Maverick Philosopher

Time 2020-09-22 22:06:57

Web Name: Maverick Philosopher

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Announcement! (2/15/18): I have decided to create a separate weblog, Maverick Philosopher: Strictly Philosophical in which to collect my purely philosophical entries. All posts will continue to appear at this, the mother site, whether strictly philosophical or not, while the separatum will feature only the purely philosophical entries. The latter will include both new posts and re-workings and reposts of the best old ones.Think of it as a best of compilation if you like.I will strive for a clean, clutter-free, easily legible presentation. No comments allowed at the separatum site, but you are welcome to e-mail me. Strictly philosophical does not exclude political philosophy but it does exclude politics. I nevertheless stand by my pledge to fight the good fight. It will continue in these pages.My PhilPapers Page currently lists 87 bibliographical items and will give you some idea of my areas of expertise. The onboard search utility leaves something to be desired. Use StartPage or Google................................Welcome to the third and latest incarnation of Maverick Philosopher. I began this weblog in May of 2004 and have kept it up continuously on different servers, missing only a few days. I m in this game for the duration, as long as health and eyesight hold out. It has proven to be deeply satisfying, not the least reason for which being that my scribbling has attracted a large number of like-minded individuals, some of whom I have met in the flesh, and have come to value highly as friends. What you need to know is that this weblog is just one philosopher s online journal, notebook, common place book, workshop, soapbox, sandbox, literary litter box, and online filing cabinet. A lot of what I write here is unpolished and tentative. I explore the cartography of ideas along many paths. Here below we are in statu viae, and it is fitting that our thinking should be exploratory, meandering, and undogmatic. Nothing human, and thus nothing philosophical, is foreign to me. Among the dozen or so books I am currently reading is Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir (Picador, 2003). Written in 1939, it was first published in German in 2000. The Third Reich is no more, but the following passage remains highly relevant at a time when the main forms of totalitarianism are Chinese Communism, the hybrid political-religious ideology Islam, and the hard-Leftism of the Democrat Party in the USA:No, retiring into private life was not an option. However far one retreated, everywhere one was confronted with the very thing one had been fleeing from. I discovered that the Nazi revolution had abolished the old distinction between politics and private life, and that it was quite impossible to treat it merely as a political event. It took place not only in the sphere of politics but also in each individual private life; it seeped through the walls like a poison gas. If you wanted to evade the gas there was only one option: to remove yourself physically -- emigration, Emigration: that meant saying goodbye to the country of one s birth, language, and education and severing all patriotic ties.In that summer of 1933 [the year Hitler seized power] I was prepared to take even this final step. (219)Haffner did emigrate, to England, then a free country. But where will we go when the whole world is under the yoke of the woke ? A review of Haffner s book.Addendum. The totalitarianism of the 20th century was hard: enforced by the threat of the gulag, etc. That of the 21st century, soft. See Rod Dreher, The Coming Social Credit System. Excerpt:You think it can’t happen here? As I show in the book, Google, Facebook, and other major corporations already collect tons of data from every one of us, based on how we use the Internet and our smartphones. If you have an Alexa, or any other “smart” device in your home, then whether you realize it or not, you have consented to allow all kinds of personal data to be hoovered up by the device and shared with a corporation. The technological capacity already exists in this country. The data are already being collected. And Covid has pushed the United States much farther down the road to becoming a cashless society. There is an obvious safety-related reason for this. But banks have a vested financial interest in weaning Americans off of cash:“Big Finance is the key driver moving us to a cashless society,” he said. “You’ll notice banks have been slowly closing branches and ATMs and they’re doing so in an effort to nudge us more toward their digital platforms. This saves them labor, it saves them a lot of real estate costs, and it improves their bottom line.”What happens when you can’t buy things at stores with cash? It’s already happening now. I’ve been to stores here in Baton Rouge that will only transact business with credit or debit cards, citing Covid, or the inability to make change because of a coin shortage. It’s understandable, but you should be well aware that the move to a cashless society makes each of us completely vulnerable to being shut out of the economy by fiat. What is it to be contingent? There are at least two nonequivalent definitions of contingency at work in philosophical discussions. I will call them the modal definition and the dependency definition.Modal Contingency. X is modally contingent =df x exists in some but not all metaphysically (broadly logically) possible worlds. Since possible worlds jargon is very confusing to many, I will also put the definition like this: X is modally contingent =df x is possibly nonexistent if existent and possibly existent if nonexistent. For example, I am modally contingent because I might not have existed: my nonexistence is metaphysically possible. Unicorns, on the other hand, are also modally contingent items because they are possibly existent despite their actual nonexistence. It take it that this is what Aquinas meant when he said that the contingent is what is possible to be and possible not to be. If x is contingent, then (possibly x is and possibly x is not). Don t confuse this with the contradictory, possibly (x is and x is not).Note that the contingent and the actual are not coextensive. Unicorns are contingent but not actual, and God and the number 9 are actual but not contingent. If you balk at the idea that unicorns are contingent, then I will ask you: Are they then necessary beings? Or impossible beings? Since they can t be either, then they must be contingent. Everything is either contingent or non-contingent, and everything non-contingent is either necessary or impossible.Note also that because unicorns are modally contingent but nonexistent, one cannot validly argue from their modal contingency to their having a cause or ground of their existence. They don t exist; so of course they have no cause or ground of their existence. Existential Dependency. Now for the dependency definition. X is dependently contingent =df there is some y such that (i) x is not identical to y; (ii) necessarily, if x exists, then y exists; (iii) y is in some sense the ground or source of x s existence. We need something like the third clause in the definiens for the following reason. Any two distinct necessary beings will satisfy the first two clauses. Let x be the property of being prime and y the number 9. The two items are distinct and it is necessarily the case that if being prime exists, then 9 exists. But we don t want to say that the the property is contingently dependent upon the number.The two definitions of contingency are not equivalent. What is modally contingent may or may not be dependently contingent. Bertrand Russell and others have held that the universe exists as a matter of brute fact. (Cf. his famous BBC debate with Fr. Copleston.) Thus it exists and is modally contingent, but does not depend on anything for its existence, and so is not dependently contingent, contingent on something. It is not a contradiction, or at least not an obvious contradiction, to maintain that the universe is modally contingent but not depend on anything distinct from itself. Contingent