Dashed Off XV

This begins the notebook begun in March 2025.

 Before you can know the just, you must know the true.

Genuine mercy has a power of achieving good that goes beyond all our planning.

In a democracy, all politics is by group status competition.

The intelligible has two formats: natural (in itself) and intentional (in another).

What happens must be either the only possible thing, or a possibility reached without regard for what it is, or a possibility selected because of what it is.

Everything that exists is either absolutely necessary or is necessarily related to another.

causation vs causativity

Every state of affairs excludes some other state of affairs.

All salvation is both individual and communal.

There are two kinds of explanation: in terms of nature and in terms of cause, or as we might put it, in terms of the nature of the explanandum and in terms of the nature of something else.

In a letter to Bernoulli, Leibniz defines being actual as being the best of possibles (with everything having been compared). Thus, for instance, a vacuum is possible but there is none, because the existence of a vacum is not best-possible with respect to the whole.

the distinction of possible and actual as presupposing a teleology

What is possible is what is implied by the teleology of the actual.

Thought experiments can only work as thought experiments on the basis of either formal necessities or teleologies.

"In short, the object created by the poet, the poem, the painting, the symphony, is like the glory of the poet, and it is in this glory, by means of which he makes himself manifest in the world, that he makes himself manifest also to himself and becomes definitely aware, but in an inevitably imperfect and unsatisfactory manner, of his original experience." Maritain
"True civilization knows the price of human life but makes the imperishable life of man its transcendent supreme value."

immortality of soul as a postulate of civil theology (cp. Maritain)

credentialed nonachievement

Preserve the good and progress will often take care of itself, because good is diffusive of good.

We respect with our bodies and not just with our minds.

Not every kind of play is make-believe.

The argument of Parmenides 135b-c (Parmenides speaking):
If we do not admit that each has a determinate form (idea),
we deny that the idea of each is always the same,
and thus annihilate the power of reasoning (dialegesthai),
so that nothing comes of philosophy.

good by another (useful), good in itself with respect to single power or desire (pleasant), good simply to whole being (honestum)

Value implies principles of attribution.

In one sense, details are important to knowing, but in another sense, there is too much to know to always be picking at details.

Fictional characters are not merely imaginary beings, although one can form imaginary beings into fictional characters.

Trade-offs are only possible against prior standards.

the experience of there being more to experience

Every human body is structured by needs for others.

A human person is the cosmos re-represented in a particular way from a particular perspective.

In drawing, nothing is a mistake until it makes progress in the drawing impossible.

"He is near to all, yet far from all, O Nanak! He Himself remains distinct, while yet pervading all." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 276
"Each and every heart is illuminated by the Perfect Lord God." SGGS 277

We preserve a tradition by being the tradition.

Demonization is generally a sign of envy.

the notion of karma and the sense that we already have 'weight' when we come into the world

People have an aversion to the idea that there are terrible things with no one to blame.

People respect power but are rarely interested in it as such, and we see this in the fact that men and women keep giving away power to get other things.

Part of our glory is always reflection from the glory of others.

the per se prior, the per alio prior, the posterior (which is also per alio)

How we learn and how we live morally are intimately linked.

Due process requires that there be soemthing due; what is appropriate to it unfolds out of its prior obligations.

Imaginary space (and likewise imaginary time) derives from Aristotle Phys 2.4.203b; and from the mathematical character of the thing (one can posit a possible greater container for any container and a possible further element for any series). It is thus a matter of the inherent projectability of place and time (every part is inherently related to the possibility of other parts).

"It is not sufficient that a man give alms; he must also take the trouble to give them in the right way." Antonino

We must cook our experience to get knowledge, and there are many different ways to cook it.

"Institutions are empty forms when no one will sacrifice for them." Benjamin Constant
"Everything serves the intellect in its eternal search. Systems are instruments by which man discovers the truth about details while being mistaken about the whole. When the systems are superseded, truths remain."

"...the intention of the devil is to attach himself to whatever is sublime." Aquinas

Wealth inequality is part of how empires organize themselves.

Smith argues (in LJ) that polygamy harms liberty by weakening the hereditary nobility.

It is first in the hereditary nobility that people begin to understand the elements of civil right and freedom. This then gets expanded outward.

