Fides Quaerens Sanitatem

"He's a Catholic guy": A concise summary of some important problems between dating and Catholics.

2012-01-09T18:04:00.000-08:00

I would preface this note by fully and completely admitting that I am singularly not a living expression of the "average Catholic" who is in the dating realm. In the first place (and I say this solely insofar as it may bear upon this post), I am actively pursuing discernment of a possible religious vocation, though I keep an open mind at the moment with respect to dating; in the second, my dating history did not start with a hookup, as is becoming something of a phenomenon in Western societies (and, I should add, even if the preceding link to MSNBC is not convincing, one must really examine how often they know themselves or their friends to go on "proper" dates. This is a universal experience.) However, by the same token, I have no attachment to the school of thought that thinks these things are necessary or inevitable parts of the "dating life" of every young man. Frankly, I wouldn't call them dating.

Putting that aside, this post is not about the hook-up as such; it is about hypocrisy, and perhaps the most common hypocrisy one sees among college-age Catholics today. I am referring here to the policy of identifying as Catholic even as one indulges the hook-up culture. To begin with: 90 percent of Catholic adults apparently, according to one Harris Interactive poll, support coverage of birth control as a health care policy. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that polls are flexible, and it does not immediately imply that they would personally use contraception, the immediate problem this presents to an educated Catholic is that those 90 percent of Catholics have turned against all the Church teaching on the matter. This would manifest itself in several issues:

Canon Law 916 states that "anyone who is conscious of grave sin may not celebrate Mass or receive the Body of the Lord without previously having been to sacramental confession, unless there is a grave reason and there is no opportunity to confess; in this case the person is to remember the obligation to make an act of perfect contrition, which includes the resolve to go to confession as soon as possible." Now, it is, in fact, a grave sin to use contraception; it is likewise a sin to support it knowing that it is wrong, because to support a mortal sin deliberately is to become an accomplice. Now, there is a clarification to be made here; one may not know that it is a mortal sin. But even in that circumstance there are other factors in play. Was someone willfully ignorant of the Church's teaching? Was their ignorance due to negligence, fully willful or otherwise? If so, even the lack of knowledge does not excuse them, because like the person who chooses to get drunk knowing that they may be tempted to drive and thus risk killing someone, they choose ignorance knowing that they may choose it to their own undoing. If these are the case, then such ignorance does NOT excuse the sin; thus, true ignorance is a much rarer bird than anyone might think. And when it is not present, one is then deliberately supporting something that one knows may be a mortal sin, and one is as responsible as a drunk man is for a murder or other crime he may commit.

Now, I have friends who are not Catholic, and a lot of them. They are very dear to me, and often tell me how their life is going; part of that involves the romantic. And many of them do not see anything wrong with hook-ups, or if they do, they tolerate the ill for some perceived further good. Occasionally, too, they meet someone who claims to be better than the rest, or to be part of a group that advocates for things which, if followed, would at least make someone trustworthy. Such a group would be the Catholic Church...if, that is, anyone who claimed to be Catholic followed her teachings. They say that the proof is in the pudding, but when one ruins a pudding of a certain sort, they still expect it to taste something like a burnt version of the sort of pudding they call it or intend it to be. Dating a Catholic who turns out to be merely nominal, not doctrinal, is like biting into a pudding only to discover that it is, in fact, mud with the word "pudding" inscribed into it with a child's finger.

People wonder why the Church has a bad name, and there are plenty of reasons, not all of them their fault. But if you want to see the most common, look to the everyday interactions between "small-c catholics" who claim to be "Catholics" even as they plot their next bedroom excursion in a bar where no Catholic should be wasting their time. Look to their life in relationships where, like the Pharisees, they wear coats of outward gold and inward lead. Outwardly, they present a picture of being in a culture of life and of respect. They present themselves to others as "the sane ones." Indeed, these are both things real Catholics can do, authentically. But the second they are tested, they fall; and they are not like those who have never been truly tested, who have some excuse; they are those who play their Catholicism as a gambler plays his cards, as tactics for their real end, the end for which they sell themselves cheaply.

To the non-Catholics, I would make this entreaty, one I have been forced to make many times before. I am not a lawyer (though, above, I may cite some Canon Law), but it is part of being a Catholic that one learns from difficult experience to advocate for the innocent. And as I am discerning that vocation, that I should live my life in service and love of the Church, it is perhaps good practice that I should ask you now: please do not blame her. The Church says not to engage in the pre-marital sex that has become the norm; people do it anyways, and to their own undoing, and a great many of the modern relationship problems are out of sex being taken out of context. The Church says, at the same time and together with the prohibition of premarital sex, not to use contraception; a schizophrenic application of this by misguided nominal Catholics or simply those too caught in the heat of an avoidable moment to care leads to children one (often, but thankfully not always) has no intention of loving, and its ignorance perpetuates the hook-up culture; and then the Church gets blamed because of the sin she prohibits. This frequently creates an occasion for abortion, which the Church prohibits in no uncertain terms; either one gets one and suffers both spiritually and physically, or one does not and blames the Church for a life that ought to be loved, prompted by a sin that child did not commit. Where in this is the Church's fault? Let's look instead to what dating a Catholic SHOULD look like, in precisely these situations.

Confronted with the temptation to premarital sex, the good Catholic recognizes it for what it is: the desire for a sort of knowledge which can only be properly situated in the context of a perpetual commitment to the other person, whereby one's own good can only be regarded together with that of the other person, where selfishness is not just antithetical to the commitment but emotionally painful in itself, properly understood. If she and I are one, regarding us as two should echo as a lie in the depths of my soul; if she is torn from me, it will be precisely that, a violent tearing, against my will; if she is gone, then so also is part of me; and if this is all the case, even that suffering is a reminder of the God who deigned to first bless our love to point to Him. That is the commitment of marriage, partially; I do not have the words or the experience to express its fullness, though many authors have plunged into that mystery. Dante, notably, remained mute; his marriage was not of that sort, but an alliance of convenience made by others. His lack of discussion of marital love in the Comedy was a mark of respect, not of distaste; and in other respects, he gave quite a bit of tribute to it.

Confronted with an occasion of temptation with regard to contraception, assuming that one has already given in to the resolve towards premarital sex, we are first dealing with the decision already made towards that resolve, which may be changed even until the moment of the deed. But assuming it remains constant, the contraception itself is the removal even of the greatest good of that communication, the possibility of producing a child, the Trinitarian virtue of sexuality. Intimacy is also a great good, but it itself is directed towards the production of the imitation of the Trinity in that act! If that direction intentionally fails, the intimacy itself is a ruse, which dissolves with the rising sun, and leads itself to further hate, further perversion, and mutual despair such as that Dante notes between Paolo and Francesca, in the first Circle of the Inferno. Contraception destroys the aim of intimacy; and if the purpose of the thing is destroyed, so also is the thing thereafter. A hammer is of no use without something it can be used for; and if hammers could be happy, they would be happy as tools, in being used, that for which they were made, because that would be their perfection. We are more than hammers; but we contain parts which are ordered as hammers are, and it is their greatness that we can allow them to do well, and our sickness (literally) that we can prevent them. But whether we employ their greatness or their sickness, what we do with them is our greatness or our sickness; and if we use their greatness or sickness badly, we become sick in soul.

And supposing the contraception fails, or supposing that one does not compound the sin of premarital sex with that of contraception, and a child results. Children are hope. One may have done horrible things that led up to their coming to be, but no child is ever truly a "mistake"; it is only our act that is the mistake, and the child its happy consequence. I say this because in children, if we have done ill, they are our natural shot at redemption; the movie Road to Perdition, with Tom Hanks and Jude Law, is all about this. If we have done well, they are our chance at our image and glory. And supernaturally, they are opportunities to once again and anew serve the God whom we may have betrayed in accidentally choosing the act that made them (in the context of the premarital sin.) A good Catholic who has nevertheless made bad choices will here buck up, take responsibility, and help to raise the child; ideally, they could make the choice to marry for the sake of the child, so as to situate the child's life in the commitment of two loving people which the child by their natural dignity should have. And if the spouses cannot always love one another as those spouses who fully freely do (personally, I would be profoundly surprised if many people who marry "for love" have such an idealistic connection as they think), they can certainly love one another for the sake of the child, who they can love even when they cannot stand one another. To think to murder this child, to abort this life, would ever be a good decision is to ignore the sheer good a human life possesses; to betray the very principle of wonder; to stick a knife into our own humanity, for once upon a time that could have been us. That it was not was luck; abortion, in fact, is the attempt to condemn someone to death for the accidental misfortune of their being conceived under an unhappy moon. And even if one cannot wax poetical thus (it is not, in fact, difficult, at least if we are sane) one can recognize that at no point was the Church responsible for the misdeeds committed under a false flag.

There are other misdeeds, of course. Disrespect of women through the sex act itself is only the most common. Other things, too, are horrifyingly common: going to strip clubs, encouraging immodest behavior, and what have you. Chivalry is not just jousting; at its heart, it is the way of being a Catholic human being; it is the imitation of Christ in the service of Mary, and vice versa. It is no surprise, in fact, that Paul says both "Husbands, love your wives," and "Wives, obey your husbands"; the first is a matrimonial analogy to the way God (God the Father, God the Son Who is called Jesus Christ, God the Holy Spirit) loves His Church (of which Holy Church Mary is precisely the Icon, the Icon of redeemed humanity), and the second is the way in which the Church obeys God in love. Marriage is a cosmological picture of salvation, in which the beloved (the Church) and the lover (God) become one in the marriage-feast that is the Song of Songs. The Church herself teaches this. But is it not the strangest phenomenon that someone who claims to believe this (the Catholic you meet on the street) should act in a way that in every particular denies it? That is hypocrisy; and a small-c catholic is no more Catholic than a hypocritical Pharisee is a holy man.

When you date, my friends, if you meet a Catholic, make sure they live up to the name. It should not be a wild card, but a badge of quality; it should be a seal upon their heart which disposes them to the seal that is marriage. The sign and character of this seal is the virtue of virginity: that quality whereby someone lives as though their purity is something that is part of their nature.

It's almost Thanksgiving...so naturally, it's time to talk neutered patriotism!

2011-11-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

The "Finlandia Hymn", by Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, was written to be a moving, patriotic anthem for Finland, and the original lyrical setting (here given not to meter but in literal translation) is quite powerful in its frank joy:

O, Finland, behold, your day is dawning,
The threat of night has been banished away,
And the lark of morning in the brightness sings,
As though the very firmament would sing.
The powers of the night are vanquished by the morning light,
Your day is dawning, O land of birth.

O, rise, Finland, raise up high
Your head, wreathed with great memories.
O, rise, Finland, you showed to the world
That you drove away the slavery,
And that you did not bend under oppression,
Your day has come, O land of birth.

Here you have a dynamic, powerful, meaningful celebration of Finland's national identity, one well adaptable to her needs in triumph and suffering alike. That's what a national anthem does; it reminds the people of some nation, in particular form and style characteristic of the nation itself, of the good which that nation is. In suffering, it gives hope; in joy, it amplifies and redounds to the glory of the nation's common good. It is in this sense the finality of music which can only come to be in a polis; and the Church, as the ultimate polis which assures the good of every true polis, likewise encourages such anthems and even sings them from time to time, because the local Church is as local as the local populace, while as universal as the love of God.

Unfortunately, this ecclesiology is a bit too involved for the modern Christian. Modern Christianity is thoroughly occupied (even obsessed!) with the private good within the spiritual life. Politicians are not considered to be people whose religious views are of any concern; thus the Church is separated from politics. Communities are seen as mere accidental collections of similar individuals, or clubs; thus parish life ceases to reflect the essential union of the body of Christ, but rather reflects baptism into the political establishment. The common good is either viewed as that which absorbs the private good, as in the socialist view of "The People", irrespective of any individuality, or that which is a non-existent fiction, as in the consumerist notion that "self-fulfillment" is something that must come at expense to others and can be procured in an exclusive manner. Person is separated from community, and since personhood is fundamentally matured in relationality, the person is separated from him- or herself. One loses the reality of what it is to be human. Community, moreover, is separated from that which the community is for "commonly"; thus one cannot speak about the ultimate end of things.

Alas! If you wish to see where this castrated identity reflects itself (and often in music probably designed more for castrati) look to the music written by modern composers of liturgical music! Or, if they do not write the music, they are not content; they also look to ruin the hymns that are approved by imposing ridiculous lyrics.

I feel sad, because the Finlandia hymn is a lovely piece of music, and can be very powerful when sung by tenors, but so many of the lyrical settings to it are such nonsense. How, realistically, can one picture a bunch of young patriotic men singing this drivel (thank you, United Methodists):

"This is my song, oh God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, thou God of all the nations;
a song of peace for their land and for mine."

I mean, okay, I get it, you want to fight prejudice, and the Church shares a common end. But if you think I'm going to say that, say, Detroit has anything as beautiful as the canyon that houses my alma mater, by God, I will FIGHT you. And there is no way in hell that I am going to say that the notoriously gray skies in Detroit are "blue as mine." My skies are pretty darned blue. And pretty much anywhere has bluer skies than Detroit. And if I were IN Detroit, patriotism would demand that I take ownership of those gray skies as gray, and stand for them unless it were actually vicious. Patriotism is not about affirmation of the good generally; it is about the active profession of the common possession of the good one has as a member of the polis, and the healthy joy and zeal one must have from defending its reputation.

The Methodists, far from being finished with their rejection of the common good, have developed an additional verse to lampshade it:

When nations rage, and fears erupt coercive,
The drumbeats sound, invoking pious cause.
My neighbors rise, their stalwart hearts they offer,
The gavels drop, suspending rights and laws.
While others wield their swords with blind devotion;
For peace I'll stand, my true and steadfast cause.

Note the picture we have here. Nations? Angry. Fears? Omnipresent. Pious cause (presumably OF said nations and fears)? Causes war. Neighbors? Involved in said war voluntarily. Justice? Completely gone. Literally everyone but the one singing? "Wielding swords with blind devotion." What do we get from this? Oh, right; it is never just to engage in war, the people who do so do so out of "blind devotion" (something which simply makes no sense in light of the real character of the wars we see every day) and the singer resolves to stay home and presumably smoke weed in protest. Or if not that, perhaps they protest that they are the only sane ones, and that all who fight are deluded. Now, I don't know about them, but I would be hesitant to make such a claim, because it requires a complete breakdown of the common good and a near total pride on the part of literally ninety percent of the populace. Yet this is a normative verse "for difficult times." I suspect that what this verse really is is the final exultation of the private good over the common, sung in a masturbatory (that is, designed for the excitation of the passions based on a reflexive action, potentially performed in company but not comunally, that only goes out for the purpose of returning into oneself) ritual of pride, designed to convince the desperate singer that what is really required of them is anything but the difficulty of acknowledging that they may be the cause of some of the evils about which they complain. Whatever the case, it fits the "everyone is equal and equally right or wrong" attitude of much of the modern United Methodist Church. I know of a few exceptions, but I also know of quite a few people who prove my point. Protestant congregations, even "United" ones, tend to vary in character.

The Unitarian Universalist version MUST be some kind of cruel joke:

"We would be one as now we join in singing,
Our hymn of love, to pledge ourselves anew.
To that high cause of greater understanding
Of who we are, and what in us is true.
We would be one in living for each other,
to show to all a new community."

Ladies and gentlemen, Unitarianism! It's not surprising that a unitary view of the Trinity involves a denial of the notion of the common good which reduces back to a stupid and dissonant over-emphasis on the individual. I mean, to say that this is masturbatory is just a factual observation, but what's really funny is that it doesn't even end on a rhyme (much like Unitarianism, which can not reach closure on anything; as a result, they identify themselves by a lack of closure.) And they aren't even able to pledge to love "who we are" and "what in us is true"; that requires a bit of cojones which Nietzche would at least consider worthy of comment. But since they don't know what it is they fancy, they have to commit themselves to loving the "cause" of (potential) "greater understanding"; it cannot be said that they HAVE said understanding without offending anyone. This is also the direction of lots of Catholic liturgical music, in which the notion of patriotism is something which simply passes along unnoticed, far from the parish. I sometimes suspect that the field of liturgical music is dominated by folks who have no interest in sports, nor can recognize why people in fact would have such an interest.

The Calvinists are starting to get warmer, in that Calvinism is all about the dependence of the individual upon something that is not oneself:

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew,
He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me;
it was not I that found, O Savior true,
no, I was found, was found of thee.
It was not I that found, O Savior true;
no, I was found, was found of thee.

But because Calvinists focus so much on the individual in predestination, and not upon the Church as an institution of the Mystical Body of Christ, it is still private. In a sense, it provides an incomplete picture of the common good, not a missing one; the private good of the soul is fulfilled by the common good that is God acting as principle of its pilgrimage. Very Dantesque or Augustinian. And yet, again, it is missing something Dante did see, namely, the role that the participating soul does have in seeking God, according to its servant's merit. One needn't thus set the primary cause of God's love against the secondary cause of the servant participating in that love freely. And that participation is not immediately the participation of the one saved, but rather mediately, through the ministry of the Church; otherwise the Sacraments, the visible and ordinary mode of salvation, would be pointless. Since this is in fact being used as liturgical music, that is a horrifying omission; particularly because it is for the Sacraments which we must pre-eminently give thanks! So out goes the Calvinist verse.

Now, the Salvation Army also has their own verse. (One might gather it is quite the popular tune.) Its verse is quite different from the others:

Thou art the way, none other dare I follow...
Thou art the truth, and thou hast made me free.
Thou art the life, the hope of my tomorrow
Thou art the Christ who died for me.
This is my creed, that 'mid Earth's sin and sorrow
My life may guide men unto thee.

Initially, this is quite nice. A repeated affirmation of the necessity of the Incarnation; an affirmation of God's theological perfection as the Way, the Truth, and the Life; a degree of thanksgiving, because "he has made me free"; and finally a profession of love of God which prompts the desire to serve others in bringing them to Him. Pleasant, good as far as it goes, and even communal at the end, in the sense of reminding someone of their duties. The problem is that it is no longer an anthem. It is, perhaps, an encomium and a personal statement of thanksgiving, which is quite beautiful; but it is not communal in principle, only in end. If I say to myself that I should better serve the common good, that can be an act either private or common. I might say it as a public act (to provide an example for others and to myself) or as a private one (for my own sake.) Anthems are not ever thus ambiguous. They do not look to one's own good, as devotional hymns do, although these are quite laudable in their own setting. They do not look directly to the duty of others as such, as hymns which inspire to service do; although these are also highly laudable. Rather, they look to the good of a polis. They are the song of a community, as a community. Each person has something to give in their experience thereof; picture a veteran who cries as he or she salutes the flag, inspired by their long and painful service to his country; or a mother, who weeps at the children she has lost; or a child, awestruck by the service of their parents. (As it is a fact that women now serve in the military, I make a point of using "or she" here, because I want to honor not just their service indefinitely but also their individual service.)

The Salvation Army thus does not really get the point, although the point they see is good. An anthem has a place. And I would like Finlandia to maintain its dignity of purpose even in translation. There are a few other translations:

We have the idyllic but generic and thus indeterminately patriotic "Cedar Grace":

The pleasant trees and silver, ripling waters,
the flow'rs and clouds, the un-dimmed, sunlit sky
and bread by thee, our gracious Father, given,
We thankful take of thy so rich supply.
And bread by thee, our gracious Father, given,
We thankful take from thy so rich supply.

and while the trees might indeed be "pleasant", I have yet to locate "silver" waters while at the same time under an "undimmed, sunlit" and presumably cloudless sky; fortunately, the last part is at least an act of communal thanksgiving.

We have (at last, something really dignified!) the beautiful but still private "Be Still, My Soul":

Be still, my soul, the Lord is on thy side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain.
Leave to thy God to order and provide;
In every change He, faithful, will remain.
Be still, my soul, thy best, thy heavenly friend
Through thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

But none of these are anthems! Where, outside Finland, would we find an anthem lyric suited to this? (It is not actually the official national anthem of Finland.) After looking a long time, one finally locates it in...

WALES?!

Well, I'll be.

Gweddi Dros Gymru, in translation:

For Wales our land, our Father hear our prayer.
The blessed vineyard entrusted to our care.
With mighty shield, guard us, defend our faith.
Make Wales a haven for truth and loyalty.
For the sake of the Son who died upon the cross,
create a land worthy of His name.
O blessed day when holy breezes blow across withered acres, breathing life again.
Heavenly raindrops fall on arid desert, turning it into a sacred garden where young saplings thrive.

Wales?!

Well! Okay, then! We have the common good: "Wales our land", under God our Father, seeking the political good of being a haven for truth and loyalty as a nation, directly connected to the Incarnation, and concluding in an aesthetic contemplation of the resurrection. Sounds to me like an anthem! Of course, because the Finnish people claimed the hymn, maybe this is all just an exercise in criticism. But hey! I guess this makes Wales the best at appropriating other people's hymns.

Wales. Wow.

“We Need To Go Deeper”: A Pragmatic Exploration of Language and the Philosopher

2011-06-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

Philosophy, to paraphrase Finley Peter Dunne, ain't beanbag. It is not easy stuff. To be a philosopher is, if not to plunge into the deepest secrets of the universe, at the very least to plunge to the heart of how we know the stuff of that universe and talk about it. This is a subject of, not specialized, but universal interest; and yet it is understood by many that philosophy is for philosophy majors in their ivory towers. This has been counteracted in one direction by those who seek to make all philosophy political, in the same way that a current suffering is counteracted by suicide; and as such intellectual copping-out is not terribly appealing, I do not think it wise to take such a route. Moreover, such a route, not grounded as it really ought to be in anything unchanging and teleological about the nature of human beings, inevitably ends in a sort of self-consuming hipsterism. A good example of this is the history of colonialist and post-colonialist thought: each epochal writer accuses the epochal prior of some prejudice left unexamined, and in doing so devours their own tail, until there is nothing left upon which to build, because the act of proposing an opposition inherent in every system whatsoever is fundamentally destructive as divisive in method. One must take with one hand what one gives with the other.

But to reflect on politics and philosophy is not the purpose of this particular offering. Rather, inspired by a fantastic discussion with a dear friend of mine, I want to reflect on a rhetorical point in the study and exposition of philosophy, the ever-present rhetorical role of language. There have been two distinct movements in the field of philosophy, the analytic and the synthetic. Each has presented us with a remarkable set of conclusions, conclusions which proceed from such differing principles as to make them the most difficult and unlikely of bedfellows. If the comparison may be allowed, the synthetic is rather like a child who has been raised by a set of conservative and strongly religious parents, and the analytic has been raised by a set of free-love supporters living in an anarcho-syndicalist commune. They have met in the university setting, where they were both given a copy of Plato's Complete Works and told to have at it. To expect any agreement on anything but the most general points over a short time would, perhaps, be folly, given their differing backgrounds. The synthetic study arose out of the stricter adherence to the classical and medieval tradition; the analytic, out of a re-examining of the very early classical tradition alongside a rejection of vast parts of the medieval tradition. With the two traditions came vastly different understandings of method.

Prelude: The Situation of Analytic Philosophy and its Discontents

(N.B.: At the time of writing this, I forgot to add a note that when I am speaking of Analytic Philosophy here, I mean it broadly, including what results (post-colonialism, etc) from what is now properly known as Analytic thought, Frege and Russell and the like. While post-colonialism is not Analytic in the sense that Frege and Russell are, in the sense of logically analyzed propositions, it is analytic in the sense of the breaking-down of the thing into perceived dichotomies.)

If much ink has been spilt about different movements in philosophy, most of that ink has been about the Cartesian shift from medieval to modern thought. Whereas the medievals taught that the foundation of our knowledge of things was the trusted if cautious infallibility of the senses, from which they deduced about other things, about themselves, and about God, Descartes placed the source of human knowledge in vastly separate deductions. Firstly, in his clear and distinct perception that he, a being that thinks, the reality of which being is deduced from its thought and therefore by his mathematicism a thinking being, existed, and secondly, in the confidence derived from his own admitted perfections as a thinker that God exists and is good, and thus not a deceiver in giving him sense impressions. While there have been varying opinions about the usefulness of this split in both traditions, these by and large characterize the more general principle that in the modern tradition, the thinker moves from thought to world, and in the classical tradition, the thinker moves from world to thought.

I am not really a fan of the analytic method, myself, as it is something holding with itself a large amount of philosophical baggage it can not easily escape and which tends to pollute the direction it takes. But it is undeniable even to honest proponents of the synthetic Aristotelian-Thomistic direction that the other tradition has made invaluable contributions “from the other direction” to the synthetic oeuvre, in such places as the continued exposition of the concept of “person” (as Robert Spaemann in his “Persons: The Difference Between 'Someone' and 'Something'” elegantly and powerfully demonstrates) and in the understanding of Art, as Jacques Maritain repeatedly shows in all his work. It is nevertheless incredibly difficult to penetrate as Spaemann and Maritain have into most analytic work from a synthetic or even a literary perspective. Picture any time one attempts to read Kant to see how this plays out in the rhetorical expression of modernity; or more directly, Hegel, in the transition to continental thought. This is not always the case, as one sees from existential authors like Kierkegaard or Sartre; or in Nietzsche for a singularly defiant exception to the rule concerning philosophy and rhetoric, as in his work philosophy becomes rhetoric. But it has become so institutionally accepted that to write impenetrably is to be intelligent that I would propose that the more obtrusive movement in writing has become accepted, and one need look no further than to authors like Judith Butler. Whether this is as everyone would like it is immaterial, because it has become what everyone accepts. But wherefore, indeed, must we accept it?

The synthetic writers, while not exempt from the charge of pedanticism (which, while many times having the same motivation, is not the same charge laid out here against Butler and the like) are nevertheless justified in saying that finer distinctions require more precise words and qualifiers. It is not enough to say that matter is “what underlies change” if one is explaining the concept; one must move to more abstract conceptions like “philosophically indeterminate” and “possibility of being” to make the concept more determined in the mind of the philosophical audience. And when one hits metaphysics it is very easy to begin to drown in Latin. I am still, after several years of study, left scratching my head when one uses the term “determinatio ad unum”, which I am assured is a fairly simple concept but for all that is never explained to me. And to say that my understanding of esse and essentia was tenuous for a vast part of my metaphysical education would be an understatement. (Thank you, Senior Philosophy class, for your unending patience. May you be rewarded with much cattle.) But such complexities are nevertheless usually resolved by a most patient teacher whittling out the history of the term in the mind of the student, then explaining the application in particular cases, usually through several analogies.

Enter Derrida. Derrida is not synthetic. Derrida said a couple of good things which could comprise a very short list, but in the process did one very bad thing. Derrida used words that are not words, and said that this is how one should “do” philosophy. This is not to say that Derrida made up words. Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger...all these people made up words, both in making new ones and in making new meanings for old ones, for better or for worse. Many of these words have become mainstays of the philosophical vocabulary, such as phenomenon and noumenon, form and matter, essence and existence (or the technical meaning of esse, for Aquinas.) I am not complaining about this, in principle. What Derrida did was take a perfectly valid word, 'difference', change the 'ence' to 'ance', making it differance, and proceed to give it a “meaning” so metaphysically convoluted that one is actually not allowed to convey an idea in a manner other than affective or emotional by means of the word. Let us say that I, after asking that teacher what esse and essentia really are, and getting a good explanation, decide to hazard another question and ask the learned professor what differance means. One usually gets one of two answers: either it is a word “without a determinate meaning”, as though it is some kind of linguistic prime matter, or one is subjected to a ten minute lecture on postmodernism which concludes with the first answer. It is a word with no definition, say supporters of Derrida, because it is the difference between things having definition. Now, I realize that this sounds nice, but to one who understands the meanings of “difference”, “between”, “things”, “having”, and “definition”, this can only result in a mental absurdity for synthetic thinkers. The Derrida supporter only looks at the one thus confused with a self-righteous smirk and says “Ha! See, o pathetic Scholastic, how I have revealed the prison of your logocentrism!”

