Thursday, August 29, 2019
Music on My Mind
Kathleen MacInnes, "Gaol ise Gaol i". It's a rhythm song; it's the sort of thing you would sing when working on some big cooperative task that requires that everybody keep time, so while it has lyrics, they can be anything that keeps the time. In Scotland they were often called waulking songs, because waulking, which is part of how tweed is made, and how it is made waterproof, required a lot of women beating wet cloth for an extended period of time.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Doctor Gratiae
Today was the feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, Doctor of the Church. From De Trinitate, Book XIV:
This trinity, then, of the mind is not therefore the image of God, because the mind remembers itself, and understands and loves itself; but because it can also remember, understand, and love Him by whom it was made. And in so doing it is made wise itself. But if it does not do so, even when it remembers, understands, and loves itself, then it is foolish. Let it then remember its God, after whose image it is made, and let it understand and love Him. Or to say the same thing more briefly, let it worship God, who is not made, by whom because itself was made, it is capable and can be partaker of Him; wherefore it is written, "Behold, the worship of God, that is wisdom." And then it will be wise, not by its own light, but by participation of that supreme Light; and wherein it is eternal, therein shall reign in blessedness. For this wisdom of man is so called, in that it is also of God. For then it is true wisdom; for if it is human, it is vain.
"The Atheist's Mass"
Thinking about the nature of gratitude, and the very different forms its expression can take, I started thinking about one of Balzac's most famous short stories, The Atheist's Mass. In it a student discovers that his notorious atheist of a professor, who often criticizes organized religion and the Catholic Church in particular, has for twenty years been paying for and attending Mass four times a year. Is the atheist a secret Catholic? When the student gets the story out of the professor, it turns out that that he is not, but that gratitude to a good man is a powerful thing. If you've never read it, it is worth reading; and it is in any case a good depiction of someone expressing sincere gratitude in a purely symbolic way.
'Tis Joy, to Move Under the Bended Sky
Oh What Doth It Avail in Busy Care
by Henry Alford
Oh what doth it avail in busy care
The summer of our days to pass away
In doors—nor forth into the sunny ray,
Nor by the wood nor river-side to fare,
Nor on far-seeing hills to meet the air,
Nor watch the land-waves yean the shivering spray?
Oh what doth it avail, though every day
Fresh-catered wealth its golden tribute bear?
Rather along the field-paths in the morn
To meet the first laugh of the twinkling East,
Or when the clear-eyed Aphrodite is born
Out from the amber ripples of the West,
'Tis joy, to move under the bended sky,
And smell the pleasant earth, and feel the winds go by.
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
The Grateful-That Kind of Gratitude
One kind of expression we find when people talk about gratitude is the grateful-to kind of expression, sometimes called prepositional gratitude:
Another kind of expression about gratitude is the grateful-that kind of expression, sometimes called propositional gratitude:
In his SEP article on Gratitude, Tony Manela gives the consensus on which philosophers discussing gratitude have converged:
This does indeed seem to be the current consensus, but a consensus of philosophers is not flock of homing pigeons, and I think this is a case in which consensus has converged on the wrong idea, for wrong reasons, to the detriment of the field. Gratitude-that is a form of gratitude. It is not equivalent to appreciation or gladness, which is an identifiably distinct response. Propositional gratitude is related to prepositional gratitude as indefinite to definite, or incomplete to complete. Obviously these get into a number of different issues; here I only give a few points related to them.
I. To say that I am grateful that it did not rain on my wedding day is very different from saying that I am glad that it did not rain on my wedding day, and what is more to the point, feeling grateful that it did not rain is a distinct feeling from feeling glad that it did not rain. One way we distinguish feelings of this sort is by their families of characteristic acts, and the characteristic acts of gratefulness and gladness are different. If I am glad it did not rain, the natural and normal way to express this is well known to everyone -- smiling, or laughing, or celebrating. Gladness disposes to celebration, in a broad sense of the term, even if this remains somewhat inchoate or does not fully develop. But if I am grateful it did not rain, I am saying that the feeling I have is disposing me to act graciously in a way that culminates when developed in thanking, and my expressions of being grateful that it did not rain will be related to thanking, even if they do not result in full-blown giving of thanks; for instance, I might take on myself a special responsibility to make sure this good fortune does not go to waste. We don't generally think of gladness or appreciation as themselves generating responsibilities, but being grateful that something has happened is very often associated with at least a basic kind of responsibility-taking. Being glad that you are alive is a great thing; but being grateful that you are alive calls for responsibility and action.I may be glad that a rock is in a given location, but this does not suggest any particular course of action with respect to the rock; if the rock is about to be destroyed I may be disappointed, but any protest will be based on the feeling the rock's being there is giving me. If I am grateful that the rock is in that location and the rock is about to be destroyed, however, I will have greater motivation to do something to stop its destruction; my protest, moreover, will not be based on my feeling of gratitude but on the reason why I am grateful for its being there.
