Visitant at a Venture

 Surmise
The Track of a Human Mood
by Alice Meynell 

Not wish, nor fear, nor quite expectancy
 Is that vague spirit Surmise,
That wanderer, that wonderer, whom we see
 Within each other’s eyes;

 And yet not often. For she flits away,
 Fitful as infant thought,
Visitant at a venture, hope at play,
 Unversed in facts, untaught. 

 In “the wide fields of possibility”
 Surmise, conjecturing,
Makes little trials, incredulous, that flee
 Abroad on random wing. 

 One day this inarticulate shall find speech,
 This hoverer seize our breath.
Surmise shall close with man -- with all, with each --
In her own sovereign hour, the moments of our death.

Floods

Here in Central Texas we have recently been slammed with severe flooding -- what is likely the most severe freshwater flooding incident in the United States in at least half a century. The death toll is currently around 80 and slowly rising; it might well reach 100 by the end. Most of the deaths occurred in Kerr County as a large thunderstorm system (distant after-effects of Tropical Storm Barry) essentially parked itself over the Guadalupe River on the evening of July 3; over ten inches of rain fell and the Guadalupe River rose 23 feet overnight. This is a problem given that the river runs directly through the town of Kerrville, and even worse given that Kerr County is camping country, and is in the middle of summer camp season. (A summer camp for young girls, Camp Mystic, was entirely flooded, and there are still several girls missing.) The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, in western Travis County on July 5. Meteorologists had been expecting rain but not major flooding (they knew the rain was coming in but didn't expect it to stay more or less in one place), so people were caught off guard. 

It was a lot of rain; I live on the other side of Austin from all of this, safely up near the top of a large ridge with reasonably good drainage, and for most of July 5 my backyard was a pond an inch and a half deep. In places harder hit, rescue operations are still going on, and there is still chance of more flooding until Tuesday.

A major reason such a bad situation has not been even worse was the Texas Military Department, which ended up saving over five hundred people. The Texas Military Department is one of the oldest and most prestigious state agencies, founded in 1836 when Texas was an independent republic; the Texas Military Forces today primarily consist of the Texas National Guard and the Texas State Guard. It has a significant number of UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters that it was able to mobilize for air rescue.

Obviously, in the broader country politically brain-damaged people try to tie the problem into their pet political issues, but although there is some question of whether the relevant authorities were too slow to issue warnings, there's really no way to prepare for having several months' worth of rain unexpectedly dumped on an area overnight.

UPDATE (July 8 morning): Currently the confirmed death toll stands at 104, with something like twenty-five more people known to be missing.

UPDATE (July 8 evening): The confirmed death toll is now at 111, and with better colligation of data from different sources, there are something like 170 people missing.

Tote Edoxe tois Apostolois kai tois Presbyterois

 Then the Ambassadors and Seniors took thought with the whole assembly, having selected men from them to send to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas: Judas called Barsabbas and Silas, men eminent among the brothers, having written by their hand:

The Ambassadors and the Seniors, brothers, to those in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, brothers out of the nations, cheers. Since we have heard that some having gone forth from us agitated you by words, disrupting your souls, telling [you] to be circumcised and to keep the law, to whom we had not given orders, we took thought, having become unanimous, having selected men to send to you with Paul and Barnabas, to whom we are devoted, people who had handed over their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus we have sent Judas and Silas, that they by word may report on the same. For the Holy Spirit and we took thought to lay no further weight upon you, save these essentials: to keep distance from the idolatrous, and from bloodshed and strangling, and from whoredom. Watching yourself with respect to these things, you will do well. Be strong.

[Acts 15:22-29, my very rough translation. 'Ambassadors and Seniors', of course, is a very literal translation; it is usually translated as 'apostles and elders'; 'assembly' could also be translated as 'church'. It's interesting that edoxe and its cognates, here translated as 'took thought', keeps coming up in this short passage -- it's found three times (the apostles and elders took thought with the assembly, then this is said again in the epistle, and then the content of what they have decided is marked by 'the Holy Spirit and we took thought'. Because it's actually in passive form, it's often translated as 'it seemed to' or 'it was supposed by'. 'Cheers' is also very literal, although I note that 'cheers' is in many parts of the English-speaking world used as a greeting or sign-off in exactly the way chairein is. Chairen and similar words are common in salutations in letters in ancient Greek.

The epistle is quite condensed. My suspicion is that it is deliberately so; the whole point of the letter is not to decide the matter by letter but to authorize Judas Barsabbas and Silas to speak authoritatively on the subject. There's a nice parallelism in the letter to emphasize that, in fact: as people who had no orders from the apostles and elders had agitated the Gentile believers with their words, so Judas and Silas, who are commissioned by the apostles and elders (literally, sent, but it's the verb that gives us the word 'apostle', and it often means a legal authorization to represent, as with an ambassador), will resolve the matter by their words. The letter is a letter of commission, not a doctrinal letter.

It's difficult for me to know how to translate the summary of what Judas and Silas will be speaking of, because it could be translated as laying a very strict charge or as simply providing a general warning. That is, while it's literally said that they should distance themselves from the idolatrous, bloodshed and strangling, and harlotry, as in English, this could mean either that they should abstain strictly and entirely or that they should avoid it as much as possible. Likewise with what is here translated somewhat literally as 'watching yourself'. It would make sense in context that they are being charged to avoid these things entirely, and this is both a very plausible translation and the way it is usually understood, but it is technically not what is explicitly said, and it could also be that the apostles and elders are deliberately not tying down Judas and Silas to an exact position, if it turned out that they discovered unusual circumstances that required a more nuanced approach.

Because of the immediate dispute, the three things to avoid are often given by commentators a specifically ritual significance -- the nations are to avoid certain pagan religious practices. But I can't help note the similarity between this list and later lists made by Jewish rabbis of things that must be avoided by Jews under any and all circumstances (idolatry, murder, adultery) and of laws that are binding even on the Gentiles. I think the point is that these are fundamental defilements, whatever the circumstances, and to be avoided by anyone who reveres God. If this is the case, the point of the apostles and elders is that what is required of the Gentiles is not to circumcise according to the law of Moses but to be God-fearing by avoiding what God regards as an abomination.

The ending, Errosthe, means 'Have strength' or 'Have health'; it can also just mean 'farewell' or 'goodbye'. Are the apostles and elders just signing off, or did they pick this particular farewell for a purpose rather than as a mere formality, to encourage the Gentile believers to be strong? It's impossible to say on the evidence.]

Shuddering Through the Paradox of Prayer

 The Lord’s Prayer
by Alice Meynell

“Audemus dicere ‘Pater Noster.’” -- Canon of the Mass 

There is a bolder way,
There is a wilder enterprise than this
All-human iteration day by day.
Courage, mankind! Restore Him what is His. 

 Out of His mouth were given
These phrases. O replace them whence they came.
He, only, knows our inconceivable “Heaven,”
Our hidden “Father,” and the unspoken “Name”;

 Our “trespasses,” our “bread,”
The “will” inexorable yet implored;
The miracle-words that are and are not said,
Charged with the unknown purpose of their Lord. 

 “Forgive,” “give,” “lead us not” --
Speak them by Him, O man the unaware,
Speak by that dear tongue, though thou know not what,
Shuddering through the paradox of prayer.

Jottings on the Philosophical Analysis of Stage Props

 Having recently helped out a bit on stage crew for a community theater production of Singin' in the Rain, I have been thinking quite a bit about what it is to be a stage prop. A few thoughts toward an account.

(1) In Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe, he identifies a number of ways in which real objects may play a role in fictions and imaginations. He highlights three in particular:

(a) Prompters. Given a real object, we may be provoked by it to imagine something. Walton's example is that you might, on seeing a bear-shaped stump, imagine a bear. Prompters "induce us to imagine what otherwise we might not be imaginative enough to think of" (p. 22). One of the important uses of prompters, which is certainly relevant to stage props is that they coordinate imaginings, in such a way that the imaginings can converge spontaneously rather than by negotiation and stipulation. "The prompter coordinates the imaginings of the participants and also gives them grounds to expect such coordination---both without disruptive discussion" (p. 23). The particular definition given to prompters here, that they induce imaginations by provoking us to imagine particular things, means that they are somewhat limited in function. If you set out to carve a bear-shaped wooden statue, the statue might be a prompter for someone else, but it is not at any point a prompter for you while making it -- you are not imagining the bear because you see the bear-statue already in the wood, but you are instead imagining a bear and re-shaping the wood to conform to the imagination you independently have. (Of course, later, you might set it aside and then come across it and imagine a bear because of it, in which case it would be a prompter.) Thus prompters are important but have a limited role in our overall imaginative activities. They are associated with a very limited range of our imaginative experiences.