and contingent upon must not be confused. On the other hand, Aquinas held that there are two sorts of necessary beings, those that have their necessity from another and those that have their necessity in themselves. God, and God alone, has his necessity in himself, whereas Platonica have their necessity from God. That is to say that they derive their esse from God; they depend for their existence on God despite their modal necessity. If, per impossibile, God were not to exist, then the denizens of the Platonic menagerie would not exist either. It follows that Platonica are dependently contingent even though modally necessary.In sum, modal contingency does not straightaway entail existential dependence, and modal necessity does not straightaway entail existential independence.So it is not the case that, as some maintain, the contingent is always contingent on something else. Or at least that is not obviously the case: it needs arguing. One who maintains this absent the arguing ought to be suspected of confusing the two senses of contingency and of making things far too easy on himself. The following, therefore, is a bad argument as it stands: The universe is contingent; the contingent, by definition, is contingent on something else; ergo the universe is contingent on something else, and this all men call God. It is a bad argument even apart from the this all men call God part because the existence of the universe might well be a brute fact in which case it would be modally contingent but not dependent on anything distinct from it for its existence.What have I accomplished in this entry? Not much, but this much: I have disambiguated contingent and I have shown that a certain cosmological argument fails. In my book, A Paradigm Theory of Existence, I present an onto-cosmological argument that fares somewhat better. Mirabile dictu, the book is now available in paperback for a reasonable price! The bums at Kluwer never told me! One may gather from my surname that I am of Italian extraction. Indeed, that is the case in both paternal and maternal lines: my mother was born near Rome in a place called San Vito Romano, and my paternal grandfather near Verona in the wine region whence comes Valpollicella. Given these facts, some will refer to me as Italian-American.I myself, however, refer to myself as an American, and I reject the hyphenated phrase as a coinage born of confusion and contributing to division. Suppose we reflect on this for a moment. What does it mean to be an Italian-American as the phrase is currently used ? Does it imply dual citizenship? No. Does it imply being bilingual? No. Does it entail being bi-cultural? No again. As the phrase is currently used it does not imply any of these things. And the same goes for Polish-American and related coinages. My mother was both bilingual and bi-cultural, but I’m not. To refer to her as Italian-American makes some sense, but not to me. I am not Italian culturally, linguistically or by citizenship. I am Italian only by extraction.And that doesn’t make a difference, or at least should not make a difference to a rational person. Indeed, I identify myself as a rational being first and foremost, which implies nothing about ‘blood.’ The liberal-left emphasis on blood and ethnicity and origins and social class is dangerous and divisive. Suppose you come from Croatia. Is that something to be proud of? You had to be born somewhere of some set of parents. It wasn t your doing. It is an element of your facticity. Be proud of the accomplishments that individuate you, that make you an individual, as opposed to a member of a tribe. Celebrate your freedom, not your facticity.If you must celebrate diversity, celebrate a diversity of ideas and a diversity of individuals, not a diversity of races and ethnicities and groups. Celebrate individual thinking, not group-think. The Left in its perversity has it backwards. They emphasize the wrong sort of diversity while ignoring the right kind. They go to crazy lengths to promote the wrong kind while squelching diversity of thought and expression with their speech codes and political correctness.So I am an American. Note that that word does not pick out a language or a race; it picks out a set of ideas and values. Even before I am an American, I am animal metaphysicum and zoon logikon. Of course, I mean this to apply to everyone, especially those most in need of this message, namely blacks and Hispanics. For a black dude born in Philly to refer to himself as African-American borders on the absurd. Does he know Swahili? Is he culturally African? Does he enjoy dual citizenship?If he wants me to treat him as an individual, as a unique person with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, and to judge him by the content of his character rather than by the color of his skin, why does he identify himself with a group? Why does he try to secure advantages in virtue of this group membership? Is he so devoid of self-esteem and self-reliance that he cannot stand on his own two feet? Why does he need a Black caucus? Do Poles need a Polish caucus? Jim Crow is dead. There is no institutional racism. There may be a few racists out there, but they are few and far between except in the febrile imaginations of race-baiting and race-card dealing liberals. Man up and move forward. Don t blame others for your problems. That s the mark of a loser. Take responsibility. We honkies want you to do well. The better you do, the happier you will be and the less trouble you will cause.In Being and Nothingness, Sartre distinguishes between transcendence and facticity and identifies one form of bad faith as a person’s attempted identification of himself with an element of his facticity, such as race. But that is what the hyphenators and the Balkanizers and the identity-politicians and the race-baiters and the Marxist class warfare instigators want us to do: to identify ourselves in terms extraneous to our true being. Yet another reason never to vote for a liberal.It must also be said that the alt-Right identity-political counter to POC tribalism is just as bad, although it may be excusable as a pro tem tactic on some occasions. (An edited re-post from 15 May 2012.)I once heard a prominent conservative tell an ideological opponent that he was on the wrong side of history. But surely this is a phrase that no self-aware and self-consistent conservative should use. The phrase suggests that history is moving in a certain direction, toward various outcomes, and that this direction and those outcomes are somehow justified by the actual tendency of events. But how can the mere fact of a certain drift justify that drift? For example, we are moving in the United States, and not just here, towards more and more intrusive government, more and more socialism, less and less individual liberty. This has certainly been the trend from FDR on regardless of which party has been in power. Would a self-aware conservative want to say that the fact of this drift justifies it? I think not. Everyone today believes that such-and-such. It doesn t follow that such-and-such is true. Everyone now does such-and-such. It doesn t follow that such-and-such ought to be done. The direction of events is towards such-and-such. It doesn t follow that such-and-such is a good or valuable outcome. In each of these cases there is a logical mistake. One cannot validly infer truth from belief, ought from is, or values from facts.One who opposes the drift toward socialism, a drift that is accelerating under President Obama, is on the wrong side of history. But that is no objection unless one assumes that history s direction is the right direction. Now an Hegelian might believe that, one for whom all the real is rational and all the rational real. Marxists and progressives might believe it. But no conservative who understands conservatism can believe it.