We may say the same of appreciation. I can appreciate the trees being colorful, but if I am grateful that the trees are colorful, this suggests some deeper reason than talk of appreciation suggests.
Further, suppose that I say I am glad or appreciate that such-and-such happened, and then discover that someone arranged it. I might then be grateful to them, but I also might not; it depends on what it is. Appreciation or being glad about something may be a reason to be grateful to someone who arranges it, but it is not always so. But if I am grateful that such-and-such happened, and discover that someone arranged it, this in and of itself is always at least some reason to be grateful to them; my gratefulness seems then to find an object, my disposition to thank now has an occasion to become active in thanking specifically. There might be something impeding, it might not be universal -- but the move from one seems more straightforward with propositional gratitude than with appreciation.
There are, of course, relations among these things. For instance, one of the responsibilities that the gratefulness-that kind of gratitude might lead me to take on is deliberate appreciation; that something regularly makes me glad may be a reason to be grateful that it does so. But they are not the same; even at first glance there seems room to make a distinction between them.
II. Manela argues the identity of propositional gratitude and appreciation at greater length in his article, "Gratitude and Appreciation". He does consider there the proposal that being grateful that something happened involves a tendency to return just like being grateful to someone for something. ('Tendency to return' is perhaps not the right phrase for the thankful tendency actually associated with gratitude, but whether or not there is some better phrase will likely not change much.) His response to it is that while being grateful to someone for something entails some such tendency to return, but cases of being grateful that something occurred do not. If, to take a somewhat simpler example than he uses, John is not grateful that it did not rain on his wedding day, we would not call him an ingrate. I'm not sure that this would always be true, but let's assume it. How is it really different from many cases of being grateful to someone for something? We are benefited by people all the time; in many of these cases we would take gratitude to be a good response but not necessarily regard someone as an ingrate if they did not feel grateful. (Indeed, many of our gratitude practices are designed to function even if they are not backed by feelings, but only the abstract recognition of the value of a properly grateful response.) Likewise, if we say that John is grateful that it did not rain on his wedding day, but never makes a return, we would not say he was an ingrate. But it's been noted since Seneca writing on benefits that gratitude does not always require return in a robust sense; sometimes a thankful spirit ready for an opportunity (which depending on the circumstances may not ever come) suffices. And there are many circumstances in which we might be grateful to someone but have no way to render return. For instance, I might really need some kind of information, and find that someone did it a hundred years ago, and feel gratitude toward them for doing it. No return directly to them is possible. We might then as a substitute simply appreciate them in memory, or, recognizing that no direct return is possible, we might just leave it at our thankful feeling toward them. When we render grateful returns, we often decide what is an appropriate return on the basis of features of the benefactor or their situation; sometimes those features render return impossible or moot or merely mental. This is particularly relevant here. Since being grateful that something occurred does not have a benefactor directly in view, the kind of thing that would normally specify a particular way to render return is not there, so you often wouldn't expect anything definite. The obvious way to think of it is to think that gratitude-that is generally a sort of gratitude that is running without what is required to result in a complete grateful expression.
(It is not especially relevant to my argument here, but Manela also has some responses to positions arguing that some of the features he attributes to prepositional gratitude are not strictly required; for instance, the idea that perhaps you can be grateful to inanimate objects. He tries to dismiss this as being due to anthropomorphism, but as far as I can see, this is simply irrelevant. OK, suppose it's due to anthropomorphism; it's still the case that someone is grateful to an inanimate object. Manela tries to conclude that it needs to be an agent to be warranted, but warranted or not, it's still an actual case of being grateful to an inanimate object -- and he doesn't actually establish that it is unwarranted, because he has not established that anthropomorphism is unwarranted. There is in fact a case of undeniable prepositional gratitude that almost always involves some degree of anthropomorphism already -- for instance, if you are grateful to a dog for saving you from a fire. Since this is an animate case, I take it that Manela would allow it, but we can hardly help anthropomorphizing animals, and there seems to be no problem with that, at least to a moderate degree, for most practical purposes. And, as I've noted before, on some quite respectable account of emotional expression in art, the natural world, even inanimate objects and scenes are rationally counted as genuinely expressive even though we know that no actual emotion is expressed, due to sharing features with human expressions, so some things that would likely be counted by Manela as anthropomorphism would on those views be rational and warranted. Manela seems to think that there is some fact about gratefulness that floats away from our actual cases of gratefulness, so that we can dismiss some of the latter as not 'real' gratefulness. But this seems entirely arbitrary,and runs the risk of somewhat dishonest characterization of actual human experience, falsifying the real responses of people by pretending their responses are some abstract scheme of what he assumes to be a more rational way to respond.)
