Burdensomeness

  In human affairs whatever is against reason is a sin. Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment. Wherefore Seneca [Martin of Braga, Formula Vitae Honestae: cap. De Continentia] says (De Quat. Virt., cap. De Continentia): "Let your conduct be guided by wisdom so that no one will think you rude, or despise you as a cad." Now a man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude, as the Philosopher states (Ethic. iv, 8). 

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.168.4] 

Skian gar Echon ho Nomos

 For the law having an outline of the about-to-be goods, not the image of the deeds themselves, each cycle with the same sacrifices that they perpetually offer, it is never able to complete the worshippers. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, no one having any more awareness of failures, the worshippers having once been purified? But in these is remembrance of failures every year, the blood of bulls and goats powerless indeed to cut off failures. 

Therefore coming into the world, he says: Sacrifices and offerings you have not wished; but you have readied a body for me. Whole-burnings and those for failures you have not approved. Then I said, See! I have arrived to do your will, God; in the book's roll it is written about me. 

Previously saying, Sacrifices and offerings and whole-burnings and those for failures, which are offered according to law, you have not wished or approved, he then adds, See! I have arrived to do your will. He abolishes the first so that the second might stand. By the willing we are consecrated, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ, once.

And indeed every priest stands each day serving, and often offering the same sacrifices, which can never eradicate failures. But he, however, one having sacrificed for failures unto perpetuity, sat to the right of God, beyond that waiting until his enemies should be laid down, a footstool for his feet. For by one offering he has completed the consecrated unto perpetuity.

[Hebrews 10:1-14, my very rough translation. The author of Hebrews is discussing Jeremiah 31, an immensely important passage for early Christians, and very formative for Christian self-understanding. The manuscript tradition disagrees about whether the first sentence should be 'it [i.e., the law] is never able to provide completion' or 'they [i.e., the sacrifices] are never able to provide completion'. 'Failures' is more usually translated as 'sins', but practically speaking I think this passage has something broader in view. For instance, the sin-offerings ('those for failures' in the above translation) were offered not for what we usually think of as sins but for sins of ignorance and purely unintentional violations of the law. They are the sacrifices you'd offer if you accidentally broke the law and only later realized it, for instance. Given that they are twice mentioned in this passage, which as a whole is specifically about sacrifices not being able to complete, it seems reasonable to take the term to be used broadly here, including even unintended and accidental failures. These accidental failures don't play a large role in most of theology, but a way of reading the above passage is as saying that Christ's sacrifice provides a consecration so complete that it deals with even unintentional and accidental moral failures, for all time.

Famously, the book of Hebrews identifies four impossible things: it is impossible for those who wholly fall away to be restored (6:4); it is impossible for God to lie (6:18); it is impossible for blood sacrifices to remove failings (10:4, above); it is impossible to please God without faith (11:6). These can be seen, I think, as the essential conditions for the new covenant that constitutes Christian life.]

A Poem Draft

 Leaves Falling

A man may love a woman, and a woman love a man,
so take my hand in yours, though we have no path or plan,
that we may dance in springtime when the flowers bloom in cheer,
and spin a pirouette to defy the turning of the year.
Then after comes a summer, when we wear a splendid crown,
and then we weep in autumn when the leaves are falling down.

A love may be as pure as sky and burn with blazing light,
undoing every darkness and making day from night,
but we ourselves, like water, through our fingers slip away;
can our love be everlasting when we have no strength to stay?
Beginnings come to endings for all we love and know;
we weep while leaves are falling, then after, only snow.

So take my hand in dancing, for the time will swiftly run,
but we may love together for a while in hope and sun;
perhaps it will give smiles that endure to our recall
even as our tears well up as leaves begin to fall.

