The Lion's Mane

"The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" is one of the most baffling of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Doyle himself claimed to like it -- indeed, to regard it as one of his best on the basis of its plot -- but almost no one else really knows what to make of it. The case is undeniably interesting, but Holmes's solution seems not only to be impossible, it seems to be based on a reason that cannot be taken seriously, and, to top it all off, we can't blame it on Watson because it is also weird in being written entirely from Holmes's point of view (Holmes is in retirement, so Watson isn't around to write it).

Holmes is living the quiet life beekeeping in Sussex, at a place near the beach that has regular lagoons form that attract swimmers. July 1907 sees a particularly nice gale that has especially filled the pools, and Holmes is taking a walk along the cliff when he meets up with Harry Stackhurst, who is headmaster of nearby prep school and is heading out for a swim with Fitzroy McPherson, the science teacher, who had already gone ahead. They are suddenly arrested by the sight of McPherson, about fifty yards away, coming up the sole path in the cliffs from the beach, staggering, crying out, and collapsing. They rush forward and discover that he is nearly dead, with "glazed sunken eyes" and "livid cheeks". His last words are (apparently) "the Lion's Mane". He is wearing only his trousers and an overcoat. Around his body is a mesh-like set of lines. They are joined by Ian Murdoch, a maths teacher at the school. They send him to get the police, and Holmes retraces McPherson's steps. McPherson was clearly the only person who had taken the path that morning. McPherson's towel is folded and dry on the rock, "so that it would seem that, after all, he had never entered the water", although bare footprints as well as shoeprints suggest that he had prepared to do so. The beach is deserted "save that two or three dark figures could be seen far away moving towards the village of Fulworth." They seem too far away and on the wrong side of the lagoon to be connected to the crime. There are "two or three fishingboats" that are "at no great distance", who can be questioned later. When he returns, he finds that there is a note from a woman in the dead man's pockets.

You can read the summary of the rest of the story at Wikipedia, if you don't have access to the story itself. Suffice it to say that the evidence points to Murdoch until Holmes argues, on the basis of a book, that McPherson was actually killed by a Lion's Mane jellyfish, and they do indeed find one hiding in the lagoon. Holmes ends the story criticizing himself for being misled by the dry towel.

So far, so good; one can see how this would make the structure of a mystery story. But nothing in it actually adds up. A few of the more obvious points:

* The Lion's Mane is a large jellyfish; McPherson can't have had the serious wounds he had unless he had been in the water where the jellyfish could reach him. (When Murdoch is later stung by it, he was well in the water and had to swim to shore.) But Holmes concludes that the dry towel shows that McPherson never entered the water; this is what he claims misled him. But Holmes was there when McPherson had died, just coming up from the lagoon; if McPherson had been in the water, he would have already known it from McPherson's body. The stings were not on McPherson's legs, as if he had dipped just part of himself in; they were on his torso. Sherlock Holmes does not need to find an indirect clue in order to tell whether a man he was with had just been in the water or not. This point is particularly salient given that at one point, Holmes describes the situation as, "he had returned without bathing, or at any rate without drying himself." That would be a very curious thing to say if you already knew that the man was dry.

* When Holmes first sees the fishing boats, he says they were "at no great distance" and they can examine them later. They never examine them. When the inspector mentions them later as a possible consideration, Holmes says, "No, no, they were too far out." Perhaps the fishing boat matter came up in the briefly mentioned inquest -- but the inspector would certainly have been aware of it, if they had. It's technically possible, I suppose, for boats to be "at no great distance" and "too far out" at the same time; but it's curious for one person to say both without any further explanation.

* The solution to the mystery lies in a book called Out of Doors, by John George Wood. It's a real book, and Wood does discuss his encounters with the Lion's Mane jellyfish. Holmes's summary if it in the story is accurate. But there are two features of Wood's story that are strange for our purposes; one of them Holmes not only mentions but arguably emphasizes, and the other of which he strangely leaves out. The one he mentions is that Wood says that his face at the end of the ordeal was "all white, wrinkled, and shrivelled, with cold perspiration standing in large drops over the surface". McPherson before he died is said to have had "glazed sunken eyes and dreadful livid cheeks". 'Livid' is the opposite of 'white'.

* The second puzzling thing is that Wood says, "The slightest touch of the clothes was agony". McPherson's wounding seems to be more serious than Wood's, but he is wearing an overcoat. What is more, the overcoat is just around his shoulders (it falls off on its own when Holmes and Stackhurst are examining him), despite the fact that he has been scrambling up a path in extraordinary agony. So you are attacked by a jellyfish and are in extraordinary agony; you take the time to put your overcoat on, despite the fact that it makes the agony even worse, and you keep it on while you scramble up the hill, occasionally falling. Maybe, but it seems a stretch.