All of this is just Manela arguing that there are significant differences between the two, but he also argues specifically that gratefulness-that is just appreciation. His argument mostly just consists of him identifying general similarities and doubting that there could be a distinction between the two. I've already questioned whether propositional gratitude is really unconnected to a tendency to return in the way appreciation is, but let's assume that Manela is right here. There are others, as I've also noted: Being grateful that something is the case is often in practice associated with responsibility in ways that mere appreciation is not; they seem to be related to motivation differently; gratitude-that seems to flow immediately into gratitude-to when a benefactor is discovered, whereas appreciation does not seem to have the same natural flow. And most importantly, we regularly express it in terms more appropriate to gratitude than mere appreciation.
III. Manela tells a number of stories to try to motivate his account of the differences between prepositional and propositional gratitude. Of course, in a sense all that anyone does when they tell stories like this is to try to convince someone that an idea makes a kind of narrative sense, which is a weak, albeit sometimes important, foundation. We can point to a number of things in actual practice that need to be taken seriously. For instance, the fact that we use the word 'grateful' at all in this context is relevant. Nor is it the only gratitude-relevant word we use. Consider the word 'thankfully': "I went to his house and, thankfully, he was there." That's very definitely a gratitude-expression, and that's very definitely describing propositional, not prepositional, gratitude. People who are expressing propositional gratitude will sometimes say things like, "It was a gift from the gods", despite not believing in gods, or "The fates have looked kindly on me", despite not thinking that there are fates. And people expressing propositional gratitude will sometimes verbalize it with nothing more than "Thank you!" despite not speaking to anyone particular. Now some of these may be linguistic relics of cases where people were actually expressing prepositional gratitude (to gods or God), and Manela in fact attempts to say precisely this, but it again is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that people who are definitely not expressing prepositional gratitude still take them to be appropriate verbal expressions of their experience. And there are lots of them. This in itself suggests that people are recognizing some close kinship between prepositional and propositional gratitude, one that they do not necessarily associate with gladness or appreciation.
Manela wants to say that all of this is conflation; this response should be seen as what it is -- an attempt to take a vast quantity of evidence against his view and pretend that it is not really there, as if vast portions of the human race were unable to use the word 'gratitude', and indeed most other gratitude-expressions, correctly. It's entirely reasonable for people to respond to his arguments with nothing more than, "We know what we mean, and we are using the word because it is appropriate; stop calling us liars or fools."
IV. It is widely recognized that we can have a spontaneous impulse to gratitude in the face of some things that we find beneficial, prior to consideration of a benefactor. William Whewell, for instance, says, "While enjoying the bounties of nature, the sentiment of gratitude spontaneously rises up in the unperverted heart." He is very clear that this sentiment is prior to concluding that there is any benefactor. And, as he notes, this is insisted upon by Kant, too: Kant holds that, in a moral state of mind, faced with beauty, we can naturally feel a need to be grateful, which becomes gratitude. That is, the origin of the gratitude is not direct consideration of benefactors, but a spontaneous feeling, perhaps arising from another feeling (like moral sentiment) or a recognition of an analogy (the world seems like a gift), and this in itself results in gratitude. Both Whewell and Kant hold that there is a relation to benefactors here, but it lies in the fact that when we feel gratitude, we look for a benefactor. The gratitude comes first; and then in light of that we recognize someone as benefactor, or else suppose or posit that there is a benefactor. Both Whewell and Kant think this is a reasonable way to follow through on our spontaneous impulse of gratitude. But the gratitude would be there even if the situation were more like that depicted by Marvin Gardner in The Flight of Peter Fromm, i.e., if we concluded that there was no benefactor at all, because it did not first depend on identifying a benefactor.
V. It makes sense to hold that gratitude-that is an inchoate or incompletely formed version of the kind of gratitude that we get in gratitude-to. I've already noted the ease with which gratitude-that often flows into gratitude-to. Manela focuses on cases where you can have gratitude-that without gratitude-to, but this would not be surprising; nothing requires that the process always complete. Indeed, in some of Manela's cases it would be common for people to assume that the character is deliberately blocking or impeding, or at least not removing an impediment, to completion, and thus is blameworthy. It would make sense of why Whewell and Kant think being grateful that something is the case leads us naturally to look for a benefactor to which we could be grateful, and why Gardner thinks that it could raise that temptation even if it is resistible. It would make sense of people who don't believe in gods, or fates, or God, still think it natural to express their gratitude-that in these terms, and the durability of that language. It would make sense of the occasional cases in which people do try to render some kind of return, even if purely symbolic or by a kind of role-playing, given their propositional gratitude.
John is grateful to Mary for her song.
Another kind of expression about gratitude is the grateful-that kind of expression, sometimes called propositional gratitude:
John is grateful that things went so well.
In his SEP article on Gratitude, Tony Manela gives the consensus on which philosophers discussing gratitude have converged:
A consensus is emerging that analyses of the concept of gratitude should be concerned only with the phenomenon expressed by the prepositional sense of the term (Carr 2013; Gulliford, Morgan et al. 2013; Manela 2016a; Roberts and Telech 2019). The consensus is based on the observation that the propositional sense of “gratitude” is more or less identical to another concept: the concept called appreciation or gladness. To say that I am grateful that it did not rain on my wedding day, for instance, is just to say that I am glad it did not. To say that I am grateful that my cancer went into remission is just to say I am glad that it did and that I appreciate the extra life and health that state of affairs entails.
