Dashed Off XIII

 The strangest things in the world are stranger the more they are known.

People who think they have reasons to think that A does not exist have ipso facto grounds of resistance to having a relationship with A.

Part of having a relationship is overcoming resistance to the relationship.

Sacrifice does not necessarily prevent self-righteousness, but self-righteousness without sacrifice is extraordinarily contagious.

Retroactive legislation is present causation; it modifies the present's uptake of the past.

memories as re-simulations within a modal tagging structure
memory as enduring self-testimony

While Walton takes pictures to have the function of being props in visual games of make-believe, his actual discussions only really require that they be accessible for such games to give them such use.

We normally distinguish cases of pretendings from (e.g.) watching movies or even acting in plays -- the actor may pretend as part of his approach to acting, and we may pretend in response to it, but these are different.

Few things make people as miserable as utilitarianism.

The rule of law is
(1) a state of law
(2) involving a politically and morally sustainable legal system
(3) in which the laws apply impartially, even to officials,
(4) and enforcement of the law is generally peaceable
(5) and maintained in broad cooperation with the general body of the citizens or subjects,
(6) who are protected from recognized abuses by safeguards.

People often think they are making themselves strong when theya re only making themselves brittle.

persons as principles of classification

"Every perfect thing is threefold." Mahabharata XIV.39.21

"The Father's Intellect said that all things be divided into three." Chaldean Oracles 22

"One who knows Brahman reaches the highest. Satya is Brahman, Jnana is Brahman, Ananta (infinity) is Brahman." Taittiriya Upanishad 21.1

The secular exists because of the sacred that shelters it.

(1) The totality of all contingents is either contingent or necessary.
(2) A given totality of all contingents depends materially on its contingent components.
(3) What depends materially for its existence on what is contingent is not necessary.
(4) As contingent, the totality of all contingents depend efficiently on a cause distinct from itself.
(5) The cause that makes the totality of all contingents a totality must be necessary.
-- All this requires the totality of contingents. Does it require that this be a consistent totality?

Spontaneously coming to exist and coming to exist uncaused are not the same; spontaneity means that the causes are internal in some way to the effect, not wholly external.

Xunzi's criticicisms of the School of Names are broadly teleological: the dialectical paradoxes arise by ignoring the purposes of names/roles/classifications.

Nobility ranks tend to have a kind of sameness the world over, partly by diffusion, but mostly due to the fact that they are historically constrained by the structures of governance, land ownership, and military support.

Christians often err by limiting the ways they can glorify God.

Ens rationis is intellectually needed because attribution is not strictly tied to being an actually or potentially existing thing. It is metaphysically needed for an account of such things because some such attributions are true.

"When everything is made relative to profit-making, all traditions of virtue are dissolved, including that aspect of virtue known as love of country." George Grant

'Reliability' is a term of diachronic assessment.

We conceive before we know we conceive, and believe before we know we believe.

We criticize people for being bad, but criticize them more harshly for being worse; we take it to be the case that people should at least make the effort to be reasonably decent by the standards of their age and land. Part of the difference in harshness, I think, is that we recognize that we ourselves are biased in several ways, and take ourselves to be at least trying to make a reasonable effort in light of what is available to us, and to be doing, with all our efforts, at least as good as people in our land and age can usually be. If we are reasonably honest, we recognize that criticizing people for not being vastly better than others of the time would make us look like hypocrites; it is safer to criticize people for not reaching a basic minimum.

Without the breath of fiction there is no civilization.

Scientific theorizing is filled with fictional makeshifts and crutches, because all inquiry into difficult matters is.

All words that express sensible ideas also express immaterial conceptions.

Everywhere in law that there is legal fiction is a point at which the law is recognizing something beyond itself, which requires that something be fit into the legal account.

The removal of legal fictions from law is often a process of legal solipsizing.

Hume T 3.2.3 as an indirect discussion of juridical personhood in terms of occupation, prescription, accession, and succession; see also 3.2.10. (A weakness of Hume's account of allegiance is that he fails to recognize that 'public interest' itself has to be explained -- what makes there to be a public at all, such that we can attribute the relevant things at all? Allegiance grows up with the development of public interest, not after it.)

It is easiest to motivate oneself by pleasure, but we have motivations not necessarily linked to the pleasant -- e.g., the depressed can motivate themselves for duty or doing good to others even when it is clear that pleasure is out of their reach.

Many philosophers suffer from the intellectual malnutrition of exposure to too few kinds of philosophy.

You should not reason as if you were randomly selected but as if you were caused under specific conditions in a particular context.

We think of infinite series not by successive adding but by sweeping over all possible successive addings of a kind.