(b) Objects of Imaginings. One of the trickiest aspects of imagination is that we do not merely imagine in response to things (prompters), but we imagine things to be other things. We might imagine a stick to be a sword, a rag doll to be a baby, a table to be a fort, an arrangement on a stage to be London. "Things that a person imagines about are objects of his imagining" (p. 25). Prompters may be objects of imagining for what they prompt us to imagine, but they are not necessarily so, and likewise, the objects of imagining may prompt us to imagine those things that they are imagined to be, but not necessarily so. Walton suggests that one of the functions of an object of imagining is to substantialize what you are imagining. If you imagine a stump to be a bear, there is now physical thing, what could be called the "imaginary bear", that can be touched, avoided, looked at, and so forth.

(c) Props. We sometimes talk about truth in a fiction or fictional truth. Thus it is true in The Hound of the Baskervilles that Sherlock Holmes is a detective; it is true in a performance of The Tempest that Prospero has magical powers; it is true in Raphael's Il Parnaso that the god Apollo plays a lira-da-braccio; it is true with respect to Santa Claus that he can come down a chimney. (Walton wants to deny that fictional truth is actually a kind of truth; this denial is a point, I think, on which Walton's overall account goes very wrong, since my own view is that fictional truth importantly is a kind of secondary or derivative truth that has reference to truth in a more primary sense, but it matters less than it might because Walton can treat the use of 'truth' here as a useful fiction for those propositions that in context are 'to be imagined'.) Suppose you have two boys who have agreed for a game that a stump 'counts as' a bear; they sneak up on what they take to count as a bear, but in fact it turns out not to be one -- perhaps it is a boulder rather than a stump, and so doesn't count as a bear. Meanwhile, however, they later, to their surprise, stumble into a stump they hadn't known was there -- there was something counting as a bear there, all along, even though they did not know it. Stumps in this game are working as what Walton calls props. "Props are generators of fictional truths, things which, by virtue of their nature or existence, make propositions fictional" (p. 37); they "generate fictional truths independently of what anyone does or does not imagine" (p. 38). The stump, given a principle of generation (e.g., the agreement that stumps count as bears), makes it a fictional truth that there is a bear there.

I find this particular vocabulary to have some oddities. For instance, it seems to follow from Walton's account of prompters that there are things that prompt us to imagine things but are not prompters, because they are not provoking us to imagine anything in particular, but merely providing a sort of guiding line or exhortation for our imagining. It's important not to forget these other things, but perhaps there's not too much lost by using 'prompter' specifically in Walton's sense. However, if I have a stick that I am imagining to be a sword, and you start talking about the object of imagining, my own natural inclination is to assume that you are talking about the sword that you are imagining the stick to be; but in Walton's sense of 'object of imagining', the object of imagining is the stick. I can see the sense in this sense, but I also find this confusing and immensely discordant with our usual practice in talking about objects of imagining. So I would suggest that we distinguish these by calling that which is imagined to be something the material object of imagining and that which we imagine it to be the formal object of imagining. In this case, the stick is the material object of imagining and the sword is the formal object of imagining.

It's also the case that Walton's use of 'prop' is rather different from our ordinary use of the word 'prop'. For instance, in a stage play, what 'generates fictional truths' about a lamppost on the stage is first and foremost the play itself -- the references of the characters to it, their actions with respect to it, and so forth. You could have a purely imaginary lamppost, in the sense that there is no physical prop on the stage but everyone acts as if there were a lamppost in a particular spot. The principle of generation (the script, or perhaps the directorial instructions about how to implement the script, or perhaps the agreement of the actors about how to perform a scene in the absence of a prop) provides all that's needed to generate most of the fictional truths that are relevant to the lamppost; it's the actions of the actors, not the prop, that constitute the primary generators of fictional truths on a stage. If we add in the lamppost, this (a) facilitates the actors' work in generating the relevant fictional truths and relatedly (b) facilitates the audience's recognition of the fictional truths that are intended to be communicated. None of this has to do with generation per se of fictional truths. Any fictional truths that the lamppost would generate would have to be specifically concerned with its being a physical object (and, therefore, presumably, with its being a material object of imagining) -- for instance, that there is a lamppost visible in that location. Thus, props cannot be the only generators of fictional truths, and, indeed, it seems that they would always presuppose non-prop generators of fictional truths. On the other side, however, Walton's account of props means that 'prop' in his sense is astoundingly wide. Not only are stage props 'props', but the actors are props, and the stage is a prop, and the curtain is a prop, and in many contexts, the audience is a prop. And beyond that, the script on the page is a prop and the handbill that explain the play is a prop and the poster that advertises the play is a prop, and if someone records the play, the video is a prop, and if someone uses the video to paint a scene based on the play, the painting is a prop, and so forth. 

Stage props can be prompters, and objects of imagining, and props in Walton's sense; but there is no straightforward way to use Walton's account of props to give much of an account of stage props. An interesting question is whether we can take Waltonian props to be a genus of stage props. Are all stage props always Waltonian props? And I think the answer is No. A reason to think not is that stage props are stage props offstage as well as onstage. If you have a cane waiting offstage to be used onstage, it is a stage prop, but it is not generating any fictional truths; it only does so when it becomes salient onstage, e.g., by an actor using it to walk. In scholastic terms, to be a prop in the Waltonian sense is a relation secundum dici, but to be a stage prop is a relation secundum esse -- the stage prop is the thing itself as capable of being related in certain ways, not its being able to be said to be proppish in function -- being a stage prop is a 'relative habitude' of the thing itself, not a relation to which the thing is further directed.

(2) One of the interesting things about stage props that needs to be considered is that all stage props represent something, but they themselves can be what they represent. If we put a piano on stage for the actors to work with in some way or other, that makes it a stage prop. But its purpose as a stage prop is to be what it is, a piano. In one sense, it's obviously not like the stick imagined to be a sword. It may not even be like a dull sword imagined to be a sharp sword; it could be like that (a defective piano standing in for a properly functioning piano), but depending on the context, it might be, and might need to be, a perfectly functioning piano that will be used as a functioning piano. On the other hand, it's not actually all that different. The piano is put on the stage to be a material object of imagining; it's just that the piano is a material object of imagining whose formal object of imagining is a piano. When you put a piano on a stage, it is not merely there; it is being put there to be imagined to be a piano.  It's not as if you have all this host of things on stage that are imagined to be various things, and then you have the piano that is not imagined to be anything at all; on the contrary, its use in the play almost certainly requires us to imagine it to be a piano. The actual piano is also a fictional piano; it is true that the piano is related in various ways to things (e.g., an actor), and it is also fictionally true that the piano is related in those various ways to things (e.g., to the character we are imagining the actor to be). One thing that makes stage props interesting is that they are an obvious case in which the actual and the fictional overlap. I can pull out an actual, physical, really functioning pen, which is then fictionally, imaginatively, attributively a pen in the context of the play. To say that something is a pen in the fiction of the play does not imply that it is not an actual pen; to say that something is an actual umbrella is consistent with its also being a fictional umbrella. Obviously, we are not using the word 'fictional' here in an exclusionary sense that implies falsehood (that's the whole point), but the way the piano, or the pen, or the umbrella is related to other things means that it has a role in the ficiotn and therefore a status in the fiction that is constituted by what is true in the fiction. In the sense in which 'fictional' characterizes what is going on in the play, we cannot deny that the piano is also fictional. I mean, the fictional characters might play the piano, which can only be made sense of if the piano is fictional, even if we have a real piano being the fictional piano. 

In this sense it is a bit like an actor playing himself in a cameo. In the movie Last Action Hero, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Jack Slater, a fictional character, who in the movie meets Arnold Schwarzenegger, who as a fictional character in the movie plays Jack Slater, a fictional character in the movie within the movie. When Jack Slater, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, interacts with Arnold Schwarzenegger, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, they are both fictional characters; it's just that Arnold Schwarzenegger, the actual person, is playing both a fictional character different from himself and also himself as a fictional character. So too the actual piano, which is playing itself as a fictional piano.

This is related to Walton's point about (material) objects of imagining substantializing our imaginations; stage props make fictions 'more real' by introducing what is non-fictional to serve fictionally. This could be by pure stipulation (like designating a section of the stage as a street), or it could be by symbolic representation (like using a stick to symbolize a sword), or it could be fictionally representing itself.

(All of this has some relevance, I think, to various philosophical positions that get grouped under the label 'fictionalism'. For instance, mathematical fictionalism is the position that mathematical objects are fictions. Well, okay, but as we see in the case of stage props, actors, self-referring fictions, and so forth, something being a fiction does not guarantee its being only a fiction, and you could very well be a mathematical realist and hold that mathematical objects are also fictions in some way -- e.g., you might analogize the role a mathematical object plays in a Euclidean proof to an actor's role in a play and take it that the real mathematical object is playing itself as a fictional role in the proof. The point is not whether this is an immediately attractive position in philosophy of mathematics; rather, the point is that when you've said that something is fictional, that does tell you something about how it works, but it rules out very little about what it could be. Fictional Troy turned out to be archeologically locatable.)

