Dashed Off XXXI

 part
(1) happenstantially
(2) formally
(3) finally
--- --- (a) actually/actively
--- --- (b) deontically/normally

Good description in English requires the use of the active/passive contrast, as a general matter. Contrasts (not necessarily, but sometimes, oppositions) are what make description vivid and useful. Extensive description with only active or only passive mood flattens the description, making everything of equal importance, or unimportance, in the description.

The intelligibility of a sentence depends on its possible context.

A word is part of a sentence in ways that are happenstantial, formal, and final.

All of mathematics is built on practices of measurement that are, as a whole, infinitesimal in comparison with all the fields of mathematics. The size of the foundation, however, is not relevant; it is secure. The infinity of mathematics is just an explication of how much tehre is in things like tallying, or comparing lines, or applying scales to intension and remission.

In anger we experience things as things that could have been different.

One thing we find in human learning and opinion-change is that human beings do not really 'update' their beliefs; when beliefs change, the prior beliefs continue to exercise some force -- their 'shape' continues to influence how other beliefs work -- and following through on change of implications is patchy and sporadic. Further, beliefs often transmogrify and get 'stuck' at various stages of half-change, being part one and part another, or sometimes belief-tracks split, so that both are held until something forces a resolution of two to one, or else a decision is made about which to begin discarding.

the imperfect commensurability of pleasures

that which tends to be unable to be (dis)approved

An open question is not a recurring question but a question not fully answered.

what is owed the state vs what is owed our fellow citizens vs what is owed civil society as a whole

Different kinds of account of personal identity get us different accounts of memory.

Every 'theory of truth' captures an aspect of language as an instrument for pursuit of truth.

Disquotational theories of truth capture the semi-transparent or self-submerging aspect of language as an instrument. (Both sides of a disquotational equation are propostiions, but on the quotational side we are considering the lens showing us something and on the disquoted side we are considering what is seen through the lens.)

language as an instrumental system of references reflecting & interacting with the world as system

The family is an inherently juridical entity, albeit one that reaches out to other juridical entities.

drama as a study of ontological exigency, of our fit in the broader realm of being and beings, whether clearly or vaguely conceived

Faith is the first step to experiencing being as love; it first does so by revealing it as grace.

gift as an experience of love

In music we experience something transient that nonetheless continues to exist.

All art seeks to be as participatory as music.

Every fine art is a distinctive symbol of the Incarnation, in part by being a symbol of our own incarnation, but in part precisely as being different.

Each person is the ethical commonwealth in seed; each virtuous person, the ethical commonwealth in one.

Prayer, like music, wells up from silence.

the social-welding function of music

We experience little bits of sound as possible parts of a whole.

Music often jogs our thinking simply by getting our thinking moving.

The  modern sense(s) of what is 'obective' and what is 'subjective' is a complex of broken parts inconsistently mixed together.

Our vulnerabilities are always beyond the limits of our loves. People think that love makes us vulnerable because it by contrast makes us aware of the vulnerabilities that we did not know that we had and to which it has not yet extended to heal.

Fictional characters arise from a wellspring of personhood, which we find in ourselves.

We live in an age of Now We Know Better, whose curious feature is that 'Now we know better' is treated as an assumption, not as a discovery, and is taken to be true on no evidence at all except that it is the assumption made. The betterness is not something we have learned; it is there, and we must discover what it is, whatever it might be. We approach perfection in our self-aggrandizing, approach the limit of self-enclosedness; we apotheosize ourselves antecedently to merit, and not consequently from any established merit, and all things other than ourselves are treated as imperfect unfoldings of ourselves. But we are not to the utter end yet; we are sometimes shaken; and our journey has not reached the true realm of Now We Know Better, which is also called hell.

Sexual fantasy is morally dangerous because in it we often indulge the thought of other people being entirely within ourselves, of their being nothing but a relation to ourselves. It is not the only kind of fantasy in which this can happen, but the association with sexual pleasure makes it especially likely that we will keep indulging it.

"A world in which men no longer sing is a degenerate world." Marcel
"The beautiful is what, in a certain way, has authority over us. Authority is the distinguishing mark of a work of art, whether it is exercised immediately or not, whether it must struggle or not with a rebellious sensibility."
"To love a being is to give him credit, that is, to be attracted to him at least as much for what he will be as for what he is."