I am not a fan of this move; it is a purely rhetorical political move, not a philosophical one. As luck would have it, my friend from above with whom I had the conversation is a damned extraordinary teacher who, though coming from the same Aristotelian nurture from which I have received, nevertheless has been more fully educated in the history of the movement from modern, to poststructuralist, to colonial, to post-colonial, to Anglophone philosophy; and who as a good friend of mine and a forerunner in that education has been a great help in all sorts of educational need. He was kind enough to explain the benefits of Derrida's move, and the assorted language-tricks which have punctuated that tradition, in an explanation more penetrable than most postmodern scholars have seen fit to couch their field. And while I can appreciate the, so to speak, accidental benefits of that tradition, I am still of the opinion, as someone interested in knowledge and not just political manipulation of the mind, that such postmodern “thought” is ultimately pure sophistry, a linguistic self-pleasuring and not a real academic discipline.

This is a claim that inspires much ire. “But Tsunami, you closed-minded, logocentric blithering idiot,” (they say, because post-modern poststructuralist argument has as its first line of defense the accusation of the one who claims to dislike it that it is the fault of the one disliking) “don't you see how powerful a tool poststructuralist thought has been in political liberation, women's rights, pastoral ministry, assessment of prejudice and generally societal harmony?” The answer is that I do see how it is “useful”, and that's part of the reason why I dislike it so. It is not honest. Real postmodernism, if taken honestly and not simply used to service the views of every single pedestrian that walks past the street-corner, is an amoral tool, devoted to destroying perceived oppositions for no purpose other than that of the one using the analysis. Based on the thought of Saussure, Derrida equates the “conventional” character of language with the “artificial” character of language; and if artificial, it seems, then words are a fact about language and not the world.

This is not true, though, because the reasoning does not follow. Conventional does not equal artificial in every respect, in the first place; it only implies an artificiality in which sound is chosen to mean which thing. It is conventional that we call a container which holds flowers and mud a flowerpot; it is artificial that we choose that sound; but it is not artificial, but natural that we require a word for this flowerpot. And indeed, there is a certain art in wordcraft, as Shakespeare exemplifies and Pratchett notes in The Wee Free Men. (The word “susurrus” is a delightful example of a word that sounds like what it means, a “rustling.”) The compelling artistic necessity, the urge to find the right word for this phenomenon, constitutes a recognition of fittingness, something which seems foreign to Cartesian and post-Cartesian thought. At a certain point, deconstruction of linguistics hits the bedrock of reality. And the problem with this issue is that most deconstructionists do not admit this; objective reality is a problem for them, because it is part of the old scaffolding which poststructuralism aimed to destroy, the notion of one reality or one truth. I used the word “natural” above to describe the point of this collision; it is precisely this notion of nature which poststructuralists deny as a sort of Ur-structure.

Mind, you don't see that many dyed-in-the-wool poststructuralists anymore, for this reason. Instead you see their politically reactionary nephews, the postcolonialists (although they are on the way out too.) Apply the rules of poststructural linguistics to politics and you get colonialism, when you analyze out the prejudice of the conqueror; apply them again and you get postcolonialism, the “liberation of the voice of the conquered.” This I see all the time, and it has all the problems of poststructuralism, plus the political mistakes of those who study analytical linguistics instead of economics. In any case, poststructuralism will get little more out of me, for the simple fact that it is not philosophy and does not deserve commentary from an actual reputable philosophy department. It is a form of Rhetoric, which is why my friend who is so well acquainted with it is quite right to study it, it is his chosen field. But it is not really a seeking-after-Wisdom, which is what philosophy is; and it is the culmination of a movement which, while accidentally being useful at times, eventually devolves into madness and the abyss. A sign of this is that literally anyone can be considered a conqueror or a conquered, and there is nothing to say why the conquered should be given a voice in some situation that should be regarded as equal to the conqueror. If one wishes an example: a serial killer who murders soap opera stars to fight consumerism out of some insanity is in some sense oppressed by consumerist culture; should they be given a voice over that of the soap opera star who has not been systematically murdering people? Any situation involving the oppressor and the oppressed may undergo a relativistic shift.

And this is indicated by the problem it introduces, the key problem for the author: the madness evinces itself in the way such “philosophers” write. Judith Butler, recently the current “thing” in the postcolonial movement, has received an award for being the worst writer in academia, for this ninety word (!) sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

(Butler, Judith. “Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time,” Diacritics 27 (Spring 1997): 13–15.)

To quote Tom Lehrer in “Lobachevsky”: “This, I know from nothing!” And indeed, who could? For, not content with giving her undergraduate students the run-on sentence of the century, Prof. Butler is a great fan of the Derrida-reminiscent fabrication of words. “Hegemony”, formerly a word one might associate with Chinese dynasties, has been adapted by Butler to mean, presumably, some sort of ideological prejudice looming in the background of politics undetected. Mind, one couldn't get that from this sentence. One could not get anything from this sentence. This sentence, in its fashionably-eccentric character and lack of willingness to give up its meaning to even the persistent reader, is like the love-child of Ebenezer Scrooge and Lady Gaga. D.G. Myers wrote an excellent examination of this phenomenon of purposefully horrific writing and the wake it generated, which included an incredibly obtuse defense of bad writing as such by Butler herself. Remarkable indeed, because now we have seen something which might be a travesty: a defense of writing which has no rhetorical efficacy in itself, written by a sitting professor of Rhetoric (!) at UC Berkeley!

When I read that sentence, I long for the days when the philosophers I disagreed with (or, for that matter, those whom I agreed with) knew how to write. This is not without parallel to my longing for the days when the most vocal atheists knew how to think and argue, unlike the insufferable Prof. Dawkins. But then I remember who the greatest author, rhetorically, in that series was, who had a golden pen to seduce and corrupt, and I remember it to have been the same man who took all analytic philosophy before him or since to task. If analytic philosophy is a history, Nietzsche is the prophet of its eschaton. I will not go into too much detail, but this is a thought: Nietzsche thought that those who would propose something and not hold themselves to it simply because they proposed it, challenge the whole world with it and defy the opponent with one's own will to power, was a coward. Now, these post-structuralists do propose things, and they parley agreement to themselves in-house, the nods and grunts of their fellow post-structuralists who want to be “in the know.” But they hide their doctrines so thoroughly behind the guise of a cloak of substandard prose as to remove them from actual “criticism”, the field in which they profess to be expert. They say, with Prof. Butler, that “complicated matters demand complicated language”, an aphoristic sentence which is by its very vocalization put out to sell its body on the street. I do not buy this as the real, deep reason they use such obtrusive language as a matter of course. I think, and Nietzsche would say, that it is because of a very deep-seated fear of being outed as charlatans.

Synthetic Philosophy and Linguistic Theory: The Ladder out of the Hole of the Linguistic Madness

Whatever the laments of the other tradition, it does not deserve our sympathy as it is itself. To say that analytic philosophy has had its moments in the Sun would be an understatement given the way Scholastic and synthetic thought has been systematically jackbooted into the ground since the time of Descartes. Why did this happen?

We are given a few excuses: Scholastics “did nothing but repeat what their teachers said”, “discussed pointless questions”, “were too dogmatic.” To the first, this Scholastic would say that this would be quite fair to say, if one knew nothing about how vastly important disagreements in Scholasticism were in moving forward at any point. Every single point of Scholastic thought took into account objections, replies to the objections, the clear elucidation of the answer to the question at hand, and even a cursory glimpse at the Summa of Aquinas will reveal that this misunderstanding of the use of authority deserves to be cast into a kindergarten waste-paper basket and burned to ash. A more conspiratorial me would say that this prejudice was maliciously perpetuated and reinforced only by the more stubborn adherence of later Scholastics who seem to have missed the point, and that more conspiratorial me would be right, as the impugning of “the Schoolmen” was part of Descartes' mission.

To the second, the discussion of “pointless” questions, we are often informed of a question as to how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In the first place, historically, that was not even an actually posed question, but probably designed to ridicule Scholastics. Secondly, any Scholastic knows that this is not how such a question would be posed; it would be broken down into “can angels move”, “can angels dance”, “can angels occupy a place”, “do angels have number”, “do angels have size”, “are angels corporeal”, and so forth. The first question seems silly; but if you, as did the Scholastics, believe in angels, the parts of the question are of the most fascinating importance! So wherefore should one spurn the noble “pointless” question, when every question (including the famous Thomistic Quodlibetal “which has more force to move man, wine, women or the truth?”) is so pregnant with explanatory value? In other words: there are no stupid questions.

To the third, well...yes. There were a lot of people asserting a lot of things without first investigating them. There are also a lot of moderns, postmoderns, structuralists, poststructuralists, fundamentalists, atheists, and greengrocers at the corner store who will dogmatically assert things for lack of knowledge of the cause of their truth or falsity. We do not, however, judge analytic philosophy, atheism (or honest atheism, anyway), fundamentalism or the occupation of the greengrocer by their dogmatism. We may very possibly judge them, if not charitably, but we cannot judge the field in which they are, unless their dogmatism somehow represents their field; and as the great Scholastics represent the field better than the shoddy ones, Aquinas and Aristotle being no dogmatists themselves in philosophy, this is a false accusation of Scholasticism as such, albeit one which indicates a need for caution. And even in the case of Scholastic dogmatism, this dogmatism was grounded upon the words of those who still find a real purchase in the modern understanding of the world, whereas a dogmatic Cartesian would be laughed out of any medical convention.

Putting these aside, one thing characterizes synthetic philosophy, and that is the movement from first principles and appearances to demonstrative knowledge. While there are many theories about how this works, the medieval theory illustrates in parallel the way I think we ought to view the use of language in philosophy. When you come to know things, you start from what you see; to Aristotle, this is what is “most known to us”, whereas the things farther from our initial grasp are “most knowable”, concluding with God being most knowable of all. For when we move from the effect, what is “more known”, to the cause by syllogism, we know both something about the cause and something about the effect as it shares in the cause; and the cause is necessarily greater than or equal to the effect. This is the principle of sufficient reason. As we sense many instances of things, we form concepts in our mind through the process of induction. Thus, seeing many dogs, I form a concept of “dog”, separated from what is accidental to being a dog: what can come to be and pass away without making the dog “not a dog.” Then, when I say “Toby is a dog” and “Wally is a dog”, I am referring to two different existing living things, Toby and Wally, both of which have that by which a dog is a dog and not a cat or anything else. I and my society or culture come up with words (“dog”, “cat”, “spoon”, “fork”, “spork”) and we use these to signify a thing.

So far, there is nothing controversial about this. But it illustrates the ancient and medieval linguistic principle: the modes of signifying in language are taken from the modes of understanding in which man understands a thing, and as man understands a thing as the thing is, these modes of understanding are taken from the modes of being of things. Linguistics itself, as human beings study it, is concerned with the connection between the modes of understanding and the modes of signifying. And it is in this way of looking at things that we start to get the notion of what medieval linguistics was all about: language is something over and above the understanding, whereby we signify the understood thing to someone else capable of understanding things as they are. This language is borne into life by convention; if I suggest that there is a susurrus emitting from the bulrushes, and the one to whom I am speaking is not so familiar with either English or botany to know that I mean that the sedge plants over there are shaking and making a sound, then there is no language between us, no signification. The other person may yet have some sort of understanding that sedge is a plant, and that the plant does not normally shake, and they may lack only the knowledge that “susurrus” and “bulrushes” are both perfectly good English words, yet that is enough to eliminate language, that these words are not accepted between me and my companion by the bulrushes; we lack convention.

Why is this so important? After all, the post-colonialists think language is for signifying and conventional as well. They do, after all, write academic papers. But this is not the whole of the thing; signification and conventionality are what it is to be a language, but not what it is to be a good language. It is here that we arrive at the bone of contention in linguistics, a bone which has been tugged from both sides since the essentialist-existentialist, nominalist-realist debate which has so plagued philosophy peeked into the tent of linguistics. I may have a “language” which is utterly, so to speak, without “that swing.” My words can be so chosen and formed, like notes in an atonal musical piece, as to be utterly incapable of aesthetic order or expressive unity within a sentence. One is reminded of Orcish in Lord of the Rings, a language so ugly that only the ugly speak it out loud; even to think it is to do violence to the mind. And as Louis Armstrong said, in a sentence which wonderfully expresses the simultaneously relaxed and tight “play” of language in slang, “it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.” Sure, one can signify conventionally in Orcish; but one, in doing so, makes oneself like the Orcs. This is a variation, a subversion, on Derrida's claims about language; language makes one like it, but it is through a certain logocentric outlook that one is able to escape the sort of ideas about language that would make this an unfortunate phenomenon. Logocentrism, this Western outlook on reason and reality, if it is a cage, is a cage for the free.

And how does this cage, as I claim, so set us free? Buried deep in this logocentric background is the notion of the complimentary necessity of fittingness: the idea that, over and above the necessity needed to achieve something at all, there is a necessity if one is to do something well, which is what one inevitably aims to do in willingly doing something for the sake of happiness. If I wish to cut wood, I could use a whittling knife, but it would take a long time and require altogether too much effort to be reasonable. In point of fact, when one wishes to cut down a tree, one buys an axe. (“Axe” is another example of a word that sounds like what it is for. One “hacks” with an axe; there is a certain therapeutic benefit to using the sharp and sudden word “hack”, and there is a therapeutic benefit to the act itself when done with an axe and not a whittling knife. “Whittle”, as well.) Likewise in the crafting of language itself, one comes up with words like “hack”, “whittle”, and “axe”, which evoke the thing they intend to signify. This, on the level of wordcraft, is how fittingness plays a role; not just in making a language itself, but in making a language good.

But there's more to language than wordcraft. How about sentence formation and structure? Let us take a classic sentence: “I think, therefore I am.” In the Latin it is, of course, “cogito, ergo sum.” The Latin emphasizes the “think” as an act of the “I” in an integrated fashion, and thus emphasizes Descartes' notion of man as a thinking being. But in the English, one can see how philosophical nuance is made more possible analytically: “cogito” is broken down into the parts “I” and “think”, each of which may be italicized or inflected for emphasis. “I think, therefore I am.” “I think, therefore I am.” The same goes for “sum.” Different languages make different sentence descriptions which actually erode the possibility of emphasizing what might be a matter of the easiest practice in other languages, for the purpose of emphasizing some sort of linguistic attitude which is commonplace or accepted by those who speak the language. In this way polyglots are at an advantage in philosophy; it is not just pretension that can cause people to quote translations in other languages. There are four or more words for love in Greek, while there is just one in English, which we have to qualify heavily to produce a linguistic equivalence. There are even words which are, because of the character of experience and the known, wholly incommensurable with expression in most other languages. The Hawaiian “da kine”, for example, is nearly entirely contextual and thus to a certain degree untranslatable without a participation in its use. (Nevertheless, it differs from differance in that it does have a meaning, albeit a variable one; if someone says “Brah, go drive to the store and da kine,” said “brah” will know that it means, in some given situation, “buy cigarettes and Spam,” a perfectly definite meaning.)

Sentence structure and wordcraft alike benefit from fittingness. So in order to understand the root of goodness in language, let us examine fittingness as it is understood classically and fittingness as it is understood by postcolonialists, as represented by the difference between pedagogy/conversation and what I will call “proportioned speech”, since that seems to be the expressed intent of Prof. Butler, to proportion her writing to the issue described in its supposed complexity. Working with the aphoristic expression above as characteristic of (though paraphrased from) her defense of bad writing, “complicated matters demand complicated language”, and working with the Aristotelian-tradition axiom that “whatever is received is received in the mode of the receiver” as the root of a pedagogical or conversational language, what is the notion of fittingness expressed in these two traditions?

The Aristotelian one, I think, has been mostly expressed above; language is for signifying. This is not to say the merely workhorse interpretation of “explicitly and rigorously getting the point across.” If this were the case one could not have rhetoric, which Aristotle defended, and poetry would be a fool's errand. (Indeed, perhaps it is...but folly is not always a bad thing after all is said and done.) Poetry signifies in a different way than rigorous speech, and one no less necessary for the human personal and common goods. Philosophical language circumscribes experience, and poetry inscribes philosophy with the experience itself. It is all quite different to know that “summer is warm,” “the sun is radiant,” and “flowers tend to be at a certain time of life” from knowing experientially the way summer is warm such that one may pen Sonnet 18. Signification is, at root, to convey the concept or understanding from one human mind to another. Thus we have language, and words that sound like what they mean. These being received in the mode of the receiver means that there is an interest in employing language in a way that does not just describe but also has power to convince or persuade, to evoke and direct. Hence, the word “bee”, which has such power in its strong-vowel simplicity to remind us of that rather complex insect. This is the place from where “common” language arises.

The specialized language of the academic has a place here. It is not enough to say “the way something is” when one wants to say what nature means. The definition lies behind our normal intuitions; it is composed of more primary concepts, which require new words, because they are so primordial and distant from the immediate use of language. Words like “act” and “potency”, in the Scholastic scheme, while not magic, are like magic; they are intellectual tools to reach beyond what we see and extract the true nature of things. They have a purpose and a unique beauty, like hidden Philosopher's Stones for the mind; and they ought to receive our respect, as a wise alchemist would respect his tools if, like these words, they actually held a power. Thus, they are a bit more difficult to understand than normal common language; they are technical terms, requiring a trip of the mind down the little streams of the understanding of what we do see. But they are not mystical; study will yield them up, and they can be understood by more than one person in the same way.

Here meaning is seen as something discovered, and the human being is the one to whom it is given to name the phenomena. Yet in discovering meaning, the synthetic philosopher is not moving outside the foundation one has in the senses; rather, part of the character of synthetic philosophy is that nothing is superfluous. Every proof, every syllogistic motion moves from something to another thing as a cord in a webbed net, such that each move must be as certain and rigorous as is possible for that science, while the synthetic philosopher recognizes that to each science belongs its own degree and sort of certainty. This informs the words we use, which nevertheless each have their own particular character. Thus no word becomes superfluous; no meaning becomes frivolous; grammar is one of the most important sciences, because the grammar of a language belonging to a (principally) synthetic culture is not artificial, but reveals the inner workings of the human mind.

From this arises a curious phenomenon, that for non-philosophers philosophy becomes incredibly difficult to decipher. The synthetic answer to this has always been that if the meaning is difficult to decipher, it is because the concepts and the tradition themselves have an order one must follow, an order from the more known to the less known, one which reflects itself in language but which is rather something inherent in the character of knowledge itself. This, from synthetic thought, is understandable if one accepts what has been said above, that synthetic thought is the attempt of the intellect to bungie-jump into the deep places of the universe and claim, in the process, her deeper causes as prize. What of the postcolonial tradition, though, represented by Butler?

One sees a similar reasoning in her defense of bad writing, an article written (in my opinion) in a rather snarky fashion having the pugilistic title “A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back”. Verbatim:

If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or "natural" understanding of social and political realities.
(Butler, Judith. "A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back". New York Times, 3/20/1999; URL=https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/wash/www/butler.htm)

Common sense, she claims, gives us normal language (the inheritance of our logocentric, Scholastic culture, presumably) which is occasionally abused by unclear definitions (as, perhaps, when one uses “he” in an academic paper intended exclusively rather than inclusively in an attempt to disparage women, or uses “man” instead of “human” in the same way for the same purpose.) Following along, Butler dictates that unclear definition demands...what? New words having no meaning whatsoever, or a meaning that itself indicates the choice of a neologism to be informed by the underlying (hegemonic) prejudice that the author has the privileged position of being within their rights to dictate how language and thought should work? Since when (I ask those in the academic community) did we lay down the arms of the English department before the altar of political conditioning? When did we allow it to be a decided thing that Grammar and Vocabulary, formerly so dignified, ought to be two-dollar prostitutes for their new pimp, Political Science?

This is, to return to the point about language, a fundamental misunderstanding of the synthetic phenomenon of deep thought demanding deep language. Butler is advocating that language should be a political tool for the purpose of informing those who are not In The Know that they are to toe the line or walk the plank; if you do not know what hegemony means, you are therefore a victim of hegemony, and the solution is to buy the postcolonialist product and become one of The Chosen Few. This is to turn philosophical writing into the sort of writing one sees in a commercial mission statement; words such as “synergistic” and “actioning”, verbal Mata Haris which seek to undermine the linguistic common good, are agents of the same Empire in a different department. It is linguistics as condescending marketing. Worse, it is as though one has taken a moderately talented band (such as the Oneders in the movie “That Thing You Do”) and put it at the mercy of a commercial machine; “hegemony”, as a word, might have admitted some neologistic potential, and is, as a concept, “a neat idea”, but was never going to be The Beatles, and yet now it has been made an all-important concept. Such a misplacement fundamentally cannot really hold. (As a side note, I hope the reader will notice the predictable scare quotes around “natural”, a word that does not mean what I think Butler thinks it means.) What this notion of fittingness represents is nothing but a denial thereof. Words cannot fit something when there is no way in which “something” can be said to be thus; only according to a thing's nature can something signify the way something really is or tends to be.

Conclusion: Save The Pitchforks And Torches, You've Got The Wrong Field

Philosophy is not at fault for postcolonialist crimes against language. This sounds strange, until one admits what I have insisted upon for the entire paper: postcolonialism and poststructuralism are not philosophy. They are ambiguous tools of political science which, because they tend to engage some of the more experiential aspects of that science, seem to be too close to the individual to be politics and too abstract to be anything else, and are therefore deemed practical philosophy, despite their denial of the wisdom philosophy (philosophia) implies etymologically. They deny natures, deny the understanding of things, deny the purpose of philosophy as impractical, and denounce those who try to understand the world in a more than opportunistic way as logocentric. Their focus on praxis subverts their “philosophical” claims because philosophy is not praxis; it is that from which praxis proceeds. Ultimately, the only way in which they serve a good purpose is when they are subordinated to a good cosmology, and left to themselves, they actively undermine any possibility thereof.

Which mode of synthetic thought proceeds in the right direction, of course, is for philosophy as a field to discover, if it has not already. As an Aristotelian-Thomist I tend to think it has, but this is immaterial to the purpose of this particular exploration. What is important is to recognize that we must remain at the level of common language, and treat the notions of poststructuralism as possible critiques; and precisely that, possible, since there is nothing in that field itself to say whether the critique is valid or not. The continuing relevance of philosophy utterly depends upon this. That being said, since (in my opinion) Judith Butler's work is more of an academic fad than a serious system, I have some hope that the absurdity of her conclusions will prevent further damage to philosophy in that they will make it more difficult for anyone having half a brain to believe them.

The Dignity of a Fool's Errand: The Useful Uselessness of Philosophy and Theology

2011-01-07T03:23:00.000-08:00

There is a popular canard in the anti-intellectual post-Dewey sphere in which we live that "those who can't do, teach." Neglecting the logical factoid that teaching is, in fact, a sort of doing, one that most who proverbially "do" are woefully incapable of "doing" well, I have always thought that this statement, for its insight into the minds of the modern members of our vaunted populace, is perfectly expressive of the plight of philosophy and theology. People who "do", one is told by the philosophy major, "do" or avoid doing because of some philosophy. If this is the case, then everyone has a philosophy, or they could not "do" or avoid doing because of it. Judging by this, then, to do philosophy is simply to be; and we don't give people government grants to simply be, we give them to do, don't we?! Thus philosophy majors, for being so tragically "meta", are deemed head-in-the-clouds useless academics who wouldn't know a day's honest work in their own dubious field if it bit them in the ethereal ass. Real work gets done by the practical folks. For all one might say about the politicians, who of themselves produce nothing, they at least organize practical folks into producing something. As to the musicians, they may not make something which will put food on the table, but at least they can make us feel something funny; and even then, they are often a bit too ethereal for the likes of the dirty-handed real man of our era.

This is the attitude of our society towards most of the higher humanities. It has become such that if one mentions that their degree is in Theology, one is like to receive, not an inquiry as to where they procured this degree, but a query as to whether that is the sort of degree one gets from an accredited source. Derogatory comments may be expected; I have been told on no less than five occasions that "it's nice that you did that; my degree, as it happens, is in Truthiness!" On one occasion the less-than-gentleman responding proceeded to add "with a minor in Snack Food Studies." I have grown used to such comments; they are not very clever. And of course, with the current plague of the Youtube attention span, one cannot possibly expect someone to sit through the five minutes it takes to explain that, well, in Ancient Greece theology was considered the highest science, since it affected every other science in principle, and it's only in the last three hundred years we have abandoned this, much to the posthumous chagrin of most of our forefathers. It may profit the soul to respect something which the men and women who brought us into being wished us to respect. Certainly de Tocqueville, in writing Democracy in America, thought so in his defense of the mores of family, private property and religion on the grounds that they perpetuated the culture by which America continued its miraculous existence.

But, of course, we do not read de Tocqueville; to most students of political science, he is an insightful but quaint relic of a past era. We are realpolitik America. "America does if America says it's so." In point of fact, we do not read, not really. We certainly ingest; we, like baby birds, take the pre-digested food provided to us mouth-to-face by our mama birds, the lecturers and writers of textbooks, and we pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on how very clever we are when we get good marks on a test (and it is always about good marks on a test. It should trouble us that we think one's personal estimation can be graded by a Scantron.) But we do not digest. We, as a culture, something grown, have never had the shock of a real heresy, because for my own generation at least, we have never had a culture against which one may be heretical and shocking. When one has no nutrients taken in, one has no growth; and when a society is not nourished by a fundamental belief held in common by all and grown-into, that society does not grow, it gains no "culture."

This might need an illustration. I will take the example of a popular game among the very young or the extremely immature: the "penis game." The goal of the game is, between two people, to shout that word louder than the other, but not so loud that one is actually caught doing so. The one caught in the act of immaturity loses. This only works because people are scandalized by the word signifying the anatomy. But we are a culture without scandal; walk through your average Ivy League school playing this game and you are like to be mistaken for the latest bunch of Women's Studies majors, those asexual hippies who spell "women" with a 'y' instead of an 'e' because, like, it's so much more, like, liberating that way! And this education is passed down, and has been since the 70s, such that we are now seeing a generation without any sort of discretion with regard to bodily members promote their agenda as the ruling climate. William F. Buckley Jr. anticipated this well enough in God and Man at Yale; let Yale abandon God, and nothing about man remains sacred, least of all Yale.

So in our picture are both ethics and politics vitiated. I have said enough in other contexts about my thoughts on the sciences, and anyone with a fleck of gray matter can see that a decline in ethics also leads to a decline in everything else human beings are concerned with in practice. These are accompanied with a decline in the character of our conception of logic itself; no longer do we begin from true first principles, but assumed axioms, from which internally consistent conclusions are deduced based on mathematical "laws of thought"; this is taken into the conception of science as what we now call logical positivism. Aristotle deduced what this would mean in Ancient Greece millenia ago; if one has no known first principles, one has no known conclusions, and therefore no knowledge at all. Certainty about things is reduced to certainty about appearances, and then uncertainty; knowledge becomes the fading grin of a Cheshire cat in the Wonderland of postmodern deconstructive thought.

