Semper eadem ...

Ma jeunesse ne fut qu'un ténébreux orage,

Traversé çà et là par de brillants soleils;

Le tonnerre et la pluie ont fait un tel ravage,

Qu'il reste en mon jardin bien peu de fruits vermeils.

Voilà que j'ai touché l'automne des idées,

Et qu'il faut employer la pelle et les râteaux

Pour rassembler à neuf les terres inondées,

Où l'eau creuse des trous grands comme des tombeaux.

Et qui sait si les fleurs nouvelles que je rêve

Trouveront dans ce sol lavé comme une grève

Le mystique aliment qui ferait leur vigueur?

— Ô douleur! ô douleur! Le Temps mange la vie,

Et l'obscur Ennemi qui nous ronge le coeur

Du sang que nous perdons croît et se fortifie!

...

'D'où vous vient, disiez-vous, cette tristesse étrange,

Montant comme la mer sur le roc noir et nu?'

— Quand notre coeur a fait une fois sa vendange

Vivre est un mal. C'est un secret de tous connu ...

Ascesis ...

‘The ascetic makes a virtue of a state of distress.’

‘In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. Now choose.’

—Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human, §76, §348)

Probably a soul-doctor would to most prescribe more solitude, that they may develop inwardness. But my prescription would say: Take two socialisation pills at mealtimes, however hard to swallow, wash them down by helloing three people, whom you do not know, and remember that your athenaeum is not a hideaway. My beloved Pascal wrote that man does not know how to stay quietly in his room (Pensée 136). I know how to do that rather well. (‘The celle welle continued waxeth swete.’*) But I do not know how to mix noisily at a party, that's the thing. Had I lived in another age, everything would be settled naturally. There were places for me then, more or less corresponding to my inner preoccupations, monasteries and hermitages and anchoritic towers.† But it seems I live in the present age, chronologically displaced, an anachronism. All the same, I know that I would make a poor monk. Yes, I would make a most excellent recluse, a withdrawn melancholy penitent summa cum laude. But that's not the same, is it? Truly, I would be too much a worldling among the monastics then, as I am too much a monastic among the worldlings now.

*Thomas à Kempis (Imitatio Christi, I.20.26). 

†Then again, ‘habyte and tonsure lytel avaylen’ (Ibid., I.17.6).

Homo totus ...

A man, as a rational animal, is a psychosomatic totality. He is not a standalone psuchē. He is not a standalone sōma. Both psuchē  and sōma are abstracted from the ousia that is a man. The danger is (and has ever been) that of concretising the abstractions, resulting in plural ousie rather than a singular ousia. (Cf. the trio of posts on G. Strawson's metaphysics below.) 

Soul-body holism was widespread in pretheoretic ancientry. We find it notably among the ancient Hebrews. The standard Hebrew word for soul in the Old Testament, nephesh, is a word for man altogether. 'The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life — and man became a living soul [nephesh]' (Genesis 2.7). So a man's soul is his self. (And so it is also in the Koran, the Arabic nafs being cognate with the Hebrew nephesh.) The soul-body Orphism of the (prototheoretic) Greeks is probably the nearest antiquity comes to mind-machine Cartesianism. Aquinas summarises the Orphic-Platonic anthropology as follows: 'Plato claimed that a human being is not a composite of soul and body but that a human being is the soul itself using a body, just as Peter is not a composite of a human being and clothes, but rather a human being using clothes' (Summa contra gentiles, II.57). In this way we are led to a flesh-despising Gnosticism. Take Plato's Cratylus 399d-400c, wherein Socrates is playacting as etymologist (cf. Gorgias 493a, 524b, Phaedo 64a):

SOCRATES: ... Sōma may be variously interpreted, and yet more variously if a little permutation is allowed. For some say that the body is the grave (sema) of the soul which may be thought to be buried in our present life, or again the index of the soul, because the soul gives indications to (semainei) the body. Probably the Orphic poets were the inventors of the name, and they were under the impression that the soul is suffering the punishment of sin, and that the body is an enclosure or prison in which the soul is incarcerated, kept safe (sōma, sozetai), as the name sōma implies, until the penalty is paid.

Neo-Platonic philosophies of man were made normative in the west by Augustine and in the east by Gregory of Nyssa. It was the later rediscovery of Aristotle and of hylemorphism that brought about a shift to an older way of thinking, now systematised. For Aristotle (and thereafter Aquinas et al), the soul cannot be a body—it is in a body. (De anima II.2, 414a.) A man is insouled body, informed matter. And there is much to say for hylemorphism. (It is adductive, not reductive. It explains without explaining away. And so on.) But Aristotelian hylemorphism is also theory-heavy. Nevertheless, it seems the best thing we've got, comparatively.

Lately I've been reading Wolfhart Pannenberg's systematics, and here I've found a reaffirmation of my feelings. He writes: 'Of all the philosophical positions held in antiquity, only the Aristotelian approach could lead to the right conclusion' (II.184). But he goes on thereafter to name his many qualms. R.W. Jenson says much the same thing, that hylemorphism is 'a solution that is [qualifiedly] satisfactory,' but that theology has not generally 'been up to the subtlety' thereof (II.110 of his systematics).

On today's much-trumpeted neuroscientism, we are not insouled bodies (ad modum Aristotle and Aquinas) but inskulled brains. And here, again, are two ousie. It's a brain-body dualism. However, as P.M.S. Hacker notes, brains are organs, not organisms:

'It makes no sense to apply psychological predicates such as "thinks," "remembers," "perceives," "imagines," "wants," "decides," "feels happy," and so forth to the brain. It is a mistake to apply predicates that signify attributes of an animal as a living whole to its parts — a mereological fallacy. Just as it is a mistake to ascribe the property of keeping time to the fusée of an eighteenth-century table clock [...] so too it is a mistake to ascribe to a person's brain the property of thinking that it is raining or of deciding to take an umbrella' (in Human Nature: A Categorical Framework, p. 306).