* Murdoch once threw McPherson's dog through a window -- not out the window, literally through the plate-glass -- in a dispute; they then later became friends, as if a man is ever going to become genuine friends with someone who deliberately tried to kill his dog. This is all the more strange given that there is an entire portion of the story about the dog, in which we learn how loyal and faithful the dog is, which suggests that McPherson and his dog were quite close. And, of course, it gets even stranger given that McPherson and Murdoch were both interested in the same woman. And, moreover, despite the fact that everyone ends up insisting on it, the first description of Murdoch is that he was "so taciturn and aloof that none can be said to have been his friend". Yet three people -- Stackhurst, Maud Bellamy, and Ian Murdoch -- go out of their way to insist that Murdoch and McPherson were friends.

This is enough to be going on with for the moment. The difficulty of all of this is further compounded by the fact that mystery stories are not written on the principle of Chekhov's gun -- that's a rule for drama, and is only applicable to the story to the extent it approximates stage-drama -- but on the principle of misdirection. There are always misleading details, so it's a question of which strange details are really important. We could accept the explanation in the story without any question, despite many other oddities, if it weren't for the key point that Holmes goes out of his way multiple times to emphasize -- the water. If you assumed that a jellyfish in the water could attack a man out of the water, and do so on such a scale as McPherson is attacked, you could certainly swallow everything else. An advantage is that McPherson's death is explained; and if you pick anyone else as responsible, the jellyfish either has to be the weapon (which seems unreliable) or was used to cover the actual reason for McPherson's death (which seems rather complicated). But there are so many oddities to swallow, and there seems no way that McPherson could have been stung by the jellyfish and not obviously have been in the water.

And it's so odd to put the solution to the mystery in the title of the mystery. It's as if "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" were instead called "The Adventure of the Horse's Trainer". (I once had an idea for a story called, "The Butler Did It", in which it is obvious from the beginning that the butler did it and the problem is just proving it, but that's half a joke.)

If you don't accept the explanation in the story, we have to play the Great Game, and there are two paths to take. The explanation could be exoteric, drawing solely on the characters in the story and what we are told about them, or esoteric, and move more widely, and more wildly, through the canon and related history. Exoterically, the culprit(s) can only be significant characters actually on the stage in the story, and there are only a limited number of possibilities. Who is responsible for the death of Fitzroy McPherson?

(1) Fitzroy McPherson. It seems a baroque, agonizing, and unreliable way to commit suicide (if that was the intent), but McPherson is the only one who is known for sure to have been on the scene. He also knew what killed him; since he's a science teacher, he could well have know it just by sight. Holmes suggests that McPherson knew it was a Lion's Mane because he saw it floating on the water, but if he did that before being stung, he wouldn't have drawn close enough to be stung so badly. If it was afterward, though, he would still had to have been in the water. Unless he arranged to use the jellyfish filaments to sting himself; McPherson is the only one who could certainly have gotten himself stung without getting very wet.

(2) Harry Stackhurst. Our entire timetable depends from the beginning on Stackhurst; he is, he says, going to meet McPherson for a swim, McPherson having gone ahead. McPherson never confirms this because he is dead, but the rest of the reasoning depends on there having been very little time because McPherson was only a bit ahead of Stackhurst. The primary difficulty with Stackhurst being the principal suspect is that Holmes is clear that only McPherson had been up or down the only path. But if one took Stackhurst to be an accomplice, some possibilities open up. The dark figures on the beach and the fishing boats are ruled out because they are too far. 'Too far' is not a matter of distance but of time. Different timeline, different possibilities. You could imagine him accosting Holmes in the attempt to make sure he wasn't going down to the lagoon, and being shocked when, instead of already being dead, McPherson comes clambering up the path. Stackhurst is alone with McPherson's body for an extended period of time, when Murdoch is sent to the police and Holmes is investigating the scene; Holmes only finds the note from Maud in the pockets after he returns. Stackhurst is strangely irate at finding Murdoch hanging around Maud Bellamy's house. A number of oddities in the story are due to Stackhurst. But it's hard to make anything definite cohere around him.

(3) Ian Murdoch. Everything points originally to Murdoch, so he's the easy case. What's more, not much actually rules him out as responsible. Suspicion moves from him when Holmes convinces everyone that the weapon that killed McPherson was the living Lion's Mane -- and that's about it. The reason he wasn't arrested immediately was timeline issues -- he was supposedly keeping students late. Stackhurst establishes that element of the timeline, as well; Murdoch tells us no more than that he was late and not on the beach. Nobody seems to have checked the alibi. When Holmes is convincing the inspector of the futility of arresting Murdoch, he says, "he can surely prove an alibi", which is an odd thing to say if it were already obvious that he had one. When Stackhurst notes that it was mere chance that there weren't any students with McPherson, Holmes asks the interesting question, "Was it mere chance?" and then Stackhurst tells us why Murdoch was late. It's weird that Murdoch goes swimming in the same lagoon in which both McPherson and McPherson's dog had already died. We have only the word of Ian and Maud that Ian was OK with Maud being McPherson's fiancee.

