Sonnet Variations XXXI

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 141

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes;
they have but few fair sights that they may note.
'Tis true that what they see none need despise,
but my eyes are not so very apt to dote,
and bright things that have my eyes delighted
bring no delight to which my love is prone.
Yet still your face has vision invited
and I am glad to see me not alone.
Though eyes do not love, yet my spirit can,
and in my way I say that I love thee
in ways that touch the heart and root of man,
and I shall train my eyes to lovers be.
-- For surely sight of you is my true gain,
and would be, though your brightness brought me pain.

Dashed Off XX

 Genres may be formed
(1) spontaneously by imitation
(2) reactively by reflection on prior achievements
(3) programmatically by cooperative attempt to achieve something new

the essay as an experiment in communication

Civilization endures for two reasons:
(1) things are occasionally renovated;
(2) things are always going to ruin, altogether and without pause, but the ruining of some things restricts the ruining of others, as when in a wall or arch the falling of one stone prevents the falling of another.

dialectics as bringing fragments into conversation with each other

Romantic irony as concerned with the meaning of a discussion among different perspectives

Kant's Prolegomena is the description of an aspiration

aphorism as:
sudden view of meaning (like medieval surprise in civic architecture)
answer to question not yet asked
mnemonic condensation of many things into one
bounding of the unbounded, the immeasurable given measure
Lesbian rule, a description exemplary of descriptions, a definition bendable to situation
proverb in embryo
arrow pointing elsewhere, a Hodegetria
dialogue in fragmetns, a partially overheard conversation
motley heap in a motley heap that nonetheless suggests an architecture
refraction through crystal of whole into part
cell in an amoeba colony, cooperating for mutual benefit
part of a convergence to something dimly suspected
pollen fertilizing different flowers simultaneously
system pretending not to be system, order in masquerade
concentration of wandering attention on the extraordinary, Easter in ordinary time, Sunday in Lent
whisper in the whispering gallery of time

All ecclesiastical art is a fragmentary diagrammatic sketch of something it can only suggest.

All of Christian life is a practice of translation. Most such translation is unauthoritative. Some of it will be fumbling and wooden; some of it loose and paraphrastic; some of it technical and limited; some of it folksy and potentially misleading; some of it inspired genius; much of it poor. But we are requried by Christ in the Great Commission to translate.

the Church as archive of divine things

Lavoisier's conception of simple substance is relative to us -- "since we have no means of dividing them, they act with respect to us as simple substances"; we suppose them simple except where experiment and observation require us to treat them as compounded, not because we are affirming that they are not compound.

a hierarchy of sublimities that are signs of sublimities

Kant is best in fragments.

Art is contagious.

The message of tragedy is that there is good even in the terrible; the message of comedy is that there is good even in the ridiculous.

the satyr play as the representation of all artistic endeavor, the artist as both Silenus throwing the myth into chaos and the hero restoring it to form

The soul is our general medium for having a point.

"If it's really philosophy, then, like the phoenix, it will always rise again from its own ashes." Schlegel

Henry V is perhaps the greatest work on representation of the legendary/heroic/mythic ever penned.

God is simple (as regards presence itself), immense (as regards how the presence itself is related to boundaries that contain), and infinite (as regards how local things are related to His presence).

For a thing to exist, there must be a providential role (li) for it.
The providential role of heaven, earth, and myriad things is that nothing is in isolation but certainly has its complement, spontaneously and not artificially.
Things have a providential role in the world, which we learn, and a providential role in the mind, which we oversee, and the one providence is a sign and symbol of the other providence.
The providential role of a thing is the reason by which it is and the rule according to which it ought to be. All things have a providential role, and as a whole they are providence.

Some friendship 'runs its course', but the only friendship commensurate with the human person is eternal friendship.

Language already presupposes a system of deontic powers.

"When the defilement of all faults is cleared away, our business is to learn eternal virtues." Leo
"Christian povery is always wealth, because what one has is more than what one does not have."
"Love is the power of faith; faith is the strength of love. Only then is the name true the fruit truth of both when the union remains intact."

"Paradox is the mark of the overcoming of abstractions." Spaemann

Knowing is something we do with others.

