charge of some pupils, that he was weary of his stay, for he had read the circulating library twice through.

Poem Retrospective IV

Mahershalalhashbaz is, of course, the name of the (probably) second son of the prophet Isaiah:

Moreover the Lord said unto me, Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man's pen concerning Mahershalalhashbaz. And I took unto me faithful witnesses to record, Uriah the priest, and Zechariah the son of Jeberechiah. And I went unto the prophetess; and she conceived, and bare a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Mahershalalhashbaz. For before the child shall have knowledge to cry, My father, and my mother, the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria.

The name is a hendiadys: both the first half (mahershalal) and the second (hasbaz) indicate swift plunder. Mene mene tekel upharsin, of course, is the writing on the wall that Daniel interpreted for Belshazzar as meaning that Babylon was weighed and found wanting, and would be given to the Medes and Persians; each word has a double meaning -- numbered and finished, weighed and lacking, divided and Persian:

And this is the writing that was written, Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. This is the interpretation of the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

If I recall correctly, the image of the horse's hoof has its root in the prophet Nahum, where he talks about the fall of Nineveh.


Mahershalalhashbaz

An angel in heaven was flying
to and fro o'er all the earth;
an angel in loud voice crying,
"How many, O sons of men?"

In starlit skies, bright-shining,
Mars has wandered to work his will;
the wolves on the plain are howling,
carrion-vultures take their fill.

How many men are fallen, sons of men,
how many dead and dying
in great Ascalon and Tyre?
How many widows crying,
where blood flows down like water
from a horse's smashing hoof?

How many youths lie dead, O sons of men?
How many in graves unwed,
where roses grow, and poppies,
on bloody fields of war?
How many, O ye nations?
How many slip to darkness,
each face to be seen no more?
How many men are fallen, sons of men?

The formless hand its word has written;
mene, mene, tekel and parsin,
no longer is it hidden.
With fire you have shown it, sons of men,
branded it on the children's faces
as they laugh and as they play,
new names to them have given, sons of men:
"Quick pickings, easy prey".

An angel in heaven was soaring
o'er sea and all the earth,
an angel in heaven roaring,
"How many, O sons of men?"

Fortnightly Book, February 3

I decided I'd do the novels of Charles Williams this year; it won't be very difficult. I've already done Many Dimensions (1931), so that just leaves six novels, and I'll start off with War in Heaven (1930) and The Place of the Lion (1931).

Each of the novels has a gimmick. War in Heaven has the Holy Graal, as Williams spells it, which serves as the locus for a battle against good and evil, as a dark conspiracy discovers that the Graal has been hidden in an English village church. The Place of the Lion, which in college was one of my favorite books, uses the Platonic Ideas -- archetypal manifestations (Virtues and Angelicals are the terms he uses) of Ideas like Beauty, Subtlety, Strength, Mercy, and Knowledge, begin bleeding into the mundane world, and thus threaten it with destruction, because all things tend toward union with their archetype.

Poem Retrospective III

I've occasionally toyed with end-alliteration. It gives more options than rhyme usually does, but it's also rather difficult to make it sound natural while also making the alliteration genuinely significant for the effect of the poem. I think this is far and away my most successful attempt.


A Poem of St. Agnes

The little lambs on heaven's field
remind me of a girl who fought
against the darkness, for the fair,
whose heart was free from trembling fear,
who would not falter, did not fail,
but held her ground against the foe.
"I faithful stay to Spouse and Friend,
my Jesus; I am truly free
with him," she said, her voice not faint.
And then she bent her head, with faith
exposed her neck. The death-stroke fell.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Introduction

Opening Passage:

Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:
"ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALL.

"Walter Elliot, born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South Park, in the county of Gloucester, by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785; Anne, born August 9, 1787; a still-born son, November 5, 1789; Mary, born November 20, 1791."

Summary: There is a common error (I find it often in philosophical discussions of moral testimony, and elsewhere) that, if you just have the right moral understanding, you have all that you need in order to make moral decisions. This is certainly not true, and Persuasion is a good argument that it is not. Prudence needs material with which to work, and it deals with things that are sometimes so uncertain that the most prudent person in the world might nonetheless stand a chance of getting them wrong. When Anne is convinced by her friend Lady Russell to break off her engagement with Captain Wentworth, she does nothing wrong, and acts with a good moral understanding. The source of advice was one that was generally reliable. Further experience and thought will show it clearly, of course, to be the wrong decision. But Anne herself concludes that its being good or bad in this circumstance probably depended more on the outcome than the advice itself Persuasion is a work that faces squarely "the uncertainty of all human events and calculations", as Lady Russell calls it at one point. Advice that should have been good turns out to be bad, and vice versa. When new evidence appears, old appearances can be shown to have deceived. Some things are only obvious in hindsight. When dealing with people, including oneself, actual experience is irreplaceable. Sometimes the solution to a problem was there the whole time, and we were just sabotaging our ability to find it, without realizing it. Everybody needs a little luck sometimes. And there will be times when we cannot make the right decision at all without the right help from the right people at the right time. There is no avoiding these truths, no matter how prudent you are.

Cat noted in the comments that, in contrast with a work like Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion is a book of experience. It is certainly true that time is a constant theme in the work: we are all running out of time, and yet we all need time in order to understand ourselves, other people, and the world, which we must if we are not to have wasted all the time we have.

Of all the Austen heroines, Anne has generally been my least favorite; she has a sort of constant melancholy reflectiveness about her that I find a little wearying sometimes. And a remarkable amount of her thought throughout the story is devoted to reflecting on Captain Wentworth, which I also find wearying. I suppose I don't really have a taste for much exposure to the thoughts of a girl in love. Nonetheless, there is much that is admirable about her; her failings are minor and entirely human, but she is in a state of improvement throughout the whole novel. It is noticeable that her fortunes start to turn when she is distracted from her melancholy, and her reunion with Mrs. Smith -- very much not a melancholy person, despite having in many ways had an even worse life than Anne's not very good one -- seems to have done her a great deal of good in making her look at the world in a new way.

Persuasion often gets criticized for its 'unfinished' quality; it's very likely that Austen would have made substantive changes had she had more time. As is often the case, however, some of the criticisms are not really justified. There are no flat characters in the work. I've largely come to dismiss any criticism that talks about flat characters; such criticism is usually based on a narrow and arbitrary notion of how characterization works. I can see to some extent how one might think some of the characters in this work are 'flatter' than those in Austen's other works, but I think a great deal of this is due to the fact that we spend so much time in Anne's head, and see so much from Anne's perspective. We certainly have more limited information about many of the characters. But this is not the same as saying that they are not well-rounded. When we are talking about Jane Austen, we are talking about someone who can pack a lot of characterization into a few sentences, and she does not in any way fall down on this here.

Virginia Woolf has a more substantive and nuanced criticism of the work:

Let us take Persuasion, the last completed novel, and look by its light at the books she might have written had she lived. There is a peculiar beauty and a peculiar dullness in Persuasion. The dullness is that which so often marks the transition stage between two different periods. The writer is a little bored. She has grown too familiar with the ways of her world; she no longer notes them freshly. There is an asperity in her comedy which suggests that she has almost ceased to be amused by the vanities of a Sir Walter or the snobbery of a Miss Elliott. The satire is harsh, and the comedy crude. She is no longer so freshly aware of the amusements of daily life. Her mind is not altogether on her object. But, while we feel that Jane Austen has done this before, and done it better, we also feel that she is trying to do something which she has never yet attempted. There is a new element in Persuasion, the quality, perhaps, that made Dr. Whewell fire up and insist that it was “the most beautiful of her works”. She is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed.

Woolf might well be right that Austen is at an in-between stage with the book. I am immensely skeptical of the idea that this is because she is discovering "that hte world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed"; Woolf goes on to suggest that there is a "new sensibility to nature", for instance, while I think this is obviously an extension of previous picturesque interests that here interact more directly with broader Romantic topics. Austen may or may not be bored; the satire is certainly harsh, but the comedy is not in fact crude -- it is, if anything, considerably more ironic in character. Comparison with the sadly unfinished Sanditon suggests that Austen's satirical and comic interests were heading in a harsher direction, but there's nothing about the harshness that we have not in some way seen before. Woolf rightly notes that Austen is trusting in this work more to reflection than to dialogue, and private thought is always a harsher medium than conversation.