Evening Note for Sunday, November 17

Thought for the Evening: Guised Being

Everything that we consider, we consider under the aspect of being. This can include either actual being or potential being or merely possible being; such a thing is traditionally known as ens realis, or real being, because they can actually exist as something. However, we also often consider things that cannot exist as something; for instance, I can consider a hole in a wall, which is not an existing thing. Yet when I consider it, I consider 'on the model of' (in Latin: instar) or 'along the lines of' an existing thing. Such a thing is known as ens rationis, or rational being. Ens rationis is not necesarily fictitious or illusory -- it is not a fiction or an illusion that there is a hole in the wall; rather, it is something that actually is there, but not as a something that has a being of its own. Likewise, to say that evil is a privation is to say that it is an ens rationis; it is not to say that there is no evil.

In any case, this notion of 'on the model of' is interesting, and I've come to think that there are other ways besides ens rationis in which it plays an important role. A significant case is when we consider one ens realis on the model of another being (either ens realis or ens rationis). Let's call this 'guised being', since we are considering one being under the guise of another.

Consider a painting. This obviously is an ens realis. Taken entirely on its own it is canvas stretched over a frame, with pigmented gunk in various shapes and textures and layerings on it. As a painting, however, it is not 'entirely on its own'; for instance, it is a sign, and has a relationality to that of which it is a painting. But it is possible to go beyond this. Someone could, for instance, talk to the painting as if it were the person painted. In such a case, the painting has guised being as the person painted. The Baroque scholastic philosopher Caramuel held that signs occur when they undergo moral transubstantiation, and become for practical purposes (in will, hence the 'moral') the things for which they stand. (Moral transubstantiation, of course, is not physical or natural transubstantiation, which would take divine power; rather, the natural thing in being considered by us also has moral being, in this case as a painted canvas, and becomes in the realm of the will the person painted, while remaining painted canvas in the realm of nature.) For a very great many reasons this cannot be an adequate or correct account of most signs. Nonetheless, I think Caramuel discovered, without adequately capturing the nuances, guised being, in which we think of one being not merely as like another, nor merely as related to another, but as another.

Guised being is not only found in art. It plays a significant role in modern science. Physicists are always considering physical systems (ens realis) in terms of idealized models (ens rationis) -- i.e., they think of something that is not a model on the model of a model, so to speak.  The fact that people are able to do this is important for understanding how the model can explain the actual thing in ways that (for instance) a mere metaphor doesn't;  we posit ens rationis because it allows us to make true judgments and more adequate explanations, and we guise a being as an idealized model for exactly the same reason.

Every guised being involves (1) that which is guised, (2) that which guises, and (3) a conflation for a purpose, such that the purpose structures (4) the domain of the guising. A child playing at being a knight might take a stick (the guised) and for the purpose of pretending to be a knight guise it as a sword (the guising); the stick is then a knight's sword within the context of the play-pretend. This guising then lets us analogically predicate of the stick things that are true of swords, again within the context of the play-pretend.

Various Links of Interest

 * Matthew Minerd, The Political Implications of Acquired Moral Virtue -- Even Amid the Life of Grace, at "A Thomist"

* Mark Zachary Taylor, The Most Controversial Nobel Prize in Recent Memory

* Ilana Raburn, Intrinsic Kinds in Internal Medicine (PDF)

* Chiara Palazzolo, It's Not Just the Music: The Ethics of Musical Interpretation (PDF) -- a very nice discussion, good both for those interested in philosophy of music and for those interested in the virtue of prudence.

* Sympawnies by Noam Oxman, which are pictures of pets in musical notation that can actually be played.

* Ben Orlin, Proof as a form of literature, at "Math with Bad Drawings"

* Kenneth L. Woodward interviews Denys Turner on Dante's Purgatorio, at "Commonweal"

* The Pillar had a nice interview recently with the chief foreign minister of the Knights of Malta.