Just so. And as for Pannenberg:

'Only in the field of intersubjectivity and in consequence of the awareness of the I-relativity of one's own self-consciousness can a distinction between made between body and soul. Over against the soul as the inner world of consciousness stands the body, which, like the things of the world and in distinction from the inner world of my consciousness, is there for others as well as myself. It is tempting to regard the inner world of the consciousness as the true I in distinction from the body. But this is unduly to restrict the concept of the soul as well as that of the ego. In pointing to the speaker, the word "I" always indicates the physical individuality of the speaker. If we are to view the living body as insouled inasmuch as it is living, then the term "soul" must cover more than the inner world of the consciousness. It must also include the unconscious, which is related to one's own corporeality and its history' (II.194).

Habit ...

'Alas, of all enemies, habit is perhaps the most cunning, and above all it is cunning enough never to let itself be seen, because the person who sees the habit is saved from the habit. Habit is not like other enemies that one sees and against which one aggressively defends oneself; the struggle is actually with oneself in getting to see it ... Sometimes a person becomes aware, as when a dream flashes by and is forgotten, that habit has changed him; he wants to make amends but does not know where he should go to buy new oil to rekindle his love. Then he becomes despondent, annoyed, weary of himself, weary of his love, weary of its being as paltry as it is, weary of not being able to get it changed, because unfortunately he had not in good time paid attention to eternity's change and now has even lost the capacity to endure the cure.'

—K, XVI.36.

'Of all sophists, time is the most dangerous, and of all dangerous sophists, habit is the most cunning. It is already difficult enough to realise that one changes little by little over the years, but the fraud of habit is that one is the same, unchanged, that one says the same thing, unchanged, and yet is very changed and yet says it, very changed.'

—K, XVII.315.

Homo est ...

What is a man? If we ask a chemist, he'd say, 'Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorous ...' But that is what a man is made of micro-materially. And we want to know what a man is formally. What is man's whatness (quidditas)? That's the question. The traditional answer is: animal rationale. The early-modern answer is: res cogitans. The late-modern answer is: res extensa. Thus Richard Dawkins says today that we are machines for replicating deoxyribonucleic acid. (And even then he has contradicted his dysteleological premises. Thereon we are machines for replicating that replicate DNA — we aren't really for anything.) But in reality we are not machines at all. And although 'rational animal' may not be the best possible definition, it hasn't been bettered. It's still the best we've got, after millennia. And it's everything a definitio rei is supposed to be: clear, terse, literal, positive, noncircular, and extensionally sufficient.

For Notker Labeo of St. Gall, homo est animal rationale, mortale, risus capax. For Wittgensteinians such as Sir Anthony Kenny and P.M.S. Hacker, man is most of all the talking animal, homo loquens. For the Princeton theologian Robert W. Jenson, man is more so the praying animal, be that prayer praiseful or maledictive (see vol. II of his systematics, pp. 58-9). Elsewise man is the weeping animal, the dancing animal, the smiling, blushing, ironizing animal. And to say as much is at least understandable. For brute animals do no such rationalised things, save by analogy (now more, now less remote). But these are bad definitions. Definitions are made of formal genera and species. And it is agreed that man's proximate genus is animal. But a particular proprium (e.g. talking, à la Kenny and Hacker) can't rightly be the specific difference. And likewise for selections of propria (e.g. moralising and laughing, à la Notker). We need an ontological antecedent that explains the countless consequents. Hence rationality. Homo est animal rationale—full stop. We talk, we moralise, and so on, because we are rational, (not the other way around).

But don't, say, chimpanzees also smile? No, not literally. That is, if we say 'Humans smile and chimps smile' then the verb isn't anymore univocal. Milton was right: 'Smiles from reason flow | To brute denied ...' (Paradise Lost, IX.239). The toothy grin of a chimp cannot literally be called a smile, for there is a rational intentionality present in the latter (and absent from the former). And so, however similar the bodily mechanics may be, brute grins are never more than simulacra of smiles. (Cf. the pathological risus sardonicus.) Thus Wittgenstein: 'A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face' (Philosophical Investigations: 583). To say that chimps smile is to anthropomorphise. And, no, there's nothing per se wrong with such anthropomorphising, so long as we remember that's what we're doing. From childhood up, we all of us animate inanimates (a metal tool 'groans' as it is bent from misuse); we animalise vegetables (a dry plant is 'thirsty' for water); and we humanise animals. So long as we are moving ontologically upward, it's a psychologically healthy thing to do. (If somebody moved downward, vegetablising animals, then we'd be worried.) But animating inanimates and humanising nonhumans is not something that scientists qua scientists may do (licitly). For it is no more literally(-univocally) true to say that brutes 'smile' (or whatever) than it is to say that rocks reproduce (because they break up into multiples).

Side-note: Here we have a serious bioscience problem, that of untranslatable metaphors and anthropomorphisms. Bioscientific terminology is through-and-through figural (and therefore through-and-through unscientific). Take so-called natural selection. The term selection is already a very misleading anthropomorphism. And in Darwin's Origin of Species metaphors hugely outnumber literalisms. (Therein natural selection is said to 'pick out with unerring skill,' it is 'always intently watching,' and so forth. It's practically a hands-on demiurge.) Darwinian evolution is supposed to be a nominalism and a dysteleogism, too, but there are realisms and teleogisms on every page of every book written by Darwinists. And it's worrisome that strictly literal translations aren't ever forthcoming. Is it even possible, we may ask, to reduce teleologies to efficiencies? Would such a translation be at all readable? Whenever a bioscientist tries his hand as literalist, he fails flatly, (elsewise he succeeds in drafting a reductio ad absurdum for his mechanically reductionist premises).