Truth has expressions in logic, ethics, and aesthetics, and the same is true of goodness and beauty.

A possibility: imperatives and questions can't be antecedents because they are inherently incomplete; incompleteness, however, is not a problem for consequents (they don't have to be affirmed). Btu this still leaves the matter of negation.

Language already presupposes understanding one thing as another or in different lights.

feeling-that as a modality weaker than belief but otherwise suggesting a doxastic logic

ens socialis straddles the ens realis / ens rationis line

(1) Each Person of the Trinity is necessarily related to the other two.
(2) The relation to one and the relation to the other must be unified, not splitting or dividing the Person.
(3) As principle the Father is at once the generator of the Son and the projector of the Spirit; as Spirit, the Spirit is from the Father so as to be the Spirit of the Father and the Son; as image of the Father, the Son is from the Father so as to be at once the Son and the sharer of the Spirit with the Father.

natural and artificial classification, as opposed to formal and instrumental classification

medium of exchange -> store of value
:: the condition is that we are dealing with exchanges over time -- with diachronic features, not just at a time
medium of exchange + store of value -> unit of account
:: the condition is record-keeping of exchanges both synchronic and diachronic
unit of account -> standard of deferred payment
:: the condition is planning in light of records

general monetary desiderata
as medium of exchange: fungibility, portability
as store of value: durability, nonreplicability
as unit of account: verifiability
as standard of deferred payment: stability
--> there can be other desiderata under specific circumstances.

Fiat money basically consists of tax certificates, for a broad sense of tax. It does not, as is often said, depend only on faith and trust; it depends on the fact that government can and does compel payment on certain matters, and does so in the form it deems fit. It would be an exaggeration, but more accurate, to say that fiat money is based on universal desperation arising from the need to pay created by government.

kinds of interaction
(1) nonexchange (different actions in the interaction)
(2) exchange of something for its own sake
(3) exchange of record of something

S uses X to represent W for purposes P.

"The fundamental idea of constitution is this: when a thing of one primary kind is in certain circumstances, a thing of another primary kind -- a new thing, with new causal powers -- comes to exist." Lynne Rudder Baker

All artisans create abstract artifacts; it's just that sometimes we are only interested in one instance, usually the prototype created in creating the abstract artifact.

"As we must live righteously all the time, so we must bear the cross all the time, for to all of us have been assigned our own crosses, and all of us carry them in our own way and in our own measure." Leo

bearing the Cross participatively, bearing the Cross symbolically, bearing the Cross aspierationally

Academic philosophy tends to confuse philosophy with the production of philosophy artifacts.

Sonnet Variations XXX

 Sonnet Variation: William Wordsworth's "Glad Tidings"

For ever hallowed be this morning fair,
for I have tread on lawn where you have tread;
I thought to go to store but went instead
along the paths that angel footsteps bear.
The sun was filtered down through morning air,
and by it I through paradise was led.
Lo, mortal! Know these realms are filled with dread;
no step will wise man take except with prayer,
and yet upon this road your heart is free
and launched upon the foam of endless sea.
A King there is who lives in heaven high,
with gaze more piercing than the sharpest swords,
but speaking to our ears with mortal words
that we may taste and see divinity.

Links of Note

 * Glenn Parsons & Allen Carlson, Environmental Aesthetics, at the SEP

* Fedor Benevich, Essence and Existence in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, at the SEP

* Brent Allsop, Physicists Don't Understand Color (PDF)

* Christian List, Decision theory presupposes free will (PDF)

* Michael Brummond, The Holy Spirit and the Four Marks of the Church, at "Homiletic & Pastoral Review"

* Benjamin Young, Consciously smelling, at "The Transmitter"

* Barry Smith, Common sense (PDF)

* Matt Dougherty, Murdoch on Heidegger (PDF)

* Paul O'Grady, Philosophy and biography

* Gozo Yoshimasu, What is Poetry?, at "Words Without Borders"

* Joshua Knobe, In a Deeper Sense (PDF)

* Shahram Arshadnejad, The Philosophical Foundation of the US Constitution (PDF)