The most common criticisms of the work are the handling of the revelations about Mr. Elliott, which seems to come suddenly, by chance, and very indirectly. I cannot say that Austen would not have modified it in any respect had she had more opportunity, but there is in fact something fitting about the fact that Anne has to piece together the key conclusions by comparing indirect evidence with her own experience, and has to think through the matter critically (which she certainly does; the entire scene is an excellent example of good critical thinking). In many ways it shows Anne at her best, and shows how far she has come from the girl of nineteen who had to rely so heavily on the advice of others. One can complain about the fact that so much of this information comes to Anne by mere chance, but, as I have noted, a subtheme of the work is that even prudent people are sometimes at the mercy of chance. If there's anything to the criticism, I think it may just be the suddenness with which we discover everything. It's clear from the few things we know about Austen's late changes to the work that she had been reworking how Anne gets information about other things, so it can perhaps be argued that Austen still had some work to do in setting up, and then using, the big reveal about Mr. Elliott in a way that meshed with everything else.

I found this reading that I really enjoyed Charles Musgrave. Mary Musgrave on her own comes across as intolerable, but the Musgrave marriage actually seems to work because of Charles. It's probably true that a better wife would have improved Charles, as Lady Russell and Anne think, but there are certainly worse marriages. It's also remarkable how often things take a turn for the better just by Charles being his good-natured, uncurious, hunting-crazy self -- even though he himself is always oblivious to it. Whatever may be said about his failings, he doesn't make the world any worse, and he does make it at least a little better. There's something charming about that.

Favorite Passage:

"Oh! Charles, I declare it will be too abominable if you do, when you promised to go."

"No, I did not promise. I only smirked and bowed, and said the word 'happy.' There was no promise."

"But you must go, Charles. It would be unpardonable to fail. We were asked on purpose to be introduced. There was always such a great connexion between the Dalrymples and ourselves. Nothing ever happened on either side that was not announced immediately. We are quite near relations, you know; and Mr Elliot too, whom you ought so particularly to be acquainted with! Every attention is due to Mr Elliot. Consider, my father's heir: the future representative of the family."

"Don't talk to me about heirs and representatives," cried Charles. "I am not one of those who neglect the reigning power to bow to the rising sun. If I would not go for the sake of your father, I should think it scandalous to go for the sake of his heir. What is Mr Elliot to me?" The careless expression was life to Anne, who saw that Captain Wentworth was all attention, looking and listening with his whole soul; and that the last words brought his enquiring eyes from Charles to herself.

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, of course.

Balm-Bearing Bough

A Candlemas Dialogue
by Christina Rossetti

'Love brought Me down: and cannot love make thee
Carol for joy to Me?
Hear cheerful robin carol from his tree,
Who owes not half to Me
I won for thee.'

'Yea, Lord, I hear his carol's wordless voice;
And well may he rejoice
Who hath not heard of death's discordant noise.
So might I too rejoice
With such a voice.'

'True, thou hast compassed death: but hast not thou
The tree of life's own bough?
Am I not Life and Resurrection now?
My Cross, balm-bearing bough
For such as thou.'

'Ah me, Thy Cross! – but that seems far away;
Thy Cradle-song to-day
I too would raise and worship Thee and pray:
Not empty, Lord, to-day
Send me away.'

'If thou wilt not go empty, spend thy store;
And I will give thee more,
Yea, make thee ten times richer than before.
Give more and give yet more
Out of thy store.'

'Because Thou givest me Thyself, I will
Thy blessed word fulfil,
Give with both hands, and hoard by giving still:
Thy pleasure to fulfil,
And work Thy Will.'

Poem Retrospective II

A great many of my poems start during a walk. Unsurprisingly, this one started while walking at night; if I recall correctly, it was a bit damp and the slight fogginess to the air made the lights halo out, and so it started with the phrase, "cast like stars / their asterisks upon the night".

City Light and Darkness

Beneath the moon-sphere city lights
in foggy halos cast like stars
their asterisks upon the night
and make the concrete glow, and cars
in speed, unheeding moving scene
like blur upon the movie screen,
make motion, growling, headlights bright,
and slice their way through starlit night.

Beside the road, and unremarked,
a sidewalk-walker travels home,
with step on step through rushing dark
that he may shed his long-spent roam
like shoes on floors of well-lit rooms
and, reading, bunker from the gloom
until, now tired, a card to mark
his page, he thence to dreams embarks.

And weary now, with aching feet,
and all the world like to a dream,
I walk with steady march of beat
to final glimpse of homely gleam;
Of lights I see, what light can shine
upon my heart? They none are mine.
But yet I march without retreat
for window-shine and light most sweet.

Poem Retrospective I

I started putting up poems here, both those of others and drafts of my own, in part as a philosophical activity; I had become exasperated at the tendency of philosophers of language to say things that were obviously inconsistent with the existence and character of poetry, despite the fact that poetry is one of the most important and universal forms of real language use. By a sort of heterogony of ends, it has served other functions since, but it has been going on for quite a while now. All of my own poems are, as I sometimes say, drafts until I die, but there are a number of them that are probably fairly close to their final form. There is usually room for some tweaking here and there, and you can never really predict when you'll have an idea that transforms a poem significantly, but allowing for this, there are a few that probably are approaching where they should be. So I thought I'd take some stock of them this February, to see where I'm at with them, and I might as well put them up.

'Luthany' is a fictional country that was invented in The Mistress of Vision by Francis Thompson in order to write poems about.

Where is the land of Luthany,
Where is the tract of Elenore?
I am bound therefor.

Tolkien borrows it as an Elvish name for the island of Britain in his early Book of Lost Tales myths; his original idea was that it meant 'friendship', to signify friendship between Men and Elves. But, as words tended to do in Tolkien's work, it took on a life of his own, and became better known as a name in the Elvish form he made for it: Lúthien.

In Luthany the Shadows Fall

In Luthany the shadows fall
on ruins of deserted halls
that, great of beam, still rise on high,
that, strong of stone, yet stand and wait.
The earth may fade, the sun may die,
but Luthany will stand and wait.

In Luthany the birds yet trill
with song of lark and whippoorwill;
sad nightingales remember days
as mockingbirds recall the years
when merchants traveled Luthan ways;
but only birds recall those years.

Yet someday soon will woods awake,
the hopes undie and hearts unbreak;
and then the dreaming souls will rise
to wake the sleeping land with dance.
When lives again the thing that dies,
then you and I once more will dance.

Music on My Mind

Lauren O'Connell, "Heart of Gold". A Neil Young song, of course.

Evening Note for Wednesday, January 30

Thought for the Evening: Baptism of Desire

Boniface over the Christmas break recommended a number of works criticizing the notion of baptism of desire. Having looked them over, I'm afraid I was even less impressed than I was expecting to be. I'd have very little problem with these Feeneyite arguments except that in their eagerness to argue that they are orthodox, which they are perfectly free to do, they regularly overshoot and end up attacking what is in fact that standard Thomistic view of the matter, apparently under the delusion that Thomism is a newfangled liberal Modernist theology that is adulterating Church doctrine with a tendency toward universalism. The ultimate reason for it, of course, is that the Feeneyites themselves share more assumptions with the liberals they oppose than they generally realize. One sign of it: they, like the liberal theologians, regularly slip into talking about baptism of desire as if it weren't baptism, despite the fact that its being baptism is the entire point. The reason for this is that they share the modern Protestant-originated notion that you can only participate in something if you perfectly possess it; this is something that (for instance) Calvinists sometimes assumed in arguing against the Catholic conception of sacramental baptism; liberals hyperextend the idea and Feeneyites turn it on its head. But no Neoplatonist or Aristotelian can accept the assumption, and most major Catholic theologians prior to the Reformation are Neoplatonists or Aristotelians. In any case what I want to do is lay out what seems, as far as I can say, to be the basic, standard Thomistic position on baptism of desire, particularly focusing on the points that have generally been agreed among Thomists.