(4) Maud Bellamy. I've always thought interesting that Maud knows Holmes by sight despite the fact that they had never met, a fact that Holmes notes explicitly. It's Maud who tells us that she was engaged to McPherson, although this appears to be confirmed by a comment made by Ian in passing; the engagement was a secret -- we are told. The difficulty with Maud as a suspect is that we have relatively little to work with; most of what we know about her is indirect.

(5) Tom and William Bellamy. We don't know much about father or son, but we do know a few things of interest. Tom Bellamy is a former fisherman, so he could handle a boat. William Bellamy is very strong, and fact that is potentially significant given that it is emphasized that, despite his bad heart, McPherson was so strong that "No single person could ever have inflicted such an outrage upon him" (according to Maud) and that it is impossible that Ian "could single-handed have inflicted this outrage upon a man quite as strong as himself" (Holmes). If any of the Bellamys are responsible, however, it seems that they cannot be the only ones involved.

There is one more.

(6) Sherlock Holmes. It seems a cheat even to suggest. But this story is unusual in that Holmes himself is telling it. Holmes was in the vicinity. Holmes alone is the reason why we think nobody else was on the path that morning. Holmes already knew about the Lion's Mane. When McPherson is indistinctly slurring words it is Holmes, and Holmes alone, who insists that he said "Lion's Mane". He does a great deal to convince everyone that Murdoch didn't do it. There are inconsistencies in Holmes's comments and behavior that could raise questions. And if he did do it, the interaction with the inspector at the end of the story could very well be read as ironic.

If we take the esoteric path, on the other hand, the sky is the limit. One could well imagine that Holmes is hinting at something he can't actually say -- that perhaps he saves Murdoch in order to save someone else, or perhaps there is something more sinister going on, in which he needs to quell the suspicions of those really responsible. But, of course, one can make up stories all day; the difficulty is making them all fit properly with what we know.

Poem Retrospective X

Somewhere or other I came across a writing exercise for building a (prose) story opening, and thought that it would make an interesting structure for a poem, which led to this. It does end up having a nice overall structure, and I don't really know what else I'd do with it, so there's no foreseeable changes for it.

Colloquy

She caught,
with casual raise of the hand,
the zephyr-breeze running through the green field --

tiny stars of daisies spangled the earth;
dew was still on their petals,
and they clustered around her feet --

the birds in the distance discoursed with angels,
who were shining like undying candles,
and she caught another breeze --

And she asked,
"Where is the flower that grants youth without end?"--

"In the gardens of Tapio,
which no mortal may ever see"--

"In the body,
you mean,
but my heart has seen it in dreams"--

"Not even in dreams,
for dreams are reflections in the Sorrowful Lake,
reflections,
and nothing more"--

She bent down to pluck a shining daisy --

the old man,
with thought-like suddenness,
rose into the sky,
the sun gleaming on his ebon wings,
a raven.

The 90s Internet

I'm not expecting the Captain Marvel movie to be particularly great, but some of the marketing for it is pretty impressive. The movie takes place in the 1990s, so for the movie website, they did a 90s-style website, which is hilarious. It is so very, very true to what the internet was in the 90s, when design options were limited, websites were set up as if they were bulletin boards with effects, and everybody was just making things up as they went along....

Poem Retrospective IX

The Blue Flower is found in Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen, one of the central works of German Romanticism:

"It is not the treasures," said he to himself, "that have awakened in me such unutterable longings. Far from me is all avarice; but I long to behold the blue flower. It is constantly in my mind, and I can think and compose of nothing else. I have never been in such a mood. It seems as if I had hitherto been dreaming, or slumbering into another world; for in the world, in which hitherto I have lived, who would trouble himself about a flower?--I never have heard of such a strange passion for a flower here. I wonder, too, whence the stranger comes? None of our people have ever seen his like; still I know not why I should be so fascinated by his conversation. Others have listened to it, but none are moved by it as I am. Would that I could explain my feelings in words! I am often full of rapture, and it is only when the blue flower is out of my mind, that this deep, heart-felt longing overwhelms me...."

It came to symbolize a kind of longing for the infinite or the beyond, the point where ideal and real are no longer separate, that is most naturally expressed in poetic speech, and yet in some way also exceeds even such expression. Tapio is the old Finnish forest spirit; he is, through his wife Mielikki associated with bears (mead-paws).