Summa. We are rational animals. And 'rational animal' is an infima species.

Evolutionary origins ...

Search your bookseller's catalogue for 'Evolutionary origin ...' or 'Evolution of ...' and you'll find a library of texts. Therein evolutionary psychologists use advanced pseudoscience, cutting-edge genetic fallacies, and state-of-the-art category errors to explain away anthropological phenomena. For example, in The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior we learn that religion underwent 'a process of natural selection in which it was rewarded in the evolutionary currency of reproductive success.' It was 'an adaptive answer to the conditions of living and surviving that prevailed among our prehistoric ancestors.' And in this way religion is implicated in baseness (of origin) and scepticism (vis-à-vis dogmata). So too are all human enterprises implicated. Existence is a reward for adaptiveness (not for veracity). Nonexistence is a punishment for maladaptiveness (not for falsity). And soon everything will be thus explained away in the system. The books are even now at the printing press.

But there is at least one volume more to be written before the explain-away system is complete. Forthcoming, then, is the capstone volume that will explain away explaining-away. What I would really like to read is a book on the evolutionary origin of evolutionary-origin books. I'm waiting for the evolutionary psychologists to explain away evolutionary psychology with evolutionary psychology, and thereby to implicate the science itself in baseness and scepticism. How long will they tarry? The system sighs for completion.

Sailing sternforemost ...

Hume seemed to use up most of his ink writing on the absurd conclusions that follow from empiricist premises. And he closed not by saying that empiricism is therefore false, but by saying that the world is therefore absurd. Scientists seem now to use up all their pixels writing on the absurd conclusions that follow from mathematismist premises. And they close not by saying that mathematism is therefore false, but, again, by saying that the world is therefore absurd. What absurdly backward methodology!

A mariner says to us: 'If we sail a sloop-of-war sternforemost, it will be very hard to steer, it will move slowly and awkwardly, and sooner or later it will capsize. Nevertheless, I am a sternforemostist, as are all lovers of seagoing truth.' Do we then engage the mariner as our helmsman? It seems the answer is: Yes.

Strawson's metaphysics ( ||| ) ...

Galen Strawson

Where were we? From the seventeenth century onward, we've understood worldstuff to be altogether non-experiential, contra mindstuff. And so in the words of Schrödinger:

'We are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [mathematico-scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it' ('On the Peculiarity of the Scientific World-View,' in What is Life? and Other Scientific Essays, p. 216).

For the past fifty or sixty years, philosophers (and scientists playacting as such) have tried ever so mindfully to explain mind mindlessly. Here the emergentists try to work experience back into worldstuff without reworking the altogether non-experiential understanding thereof. Meantime the scientismists feel that they must deny experience completely, even though denying is experiential, so as to be proper card-carrying materialists. And on and on and on. Absurdity upon absurdity upon absurdity. But if your premises lead you to the madhouse, straightly or circuitously, then you need to give them up. And Galen Strawson wants to help you, if you'll but let him. That's what he's here for. 

Something akin to shock treatment may be necessary for inpatients at the start. There's much for them to unlearn (viz., about four-hundred-year's worth of bad metaphysics). They've moved so far away from how things really are in rerum natura. And they always seem to think that we've got 'matter' in the bag, whereas 'mind' evades us. But, as with most every modern dogma, this is the reverse of the truth. Thus Strawson: 'We tend to think we have a good general understanding of what Russell calls the "intrinsic" nature of matter in spite of all the conundra of current physics and cosmology. But this belief is wholly unjustified ... When it comes to the mental, by contrast, we know quite a lot about its intrinsic nature' (Selves, pp. 285-6). What we really need is another scientifico-philosophical revolution, stresses Strawson [say 'stresses Strawson' three times fast], for day-to-day reality cannot be described 'by any non-revolutionary extension of current physics' (ibidem, p. 284).

Strawson's way to dissolve the problems is to say that worldstuff and mindstuff are both one and the same worldmindstuff. From the outset he wants to be a monist, but nota bene a monist who's adductive, not reductive. And that leads him to panpsychism/panexperientialism. Here everything is at least somewhat experiential. Strawson isn't saying that darning needles, porcelain teapots, and other household miscellanea are experiencers (à la H.C. Andersen). He wouldn't be able to look his fellows in the face again if he said that. It's all and only experiencers that have experiences. However, to steer around anything anywise dualistic, he must perforce say that darning needles are proto-experiencers. There must in all things be proto-experience, proto-mind, proto-what-it's-likeness, proto-qualia, et cetera. Already there are many problems here. (Do many proto-experiences add up to an experience?) And, yes, most of the perceptive thinkers nowadays go for something dualistic. (Some sort of property dualism isn't uncommon. Cf. David Chalmers and John Searle.) But Strawson wants to be a monist full-stop, though he grants that dualisms are intuitive (and monisms counterintuitive):

'Things are not as they seem if materialism Strawsonian monism is true; for if materialism Strawsonianism is true, then mental phenomena and non-mental phenomena, and in particular experiential (i.e. conscious) phenomena and non-experiential phenomena, do after all belong wholly to the same single sphere of being' (Selves, p. 71; my strikethroughs and italicizations of course).