(3) In a play. we normally think of the play as actors doing things on the stage. But you can also think of it in terms of the under-play, in which the stage props (including things like most costumes, which are often wearable stage props) are moved on and off and around the stage. The under-play actually works a lot like the play; things have to go on and off stage on various cues, at various times, at various locations. The stage props are themselves the 'actors' of the under-play, although they differ from the actors in that they are not active but patient. They are the patients of the play, the things that do not themselves do but instead undergo. In this sense, there is a clear similarity between a stage prop and a puppet in a puppet show. The difference is that puppets symbolically represent actors, whereas stage props don't unless the stage prop is itself a puppet or something similar. A puppet show is in a sense all under-play, one representing a possible actual play, whereas in an ordinary play, the under-play is a fragmentary thing in which (for instance) chairs are brought off and on in a way that only gets its full meaning within the play itself. You could have postmodern play that was all under-play -- it would consist of a stage set with people doing nothing put moving chairs and things on and off the stage on various cues. It would be quite mysterious without the actual play, and probably would have difficulty keeping people's interest for the same lenght of time as an actual play which had the very same under-play.

What this highlights is that stage props have roles just as actors do. Roles are deontic structures. The piano ought to be out on the stage for such-and-such scene. The coatrack ought to have been removed by such-and-such scene. The table ought to be placed on the such-and-such side of the stage. To be a stage prop is to be something capable of participating in a deontic structure for a show, a role. This role may include any of Walton's functional statuses (prompter, material object of imagining, or Waltonian prop). This deontic structure in a play is established by the play itself -- the script and various decisions made for implementing it. In a magic show it would no doubt be established by the requirements of the magic tricks and the plan for their order. But it is only because there are such deontic structures that there are stage props.

(4) One thing that is very important about a stage prop is that, as a stage prop, it is purely instrumental -- it is usually a separated instrument, although sometimes it could be a conjoined instrument. A stage prop is something that is for use on the stage for a show. Even if we have a rock, in using it as a stage prop, we in a sense 'artifactualize' it; it is no longer just a rock, but a rock to serve a purpose in a play or some other kind of show. You can take a rabbit and make it a stage prop in a magic show. Thus whether something is a stage prop is about whether it can be classified as an instrumental patient available for a role in a show. 'Availability for a show' is not a particularly precise thing; obviously the things in a prop lock-up for a theatre company are available for a show, and thus can be classified as instruments available for a show. An umbrella at a store is not a stage prop, but if someone buys it to be an umbrella in a show, then it is a stage prop. To be classified as available for a show requires there being some idea of the kind of show for which it could be available; the kinds of things that could be stage props for a magic show may overlap but are not necessarily the kinds of things that could be stage props for a tragedy. Tragedies in ancient Greece had props, but they were quite limited, in part because they were religious ceremonies, in part because there were expectations about how they could be done, and in part because the venues required that you only use things that would be easily visible to more or less everyone in what was effectively a stadium. They would likely have been puzzled as to how a rabbit, a top hat, and stick would function as stage props, having no conception of our magic show conventions, or how a pocket-watch would work as a stage prop in a modern drama, not being used to our relatively intimate stage-theater setting. Thus what can be a stage prop depends on what can be an actual show. There's no point trying to claim that Mount Rushmore is a stage prop unless you have the kind of show in which it could be a stage prop. Nonetheless, if you had such a show, absolutely nothing forbids Mount Rushmore from being a stage prop, i.e., classified as an instrumental patient available for a role in a show.

(5) One complication with the considerations in (4) is that a stage prop has different modes. A stage prop 'in storage', i.e., as available in a broad sense, is different from a stage prop 'in waiting', i.e., as available in the more immediate sense of 'ready to go'; and a stage prop 'in waiting' is different from a stage prop 'in use', i.e., actually being used specifically as a stage prop.  Thus 'classified as an instrument available for a show' is not quite a complete account of a stage prop; you can have a stage prop that just stays in storage, available but never used, but what makes it a stage prop is that it is for being 'in use'. The old, technical way of making this distinction would be by saying that stage props can be potential and actual; thus stage props 'in storage' are potential stage props and stage props 'in use' are actual stage props. Unfortunately, this has also become a confusing way of talking, because there are two different things you can mean if you say that something is a potential X. You could mean that it is an X, but as being potential. You could also mean that it is not an X, but has the potential to become X. Potential being and actual being are both being; potential being is not nothingness. Likewise, a potential infinite and an actual infinite are both infinite; it's actually quite essential that a potential infinite not be finite. But we see in both cases that people get confused. In philosophy of mathematics, people repeatedly get Aristotle wrong by confusing his potential infinite (which is infinite) with an indefinite finite (which is not infinite); in metaphysics, a large number of mistakes get made by assuming that if something is potential it is not anything at all. Obviously, if we use this terminology here, both potential stage props and actual stage props are stage props.

While the terminology has the disadvantage of being confusing, it has the advantage of giving us roughly the right structure for reasoning. The stage prop 'in storage' (the potential stage prop) has to be partly activated as a stage prop to be a stage prop 'in waiting' (what the scholastics might have called the virtual stage prop), and the stage prop 'in waiting' has to be fully activated as a stage prop in order to be a stage prop 'in use'. These modes are related analogically; the potential stage prop and virtual stage prop exist to be an actual stage prop, to be not merely available for use, but available as actually being used.

***

Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA: 1990).

Links of Note

* Vanessa Seifert, Reframing the Reduction-Emergence Debate around Chemistry (PDF) 

* Patrick Flynn, Is All Truth-Seeking Philosophy?, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* James Como, Le style c'est l'homme meme, at "The New Criterion", on C. S. Lewis

* João Pinheiro da Silva, The Problems of Essentialist Natural Necessity, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Jack Davey,  Chateaubriand's England, at "Stac Davey"

* John Hawks, How evolution became a uniquely American controversy

* Christian List, A quadrilemma for theories of consciousness

* Eric Falden, What Did Kings Actually Do All Day?, at "Falden's Forge"

* Anthony Madrid, What Goes Wrong When We Write Ghazal's in English, at "The Paris Review"

* Edward Feser, Preventive war and the U.S. attack on Iran, at "Catholic World Report"

The Riotous Wet Leaves with Music Ring

The World Was Waiting for the Thunder's Birth
by Maurice Baring 

The world was waiting for the thunder’s birth,
To-day, and cloud was piled on sullen cloud:
Then strong, and straight, and clean, and cool, and loud
The rain came down, and drenched the stifling earth.
The heavy clouds have lifted and rolled by;
The riotous wet leaves with music ring,
And now the nightingale begins to sing,
And tender as a rose-leaf is the sky. 

I wonder if some day this stifling care
That weighs upon my heart will fall in showers?
I wonder if the hot and heavy hours
Will roll away and leave such limpid air,
And if my soul will riot in the rain,
And sing as gladly as that bird again?

Fortnightly Book, June 29

 I'm running a little behind on this, due to travel.

813 was Maurice Leblanc's attempt to put Arsene Lupin to rest. It failed, and the next Lupin book, which is also the next fortnightly book, is The Crystal Stopper, which was serialized in Le Journal in 1912. Two of Lupin's associates are arrested and in danger of being executed; one of them is innocent, and Lupin puts his wits to plumbing the depths of the mystery in order to find the evidence to save him, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems.

Pretty much every source that talks about this book also talks about how the book was inspired by the Panama Canal Scandals. The Panama Canal Company was a French company that, as its name suggests, was hired to construct a canal in Panama. The company found that, despite the project being for a shorter canal than the Suez Canal, the tropical climate was a massive impediment. Something like 22000 workers died trying to build the canal, largely due to malaria and yellow fever. The tropical rainy season also created severe engineering problems for which there was not always an obvious solution, and in fact, established clearly that the original design would need to be modified. In 1889, the company went bankrupt, and a court ordered it to be liquidated, a process that ended up being slow and complicated, and a financial disaster for a large number of people. In 1892, while this process was still going on, accusations were made that the company had been bribing politicians in an attempt to cover up the company's difficulties. Literally hundreds of legislators were accused, and a parliamentary inquiry discovered that over a hundred may have been involved, although the evidence in many of the cases was not sufficient for conviction. The scandal contributed to the downfall of the Clemenceau government, and, because some of the few people who were actually convicted were Jewish, greatly intensified the rising surge of French antisemitism. It also convinced many that the Third Republic was too corrupt to be viable. As to the Panama Canal Company itself, a New Panama Canal Company was formed in order to find a buyer for the assets; the United States government bought them, and, based on what the Panama Canal Company had learned, was able actually to complete the Panama Canal. I don't know what relevance any of this will have to the story, but we will see.