* Elodie Boublil reviews Franz Brentano's The Teaching of Jesus and Its Enduring Significance. (hat-tip)

* Katie McBride Moench, The Sovereignty of the Latter-Day Saints, on the Mormon War of 1857-1858, at "JSTOR Daily"

Sonnet Variations XXIX

 Sonnet Variation: William Wordsworth's "Seathwaite Chapel"

Sacred Religion! 'mother of form and fear',
the natural issue of true respect,
without which love of man is slowly wrecked,
you weigh like worlds upon the worshipper.
You are too much for those who sojourn here,
yet not enough; we cannot protect
both ourselves and your charge with sure effect;
and in this dark and holy atmosphere
beneath the throne of the Ancient of Days,
we learn of mysteries we never knew
and find ourselves in Heaven's retinue,
doing things beyond all heroic lays,
not knowing how. But the splendor that drew
cannot but wrench from us undying praise.

Doctor Gratiae

 Today is the feast of St. Augustine, Doctor of the Church. From the Confessions, Book XIII:

I call upon Thee, O my God, my mercy, Who createdst me, and forgottest not me, forgetting Thee. I call Thee into my soul which, by the longing Thyself inspirest into her, Thou preparest for Thee. Forsake me not now calling upon Thee, whom Thou preventedst before I called, and urgedst me with much variety of repeated calls, that I would hear Thee from afar, and be converted, and call upon Thee, that calledst after me; for Thou, Lord, blottedst out all my evil deservings, so as not to repay into my hands, wherewith I fell from Thee; and Thou hast prevented all my well deservings, so as to repay the work of Thy hands wherewith Thou madest me; because before I was, Thou wert; nor was I any thing, to which Thou mightest grant to be; and yet behold, I am, out of Thy goodness, preventing all this which Thou hast made me, and whereof Thou hast made me. For neither hadst Thou need of me, nor am I any such good, as to be helpful unto Thee, my Lord and God; not in serving Thee, as though Thou wouldest tire in working; or lest Thy power might be less, if lacking my service: nor cultivating Thy service, as a land, that must remain uncultivated, unless I cultivated Thee: but serving and worshipping Thee, that I might receive a well-being from Thee, from whom it comes, that I have a being capable of well-being.

Sonnet Variations XXVIII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 123

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change;
though clock rules all, I shall defy its might,
though I must sack dimensions far and strange
that never have been known to human sight.
We look up to the stars and we admire
the ever-ancient that shall not grow old
and yearn for it with craving and desire,
for which great deeds are done and tales are told.
Like demigod of old I shall defy
the mist of future and the chains of past
and never shall succomb to Saturn's lie
but take my life in whole and without haste.
-- Quixotic though this quest may ever be,
Old Time, I shall have conquest over thee.

The Holy Breath

Today is the feast of St. Monnica of Hippo, usually known in English as St. Monica, and best known as the mother of St. Augustine.

  St. Augustine and Monica
by Charles Tennyson Turner 

 When Monica's young son had felt her kiss --
Her weeping kiss -- for years, her sorrow flowed
At last into his wilful blood; he owed
To her his after-life of truth and bliss:
And her own joy, what words, what thoughts could paint!
When o'er his soul, with sweet constraining force,
Came Penitence -- a fusion from remorse --
And made her boy a glorious Christian saint.
Oh ye, who tend the young through doubtful years
Along the busy path from birth to death,
Parents and friends! forget not in your fears
The secret strength of prayer, the holy breath
That swathes your darlings! think how Austin's faith
Rose like a star upon his mother's tears!

Quasi-entitative Non-entities (Re-Post)

A re-post from 2021.

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

  We can identify cracks, talk about them, point to them. Cracks spread, travel, propagate. There is even a field of physics, fracture mechanics, that studies the underlying laws of their motion. There are cracks; cracks are. But cracks, we can very well say, are not existing things.

We can say similar things of holes, of gaps, of empty spaces, of blanks, of silences. There is an entirely understandable sense in which all of these are 'nothings'. But they also in some sense are. These paradoxical nothings you find in the real world are what we might call quasi-entitative non-entities, although, to be sure, we could also call them, more vaguely and loosely, 'things that in a way really aren't but in a way definitely are'.