What about God? To be a half-dualist monist is to set oneself about as far from God as possible. (It's also to set oneself about as far from reality as possible.) And to half-dualist monists, Strawsonian monism is much too godly, too mystical. If anything, it would disarm them in their theomachy. It may even be argued that Strawson's philosophy is just a sort of neo-primitivism, a neo-animism. (What, really, is the difference between a present-day Strawsonian and a pre-Socratic hylozoist or a pantheist Stoic?) And yet Strawson himself seems to think that by calling his holism a physicalism-materialism-naturalism he's somehow protecting himself from God. But the God-fearing ancients also had a holistic philosophy of nature. (Maybe he's thereby protecting himself from the God of Galileo, Descartes, and Malebranche, but not from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.) Earlier I talked of the breathy-airy understandings of soul-spirit in antiquity up to the Greeks, but that's not to say that they went away thereafter. Consider emperor Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD, foremost of the later Stoa, who called the soul an airy 'whirl' some six hundred years after Aristophanes (with whom we left off):

'If souls continue to exist, how does the air contain them from eternity? But how does the earth contain the bodies of those who have been buried from time so remote? For as here the mutation of these bodies after a certain continuance, whatever it may be, and their dissolution make room for other dead bodies; so the souls which are removed into the air after subsisting for some time are transmuted and diffused, and assume a fiery nature by being received into the seminal intelligence of the universe, and in this way make room for the fresh souls which come to dwell there ...'

'No longer let thy breathing only act in concert with the air which surrounds thee, but let thy intelligence also now be in harmony with the intelligence which embraces all things. For the intelligent power is no less diffused in all parts and pervades all things for him who is willing to draw it to him than the aerial power for him who is able to respire it.' (Meditations, IV.21 and VIII.54). 

Reading the literature, it often seems they are talking of the selfsame worldmindstuff at varying levels of condensation and rarefication, so that there's uniformity beneath pluriformity. Here are earth and water, which rarefied become air and fire, which ultrararefied become aether. Then the traditional Christian understanding of body and spirit—(which is not substance dualistic, as popular opinion today says it is, reading modernism into pre-modernism)—was of course carried over from ancient Jewry. Yes, you'll find in the history of the faith every sort of anthropology — that man is one, two, three things, or two in one, or three in one. But the point is that when they spoke of body and spirit, flesh and breath, they didn't mean machine and mind as we do now. Justin Martyr (AD 100-165 ) could say that the soul is as perishable and corruptible as anything else (Dialogue with Trypho, V). And Tertullian (AD 145-220) had no problem saying that 'the soul is corporeal, possessing a peculiar kind of solidity in its nature,' that it 'has a bodily substance of its own,' and so on (De resurrectione carnis, XVII; cf. his De anima). The closest churchdom came to a fully worked-out and systematised anthropology was the Aristotelian hylemorphism ('matter-formism') of High Scholasticism, affirmed by the Council of Vienna in 1312. Here man is a psychosomatic totality. He is informed matter, insouled body. (Again, there are no interaction problems. For soul and body don't 'interact' at all.)

So I can't but wonder if Strawson is very much versed in pre-modern thinking. He knows his moderns well, entering into serious discussions with Locke, Hume, Kant, et al. But does he know his pre-moderns? They're not part of his discussions anyway. Aristotle is spoken of underbreath now and then in Selves. But that's about it. We don't find, say, Bonaventure or Aquinas in the index (though we find 'Winnie the Pooh' and 'Heffalump'). And all of this is somewhat worrisome, for we cannot really understand Western modernism until we really understand the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, which came to an apogee in the Christianised Aristotelianism of the later middle ages. For modernism was contrarian above all. Much as teenagers do the utmost to be unlike their parents—going so far as to say the waist is a handbreadth above the knee, to severally inkstain themselves, and to do many other things traditionally associated with criminals—so the early-modern thinkers did the utmost to be unlike their philosophical forebears.

Anyway, the bottomline is: were the bygones to use modern terminology, they'd say that both body and spirit-soul are physical-material-natural, in much the same way that Strawson does. And when thinkers like him and Thomas Nagel talk about how we need a scientifico-philosophical revolution, they're really talking about a devolution, about returning to an older worldview (updated howsoever). But they're correct all the same. The scientific revolution turned the world upside down, and we need to turn the world upside up again. To me, then, although there's much to learn from Strawson, he has an all-too-modern mindset. He writes: '[Panpsychism] sounded crazy to me for along time, but I'm quite used to it, now that I know that there is no alternative short of substance dualism' ('Realistic monism,' p. 19). But there clearly are alternatives short of substance dualism: hylemorphism, for example. Moreover, David S. Oderberg, a present-day exponent of hylemorphism, teaches philosophy at the same university as Strawson. So Galen need only go down the hallway to learn all about it. No excuses then!

UPDATE: After writing the above, I had a small e-mail back-and-forth with Prof. Strawson, (something that came about per accidens). He was a very good sport. And I put it to him: what about hylemorphism? Here, after all, is another way of thinking altogether, dualistic but not so to speak a dualism. Plus, all the waving of hands and shrugging of shoulders that comes with panpsychism is absent. Strawson's reply: 'I don't really know what hylemorphism is.' So there we have it. (And him with Prof. Oderberg right around the corner too. Tsk, tsk.)

Strawson's metaphysics ( || ) ...



