Where the Fool Remains Forever and the April Comes No More

 The Aristocrat
by G. K. Chesterton 

 The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At the little place at What'sitsname (it isn't far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't brag himself. 

 O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What'sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that's played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word.

Admin Note

 About a year ago, I switched commenting systems; Disqus had become increasing bloated and unpleasant to use, so I switched to Commento, which had the advantage of being relatively cheap and, compared to Disqus, massively easier and quicker to load. As a transitional thing it worked well enough, but it quickly became clear that there was inadequate support and it would occasionally go rather inconsistent. Unfortunately, it has grown increasingly inconsistent in the past month or so, to the extent that it is very unpredictable. And I've occasionally been locked out of comments myself recently. Commento wasn't expensive, but I'm certainly not paying for a third-party commenting platform in order not to have access to the commenting system. So it's definitely time to move on.

And it is as tricky a matter as one might expect; most of the commenting systems out there are either absurdly expensive (obviously for businesses rather than little blogging endeavors) or overloaded (with indefinite waiting lists) or are obviously lacking in other ways. After some research, I've decided to try CommentBox for a while. Because Commento is acting up, I'm not sure I'll be able to import any Commento comments, so if you were extraordinarily proud of some comment you left in the past year, I apologize, I guess, since it might be lost to all but the omniscience of God.

It allows for simple Markdown (*italic* for italic, **bold** for bold, > for blockquote). Replies to comments are not particularly good, I'm afraid, although there is a little icon near the name for the comment which if clicked gives a menu by which you can reply to a comment (which in practice, I think, just means that it puts it below the comment to which you are replying and lets those who have clicked the box for emailed replies get a notification.). Comments can be edited for about eight minutes after posting.  It requires sign-in (by social media or email) but once you've signed in, there's a little box you can click to post anonymously, and another if you want emailed replies. As with Commento, it will only be on the web version. (I'm sure there's a way it could be done on the mobile site, but the problem is that it would require extensive experimentation with figuring out how to put the relevant snippets in the HTML, and Blogger does not make that easy anymore.) We'll see how it does with spam (which is not as big a problem as it once was, but still occasionally causes problems); the moderation options are not particularly extensive, but as it's a roughly-free commenting service for the moment (it only costs if you get above a certain number of comments a month, a number that I have not reached in a few years now). 

Let me know if it gives you trouble.

Say the Word

 The whole span of my life disperses and vanishes vainly in the confusion of the vanities of this world. And because I have not even desired, for a single hour, to prepare myself for tackling work in the spiritual vineyard, I do not expect to receive the wage prepared for the just. But, for the hidden wounds of my sins, I ask forgiveness from you, unworthy though I am. And because of this, before I stand before your frightful judgment seat and am found guilty of my crimes by your just judgment, say the word, and I will be healed by your mercies: O Friend of mankind, glory to you!

[From the Basilica Hymn for the Fifth Week of Lent, in The Book of Before and After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East, Fr. Andrew Younan, ed. and tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024), p. 483.]

Links of Note

 * Rebekah Wallace, Legacy of angels, at "Aeon"

* Chris Pruett, Divine Command Theory, Robust Normative Realism, and the Argument from Psychopathy: A Reply to Erik Wielenberg (PDF)

* Andrew Chignell and Derk Pereboom, Natural Theology and Natural Religion, at the SEP

* Jean-Luc Solère & Nicholas Westberg, Descartes on God and Duration, Revisited (PDF)

* Louis Daoust reviews Deborah Boyle's Mary Shepherd: A Guide.