In the solidarity of the shaken, people reach for communion with a more promising past or future.

the role in narrative adventure of the morally unsafe yet justifiable

Growing as a person is an exercise in learning how not to sabotage oneself.

overwhelming plausibility and the aesthetic sense of teh real world or reality

The Dowager Duchess in the Wimsey stories gives us, by comparison and contrast, insight into Lord Peter's thinking, without having to show the latter -- he has inherited a more practical variety of her allusive hyper-associativity.

honesty before one's own conscience

music as a system of prescriptions -- considered abstractly, notationally, and implementationally

instruments as characters in the symphony

the musical plane of feeling

attacking a problem from many different directions

The statue or painting is performed in displaying and seeing it.

the painting's frame as part of its performance

"To restore man to himself is in truth to restore him to God." Marcel
"Never will one be able to meditate too deeply on the marvelous affinity that connects music and memory, from the most mechanical to the most intimate, from the one that is a mere 'reproduction' to the one that is a *revivre* and a *survivre*."
"Like every expression, music is a restitution, a release of what one has breathed in."

Music is an imitation of music; artificial music of natural music, designed music of received music, actual music of suggested music.

We express because we are already aiming for something, or because we are provoked, or because we are inspired.

We express by judgment as part of a larger expression.

music as constituting a fairy space (Marcel)

We live in a world of sound, and music transforms the whole sound-world.

initiating vs reactive expression

One thing that is noticeable about most expressivism is how useless it is for understanding expression or expressiveness.

preparation/need fairness vs achievement/desert fairness
(many disputes over what is fair seem to arise from disagreement over which of these is the relevant fairness)

Those who reason well will often fail to reason well; they just don't stop there.

With a lying or unreliable narrator, we have a subfiction nested in a fiction whose apparent incorrectness implies another fiction that is perhaps never directly stated.

When people earn money, they most often earn it for their whole household.

It is impossible to design a system in which people's life-chances are only determined by what they do and never by the choices of those with whom they do it.

Faith sheds new light on everything moral.

The nation-state seems primarily a product of the unusual degree of tribal territorial stability in medieval Western Europe.

We learn adequation of mind to thing in the way we learn most things, by imitation.

"Although freedom is an exercise of the 'I', it comes into being through the 'we'; it cannot be assumed that people will still achieve freedom in a world where the 'we' is merely imagined and relationships and attachments no longer exist." Scruton

We come to understand our capabilities by thinking ourselves from the perspective of those capabilities -- the intellectual man, the person qua imaginative, etc.

In Sikhism, langar and pangat serves as a symbol of Sikh doctrine itself.

Every social progress is within a tradition.

"Things that have a relation of brotherhood are not, as some persons have supposed, 'consubstantial', but when both the cause and that which derives from the cause are of the same nature, then they are called consubstantial." Basil (Ep 52)
"Nothing can be consubstantial with itself, but one thing is consubstantial with another."

Everything human rots eventually.

imperfect shadows of perfection.

St. John Henry Newman

 Today is the feast of St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:

My Brethren, there are those who imagine that, when we use great words of the Church, invest her with heavenly privileges, and apply to her the evangelical promises, we speak merely of some external and political structure. They think we mean to spend our devotion upon a human cause, and that we toil for an object of human ambition. They think that we should acknowledge, if cross-examined, that our ultimate purpose was the success of persons and parties, to whom we were bound in honour, or by interest, or by gratitude; and that, if we looked to objects above the world or beyond the grave, we did so with very secondary aims and faint perceptions. They fancy, as the largest concession of their liberality, that we are working from the desire, generous, but still human, of the praise of earthly superiors, and that, after all, in some way or other, we are living on the breath, and basking in the smile, of man. But the text, and the train of thought which I have been pursuing, remind us of the true view of the matter, were we ever likely to forget it. The Church is a collection of souls, brought together in one by God's secret grace, though that grace comes to them through visible instruments, and unites them to a visible hierarchy. What is seen, is not the whole of the Church, but the visible part of it. When we say that Christ loves His Church, we mean that He loves, nothing of earthly nature, but the fruit of His own grace;—the varied fruits of His grace in innumerable hearts, viewed as brought together in unity of faith and love and obedience, of sacraments, and doctrine, and order, and worship. The object which He contemplates, which He loves in the Church, is not human nature simply, but human nature illuminated and renovated by His own supernatural power....

["The Secret Power of Divine Grace", Sermon 4 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.]

Bath'd in a Cold Quicksilver Sweat

The Apparition
by John Donne

When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tir’d before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, 
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threat’nings rest still innocent.

A Good Rule for Finding Truth

 A good rule for finding the truth is to draw near it with a unprejudiced mind and a will equally disposed to receive whatever the truth has to give -- if we do not approach in this way, we hear not what it says to us, but what we want to hear. When we consult the truth, we should receive and love in the same spirit everything that it has to say to us. Indeed, we should love whatever we love only because the truth has said it.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991) p. 183 (sect. 1316).]