Galen Strawson

OK. Let's try again. What is it for something to be physical? My handy-dandy Blackwell Dictionary of Philosophy says that physical things are those 'which possess physical characteristics'—that's a semicircular definition, Blackwell, but go on—for example: 'position, size, shape.' But where's quality, Blackwell? See, this is just physics-alism all over again. And physical isn't physics-al; we may be sure of that much. Still, all in all, it's not easy to say just what physicality is. I feel about it as St. Augustine felt about time: so long as nobody asks me, I know what it is; if anybody does ask me, I don't. Physical-nonphysical, material-immaterial, natural-supernatural, bodily-mental—there's so much adhockery to these contraries and contradictories. Noam Chomsky once said to John Searle that as soon as we come to understand anything, we call it 'physical' (quoted in Searle's Rediscovery of Mind, p. 25). And, to be sure, there's notable terminological elasticity here, though the terms won't stretch forever. At least substance dualists have a clear-cut definition of physicality-materiality (wrong, but clear-cut). Whereas the rest of us are left scratching our heads. And if we can't say what it is for something to be bodily (contra mental) then what is the mind-body problem? Chomsky puts it this way:

'The mind-body problem can be posed sensibly only insofar as we have a definite conception of body. If we have no such definite and fixed conception, we cannot ask whether some phenomena fall beyond its range ... There is no longer any definite conception of body. Rather, the material world is whatever we discover it to be ... The mind-body problem can therefore not even be formulated' (Language and the Problem of Knowledge, pp. 142, 144-5).  

Well, what Strawson wants to do is altogether collapse the mind-body dichotomy, thereby collapsing the mind-body problem. (There'll be no interactionist problems, for there'll be no interaction.) Here is Strawson's for-starters:

'The first thing one needs to do when addressing the question about the relation between the mental and the non-mental is to recover a proper sense of our ignorance of the non-mental. Many take the "mind-body problem" to be the problem of how mental or experiential phenomena can be material or physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the matter, or the physical. They've already gone hopelessly wrong, because we have no good reason to think we know anything about matter that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental or experiential phenomena are physical phenomena' (Selves, p. 285; Strawson's emphases).

Strawson refers often to the late astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944). Eddington, (whom I've not read), woke Strawson from his half-dualist slumbers, sometime in the 1990s, by way of a book called The Nature of the Physical World. He quotes Eddington as follows:

' "What knowledge have we of the nature of atoms that renders it at all incongruous that they should constitute a thinking [experiencing] object?," asks Eddington, who took the existence of experiential phenomena — "qualia" — for granted: "science has nothing to say as to the intrinsic nature of the atom. The atom, so far as we know anything about it, is, like everything else in physics, a schedule of pointer readings [on instrument dials]. The schedule is, we agree, attached to some unknown background. Why not then attach it to something of a spiritual nature of which a prominent characteristic is thought. It seems rather silly to prefer to attach it to something of a so-called 'concrete' nature inconsistent with thought, and then to wonder where the thought comes from" ...' (Ibidem, p. 293). 

All of that, from Strawson and from Eddington, seems (more or less) correct to me. By 'experiential phenomena' Strawson means any sort of qualitative, what-it's-likeness phenomena—the 'what it's like' of any and all psychological goings-on. And what we're after, then, is a holistic metaphysic, 'not reductive but adductive' (ibid., p. 284, Strawson's emphasis). For it is, as Eddington says, rather silly for materialists to define matter in a literally thoughtless way and then to wonder where thoughts come from, why they can't find them materially, and so on. My personal favourite sciolism is when they say that consciousness is a mystery, but a mystery that scientists qua scientists will nevertheless solve someday. (O fides.) Well, 'mystery' is hardly the word. It's about as mysterious as giving a schoolboy white chalk and a blackboard so to colour a rainbow. He'll toil and moil for a thousand years — all the time being told 'Believe in calcareous progress!' and 'Look to the future!' and 'Here are government subsidies for more white chalk and a bigger blackboard!'—but he'll never colour a rainbow, for he hasn't the wherewithal. Meantime everybody will be talking about the mystery of prismatic colour, that maybe it doesn't really exist, or that maybe chromaticism 'emerges' from achromaticism ...

'Sod you lot!'

Now, there are some difficulties at the get-go. For example, Strawson's terminology is problematic, if not downright bothersome, as it runs crosswise of everyday speech. If today's man-on-the-street says 'physical,' he means physical contra nonphysical substance dualistically. Whereas by 'physical' Strawson means both physical and nonphysical blended together monistically. He calls his metaphysic a physicalism and a materialism, but he may just as well call it a nonphysicalism or an immaterialism (as did Eddington). All the terms are equally misleading. (Strawson has suggested more accurate titles, apathetically, like the cumbersome 'experiential-and-non-experiential-monism.') He uses the terms 'physical,' 'material,' and 'natural' to denote anything and everything that's concretely real. '[T]he physical is whatever general kind of thing we are considering when we consider things like tables and chairs and experiential phenomena' ('Realistic monism,' p. 5). 'Experiential phenomena are as real as rocks, hence wholly physical. They are part of reality [...] just like extension phenomena or electrical phenomena' (Selves, p. 288). Thus, if ghosts and ghostesses are real, they're Strawsonianly physical-material. (Of course, Strawson is an atheist who doesn't believe in boojums or faeries or homunculi.)

'I am ... a physical object — a wholly physical object ... I should admit, though, that I don't fully know the nature of the physical. No one does ... [T]he overall nature of the physical remains in many respects profoundly obscure to us — a point made vivid by the fact that although the experiential-qualitative or ‘what-it’s-likeness’ character of conscious experience is itself a wholly physical phenomenon, if materialism is true, our most general science of the physical, i.e. physics, provides no resources for its description, for the positive acknowledgement of its reality ... So even if I know — take for granted — that I’m a wholly physical thing, much remains unknown' (pp. 4-5).

Even though he forthrightly rejects dualism and half-dualist monism, he seems to want readers to hear the atheistic half-dualist overtones of words like 'physical' and 'material.' (Atheistic because on substance dualism God is made out of the mental stuff, and if you toss that away, keeping only the bodily stuff, you thereby toss away God.) He seems to hear the overtones himself too. But listen to how different he sounds if we standardise his terminology: 'The overall nature of the physical real remains in many respects profoundly obscure to us—a point made vivid by the fact that although the experiential-qualitative or ‘what-it’s-likeness’ character of conscious experience is itself a wholly physical real phenomenon, if materialism realness is true, our most general science of the physical real, i.e. physics, provides no resources for its description, for the positive acknowledgement of its reality.'