The Church Father who most explicitly affirms a form of baptism of desire is St. Ambrose in his eulogy for Valentinian. The Emperor Valentinian II had been a catechumen; he had arranged to be baptized by Ambrose, but was killed before that could happen. In the eulogy Ambrose consoles those who are distressed by the fact that he had not received baptism before death by arguing that just as catechumen-martyrs cease to be catechumens when they die due to their blood and piety, so someone like Valentinian can cease to be a catechumen at death due to his pious desire to be baptized, because the pious resolve to be baptized is the aspect of baptism that is entirely in our power. It's worth pointing out, because it is regularly missed by liberal theologians, that Ambrose does not say that catechumens can be saved, whether they are martyrs or not; his argument requires that their death be a form of baptism. In any case, probably due to the influence of Ambrose, the idea entered into the Gloss tradition that there were three kinds of baptism, baptism of water, baptism of blood, and baptism of repentance (later called baptism of desire), and thus it became a part of one of the standard theological sources in the medieval period, which is how it comes to Aquinas.

St. Thomas explicitly affirms the Gloss position in ST 3.66.11. Baptism of water, of course, is the primary form of baptism, but he takes both baptism of blood and baptism of repentance to be affirmed in Scripture explicitly (in Rev. 7:14 and Is. 4:4, respectively), and, based on a claim attributed to Cyprian, puts forward as an obvious example St. Dismas, the Penitent Thief. The thief, despite the fact that we have no indication that he ever received the baptism of water, and despite the fact that he is not a martyr, receives salvation; Christ tells him that that very day he will be with Christ in paradise.

Aquinas is very clear about a number of things. No one -- no one -- is saved without baptism in some sense; but sacramental baptism is not always required (cf. ST 3.68.2). Baptism of blood and baptism of repentance are baptism. Baptism of water is baptism in the full and primary sense; it is the form of baptism that gives a sacramental seal. Baptism of blood and penitential baptism are not sacraments; they are effects of that of which baptism of water is the sacramental sign, and thus they are indirect extensions of the efficacy found directly in the baptism of water.

The standard view of Thomistic theologians follows Aquinas, extending him in certain respects. Drawing from Aquinas's theology of baptism overall, one can identify a few essential elements of baptism: baptismal intention (usually called 'desire' in this context), water, Christ's blood, and the Holy Spirit. All of these are operative in all of the three kinds of baptism, they are just not operative in exactly the same way. They are most perfectly found in baptism of water, which is a direct sign of both the Passion of Christ and the Holy Spirit, and, of course, involves water. Baptism of blood and baptism of desire also involve these, but not so perfectly encapsulated; martyrs are united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, and therefore benefit from the water and blood that flowed from Christ's side through that union, and those who receive baptism of desire are even more imperfectly united to Christ's sacrifice on the Cross through their having the correct intention. St. Dismas continues to be the primary Thomistic example, but reflecting further on the subject, it becomes quite common to take at least many of the Old Testament saints to have been saved by a kind of baptism of desire. No one, remember, is saved without baptism; and it's a standard view that the patriarchs and prophets are saved by their anticipation of Christ, so it's natural to connect the two.

The standard Thomistic view becomes fully completed with Cajetan, who notes that if you take the standard Thomistic view of baptism of desire, then the standard arguments for infant baptism apparently also apply. Infant baptism, like adult baptism, requires baptismal intention; but the baptismal intention for infants is not proper but vicarious -- the parents and the Church have the intention for the infant. This would mean, though, that in cases where parents intend to baptize their infant, but the infant dies before baptism of water, the baptismal intention is there, and thus that such infants receive a kind of baptism of desire. This is what has usually come to be called baptism of vicarious desire; it is the idea that infants who die before baptism of water and (probably) those who are miscarried, whose parents nonetheless had the pious intent to baptize them, receive the grace of baptism in their death. Other infants, of course, go to limbo. Cajetan does note that there are a number of uncertainties here. As we move from water to blood to desire to vicarious desire, the kinds of questions that are raised are increasingly complex, so it's entirely possible that the Church might at some point make some correction to this position. However, Cajetan is exactly right that something like a baptism of vicarious desire is made highly probable by other Thomistic claims about baptism, and if the Church ever did issue a correction, it would likely require a massive revision of the entire Thomistic theology of the sacrament of baptism.

In any case, precisely because it is very probable given other Thomistic positions, it became a standard part of the Thomistic view of baptism. Because of the collapse of Thomism by the nineteenth century, systematic discussion of the topic was left in some disarray, and reviving systematic discussion of it has not been a major priority of the Thomistic revival since, probably because the number of Catholics who take a more restrictive view of baptism than the Thomistic one is at this point very, very small, so it's just not where Thomists are going to focus their limited resources. I would suggest -- fully admitting that there is room for variation and disagreement among Thomists due to the standing disarray of systematic discussion of the topic -- that the Thomistic picture is something like this:

Baptism of Water: baptism in its full and complete form, giving a sacramental character
-- with proper intention: adult sacramental baptism
-- with vicarious intention: infant sacramental baptism

Baptism of Blood: imperfectly reflects baptism of water as union with Christ's Passion
-- with proper intention: catechumens who are martyred for the faith, very likely Old Testament saints who were martyrs
-- with vicarious intention: probably the Holy Innocents, who may be the unique case (that the Holy Innocents are martyrs and saints is undeniable given the traditions of the Church, but vicarious intention in martyrdom is an extremely difficult theological topic, filled with uncertainties)

Baptism of Desire: imperfectly reflects baptism of water as penitential union with Christ through the Holy Spirit
-- with proper intention: St. Dismas, catechumens with intention to be baptized who die before they can be baptized, Old Testament saints who were not martyrs
-- with vicarious intention: infants who die before intended baptism, including (very probably) miscarried infants whose parents genuinely intended to baptize them

There is absolutely no reason why one should regard the Thomistic account as absolutely definitive; Thomists themselves have never regarded every part of the account as such. It might very well at some point need to be corrected, and even without that, there are certainly other views of baptism you could take. But any suggestion that the Thomistic account is unorthodox, short of the Church actually, formally correcting some aspect of it, is nonsense, and any suggestion that it involves any kind of implicit universalism is nonsense to the point of being gibberish. Despite the fact that you could have other interpretations, it's quite clearly based on the evidence of Scripture and the traditions of the Church. It's a perfectly legitimate position for Catholics to take, and, barring correction from the Church, I will defend to the end their right to take it. If others want to argue for a different position, there is certainly room for it; but it entirely stands or falls on the quality of the arguments, and the cogency of the assumptions on which they are based, and nothing else.

Various Links of Interest

* Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Religion -- an old one (from 1968), but very interesting.

* Susan Fowler, So You Want to Learn Physics, gives some suggestions of books to use for learning physics.

* John Irons translates Schiller's "Nänie".

* Thomas Pink, Suarez on Authority as Coercive Teacher

* MrD on Stopping the Outrage Cycle

* Franck Latty on Christine de Pizan and international law

* David H. Montgomery on what you would get if you merged North and South Dakota into a single state: Meet Megakota.

* Brian Kemple, The Continuity of Being: C.S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Synechism

* It is looking worrisomely like the Archdiocese of New York might shutdown St. Michael's Chapel over a financial dispute. Given that the little chapel is one of the historical treasures of the modern Russian Catholic Church, that would be a very grave loss.

* Derke Lowe notes that one of the longstanding mysteries of medicine, how exactly quinine works against malaria, may now be more or less solved: Quinine's Target.

* On the other side of scientific progress, Ed Yong notes that the nature of lichen may be more complicated than had long been thought.

* Eve Browning discusses Xenophon. Always good to see him get more attention; he is massively underappreciated.

* Sara L. Uckelman on the question of who Gaunilo was.

Currently Reading

Jane Austen, Persuasion
Plotinus, The Enneads
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics
Xiong Shili, New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness
James Blish & Norman L. Knight, A Torrent of Faces

'Bloom' in Austen's Persuasion

Chapter 1:

A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own), there could be nothing in them, now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem. He had never indulged much hope, he had now none, of ever reading her name in any other page of his favourite work.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost. It was so with Elizabeth, still the same handsome Miss Elliot that she had begun to be thirteen years ago, and Sir Walter might be excused, therefore, in forgetting her age, or, at least, be deemed only half a fool, for thinking himself and Elizabeth as blooming as ever, amidst the wreck of the good looks of everybody else; for he could plainly see how old all the rest of his family and acquaintance were growing. Anne haggard, Mary coarse, every face in the neighbourhood worsting, and the rapid increase of the crow's foot about Lady Russell's temples had long been a distress to him.

