Dashed Off XXIX

 "The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well." Elias Canetti

Beyond a very limited point, neither imagination nor sympathy suffice for inhabiting another's perspective, or even sharing their imagination and sentiment.

Morality is as much about the world in which we can live as it is about ourselves.

the service of calm passions to reason

It is an important step in maturity to recognize that your value is not because God needs you but because God loves you.

All of our acts of love are dim, distorted echoes of the divine creative act. Not recognizing the imitation and creativity is a grave failing; not recognizing the dimness and distortion is at least as grave a failing.

Mathematics looks superficially as if it were the realm of clean and clear conceptual analysis, but both history and acquaintance with mathematicians show that this is potentially misleading; all these apparently clear and clean results are the results of (1) generations of mathematicians working on precisely the same kinds of problems; or (2) large cooperative communities of mathematicians arguing intensively over the matter for decades; or (3) mathematicians stumbling accidentally on the solution, often in the middle of trying to do the opposite of what the solution required; or some mix of these. In reality, conceptual analysis in mathematics is difficult and messy, with mathematicians throwing everything they can think of at it, following thousands of possible clues, filtering heaps of possible stipulations. There is no general method or systematic process for it beyond trying and trying again, using every heuristic and analogy that seems even slightly relevant.

disordered hatred of evil (e.g., losing sight of the good)

People will do extraordinarily stupid things to avoid looking stupid, and extraordinarily evil things to avoid looking evil.

We modulate our assessment of goodness and badness of consequences in light of meaning or role in context; this is true of even basic things like pleasure or satisfaction of preferences. (The failure to allow this at a basic level is a reason why utilitarianisms so often get results that people find uncanny, creepy, and unsettling.)

In order to make decisions about what we should do, we fictionalize our lives and selves, as a way to consider the options.

Intellectual fields grow out of lives; mathematics (e.g.) grows out of mathematical life.

the role of plausible fictionalization in inquiry and discovery (the 'what if', the 'Suppose we did this')

reductio ad absurdum as using fiction to prove

The wise affect everything, the good endure always.

The balance of education is in every field both to learn widely but hold to the essential.

Even mathematicians are motivated by the mathematically heroic -- to achieve the height of Gauss or such, even if only for one moment on one small thing. All intellectual fields get their power from striving for a form of heroism, some kind of greatness of deed that puts one at the pinnacle of what it is to be a human being working in that field.

LLMs get their most impressive results because they approximate the human sense of relevance by statistically analyzing vast quantities of its results.

allusion and the feeling of depth

coordinated game pairs (hide/seek; DM / rpg character)

[justice (dike) -> order (eunomia)] -> peace (eirene)

joy : charity :: order : justice

We rely on the expressiveness of music not merely to express but also to compensate for the difficulty of expressing.

When we say that one thing (A) means another (B), we do not mean that B follows from A, even with background information; we mean that A is B for a relevant interpretational purpose, that A can be interpreted as B.

formal and instrumental norms
natural and voluntary norms
spontaneous and artificial norms

omniscient third person narration as an essential part of intellectual inquiry in general (e.g., to coordinate different perspectives or appearances, or to assess mistakes and erorrs)

To learn from inquiry, we must usually narrate it.

When we compare suffering to suffering, we never do so directly outside of philosopher's constructed cases.

We understand suffering and happiness only by telling stories about them.

We do not experience singular pains as bad, but more as resistance or pushback; and we do not experience singular pleasures as good, but more as interesting. Pain and pleasure become appearance of bad and good only as they cease to be singular, momentary, and unexplained.

Once there is a definite thing, there is a definite order for it.

Sympathy, the sense of fairness, and stable all-things-considered preference are all reasons to think something has non-instrumental value.

Maximizing happiness and maximizing utility (causes of /factors contributing to happiness) should not be assumed to be the same.

Harsanyi's aggregation theorem has a problem common to arguments of its general sort: it shows that a conclusion is required by certain assumptions which are taken to be 'reasonable', but fails to involve any recognition that 'reasonable' may be had in different modes, thus providing no effective argument that these are assumptions we need to posit always rather than assumptions we may want to posit sometimes.