*The other night a conservative talk show host told a guest that she was on the wrong side of history in her support for same-sex marriage. My guess is that in a generation the same-sex marriage issue will be moot, the liberals having won. The liberals will have been on the right side of history. The right side of history, but wrong nonetheless. As I have said more than once, if you are a conservative don t talk like a liberal. Don t validate, by adopting, their question-begging phrases._______________*Memo to self: this entire problematic needs more careful thought. What about the theist who believes that God has a providential plan and that what happens happens in accordance with the divine will? And doesn t Christian eschatology in good measure drive the Hegelian and Marxist schemes?Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent. There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work. By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better. But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain t broke, don t fix it. Conservatives are not opposed to change. We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation? How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation? You love a girl and want to marry her. But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover: butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your currently uninstantiated idea of what a girl should be?The extension to love of country is straightforward. If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation. Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it. Can I assuage my feelings of guilt over a long past misdeed by telling myself that I was a different person then? Not very well. I was different all right, but not numerically.One could try to soften strict numerical identity of a person over time by adopting a bundle theory of diachronic personal identity. (Roughly, a person at a time is a bundle of mental data; a person over time is a bundle of these bundles.) But even if such a theory were otherwise in the clear it is difficult to square such a theory with what appears to be a non-negotiable datum: I and no one else did such-and-such 30, 40, 50 years ago; I am the source of that misdeed; I could have, and should have, done otherwise. We convict ourselves in memory knowing that the one who remembers is strictly the same as the one who did the deed.The mystery of the self! Try to absorb criticism without affect, attending only to its merits or demerits. Moral failure makes us humble and it casts serious doubt on the proposition that we can appreciably improve ourselves by our own efforts whether individual or collective. Taken to heart, moral failure points us beyond the secular sphere for the help we know we need. Whether there is anything beyond said sphere, and whether help is available there, are further questions.Two adult men, occupying lofty perches as law professors, argued this week that the voting age in the U.S. should be lowered to 16 because some high school survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting who want gun control are proving how important it is to include young people s voices in political debate. Read it all. There is really nothing so idiotic that it won t be embraced by some destructive leftist. And you are still a member of the Democrat Party?If breathing is a sufficient condition for voting, then cats and dogs should have the vote. So I should have three votes, my own and two cat proxies. The cat lady down the street, who is reputed to have nine cats, should be allowed ten votes. After all, cats and dogs and children and illegal aliens and felons have an interest in clean air and clean water and other things affected by political arrangements. So why shouldn t they have a vote? If I have to explain to you why, then you are too obtuse, morally or intellectually or both, to profit from any explanation. Do you remember that race-hustler Jesse Jackson? He wanted felons to have the vote. He wanted people who lack the sense to order their own lives to have a say in how a society, or rather our lives, should be ordered. But of course the destructive leftist is not interested in right ordering, but in any ordering that grants him and his ilk maximum power. So it is no surprise that leftists never miss an opportunity to assault our Constitutional rights.Vile, mendacious, and stupid. In that order. Leonard Bernstein conducts.20th century classical music with human meaning. My favorite part is the Andante movement, starting around 13:00.Commentary by Robert Reilly: Jean Sibelius Music of the Logos.Sibelius said, “There is music in the whole universe.” He believed in the “Music of the Spheres,” the classical Greek view that held that the mathematical relationships among the heavenly bodies are the same as those of music. The heavens are literally harmonious. He said, “I believe that there are musical notes and harmonies on all planets.” This included planet earth. Sibelius’s experience of the world was essentially musical.[. . .]Though Sibelius was not religious in a conventional sense, he was a deep believer. “The essence of man’s being,” he said, “is his striving after God.” He saw art as hieratic and composition as a vocation. In words that could hardly go more directly to the heart of the matter, he said, “It [composition] is brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that really has significance.” Joseph B. Soloveitchik s The Lonely Man of Faith (Doubleday 2006) is rich and stimulating and packed with insights. But there is a long footnote on p. 49 with which I heartily disagree. Here is part of it:The trouble with all rational demonstrations of the existence of God, with which the history of philosophy abounds, consists in their being exactly what they were meant to be by those who formulated them: abstract logical demonstrations divorced from the living primal experiences in which these demonstrations are rooted. For instance, the cosmic experience was transformed into a cosmological proof, the ontic experience into an ontological proof, et cetera. Instead of stating that the the most elementary existential awareness as a subjective I exist and an objective the world around me exists awareness is unsustainable as long as the the ultimate reality of God is not part of this experience, the theologians engaged in formal postulating and deducing in an experiential vacuum. Because of this they exposed themselves to Hume s and Kant s biting criticism that logical categories are applicable only within the limits of the human scientific experience. Does the loving bride in the embrace of her beloved ask for proof that he is alive and real? Must the prayerful soul clinging in passionate love ecstasy to her Beloved demonstrate that He exists? So asked Soren Kierkegaard sarcastically when told that Anselm of Canterbury, the father of the very abstract and complex ontological proof, spent many days in prayer and supplication that he be presented with rational evidence of the existence of God. A man like me has one foot in Jerusalem and the other in Athens. Soloveitchik and Kierkegaard, however, have both feet in Jerusalem. They just can t understand what drives the philosopher to seek a rational demonstration of the existence of God. Soloveitchik s analogy betrays him as a two-footed Hierosolymian. Obviously, the bride in the embrace of the beloved needs no proof of his reality. The bride s experience of the beloved is ongoing and coherent and repeatable ad libitum. If she leaves him for a while, she can come back and be assured that he is the same as the person she left. She can taste his kisses and enjoy his scent while seeing him and touching him and hearing him. He remains self-same as a unity in and through the manifold of sensory modes whereby he is presented to her. And in any given mode, he is a unity across a manifold. Shifting her position, she can see him from different angles with the visual noemata cohering in such a way as to present a self-same individual. What s more, her intercourse with his body fits coherently with her intercourse with his mind as mediated by his voice and gestures.I could go on, but point is plain. There is simply no room for any practical doubt as to the beloved s reality given the forceful, coherent, vivacious, and obtrusive character of the bride s experience of him. She is compelled to accept his reality. There is no room here for any doxastic voluntarism. The will does not play a role in