The scholastics distinguished between thing-beings and reason-beings, and it is clear enough from the sense in which we call these things 'nothing', quasi-entative non-entities have to be reason-beings rather than thing-beings. A reason-being (ens rationis) is being that is only found in and of itself as an object for thought.

This is not necessarily to say that they are purely imaginary or made-up, which is a confusion that always arises when people talk about beings of reason. Reason-beings can really be; they just aren't real things in themselves. The hole currently in my ceiling as I wait for it eventually to get repaired is in my ceiling. You can see it. You can put your hand through it. You can fill it. If you don't take it into account, you will not understand certain things about the ceiling. But the hole is there only as negative space, only in the sense that the really existing ceiling stops and has non-meeting borders from several directions. The being it has as a hole consists in the fact that we think of it on the model of a real thing, that we take it as an object of our minds. A hole is in the thing insofar as the thing is (or could be) an object of our minds.

It's possible that thinking in terms of holes, cracks, etc., at least as such, is due to limitations of our minds. God knows things fully as they are, in and of themselves, but in navigating the world, we find that we can't know thing-beings, like ceilings or windows or stones, both directly and adequately. Much of what we know about real things we have to know by thinking of them on the model of other real things. And much of what we know about real things requires having a way of going beyond the limits of what we directly know about them.

Traditionally, the classes of reason-beings were negations and rational relations, although sometimes people preferred to divide the first class into bare negations and privations, and although you can even find some philosophers, like Thomas Compton Carleton, who argued for the (mostly unpopular and difficult to defend) opinion that bare negations were actually thing-beings. I think we have to be a little careful with this -- we should really think of these as being-by-negating and being-by-relating, and (as I will go on to suggest) take them to be combinable.

All quasi-entitative non-entities are 'quasi-entitative' because we think of them in terms of thing-beings. Take a hole in the wall. We can think of this as a hole in the wall in two ways. We can think of it as fillable. When we do this, we are thinking of the hole in terms of thing-beings (usually but not necessarily exclusively the normal components of the wall) that could be there but are not. If I walk into the room and find to my surprise that there is a hole in the wall, it makes sense that I would think of it as a not-there part-of-a-wall. Or we can think of it as traversable. For instance, we could move through it. If we do this, we are thinking of the hole in terms of its relation to thing-beings in its context -- the wall that makes its borders, the things that can move through it. In fact, we all have deliberately placed holes in our walls -- windows to let in light and perhaps air, doorways to let physical things in and out. Passageways are there, but a passageway is an emptiness understood as related to its context in a certain way.

I would suggest that all quasi-entitative non-entities have this feature: they are negative reason-beings that are also relative reason-beings. (I think you can go in the reverse direction and have primarily relative reason-beings that are also negative reason-beings; distinctions and partitions, I think, are such things.) They are not mere non-entity. Walking into a room and discovering a hole in the wall is not like walking into a room and discovering a lack of unicorns. There just aren't any unicorns, but there is a hole in the wall. I can't do anything directly with a lack of unicorns; I can do something to a hole, like put my hand through it. So holes are negative, but not merely negative; it's actually essential to their being holes that they also be understood as relative. The same is true, of course, of cracks, blanks, gaps. It may be a bit less obviously true of empty spaces and silences, but I don't think it's difficult to argue for them, either. It's probably also true of shadows, which as someone somewhere has said are like holes in light. In general, I think particular non-things will always be in this same family; mere negating leaves you with something indefinite, so you need relating to get a particular negation-of-thing. Thus evils, not evil as such but particular evils, are in this family: they are privations related to a context so that we can reason about those contexts more easily, in the way that we would do if they were particular examples of substances, qualities, or stuffs.

Sonnet Variations XXVII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 109

O, never say that I was false of heart,
however much circumstance qualify;
my spirit from you never did depart,
nor was my constancy a kind of lie.
Through all the world, wherever my heart rang'd,
I held this sure: to come to you again.
My loyalty was never once exchang'd.
No treachery my heart will ever stain.
Your interests upon my heart have reign'd
with bond more intimate than any blood,
and if I have endured with word not stain'd,
it is because your good is all my good.
-- A knight, however flawed, may hear the call
and keep it close, as I kept you my all.