Maurice Leblanc, 813

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Mr. Kesselbach stopped short on the threshold of the sitting-room, took his secretary's arm and, in an anxious voice, whispered:

"Chapman, someone has been here again." (p. 1)

Summary: Arsene Lupin, the greatest thief in France and perhaps the world, does not kill -- clever in a thousand ways, he does not need to do so in order to steal. But when he robs the diamond magnate Rudolf Kesselbach, Kesselbach turns up dead, with all the evidence pointing to Lupin. This sends Lupin on a hunt to uncover who has framed him, but he soon finds himself in a fight for his life as his opponent turns out to be an extraordinarily clever serial killer who has an uncanny knack for being a step ahead. At the same time, Lupin strives to maintain his current plan -- to steal much of Europe -- and prevent it from collapsing into ruin due to the machinations of his unknown and unusually dangerous foe, and to save Dolores Kesselbach, the wife of the late Rudolf Kesselbach, from sharing the same fate as her husband. Unfortunately for him, even Lupin cannot successful juggle all three aims at once. Something will give.

This was an extraordinarily good story. It was not as fun as Arsene Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes; this is deliberately darker. It was at least as well plotted as the prior book, The Hollow Needle. In the earlier works of the series, we have seen Lupin being a mischievous joker; in The Hollow Needle, we saw him both ruthless and harried. But here, for the first time, we find Lupin anxious and afraid. More people than Mr. Kesselbach will be dead by the end of it, and Lupin eventually finds himself in a situation in which, for the first time, he kills someone. Lupin himself, in fact, has more than one 'death' in this book. Many of the characters -- the cunning chief of detectives, Lenormand, or the scheming Prince Sernine, are quite interesting in their own right, and add new dimensions to our understanding of Lupin, who comes across as more of a person-in-the-round here. This story was intended to end Lupin; Leblanc is perhaps less abrupt about it than Doyle was with Holmes, but there is an air of finality and fatality hovering around everything in the tale. Of course, we know that Lupin will return, because the reading public would no more let him die than it had let Holmes die, but as an attempt to bring his story to an end, this is a very solid one.

Favorite Passage:

He lit the young man's cigarette and his own and, at once, in a few words uttered in a hard voice, explained himself:

"You, the late Gérard Baupré, were weary of life, ill, penniless, hopeless....Would you like to be well, rich, and powerful?"

"I don't follow you."

"It is quite simple. Accident has placed you on my path. You are young, good-looking, a poet; you are intelligent and -- your act of despair shows it -- you have a fine sense of conduct. These are qualities which are rarely found united in one person. I value them...and I take them for my account."

"They are not for sale."

"Idiot! Who talks of buying or selling? Keep your conscience. It is too precious a jewel for me to relieve you of it."

"Then what do you ask of me?"

"Your life!" (p. 100)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Maurice Leblanc, 813, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).

Doctor Unitatis

Today is the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Doctor of the Church. What follows is Adversus Haereses, Book II, Chapter 25; St. Irenaeus is criticizing Gnostic attempts to argue for their views on the basis of esoteric meanings of "numbers, syllables, and letters" in Scripture, which Irenaeus recognizes as linked to their false view of creation:

 If any one, however, say in reply to these things, What then? Is it a meaningless and accidental thing, that the positions of names, and the election of the apostles, and the working of the Lord, and the arrangement of created things, are what they are?— we answer them: Certainly not; but with great wisdom and diligence, all things have clearly been made by God, fitted and prepared [for their special purposes]; and His word formed both things ancient and those belonging to the latest times; and men ought not to connect those things with the number thirty, but to harmonize them with what actually exists, or with right reason. Nor should they seek to prosecute inquiries respecting God by means of numbers, syllables, and letters. For this is an uncertain mode of proceeding, on account of their varied and diverse systems, and because every sort of hypothesis may at the present day be, in like manner, devised by any one; so that they can derive arguments against the truth from these very theories, inasmuch as they may be turned in many different directions. But, on the contrary, they ought to adapt the numbers themselves, and those things which have been formed, to the true theory lying before them. For system does not spring out of numbers, but numbers from a system; nor does God derive His being from things made, but things made from God. For all things originate from one and the same God.  

But since created things are various and numerous, they are indeed well fitted and adapted to the whole creation; yet, when viewed individually, are mutually opposite and inharmonious, just as the sound of the lyre, which consists of many and opposite notes, gives rise to one unbroken melody, through means of the interval which separates each one from the others. The lover of truth therefore ought not to be deceived by the interval between each note, nor should he imagine that one was due to one artist and author, and another to another, nor that one person fitted the treble, another the bass, and yet another the tenor strings; but he should hold that one and the same person [formed the whole], so as to prove the judgment, goodness, and skill exhibited in the whole work and [specimen of] wisdom. Those, too, who listen to the melody, ought to praise and extol the artist, to admire the tension of some notes, to attend to the softness of others, to catch the sound of others between both these extremes, and to consider the special character of others, so as to inquire at what each one aims, and what is the cause of their variety, never failing to apply our rule, neither giving up the [one ] artist, nor casting off faith in the one God who formed all things, nor blaspheming our Creator.

Dashed Off XV

 When we rejoice in a sunny day, the expressiveness of the day is incorporated into our expression of joy.

the social ontology of the physical world

All human beings relate to the natural world symbolically.

Love creates deontic structures, for it is inherently creative.

the better-not, the culpable, the piacular

Most beliefs grow up in the context of inquiry, within the inquiries we make and not after them.

"The best way to convince yourself that there is a world of inner experience is to explore it." Owen Barfield
"Strangeness, in fact, arouses wonder when we do not understand; aesthetic imagination when we do."

characters acting out of character in a way that makes sense given their character

(1) What begins to exist is capable of beginning to exist.
(2) Capabilities are only intelligibly identified in terms of powers to act.
(3) The power to act must exist in something.
(4) The power to act relevant to the capability of beginning to exist cannot be that of what begins to exist.

Literally nobody makes 'beginning to exist' to depend on infinitely precise measurements of time, and we do not in our experience identify separate discrete points of time, so it is false to say (as Fantl does) that for an object to begin to exist "it need only be the case that at one time there is no such object...while at the next moment the object is present." (It's also worth asking the question, "Present to what and by what means?")

Lived experience is understood by living, not by listening: living it oneself, living with another, living sympathetically through another.

the dignitative equality of husband and wife

monotonicity as a generalization of distribution

Strategy is policy with arms.

primary ends -> prioritization of subordinate ends -> plan of means -> means of execution -> means in appropriate execution

divine order as a postulate of creative imagination

poetic intimation by conveyance of associations

poetic intimation as playing an important role in movement from notional to real assent

(1) The system of things, having an order, cannot arise from mere chance.
(2) Therefore there is or are cause or causes for the system of things.
(3) The system of things having a multiplicity of distinctions cannot arise from mere natural causes.
(4) Therefore it must arise from a cognitive cause or causes.
(5) Taken as a whole, the system of things cannot derive from any secondary cause or casues, which would be included in the system of things.
(6) Therefore the system of things is caused by primary cause.
(7) This primary cause is cognitive.

The actual intelligible is the intellect acting.

All explanation is in terms of source, nature, or end.

"There is something in every truth which determines the proposition by excluding the opposite predicate." Kant

Every possible world implies the existence of an actual world (but not of the actual world being thus and so).

Every serious intellectual inquiry is completed in a prayer of thanksgiving.

"The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all." Auden

"...our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms." CS Lewis

We love because we exist by grace of Love.

the garden at the edge of dawn

regulative, educative, and nobilitative duties

first-nature ontology & second-nature (habitus-based) ontology

socially grounded vs socially constructed (cf. Epstein)

The firm is a byproduct of the household.

genres as socially constructed artifact-kinds that build on socially grounded features of particular artifacts

A coin buried in the ground is not functioning as money, and even whether it can depends on the broader economic system.

Signs are semi-arbitrary, not purely arbitrary.

Signs may be associated at the level of sign-vehicle, object, or interpretant.

People derive unearned benefits from every thriving social group to which they belong; joining together cooperatively so that not every benefit has to be earned is a major aspect of human sociality.

the cultivation of "the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Pet. 3:4) in the Church

the three Mysteries of the Life of Christ: private, ministerial, paschal

Love allegorizes the world in light of the beloved.

sacramental grace as imbuing us with the dignity of causality (esp. with regard to the sacramental character)

the ecclesial semiosphere

Constitutional law always implies a conception of the citizen.

time as relative mutability, probability as relative contingency

CPT symmetry: no change in laws would be required to describe the universe if, at once, all matter were instead antimatter (charge inversion), all momenta were reversed (time inversion), and all positions were reflected through an arbitrary point (parity inversion).

For an entire economic system without the introduction of new resources, value does not increase, and only remains the same under ideal conditions involving no irreversible exchanges.