her believing that he is real. There is no need for decision or faith or a leap of faith in her acceptance of his reality.Our experience of God is very different. It comes by fleeting glimpses and gleanings and intimations. The sensus divinitatis is weak and experienced only by some. The bite of conscience is not unambiguously of higher origin than the Freudian superego and social suggestion. Mystical experiences are few and far-between. Though unquestionable as to their occurrence, they are questionable as to their veridicality because of their fitful and fragmentary character. They are not validated in the ongoing way of ordinary sense perception. They don t integrate well with ordinary perceptual experiences. And so the truth of these mystical and religious experiences can and perhaps should be doubted. It is this fact that motivates philosophers to seek independent confirmation of the reality of the object of these experiences by the arguments that Soloveitchik and Co. dismiss.The claim above that the awareness expressed by I exist is unsustainable unless the awareness of God is part of the experience is simply false. That I exist is certain to me. But it is far from certain what the I is in its inner nature and what existence is and whether the I requires God as its ultimate support. The cogito is not an experience of God even if God exists and no cogito is possible without him. The same goes for the existence of the world. The existence of God is not co-given with the existence of the world. It is plain to the bride s senses that the beloved is real. It is not plain to our senses that nature is God s nature, that the cosmos is a divine artifact. That is why one cannot rely solely on the cosmic experience of nature as of a divine artifact, but must proceed cosmologically by inference from what is evident to what is non-evident.Soloveitchik is making the same kind of move that St. Paul makes in Romans 1: 18-20. My critique of that move here.A member of the distaff contingent advises. If men are too cocky, then perhaps the female equivalent is the answer rather than the cultivation of grievances:How did we create an entire class of highly privileged, mostly affluent young women who feel unsafe on campus, microaggressed at every turn, utterly unable to cope with the garden-variety misdemeanours of boys and men, who have been behaving badly since time began despite our many efforts (most quite successful) to civilize them?Well, you know the answer. The universities are hothouses for a grievance culture that sees racism, sexism and misogyny under every rug. Many of the faculty derive their livelihoods from it. These institutions have constructed increasingly elaborate codes of conduct and large administrative apparatuses to detect and uproot these evils, however subtle and invisible they may be to ordinary people. One positive upshot of these times that try our souls is that more and more of us will come to appreciate the hopelessness of this world and the people in it. Self-satisfied worldlings will find it difficult to retain their worldliness and self-satisfaction as civil order collapses and the tide of irrationality rises. Their naive faith in humanity will experience a serious rebuke. They will come to realize that we cannot extricate ourselves from our dire predicament by human, all-too-human, means. Some will despair unto anti-natalism or even suicide. But others will enter upon the Quest for a saving Reality beyond this passing scene of ignorance and evil. They will tread the paths of prayer and meditation. Feeling for the first time the pangs of spiritual hunger, they will turn in the right spirit to the great scriptures and the writings and practices of the sages. Their smug complacency will be a thing of the past. The following quotation from Rod Dreher receives the plenary MavPhil endorsement:. . . the “major threat of the far left” to us on the right — the major threat, not the only threat — is that in power, they will go pedal to the medal [metal] on a soft totalitarian “social justice” regime that would punish dissenters by costing them their livelihoods, and ruining their churches and other institutions. The major threat is the empowerment of ideologues who believe that all white people are racist, by virtue of their being white, and that the state should intervene to arrange society to suppress those disfavored by the left (whites, non-feminists, religious traditionalists, social conservatives, etc). The major threat is that they wish to erase American history and foundational principles of our constitutional order. The major threat is that the state will use its power to force parents to allow their minor children to take cross-sex hormones, and will seize those children if they don’t. The major threat is that the left in power through professional associations (law, medical, and so forth) will make it impossible for dissenters from the social justice credo to earn a living. The major threat is that violent social justice mobs will overrun cities and even suburbs, demanding that everyone assent to their ideology, or be looted or burned out. The major threat is that the left is propagandizing the young to despise their religion, their family, their country, their history, and themselves.In sum: The major threat is that the state, aligned with powerful US-based global corporations, an ideologized mass media, and universities — basically, all the elites in the ruling class, distributed throughout institutions — will accelerate its current evolutionary path towards a coordinated totalizing system that will seek to crush any dissent or opposition to it.This is why sane and decent Americans absolutely must vote for Donald J. Trump. Dreher doesn t draw this conclusion due to his irrational Trump hatred, but indications are that he too will vote for Trump come November.Addendum (9/7). Dr. Vito Caiati comments:Thank you for posting that long quotation from Rod Dreher, which well sums up the principal threat of the social, cultural, and intellectual threat of the Left. Today, Malcolm Pollack calls attention to the coming post-election mayhem that the Left will unleash given a Trump victory in November He links to Michael Anton s alarming essay on the form this coup will take (https://americanmind.org/essays/the-coming-coup/). Anton may well be right, and if so, the threat that we are facing goes far beyond that of the soft-totalitarianism so often discussed by Dreher. Very dark times have arrived if even a fraction of Anton s prognostication occurs. I am increasingly convinced that this federal republic of ours, the product of early capitalist and pre-capitalist social forces, that is, of a particular historical conjuncture in the history of early modern Europe and its colonial offshoots, is at odds with the underlying interests of contemporary corporate capital,whose ruling class and the myriad of minions who either serve it directly or are sustained and tolerated by it--all anti-national, globalist, technocratic, anti-democratic, and anti-(classical) liberal to one degree of another--and that they are determined to sweep it away. The Left today is bizarrely made up of the most disparate and far-flung social elements, from the anarchist or pseudo-Marxist Antifa shock troops in the streets; the apparatchiks of the federal, state, and local governments; the swarms of ill-educated intellectuals in and out of the universities; the leftist heretical or cowed Christian leaders of the Catholic and other churches; and of course the hacks of the media and the culture industries. Whether this coalition, wielded together only partially by ideology, can withstand the inevitable leftward track that would come with full power is unlikely, but in the meantime it will have reduced what remains of the Old Republic and its traditions to ruins. PS. In my quick list of the Left s disparate elements, I forgot to include the significant portion of very rich corporate elite, the core of the ruling class, which have become the key funders and advocates of its ideology and policies, whether through conviction or convenience. Here, one can speak of a strange compromesso storico, one based on continued