***

She [Elizabeth] had, while a very young girl, as soon as she had known him to be, in the event of her having no brother, the future baronet, meant to marry him, and her father had always meant that she should. He had not been known to them as a boy; but soon after Lady Elliot's death, Sir Walter had sought the acquaintance, and though his overtures had not been met with any warmth, he had persevered in seeking it, making allowance for the modest drawing-back of youth; and, in one of their spring excursions to London, when Elizabeth was in her first bloom, Mr Elliot had been forced into the introduction.

Chapter 4:

She was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing: indiscreet, improper, hardly capable of success, and not deserving it. But it was not a merely selfish caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not imagined herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given him up. The belief of being prudent, and self-denying, principally for his advantage, was her chief consolation, under the misery of a parting, a final parting; and every consolation was required, for she had to encounter all the additional pain of opinions, on his side, totally unconvinced and unbending, and of his feeling himself ill used by so forced a relinquishment. He had left the country in consequence.

A few months had seen the beginning and the end of their acquaintance; but not with a few months ended Anne's share of suffering from it. Her attachment and regrets had, for a long time, clouded every enjoyment of youth, and an early loss of bloom and spirits had been their lasting effect.

Chapter 5:

Though better endowed than the elder sister, Mary had not Anne's understanding nor temper. While well, and happy, and properly attended to, she had great good humour and excellent spirits; but any indisposition sunk her completely. She had no resources for solitude; and inheriting a considerable share of the Elliot self-importance, was very prone to add to every other distress that of fancying herself neglected and ill-used. In person, she was inferior to both sisters, and had, even in her bloom, only reached the dignity of being "a fine girl."

Chapter 7:

"Captain Wentworth is not very gallant by you, Anne, though he was so attentive to me. Henrietta asked him what he thought of you, when they went away, and he said, 'You were so altered he should not have known you again.'"

Mary had no feelings to make her respect her sister's in a common way, but she was perfectly unsuspicious of being inflicting any peculiar wound.

"Altered beyond his knowledge." Anne fully submitted, in silent, deep mortification. Doubtless it was so, and she could take no revenge, for he was not altered, or not for the worse. She had already acknowledged it to herself, and she could not think differently, let him think of her as he would. No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.

Chapter 12:

When they came to the steps, leading upwards from the beach, a gentleman, at the same moment preparing to come down, politely drew back, and stopped to give them way. They ascended and passed him; and as they passed, Anne's face caught his eye, and he looked at her with a degree of earnest admiration, which she could not be insensible of. She was looking remarkably well; her very regular, very pretty features, having the bloom and freshness of youth restored by the fine wind which had been blowing on her complexion, and by the animation of eye which it had also produced. It was evident that the gentleman, (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, "That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again."

Chapter 17:

The visit was paid, their acquaintance re-established, their interest in each other more than re-kindled. The first ten minutes had its awkwardness and its emotion. Twelve years were gone since they had parted, and each presented a somewhat different person from what the other had imagined. Twelve years had changed Anne from the blooming, silent, unformed girl of fifteen, to the elegant little woman of seven-and-twenty, with every beauty except bloom, and with manners as consciously right as they were invariably gentle; and twelve years had transformed the fine-looking, well-grown Miss Hamilton, in all the glow of health and confidence of superiority, into a poor, infirm, helpless widow, receiving the visit of her former protegee as a favour; but all that was uncomfortable in the meeting had soon passed away, and left only the interesting charm of remembering former partialities and talking over old times.

The lack of a bloom of youth plays a significant role in Persuasion, although it is not explicitly mentioned all that much. We learn from these mentions that it consists in complexion and liveliness of eye, that haggardness is opposite to it, that it is one of the beauties a woman may have (but it is definitely not the only one). This surface issue with Anne's loss of bloom serves as a contrast to Anne's character -- 'character' arguably being thematically the most important notion in the book.

'Bloom' is mentioned twice in Northanger Abbey (once of a man), once in Lady Susan (Lady Susan has kept her blooming complexion well into her thirties, and has it in greater degree than her daughter, which must make her something of a marvel), five times in Emma, three times in Sense and Sensibility (once of a man), once in Mansfield Park, and never, as far as I can see, in Pride and Prejudice.

The Tortured Bones of a Perished Race

Waste Land
by Madison Cawein

Briar and fennel and chincapin,
And rue and ragweed everywhere;
The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,
Or dead of an old despair,
Born of an ancient care.

The cricket's cry and the locust's whirr,
And the note of a bird's distress,
With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,
Clung to the loneliness
Like burrs to a trailing dress.

So sad the field, so waste the ground,
So curst with an old despair,
A woodchuck's burrow, a blind mole's mound,
And a chipmunk's stony lair,
Seemed more than it could bear.

So lonely, too, so more than sad,
So droning-lone with bees –
I wondered what more could Nature add
To the sum of its miseries . . .
And then – I saw the trees.

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose –
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They startled the mind's repose.

And a man stood there, as still as moss,
A lichen form that stared;
With an old blind hound that, at a loss,
Forever around him fared
With a snarling fang half bared.

I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again –
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn. . . .

Were they a part of the grim death there –
Ragweed, fennel, and rue?
Or forms of the mind, an old despair,
That there into semblance grew
Out of the grief I knew?

Aquinas on the Passion of Love

The following is a slightly revised version of a post from 2009..

You are struck by a vision, some exquisite example of beauty. Being struck, you are changed, this beautiful object introducing itself into your very disposition, so that you become, so to speak, adapted to it, so as to find satisfaction in it. You are pleased by it, and, being pleased by it, you desire it, and this desire seeks the joy and rest of its presence. Thus you have become caught up in a sort of circle: it has joined itself to you, by changing you; you are thereby driven to join yourself to it, that you may rejoice in it. You are set in motion by it, and this motion comes to rest only in that which started the motion in the first place.

Such is Thomas Aquinas's view of the passion of love. In this account, the experience of love consists in a series of changes induced in us, immutationes, the first of which, [1] complacentia, the taking pleasure in, or being pleased by, a thing, is what we most often refer to as 'love'. The beloved becomes, in a sense, a part of the lover. But this complacentia isn't the term of the change; it continues on to [2] desiderium, desire, the drive to union (of some sort) with what is loved, and the change involved in this desire continues until one finds a way to be united to what is loved, and rest in it. This rest is [3] gaudium, joy.

This is all on the supposition that everything else is equal, of course; any discussion of the changes involved in the passions has a mercurial and unstable subject. There are endless numbers of things that might intervene. But there is enough pattern to the chaos that each of these, the amor or complacentia, the desiderium, the gaudium, is a recognizable feature, as is the sense of coaptatio, adaptation to the beloved, the experience of being disposed in some way by the loved one to love the loved one.

There is much more to St. Thomas's account of the passion than this; his discussion of the effects of love is particularly interesting. Love, says Thomas, has four proximate effects: liquefactio, fruitio, languor, fervor. (1) In liquefactio our defenses are melted, our heart is softened. (2) To the extent the beloved is present to us, we have fruitio, enjoyment. To the extent the beloved is absent, (3) we have languor, sorrow or pining, and (4) fervor, the passion to possess. These effects are induced in us proportional to the severity of the immutatio. Beyond this there are other effects that may ensue: union, indwelling (dwelling upon the beloved in thought and in sympathy), zeal or jealousy (understood as the repulsing of what stands in love's way), ecstasy (in the sense of being somehow carried away, either elevated beyond or debased below our usual state of sanity), and the myriad acts of lovers.

All of this, of course, concerns the passion or sentiment of love; the acts of the virtue of love have many similarities to those of the passion, but also introduce a number of distinctive features of their own.

Angelic Doctor

This is a re-post from 2015.


Today is the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church! Here's Giovanni de Paolo's painting of St. Thomas Aquinas Confounding Averroes:



Here's a passage from De Regno 1.13, in which he lays out the seven essential goals of good government. (My translation.)

