Dashed Off IV

Still trying to catch up on these. As always, it's exactly what it says on the tin -- dashed off.

pleasure and pain as ingredients of cognition

the suitability of the world as a stage for moral lives as rational animals

intelligibility - congeniality for thought - purposefulness

All tradition presupposes the tradition of human nature itself, as educable and as having a cultivation or education appropriate to it.

Ought implies can because ought is needful can.

The (sensible) beautiful as concerning us precisely as both rational and animal.

Polytheism tends to move from subjects to agencies or roles, especially when faced with other polytheisms.

Rhetoric is concerned more with the conditions of persuadability than with persuasion as such. The basic principle is that people must be under conditions so as to be persuadable in order to be persuaded: that is, they must be ordered, disposed, to persuasion.

analogy as an indeterministic logic allowing different answers according to level of focus, contextual assumptions, and (perhaps) trial-and-error search in a conceptual field marked out by them

We know divine reason or eternal law by image in reason and by indication and symbol in revelation.

Language is natural to us in the sense that coming up with language is natural to us; and even our everyday use of language is just a coming-up-with-language. We invent on the fly, even if we make extensive use of previously discovered solutions.

sign languages as dynamic 3D written languages
sign language as iconic presentational spoke languages

consensus gentium as abstracting from merely individual biases (still leaves systemic biases)

Practice and habit smooth over waverings in genius and temper.

books as licensed discussions, the licenses for which may be leased or traded under contract

(1) Do we reason practically with regard to means and end?
: Obvious to experience
: Required for communication and structuring of argument
(2) Does this reasoning admit of analysis in terms of principles?
: Experience shows ability to make principled distinctions and to give reasoned, principled arguments
: Intrinsic to its character as reasoning
(3) Do these principles concern the good?
: Obvious to experience that we consider good in practical reasoning
: Agents act for ends under aspect of good
: Convertibility of being and good guarantees good-based principles of reason
(4) Is bonum est faciendam et prosequendam a necessary first principle?
: Cannot distinguish good and bad in practical life without it
: Necessary given nature of good as desirable
: Results when converting the principle of noncontradiction according to convertibility of being and good
(5) Does moral life fall under these principles?
(6) Are these principles precepts?

Marriage makes more reasonable the loves even of those who are not married.

One may marry because of love, but one certainly marries in order to love.

The meaning of every work of art at least partly contains the history of art.

pauses in reasoning as part of the reasoning

Being a means and an instrument, the state must be constrained not merely by aims but by procedural and institutional constraints that preserve it as an appropriate means and instrument.

The purpose of argument in general is not to persuade but to reason.

probability as modal logic with proportions

will to power as thymos

Game-theoretical explanations presuppose stable demerit and benefit.

first principles of natural law -> general reflex principles of aesthetics -> canons of aesthetic ends -> cases of productive reason

clarity as dialectical success

Beyond a certain expanse of time man can only plan ahead by appeal to the timeless.

The only true sign of learning is understanding what it is that we do not yet know.

the beautiful as occupying us cognitively

Our sensibility is not structured independently of our capacity to understand the world.

reflex principles as rules for the unification of taste with reason

An exhaustive account of beauty would require an exhaustive account of cognition.

The beautiful as that which is cognized as the exemplary object-of-satisfaction.

beauty as an apparent preadaptedness to our minds

The pleasantness of the pursuit of the pleasant does not depend wholly on the pleasant that is pursued.

The state is the child of the populace.

the familial destination of man

Art reflects our cultivation of ourselves.

Overwhelming joy stuns like terror.

Every sublimity is in some sense an intelligible sublimity.

rhetoric as the logic of advice

cultivation of taste for beauty as related to cultivation of freedom of mind

universal communicability of taste as the sociality implicit in reason

Nothing can be regarded as an appearance except by regarding it as being given.

The maximum of saturation is not revelation but union.

An interpretation is an interpreter interpreting.

Love is not univocal & is told in many ways; to recognize a single garment of love does nto requrie us to hold it is a single unwoven thread. The weaving of the garment is precisely what it is for love to be told in many ways.

love as rationality-giving

God is presupposed in making distinctions.

The apophatic opens out into confession, and confession returns at its end to negative theology.

hierarchy as the work of teleiosis

In transubstantiation, Christ is first exterior and we must come to Him in order to commune.

Transubstantiation is not an account of change so much as an account of presence in mystery (sacrament).

There are few mistakes worse than criticizing theology for not being omniscience.

transubstantiation as an account of the beginning or genesis of our theosis (bodily through sign and spiritually through faith Christ in His full humanity unites us to God) - > cf "This sacrament is nothing else than the application of our Lord's passion to us."

