As noted at the beginning, this was a barebones introduction to forms of reasoning in ethics, following loosely the order in my Ethics courses while stripping out most secondary readings. Doing the latter required some occasional re-organization; it also made sense to explain in a bit more detail a few things that I can usually only gesture briefly at in lectures, or that I usually explain by way of class activity or assignment rather than directly, where it was relevant to understanding the main figure in question.
Consequentialist
I (Bentham)
II (Mill)
III (Mill)
Deontological
IV (Kant)
V (Kant)
Virtue-Ethical
VI (Aristotle)
VII (Aquinas)
VIII (Aquinas)
If one were going beyond the limited range of primary topics I can cover in a term, one could certainly look at more: non-utilitarian consequentialisms, non-Kantian deontologies, non-Aristotelian virtue ethics. But the point here, of course, was not an exhaustive survey but a first look.
One thing that is perhaps worth emphasizing in general is that in no case is ethics actually seen as standalone, or even something that can be adequately addressed as a standalone field; ethics is always touching on and related with law (Bentham, Aquinas), aesthetics (Mill, Kant), and natural theology (Kant, Aquinas), in quite substantive ways, and here I've only even looked at a few of the really obvious cases -- politics and education are both topics, for instance, that are much more important to ethical reasoning than one would be able to see just from the above survey. Ethics, to be sure, is a sea that touches every shore, but it is more than just general relevance; it draws on and is strengthened by other fields. An ethics standing alone, sealed off from aesthetics, law, religion, politics, education, etc., is a malnourished ethics.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Friday, April 17, 2020
Ethics and Reasoning VIII (Aquinas)
Moral life according to Aquinas requires not just our own self-cultivation (development of virtues exercised in ways appropriate to our state of life), but also external helps. These external helps are not external in the sense of being wholly outside us (and indeed, the most important cases are not), but in the sense that they are not things we ourselves develop; rather, we receive them in some way. There are many such helps; the most important are law and grace. Both of these will also in a number of ways overlap and support the virtues.
Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli, showing Thomas Aquinas's association with law and grace in both sacrament (church) and teaching (book).
One of Aquinas's most famous philosophical contributions is his definition of law. According to Aquinas, law is
(1) a rational ordering
(2) to common good
(3) by one who is caretaker for what is common
(4) promulgated.
The purpose of a law is to act as guide and be a standard for rational beings, so it is necessary for it to be something that reason can use as a guide and standard. There are many kinds of rational guides and standards, though, even in practical matters. To be a law, it must be something that applies stably to everyone in the community; it must therefore deal with some stable motivation for the community. As an Aristotelian, of course, Aquinas takes this to be happiness, but it must be happiness insofar as it is shared as a goal by the community itself. Thus all law is concerned with that kind of happiness that is the totality of good in a life insofar as it is lived with others. Every community is formed around some common good, some good shared in common by the members of that community, whether that good is possessed or sought. Indeed, community just means 'the whole of what is common' or 'the state of having things in common'. This brings us to the third element of law; to have something of the authority that comes from the common good constituting a community, the law has to be put forward in a way adequate to that common good, that is to say, it can't be just anybody's rational ordering, but must be the rational ordering of a reason that is particularly connected to the common good. It must be put forward by someone who has the care (cura) for what is common. Usually the natural caretaker for a community is the whole community itself working together, but in practice it is often somebody who is designated a public person by the community and who acts as viceregent of everybody. This feature is what distinguishes law from the advice of private persons (which may be providing a rule relevant to common good but are not acting on behalf of the community whose common good it is) or the rules imposed by parents on a household (parents having the care of what is by definition only a partial contribution to common good). And finally, it must be actually applied. That is to say, if the rule is to be obeyed, it must be such that those who obey it can know it, so it must be promulgated or published.
Aquinas takes this to be a strict definition of law. Every law will have all four properties, anything that has all four properties is a law, and these are both true regardless of whether we call it a law or not. Both of them have points that are controverted by other philosophies of law. For instance, it follows from Aquinas's account that something cannot be a law at all if it is in itself inconsistent with common good -- such a thing is really a usurpation of power and an act of violence against the community, even if people call it a 'law'. And there will be quite a few different kinds of laws that will fit this definition, even if they are not what we typically call 'laws'.
The most general and encompassing kind of law is what Aquinas calls eternal law, which is the rational order of divine providence; God, being the good to which the totality of the world is directed and the source of everything in the universe, is the natural caretaker for what is common to the entire universe. The eternal law is in a sense the idea of law itself insofar as the entire world is subject to it. All other kinds of law depend on this, for the simple fact that none of the other kinds of law would exist without it.
More directly relevant to any consideration of ethics and reasoning, however, is natural law. Human practical reason operates according to practical principles, which are the standard against which one measures whether a plan or decision is a good one or a bad one, whether it 'makes sense', whether it is worth implementing, just like the principle of noncontradiction and other principles of theoretical reason are standards against which one measures whether theoretical reasoning is good or bad. These practical principles cover absolutely every practical plan and decision we make. And the most general of these, the noncontradiction of practical reasoning, so to speak, is Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided. If any practical plan violates this, then to that extent it is irrational. To be rational is in part to recognize and apply principles like this.
This principle of practical reason concerns every kind of good or bad. But suppose we look in particular at good that human beings share as human beings. There is a human community; we can recognize goods that we have in common with all other human beings. Examples are things like survival, reproduction and education and care for children, or rational life. But if we focus on this kind of good, then we find that the first principle of practical reason fits the definition of law. By supposition it is being applied in a way that concerns common good; by definition it is a rational ordering to good; as all rational beings can know it, it is promulgated; and it is promulgated by all human beings, who are together the natural caretaker of the common good of all human beings. The same will be true of other principles insofar as they touch on human common good, as well as any conclusions of those principles that do the same. There is a law natural to our own reason, which is our participation in eternal law, and its existence follows from the bare fact that we are rational beings who share a rational human nature with each other. We are always already under law.
An important aspect of how Aquinas builds his account of natural law -- and it is sometimes forgotten even by natural law theorists -- is that natural law serves as a general rational standard, not a rigorous account of the full moral life. It is in fact very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reason out precisely what natural law requires for every single situation. Natural law is linked to acquired virtue in that it obligates us to acquire each virtue and act according to it in some way. It does not obligate us to every act of every virtue, nor does natural law cover every aspect of moral life; but as our virtues all have bearing on the common good of the human race, virtues in a general way are all obligatory under natural law. Natural law cannot replace the virtue of prudence, although it does obligate us to be prudent, and most of the reasoning involved in our actual moral lives will derive from the virtue of prudence approximating and estimating and developing guidelines appropriate to circumstances, not directly by reasoning from natural law.
It is also perhaps worth recognizing that all obligation is in Aquinas's account communal. Without a common good, there is no law. Without a role in a community, there are no offices, i.e., duties based on our state of life. Private goods, goods belonging entirely to one and only one individual, obligate nobody. Obligation is something that arises out of our lives in community. But it is also important to recognize that we are all in community, and cannot function as human beings without being so. Reason is in-common by its very nature; we are social beings not merely in the fact that our natures lead us to try to be in society but in the fact that we are already in a community by the bare fact of being human. Natural law reflects this.
Natural law is a general standard; we often need something more specific. This gives us positive laws, laws that are made for specific purposes, of which there are two kinds, divine law and human law. The essential idea in both is that our moral life is a life of virtue, and acquired virtue is something we can have only by training, for which natural law provides only general guidance. Some of this is training we ourselves develop. But none of us are sufficient of ourselves to determine all the training that must be done in order to be virtuous. We need in part to be trained by others. Advice and admonition will sometimes be enough, for at least some things, but their implementation still depends entirely on our choosing to take them into account, and in matters of common good, it's not possible for everybody just to make their own decision about what should be done, particularly given that some people will choose in ways that are utterly inconsistent with virtue. So we need additional laws that give us specific guidance going beyond natural law. If this comes from God, like the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) or the precepts of Christ, it is divine law; if it comes from the human community, it is human law. Human law has no legitimate rationale other than to make it easier for us to become and to be virtuous people living with others who are becoming and being virtuous people.
All genuine human law by definition has to be consistent with natural law. However, because human means of enforcement cannot cover everything practical reason can, not every precept of natural law can be legislated by human law. For instance, if in addition to recognizing that lying is against natural law, we made it illegal ever to lie by human law, the enforcement of this would be so difficult that we certainly could not enforce it without violating natural law ourselves. So it makes sense simply to endure the fact that people will violate natural law by lying, and confine ourselves only to those things we can morally enforce. This is called the doctrine of toleration: human law must sometimes tolerate violations of natural law. On the other side, though, it is often necessary for us to be in agreement about particular matters that natural law does not on its own decide, so human law gives us a way to work together on particulars that are not rationally necessary but have to be determined if we are to act as we should.
Besides law, the other major factor of our moral lives that enters from outside is grace. 'Grace' is used in three different ways, all connected with the root meaning of the word in Latin, which is freedom. It can mean the love or favor of another person (this is the sense in which you are in someone's 'good graces'). It can mean a gift that is freely given. And it can mean a response to such a gift that is appropriate (this is the sense in which we are grateful or gracious). These are all interlinked: the first gives rise to the second, which gives rise to the third. The second, however, is the primary kind of thing Aquinas has in mind, and the most important thing fitting this description is the quality of the soul, which makes us worthy of God, added to our very being by God in order to lead human beings to God. Such grace can either be a gift directly leading someone to God (sanctifying grace), or a gift helping someone to lead someone else to God (gratuitous grace).
Grace, of course, is the foundation of the infused virtues, which raise human beings to a higher degree of society. However, Aquinas also thinks that we cannot fulfill the obligations of natural law without grace -- we have a tendency toward wrongdoing, so we need grace to compensate for this, and even if we did not, we would still need grace in order not just to conform to the law but to do so in a way that is appropriate to it. We cannot fully act well without divine help; our freedom needs a free gift from God in order to come to the end suitable for it.
In practical life, the notion of grace is generally (although not always) linked with the notion of sacrament, which is also a point at which law and grace intermingle. A sacrament is a sensible sign of something holy insofar as it contributes to our being holy, like sacrifices and tithes. Prior to any specification by divine law, in a regime of natural law, our sacraments our determined by our own vows or (at times) by special divine inspiration; these sacraments have only the most indirect connection with grace, in that we hope that God will give grace to help us because we are recognizing explicitly that we need it. When God gives the Law through Moses, however, He institutes a new regime, one that both gives a divine specification of the sacraments and a greater assurance of divine grace. These sacraments, like circumcision or Old Testament sacrifices, signify grace more consistently and accurately than other sacraments could, and convey a sort of promise that grace will be given. However, as a Christian, of course, Thomas holds that these sacraments are merely preparatory to a more complete form of sacrament, given in the New Law received from Christ; this New Law is itself given by grace, and its sacraments, like baptism, are signs of grace that both contain and cause grace directly to those who are properly disposed. It is in the sacrament of baptism, for instance, that we receive the infused virtues, and it is by the sacrament of penance that the infused virtues are restored if we act so as to lose them. And since, of course, law is by its very nature a communal thing, and determines the nature of sacrament, our primary form of expressing our readiness for grace, and in the case of the New Law, the primary form of receiving it, grace, like law, makes clear that our moral life is a communal life.
Both law and grace, Aquinas thinks, are ultimately founded on divine providence, and thus the moral life can only be fully lived when it is lived in a way appropriate to the broader context established by this divine providence, which is like a higher prudence -- 'prudence', in fact, is just a short form of the word 'providence'. We are not isolated individuals, and cannot be moral as isolated individuals. Our moral life presupposes others, whether by law or by grace or by some lesser assistances like these, and it is done in community with others, both God and other human beings, and it is diversified according to the communities of which we are part and our roles in those communities, and the goal of that life, whether the incomplete goal of peaceful and harmonious felicity or the higher goal of beatitude, is a goal shared in common. And understanding that Thomas sees life as structured in this way by community is essential to understanding his virtue ethics.
Altarpiece by Carlo Crivelli, showing Thomas Aquinas's association with law and grace in both sacrament (church) and teaching (book).
One of Aquinas's most famous philosophical contributions is his definition of law. According to Aquinas, law is
(1) a rational ordering
(2) to common good
(3) by one who is caretaker for what is common
(4) promulgated.