This does indeed seem to be the current consensus, but a consensus of philosophers is not flock of homing pigeons, and I think this is a case in which consensus has converged on the wrong idea, for wrong reasons, to the detriment of the field. Gratitude-that is a form of gratitude. It is not equivalent to appreciation or gladness, which is an identifiably distinct response. Propositional gratitude is related to prepositional gratitude as indefinite to definite, or incomplete to complete. Obviously these get into a number of different issues; here I only give a few points related to them.
I. To say that I am grateful that it did not rain on my wedding day is very different from saying that I am glad that it did not rain on my wedding day, and what is more to the point, feeling grateful that it did not rain is a distinct feeling from feeling glad that it did not rain. One way we distinguish feelings of this sort is by their families of characteristic acts, and the characteristic acts of gratefulness and gladness are different. If I am glad it did not rain, the natural and normal way to express this is well known to everyone -- smiling, or laughing, or celebrating. Gladness disposes to celebration, in a broad sense of the term, even if this remains somewhat inchoate or does not fully develop. But if I am grateful it did not rain, I am saying that the feeling I have is disposing me to act graciously in a way that culminates when developed in thanking, and my expressions of being grateful that it did not rain will be related to thanking, even if they do not result in full-blown giving of thanks; for instance, I might take on myself a special responsibility to make sure this good fortune does not go to waste. We don't generally think of gladness or appreciation as themselves generating responsibilities, but being grateful that something has happened is very often associated with at least a basic kind of responsibility-taking. Being glad that you are alive is a great thing; but being grateful that you are alive calls for responsibility and action.I may be glad that a rock is in a given location, but this does not suggest any particular course of action with respect to the rock; if the rock is about to be destroyed I may be disappointed, but any protest will be based on the feeling the rock's being there is giving me. If I am grateful that the rock is in that location and the rock is about to be destroyed, however, I will have greater motivation to do something to stop its destruction; my protest, moreover, will not be based on my feeling of gratitude but on the reason why I am grateful for its being there.
We may say the same of appreciation. I can appreciate the trees being colorful, but if I am grateful that the trees are colorful, this suggests some deeper reason than talk of appreciation suggests.
Further, suppose that I say I am glad or appreciate that such-and-such happened, and then discover that someone arranged it. I might then be grateful to them, but I also might not; it depends on what it is. Appreciation or being glad about something may be a reason to be grateful to someone who arranges it, but it is not always so. But if I am grateful that such-and-such happened, and discover that someone arranged it, this in and of itself is always at least some reason to be grateful to them; my gratefulness seems then to find an object, my disposition to thank now has an occasion to become active in thanking specifically. There might be something impeding, it might not be universal -- but the move from one seems more straightforward with propositional gratitude than with appreciation.
There are, of course, relations among these things. For instance, one of the responsibilities that the gratefulness-that kind of gratitude might lead me to take on is deliberate appreciation; that something regularly makes me glad may be a reason to be grateful that it does so. But they are not the same; even at first glance there seems room to make a distinction between them.
II. Manela argues the identity of propositional gratitude and appreciation at greater length in his article, "Gratitude and Appreciation". He does consider there the proposal that being grateful that something happened involves a tendency to return just like being grateful to someone for something. ('Tendency to return' is perhaps not the right phrase for the thankful tendency actually associated with gratitude, but whether or not there is some better phrase will likely not change much.) His response to it is that while being grateful to someone for something entails some such tendency to return, but cases of being grateful that something occurred do not. If, to take a somewhat simpler example than he uses, John is not grateful that it did not rain on his wedding day, we would not call him an ingrate. I'm not sure that this would always be true, but let's assume it. How is it really different from many cases of being grateful to someone for something? We are benefited by people all the time; in many of these cases we would take gratitude to be a good response but not necessarily regard someone as an ingrate if they did not feel grateful. (Indeed, many of our gratitude practices are designed to function even if they are not backed by feelings, but only the abstract recognition of the value of a properly grateful response.) Likewise, if we say that John is grateful that it did not rain on his wedding day, but never makes a return, we would not say he was an ingrate. But it's been noted since Seneca writing on benefits that gratitude does not always require return in a robust sense; sometimes a thankful spirit ready for an opportunity (which depending on the circumstances may not ever come) suffices. And there are many circumstances in which we might be grateful to someone but have no way to render return. For instance, I might really need some kind of information, and find that someone did it a hundred years ago, and feel gratitude toward them for doing it. No return directly to them is possible. We might then as a substitute simply appreciate them in memory, or, recognizing that no direct return is possible, we might just leave it at our thankful feeling toward them. When we render grateful returns, we often decide what is an appropriate return on the basis of features of the benefactor or their situation; sometimes those features render return impossible or moot or merely mental. This is particularly relevant here. Since being grateful that something occurred does not have a benefactor directly in view, the kind of thing that would normally specify a particular way to render return is not there, so you often wouldn't expect anything definite. The obvious way to think of it is to think that gratitude-that is generally a sort of gratitude that is running without what is required to result in a complete grateful expression.