In transubstantiation, sacrifice is no longer merely exterior (priestly) nor moral-symbolic (prophetic).

Without real presence in some way, Christ's sacrifice is not for us, not made ours in particular, but is merely a generic sacrifice, at best.

Hope is lifted up by signs of charity, for it exists itself by inspiration of charity.

Covenant presupposes law; in particular, it requires our being able to act together under one law, or in light of one law.

Transubstantiation is the way in which Christ's presence in sacrament and liturgy goes beyond His presence in creation; and rejecting it turns Christian worship into the contemplation of God in His creation. In other words, all accounts other than transubstantiation are accounts of a particular way God is present in creation and cannot distinguish communion from these. (Possibly consubstantiation, taken in ways other than ubiquity, has some room here, as well.)

the heresy of Modernism as flight from the body in theological matters, flight from the theological body (informed by rational soul, with divine vocation)

transubstantiation
(1) real presence
(2) conversion (real difference)
(3) this conversion is neither annihilation nor creation
(4) this conversion is not a natural change (material transformation)
(5) symbolic (accidents remain)
(6) but complete
(7) and nongradual, being a pure expression of divine power

pharisaism as the failure to give alms to oneself (Augustine Ench XX sect 76)

natural law as first tradition

The Eucharist symbolically represents glory; one's account of it establishes the limits of human glorification by God.

Marriage expresses in holy sign that which Eucharist accomplishes in holy act.

Marriage becomes a sacrament in part because Eucharist is the sacrament of sacraments.

The sacraments each transfigure different aspects of rational life: e.g., eucharist community, reconciliation repentance, matrimony covenant.

sacramentals as showing how grace ripples out and transfigures the world around us, giving it new significance (the work of bees)

The epiclesis establishes that transubstantiation is not merely of bread and wine but of bread and wine made holy sacramentalia by prayer and grace.

Scripture as the principle and matrix of all sacramentalia

liturgy and the sublime in the picturesque and harmonious

unction as the hylemorphic sacrament -- why the rational soul must in some way be form of the body (not origin of Vienne, but the sacrament requires Vienne's insistence)

Kant's moral philosophy throughout presupposes the impossibility of the Beatific Vision.

Christ's Baptism shows that baptism is the sacrament of being a child of God; in baptism, we stand in Christ's place, the Spirit descends, and the Father says, "This is My Son."

Christ had not only to take on human nature, flesh, but also the tradition of it, which chiefly consists in each generation being part of the previous, invested in it, by each being part of his or her mother. (This closely ties to Mary as New Eve; Christ must take on not merely mankind as Adam, dust, flesh, man; but also in some way mankind as Eve, life, the being-given of a new generation.)

cause as explaining resemblance, contiguity and regularity

The modern world does not handle symbolism well because it approaches it purely associatively, leading to insuperable gaps and strange incongruities.

liturgy as a participation in eternal reason

natural law as teleology of the will precisely as free (Chastek)

Given that Kant makes the subject of ontology objects of thought rather than being, Hegel was perhaps inevitable.

practices helping to fix metaphorical meaning (alchemy has some excellent examples of this)

Humean curiosity & Nietzschean will to power

Randomness in evolutionary theory is randomness with respect to fitness outcomes; i.e., you can always substitute 'not tending in itself to fitness'.

Leviticus as the book of vocation (cp Vayikra)

shelamim as showing the Israelites to be a priestly people

the sacrificial system as uniting the Israelites so that they could together carry the burden no one of them could carry alone

sacrifice & vocation as connected: no vocation without sacrifice

The first step in carrying the Cross of Christ is to take up the compassion of Christ.

In judgments of taste we posit the unity or oneness of human nature.

enlightenment, universal standpoint, consistency

humanity (rational nature) -> sociability -> taste as having universal import -> civilization

genius as exemplary originality, originating standards for freedom

As judgment of sublimity concerns the supersensible in ourselves, so Kant's judgment of design concerns superhuman art in nature.

taste as the discipline of genius

Stimulus is not a distinct event from receiving of the stimulus.

taste as unification of experience

articulation, presentation, modulation

rhetoric as imaginatizing the intelligible; poetics as intellectualizing the imaginable

poetry as intimating the supersensible with the sensible

the attraction of gambling as based on free play of sensation

For Kant teleology is as if we treated the beautiful as determinative for causation.

teleological judgment is problematic for Kant; this makes possible the use of it as analogy
->indeed problematic modality seems analogy-linked; it is the as-if modality, so to speak

Kant's 'ontology' is necessarily just empiricism.