Furthermore, there's a sort of misrelation present, for Strawson is both agnostic and dogmatic at the same time and about the same thing. By his own admission, he can't set out a definition of physicality-materiality. (How then is he to argue his case, we may ask? Arguments are made of propositions, and propositions are made of definable terms.) For Strawson, the physical is something we know not what. And so physicalism is something we know not what. Why, then, call oneself a physicalist? (Isn't physicalist just another word for ignoramus?) He's so very sure he's 'a physical object—a wholly physical object.' But then he's so very unsure about what a physical object is. What marvellous surety!

Well, that's all as may be. The point for now is that Strawson is in the right where it matters: i.e. the qualitative stuff is just as real and as 'natural' as the quantitative stuff, and there's no good reason to suppose otherwise. Going back to Chomsky, 'matter' is whatever it turns out to be. And in that sense we're all to-be-determined-ists.

Still more to come.

Strawson's metaphysics ( | ) ...

Galen Strawson

Galen Strawson is an Oxford-educated analytic philosopher, as was his father P.F. Strawson. He writes about metaphysics and things metaphysical, as did his father. And re philosophies of nature and mind, he's among the present-day few who 'get it'. Today's mathematico-mechanical philosophy of nature, that which has so severely problematized philosophy and science, has got to go, he says, sooner or later. (And so it does.) Today's eliminativisms he laughs off as the 'silliest,' 'craziest' things in the history of mankind. (And so they are.) In short, I like Galen Strawson. So far I've taken in a full-length book of his (Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics), several articles, and a YouTube lecture. And I want to write a little something on his panpsychist physicalism. (Go here for a onceover of the same from the man himself.)

What is it for something to be physical? Most nowadays enter the question scientistically. That is, they unthinkingly think that physical stuff is scientific stuff, is that which scientists may (at least in principle) get at scientifically. But scientism is at bottom physics-alism (as Strawson calls it), and physics-alism is at bottom mathematism. Something is to us physical, then, only insofar as it is quantitative. And so an irreducibly qualitative thing—a quale, say—is to us nonphysical, immaterial, supernatural. But how did this happen? How did we come to supernaturalise such very natural things as qualia? Well, here we may especially thank the revolutionary seventeenth-century. The early-moderns made heady scientific advances by working with strictly mathematical projections of the world, by abstracting from concrete reality only that which was quantitative. The problem was that they thereafter hypostasised the projections, they concretised the abstractions, fallaciously turning method into metaphysic. (There's reason to be methodologically qualitiless, but there's no reason to be metaphysically so!) Abstractions are of course incomplete descriptions of the things from which they abstract. But scientists and philosophers more and more understood the incomplete abstractions—both the quantitative and the qualitative—to be complete concretions. Enter now substance dualism and the mind-body interaction problem. (For the history, see E.A. Burtt's The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.)

Many with a passing knowledge of philosophy are surprised to learn that, although philosophy has been around for some three millennia, the mind-body problem, as we understand it, is a seventeenth-century latecomer. Consider how things were in ye olden times. Everywhere we go, life and breath are interconnected. In the Hebrew scriptures, it is God's spirit-breath that livens the lifeless dust: 'The LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life' (Genesis 2.7; cf. Ezekiel 37.9-10.). So it is for both man and beast, 'yea, they have all one breath' (Ecclesiastes 3.19). And if God 'gather unto himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again unto dust' (Job 34.14-15; cf. Ecc. 12.7). The thing to note presently is the breathiness of it all, the airiness, (and to us moderns, therefore, the physicality-materiality). Two Hebrew nouns translated 'soul', 'spirit,' and 'mind' in the KJV — nĕshamah and ruach — are also translated 'breath,' 'wind,' 'blast,' and 'air.' Note also that the Old-Testament man is a single thing, not dust here and spirit-breath there, but inspirited dust. There's no dust-spirit interaction problem.

Hurrying forward to pre-Socratic Greece, things are very much the same. Everybody knows that psychē, the standard Greek word for soul, means both air and breath. (It's the same with the Latin anima, cognate with the Greek anemos or 'wind.') And we needn't be reminded about pneuma. The Orphic poets sang that 'the soul enters into us as we breathe, borne by the winds.' And it was a prayer among Grecians not to die on a windy day, lest a soul be blown off to barbarian lands or waste places. The philosophers, too, all found room for soul-breath somewhere in their systems, monist or pluralist. Take the philosopher-doxographer Aëtius on Anaximenes:

'Anaximenes of Miletus, Son of Eurystratus, declared that the origin of existing things was air, for out of it all things come to be and into it they resolved again. "Just as our soul," he says, "which is air, holds us together, so breath and air surround the whole cosmos" ...'

Or take Aristotle on Democritus:

'In the air there are many of those particles which he calls mind and soul. Hence when we breathe and the air enters, these enter along with it ... This explains why life and death are bound up with the taking in and letting out of breath ...' 

Or take even Aristophanes on Socrates:

STREPSIADES: Socrates! Dear Socrates!

SOCRATES: [suspended up in a basket] Why do you call me, creature of a day?

STREPSIADES: Tell me please, first, what is it you are doing?

SOCRATES: I tread on air and contemplate the sun ... I have to suspend my brain and mingle the subtle essence of my mind with this air, which is of the like nature, in order clearly to penetrate the things of heaven ...