There goes Tom ranting again, the casual and hasty reader will say, imbecile-like. This is all philosophical degree-waving, and like Descartes said about Aristotle's definition of motion: "Who understands this?" Clearly, not such a reader. But I will have it be understood to that reader that they had best understand that it is better to have someone with an intact conception of ethics around when the decision to push the nuclear button is being made; or when any sort of decision is being made about any group of people; or when the reader's own case is being decided in a court of law; or in the last judgement, if at no other time. These people do not spring, fully formed, from the womb of their parents; and if we keep neglecting education in the humanities, it is unlikely that their parents will be able to produce something truly human in their soul, not possessing it themselves. You cannot do this without the humanities, which brings me to a point very dear to me.

I am not getting my degree to masturbate myself to the academic rhythm. I intend to do something with it. I will not be a perpetual academic, nor would my graduate school (or any such school) desire me to be so; they do, after all, need donors. However, I am not out to "change the world." I am not a recently-graduated, fresh-faced 21 year old. That is the task of other people, with more ambition than probable result and an infinite capacity for disappointment. I have long ago resolved that if the world is changed as a result of anything I do, welcome as that may be if it is positive, it cannot be because of me, but because of the One who loved me into existence. People are just too annoying for me to expect to be able to change them under my own power. And even if I could change them, as one can see from reading this post, I am terribly annoying, myself. The difference between me and them is that a) I am annoying in a better way, because b) I know that I am annoying, and c) I know the point of being so. Sometimes, doing the right thing is about annoying someone in just the right way, just enough.

No, I do not want to change the world. It's far too big and too difficult to maintain. My mission is to offer young men and women the ability to decide whether or not it's worth it to seek change themselves, according to the highest and best ways one may seek it. Adults today are too set in their ways, since by and large they, and their educators, are the reason why we children of the children of the '60s have our work cut out for us in teaching the humanities. And why do I want to teach them this useless science? Because whatever else those young men and women do, their enjoyment and excellence depends on their having someone teach them why anything is worth anything, and why this is worth more than that, and why this is most worthy of all; so that when they realize, for example, that their husband or wife trusts them not to cheat, they will not; so that when given a choice between drugs and education, they will choose education; so that when they see a stranger in mortal need, they will drop everything and help, not because someone told them to, but because it's the right thing to do and the right thing is always worth doing. And teaching them this useless science, moreover, opens them to the possibility of being happy in whatever they do. There is very little in working in retail conducive to happiness, but one who truly understands what the promises of Christ are may be happy cleaning the slime out of his worst enemy's shower, let alone while working in retail. We understand these in part through imitation and connatural knowing, but in part through arduous and devoted study.

Lastly, and also really firstly, I want to teach philosophy because it makes me truly happy. I am not happy doing research to "advance the field". I will do it, and I will strive always to excel at it, but my happiness is not in innovation but in transmission. I do not want to transform academia, except insofar as I stop it from betraying its charges by poisoning the wonder inside them through politically-motivated betrayals of duty, or insofar as I make it better by being the best damn teacher I could possibly be. I, too, was once a confused, scared teenager, with no direction or conception of my own happiness. I would pleasantly have spent all my time on my computer, then learned a trade skill in community college, packed up my leisure time into a work-a-day job, made some money, eventually bought a house, and probably asked myself a couple of times what went wrong with me and when. This is assuming I did not acquire any worse addictions on the way, as I watched all my friends head off to college. Instead, I made a choice, prompted by my mom, to look at colleges, and by sheer chance she showed me TAC. I fell in love, applied, went, and here I am. I am terrified at what might (not) have been if I had not done it. I am a great believer now in doing the right thing at the right time, because it saved my life from an unfulfilled pointlessness.

Look at this, and ask yourself, reader: is this not worth teaching? Do I not have something to give, having received? I am 23 years old, about to get two Master's Degrees, in Philosophy and Theology, and I now can do something very few people I know can claim: I can save lives. And not just in the basic physical way, either, although I have no doubt that philosophy and theology can stop someone from harming themselves or others, and routinely save the world on their own merits. I can give people the ability to not just be alive, but to have a life worth living, through teaching philosophy; and in theology, I am able to be an instrument of God, by which those same ones may have life more fully. If this is "useless", it is the most noble, useful, beautiful way of being "useless" that I can fathom. I save lives. I make people happy. I give people the chance and the ability and the expertise to be human. That is a damn good aspiration.

Posts on Poetry Pt. 2: Brutal Honesty

2010-11-22T16:27:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I spoke on the formal and basic attribute of poetry that is conviction. In speaking about it, I mentioned honesty a couple of times, and with a bit of difficulty (as we all have difficulty in being perfectly honest, even about honesty) I feel I ought to speak about it as the material side of things. One does not have a conveyance without something conveyed, nor an expression without something expressed; and if one wants their expression to reach impression, if they want their poetry to be impressive, as all good poetry fundamentally is, one needs to have something worth conveying. But this is the real first step behind seeking the form to fit the matter, namely, seeking the knowledge of the matter itself.

Everybody's got something to say, I said in the last post. This is well and good, but telling someone that somewhere inside them is an interesting person waiting to jump out and wail at the world is cliched if one does not at the same time tell them that there is perhaps no more difficult thing in the history of poetic composition than the eduction of that inner voice. To give an idea of how difficult a thing it is, I am again going to present you, my dear reader, with the brutal honesty of a man wounded in the expression of Taylor Mali, because the man is a most excellent poet and knows precisely how to examine himself in front of a crowd in such a way that the crowd is brought into that examination. I will not give any context; the poem, I think, is enough.

And as I think of this it occurs to me to provide a second example from his body of work on the same subject, or as it were subjects, or as it were now, part of a subject, bruised and battered.

As you can no doubt see, poetry can be very brutal. In fact, it should be, at least at times. The child speaking with conviction about his toy is in no way as expressive as Mali's anguished lament in sheer content, though very much more so in volume. One may screen out the child's wailing lament, but the silent gravity of Mali's self-baring pierces, perhaps as many times as we watch it, into our very souls, as we for just an instant are led into the way he sees himself and the one who borrowed his soul, only to return it, unexpectedly and expectedly, in another condition. What gives his poetry this bitter power? The answer is that he is brutally, brutally honest.

But what is honesty? We must certainly have some concept of it, since every poetry teacher ever has informed their class that honesty is not just the best but the only policy when it comes to poetry. Poetry of the most fiery sort requires first that the poets drag themselves over the coals of self-examination, and some of their substance is going to suffer in the act. This dragging-over-the-coals, this act of self-examination whereby one confronts and determines oneself is honesty; but it is more primary than this, it is more than an act. Honesty is a virtue, a habit whereby one is in the habit of expressing the truth and confronting it, without compromise, even when one feels that the part of oneself that confronts may be, so to speak, broken in the battle. Thus, a Lear goes insane when confronted with the real character of the situation of his ungrateful daughters, Regan and Goneril:

You think I'll weep
No, I'll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I'll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

Lear's madness is rational because its cause, his honesty, is rational, and because its effect, his seeming despair at the rational order of the universe, is the normal result (in the Greek world, anyway) of confronting the tragic order of things. Orestes must be chased by the Furies. Oedipus must suffer until Colonus. And yet in doing this, in confronting that order, a remarkable thing occurs. Mortality is given new meaning. Achilles must become mad with rage in confronting his own mortality and that of Patroclus, dragging Hector around Troy seven times by chariot mercilessly; but this sets the stage for the meeting with Priam, the character of paternity and justice himself to Troy, who nevertheless will kiss the feet of Achilles, murderer of his son, in supplication. And in Achilles' greater story, though to all the world Hector looks to have failed his city, his family and himself, Hector, breaker of horses, has tamed swift-footed Achilles. He has succeeded. Homer writes this and it becomes the original poem of all Greek and ultimately Western civilization. When Gilgamesh stopped being quoted, the Iliad still continued. The Iliad was an honest look at mortality itself, a look which begins in fear and despair but ends in the realization that whatever it is that ends our lives is a gift, not a withholding; the very gods envy us for mortality.

If one wishes to see how we see this in everyday life, and more specifically in semi-popular art, one could do worse than look at Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra: “Mr. Blue, you'll get it right, / but soon comes Mr. Night, / creeping over, now his hand is on your shoulder, / never mind, I remember you this...I remember you this way!” Sleep is an analogy to death. “Do not go gently into that good night, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light” would be the way Dylan Thomas or immature Achilles would look at it, and pensive Hamlet thinks to himself “but in that sleep of death what dreams may come / must give us pause.” Honesty dictates that we remove our presuppositions based on deception of ourselves, and is tied to conviction in the way Mali speaks in his poem on conviction: “Contrary to the wisdom of the bumper sticker, it is not enough to 'question authority.' You have to speak with it, too.” Honesty is, in other words, the proper submission of one's belief to the authority of truth and her ministers.

As seems to be the style, the reader may object: “What about certainty? Isn't certainty the highest authority? Wouldn't honesty just be tied to 'thinking for ourselves'?” I would say that that was the case, if we ourselves were the only authority we could trust. And indeed, we do get something out of trusting ourselves. Mostly, we get what we had before we started our self-examination, varying degrees of truth and falsity. We do not derive, trusting only ourselves, anything new about ourselves, since what you finish with is that with which you start. If anything, one is in danger of losing something, since we are prone to second-guess what we believe ad infinitum out of the sometimes rational but usually irrational fear of being wrong. And when do we get a rational indication that we are wrong? Precisely when we open ourselves to the rational authority of something outside that which accepts authority. In other words, true honesty comes from due trust in what is, at least in part, not the one trusting, such that we may rightly redetermine ourselves to the truth. And this authority, this owed nature of trust, comes about precisely from union with the truth. In other words, to be honest with oneself is to seek the truth about oneself through her ministers.

Now, this almost seems like a homily. And in point of fact, according to most speakers on spiritual discipline, it is the result of the first step, since honesty is developed by discipline, something which most would-be poets could use. Poetry is in many respects an attempt to convey reality as experienced, and reality is experienced more deeply in honesty than in deception. Indeed, one can ask whether a life of being deceived is any life at all. As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, and to allow oneself to deceive oneself, I should think, is even worse. Poetry itself is an attempt to represent the life of a human being to another, both in relation to itself and in relation to other things. If one wishes to know oneself, such that one may know other things, one must acquire the virtue of honesty.

Posts on Poetry Pt. 1: Speak With Conviction.

2010-11-21T00:47:00.000-08:00

I'm going to start a series of a few posts on the virtues of a poet. Specifically, if one wishes to write poetry, though I am no great poet myself, I am going to give a few pointers I have learned from listening to great poets, from mystical poets like Bernard to troubadour poetry to the sonnets of Shakespeare to modern slam poetry I myself have had the mixed experience of hearing. Why am I doing this, singularly unqualified as I am in actual poetry writing? Because the pointers of a poet to a poet are pointers of technique and experience; the pointers of an audience to a poet are pointers of the interconnection of persons that comes from having someone bear the innermost thoughts of their soul to a willing audience, and therefore pointers which are much more obvious, but still deserve great study for any would-be poet. These pointers will not be such as “write in rhyme”, or other assorted tips given by assorted people all of whom have views on technique. A Shakespeare is not the same as a Joyce, nor a Chesterton a Ginsberg, nor even an Eliot a Dante, except in an influential sense. I will not profess on who is better or worse; that is for critics, and I am the sort of critic who speaks to the poet as he writes and not the one who compares apples and oranges as fruit after they have fallen from the tree and been consumed.

And although I had told someone that I was thinking of writing on love, that comes after a few more immediate pointers, which have consequences in technique but are not technique itself. I'm going to start with that basic condition of public speaking and testimony, conviction and its needed root. I think it would be fun, in these posts, to show some examples in Spoken Word poetry that I think exemplify particular aspects, and I can think of none better to start with than Taylor Mali's “Totally like whatever, you know?”, also known on the Internet as “Speak With Conviction.”

Taylor Mali is an English teacher who has become very popular on the Spoken Word circuit. He is very versatile, but I think he is never more entertaining (though he is always entertaining) than when he is speaking on education, teaching, and language.

What is it to speak with conviction? To use Mali's working definition, it is to “say what you believe in a manner that bespeaks the determination with which you believe it.” To use the Thomistic way, it is to employ a linguistic form, definite, determinate language, that fits the matter, the interior belief of the speaker. In order to understand how vital this is to any poet, it is important to understand what one does in expressing something.

When one speaks a sentence as simple as “I think it is going to rain today”, one is not materially expressing a whole lot when the sentence is delivered in a monotone. Inflection permeates communication, though, and gives new expressiveness to a formerly very dull sentence. “I think it is going to rain today” implies a disagreement with another, or an emphasis on one's own authority. “I think it is going to rain today” implies an uncertainty, or an emphasis on the act of thought, in contradistinction to a meteorological knowledge; or if inflected in a testy manner, implies a somewhat tetchy correction of the preacher of a coming blue sky in the daytime. “I think it is going to rain today” implies a definition of the subject of the act of raining, like that particular cloud over there, that one, over there that I am pointing at as we lie back in the grass. “I think it is going to rain today”, implying an unexpected torrent on the horizon that has just suddenly become far more likely. “I think it is going to rain today”, implying that it is not yet, but bring your umbrella to the bluegrass concert anyways. “I think it is going to rain today” doesn't mean much on the face of it, but shows something about inflecting prepositions, that the inflection is led back into the “going” and ends up much the same in meaning; or perhaps one is making a linguistic-philosophical correction, that it is not “going rain” today, whatever that would mean. Finally, inflecting “rain” indicates that it will rain and not shine.

Why this extended, dull, English teacher explanation? The sentence I chose was terribly mundane for a reason. Something which seems very limited in meaning suddenly takes on no less than ten different meanings, simply based on a slight change in sound. Certainly the inflection is not built into English, as it is in Ancient Greek or Chinese, but it is tremendously potent when we apply it to our speech. Accordingly, people emphasize the spoken word, actual or imagined, as the emotional and even intellectual principle of interpretation of any work of writing. Even a line as simple and materially elegant as “Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?” is absolutely pregnant with meaning when a careful use of emphasis is applied in this fashion; thus one sees as many possible expressive significances in a single line as there are words to inflect and poets to inflect them. And lest one thing be assumed for every possible kind of inflection, let us not forget that inflection admits of degree and volume. That line from the sonnet takes on a very strange character when one shouts it angrily as a hastily retreating former lover, sarcastically and angrily, than when it is read softly and gently in a country field. Perhaps the former interpretation would be a violence to the sonnet, but none will deny that through the meaning of the sonnet that linguistic act has been given a particularly potent and bitter meaning when thus inflected.

This is very general. When applied to poetry and public speaking, it becomes very specifically relevant. Conviction bespeaks determination. Determination bespeaks sincerity. Sincerity bespeaks a penetrating, interested mind, capable of yielding something about reality which none have seen in quite the same way. When one lacks conviction, one lacks the ability to convey even the most basic interest of what one is saying; a poet who lacks conviction is a poet everyone has heard before, in their own mind, when they confront that awkwardness that is relationships, when they confront their own terrified fear of what they do not know and the fact that they do not know it; and if one wished to hear a poet without conviction, they could go to their average English department and listen to the bored attempts to write poetry just to get a grade. Poetry without conviction is forced, poetry for the sake of that for which poetry was not made to be. Poetry without conviction is a poet stopping in the composition of a poem, not knowing what to say, and instead of stating their own conviction of their own unknowing, which is itself a sort of honesty, trying to gloss over this real thing with a fake persona, a disingenuous attempt to convey strong knowing where there is none. Poetry without conviction is no poetry, no making, no poesia at all.

And what if I am wrong? Perhaps, the reader might think, they should be wary of my stating with such conviction the need for conviction itself. If not for the conviction of my diction, I respond, with conviction, the reader cannot ask that question at all. And if poetry cannot leave you with a real answer, an answer which arises from the honesty that produces conviction, it is better than nothing (and sometimes better than an answer!) that it leave the reader with a question. This article is, of course, not poetry. But I deliberately and decisively (that is to say, with conviction) write with poetic elements, because it illustrates my point in a way that dry prose cannot hope to achieve. And I do think the tradition of conviction is the answer to provide to the question “how ought I to speak poetically”, because even that poetry that writes seemingly in a non-convicted manner can only be fruitful as poetry when it is founded upon an even deeper conviction that it has something real to say, that this pouring-forth of the tormented or loving or angered or hopeful soul is not just a random mass of pointless spontaneity.

But let us say that the one asking about poetry is really and genuinely convinced (and being convinced is the foundation of conviction) that one has nothing of interest to anyone to say? The immediate answer to that is that there is conviction even in that statement, which when evinced in poetry can be a statement about its cause. The more distant answer is that in fact everyone has something to say, unless their mind is a blank slate and their life so distant from any sort of real contact with reality that they literally have nothing which breeds a most passionate response to that reality. And as even a child can pronounce that it is not right to take their toy away, or that they really do deserve to go to Disneyland, to deny that human beings always feel strongly about something requires some particularly extraordinary change in everything that motivates them. The child who wants that toy, and insists upon their deserving to have it in some way, has a very specific opinion on the justice of a situation; when one reflects upon this, to say one deserves anything becomes a reflection on justice in general (because no case of deserving, no matter how seemingly insignificant, says nothing at all about justice.) We grown-ups have, we fancy, much greater concerns about justice, although insisting that one has some injury dealt to them by the illegality of, for example, marijuana seems in some cases rather similar to the child with a bottle having it taken from them. For the most part, we do have greater concerns, the stuff of popular music. Why does she leave me? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why didn't I go to class? (Because I got high. This is seen as a self inflicted wound in the titular song, and the justice of its consequences does not escape such a one as Afroman.)

If one can make song of these things, one can make poetry. After all, spoken poetry is a species of song, having rhythm as its basis, and occasionally melody. The fact is that every human, as a willing being having human desires, priorities, dreams and cares, is a born poet in matter; the real desire in the poet seeking to write is for the form. And the first “form” of form in poetry is conviction.

Posted today on Facebook: Uniformity, Pluriformity, and Virtual Presence

2010-11-04T15:35:00.001-07:00

There is a question predominant in the understanding of modern and Aristotelian science, the question of the current understanding of the character and role of substantial form. While I myself am convinced of its unity against the pluriformists, and of its utility even to modern science, I am, like many others, dissatisfied with some of the lingering dark places left unexplored in general by the modern attempts to adapt the ancient to the modern, and would like to see some discussion by those who are interested in exploring these wonderful realities. Principally, I am concerned with the need for a greater understanding of "virtual presence" and participation in the application of substantial form to modern science.

The World Outside of Yonkers: Introducing Formal Cause

I have recently been studying the relation of substantial form to modern science in both my Philosophy of Nature and Divine Action classes. To this end, I recently read Dr. Goyette's "Substantial Form and the Recovery of an Aristotelian Natural Science" (http://www.thomist.org/jour/2002/October/2002%20Oct%20A%20Goyette%20web.htm) and his following article, "St. Thomas on Substantial Unity against the Pluriformists" (http://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti01/goyette.htm). While Dr. Goyette's arguments were all very well, and even convincing, they have also left a number of people dissatisfied with the state in which the field has been left. To explain why this is, it is necessary to summarize his arguments a bit, with attention to some particular terminological uses.

Dr. Goyette begins (in "Substantial Form and the Recovery of an Aristotelian Natural Science") by laying out the Thomistic understanding of substantial form with great clarity, and explaining the nature of the difference between accidental and substantial form. Accidental form is a sort of character of the thing as composed and ordered, but the substantial form is that principle by which the parts are, let alone by which they are ordered. From the substantial form, we say that the thing is one organism per se; from the accidental form, we say that the thing is one per accidens, as a house is one thing and yet nothing more than the composition and order of the materials. He then proceeds to defend the concept of substantial form against three modern "scientific" objections:

Objection 1: DNA. If we are composed of little material-efficient causes which, by their interaction and the information contained within them, construct us into a living being, isn't the doctrine of a metaphysically prior principle unnecessary? Dr. Goyette argues otherwise, claiming that the information is, first, not reducible to the material (as informative words cannot be reduced to a composition of uninformative sound waves,) and second, left uninterpreted in a materially reductive hypothesis, because words do not interpret themselves, and likewise DNA requires a prior principle of interpretation of a kind different than a material bearer of information. Moreover, although DNA is potentially expressive in each gene, only some come to be expressed; as a lung, or a heart, or suchlike, even though the same DNA is present in every cell. Something prior, a principle of order, is needed to determine how the DNA comes to be expressed.

Objection 2: Organ transplants. We can now keep an organ alive outside the body; that is, outside the participation the organ has in the substantial form of a living human being. Before this was possible, it is often claimed, this was thought impossible under the doctrine of substantial form; myself, I am inclined to think it was not explored at all, not being a current concern. That being said, when it came to be known to be possible, substantial form seemed a less likely explanation. Goyette responds that in fact, since the organ needs to bekept alive, there might be a way in which even organ transplants testify to the understanding of substantial form. Inside the body, the organ does not require artificial life support, but is sustained in being by being part of a living organism. Outside, it requires an imitation of the natural system in which the organ is sustained internally in order to maintain it. Clearly there is some state in which one is aiming to maintain the organ. Left to itself, the organ quickly decays past this state, just as the transplant, put within a human body, quickly adapts itself into the whole if accepted. Goyette posits that there are intermediate states between "human" or "living" organs and "dead" organs, such that the organ is a human organ in potency in the state wherein the transplanting agent preserves it. This state is characterized by the organ being properly disposed to accept the participation in the higher substantial form of a living being.

Objection 3: Formal vs. Mechanical Causality. If there is already a mechanical explanation, why does there need to be a formal one? Don't we already have an explanation for how it works? Dr. Goyette capably answers this by explaining that nature acts in a similar way to art. If, seeing an artifact, we are compelled to consider the role of the artist in its composition, order and identity as an artifact, we must also understand that complex organisms do not come to be purely by chance. If something comes to be always or for the most part thus (as in reproduction), and not by some direct artistry on the part of an artist, but by nature, on that account one must posit an explanation in the thing itself whereby the natural organism comes to be thus. Material configuration cannot explain itself; it answers the how (according to what the thing does) but not the why (the question of how the material became thus "configured.") Thus we posit the substantial form.

These objections are neat, tidy, and well-refuted, but the difficulty in any refutation is that that by which one refutes it is often itself in need of clarification. What is substantial form? Some others, the pluriformists, posited it to be the form of the substance in a hierarchy of governed forms. Thus, each part has its own substantial form, and each part is changed by being under some higher part which has a more dominant form. This is not the understanding Goyette expresses, as he makes clear in a second paper on the Unity of Substantial Form. The second part of the introduction to my question requires a similar explanation of this paper.

Put on Your Sunday Clothes: Against Substantial Form as an Addition Producing Order

The pluriformists, looking at the same things as Dr. Goyette, conclude that there is in fact a multiplicity of forms in the being; the ruler form being the chief form by which we name the whole, "man", and which subordinates the forms of the other things (so that the heart, the lungs, etc all have special substantial forms by which they are what we call them, but are also the heart, lungs, etc of a man) into the divisible totality of the organism. Goyette provides several objections to this:

Objection A: Being vs. Being Ordered. The pluriformists claim that a single body can be informed by multiple substantial forms: thus, water is water by the substantial form of water, but part of blood by being ruled by the substantial form of blood. Yet as Goyette notes, the substantial form of water is that by which the water is, simply, as well as that by which it is water. To add another substantial form does not give the water being, but this is precisely what a substantial form does. Thus, Goyette claims, it were better to call it an accidental form, so that water could come to be blood or cease to be blood and still remain water. But the pluriformists, he claims, disagree on the basis that the form of blood directs and orders the water to a further end (which is, indeed, an act of substantial form). This does not answer the problem of the water alreadybeing prior to the blood-form ordering it. What is attributed to the blood-form is rather the character of an efficient or moving cause, by which something already having being comes to be changed to some ordered state accidentally. Thus, the soul (being even more distant from the being of the parts) is not the formal cause but the ultimate efficient mover of the human being, intermediated from the parts by several degrees of lesser moved movers, the ultimate form of "substance" being that by which any part (and thus the whole) has being. Thus, that by which "such-and-such" a thing is simply becomes not the form of "such-and-such" a thing (as Aristotle postulated rather sensibly, that by which a man is a man is the substantial form of "man") but the form of "thingness most basic", either matter itself considered as a thing (bad) or matter to which the most elemental form (whatever that means) is added; the form, I suppose, of "substance" said exclusively.

The soul thus has only the character of an efficient cause or mover. Yet when the form of man departs, as Goyette notes, the parts begin to corrupt and decay and the thing ceases to be a man; so in the first place, the form of man seems to be prior in being to the form of the parts, not posterior. The problem of organ transplant does not really present a problem according to the reasoning in Objection 2 above; the form of the organ may be understood as transitional. The most difficult objection to address, really, and the cause of this note, is the question of how every part of the being has its form from the whole. After all, it's easy enough to see it from the organs, but our bodies are 70 percent or so composed of water, which is water outside as well as in (at least in some manner.) Goyette admits this, and claims something remarkable from the writings of St. Thomas, namely that the higher form ("man", in the example) contains "virtually" all the perfections of the lower forms that constitute his parts taken separately, and accordingly these things keep their character without requiring unique substantial forms. As far as this goes, it saves the appearances; but pluriformism still seems possible, if not hylomorphic, so that Goyette educes three further objections to pluriformism as it seems to oppose the empirical evidence from which it was prompted.

Objection B: Sensing Our Own Unity. We sense that we, body and soul, are one thing, intrinsically and empirically. It is difficult to empirically posit a living body distinct from the soul, or vice versa. Yet if we are in fact an incredibly multiple series of movers, we are not one thing, even in species, but a composition of many things different in both species and number, unified only by a tenuous ruling form, governing through many ministers. In this way, that by which we are human is the least of all, according to being that by which we leastare, while at the same time that by which all the parts are somehow ordered to what is best; moreover, form being recast as a mover requires us to educe some other principle of being simply in the thing, which posits a dualism.

Objection C: Immaterial Being and Immortality of Form. If our form is thus given its own being as a mover, it must have being distinct from what is moved (because, as Aristotle proves, there can be no self-mover; moreover, if there was, one must deny the First Way of St. Thomas, which requires great trepidation indeed!) Yet if the form exists distinctly as mover of the whole, it must be distinct from the matter moved, and thus immaterially existing, and thus immortal, as matter is the principle of corruption of the hylomorphic subject. Thus, the human being comes to be composed of a magnificent multiplicity of immortal forms, and not one immortal soul.

Objection D: Nature Follows Intrinsicality of Form. If our form is recast as an extrinsic mover, there is no nature of the thing itself, but only the nature of substance to which nothing is added, or some substantial recharacterization of prime matter, which is then sculpted into the character of this thing by a multiplicity of efficient causes acting in hierarchy; "all things are full of gods." But we believe and empirically experience the nature of the thing to be intrinsic to the thing, so that this ought to give us pause.

Now, each of these convince me well enough. This is not the matter of the question, as such, but an introduction. So here's my question:

What the heck is virtual presence of lower forms?!