A firm is first and foremost an accounting system for a specific purpose in exchange.

The meaning of myth expands outward by suggestion, association, and allegorization.

Pleasures are often different in such a way that pleasures exclude pleasures.

We are given not merely miracles and laws but providential coincidences; that is to say, providence has set up the world so as to provide coincidences and chance events that may provide both windfall and challenge, and remind us of the world and the possibilities beyond our expectation but within our reach.

For much of ethics we need not a template but a method of discovery.

People often feel themselves indebted for the world itself.

LLMs draw texts with rational order from relationships between rationally ordered texts.

the key as symbolic title and title as symbolic key

Every narrative suggests further narratives.

To understand explanations, we embed them in narratives of how they were reached and how they are applied.

We have a reason that draws from our passions. It is precisely this that occasionally leads to conflict.

Holy Scripture is a shared inheritance that must be received as such.

When we look at technological progress closely, it often is much slower than it seems at superficial glance; innovations have to be developed, refined, diffused, usually across many different people and markets. Part of the reason for the difference is that some technologies that are very obvious (e.g., for entertainment) spread more quickly than the rest.

We often have to learn how things resemble each other; that is, resemblances are often not obvious and we need to learn how to recognize them.

We legislate for hypotheticals.

Bayesianism models cognition like stimulus-response models actions; it crudely approximates it with highly restrictive assumptions under limited conditions.

"Our visual perceptions sometimes contradict our tactile perceptions, for example, in teh case of a rod immersed in water, but nobody in his right mind will conclude from this fact that the outer world does not exist." Godel

the hatred of the natural as a recurring pathology of modernity

All loneliness presupposes some form of non-loneliness; loneliness lies in the contrast.

And All the Dread Magnificence of Heaven

 Nature
by James Beattie 

O how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of heaven,
O how canst thou renounce and hope to be forgiven!

How It Is Produced

 A competent teacher must go to school with God and himself if he wishes to exercise his office with wisdom. He must imitate him as he reveals himself in nature and in sacred Scripture, and be able to teach both equally in our souls. Almighty God, for whom it costs nothing, for whom nothing is too expensive for human beings, is the thriftiest, slowest God. His rule for agriculture, and the time that he waits patiently for its fruits, should be our guide. It is not a matter of what fruit, or how much fruit, but it is all about how it is produced. Both children and we too know that! He tells his disciples that, in that hour when you need to speak, it will be given to you first and foremost how to speak and then what to say. This order seems to be back to front for us human beings; yet it is to some extent proper to God and sanctified through his own ways.

[Johann Georg Hamann, The Complete London Writings, Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025), pp. 330-331, from "Thoughts on the Course of My Life".]

Habitude XXXII

And to the first one proceeds thus. It seems that gifts are not distinguished from virtues. For Gregory, in Moral. I, expositing Job, there were born to him seven sons, says, Seven sons were born to us when through conception of good thinking, seven virtues of the Holy Spirit arose in us. And he confirms this with Isaiah XI, And the spirit of intellection rests upon him, etc., where are enumerated the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Therefore the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are virtues.

Further, Augustine, in the book De Quaestionib. Evang., expositing what is found in Matth. XII, Therefore he goes and takes with him seven other spirits, etc., says, Seven vices are contrary to seven virtues of the Holy Spirit, that is the seven gifts. But the seven vices are contrary to virtues, commonly named. Therefore gifts are not distinguished from virtues, commonly named.

Further, those things whose definitions are the same, are the same. But the definition of virtue is appropriate to the gifts, for each gift is a good quality of mind, by which one lives rightly, etc. Likewise, the definition of gift is appropriate to the infused virtues, for gift is unreturnable giving, according to the Philosopher. Therefore virtues and gifts are not distinguished.

Further, several of the things enumerated among gifts are virtues. For as was said above, wisdom and intellection and knowledge are intellectual virtues; counsel pertains to prudence; and piety is a kind of justice; and fortitude is a moral virtue. Therefore it seems that virtues are not distinguished from gifts.

But contrarwise is that Gregory, Moral I, distinguishes seven gifts, which are signified by seven sons of Job, from the three theological virtues, which he says are signified by the three daughters of Job. And in Moral. II he distinguishes the same seven gifts from the four cardinal virtues, which he says are signified by the four corners of the house.

I reply that it must be said that if we speak of gifts and virtues according to the notion of the name, they have no opposition to each other. For the notion of virtue is drawn from what completes the human being for acting well, as was said above, but the notion of gift is drawn from comparison to the cause from which it is. But nothing forbids that which is from another as gift from being such as to complete [completiva] someone for acting well, especially since we said above that some virtues are infused into us from God. Thus according to this, gift and virtue are not able to be distinguished. 