Tapio

The blue flower grows in the realm of Tapio,
where tree-roots deeper than any mountain's grow,
where forest-tops are marching like the sea,
an endless and everlasting sea,
and mead-paws dance in fields untouched by snow
where blossoms flourish whose names nobody knows
on a hill whose name nobody knows.

Dashed Off III

To think of the finite is nothing special; to think of the finite qua finite requires the idea of the infinite.

Every 'ontological argument' can be taken formally or finally.

the welfare state as inherently anti-Stoic (note that 'welfare state' is not the same as 'welfare programs/policies/projects'; a Stoic forming these things would not do so in a welfare-state form)

"There is not a single doctrine of natural religion which when it enters into the content of the Christian faith, remains what it was outside Christianity." John Caird
"Christianity, whilst it explains the latent significance of all that was true in the imperfect religions, at the same time transcends, and in transcending, transmutes and annuls or supersedes them."

Cantor's Actual Infinite as the mathematical as such; mathematics as an inconsistent multiplicity

"The power that represses infinite power cannot be itself less than infinite. The notion of the self-limitation of an omnipotent Being is one which dissolves in the very attempt to grasp it." John Caird

the corporate immortality of the Church

"The real and the useful are, for us, an incentive towards the True, the Beautiful and the Good." Boutroux

objects posited as divine (Paterson)
A. THINGS (sensible objects)
....(1) Inanimate: Fetishism, Nature-worship, (Religious) Materialism
........(a) Artificial
........(b) Natural
....(2) Animate: Plant/Animal Worship, Organic Pantheism
B. FORCES (invisible energies)
....(1) Sporadic: Mana, Natural Forces, NAturistic Polytheism, Dynamic Pantheism
....(2) Universal: Principle of the Universe, Spiritual Pantheism
C. SELVES
....(1) Human & Subhuman (souls, ghosts, demons): Animism, Polydaemonism
....(2) Superhuman (gods): Humanistic Polytheism, Dualism
....(3) Infinite (God): monotheism
D. MYSTERIES (The Unknown Deity): (Religious) Agnosticism

"The general position for which the consensus gentium may be claimed is that man is entitled to the defence and the furtherance of his highest interests, and that for this he is dependent on the favour and the protection of a Divine Being." Paterson

non-generic resemblance & the synthetic a priori

modes of reason: free play, social, suppositional, suppositional-social, limitative

'encrypted' evidence -- i.e., evidence that only becomes usable as such with a key -- an interesting question is whether all evidence is in fact 'encrypted', requiring some key to be recognized as evidence: either there is unencrypted evidence, or a key that is not evidence.

Renaissance sculpting and painting as the creation of a pictorial vulgata

imperation // assertion

Contractualism requires a prior moral reasonableness.

Human beings assess reasons in part as members of, and on behalf of, groups of which they are part, because reasons are assessed according to what is common.

All religious by nature require some living question-answering authority, and any religion with a sacred text requires a primary authority of such a kind, whether it be more like an imam or more like a Panth.

The problem of the external world is bound up with the problem of the origin of the idea of the potential.

Perception is intrinsically teleological in structure.

The fundamental error of American politics is its tendency to subordinate organic civil society to the state, as if the former were but the instrument of the latter in the pursuit of certain abstract ideals.

unary overlap, Oa: a is such as to be a thing tha toverlaps something, a is an overlapping thing

axioms as answers to fundamental questions

genius : talent : competence :: simple apprehension : judgment : ratiocination

Judgment of verisimilitude is synthetic a priori judgment.

"Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel." Chesterton

Trusting to merit alone never merited anything.

A people disarmed is a people easily placed under the boot of tyranny.

Personal views and personal political policies never entirely coincide; the latter are generally stabilized for ease of use, and simplified for ease of communication, and qualified to take into account expected disagreements, and adapted to what is thought to be more proximately feasible, and all of this is long before we get to anything like hypocrisy or inconsistency. Happy is the one whose private and public views are closely connected; stupid is the one who cannot distinguish them.

Intellectualism is more a matter of interest than talent; that's the ism of it.

Just as plants sometimes do better far from their native region, since they are not suppressed by pests and predators used to them, so too with ideas.

Human beings have to feel their way to justice.

When politicians are high-minded and idealistic, look for the people whose punishment they are trying to justify.

The human body is by nature a musical instrument.

dancing : puppetry :: singing : playing an instrument

Anne of Green Gables as an argument for the intrinsic value of the imagination

transcendentals can be qualified by causation (first), by eminence (most), by remotion (pure)

dancing and the difficult that is apparently effortless

material signs of common good (Declaration of Independence, Stone of Destiny, etc.)

The future is never a straight road.

One of Nietzsche's errors was not recognizing that ressentiment is a perpetual feature of extensive social interaction, regardless of details of ideology.