Define Dancing: introit quaestio

Some time back, in TAC's Sophomore Lab program, whilst studying atomic theory and the philosophical foundations thereof, we students were given an article by Dr. Christopher Decaen entitled Elemental Virtual Presence in St. Thomas. (http://www.thomist.org/jour/2000/April/2000%20Apr%20A%20Decaen.htm) This article made some inroads into discussing the character of the virtual presence of elements in the composition thereof, and I think it will prove helpful in seeking an answer to the mysterious character of the participation virtually of the lower forms in the substantial form of the organism. Here, I suppose, I'll give my thoughts on the matter, but I must warn you, dear readers, that the article is in some respects almost as confusing to me as Mr. Sean Collins' force paper (which, intriguingly enough, may rear its head in this very discussion, if the enormous importance of virtual presence is as important as I think it is); and like the force paper, this is not for its being badly written (it is written as well as one might hope such a thing to be written) but for the subject itself being so far from ready understanding. A sign of this is the headache it regularly gives me when I try and define the "powers" of an element in composition, the difficulty of the element not being regarded as substantially actually present when the very bonding of "this substance" to "that substance" in a structural order produced "this other substance", and so forth. But here's my hazarding of a guess on how the elemental virtuality gives us an understanding of virtual presence of the lower forms.

Decaen argues that since the distinction between potency and act is indeed exhaustive for St. Thomas, and the elements are not in act, they must be, at root, in a kind of potential existence. Yet this is not pure potentiality, because prime matter has potentiality to every form, not just that of the elements said to be virtually present. It is rather (on the side of potency) the potential presence of the substantial forms of the elements. But there is also an actuality present, the presence of the accidents (namely, "anything that is not the primary substance or its substantial form"), and not just as they are in the elements (because if so the new element would be both hot and cold at the same time, or suchlike in theory) but as they reach a mean according to their proportion in the mixture.

This bears a striking similarity to our picture of the human person. Within the human, there are various organs, the form of which we take to be the substantial form of the whole human. Yet they clearly have their own shape and function, which led the pluriformists to propose the seemingly obvious idea that they have their own substantial forms, and which led Thomas to refute them with virtual presence. Likewise, we now look at the individual water molecule and discover, in an electrical dance, the component elements, seemingly existing as a system bonded in its parts. We are thus expected to say, just as Thomas said of the form of "man" and the presence of the lower forms of his organs, that hydrogen and oxygen have a virtual presence in water, while nevertheless having only potential presence of the substantial form. Looking at them, though, we feel a certain sympathy for the pluriformists, because, well, look at it! It's hydrogen, and oxygen, isn't it? Totality in the organism seems mystical when you have the guts laid out upon the table.

The situation only gets odder as one moves down to quarks, as it happens. I do not feel qualified to undertake that particular investigation (...yet) but I imagine it would follow in a similar way, quarks being more elemental than hydrogen and oxygen. What happens when one moves up, though? The elements become part of bodies, lower forms virtually present in a larger combination with various emergent qualities and such. These in turn become part of a vegetative animal, and so on. This is laid out explicitly in the Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 22:

As we said, since any moved thing, inasmuch as it is moved, tends to the divine likeness so that it may be perfected in itself, and since a thing is perfect in so far as it is actualized, the intention of everything existing in potency must be to tend through motion toward actuality. And so, the more posterior and more perfect an act is, the more fundamentally is the inclination of matter directed toward it. Hence. in regard to the last and most perfect act that matter can attain, the inclination of matter whereby it desires form must be inclined as toward the ultimate end of generation. Now, among the acts pertaining to forms, certain gradations are found. Thus, prime matter is in potency, first of all, to the form of an element. When it is existing under the form of an element it is in potency to the form of a mixed body; that is why the elements are matter for the mixed body. Considered under the form of a mixed body, it is in potency to a vegetative soul, for this sort of soul is the act of a body. In turn, the vegetative soul is in potency to a sensitive soul, and a sensitive one to an intellectual one. This the process of generation shows: at the start of generation there is the embryo living with plant life, later with animal life, and finally with human life. After this last type of form, no later and more noble form is found in the order of generable and corruptible things. Therefore, the ultimate end of the whole process of generation is the human soul, and matter tends toward it as toward an ultimate form. So, elements exist for the sake of mixed bodies; these latter exist for the sake of living bodies, among which plants exist for animals, and animals for men. Therefore, man is the end of the whole order of generation.

Wondrous as this map is, it has still more wondrous implications when one considers the subject; virtual presence becomes fundamental to the understanding of the entire order of creation. To clarify:

The lower elements are virtually present in the mixed bodies.

The mixed bodies are virtually present in the animals having lower souls.

The lower souls are virtually present in the souls of the higher animals.

Man is the highest animal.

Simply put, virtual presence is fundamental, not just to the understanding of the elements, but of the participation of all created reality in Providence; to the ultimate end of each sort of living thing as that sort of living thing up to man; and who knows what theological significance it has. I can only wonder at what role it has in the Beatific Vision, when man enters into the unio caritatis with the very highest order of being, God Himself, the Wisdom who laid the foundations of the universe in measure, and number, and weight. I think it pretty important to understand, from a philosophical and theological point of view; but it is also the place of great contention, as Dr. Decaen stated in his paper, and a better understanding of the relation of virtual presence and empirical science is not just useful, but crucial to understanding both nature and divine action.

Any thoughts on virtual presence or what I've written here? There could be a paper in this.

My first interaction with Tom Woods as of 7:56 PM 10/5/10

2010-10-05T20:13:00.000-07:00

The following is the account of an amusing (to those who, unlike Woods, actually know me) correspondence between myself

and Tom Woods on a friend's wall.

name withheld via Thomas E. Woods Jr.: If the title "The Man" were not already claimed by Ron
Paul, Tom Woods would have it. Hands down.

Tsunami: dude, false! "The man" is basically in open dissension against Church teaching on markets,
he's postulating a "free market" which has never existed in truth, and his postulation has this
rhetorical effect that any problems are dealt with thus: if something bad happens, it's because we
don't have a free market, and if something good happens, it's because of the free market that
didn't exist a second ago. Now, if he actually wanted to be precise, he would start being like
Acton and making the darn distinction between free markets and free enterprise.

If he did, though, he'd be opening a can of worms he's not willing to open! As it is, he seems to
think that markets, taken in themselves, are not the exchange of fallen human beings, but the
exchange of some sort of God-supervised system, like Newtonian gravity, where God, as the Supreme
Market Pantokrator, is sitting at the ground of it, ensuring morality through mixed agencies. This is
absurd! I simply, *as a Catholic*, cannot abide his anthropology. Paradise is not Somalia during those
infamous fifteen years. And as much as we may have an excess of government, and we most certainly do,
one cannot accordingly deny the whole of government! Rothbard is a shill for a foul
anthropology, one which cannot hold at all, and Woods is his willing prophet, even to the point of
treating Leo XIII as though he, despite being a most perceptive anthropologist in his own right and
a pioneer of Catholic socio-economic teaching, has no business talking about economics! How dare he
impugn THE MIGHTY ROTHBARD?!

And indeed, the mighty Rothbard has much to speak for. His position regarding the termination of
infants, for example; or his defective conception of the human being as a willing natural being; or
his proceeding mistaken conception of contract law. But this is not Rothbard, this is Woods, and I
needn't pick the economic fight; I can repudiate him simply on the fact that he has no conception of
the nuance of Catholic social teaching.

I have three bones to pick with him, which are fundamental in character.

He thinks man is an isolated atom, who can be made to be good in the absence of government by virtue
of the mythical free market;

He has NO conception of a common good over and above the private goods of the participants in that
mythical free market;

and he has no conception of the good beyond efficiency. This is no good at all, in the end,
because the good is destroyed when expediency is placed above virtue and the good of a community,
which necessitates government.

I do not think that he has real answers for these, and he has less than kind things to say about the
thought of the Church on these matters.

Tom Woods: name withheld, I'm sorry you were subjected to that string of cliches. No matter how much one writes about the market, no matter how much one clarifies his position, it always comes back to the
cliches. I will guarantee you that your friend has read me only in caricature and not my actual books
and articles. No one could view my position this cartoonishly who had actually read it. Pat Buchanan
promised to award Rothbard, who was his economic adviser in 1992, the Medal of Freedom if elected;
Joe Sobran likewise spoke highly of Rothbard. I will await your friend's denunciation of these men.

The know-nothing traditionalist is the most maddening stripe of Catholic. I expect the Left to
do nothing but study their own navels; I expect more of traditionalists.

Tom Woods: Here's a link for your buddy:
http://www.thomasewoods.com/on-chris-ferrara

Incidentally, Otto von Habsburg, teh Crown Prince of Austria, said Ludwig von Mises was "one of the
truly great men of our century." I guess the Habsburgs don't even get Catholic social teaching.
What a world!

Tsunami: Please don't make the error, by the way, of associating me de facto with traditionalist
Catholics. I am a Catholic, and I am traditional, but I am not what the usual combination of those
two words yields. I HAVE read Ferrara, as it happens; but my distaste for market libertarianism
is nothing so new, and was certainly around before I interned at Acton junior year. I have nothing to
say regarding Sobran and Buchanan, except that good men are nevertheless sometimes deceived into
following bad ideas concerning human freedom in the name of bending the stick the other way, and that's
why places like the Mises Institute exist.

Don't get me wrong; I think Austrian economics is a good way of understanding how to grow an economy,
when understood as free enterprise and not the canard of the free market; I do not however think
it is enough to have "free enterprise" for the purposes of government, because it is by the action
of government that this is protected. And part of the reason we have free enterprise is our duties
demand it, and part of those duties is the duty to the common good, the dreaded "distributive justice"
which has been part of Catholic Social Teaching for since Thomas and which von Habsburg was very aware
of, but which every single advocate of Rothbard virtually abandons in favor of the end-all of
self-interest. Unless you can surprise me with some intricacy of your position I am not aware of? I am
ever optimistic.

Tom Woods: my first name (if I may), when you say Austrian economics is a good way of doing thus and so, you are confirming my fears. Austrian economics is a body of descriptive knowledge. It is not a list of
policy prescriptions. Austrian economists as private individuals may make such recommendations,
but "Austrian economics" has nothing to say about them one way or another. That's why I find it so
funny when traditionalists say Austrian economics is "immoral" or whatever. Shows they don't know the
first thing about what they are criticizing. How could the concept of heterogeneous capital, or
marginal utility, be "immoral"?

As for the "common good," sorry, but I am not enamored of a phrase that sociopaths can exploit on
behalf of looting and enslaving. That doesn't mean we have no obligations to our fellow men, which is
the usual caricature of the anti-state position. The point, rather, is that it does not follow that
it is the state, rather than the individual conscience, that must do the enforcing.

St. Thomas was willing to tolerate prostitution if the attempt to prohibit it would be more disrputive
and harmful to souls. If prostitution can be tolerated, though, then surely private property --
a positive good -- can, when the alternative (and it is the only alternative) is some form of state
violence. I do not wish to empower this most deadly of institutions, an institution that bears zero
resemblance to the practically invisible "state" as St. Thomas knew it.

You may disagree with this judgment of mine, but to say I'm not allowed to think it, or to caricature
me as someone who believes individuals are "atoms" just because I don't believe in the initiation of
violence against innocent people, is really absurd. Everyone is owed respectful treatment, rather than
these crude generalizations. I have never met anyone, by the way, who believes this crazy
"individuals are atoms" nonsense.

Tsunami: Alright, well, if as they say this just got real, then I'd like to open with some
bridge-mending.

I apologize for my tone initially. It would be far too easy to dismiss myself by saying that the
manner in which I talk to name withheld is perhaps more fiery than my usual, but that is not enough to
excuse me from speaking too rashly about someone who, up until you actually showed up, I didn't know
would be present. It was imprudent and generally not befitting a Christian, and I do apologize. I
hope that this, at least, will show you that, though I have read Ferrara's work, I must say, like
Olivia to Sir Toby, that I am not allied to his misdemeanors as a matter of course. The man tilts
at windmills, it's just that this time when it comes to Libertarianism I think he might have the
right idea, socially though not always prudentially.

I'll leave this post separate and continue below.

Tsunami: Now, with that, I am not unacquainted with Austrian economics. I went to school with
David Friedman's grandkids, spoke to him on a fairly frequent basis about his social theories,
and read Machinery of Freedom when I was still in high school. My mom worked with Milton Friedman on
school choice in California when I was in grade school. We've known the Acton Institute for some
time, and I interned there a few summers ago; indeed, the way I know name withheld is that I recommended
two other people to intern there, and name withheld knew one of them even before he interned with them. (For the cause of civility, I am determined to strive to be the example in making this a polite discussion,
both out of that general courtesy I really should have shown earlier and out of my special respect
for name withheld, who someday will re-enact "Well, Did You Evah" with me in a study filled with rich mahogany. :-D ) I took great umbrage at Ferrara's snipe at the Institute in his latest work, because I think
it characteristic of his shotgun tactics that he often shoots people he doesn't really know.
I have read a good portion of von Mises, and I have read Rothbard, and Hayek was required reading for
me in high school. That I have read Milton Friedman, and watched with glee as he destroyed a
young Michael Moore on Youtube, I will say so. So I'm not unacquainted with the field. And I fear you
are mistaking my meaning by isogesis, because what I meant to say was precisely this, that Austrian
economics are good in respect of themselves, in that they are essentially the modus of free
enterprise taken in an isolated manner. Other economic systems than that which allows man
naturally to exercise his right to private property don't work. So I'm not disagreeing with you in
this, actually. I am not thinking of Austrian econ as a set of prescriptions like "lower taxes,
privatize, etc." although as you say many Austrian economists will advise such things based on the way
enterprise fundamentally works. Nor am I calling "Austrian economics" immoral; far from it! I was
one of the only defenders of Smith in my undergraduate seminar!

I will say this, though, that too much is attributed to the role of the economy in
Libertarian economic conceptions. And a sign of this is your reaction to the common good. Don't get
me wrong; it has been misused, as a concept, far too often. One could say the same about Austrian
economics. Ought we then to throw out the common good, or a practical understanding of economics? I
daresay either move would be dangerous.

Tsunami: As to dear St. Thomas, my patron, namesake, and current and past object of study, I
fear that you yourself misunderstand him. For a start, his entire concept of private property is
conditioned by distributive justice and the universal destination of goods. If Jean Valjean
crawls up, starving, to your window, he is allowed to take that loaf of bread from your store to feed
his family. This is a basic principle of Catholic social teaching; and part of it involves respect
for it, naturally, in the courts. In other words, in Thomas' society, that man is able to take bread
from my store to survive, and the courts must say that the bread, because of his need, belonged to
him.

Now, I'm not sure you DISAGREE with this, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it, so I can better
see where you are coming from, if, that is, you are still willing to have this exchange. I know that
you are a busy guy.

A wee bit of insurance

2010-08-29T13:19:00.000-07:00

Recently, I took issue with the treatment of various distributists on the InsideCatholic blog. My politely worded redress to the editors was promptly deleted as though my comment was a defamation or some violation of the terms of service, which, in fact, it was not. I am not a distributist or a libertarian at the moment, and have no dog in this fight. Nevertheless, I am no fan of this sort of nonsense and said so. The following is my comment, reposted for insurance purposes in full.

"I see that my previous censure has been deleted. Lovely.

I am frankly a bit annoyed by the blasé dismissal of all other Catholic economists than those who work at the Mises Institute, especially given the questionable nature of the Mises-Rothbard economic schema in matters of morality and even basic understanding of anthropology. I am not a distributist, at the moment at least, and I am certainly not a libertarian, though I was one at one point (and there's a very interesting story to that); rather, I am a Catholic seeking an economic theory which compromises on neither efficiency, anthropology, nor theology, and in my opinion the libertarian over-reliance on the unmitigated free market, as Leo XIII said himself in Rerum Novarum and John Paul II reiterated in Centesimus Annus, is absolutely anthropologically catastrophic and ultimately theologically dangerous, because salvation only happens in the context of a community of persons, and that takes more than a market of buyers and sellers.

Of the Mises Institute I have heard and read ample amounts; indeed, one cannot speak of "Catholic economists" without attracting the attention of twelve Mises Institute pamphleteers trying to argue that one should hate the state...with "as a Catholic!" hastily tacked on at the end, similar to the way they tack on Thomas Aquinas to their understanding of private property, in a way similar to the way Copernicus described the Ptolemaic system, as a freakish chimera of misaligned parts. I do not dislike them as people, of course, but the discussion of Catholic social teaching rapidly becomes tiresome when one only hears, in principles, arguments from authority and conspiracy theories about the origin of the state in force.

Yet when I was almost given a chance to see a professional Catholic distributist by profession and study battle it out with a professional Catholic libertarian from the Mises Institute (something which, as a theology, philosophy and economics nerd, really gets my gears turning) apparently the folks at IC decide that some prior nonsense having nothing to do with this thread and seemingly out of the blue allows them to discontinue the discussion, effectively giving the Mises folks an unfair advantage, without any explanation further than "they are a tribe of trolls" (unjustified) and "past history" (enigmatic, opaque, and peremptory.) Needless to say I was not fond of this course of action.

Let it be known (for the defense of my OWN reputation) that I was polite, made no ad hominem arguments, spoke only to the facts as they were visible to the people on this post, and said nothing about anything other than the appearances. It dos not seem right to censure the distributists based on this thread. I am told that there is "past history", which I couldn't possibly understand; but what I do understand is that there was no misbehavior here, and that as a result of the administration's actions all professional distributists have been summarily dismissed, along with any casual supporter of theirs who wishes to speak at all frankly.

This is not just, it is not Catholic, and it is not even equitable. As a result of this action, the only people with any training or credentials in economics are the folks from the Mises Institute, and if I wanted to hear their opinion again all I'd have to do is state my distaste for Rothbard.

If you delete this comment, I am going to write a letter to Deal Hudson explaining my unjust treatment. Following this, if nothing is done, I am going to cancel any subscription or contact with anything sponsored by Inside Catholic, which is lamentable but a necessary move; "be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad." In addition, as I say, if nothing is done, I will inform every Catholic I know of the mistreatment that has occurred here.

Of course, there is a VERY simple solution, if, as the admins say, it is because we don't know the past history. TELL US THE PAST HISTORY, and give Medaille, Ferrara and co. the chance to either defend themselves or apologize for their past actions or at least state that they won't do whatever genuinely bad thing they MAY have done. Since it seemed to be going just fine BEFORE the admins brought out their shovels and ice picks, I imagine that the Catholic part of Inside Catholic gives reason for the expectation of a decent result.

I am also posting this comment on my blog and my Facebook account, as insurance; furthermore, if it is deleted, I am resolved to send it to various friends of mine in Catholic academic circles with whom you might be aware. If this seems too much, realize that I am no friend of injustice in any form."

How Can I Keep From Singing: the real beauty of philosophy and theology

2010-08-09T15:10:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, I was watching, marathon-style, all the newest Doctor Who episodes with the new young thing they've got playing everyone's favorite Time Lord. I can remember having an epiphany while reading my Dante later that night: for all my talk of theology and philosophy, what use is trying to get all the nuts and bolts straight in my mind if I can't ever show anyone what I'm building with it, how it looks; on the road, so to speak? Or, in another respect, because most of my blog posts start with experiences, people get a small taste of what makes me so excited about this stuff, but in an incredibly indirect manner. Then, when I talk about it, the philosophy behind it sounds dry, chalky, bony perhaps. It is not supposed to be left in this state, this academic comatose state which simply stating the truth “without tenderness” displays to others. Philosophy is not supposed to be left out in the sun to die and be eaten by the vultures of academia, but to be nurtured and grown in the womb of the personal human reality. This is, in a manner of speaking, the role of the poet in relation to philosophy: to put flesh to the bones of philosophical inquiry by relating what would normally be a dry statement to the “wet” human reality, and in doing so, reveal the beauty implicitly locked in the vault of reason to the emotions.

I am no such very good poet. I am not technically trained; I lack that sort of creativity. I can create, on a limited level, a few small phrases, and perhaps they will rhyme; but upon examination I am far more an art critic than an artist. That being said, I would not wish people to think less of me for being a critic, for to every good poet there exists an excellent critic. Dante did not write the Divine Comedy in one go, all by himself. Moreover, as a writer, I fear I am too verbose. But this is not going to prevent me from trying to express something of what I have come to love, because I do not wish others to remain blind to beauty; or as Dante says, “Father, Virtue Divine, should you but deign / that I make manifest a shadow of / the blessed kingdom sealed upon my brain, / then at the foot of that great tree whose roots you love / you'll see me stand, and crown my brows with green, / made worthy by the subject, and by you.” It is important to remember that his entire pilgrimage is inspired by the intercession of St. Lucy, patroness of blindness.

When artists depict ordinary scenes like a starry night in an extraordinary manner, we recognize that they “see” something different about the thing, like Van Gogh's rivulets and profusions of golden light. Ramachandran, who I mentioned in a previous note, has even made the claim that mild to strong synaesthesia is closely tied up with the parts of our brain where things like analogy and metaphor are made physically. We see the gift of the artist as somehow taking the ordinary and revealing the extraordinary in the thing itself, and we recognize that this gift is itself extraordinary and precious, because if everyone had it, the extraordinary itself would be something ordinary to people.

The fact is, when I see things, I think differently than the norm. Apple could make a commercial out of my life. When I look at something like a rose, my mind swirls with possibilities. Of course, I am not disconnected to the immediacy of the thing; the first thing I apprehend is the immediate, stunning beauty and complexity inherent in the design of the rose, its color, its smell, its shape. But my mind will not allow me to disconnect from that experience without reflection, what I think St. Paul thought of when he claimed that the “unexamined life is not worth living.” Of course, the sensation and absorption in the rose is itself a sort of examination, but even my dog enjoys the smell of things, and indeed, many more smells than I enjoy. Everyone examines life this way, unconsciously. But for me, the experience continues into a conscious, almost frenetic series of connections between that and other things, like the Divine Rose in the Paradiso, or the diversity of the flowers in the world, which St. Therese so beautifully used to illustrate the more perfect uniqueness of the people God created individually. From these, I cannot help but jump to the most basic similarities between these different, amazing and beautiful things; the understanding of complexity in so much beauty, for example. A rose has so many petals, all fragile, delicate, easily broken away, and all individually beautiful, which come together in their simplicity to create this complex, beautiful thing, which nevertheless is definitely one rose, beautiful in its uniqueness, more powerfully able to grab our attention, and able to represent to us something as magnificent as the love of the angels for God and man.

Aristotle once said that he gained this by philosophy, that he did without being told what others did only out of fear of the law. I think only a philosopher, one who has been truly bitten by the love of wisdom, really grasps what he meant by this. And, I think, not all philosophers do, and that this is often evidenced by their philosophies. In fact, it seems to me that there's really only one way to guarantee that that love will come about, since nothing in this world can itself guarantee that it will change a person. Really, the only way to assure that this love will be borne out in a philosophy is an openness to theology. And such beauty is unlocked from that wonderful vault! I said before that the rose points to the love of the angels for God; but in the understanding of unity in complexity, it becomes far easier to see the beauty in the fact that God Himself is one God in three Persons, the classic formula for the Trinity. The rose, once an element in the understanding of high things, now points to the ineffable beauty of God in Himself. And if that beauty is something infinitely more than that of the rose which gives me so much current pleasure, if it can indeed promise me that happiness which all things in this world are for the sake of, then how much should I turn myself to seek it, like an artist devoting himself to his masterpiece, his Ninth Symphony?

The fact is that philosophers have, owing to a few bad apples, fallen victim to a more horrible sort of scientific bigotry. We are considered to be regurgitators of dead things, or the producers of ontological buffoonery. But it is, I suppose, the plight of the philosopher to be regarded thus, because to us, the roses are beloved to the angels; to the ones who claim to know what they are exhaustively through scientific materialism, the rose is just a rose. And the worst bigotry has fallen upon theologians, because we “don't study a real subject”, our God is a “delusion”, we “lack a purpose for being in academia”. Yet to us, the rose has a purpose in our happiness; to those bigoted fellows, the rose is just “matter, that will someday scatter, when peaceful, the world lays us down.” And what, I ask the reader, could explain why the rose is there, and so beautiful? If you believe the materialists, this question doesn't matter; if you believe the philosophers, this question becomes a labor of love. And it is a labor that, despite the bigotry, despite the lies about the history of my field, despite the sneers from the people who don't respect my field, despite the claims that my field is an academic mortuary, and despite the idiots who have never tasted beauty and thus refuse to believe it exists, I will not, cannot abandon it. The roses are too beautiful.

The Human Factor: Why socialism and libertarianism have the same problems

2010-07-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

There are two portions to this note, the anecdote and the analysis. The anecdote:

I was not always the strapping young Thomist with which my friends and readership are familiar. There was a time, in fact, when I was a young libertarian. When I was much younger than I am now, I attended what can only be described as a libertarian educational experiment. This school was very much an example of libertarianism trying to put its best foot forward: the hired educators were not called "teachers", but "staff members"; the students voted on whether they would be hired or not; the baseline rules were that no-one could harm anyone else, for a rather broad definition of harm; and no-one was forced to take either a given class or a certain number of classes. It was, in other words, complete educational liberty. This would be great, if given to a mature and thoughtful human being; unfortunately, I was 12 or maybe a bit older, and spent most of my time playing Warcraft 2 on the school computer.

Now, it seems immediately that libertarianism demands a mature populace, and this is fine by libertarians, because they have rarely claimed otherwise. Only the most devout and deluded supporter of the utterly free market would ever claim that corruption is removed from the political sphere simply by competition. If anything, corrupt individuals compete in their corruption, using it to one-up the other guy. Happily, for what I like to think of as the first phase of my time at the school, this was not a problem; the staff members were always very altruistic in their outlook, willing to risk a lower pay and possible inactivity to support the grand experiment. In many respects, when the school was peaceful and educational, they were what helped it to be so. But the immaturity of the populace was something expected of the populace as young; there was a change brewing, as surely as the Tides of Darkness brewed on the computer screen every morning.

Eventually, some few students decided (quite rightly) that the school should be providing for their interests. They happened to be Wiccans, and their particular interest was "Women's Spirituality", a frightening phrase which since then to me always conjures up images of broomsticks, dead trees cracked by lightning and cackling, which they made no effort to subvert. They spelled their gender with a 'y' instead of an 'e' (womyn), they wore what could be called Gothic clothing but was less charitably the sort of stuff you'd see if a Harry Potter convention crashed into a showing of Prince of Persia; they talked loudly about the power of women and whatnot. Mind, this is not actually a personal judgment on them, just a depiction of the way they portrayed themselves to others. As I was at the time a libertarian and am now a citizen of our politic, be it never so humble, this was and is not terribly shocking to me, and in point of fact they were often, perhaps generally, very nice people. Sometimes they could be a bit coarse, but that's the way of our times, I learned.

What is interesting is not the way they expressed, but the way they worked the system. There are a great many people today who fancy that to harm an animal should be given the same legal standing as harming a human, and they were one group of them, which I think is funny since they wore clothing. If they were really religiously serious about it they'd all be Jains or something. In any case, there was a rule proposed at the weekly legislative meeting (which no-one willingly attended because legislation is an utterly, utterly dull activity, and children are creatures of passion) that the "discrimination against animals" should be disallowed. This was a vastly overreaching law, and one which taught me to pay attention in any pursuit to definitions used in legislature. Among the effects: One could not eat meat, wear animal-tested products, keep pets (including the school pet, which they wanted to set free! Rats do not mind being in cages as much as people often impute to them) or call an animal anything they wouldn't call a person.