* Austen McDougal, Loving Your Enemy (PDF)

* Edmund Waldstein, Happiness as the Principle of Ethics, Law, and Rights, at "The Josiah"

* Nevim Borçin, Rethinking Natural Slavery in Aristotle (PDF)

* Kailani B., I Am Not the Main Character in Fictional Stories, at "Damsel in the Library"

* Sofia Calvente, Hierarchy of Beings and Equality of Men and Women in Catherine Trotter Cockburn (PDF)

* Edward Feser, A Catholic Defense of Enforcing Immigration Laws, at "Public Discourse"

* Michelle Kassorla and Eugenia Novokshanova, If Academic Neutral Isn't Dead Yet, It Soon Will Be, at "The Multimodal AI Project"

* Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley, For this unsung philosopher, metaphors make life an adventure, on Susanne Langer, at "Psyche"

* David Schleicher and Nicholas Bagley, The state capacity crisis, at Niskanen Center

* Victoria, The Anglo-Latin haibun, at "Horace & friends"

* Hilarius Bookbinder, The average college student today, at "Scriptorium Philosophica". The description is recognizable, although, of course, the degree to which it fits is variable; and complaints of this sort are very common among college professors. The problem, of course, is that by the point students get to college, all the damage is already done, and only the most motivated students will be able to correct course by this point. And, contrary to almost every bloviator with an easy solution, the problems are so pervasive and across so many domains that they quite obviously cannot be monocausal. Yes, phones are a serious problem, but students also generally don't have sufficient reading skills, which directly implies that they haven't read enough to develop the reading skills, since that's the only way one develops them, and something similar is true of basic writing and arithmetical skills; they often haven't been socialized enough to hold themselves to basic obligations or courtesies, and they sometimes take trying to bluff and fake their way through anything difficult to a truly extraordinary level, and, perhaps worst of all, they are extremely inclined to give up at the first serious challenge, to such an extent that they will fail to make use of second chance opportunities even when they need them. All of these problems are regular complaints, and none of them can be due entirely to the same thing. (I think a lot of them are tied to the fact that many students have never really been challenged before, as modern teenagers often don't have a wide range of opportunities for doing challenging things or incentive for using the opportunities they do have, but this is not a single problem, either.) 

It's also true, of course, that there are many students who don't have these problems, or at least don't have them so severely as to damage their ability to get through just fine; but if you're not already that sort of student, there is no way to solve such problems on the fly in a college course. The closest one can get on the professor side is just to design the course in such a way that students are forced to do things in their head like memorization and analysis instead of trying to google answers, and required to do things in full view, like reading, that we have often just left to the discretion of the student; that is, one can bring directly into the class the sorts of things that they should be doing outside the class. But there's only so much time, and only so far one can go in doing this; almost everything substantial in higher education, necessarily and inevitably, depends on the initiative and self-instruction of the student. That's the whole point of it; college teachers are only there to give you resources and assistance in doing the learning yourself, not to try futilely to shove things into your head while you're scrolling the internet.

Of course, lest we be unfair, it is worth noting that many professors are idiots and stupidly think that they are brilliant at teaching because their college has a good pre-selection process in which the particular students who end up in their classes don't need much teaching in order to learn. And you get the common problem of the Myth of the Method, in which college teachers think that if only they have the right method, which must exist somewhere out there, all problems are solved. And you get the tech-hounds who think that the obvious problem is that professors are Luddites who can't get with the times, and who repeatedly ignore the very large amount of evidence that none of their tech solutions actually have the extraordinary results they claim, and sometimes have worse results than the old-fashioned technology of pen-and-paper. Perhaps it's not surprising that the problems are so complicated when so many people keep making them worse.

The Divine Guru

The Divine Guru is our mother, the Divine Guru is our father;
the Divine Guru is our Lord and Master, the Transcendent Lord.
The Divine Guru is my companion, the Destroyer of ignorance;
the Divine Guru is my relative and brother.
The Divine Guru is the Giver, the Teacher of the Lord’s Name.
The Divine Guru is the Mantra which never fails.
The Divine Guru is the image of peace, truth and wisdom.
The Divine Guru is the Philosopher’s Stone -- touching it, one is transformed.
The Divine Guru is the sacred shrine of pilgrimage, and the pool of divine nectar;
bathing in the Guru’s wisdom, one experiences the Infinite. 
The Divine Guru is the Creator, and the Destroyer of all sins;
the Divine Guru is the Purifier of sinners. 
The Divine Guru existed in the very beginning, throughout the ages, in each and every age.
The Divine Guru is the Mantra of the Lord’s Name; chanting it, one is saved.
O God, please be merciful to me, so that I may be with the Divine Guru;
I am a foolish sinner, but holding onto Him, I will be carried across.
The Divine Guru is the True Guru, the Supreme Lord God, the Transcendent Lord;
Nanak bows in humble reverence to the Lord, the Divine Guru.