Sonnet Variations XXVI

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 106

When in the chronicle of wasted time,
which, desolate, is empty of all wights,
I come across some strange, enchanted rhyme
that devastates an army of fair knights,
or guides the course of fate to ruin best,
or puts a crown of thorns on weary brow,
I wonder what the gods have there express'd
that once was wise but alien seems now.
But all these cruel things are prophecies,
a stranger, greater thing prefiguring;
we call it 'love'. O man, avert your eyes!
Do not let it tempt you, its rhyme to sing!
For soon you will be slave for all your days
and in your poems devastation praise.

Legal Fictions and Scientific Fictions

 I have noted before that, despite the name, not all legal fictions are in any obvious way fictional; the 'fiction' in 'legal fiction' seems to indicate not (as philosophers of law have often taken it) 'falsehood' but rather 'artificial construction for a domain'. Legal fictions may at times be falsehoods treated as true for convenience, but the label also includes things that are really such and so for the purposes of law; when so constructed, it is not a falsehood but a truth that they are such and so in legal contexts. If a whale is counted as a fish for purposes of fishing law, this is not a falsehood, but a fact; it is just a fact that depends on the interpretation and application of the law rather than the biology of whales and fish. 

Legal fictions are inevitable in law because a very large portion of law is entirely about practical classification. Does this count as a fish for such-and-such statute? Are this person's actions of a sort to make him responsible in a way that matters to us for a court decision? Who counts as a citizen? Which behaviors are subject to punishment? Does this crime meet the requirements for this specific kind of sentence? Does this business firm have basic legal protections as a whole under a law that concerns persons, or is it necessary to spend the time and resources to sort out the specific legally relevant protection of each and every actual person in the firm? Indeed, almost all of the distinctive features of law as a field have to do with the fact that a legal system is a huge jumble of systems of artificial classifications for a very large variety of practical purposes.

However, law is far from the only field that uses fictions in this way. A good example of a field that extensively uses fictions is physics. Physics fundamentally differs from law in that it is much more theoretical than practical, and this does have a significant effect on how physicists use scientific fictions to do their work. But there are at least two practical purposes that lead to fictions that have many similarities to legal fictions: pedagogy and problem simplification.

Physicists use a lot of pedagogical fictions; they are notorious for them. Teachers in physics courses are always saying things like, 'Imagine an evenly spaced field of clocks' or 'Think of an electromagnetic wave in this context as a sound wave' or 'Think of the atoms as being people in a crowded room'. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that the teaching of physics mimics in a simplified way how physicists often solve problems and make discoveries, namely, by comparing the structures of different problems, finding similar structures, and then fine-tuning to take into account any differences. In advanced physics, this is often quite abstract, and often occurs at the level of mathematical equations; but not always, and you can fairly easily find physicists trying to get a first beginning on a difficult problem by first imagining a more loosely defined but simpler problem. And in pedagogical contexts, of course, the context itself limits the abstraction, so physicists in teaching things are always trying to give narrative pictures that are very loose but capture some of the relevant structure.

Physicists are not, of course, unique in this regard; virtually all teachers use these sort of artificial constructions ('For our purposes here, think of X as being Y' where this is only true 'for our purposes here', whatever they might be) to bridge the gaps between where students are and where they need to be. Pedagogical fictions give a way to direct the attention of students to the things to which they need to be attending, and a way for them to start getting used to thinking of situations in certain ways without feeling completely lost and getting discouraged. Many of these pedagogical fictions are fictional in a fairly straightforward way, stories told to help orient students; but other pedagogical fictions are actually simplified versions of the physicist's actual problem-solving toolkit, and thus serve a broader purpose in the field of physics. These fictions are in some sense more interesting, and they also tend to be the fictions that have the most similarities to legal fictions, because they really are about problem classification.