* David Landy, Shepherd's Claim that Sensations Are Too Fleeting to Stand in Causal Relations with Other Sensations (PDF)

* Ryan Holston, Straw Men and the Possibility of Community in Modernity, at "The Front Porch Republic"

Currently Reading

Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown
Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions
Edward Feser, Immortal Souls
Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things

In Audiobook

Stephen R. Lawhead, The Spirit Well
Kenneth W. Harl, Empires of the Steppes

Arnobius on 'Natural Evil'

 Would you venture to say that, in this universe, this thing or the other thing is an evil, whose origin and cause you are unable to explain and to analyze? And because it interferes with your lawful, perhaps even your unlawful pleasures, would you say that it is pernicious and adverse? What, then, because cold is disagreeable to your members, and is wont to chill the warmth of your blood, ought not winter on that account to exist in the world? And because you are unable to endure the hottest rays of the sun, is summer to be removed from the year, and a different course of nature to be instituted under different laws? Hellebore is poison to men; should it therefore not grow? The wolf lies in wait by the sheepfolds; is nature at all in fault, because she has produced a beast most dangerous to sheep? The serpent by his bite takes away life; a reproach, forsooth, to creation, because it has added to animals monsters so cruel.

It is rather presumptuous, when you are not your own master, even when you are the property of another, to dictate terms to those more powerful; to wish that that should happen which you desire, not that which you have found fixed in things by their original constitution. Wherefore, if you wish that your complaints should have a basis, you must first inform us whence you are, or who you are; whether the world was created and fashioned for you, or whether you came into it as sojourners from other regions. And since it is not in your power to say or to explain for what purpose you live beneath this vault of heaven, cease to believe that anything belongs to you; since those things which take place are not brought about in favour of a part, but have regard to the interest of the whole.

[Arnobius of Sicca, Seven Books Against the Heathen, Book 1, chapters 11-12.]

Dashed Off XXVI

This completes the notebook finished in September 2023. 

***************

"The unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification is 'lived.'" Merleau-Ponty

One of the modes of human sexuality is consecration to something higher, whether in honor, or in moral integrity, or in sanctity.

Quality of evidence is relevant to reasoning with the evidence but is neither reducible to probability nor any strict quantity at all; how good the evidence is for being evidence is distinct from both its own probability and the probability of that for which it is evidence.

time: measured by change (=clock) according to before and after of number
place: measured by boundary (=containing limit) according to inside & outside of direction
probability: measured by kinds of possibility (=classification) according to ratio of membership in whole

simultaneity, co-location, equiprobability (relations allowing us to extend one set of measurements to another)

prettiness as small & contained beauty

the theology of Scripture in Sirach 24

the aesthetic dignity of the human person

The Zohar associates Gn 1:1 with the fear of the Lord & Gn 1:2 with the punishments of those who reject it; Gn 1:3 it associates with love of God.

Making assumptions for practical reasons is essential to investigating.

All serious exegesis derives from & is based on a mix of reason and tradition.

People are at their most beautiful in doing; 'passive beauty' is active beauty, so to speak.

What the material conditional interpretation of indicative conditionals fails to capture is inferential dependence.

The theology of divine names is itself a way of covering everything in theology, the method of names touching on every theological field in precisely the way in which it is theological.

As in chess, power serves to protect not power but the only thing that matters.

the method of winning by forcing the accumulation of mistakes (the OODA loop would be an example)

Historically very powerful legislatures have tended to be slow to act.

Modern synods are often less synods than contiones.

militia as exercitus, militia as comitia centuriata

The electromagnetic field at a given location is the time-delayed effect/representation of the position, velocity, and acceleration of a charge in the past.
--> Related to this, electric fields and magnetic fields neither interact nor cause each other, but are mathematical patterns of charge-charge interaction.

shared text as integral to the structure of the Church as Church
-- Scripture, preaching, correspondence, etc.

The basic political strategy of the Church is to outlast.

The corruption of rights discourse arises from attempts to use it to shirk moral responsibility, when in reality a right is in itself a region of responsibility.

A remarkable amount of 'gender identity' involves taking jokes made by previous generations to deal with embarrassment and treating them as serious, literal statements of truth.

A truth that cannot be shared among inquirers cannot be known.

Locked inside every virtue is a way to God.