The purpose of a law is to act as guide and be a standard for rational beings, so it is necessary for it to be something that reason can use as a guide and standard. There are many kinds of rational guides and standards, though, even in practical matters. To be a law, it must be something that applies stably to everyone in the community; it must therefore deal with some stable motivation for the community. As an Aristotelian, of course, Aquinas takes this to be happiness, but it must be happiness insofar as it is shared as a goal by the community itself. Thus all law is concerned with that kind of happiness that is the totality of good in a life insofar as it is lived with others. Every community is formed around some common good, some good shared in common by the members of that community, whether that good is possessed or sought. Indeed, community just means 'the whole of what is common' or 'the state of having things in common'. This brings us to the third element of law; to have something of the authority that comes from the common good constituting a community, the law has to be put forward in a way adequate to that common good, that is to say, it can't be just anybody's rational ordering, but must be the rational ordering of a reason that is particularly connected to the common good. It must be put forward by someone who has the care (cura) for what is common. Usually the natural caretaker for a community is the whole community itself working together, but in practice it is often somebody who is designated a public person by the community and who acts as viceregent of everybody. This feature is what distinguishes law from the advice of private persons (which may be providing a rule relevant to common good but are not acting on behalf of the community whose common good it is) or the rules imposed by parents on a household (parents having the care of what is by definition only a partial contribution to common good). And finally, it must be actually applied. That is to say, if the rule is to be obeyed, it must be such that those who obey it can know it, so it must be promulgated or published.
Aquinas takes this to be a strict definition of law. Every law will have all four properties, anything that has all four properties is a law, and these are both true regardless of whether we call it a law or not. Both of them have points that are controverted by other philosophies of law. For instance, it follows from Aquinas's account that something cannot be a law at all if it is in itself inconsistent with common good -- such a thing is really a usurpation of power and an act of violence against the community, even if people call it a 'law'. And there will be quite a few different kinds of laws that will fit this definition, even if they are not what we typically call 'laws'.
The most general and encompassing kind of law is what Aquinas calls eternal law, which is the rational order of divine providence; God, being the good to which the totality of the world is directed and the source of everything in the universe, is the natural caretaker for what is common to the entire universe. The eternal law is in a sense the idea of law itself insofar as the entire world is subject to it. All other kinds of law depend on this, for the simple fact that none of the other kinds of law would exist without it.
More directly relevant to any consideration of ethics and reasoning, however, is natural law. Human practical reason operates according to practical principles, which are the standard against which one measures whether a plan or decision is a good one or a bad one, whether it 'makes sense', whether it is worth implementing, just like the principle of noncontradiction and other principles of theoretical reason are standards against which one measures whether theoretical reasoning is good or bad. These practical principles cover absolutely every practical plan and decision we make. And the most general of these, the noncontradiction of practical reasoning, so to speak, is Good is to be done and sought, bad is to be avoided. If any practical plan violates this, then to that extent it is irrational. To be rational is in part to recognize and apply principles like this.
This principle of practical reason concerns every kind of good or bad. But suppose we look in particular at good that human beings share as human beings. There is a human community; we can recognize goods that we have in common with all other human beings. Examples are things like survival, reproduction and education and care for children, or rational life. But if we focus on this kind of good, then we find that the first principle of practical reason fits the definition of law. By supposition it is being applied in a way that concerns common good; by definition it is a rational ordering to good; as all rational beings can know it, it is promulgated; and it is promulgated by all human beings, who are together the natural caretaker of the common good of all human beings. The same will be true of other principles insofar as they touch on human common good, as well as any conclusions of those principles that do the same. There is a law natural to our own reason, which is our participation in eternal law, and its existence follows from the bare fact that we are rational beings who share a rational human nature with each other. We are always already under law.
An important aspect of how Aquinas builds his account of natural law -- and it is sometimes forgotten even by natural law theorists -- is that natural law serves as a general rational standard, not a rigorous account of the full moral life. It is in fact very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to reason out precisely what natural law requires for every single situation. Natural law is linked to acquired virtue in that it obligates us to acquire each virtue and act according to it in some way. It does not obligate us to every act of every virtue, nor does natural law cover every aspect of moral life; but as our virtues all have bearing on the common good of the human race, virtues in a general way are all obligatory under natural law. Natural law cannot replace the virtue of prudence, although it does obligate us to be prudent, and most of the reasoning involved in our actual moral lives will derive from the virtue of prudence approximating and estimating and developing guidelines appropriate to circumstances, not directly by reasoning from natural law.
It is also perhaps worth recognizing that all obligation is in Aquinas's account communal. Without a common good, there is no law. Without a role in a community, there are no offices, i.e., duties based on our state of life. Private goods, goods belonging entirely to one and only one individual, obligate nobody. Obligation is something that arises out of our lives in community. But it is also important to recognize that we are all in community, and cannot function as human beings without being so. Reason is in-common by its very nature; we are social beings not merely in the fact that our natures lead us to try to be in society but in the fact that we are already in a community by the bare fact of being human. Natural law reflects this.
Natural law is a general standard; we often need something more specific. This gives us positive laws, laws that are made for specific purposes, of which there are two kinds, divine law and human law. The essential idea in both is that our moral life is a life of virtue, and acquired virtue is something we can have only by training, for which natural law provides only general guidance. Some of this is training we ourselves develop. But none of us are sufficient of ourselves to determine all the training that must be done in order to be virtuous. We need in part to be trained by others. Advice and admonition will sometimes be enough, for at least some things, but their implementation still depends entirely on our choosing to take them into account, and in matters of common good, it's not possible for everybody just to make their own decision about what should be done, particularly given that some people will choose in ways that are utterly inconsistent with virtue. So we need additional laws that give us specific guidance going beyond natural law. If this comes from God, like the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) or the precepts of Christ, it is divine law; if it comes from the human community, it is human law. Human law has no legitimate rationale other than to make it easier for us to become and to be virtuous people living with others who are becoming and being virtuous people.
All genuine human law by definition has to be consistent with natural law. However, because human means of enforcement cannot cover everything practical reason can, not every precept of natural law can be legislated by human law. For instance, if in addition to recognizing that lying is against natural law, we made it illegal ever to lie by human law, the enforcement of this would be so difficult that we certainly could not enforce it without violating natural law ourselves. So it makes sense simply to endure the fact that people will violate natural law by lying, and confine ourselves only to those things we can morally enforce. This is called the doctrine of toleration: human law must sometimes tolerate violations of natural law. On the other side, though, it is often necessary for us to be in agreement about particular matters that natural law does not on its own decide, so human law gives us a way to work together on particulars that are not rationally necessary but have to be determined if we are to act as we should.
Besides law, the other major factor of our moral lives that enters from outside is grace. 'Grace' is used in three different ways, all connected with the root meaning of the word in Latin, which is freedom. It can mean the love or favor of another person (this is the sense in which you are in someone's 'good graces'). It can mean a gift that is freely given. And it can mean a response to such a gift that is appropriate (this is the sense in which we are grateful or gracious). These are all interlinked: the first gives rise to the second, which gives rise to the third. The second, however, is the primary kind of thing Aquinas has in mind, and the most important thing fitting this description is the quality of the soul, which makes us worthy of God, added to our very being by God in order to lead human beings to God. Such grace can either be a gift directly leading someone to God (sanctifying grace), or a gift helping someone to lead someone else to God (gratuitous grace).
Grace, of course, is the foundation of the infused virtues, which raise human beings to a higher degree of society. However, Aquinas also thinks that we cannot fulfill the obligations of natural law without grace -- we have a tendency toward wrongdoing, so we need grace to compensate for this, and even if we did not, we would still need grace in order not just to conform to the law but to do so in a way that is appropriate to it. We cannot fully act well without divine help; our freedom needs a free gift from God in order to come to the end suitable for it.
In practical life, the notion of grace is generally (although not always) linked with the notion of sacrament, which is also a point at which law and grace intermingle. A sacrament is a sensible sign of something holy insofar as it contributes to our being holy, like sacrifices and tithes. Prior to any specification by divine law, in a regime of natural law, our sacraments our determined by our own vows or (at times) by special divine inspiration; these sacraments have only the most indirect connection with grace, in that we hope that God will give grace to help us because we are recognizing explicitly that we need it. When God gives the Law through Moses, however, He institutes a new regime, one that both gives a divine specification of the sacraments and a greater assurance of divine grace. These sacraments, like circumcision or Old Testament sacrifices, signify grace more consistently and accurately than other sacraments could, and convey a sort of promise that grace will be given. However, as a Christian, of course, Thomas holds that these sacraments are merely preparatory to a more complete form of sacrament, given in the New Law received from Christ; this New Law is itself given by grace, and its sacraments, like baptism, are signs of grace that both contain and cause grace directly to those who are properly disposed. It is in the sacrament of baptism, for instance, that we receive the infused virtues, and it is by the sacrament of penance that the infused virtues are restored if we act so as to lose them. And since, of course, law is by its very nature a communal thing, and determines the nature of sacrament, our primary form of expressing our readiness for grace, and in the case of the New Law, the primary form of receiving it, grace, like law, makes clear that our moral life is a communal life.
Both law and grace, Aquinas thinks, are ultimately founded on divine providence, and thus the moral life can only be fully lived when it is lived in a way appropriate to the broader context established by this divine providence, which is like a higher prudence -- 'prudence', in fact, is just a short form of the word 'providence'. We are not isolated individuals, and cannot be moral as isolated individuals. Our moral life presupposes others, whether by law or by grace or by some lesser assistances like these, and it is done in community with others, both God and other human beings, and it is diversified according to the communities of which we are part and our roles in those communities, and the goal of that life, whether the incomplete goal of peaceful and harmonious felicity or the higher goal of beatitude, is a goal shared in common. And understanding that Thomas sees life as structured in this way by community is essential to understanding his virtue ethics.
Thought Laboratory
Comparing how one perfection or another (life, knowledge, language, love) is achieved in a pure spirit and in a human being allows us to determine simultaneously the analogically universal stable nucleus of this perfection and the particular features that it assumes in man. The specificity of the human condition stands out all the more clearly as a result. For example, the study of such an exotic topic as the language of the angels allows us to sort out the fundamental structures of all communication and to identify the things in our experience of language that depend on specifically human modalities. Moreover, an examination of the metaphysical structure of an angel reveals, like a photographic image chemically developed in a darkroom, the fundamental truth of the composition of being and essence in every creature. In short, angelology is a "thought laboratory" that allows the philosopher to distill and refine his metaphysical or noetic concepts and to define further what is properly human.
Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., Angels and Demons, Miller, tr. The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2016), p. 2.
Thursday, April 16, 2020
But Even Mine Own Long-Lost Abandoned Home
Knowledge
by Richard Chenevix Trench
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. -- Wordsworth.
True knowledge is the waking up of powers
To conscious life, which were already ours.
What now is mine in leaf and flower and fruit,
Was mine before in blossom, bud, and root.
The writing that had faded quite, again
By chymic art comes out distinct and plain.
Springs that were stopped, when that is cleared away
Which choked them, bubble forth in open day.
The stars look forth at eve, which yet have been
All day in heaven, although till now unseen.
The dawn lights up the landscape; the great Sun
Shows, but not makes, the world he looks upon.
I found a rich pearl flung upon my coast,
Which yet no other than myself had lost.
I entered a large hall--no foreign dome,
But even mine own long-lost abandoned home.
In what at first appeared a stranger's face,
An ancient friend I daily learn to trace.
I am at rest--my centre I have found,
The circle's edge I had been wandering round.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Evening Note for Tuesday, April 14
Thought for the Evening: The Landscape of Possible Arguments
Scott Aikin and Nicholaos Jones had a paper a few years back called "An Atheistic Argument from Ugliness". In that paper they put forward a few claims of interest: (1) teleological arguments for God's existence have 'evil twins'; (2) that there is a specific teleological argument for God's existence based on beauty; (3) that (from the prior two points) there is an atheistic argument from ugliness, combining the evil twin of the argument from beauty with the premise that God must be good; (4) that there is a generally exportable way to reverse 'theodicies' addressing the 'problem of ugliness'; and (5) that this suffices for at least an 'agnostic tie'. I find the paper interesting in part because I have an interest in 'abstract history of philosophy', one element of which is looking at the landscape of possible argument that is traveled in the development of actual arguments, and I think the paper exemplifies a very common failure in metaphysics and philosophy of religion to understand how the possible-argument landscape relates to real argument, and it does so in several ways.
Is there an 'evil twins' problem for theistic teleological arguments? We have to be somewhat careful here; 'teleological argument' is a very broad and loose category. Aikin and Jones mean a very specific kind of teleological argument, which they characterize as having a particular structure:
[a] a premise assigning a property X to the universe or parts of it;
[b] a premise attributing X at least usually to purposive action creating something to be X;
[c] a premise ruling out that the purposive action for X attributed to the universe or parts of it can be human;
[d] a conclusion that the universe is due to purposive action creating to be X.
At least this is what they start out purporting to discuss; they immediately then explain further what they mean by giving a brief historical survey that jumbles it together with arguments that do not have this structure. But their argument is stronger if we stick with this structure, so let's ask about this structure whether it allows 'evil twins'.
The answer is obviously yes; this is trivially true, given that you can plug in anything into X and get a new argument. 'Twins' underplays the combinatorial possibilities. For instance,
(1) The universe is cool.
(2) Coolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be cool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe cool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
(1) The universe is uncool.