We all know the standard postulation process for physics problems -- we get problems where we assume there is no friction, or no air resistance, or no outside forces. These are sometimes known as spherical cows, based on the physics joke. A farmer wanted to know how many cows he could pasture on a weirdly shaped piece of land, so he went to the smartest person he knew, the physicist at the local college. (Physicists are always the smartest people in physics jokes.) When he told his problem to the physicist, the physicist said, "Let me see if I can come up with something helpful tonight; come back tomorrow and I'll let you know if I have." 

So the farmer came back the next day, and he was met at the door by a very excited physicist. "Your problem was a great problem, but it turns out that it's easy to solve. All we have to do is assume that every cow is a perfect sphere!"

What makes the joke so lasting is that this is exactly how physicists handle many, many kinds of problems and come up with extremely good solutions for them. Cows, of course, are not spheres. But they are three-dimensional objects, and they need space around them which, because the cow has to turn around, is not all that far off from a circle. And a three-dimensional circle is a sphere. But, of course, the key is that if you assume that every cow is a perfect sphere, you turn a complicated problem about cows into a relatively simple sphere-packing problem. The mathematical apparatus for handling sphere-packing problems is very, very well-developed. So by assuming that cows are spheres, you place the problem that needs to be solved under a category of problems that is very well understood. 

It ties in to something once said by a physics professor in a class I was once in (it was actually an intro astronomy class): The first step to solving any problem is to figure out what kind of problem it is. Physicists use problem-simplifying fictions, postulates as they are sometimes called, to figure out what problem they are actually solving and remove anything that could obscure the path to the solution. Assume that a body is perfectly rigid, assume that a volume is actually a point, assume that lines are perfectly straight, assume that there is no gravity, etc. The point is not the assumption, which is often not true (although occasionally it may be -- your assumption that there is no air resistance, for instance, could conceivably turn out to be the case if you later discovered that the interaction was happening in space), but the problem: the scientific fiction, properly speaking, is that a cow problem is a sphere-packing problem. And for the purposes of solving the problem that is true.

This (true for the purposes of solving the problem) is more or less the end of the story for the legal fiction -- we might change over at some point to something that works better, but if the legal fiction works, it works. In physics, of course, it is not, precisely because all practical matters in physics subserve larger theoretical aims, and you need not only to know how to co-classify problems for practical results but also, as Pierre Duhem noted, how well those artificial classifications capture the relevant natural classifications. 

The same is true, of course, for all the sciences; if treating whales as fish gives us an appropriate classification for a practically sensible fishing law, that is justification enough, but while a biologist might conceivably treat a whale as a fish for a particular problem, it matters to the biologist that a whale is in fact not a fish, because that's something you need to recognize to understand whales and fish. A physicist may solve a particular problem by assuming perfectly rigid bodies, but it in fact ultimately matters to the physicist that the bodies he's dealing with are not perfectly rigid, because that's something you need to remember in trying to understand the physical world. In law, a realm full of the artificial, it often doesn't matter that your classification is artificial, even at times to the point of being entirely arbitrary; in scientific fields you don't want your classifications to be entirely artificial, much less arbitrary. Scientists spend their days solving problems, but science is not a sport of problem-solving; problem-solving is not valued solely for its own sake, but for what it contributes to our understanding of the world.

Music on My Mind

 

Paul van Dyk & Peter Heppner, "Wir Sind Wir". About post-Cold-War Germany, but it captures something that is very widespread; I particularly like the lines,

Jetzt können wir haben was wir wollen,
Aber wollten wir nicht eigentlich viel mehr?

Roughly: 'Now we can have what we want, but didn't we really want more?' And of course, there is the line that captures so much of the First World these days: Superreich und abgebrannt, 'super-rich and destitute (lit. 'burned out or spent')'.

Sonnet Variations XXV

Sonnet Variation: William Wordsworth's "With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the sky"

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the sky,
with what sad sorrow burning in your face,
what what swift tears thou weep'st from throne on high!
Your foot is laggard in the running race,
the night is filled with breezes that you sigh,
and often do you trip in keeping pace
with the happier Sun in heaven's chase.
You almost seem as sorrowful as I;
so let us, grieving brothers, sadly be
co-weepers, and the loss that has riven
we both shall mourn in heavy company,
I broken on earth and you in heaven.
-- To few is the truest friendship given;
but sorrow's brotherhood has majesty.