When one looks at how different physical theories handle energy, it becoems clear that in all the physical theories we have, energy is only indirectly and approximately defined.

Wis 2:12-20 as messianic prophecy

ways to handle the notion of 'nothing'
(1) bare exclusion
(2) relative exclusion
(3) contrastive representation of excluded
(4) construct on the model of being, contrasted with being itself
(5) construct on the model of being, as purely rational being

'Can you please pass the salt?' is an example of imperative-softening, in which an imperative is weakened to avoid being rude; turning imperative-form requests into interrogative-form requests is common in rather different languages (e.g., both English and Vietnamese do it), and they tend to work similarly -- the interrogative-form request recognizes that it is in the requestee's power.

Liberal societies are always tempted to treat human rights as grounded in the agreements of liberal socieites; and whenever they do, they become enemies of human rights.

If there are no natural rights, nothing is owed to human beings as such.

Sinott-Armstrong's principle of moral substitutability confuses obligatory, decisive moral reasons and moral reasons generally.

People who cannot treat their own heritage well cannot be trusted with anyone else's.

All the graces in all the Church are refractions of the fullness of grace in Christ.

"The Born Rule does not occur in ordinary classical probability theory because that theory does not include superposition events and the accompanying amplitudes (that come from representing the density matrix of a superposition event as an outer product). When superposition events are introduced into the purely mathematical theory (over the reals), then the probability of outcomes can be computed as the *squares* of the coefficients in teh normalized amplitude vector...associated with the superposition event...." David Ellerman

Asking, 'Why should I be moral?' is like asking 'Why should I be human rather than a duck?' It is nto the actual question being entertained. What is meant is, 'Why cannot I make up what is moral or moral enough, in this or that way?' or 'Why must this be the actual moral thing?' or 'What motivations is there to do this particular moral thing?'

sovereignty as a trust

Smith (Lectures on Jurisprudence) gives the principle of authority and the principle of utility (common/general interest) as the components of allegiance, but there seem others, e.g., the principle of team spirit.

Smith attributes three things to 'police power': cleanliness, security, and plenty.

injury
(1) as a man
--- --- (1a) in body
--- --- --- --- (1a1) harm to bodily integrity
--- --- --- --- (1a2) harm to physical liberty
--- --- (1b) in reputation
--- --- (1c) in estate
--- --- --- --- (1c1) real right
--- --- --- --- (1c2) personal right
(2) as a member of a family
(3) as a member of civil society
(4) as a ember of ecclesial society

Piety to the dead quite clearly extends beyond freshness of memory.

Extensive division of labor requires an already established prosperity beyond subsistence.

Probity and punctuality are essential elements in commerce.

The medievals deliberately and explicitly beat words in order to make obvious connections obvious, but were later attacked for this, because the connections were then so often verbally obvious, as deriving the connections from the words. This is one of the dangers of adapting language to a system of thought or an approach to inquiry.

"The human world is characterized by the opposition of home and alien, by a temporal dimenion and mood coloring." Patocka
"Thought and language are an explanation of human freedom, an expression of the fact taht the world is at our disposal, that we are not purely passively determined by our environment and the tendencies emerging in it, but rather actively appropriate reality and dispose of it."

"All art orders and subjugates matter to human desire, but human desire is either for goods beyond us or goods limited to ourselves, and to 'ourselves' as limited in time, power, resources, etc." James Chastek

Even while engaged in explicit thinking, we all form opinions on things in the world that we do not distinguish from givens unless we find a need to do so.

The greatest achievements of even very skilled soldiers and generals have an element of luck in them; the same is true of artists and artisans. One sign of greatness of skill or training is that the lucky is used well, and crowns the competently good with splendor.

Some things that can be doubted nonetheless cannot be avoided.

The perceiving and the perceived are one, but not one and the same.

Challenge arguments establish a threshold and so depend heavily on teh cogency of the threshold, which sets what counts as success in the challenge. The threshold has to be justifiable by the teleology of inquiry.

'Ceteris paribus' is a causal phrase.

We assess alternate possibilities with respect to a cause -- epistemic possibilities with respect to cognitive power, physical possibilities with respect to physical causes, etc.

The notion that emotion is a better expression of spirituality than ritual is a grave error.