Sri Guru Granth Sahib 262

Herlock Sholmès on the Trail of Arsène Lupin

 The first part of Arsène Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes, called "The Blonde Lady", sees France's greatest thief and England's greatest detective playing cat-and-mouse games all over Paris, so I began to wonder how it would look on a map. I started to piece together such a map, but as it turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly) someone had already done it -- Bernadette Pivote, who does a lot on what might be called Literary Paris, the city as seen through novels. 

Her brief summaries of the places and how they appear in "La Dame blonde" (in French) are worth reading, and I highly recommend them -- especially if you are reading the novel, of course, but it is also interesting in itself.

Dashed Off VII

 Dancing to music is something suggested by the physical way we experience music, feeling the beat and the melody.

"Understanding music involves the active creation of an intentional world in which mere sounds are transfigured into movements, harmonies, rhythms -- metaphorical gestures in a metaphorical space. And into these metaphorical gestures a metaphorical soul is breathed by the sympathetic listener." Scruton
"Every sound intentionally made is instinctively taken to be an attempt at communication. And this is as true of music as it is of speech. In the presence of sound intentionally produced, and intentionally organized, we feel ourselves within another person's ambit."

cosmological arguments in the alethic order, in the deontic order, in the epistemic and doxastic order?

questions as a sign of our cognitive contingency

Extremisms often arise from an inadequate attention to everyday duties.

colors as actings (emission), sounds as products (emitted)

the sounding vs the sound
the experience of being acted upon by way of sound vs the acousmatic experience of sound

The physical and spatial experiences of singing and playing instrumetns give us orientations in the figurative space of music, as if we built a kind of coordinate system out of them.

the kinaesthetic inness and outness of speaking and singing

In experience of music we are in music and not of it.

virtual causality in acousmatic space

osculans, os, osculum as Trinitarian (Giles of Rome)

There is not a single order of existence, and existence that is not vague with respect to one order may be vague with respect to another.

A musical cover is not merely an instance of the music but an allusion to another instance of music, which serves as a sort of exemplar (although to varying degrees).

We experience music as both an acting and a product. (This is true of dance as well.) The product-ness is instrumental to the action-ness.

The acousmatic character of sound is experienced as received.

cives optimo iure vs. cives sine suffragio
-- note that in the Roman system, cives sine suffragio are specifically 'sine suffagio' in Rome -- they could have suffrage in their own communities, on independent grounds, but in Rome they had legal protection but no right to vote or hold office.

resonance : auditory medium :: transparency : visual medium

"Our Imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its Capacity. We are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them." Addison (Spect 412, 23 June 1712)

Dante's Inferno is a depiction of the forms of being anti-creative.

Cantor's definition of a set requires
(1) a collecting operation
(2) resulting in wholes with parts
(3) where the parts are definite,
(4) separate,
(5) objects of intuition or thought.

The measure of how consistent a social movement or political position  is with a free society, is how it treats pacific opposition. All free societies require a principle of respect for peaceable disagreement.

The handing down of tradition over a long period of time requires an interweaving of organic recoveries, artificial recoveries, extrapolations from precedent, restorative repairs, conserving actions, improvements of scaffolding, anticipatory preparations, functional substitutions, etc.

the Humean general (T 3.3.1.15) or common (T 3.3.1.30, EPM 9.6) point of view in aesthetics, unites us in 'the party of humankind' (EPM 9.5) against disorder and ugliness
-- involves putting ourselves in other spectators' perspectives than our own (cf. T 3.3.3.2)
-- lets us establish general rules (cf. T 3.3.1.20) that ignore possible responses dependent on happenstance circumstances (e.g., whether we are feeling sick or not at the moment)
-- lets us have common ground for aesthetic discussion (cf. T 3.3.1.15) and develop an appropriate language for it (cf. T 3.3.1.16)
-- facilitates practical coordination in aesthetic projects

the role of the principle of humanity (EPM 9.6) in aesthetic judgment

All virtues are useful and agreeable both to the person himself and to others.