corporate dominance (for example, silence on real economic and social problems), and hence the interests of the ruling class, in return for the advancement of the tribalist, racist, anti-American, anti-Western ideology and policies of the Left. This is not the first time that capitalists and corporate elites have coalesced with anti-democratic and anti-liberal political formations; one only has to consider the accommodations of German big capital with the Nazi regime or that of Japanese zaibatu with Japanese militarism. This time, however, the dance is with the Left. September already. A transitional month leading from hot August to glorious October, Kerouac month in the MavPhil secular liturgy. Dinah Washington, September in the RainRod Stewart, Maggie May. Wake up Maggie, I think I got something to say to you/It s late September and I really should be back at school. Carole King, It Might as Well Rain Until SeptemberDjango Reinhardt, September SongGeorge Shearing, September in the RainWalter Huston, September Song AddendumThis from a London reader:Thanks for linking to the George Shearing ‘September’. I had forgotten he grew up in London (in Battersea, just down the road from me). I love the Bird-like flights on the piano. Indeed I think he wrote ‘Lullaby of Birdland’. Another Londoner is Helen Shapiro who does a great version of ‘It might as well rain until September’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De0_zZ7qQDA. Great alto voice, never made it in the US as far as I know. There is an account of her conversion to Christianity here.I was first hipped to Shearing by Kerouac who referred to him in On the Road. I too love the Bird -like flights on the piano. The allusion is to Charley Bird Parker, also beloved of Kerouac. Helen Shapiro is new to me, thanks. She does a great job with the Carole King composition. Believe it or not, King s version is a demo. That s one hell of a demo. A YouTuber points out that Shapiro was not part of the 1964 British Invasion. I wonder why. The thesis under examination as expressed by Diogenes Allen: The world plus God is not more than God alone. God less the world is not less than God alone. Is this a defensible position? Let s consider both sides of the question.A. First, a crisp little argument against the view.Consider two possible scenarios. In the first, God alone exists. In the second, God exists and creates a world. On a view of God according to which he is libertarianly free, both scenarios are indeed possible. It is possible that God create and it is possible that he not create. There is no necessity that God create; his creating is free in the could have done otherwise sense. Clearly, the scenarios are different. But if God + World = God, then there is no difference between the two scenarios. For on that supposition, God alone exists in both scenarios. Therefore, it is not the case that God + World = God.To extend the argument:If God is Being itself, ipsum esse subsistens, Being in its plenitude and infinity, then how could there be anything else? If God is Being itself, and thus not a being among beings, how could there be any ontological room for anything else? How is creation so much as possible if God is Being itself? Isn t the Thomist line, as articulated by Diogenes Allen and Etienne Gilson (quoted previously) just obviously mistaken?After all, it is evident to the senses, even if not self-evident, that this material world of time and change exists: it is not nothing. Nor it is a dream or an illusion. Nor is it a world of Spinozistic modes, but a world of finite substances. I would also say that it is better known that this material world of multiple substances exists than that God exists. But suppose God does exist. Then both the world (creatures) and God exist. Is it not perfectly obvious that the totality of reality is greater with both God and creation than with God alone? Someone who maintains that God + world = God is maintaining in effect that there are no creatures at all.B. Now let s consider what could be said in favor of the view.Given the force of the arguments for the thesis that God is not a being among beings, arguments we cannot rehearse again here, it is reasonable to hold that God is Being itself. This leaves us with the task of attaching some tolerably clear meaning to God + world = God in the teeth of the argument contra. This cannot be done if there are no modes of Being. For if everything that exists exists in the same way (mode), and if G exists and W exists, and they are numerically distinct, then it is self-evident that there is a totality of existents and that this totality is greater if G and W both exist than if G alone exists.So we need to bring in modes of Being or existence. To motivate the modes-of-Being doctrine, consider an analogy. I am standing before a mirror looking at my image. How many men? One, not two. I m a man; my mirror image is not a man. An image, reflection, picture, drawing, sculpture of a man is not a man. To be of a man is not to be a man. My image is of a man (genitivus objectivus); it is not a man. And yet my mirror image is not nothing: it exists. I exist and my image exists. Both exist, but in different ways. I exist whether or not any mirror image of me exists; but no mirror image of me exists unless I exist. Note too that the mirror image is dependent on me for its existence at each moment of its existence, unlike a photograph or a sculpture. (Herein an analogy with creatio continuans.) It is also worth noting that there is a correspondence between the visual properties of the man and the visual properties displayed in the image. (This fact is what allows a dentist to do precision work on a tooth without looking at it directly.) Now we cannot say that the man and his image instantiate the same quidditative properties since, e.g., the man is bearded but his image is not. But we can say that the same visual properties instantiated by the man are displayed in the image. While the image is not bearded, it is an image of a bearded man. There are two different properties, but they are related: being bearded, being of something bearded, where the of is an objective genitive.Man and image both exist. Yet there is an important difference. I say it is a difference in mode of existence. The image, unlike the man, exists dependently or derivatively, and it depends existentially on the very original of which it is the image. Existential dependence is not a quidditative property. This mode of existence is no more a quidditative property than existence is.So I say we need a tripartite distinction: quiddity (nature, essence in the broad sense); general or quantificational existence, the existence expressed by the particular quantifier; mode of existence. Now it makes a certain amount of sense to say that Man + Mirror Image = Man. This could be explained by saying that there is no totality of independent existents that has both me and my mirror image in it. If we are adding and subtracting over a domain of independent existents, then it is true that Man + Image = Man.Accordingly, God + World = God could be explained by saying that there is no totality of a se existents that has both God and creatures in it. C. Aporetic ConclusionThe argument I gave in section A will strike many as compelling. But what I said in section B shows that it is not compelling. If one holds that God exists in a different way than creatures, then there is no totality in reality to which God and creatures all belong. One can of course say that something is (identically) God and that something is (identically) Socrates and that *Something is (identically) ____* has exactly the same sense, no matter what you throw into the gap: no matter what its mode of Being. But that implies only that there is a merely conceptual totality to which God and creatures all belong. In this merely excogitated conceptual totality, however, abstraction is made from the real existence of the things in question, and their different modes of Being.I grant that God and Socrates both exist in the quantificational sense of exists, a sense univocal across all existential sentences regardless of subject matter; but that is consistent