Thus taught by divine law, [the king] should set himself especially to study how the many subject to him may live well; which study is divided into the three parts: as the first is to institute a good life in the many subjects, the second to conserve what is instituted, and the third to move what is conserved forward to what is better [conservatam ad meliora promoveat].

And for good life for one man two things are required, one principally, which is acting according to virtue (for virtue is that by which one lives well), the other secondarily and as it were instrumentally, which is sufficiency of bodily goods, whose use is needed to act virtuously. But the unity of that man is caused by nature; while the unity of the many, which is called 'peace', is procured through the industry of the ruler. Therefore for the instituting of good life for the many three things are required. [1] First of all, that the many be established in the unity of peace. [2] Second, that the many united by this bond of peace be directed to acting well. For just as a man can do nothing well unless a unity of his parts is presupposed, so a multitude of men, lacking the unity of peace, by fighting among themselves are impeded from acting well. [3] Third, it requires that through the industry of the rulers there be present a sufficient abundance of things necessary for living well.

So when the good life by the duty of the king is established for the many, it follows that he must set himself to conserving it. But there are three things which do not allow public good to last, of which one arises by nature. The good of the many should not be instituted for only one time, but should in some way be perpetual. Yet men are mortal; they are not able to abide perpetually. Nor, while alive, are they always vigorous, because they are subject to many variations of human life, and thus men are not able to perform their duties equally throughout their whole lives. And another impediment to conserving the common good, proceeding from inside, consists in perversity of will, in that some either are lazy [sunt desides] in performing what the commonweal requires or, beyond this, are noxious to the peace of the multitude, in that by transgressing justice they disturb the peace of others. And the third impediment to conserving the commonweal is caused from outside, in that through the incursion of enemies the peace is dissolved and sometimes it happens that the kingdom or city is scattered.

Therefore to these three a triple charge is placed on the king. [4] First, that he prepare for the succession and substitution of those who fulfill diverse duties; just as through the divine government of corruptible things, which cannot abide forever, provision is made that through generation one should take the place of another, so that the integrity of the universe is conserved, so also is the study of the king to conserve the good of the many subject to him, in that he concerns himself attentively to fill with others places that are empty. [5] And second, by his laws and precepts, penalties and rewards, he should force [coerceat] men subject to him away from iniquity and induce them to virtuous works, taking God as example, who gives law to man, favoring those who observe it, repaying with penalty those who transgress it. [6] Third, a charge is laid on the king to restore safety against enemies to the many subject to him. There would be no use in eliminating internal dangers if one could not defend from external ones.

And then for the instituting of the good of the many there is a third thing belonging to the duty of a king, [7] that he attentively move it forward, which is done when, in each thing noted before, he studies to perfect it, correcting what is disordered, supplying what is missing, and doing better what he can.

Impulsive Grounds of Morality

Those who are for ever on the look-out for moral impurities in their actions tend to lose confidence in their ability to do good and moral actions. They convince themselves that they are too weak and that morality is beyond them. We must rather believe that rectitudo moralis can be a strong impulsive ground of our actions. The human soul is not altogether devoid of all impulsive grounds of pure morality. Let, for instance, some poor wretch come to us with his tale of sorrow and we are moved to pity and help him, though a written request from him would not have achieved the same result. Again, a traveller who sees people starving by the roadside and gives them alms is not actuated by any self-interest or considerations of honour: he is a stranger to them and to the place and will soon be miles away; he does it from the inner goodness of the action....We ought not, therefore, to be on the look-out for blemishes and weaknesses in the lives, for instance, of men such as Socrates. The practice is not only useless but harmful.

[Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Infield, tr., Hackett (Indianapolis: 1980), pp. 65-66.]

Kant's philosophy is often taught as if it were in a way inhuman and allowed no concession to human weakness; there is some truth to this, but it is also partly an artifact of looking at his account of the purity of moral law and not at his account of how he thinks human moral motivation works.

The point Kant makes about the moral harmfulness of trying to suss out the weaknesses, failings, and faults of morally admirable people is one that I have thought about quite a bit. There is a very dangerous tendency in certain strands of modern culture to try to deface the heroes of others; it is often an indirect way of trying to deface the people who regard them as heroes. It's one thing to insist on moral principle if someone is trying to hide a denial of it in the guise of someone admirable for something else, or if someone is putting forward someone as morally heroic for actions that are specifically themselves immoral; but this has to be done quite carefully because, as Kant will go on to say, fault-hunting when it comes to people regarded as excellent examples is often motivated by malice and envy, and not any genuine regard for moral principle. That a human being failed in some way is not an extraordinary revelation; that they excelled in some way may well be impressive regardless of their failing, and give an encouraging example to others who are trying to be morally good.

Two New Poem Drafts

If you didn't know about the moon last week: a Supermoon is a full moon at its closest approach to the earth, the Wolf Moon is the full moon in January, and a Blood Moon is a full lunar eclipse, because the moon turns red. It was quite a sight. For reasons that I cannot fathom, all the news reports called it "Super Blood Wolf Moon", which sounds like it was made up by an eight-year-old. It makes no sense; 'supermoon' is one word, so why would you split it?

Blood Wolf Supermoon

Quite bitter chill pervades the night,
biting deep; the silver light,
white with grace and vast to sight,
brightly beams -- but wolfish bite,
night's dark jaws, with vicious spite
light like blood will pour on white.


Everything Flows to the Sea

Rise up my darling, come dancing with me;
let the wave of your hair and your spirit float free;
I wish this sweet moment would evermore be,
but everything flows to the sea.

All is in motion and nothing is still,
nor can we stay it by power of will;
we cascade through life and tumble until
everything flows to the sea.

As the wind through the grass
will rejoice and then pass,
as the earth ever turns
and the wood swiftly burns,
as the day turns to night
and all dreams take to flight,
so everything flows to the sea.

Cast off your shoes and leap lightly along,
fill all your days with the splendor of song;
one day in darkness you'll join the great throng,
for everything flows to the sea.

Music on My Mind

The High Kings, "Red is the Rose".

Dashed Off II

A major difference between Greek and Roman mythology is that the Greeks were promiscuous tale-tellers, whose religion literally involved coming up with stories about the gods.

A constitutional concept cannot be merely abstract. (The closest one gets is preambular material in written constitutions, but even this has no significance except so far as it is embodied in the actual institutions and practices.)

"...there is but ONE law which can experience no change whatever; namely that similar qualities in union necessarily include similar results...." Lady Mary Shepherd

Note Shepherd's analogy between the cumulative force of miracles as evidence and the readiness to appear for establishing independent existence.

The case of testimony establishes that a weaker kind of evidence can 'destroy' a stronger kind, if the particular circumstances are appropriately right for it and not for the stronger kind of evidence.

(1) The memory is tenacious to a certain degree.
(2) Men commonly have an inclination to truth.
(3) Men are sensible of shame when detected in falsehood.

We cannot make sense of testimony without assuming an a priori connection between testimony and reality; testimony is intrinsically an 'image', even if falsified, of reality. What we learn by experience is ease and modes of falsification rather than the existence of the connection.

Hume's account of testimony takes lack of education *in itself* to be a strike against testimony. but this is not so for the actual appearance of the phenomena. An unschooled man can testify as well as a schooled one to what he honestly and truly saw.

Nobody needs to attribute undoubted integrity to a source to place them beyond all suspicion of a design to deceive; the reverse is true, but there is no equivalence.

That the apparent course of nature may be altered is clear from the history of the appearance of the course of nature.

Eloquence at its highest pitch is never purely a matter of fancy or the affections; this is to confuse it with entertainment.

All court systems have sharp limits on their speed and flexibility; they should never be the first gate in upholding justice, but the last bulwark. It is clear that almost all modern democratic nations over-rely on their court systems.

"It is the nature of the hero-cult, as distinct from the worship of ancestors, to spread spontaneously over a wide area, if it possesses sufficient energy and attractiveness." Farnell

If a composite thing were to pop into existence, its doing so would be entirely explained in terms of the popping into existence of its parts in relation to each other. Therefore nothing composite can be a 'brute fact', nor can the coming-into-existence of anything composite be a brute fact.