One's sense of another's state of mind is prior to any explicit belief about their state of mind.

fellow-feeling : magnetism of the good in human animality :: sense of rightness : magnetism of teh good in human rationality

Religious Controversy, considered as a field of thought, is one of the great achievements of the human race: massive numbers of ordinary people *reasoning through* deep ideas and fundamental questions. Yes, the arguments are sometimes crude (but they sometimes are not) and sometimes foolish (but one should not underestimate the plain good sense of ordinary people doing their best), but the overall effect is truly remarkable, and it is one of the important mechanisms for the diffusion of serious philosophical thought.

"If the Church is independent of the nation, she can protest and denounce freely; if she is knit closely to the nation, such rebuke is almost impossible." Benson

narrative meditation -> allusive meditation -> simple contemplation

the three aspects of conversion
(1) clarification of intellectual difficulties
(2) resolution of moral obstacles
(3) communal consolidation

A philosophical system is not closed; it involves resources for repair (in response to objections not yet encountered) and extension.

Box/Diamond for each kind of measurement: count (∀, ∃), order (time, location), intensity

archive as civilizational intermediary

Every proposition can be analyzed into at least one question and answer pair.

distributive vs commutative largesse

(1) In real life basic goods may be found in more and less pure forms.
(2) One must distinguish between an instance of a basic good being a terminal reason and the basic good itself being a terminal reason.
(3) While basic goods are incommensurable, they are not incomparable.
(4) The coextensive transcendentals are all basic goods in teh respect in which human life is oriented to them; thus goodness itself is a basic good.
(5) Human life is a basic good insofar as it is a capacity to be oriented to basic goods.

Pleasure and pain are not reasons in abstraction from what pleases and what pains.

guild as economic (trade union)
guild as juridical (licensing)
guild as social (fraternity)
guild as aesthetic (pageantry)

The sincere smile of a woman gives her a kind of timelessness.

universality as a moral postulate
immortalization
the life appropriate to immortal freedom under God (immortal freedom participating providence)
law of nature : providence :: end in itself : freedom and immortality :: kingdom of ends : messianic community

The diversity of views in liberal societies leads not (as Mill thought) to extensive engagement with the content of different views but to the attempt to find ways to dismiss views without regard for content.

"Since what is brought from nonbeing into being must also decay, whatever has a beginning will also have an end." St. Cyril of Alexandria
"Whatever falls short of being God by nature is surely originate, and whatever escapes the condition of being made is surely within the limits of divinity."
"The originate and created nature has no riches from its own resources. Whatever it does have is certainly from God who bestows both being and how each one ought to be."

To try to have love without faith and hope is to develop disordered loves.

Revelation is not something wholly external; it structures faith itself.

That from which one draws one's premises is as important to arguments as the premises themselves.

A just society, to exist, must be founded on truths and aimed toward goods.

The nature of insight is known by causation, remotion, and eminence.

People are reluctant to retract because others take retraction as evidence of a general flaw; when one retracts, one has to do so while showing that it was due to a local or nonstandard problem, or one's entire credibility receives a question mark.

the decency structures, the honor structures, and the interest structures of a society

philosophy as the cultivation of wisdom as virtue
philosophy as the honorable work of reason
philosophy as a career or an interest

Poem Retrospective VIII

Melancholia

The garden hidden off the way
was glistening in the dewy day
as sun, new-wakened, rose to play
in blue, unburdened sky.
A threefold wall laid thick with vine
was raised around it, ivy twined
upon the gate in tendrilled line
through which the breezes sighed.

Within, in centermost estate,
a fountain rose in joy elate;
it rose and did not dissipate,
but lived with laughing smile.
Beside its pool, where lilies slept
a mournful maiden softly wept;
she hid her face but tears surrept
fell gently down the while.

A song she sang of sorrow's dreams,
of griefs revived where sadness teemed:
how sad it sounded in the gleams
that morning cast on dew!
I saw her eyes once; softest green,
not emerald but ocean-sheen
before the gray grows sharp and keen,
leaped out with wisdom true.

Long grief indeed will make one wise.
I saw that wisdom in her eyes,
the memory that never dies
but gives the heart a weight.
They saw, but did not see, my face,
attention by her grief erased;
tear on tear with hurry raced,
on pool-glass to abate.

She turned away, and yet my thought
has by her been enchanted, caught;
I found her, though I had not sought.
She haunts my inner mind.
And like an illness sorrow spread
to tinge her image in my head;
at times I stare as were I dead
and weep with eyes turned blind.