Ódáinsakr

 In the Skálholtsbók, one of the (now fragmentary) sources we have for Icelandic sagas,  which is from the early fifteenth century, there survives a short saga called Eireks saga víðförla, the saga of the traveller Eirekr. Eirekr was the son of Thrand, the king of Thrandheim, a region in northern Norway, and he made a vow that he would travel the whole world if necessary to find Ódáinsakr, the Deathless Land. He set out for Denmark in a magnificent ship with twelve men. There he was welcomed by the king of Denmark, also named Eirekr, and they became good friends, so that when Eirekr son of Thrand continued on his way, Eirekr the Dane-King went with him, bringing twelve more men. Then they journeyed to Miklagard, or, as we call it, Constantinople. There the king of Miklagard, i.e., the Emperor, heard about their quest and asked to see them, and bestowed great honors on them.

What follows next in the saga is a sort of catechism, because Eirekr the son of Thrand happens to ask the Emperor about what created the world. The Emperor tells him that there is one who made the world, God almighty, one God in three greiningar, which I think here might mean something like 'distinctions'. Just as the sun has fire, brightness, and heat, but is one sun, so also God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but one almighty. God is above all things, knows all things, and lives with angels (englar), whom God made to be servants. God made a bright hall, Heaven, and also a deep dungeon, which is our world, within which is a pit called Hell. The wicked are punished in this pit and ruled over by Satan, but God bound Satan there when He suffered, died, and rose from the dead, and when God ascended back into Heaven, he prepares it for us so that we may fill up the gaps created by the angels who became corrupted. The Eirekr asks who is in Hell, and the Emperor says that heathens and traitors are; Eirekr asks why the heathens are there, because they worship gods. When the Emperor says that these gods are not God, Eirekr is surprised, because he has heard nothing of this before.

They then discuss various things about the nature of the world, and, of course, inevitably, Eirekr asks the Emperor where Ódáinsakr is, and the Emperor says that it is east of India and protected by a wall of fire. The Emperor agrees to help Eirekr try to get there, if Eirekr and his men will be baptized, which they eventually are.

Thus they set out again, walking, and riding, and walking, all the way to India, where they saw many, many wonders. They eventually reach the river Phison, which the Emperor had told them flows out of Paradise, the Deathless Land, and come to a bridge across it. But on the bridge is lying a fierce dragon.  Eirekr the Dane urges Eirekr of Thrandheim to go no further, but Eirekr of Thrandheim, with one of his companions, tries to cross the bridge and is apparently swallowed by the dragon. Saddened by this, Eirikr the Dane-King goes home.

The story is not over for the other Eirekr, however. From his perspective, and that of the companion with him, they jumped into a lot of smoke, which they pushed through, and when they came out they were in a beautiful country. They soon came to a tower hanging from the sky, with a ladder up against it. They climb the ladder, and find an amazing feast. They praise God for having found Ódáinsakr and go to sleep.

Eirekr has a dream, in which a good-looking man greets them, and introduces himself as the angel who guards the gates of Paradise. He had from the beginning aided Eirekr in his quest, serving as his guardian. However, the place they have found is not Paradise, but something that in comparison to the actual Paradise is just a wasteland. It is called the Land of the Living; no one gets to Paradise alive. Then the angel offers Eirekr a choice: he can stay in the Land of the Living, or he can go back home. Eirekr chooses to go back home, because otherwise people will think he died horribly. 

Thus Eirekr and his companion go back the way they came and come out of the dragon's mouth. After four years of travel, they come again to Constantinople, and after staying three years there, they return to Norway. Because of his travels, Eirekr is a changed man. He prays every day, and in the eleventh year, the angel from the tower takes him to Paradise, and no one on earth can find him.

There is a complete translation of the saga here, by Peter Tunstall.

A Chaos of Conscious Forces

 A city is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol – a message from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate covered with addition and subtraction sums.

[G. K. Chesterton, A Defence of Detective Stories.]