(It is not especially relevant to my argument here, but Manela also has some responses to positions arguing that some of the features he attributes to prepositional gratitude are not strictly required; for instance, the idea that perhaps you can be grateful to inanimate objects. He tries to dismiss this as being due to anthropomorphism, but as far as I can see, this is simply irrelevant. OK, suppose it's due to anthropomorphism; it's still the case that someone is grateful to an inanimate object. Manela tries to conclude that it needs to be an agent to be warranted, but warranted or not, it's still an actual case of being grateful to an inanimate object -- and he doesn't actually establish that it is unwarranted, because he has not established that anthropomorphism is unwarranted. There is in fact a case of undeniable prepositional gratitude that almost always involves some degree of anthropomorphism already -- for instance, if you are grateful to a dog for saving you from a fire. Since this is an animate case, I take it that Manela would allow it, but we can hardly help anthropomorphizing animals, and there seems to be no problem with that, at least to a moderate degree, for most practical purposes. And, as I've noted before, on some quite respectable account of emotional expression in art, the natural world, even inanimate objects and scenes are rationally counted as genuinely expressive even though we know that no actual emotion is expressed, due to sharing features with human expressions, so some things that would likely be counted by Manela as anthropomorphism would on those views be rational and warranted. Manela seems to think that there is some fact about gratefulness that floats away from our actual cases of gratefulness, so that we can dismiss some of the latter as not 'real' gratefulness. But this seems entirely arbitrary,and runs the risk of somewhat dishonest characterization of actual human experience, falsifying the real responses of people by pretending their responses are some abstract scheme of what he assumes to be a more rational way to respond.)
All of this is just Manela arguing that there are significant differences between the two, but he also argues specifically that gratefulness-that is just appreciation. His argument mostly just consists of him identifying general similarities and doubting that there could be a distinction between the two. I've already questioned whether propositional gratitude is really unconnected to a tendency to return in the way appreciation is, but let's assume that Manela is right here. There are others, as I've also noted: Being grateful that something is the case is often in practice associated with responsibility in ways that mere appreciation is not; they seem to be related to motivation differently; gratitude-that seems to flow immediately into gratitude-to when a benefactor is discovered, whereas appreciation does not seem to have the same natural flow. And most importantly, we regularly express it in terms more appropriate to gratitude than mere appreciation.
III. Manela tells a number of stories to try to motivate his account of the differences between prepositional and propositional gratitude. Of course, in a sense all that anyone does when they tell stories like this is to try to convince someone that an idea makes a kind of narrative sense, which is a weak, albeit sometimes important, foundation. We can point to a number of things in actual practice that need to be taken seriously. For instance, the fact that we use the word 'grateful' at all in this context is relevant. Nor is it the only gratitude-relevant word we use. Consider the word 'thankfully': "I went to his house and, thankfully, he was there." That's very definitely a gratitude-expression, and that's very definitely describing propositional, not prepositional, gratitude. People who are expressing propositional gratitude will sometimes say things like, "It was a gift from the gods", despite not believing in gods, or "The fates have looked kindly on me", despite not thinking that there are fates. And people expressing propositional gratitude will sometimes verbalize it with nothing more than "Thank you!" despite not speaking to anyone particular. Now some of these may be linguistic relics of cases where people were actually expressing prepositional gratitude (to gods or God), and Manela in fact attempts to say precisely this, but it again is irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that people who are definitely not expressing prepositional gratitude still take them to be appropriate verbal expressions of their experience. And there are lots of them. This in itself suggests that people are recognizing some close kinship between prepositional and propositional gratitude, one that they do not necessarily associate with gladness or appreciation.
Manela wants to say that all of this is conflation; this response should be seen as what it is -- an attempt to take a vast quantity of evidence against his view and pretend that it is not really there, as if vast portions of the human race were unable to use the word 'gratitude', and indeed most other gratitude-expressions, correctly. It's entirely reasonable for people to respond to his arguments with nothing more than, "We know what we mean, and we are using the word because it is appropriate; stop calling us liars or fools."