Treaties establish international law obligations on states (assuming they are legitimate) but only the obligation and only on states: the obligation on the state is an obligation to legislate and enforce, not itself the legislation.

You cannot plan away the need for prudence.

Whom None Can Bribe, and None Can Overawe

Any Poet At Any Time
by Alfred Austin

Time, thou supreme inexorable Judge,
Whom none can bribe, and none can overawe,
Who unto party rancour, private grudge,
Calmly opposeth equitable law,
Before whom advocacy vainly strives
To make the better cause to seem the worse,
To thy Tribunal, when our jangling lives
Are husht, I leave the verdict on my verse.
Irrevocably then wilt thou proclaim
What should have been, what now must ever be,
If in oblivion perish should my name,
Or shine aloft in mighty company.
I to my kind proffering of my poor best,
Remit to Time's arbitrament the rest.

Alfred Austin had the unenviable task of being a merely ordinary poet following Tennyson as Poet Laureate, which was made worse by the fact that he was suspected of getting it for political reasons, and probably did. He also tended to write in old-fashioned and unpopular styles. When he was appointed, he had the instant hate of his peers for being undeserving, and his reputation has never recovered from it.

In reality, he is a competent poet, particularly good with natural description. His poetry consistently reads well aloud, which is one test of poetic competence, and his strange reputation as both pompous and pedestrian arises from the conversational quality of his poetry -- he has no soaring flights of prettiness, just surges of excitement, complicated by an English irony. It is a common fault of poetic criticism to label every walking poet plodding and everyone less than high genius incompetent; such bombastic court flattery results in many an injustice to the common craftsman.

Nicholas Cusanus and Squaring the Circle

I was looking up something or other on Bl. Nicholas of Cusa the other day and started reading about his works on squaring the circle. One of the things that I noticed was that a lot of websites simply stated that he attempted to square the circle -- which, of course, is mathematically impossible. Now, this, and particularly the dispute with Regiomontanus on squaring the circle, which the websites mostly had in view, is not something I am deeply familiar with, but I have read more than a bit of Cusanus, and one thing I am quite sure of is that his position on the subject is not that straightforward. The fact of the matter is that you can find arguments both for and against the possibility of squaring the circle in his works; part of the reason for this being that he often is attempting to summarize the dispute. He also very famously has a tendency to slip out of subjunctive mood into indicative mood in talking about things that he does not necessarily believe, which sometimes makes it difficult to determine whether he is putting forward something as his own view or as a reasonable conclusion given some assumption he might not actually hold. And he uses examples and analogies in a way that takes some getting used to. Thus, for instance, it is often said that he held that a straight line was a circle of infinite diameter although it's not actually clear that he thought that this was literally true. Interpretation is further complicated by the fact that he seems to have thought that the dispute between those who thought the circle could be squared and those who thought it could not be was based on equivocation, and that the two sides were not using the same definition of equality.

Nonetheless, it is definitely true that he here and there gives theological arguments, in which he uses squaring the circle as an example, that seem very clearly to presuppose that it is not possible to square the circle. What is more, he occasionally uses it as an analogy in discussing one of his most important philosophical positions, that we are not able to achieve exact, precise truth, but only an approximation to it. (As he says at one point, the human intellect is to truth as a many-sided polygon to a circle.) So it seems more likely to be his view that it is not, in fact, possible to square the circle, in the proper sense, but that we can 'square' the circle in the sense of getting something like it by approximation.

Again, the whole is quite complicated, and I don't pretend to have an understanding of his full view; it's possible that there is some nuance I am missing. But I am, again, quite sure that it is an error simply to claim that he held that the circle could be squared when one can find both explicit statements in his work denying that it is possible and importantly placed analogies that seem to assume that it is not; his view is certainly more complicated.

Autonomy, Compassion, and Physician-Assisted Dying

Mercier, Sumner, and Weinstock on "physician-assisted dying":

Those who advocate for the legal option of medical aid in dying have been quite consistent in calling upon these two principles, autonomy and compassion, in support of their efforts.

It should now be obvious why the opponents’ equation of physician-assisted dying with murder is mistaken. No one, of course, doubts that murder is wrong. But its wrongness is due to two important factors: the harm it does to the victim and its violation of the victim’s autonomy. Neither of these factors applies to physician-assisted dying.