(2) Uncoolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be uncool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe uncool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
We can get infinitely many possible arguments this way, using whatever property you want for X: big, orange, wicked, round, up someone's nostril, whatever. So obviously, you can have arguments from beauty and ugliness both. You can have arguments from anything.
But we don't, and this is because human beings don't reason with the bare landscape of possible argument. And the reason we don't is that truth distorts the landscape. For instance, if we plug 'up my nose' for X, then 'The universe is up my nose' is obviously false given the understanding of noses and the universe had by virtually everyone outside the madhouse; you have but to look up my nose to see that the universe is not up it. What's more, 'The universe is up my nose' is probably necessarily false: that is to say, my nose is probably necessarily a finite part of the universe, and therefore cannot have the universe as a part bounded by it. Add any truth at all, and like a star warping space and time, it makes the landscape of possible arguments non-flat. Once truth is in the mix, not all possible arguments are equal. Shift in terms yields an argument with the same structure but not an argument by parity.
The same point arises again for their theodicy reversals. Can you turn every beauty-based theodicy into an ugliness-based theodicy? Yes, and again trivially: it follows directly from the fact that theodicies have a logical structure detachable from the content of their terms. But this too does not establish parity of argument.
This is of significance to their argument because you can only get an 'agnostic tie' on grounds of parity, not on grounds of the multiple realizability of logical structure. It is irrational to treat arguments equally merely because they have the same logical structure. I mean, literally irrational; one would have to be insane to do it.
When they actually make their 'atheistic argument', Aikin and Jones come close to recognizing that replacing terms is not the only thing that must be considered. The 'evil twin' of the theistic argument from beauty is, of course, a theistic argument itself. The atheistic argument is a very different argument that treats the theistic argument from ugliness as a reductio when added to the premise, assumed true, that God could not possibly love ugliness nor be ugly nor torture us with ugliness. It's analogous to atheistic arguments from 'bad design'; these are not 'twins' of theistic arguments from design, because they can't possibly have the same logical structure. Whether something is (really, as opposed to merely apparently) designed badly or well brings one to the same conclusion: there is a designer. To get an atheistic argument, you have to treat 'There is a designer who designed this badly' as conflicting with a more fundamental assumption about what's true, either your own (if you are putting it forward categorically) or that of the person with whom you are arguing (if you are arguing ad hominem in the Lockean sense). To get the atheistic argument, you have to know something about God that the original argument does not require you to know. And so here. But the point is that treating something as a reductio already requires recognizing that the landscape of possible arguments twists around truths, so that assuming something to be true changes the acceptability or cogency of arguments. What really does their work in the 'agnostic tie' conclusion is the assumption, which they never establish for any of the evil twins or reverse theodicies, that the premises are equally supportable given the way the world is. This is where the real action is.
And there are reasons why people do not in general treat arguments and their 'evil twins' as on a level: they usually aren't. The Pyrrhonists used to draw agnostic conclusions from the isosthenia of arguments, the sameness of strength on opposing sides; but sameness of strength is actually very difficult to get -- you can usually only get it if you are assuming an even larger-scale agnosticism to begin with, one concerning everything else that's relevant to the arguments and thus could possibly change their supportability. Start assuming things and the symmetries begin to be broken. This is a major reason, arguably, why Pyrrhonist skepticiam is not a popular position, why it is, in fact, easier to be a dogmatist than a Pyrrhonist: equilibrium requires that all the forces balance, and that requires a very specific set-up.
In the actual history of philosophy, a lot of the dynamics of arguments comes about through this sort of symmetry-breaking -- something is taken as true, and the possible arguments are no longer equally possible; something else is taken as true, and the possible arguments that can be made shift again. What historians of philosophy often are doing is looking at (1) the factors introducing assumptions and (2) the effects that these introductions have on the salience and viability of possible arguments. But it is in fact essential to understanding and comparing arguments to recognize that the landscape of possible arguments for us is never flat, and that the bare fact of using arguments, rather than merely contemplating them, requires that more than logical structure be considered.
Various Links of Interest
* Why is the sky green before a tornado? at "Science Notes"
How to subsitute baking powder and baking soda
Make hot ice from baking soda and vinegar
* Lydia Moland, The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child
* J. D. Vance, How I Joined the Resistance
* Lucie Levine, Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? The evidence that a significant portion of modern art's success was funded by intelligence agencies is quite undeniable. How much the intelligence agencies pushing an anti-Soviet (and thus in part anti-Soviet-propaganda) propaganda campaign were the engine of modern art movements, as opposed to simply taking advantage of what was already working on its own, is a more tricky question.
* A.-S. Barwich, It's hard to fool a nose
* Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Confucius, at the SEP
Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, Edith Stein
* Udo Schuklenk, Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients. A very rare instance of my agreeing with Schuklenk on an ethical matter (although he ruins it by detouring into a rant on political policy that at most optimistic assessment has only indirect bearing on the immediate ethical question of personal medical obligations). It's of course undeniably good for health care professionals to do so if they can genuinely help (but this is not the same as an obligation); there are particular situations in which particular health care professionals might be obligated to care for particular COVID-19 patients (but this is not the same as a general obligation); it is in principle possible to draft health care professionals for a medical emergency in the same way we draft soldiers for war (but we have not done so, and healthcare professionals are not organized as a soldiery under command). One sometimes finds people arguing about a duty to care; but the duty to care that healthcare professionals have is just the same duty to care that we all have, allowing for the fact that their skills give them an expanded range of action. Doctors and other practitioners in the medical tradition have rights; and just as there is a legitimate space for both technical objection and conscientious objection, so there is legitimate space for personal safety objection. And it is very important to recognize the degree to which doctors risking themselves for others is voluntary and not something simply to be expected, as well as to recognize that if you want them to take such risks as a consistent thing, you need to support them properly for it.
People are always trying to rig ethics to get the results they want; you have to be careful about assuming that because a result is tragic that the actions to avoid it are obligatory rather than just good, and even more so that they are obligatory on particular people rather than being the responsibility of all of us. There is such a thing as obligation creep, in which things that are not obligations are treated as such because people like the results, or in which responsibilities that are really shared are fobbed off on particular people as 'their' obligations. I think people especially tend to conflate these matters when talking about 'healthcare', and it is a very dangerous moral habit.
* Christiaan Kappes, Transubstantiation: Maybe Dositheos Got It Right
* Ben Zion Katz, The Breadth of Rabbinic Opinion Regarding Mosaic Authorship of the Torah in the Middle Ages
* Loebolus. All the public domain Loeb editions, available for download.
* Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes, The Inside Story of How H-E-B. Planned for the Pandemic. For those who don't know, H-E-B is the major local grocery chain here in Texas. There is no question that its handling of recent events has been exemplary.
* The mathematician John Conway, most famous for his Game of Life and surreal numbers, has recently died due to COVID-19.
Currently Reading
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick
Ed Peters, tr., The 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law
John C. Wright, Count to a Trillion
Scott Aikin and Nicholaos Jones had a paper a few years back called "An Atheistic Argument from Ugliness". In that paper they put forward a few claims of interest: (1) teleological arguments for God's existence have 'evil twins'; (2) that there is a specific teleological argument for God's existence based on beauty; (3) that (from the prior two points) there is an atheistic argument from ugliness, combining the evil twin of the argument from beauty with the premise that God must be good; (4) that there is a generally exportable way to reverse 'theodicies' addressing the 'problem of ugliness'; and (5) that this suffices for at least an 'agnostic tie'. I find the paper interesting in part because I have an interest in 'abstract history of philosophy', one element of which is looking at the landscape of possible argument that is traveled in the development of actual arguments, and I think the paper exemplifies a very common failure in metaphysics and philosophy of religion to understand how the possible-argument landscape relates to real argument, and it does so in several ways.
Is there an 'evil twins' problem for theistic teleological arguments? We have to be somewhat careful here; 'teleological argument' is a very broad and loose category. Aikin and Jones mean a very specific kind of teleological argument, which they characterize as having a particular structure:
[a] a premise assigning a property X to the universe or parts of it;
[b] a premise attributing X at least usually to purposive action creating something to be X;
[c] a premise ruling out that the purposive action for X attributed to the universe or parts of it can be human;
[d] a conclusion that the universe is due to purposive action creating to be X.
At least this is what they start out purporting to discuss; they immediately then explain further what they mean by giving a brief historical survey that jumbles it together with arguments that do not have this structure. But their argument is stronger if we stick with this structure, so let's ask about this structure whether it allows 'evil twins'.
The answer is obviously yes; this is trivially true, given that you can plug in anything into X and get a new argument. 'Twins' underplays the combinatorial possibilities. For instance,
(1) The universe is cool.
(2) Coolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be cool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe cool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
(1) The universe is uncool.
(2) Uncoolness usually requires purposive action creating something to be uncool.
(3) Human action can't be what makes the universe uncool.
(4) Therefore the universe is likely the product of a purposive agent creating it to be cool, namely, God.
We can get infinitely many possible arguments this way, using whatever property you want for X: big, orange, wicked, round, up someone's nostril, whatever. So obviously, you can have arguments from beauty and ugliness both. You can have arguments from anything.
But we don't, and this is because human beings don't reason with the bare landscape of possible argument. And the reason we don't is that truth distorts the landscape. For instance, if we plug 'up my nose' for X, then 'The universe is up my nose' is obviously false given the understanding of noses and the universe had by virtually everyone outside the madhouse; you have but to look up my nose to see that the universe is not up it. What's more, 'The universe is up my nose' is probably necessarily false: that is to say, my nose is probably necessarily a finite part of the universe, and therefore cannot have the universe as a part bounded by it. Add any truth at all, and like a star warping space and time, it makes the landscape of possible arguments non-flat. Once truth is in the mix, not all possible arguments are equal. Shift in terms yields an argument with the same structure but not an argument by parity.
The same point arises again for their theodicy reversals. Can you turn every beauty-based theodicy into an ugliness-based theodicy? Yes, and again trivially: it follows directly from the fact that theodicies have a logical structure detachable from the content of their terms. But this too does not establish parity of argument.
This is of significance to their argument because you can only get an 'agnostic tie' on grounds of parity, not on grounds of the multiple realizability of logical structure. It is irrational to treat arguments equally merely because they have the same logical structure. I mean, literally irrational; one would have to be insane to do it.
When they actually make their 'atheistic argument', Aikin and Jones come close to recognizing that replacing terms is not the only thing that must be considered. The 'evil twin' of the theistic argument from beauty is, of course, a theistic argument itself. The atheistic argument is a very different argument that treats the theistic argument from ugliness as a reductio when added to the premise, assumed true, that God could not possibly love ugliness nor be ugly nor torture us with ugliness. It's analogous to atheistic arguments from 'bad design'; these are not 'twins' of theistic arguments from design, because they can't possibly have the same logical structure. Whether something is (really, as opposed to merely apparently) designed badly or well brings one to the same conclusion: there is a designer. To get an atheistic argument, you have to treat 'There is a designer who designed this badly' as conflicting with a more fundamental assumption about what's true, either your own (if you are putting it forward categorically) or that of the person with whom you are arguing (if you are arguing ad hominem in the Lockean sense). To get the atheistic argument, you have to know something about God that the original argument does not require you to know. And so here. But the point is that treating something as a reductio already requires recognizing that the landscape of possible arguments twists around truths, so that assuming something to be true changes the acceptability or cogency of arguments. What really does their work in the 'agnostic tie' conclusion is the assumption, which they never establish for any of the evil twins or reverse theodicies, that the premises are equally supportable given the way the world is. This is where the real action is.
And there are reasons why people do not in general treat arguments and their 'evil twins' as on a level: they usually aren't. The Pyrrhonists used to draw agnostic conclusions from the isosthenia of arguments, the sameness of strength on opposing sides; but sameness of strength is actually very difficult to get -- you can usually only get it if you are assuming an even larger-scale agnosticism to begin with, one concerning everything else that's relevant to the arguments and thus could possibly change their supportability. Start assuming things and the symmetries begin to be broken. This is a major reason, arguably, why Pyrrhonist skepticiam is not a popular position, why it is, in fact, easier to be a dogmatist than a Pyrrhonist: equilibrium requires that all the forces balance, and that requires a very specific set-up.
In the actual history of philosophy, a lot of the dynamics of arguments comes about through this sort of symmetry-breaking -- something is taken as true, and the possible arguments are no longer equally possible; something else is taken as true, and the possible arguments that can be made shift again. What historians of philosophy often are doing is looking at (1) the factors introducing assumptions and (2) the effects that these introductions have on the salience and viability of possible arguments. But it is in fact essential to understanding and comparing arguments to recognize that the landscape of possible arguments for us is never flat, and that the bare fact of using arguments, rather than merely contemplating them, requires that more than logical structure be considered.