Hume's claim that the 'monkish virtues' are not agreeable to their possessors does not exactly square with the history of the practices involved; the same is true of the claim that they are not useful to society.

Hume's 'artificial virtues' are not made-up virtues but virtues involving artifice, i.e., some sort of social machinery like a government, a legal system, or social custom. Hume tends to talks as if they presupposed the machinery, but there is at least an argument to be made that they are actually involved in the building of it -- the virtuous work of our tool-use ability (property-justice) creating the rules of property, ofr instance, or social graciousness creating the rules of etiquette. All of the artificial virtues would then really be natural virtues of cooperation that make use of ingenuity.

What is due someone is not and cannot be a purely conventional matter.

Human beings experience something like Hume's and also Smith's sympathy (both) even for nonhuman animals, plants, and landmarks.

While Hume's general point of view is not ideal in the sense of being that of an ideal-spectator, it is ideal in the sense of being idealized.

The possible meanings of words cover ranges of things with varying degrees of centrality or marginality; the range is constrained by context to varying degrees of precision in actual meaning.

The Copenhagen interpretation effectively treats the world as consisting entirely of possible and actual measurements.

yes/no questions as possibilities of premises

the first four categories as the fundamental preconditions of measurement

ecology and life-dependent being (esse vitalis) -- niche, etc.

(1) Some X's are Y's; therefore (2) All of the X's which verify (1) are Y's.

tutiorism // totalitarianism
laxism // the more extreme forms of liberalism

Only death is fully egalitarian.

Many things must be tried to reach great discoveries; genius discovers how to try things not one by one but as a group or mass.

"If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change." Chesterton

There is no being-in-the-world without co-being-in-the-world.

music as a symbol of the Holy Spirit

The experience of music as an interplay of memory, attention, and anticipation.

the moral sphere, the jurisdiction, and the templum of marriage

'field' as the mediating concept between point-like measurement and area-like measurement

the physical as that which always has a mass-momentum and energy-time measurement relationship

kinds of prudential judgment
(1) disturbance mitigation
(2) feedforward control
(3) feedback control
(4) reference selection (planning)
(5) noise mitigation
(6) state estimation
(7) evaluative reflection

perversion of the state (deliberate use of the state as a means to an end inconsistent with its natural end)

When economists say, 'The economy is in bad shape', they are talking about overall measurements, when ordinary laymen say, 'The economy is in bad shape', they mean that the parts around them are organized in a bad way.

Hb 1:4 -- The Son receives by merit in exaltation what He already possessed by nature in original filiation.

Epiphanius in the Panarium (Aer 65.8) distinguishes homousios with the Father from heteroousios (Arians) and tautoousios (Sabellians).

Lk 1:53 & the ecuharist: "He has filled the hungry with good things."

"For nothing is ever atoned for which the blood of Christ did not atone for and repair." Albert

modes of being
(1) tantum in ratione: negation and privation
(2) admixed with negation and privation: motion and mutation
(3) weakly existing (in alio): quliaties, quantities, and properties of substances
(4) completely existing (in se): substances
-- (3) are referred to (4) as in substances, (2) to (4) as tending to substances or accidents, (1) to (4) as removing substance, accidents, motions.

In every substance there is a power to be, and to be like, and to be so, and to be with respect to another.

God as that being with which all being has co-being

Predicamental vestment as it were forms an extended substance by making one substance subordinate co-substance with another. There is a substance, and it is vested with a co-substance.

being clothed as a physically realized moral status

Every human person re-presents the universe that is present to him or her.

accidental predicaments as systemic capacities (this is certainly defensible for sex principia)

forms of systemic relation: resemblance, mensuration, action

Fictional characters are not purely imaginary but involve references to real and actual beings, and ultimately to the storytelling-testimony, spoken or written, that communicates them.