Evening Note for Thursday, February 7

Thought for the Evening: Doxastic Synousia

When people speak of support for beliefs, they often are thinking in particular of evidential support and grounding -- something implies or else directly affects the probability of another belief. Part of the reason for this is, no doubt, that this is the easiest kind of support to make some kind of model for. There is also, I think, good reason to take this kind of support as being able, under the right conditions, to dominate other kinds of support. But any significant examination of how beliefs are confirmed shows that there do seem to be kinds of support that don't fit the standard models; that is, they don't involve any sort of strict logical implication, and at the very least we have no clear answer as to how they would directly affect the probability -- and yet the assessments of everyone, and I mean everyone, are constantly affected by them. There is, broadly speaking, a way in which beliefs support beliefs not directly but by fitting each other in other ways. Call this relationship confirmation by synousia -- the beliefs support each other just by going well with each other, without even considering strictly evidential relations. Some examples, all of which I would suggest are capable of being entirely rational and none of which can, I think, be reduced to one belief making another belief more probable in any definitely specifiable way. (I don't think these are the only examples.)

(1) If you start with a well supported universal claim, and then find that you have reason to make an exception, it becomes easier to allow the possibility of exceptions. That is, our having good reason beforehand to think the universal claim was true gives us a sense that any exceptions are probably merely apparent exceptions; but once we know that there is an exception in some particular kind of case, this does not seem so sure -- an exception in one case suggests there could be exceptions in other case. Now, this is not a matter of entailment; nor does it seem to be implied when we combine this with other general assumptions that we commonly make. Nor can we specify any definite way in which this is evidence that affects probabilities -- given a well supported universal claim and one well supported exception, we simply don't usually know what the probability of another exception is. Rather, what seems to have shifted is what we take to be a plausible candidate for evidence against the claim -- note, not what we take as evidence against the claim, but what kind of thing we take as seeming like evidence against the claim.

(2) Analogy certainly plays a role in confirming the beliefs of rational people, but attempts to reduce this confirmation entirely to making-more-probable clearly fail -- everything has an analogy to everything else, in varying degrees, and the degrees of analogy don't have any clear relation to any direct evidential assessment (for instance, it can depend on how important we regard the analogue). What is more, in many cases it is obviously only an analogy. Thus, for instance, the analogy of ideas with organisms leads many people to give greater importance to theories that treat ideas as undergoing a kind of natural selection. What seems to be happening is that a habit of thinking that has been found successful in one domain carries over, when evidence is not definitely against it, to other domains that have certain obvious similarities, even if there are also obvious differences. This carry-over by analogy often precedes any definite evidence; indeed, it is the carry-over that often leads us to search for whether there is any evidence.

(3) People often recognize that some theory about X is more credible when, if the theory is assumed to be true, we can get a clear sense of how to discover new things about X. Something can be more believable than something else because we believe it opens more possibilities for further inquiry into things we believe to be important. This doesn't seem to be a matter of one belief making another more probable; again, we don't seem to have enough information for the probabilities, and apparent importance is clearly playing a role. It's more like prioritizing than probabilizing.

(4) Our beliefs seem to be subject to a kind of social pressure that is not itself evidential. If we believe that someone we know leans one way, we can lean that way ourselves. While we could make an argument that this is (very indirect) evidence, all the arguments I have come across only are able to do this by assuming that all support of belief for belief is evidential. In practice, we often don't seem to be actually using it as evidence for why we should believe; it just makes something more salient for belief, by the ordinary course of human sympathy.

(5) We seem sometimes to find it easier to believe if we can easily fit it into a narrative or description we already have in place, even if it's not necessary for the narrative or description, and even if it, on its own, would not be a reason to believe the narrative or description -- the mere fact that we can put it in our already supported story or description without messing the story or description up, tells in its favor. It's consistent with our prior belief, but I suppose it's not just consistent, because it's consistent in a particular way: it's consistent with the narrative or description we already have reason to hold without making the narrative or description too cluttered or complicated to continue using it for what we use it for. It's also not just consistency with individual beliefs; it's about how easy it is to accommodate in an already existing structure of belief.

These kinds of cases are easily overlooked, in part, I think, because they aren't in most cases the kinds of things that "lead you to believe" something; rather, they make things more believable. They don't usually function as evidence, because they aren't so much evidence for what they support as things that make evidence more clear, or more plausible, or more accessible, or perhaps make us more open to something's being a thing that could be supported by the evidence. And in practice, probably what they contribute most (but not, I think, solely) to rational life is to help stabilize belief -- i.e., make it more resistant to change when there is a lot of noise in the evidence. My suspicion is that all the things that contribute to doxastic synousia are things that are already operative well before we've actually believed something -- that is, they are strengthening relations that are already working with guesses, suspicions, presumptions, hazy opinions, speculations, in short all sorts of cognitive states, and something's coming to be believed doesn't eliminate this influence; even though direct evidential support is obviously in many cases a more significant influence on belief, this doesn't mean that the background 'fit' with other beliefs, suspicions, etc., has a nonexistent role. And in all these cases the reason that the synousia seems irreducible to evidential support is that it's a regulative support, not a constitutive support like evidential support is -- that is, one belief's fit with another belief is not itself a fact about what is believed but a fact about how our minds work when we are inquiring rationally. This is why 'seeming' keeps coming up in describing how it works.