with there being no commonality in reality between God and creatures to warrant talk of a totality in reality containing both.My interim conclusion is aporetic: both positions on our question are reasonably maintained. They cannot both be true, but they can both be reasonably upheld.I would be satisfied if Dale Tuggy and the supreme (miniscule) being theists would agree with me and other (majuscule) Being theists that it is a stand-off. Man up, and serve your time in the penal colony of the world. You ll die soon enough.I am wondering if you d like to tackle this question prompted by your latest post on the sensus divinitatis. Suppose a man indulges his sensual desires and passions (especially sexual passion) without restraint when he is young. Then, as he ages, he realizes the folly of his ways and retrains himself. He trains himself to avert his eyes from beautiful women or lusty images, instead of simply soaking up the sensory delight unimpeded. He becomes chaste. He takes every lustful thought captive and refrains from sexual behaviour or activity that is inordinate or otherwise immoral. My question is, can this man ever fully escape the pull and attraction of sexual passion having so fully indulged it in his youth? Thank you for asking such an easy question. The answer is No, based on my own experience, my observation of the lives of others, and wide reading in the wisdom literature of the East and West.Even though he is now chaste and is more or less self-restrained, he still feels the intense pull of sexual desire from time to time, even if he doesn t entertain it. Will he always feel this pull? Will he always feel that pang within when he sees a beautiful woman, no matter how many years he cultivates a disciplined and chaste soul? Or, is this simply an idiosyncratic matter that is unique to everyone, regardless of how they have lived in the past? Yes, he will always feel it, with the exception of a very few spiritually advanced souls, the existence of whom is hard to verify in a critical way that avoids hagiographic excess. The intensity of the allurement will diminish with time along with the means of acting upon it. As we work to abandon our vices, they do their part by abandoning us.But of course there are those fools who fail to make good use of their decline in vitality (the pride of life ) for spiritual advancement and try to keep their enslavement to the flesh going until death swallows them. Hugh Hefner is one example I have commented on. Jeffrey Epstein is another. My title above is from 1 John 2:16: For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. (KJV)Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .The New Testament verse condemns the Roman Catholic Church in its current corruption.The following two are probably my best entries on the topic:The Fall of John SearleAbortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained Our sense of the reality of the Unseen Order and the Unseen Other waxes in the measure that we detach our love from the objects of the senses and the pleasures they promise but never quite deliver. It wanes as we lose ourselves in the diaspora of the sensory manifold and its multiple temptations and dis-tractions. There is a sense in which we realize the mundus sensibilis by our spiritual attachment to it and de-realize it by our spiritual withdrawal from it.Traditional strictures against gluttony and lust have part of their origin here. The glutton and the lecher seek happiness where it cannot be found. It seems somehow fitting that Anthony Bourdain and Jeffrey Epstein should end their days in awful ways.Simone Weil, and her master, Plato, approve of this message.There is a Platonic problem of the reality of the external world. It is a problem not so much about the existence of sensible things as it is about their importance. But this is a large separate topic. Among the riddles of existence are the artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. What started G. E. Moore philosophizing was not so much the world as the puzzling things people such as F. H. Bradley said about it. That too is a way into philosophy, if an inauthentic one. The authentic philosopher gets his problems from the world, directly. The lazy do not work. The ambitious work hard -- but for their own enhancement and advancement. The sage works, but without ambition, with detachment from the fruits of action. Be satisfied with what you have, but not via the comparative thought, I have more than them. I am increasingly convinced that we on the Right are caught up in a set of contradictions of our own making, in that we wish to uphold, on the one hand, a particular political, social, and cultural inheritance and, on the other, an economic system, which in the past was largely supportive of or at least conducive to the former but which now, that is, in the form that it has attained in the last century, its principal solvent. The capitalism of which we often so glowingly speak on the Right is long-gone, along with the social classes and modes of life tied to it. How do we not fall into the trap of denouncing the latter while upholding the former? I see this as the hardest of puzzles to solve, and it may well mean that something is at work deep in the American social formation that deprives us on the Right of a firm footing in existing reality, which would explain why the Left has succeeded in conquering one political and cultural institution after another: The nature of contemporary capital, not merely its economic nature but the ways of life and cultural norms that arise from it, is inherently antagonistic to the nation state, classical liberal polities and rights, and traditional forms of civic society and belief systems. If this is so, then the Right has the unenviable task of opposing all forms of collectivist organization and control, public and private (that is, corporate), the latter of which is the inevitable form of corporate capitalist development today, while proposing some viable alternative, one that would inevitably result in a direct challenge to the dominance of the present ruling class. This is a very contradictory situation for the defenders of order, since we ordinarily do not seek to undermine the leading institutions of society. At best, we on the Right have so far only snipped at this dominance, speaking of outsourcing of manufacturing or corporate censorship, but all of these efforts leave the beast intact. What would a real assault from the Right look like, and how could it be mounted without giving up basic philosophical commitments to private property and initiative? For me, this is a real dilemma, but perhaps you disagree? The following may serve as an illustration of Vito s dilemma. Consider Amazon.com. I love it and its fabulously efficient services. I fund it to the tune of about $100 per month buying books and other merchandise. The company is a perfect example of how a man with an idea can make it big in America and enrich the lives of millions with his products. This is made possible by capitalism and the rule of law, not one or the other, but both in synergy. An enterprise like Amazon is unthinkable under socialism. The man in question, Jeff Bezos, is now the Croesus of the modern world. I have argued many times that there is nothing wrong with economic inequality as such. But money is translatable into power including the power to shape attitudes and work cultural changes. Bezos vast resources translate into formidable political and cultural clout. As you know, Bezos owns the left-leaning Washington Post.By buying from Amazon, I support the Left nolens volens and its censoring of conservative books, not all of course, but many that only a hard-core leftist would think of censoring. I also aid and abet the hollowing out of that buffer zone between the individual and the state apparatus that is called civil society. Amazon puts small book stores out of business which are not merely places of business but meeting places for citizens. But haven t I called repeatedly for the defunding of the Left? I have. Ought I not use Amazon? But that would be an impotent protest on my part. The company is a juggernaut that won t be stopped