Various Links of Interest
* Why is the sky green before a tornado? at "Science Notes"
How to subsitute baking powder and baking soda
Make hot ice from baking soda and vinegar
* Lydia Moland, The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child
* J. D. Vance, How I Joined the Resistance
* Lucie Levine, Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? The evidence that a significant portion of modern art's success was funded by intelligence agencies is quite undeniable. How much the intelligence agencies pushing an anti-Soviet (and thus in part anti-Soviet-propaganda) propaganda campaign were the engine of modern art movements, as opposed to simply taking advantage of what was already working on its own, is a more tricky question.
* A.-S. Barwich, It's hard to fool a nose
* Mark Csikszentmihalyi, Confucius, at the SEP
Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, Edith Stein
* Udo Schuklenk, Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients. A very rare instance of my agreeing with Schuklenk on an ethical matter (although he ruins it by detouring into a rant on political policy that at most optimistic assessment has only indirect bearing on the immediate ethical question of personal medical obligations). It's of course undeniably good for health care professionals to do so if they can genuinely help (but this is not the same as an obligation); there are particular situations in which particular health care professionals might be obligated to care for particular COVID-19 patients (but this is not the same as a general obligation); it is in principle possible to draft health care professionals for a medical emergency in the same way we draft soldiers for war (but we have not done so, and healthcare professionals are not organized as a soldiery under command). One sometimes finds people arguing about a duty to care; but the duty to care that healthcare professionals have is just the same duty to care that we all have, allowing for the fact that their skills give them an expanded range of action. Doctors and other practitioners in the medical tradition have rights; and just as there is a legitimate space for both technical objection and conscientious objection, so there is legitimate space for personal safety objection. And it is very important to recognize the degree to which doctors risking themselves for others is voluntary and not something simply to be expected, as well as to recognize that if you want them to take such risks as a consistent thing, you need to support them properly for it.
People are always trying to rig ethics to get the results they want; you have to be careful about assuming that because a result is tragic that the actions to avoid it are obligatory rather than just good, and even more so that they are obligatory on particular people rather than being the responsibility of all of us. There is such a thing as obligation creep, in which things that are not obligations are treated as such because people like the results, or in which responsibilities that are really shared are fobbed off on particular people as 'their' obligations. I think people especially tend to conflate these matters when talking about 'healthcare', and it is a very dangerous moral habit.
* Christiaan Kappes, Transubstantiation: Maybe Dositheos Got It Right
* Ben Zion Katz, The Breadth of Rabbinic Opinion Regarding Mosaic Authorship of the Torah in the Middle Ages
* Loebolus. All the public domain Loeb editions, available for download.
* Dan Solomon and Paula Forbes, The Inside Story of How H-E-B. Planned for the Pandemic. For those who don't know, H-E-B is the major local grocery chain here in Texas. There is no question that its handling of recent events has been exemplary.
* The mathematician John Conway, most famous for his Game of Life and surreal numbers, has recently died due to COVID-19.
Currently Reading
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers
Stephen Jarvis, Death and Mr. Pickwick
Ed Peters, tr., The 1917 Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law
John C. Wright, Count to a Trillion
All Eyes Outside
Self-Knowledge
by John Holland
"A man can never understand himself till he make a right estimate of his knowledge; till he examine what kind of knowledge he values himself most upon, and most diligently cultivates: how high a value he seta upon it; what good it does him; what effect it hath upon him; what he is better for it; what end it answers now; or what it is likely to answer hereafter."—Mason.
Most men by instinct, interest, or caprice,
Or by the current of the crowd, are led;
Perchance their aims wide as the world are spread,
Their vigorous mental motions never cease
During their waking hours; yea, of a piece
With daylight duties, are their dreams a-bed:
Wealth is their wisdom; and full oft they shed
On those around, glad proof of wealth's increase:
But never pause they one short hour to trace
The secret source of action or of thought;
Nor, meeting their own spirits face to face,
By introspection are they warn'd or taught:
All eyes outside--they scape life's dangerous shelves,
And know--base Knowledge! all things, but--themselves.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Ubi Est Mors Victoria Tua?
Christ is risen!
Now after the sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the sepulchre. And behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. And for fear of him the guards trembled and became like dead men. But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples that he has risen from the dead, and behold, he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him. Lo, I have told you.”[RSVCE]
Sonnet 68
by Edmund Spenser
Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day
Didst make thy triumph over death and sin,
And having harrowed hell, didst bring away
Captivity thence captive, us to win:
This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin,
And grant that we, for whom thou diddest die,
Being with thy dear blood clean washed from sin,
May live forever in felicity:
And that thy love we weighing worthily,
May likewise love thee for the same again;
And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy,
May love with one another entertain.
So let us love, dear love, like as we ought,
Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.
An Easter Carol
by Christina Rossetti
Spring bursts to-day,
For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.
Flash forth, thou Sun,
The rain is over and gone, its work is done.
Winter is past,
Sweet Spring is come at last, is come at last.
Bud, Fig and Vine,
Bud, Olive, fat with fruit and oil and wine.
Break forth this morn
In roses, thou but yesterday a Thorn.
Uplift thy head,
O pure white Lily through the Winter dead.
Beside your dams
Leap and rejoice, you merry-making Lambs.
All Herds and Flocks
Rejoice, all Beasts of thickets and of rocks.
Sing, Creatures, sing,
Angels and Men and Birds and everything.
All notes of Doves
Fill all our world: this is the time of loves.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
Dashed Off VI
This starts the notebook that was begun December 2018.
Philo's pancratist as a model for the true politics
criminal confessions as gap-filling evidence sources (their primary value is filling gaps from other evidential sources)
case-building vs truth-discovering evidence
the gradival aspect of confirmational character
baptism : Greek (mystery religion) :: confirmation : Latin (Roman soldier) :: ordination : Hebrew (priesthood)
Mathematical excellence requires more than technical ability; it also requires contextualizing ability.
deciphering as a causal inference from effect to final cause (pattern of effect to why that pattern is the pattern)
Through law and through grace we may possess by anticipation what we do not have in actual possession.
Forensic accounts of justification assume that title by grace works very much like title by law.
Baptism on the human side always involves water, blood, intention, Spirit, but sometimes one is more obvious.
(1) water, proper intention: adult sacramental baptism
(2) water, vicarious intention: infant sacramental baptism
(3) blood, proper intention: martyrs
(4) blood, vicarious intention: Holy Innocents
(5) desire, proper intention: St. Dismas
(6) desire, vicarious intention: infants intended to be baptized
-- Note that this explains why the Holy Innocents are poss. unique -- only God could be the source of vicarious intention in cases of baptism of blood.
-- On the divine side is Spirit. Perhaps one could distinguish two cases, baptism-relevant, in a way exemplar and preconditional, for baptism:
(7) Spirit, proper intention: Christ's Baptism
(8) Spirit, vicarious intention: Immaculate Conception
"The essence of sportive hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man, but something much more spiritual than that: a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal." Ortega y Gassett
Every freedom has a kallipolitical, a timocratic, an oligarchic, and a democratic interpretation.
forms of superpower in superheroes
(1) natural talent: Superman, Wonder Woman
(2) artificial/acquired talent: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Flash, Fantastic Four, Black Panther
(3) honed skill: Green Arrow, The Shadow
(4) suit/vestment: Iron Man, Ant Man, Ralph Hinkley
(5) tool: Green Lantern, Michael Knight
--perhaps patronage should be on this list as well
MacIntyre & virtue aesthetics: While looser than things like sports, arts and crafts are coherent and complex forms of human activity, etc.
If probability is tied to frequency, it makes sense to measure it between 0 and 1 (by fractions); if it is tied to subjective assessment of some kind, however, there is good reason to think that there can be surplus in either direction.
-- an interpretation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness as about the phenomena of reading, writing, being read
two means of storytelling: re-enacting performance, narration
Esther obtains by title of grace salvation for her people that goes beyond title by law.
Boole takes = for secondary propositions to be synchrony.
x(1-x)=0
(1) It is impossible that there be a class of members who have a quality and do not have it at the same time.
(2) It is impossible for a proposition to be at the same time true and false.
(3) It is impossible for an argument to be both sound and unsound at the same time.
co-soundness of arguments
A is co-sound with B, B is co-sound with C, therefore A is co-sound with C.
(A=B), (B=C), therefore (A=C)
"Piety and love of man are related virtues." Philo
"The lives of those who have earnestly followed virtue may be called unwritten laws."
modalities as characterizing ways of being the same
titles of right to govern (Rosmini)
(1) Arising from prior right of ownership and dominion
---- (a) title of absolute being
---- (b) title of fatherhood
---- (c) title of seigniory (lordship)
---- (d) title of ownership
(2) Not arising so
---- (a) arising from unilateral action
-------- (i) peaceful occupancy
-------- (ii) forced occupancy
------------ (a) out of just self-defense
------------ (b) out of just defense of others
---- (b) arising from combined act
Russell gives an other minds account of external world in ABC of Relativity ch. 2.
baptism : Word as Son :: confirmation : Word as Christ :: ordination : Word as Savior
rights following directly from the adoptive aspect of baptism in itself: right to express thanks to God, right to give first honor and submission to God in all things without exception, right to acts of piety
A difference in measurement is due to a difference in either the measured, or the means of measuring, or the act of measuring.
difference-difference principles
Poisson takes 'probability' to mean the reason we have for thinking an event has taken place; this is measured by the standard ratio.
"As the realms of day and night are not strictly conterminous, but are separated by a crepuscular zone, through which the light of the one fades gradually off into the darkness of the other, so it may be said that every region of positive knowledge lies surrounded by a debateable and speculative territory, over which it in some degree extends its influence and its light." Boole
materiality as travel-resistance
While there is a conventional aspect to coordinates, the theory of tensors as used in physics establishes that they involve using a convention to describe real facts, even if only in a limited or relative way.
"When the most important subjects are investigated by insignificant men, they typically make these men important." Augustine
"Pro veris probare falsa turpissima est." Cicero
Every human person is a sublime catastrophe.
due process as a moral notion and detraction, calumny
knowledge as that cognition such that error is ruled out and it does not vacillate under rational opposition
Augustine's recommendations among Platonists (De Civ 8.12): Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Apuleius
"various saints in various ways excel one another in applications of the various virtues." Aquinas (Sent 3d36q1a2ad1)
To search for the truth is already to have a first glimmering participation in the truth, even if that truth is far distant.
Promises and gifts overlap; one may give by promising.
Vows are simultaneously moral and ceremonial.
academic prose and anodyne tone -- much academic prose is concerned with dampening the ability to dispute points (nonprovocation in presenting the disputable, to minimize dispute except along certain channels)
principle, beginning, origin, source, font, spring, cause, author
elements of a political stance in democratic politics
(1) badge of superiority (marks Us off from Them)
(2) disaster to avoid (associated with Them)
(3) enemy (Them)
(4) consumption practices (how We buy and support as Good People)
(5) propaganda practices (how We communicate the Truth)
(6) slogan content (the Truth We communicate, which only They fail to see as obvious)
We only respect teachable doubt; unteachable doubt, doubt involving a refusal to learn, is an object of annoyance, contempt, and dismissal.
ekas demos, remote from the people
Augustine plays on this for the Akademeia; cp. Diogenes Laertius, who holds that the original name was Ekademia in Lives 3.7-8.
followable claims [ plausible claims [ probable claims
A shadow is a form of causation (hence the need for an obtruder).
shadow-casting & light-blocking
puzzlement stance and empty question
-- one sees this with self-standing ? in comics etc.
the difference in comics between ?, !, and ...
'authors to whom the laws of words are attributed by the consent of all'
Grammatical rules arise not directly out of the language but out of how language is used to talk about itself.
We speak for the sake of teaching or bringing to mind.
"The use of words should itself already be preferred to words: words exist so that we may use them. Furthermore, we use them in order to teach." Augustine
The use/mention distinction is a distinction between two kinds of use.
words as signs, as instruments, as expressions
While relevant evidence can make the plausible probable, relevant evidence can make the implausible probable, as well. Does this still involve a significant distinction (of kind of relevant evidence, of kind of probability)?
the value of a jury as being a nonmonolithic perspective
No form of inquiry considers all evidence promiscuously; part of the structure of inquiry is its admissibility conditions for evidence, for the kind of inquiry it is.
evidence // diagram in geometry
admissibility of evidence // postulates (admissibility of diagrams)
propositional force as a form of usability in reasoning
One of the difficulties that faced logical positivism in general is the sheer volume of things that had to be assumed even to get it off the ground, because it is in fact not based on a few select shared principles but on a general impression (of how science works) for which principles were sought.
All terms in any actual scientific theory seem to be both theoretical and observational (as Whewell had suggested to begin with). 'Empirical laws' like PV=rT require a lot of prior theory; 'theoretical laws' require a lot of empirical grounding.
Formalizing should always be for a specific purpose.
the Rocky movies and 'chin' as a moral quality
the allegorizability of sports as an important part of their character
"To give them as much credit as possible, words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don't display them for us to know." Augustine
sense : reference :: intellect : will
Ambiguity is not something that wanders into expressions; it is something squeezed out of them.