Morality itself has a divine quality, regardless of how you choose to explain the fact.

It is part of the human lot that what we want or what makes us happy regularly involves or presupposes things we have not considered.

One of the essential requirements of moral maturity is recognizing that you yourself are capable of great evil.

Reason is expressed in the possibility of friendship. All acts of reason that are appropriate to reason are possible grounds of friendship or friendly acts, or else express friendly acts or friendship themselves.

problem space (David Scott): a historically contingent ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes hangs

The Souls of Black Folks as in part a study of virtue-signaling as a sociological phenomenon

Catherine of Siena, Dialogues, ch. 47: no one can observe the commandments fully and properly without observing the counsels 'at least in thought'

modes of passions
(1) simple anger (sorrow, joy, etc.)
(2) anger (etc.) with another
(3) anger (etc.) on behalf of another
(4) abstract anger (etc.)

the long percolation of thought

elements of experience
--- direct perception
--- --- sensation
--- --- sentiment
--- --- immediate apprehension
--- indirect perception
--- --- memory
--- --- anticipation
--- --- sympathy
--- classification
--- inference
--- testimony

Many people enjoy works of art less on aesthetic grounds and more on social or empathetic grounds. Most enthusiasms or fandoms are built on the latter.

love : good :: joy : true :: peace : beautiful

"We exist in a social reality which has been made by others and which we make for others....Speech is the way that we reorganize the universe." Rosenstock-Huessy

Any action norms are valid that are rationally appropriate to the general form of the rational discourse involved; we always have a wide selection of possible discursive norms.

People who ask how God can permit evil have a tendency never to ask how God can permit them.

To imagine a just society is to imagine a society whose actions are oriented to a common good to which one may subordinate one's private good.

custom --> honor & shame --> law

In many areas of thought, human guesses, while not consistently right, are also not consistently wrong, and that we sometimes get what is true by guess plays an important role in human inquiry.

It is precisely the task of human reason to go beyond what merely appears.

"that long experiment called common sense" (Duhem)

what the signifier suggests vs. what the object suggests

Charity humbles its possessors, and often those receiving it.

Signs suggest co-signs.

Occasional (as opposed to systematic) writing has a tendency both sometimes to concede too much and sometimes to claim too much.

The strength of experiment is in matters of mediating causes; it presupposes final effects and first causes, and mostly tells us of the network in between.

"The physicist does not choose the hypotheses he will base his theory on: they germinate in him, without his assistance." Duhem

Duhem's historical work is in part to show that great scientific ideas are not created ex nihilo but grow over long periods from seeds that sometimes look very different from themselves.

Prophet, priest, and king all involve a relation to God; in Christ this relation occurs within Christ Himself, in His very person.

The teachings of Jesus touch on the fundamental preconditions of ethics.

Talk of a 'conserved quantity' presupposes (1) changes with measurable features (2) the negative thesis that proper causes of those changes do not also change the given measurable feature. We cannot identify anything as genuinely conserved unless we have identified it as not subject to modification by a relevant moving cause; a conserved quantity is the same even given that things are caused to change. The notion therefore presupposes causation.

Scripture and Tradition are two modes of being Apostolic.

The standard for quality in  education is how well it contributes to our roles in fundamental moral communities: humanity, family, civil society, Church, etc.

Porphyry and Simplicius both attest that Aristotle's Categories was sometimes called Pro ton Topikon (Before-the-Topics).

The New Testament makes reasonably clear that divine revelations in the Old Testament involved angels even when angels are not explicitly mentioned as such.

"All things are full of angels." Origen

signs with respect to sensory interpretants, with respect to discursive interpretants, with respect to intellectual interpretants

"Nothing comes to be from nothing within the order of nature." Albert

An organic body is constantly flowing in and out in various ways.

conserved quantities as consistent signates

Humans seem to have evolved under pressure to philosophize; dialectical skill was, from all that we can tell, necessary to navigate some kinds of constant problems, both social and natural.

protection, respect, and audience for the common people

"Magic is the the art of using the world of sense arbitrarily." Novalis

The Church as pillar of truth has both load-bearing and space-organizing functions.