The artist purifies, illuminates, and completes the materials of the work of art in making it.

What phenomenologists call 'world' is a representation of the world.

If a normative claim is successfully applied, then it is also a descriptive claim.

"People truly have a kind of feeling from human nature (xingqing) that surpasses individual life and finds completion in affective connection with people and things." Tang Junyi
"The most important point for our affirming the value of a kind of cultural activity is that it directly reveals the value of the human spirit itself, and not its instrumental or utilitarian value."

ontic personhood : ground of value :: moral personhood : response to value

In recognizing the personhood of anything, we recognzie that attributing personhood to it is not arbitrary but requires principled attribution.

"Even knowing God, I cannot describe Him; He cannot be described in words." SGGS 2
"No matter how much anyone tries to explain and describe them, / the actions of the Creator cannot be counted."
"You created the vast expanse of the Universe with One Word!"
"Virtue and vice do not come by mere words; / actions repeated, over and over again, are engraved on the soul." SGGS 4
"If anyone presumes to describe God, /he shall be known as the greatest fool of fools!" SGGS 6
"Everyone says that God is the Greatest of the Great. No one calls Him any less. / No one can estimate His Worth. By speaking of Him, His Greatness is not increased." SGGS 15
"The Wine of Truth is not fermented from molasses. The True Name is contained within it."
"Bathe in the waters of Goodness and apply the scented oil of Truth to your body, / and your face shall become radiant. This is the gift of 100000 gifts." SGGS 16
"To reach your True Home after you die, you must conquer death while you are still alive." SGGS 21

Pew Research (June 29, 2021) on Religion in India

self-identified	Believe there is only one God	There is only one God with many manifestations	There are many gods
Hindus	29%	61%	7%
Muslims	66%	22%	3%
Christians	68%	24%	5%
Sikhs	57%	36%	0%
Buddhists	39%	22%	5%
Jains	41%	54%	5%

"A value is characterized not by its strength but by its depth, by the extent to which it brings order to experience." Scruton

As an architectural work, a building is not merely lived in but lived through.

Gothic architecture as an architecture of the uprising symbolic city

Modern church architecture seems primarily cocerned with creating buildings indicative of a congregation.

the aesthetic syllogism:
major (aesthetic reasons)
minor (features of aesthetic object)
conclusion (way of experiencing aesthetic object)

Learning to experience works of art is learning to reorganize one's attention.

As the Body, Soul, and Divinity of Christ are in the Eucharist sacramentally and by real presence, so the sacramental Body of Christ is in the Eucharist representatively and by symbolic presence, in its Head.

Music works on us by being both inside and outside us.

One of the most common patterns is that human beings are stiffnecked on religious matters; we all get obstinate about what we like and find convenient.

All virtues create responsibilities; justice (and its potential parts) create them in the form of obligations.

glorying as an act of hope

the gift vs the effect of the gift (with respect to actual conferring, proportion/suitability to the recipient, and durability of the need)
-- the effect of the gift is the gift in the recipient

zikkaron and the presence of Israel in the heavenly liturgy

The first thing God gave Adam was God.

fictionalizations of fictions and fictionalizations
-- this is a common way versions of fictional chracters are related, e.g., I can write a Holems pastiche that is fictionalization of the Sherlock Holmes

perception, punishment, and argument as the three natural means of persuasion

Dancing and music are things we naturally do, which are then 'packaged' as artifacts in which the dancing or music is intentionally presented as dancing or music.

"Dancing creates a 'sympathetic space' whose meaning is corporate." Scruton

festivity, solemnity, and sublimity as the key values of church architecture

One way we affect other minds is by affecting the possibilities available to them.

We treat our bodies as having meaning in such a way as to require the bodies of others to have meaning.

The body as we experience it is both 'just now' and 'soon' as well as 'right now'.