Needless to say, the kids, who liked their meat and their Birkenstocks and their school pets, took offense at this; but because of the fact that they proposed it suddenly and without warning, only their cronies (in the technical sense of the term, people who vote only out of private interest) were there, and so the rule passed. This, of course, was not ideal. Immediately when the rule had been promulgated, a special legislative session was scheduled without so much as a "let's give this a try" to repeal the ghastly law. Immediately the kids got involved, because the law touched upon their private interest. (Now, admittedly, this is evidence of the market correcting itself, but there's a curiosity even here I will mention later.) After the bill had been repealed, immediately another bill was put on the books by the promulgators of the first, legislating something rather shocking even to most of the staff. If I recall correctly, the staff didn't vote, but the students could; the initiative was that one of the feminist staff members (nice lady, well-liked, but rather political, as the scene evinced) would be elected "Grand Poobah", given the power to introduce bills without their being seconded, given the ability to veto decided votes, given the ability to decide in favor of a minority vote, and given the power to make, essentially, executive orders.

This appalled the libertarian conscience of the school. To this day, I am unsure what they were thinking, whether they really believed anyone would allow it to pass. I suppose because of their substantial feminist lobby, they thought they could. But a lot of students turned out to the meeting, and it turned out that the founder of the school (for whom, among libertarians and among friends, I have great respect) threatened to quit if the bill had passed; if it had, I suppose, the experiment would be an utter failure, and les enfants terribles would have voted themselves into a tyranny. The school would have quickly devolved into an inescapable mess, and shortly thereafter disbanded or turned into some kind of Wiccan yoga center or something. I don't know. In any case, the bill failed. The school went on for quite some time, and although I do not know if it still runs, it apparently fared much better educationally once a few of the students took initiative.

Now, the analysis.

When I came to the school, I really told myself that I would take a math class, which my mom wanted. Then I found out Warcraft II and Command and Conquer: Red Alert I were on the school's Pentium I. No such math class happened; the time spent at that school was, during my inexhaustible reserve of free-time, spent either playing computer games or waiting in line to do so. Occasionally I would go outside when the line was too long to play computer games, or something interesting was going on. This is because children are selfish, imperceptive, foolish little beasts of passion even at their best moments when they have no interest presented to them to be otherwise. This is to say that men are not naturally evil in toto, but they aren't naturally perfect either. A bit more prodding from the staff members, perhaps, or a stirring reminder that schools are not simply for the purpose of passing time, might have provoked me to make a weak commitment, but libertarians, as a rule, are against forcing or urging maturity onto people. Thus, as an educational institution, the school depended entirely on being composed of Huck Finn-types, kids who would make an education of their own lives if only given an opportunity, or Tom Sawyer-types, kids who'd spend their whole day either in society or trying to be so. But kids aren't naturally either of these, though they might have elements of both. In point of fact, the second one introduces recreational activity at this age of the sort provided by a computer, man reduces himself to a beast; the loss of his reason for a time is merely the first consequence.

So in the first place, the school had this problem, because it was a school run by libertarians; libertarians whom I continue to love very much, but nevertheless, libertarians. This is what I'd call the bottom-up problem, which results from two factors: non-pedagogical lawmaking and insufficient integration of the family into the school's activities. Were there more parental supervision, I don't doubt that I'd have taken that math class, because I'd be terrified of my mom catching me spending all day playing video games. Were the laws not made simply to cause punitive retribution (as, for example, in the case of laws to punish new types of offenses that developed, such as preventing people from playing in the loft just because you were using it, or other minor but unique offenses) or prevent damage to property (having to get certified to use the computers, for example, which acted as the promulgation of the laws set by the "Corporation", or smaller interest group, governing the use of the computers) then perhaps, when a governmental philosophy developed, the individual citizens would get an idea of their duties. All that the laws served to do, though, was create a minimal culture, a culture built around students satisfying their immediate or sufficiently powerful distant inclinations. (A monthly field trip, for example.) These inclinations, while I was there, never included actual classwork.

The lack of this remedy, and the perversion in some cases thereof, constituted the second, top-down problem. Legislators are rarely saints; they are simply people with the patience and popularity to get elected. Their job is simply to legislate according to the common good. This is tremendously boring and extremely slow work. The Norse had to liven it up with drinking parties and fights to make it bearable. In a libertarian society, there are no dedicated electors; there are simply the citizens, and most of them hate doing the necessary busywork. Hence, no-one showed up at the school meetings as a matter of course. Now let us say that someone passed a bad law which perhaps offended less than the amount of private interest the meat law did, or perhaps that the Grand Poobah initiative had been put forward first, when no-one had expected it. In the first case, because people are so very lazy, the repeal would have taken a good deal longer if it had happened at all; in the second, the school would have disbanded. Politics is a science and statecraft is an art, and the only thing that saved Cedarwood that time was a combination of bad Machiavellianism on the bad side and good statecraft on the good. If the bad were less bad or the good were less good, things would have been different.

Or, to torpedo another libertarian axiom: the actor in the free market is not a mathematical quantity acting the second a bad thing happens, and sometimes seconds count. When one hears, for example, the discussion of how a Rothbardian economy would deal with a clever con man, one is told that that person would be blacklisted. But in the first place, since he's a con man, who would they blacklist? Secondly, and more apropos, "a lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on." Economic actors are not a wise, informed version of caffeinated chipmunks; they do not act instantaneously, or even all the time prudentially; and the market being composed of these people, it does not act quickly as a result. Time does not slow down when one is making an economic decision or its necessary physical correlates. Thus, by the time the con's been blacklisted, AND the other actors (who are living in an economy wherein trust is not always encouraged) have confirmed that despite their quarrel with this, that or the other company, they will corroborate the list, five more people have been conned. Or in the case of Cedarwood, the Grand Poobah has already been elected, or the school pet is already running cage-less into the woods.

So far I've mentioned three problems: the top-down, the bottom-up, and the problem of economic actors as temporal. What is vitally interesting is that these are the flip-side of a dualism one also sees in the enemy of libertarianism, socialism.

In extremis, Marxist socialism, man is, as much as possible, reduced to a materialist understanding; he is defined as part of a class, reduced to his (material) property, and his individualism away from "The People" is drained away with the discouragement of any discussion of an immortal soul. He is defined merely in terms of his praxis. Thus, from the bottom-up, man has no liberty, and even if he wished to pursue a better life, an education, marriage to a woman he loves, religion of his choosing, he is forbidden all of these things; they are denounced as capitalistic, artificial constructs, ways of keeping power such that the classes are divided.

In extremis, Rothbardian libertarianism, on the other hand, man is thought of as some disembodied will, the one thing which cannot be enslaved by law; he can abrogate from any future labor contract at will, he is reduced to his ability to choose (and not the things he chooses, because the second one chooses, one self-determines, and the second one determines oneself, one can be enslaved by that determination; thus at any time one may abrogate oneself from any real commitment.) Goods contracts, Rothbard claims, are respected, but here's where being bodily comes back and bites him in the posterior. Since every goods contract involves some labor, labor being a bodily act, every labor contract is in fact a future labor contract, since there is no such thing as duration-less labor. Since there is no such thing as a purely durationless act, or an act with no durationless correlates, there is no such thing as a "safe" contract, or a contract, goods or otherwise, from which one may not abrogate. Government is viewed also, interestingly, as an instrument of force to prevent people from gaining power such that the people are unjustly united.

Both of these problems, as John Paul II said previously of Socialism, are anthropological in nature. Human nature is such that we do not just tend towards society, we require it, precisely because we are materially finite; we need other goods and other people to truly be what our nature was to be. Because we are sinful, as even many libertarians will admit, we need some form of government for policing; but we need government for more than just this, owing to the fact that law also has a pedagogical purpose and the fact that the affairs of a human society are too extended for one human actor or a system of human actors at the level of subsidiarity of industry alone to handle. Although such actors are required and should be given liberty at that level to act, at the same time, the common good is more than simply a collection of private goods, and has its own level of governance required, which is more and different than the sort of governance required for industry.

In fact, the common good may require someone to go against their immediate self-interest in favor of some more distant interest, even an interest which may not be recognized by the individual entrepreneur. An example of this would be subprime loans, where investors cast the risk to the future from their mind and invested for the sake of instant gratification. Another example would be, in Christian circles, Heaven: if you want to get to Heaven, you can't pay your workers an unjust wage (which is not the same sort of thing as the "Fair Wage" theory) and expect to get there, even if it makes you lots of money now. Accordingly, the government may suggest or incentivize that businesses do a certain thing, as long as it does not imprudently interfere with entrepreneurial liberty. I say imprudently because virtually everything a government does interferes somehow with entrepreneurial liberty; it is freedom, ultimately, which is desirable, not liberty for its own sake. That much for libertarianism. But one cannot have freedom without liberty, and that much for socialism.

But why, the reader may ask, the emphasis on anthropology? The reason why extreme socialism and libertarianism have these problems is that they misunderstand two things: the way the body and the soul relate together, and the way human beings relate to their possessions, other human beings, and their government. This is not to say that their ideas are in every case entirely wrong; Marx's critique of materialist capitalism, while economically woefully sloppy, was spot on anthropologically (if one forgives the fact that it is not the whole picture of free enterprise), and the libertarian critiques of socialism have been insightful and prescient on an economic level. The difficulty with this latter, though, is that economics does not exist in a vacuum, and while badmouthing the other guy because he didn't bring a hammer to the construction site, one must take the greatest care that one is not diagnosing each problem of one's own as a nail. Some things are more important than liberty: these things pertain not to liberty, which is the potency to good choice and therefore freedom in the realm of act, but freedom herself, more precious than gold.

Dancing and Body Language: why premarital sex is bad

2010-07-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite activities nowadays is to swing-dance. I was not always a skilled dancer; being Indian, the stereotype is that I have two left feet, and while I might, having taught a few Indians how at this point, protest this stereotype, in my own case it was abundantly clear. It took me roughly two months to develop the foot coordination to learn the basic step, in point of fact, and other moves took pretty long themselves. But before long I was doing well enough to teach the dancing, and I learned a great many things from it. Before I went to my alma mater and learned how, I was inclined to belittle dance; it seemed to me a silly degree for young women and gay men with an inflated opinion of the importance of their own expression. I suppose it was characteristic of the maturity one usually learns in college that I quickly had to discard this impression; dance can be beautiful, skillful, and an exultation of the beauty of the human person God made. Moreover, it is undeniably fun, and the pretty girls I met through dancing were certainly not a detraction from learning how. I had, before I entered, a prideful and immature opinion of the art, and now I have long since changed my tune.

I learned a great deal about more than dancing from learning how, too. Dancing, like so many arts, is definitely a form of expression; and while we may think this only applies to interpretive dance, which is more explicitly expression, it applies, I think, in another way to social dancing. In the interaction between leader and follower, a lot of information is exchanged: cues for moves, directions of motion, indicators of caution on crowded dancefloors. Many of these notifications are unconscious in good dancers; in bad ones, they are either overly conscious, muted or nonexistent. Communication is essential to dance.

One thing that one realizes after some time is that, like speech patterns, this communication has personal touches. I can tell if someone has taken ballroom dance lessons from a number of factors. Perhaps they exhibit hesitance towards turning by means of my right hand, or show preference for a more defined stance in more formal swing; maybe they have an insistence on ballerina turns, where the leader does not push the follower into the turn, but raises the hand, more formally, above the head and turns by means of the wrist. Each of these things, like in poker, are "tells"; they give away information about the person that might be something they did not want to reveal. However, it is extremely helpful to a leader to recognize them, as it shows the leader how, perhaps, he should restrain himself from or let himself go into certain moves, like aerials.

Or in another case, the circumstances of teaching can be helpful. If someone is hesitant to learn, and male, I will sometimes (and rather casually) request that a nearby lady will come be my guinea pig to help teach the young man in question. Now, I don't normally let this out, but the young lady is not chosen by accident. If I see a young man standing around staring awkwardly at the dancers, I pay attention to who it is in particular who dazzles his inexperienced eyes. Typically, just by human psychology, he stands close but not too close to wherever she is on the sidelines; he wants to ask her to dance but is restrained by his inability to do so himself. Say what anyone may about mind-body dualism, there is usually a bodily correlate to social psychology, and I'm getting pretty good at spotting the more common ones. I will then stroll up to him (at a different pace depending on what is required; quickly if he seems shy, or slowly and circuitously if he seems social, so as to respect his personal dignity), strike up a conversation in the same manner, and bring them around to the possibility of learning. Then I surprise them with the girl. Ladies: you may not realize it, but guys practically wet themselves with fear when suddenly confronted with the possibility of having to make a good showing of themselves for a girl they like in this manner. It's a cruelty, but so is the way Petruchio "tamed" Kate, and if there's any other way, I have yet to find it; to paraphrase Petruchio, if you know a better, "'tis charity to show."

This forces them into a decision, and nine times out of ten (since I've made it clear to the girl that this is a lesson, so it's understood he doesn't know how) they'll step up to the plate. Five minutes later, usually, they're on the floor; it's not tough when you know how to teach it. I realize that some might think me a manipulative bastard, but this is dancing, not Lie To Me. I'm not in the habit of interrogating people with a Tango or getting to know their deepest secrets with a waltz, it's not that sort of thing. Like music, it communicates some circumstance (in this case, the sort of dancing experience they have) and lots of emotion; you can tell when something bad has happened to someone by the way that they waltz a little bit more tightly than normal, as though clinging to a board at sea, or when someone is feeling a bit more social than usual, by their more adventurous tendencies in swing or a tendency towards moving faster than the beat.

Personality, too, shows itself; obviously, in the way that the tendency of the follower to act like a leader signifies a certain pride or a certain attitude towards the general population of leaders (and that not always an unmerited one!) Personality also shows itself in, for example, the way some people like to do unorthodox moves, or play around with the existing ones (which, in my opinion, should be encouraged if it won't cause an injury); it's a sort of insatiable attitude towards adventure. The sort of dance one prefers speaks volumes, as well, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure this out.

Overall, it is the most obvious thing in the world to me that one can "speak" through the use of one's body and contact with another. One thing that is also clear is that one can lie; it is the possibility inherent in speaking using anything that one can send the wrong signals. Some who watch, for example, "So You Think You Can Dance?" or "Dancing With The Stars" are familiar with, to use an obvious case, the Argentine Tango. This species of tango has a very simple basic step: in a straight line forward, left-beat-right-beat-left-beat-right-beat, with occasional pauses when one wishes to do a move. This typically matches with a pulsing beat, as in for example Gotan Project's excellent Santa Maria (Del Buen Ayre):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zD9W9SZj9w

I like to joke that the basic step, while aggressively "forward", cannot sustain the dance on its own; it needs a lot of help. By itself, it's boring. Now, the Argentinians know this as well as anyone, which is why this step is mostly reserved for using floor space quickly; the MAIN event of the Argentinian tango is the foot action. Through a series of bold and aggressive movements (one such move being the lady kicking up and backwards, under the crotch area, coming up just short of what I like to call the checkmate area) the leader and follower convey the feeling of being in a "passionate war", a war sustained by the lady clinging for dear life to the man, such that the entire dance becomes a legitimized form of dirty dancing, one which has more powerful expression than the ol' fashioned "club bump and grind" could ever dream of having. This, in fact, is precisely the way Antonio Banderas' character in "Take The Lead" gets the kids interested in dance...which conjures up all sorts of moral censure in my mind. This dance, from its very nature, is the sort of dance I wouldn't dance unless I was married for a few years already. I know HOW, as it happens, albeit without practice; the moves are fairly primal and simplistic. But although I know how, I will not teach it to anyone; they'd have to go elsewhere. Nevertheless, people regularly dance this, at younger than my age, with people to whom they are not married; in fact, it's the foundation of a lot of normal tango choreography.

This, it seems to me, is a form of institutionalized lying. As doing follows knowing and knowing follows doing, body follows soul and vice versa, dancing this way is a real act of expression; and the expression is undeniably voulez-vous coucher avec moi, not just ce soir but right now, here, on the dance floor, in front of hundreds of people. A tribute to this fact is that moves from Argentine tango play a large role in both the Dirty Dancing movies. There is an undeniable, always-present signal in Argentine tango. Anyone who denies this has either never danced it or never seen it taught well. If someone dances this without this intention, they are conveying that signal dishonestly or unknowingly (but how could it ever be unknowing?!) and thus lying about their actual intentions, and given the situation, they are probably first lying to themselves. It's undeniably a seductive dance to try, but seduction is seductive. For Catholics, certainly, dancing this without being married to your partner almost always represents an occasion of sin for one or both people dancing.

If, in fact, one dances this with another, trying to claim one isn't "into" them after the fact seems hypocritical, unless one has no idea what they are doing. Thus, we see a dancer's lie. Similarly, one may tell lies while dancing swing: one may be more daring, cling a little bit more tightly than necessary to their partner, maybe dally in a dip, gazing into her eyes a bit longer than is perhaps necessary; these things are all quite natural when dancing with a girl one likes, but only someone terribly naive would think these signals invariably honest. I do not tell most of this, of course, to people as I teach them to dance; the more clever ones figure this out quite easily. Part of the reason I don't tell them is because, in a way, it would be enabling them to lie; there is a certain innocence to a bad dancer, because all of their ways of conducting themselves, while primitive, are at the same time more genuine, if a bit insecure. But I will not deny occasionally (and usually, I might add, accidentally) giving the wrong signals, as when I am angry and I perhaps have a different attitude towards life I will be more forceful and less responsive. Sometimes one has to check oneself...belay that, often one has to check themselves.

The fact of the matter is that the general admission that dancing "expresses" should give us a real idea of what "body language" really means, that it is not just isolated to the way that girl down the bar is bearing herself towards you but in fact shows itself all the time, in almost every activity, some more so than others. Yet there is inevitably one incredibly bodily activity which our culture, while affirming the importance of dance, wants to claim has been muzzled or never spoke at all, and that activity is sex. Casanova slept with hundreds, maybe thousands of women, and I'll bet you that many of them were prepared to think they were the only ones in his life after he told them so. That man knew, perniciously, how to control signals he gave in that activity, or he'd never have gone so far. Sometimes a longtime wife, so we're informed by fiction, Shakespeare and conventional wisdom, can tell if there's something wrong, or another woman, or another such problem; to deny this would be to deny common sense.

The undeniable fact is that even in that activity (and perhaps, as the Church says, especially in that activity) bodies speak more than the most exquisitely written letter. And sometimes one can lie just as exquisitely; lies like "it can't be bad, what we do, when it feels so good", or "you're the only one", or "we'll be together forever", or the most poignant to the act itself, "all that I am is yours, reserving nothing." Of all these, the last is the most obvious; and all the others, some more obviously and some less, arise from that primary communication. Atheists and anti-naturalists might try to claim that this is not by purpose, but the Catholic author writing this is certainly willing to say that the institution of marriage is the only place where sex as communication may be, so to speak, "honest"; because at most, outside of a marriage, the only testament to the claim made in sex is the word of someone who has not made explicit their never-ending devotion until death, which cannot but carry a large portion of doubt with it naturally.

Another way that one can lie in that act is with contraception, as a corollary. If implicit in sex is the promise that one is committed to the other in every respect, that one wishes to be entirely part of the life of the other, yet one uses contraception, one imposes an artificial barrier which acquires a similar character to someone wearing running shoes at the altar. It is to say "yes, I will give myself totally to you...but if anything results, it'll be unexpected, and I'm trying to avoid the responsibility or difficulty of dealing with it right now."

It becomes worse when the man tries to procure an abortion for the woman when such measures fail, as then the statement becomes "yes, I promised you my whole self, but that was as long as you never called on me to face the consequences of my promise." Now, some will say that the former oversimplifies contraception, and that the latter is somehow contrary to their experience of men who sought such abortions (which is strange to me, since in these cases where the experience is contrary, usually there is an agreement between the man and the woman, in which case what is really said there is that the woman agrees never to make the man keep his promise...at which point the man may as well be both relieved and a scumbag, and the woman is lowering her standards.) The objection to the former, though, comes from the idea that I am not somehow restraining myself from describing the reality, which can be much worse. If a man sees a pregnancy, for example, as a difficulty and not a potential child, then one has really convinced themselves that the one whom he sleeps with is simply a sex object; the whole purpose of sex is removed, and the only remaining purpose of that communication is some sort of degraded pleasure, like telling an imprudent joke because one feels as though a lady one claims to love is "just one of the guys", and one can act as slovenly as one pleases around her because she will never judge or show any sign of calling your bluff. If it is a woman who thinks this way, then it is as though she has lowered her standard of herself; which is why the movie Bella is so brilliant in making her most powerful objection "I can't be a mother, I'm afraid." A woman, by allowing such folly, cheapens herself to a sex object, and loses the basis of sexual expression.

And THIS is at the same time the greatest exultation of sex and the greatest condemnation of our culture: it is only in sex that one is able to express (literally!) not only an idea, not only an emotion, not only a political sea change or grand gesture, but a person, the most complex and beautiful thing in existence. In this, we are made like the Trinity, because the fecundity of created things, as Thomas says, imitates the perfect fecundity of the Father expressed in the procedure of the Word. We make another like ourselves. If this is difficult to understand, it's important to look into the character of expression itself. An expression is an expression of what is expressed; what is expressed is something of the thing expressing; and when an expression is not correspondent to the thing, we call it false. When I speak, for example, "I am writing a blog post", I am expressing my action which is something present, first, to my senses, and following this, to my mind, by which I am able, unlike other sorts of animals, to communicate. If I were to say "I am drinking water", that would be false, because I am doing no such thing. As shown above, one can convey information about everything from emotion to personality in dance; but the second one is aware of this, one may lie through the same means. In sex, one can convey most intimately the giving-over of the whole self; but without the possibility sex has of fecundity, it loses something major in signification; what is left is just idle play, pleasurable though it may be. In the use of contraception, one is left with an act which keeps the other person at arm's length while at the same time pretending to pull them close. In abortion, one actively pushes the other person away. In premarital sex, one pulls the other close, but refuses to give any pledge that they will not abuse that power by then giving themselves to another, or sending the wrong signal. Or perhaps premarital sex simply signifies what many women already know it does: that the man's too immature to know that his actions have results of which he is unaware.

This is as much, I will say, as has been explored in the beautiful, brilliant, and prescient work of John Paul II, his Theology of the Body. The connection to dance, I will say, is my own, but everything I have said here is contained implicitly, and at times more clearly, in what the Holy Father observed.

Education, the Family, and Catholic Anthropology; or Why Fathers Are Awesome

2010-06-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

As I've said in previous posts, we live in a culture with some very interesting factors to it: the Internet, modern philosophy and its effects, feminism of every possible degree or wave, and modular movements in art and communications. The Medieval in me, while recognizing that the many doesn't always reduce to the one, wants to understand what principle would explain all these changes. It is the rallying cry of the day that we have “a new understanding” of women, reality, communication, and anthropology; that the “newness” of our culture is a process of discovery and not invention, and that we are more enlightened today than in yesteryear. While I would love to believe that one may rest secure knowing that the popular outlook of our day is motivated entirely by truth, since that would mean life would be perfectly peachy in the end, the suicide rate, the unhappiness one sees all around, and in general, the complete malaise one witnesses in everyday life seems to belie any such neat explanation.

If one may express the entire set of movements in our culture (modularity in art and technology, the self-determination of gender, popular relativism, and other such trends) as a theme, it seems to me the theme of “possible dynamism.” Our culture sees power in the possession of options. These options take many forms. If one feels clamped in by sexual norms, one may pursue an “alternative” lifestyle. Money enables us to “be” anything if we throw enough at our problems. Our technology is geared towards adaptability; the iPhone, the paradigm of a multifunction device, is an example of this, and the Internet is more than an example, almost to the point of becoming the frame of such technologies. Our classes, in academia, are viewed as modular tinker-toys we may put together to build a career's foundation; so that one often sees someone studying philosophy as a prerequisite, but rarely as a pursuit. Modular art, the idea of “evolutionary” music and fine art, has come to be in vogue, with the prodding, goading and occasional shoving of Wired magazine. One is no longer a citizen of a country, but a citizen of the world or of a cyberculture, a culture characterized by every possible piece of information conceivable being at hand.

With this range of possibility, we prize above all else this ability of self-determination of the individual. God forbid one judge the choice to act in a homosexual manner (which, I note, I contrast with “having un-acted-upon homosexual inclinations”, which is a defect of chemistry and not virtue) because one is then subjected to a withering barrage of self-righteous comments, usually involving the word choice; simili modo the obvious connection to the abortion debate. To claim that one religion, one philosophy, one viewpoint is innately superior by being true, presentation not being the concern, is considered to be a horrific social faux pas. We have come to accept that one does not discuss religion, politics or philosophy in polite company, as though these do not tell us the most about a person and reflect the purpose of their politeness; such a discussion inevitably demands that people take a stand on anything, which they may be unable to recant when it becomes inconvenient. Lastly, and in a way that may seem to many peripheral in relevance, we have come to regard that objets d'art ought always to be multi-functional or multi-interpretational, to the neglect of the dignity of things that do one thing and do it well, or say one thing and say it better than anything else. For this latter, modern art is an example, or the much-maligned comment of Gwen Stefani about “Hollaback Girl”; when asked what the song meant, her response was “Well, what do you think it means?” in a pseudo-sophisticated tone. We have come to associate beauty with complexity, forgetting that the reflection of simplicity is the purpose for which complexity exists. To put it another way, our culture is a maladjusted collection of chimerical opinions.

Against this attitude of “complexity as best”, Catholic philosophy (and by this I mean “Thomist philosophy”) has proposed a remarkable thing, that God is perfect and perfectly simple, and the complexity of the created world is the way by which natural things strive to imitate the simplicity simpliciter of their Maker. In this view, one may still have such dynamism, but only for the purpose of such dynamism, to know, love and serve God. One may still have possibility, but only for the purpose of such possibility, to be united in charity with God, Who is pure act. Through this, we gain the purpose of such dynamism, and it is in this understanding that I view Catholic anthropology. We are complex beings, but we are complex for a certain purpose: that we may love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, with all our being, and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, which love itself involves the love we have for ourselves because God loved us first into being. In this one purpose anthropology may be understood according to virtue ethics, because the existence of our supreme happiness is guaranteed by revelation, our Way to Him being that revelation Himself, and our whole being is made for him, as Augustine is so frequently quoted to say. But since in the very nature of love is justice, and in the very nature of justice is choice, there is a way we were meant to act, a way which we give up through sin; Dante's “straight and true.” And like Dante, we often need guides along the way. It is the education the guides we are given provide for us that help us to properly “determine” ourselves at every step of the way.

This brings me to the point of this note. When we vote for politicians, when we elect people to safeguard and promote our good, the idea that we should support “family values” has fallen somewhat out of fashion. Family values, to the mind of the modern American, are static. They are not dynamic. No longer does one, hearing that term, think of parents teaching us to ride a bike, or fathers teaching us to work a trade, or other such mental pictures of reality; when one suggests family values as a good, the image is rather that of a deliberately idealized Norman Rockwell painting, or picture of “the idyllic 50s” which to the rather clever modern teenager represents a picture of propaganda. This, to me, indicates the failure of the duties of those people in their lives and the lives of their influences, because this is not at all what the family is made to be. Fundamentally, the family is not a static reality. And although the idea of conditioning has been taken to an absurd degree of late, it is absolutely undeniable that parents make us who we are in principle as actors, by their virtues and their vices. While they do not write our lines on the stage of life, they as much as set the initial conditions of the act, define with what sort of people we are forced to associate, and generally give us the condition of all our conditions. It is only the very strong-willed child who can cease to be in the conditions in which parenting places him or her. If their conditions are good, doing bad things becomes painful to them, because good parenting breeds virtue. If their conditions are bad, it is tough to escape the vices which pick up new appeal. With such a powerful role in making children human beings, parents should be encouraged at every point.