IV. It is widely recognized that we can have a spontaneous impulse to gratitude in the face of some things that we find beneficial, prior to consideration of a benefactor. William Whewell, for instance, says, "While enjoying the bounties of nature, the sentiment of gratitude spontaneously rises up in the unperverted heart." He is very clear that this sentiment is prior to concluding that there is any benefactor. And, as he notes, this is insisted upon by Kant, too: Kant holds that, in a moral state of mind, faced with beauty, we can naturally feel a need to be grateful, which becomes gratitude. That is, the origin of the gratitude is not direct consideration of benefactors, but a spontaneous feeling, perhaps arising from another feeling (like moral sentiment) or a recognition of an analogy (the world seems like a gift), and this in itself results in gratitude. Both Whewell and Kant hold that there is a relation to benefactors here, but it lies in the fact that when we feel gratitude, we look for a benefactor. The gratitude comes first; and then in light of that we recognize someone as benefactor, or else suppose or posit that there is a benefactor. Both Whewell and Kant think this is a reasonable way to follow through on our spontaneous impulse of gratitude. But the gratitude would be there even if the situation were more like that depicted by Marvin Gardner in The Flight of Peter Fromm, i.e., if we concluded that there was no benefactor at all, because it did not first depend on identifying a benefactor.
V. It makes sense to hold that gratitude-that is an inchoate or incompletely formed version of the kind of gratitude that we get in gratitude-to. I've already noted the ease with which gratitude-that often flows into gratitude-to. Manela focuses on cases where you can have gratitude-that without gratitude-to, but this would not be surprising; nothing requires that the process always complete. Indeed, in some of Manela's cases it would be common for people to assume that the character is deliberately blocking or impeding, or at least not removing an impediment, to completion, and thus is blameworthy. It would make sense of why Whewell and Kant think being grateful that something is the case leads us naturally to look for a benefactor to which we could be grateful, and why Gardner thinks that it could raise that temptation even if it is resistible. It would make sense of people who don't believe in gods, or fates, or God, still think it natural to express their gratitude-that in these terms, and the durability of that language. It would make sense of the occasional cases in which people do try to render some kind of return, even if purely symbolic or by a kind of role-playing, given their propositional gratitude.
Virtuosius Est Bonum in Bonitate
[M]any goods are present in things which would not occur unless there were evils. For instance, there would not be the patience of the just if there were not the malice of their persecutors; there would not be a place for the justice of vindication if there were no offenses; and in the order of nature, there would not be the generation of one thing unless there were the corruption of another. So, if evil were totally excluded from the whole of things by divine providence, a multitude of good things would have to be sacrificed. And this is as it should be, for the good is stronger in its goodness than evil is in its malice, as is clear from earlier sections. Therefore, evil should not be totally excluded from things by divine providence.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 3.71.6.
Monday, August 26, 2019
King and Priest
Today is the feast of Melchizedek in the Roman Martyrology. Melchizedek is notable in a number of ways; for instance, he is the first person in the Bible who is explicitly called a priest.
According to one common Jewish tradition, Melchizedek was Shem, son of Noah; 2 Enoch makes him Noah's nephew. Christians seem largely not to have been interested in these legends, although I'm told that Jerome somewhere mentions them. Philo interprets Melchizedek as a symbol of the Logos, which in a way we find in the book of Hebrews, as well, and the latter, of course, is the primary influence on what Christians have thought about him. The second thing that caught their attention was the bread and wine (in some modern translations bread and raisin-cakes), which has generally been read as a type of the Eucharist; Clement of Alexandria seems to be the first person to have discussed this explicitly:
Cyprian is a major influence on this line of thought in the West; from his Letter 62 to Caecilius:
Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed Abram, saying, "Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth. And praise be to God Most High, who delivered your enemies into your hand." Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything. (Gen. 14:18-20 NIV)
The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.
The LORD shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.
Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning: thou hast the dew of thy youth.
The LORD hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. (Psalm 110:1-4 KJV)
This "King Melchizedek of Salem, priest of the Most High God, met Abraham as he was returning from defeating the kings and blessed him"; and to him Abraham apportioned "one-tenth of everything." His name, in the first place, means "king of righteousness"; next he is also king of Salem, that is, "king of peace." Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but resembling the Son of God, he remains a priest forever. See how great he is! (Heb. 7:1-4a NRSV)
According to one common Jewish tradition, Melchizedek was Shem, son of Noah; 2 Enoch makes him Noah's nephew. Christians seem largely not to have been interested in these legends, although I'm told that Jerome somewhere mentions them. Philo interprets Melchizedek as a symbol of the Logos, which in a way we find in the book of Hebrews, as well, and the latter, of course, is the primary influence on what Christians have thought about him. The second thing that caught their attention was the bread and wine (in some modern translations bread and raisin-cakes), which has generally been read as a type of the Eucharist; Clement of Alexandria seems to be the first person to have discussed this explicitly:
Righteousness is peace of life and a well-conditioned state, to which the Lord dismissed her when He said, "Depart into peace." For Salem is, by interpretation, peace; of which our Saviour is enrolled King, as Moses says, Melchizedek king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who gave bread and wine, furnishing consecrated food for a type of the Eucharist. And Melchizedek is interpreted "righteous king;" and the name is a synonym for righteousness and peace.