The categorical imperative implies that every candidate standard of success in action must be considered from the point of view of the rational person sharing standards with other rational persons in a rational community structured by such standards.

Playing with dolls and pets is part of how children understand parenting and being parented.

God as infinite valuable // God as infinite intelligible

possible relations between one fictional character (A) and another (B)
(1) incorporation (e.g., B is by authorial attribution the same as A)
(2) extension (e.g., B is a different version of A by the same author)
(3) responsive imitation (e.g., B is a version of A by different author)
(4) allusive imitation (e.g., B is different but represents A, e.g., in a parody)

Many things that make us 'feel alive' do so contrastively, by touching lightly on our mortality.

Empathy is not the proper emotional response to horrors.

Pain and pleasure do not aggregate; some (but not all) of the measurements of pain and pleasure do.

Description is a style of speaking, not a metaphysical status.

Being grateful to beneficiaries for accidental benefits increases the chances that similar benefits will be given intentionally; gratitude is an encouragement to beneficence.

The state has no absolute claim on obedience; it has to earn it (although this is sometimes after the fact, on credit -- i.e., the state borrows the obedience with promise that it will turn out to be worthwhile to the lender).

A problem with 'gender' in discussions is that the word is deliberately used to blur sex, social role, and membership in a community; but these do not all work the same way. And because 'gender' blurs these things, it makes it impossible to work out their proper relations.

Anything we say about someone can be said as an insult or as a compliment.

An attitude is a way of relating.

rationality as capacity for at least eventually recognizing the necessary and the obligatory

docilitas as the true epoche

We understand the goodness and badness of pleasure and pain in terms of what they motivate.

Ways to be derivatively intrinsically bad are to be instrumentally bad in an excess that is destructive, or instrumentally good in an excess that is self-defeating.

The goodness and badness of pleasure and pain are in their contribution to a life.

-- All other things being equal, we help those beasts most who can most help us.
-- All other things being equal, we help most those beasts with which we most easily sympathize.
-- All other things being equal, we most help those beasts with which we see ourselves already co-contributing in a worthwhile system.

Faith is a trust in an intelligibility not yet seen, and hope in an improvement not yet had.

Whether or not something is a mere truism depends on context.

considering the various parts of man as though they were various persons (ST 2-2.106.3 ad 1)

The oblique is the path to power.

strands of morality (Dorothy Emmett)
(1) C-strand (Custom) -- "rules of thumb, wisdom of experience, and taboos"
(2) R-strand (Reciprocity) -- "attempts to bring some rationality into customary morality"
(3) G-strand (Generosity) -- "a highly personal kind of behavior, which certainly cannot e prescribed in any set of rules, or be expected as of right"

overflow obligations
(1) 'for all one knows' cases under uncertainty
(2) analogous cases
(3) cases that are preconditions
(4) cases that facilitate primary obligation

What some people call 'empathy' is just weak emotional regulation.

kinds of direct objection
(1) alethic
--- (a) logical
--- (b) probable
(2) epistemic
--- (a) probative
--- (b) common sense
(3) pragmatic
--- (a) deontic
--- (b) prudential
(4) functional
--- (a) irrelevance
--- (b) inadequacy

displausibilization: attacking a position indirectly by refuting things with which it is imaginatively and associatively linked

the casuistries of honor and shame

Obscure and confused ideas are not different kinds of ideas from clear and distinct ideas.

Almost all entrenched political controversies arise from an attempt of everyone to avoid the real point of disagreement.

It is part of the business of the moral philosopher to give what is useful for personal advice and exhortation, because an ethics useful for neighter would obviously be defective.

Moore's argument that Casuistry is part of Ethics is quite good

Moore's Trilemma
(1) Either 'good' denotes (a) a simple and undefinable notion or (b) a compelx and thus definable notion; or (c) an unintelligible or meaningless notion.
(2) As being good is good, (b) gets us the open question argument and, in addition, gives us analyses that are sometimes obviously too complicated to allow equivalence.
(3) As we do in fact understand questions about good, (c) is not sustainable.

The line between pleasure and pain is fuzzy.