And therefore some have proposed that gifts should not be distinguished from virtues. But no lesser difficulty remains for them, to wit, to assign a reason for why some virtues are called gifts, and not all, and why some things are counted among gifts that are not counted among virtues, as is obvious from fear.

Hence others said that gifts should be distinguished from virtues, but they did not assign an appropriate cause of distinction, which, to wit, would be common to the virtues but in no way the gifts, or the converse. For some, considering that among the seven gifts, four pertain to reason, to wit, wisdom, knowledge, intellection, and counsel, and three to the striving impulse [vim appetitivam], to wit, fortitude, piety, and fear, held that gifts completed free judgment [liberum arbitrium] according as it is a faculty of reason, but virtues according as it is a faculty of will, because they discovered only two virtues in reason or intellect, to wit, faith and prudence, but others in the striving or receiving impulse [vi appetitiva vel affectiva]. But it ought to be, if this distinction were appropriate, for all virtues to be in the striving impulse, and all gifts in reason. 

Some, however, considering  what Gregory says in Moral. II, that the gift of the Holy Spirit, which in the mind subject to it forms temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude, secures the same mind against any particular temptation through seven gifts, said that virtues are directed to working well, but gifts to resisting temptation. But even this distinction does not suffice. For virtues also resist temptations that lead to sins contrary to virtues, for everything whatsoever naturally resists its contrary. This is especially obvious with regard to charity, of which it is said in Cantic. VIII, Many waters were not able to extinguish charity. 

But others, considering that these gifts are handed down in Scripture as they were in Christ, as is obvious in Isaiah XI, have said that virtues are simply ordered to working well, but gifts are ordered so that through them we are conformed to Christ, especially as to what He endured [passus est], because in His passion suchlike gifts blazed [resplenduerunt]. But this also does not seem to be sufficient, because the Lord Himself especially leads us to conformity to Him according to humility and meekness (Matth. XI, Learn from me because I am lowly and humble of heart) and according to charity (as in John XV, Love each other as I have loved you). And these virtues also especially blazed in Christ's passion. 

And therefore, to distinguish gifts from virtues, we must follow the Scriptural way of speaking, in which they are handed down to us not indeed under the name of gifts, but rather under the name of spirits, for thus it is said in Isaiah XI, There shall rest upon him the spirit of wisdom and intellection, etc. From which words it is clearly given to be understood that these seven are enumerated there according as they are in us by divine inspiration. But inspiration signifies a sort of being changed from outside [motionem ab exteriori]. For it must be considered that there is in the human being a twofold source of changing, one indeed inside, which is reason, and the other outside, which is God, as was said above, and also the Philosopher says this, in the chapter on good fortune. Now it is clear that everything that is changed must be proportioned to the changer, and this is the completion of the changeable inasmuch as it is changeable, the disposition by which it is disposed to be changed well by its changer.  Therefore by as much as the changer is higher, by so much it is necessary for the changeable to be proportioned to it by way of a more complete disposition, just as we see that a student needs to be more completely disposed in order to be capable of higher teaching from a teacher. 

Now it is clear that human virtues complete a human being according as the human being is born to be changed according to reason in those things he does inwardly and outwardly. Therefore there needs to be in the human being higher completions according to which it is disposed to be changed by divinity. And these completions are called gifts, not only because they are infused by God, but because according to them the human being is disposed so as to be made readily changeable by divine inspiration, as is said in Isaiah I, The Lord opened my ear, but I do not contradict, I did not turn back. And the Philosopher also says, in the chapter on good fortune, that for those who are changed through divine instigation [instinctum], it does not benefit to be counseled according to human reason, but rather that they follow their inner instigation, because they are changed by a better source than human reason. And this is what some say, that gifts complete human beings for higher acts than acts of virtue.

To the first therefore it must be said that suchlike gifts are sometimes named virtues, according to the common notion of virtue. However, they have something supereminent over the common notion of virtue, inasmuch as they are sorts of divine virtues, completing the human being inasmuch as he is changed by God. Thus also the Philosopher, in Ethic. VII, places above common virtue a sort of heroic or divine virtue, according to which some are called divine men.

To the second it must be said that vices, inasmuch as they are against the good of reason, are contrary to virtues, but inasmuch as they are against divine instigation, they are contrary to gifts. For the same thing is contrary to God and reason, whose light is derived from God.