Right and wrong are related to need for education; where one posits a need for education, one posits a standard of right and wrong, and where there is no such standard, there is no need for education.

Church politics is always tending (in different populations) to the complacent or the histrionic.

cold vs warm recognitions of beauty and sublimity

the intrinsic novelty of creation (its ever-newness)

Every work of fine art is simultaneously abstract, ideal, and dynamic; every kind of fine art has symbolic, classical, and romantic modes.

A thing is ugly only as contextualized by a beauty.

Some beauty presupposes ugliness; all ugliness presupposes beauty.

consilience of true, good, and beautiful

sublimity as the greatness our greatness makes experienceable

A painting does not need to be vast to express vastness, and it may represent vastness without expressing it.

Seal of All the Fathers

Today is the feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, but also the memorial of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Doctor of the Church, a very fitting combination. From St. Cyril's Scholia on the Incarnation c. 17: 

They who have their faith in Christ undefiled, and approved by right votes of all men, will say that God the Word Himself out of God the Father descended into emptiness, taking servant's form and, making His own the Body which was born of the Virgin, was made as we and called Son of Man. He is indeed God according to the Spirit, yet the Same Man according to the flesh And the Divine Paul also addressed the people of the Jews saying, God Who manifoldly and in many ways of old spake to the fathers in the prophets, in these last days spake to us in the Son. And how is God the Father understood to have spoken in the last days in His Son? For He spake to them of old the Law through Him; and hence the Son Himself says that they are His Words through the most wise Moses. For He says, Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets, I am not come to destroy but to fulfil: for I say unto you that one jot or one tittle shall not pass from the Law till all be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away but My words shall not pass away: there is also the Prophet's voice, I that speak am at hand. Hence when He was made in flesh, then spake to us the Father through Him, as saith blessed Paul, in the last days. But lest we should not believe that He it is Who before the ages also was Son, he added immediately, Through Whom He made the worlds too: he also mentions that He is the brightness of the glory and the Impress of the Person of the Father. 

 Man therefore was He truly made, through Whom God the Father made the worlds too; and was not (as some suppose) in a man, so as to be conceived of by us as a man who has God indwelling in him. For if they believe that these things are really so, superfluous will seem to be the blessed Evangelist John, saying, And the Word was made Flesh. For where the need of being made man? or why is God the Word said to be Incarnate, unless was made flesh means that He was made like us, and the force of the being made man declares that He was made like us, yet remained even so above us, yea also above the whole creation?

Lift Up Your Minds

 And so I say to you, if you wish to become men of might and effectiveness,--"Lift up your minds." However humble any of us may be, however ordinary and common-place in mind, our nature is prefigured after the universal; all the cardinal facts of the universe are the common heritage of humanity; all the prime ideas which pertain to the Godhead and to humanity, all the ground ideas and principles which abide in the realms of mind and spirit! 

 Alexander Crummell, "Right-Mindedness," in Civilization and Black Progress: Selected Writings of Alexander Crummell on the South, J. R. Oldfield, ed. University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville: 1995) p. 151.

Two Poem Drafts

The World Is Bright

The world is bright
and filled with glowing light of day;
the air is clear
and in the forest deer are found,
where scarce a sound
is heard the land around, save song
of living throng
in day's delight.

 Epaulia

Our love is like the sunshine on the lawn today;
I awoke, life was good, and all was fair today.
The world cannot bring shadows dark enough to hide
our brilliant love, for we can have no care today,
and fools may laugh, thus known to be but stupid fools,
for morning song is leaping everywhere today;
it could not be otherwise, my love, this light,
for in every place I look, you are there today.
As bright as burning brand, my glowing face shall shine:
reflection from your light is all I wear today.

Strange, Fiery Crowns Crested the Sea-Cliffs Dun

 Tintagel
by Aubrey De Vere 

When first remote Tintagel met mine eyes
 Between its bastions and the setting sun
 Cloud-pageantries of conflicts lost and won
 Rushed madly, so it seemed, through reddening skies:
 The glooming wave was streaked with sanguine dyes;
 Strange, fiery crowns crested the sea-cliffs dun,
 The caves beneath them, black as Acheron
 Blended their widow-wails with onset cries
 From Bostcastle and Bude. There moved in power
 Arthur, the King! No knightly mail he wore,
 No charger strode. Thundered his battle-axe
 Upon the flying Northmen's iron backs.
 Sunlike that long-haired Briton shone that hour;
 Fast fled the heathen o'er that ship-thronged shore!

Links of Note

 * Nicolas Zaks, Plato's Classification of Change (PDF)

* Raphael, The Metaphysics of Plato's Political and Moral Philosophy, at "A Just Logos"

* James Read, Why philosophy of physics?, at "Aeon"

* Brian Niemeier, The Ring Is Not What You Think, at "Kairos Publications"

* Richard Yetter Chappell, Preference and Prevention: A New Paradox of Deontology (PDF). Having read this a few times, I'm inclined to think that most deontologists do not face this particular paradox; it seems to arise only if you assume a deontological theory of moral obligation with a consequentialist approach to preferential value. But most deontologists assume that we are obligated to re-align our preferences in such a way as to give priority to deontic principles ('respect for moral law' and the like); and I don't see that the paradox would arise on assumptions of preferences re-aligned in such a way. That is, the paradox is really due to the fact that if you are going to be deontological, you have to be consistently so. Nonetheless, this is an interesting argument even so, and perhaps there are subtler features to the argument that I'm not seeing.

* Patrick Flynn and Mike Schramm, I am, whether I think or not, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Mark A. Brewer, Regulatory Kinds: A Metaphysical Framework for Epistemically Stabilized Social Classification (PDF)

* Vanessa A. Seifert, Chemical causal relations across different levels of description (PDF)

* Robert Koons, Warranted Group Belief (PDF)

* Woarna, S4 is Inadequate as a Logic of Formal Provability, at "Lambda Continuum"

* Cameron Harwick, The University in the AI Era

* Fr. Cajetan Cuddy, OP, The Continuity Between the Prima pars and the Secunda pars of the Summa Theologiae, at "A Thomist"

* Conor Feehly, How Much Energy Does It Take to Think?, at "Quanta". As I've noted before, all the evidence is that, while our brains are energy hogs, almost all the energy goes to keeping the brain up and running, and the amount of energy it takes beyond that for the brain to do anything is so miniscule it is difficult to measure. It takes huge amounts of energy to have a brain, very little to use it. The 5%-beyond-resting-energy that they suggest here is very much on the higher side of what I've seen, and I would guess that this is really just the upper limit of what is consistent with well-established evidence. But even if we take the 5% value straight, it's something that only adds up over an extended period of time.

*Jennifer Egan, How Jane Austen Pulled It Off: On Emma, at "The Paris Review"

Corpus Christi

 Pange Lingua
by Thomas Aquinas

Sing, my tongue, of glorious
mystery of the Body,
also of the precious Blood,
in which the price of the world,
the fruit of generous womb,
the King of Nations, flowed forth. 

 For us given, for us born
from the untouched Virgin,
He dwelt in the world
after seed of the Word was sown;
his enclosure ended the wait
with marvelous order. 

 On the night of the Last Supper,
reclining with His brothers,
having fully observed the Law
with the lawful meal,
He as food to the crowd of the Twelve
gave Himself with His own hands. 

 Word made flesh, true bread
into flesh makes by His word
and wine becomes Blood of Christ.
Even if the senses fail,
to establish sincere heart
faith alone suffices. 

 Such sacrament we therefore
reverence, bowing down,
and ancient covenant
gives way to new rite:
Faith stands as supplement
to failure of the senses. 

 To Begetter and Begotten
praise and jubilation be,
strength and honor, might as well,
and also blessing be;
and to the one who proceeds from both
equally be the praise.

My very rough translation. 

Whewell on Theory Change

 ...[W]hen a prevalent theory is found to be untenable, and consequently, is succeeded by a different, or even by an opposite one, the change is not made suddenly, or completed at once, at least in the minds of the most tenacious adherents of the earlier doctrine; but is effected by a transformation, or series of transformations, of the earlier hypothesis, by means of which it is gradually brought nearer and nearer to the second; and thus, the defenders of the ancient doctrine are able to go on as if still asserting their first opinions, and to continue to press their points of advantage, if they have any, against the new theory. They borrow, or imitate, and in some way accommodate to their original hypothesis, the new explanations which the new theory gives, of the observed facts; and thus they maintain a sort of verbal consistency; till the original hypothesis becomes inextricably confused, or breaks down under the weight of the auxiliary hypotheses thus fastened upon it, in order to make it consistent with the facts. 

 William Whewell, "Of the Transformation of Hypotheses in the History of Science" in Selected Writings on the History of Science, Yehuda Elkana, ed. U Chicago P (Chicago: 1984) p. 385.