William of Sherwood's rule for supposition of subject: The subjects are such as the predicates have allowed.
The meaning of a statement lies in its interrelation of signs as terms, not in its 'expression of a state of affairs'.
There is no single 'simplest sentence form' in which a word can occur. If we take Carnap's 'stone' example, we get not only 'x is a stone' but 'a stone is F', 'Use a stone', 'Stone!', 'That is a stone' (which is different from 'x is a stone'), 'A stone exists', 'What is a stone?' and endless others.
Suppose that someone invents in an artificial language the new word 'x', a word of the class 'variable', and proposes a sentence, 'Everything is x or not x'. How would you trace the meaning of 'x' to observations. Its meaning is based on what you want to do with it, not on observation. And no, do not be so stupid as to tell me that variables in artificial languages are not words.
Artificial languages primarily express attitudes, and only secondarily describe anything, a feature that they derive from the combination of natural language within which they are constructed and the specific task to which they are put.
Let us grant to metaphysicians the freedom to use any form of expression that seems useful to them; the work in the field will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms for which people have no real use. Let us be cautious in making metaphysical assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
'There is an n such that n is a number' does not follow from 'Five is a number' unless there is understood 'There is a five and five is a number'.
Truth in fiction is a sign of truth in understanding of things.
There is no particular reason to think that the set of 'observation sentences' (in Hempel's sense) that pass a given empirical test would be consistent.
Carnapian explication and the synthetic a priori
The empiricist criterion of meaning does not provide a reasonably close analysis of the commonly accepted meaning of 'intelligible assertion' or 'sentence that makes an intelligible assertion', nor does it provide a consistent and precise restatement and systemization fo the contexts in which 'intelligible assertion' is actually used.
Philo's pancratist as a model for the true politics
criminal confessions as gap-filling evidence sources (their primary value is filling gaps from other evidential sources)
case-building vs truth-discovering evidence
the gradival aspect of confirmational character
baptism : Greek (mystery religion) :: confirmation : Latin (Roman soldier) :: ordination : Hebrew (priesthood)
Mathematical excellence requires more than technical ability; it also requires contextualizing ability.
deciphering as a causal inference from effect to final cause (pattern of effect to why that pattern is the pattern)
Through law and through grace we may possess by anticipation what we do not have in actual possession.
Forensic accounts of justification assume that title by grace works very much like title by law.
Baptism on the human side always involves water, blood, intention, Spirit, but sometimes one is more obvious.
(1) water, proper intention: adult sacramental baptism
(2) water, vicarious intention: infant sacramental baptism
(3) blood, proper intention: martyrs
(4) blood, vicarious intention: Holy Innocents
(5) desire, proper intention: St. Dismas
(6) desire, vicarious intention: infants intended to be baptized
-- Note that this explains why the Holy Innocents are poss. unique -- only God could be the source of vicarious intention in cases of baptism of blood.
-- On the divine side is Spirit. Perhaps one could distinguish two cases, baptism-relevant, in a way exemplar and preconditional, for baptism:
(7) Spirit, proper intention: Christ's Baptism
(8) Spirit, vicarious intention: Immaculate Conception
"The essence of sportive hunting is not raising the animal to the level of man, but something much more spiritual than that: a conscious and almost religious humbling of man which limits his superiority and lowers him toward the animal." Ortega y Gassett
Every freedom has a kallipolitical, a timocratic, an oligarchic, and a democratic interpretation.
forms of superpower in superheroes
(1) natural talent: Superman, Wonder Woman
(2) artificial/acquired talent: Spider-Man, Daredevil, Flash, Fantastic Four, Black Panther
(3) honed skill: Green Arrow, The Shadow
(4) suit/vestment: Iron Man, Ant Man, Ralph Hinkley
(5) tool: Green Lantern, Michael Knight
--perhaps patronage should be on this list as well
MacIntyre & virtue aesthetics: While looser than things like sports, arts and crafts are coherent and complex forms of human activity, etc.
If probability is tied to frequency, it makes sense to measure it between 0 and 1 (by fractions); if it is tied to subjective assessment of some kind, however, there is good reason to think that there can be surplus in either direction.
-- an interpretation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness as about the phenomena of reading, writing, being read
two means of storytelling: re-enacting performance, narration
Esther obtains by title of grace salvation for her people that goes beyond title by law.
Boole takes = for secondary propositions to be synchrony.
x(1-x)=0
(1) It is impossible that there be a class of members who have a quality and do not have it at the same time.
(2) It is impossible for a proposition to be at the same time true and false.
(3) It is impossible for an argument to be both sound and unsound at the same time.
co-soundness of arguments
A is co-sound with B, B is co-sound with C, therefore A is co-sound with C.
(A=B), (B=C), therefore (A=C)
"Piety and love of man are related virtues." Philo
"The lives of those who have earnestly followed virtue may be called unwritten laws."
modalities as characterizing ways of being the same
titles of right to govern (Rosmini)
(1) Arising from prior right of ownership and dominion
---- (a) title of absolute being
---- (b) title of fatherhood
---- (c) title of seigniory (lordship)
---- (d) title of ownership
(2) Not arising so
---- (a) arising from unilateral action
-------- (i) peaceful occupancy
-------- (ii) forced occupancy
------------ (a) out of just self-defense
------------ (b) out of just defense of others
---- (b) arising from combined act
Russell gives an other minds account of external world in ABC of Relativity ch. 2.
baptism : Word as Son :: confirmation : Word as Christ :: ordination : Word as Savior
rights following directly from the adoptive aspect of baptism in itself: right to express thanks to God, right to give first honor and submission to God in all things without exception, right to acts of piety
A difference in measurement is due to a difference in either the measured, or the means of measuring, or the act of measuring.
difference-difference principles
Poisson takes 'probability' to mean the reason we have for thinking an event has taken place; this is measured by the standard ratio.
"As the realms of day and night are not strictly conterminous, but are separated by a crepuscular zone, through which the light of the one fades gradually off into the darkness of the other, so it may be said that every region of positive knowledge lies surrounded by a debateable and speculative territory, over which it in some degree extends its influence and its light." Boole
materiality as travel-resistance
While there is a conventional aspect to coordinates, the theory of tensors as used in physics establishes that they involve using a convention to describe real facts, even if only in a limited or relative way.
"When the most important subjects are investigated by insignificant men, they typically make these men important." Augustine
"Pro veris probare falsa turpissima est." Cicero
Every human person is a sublime catastrophe.
due process as a moral notion and detraction, calumny
knowledge as that cognition such that error is ruled out and it does not vacillate under rational opposition
Augustine's recommendations among Platonists (De Civ 8.12): Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Apuleius
"various saints in various ways excel one another in applications of the various virtues." Aquinas (Sent 3d36q1a2ad1)
To search for the truth is already to have a first glimmering participation in the truth, even if that truth is far distant.
Promises and gifts overlap; one may give by promising.
Vows are simultaneously moral and ceremonial.
academic prose and anodyne tone -- much academic prose is concerned with dampening the ability to dispute points (nonprovocation in presenting the disputable, to minimize dispute except along certain channels)
principle, beginning, origin, source, font, spring, cause, author
elements of a political stance in democratic politics
(1) badge of superiority (marks Us off from Them)
(2) disaster to avoid (associated with Them)
(3) enemy (Them)
(4) consumption practices (how We buy and support as Good People)
(5) propaganda practices (how We communicate the Truth)
(6) slogan content (the Truth We communicate, which only They fail to see as obvious)
We only respect teachable doubt; unteachable doubt, doubt involving a refusal to learn, is an object of annoyance, contempt, and dismissal.
ekas demos, remote from the people
Augustine plays on this for the Akademeia; cp. Diogenes Laertius, who holds that the original name was Ekademia in Lives 3.7-8.
followable claims [ plausible claims [ probable claims
A shadow is a form of causation (hence the need for an obtruder).
shadow-casting & light-blocking
puzzlement stance and empty question
-- one sees this with self-standing ? in comics etc.
the difference in comics between ?, !, and ...
'authors to whom the laws of words are attributed by the consent of all'
Grammatical rules arise not directly out of the language but out of how language is used to talk about itself.
We speak for the sake of teaching or bringing to mind.
"The use of words should itself already be preferred to words: words exist so that we may use them. Furthermore, we use them in order to teach." Augustine
The use/mention distinction is a distinction between two kinds of use.
words as signs, as instruments, as expressions
While relevant evidence can make the plausible probable, relevant evidence can make the implausible probable, as well. Does this still involve a significant distinction (of kind of relevant evidence, of kind of probability)?
the value of a jury as being a nonmonolithic perspective
No form of inquiry considers all evidence promiscuously; part of the structure of inquiry is its admissibility conditions for evidence, for the kind of inquiry it is.
evidence // diagram in geometry
admissibility of evidence // postulates (admissibility of diagrams)
propositional force as a form of usability in reasoning
One of the difficulties that faced logical positivism in general is the sheer volume of things that had to be assumed even to get it off the ground, because it is in fact not based on a few select shared principles but on a general impression (of how science works) for which principles were sought.
All terms in any actual scientific theory seem to be both theoretical and observational (as Whewell had suggested to begin with). 'Empirical laws' like PV=rT require a lot of prior theory; 'theoretical laws' require a lot of empirical grounding.
Formalizing should always be for a specific purpose.
the Rocky movies and 'chin' as a moral quality
the allegorizability of sports as an important part of their character
"To give them as much credit as possible, words have force only to the extent that they remind us to look for things; they don't display them for us to know." Augustine
sense : reference :: intellect : will
Ambiguity is not something that wanders into expressions; it is something squeezed out of them.
William of Sherwood's rule for supposition of subject: The subjects are such as the predicates have allowed.
The meaning of a statement lies in its interrelation of signs as terms, not in its 'expression of a state of affairs'.
There is no single 'simplest sentence form' in which a word can occur. If we take Carnap's 'stone' example, we get not only 'x is a stone' but 'a stone is F', 'Use a stone', 'Stone!', 'That is a stone' (which is different from 'x is a stone'), 'A stone exists', 'What is a stone?' and endless others.
Suppose that someone invents in an artificial language the new word 'x', a word of the class 'variable', and proposes a sentence, 'Everything is x or not x'. How would you trace the meaning of 'x' to observations. Its meaning is based on what you want to do with it, not on observation. And no, do not be so stupid as to tell me that variables in artificial languages are not words.
Artificial languages primarily express attitudes, and only secondarily describe anything, a feature that they derive from the combination of natural language within which they are constructed and the specific task to which they are put.
Let us grant to metaphysicians the freedom to use any form of expression that seems useful to them; the work in the field will sooner or later lead to the elimination of those forms for which people have no real use. Let us be cautious in making metaphysical assertions and critical in examining them, but tolerant in permitting linguistic forms.
'There is an n such that n is a number' does not follow from 'Five is a number' unless there is understood 'There is a five and five is a number'.
Truth in fiction is a sign of truth in understanding of things.
There is no particular reason to think that the set of 'observation sentences' (in Hempel's sense) that pass a given empirical test would be consistent.
Carnapian explication and the synthetic a priori
The empiricist criterion of meaning does not provide a reasonably close analysis of the commonly accepted meaning of 'intelligible assertion' or 'sentence that makes an intelligible assertion', nor does it provide a consistent and precise restatement and systemization fo the contexts in which 'intelligible assertion' is actually used.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Good Friday
The Battle
God came to me, rebuked me for my life of sin
and showed to me a way in which we both could win;
I heard His offer out, but in the summit of my pride
I chose to win alone. God I crucified.
I hanged Him on the tree, and on the tree He died.
But God does not just die; He must rise to live again,
and soon returns, rebuking me for my life of sin.
Frustrated with His returning, that He does not simply die,
I choose myself again, and Him I crucify.
I hang Him on the tree again; on the tree He dies.
He returns and comes again, each time so vital, bold,
that I can only crucify by growing yet more cold.
Where our ending finds us is where we did begin;
we either taste of glory's grace or we crucify with sin,
crucify forever or someday just give in.
God came to me, rebuked me for my life of sin
and showed to me a way in which we both could win;
I heard His offer out, but in the summit of my pride
I chose to win alone. God I crucified.
I hanged Him on the tree, and on the tree He died.
But God does not just die; He must rise to live again,
and soon returns, rebuking me for my life of sin.
Frustrated with His returning, that He does not simply die,
I choose myself again, and Him I crucify.
I hang Him on the tree again; on the tree He dies.
He returns and comes again, each time so vital, bold,
that I can only crucify by growing yet more cold.
Where our ending finds us is where we did begin;
we either taste of glory's grace or we crucify with sin,
crucify forever or someday just give in.