Cyprian is a major influence on this line of thought in the West; from his Letter 62 to Caecilius:
Also in the priest Melchizedek we see prefigured the sacrament of the sacrifice of the Lord, according to what divine Scripture testifies, and says, "And Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought forth bread and wine." Now he was a priest of the most high God, and blessed Abraham. And that Melchizedek bore a type of Christ, the Holy Spirit declares in the Psalms, saying from the person of the Father to the Son: "Before the morning star I begot You; You are a priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedek; " which order is assuredly this coming from that sacrifice and thence descending; that Melchizedek was a priest of the most high God; that he offered wine and bread; that he blessed Abraham. For who is more a priest of the most high God than our Lord Jesus Christ, who offered a sacrifice to God the Father, and offered that very same thing which Melchizedek had offered, that is, bread and wine, to wit, His body and blood?
Alit of Old the Olive-Bearing Bird
Glastonbury
by Henry Alford
On thy green marge, thou vale of Avalon,
Not for that thou art crowned with ancient towers
And shafts and clustered pillars many an one,
Love I to dream away the sunny hours;
Not for that here in charmed slumber lie
The holy reliques of that British king
Who was the flower of knightly chivalry,
Do I stand blest past power of uttering;—
But for that on thy cowslip-sprinkled sod
Alit of old the olive-bearing bird,
Meek messenger of purchased peace with God;
And the first hymns that Britain ever heard
Arose, the low preluding melodies
To the sweetest anthem that hath reached the skies.
Alford was a prodigious polymath, talented in drawing, in music, and in writing, whose most famous works were his hymns and his eight-volume New Testament in Greek, which rigorously collated all the manuscript readings available to Alford.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Fortnightly Book, August 25
The next fortnightly book is the Nibelungenlied. A Middle High German epic, it was written about 1200 by a poet whose name we do not know, and, of course, it is one of the major surviving literary works that deals with the Germannic family so dysfunctional its dysfunction passed into unforgettable legend; other works on the same topic that I have done for fortnightly book were Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and the Volsunga Saga in Jackson Crawford's translation. As with both of those works, the author of the Nibelungenlied is attempting to organize prior materials that were often contradictory into some kind of coherent narrative.
I'll be reading the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Arthur Thomas Hatto.
I'll be reading the Penguin Classics edition, translated by Arthur Thomas Hatto.
Saturday, August 24, 2019
Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine
Introduction
Opening Passage:
Summary: The Chapdelaines are a farm family in the wilderness of Quebec, in regions where farms still must be carved out of forests that are old and strong enough to resist the axe, where the soil is excellent but well-defended against the plough and the winters cold and brutally hard. Maria is the eldest daughter, a beautiful young woman of marriageable age, and as beautiful young farmer's daughters of marriageable age do, she attracts suitors. François Paradis is a trapper, woodsman, lumberjack, as needed; he is a handsome man of pioneering spirit. He and Maria fall in love, but when the over-daring youth vanishes in the harsh wilderness in winter -- a danger that could come up on even the most experienced woodsman -- and, what is more, having set out from his logging camp to visit her for New Year's Eve, she is desolate. Lorenzo Surprenant is a factory worker who has gone to America to earn his fortune, but wishes a wife from his native Quebec. He comes with stories of the wonderful things of city life, the possibility of a life of relative ease far away from the harsh winter. It is a common tale: Maria doesn't love him, quite, but what draws her to him is the image, however hazily imagined, of the life she could have with him. Eutrope Gagnon is a farmer, a neighbor of the Chapdelaines. He himself knows that he has little to offer her beyond a hard life and all of his effort to make it worthwhile. But there is something else that speaks, if not exactly for him, yet less against him than Surprenant: the fact that Quebec is her home, and the country of her people.
It is not an accident that the key event moving the story is the loss of all hope of paradise (Paradis); Paradis represents the Quebec of legend, the Quebec of the French pioneers, the indomitable, dashing, daring Quebec, and that Quebec is lost in the past. Surprenant more than any other suitor catches her imagination with dreams of the future, things not before imaginable (his name means 'Surprising'), but very noticeably it is an American future. (The Quebec that Hémon knew was one in the middle of L'Exode, the massive drain of young people desperately seeking jobs elsewhere.) Gagnon offers her simply the continuation of the Quebec that Maria already knows, a fall from a heroic paradise, but still home. The option of Gagnon is itself something that Quebec would only have a while longer; part of the endurance of the book, I think, has been that it later came to fit with a nostalgia for a farming past that also had begun to vanish. Modern Quebec is very much a Surprenant Quebec, although with the added convenience that no one actually has to cross the border.
But the book itself is not particularly nostalgic, even for the Quebec of Paradis; happiness is difficult, perhaps in the strictest sense impossible, but it is possible to have a good life even in the face of such difficulty. The world is desolate, and will wear you down, and will eventually take you away, but life is not awful for all that. There is faith, and there is hard work, and there is home and community, and with these things a homestead can be carved out of the territory, however ruthless the winter and however difficult the task. There is content to be had, though one will still regret what never was and dream of what one will never see, and though sorrowful memories may be the bulk of your lot. In a sense, Maria's choice is a vote for what it is to be Quebecois at all, and her answer is clear: to be Quebecois is to hold fast, regardless of how the world may change and the trials it may throw one's way.