Planet-Blinding Sprays

 Even in Slumber
by Clark Ashton Smith

This separation cleaveth to the core. . . .
Even in slumber I am fated
To seek thee in vast throngs and dreamlands desolated---
And find thee nevermore. 

Bewildering phantoms rise between, and ways
Where demons claim their olden debt;
The rote of sullen streets and streams; the spume and fret
Of planet-blinding sprays.

Juan José Urráburu on Vestment

Last year I did a few posts on the tenth predicament (ninth accident), habitus, i.e., habit in the sense of vestment, which is roughly the category in which one substance is predicated as an accident for another. I looked at a number of different people and what they said about this -- Jeremy Bentham, Robert Sanderson, James Beattie, Thomas Aquinas, John of St. Thomas. I was recently playing around with various automatic translation programs, and decided to test them with a passage from Juan José Urráburu's Institutiones Philosophicae on the same category. Urráburu (1844-1904) is a case of an extremely important figure in the history of philosophy whose name is rarely known. He was a Spanish Jesuit whose eight-volume Institutiones Philosophicae, begun about 1890 and finished in 1900, and five-volume Compendium version of the same work, was of overwhelming significance and importance for the early twentieth-century Neo-Scholastic movement; in effect, it became the primary reference for most of it, and shaped its structure and approach. Unlike in the previous posts, where I translated, the following translation is basically that of Google Translate (which has become quite good at translating Latin, even though it is still very occasionally odd in particular translation preferences and occasionally gets phrases the wrong way around), although I have checked it briefly for any very obvious errors and have also regularized its clothing terms to use 'vestment' and 'vested' for the similar vest- terms in the original. It is from volume 2 of the Institutiones, Ontologia, disputation 6, chapter 4, article 3 (section 378).

This category (*habitus*) expresses the meaning according to which something is said to be clothed or adorned by something adjacent to the body—such as vestments or protective armor (e.g., a breastplate, helmet, etc.); it is thus defined by Gilbert in terms of bodies and the things adjacent to them. Consequently, the primary subject of the determinations belonging to this category is man alone, since he is the only animal that uses vestment out of necessity and natural instinct. Nevertheless, animals can secondarily be the subjects of such denominations insofar as they are clothed or armored through human ingenuity—for example, a horse or a monkey—as can statues vested in human fashion, and temples or houses adorned with tapestries and hangings. Also included here are terms like "gilded," "whitewashed," "red-hot," and similar ones, which arise from one substance being accidentally superimposed upon another in the manner of an ornament. 

This follows St. Thomas, but in a very specific later reading that (as I have said elsewhere) St. Thomas may not have actually meant. I am a bit baffled by the last sentence, which at first seems to contradict everything else in this paragraph; but I suppose Urráburu probably means that these are figurative cases.

Now, the denomination belonging to this category can be stated in two ways: first, as "having vestment," and second, as "being vested." In the first sense, the denominating form is the act of having or wearing the vestment—or the actual state of wearing it and the union, as it were, of the vestment with the body; it is in this sense that Aristotle could write that *habitus* is an intermediary between the one who has the vestment and the vestment that is possessed. In the second sense, the form is the vestment itself, which—acting like an extrinsic form and through its adjacency to the body (a kind of union)—denominates the body as "vested." Similarly, when a body is denominated as "having a soul," the denominating form is the state of possession or union; but when it is called "animated," the form is the soul itself. Furthermore, the very habition, or adjacency of vestment is nothing other than a twofold contiguous ubication—one of the vestment, the other of the body; while this falls under the category of *Ubi* insofar as it involves the office of locating, it belongs to the category of *Habitus* insofar as it involves the office of clothing or uniting the vestment to the body. The Eximious Doctor explains all this at length and excellently, and one may also consult him regarding the species of *Habitus*. 

The second-to-last sentence I had to restructure, because Google's translation was very loose (one of its weaknesses is that it tends at times to translate technical terms colloquially, which is sometimes nicely clear but sometimes makes a complete hash of things). The 'Eximious Doctor' is Suarez. While it is true that the category of vestment presupposes the category of 'where' (or 'place', as it is often called), this is, I think, because it presupposes all of the categories. As usually conceived by the scholastics, there is basically an ordering in the categories; we have the fundamental first four (substance, quantity, quality, relation), and then the next six, sometimes called the sex principia, which all presuppose the fundamental four: action, passion, when, where, posture (situs), vestment (habitus). But even within the sex principia, it is very obvious that when and where presuppose action and passion, and that situs presupposes all four of those, and then habitus presupposes all of them. Thus I think it is very misleading to say that habition, i.e., the act pertaining to habitus, is 'nothing other' than being reciprocally in the category of 'where'; for one thing, habitus presupposes situs almost as much as it does ubi, and second, reciprocal contiguous placement would not usually be habition at all. (Indeed, on Urráburu's own acceptance of the traditional idea that the category of vestment only applies to human beings, it could not possibly be so.) Thus there must be something distinctive about vestment. The obvious thing, of course, is that in reciprocal contiguous placement, the reciprocity is precisely not enough to get you vestment; vestment involves something like a dependence, and thus involves an asymmetry. You literally wear your clothes; your clothes do not literally wear you. Indeed, even figuratively saying that your clothes wear you indicates that something has gone very wrong.