Thursday, April 09, 2020
We Rush with a Speed that Is Lightning Indeed
To the Shadowy Land
by Thomas Sarsfield Carter
To the shadowy land--to the shadowy land,
We nearer, nearer go;
Like a gallant barque thro' the midnight dark,
O'er the ocean's billowy flow.
O'er the surging tide of stormy life,
'Fore the hurricane breath of Fate,
We rush with a speed that is lightning indeed,
To Eternity's ebony gate.
By the breath of Prosperity wafted serene,
From billow to billow we wing;
Till shooting afar like the meteor-star,
To the realms of ether we spring.
Or lashed by Adversity's arrowy wind,
We draggle athro' the fierce surge;
Till weary and worn, grief-laden, forlorn,
We sink on Eternity's verge.
To the shadowy land--to the shadowy land,
Be the day brightly flashing or dark,
We are hurrying on, with no harbour but one
To shelter the storm-shattered barque!
I know practically nothing about Carter, but in preface of the Hours of Illness (1870), in which this poem is found, he notes that the poems in the book were all written around the age of seventeen or so when he was confined to "the rather unpoetic and dreary atmosphere of a sick-chamber"; he was trying the relieve the monotony of an incurable illness.
Lent XXXVIII
Since then Christ's Ascension is our uplifting, and the hope of the Body is raised, whither the glory of the Head has gone before, let us exult, dearly-beloved, with worthy joy and delight in the loyal paying of thanks. For today not only are we confirmed as possessors of paradise, but have also in Christ penetrated the heights of heaven, and have gained still greater things through Christ's unspeakable grace than we had lost through the devil's malice. For us, whom our virulent enemy had driven out from the bliss of our first abode, the Son of God has made members of Himself and placed at the right hand of the Father, with Whom He lives and reigns in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God for ever and ever. Amen.
Leo, Sermon 73.
Wednesday, April 08, 2020
Examples of Analogical Predication
This is mostly for my own use: some common examples used in discussing analogical predication, with locations. Some of the examples are from Domenic D'Ettore's Analogy after Aquinas; he notes that the examples used sometimes matter for conclusions drawn -- there was an active dispute post-Thomas, for instance, between those who held that analogical predication primarily worked like the health example and those who held that it primarily worked like the principle example.
| Predicate | said of | found in (e.g.) |
|---|---|---|
| wise | God and man | ST 1.13.5 |
| healthy | medicine, urine, body, food | ST 1.13.5; SCG 1.34 |
| being | substance and accident | ST 1.13.10, SCG 1.34 |
| God | God and idol | ST 1.13.10 |
| animal | animal and painted animal | ST 1.13.10ad4 |
| seeing/vision | act of eye and act of intellect | DV 2.11; Defensiones 1.35 (Capreolus) |
| military | sword and soldier | In Eth 1.7 |
| body | terrestrial and celestial body | I Sent. 19.5.2ad1 |
| Hercules | Hercules and statue of Hercules | Defensiones 1.2.1.1 (Capreolus) |
| principle/source | unit, point, heart, axiom | Quaestiones de div. praed. 18 (James of Viterbo) |
| principle/source | heart, river | Quaestiones Ordinariae 33 ad 5 (Thomas Sutton) |
| mover | God and creatures | Quaestiones Ordinariae 33 ad 24 (Thomas Sutton) |
Lent XXXVII
It was necessary for Christ to rise again, for five reasons.
First of all, for the commendation of divine justice, to which belongs exaltation of those who humble themselves for God's sake, according to Luke 1: "He deposes potentates from their seats and exalts the humble." Therefore because Christ, according to charity and obedience to God, humbled himself even to death on the cross, it was needful that he be exalted by God even to glorious resurrection, as it is said in His Person in the Psalm (138:2) as the Gloss expounds it, "You have known," that is, approved, "my sitting down," that is, humility and passion, "and my rising up," that is, glorification in resurrection.
Second, for our instruction in faith. Because through his resurrection our faith about Christ's divinity is confirmed, because, as is said at the end of II Corinthians, "Although he was crucified from our infirmity, he lives from God's power." And likewise, it is said in I Corinthians 15, "If Christ did not rise, our preaching is empty, and our faith is empty." And in the Psalm (29:10), "What profit is in my blood," that is, in the shedding of my blood, "while I descend," as it were through various grades of evil, "into corruption?" As though He were to answer, "None, If therefore I do not rise again at once, an my body be decayed, I shall bring news to no one, I shall profit no one," as the Gloss expounds.
Third, for the uplifting of our hope. Because, while we see Christ, who is our Head, rise again, we also hope in our own resurrection. Wherefore it is said in I Corinthians 15, "If Christ is preached that He rises from the dead, how is it said among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?" And in Job 19 it is said, "I know," that is, through the certainty of faith, "that my redeemer," that is, Christ, "lives," having risen from the dead, and therefore "in the last day, I shall rise out of the earth; this my hope is stored in my bosom."
Fourth, for the structuring (informationem) of the lives of the faithful, according to which [it is said in] Romans 6, "As Christ is risen from the dead through the glory of the Father, even so may we walk in newness of life." And further down, "Christ, rising from the dead, therefore no longer dies; so also recognize that you are dead to sin, but living to God.
Fifth, for the completion of our salvation. Because just as for this reason he endured evil things in dying so that he might liberate us from evil, so he is glorified in rising again so that he might promote us to good, according to Romans 4, "He was delivered for our sins, and he rose for our justification."
Thomas Aquinas, ST 3.53.1, my translation.
Tuesday, April 07, 2020
Satispassion Guaranteed
I've long been interested in the notion of satispassio (satispassion; we could also translate it, and I think it would sometimes be more intuitive to translate it, as satispatience). It is an idea that is remarkably difficult to find a good explanation for, although there is also good reason to take it seriously.
Satispassion is contrasted with satisfaction. Satisfaction in this sense is, as Aquinas says, "medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins". It compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing. The debt is paid, the balance restored. And it is very much a doing; that's in the name itself, doing-enough. By it we deliberately take on a penalty for common good. The most eminent example of this is martyrdom.
Purgatory is also a medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins; it also compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing; the debt is paid, the balance restored. So it seems natural to talk about it in terms of satisfaction. But in the strict sense, it has always been the doctrine of the Church that the patient souls of Purgatory engage in no satisfaction. And the issue is that what is done in purgatory is not really something done by the soul that undergoes it. It is not a doing; it is an undergoing. Hence the name: enduring-enough. They endure the penalty of waiting until the waiting is enough.
I think this is a little difficult for us to grasp, particularly when it is combined with a crucial additional point, which is that souls in Purgatory are in a higher spiritual state than souls on earth generally are. Church Patient is a higher manifestation of the Church than Church Militant. And this is linked to another difficulty with which people often have difficulty, namely, that we can merit divine reward but the souls in purgatory cannot because they are better than we are. I don't think most people actually manage to reconcile with this; when Catholics talk about souls in Purgatory, they constantly talk as if souls in purgatory were poor cousins in dire need of our intercession and largesse. But by the nature of the case, this is backwards. Unlike us, they have absolute guarantee of Heaven. They are not worse off than we are; they are infinitely better off. They have a wealth in store for which we can only hope. They don't need our help. Praying for them is the sort of thing that could very well be seen as a bit of presumption on our part, except that we are allowed it. We are allowed to help them by prayer as a privilege graciously granted to us.
I think a possible way forward in understanding this is by recognizing that the contrast with satisfaction, although right, is also potentially misleading. It makes it sound as if there were satisfaction and then satispassion, and the two were simply separate things never coming together. But this is not, I think right. We too have satispassion; it's just that for us, we can only have it by its being a subordinate part of satisfaction. In a sense this is what is going on when we 'give it up to God'; one of the general grants of (partial) indulgence is for those who, carrying out their duties and enduring the hardships of life, raise their minds in trusting prayer to God with a pious invocation. This is effectively taking the enduring of difficulty and, as part of satisfaction, making it an act of prayer to God. That is satispassion, and is the sort of thing attributed to the souls in purgatory. But there is a key difference here. The souls in Purgatory are already united to Christ's passion in an intimate way; the attitude of humble trust in the enduring of penalty as part of this union with Christ's Passion is what they do by being souls in Purgatory. Their enduring is already itself trusting prayer to God, a penitential exercise for the purpose of becoming more closely united to Him. We, on the other hand, wavering and faulty, have to make our enduring an act of union with Christ's Passion. Our patience becomes satispatience only in the context of our satisfaction. Theirs is guaranteed. We must deliberately act in order to endure in a way that makes us one with Christ; but the patient souls in Purgatory simply endure and are one with Him.
Ultimately, satispassion, like satisfaction, is rooted in Christ's Passion; for the purposes of Heaven, a satispassion not so rooted, like a satisfaction not so rooted, is not relevant. The Cross is the only bridge to Heaven. But satispassion is the higher part, not the lower; it is like the prayer of quiet compared to verbal prayer, like the mature soul enduring aridity to the beginner in an ebullience of consolations. It is something toward which we must reach. But the patient souls of Purgatory are satispatient; they need not reach, but simply wait, being one with Christ who suffered for our sins. And as no one receives Heaven without learning how to receive, so no one reaches Heaven save by being one with Christ on the Cross, enduring until the enduring is enough.
This is all approximation and extrapolation. It is something about which we know little enough that it is almost impudent to babble on about it as I have. But I am put in mind of it by current events. As Lent draws to its close and Good Friday draws near, a great many Catholics are in a desert of sacraments, perhaps locked inside their houses due to conditions whose end is as yet unknown. That is patience of a sort. On its own it is not a medicine curing past sins nor preserving from future sins. But we may make it so by prayer and penitence. When we do, we are in our crude way approximating a higher state. And in that crude approximation we may know a little better the life of Purgatory.
Satispassion is contrasted with satisfaction. Satisfaction in this sense is, as Aquinas says, "medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins". It compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing. The debt is paid, the balance restored. And it is very much a doing; that's in the name itself, doing-enough. By it we deliberately take on a penalty for common good. The most eminent example of this is martyrdom.
Purgatory is also a medicine curing past sins and preserving from future sins; it also compensates for lapses and uproots the causes of wrongdoing; the debt is paid, the balance restored. So it seems natural to talk about it in terms of satisfaction. But in the strict sense, it has always been the doctrine of the Church that the patient souls of Purgatory engage in no satisfaction. And the issue is that what is done in purgatory is not really something done by the soul that undergoes it. It is not a doing; it is an undergoing. Hence the name: enduring-enough. They endure the penalty of waiting until the waiting is enough.
I think this is a little difficult for us to grasp, particularly when it is combined with a crucial additional point, which is that souls in Purgatory are in a higher spiritual state than souls on earth generally are. Church Patient is a higher manifestation of the Church than Church Militant. And this is linked to another difficulty with which people often have difficulty, namely, that we can merit divine reward but the souls in purgatory cannot because they are better than we are. I don't think most people actually manage to reconcile with this; when Catholics talk about souls in Purgatory, they constantly talk as if souls in purgatory were poor cousins in dire need of our intercession and largesse. But by the nature of the case, this is backwards. Unlike us, they have absolute guarantee of Heaven. They are not worse off than we are; they are infinitely better off. They have a wealth in store for which we can only hope. They don't need our help. Praying for them is the sort of thing that could very well be seen as a bit of presumption on our part, except that we are allowed it. We are allowed to help them by prayer as a privilege graciously granted to us.
I think a possible way forward in understanding this is by recognizing that the contrast with satisfaction, although right, is also potentially misleading. It makes it sound as if there were satisfaction and then satispassion, and the two were simply separate things never coming together. But this is not, I think right. We too have satispassion; it's just that for us, we can only have it by its being a subordinate part of satisfaction. In a sense this is what is going on when we 'give it up to God'; one of the general grants of (partial) indulgence is for those who, carrying out their duties and enduring the hardships of life, raise their minds in trusting prayer to God with a pious invocation. This is effectively taking the enduring of difficulty and, as part of satisfaction, making it an act of prayer to God. That is satispassion, and is the sort of thing attributed to the souls in purgatory. But there is a key difference here. The souls in Purgatory are already united to Christ's passion in an intimate way; the attitude of humble trust in the enduring of penalty as part of this union with Christ's Passion is what they do by being souls in Purgatory. Their enduring is already itself trusting prayer to God, a penitential exercise for the purpose of becoming more closely united to Him. We, on the other hand, wavering and faulty, have to make our enduring an act of union with Christ's Passion. Our patience becomes satispatience only in the context of our satisfaction. Theirs is guaranteed. We must deliberately act in order to endure in a way that makes us one with Christ; but the patient souls in Purgatory simply endure and are one with Him.