To the third it must be said that that definition is given to virtue according to the common way of virtue. Thus if we wish to restrict the definition to virtues as opposed to gifts, we will say that what is said, by which one lives rightly, is to be understood of rightness of life which is taken according to the rule of reason. Likewise, gift, as distinguished from infused virtue, is able to be said to be that which is given by God, in order to change one, to wit, that which makes a man follow well His instigation.

To the fourth it must be said that wisdom is called intellectual virtue inasmuch as it proceeds from the judgment of reason, but it is called gift inasmuch as it is worked from divine instigation. And likewise it must be said of the others.

[Thomas Aquinas, 2-1.68.1, my translation; the Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

We could spend more time on the virtues, which again are the habitudes everyone discusses the most, but what we have so far has been enough to touch on all of the essential principles. So we'll move on to the next kind of habitude: the gifts of the Holy Spirit. How we are to understand them as habitudes will come later, but we already get the essential principles here in distinguishing them from the infused virtues.

Links of Note

 * Austin Suggs, Should We All Be Skeptics?, on Augustine's early philosophical works

* Mark K. Spencer, Defending the Filioque and the Essence-Energy Distinction, at "Living With Lady Philosophy"

* Brian Embry, Suarez's Partial Pluralism About Substantial Form (PDF)

* Yascha Mounk interviews Kathleen Stock on the case against assisted death.

* Andrew T. Forceheims, A Function-Based Account of Fittingness (PDF)

* Matthew Minerd, There Is No Esoteric Doctrine in Christianity, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Brad Skow, You Too Could Found a Nation and Become Its President, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Amy Kind, Imagination, Creativity, and Skill (PDF)

* Flame & Light, A Brief Overview of Waltonian Theory of Make-Believe

* Allison Aitken, Dharmakirti on Relations and Persons (PDF)

* At the SEP, Voula Tsouna, The Cyrenaics

Fortnightly Book, April 12

 Michael Psellos (or Psellus) was originally named Constantine, Michael being the name he took in later life when he became a monk; 'Psellos' is probably a nickname, and means 'one who stammers'. He spent some time in the Imperial civil service, and eventually became a hypogrammateus, or secretary, and advisor to Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. He also became involved in the Imperial University of the Palace Hall of Magnaura, which Monomachos was restructuring. He received the formal title of Hypatos ton Philosophon, the Chief of the Philosophers. With a few pauses, he would become a significant figure in the courts of laters Empresses and Emperors, as well. We know very little about his later life, and, in fact, he may not have long survived leaving imperial service at some point in the reign of Michael VII Doukas.

His best known work, which will be the next fortnighly book, is the Chronographia, a historical discussion of the reign of the fourteen emperors and empresses of the Empire from 976, the accession of Basil II Porphyrogenitos (Bulgaroctonos), to around 1076 or so, just before the end of the reign of Michael VII Doukas (Parapinaces). It is famous for its focus on biographical and psychological portraiture, which it uses historical events to illuminate, rather than the more common approach of doing the reverse. I will be reading it in the Penguin Classics edition, which has the title, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, and is translated by E. R. A. Sewter.

Maurice Leblanc, The Secret of Sarek

 Introduction

Opening Passage: Narratively, either the Foreword or Chapter 1 can be treated as the beginning of the book. From the Foreword:

The year was 1902. While strolling in the Bois with his daughter Véronique, the well-known scholar of the megalithic monuments of Brittany, M. Antoine d'Hergemont, was assaulted, and Véronique abducted, by four men. This came to be called the Hergemont scandal.

From Chapter 1:

Into the picturesque village of Le Faouet, situated in the very heart of Brittany, there drove one morning in the month of May a lady whose spreading grey cloak and the thick veil that covered her face failed to hider her remarkable beauty and perfect grace of figure.

The lady took a hurried lunch at the principal inn. Then, at about half-past eleven, she begged the proprietor to look after her bag for her, asked for a few particulars about the neighbourhood and walked through the village into the open country. (p. 1)

Summary: Véronique d'Hergemont was once kidnapped and forced into marriage by a man named Count Alexis Vorski; the marriage led to a son, François. Véronique's father fled with François but they were lost at sea and presumed dead, leading Véronique to withdraw in grief into a Carmelite convent, in 1905. But in 1919, when watching a film about Brittany, 'A Breton Legend', she happened to see a door with the initials V. d'H. in what looked like her own handwriting, despite her not remembering ever having written. She investigates, and begins to find herself in a complicated tangle of mysteries. These mysteries lead her to the island of Sarek, a strange island off the coast of the most superstitious part of Brittany. Sarek is also known as the Island of the Thirty Coffins, the 'thirty coffins' being a complicated series of reefs that surround the island and make it difficult to approach. There are many strange legends associated with it, and Sarek is in fact chock full of Gothic Romance tropes. The island is associated with Druids, and has a lithic structure, the Fairies' Dolmen; it has a ruined Priory from a medieval monastery. There is a cave system on the island. There is a garden on the island, known as the Calvary of Flowers, in which the flowers grow strangely large and vibrant.