But this is not the fashionable view. If one is in favor of family values, one tends to be against allowance of abortion and encouragement of homosexuality, because these things do prevent children from having a family, through all sorts of myriad ways. With abortion, there are accounts and accounts of psychological damage to the would-have-been parents, difficulty for the kids who survive, and whatnot. With homosexuality, the encouragement of such a lifestyle is itself a repudiation of the idea of man having a certain sexual nature, to the point that it is always the villain in any movie who becomes angry at something being “unnatural.” One rarely notices this de-nuancing of the meaning as a child, but one is certainly deluged with it. (If one wishes an example, I would provide (out of so many) the episode of Firefly where Summer Glau's character is almost burned as a witch because of her “unnatural” psychic powers.) To judge anything as unnatural is now taboo, yet it goes further; homosexuality is viewed as “a perfectly natural thing.” Abortion, likewise, falls under this defense; while perhaps unnatural, it is done in order to defend the supposedly natural “freedom of choice”, as though no choice anyone makes should ever be punished.

These are just two ways in which proponents of Catholic anthropology are (unjustly) considered squares. But going back to that same anthropology, we realize that it is in fact the dynamists for dynamism's sake who are squares (and eventually, so do they.) Because the family, in the end, is anything but static. Good parents are able to raise their children to do whatever those children will love, irrespective of how unusual that calling may be, because good parents love their children. Family values is shorthand for those values which allow children and parents to live in a way which will bring them both true happiness, a happiness which is anything but static (although He is immobile.) And in fact, while we never, ever acknowledge it, it is the reason why children grow to the point they can even protest such values; the good protestor is the good speaker, and the good speaker is one who has learned to speak properly, and who taught them to speak, or enrolled them in a class to learn? Indeed, anyone who protests that the father in a family is unimportant in the development of a child or the life of that family is deluded, and yet in a way that is telling, sad, and which should provoke a degree of charity, because they are no doubt a victim of this very philosophy, or the hateful things men do to prompt it.

Or, to put all this in another, more concise way: education is the cause of dynamism, as most will admit, but it is the educator who is the principal cause of the good of that dynamism. I study philosophy, and I do well in it. But it is my parents, biological and spiritual, who taught me my most basic principles of thought and the understanding of what makes life worthwhile, and that is what makes my study something to be loved, pursued even when it is difficult. Were it not for my father teaching me to be a man, I would not know what it is to be one. Were it not for my mother teaching me my faith, I would not (ultimately) know why one would ever want to try so hard to be so. Were it not for the good Fathers I know who taught me what it is to follow that faith in one's life the way they were called to do so, I would not have the strength to attempt it. Were it not for the grace of my Father in Heaven, none of us would. That's parenthood. And were it not for my sisters to keep me in check, I might still be a wreck, so I suppose that's family.

Family is important because life has meaning. Life has meaning because we have natures. We have natures because we have a Father in Heaven. Fathers are really, really important. Happy belated Father's Day, Dad.

Regarding my much-belated Paradiso post...

2010-06-21T07:57:00.000-07:00

I've decided I can't write my reflection on the Paradiso yet, for lack of sufficient inspiration. It's not that I CAN'T write it, it's that I won't until I'm sure I'm giving Justice justice, if you will. :-) I apologize to anyone who was expecting it sooner; if you want it, please ask the Holy Spirit to inspire me in a more timely fashion. The Muse is a fickle one, but she's to be respected and won't be rushed, and to take a long time adorning oneself is, I am told, the prerogative of a lady. Besides which:

And it is good, such lack in what we know,
That what the Lord may will, we too will so.

I do have some real cookers on the burner, though, particularly about education and the family in light of the Catholic understanding of the human person, so hold on to your headwear of choice.

For the benefit of any new readers:

2010-05-20T03:43:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of a three-post series on the Divine Comedy, which is my stock in trade. When this is done, I plan to start doing articles on the Summa, going article(s) by articles(s) at a time and doing a running commentary, since I want to review it over the summer. Anyone who is interested is welcome to comment on these things, as long as it is kept not just civil, but amicable! I am relatively certain that at least most of my readership is Catholic and by God, we'll be one, "ut unum sint", if I have to moderate the Hell out of things. :-D

(And, the Inferno being my specialty, I am not afraid of moderating the Hell out of things.)

Anyhow, I hope people enjoy the postings!

Purgatorio and the Virgin

2010-05-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

This is a bit belated; I'd intended to write it on Mother's Day, but I figure I can still dedicate it to that day.

One would have sworn that he was saying, Ave;
for in that scene there was the effigy
of one who turned the key that had unlocked
the highest love; and in her stance
there were impressed these words, Ecce ancilla Dei,
precisely like a figure stamped in wax.

In honor of Mother's Day, I have decided to write on Mary our Mother as she has a role in the Commedia; first as she is in the Purgatorio, then as she recurs the themes spoken of in the previous post, and lastly as she occurs prominently in the Paradiso. When Dante finally enters the Purgatory proper, he is greeted with statues etched into the walls of the mountain of Purgatory:

There we had yet to let our feet advance
when I discovered that the bordering bank,
less sheer than banks of other terraces,
was of white marble and adorned with carvings
so accurate not only Polycletus
but even Nature, there, would feel defeated.

These statues are so vividly sculpted they almost appear to move; Dante sees these statues as having such supernatural artifice that they, while being in an art form normally restricted to objects of sight and, to a degree, touch, seem even to convey the sound of the angel Gabriel's "Ave" and the great obedience of our Lady, in which the Magnificat has its act. Dante's entire sensation is so engaged in these works of artistry that he focuses on nothing else, but is drawn into the scene of the Annunciation itself, in the manner of many Franciscan devotional practices of popular piety, such as those practiced by Margery Kempe and popularly attributed to Bonaventure. This amounts to a sort of minor mystical transport in appearance, although not a real one, but one made in the manner of created artifice which acts analogously. This vision of the art in the Purgatory foreshadows, partially, the vision of God which the souls enjoy in the Paradise.

There is a very interesting aspect to the order of the presence of beauty in the Divine Comedy, which one sees when one zooms out from the particular canzone one is reading. In the Inferno, to the souls present there, there is and can be no beauty. Just as a beast is unable to understand the rational order, so insofar as man makes himself bestial by vice, he loses even the ability to be affected by beauty of the highest sort. Moreover, the souls in the Inferno are more and more inclined to evil by the order of their sin; the souls who sin the worst lose "the good of intellect" in a worse and worse way. There is no beauty to the souls in Hell. Yet there is a certain beauty to the justice of God's putting them there, in the same way as there is a beauty in justice meting out to each their proper due. Would it be fair to the raped to see the rapist go free, or the murdered to see their killer escape his own consequences? Perhaps, in one sense, there is a place for leniency, but it is not for the souls in Inferno; they would laugh at leniency; it is the act of the weak, to them. Or if they would not laugh, they would not react. They would be indifferent, and the whole act would be hollow. They dispose themselves against the good of all mercy, all beauty, and ultimately, every love, including that of themselves.

In the Purgatory, though, one has a wonderful recognition that this needn't be the case for all. It is a humbling thought to realize that the best we could hope for without God's mercy, even according to our own choosing, would be Limbo. Yet Purgatory is populated! And with such people! Cato the Younger is there, a Pagan suicide and a stoic par excellence, and so many other unlikely cases, especially in the Valley of the Princes, in Ante-Purgatory. Dante puts his closest friend there as well, Forese Donati, perhaps indicating that Purgatory is the state in which Dante persona views himself. All of these souls proceed under the auspices of Our Lady, singing penitential hymns and hymns of pilgrimage, as they make their way up the mountain which leads to their happiness. Immediately, one sees the contrast between Purgatorio and Inferno; the souls in Purgatory have art, and that's a strong sensible difference. But even as art is differentiated in its very existence by its object, so the object of their hymns, and the sense-sculptures which surround them, reveal something about the pilgrimage of repentance and cleansing on Earth as well as in Purgatory, that nothing happens without the intercession and presence of Our Lady. Analogously, without the star of the sea to guide it, the Church Suffering cannot find her appointed port, as it is through imitation of her example, the result of her obedience, and grace acquired through her as Mediatrix that we are able to find our end at all.

In the Paradise, though, one might think that this isn't the case. There is no "art", as such, in the sense of artifice or likeness containing a representation of the beauty; but why is this? The answer is in the fact that He is there, the One to whom all beauty and art points, and the souls who love Him are there, who in their participation in His Love, as we on Earth participate in His Eucharist, possess Him and are possessed by His Love. In other words, there is no "art", because Beauty Himself is there; artifice would be a distraction. There is singing, though; and such singing! This singing serves as an expression of the souls' being directed to Him, receiving Him each in their own manner, and serves to glorify Him in the beauty thereof.

Our Lady is there too, precisely in that place where Dante personaggio receives the Beatific Vision. She is immediately preceded by her knight, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. What is her significance? Is she standing idly by, basking in the glow of her Son, but otherwise the same as every other soul? This is not the case. Dante persona was already aware of the cosmological understanding of the planets, and the angelic movements thereof, and the role the planets astrologically play in the formation of the human soul under the views of the time. This itself, he knew, came about from the need for higher orders of perfection to deliver the act of the lower, even down to the speciation of particular plants and the formation of inanimate things. The Protestant understanding of Kierkegaard and others in his line have no time for such mediations in between the person and God, conflating mediation and obstruction; and indeed, the vision of God in Paradise is immediate, so one might wonder whether the truth of that claim insofar as it is true is present in the Comedy. Yet Catholics believe better. We have a Church, with a hierarchy, revealed by God, and this hierarchy reflects the heavenly order as an established image of beatitude. Yet we realize that this mediation, far from an obstruction, is the appointed vehicle by which souls arrive at their beatitude, represented, in part, by the ship driven by an angel at the beginning of the Purgatorio, or Dante's warning in the Paradiso regarding his ship:

O you who are within your little bark,

eager to listen, following behind

my ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas,

turn back to see your shores again: do not

attempt to sail the seas I sail; you may,

by losing sight of me, be left astray.

Unless we are fed, he claims in the next few verses, by the "bread of angels", philosophy and theology (and more literally, the Eucharist, the "bread from heaven containing every blessing") we cannot follow his "ship that, singing, crosses to deep seas". Yet what is the vehicle on Earth by which we obtain this Viaticum? The answer is the Church that Christ established, in her Magisterium and her role in administering the Sacraments. This is made more poignant by his reference to "singing"; it is the souls in Purgatory and Paradise that sing, and it is the Psalms and Thomistic hymns of adoration that they sing. Their singing is a mark of their Catholicism. This was somewhat funny to me, because as I was reading for this note, I was reminded of the attempt by the Geneva Bible to claim that Dante, by his criticism of particular Popes, made himself a prophet of Protestantism. This verse makes that rather silly, as one must assume a very esoteric interpretation to get around Dante's reverence to the "bread of angels." While it is true that the bread of angels is theology, it is important to remember also that Dante's sources all thought of theology as revealed in Christ, who founded the Church, which Dante clearly respected in his zeal for reform, or else his biting critiques make no sense. It would not make any sense at all for a Catholic to critique a Protestant for not being Protestant enough, or vice versa. Moreover, it would be a complete anachronism in Dante's time.

In any case, Dante's cosmological order reflects the mediation of Creation itself through different orders of perfection. This is a trouble for some when he gets to Paradise; the souls are in different rings! Why would the blessed souls, who all love God with all their being, be so divided? The answer is to say, in the Thomistic style, that they are "in a way divided, and in a way not." Yes, they are in different places, each according to the species of their sin in life, but as Piccarda shows us in the orbit of the Moon, this, His Will, is their peace, as it serves to bring them to glory in God's mercy and justice at the same time. It is merciful that they are there at all, and it is just that they are there in such a way. This also defies the conception of some Protestants that man is sinful at all times, and his sin is merely covered over by God, like "snow-covered dung." These souls have been made worthy to be in His presence, to receive Him, even as we (should and will) say in the Mass: "Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only speak your Word and my soul shall be cleansed." Moreover, they are not equally "there", since equality with God or the other souls is not something to be grasped, but they are there in their appropriate orders, and more happy thus than if they were all in the same ring. In this, we see another way in which beauty in Creation reflects the Paradise; the order of things on Earth is a mere analogy to the Just order of Heaven.

On this cosmological order, one would expect a very logical thing, that God is at the center, and indeed he is. But arriving at the center, we see something else; Our Lady is right there present, like the closest orbit herself, almost indistinct, such that Dante can be at the very center of things and still see fit to look to her. Moreover, he cannot immediately look at God, but must first cede himself to the direction of a further order, the one who takes over after Beatrice as mediating guide, namely, St. Bernard. If Dante is to enter into the erotic mysticism of the direct vision of the Bridegroom, he requires Bernard's intercession, as Bernard's joyous appointment; and even Bernard does not do it himself. Canto 33 begins with one of the greatest prayers to Our Lady ever put to paper, and I will reproduce it here:

Virgin mother, daughter of your Son,

more humble and sublime than any creature,

fixed goal decreed from all eternity,

you are the one who gave to human nature

so much nobility that its Creator

did not disdain His being made its creature.

That love whose warmth allowed this flower to bloom

within the everlasting peace was love

rekindled in your womb; for us above,

you are the noonday torch of charity,

and there below, on earth, among the mortals,

you are a living spring of hope. Lady,

you are so high, you can so intercede,

that he who would have grace but does not seek

your aid, may long to fly but has no wings.

Your loving-kindness does not only answer

the one who asks, but it is often ready

to answer freely long before the asking.

In you compassion is, in you is pity,

in you is generosity, in you

is every goodness found in any creature.

This man who from the deepest hollow in:

the universe, up to this height, has seen

the lives of spirits, one by one now pleads

with you, through grace, to grant him so much virtue

that he may lift his vision higher still

may lift it toward the ultimate salvation.

And I, who never burned for my own vision

more than I burn for his, do offer you

all of my prayers and pray that they may not

fall short that, with your prayers, you may disperse

all of the clouds of his mortality

so that the Highest Joy be his to see.

This, too, o Queen, who can do what you would,

I ask of you: that after such a vision,

his sentiments preserve their perseverance.

May your protection curb his mortal passions.

See Beatrice how many saints with her!

They join my prayers! They clasp their hands to you!

This is the last "song" heard in the entire Comedy, the greatest one expressible, wherein the most fervent lover of our Lady among fallen men, so fervent in his love of God, so self-sacrificing that he alone retains his body before the second coming, pleads her with, not just all of his being, but that of all of the saints, including Beatrice especially, that Dante could see God without mediation and retain some semblance of the truth, goodness and beauty of that vision, and persevere in its grace when he returns to Earth. This is, so to speak, Dante's marriage aria, in which the entire curtain is torn away and he is allowed into the Holy of Holies. And this in an entire canzone of having that curtain opened in drastic ways!

And what an aria! In it is illustrated at once our Mother's glory and humility, that she, who through perfect obedience allowed herself to be the new Ark, the way by which He chose "His being" made "a creature." In order to understand the significance of all of this, we must return to the examination of the cosmological order briefly, "return from such great heights," or at least look down awhile. At every procedure upwards over the mountain, and in every transition from ring to ring, Dante is able to look down and see more and more of Creation reveal its order, particularly when he reaches beyond the sphere of the fixed stars. Yet Creation is finite, and not enough to satisfy the desires of the human soul, man whose mind is, according to Bonaventure and Boethius, a "potential All." Man's happiness is nothing less than God Himself. So with each procedure upwards and inwards, man sees more and more of the secondary causality of the natural things, the saints, the angels. Each has agency in their diversity over the unity of the created and blessed order of things. What, then, does it mean, that Our Lady is closest to God Himself, so close that she is "the one who turned the key", the one who opened the door to beatitude by giving us the Way Himself? She is the ultimate secondary cause of the order of all things other than God, the "fixed goal decreed from all eternity."

In a humble stable in Bethlehem, we are accustomed to think, the most important event in our lives or anyone's life occurred, Christ was born into the world, and this is most true. Yet a new level of beauty reveals itself in the fact that that blessed Nativity, and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, was ordained to occur through Mary from all eternity. Without her, we are nothing at all. If by nature we long to fly, as "all men by their nature desire to know" and thus to participate in the order of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars", without her raising our nature through being most humble of all, through her humility giving human nature so much "nobility" (and that, of course, by the supreme grace of God) we have no wings.

This month is her month. Were we in a perfect world, the entire month would be spent in Marian devotion, feasting, planting flowers, dancing and generally celebrating this month dedicated to her, Our Lady, the one by whom human nature bloomed in grace. Sadly, we are not; we are forgetful and feeble folk, living in our little shire, with dark riders looming all about. Yet if we can just once this month take a day, just to acknowledge the sheer love we ought to have for our Mother, even as we take a day to celebrate mothers everywhere, we would be playing a sweet theme in the symphony of Love that is Creation just for her. And she deserves as much as we may give.

Interlude: By popular demand...

2010-05-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

I'm suspending the Dante series for one post because some folks wanted to know what this paper I'm so giddy about writing is about.

Because of my enduring faith in Aristotle's insights about sensation, I decided to write a paper on the Molyneux problem and the common sense. The Molyneux problem, which was printed in Locke's Essay, went thus:

Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube, and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t'other; which is the Cube, which the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man to be made to see. Qaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch'd them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube.

Now, looking at the problem, the solution seemed to scream "Aristotle's common sense!" The common sense is that sense by which the different sensibles are united into one object and yet distinguished. Initially, I figured I would investigate it strictly on philosophical grounds, but then a very dear (and also very beautiful, and stunningly intelligent) friend of mine over at Texas A&M sent me a very interesting link to a Youtube clip in which Vilayanur Ramachandran, a professor at UCSD and virtuoso biologist, was discussing the various eccentricities of the brain, for example, qualia, consciousness, and the like. These had already (briefly) been discussed as theories in my Theory of Knowledge class at DSPT, and so a neuroscientist's take on their materiality was of the greatest interest. So rather than writing a paper that basically went "well, if Aristotle's common sense were as Aristotle claimed it would work in De Anima, then maybe the Molyneux problem would be answered something like this, or this other way, or perhaps that, and this one is most likely", I decided to attack the question as it stands neurologically, and then see whether or not Aristotle's theory would hold.

I expected it to hold. I did not expect that it would so exceed my expectation as to hold for stuff Ramachandran said in particular about neuronal pathways and the like, but I was given a great shock. It held with a whole greater degree of fittingness than I expected. The basic stuff was pretty obvious; the common sense, as Aristotle proposed, has to exist because our sensation is such; therefore, there's some faculty that carries out the thing that makes our sensation such. That I'd already presumed true, and even a cursory glance into neuroscience readily confirms it. It's part of sensation, not the intellect; therefore it's concerned with material particulars; therefore it's tied to a bodily organ tooled to receive that material particular's form; surprise, that function is tied to a bodily organ. Since Galen, the Medievals had placed the common sense in the brain, and one can figure this out even from conventional wisdom, that the common sense, if it exists, is in the brain. No big step there.

So I'd already shown that the hypothesis of the common sense broadly agrees with the modern understanding of what the brain does for sensation. If I presented that, I'd probably get an A for effort (writing obvious things is a real trial for me), but I'd expect a C for originality. So I decided to look deeper. After reading several articles (Gallagher's claims about the Molyneux problem, various articles on proprioception and phantom limbs, which are both concerned with sensation of touch, and various articles on synaesthesia, which was an easy task since it fascinates me, I'd deduced that there was a much closer investigation that could be made of the thing. So I rallied myself and got it together, and started to watch and read more Ramachandran (who is an absolutely fascinating person for his insights.) I cannot say how surprising this was; every single thing that I heard confirmed my prior judgement of the legitimacy of the common sense on the prior basis, even the more complex claims. One claim in particular, though, took the cake.

Before all this, I had decided to sweeten the pot as far as my argument by talking about what it means for the common sense to "know" the objects of the other senses, but from a philosophical standpoint, not a neurological one. This would be necessary to talk about the Molyneux problem. So I'd started by making a (rather lame, but pretty obvious) hypothetical argument that the common sense must be in the brain, because only in the brain are the different sense modalities conjoined as data, and the common sense must know and compose the different data. This would have been easy, but boring. However, I was watching Ramachandran talk about synaesthetes, and I heard him say something utterly remarkable. Neuroscience has actually investigated (and this was a shock) a colorblind text-color synaesthete.

This might take some explanation. A text-color synaesthete, when they read letters or numbers, see them as different colors. To take an example:

   2
   5 5
2 5 2

It might not be immediately evident upon first glance that there is a triangle of fives in the center of this diagram; when non-synaesthetes perceive the numbers, they see them in font color black. For synaesthetes, though...

   2
   5 5
2 5 2

...they look like this. As one might imagine, they have better pattern recognition, and in a feat that defies the conception of synaesthesia as some sort of lunacy or madness, they receive this pattern as the non-synaesthete reader might perceive the intentionally colored font of the second triangle, immediately. It's not an insanity, but perhaps it is a gift; one in about every two hundred people is a synaesthete, and many of the greatest artists (some even think Dante was one, because of his analogies!) have been closeted or openly synaesthetic.

Now consider, if I may propose, the case of the colorblind synaesthete. How would this work? The subject in question had a pigment deficiency in his eye that made him "peripherally colorblind"; he did not see the full range of colors. Yet when he saw numbers, he saw what he called "alien" colors correspondent to them! For example, if one cannot see green in things, one would not expect to have green as an imagination, as an idea or otherwise; and yet the numbers, before him, were this weird shade of color he simply couldn't see in other things. If a synaesthete cannot see, through his external organs, a particular shade, but through the interconnection of his neuronal pathways has that shade projected to him, what is one to conclude?

He has the object of the proper sensibles in his mind already.  Specifically, the V4 center of his brain, used to process and project color into our perception. And what faculty of his mind so "knows" the proper sensible? That series of neuronal pathways which enable him to give dominance to or intermodalize his senses. You know, that thing Aristotle predicted people had 2000 years ago? Which he also predicted knows the proper sensibles and is prior to the outer senses, as being closer to the immaterial intellect?

I'm not going to show my whole hand (plagiarism is a terror of modernity), but let's just say that this paper is one of which I can be proud.

On poetry, justice, and nature: an exploration of Canto 1 of Dante's Inferno (the BOOK)

2010-04-29T01:10:00.000-07:00

I've decided to split this post into three, one for each canzone. This is because I'd like whoever actually reads this blog to carefully consider what is said, one reading at a time, the reason for which will become clear as one reads.

I'd like to dedicate anything good in this series to Anthony Esolen, who has been a great friend and companion thus far in the study of the Poet, and who has been my greatest encouragement, so to speak, even before I had the pleasure of meeting him, through his lovely translation of the Commedia. Moreover, many of the thoughts in these posts will consciously echo and expand upon many things he has already said in his lecture at Thomas Aquinas College, and the subsequent article in First Things in March 2009 based on that lecture, so this is as much as giving credit where credit is most certainly due.

I promised (mostly to myself, as I do not have any idea of how much readership I actually get,) in my last post, that this one would be about the Catholic Poet's work. I owe so much to the Commedia that I cannot begin to estimate what my life would be like without that man-made representation of “la gloria di colui che tutto move”; in his magnum opus, I was given a window by which that glory of the One could shine into my life, revealing to me the beauty of a universe formed in an order of Divine Love. And this universe was not just some theoretical universe, constructed by the magnificent but fallible genius of some human prodigy, but a universe which in its very nature excelled even the great representation Dante made, both in being real and in transcending his words, by Dante's own admission:

Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che 'l parlar mostra, ch'a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.

Whatever human language can convey
must yield to vision, passing the extreme---
to such prowess memory must give way.

Ultimately, the origin of the order of this magnificent universe, in all its splendor, is something which passes beyond our very mode of describing the universe, and can only be pointed to, never comprehended and only partially understood, as one understanding that knowledge is in the most qualified manner understands the fullness thereof. It was Dante who introduced me to this magnificent splendor beyond splendor, revealing to me that what I professed was in fact more beautiful than I could imagine even possibly; as though one lived their whole life feeling alone, only to suddenly have a curtain lifted and a innumerable multitude of companion angels revealed. No longer did I need to fear death, though surely death was something which the things I professed would preclude fearing. To be unsuccessful in life, to be afraid of failing; these things were irrational fears, to be cast aside as I race for the goal which is presented to all and exceeds all other possible goals, sanctity. Without this realization, I realize now, my life would be worthless to me (as I am now, admittedly, but also objectively, since it is possible to speak of these things considered as goods.) For what is the point of an unexamined life? What could possibly satisfy me but God? I am as aware as anyone else that the things of this world don't satisfy, although I haven't tried them all (thanks be to God!) On the one hand, it is good to have experience; on the other hand, the way today's culture rates “experience” and “maturity” is flatly insane, as though one must contract a disease in order to seek the good of health.

I have often said, in defense of Dante's importance to the Catholic life, that Dante is to Scholastic theology as flesh is to bone. Those who find Scholastic theology heartless have never read Thomas' Eucharistic hymns, or the poetry of Bonaventure's thought, or Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso. This, I think, is a good analogy, but I could make a bolder one closer to the senses: poetry is to philosophy as sex and the four loves are to marriage. When one makes the commitment to matrimony, one binds oneself to their spouse, making their two lives one life; accordingly, when in a good marriage, one spouse passes away, the other feels as though part of their life is gone, never to be replaced. The purpose of sex in marriage is the opposite of this; when two lovers unite, they express their intimacy in a visible act held between them alone, and by that act bring another into the world as a visible fruit of their love. Likewise, when one reads Thomas, or other systematic theologians, one binds oneself to God in the pursuit of knowledge of the truth, but this systematic understanding can feel hollow when one is actually tested; one needs a visible reminder, and the pursuit of knowledge without love is vain, like a marriage without sex. Poetry, in one of its most evident purposes, is the expression of the experiential truth of what one believes; it ties the intellectual order of knowing to our own experiences, making them more definite, incarnating them. And when poetry achieves what it sets out to do, it bears fruit in the soul. The resolve to knowledge and the binding-to-the-self thereof becomes a binding in act. Perhaps the truer exposition of this relation would be that poetry is to philosophy as the recognition of the good of sex is to the recognition of the good of marriage, but this is not really as snappy, nor does it set up the difference in kind between these two pursuits, and rather emphasizes their similarities, which is not as helpful.

This brings me to the topic of today's exploration: why our life? Dante begins the Inferno with the line “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”, a line which has become an exemplar in the history of poetry for its bringing the reader into Dante's opus. “Nostra vita”, “our life”. What does he mean when he says the Pilgrim's journey is the journey of “our” life? The first, and most evident claim, is that of the Inferno, that man, having sinned, justly deserves the punishment of Hell. But the Inferno is not all; there are also the Purgatorio and Paradiso. The first line of the Inferno is equally the first line of the whole work, and Dante is not in Hell yet at that point. So there is a prismatic meaning here, one shedding light in various ways depending on the perception thereof, much like the prophecies of the Old Testament. Dante persona's poetry is to serve as a guide for the reader, even as Virgil serves as a guide for Dante personaggio; Virgil representing the height of reason, the Pilgrim represents reason being brought back to itself. And we, ourselves, as sinners deserving worse than Limbo, are not at the height of reason. Thus, in the Inferno, there is a very real correspondence between reader and read; we are the Pilgrim and the Pilgrim is us. Thus, when we read the Inferno, we fear and tremble as the Pilgrim does, with special attention to those sins of which we know we are guilty. In our trembling we realize the justice of our own condemnation, or come to realize it in an honest reading. In this way, Dante draws us into his own experience.