by any boycott or influenced in its corporate policies by any boycott.There is a tension between advanced corporate capitalism and conservative values. The question I would have for Dr. Caiati, however, would be whether advanced corporate capitalism is inherently or essentially antagonistic to conservative values as he maintains. (See bolded sentence above) Perhaps there is no necessity to this antagonism and that a sufficiently strong state headed by a nationalist such as DJT could rein in such corporate behemoths as Amazon. Today, August 28th, is the Feast of St. Augustine on the Catholic calendar. In honor of the Bishop of Hippo I pull a quotation from his magisterial City of God, Book XIX, Chapter 4:And I am at a loss to understand how the Stoic philosophers can presume to say that these are no ills, though at the same time they allow the wise man to commit suicide and pass out of this life if they become so grievous that he cannot or ought not to endure them. But such is the stupid pride of these men who fancy that the supreme good can be found in this life, and that they can become happy by their own resources, that their wise man, or at least the man whom they fancifully depict as such, is always happy, even though he become blind, deaf, dumb, mutilated, racked with pains, or suffer any conceivable calamity such as may compel him to make away with himself; and they are not ashamed to call the life that is beset with these evils happy. O happy life, which seeks the aid of death to end it? If it is happy, let the wise man remain in it; but if these ills drive him out of it, in what sense is it happy? Or how can they say that these are not evils which conquer the virtue of fortitude, and force it not only to yield, but so to rave that it in one breath calls life happy and recommends it to be given up? For who is so blind as not to see that if it were happy it would not be fled from? And if they say we should flee from it on account of the infirmities that beset it, why then do they not lower their pride and acknowledge that it is miserable? Companion posts: The Stoic Ideal and Christian Stoicism.I have been doing some reading and thinking, and there are a few things that I cannot quite get my head around. I was wondering whether you could help me, or point me in the direction of some work on the issue. My somewhat naive task has been to try and find the most foundational and basic pieces of knowledge that are required by any worldview. It seems to me there are at least two things that are in some sense foundational:(1) Something exists(2) There are correct and incorrect inferences(1) seems to follow from what is meant by a thing and what is meant by exists . However this is only the case, if there are correct and incorrect inferences. Therefore, (2) is in some sense prior to (1). Hopefully that makes sense. BV: It does indeed make sense. But I would approach the quest for secure foundations more radically. How do I know (with objective certainty) that something exists? I know this because I know that I exist. Something exists follows immediately from I exist. To say that one proposition follows from another is to say that the inference from the other to the one is correct. The correctness of the inference preserves not only the truth of the premise but also its objective certainty. I agree that your (2) is in some sense prior to (1); it is a presupposition of the inferential move from (0) I existto(1) Something exists.My problem arises when I consider that both (1) and (2) are not actually part of reality: both are sentences or linguistic expressions. BV: Here you have to be careful. Surely a sentence token is a part of reality, even if you restrict reality to the spatio-temporal. The truth that something exists is not the same as its linguistic expression via the visible string, Something exists. That same truth (true proposition, true thought) can also be expressed by a tokening of the German sentence Etwas existiert and in numerous other ways. This suffices to show that the proposition expressed is not the same as the material vehicle of its expression. And already in Plato there is the insight that, while one can see or hear a sentence token, the eyes and the ears are not the organs whereby one grasps the thought expressed by marks on paper or sounds in the air.So we need to make some distinctions: sentence type, sentence token, proposition/thought (what Frege calls der Gedanke). And this is just for starters.And should we restrict reality to the spatio-temporal-causal? Are not ideal/abstract objects also real? The sign 7 is not the same as the number 7. A numeral is not a number. I can see the numeral, but not the number. I can see seven cats, but not the (mathematical) set having precisely those cats as members. I can see the inscription 7 is prime but not the proposition expressed on an occasion of use by a person who produces a token of that linguistic type. The ideal/abstract objects just mentioned arguably belong to reality just as much as cats and rocks. Thus I have come to consider the role of language. The issue is that language is just a way of mapping reality, and as such is disconnected from it. This raises the question of what truth is, since on one hand we know that there are objective truths, yet truths are only expressed [only by] using language. My question is, then: how can the analysis of language be used to answer philosophical questions? I know that linguistic analysis plays a central role in analytic philosophy, but I cannot help by having [but have] doubts or suspicions that something is wrong. As you see, I cannot fully express what it is that causes me such a headache, but it stems from a suspicion with respect to the use and limits of language, and thus philosophical inquiry. BV: We do distinguish between WORDS and WORLD, between language and reality. But this facile distinction, reflected upon, sires a number of puzzles. My cat Max is black. So I write, Max is black. The proper name Max maps onto Max. These are obviously distinct: Max is monosyllabic, but no animal is monosyllabic. So far, so good. But what about the predicate black ? Does it have a referent in reality in the way that Max has a referent in reality? It is not obvious that it does. And if it does, what is the nature of this referent? If it doesn t, what work does the predicate do? And then there is the little word is, the copula in the sentence. Does it have a referent? Does it map onto something in reality the way Max does? And what might that be? The transcendental unity of apperception? Being? If you say nothing, then what work does the copula do?One can see from this how questionable is the claim that language is just a way of mapping reality . . . . We don t want to say that for each discrete term there is a one-to-one mapping to an extralinguistic item. That would be a mad-dog realism. (What do and and or and not refer to?) Nominalism is also problematic if you hold that only names refer extralinguistically. And you have really gone off the deep end if you hold that all reference is intralinguistic.Here is another ancient puzzle. A sentence is not a list. Max is black is not a mere list of its terms. There is such a list, but it cannot attract a truth-value. That is a philosopher s way of saying that a list cannot be either true or false. But a sentence in the indicative mood is either true or false. Therefore, a sentence in the indicative mood is not a list. Such a sentence has a peculiar unity that makes it apt to be either true or false. But how are we to understand that unity without igniting Bradley s regress?And then there is the question of the truth-bearer or truth-vehicle. You write above as if sentences qua linguistic expressions are truth-bearers. But that can t be right. How could physical marks on paper be either true or false? My question is, then: how can the analysis of language be used to answer philosophical questions?It is not clear what you are asking. You say that there are objective truths. That s right. Your problem seems to be that you do not see how this comports with the fact that truths are expressed only by using language. The source of your