Most importantly, the locals are terrified of the island, and it is associated with fragments of prophecy about the thirty coffins having thirty victims and a four women being crucified and a miraculous stone, known as the God-Stone, that can kill and heal. In the course of her investigation, Véronique discovers a drawing by her own father of the illustration in an old manuscript concerned with the prophecy; one of the four crucified women has her own face, and is identified by the initials, V. d'H. And it will only get stranger from here, until Don Luis de Perenna -- better known as Lupin -- arrives to solve the mysteries.

When we look at reviews of this book, it tends to get a love-or-hate response. The first third of the book at least is quite slow-moving; the story is structured so that there are many pieces that have to be put into place. This clearly loses it a lot of readers. Once things begin moving, however, they move quite quickly. Lupin's role in the book is really as a deus ex machina rather than anything else; Lupin ends the book, in fact, reflecting that a novelist could have written a version of the story that did not involve him. (My suspicion, albeit based on very little, is that this is Leblanc commenting sarcastically on the fact that readers keep wanting more Lupin, despite there being so many other stories to tell and hinting at the novel he actually had wanted to write.) Personally, I found the book quite fun, especially once the pieces were all in place. I had no problem with Lupin's being the external resolver. The book is in the genre of apparently supernatural mysteries that turn out to be not so supernatural; these are often not very convincing, but I think this was handled quite well.

There are many mysteries to the Isle of Sarek, but I think it does not give away too much of the story to remark that the book is the book it is because it was written in 1919.  In 1898, the Curies discovered radium, and were able to isolate the pure form in 1910. A few things were known about it, but radioactivity was (for obvious reasons) difficult to study, and radium in particular is difficult to gather together in large amounts. And the early bits and pieces that anyone could put together made radium, although already known to be potentially dangerous, seem to have immense potential for a large number of things, if you just used it correctly or in the right doses. In 1918, for instance, you have the development of the patent medicine, Radithor, which claimed to cure a number of illnesses with a solution that included traces of radium. This was the one of the early entries into what later became known as the Radium Fad, in which radium showed up in all sorts of medicines and cosmetics, extraordinary effects being attributed to its radioactive powers, which, after all, were not any kind of superstitious miracles, but were scientific facts. It wasn't until the 1930s that the Radium Fad began to crash. This happens to be historically important in the United States, because Radithor's demise in a scandal in which one of its major advocates died of radiation poisoning led to a massive expansion of powers in the Food and Drug Administration and a great deal more regulatory caution about medicines and cosmetics. 

All of this is to say that the story was written in that exciting time when radium was seen as having limitless potential, near the very beginning of the Radium Fad. Scientific magic, scientific miracle, sweeping away superstition. It's not magic, it's vita-rays! Of course, we know now that it was all a sort of superstition itself (although we have certainly not in general learned the lesson that what we replace superstition with is often just a new kind of superstition). But that was in the future. The romantic possibilities of it had not yet crashed into disillusionment, and I think it works well as a science fiction thriller for its day. And frankly, I like how it meshes with the Gothic atmosphere and folkloric elements.

Favorite Passage:

"They are very complicated legends," said Stéphane, "very obscure traditions in which we must abandon any attempt to distinguish between what is superstition and what might be truth. Out of this jumble of old wives' tales, the most that we can disentangle is two sets of ideas, those referring to the prophecy of the thirty coffins and those relating to the existence of a treasure, or rather of a miraculous stone."

"Then they take as a prophecy," said Véronique, "the words which I read on Maguennoc's drawing and again on the Fairies' Dolmen."

"Yes, a prophecy which dates back to an indeterminate period and which for centuries has governed the whole history and the whole life of Sarek. The belief has always prevailed that a day would come when, within a space of twelve months, the thirty principal reefs which surround the island and which are called the thirty coffins would recieve their thirty victims, who were to die a violent death, and that those thirty victims would include four women who were to die crucified. It is an established and undisputed tradition, handed down from father to son: and everybody believes in it. It is expressed in the line and part of a line inscribed on the Fairies' Dolmen: 'Four women crucified,' and 'For thirty coffins victims thirty times!'" (pp. 122-123)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although, as noted above, mileage may vary. The book is explicitly a sequel to The Golden Triangle, and I think parts of the story work better if you have already read that book.