A sitcom is a set of stable characters united by a stable location that carries the potential for recurring but varying trouble whose disruptions can consistently be overcome, anchored in a humorous lead character or a humorous relationship between lead characters.

All taxes restrict the freedom of action of those who are taxed.

eshet chayil  -- Ruth 3:11b, Pr 12:4, Pr 31:10; cp. also Pr 31:29
LXX: gyne andreia Pr 31:10, 12:4), gyne dynameos (Rt 3:11); cp also Sir 26:2 (gyne andreia)

Every particular truth is a sign of a larger intelligibility to which it is subordinate.

A sacred text demands of our interpretations that they become more tightly interwoven.

defensive, regulative, and unitive functions of sovereignty

Compatibilists are often really argue that determinism is consistent with teleology.

Human ethics cannot reach to impairments of will except very indirectly; but Christ can.

"The whole order of events that the Gospel narrative fully describes must be received by the faithful hearing it, so that, by a saving faith in the actions then completed during the time of our Lord's Passion, we should understand not only the forgiveness of sins to have been accomplished in Christ, but also the pattern of justice to have been set forth." Leo the Great
"One faith justifies the holy people of all times."
"Although the rigor of that figurative law has been revoked, the benefit of voluntary observance has increased nonetheless."

Human beings discover truth by filtering the world in many different ways; it is important not to confuse the filter and the truth, although people often do.

Scientific investigations cannot be fully methodized because nature itself, despite its regularities, is not methodical.

The need to eat and drink is a biological form of obligation; there are other kinds, like pregnancy or stress.

Repetition is not a mechanism of cultural reproduction but an effect; this is a fundamental flaw in the work of Judith Butler, and why so many attempts to implement Butler's ideas have a cargo-cult quality.

Every baptism -- sacramental, blood, desire, vicarious desire -- is a death.

picturesque : painting :: romantique : literature

"The episcopate is one order with the presbyterate, but in genus, not in species. For orders are derived from the relation they have to the Eucharist, and because the highest power concerning the Eucharist is the power of consecrating it." Bellarmine

What is not distributed through a money-based market will tend to be distributed through a favor-based market.

Being actual implies not just being possible but also being possible with respect to other things in various ways, possibilities of acting and receiving, possibilities of being related.

affinity, focus, channel

Through the image of God we are in principle capable of being His representatives, personating Him to the universe.

Necessity does not merely imply actuality; it implies the possibility of being actual to and with and for other things in some way, and it implies being necessary for other things.

Understanding is a way of living.

The citizenry as a body and moral person is under an obligation to promote just institituions in the manner available to it as a body, because this is true of all moral persons. This obligation induces a derivative set of obligations on citizens as participants in the citzenry, first, to act in ways that do not directly impede the fulfillment of that obligation, and second, to act in reasonable ways that contribute to the possible success of fulfilling that obligation.

Consciousness is a species of interlinking between memory and anticipation.

normativity-in-an-inquiry (or in-a-model) -- plays an important role in scientific inference

Whose Speech Fed Rome Even as the Tiber's Flow

 Tiber, Nile, and Thames
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The head and hands of murdered Cicero,
 Above his seat high in the Forum hung,
 Drew jeers and burning tears. When on the rung
Of a swift-mounted ladder, all aglow,
 Fulvia, Mark Antony's shameless wife, with show
 Of foot firm-poised and gleaming arm upflung,
 Bade her sharp needle pierce that god-like tongue
Whose speech fed Rome even as the Tiber's flow.
 And thou, Cleopatra's Needle, that hadst thrid
Great skirts of Time ere she and Antony hid
 Dead hope! -- hast thou too reached, surviving death,
 A city of sweet speech scorned, -- on whose chill stone
Keats withered, Coleridge pined, and Chatterton,
 Breadless, with poison froze the God-fired breath?