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right (Index Post)

 Here are the posts for my recent look at Blessed Antonio Rosmini's The Philosophy of Right:

I: The Essence of Right

IIa: Rights of the Individual (Connatural Rights)

IIb: Rights of the Individual (Acquired Rights)

IIc: Rights of the Individual (Transmission of Acquired Rights)

IId: Rights of the Individual (Other Modifications of Rights)

III: Universal Social Right

IV: Rights in Theocratic Society

V: Rights in Domestic Society

VIa: Rights in Civil Society (The Essence of Civil Society)

VIb: Rights in Civil Society (Free Concurrence and the Sanction of Civil Rights)

Related Posts:

Person as Subsistent Right

Rosmini on the Proximate End of Civil Society

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right VIb: Rights in Civil Society (Free Concurrence and the Sanction of Civil Rights)

 VIa: Rights in Civil Society (The Essence of Civil Society)

In civil society, governmental right and communal right have a particularly close relationship, so Rosmini decides to consider them at the same time. In order to approach the difficulty of rights in a civil society that has already been constituted, he also decides to start by looking at injustices, "in the way that the dark areas of a painting make the light areas stand out" (p. 254).

Civil society, we have already learned, is an individual subject of rights; that is, it is "a collective person, jurally equal to individual persons" (p. 255), but to consider the relevant social rights, we need to consider how civil society differs from other jural persons. In individual right, it has jural equality with every other jural person, with that jural person is a single human being or a society. But in social right, as with other societies, civil society is not the equal of other jural persons; the way Rosmini puts this is that it "has jural but not constitutive equality with all other persons" (p. 255). We find the inequality between civil society and other societies when we consider the injustices that are peculiar to it, which have to do with society, government, form of government, and individual persons associated with the form of government (cf. p. 257).

1. Injustices of society. "For example, we may think that civil society can dispose of everything as it likes, and that everything must be sacrificed to it..." (pp. 257-258). This results in "tyranny by society", when people are unaware of the bounds of civil society as a society, confined to the regulation of the modalities of rights. The injustices of society can be toward non-members -- Rosmini counts slavery as an example, since one is deliberately excluding someone from civil society in order to exercise unjust dominion over them -- or toward members -- as when the civil powers legalize excessive servitude by which citizen can oppress citizen.

2. Injustices of government. These arise when people are ignorant of the means used by civil society, or fails to recognize that civil society is jurally equal with other jural persons, or something similar. This results in "tyranny (and sometimes indolence) by government" (p. 258). The governing powers can be directed to an inappropriate end, for instance by violating the rights of other societies.

3. Injustices of the form of government. These arise when the form of govenrment is imprudent or when people go about claiming that one form of government is absolutely the best without qualification, thus trying to force everything into the same mold. This leads to "impotence, uncertainty, or even tyranny by the form of government" (p. 258). In this we are concerned with whether the powers being used are actually established for a given civil society, by way of appropriate titles and legitimate institution by a relevant authority. Ultimately everything has to traced back to what Rosmini calls autocracy, which in his sense is the foundational power by which a society governs itself.

4. Injustices due to individual persons who are part of the form of government. These are the most obvious in some ways -- people using official power arbitrarily, or selling public offices, or engaging in immoderate partisanship. This can lead to "tyranny or indolence by persons" (p. 258). In this we are concerned with whether power has been legitimately invested or used rather than abused.

These injustices are something of a many-headed hydra, but Rosmini thinks that they can all be cut off in a single stroke. There is one basic principle that, if realized in civil society, prevents the civil society from falling prey to any of these four kinds of injustices. If we return to what the authority of civil society is, we remember that its function is to regulate the modalities of rights so that they are consistent in practice with other rights. We can prevent all injustices of society, then, by preventing civil society from 'crossing the line of modality'. Then all citizens maintain their jural freedom, which in the specific context of civil society we can call civil freedom. This civil freedom is itself a protection from the other injustices. 

Thus the principle that renders civil society just is the principle of free concurrence. Every jural person, whether an individual human being or a society, can acquire any right as long as it is just in the way it acquires it. If civil society does not arbitrarily interfere with this, this is free concurrence. For instance, suppose we are a civil society and someone asks to become a citizen. There are times when we would reasonably refuse -- for instance, if they have already shown themselves to be dangerous to civil society -- but where the person requesting has the basic qualities appropriate to being a citizen and has asked in a reasonable way, free jural concurrence for the state of being a citizen involves giving them citizenship. If someone is a bond-servant and they negotiate a reasonable price for their emancipation, free jural concurrence for the state of freedom requires us to back their emancipation. If someone meeting the requirements of eligibility and suitability for a given public office goes through the appropriate process, free jural concurrence for social offices involves not denying them the office. In short, we, as a civil society and all its parts, do not deny jural persons any justly constituted freedom for which they meet the necessary requirements or to which they have right by just title. We defend civil society from developing injustice against any by upholding the civil freedom of all. This, of course, will not shut down all injustices; but it will prevent civil society itself from being unjust.

There are two major forces that provide sanction for the social rights of civil society: material force, which belongs to the governing part of society, and public opinion, which belongs to the governed part of society. These powers of sanction expand and develop over time, and civil society necessarily grows and develops with them. Historically, there have been attempts by the governors of societies to use material force, of various kinds, to try to break up public opinion; this violates the rights of the governed, who have the right to use all reasonable means to develop uniformity of opinion, and is foolish in general, since the work of developing public opinion is part of how civil society develops. The government also contributes to this development, e.g., by informing the public of the facts and reasons available to it and by punishing those who maliciously spread falsehoods. But it takes some work to find the proper balance; fundamentally, the government must not interfere with free discussion and must not try to pretend that its task, as civil government, is to teach rather than just to inform and act as a check on malice. Civil society can only develop properly if both the material force and public opinion are in balance: "It will be the sacred, supreme duty of government to rule civil society according to prevalent public opinion, not according to particular theories" (p. 297). If a government rules according to prevalent public opinion, it is stable and strong, and (whatever its limitations) has at least the capacity to fulfill its functions well. In the short term, imbalances cannot always be avoided; but almost everything that can dangerous disturb a society consists in an ongoing opposition, either real or imagined, between these two sanctions. Only when there is a general balance between the two can all rights be protected.

There are seven classes of governmental acts by which power is applied, and the rights to which are involved in the effectiveness of government:

(A) Direct material actions by the one with power. These are in general quite limited, and become more limited the larger society becomes.

(B) Commands given to members of society or to ministers.

(C) Acts of judicial power.

(D) Legislation. Civil society must be directed primarily by laws, not by orders, and the right to legislate is restricted to matters concerned with the end of the society and to what is consistent with moral law. And, of course, in a civil society, these ultimately mean that the legislator only imposes law to regulate the modalities of already existing rights, intervening only when jural persons in the society are unable or unwilling to agree among themselves. Penal laws must be only established as necessary, and in every case an eye should be had to the minimum punishment required to resolve the problem.

(E) Organization into social offices.

(F) Nomination to social offices. In a dominion, the master can simply appoint whomever he pleases, but in a civil society, an administrator is governed by an obligation to name to office those whome he judges to be best suited for it.

(G) Social vigilance and inspection.

All of these seven governmental powers are contained in what Rosmini calls autocratic power, that is, the fundamental power, whether held by a single person or by a body of persons, that makes possible the governance of the society. Fundamentally, the essential powers of autocracy are "supreme command, supreme judgment, supreme legislation and supreme inspection" (p. 401). They can be partly delegated, but cannot be given up without destroying the autocratic power. Other powers, including lesser versions of these, are exercised through social organs in a ministry.

And thus ends Rosmini's discussion of civil society, having covered the whole outline of it. However, he notes that there is another aspect to the philosophy of right, in that it has to connect up with the philosophy of politics, despite the fact that the two are distinct. "Justice is the object of Right, prudence the subject of Politics" (p. 403). In attempting to build a just civil society, there are many different paths that can be taken, and therefore one should aim at "that particular one which best protects justice from disturbance and more easily facilitates the progress of human happiness" (p. 404), which Rosmini calls the "regular state" of civil society. This requires two fundamental conditions: justice and balance. Justice is required for the preservation of civil society in a form that is appropriate to its ends. Balance depends on conjoining in a reasonable way goods that naturally fit together in human choices and pursuits: population and wealth (which when imbalanced disrupt the family), wealth and civil power (which, when balanced, make it so that wealth defends the right to govern and the right to govern defends wealth), civil power and material force, civil power and knowledge, knowledge and virtue. When these goods are stripped away from each other, or joined in a way discordant with each other, we get problems, consistently enough that Rosmini thinks we have here a law of politics: "Every movement or action, regular or irregular, arises from the effort made by two forces endeavouring to attain the balance they lack" (p. 414). Given justice and balance, there is a third condition for the construction of the regular state of civil society, social inequalities not arising from arbitrary choice, that is, from wealth, knowledge, and virtue. 