Ultimately, satispassion, like satisfaction, is rooted in Christ's Passion; for the purposes of Heaven, a satispassion not so rooted, like a satisfaction not so rooted, is not relevant. The Cross is the only bridge to Heaven. But satispassion is the higher part, not the lower; it is like the prayer of quiet compared to verbal prayer, like the mature soul enduring aridity to the beginner in an ebullience of consolations. It is something toward which we must reach. But the patient souls of Purgatory are satispatient; they need not reach, but simply wait, being one with Christ who suffered for our sins. And as no one receives Heaven without learning how to receive, so no one reaches Heaven save by being one with Christ on the Cross, enduring until the enduring is enough.
This is all approximation and extrapolation. It is something about which we know little enough that it is almost impudent to babble on about it as I have. But I am put in mind of it by current events. As Lent draws to its close and Good Friday draws near, a great many Catholics are in a desert of sacraments, perhaps locked inside their houses due to conditions whose end is as yet unknown. That is patience of a sort. On its own it is not a medicine curing past sins nor preserving from future sins. But we may make it so by prayer and penitence. When we do, we are in our crude way approximating a higher state. And in that crude approximation we may know a little better the life of Purgatory.
Lent XXXVI
The fact, therefore, that at the time appointed, according to the purpose of His will, Jesus Christ was crucified, dead, and buried was not the doom necessary to His own condition, but the method of redeeming us from captivity. For "the Word became flesh" in order that from the Virgin's womb He might take our suffering nature, and that what could not be inflicted on the Son of God might be inflicted on the Son of Man. For although at His very birth the signs of Godhead shone forth in Him, and the whole course of His bodily growth was full of wonders, yet had He truly assumed our weaknesses, and without share in sin had spared Himself no human frailty, that He might impart what was His to us and heal what was ours in Himself. For He, the Almighty Physician, had prepared a two-fold remedy for us in our misery, of which the one part consists of mystery and the other of example, that by the one Divine powers may be bestowed, by the other human weaknesses driven out. Because as God is the Author of our justification, so man is a debtor to pay Him devotion.
Leo, Sermon 67, on the Passion.
Monday, April 06, 2020
Declaration of Arbroath
Today is the 700th anniversary of the Declaratio Arbroathis, also known as the Tiomnadh Bhruis, the Declaration o Aiberbrothock, and, of course, the Declaration of Arbroath. Pope John XXII had recognized the claim of Edward I of England over Scotland. Robert the Bruce had been excommunicated due to killing a rival in a church (the circumstances under which this happened are extremely unclear and we do not know exactly what led to that happening), and, when the excommunication was lifted, he was warned that he must make peace with England or be excommunicated again. War, however, was pretty much unavoidable at that point, and due to the fact that it continued, Robert the Bruce was excommunicated again in 1320. In response, Robert and the Scottish barons wrote a letter to the pope defending their independence from England, their right to self-defense, and the legitimacy of Robert's rule. This is the Declaration.
(It has been noted by historians that the conception of government found in the document is heavily influenced by Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline.) The Declaration was sent to the Pope, who wrote Edward asking him to do more to make peace with the Scots, but otherwise did not much in his position. Scottish independence was only recognized by England in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, after which the excommunication was lifted. The Declaration itself fell largely out of sight until republication in the seventeenth century, but has since been regarded as one of the central documents of Scottish heritage.
From these countless evils, with His help who afterwards soothes and heals wounds, we are freed by our tireless leader, king, and master, Lord Robert, who like another Maccabaeus or Joshua, underwent toil and tiredness, hunger and danger with a light spirit in order to free the people and his inheritance from the hands of his enemies. And now, the divine Will, our just laws and customs, which we will defend to the death, the right of succession and the due consent and assent of all of us have made him our leader and our king. To this man, inasmuch as he saved our people, and for upholding our freedom, we are bound by right as much as by his merits, and choose to follow him in all that he does.
But if he should cease from these beginnings, wishing to give us or our kingdom to the English or the king of the English, we would immediately take steps to drive him out as the enemy and the subverter of his own rights and ours, and install another King who would make good our defence. Because, while a hundred of us remain alive, we will not submit in the slightest measure, to the domination of the English. We do not fight for honour, riches, or glory, but solely for freedom which no true man gives up but with his life.
(It has been noted by historians that the conception of government found in the document is heavily influenced by Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline.) The Declaration was sent to the Pope, who wrote Edward asking him to do more to make peace with the Scots, but otherwise did not much in his position. Scottish independence was only recognized by England in the Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton in 1328, after which the excommunication was lifted. The Declaration itself fell largely out of sight until republication in the seventeenth century, but has since been regarded as one of the central documents of Scottish heritage.
Lent XXXV
And now, my soul, consider how the One who is, over all things, God blessed forever, is submerged in a flood of suffering from the sole of the foot unto the top of the head. He permits the waters of affliction to flow even unto His soul, in order to save you from all such afflictions. He is crowned with thorns; He is forced to stoop under the load of the cross, bearing the instrument of His own disgrace; He is led to the place of execution and stripped of His clothes, so that the scourge-inflicted bruises and wounds exposed on the back and the sides of His body, make Him appear like a leper. Then, He is transfixed with the nails. All to show that He is your Beloved, martyred wound by wound for the sake of your healing.
Bonaventure, The Tree of Life II.26.
[Bonaventure, The Works of Bonaventure I: Mystical Opuscula, José de Vinck, tr., Martino Publishing (Mansfield Centre, CT: 2016), p. 123-124.]
I just realized that I dropped an X a while ago; I went from XVIII to IX and then kept counting from IX instead of XIX as I should have. In fairness, there has been a lot going on.
Sunday, April 05, 2020
A Little Bit of Cribbin' from the Works of Edward Gibbon
Jack Butler has a very odd review of Asimov's Foundation series:
This is odd because the things being criticized are standard science fiction patterns. Many important science fiction works have a serialistic structure -- e.g., A Canticle for Leibowitz, arguably the greatest science fiction novel of all time, is serialistic in structure. Asimov's characters are lightly sketched, but none of them are "stock" -- a stock character is a character structured as a literary stereotype who doesn't rise above a stereotype, but most of the characters in the first three Foundation novels are fairly distinctive if you compare them with characters in other texts. And science fiction is not typically character-focused. I think it may have been C. S. Lewis who noted that science fiction stories often suffer from excessive character-work. This is not to say, of course, that there aren't great characterizations in science fiction -- Miller's Canticle or Stapledon's Sirius come to mind as novels that do well in this regard -- but in the Aristotelian elements of story, science fiction is primarily distinguished by Thought, not Character, and there are major science fiction works, like Stapledon's Starmaker, that can only be said to have characters at all in the very broadest sense. And, of course, the early Foundation novels by their very topic necessarily share more with sweeping-history science fiction like Starmaker than with character tales. It was conceived as a science-fictional Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after all.
Likewise, it's odd to criticize the characters as passive when this is the point -- it is in fact explicitly the point of the first part of Foundation and Empire, in which the characters are quite active trying to subvert the Empire, all of which is entirely irrelevant, because they fail to understand until it's too late that the Empire's weakness is the combination of economic deterioration and unavoidable civil-military instability. Asimov's stories are very often puzzle-stories of one kind or another, and that was precisely the solution to the puzzle presented by Bel Riose: How do you stop the Empire's most talented and incorruptible generals from invading you? You don't have to do anything, because the Empire will stop him the moment he begins to look too successful; from the perspective of an Empire in decline, a successful general is always a more obvious danger to the Empire than barbarians beyond the borders. It all reminds me a bit of when some feminists attacked Ursula K. LeGuin's works for having female characters who were too passive -- LeGuin was, in broad terms, a Taoist, so the whole point of the stories that were being attacked was that being too eager to act and achieve was a poisonous temptation that often leads to self-destruction. The characters -- even characters like Bel Riose who are fairly well rounded for the brief time they are on the stage -- are not the point of the story.
Butler likes The Mule best of the characters in the original trilogy; that's a defensible taste, although my preference would be for Preem Palver. But he claims that he gets the fullest backstory of any character in the trilogy, which is again odd, since we get only a very sketchy backstory about him. Ducem Barr probably has the "fullest motivation and backstory of any character in the Foundation series", at least if we are talking about the original trilogy. (Of course, if you had the prequels, Seldon gets the fullest motivation and backstory.)
Though Asimov wrote more Foundation novels, the first three books won a Hugo Award (an Academy Award equivalent for sci-fi and fantasy) in 1966 for best all-time series. But more than 50 years later, it’s hard to see why (especially when it was up against The Lord of the Rings). The novels do not rise above their serialized origins, with the individual parts of each book so distinct from one another as to seem like separate works crudely collated. They burn through a succession of stock characters, only a few of whom register in any meaningful way, and who are easily forgotten once they serve their purpose in advancing the narrative. Ultimately helpless in the face of psychohistory’s plan, most of them are rendered passive and interchangeable actors, mostly mere witnesses to the Foundation’s triumphs. As Seldon states in one of his pre-recorded messages, he has engineered their fates such that they “will be forced along one, and only one, path.”
This is odd because the things being criticized are standard science fiction patterns. Many important science fiction works have a serialistic structure -- e.g., A Canticle for Leibowitz, arguably the greatest science fiction novel of all time, is serialistic in structure. Asimov's characters are lightly sketched, but none of them are "stock" -- a stock character is a character structured as a literary stereotype who doesn't rise above a stereotype, but most of the characters in the first three Foundation novels are fairly distinctive if you compare them with characters in other texts. And science fiction is not typically character-focused. I think it may have been C. S. Lewis who noted that science fiction stories often suffer from excessive character-work. This is not to say, of course, that there aren't great characterizations in science fiction -- Miller's Canticle or Stapledon's Sirius come to mind as novels that do well in this regard -- but in the Aristotelian elements of story, science fiction is primarily distinguished by Thought, not Character, and there are major science fiction works, like Stapledon's Starmaker, that can only be said to have characters at all in the very broadest sense. And, of course, the early Foundation novels by their very topic necessarily share more with sweeping-history science fiction like Starmaker than with character tales. It was conceived as a science-fictional Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, after all.
Likewise, it's odd to criticize the characters as passive when this is the point -- it is in fact explicitly the point of the first part of Foundation and Empire, in which the characters are quite active trying to subvert the Empire, all of which is entirely irrelevant, because they fail to understand until it's too late that the Empire's weakness is the combination of economic deterioration and unavoidable civil-military instability. Asimov's stories are very often puzzle-stories of one kind or another, and that was precisely the solution to the puzzle presented by Bel Riose: How do you stop the Empire's most talented and incorruptible generals from invading you? You don't have to do anything, because the Empire will stop him the moment he begins to look too successful; from the perspective of an Empire in decline, a successful general is always a more obvious danger to the Empire than barbarians beyond the borders. It all reminds me a bit of when some feminists attacked Ursula K. LeGuin's works for having female characters who were too passive -- LeGuin was, in broad terms, a Taoist, so the whole point of the stories that were being attacked was that being too eager to act and achieve was a poisonous temptation that often leads to self-destruction. The characters -- even characters like Bel Riose who are fairly well rounded for the brief time they are on the stage -- are not the point of the story.
Butler likes The Mule best of the characters in the original trilogy; that's a defensible taste, although my preference would be for Preem Palver. But he claims that he gets the fullest backstory of any character in the trilogy, which is again odd, since we get only a very sketchy backstory about him. Ducem Barr probably has the "fullest motivation and backstory of any character in the Foundation series", at least if we are talking about the original trilogy. (Of course, if you had the prequels, Seldon gets the fullest motivation and backstory.)
Fortnightly Book, April 5
Robert Seymour was perhaps the greatest illustrator of his day. He was skillful in almost every form of book illustration and his sporting caricatures were immensely popular. This led him to make the fateful decision to suggest to his publisher a series of comic sporting illustrations with some sort of descriptive text to unify them as a series -- little anecdotes to add a little extra fun to the humorous depictions. Since the illustrations would be of things going wrong, he suggested that it could be packaged as the misfortunes of a 'Nimrod Club'. Seymour had recently done very well publishing a work, Sketches by Seymour, that had these kinds of illustrations, so the publisher was definitely interested. The kind of writing work that this required was what was known as 'hack' work. ('Hack' was a shortened form of 'hackney', i.e., a riding horse.) It was a routine kind of gig but required a certain kind of short-writing skill, like writing ad copy in our day. The publisher, apparently busy with other projects, decided to hire an outside hack, and eventually hired (according, later, to Seymour's wife, due to her own recommendation) a young writer who had made a modest name for himself in short-writing through a series called Sketches by Boz. Boz (long o), of course, was his pen-name. Boz, while in need of the money, noted that as he was not a sporting person, he was probably not the best person to do anecdotes for sporting illustrations. He proposed instead that he should write humorous literary sketches that Seymour could then illustrate; they would be about a club, but one Boz could write about. The publisher liked the idea, and Seymour found himself second fiddle on his own creative project, and not on very good terms, either, because he was never paid for the idea and was only commissioned for a limited number of illustrations per magazine edition. And when it was being published, it came out under the title, The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club – containing a faithful record of the perambulations, perils, travels, adventures and Sporting Transactions of the corresponding members. Edited by 'Boz'. With Illustrations. 'With Illustrations'! That's it. Seymour was not even given a byline.