puzzlement may be your false assumption that sentence qua linguistic expressions are the primary vehicles of the truth-values.Combox open. St. Monica s feast day is today; her son s is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of unpacking the relevant passages.Kreeft in Is Stoke a Genuine Mystical Experience? lists fourteen features of mystical experience which comport well with my experience.Surfers take note.Related: Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism, and Wisdom HereI was misinformed. I was told that individual FB posts could be read by people without FB accounts if they were provided with the URL of the post. Well, click on the link and see what happens. You will see the post for a second or two, sans comments, and then you will be directed to a page that has a fabulous picture of some handsome dude taking a selfie before the Coliseum in Rome.I fully understand why people hate FB and refuse to sign up, and also why many are leaving for other social media sites.The assault on free speech by the Left and their party here in the USA, the Democrats, is becoming intolerable. A writer at Crisis Magazine opined that conservatives should boycott FB. That makes no sense to me. Better to speak the truth on FB in public posts until we get de-platformed...................................UPDATE 7:25 PM. I tried it again. Click on the link above. If you are quick on the trigger, you will be able to click on Comments. They will appear. You will then be sent to the dude on Roman holiday. You should be able to close that window. Now you can read the whole post with the comments. So I wasn t misinformed after all. My mistake. You can read FB posts even if you are not on FB if you have been provided with the URL. What you can t do is read the whole site.Alles klar? This from R. J. Stove, the son of atheist and neo-positivist David Stove:When the possibility of converting to Catholicism became a real one, it was the immensity of the whole package that daunted me, rather than specific teachings. I therefore spent little time agonizing over the Assumption of Mary, justification by works as well as faith, the reverencing of statues, and other such concepts that traditionally irk the non-Catholic mind.Rather, such anguish as I felt came from entirely the other direction. However dimly and inadequately, I had learnt enough Catholic history and Catholic dogma to know that either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Such studying burned the phrase By what authority? into my mind like acid. If the papacy was just an imposture, or an exercise in power mania, then how was doctrine to be transmitted from generation to generation? If the whole Catholic enchilada was a swindle, then why should its enemies have bestirred themselves to hate it so much? Why do they do so still?This reminds me of the famous trilemma popularized by C. S. Lewis: Jesus is either the Son of God, or he is a lunatic, or he is the devil. This trilemma is also sometimes put as a three-way choice among lord, lunatic, or liar. I quote Lewis and offer my critical remarks here. Just as I cannot accept the Lewis trilemma -- which is not strictly a trilemma inasmuch as not all three prongs are unacceptable -- I cannot accept the Stovian dilemma which strikes me as a text-book case of the informal fallacy of False Alternative. . . . either Catholicism was the greatest racket in human history, or it was what it said itself that it was. Why are these the only two alternatives? The Roman Catholic church claims to be the one, true, holy, catholic (universal), and apostolic church. One possibility is that the Roman church was all of these things before various linguistic, political, and theological tensions eventuated in the Great Schism of 1054 such that after that date the one, true, etc. church was the Orthodox church of the East. After all, both can and do trace their lineage back to Peter, the rock upon whom Christ founded his church. That is at least a possibility. If it is actual, then the present Roman church would be neither a racket nor what it claims to be. It would be a church with many excellences that unfortunately diverged from the authentic Christian tradition.Or it could be that that true church is not the Roman church but some Protestant denomination, or maybe no church is the true church: some are better than others, but none of the extant churches has cornered the market on all religiously relevant truth. Perhaps no temporal institution has the hot line to the divine.I get the impression that Stove has a burning desire to belong to a community of Christian believers, is attracted to the Roman church for a variety of reasons, some of them good, and then concocts an obviously worthless argument to lend a veneer of rationality to his choice.My point is a purely logical one. I am not taking sides in any theological controversy, not at the moment, leastways. What follows is from my first weblog, and is dated 4 May 2004. The photo was taken this morning by Dennis Murray, fellow aficionado of strenuous pursuits......................Time was, when running was my exercise, the daily bread of my cardiovascular system. But then the injuries came: chondromalacia patellae in both knees, shin splints, plantar fasciitis, you name it. So I took up the bike, and eventually the mountain bike. Now I run just once a week, on Sunday mornings, for about 75 minutes. The other days I either hike or ride the mountain bike, mostly the latter. I like to be on the road before sunrise, and catch old Sol as he rises over the magnificent and mysterious Superstition Mountains. There is nothing like greeting the sun as he greets the mountains, bathing them in the serene light of daybreak. It is an appropriate moment for gratitude, gratitude for another day on which to bang my head against the riddle of existence. Riding into the rising sun, I sometimes recall Nietzsche’s words from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “O you overrich star, what would you be except for those for whom you shine?”The beauty of the mountain bike is that you can get off the roads, away from cars and people, and onto trails and jeep tracks. I’d rather dodge rattlesnakes than cars any day. I have even been known to strike out cross-country across open desert. I’ve got kevlar-reinforced tires, with thick tubes, and a strip of plastic betwixt tube and tire as prophylaxis against cactus spines and other impregnators. No need for slime, and no flats for going on two years. My bike is an old Trek 930, a modest mid-range hard-tail – having been called a hard-ass, I suppose this is appropriate – with front-end suspension. As every Thoreauvian knows, one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to have fun and live well.Still, nothing in my experience beats running for the endorphin kick. ‘Endorphin’ is a contraction of ‘endogenous morphine.’ The adjective means originating from within, in this case, from within the brain. You know what morphine is. The brain of a body under athletic stress seems to produce these endorphins the existence of which, I understand, is more scientific postulation than verified fact. Endorphins manifest themselves at the level of consciousness in rather delightful sensations. When conditions are auspicious, and I am about 45-50 minutes into a run, I enter a phase wherein I apperceive myself as merely riding in my body as a pure spectator of a pure spectacle. I become a transcendental onlooker, and the world becomes George Santayana’s realm of essence. “I become a transparent eyeball: I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature.”) On this date in 1940, the long arm of Joseph Stalin finally reached Trotsky in exile in Mexico City when an agent of Stalin drove an ice axe into Trotsky s skull. He died the next day. The Left eats its own.Read the rest.The tragedy of Trotsky is that of a man of great theoretical and practical gifts who squandered his life pursuing a fata morgana. His was not the opium of the religionists but the opium of the intellectuals, to allude to a title of Raymond Aron s. The latter species of opium I call utopium.

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