These three conditions so far can be summarized in terms of distribution of goods: "1. everything is distributed justly; 2. in each of the different kinds of goods, inequality is relatively distributed in a uniform way to ensure their balance; 3. the degree of inequality depends upon the indications given by the very nature of things in different nations" (p. 421). A fourth and fifth condition can be added to these, namely, that wealth, virtue, and knowledge must have a lower limit in what is required for membership of the society, and all goods must have a higher limit determined by what is necessary for virtue (the one good that has no upper limit).  When all five of these are found in a civil society, it is in its regular state and is stable and strong. It is possible to have a just society (which respects rights) that is irregular, but Rosmini thinks that societies that respect rights will usually tend toward the regular state. A key element important for actual progress in this direction is to keep a distinction between the government as deciding matters and as administering them, and attempting to direct both to justice. But again, while this has to look back to the philosophy of right, and the philosophy of right has to look forward to this regular state of civil society, this is properly a matter for politics.

****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right, Volume 6: Rights in Civil Society, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1996).

When Every Leaf Is on Its Tree

 Summer
by Christina Rossetti 

 Winter is cold-hearted,
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weather-cock
Blown every way:
Summer days for me
When every leaf is on its tree; 

 When Robin's not a beggar,
And Jenny Wren's a bride,
And larks hang singing, singing, singing,
Over the wheat-fields wide,
And anchored lilies ride,
And the pendulum spider
Swings from side to side, 

 And blue-black beetles transact business,
And gnats fly in a host,
And furry caterpillars hasten
That no time be lost,
And moths grow fat and thrive,
And ladybirds arrive. 

 Before green apples blush,
Before green nuts embrown,
Why, one day in the country
Is worth a month in town;
Is worth a day and a year
Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion
That days drone elsewhere.

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right VIa: Rights in Civil Society (The Essence of Civil Society)

 V: Rights in Domestic Society

"I now have to take in hand the most complicated, thorny, and highly litigious part of social Right, split as it is by disparate opinions and encumbered with fierce resentment, hatred, and love -- stained even by blood" (p. 4). So begins Rosmini's account of rights with respect to civil society. In order to deal with such a difficult subject properly, it is necessary to pay close attention to the foundations, and in discussing social right, those foundations are found in the nature of the society in question. Civil society is in some sense the culmination of human nature, and therefore it is the form of society we most have to struggle to perceive clearly. We start with natural theocratic society (the universal society of humankind) and domestic society; we learn about societies in the context of these. They have a simplicity to them, relatively speaking, and our familiarity with them begins early. Supernatural theocratic society is more difficult, but we have many obvious analogies to natural theocratic society and domestic society to work with, and part of it is based on revelation and therefore, at least in its basic elements, requires no deep rational reflection to reach. Civil society, on the other hand, is immensely complicated, and understanding it requires abstractions we do not use on a daily basis. To understand civil society is in some sense to begin to understand human nature itself, and that is not something for which we have much facility.

All societies have three elements: the human fellow-feeling (consentimento dell'uomo)  that unites person to person, the concept of the special society itself, and the good intended by means of that society. "These three elements are, "as it were, the beginning, the core, and the aim of society" (p. 8). All societies may be considered de facto, as actually subsisting, or de iure, in its  nature as shown by its concept. Theocratic society alone is principally de iure; it exists in ideal, de iure, and is received by human beings so as to become de facto. Domestic society and civil society contrast with this in that we develop the de facto society, and through it achieve the de iure society. The good at which theocratic society aims is union with God; that at which domestic society aims is the development of human nature. Civil society aims at a somewhat more complicated good, however. Civil society is a union of domestic societies, which need to come to agreements to reduce and prevent violations of rights due to divergences among households; thus the proximate good at which civil society aims is the peaceful co-existence of families, in which the conflicts are prevented or reduced and rights are regulated so that rights may be exercised without conflicts. That is, it aims at good order with respect to the modalities of already existing rights. Thus civil society can only arise through extensive free reflection as a result of human genius and art (cf. p. 14), and it exists specifically to further theocratic society and domestic society. The nature of civil society is often obscured by confusion of its pure social right with seignorial right; civil society is fundamentally structured by agreement rather than dominion. In particular, "Civil society is the union of a certain number of fathers who agree that the modality of the rights which are administered by them should be regulated perpetually by a single mind and a single (social) force in order to better safeguard these rights and ensure their most satisfactory use" (p. 25).

A number of different kinds of society have the aim of regulating modalities of rights, but civil society is distinguished from the others by being universal in scope; it considers all rights. This has led to considerable confusion among people who do not clearly recognize that civil society is concerned with modality of rights. Civil society is universal in authority with respect to rights, but this does not mean that it is the source of all rights. In fact, it is strictly speaking the source of no rights at all; 'civil rights' is a name we use to talk about cases where civil society has activated some latent function of already existing rights in a particular way. Civil society is universal, but it is not and cannot be totalitarian; it does not touch the substance of any right, only the way it relates to titles and to other rights. Likewise, while civil society has a sort of supremacy with regard to other societies, it cannot be the supremacy of absolutism; it is merely the most eminent society concerned with modality of rights, and regulates the relations between society and society, for the good of all societies. It is a universal coordinator, not a universal despot; it is a mediator, not a tyrant; other societies are its clients, not its slaves.

Civil society also has the feature of perpetuity. This does not mean that it cannot be dissolved, but that it is a society that has no inherent expiration; it is built to go on indefinitely. "Civil society, therefore, must regulate the modality of rights of its members universally, supremely and in perpetuity" (p. 32). These three characteristics require that civil society also have prevalent force, the ability to overcome obstacles that stand in the way of its universal, supreme, and perpetual regulation of the modality of rights. And because civil society regulates all rights so as best to preserve all rights, civil society is concerned with common good, in the sense of the good of all subjects of rights in the society. Rosmini sharply distinguishes this common good from public good, which is the good of the the civil society as a whole; confusions of the two create despotism and usurpation. However, the public good can also be an end of civil society if the public good itself aims at common good. Thus the rights of no subject of rights can be sacrificed to the public good, although, if rights are preserved, public good is to be preferred to private good. Civil society can likewise have private good as an end, if this is open to all and consistent with the rights of all.

Civil society also cannot exist without external means. These have to be provided by its members, and in such a way that all members directly or indirectly contribute to this provision of external means. Such members are the citizens. Not being a citizen does not strip you of individual, theocratic, or domestic rights, and it is possible for someone not to be a citizen of any civil society. Likewise, nothing prevents a person from being a citizen of several civil societies. And, properly speaking, in any civil society, considered simply as a civil society, the social power of any citizen, outside of the judicial part of society, should be proportionate to their contribution to the means of the society.

When heads of households combine to form civil society, they give civil society the ability to regulate the modality of rights, but this is not an exclusive thing; rather, they are agreeing to regulate such modalities in common rather than solely regulating the modality of their own rights. The authority that comes form this union of households has two forms: legislative and executive. When they exercise the legislative authority through representatives, the authority of the representatives is limited by its origin: the representatives are limited to regulating the modalities of rights for common benefit, and they can only do so to the extent and in the way that they are mandated as representatives. In practice, however, we often do not find pure civil societies; instead, civil societies are combined with an element of seignory or dominion. Those in the society who exercise this dominion should, strictly speaking, confine themselves to regulation of the modalities of rights, although due to inadequate understanding of civil society, they do not always do so.

Civil government arises when someone has title to govern. Rosmini divides these titles into two families: titles of first acquisition and titles of second acquisition. Titles of first acquisition may arise from other rights or not. The titles that arise from prior rights are:

(1) The title of absolute Being: God, as Creator, has first and absolute right, and therefore has the first title to govern civil society.

(2) The title of paternity: Regulation of modalities is already contained in the patria potestas belonging to the head of household; civil society itself is formed out of the agreement of heads of household to exercise this regulation in common.

(3) The title of seignory: "Anyone who has bond-servants, that is, persons obliged stably to his service, is clearly also the person who regulates the modality of their rights by general ordinances" (p. 81).

(4) The title of already existing right of proprietà: Landowners who have others living and working on their land gain the ability to regulate the modality of rights insofar as it concerns living and working on that land; in Egypt, for instance, the king owned all land as part of the foundation of his power to govern.

The titles of first acquisition that can be had independently of other rights may arise from unilateral action or from commission by the heads of household forming the civil society. These are essentially various forms of title of occupancy. Unilateral occupancy may be either peaceful or forced.

(5) The title of peaceful occupancy: By individual right, "everyone can take possession of an unoccupied good, provided the occupancy harms no one" (p. 89). Civil government is a good for the one exercising it and, considered in itself, beneficial for the one governed, so if everyone consents to someone exercising a civil authority that is not already taken, this is a just title. Since jural resentment -- that is, the feeling of a reasonable person that their rights are being violated, that is, that what belongs to them is being invaded, is an important sign of injured right, the lack of any jural resentment over someone taking over any part of civil governance is a good sign that it is legitimate.