Act in such a way as does not rule out sublimity in human life.
-- broadly related to heroism, which is to act in such a way as suggests the possibility of sublimity of character

Having too many jokes begins to spoil all jokes.

A philosophical notebook is an explorer's journal: partial charts, natural-historical studies, reminders for navigation.

Pleasure and pain agree in being means to further life and aids in navigating the world.

We should take seriously and appreciatively goods we cannot maximize, that are received only as gift or that are beyond our ability to guarantee.

Since possible worlds are constructed with propositions, taking propositions to be sets of possible worlds requires either (1) that propositions not have truth values for every possible world or (2) that every proposition is the set of all possible worlds. (Any truth value has to be considered for each proposition, whether true, false, or other.)

knowledge : proposition :: extension : constructed lines

Beneficence often takes advantage of luck.

'Bayesian arguments' as often arguments from fictional conversion testimony
-- as often used, they require that the probability assessments be both subjective and objective

hypotheticals as an instrument for approximating possibilities

presumptive True -> conditionally required Diamond

genius as rationality without logical fetters

We read with other readers, including the author as reader.

skepticism as glass cannon

Every virtue has an aspiring, an achieving, and a consolidating action.

kinds of difference between waking and dreaming: substantiality, efficacy, rationality, comprehensivity, teleology, intersubjectivity

First Reflection

 The first reflection of human beings 1. is lively precisely because phantasy is still fresh and vivacious, as it is in the youth of individuals, of nations and of humankind; 2. is new precisely because it is first reflection, discovering the relationships of things with a kind of creative inventiveness; 3. is sublime because it is necessarily concerned with relationships between the most important and necessary things, and indicates invisible beings such as a cause, a God; 4. is vast because it has not yet learnt to halt before particular things and their minute parts where there is nothing to hold its attention, but gazes around once more, ranging eagerly over everything to which, still unsatisfied, it adds the infinite.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary and Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), pp. 156-157.]

Rosmini notes that this is why ancient poetry often has the features it does. 'First reflection' is also responsible for the features of what he calls 'popular knowledge', which lies between direct or immediate knowledge and the philosophical knowledge that arises from what he calls 'second reflection'. In the sense that the terms are used here only direct knowledge is factive; that is, precisely because they are reflective, popular knowledge and philosophical knowledge can be mixed with various errors. But ideas arising from first reflection tend to have a vivid, common-sensical, concreteness to them, due to being a synthesis of different things into something that makes some kind of sense; their primary difficulty is a tendency to glide over potentially important distinctions. It is from dealing with this failing in popular knowledge that philosophical knowledge, arising from the much more analytical second reflection, comes; thus Rosmini says that philosophy first arises from the masses.

Two Poem Drafts

 Social Media

The chim-chim of conversation may lull to sleep the ear;
the termless perorations may eat through all the year;
the chatter on the branches may drown the highway-roar;
but one day it will falter.
One day it will end
and the mouth take bit and halter,
all blather to forfend.

The blatherskite may jabber with ishkabibble roar;
the monkeys sling their gibber, the jungle trees to bore;
the World our Foe may babble and repeat its mock and sneer;
but one day it will silence.
One day it will end,
and the tongue, despite its violence,
beneath the yoke will bend.

Strange Primates

I hear the music and your eyes
are lovely like the ocean-wave,
darkly blue and gray,
like wild and stormy skies,
like death, so deeply grave --
yet somehow they are bright with light
that overshadows day.
And in such times I know,
whatever the worldly-wisemen say,
whatever counsels fools may rave,
that we, strange primates,
are yet unbound,
yet timeless,
though even our timelessness dies;
that something eternal we somehow save
from rapacious time that flies --
and there, only there, are we found.

Sounds and Movements

 Music is a joy, an unavoidable human disposition. So, people cannot be without music; if they feel joy, they must express it in sound and give it shape in movement. The way of human beings is such that changes in the motions of their nature are completely contained in these sounds and movements. 

 Xunzi, "Discourse on Music", in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, tr., Princeton University Press [Princeton, NJ: 2014] p. 218.