 As for the properties of this category, it possesses almost none that are peculiar to it. However, certain accidents seem to pertain to it in a special way—specifically color and shape; for just as these two contribute greatly to beauty, so too do they contribute to the nature of ornamentation. Gilbert and the author of the *Summa of Aristotle's Entire Logic* also assign a twofold property to this category: that it has no contrary and that it admits of degrees (more and less). Yet this latter property is not to be understood as the admission of degrees through intrinsic intensification. "For since *Habitus* is a kind of substance, it cannot admit of more and less any more than substance itself can; just as, for the same reason, it lacks a contrary. Rather, it is said to admit of more and less through a certain kind of addition—not merely an extensive addition regarding the subject (which is common to other accidents), but through the multiplication of vestments around the same part of the body; in the same way that a person wearing two tunics is said to be 'more clothed' than one wearing only a single tunic. Hence, it is also a distinctive feature of this category that one of its forms can be placed over another—either quasi-accidentally through human choice (as when garments are of the same type) or essentially through the very nature of the attire (as when a toga is placed over other vestments)—even though the denomination always refers immediately to the person himself; for it is the man who is denominated 'wearing a toga.' And even if it happened that he lacked inner vestments and wore only the toga, he would still be denominated in that way. It is also, in a sense, proper to this category that its forms are distinguished according to the organic parts of the human body, yet they denominate the man absolutely; for although shoes or a hat are located only on the feet or the head, the man is said absolutely to be 'hatted' or 'shod.' And one point rightly follows from the other; for when a form is not naturally suited to apply to the whole except by reason of a specific part, then—existing in that part alone—it denominates the whole, just as a man is called 'curly-haired' solely because of his hair. Thus, since a shoe is an extrinsic form belonging only to the foot, it denominates the whole while existing in that part; and the same applies to other instances. Conversely, when a denomination naturally pertains to the whole, it is not derived simply from forms of this kind; and therefore, a man is not said absolutely [to be defined by them], even if he is wearing shoes or a hat, etc." 

The long quotation starting with "For since Habitus" is from Suarez (from Metaphysics, disputation 53). I find myself of two minds with regard to Suarez's rejection of the idea that vestment admits of more and less in a proper sense (which, as he says here, would involve intensity). It is true that we usually say someone is 'more clothed' when they have (quantatively) more clothes on them. Nonetheless, I wonder if there's a sense, not often discussed but nonetheless real, in which vestments admit of degrees in how much they clothe you. That is to say, not as a matter of having more clothes, but of having clothes that clothe you more. In particular, vestment involves a relation between two substances, usually called adjunction or adjacency, that seems like it might admit of degrees, or something very like it. We perhaps talk about this very indirectly when we talk about 'fit'. But I don't know; it's something I hadn't really thought about before. Suarez (and with him Urráburu) rejects the idea that vestment admits of degrees because vestments are substances, which does not admit of degrees; but vestments are substances adjoined to substances in the manner of accidents, and the adjunction itself is not something he is taking into account.

However, I very much like two points in the Suarez quotation. The first is the recognition that vestments can 'nest', and that this is related to the fact that they function as extrinsic forms, in particular, as extrinsic forms for parts, although the vestment is attributed absolutely to the whole person. These are, I think, more important than has usually been recognized. Nonethless, Urráburu does not do anything with them, although I find it interesting that he thought it important enough to quote the whole thing.

In any case, another entry in my quixotic quest to become the World's Foremost Expert on the category of habitus, if only because no one else can be bothered.

Important in Themselves

 Only he who understands that there exist things "important in themselves," that there are things which are beautiful and good in themselves, only the man who grasps the sublime demand of values, their call, and the duty to turn toward them and to let oneself be formed by their law, is capable of personally realizing moral values. Only the man who can see beyond his subjective horizon and who, free from pride and concupiscence, does not always ask, "what is satisfying for me?", but who leaving behind him all narrowness, abandons himself to that which is important in itself---the beautiful, the good---and subordinates himself to it, only he can become the bearer of moral values.

[Dietrich von Hildebrand, Fundamental Moral Attitudes, Part 1: Reverence]