Various Links of Interest

* Jeremiah Lawson reviews Roger Scruton's Music as an Art

* Matthew T. Segall and Tam Hunt discuss Alfred North Whitehead.

* Darwin has a good post on the 'Problem of Susan'. I've never thought the Problem of Susan was any sort of problem at all; it seems usually to be pushed as a problem by either (1) people who like Susan for other reasons and (2) people who think they might be a bit like Susan. It's not particularly surprising that such people would prefer something different, but that's not really anything relevant to the story, particularly since what we are told is actually consistent with what we know of Susan directly from Prince Caspian and indirectly from Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Darwin's post got me thinking, however, about perspective, since we aren't told anything about Susan by the narrator but by the characters, and Darwin seems right that what the characters say about it seems affected by who they are. This is true also in the evaluation. Peter, the High King, seems harshest -- he answers "shortly and gravely", and doesn't say anything other than that she is no longer "a friend of Narnia". Eustace, however, seems mostly irritated at Susan treating Narnia as a child's game, while Jill and Polly seem from their different perspectives to see Susan's attitude as a sort of exasperating silliness associated with her age (and the sort of maturity that she thinks goes with it).

(I also find it interesting that when Peter says she's not a friend of Narnia, he is not saying it as a general claim, but explicitly giving it as the reason why she's not there with everyone else -- that was the question Tirian had raised. The reason that Susan is not there is that she's the only one who's not yet dead; the others died in a railway accident. They were not all in the same part of the railway accident -- Peter, Edmund, and Lucy were on the train platform, while Eustace, Jill, Digory, and Polly were on the train coming into the station, and it is clearly implied that they were all meeting together as 'friends of Narnia', which they occasionally did. It's not a claim, as some loons try to make it, that Susan is 'shut out of heaven'; what would Peter know about that, since at this point in the story he like everyone else hardly knows what's going on? It's why Susan isn't among those who were at the railway station: she no longer meets with the rest to talk about Narnia.)

* Richard Marshall interviews Elisa Freschi on Indian philosophy.

* Simon Newcomb's science fiction novel, His Wisdom the Defender. Newcomb is best known for his impressive work in applied mathematics, for being a good friend of Benjamin Peirce, and for (possibly) deliberately torpedoing the career of Benjamin Peirce's son, C. S. Peirce, with whom he had many disagreements.

* Stephen Boulter, The aporetic method and the defence of immodest metaphysics.

* John G. Brungardt, World Enough and Form: Why Cosmology Needs Hylomorphism (PDF)

* William Newton on a recent exhibition of Tolkien's paintings at the Morgan Library in New York.

* P. D. Magnus, Risk and Efficacy in 'The Will to Believe' (PDF)

Currently Reading

Charles Williams, War in Heaven
Plotinus, The Enneads
Xiong Shili, New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness

Poem Retrospective VII

An adaptation of part of Euripides' The Bacchae.

Evoë

Mountained is my love,
wearing holy fawn-skin,
singing as he slays the goat,
delighting in the flesh.

Mountained in Phrygia is my love,
Bromios, who dancing leads
by milk-rich, wine-flowing streams,
by nectar-wine of bees.

Evoë!

With incense-fume of pine torch,
fragrant on the fennel rod;
running, dancing, hair-streaming,
band-rousing, ever shouting:

Evoë!

Booming timbrels hymn the Bacchic god;
the Phrygian flute of Mother Rhea,
satyr-stolen, it blends with revel,
sweet-graced and most holy,

antheming the wild troops;
mounting up they band and revel,
mountained, they are light of foot,
gambolling like wild foals.

Evoë!

Hypothetical and Categorical Proposals of Arguments (Re-Post)

(This is a re-post of a post from 2008.)

Thomas Aquinas:

Some have understood God to work in every agent in such a way that no created power has any effect in things, but that God alone is the ultimate cause of everything wrought; for instance, that it is not fire that gives heat, but God in the fire, and so forth. But this is impossible.

First, because the order of cause and effect would be taken away from created things: and this would imply lack of power in the Creator: for it is due to the power of the cause, that it bestows active power on its effect.

David Hume:

Thus, according to these philosophers, every thing is full of God. Not content with the principle, that nothing exists but by his will, that nothing possesses any power but by his concession: they rob nature, and all created beings, of every power, in order to render their dependence on the Deity still more sensible and immediate. They consider not that, by this theory, they diminish, instead of magnifying, the grandeur of those attributes, which they affect so much to celebrate. It argues surely more power in the Deity to delegate a certain degree of power to inferior creatures than to produce every thing by his own immediate volition.