Links of Note

* Patrick Flynn, The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity, at "Dumb Oxen" 

* Gregory B. Sadler, Political Faction and the Passions in Aristotle: Rhetoric Book II's Significance for Politics Book V

* Edward Feser, Leo XIV contra the new Babel: Reflections on the pope's landmark encyclical

* Nilanjan Das, Udayana on Learning through Memory (PDF)

* Jay Caspain Kang, The Despair of the Professor in the Age of AI, at "The New Yorker"

* Venkatesh V. Ranjan, Where Does the Earth's Water Come From? and The Zen of Earth's Water, at "WYSR: Why You Should Read"

* Jenna Russell, Rishanth Rajendhran, Chau Minh Pham, Mohit Iyyer, John Wieting, StoryScope: Investigating idiosyncracies in AI fiction (PDF)

* John Psmith reviews Xenophon's Anabasis, at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf"

* Matthew Minerd, The Real Distinction Between Act and Potency, at "To Be a Thomist"

* James D. Capeheart, Etienne Gilson's Christian Philosophy of Creation (PDF)

* Darwin, Could AI Cheating Save Liberal Education?, at "DarwinCatholic"

The Virtue of Magnificence (Re-Post)

 This is a re-post, slightly revised, of a post from 2021.

 Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics (Book IV) distinguishes two virtues concerned with money: liberality and magnificence (megaloprepeia). Liberality covers every aspect of wealth, magnificence covers only expenditure, which makes the latter like just an offshoot of the former, but, Aristotle says, magnificence greatly exceeds liberality in scale. He notes, however, that scale is necessarily relative when we are talking about money, so concludes that 'greatness of scale' is really determined by appropriateness to context: magnificence is spending greatly in doing great things. As he puts it, the magnificent man is like an artisan, seeing what is appropriate and spending on it what is in good taste, focusing on what would be beautiful rather than what it costs. It is between stinginess and vulgarity; the stingy will harm the beauty of the result to save money and the vulgar will harm it by focusing on showing off their wealth rather than the beauty of the result.

He gives a number of  examples of the kind of things he means:

sacred embassy
votive offerings, buildings, and sacrifices
religious services
equipping a chorus
equipping a trireme (which comes up more than once)
wedding
receiving a foreign dignitary
diplomatic gifts and counter-gifts
furnishing of house
beautiful ball or bottle (for a child)

It is famously difficult to make complete sense of Aristotle's comments on the virtue. The distinction between liberality and magnificence is hard to make out, since liberality covers all matters of money already, and Aristotle's few comments about the difference -- essentially that magnificence is concerned with greatness and beauty in a way that liberality is not -- are not particularly helpful. It seems like it's a virtue only rich people could have, and Aristotle in fact flatly says that the poor cannot be magnificent because they do not have the funds for spending a lot appropriately. But he repeatedly says that the greatness involved is relative to circumstances, and the example of the child's ball or bottle raises the question of why the poor could not in fact spend appropriately on 'small greatnesses' like that. 

Aquinas has some difficulty with this; he always wants to give Aristotle the benefit of the doubt, if he can, but being Christian he obviously cannot sign on to the notion that there is a special virtue for rich people. Aquinas handles things by splitting up liberality and magnificence -- instead of being related, as Aristotle, seems to treat them, liberality is associated with justice while magnificence is associated with fortitude. Magnificence involves a certain amount of sacrifice and risk. Since the greatness involved is relative, it is clear that the poor can risk or sacrifice in reasonable and appropriate ways to achieve relatively great things.

This is an ingenious solution (and it has a nice symmetry, since Aquinas does something similar with magnanimity, another troublesome greatness virtue). But, while it's dangerous to try to correct Aquinas on the subject of virtues, I think we have room here for a better solution. There are two things that I think provide the materials for a solution:

(1) With the possible exception of the child's ball and bottle (which doesn't seem to be a typical result of magnificence), every example Aristotle gives clearly relates to the good of the city, and Aristotle at several points emphasizes the public nature of these things, that the magnificent do what is publicly honorable, etc. For instance, he explains that the reason the magnificent man spends lavishly on furnishing his house is that houses are public ornaments.

(2) Aristotle clearly characterizes magnificence as a virtue that is concerned with getting a beautiful or fitting result.

A virtue being concerned with beauty and fitting results is generally a sign of a virtue in the temperance family of virtues. So Aquinas's idea of splitting up liberality and magnificence seems sound; but magnificence would on this proposal be a virtue adjacent to temperance, not fortitude. The key point is not risk or sacrifice but beautifying, doing a beautiful job. But more than this, magnificence is concerned specifically with common good in a way that liberality is not.