The first edition came out and was immensely popular. In April of 1836, as part of work on the second edition, Seymour met up with Boz for drinks to discuss artwork for one of the stories. They argued vehemently over something (we do not know what), then Seymour went home and at some point afterward took his sporting rifle out into his garden and shot himself.
An emergency illustrator was commissioned to finish the second installment, Robert William Buss, a highly talented artist; but Buss was not familiar with the particular process, and didn't yet have a knack for knowing what would look good or bad with etched steel printing. His illustrations were lackluster and rushed by his own admission, and he was fired -- Buss took it in good humor and held no grudges. The unlucky commission passed to Hablot Knight Browne who did his illustrations first under the name 'Nemo' and then, to go better with 'Boz', under the name 'Phiz'. Boz and Phiz happened to get along quite well with each other, and Phiz became the go-to illustrator for Boz's works. Although, of course, by then Boz was no longer writing under the pen name 'Boz' but under his real name, Charles Dickens.
The Pickwick Papers was published in book form in 1837, becoming one of the bestselling books of the nineteenth century and making Dickens's name as one of the greatest authors of the day. And, of course, it is the next fortnightly book.
Looking around, it looks like an adaptation was made by Orson Welles for Mercury Theater on the Air, so I will try to find time to listen to that, as well. In addition, a while back I picked up at the Dollar Store a book called Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel by Stephen Jarvis. It's a highly fictionalized account of the issues between Dickens and Seymour in the publication of the work. It's a big book to put on top of a big book, so I don't know if I'll be able to fit it in, but I will be reading it as well.
Robert William Buss, Dickens' Dream. A painting that Buss started working on after Dickens's death; he died before he could finish it, but somehow the unfinished character works well for it.
The first edition came out and was immensely popular. In April of 1836, as part of work on the second edition, Seymour met up with Boz for drinks to discuss artwork for one of the stories. They argued vehemently over something (we do not know what), then Seymour went home and at some point afterward took his sporting rifle out into his garden and shot himself.
An emergency illustrator was commissioned to finish the second installment, Robert William Buss, a highly talented artist; but Buss was not familiar with the particular process, and didn't yet have a knack for knowing what would look good or bad with etched steel printing. His illustrations were lackluster and rushed by his own admission, and he was fired -- Buss took it in good humor and held no grudges. The unlucky commission passed to Hablot Knight Browne who did his illustrations first under the name 'Nemo' and then, to go better with 'Boz', under the name 'Phiz'. Boz and Phiz happened to get along quite well with each other, and Phiz became the go-to illustrator for Boz's works. Although, of course, by then Boz was no longer writing under the pen name 'Boz' but under his real name, Charles Dickens.
The Pickwick Papers was published in book form in 1837, becoming one of the bestselling books of the nineteenth century and making Dickens's name as one of the greatest authors of the day. And, of course, it is the next fortnightly book.
Looking around, it looks like an adaptation was made by Orson Welles for Mercury Theater on the Air, so I will try to find time to listen to that, as well. In addition, a while back I picked up at the Dollar Store a book called Death and Mr. Pickwick: A Novel by Stephen Jarvis. It's a highly fictionalized account of the issues between Dickens and Seymour in the publication of the work. It's a big book to put on top of a big book, so I don't know if I'll be able to fit it in, but I will be reading it as well.
Robert William Buss, Dickens' Dream. A painting that Buss started working on after Dickens's death; he died before he could finish it, but somehow the unfinished character works well for it.
Saturday, April 04, 2020
Pandemic Notes
1. It's remarkable how a large-scale catastrophe unites us all in the firm commitment to being right at any cost, and in the equally firm belief that everyone who disagrees with us is literally killing people by disagreeing with us.
2. I think it's important to be honest about what we are facing here. We have no plan. Without a vaccine in hand, all we are doing is trying to slow things down so that the medical system only has to deal with the deaths over a long period of time rather than a short one. And that's all we can do. We have going for us that trying to find an effective vaccine is a truly global project. But it's not the sort of thing for which we can guarantee any timetables. We are all improvising. Every proposal, every single one, is gambling on the truth of assumptions that cannot be guaranteed. There's no avoiding that. But it's important to recognize that every confident proposal for how to go forward is an overconfident proposal. We don't know how we are going to get past the epidemic; we are experimenting with ways to do that on a global scale. We don't know how we are going to recover from the economic problems that it will inevitably cause; we are in the middle of the largest economic experiment that we have ever done, trying things out as we go. We'll just have to see.
Similarly, one should be fairly generous about recognizing that there are lots of different ways to go about responding to the epidemic, and that it may turn out well in the long run that we are not putting all of our eggs in one basket, but instead trying different approaches in different places. We don't know what will save more lives in the long run; some things have better odds than others, but we are all gambling.
4. I've been impressed at the number of people who attack other people for not doing such-and-such thing that they themselves were doing just a few days earlier. The whiplash is going to trip us all up eventually, as we have to somersault over our own heads to adjust to new information. A little tolerance for people who are somersaulting more slowly is in order.
5. Most people are worried about the potential breakdown of medical services; something we unfortunately need also to worry about, but which people seem often to ignore, is potential breakdown of distribution networks. Truckers and the like are on the front line here, suddenly finding themselves in the position of, day after day, being emergency personnel. Transportation is an industry that's hard on people in normal times; it's important not to forget it now.
6. Despite rumors of 'panic buying' or 'hoarding', I've seen very little of it (and when you look at specific cases to which people apply these labels, they very rarely turn out to be accurate). What is happening is that people are reasonably buying more than they usually do, and when everybody is doing that, shelves start emptying out no matter what people are doing. (Although I confess I really don't understand the overbuying of toilet paper; I'd've thought that this was the sort of thing we all keep in large quantities already. I'm a little low and I still have enough in the bathroom cabinet to last half a year. I suppose one of the temptations is that it's something you know you'll use anyway, and perhaps people are sometimes not wanting to rely on their remembering correctly how much they actually have.)
7. Once I would have thought that no government agency could possibly be as despised by Americans as the IRS; after all, everybody hates the taxman. But then the TSA came along and proved that the IRS can have stiff competition in that unenviable category. If there's one thing that seems increasingly to be uniting Americans in these times it is a steadily rising river of loathing for the FDA, which I honestly would not have expected. Unfortunately, they seem very much to deserve it; they both have bungled things for which they should have been prepared and have repeatedly impeded honest attempts to solve particular unexpected problems until the pressure of events has forced them to change. We only started learning, even as late as we did, how bad things were in Seattle, for instance, because doctors became so worried that they started violating FDA regulations governing tests. And it's not become much better since.
But this seems to be the real problem. The people at large have been improvising on a rather impressive scale. But too many of those in charge seem to think it is just business as usual, with slightly more urgency. Both political parties and bureaucracies inevitably grow rigid as they get into the habit of mechanically putting everything into the same categories over and over again, but we have seen in clear light of day how utterly sclerotic it's all become. The interesting question is whether we will learn anything from it.
8. Transition to online teaching has not been smooth, but it's not been especially difficult, either, at least in my experience so far. But that too is all improvising in response to a continually changing situation. On the plus side, I am saving an immense amount of time by not losing any from commuting or having to be on campus. But it all seems a little unreal. I tell myself that that's fine, given the circumstances, but I worry a bit about whether it will affect my ability to get things done that need to be done. Nonetheless, this term looks like it will be quite manageable despite everything. But I have no idea what will happen for summer term, or even for fall. I had the bad luck of deciding that for my summer class I would try a new book and different format, and now I simply don't know what I'll be doing. On the plus side, if you can call it that, the class might not even make; there's no guarantee that any summer class will make at this point. We'll just have to see.
******
ADDED LATER: An interesting discussion by Stephen Pimentel:
The consistent error of Western modernity is thinking that everything can be done by method, that if you just have your methods right, everything is guaranteed. But method is not as important as being able to assess the situation and work out what is appropriate for it, which is precisely the function of phronesis. Methods and procedures have their place, of course; but that, too, is determined by prudence.
2. I think it's important to be honest about what we are facing here. We have no plan. Without a vaccine in hand, all we are doing is trying to slow things down so that the medical system only has to deal with the deaths over a long period of time rather than a short one. And that's all we can do. We have going for us that trying to find an effective vaccine is a truly global project. But it's not the sort of thing for which we can guarantee any timetables. We are all improvising. Every proposal, every single one, is gambling on the truth of assumptions that cannot be guaranteed. There's no avoiding that. But it's important to recognize that every confident proposal for how to go forward is an overconfident proposal. We don't know how we are going to get past the epidemic; we are experimenting with ways to do that on a global scale. We don't know how we are going to recover from the economic problems that it will inevitably cause; we are in the middle of the largest economic experiment that we have ever done, trying things out as we go. We'll just have to see.
Similarly, one should be fairly generous about recognizing that there are lots of different ways to go about responding to the epidemic, and that it may turn out well in the long run that we are not putting all of our eggs in one basket, but instead trying different approaches in different places. We don't know what will save more lives in the long run; some things have better odds than others, but we are all gambling.
4. I've been impressed at the number of people who attack other people for not doing such-and-such thing that they themselves were doing just a few days earlier. The whiplash is going to trip us all up eventually, as we have to somersault over our own heads to adjust to new information. A little tolerance for people who are somersaulting more slowly is in order.
5. Most people are worried about the potential breakdown of medical services; something we unfortunately need also to worry about, but which people seem often to ignore, is potential breakdown of distribution networks. Truckers and the like are on the front line here, suddenly finding themselves in the position of, day after day, being emergency personnel. Transportation is an industry that's hard on people in normal times; it's important not to forget it now.
6. Despite rumors of 'panic buying' or 'hoarding', I've seen very little of it (and when you look at specific cases to which people apply these labels, they very rarely turn out to be accurate). What is happening is that people are reasonably buying more than they usually do, and when everybody is doing that, shelves start emptying out no matter what people are doing. (Although I confess I really don't understand the overbuying of toilet paper; I'd've thought that this was the sort of thing we all keep in large quantities already. I'm a little low and I still have enough in the bathroom cabinet to last half a year. I suppose one of the temptations is that it's something you know you'll use anyway, and perhaps people are sometimes not wanting to rely on their remembering correctly how much they actually have.)
7. Once I would have thought that no government agency could possibly be as despised by Americans as the IRS; after all, everybody hates the taxman. But then the TSA came along and proved that the IRS can have stiff competition in that unenviable category. If there's one thing that seems increasingly to be uniting Americans in these times it is a steadily rising river of loathing for the FDA, which I honestly would not have expected. Unfortunately, they seem very much to deserve it; they both have bungled things for which they should have been prepared and have repeatedly impeded honest attempts to solve particular unexpected problems until the pressure of events has forced them to change. We only started learning, even as late as we did, how bad things were in Seattle, for instance, because doctors became so worried that they started violating FDA regulations governing tests. And it's not become much better since.
But this seems to be the real problem. The people at large have been improvising on a rather impressive scale. But too many of those in charge seem to think it is just business as usual, with slightly more urgency. Both political parties and bureaucracies inevitably grow rigid as they get into the habit of mechanically putting everything into the same categories over and over again, but we have seen in clear light of day how utterly sclerotic it's all become. The interesting question is whether we will learn anything from it.
8. Transition to online teaching has not been smooth, but it's not been especially difficult, either, at least in my experience so far. But that too is all improvising in response to a continually changing situation. On the plus side, I am saving an immense amount of time by not losing any from commuting or having to be on campus. But it all seems a little unreal. I tell myself that that's fine, given the circumstances, but I worry a bit about whether it will affect my ability to get things done that need to be done. Nonetheless, this term looks like it will be quite manageable despite everything. But I have no idea what will happen for summer term, or even for fall. I had the bad luck of deciding that for my summer class I would try a new book and different format, and now I simply don't know what I'll be doing. On the plus side, if you can call it that, the class might not even make; there's no guarantee that any summer class will make at this point. We'll just have to see.
******
ADDED LATER: An interesting discussion by Stephen Pimentel:
Many Westerners may resist the insight, but competence rests not so much on well-planned systems as on virtue, beginning with phronesis (φρόνησῐς), or practical wisdom acting in the world. Government planning in Western nations too often rests on an overextension of episteme (ἐπιστήμη), or rationally grounded knowledge, to areas of human life and organization in which it serves poorly. The future, more often than we wish to admit, is unknown and unknowable, and the effort that we might expend preparing for it is better spent preparing ourselves.
The consistent error of Western modernity is thinking that everything can be done by method, that if you just have your methods right, everything is guaranteed. But method is not as important as being able to assess the situation and work out what is appropriate for it, which is precisely the function of phronesis. Methods and procedures have their place, of course; but that, too, is determined by prudence.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)