"The Canon Yeoman's Tale" as giving the structure of a con game

'Grasping' is an excellent metaphor for understanding because physical grasping (1) is factive, in the sense that what one grasps, is; (2) is described by analogous linguistic constructions -- it takes an object in analogously describable ways; (3) it is described in strong-tone ways, in that grasping is stronger than touching, holding, etc.

Pleasure as pleasantness, as sense of reward, and as satisfaction of desire, all come apart, and yet all have been conflated by utilitarians.

"Plato was the first who used the word 'theology'..., and he evidently was the creator of the idea. He used it in his Republic, where we wanted to set up certain philosophical standards and criteria for poetry." Jaeger

NB Aristotle's comment that apeiron is cause qua mind (Anaxagoras) or qua eros (Empedocles) in those who hold that it encompasses and governs all, and this is the divine because it is deathless and incorruptible (Anaximander).

True genius has something like prescience, for true genius reflects something of the eternal.

One of Pascal's key apologetic insights was that the men who were despising faith for not being knowledge were nonetheless gambling. This can be generalized: When they despise something Christian, look at what they nonetheless are doing.

Conviction and sympathy are the two aspects of hortatory power.

No epistemology can be right that does not recognize that understanding outstrips reasoning.

"It is hardly too much to say, that almost all reasons formally adduced in moral inquiries, are rather specimens and symbols of the real grounds, than those grounds themselves." Newman

Contemplative prayer is the act by which one adapts oneself better to God's simplicity.

"We cannot teach except by aspects or views, which are not identical with the thing itself which we are teaching." Newman

'ontological argument' for possibility: idea of possibility; therefore necessarily something is possible

Mary, Emblem of Grace

Property has a twofold aspect, being an instrument for furthering common good and a remedy against oppression.

intrinsic vs. extrinsic title to anger, etc.

Art tends naturally to syncretism.

One cannot be a good journalist without studying the field on which one reports. A journalist does not need to be an expert, but a journalist needs to avoid being a fool.

compassion : sorrow :: congratulation : joy

Republics have the curious feature of being both stingy and careless with money.

NB Adam Smith takes worldly contempt to be a harder trial for virtue than death (TMS 1.3.2.2)

Note that St. Cyril of Alexandria takes Deuteronomy 20:19-20 to give the appropriate strategy for dealing with heretics.

Multi-ethnic empires have historically been built not on tolerance but on force-backed compromise.

the Democritean theory of religion:
(1) eidola seen in dreams (residues of sense-perception) which have beneficial or maleficial effects --> prayer as wish for propitious images
(2) guilt & anxiety over wicked ways given a failure to understand death
(3) paradoxa of nature (eclipses, storms, stellar events) leading to fear of their causes

The human mind is so splendid that it can do extraordinary things even with errors.

Goethe is a genius most easily admired at a distance.

For most of us most of the time, even human wisdom is known only by triplex via; how much more divine Wisdom!

The lives of martyrs make available a 'particular and privileged vantage point' on worldly reasoning.

- analysis of society in terms of potential for charitable action

It is not enough to treat mothering as work; one must treat it as an honorable profession and a humanitarian tradition.

Every Catholic is called to cultivate the standpoint of the saints.

standpoint as a creative ability (Miriam Solomon)

In theology the epistemic authority that matters is holiness.

preservative love, fostering of growth, and training

The martyrs critique by being there.

Our body is experienced in terms of both facility and resistance.

internal goods (of a practice) as related to trying well, doing well, and succeeding well

kisses as questions vs as assertions

the whole of x is y, the whol of x is not y, not the whole of x is not y, not the whole of x is y (subalternates)
the whole of x is y, the whole of x is not y, part of x is y, part of x is not y (does not subalternate)
-- the fallacy of division as related to subalternation

In ritual one feels one's way through the means to the appropriate ends.

Every actual liberalism gives preference ot the liberties of some over the liberties of others.

position, influence, school
position, implication, system

Sukkot & Hanukkah (2 Macc 1:9, 1:18, 10:6)

Economics is most commonly the theory of predicting teh policies that economists will recommend.

'What is?' as an 'axiomatic' question

Even the appearance of injustice eats away at society.

The human mind by its nature is suggestive of infinity, and has often been recognized as such.

"We act unconsciously as if we were infinite." Tiele

"All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue." John Adams

infinite intelligibility arguments
(1) final cause (Aristotelian: Aquinas)
(2) formal/exemplar (Platonistic: Malebranche)
(3) necessary postulate of action (Transcendentalist: Brownson)

Newman's notes of development as applied to actions genuinely unfolding from faith rather than other motives (i.e., development at the individual level)

"There is nothing harder than to determine the real character of the religion of a people, even when the religion is still living." Sayce

(1) Being is a transcendental perfection.
(2) What is entailed by a transcendental perfection is a transcendental perfection, either entitative, or a transcendental of eminence, or a transcendental of distinction.

If anything is possible, something is necessary.

formal plausibility (extrapolative) vs material plausibility (associative)

Every self-evident principle is also a heuristic principle.

charity as moral panchymogon

In the long term, even at its best, progressivism starts to err into micromanagement.

the fourfold beginning of Christ: in God (John), in Israel (Matthew), in Mary (Luke), in the Baptism (Mark)

the right to quiet enjoyment of one's life

Suppose a Change o' Cases

Tonight is Burns Night, the 260th anniversary of Robert Burns's birthday in 1759. So it seems fitting to re-post a poem that has been with this blog almost since the beginning.

Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous
by Robert Burns

        My Son, these maxims make a rule,
        An' lump them aye thegither;
        The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
        The Rigid Wise anither:
        The cleanest corn that ere was dight
        May hae some pyles o' caff in;
        So ne'er a fellow-creature slight
        For random fits o' daffin.
        Solomon.-Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' still the clap plays clatter.

Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door
For glaikit Folly's portals:
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences-
Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,
Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer;
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),
Your better art o' hidin.

Think, when your castigated pulse
Gies now and then a wallop!
What ragings must his veins convulse,
That still eternal gallop!
Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail,
Right on ye scud your sea-way;
But in the teeth o' baith to sail,
It maks an unco lee-way.

See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses!

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Tied up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor Frailty names,
Suppose a change o' cases;
A dear-lov'd lad, convenience snug,
A treach'rous inclination-
But let me whisper i' your lug,
Ye're aiblins nae temptation.

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

The Burns Monument in Edinburgh:

Devotion

Today is the feast of St. Francis de Sales, Doctor of the Church. From his most famous work, Introduction to a Devout Life:

It is an error, nay more, a very heresy, to seek to banish the devout life from the soldier’s guardroom, the mechanic’s workshop, the prince’s court, or the domestic hearth. Of course a purely contemplative devotion, such as is specially proper to the religious and monastic life, cannot be practised in these outer vocations, but there are various other kinds of devotion well-suited to lead those whose calling is secular, along the paths of perfection. The Old Testament furnishes us examples in Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, David, Job, Tobias, Sarah, Rebecca and Judith; and in the New Testament we read of St. Joseph, Lydia and Crispus, who led a perfectly devout life in their trades:—we have S. Anne, Martha, S. Monica, Aquila and Priscilla, as examples of household devotion, Cornelius, S. Sebastian, and S. Maurice among soldiers;—Constantine, S. Helena, S. Louis, the Blessed Amadaeus, and S. Edward on the throne. And we even find instances of some who fell away in solitude,—usually so helpful to perfection,—some who had led a higher life in the world, which seems so antagonistic to it. S. Gregory dwells on how Lot, who had kept himself pure in the city, fell in his mountain solitude. Be sure that wheresoever our lot is cast we may and must aim at the perfect life.

Unfeeling World!

The Ways of the World
by Sir Aubrey de Vere

Unfeeling World! I mourn your vanished worth:
For when I look around, where'er I turn,
I can see nought but selfishness on earth;
The Rich are grown too strong, the Poor forlorn;
The tongue of Malice thrives; and there's a dearth
Of all the milder traits that should adorn
Or smooth the frailties of our human birth.
O! I would rather, in some distant nook,
Beneath a sheltering oak, beside a brook,
Far from the varying passions of mankind,
Know nothing of their ways but in a book;
Be to their follies deaf, their vices blind,
And leave, for ever, all their joys and griefs behind!