In the same Canto, we are presented with each of the promised ends which come as our fate, from Virgil's point of view. We are presented with the fate of the intensive punishment of Hell (“ove udirai le disperate strida, / vedrai li antichi spiriti dolenti, / ch' a la seconda morte ciascun grida”, “where you will hear the groans of hopeless men, / will look upon the sorrowing souls of old, / crying in torment for the second death”), the possibility of a mere extensive punishment, which is nonetheless a punishment for original sin (“che quello imperador che la su regna, / perch' i' fu' ribellante a la sua legge, / non vuol che 'n sua citta per me si vegna”, “for that great Emperor who reigns above, / because I was a rebel to His law, / will not allow me entry to his realm”), and lastly the possibility of beatitude (“a le quai por se tu vorrai salire, / anima fia a cio piu di me degna: / con lei ti lascero nel mio partire”, “should you then wish to rise and go to them, / another soul will come, worthier than I--- / with her I'll leave you when I go my way.”) These ends, while they are understood to the best of Virgil's ability, are understood in the way of a man without supernatural grace; this is evidenced by his inability to speak of God as more than an Emperor, an impersonal ruling figure whose order is expressed only in rule, a rule to which Virgil was not outside, but a rebel. This is likewise the best that a man in sin can understand, for when we sin, we separate ourselves from God's love, and doing so, cannot grasp it experientially. Or sometimes that experiential basis is removed deliberately, as a test, in the dark night of the soul, so that even those having faith fall subject to this. Thus, Dante provides hope to the intelligence in the form of a promise, but at the same time presents the promise via one for whom its good was not fulfilled, seemingly. This is the state of one who believes in God in the manner of the demons, and they tremble. Even as they do, we are brought to tremble in confronting what perdition we plunge ourselves into by our own choice. The difference is that we, unlike the demons, are given a choice that can be against that evil; they already chose, and can only tremble at the order they rejected.

There is something very interesting about the motion-analogy inherent in “trembling.” One trembles when one faces something they fear, and as Hitchcock knew well, a great part of fear is recognizing a possible outcome and feeling powerless to prevent it. Fear is, at its heart, a recognition of powerlessness. In the case of the demons, this powerlessness is entire. Their desire for autonomy over freedom meant that autonomy was given them, but the autonomy is to their undoing; in a matter of speaking, to tremble is a motion born of autonomy, because in God, there is no need to fear; death has no sting. Thus, ultimately, we are to overcome our trembling. This is as much as the Church teaches, in that it is actually sinful to spend our entire lives, having recognized our sins, weeping over them and fearing. To do so reveals a willful separation from God, an act of despair. Recognizing our sins, which are always born of our autonomy, we recognize that we are simply not enough to save us. Virgil himself recognizes this: as he says, happy is the man God calls to His throne, and all who are not called, as a converse, are in Virgil's state or worse. Virgil himself, recognizing his own loss, is not happy, but stoical about his fate, which makes his later encounter with Cato downright comical. We are called, though, to accept the grace to get beyond this stoicism, and this trembling.

There is, in this, an analogy to humanity. Dante was a genius at parallelism. What goes for every human goes for humanity, and these fates are assigned to and chosen by every human; thus, humanity itself is affected. There are three states in which one may apprehend human nature: the state of beatitude, in which human nature is supernaturally raised by grace; the state of naturally perfect nature, in which Adam and Eve were in the Garden; and the state of fallen nature, to which we ourselves as sinners are subject. This canzone most evidently corresponds to the last, as is vividly depicted by the more airy punishments allowing a sort of autonomy towards the beginning, and as gradually being supplanted by less autonomous punishments as it goes on (buried upside down, boiling tar, various transformations, crippling and painful diseases, etc) until eventually one reaches the traitors in Judecca, encased in ice, and Satan himself, whose strange autonomy itself serves to encase him. Recognizing how we are inevitably imprisoned by our pride and other sins, we are to desire the levity of freedom; this levity, though, only comes about from subordinating ourselves to a higher order. To the degree that we subordinate ourselves, though, we are given the good of autonomy, as will be more evident in the Purgatorio.

There is also an analogy to the order of our study of nature. The ungraced study of philosophy and the natural sciences can, at best, when perfectly studied and acted upon, keep us from intensive sin of the sort seen after Limbo, but just as our powers of understanding are fallen in original sin, so also is the power of our knowledge. Adam and Eve, had they not acted against the ordination of God which was made clear to them, would not have fallen; they had perfect control over themselves, which means they were not inclined by concupiscence to sin. Yet in their pride they did so, and in their sin the very knowing they had was fallen, and through Adam we are inheritors of this fallen nature, whereby we cannot by our own power control ourselves, but are subject to the new law in our members of which St. Paul spoke. Thus, however much we know under our own power, we cannot escape the justice of our condemnation by our own actions, prompted by our fallen way of knowing. We cannot, on our own, return to the Garden, in which is our second childhood, our "Hurrah for Karamazov!" Thus, the knowledge of the Pagans, their great learning and their expressions thereof in poetry, are futile for them; nothing of their own can help them escape condemnation.

Both of these analogies (of nature and of knowledge in particular) will be revisited in subsequent posts, because they are not abandoned in the later canzoni, but fulfilled. In fact, all things spoken of in the Inferno are put into a greater context in the later canzoni; the justice of condemnation, the difference between autonomy and freedom, the order of sin as subsumed and brought forcefully to a good in the order of love, and the new recognition of justice which comes with that love. That all these things are but individual themes in a brilliant and diverse symphony, transcending all music ever composed and fulfilling all goods which inspire music at all, should indicate to the reader that the exploration of the Commedia is no idle pursuit. It is, at its greatest, the bringing forth of the order of the Incarnation in our very hearts, bit by bit, through the injunction to subordinate oneself to the order of Divine Justice, and seek the mercy God has promised us. This is, of course, insofar as Dante can bring us to act by his poetry, and this, he recognizes, is something requiring the intervention of those blessed souls who already live in union with Love Himself. Thus, I feel I should end this post with a prayer to one saint who inspired him to see, and to act from that seeing.

Saint Lucy,
Whose beautiful name
Signifies light, By the light of Faith
Which God bestowed upon you,
Increase and preserve
His light in my soul,
So that I may avoid evil,
Be zealous in the performance
Of good works,
And abhor nothing
So much as the blindness
And the darkness
Of evil and sin.

Obtain for me,
By your intercession
With God,
Perfect vision
For my bodily eyes
And the grace to use them
For God’s greater honor
And glory
And the salvation of souls.

Saint Lucy,
Virgin and martyr,
Hear my prayers
And obtain my petitions.

Amen.

Prelude to my next post

2010-04-13T17:22:00.000-07:00

I've decided that I have not talked about Dante as Dante enough lately. It is depressing. My next post will be about Dante; probably about one specific Canto, or perhaps some persistent theme in the Purgatorio or Paradiso. Haven't decided. It'll be a fun one, though.

Until then, here's a video of Bob Dylan singing Tangled Up In Blue, which has a Dante reference in it.

Operatio sequitur esse? vel esse sequitur operationem?

2010-04-13T15:09:00.000-07:00

For those of you ladies and gentlemen who might for some reason read my blog but who have not devoted several years of your life to the study of a language on life support, the title of this post translates to "operation follows being? or being follows operation?" I apologize for any pedantic impressions. :-)

Today, in philosophical anthropology, we are studying a work by Julian Marias about personhood, a much-contested topic since the time of Descartes and especially Jean-Paul Sartre. Traditionally in Scholastic thought, the definition of "person", according to Sts. Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, has been an "individual substance of a rational nature." This held as the academic standard up until the time of Descartes, whose cogito, ergo sum changed the manner in which people tended to look at this reality; his principle of skepticism came to introduce what is now known as the mind-body problem, which has only recently been attacked by modern neuroscience in the work of men like Searle and Ramachandran (but mostly Searle.) This mind-body problem introduced the perpetual albatross of dualism into attempts to study the human person, which roughly (at the time) divided philosophy into rationalists and empiricists, then led to the essentialistic views of Kant and Hegel, and eventually led to the Continental existentialism and the movements which arose from it, such as structuralism and post-structuralism.

In Continental thought, Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that man's existence, his being here-and-now, is prior to his essence, his "what he is to become", such that man defines himself in the absence of a God Who defines him in his creation. This self-definition occurs throughout history by man's choices and the acts which arise from those choices, such that man's "being" (in the sense of what he will be) is defined by his "doing" (in the sense of his doing something in his now-existence.) This led visibly to the thought of the modern feminist movement, both first- and second-wave, in which gender, that much-controverted term, became a matter of what woman chooses to make herself. This was, historically, held forth in the longtime relationship between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the pioneer of the Continental feminist movement.

Marias proposes that when we ask "what it is" about something, we are not inquiring into its "personhood", but its "facticity", to use Sartre's term: that state of being-now which is the result of the becoming men and women choose. When we ask "who it is", we are in some sense asking about its futurity, the character of its self-determination. Sartre speaks of existence, the facticity, as a solid thing, which is in some sense no longer the person, but merely circumstance; the essence, on the other hand, is a fluidity, something that changes depending upon the way men or women choose. Thus, to Sartre, de Beauvoir and Marias, the person is not something one may speak of here-and-now in time, but something which, really, can only be spoken of as a "project": something which by being "flung forward" in time, "projected", is condemned to freedom of self-determination. This accords, in some sense, with our perceptions; I am not, having chosen to sin or to resist sin, according to the same personal circumstance as I was before I did so. This allows for a massive amount of, so to speak, wiggle room in the understanding of the person, in that the person is in no way definite as person. Personhood can be everything or nothing; its definition lies in the choosing, which is able to be many different things until it is determined.

While this option is attractive to many, it needs to address whether there is actually a meta-reason to posit this idea that "being follows operation." And in fact, we already have a definition provided that states precisely the opposite from medieval philosophy. It is important, before we side unilaterally with one side or the other (and they are, in principle, mutually exclusive, although whether there can be some accounting for the other side on either end will become clearer later) that we understand both. Whereas Sartre, Beauvoir and Marias start with the action as determining the facticity, which is not the personhood in their view, Boethius starts with what they would consider the facticity and moves to the action. It is a first principle, not just of philosophy but of any science whatsoever as such, that something cannot come from nothing. Some think that quantum mechanics escapes this principle, but this is either a misunderstanding of "something", "nothing", or "quantum mechanics." This is no less true in the case of personhood. If I am able to act, "I" must be; if I am able to act in a certain way, I must be a certain way. A hammer made of chalk cannot hammer a steel nail. A plant cannot compose music. An animal, even a gorilla or a dolphin, cannot "discuss" rational topics, but can merely convey emotional responses, and that through a certain complex memorization of sensations and a power of instinctual discernment.

Boethius, moving from this principle, examines the understanding we have of people. People are always individual subsistences; they are never species. This is perhaps the first thing we realize about them; a person is an "I", and with respect to that I, other things are other than them. "I" am, in some respect, here and now, my blood, my bones, my eyes, my brown skin, my outfittings, my rational apprehension of things, and other such properties and accoutrements. Other things are not "I". People are always "substances", composed of form and matter, a soul and a body, which is as much as Marias is willing to admit; a body, because we require a body for sensation of particulars, for the acts which constitute our life, and a soul, because we require a form according to which we are materially determined to those powers (in our organs, DNA, etc, but not as those things), as well as an immaterial principle by which one is able to have unchanging, immaterial knowledge of universals such as the figures of mathematics.

Lastly, people are always "of a rational nature"; animals and plants are not people, and even when we jokingly or semi-seriously attribute a personal character to them, we call it "anthropomorphism", "human-likeness." Animals cannot determine themselves the way man can; they do not become domesticated in nature, but feral, and it is characteristic of the relation of man to creation as a steward that they become "pets", having a certain affectionate relation to us. This is not heartless reasoning, though it may seem so to those unfamiliar with the way we speak about things in philosophy, or the addle-pated few who want to propose a rationality we simply do not see in creatures we see every day of our life on the way to class. Only human beings have this sort of rationality. Some might propose that angels are "rational", but this, aside from complicating the argument needlessly, means something more nuanced in angels and God, and is immaterial to this argument. Human beings discuss philosophy, create art, determine means to their ends, choose some proximate ends as means to ultimate ends; animals do only what their sensitive life requires, and that by instinct and discernment, which are already determined in many respects. This is particularly important in the discussion of people, because it is a most manifest thing that the way the reason of human beings influences their sensation, their artistic sensibilities, and the degree to which a human being is inclined to contemplation of the causes of things determines the way they are in those ways which for us define their personhood, although it may be that some aspects of personality, which is probably an accident of personhood to my knowledge, are themselves formed in some other way.

With this consideration, one can begin to compare the examples. A person, for Boethius, is body and soul, possessing certain powers of self-determination, the sensitive principle, the intellectual principle and the will which follows from that intellectual principle. These powers determine the person in those ways in which we realize that people become, for example, more mature, more learned, more experienced. The operation of the person is the potential of the person, but in this conception, the potential is founded upon the actuality already present; my ability to study personhood is founded upon my ability to discuss philosophy, which is founded upon my sensation of things, and my ability to express that study is founded upon my being organized, having fingers, the ability to use tools, to type and to act according to the common language between my audience and myself. Thus the potentiality of the person, the becoming, the operatio, is founded upon the actuality of the person, the being, the esse. This makes the most manifest sense, because this is the way we think. When we construct a tool, we have the understanding of what it will be in our mind; first, I need to hammer a nail, so I need to make a hammer; and since the "doing-well" of hammering a nail requires a head and a handle, the hammer ought to have this form; and of course, the hammer must be made of a sufficiently hard material, or I can't hammer the nail; and I will need these mediate tools to make the hammer to be so. These are Aristotle's four causes, final, formal, material and efficient. These are taken directly from our experience conditioned by our rationality. It is part and parcel with the manner in which we, analogously, "create" that we should think thus.

For Sartre, on the other hand, this is precisely the problem. Sartre was no mere conventional atheist; Sartre was a hard-bitten philosophical atheist, whose entire philosophy of existentialism, he says at one point, is determined by the principle that it is an attempt to explain how man is if not created by God, the immutable. Accordingly, his conception of "person" is totally reversed; man is not a being for which "operatio sequitur esse" holds, but precisely the opposite. The first thing in the creation of a thing is meaning, as in the case of the hammer's final cause, the hammering of a nail; God does not give us meaning; therefore man must create his own, so that man is, so to speak, creating himself in his own, not-yet-existent image. Thus something is, according to Sartre, coming from nothing; man "becomes what he is"; he is not yet, and will be, but must always be becoming. His or her very existence, his or her "humanity" is a project, a "going-forward." His or her esse follows his or her operatio. Accordingly, his or her formal, material, and efficient causes will be, even in their finitude, a temporary state; I may be such-and-such a thing now, but I will not be thus after I choose; my persona, coming from the term "mask", is fundamentally mutable. My identity, my gender, my "what-I-am" is continually changed by my "who-I-am", and my every state of being determined by choice.

Now it seems that it is not enough today to say that something makes sense; in order to make one's case, one must always "prove it." But it is the hazard of these discussions, and the hazard of the whole philosophical undertaking since Descartes, that all would-be Johnny-come-latelies to the game need simply deny the principles (sensation can be trusted, something can't come from nothing, something cannot be and not be in the same respect at the same time) in order to invalidate (to their mind) anything one says; thus Descartes, unwittingly, drove a wedge into the ability of man to truly be man. So it might be good, before I begin my critiques proper to say that I'm trusting people reading this to use their common sense, except that after Descartes, Locke proceeded to try and redefine even that from its classical usage, such that it ceased to mean anything in short order. It used to mean that faculty of sensation by which a human being unites the various external sensibles (color, sound, etc) into one object (Socrates, my dog Wally, a plant of a certain sort), such that asking someone to use their common sense here would mean bringing all the different things I've said together and comparing them as a whole, but Locke changed it to mean "knowledge that everyone has in some measure", a phenomenon that, for Cartesian reasons given above, has since become a sort of begging after the non-existent.

Nevertheless, I present my case. I disagree with Sartre precisely because I am such a thing that is able to disagree with him, which requires that I understand his terms, such that I need to be able to read his terms, such that here-and-now I need to be a certain way, and I must remain this way however much I may do what he considers a redefining. I take it that however it may be that my actions may change me, however it is that my personhood is dynamic, nevertheless, like all potencies to change, that dynamism is founded in and implicit in my static being. That static implicitude is in my being rational. It is by my rationality that I apprehend time, the number of motion according to before and after. It is by my rationality that my sensations are changed to being the sensations of a beast to those of a man, such that my knowledge can condition my sensation. It is by my being composed of this soul and this body, a body of such-and-such a sort, such that I can sense at all; it is by my being constituted as capable of coming to these sensations, this knowledge, that I am able to become so. And just as a hammer of chalk cannot hammer a nail, and a Venus fly-trap cannot develop into a reasoning being, and a monkey cannot produce Hamlet except by sheer accident, an accident which by nature is able to be and not to be, such that it may never be so, so I could not be me now if I was not such-and-such a thing at my adolescence, my birth, and my conception, etc. I did not make me me, except by being somehow capable of being me prior to becoming so. That capability is in my being, at some time, a static not-me which nevertheless was. That static not-me was not my own production, but that of my parents and God. And this is the key: that for me to be me, at some time (said loosely), I must, like the hammer, have been a final cause in the mind of God, some purpose which entered into His creation, known before I was formed in the womb. This is part of what the Church means, mechanically speaking in respect of the creation of the form of a body, when she, in her wisdom, says that life begins at conception.

I am not simply by having chosen thus prior to being simply, without qualification; even Sartre says that we are condemned to freedom. In order to be condemned to freedom, one must first be directed towards it; in order to be thus directed, one must be. In order to be, one must become by some other's agency. A thing cannot cause itself this way. And in order to be free, or condemned thus, one must become in such a way that one becomes free or condemned thus. This indicates an Intelligence behind creation, which made creatures thus. And indeed, to accept this reversal of essence, what Sartre rightly sees as pertaining to becoming, and existence, which he rightly sees as pertaining to being-here, is against the faith. Thus, I cannot without extreme reserve say that I agree with Sartre, although none can deny that he was insightful. I would say that this invalidates a large portion of modern feminism. However, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Marias were not blind; I have admitted as much in the last few sentences. One must try to reconcile what is true in what they say with what the Church herself and reason itself necessitates, since even amidst the rough one may sometimes find diamonds.

As I've said above, being precedes operation in principle. Yet in the procedure from that principle, as I have also said implicitly, there are ways in which being follows operation. If the definition given by Boethius is both true and comprehensive (as I do, indeed, believe it is) it must be reconcilable with the true phenomena. It is true that man determines himself. Sin is an evident example of this; the one who looks at pornography degrades their capacity to enter into relationships, for example. Virtue is also a good example; the ones who act in a courageous manner, seeking to obtain courage itself, sometimes do so, such that the courageous thing becomes pleasant, and they seek it in every circumstance as part of their happiness. We do, indeed, determine ourselves, according to our free will. And this will is, indeed, influenced principally by our knowledge; one cannot love what one does not know. Yet this itself is in the context of our nature. Sin and vice detract from our rationality and turn us into beasts. Lewis saw this, and made it explicit in the case of the Talking Beasts; a Beast treated badly eventually gives into such a treatment, changes themself, and loses the ability to talk. Virtue, on the contrary, makes us more in accord with our rationality, the highest activity and perfection of our nature as nature; Edmund, after betraying his family, fought the White Witch alongside them on the battlefield. Supernatural virtue adds a whole new dimension to this; our very nature, created good, is raised to a supernatural perfection in grace, such that we may enter into contemplation of God in love. This, indeed, is a further determination in the accidental cooperation of the will, such that in a real way, despite our nature as accidental movers (for in Him we live and move and have our being) we really do participate in the decision to be changed "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye." And leading the discussion back to de Beauvoir, our model for this is not some upstart philosophers setting themselves against themselves, but Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin, who when asked if she would bear our salvation Himself in her womb responded "Let it be done to me according to your Word."

Our personhood is not acquired in mere liberty, which is really libertinism, but freedom, which is liberty in submission to just rule. When we act against this freedom, this justice, we do not determine ourselves as people, but against our personhood. We lose our personhood and become beasts, scratching in our dirt patches, encasing ourselves in the ice of our self. We degrade our nature, losing our very humanity, becoming, as Nietzsche proposed, nothing more than beasts, learning "to dwell in deepest polar Hell, forgetting God and man." As with most discussions of contemporary philosophy, one is led back into Nietzsche and the question of whether man can get "beyond good and evil." But that is, perhaps, a question for another time.

There is a postscript of modern relevance. Much has been made of modern feminism, both in its successes and its failures. Within the Catholic tradition, there is a vast movement in attempting to move back to a true anthropological account of what femininity really is, a movement resisted almost unanimously (and with much animosity) by the feminist legacy of de Beauvoir. I will not profess to go into specifics about what constitutes femininity; it would be folly to do so, as I am not a woman, cannot live that reality, do not wish to do so, and quite frankly cannot conceive of its special sufferings and blessings on a primordial, experiential level. I can only profess to respect such femininity as having the greatest dignity, for it is as having that dignity with which we are called to revere Our Lady, the perfection of femininity in being sinless, immaculate. Yet there is something which immediately follows from this conception of personhood. Part of personhood is our facticity, our static being, and that static being includes our bodily character. It is most evident to anyone who is not willfully blind or stupid that there are generally differences (barring the peculiarities of certain individuals who accordingly deal with those peculiarities as a different facticity, a special suffering, and accordingly deserve our respect) between men and women. These differences in their generality constitute a unique facticity. If there is such a unique facticity, and if as said above these facticities, like the facticity of a hammer, indicate a different final cause, why should we not soberly consider the claim that men and women are called to different identities as men and women? This is not to say that these vocations do not overlap, often, or even that some particular women are not better than particular men at performing some particular act usually (in our feeble sight of vocation) attributed to men. Rather, it is to say that there is a much richer ground to explore, one which includes anything true or good de Beauvoir or any of her followers had to say about femininity, in this more comprehensive and clear understanding of humanity and personhood.

Ecumenism, "interfaith dialogue", and charity

2010-04-07T01:17:00.000-07:00

I've had problems with the way many understand the phrase "interfaith dialogue" ever since high school. My former teacher from that time is a very intelligent man, but disagrees with me on the foundation of religion. This reflected itself in a number of ways, which had the effect of making me a rather scrappy character when it comes to discussions of philosophy, theology, and Catholicism in particular -- a scrappiness which only developed moderation in the matter of the prudence of circumstance, and did not diminish in other respects. I no longer, for example, feel the need to shout at Jesuits. It would do more harm than good, even when they really deserve it; I suppose I'm developing a sense of romanita after all.

This teacher of mine was very much of the opinion that religion is nothing more than man reaching to God. He was of the unwavering belief that "truth" (a thing very rarely defined) is found through all religions, which in one sense is mostly correct as far as it goes (inasmuch as religion is a natural thing) but in another sense is a terribly bigoted thing to say. You see people killing people over the way they believe in God? The solution is not to assume that there is no reason to fight, but to examine their claims. If Christ really was God, then saying He was some enlightened guru is an offensive statement; it's sacrilege. To claim that one shouldn't take offense because others might believe otherwise is also silly. "Others" used to believe that human sacrifice was okay, that people weren't really "people" because they had different pigmentation, and that genocide was an acceptable political move; some, indeed, still seem to believe as much in each of these. It is true that tolerance is an important attitude to adopt in a multicultural setting, but you only "tolerate" things that should not be so, and that only when there is a good reason to do so. I "tolerate" the cold of my house because my money is better spent than on heating bills.

Yet nonetheless this bigoted attitude is present in every single "interfaith initiative" that I have ever seen in organized form. Every institution of this sort that I have seen (except that of the Vatican, which has been the sole voice for what I think is the non-bigoted understanding) has stated that one must emphasize the similarities between the fundamentals of the religion. Christians have the Golden Rule; apparently Confucians have something like it too. (Interestingly, the Christian version is worded positively, while the Confucian one is worded negatively, and these things do not result in the same ethic.) Therefore, they say, we ought to look for these things in all "world religions." Lo and behold, at some point Islam said it was important to be nice to people. Hinduism says something like this too. The normal conclusion to take from this is either that there is some partial similarity in nature, or some accidental similarity. The "interfaith dialogue" solution, the only one I have ever seen (and I have seen many attempts) is inevitably to say that all these religions are essentially the same, but differ in expression.

This is preposterous and insulting. The people who make this claim are inevitably not students of what one would call "metaphysics", but approach the whole phenomenon of religion from a homocentric, hermeneutical, often pseudo-Jungian prejudice that religion is nothing more than what people make up to explain their experiences as ordered and fulfill their needs, whether rationally or irrationally. The idea that some religion may claim to have something special, namely, God-revealed and in-frangible doctrine from above through a revelation, is dismissed out of hand. This is most evident in the tendencies in the thought of Bultmann. Miracles are presumed impossible; therefore in interpreting the Bible, we must presume that Christ never actually performed any, but that all miraculous tales are exaggerations or interpolations of our account of what is reduced, as a conception, to something notionally temporal, the "Christ-event."

Catholics are called to reject this degradation of our religion. We have something special, a Church established by God Himself, protected by the arms of His Providence, ushered in by miracles which pointed to the greatest miracle of all, His Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection. Without his death and Resurrection, our faith is in vain, and we may as well stop trying. This is not a man-made foundation; our foundation is God Himself in the Incarnation. The Church is not a man-made temple; it is the Mystical Body of Christ. We do not preach fashionable doctrines to suit the times; we preach Christ Crucified. Our ethical teaching is not some invented concept, but the concretion of our love of God through the grace given to us, flowing from the wounds He sustained for us.

And in fact, it is more than just Catholics who object to this conception of "interfaith dialogue." Is a Hindu supposed to sit and be quiet as someone claims to understand his beliefs, in all their complexity, then proceeds to claim that they can, fundamentally, differ only in notion from the beliefs of a Muslim, a Jew, a Zoroastrian, a Jain, a Christian? Or likewise anyone from one of these groups who takes their particular religion seriously enough to study it and not some other? This is the pernicious effect, too, of "interfaith dialogue"; it is not based on truth, and encourages the attitude that one only really needs to know a very limited amount about what is really a very complex phenomenon in order to say that it is somehow essentially the same as something else one knows nothing about. It thus disrespects religion in general, by disrespecting every particular religion.

Now, this is not to say that people shouldn't be civil to those of other religions. Many will no doubt interpret me as saying this, thus falling victim to the same prejudice as spoken of above. "He's an Aristotelian, and thinks he knows everything." "He's a Thomist, and would never trouble himself to read any other theologian." "He went to Thomas Aquinas College, and they are all crunchy neocon DeKoninck groupies inflated with intellectual pride." But what are these but the same brandings of which one accuses me? Before one may comment on the mote in my eye, I would request that they look to the beam in their own. What I am saying here is that interfaith dialogue should not be based on recognizing religious similarities; that is the task of anthropology and the understanding of what is common between men in nature. It should rather be based on clarifying and illuminating our differences. It is one thing to say that Islam and Christianity "believe in the same God" (a statement which requires massive theological justification before it can be made); it is another to say that they have the same opinions about Christ, or ethics, or the role of knowledge, or whether one can love God, or how, or the role of the Church, or the Sacraments. These are the things that make religions unique. And it is not based on our similarities that two people "dialogue"; such a "dialogue" would be a monologue, which is perhaps why these "interfaith" conventions seem to be composed of a great many people agreeing each other into oblivion.