It all sounds so overly physical-material to us. But, then, the physical-nonphysical, material-immaterial dichotomy wouldn't make sense to the ancients. We mean physical-material substance-dualistically. They knew no such substantial separation. (The bygone Greeks had the word sōmatikos, but not asōmatikos.) The ancient and the modern philosophies of nature are radically different. Hylozoism and animism are deeply rooted in ancientry, (as substance dualism is deeply rooted in modernity), and they hadn't been uprooted even by Aristotle's time. Don't let's forget, physical-nonphysical, material-immaterial dichotomising was historically very gradual. (W.K.C. Guthrie has lots of good writing here, e.g. in his multi-volume history of Greek philosophy and in The Greeks and Their Gods.)

So we came to supernaturalise natural things, thanks mostly to a 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' (Whitehead). Suppose, however, that we want to be a naturalists, allowing the natural, disallowing the supernatural? Surely the commonsensical thing then would be to go back and renaturalise the supernaturalised, leastwise as much of it as we cannot do without. (And such, as we'll see, is Strawson's method.) But today's naturalists are generally not commonsensical—they're nonsensical. See, they accept the terms of the debate as put forward by the Cartesians. (Big mistake.) They accept the mathetismist definition of the physical-material-natural: all quantity, no quality. (Whereas Strawson wants to remix quantity and quality.) They accept res extensæ and reject res cogitantes. (Why? Well, really, it seems to be mostly theophobia. But this fear of God is the beginning of unwisdom.) Again, they're scientismists, therefore physicsalists, therefore mathematismists (both epistemologically and metaphysically!). Note how very Cartesian they are, then, despite their anti-Cartesian blustering. They let the dualists fallaciously dualise, and thereafter select from the dualisation for their monism. It's a fallacy within a fallacy. Thus Strawson writes that they out-Descartes Descartes (‘Realistic monism,’ p. 7 footnote). And it's just no good at all. For if you define matter as Descartes did, it follows logically that you must posit mind (short of brute, reasonless 'emergence'). Moreover, substance dualism isn't meant to be taken by halves, but if you're going to do so, you must take the supernatural half, mind over matter (à la G. Berkeley). For, among other reasons, 'it is less certain that there is non-experiential stuff than that there is experiential stuff'' (ibidem, p. 5 footnote).

Alright. Here's an adapted analogical summary. Say we ask the philosophers what an apple is. The old wisemen would present the apple to us as such in toto.

classical apple

But the Cartesians are too modish for such old-world holism. They first take the apple and put it in a high-powered juicer, the GALILEO-5000, made in Italy, limited warranty. One thing goes in, two things come out—the tasty liquids here, and the tasteless solids there. They then set them side by side, as close together as they may, saying: 'There, that's an apple! The wet and the dry interact somehow, but don't worry your heads about that.'

Cartesian apple

But now along come the present-day materialists. They say: 'You don't really believe in apple juice, do you? What a lot of superstitious nonsense! We now know much. An apple, we now know, is just a dishful of dry pulp. And wet juice, we now know, doesn't really exist.'

materialist apple

So Cartesians make two of one (also thereby making the juice-pulp interaction problem, the hard problem of juiciness, et cetera). Materialists then take but one of the Cartesian two, denying juice outright. Others say that juice 'emerges' from juiceless pulp, a conjuring trick. Still others try to remake apples ex post facto by mixing the juice halfwise with the pulp, but that always turns into applesauce ... 

More to come.

Every little action ...

'The gods had given me almost everything ... But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it ... '

— Oscar Wilde, Epistola: in carcere et vinculis

Therefrom, therefore ...

They say there was a time when artists were simply artisans. Nobody cared very much about an artist's name, background, upbringing, personality, appetites, political views, chest measurement, hat size. What did all of that matter, so long as the artworks were good? We don't ask after the personal minutiae of other hirelings, do we? That was back then. (And already by classical times artists had become names.) Nowadays we're at the other extreme. What does it matter if an artwork is good? (And what does 'good' mean anyway? Hah!) All that matters is a name, famous or infamous. An artist may exhibit a bag of garbage so long as he has a name. (However, that bag of garbage may be thrown out by the night cleaner—a truly newsworthy story.) Well, 'good' means what it has always commonsensically meant. And it is time that we put again some distance between the artist and his artwork, though not too much.

All too often we say that bad artworks are good, because we take the artists themselves to be good, not qua artists, but in some other way. Then we say that good artworks are bad, because we take the artists to be bad, not qua artists, but in some other way. Tsk, tsk. We may be ashamed of an artwork's parenting, of its birthplace, its provenance, of the rundown carriage that carried it to us—no matter. The artwork is its own standalone thing. How it came cannot change what it is (ex post facto). And if we can't see the what for the how, for the wherefrom, then so much the worse for us. Yes, if you're looking at a painting in a gallery, and a fellow gallerygoer tells you of the painter's turpitude, that he was vicious qua man (though virtuous qua painter), then what you see will probably change, though that at which you look is unchanged. And that's OK. We're not superobjective thingamabobs, after all. But don't let's visit the sins of the father on his children. Don't let's go searching for what isn't there, lest we find it, as hypochondriacs find diseases, diseases that aren't there but may as well be. (Wagner's 'Gesamtkunstwerks,' for example, have been constantly maltreated in this way.)

Note: The 'genetic fallacy' is the go-to fallacy these days. It's a real workhorse. For example, biological taxonomy is now phylogenetical, rather than morphological, and so genetic fallacies run roughshod over it. (Some Animalia are classed as Plantae, etc.) Moreover, Darwinists are forever telling us that we're really no greater than other animals. Why? Because we all have common ancestries and we all came by way of natural selection on random genetic mutation! But what we have here is another textbook genetic fallacy. Suppose the evolutionary anthropologist's just-so story is true, the story about humankind's wherefrom and whereby. Do we then become something other than what we here and now are (viz., rational animals)? Is phylogenesis morphology? Is efficiency formality? No, no, no.