The Principle of Heightened Responsibility

We often talk as if responsibility were a sort of general and ongoing thing, but in practice we recognize that special situations can call for special kinds of responsibility -- things that are serious become more serious, things that are morally necessary somehow become even more necessary. There are several things that can intensify our duties and obligations, but the overwhelming majority of cases fall under a single principle, which in practice tends to be the principle of heightened responsibility: Responsibilities and obligations are more serious, and our actions with regard to them must be held to higher standards, in cases involving relevantly vulnerable people. This principle is not a principle that defines any particular course of action; rather it changes the modality of obligations and responsibilities we already have. It is a form of the responsibility to be appropriately responsible. (In the history of ethics, there is not, as far as I can see, much extended discussion of these kinds of principles, although they keep popping up. Probably the most developed discussion is found in William Whewell, who discusses things like the Principle of Earnestness, which is a different principle, but one that also affects modality rather than content of duty. But even Whewell's discussions are at a very general level.)

The kind of relevant vulnerability varies depending on what we are talking about. Patients are relevantly vulnerable with respect to doctors, students with respect to teachers; family members, the disabled, the elderly, minorities, employees might all be relevantly vulnerable in different cases. In general there needs to be some specific reason provided why there should be heightened responsibility with regard to these people in these circumstances; if you are too promiscuous about what requires heightened responsibility, you are obviously not talking about heightened responsibility but just ordinary responsibility. There is one group, however, that has the status of having universally relevant vulnerability: children, or minors more broadly. Any situation involving minors creates heightened responsibilities. This does not, of course, mean that the responsibility is unrestricted (again, it doesn't actually change your duties, but only the way you should go about them) or that everyone must freak out all the time with children; it just means that, when minors are involved, you should not only try to do what is right but take special care to do it, hold yourself to special scrutiny in how you do it, and take special precautions when appropriate.

This is recognized by most decent people in most situations. It's why trying juveniles as adults is a matter for serious ethical argument. It's why, when minors become public figures for any reason people are rightly slapped down for not taking into account their age when responding to them. It's why people were reasonably upset to see children in caged areas in ICE stations. It's why "They're kids" can be the kernel of a genuine, even if not always definitive, moral argument. We recognize that ordinary obligations and duties require special attention when children are involved. The principle of heightened responsibility with regard to minors is a basic moral principle of all civilized and decent people.

This past weekend, of course, we were treated to the shameful sight of a vast number of adults not grasping their responsibilities when it comes to minors, and doing in so ways that, sometimes, were such that I would not hesitate to call them evil and wicked. It was indeed a serious reminder of just how evil ordinary people can be when they begin to mob. A Catholic school from Kentucky had sent a group of boys on a field trip to Washington, DC for the March for Life. A confrontation during the trip blew up to huge proportions when a video went viral and journalists reported on it; it spread through social media, to huge uproar. Students from that high school -- including some that had not gone on the trip -- were threatened; people in social media tried to doxx them; then it came out that maybe there was more to the matter than originally had been thought, leading eventually to a spate of apologies; and it still continues with people trying to justify themselves over the matter, so that, for instance, the school had to cancel classes today out of safety concerns. Now, whatever the political situation, in a civilized society, decent people do not go about trying to intimidate or punish anyone they choose; and when dealing with high school students, the principle of heightened responsibility applies to this. There was one tweet that I thought summarized the attitude of a lot of people involved; it said, and I quote, "We must condemn those actions as wrong so that they and others will learn to recognize them as such." This kind of reasoning is sociopathic. The 'we' that they assume to exist does not exist. Most people are not parents, school officials, the priest or bishop or even the chaperones. The appropriate response -- one might almost say the response that one would expect of any reasonable adult -- is to recognize that inquiries and punishments, if any, need to be done by the relevant authorities, and when dealing with high school students, 'relevant authorities' does not include random people surfing on the internet or reading news articles. In a serious case, you might inform the relevant authorities. And that's it. Nothing else is appropriate behavior. It does not matter how bad you consider it; you don't have the authority to stalk, harass, and bully people merely because you think what they did was bad. And whatever complications to this one supposes there to be in real life, when there are minors involved, heightened responsibility applies and you have to demand more of yourself in avoiding this sort of injustice.

But this is not the only failure. Both the school and the diocese failed to exercise their responsibilities properly to try to guarantee fair protections for the minors involved. Their statements in the first phase of the uproar are extraordinary examples of putting placating other people over other concerns. It's not that they didn't do something like their duty; their doing it was inadequate probably even in ordinary circumstances, but in this case, involving high school students they had a responsibility to protect from injustice, it was utterly inadequate, although, alas, not too far from what we've had to come to expect from schools and bishops.

The most serious failures, however, were in the press. Journalistic ethics is a remarkably well developed field of professional ethics. There are lots of excellent professional codes of journalistic ethics, and there has been a lot of honest and very intelligent discussion in the journalistic community about ethical issues arising in the field. And throughout even very different approaches to journalistic ethics, you find a number of recurring themes, of which three in particular are relevant here:

(1) Journalists, as such, have a special responsibility with regard to the truth, in the sense that they have the responsibility as journalists to make every reasonable effort to guarantee that those receiving the news are receiving everything they need in order to interpret and evaluate as part of trying to discover the real state of what happened.

(2) Journalists have a responsibility to the public good; the difference between journalism and gossip-mongering is that the former involves taking the trouble to consider what is genuinely appropriate to the public good, in ways that are genuinely appropriate to the public good.

(3) Closely related to (2), everyone has the the right not to be subject to unnecessary intrusion; when journalists publish matters potentially harmful to someone, it needs to be justifiable by some necessity created by (2). No journalist has the right to strip someone of their ordinary privacy protections and expose them unprotected to public view; the tabloid tendency to engage in unnecessary intrusion is precisely why they have a bad name.

Now, all of these should be operative all the time. There was a kerfuffle a while back in which CNN exposed the identity of the pseudonymous creator of a gif mocking CNN; that was a very grave violation of journalistic ethics. CNN had no right to the intrusion by any principle in any standard of ethics recognized by professional journalistic associations. The existence of tabloids shows that such principles are often violated; journalism is, for reasons that are not wholly the fault of journalists themselves, is subject to far more extensive ethical violations than many other professional fields. But they should be in play, and any respectable journalist will ensure that they are.

But it's clear that in this case all three ethical responsibilities were violated; and this is an especial problem here given the principle of heightened responsibility. In the middle phase of the controversy it became quite clear that journalists reporting on it had often failed to make a serious effort to gather and provide information that was available and relevant to evaluating what happened. Given that minors were involved and that this was a controversial matter, it was an especially grave form of negligence not to do things right and by-the-book from the very beginning. Second, many journalistic outlets published a particular photo showing one particular student's face very clearly. Now, in any situation involving something that can be regarded as negative, publishing a name or a photo of someone is an ethically serious matter. It's not just the person in the news who is affected by it; people are mistaken for other people all the time, and there have been many cases of people who were harmed because they happened to share a name with someone, or because they happened to look like someone, about whom something negative was reported in the press. In addition, journalism is not infallible; sometimes what appears bad turns out, with further information, not to be so. In many cases, of course, there is good reason why someone's name or photo can and should be provided; but not for private persons who could potentially be harmed by it when there is no clearly definable public-interest need for it. And all of this is vastly more serious when we are dealing with minors.

It should not have to be said, but, unfortunately, in this age of moral barbarism apparently does, that none of this is affected in any way by one's assessment of the original event. That you think a high school student did something bad does not make them cease being high school students, and it provides no license or pass for failing in your responsibility to take special care in doing right by them. And this is all a matter of basic ethics, not particularly controversial even between very different ethical schools of thought; recognizing that special care needs to be taken when minors are involved, regardless of the situation, is part of what it is to be civilized. I have unfortunately seen more and more cases of uncivilized behavior in this respect; but usually it's just someone exercising bad judgment here, not taking proper care there. The scale -- and in some cases the self-justifying obstinacy -- with which it was done in this case, though, has been mind-boggling.