What really should be obvious is how much this begs the question; practically all opponents of the process involved hold that it in fact does harm the victim and/or in fact violates the victim's autonomy. We see this even more obviously when they go on to explain. First, for autonomy:

Murder substitutes the will of the perpetrator for that of the victim. Physician-assisted dying respects the free will of the patient.

But no serious analysis of murder as wrong on autonomy grounds takes it to be wrong for such an absurdly vague reason as that it "substitutes the will of the perpetrator for that of the victim," a description so thoroughly useless that it can apply to virtual identity theft in Second Life. And respect for "the free will of the patient" in no way affects the analysis for whether one should actively cooperate with it or not; one cannot simply leap from one to the other as if they were the same. Much of the confusion here is due to the author's conflation of autonomy and freedom of choice -- the two on certain conceptions overlap but are not the same -- but even setting this aside, the analysis given is absurdly simplistic.

And on harm:

Murder harms its victims by depriving them of further life which would be of value to them. But patients elect medical aid in dying when the only future they can foresee promises nothing but additional suffering.

That the terms are being deliberately rigged to get the 'right' answer is even more obvious here, since most people would hold that the harm to a victim comes by depriving them of further life -- no additional weasel clause. If someone clearly and obviously did not value further life and someone came up and killed them without asking their consent, there would be no room to argue that it didn't count as murder because further life wasn't of value to them; the bare fact of taking their life would be regarded as harming them. What is more, it isn't clear why anyone would assume that 'harm' can be connected so tightly to valuing of one's life. Everyone recognizes that people die because of biological harms; this doesn't magically go away if the person in question is suffering from severe prolonged depression. Everyone recognizes that people can be harmed in ways of which they are not aware, or, indeed, in ways that they don't think they are being harmed, by means of things that they do not at that point value. (For instance, the experience of looking back and seeing that one was harmed by being deprived of something of value that at the time one was simply not in a position to value is not an uncommon experience.) When they first raised the issue of harm, the authors said that the principle involved was "compassion for our fellow citizens". Does compassion suddenly vanish if people don't value further life, so that no harms against them are recognized at all? Because to hold not that the harm is outweighed but that there is no harm to raise the issue of compassion is, at the most generous assessment, a clear case of trying to rig the definitions to get one's pet result. (This doesn't even get into the obviously illegitimate slide from talking about "further life which would be of value to the patient" to "further life of which the patient can foresee no value".)

Mercier and Weinstock I don't really know, but that Sumner, who can generally be expected to give an argument with some effort in it, would put his name to such ridiculously amateurish and question-begging reasoning just baffles me. This is not serious philosophical argument; it is sophistical advocacy pretending to give reasons.

Music on My Mind

Epica with Roy Khan, "Trois Vierges". The lyrics are a bit bizarre, and don't really fit the melody at all; but that's typical of Epica and, frankly, you could give Simone Simons and Roy Khan stock reports to sing and it wouldn't matter much.

Unity

Let us, then, embracing more and more this good obedience, give ourselves to the Lord; clinging to what is surest, the cable of faith in Him, and understanding that the virtue of man and woman is the same. For if the God of both is one, the master of both is also one; one church, one temperance, one modesty; their food is common, marriage an equal yoke; respiration, sight, hearing, knowledge, hope, obedience, love all alike. And those whose life is common, have common graces and a common salvation; common to them are love and training.

St. Clement of Alexandria, Pedagogus, Book I, Chapter 4

Infinity and Dignity

The dignity of the intelligent subject arises, as I have observed, from the dignity of the idea of being, the source of the subject's understanding. Being, the first object of knowledge and the source of all our other knowledge, is universal, unlimited and infinite, and alone renders the mind capable of knowing all the genera and species of good, and enjoying such knowledge. The nature of this knowledge and enjoyment is characterised by a truly supreme and infinite dignity. It enables the intelligent subject to forget self by considering things as they are in themselves; to look at things impartially and justly; and in so doing, to render homage to being itself, without thought of self, in all the degrees in which it knows being.

The objectivity found in intellective contemplation is in a certain sense infinite, as I said, because it has no limits. It is capable of making known all things, even infinite things, as they are and whatever they are. And infinity is the fundamental principle of dignity. Wherever we are engaged with something infinite, we are dealing with something so great and awesome that finite things give way before it. In its presence, they experience a sublime sense of their own nothingness in thinking of this being which, transcending them, calls forth unlimited reverence for its own veiled, obscure grandeur. The primary dignity of the intelligent subject, therefore, lies in the contemplation of truth.

Bl. Antonio Rosmini, The Principles of Ethics, Chapter 3, Article 9 (section 66).