The basis for our talking to each other is our common humanity. The basis for our dialogue is our different understanding of God, and his relation to Creation. One requires both. But then one must ask how dialogue is to do anything. "Very well," the Muslim says to the Catholic, "you think Christ is God, and I disagree. Is this dialogue? Shouldn't we move somewhere from here?" And he should rightly ask that, because it's a darn good question. Even were "interfaith dialogue" able to diagnose how it needs to move about, it still has no conception of where it moves to. This is because such initiatives have long since abandoned the pursuit of truth in pursuit of harmony, never understanding that harmony without truth is an utter illusion. The goal of dialogue is not to "agree to disagree", which except in prudential judgements about particular dubious actions is an incredibly retarded way to resolve a discussion. The goal of dialogue is to agree. And the goal is not to agree on just anything, but to agree on what is correct, what corresponds to the reality of the thing, what is true.

I'm going to say that again: The purpose of dialogue is truth. Anything that claims to be "dialogue" without ultimately seeking a correct understanding is frivolous chatter about one's favorite music. Have we been so far from Plato for so long, that we have forgotten that the goal of his Dialogues was always and everywhere the obtaining of wisdom? Why, then, do we yammer on about earthly harmony and those ridiculous "coexist" bumper stickers like fools? Our job is not to make harmony, but peace, and Christ came not to bring peace, but a sword, the sharp and biting sword of truth in love, through which real peace finally arrives, not by our own power, but His. And those claiming to be of His Church are the worst offenders, because there is simply no way to speak of "interfaith dialogue" as these men do without letting the little foxes, the heretics, into His vineyard. Every dialogue, for them, is a homogenization; two religions come into contact with each other and are mutually absorbed. This cannot be the attitude of Catholics as Catholics. What we believe, what we preach, what has been handed down to us, is absolutely sacrosanct. Those who profess against it are by definition heretics, and heresy never ceased to be a sin, though it certainly became fashionable some time ago.

What is the true charity one must show in true dialogue? Simply, speaking the truth in love, and listening to adopt what is good into our own understanding. Thus, we listen, we understand, we ruminate, we formulate, we respond, and if something seems wrong, we address it. This is in marked contrast to the picture we are given, in which if there is a disagreement, both sides must do a sort of dance of hermeneutical self-examination, to find out how closed-minded they must be for daring to disagree on some issue, until one side or the other capitulates, and what results is a homogenous blob of "wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice" religion. This is not the beatitude of man. The beatitude of man is to seek, and to find, the Truth in Love.

Easter Thoughts

2010-04-05T02:10:00.000-07:00

Today, I got on the Internet, and I saw a Senator from Georgia say that he was worried that Guam would tip over. I saw more woes foretold as a result of the Obamacare bill; I watched some episodes of the Jamie Oliver Experiment, in which a cook tries, and barely manages, to reform one district in one city in one state in one country's schools away from feeding their children what, in such quantities and ingredients, basically amounted to a slow and gruesome poison that tasted good. I saw various stories about sexual abuse by priests, stories about the media targeting the Pope with allegations that are patently false, stories about what amounted to gross miscarriages of journalistic justice even in portraying the state of those sex abuse cases, and stories of the ninety-eight percent good priests who have had their good names besmirched by the actions of two percent of the priestly number.

Looking to my own case, I see a situation whose hopes are, to most, idealistic at best. I have to spend two more years in school to get my Master's degrees; I have, to my name, no money of my own and a Bachelor's degree in an unemployable major. God be praised and my parents be thanked, I have no loans, which is surely a blessing. But I will confess that every year I add to my time in school makes me chafe at the bit of my student's occupation. I want to teach, badly. And in this recession, such jobs can hardly pay for themselves; I am best off simply pursuing my education as it stands. This is itself a difficult enough prospect, though if I focus I needn't worry about the peripheral bits so much. And, of course, there is the perpetual meta-discernment of my vocation. That's between me, my spiritual director (thank God I have one!), and God.

Things are, not to put too fine a point on it, terrifying in nature. And yet, I am not afraid. How could I be? Today is Easter Sunday! Beginning in the Annunciation, which was just recently (March 25th), we were told to "be not afraid." There was a place and a time where, perhaps, all the forces of evil conspired to bring the world to fear. That conspiracy was dashed to pieces, never to recover, on Holy Saturday, and brought forth today. Death has no sting! How could this be?

I sometimes, in my more morbid (I should say, more mortal) moments, consider the situation in which I am found. I could die at any minute.

At any time, a stray meteorite might just manage to get past the layer of atmosphere which burns off most of its matter in transit and pop! go right through me, leaving a blast crater and probably no traces of my body. There would be a funeral, my family and friends would be very sad, and sure, I'd be remembered, but beyond that, I'm no-one of much consequence, to my knowledge. I haven't taught hundreds to teach thousands, nor would I have given my life that others might life, except in the little ways in which we are called to give ourselves each day. If I have hope in any saint right now, it's the Little Flower, because I don't think I am given the basis to bear the larger blooms of the Garden. Whatever the case, though, I have confessed the sins of which I'm aware, and if there are any I've missed or that have slipped my mind, I'm sorry for them. If that meteorite hit me now, it'd be but a moment, after which comes Life itself. And that's nothing so unimpressive that I should worry I missed out.

Or perhaps, perhaps, I might go on, and no such meteorite has my name on it; perhaps I must soldier on in love. Perhaps I will get my degree, and become a teacher, and perhaps I'll be no good at it. Who knows; maybe sin will keep me from bearing fruit (may it not be so!) or maybe it'll just be being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like an elementary school teacher who cannot teach ten year olds. Maybe I'll get married, and maybe, for whatever reason, I'll have my heart broken, or I'll break someone's heart; maybe I'll get old, and write poetry about the joys of youth, while longing for that youth to be returned to me.

I don't know. No-one does. I can hope, certainly; I have faith, and therefore hope and love; but the particulars of the future and of beatitude or perdition are unknown to me. I am no mystic; I have to soldier on like everyone else, and read my Eliot longing for the resolution, and my Dante longing even for the taste. But I know this: that two thousand years ago God Himself became man, died for me, and rose again so that I, contrite, broken, a sinner, might have eternal life. And no matter how small I am in this universe so large, a mite on a speck on a mote in God's eye, yet He loves me most. He died for me, after all, gave Himself totally for me; Pure Act Himself became man, Eternity Himself united himself in Person to mutable humanity, lived in our temporality, and gave Himself up for me. I apologize if I say anything that sounds heretical here; it is fully unintended. But I cannot wrap my mind around how beautiful this is; every faculty fails in daring to drown itself in it. One is left only in tears of love and joy.

And this is how I see the Sacraments: not as "mere ritual", as so many seem to think of them, but as real expressions of love through the Body of Christ. We are born into that Body of Christ through the Sacrament of Baptism. We are given a way to reconciliation with the Body of Christ, a way back into the unity of his love between God and man, in the Sacrament of Penance. We participate in the most intimate act of love of the Church, becoming what we eat, Who is our Husband and Maker, in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and so on. These three Sacraments, especially, are celebrated on Holy Saturday's Easter Vigil Mass in particular, because it is on this day, Easter, that our Lord conquered death and took us to Himself. We may lose the world, but in His Love, through the Sacraments, we gain eternal life.

Accordingly, though, there are a few dissonances which cannot but arise to the one seeing this and knowing the tradition of the Church. If the Sacraments are the very acts of love of Our Lord, where the Eucharist is His Real Presence under the accidents of bread and wine, then how important must it be that the liturgy is not just the most solemn procedure we may imagine, but that anyone may imagine? We do not worship an idol, but God Himself. Why, then, do we relegate him to the side of our chapels, not the central position which he minimally deserves? Why do we subject him to cheapening rally music which lacks intrinsic gravity (where, here, the term is understood even very broadly)? Why do we steadfastly refuse the dignity of the ancient Rites of the Church, even as an option alongside the current Rite? Wherefore do we have the audacity not to offer the Sacrament of Penance more than once a week, or even once a month in some parishes? From whence do we derive the authority to delegate more and more of the priest's duties to "extraordinary ministers" as though they were ordinary? For what reason do our parish councils, and our Bishop's councils, and our diocesan appeals focus, not on the theological impact of our actions but on exigencies which could only very broadly be considered "practical", such as pseudo-socialist "social justice" initiatives? Why must these initiatives be give rampant reign, while even the addition of a prayer rail or a chansel screen is fought with the bitterest of opposition, and often with no theological justification?

These are all questions which, I think, are most connected to our identity as Catholic Christians. And they are all most timely, because to mis-portray the fundamental mission of the Church, the salvation of souls, in these seemingly unconnected externals is to lead the lost further into the dark. And in this respect, we do have to fear; because while the continued prosperity of the diocesan appeal seems to matter, it only does so insofar as it is dedicated to this mission of the salvation of souls. Without this as our mission, our purpose and the root of all our choices as Christians, we will fail; we will not be the good and faithful servant, but one who buries his talent in the ground, never letting it bear fruit. "For what doth it profit a man to gain the world, but lose his soul?"

A critique, ere I begin

2010-04-01T09:13:00.000-07:00

It seems to me that the Internet has posed an interesting dilemma for Catholics. We like it. It does nice things. On the other hand, places like 4chan exist; hollow Eliot-esque Wastelands of depravity in which people indulge their fading senses of community in places where there will be, even can be no such community. As a result, two extremely different schools of relation have developed towards this phenomenon of the information culture. I consider these to be, in extremis, the "pseudo-Platonist utopian" culture and the "Hobbesian" culture. Both are grounded upon a technological situation, in which our "advances" (a term which is itself replete with philosophical baggage) take the individual into deeper and deeper levels of, however it might be called, individuality, in which one is more able to express and interact with the informational world outside themselves, based upon the free availability of information. The two extreme attitudes express themselves in the following ways: in the pseudo-Platonist outlook, this changes people such that, and this is the defining characteristic of a pseudo-Platonist information culture, the people changed, by their "awareness" of outward things, actually come to be better people, "more human", by their passive receptivity to such information. One comes to truly "know" the effects of one's actions upon the outside world, as evidenced by our more free infiltration into the effects of das leben der anderen.

This pseudo-Platonist attitude is characterized by a youthful enthusiasm in the investigation of such polarizing subjects as "net neutrality", or the characteristics of "freedom of speech", both concepts relating to why the Net became so popular in the first place. And to deny the fact that information changes the manner in which people relate to each other is to deny the most obvious facts of the day: though we may not associate with our geographical neighbors, our family who live nearby, such potential acquaintances as even live at the same college campus, or even the members of our dorm, we will nevertheless associate with those people who, across the world, request to be our Facebook "friends", inasmuch as the word now has any meaning. We relate to "causes" over Facebook; we form "groups" of public interest; we even coordinate our real-world events through that medium. To restrict our ability to associate through such an incredible medium is surely an undertaking which must not itself be taken lightly. It is also important to remember Marshall McLuhan's identity, that the Medium is the Message, since in restricting the medium, we must therefore restrict the message. And Catholics, nowadays, are extremely hesitant to restrict anyone's message.

On the other hand, one has what I like to call, as referred to above, the "Hobbesian" outlook upon the Internet. This is not a very popular outlook, to say the least. One most often sees it represented in news stories by frightened parents and out-of-touch senators. Why this representation is prominent is a matter for another time; what is important is the examination of the truth of the attitude. I was once listening to a lecture from TEDTalks by Pranav Mistry, founder of the SixthSense pocket computer/projector technology, in which I discovered the claim made explicit that the more free availability and functionality of information makes man "more human." When I first heard this phrase, I thought it was a bold, yet nifty claim, to say the least. Could it be that the ability to shape the world of social information can help us to be more human? Surely newspapers have enabled us to know more about what happens in the world, foreign countries and even neighboring counties; the internet has enabled instantaneous awareness of the most minute details of our friends' lives. Yet the part of me that had read Hobbes, in whose work human life outside rule is described as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", realized that this was a perilous claim to make.

Hobbes was none too excited about human nature. The rights of men in what he regarded as the natural state were such that men could do, literally, whatever the hell they wanted. Kill someone, rob someone, lie, cheat; there's nothing stopping you. Whether you should is not the same question; man, as he came to be "naturally", could do all of these things, and thus they were "rights" of his. Society, in order to enable him to live well, removes his abilities to do things, putting him in bondage, as it were, to set him free. Society thus becomes a Leviathan, a great beast which prevents the many little beasts from being so through force. Man must be prevented, says Hobbes, from being a man in order to truly be a man. We ourselves recognize the role of restraint, in some fashion, in governance: vide, the role of the police in preventing murder, rape, theft, and other such naughty deeds. But even as the Founding Fathers thought in positing the "rights" to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and even as Adam Smith thought in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, there is evidently something in man that attempts to reach beyond himself in his happiness, that cares about the fate of others. This something seems to constitute a common good; else there would be no need for a "commons", or a government, except according to penal principles. If America was to be a country, and not simply a very specialized form of jail, some freedom must be preserved. Hence, we do not live, as Hobbes would have us live, under an absolute monarch who restrains us.

The Internet seems to give Hobbes evidence every day. The famous Rule 34, for example, which I will not go into in detail except to say that it is depravity made into a rule of behavior; the existence of free and prolific pornography and the easy access thereof; the character, indeed, of online debate, which is enough to convince almost anyone that such an idealized thing as an argument is almost a pearl cast before online swine. All these things point to a pervasive depravity at the very root of our cultural expression, and yet we laugh at people who speak of America as decadent, as the Great Satan, thinking that they are simply not with the times. Hobbes, seeing such depravity, would simply say he told us so. What would he suggest? Nothing less than an absolute clampdown on all such depravity, a ban on pornography based on pragmatic grounds, the closing of 4chan, and perhaps the closing of independent expression as it conflicts with such an opinion. Not to give too much away about where I plan to come down on this issue, this very blog would perhaps be terminated in such a new regime. This may sound shocking, but Australia and other countries, for example are far more in favor than we might suspect. China, itself, already adopts such a philosophy when it suits them.

Amidst two such radically different attitudes, what are we to do? Is there some mediation, or is it all or none for those taking a stand? Certainly, it is often regarded as all or none; either you side with neutrality, or you side with censorship! either you side with the regulation of content, or you side with libertinism! This, it seems to me, is the shallowest attitude, and yet it permeates our entire social fabric. Enough people have criticized labeling that the criticism has become passé. Yet it nevertheless needs to be said, passé as it may seem, that the tendency people have to label others conservative or liberal, republican or democrat, hermeneutically suspicious or hermeneutically kosher, is itself a suspicious manner of proceeding. If one wishes to argue with others, one must take their argument as they argue it, not as one thinks they do; likewise, if one argues with another, one must make an effort to understand. Such labeling as negates this process disables such an adequation of the mind to the argued thing, and there can be little truth in arguing so. As a critique, first, of the argumentation process, this is quite important.

The solution to this diametric dispute, given the good evidence for both sides, is likely somewhere in the middle. To get to the middle, one must really attack the sides. To start with the pseudo-Platonist, utopian view, it's quite clear that while technology is a wonderful tool for allowing people to relate to their environment, it is just that, a tool. A hammer is a tool for carpentry, when employed by a carpenter, but it is as well used as a weapon in a murder, by virtue of the same qualities that make it a good woodworking tool. And it is quite clear to most people's senses that no matter how much information is pumped into people, there is only so much action one can hope to provoke. Simply being "aware" of a problem does not always provoke us to action, although it may shame us not to act. And in fact Plato himself would disapprove of the Internet on principle, shockingly enough; such a source of unregulated information would spell doom for the soul; this is why I have tried consistently in the past to refer to this attitude as only pseudo-Platonist. To take such a sunny view of the power of this fire hose of information is, at best, naive, and at worst, downright delusional.

At the same time, the flip side of the coin is that the Internet is not entirely depraved, contra Hobbes. Evidently there are ways to use any tool not intrinsically, fundamentally ordered to an evil end in a good way; even the birth control pill apparently has some other uses which are not for the purpose of contraception. The trick is to decide the prudence of use. One must ask oneself what the purpose of this tool, the Internet, in fact is. Having asked this, one can actually get to the bottom of how the Catholic, who must see the tool in light of the purpose of human artifice as bringing man closer to God through the medium of man's intellect, will and senses, can use the Internet in a really profitable way. This may seem an incredibly obvious thing to speak about; surely I have already got some idea of how to use the tool, since I am right now using it! The Internet has been around quite a while now. You would think we would have figured this out already. But one must realize that there is a certain use in exploring and stating the obvious, in a still more obvious manner. We often forget the foundational purposes of the things we use, and thus misuse them. Hopefully what I am getting at will be clearer later in this same article.

So it has come to pass that we must give an account of the Internet. How it works is only incidentally important to this. We are not looking for the way it works (although I would like to state for the record that I do not believe it is a system of tubes) but its purpose. What is it and what is it for? The Internet, most basically, is a tool by which people make content available to others, or so most of the communications majors speak about it. I may not be intending to have a conversation with the readers of this article, at the moment of writing it, but I am intending that this article be available to readers. Of course, that begs further explanation, as most such definitions do: what constitutes "content", and what does it mean to make it available? Most define content in terms of information, as I have spoken of above; content is the information available at a given website, what it "contains." When I make this available, what precisely comes to pass is that the thing on the page, the content, is taken into the mind of another through the senses and that by which they understand the various media. In other words, content includes the account of communication; the Internet is a tool for the communication of content. Why this belabored account of what happens when one looks at a webpage, one may well wonder? The examination of the obvious reveals a core concept which is none too obvious itself: "communication."

What on earth is "communication"? There are a great many sources on this, but not all of them are so very clear as my two personal favorite sources for everything, nor so correct. St. Thomas Aquinas, in Contra Impugnantes Dei Cultum et Religionem, quotes Aristotle on the social meaning of "communication." From Part 2, Chapter II: "Aristotle, (VIII Ethics) classifies different 'communications'. By this term he means associations formed for divers objects, wherein the members hold communication one with the other." And regarding the meaning of "association", from the same chapter: "For, an association means the union of men, gathered together for the accomplishment of some specific work." Or, united into one definition: A communication is some union of people gathered for the accomplishment of some specific work, wherein the people "communicate" one with the other. Or, to put it still another way, a communication is some association for the sake of some good to be achieved through that association. Distilling all this, one realizes something important: communication is for the sake of some "good", whether true or apparent. To make a communication truly good, one must first ensure that the end of that communication, the good toward which it aims, is truly good, and that it is pursued in a truly good manner.

Hence, when two businessmen gather, for their business to be truly good, it must have happiness as its end, not merely wealth, and the means to happiness employed must be prudent. Likewise, coming back to the Internet, if the Internet is a tool for communication, it is a tool used for the sake of some good. Yet in the use of that very tool there is a prudence to be considered. If Pranav Mistry wishes people to be more human by its use, it is of the greatest importance that the one using recognizes, among other things, the characteristics of the way we communicate. This brings me to the less apparent part of the article: the ways in which the Internet, without noticing, makes people less human. For after all, the Internet is a communication among many, and there are greater and lesser communications; knowing this, it is possible to assess the Internet among other tools, impartially.

When we speak in real life, ninety percent or so of our communication is not in the words themselves. A good sized amount is in inflection, facial characteristics, body language, pheromone factors...the list goes on. Yet on the internet, we are limited to words, conveyed as input via our fingers and not our mouth, lacking any inflection beyond italics and other typeface, which themselves, if they have a set inflective meaning, are extremely limited in conveying such inflection. Body language and tactile factors are nonexistent. Realizing that we only convey ten percent of our communication in chat, email, and such means, we must be cognizant of the way that this degrades our normal conversation. As Thomas said, operatio sequitur esse, and esse sequitur operatio: operation follows being, and being follows operation. Do something enough times, and it will change you; when it changes you, you will do that thing more. That's habit and disposition. What does this mean for the Internet vis-a-vis our humanity? We are only partly human in our expression through chat, texting, email, and other such media. Yet this is how we relate on the Internet, just as speech is how we relate in reality. How we relate determines our relationships, and our relationships, in turn, condition us; thus, slowly, we remove our humanity if we give ourselves to the medium too fully.

Recognizing the limits of this technology, it is clear that to become dependent upon it is a dangerous proposition. Yet recognizing the limits of a tool also gives us an opportunity to use it prudently. Surely the claim that the Internet can make us "more human" is quite attractive and believable on some level, and I don't want to deny it myself, because to know the purpose of a tool is to know the good it is for, and the Internet is a most powerful tool. To deny this would be folly, and not the good kind. In order to shed some light on this claim, it's time for another obviousness examination. What is a tool? Clearly, something used by man (as other creatures do not use tools to the same degree or in the same manner) to achieve an end which is either unachievable simply or unachievable well without its use. A good example is the hammer. It could be that there is no tool at hand other than the hammer, and there is a nail that needs its work, in which case the necessity would be the former; or it could be that the nail would go in by hand or by a lesser tool, but not as well as it would with the hammer, which is the latter case. A tool, through its use by man, enables him to reach some previously unachievable good. In a matter of speaking, if one is said to be better off by the possession of some good prudently, tools raise man himself; they can make him able to live at his dignity, to really "be human". And it is perhaps fair to say that any tool, inasmuch as it brings man some new good prudently, makes man "more human". But the key here is prudence and the understanding of the good; only if we understand "humanity" can we understand in what way goods can make man "more human."

Thus, we get to the core of our quandary, hinted at by the Hobbes/utopian disagreement above. The thing that determines the good use of the Internet is the way man is, anthropology. This is, naturally, where things get dicey. One may think a good many things about man, but ultimately each thing comes down to how one thinks man is ordered or disordered. If man is entirely material, then his highest good is material. Yet for some reason we have this tendency to seek the unchanging, which we do not see in material things. Why do we seek immaterial things, including things which do not exist, when nothing else seeks so high? If men were tools, we would guess our purpose from the way we were made, and clearly we are made to contemplate, as only we can. It makes sense from this view that our purpose is the end for which we can do what we do, and what we do is seek happiness. Everyone does it; if someone says they want something else, it is inevitably led back to either happiness or pleasure, and pleasure itself is for the sake of happiness. What, then, is our purpose? Naturally, to seek whatever it is that makes us happy. Speaking as a Thomist, I would say that Boethius aptly proves this to be God in his Consolation of Philosophy. Whatever the case, even if it is not taken to be God, we surely see that there are things that make man unhappy, naturally, or so the humanist atheists would have us believe. Were we to take up Aristotle's reasoning, as I will, this falls out readily enough: anything not in accordance with our rational principle detracts from that happiness, anything that goes against virtue, because happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, and virtue is activity in accordance to man's rational principle. So everything we do is given order according to that happiness.

Thus, some things are clearly higher than others. Family duties are more important than immediate pleasure. Politeness is important even in casual encounters, but not as important as getting the truth across, which sometimes requires a bit of rudeness. Everything comes down to the way in which the tool, according to its purpose of use, contributes to our happiness. So how is the Internet to do so? Firstly, by presenting us with content according to our good, not content that degrades us. This much was obvious once, at least to the people in charge of things; but now it is almost expected, owing to the success of the vitiation of our culture, that any man with working eyes and other organs will have looked at pornography, and this is regarded as the least of offenses, when in reality it destroys the human person, by reducing his faculties through violent habits. In this case, some censorship is actually necessary. We already do so to prevent violence against minors on the side of the acts depicted themselves, and in other media we strive to prevent such depictions from falling into the hands of minors, which is a sort of censorship; is it so shocking that we should try to do so in this medium? This is not to say that one should go into other areas with this censorship, necessarily, or that the possibility of this happening is realistic (the industry in question is the Goliath to anyone's David) but that the continued free availability of this cancerous growth destroys, even in the foundation, any good the Internet may do, simply because it is so pervasive that the smallest investigation can lead one to such a thing, even in unrelated topics.

Perhaps I seem a prude for saying this. I realize this seems a digression, or perhaps as though a tilting at such windmill-giants has been my point the whole time, but it is neither. It is, like Dante's Satan, at once central and peripheral. But consider the parallel; like all sin, where Satan brings it to be out of malice but makes it appear inoffensive, so the porn industry, which wants to profit from the inhumanity of its product, which they regard as a service, wants those who come in contact with it to think it harmless. And the Internet, really, has been the most perfect ground to subvert the popular morality, because there is no populum on the Internet. There is no commonality. My greatest pet peeve of late regarding modern communications studies in relation to the Internet has been to refer to my generation as "digital natives." This is pure idiocy. I am a native of my city in California, in the United States, and perhaps in a derivative way of the area of my college in "birthing" me into the liberal arts proper, according to which she is my alma mater. I am not a native of a place which is no place; I was not born into cyberspace, but real space. "Native", taken from natus, born, is a misnomer to describe any sort of connection to the use of a tool. There are cases in which one may use the term to describe a person who seems to have a particular talent: a "native blacksmith", for example, if such speech is even used anymore. But this is hardly the same thing. A native internet user would in this sense be one who uses the Internet with uncommon facility; it would certainly not apply to a whole generation, but can only be reserved to individuals, since it refers to a rarity of talent.

To be a native requires a place, or, failing a place, a community, or failing a community, some sort of culture. Culture itself requires an unchanging commonality (since accidental commonalities do not tend to last), like Aeneas' household gods, or the grace of God, or the Pax Romana. The Internet, if it has any unifying interest to it, has only the unity of being available to all. Every fetish is satisfied--but none are banned. Every vicious sort of humor is enabled--but none are regarded as beyond the pale. The only thing keeping people from disrespecting one another, in many cases, is a sense of policy. This is not, at the same time, to classify the Internet as, so one person apparently put it, a "dystopic" space; that would be the Hobbesian outlook, which has many and manifest problems. People can be better. The problem, in most cases, is that presented with the choice they already have, they simply refuse to be so. This refusal is not simply the cause, though, of the Internet's problems; it's also the symptom. Before someone can misuse a tool, the misuse occurs in themselves in deliberation. This misuse is an attitude, not an isolated choice; and it is not simply one person, but a majority of Internet users. I genuinely think that to force some (but only some!) limits upon Internet users as to the content they may see, in this immature culture, would actually give people a greater sense of what freedom really is, and not simply by contrast.

Consider, if you will, this concretion of my rather controversial little yarn. We have, at this moment, most of the greatest works of Western Civilization online. For free, in multiple editions and translations; one may hear Eliot reading the Four Quartets or the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ("like a patient. Anesthetized. On. A. Table"), or Lewis reading the Four Loves; one may read More's Utopia or Swift's Gulliver's Travels free of charge, or if one is rather daring, most of the greatest works of political philosophy. We have the grandest possibility through the sheer power of this magnificent tool, and yet it is piddled away with degradation and vice. It is as though a grand piano were put in every living room, and all people decided to learn for recreation was "Shave and a Haircut." This is unfitting! If people were torn away from their pornography, and their YouTube idiocy, and their pleasantly enumerated cracked.com lists, they might, just might, be brought to realize how wasted most of the time they spend online really is. It is vital, too, to remember that this time wasted is not spent merely idly, but absolutely violently.

People make much of what it is to live in the so-called "Internet culture", and wild-eyed Wired editors routinely act as though technology will save the world. But people forget the most vital and essential thing about technology: it is supposed to serve man, and not the other way around.