Gift of the Lord

 Today is the feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. Most of what we know about him directly comes from his call:

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:9-13 NRSV)

In 10:3, he is again called a tax collector; other than that, he is just mentioned as one of the Twelve. In the very similar corresponding passages in Mark 2 and Luke 5, the tax collector is called Levi; Mark specifies further that he is the "son of Alphaeus". On the basis of this, Matthew and Levi are almost universally identified; because another one of the Twelve is also usually identified as 'James, son of Alphaeus', there is a common tradition that they were brothers. There are technically other possibilities consistent with the texts we have -- e.g., that Matthew, Levi, and James were three brothers -- but all of them are more complicated and none of them show up in the tradition. In the first century people using different names for different purposes was not uncommon; Judeans in Judea and Galilee had a much more fluid sense of names than we do. (One idea I once heard, which is pure speculation, but which has always stuck in my mind, is that Jesus, whom we know sometimes to give his disciples names, called Levi and gave him the name 'Matthew', Gift of the Lord, as a way of putting his past behind him.)

Some people have suggested that Matthew may also be the 'Mattai' who is one of the five disciples of Yeshu the Nazarene in Sanhedrin 43a; but it's hard to say. The rabbis may be conflating Jesus with another, earlier person of the same name, and in any case they are not interested in the history but in the question of whether something in a preserved baraita (an oral tradition not found in the Mishnah) conflicted with a given interpretation of the law. They effectively conclude that it doesn't because the Yeshu case was a weird exception due to the practical conditions. Of the five disciple names given, the others (Nakai, Netzer, Buni, and Toda) seem to be chosen just to make the point that the case was a unique one, which suggests that we should not put much weight on it. Nonetheless, we can't rule out that the original story was partly inspired by Matthew's name to begin with, and the play-on-words it allowed, so we don't know.

According to tradition, Matthew mostly spent his life preaching in Judea, but eventually went to preach to the Jewish community elsewhere -- most traditions and legends say Ethiopia, although by a weird quirk of naming, this could mean either Africa or modern-day Georgia, we don't know. He is traditionally regarded as a martyr, although we don't know how he died; one later legend suggests that he was killed by sword during liturgy.

His status as an Evangelist is due in part to the influence of Papias, who says in a quotation preserved by Eusebius that Matthew collected the logoi or sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew dialect, and others interpreted it. It's unclear whether the Gospel was attached to the name of Matthew because it seemed like the one that best fit the claim of Papias or whether Papias says it because it was already seen as Matthew's. In either case, it is a very reasonable conclusion that the sayings Papias mentions and the Gospel of Matthew are connected; parts of the Gospel as we have it are clearly arranged around sets of prophetic texts connected to Jesus' life and around sets of parables, so it's entirely possible to think of the Gospel as we have it as being such an original set of sayings 'interpreted'. (If you accept Markan priority, the 'interpretation' could very well have been in part by integrating it with Mark.) 

What is interesting is that Matthew is consistently associated with writings specifically for Jewish Christians; this is true not only of Papias's tradition and the superscription for the Gospel, but also of the various heretical works attributed to Matthew. James son of Alphaeus is sometimes identified with James the Less, who was one of the Brothers of the Lord. The Brothers of the Lord were relatives of Jesus who played (as we see at the beginning of Acts and in 1 Corinthians 9) an important leadership role in the early Christian community, especially around Jerusalem, up to the destruction of the Temple. There are complications with identifying James son of Alphaeus and James the Brother of the Lord, but if they are identified, then it would mean that Matthew may have been one of the Brothers of the Lord too. (The brothers of the Lord are named in Mark 6 and Matthew 13 as James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, but we don't know if the list is intended to be exhaustive or just representative.) I'm inclined not to make the identification between the two Jameses, but it's certainly one that has occasionally been made.

Links of Note

 * Spencer Jay Case, Good Riddance: On Speaking Ill of the Dead, at "Case in Point"

* David Schneeweiss, Job

* James T. Keane, Sigrid Undset: Scholar, storyteller--and future saint?, at "America"

* Tamar Kushnir & Shaun Nichols, Moral Learning, at the SEP

* F. W. J. Schelling: On so-called Weather-shooting, at James Crane's "Substudies"

* Rex Butler interviews Ian Hunter: Spiritual Exercises in Kantian Philosophy, at the "JHI Blog"

* Louis Larue, Against Guala and Hendriks' Functionalist Theory of Institutions (PDF)

There is apparently a Blogger-wide problem with handling of feeds, so the recent posts and 'Weblogs I Regularly View' feeds in the sidebar are likely to be unreliable for a while.