(6) The title of forced occupancy: In general, no one can force others to give him the authority to regulate the modality of their rights, but political situations are immensely diverse, and so there are unusual cases in which taking over powers of civil governance by force can be just title. These are all defensive, either in self-defense or in defense of others. If you are living in a barbarian land and the barbarian start actively violating your rights, it might be that your best option is to use force to establish civil government, e.g,. to prevent a more terrible war. A case of doing it in defense of others might be if you are dealing with what Rosmini calls vices against nature, which overlap with what we call 'crimes against humanity'; your best option might in such cases be to go to war and establish civil government by right of conquest.

One can also have title to civil government by commission from the those forming the civil society; that is, you can receive it as part of a contract created by all of the heads of the household in forming the civil society.

(7) The title of occupancy by the body of the people: While Rosmini puts a great deal of emphasis on the importance of the people, he wants to head off what he sees as a major error, the idea that there is just a 'People' always already constituted with an inalienable sovereignty. In reality, "prior to the existence of civil society, a people as such has no political right; they do not form a body, exist as a collective person, have unity" (p. 106). The People are formed when the families come together in civil society in such a way as to recognize themselves as having civil power as a body. This People can then make for themselves a representative government to exercise the civil power that the People corporately occupy.

All of this, again, is talking about pure civil power. Historically, while civil society is natural to us as being necessary for the full scope of human reason and capability, recognizing what does and does not pertain to civil society itself has always been difficult, and requires a considerable degree of experience and abstraction. Thus civil power has tended to be intermingled in various ways with seignory and other kinds of power, in ways that are not very carefully distinguished. Thus, to take an example Rosmini would not have really been able to consider, the United States has pretensions to many of the features of civil society, but like all modern nation-states, when it formed it essentially to gave to Republic and the particular states most of the rights and powers of feudal and monarchical governments, which are heavily matters of seignory. Being citizens of a civil society and being subjects of a dominion are distinct things, but when we talk about citizenship, we don't disentangle them, and don't even recognize them as needing to be -- we use 'citizen' to talk perhaps even more about our being subjects in the jurisdiction of the federal government than about things that are strictly relevant to being citizens of the United States as a civil society. This is quite common. Even a country like the United Kingdom which explicitly maintains the distinction in principle -- British citizens are citizens of the realm and subjects of the Crown -- does not actually make much of an effort in practice to keep them distinct. In reality the seignorial powers and the civil powers have to be justified independently, because while combined in practice, they are different things. And one very particular distinction is that civil power is specifically for regulating the modality of rights so that they are exercised in a way harmonious with the rights of others, and is not itself the foundation or source of any right itself. If you start treating a civil government as if it had power over rights, rather than just over how our rights fit together, the society begins to degenerate into despotism. What Congress or Parliament does for you as your lord and master is very different from what it does for you as your representative and agent. Lords (other than God) do not have universal sovereign authority or unlimited scope of governance at all; civil powers do but are restricted to regulating how rights relate to each other in practice. When you try to combine them, so that you have a power trying to exercise dominion over rights on the scale of sovereign and universal civil society, you have totalitarianism.

There is another kind of title to civil power besides the titles of first acquisition, and these are the titles of second acquisition, which arise because civil power previously held by someone is transmitted to someone else. There are three ways that already existing civil power can be transmitted:

(1) The first person might both retain and communicate it. An example would be Diocletian dividing the imperial office of the Roman Empire.

(2) The first might might give it up, passing it to the one to whom he communicates it. In hereditary monarchies, it's common for some civil power to pass by inheritance at the death or abdication of the monarch to the royal heir, for instance.

(3) The first might simply retain it, so that the second receives it not as proprietà but as an instrument of the first. This is, for example, the way in which power passes to elected representatives in societies organized by popular sovereignty.

All of this is quite abstract; obviously, a full discussion of rights associated with civil society has to look at the concrete as well, since the history of civil society and how it develops plays an important role in how its structure works. I have, with limited exceptions, mostly skipped over that here. What we still need to look at are the specifics of  rights in civil societies that are already constituted.

to be continued

*****

Antonio Rosmini, The Philosophy of Right: Volume 6: Rights in Civil Society, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham, UK: 1996).

Music on My Mind

 

The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows (Remastered 1999)". I only just learned today that Brian Wilson, most famous for being the musical genius behind The Beach Boys, passed away at the age of 82 on June 11. This is usually considered his masterpiece composition, an extremely catchy pop song in no definite key that broke all the conventions of pop songs and paired, among other things, the harpsichord and the accordion, and for percussion included things like plastic orange juice cups and sleigh bells and a piano with tape on its strings. Some people consider it the greatest thing ever composed specifically for the recording studio; indeed, in a sense it uses the recording studio itself as an instrument, creating sounds that could only be loosely approximated live. The band and the record company were worried that it wouldn't get any play on the radio because, despite being neither an anthem or a hymn, it repeatedly uses the word 'God'; as it happens, this turned out not to be a problem.

There's Much Afoot in Heaven and Earth This Year

 The Rainy Summer
by Alice Meynell 

There’s much afoot in heaven and earth this year;
The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon,
Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear
Height of a threatening noon. 

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,
May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud;
The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,
And strains against the cloud. 

No scents may pause within the garden-fold;
The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells;
Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold
Wild honey to cold cells.

Doctor Evangelicus

 Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. Here is a re-post from 2016, on one of the most famous legends about him, the Sermon of the Fishes.

*****

Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in about 1195, and died in Padua in 1231; he was canonized within a year of his death. He joined the Franciscan order, and soon became renowned as a homilist. His sermons, which are typically concerned with tracing concordantiae or parallels and analogies between different parts of Scripture, are the reason for his liturgical status as Doctor of the Church, but he is perhaps most famous for being the patron saint of lost articles, and the primary association of him with his preaching in the popular mind is the hagiographical legend of his preaching to the fish:

St Anthony being at one time at Rimini, where there were a great number of heretics, and wishing to lead them by the light of faith into the way of truth, preached to them for several days, and reasoned with them on the faith of Christ and on the Holy Scriptures. They not only resisted his words, but were hardened and obstinate, refusing to listen to him.

At last St Anthony, inspired by God, went down to the sea-shore, where the river runs into the sea, and having placed himself on a bank between the river and the sea, he began to speak to the fishes as if the Lord had sent him to preach to them, and said: "Listen to the word of God, O ye fishes of the sea and of the river, seeing that the faithless heretics refuse to do so."

No sooner had he spoken these words than suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood, that never before had so many been seen in the sea or the river. All kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, where the water was deeper, the largest.

When they had placed themselves in this order, St Anthony began to preach to them most solemnly, saying: "My brothers the fishes, you are bound, as much as is in your power, to return thanks to your Creator, who has given you so noble an element for your dwelling; for you have at your choice both sweet water and salt; you have many places of refuge from the tempest; you have likewise a pure and transparent element for your nourishment. God, your bountiful and kind Creator, when he made you, ordered you to increase and multiply, and gave you his blessing. In the universal deluge, all other creatures perished; you alone did God preserve from all harm. He has given you fins to enable you to go where you will. To you was it granted, according to the commandment of God, to keep the prophet Jonas, and after three days to throw him safe and sound on dry land. You it was who gave the tribute-money to our Saviour Jesus Christ, when, through his poverty, he had not wherewith to pay. By a singular mystery you were the nourishment of the eternal King, Jesus Christ, before and after his resurrection. Because of all these things you are bound to praise and bless the Lord, who has given you blessings so many and so much greater than to other creatures."

At these words the fish began to open their mouths, and bow their heads, endeavouring as much as was in their power to express their reverence and show forth their praise. St Anthony, seeing the reverence of the fish towards their Creator, rejoiced greatly in spirit, and said with a loud voice: "Blessed be the eternal God; for the fishes of the sea honour him more than men without faith, and animals without reason listen to his word with greater attention than sinful heretics."

And whilst St Anthony was preaching, the number of fishes increased, and none of them left the place that he had chosen. And the people of the city hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it. With them also came the heretics of whom we have spoken above, who, seeing so wonderful and manifest a miracle, were touched in their hearts; and threw themselves at the feet of St Anthony to hear his words. The saint then began to expound to them the Catholic faith. He preached so eloquently, that all those heretics were converted, and returned to the true faith of Christ; the faithful also were filled with joy, and greatly comforted, being strengthened in the faith. After this St Anthony sent away the fishes, with the blessing of God; and they all departed, rejoicing as they went, and the people returned to the city.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Part I, Chapter XL.

Because of the tale, Anthony is often pictured with fish: a reminder that the gospel must be proclaimed even if there is no one to hear but the fish.