Favorite Passage:
Recommendation: Recommended.
***
Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine, Blake, tr. Dundurn Press (Toronto: 2007).
Opening Passage:
Ite, missa est.
The door opened, and the men of the congregation began to come out of the church at Peribonka. A moment earlier it had seemed quite deserted, this church set by the roadside ont he high bank of the Peribonka, whose icy snow-covered surface was like a winding strip of plain. The snow lay deep upon the road and fields, for the April sun was powerless to send warmth through the gray clouds, and the heavy spring rains were yet to come.... (p. 27)
Summary: The Chapdelaines are a farm family in the wilderness of Quebec, in regions where farms still must be carved out of forests that are old and strong enough to resist the axe, where the soil is excellent but well-defended against the plough and the winters cold and brutally hard. Maria is the eldest daughter, a beautiful young woman of marriageable age, and as beautiful young farmer's daughters of marriageable age do, she attracts suitors. François Paradis is a trapper, woodsman, lumberjack, as needed; he is a handsome man of pioneering spirit. He and Maria fall in love, but when the over-daring youth vanishes in the harsh wilderness in winter -- a danger that could come up on even the most experienced woodsman -- and, what is more, having set out from his logging camp to visit her for New Year's Eve, she is desolate. Lorenzo Surprenant is a factory worker who has gone to America to earn his fortune, but wishes a wife from his native Quebec. He comes with stories of the wonderful things of city life, the possibility of a life of relative ease far away from the harsh winter. It is a common tale: Maria doesn't love him, quite, but what draws her to him is the image, however hazily imagined, of the life she could have with him. Eutrope Gagnon is a farmer, a neighbor of the Chapdelaines. He himself knows that he has little to offer her beyond a hard life and all of his effort to make it worthwhile. But there is something else that speaks, if not exactly for him, yet less against him than Surprenant: the fact that Quebec is her home, and the country of her people.
It is not an accident that the key event moving the story is the loss of all hope of paradise (Paradis); Paradis represents the Quebec of legend, the Quebec of the French pioneers, the indomitable, dashing, daring Quebec, and that Quebec is lost in the past. Surprenant more than any other suitor catches her imagination with dreams of the future, things not before imaginable (his name means 'Surprising'), but very noticeably it is an American future. (The Quebec that Hémon knew was one in the middle of L'Exode, the massive drain of young people desperately seeking jobs elsewhere.) Gagnon offers her simply the continuation of the Quebec that Maria already knows, a fall from a heroic paradise, but still home. The option of Gagnon is itself something that Quebec would only have a while longer; part of the endurance of the book, I think, has been that it later came to fit with a nostalgia for a farming past that also had begun to vanish. Modern Quebec is very much a Surprenant Quebec, although with the added convenience that no one actually has to cross the border.
But the book itself is not particularly nostalgic, even for the Quebec of Paradis; happiness is difficult, perhaps in the strictest sense impossible, but it is possible to have a good life even in the face of such difficulty. The world is desolate, and will wear you down, and will eventually take you away, but life is not awful for all that. There is faith, and there is hard work, and there is home and community, and with these things a homestead can be carved out of the territory, however ruthless the winter and however difficult the task. There is content to be had, though one will still regret what never was and dream of what one will never see, and though sorrowful memories may be the bulk of your lot. In a sense, Maria's choice is a vote for what it is to be Quebecois at all, and her answer is clear: to be Quebecois is to hold fast, regardless of how the world may change and the trials it may throw one's way.
Favorite Passage:
Four hundred miles away, at the far head-waters of the rivers, those Indians who have held aloof from missionaries and traders are squatting round a fire of dry cypress before their lodges, and the world they see around them, as in the earliest days, is filled with dark mysterious powers: the giant Wendigo pursuing the trespassing hunter; strange potions, carrying death or healing, which wise old men know how to distil from roots and leaves; incantations and every magic art. And here on the fringe of another world, but a day's journey from the railway, in this wooden house filled with acrid smoke, another all-conquering spell, charming and bewildering the eyes of three young men, is being woven into the shifting cloud by a sweet and guileless maid with downcast eyes. (p. 73)
Recommendation: Recommended.
***
Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelaine, Blake, tr. Dundurn Press (Toronto: 2007).
Thursday, August 22, 2019
Music on My Mind
Mes Aïeux, "Dégénérations". In Maria Chapdelaine, Maria, like Quebec, has to pick among futures represented by a trapper, a farmer, and a factory worker. The wilderness way of life represented by the trapper was already on its way out in her day, so it really becomes a choice between the latter two. It's brought to mind this song, which I've posted before, and which represents a much later stage of the same kind of transition, in which the traditional farming way of life has also dissipated.
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