Dashed Off XXVIII

 Our time experiences push us toward thinking about things they do not show us.

We are not merely symbol-makers but symbol-finders.

To be able to ask for the name of something requires an already vast familiarity with classification.

As far back as we can trace consistent tool-making we can trace the history of the ability to classify. (The consistency is essential here.)

To give an example one must do more than can be found in only the giving of the example.

To learn the meaning of a word is to learn the seed-crystal of infinite possible uses of the word.

Learning a new language may change the way one gardens and thereby change one's garden.

"In speculation as well as in gossip, we have some natural inclination towards the more surprising version of a story." Mary Midgley

Those meats tend to be favored in barbecue that are rich in fats and also have a strong distinctive taste that can bear an overlay of smokiness. (Hence the prevalence of cow and pig.)

Boo and hooray derive from our evaluations and do not ground them; in saying them we express an evaluation already made.

A divorce of philosophy and poetry causes problems for moral motivation.

We always learn languages by playing games.

There once was a critic of Thomism
who said, This is nothing but Rome-ism!
Though I never know why
the thing will not die
and it eats up my own view, Coxcomb-ism.

Great poets can survive having manifestos, but it always ruins lesser poets.

What we value structures what we regard as dangerous.

Humean psychology as what it would be like to live in a dream: wandering in images of experience held loosely together by the lingering associations from how they were associated in experience, nothing of substance, nothing of causation except custom and anticipation of imagination, appearance of reality maintained by coherences and constancies and the momentum and mistake of the mind

To have and apply a concept of reality or the real world, we must contrast things with dream, fiction, hallucination, etc. To make this comparison, however, there must be something that it is to be, there must be something 'true in a dream', 'true in fiction', etc.; otherwise there would be nothing allowing the comparison and contrast.

qualia as a crude way of talking about 'way of being true in experience', a substet of 'way of being true'

signs as interfaces between ways of being true -- e.g., testimony of what is true in one's experience

dream as natural version of Rimbaud's derangement of senses

Physicists work with both 'truth in a model' and 'truth in the physical world', and the relations between these need more elucidation.

Wittgensteinianism is just a preculiar form of seeking clear and distinctinct ideas by using a method doubt.

that which cannot be merely true in a model

transcendental arguments as movements from one truth domain to a more fundamental truth domain

Reasoning on the basis of testimony requires that there be a fact of the matter about whether a person is honest or lying, and that this fact not be a matter of appearances or reputation only.

Many of the features of fiction are also found in other domains in which we have nonsystematic evidence about something to which we lack direct access.

Reading up on the Zimbabwean Hyperinflation Crisis is like seeing a tornado lift a mountain and drop it on an overflowing dam; it is an economic disaster that begins to approach something like sublimity.

Some kinds of etiquette are higher and more sacred than any artificial protocol.

Follow back any social construction and you hit something natural that makes the features of that social construction possible and salient.

Even very intelligent and social beasts don't place the weight on suffering in their actions and responses that human beings do. Humans often don't experience suffering (their own or others) as just bad but as wrong, what ought not to be, as a defect in the way things are. We are, as far as we can tell, the only animals that do this consistently and certainly the only ones that keep doing it when only remembering or imagining it.

Companonionable silence is itself a sort of conversation.

household as grex, as group, as society

There are many moral obligations to which we have to learn to be committed.

an allegorical reading of Deuteronomy 20:19-20: When engaged in religious or apologetic argument, do not attack the good things in your opponent's position, because your dispute is not against what they get right, but instead distinguish out the things that are not valuable in this way, and by demolishing them build your own position against theirs, until you have achieved the point.

We inquire by creating domains of truth to compare with other domains of truth.

sufficient reason as involving three things: adequacy, reason, and Box (the mode under which adequacy and reason are linked for sufficient reason)

We learn about ourselves by defeating ourselves.