In ancient Athens, there were taxes, of course, but for particular important expenditures -- like equipping a trireme, or important civic ceremonies, which in the ancient Greek world were all religious -- what would generally happen is that the Assembly would ask the wealthy to pay for them out of their own pockets. And the wealthy would do it, in part because the Assembly is not something you lightly say no to, but also because it earned them respectability, honors, attention, and, of course, good publicity for business. The magnificent man would be someone who, in providing some good for the city, would spend lavishly so that it was well done, but would not make it about himself or his own wealth. It's in this sense, I think, that Aristotle really means that the poor cannot be magnificent (although it is still a weakness in his account): it's not about the bare quantity, it's that, while the rich will regularly have the duty to pay for celebrations and triremes and the like, the city will never expect the poor to pay for these things, and it would be rather absurd for them to try.

But we can be more generous in these matters than Aristotle. Even the poorest of the poor will often spend well, to the extent they can, on a wedding or on hospitality to important figures or on religious services. And these are contributing to common good in their case as much as it would in the case of the wealthy. The poor widow throwing her two mites into the Temple treasury was giving a magnificent gift, relative to her means, to exactly the sort of thing that the magnificent man would. 

In addition, human beings are social animals, and by pooling our resources can sometimes do impressive things together that none of us could have done individually. Here in Central Texas, there is a set of famous buildings, southeast of Austin near Schulenberg, mostly, called The Painted Churches. In the nineteenth century, there were a lot of Eastern European immigrants pouring into Texas through Galveston. They were tight-knit poor laborer-communities, from Moravia, Poland, eastern Germany, etc. They wanted churches like they had known back home, but were limited by the limits of workmen's wages. So they pooled their funds together and built churches, Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant as they happened to be. They were just ordinary wood and brick churches with steeples, like you find everywhere. But for the inside they hired wandering painters who were from Europe (and thus would know themselves what the inside of European churches were like) to paint and stencil them so that they looked like the great basilicas of Europe. The painters painted the inside of the churches on the inspiration of the European church interiors they remembered enjoying. The people couldn't afford the gold and silver, so they had wood painted in metallic paints; they couldn't afford fine marbles, so they had the woods painted in delicate pastels; wood and stone carving in any large quantity was prohibitively expensive, so they had the beams and panels painted to look like they were carved in intricate designs. Much of it is done so well that the eye cannot easily tell what is two-dimensional and what is three-dimensional. And they are magnificent.

(Nativity of Mary Blessed Virgin Catholic Church, High Hill, Texas)

Aristotle notes in a number of places that wealth lies more in the using than the possessing, and it is here that the significance of all of this lies. The existence of the virtue of liberality establishes that part of the rationally necessary use of money is in giving to those in need (which, as it happens, could be our families, friends, and neighbors as well as anyone else). And the existence of the virtue of magnificence also implies something about the rational use of money: part of it concerns what we all have in common. Money well used will meet your own needs, yes, and the needs of others, as these things come up (thus thrift and liberality); but money well used will also lavish what is required on making the whole community more beautiful (thus magnificence). And this is not a 'rich person thing'; it's part of the rational use of all money. This is what money is for: necessities, gifts, and community.

Music on My Mind

 

Jenni Varitainen, "Joku johun nojota". Joku johun nojata means something like 'someone you can lean on'.

Iustinus Martyr

 Today is the feast of one of the patron saints of this blog, St. Justin Martyr. From his Second Apology (ch. 13):

For I myself, when I discovered the wicked disguise which the evil spirits had thrown around the divine doctrines of the Christians, to turn aside others from joining them, laughed both at those who framed these falsehoods, and at the disguise itself and at popular opinion and I confess that I both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, Stoics, and poets, and historians. For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation impacted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.

The word for 'Word' and 'word' here is, of course, logos, which can also be translated as 'reason'. The mention of 'seed' is a reference to the Stoic idea of logos spermatikos, seed-reason, which in this particular case is our own partial rational participation in Reason itself; as he says earlier (ch. 10), "For whatever either lawgivers or philosophers uttered well, they elaborated by finding and contemplating some part of the Logos."