These two passages give some sense of the importance in distinguishing hypothetical and categorical proposals of a particular type of argument. The arguments are in one sense very similar. There are some minor differences, due to different contexts (Aquinas is arguing against al-Ghazali, Hume is arguing against Malebranche) that would need to be considered in a full interpretation, but we can abstract from these for our purposes here. They both make the same basic criticism of occasionalism: that, while it is trying to exalt divine power, it really detracts from it, because giving power to the effect is more indicative of power in the cause. But there is another sense in which they are very different arguments. Aquinas's argument is a categorical argument: he is committed to each step of the argument, and thus the argument is an argument to a conclusion he thinks true, on the basis of premises he thinks true. It is an argument for what everyone should believe. Not so Hume's. We don't quite know Hume's actual position on these matters, but it is clear from the context that Hume is not committed to anything said in this argument. His argument is hypothetical: he may or may not believe any particular element of the argument, but his point is that occasionalists should believe this, or at least consider it more plausible than what they do believe. That is, it's not an attempt to lay out the serious philosophical reason for rejecting occasionalism (indeed, he goes on to offer what he calls "a more philosophical confutation of this theory" -- it is difficult to imagine Aquinas doing that, since on Aquinas's view the argument is as philosophical a confutation as could possibly be); it's an attempt to give occasionalists pause, to force them to ask themselves whether they are really being consistent. So very similar arguments, structurally and thematically speaking: but very different arguments, functionally speaking.

It is clear that any type of argument may be put forward either categorically or hypothetically. It is also clear, I would suggest, that categorically proposed arguments are stronger arguments than their hypothetically proposed counterparts; but hypothetically proposed arguments are safer, in the sense of committing the arguer to less, than their categorically proposed counterparts.

Thus in interpreting an argument we must consider not merely the concepts and logical structures involved; we must consider also how the argument is being put forward.

Poem Retrospective VI

Sometimes poems just come to you, for no discernible reason, and then only need minor tweaking at most. This one's always said pretty much what it was supposed to say, and has never needed more than a little smoothing out to say it. No doubt you could have a better poem on the general theme, but, beyond possible slight tweaking, further revision of this poem would end up essentially turning it into a different kind of poem. Whether a poem has reached its final state is not purely a question of quality; sometimes you've just done as much as you yourself can do with those kinds of materials. Perhaps it's a grand masterpiece, and perhaps it's just a minor still life, but with poems as with everything else in life, there's always a point at which you've basically done what you were doing with it.

Shaded Isles

Alas, no more the morning light
will catch the eye and spark to sight
the verdant earth, the azure blue,
and every other rainbow hue
that vests the world to make it bright;

alas, no more the morning light
will understanding's power fire
with vision and with heart's desire,
with waking thought and morning grace
as sunlight gladdens loving face;

instead the darkness, old and deep,
shall turn your eye and heart to sleep
and dreams no more shall haunt your brain,
nor tragic hopes, nor sorrow's pain,
but somewhere, lost in shaded isles,
your thought will stop to rest a while.

Something Elusive, yet Supremely Fair

The Ideal
by Florence Earle Coates

"Not the treasures is it that have awakened in me so-unspeakable a desire, but the Blue Flower is what I long to behold."—Novalis.

Something I may not win attracts me ever,—
⁠Something elusive, yet supremely fair,
Thrills me with gladness, but contents me never,
⁠Fills me with sadness, yet forbids despair.

It blossoms just beyond the paths I follow,
⁠It shines beyond the farthest stars I see,
It echoes faint from ocean caverns hollow,
⁠And from the land of dreams it beckons me.

It calls, and all my best, with joyful feeling,
⁠Essays to reach it as I make reply;
I feel its sweetness o'er my spirit stealing,
⁠Yet know ere I attain it I must die!

Poem Retrospective V

Dhruvasimha means 'steadfast lion'; in some Buddhist traditions it is the name of the lion-headed buddha, the buddha of the animal world. He is often shown with a book, and is associated with the power of language to ask questions. The beast asks no questions; to ask questions is to overcome bestial ignorance. Only by asking questions can one recognize that one's assumptions are not true answers.

Dhruvasimha

Sacred text in hand, the lion waits;
teaching is the path through golden gates
reaching other realms the mind has sought,
byssal depths of light beyond all thought.
Flawless question given, answers dissipate.

Past the first awareness is the seed,
source untouched by any craving need,
spark forever steadfast in its light,
constant in reflection and in fight:
thinker is but thought, and doer deed.

Lion for reflection on the plains,
Free of deep delusion, in the rains
sees the golden grasses and the sky;
golden eyes outlook all things that die.
Thoughts devoid of craving know no pain:
self once overcome, no self remains.

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.