Parliaments increased prosperity by aligning legislative interests with protection of property rights and expansion of tax capacity.

Every society requires, if it is to survive, small bits of shareable beauty.

Because of the unity of virtues, you can in principle start with any virtue and develop an account of all the virtues, and such developments from different starting points will converge (although not always in straightforward ways). But not all virtues are equally valuable as the starting seed for virtue ethics. The best are those that are themselves inherently architectonic (like prudence or justice) or pedagogical (like filial piety or respect).

We uplift ourselves with poetry, stabilize ourselves with ritual, and for the culmination express ourselves with art.

In virtue the heart goes upward.

Inferior authority cannot rid itself of trying to appear authoritative.

Authority is what maintains what emerges from the ways of things.

Many criticisms of capitalism are really identifying weaknesses in democracy, but as people don't want to attack democracy, they find a scapegoat, with the result that they do not fortify democracy against its weaknesses; they have convinced themselves that if the scapegoat is destroyed, the weaknesses will vanish.

(pure being -> pure act) -> pure spirit

As actuality is the precondition for possibility, and some possibilities are necessarily so, there must be necessary being.

Ps 118:16-17 Vulg: The right hand of the Lord (the Holy Spirit) has wrought virtue (infused virtue); I shall not die but I shall live.

Amends are sometimes of greater value than punishment.

For there to be a community of nations, there must be a community of reason, structured by common rational principles and obligations.

All human beings are thrust into a discipline of service and obedience, and therefore can only come to rest in a discipline of service and obedience prior to and more fundamental than all others.

Everybody seems reasonable on the occasions that they accidentally make a reasonable argument.

If God judged man even with an imperfect but just man's standard, not many would stand.

We treat people as projecting an intentional structure and this intentional structure is part of our assessment of their actions.

"People do not suspect what does not appear to be hidden." Maurice LeBlanc, The Crystal Stopper

Every idea dropped into the sea of humanity mutates.

Reading is a discipline in structuring one's thoughts.

The 'obligation to obey the law' is not a single obligation.

All beneficiaries have a moral obligation to requite their benefactors.

To be grateful only for things requiring special effort or sacrifice is to be an ingrate. To refuse to be grateful for a benefit until it has tbeen established to have been intentional or voluntary is also to be an ingrate.

Obeying the law is not an adequate return for benefits received from civil society, much less any kind of uniquely suitable return, but where it is interpreted in a way reasonably consistent with common good, it is usually a necessary condition for some of what is necessary for a suitable and adequate return.

People are often grateful to institutions, like schools or churches or militaries.

The heart of grateful response is not attitude but active relationship. Neither goodwill nor respect nor gratitude are reducible to attitudes.

A very general sort of indebtedness, in particular and very distinctive situations, often spawns very specific debts.

Obligations of gratitude range from minor to extremely strong; it is not possible to be a grateful person and assume that this will not ever require significant sacrifice.

The stringency of gratitude obligations do not only vary with the sacrifice or effort behind the benefit, but also the extent and importance of the benefit.

Actions performed from gratitude are no more necessarily caught up in feeling grateful than actions performed from love; indeed, in both cases, adequate action often requires the action to stretch or extend farther or longer than the feeling can.

People often treat obedience to the law as part of 'giving back' to their society and often justify disobedience on the basis of society not giving them anything that would give them reason to obey.

M-T pronoun pattern: Across Eurasia , many otherwise unrelated languages have first-person pronouns beginning with M (or close equivalent) and second-person pronouns beginning with T (or close equivalent).
N-M pronoun pattern: Across the Americas (especiall the western coast), otherwise unrelated languages have first-person pronouns beginning with N (or close equivalent) and second-person pronouns beginning with M (or close equivalent).
-- The most obvious explanation is that these are relics of a common ancestry so far back there is no other known specific trace of it.
-- Another possible explanation is that this is actually due to convergence due to 'pronominal resonance' (Johannes Nichols) -- i.e., pronoun sets tend toward alliteration and rhyme, so languages tend to shift toward being more like those with more consistent alliteration (e.g., Turkish shift in first-person pronouns from B to M).
-- M-T families tend to be consistent with the Altaic hypothesis.