Fac Bonum et Omitte Malum

Today, of course, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States. As one might expect from the name, it honors an American hero, a man who, while not a saint, did great and admirable things. But one never merely has a holiday for a man. The day also remembers the Civil Rights Movement in general, of which he was only one leader among many, although the one perhaps who did most in the attempt to make the Civil Rights Movement truly a movement of the whole nation. But I think also more generally, and in practice, the day serves as a remembrance of the natural law traditions that have shaped the American republic. I say 'traditions' because there have been several, and not all consistent with each other, but the day serves as a reminder of the central principle of them all, that there is a moral order to which human law and custom must answer. And this is important particularly for a republic; a republic that recognizes no authority higher than human is a republic that has begun to die. In any case, all of this is to say that it's an appropriate day for a brief post on a natural-law-related topic.

From Kant's Lectures on Ethics[Infield, tr., Hackett (Indianapolis: 1980)]:

The statement 'fac bonum et omitte malum' cannot, however, be a basic principle of moral obligation, because the good can be good in diverse ways according to the end chosen, the statement being thus an axiom of skill or of prudence, whereas for it to embody a moral principle it would have to imply that which is good for moral action. (p. 25)

This particular version of the first precept of natural law is from Wolff (although in context Kant attributes it to Baumgarten); it is in line with the traditional Thomistic view although not exactly the same. However, the difference is not particularly important for my purposes, because Kant is in fact right here. This is not a problem for traditional natural law theory because traditional natural law theory is structured on this very point.

'Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided' or 'do good and avoid bad' are not direct statements of moral obligation. There are many reasons for this, but the basic point is that these are general principles of practical reason itself. They cover all practical fields about which we can rationally deliberate, not just morality, and that includes, as Kant correctly recognizes, matters of skill and of prudence.

Kant will go on to say that it is tautological, which, depending on what precisely you take that mean, is also arguably right. His idea is that the command 'fac bonum' here just boils down to 'it is good that actions happen that are good'. One can quibble about the precise formulation, but there is a legitimate truth here, one that is often misunderstood even by people wishing to understand natural law: the most fundamental precepts of natural law are supposed to divide rational from irrational behavior, and therefore violating them is supposed to be irrational, just like violating the principle of noncontradiction. But this, too, is not a problem for natural law theory, since natural law theory is deliberately built like this.

So both the objections are true as far as they go. However, that they are not serious problems for natural law theory in general can be seen by looking at the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas. In Aquinas's account, 'Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided' is explicitly the practical reason counterpart of the principle of noncontradiction. Just as all theoretical reasoning is held, in one way or another, to the standard of the principle of noncontradiction, and just as any reasoning that violates the the principle of noncontradiction is irrational, so too with practical reason and the first principle of practical reason. (Indeed, although it's not an essential point to make here, I think there is a very good argument that Aquinas thinks they are in a sense the same, given the coextensiveness of good and being.) Thus all practical reasoning whatsoever is governed by the first principle of practical reason, 'Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided'. This is true of your decision to tie your shoe, of your choice of what to eat for lunch, of where to go on vacation, of, in short, everything in your practical life.

It also applies to moral obligation. But how does the obligation arise? In Aquinas what we call 'obligation' he calls 'law' -- indeed on any natural law theory, the latter is the more proper term, with 'obligation' being a metaphor for what law does. Aquinas famously defines a law according to its four Aristotelian causes:

A law is a particular ordering of reason to common good by one who is caretaker for what is common, promulgated.

So if we look at the first principle of practical reason just on its own, what is missing for it to be an obligation? It is obviously an ordering of reason; indeed, there is a sense in which it is the ordering of reason, the most fundamental one. Because it can be known by any rational person, it is promulgated, that is, it is in principle possible for those who are supposed to follow it, to follow it, which is the point of promulgation. What is missing is common good. The first principle of practical reason on its own is an ordering to good, but it is not restricted to common good. Once we do restrict it, that is apply it to that kind of good which is common good, we get the caretaker clause immediately; on Aquinas's account the natural caretaker for any common good is the whole body of rational beings whose common good it is.

There are lots of different kinds of common goods. To get morality in the full sense, we would have to apply the principle to that common good that is the most general common good we human beings definitely share. And that is the common good of the entire human race. That common good involves a lot of different subsidiary goods, but they concern, at least among other things, the goods we share that are relevant to our individual physical survival, the survival of the human race, and our survival as rational social beings. Given this, the first principle of practical reason becomes the first precept of natural law, the fundamental obligation.

And it is very fundamental, and very deliberately so. The point of identifying the first precept is not to identify directly what the right thing in any particular case is. You can't do that without reasoning about the goods involved in the particular case. (This is something Kant himself smuggles in, unacknowledged, in his notion of a 'maxim'.) The first precept provides a standard that has to be met by every action and all practical reasoning that touches on matters of common good. In general, natural law theorists don't think it is the only standard; it's just the most general one. In your explicit reasoning it might not even show up, just as you don't normally have to introduce the principle of noncontradiction as a premise in an argument about theoretical subjects. But it is what makes your reasoning about what you ought to do coherent at all.

So in a natural law account, being moral is acting reasonably with regard to matters important to us all. Natural law theorists do not make the sharp distinction between the pragmatic and the moral that Kant does; they are the same kind of things, just differing as to the kinds of goods in view. And once natural law is recognized, then all other kinds of law and obligation have to conform to it -- if they violate it they violate both reason and common good, so fail at two of the four requirements for a law.

What is more, since the most fundamental precepts of natural law are part of what it is to be rational in the first place, all moral reasoning whatsoever involves them, in the same sense that all reasoning involves the principle of noncontradiction. This includes arguments that never explicitly talk about natural law. All ethical arguments are natural law arguments; the only question is whether they are good arguments. This is also something that is often forgotten even by people who want to affirm natural law theory: natural law theory is not a theory of arguments that explicitly mention 'natural law', but a theory of all moral reasoning whatsoever.

Other natural law theories are not always so clean and clear-cut as Aquinas's, so some of these points are a bit more complicated in those cases than they are when we are talking about the Thomistic version. But in pretty much every case, its true that the first precepts of natural law are specified versions of more general practical principles, and they are concerned with rational consistency in our actions, whatever goods we may consider, so that what we ought to do has to consider the goods involved, and not just the abstract formal principle. So, again, Kant's two objections are right; they are, in fact, deliberate elements of natural law theory, and for the natural law theorist they are not bugs but features. Kant wouldn't be satisfied by that, of course, but that's only to be expected.

Creative, Understanding Good Will

Another way that you love your enemy is this: When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy, that is the time which you must not do it. There will come a time, in many instances, when the person who hates you most, the person who has misused you most, the person who has gossiped about you most, the person who has spread false rumors about you most, there will come a time when you will have an opportunity to defeat that person. It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job; it might be in terms of helping that person to make some move in life. That’s the time you must not do it. That is the meaning of love. In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.

Martin Luther King, Jr., "Loving Your Enemies".

Fortnightly Book, January 20

The new term is starting up, so I thought I'd do something I've read before, particularly after the unexpectedly trek through Narnia in various formats. So the next fortnightly book is Persuasion, by Jane Austen.

While persuasion does play an important role in the course of the story, Persuasion is not actually Austen's own title. By 1816, Austen was not feeling well. She continued to work on various projects, including The Brothers, which would becoming the unfinished fragment usually published today under the title Sanditon, which I did for a fortnightly book way back in 2012. Around the same time she completed a full draft of Persuasion, the first novel that she had not worked up from a much earlier draft; she went through a series of drafts in a matter of two or three years. When she died on July 18, 1817, she hadn't done much further revision of it, but she apparently expected it to be published the next year, so we can reasonably assume that she thought it was at least approaching readiness for publication. In any case, it was published posthumously, along with Northanger Abbey, which despite being much earlier was the only other work of hers that was in fully complete form. Persuasion was the title her brother Henry put on the work. Her own working title for it was probably The Elliots.

Anne Elliot is an unmarried girl of twenty-seven who has lost her 'bloom' and thus finds her prospects dwindling away rapidly. She had been engaged seven years before to a certain Captain Wentworth, but she had been persuaded by her family and a close friend to break off the engagement. And now she will find herself meeting him again....