Tippy ...

Tippy (who won't be leashed for walkies nohow)

Xantippe is sick. Yesternight she couldn't stop sneezing. And whereas most days she runs upstairs to say 'Good morning' with chirrups and purrs, when she hears I'm no longer abed, today she just sat dispiritedly at the bottom of the staircase. She's inappetent too, passing by her saucerful of milk, turning away from her cat treats. Poor Tippy. She's never been sick before.

UPDATE (Aug. 15): Yesterday Tip-tip was still immobile and inappetent. I was worried about dehydration and made her drink from a dropper. She seemed glad of it too — so why wouldn't she drink by herself? Then today I found an ugly bump on her underbelly. Was it a parasite? Off we went to Hillcrest Animal Hospital. Tippy had no fever, they said, and the bump was simply an abscessed wound. They cleaned it up, prescribed antibiotics, and said, '$200 please.' Now we're home and she's sleeping. Let's hope that's all it was. We'll see.

UPDATE (Aug. 16): That's all it was. (Leastwise she's eating and drinking normally now.)

Apprenticeship ...

Schönberg

Schönberg was a grandmaster. He was also my first real music teacher, though he died some thirty-four years before I was born. I read and reread all of his books and booklets, even such as were out of print and therefore costly, or which had to be ordered directly from UCLA, where he taught in later years. (I studied and wrote serial works, too, just to make his ghost happy.) And I read very trustingly, attentively, receptively, lovingly. It wasn't such a bad thing to do. He was a very good teacher. Nowadays I strongly disagree with his philosophy of music, nowadays I talk back. But I listened well for years beforehand. And if you're going to criticise something, you might at least know what it is.


(Side-note: We stress 'critical thinking' overmuch today, teaching students to talk back before they've really listened. Result: they criticise chimeras. Damnant quod non intelligunt. Look at the army of undergraduates fighting for 'rights,' human, animal, and even vegetable. Now try to find one among them who knows what a right is. If they'd had any sort of colloquy with tradition then they'd know that most 'human-rights violations' that come before the tribunals violate no human right, and that a brute animal cannot in principle be a rightholder. But they don't want first to listen to tradition. That comes late or never. No, the first thing is to strike! [At what? The chimera.] Well, well. To these weathercocks we may say: Welcome to a conversation that's been going on for thousands of years. Glad you could come. Sit and listen for a time. If you feel the need to speak, listen harder. Then, if you still have something to say, do so, but let the elders go first, the longtime listeners, as did Elihu, and prepare to be corrected, as was Elihu.)

Lately I've been returning to Schönberg's essays. What memories are here! They make me long for another trusting student-teacher relation. Some ask why I don't go back to school for a graduate degree. But college was for me just a long and expensive review that I didn't need (and that I'm still paying for). I'm in no hurry to go back. What I would really like is to find an old master with whom to study, maybe as a live-in. A sort of apprentice-manservant, yes, that's what I'd be. We'd live somewhere out of the way in Europe. Probably I'd have to learn German, elsewise to remember my boyhood French, s'il vous plaît. I'd make his tea, bicycle to the shops for him, feed the cat, do whatever needs doing. And he'd teach me advanced composing ἀρετή: how to deal justly with each note, how temperately to keep away from 'too-ness,' and so on. Most afternoons would find us at the café, going over our present scorework. Then there'd be long walks and longer talks. Cigars. Claret. Sometimes we'd go to church, analysing chorales in the hymnal, 'fixing' them if need be. (This I do already. It's not really vandalism is it? Anyway, I use a pencil. And I leave the book better than it was before.) Sigh. It's a daydream anyhow.
 

1,000 hours ...

On Friday evening I went to hear the Toronto-based 'Tokai' string quartet. It was the fourth or fifth time that I've heard them, and they always play well. This time we had Purcell, Britten, Dvorak, and also a brand new work, commissioned—heaven help us—by the Art Council of Ontario. It was a formless succession of scraping willy-nilly and scratching hitty-missy. The composer had simply thumbed through the catalogue of special effects, from A to Z, and written them in as they came. There were openhand violin slaps, and savate strikes to the body of the cello. ('Let's report them for cruelty to instruments,' whispered my companion afterwards.)

Hackwork makes me fidgety. I can't then be patient with my own life-task. And I say to myself: Alright I'm no master, but I can do far better than that. (Plus, the Art Council's $6,775 would do me material good, wretched indigent that I am, living on weak tea and sawdust.) But, then, I'm not ready. Yes, I can here and now write music in most any historical style, from academic fugues with crab-canons to sugarsweet salon romanzas, and even rigorous serial works. But to step out of history and into the present—no, I'm not ready. For I, too, live with the unanswered 'what now?' that troubles so many. (But more on that later.)

And there's so much to do. And it's easy for me with my singlemindedness to be altogether taken up with asides (literature, philosophy, whatever). My time needs governance. I need to spend as much time reading scores as I do books. It's not much, but I've determined to log 1,000 hours of study in the next twelve months. See, here's a moleskin logbook to make it official. To work!

Odi et amo ...

Things I love: old churches, good penmanship, a day's first espresso, T.T.'s impastos, Mozart in the forenoon, Chopin at even, (the greater light to rule the day, the lesser light to rule the night), slow food, realising that I've only made two half-pots of coffee (therefore: a third is forthcoming), faraway train whistles on summer nights, driftwood, open-air theatre, cigar smoke, the dear-old Greeks, wine at gloaming, the unauthorised poet ...

Things I hate: dribblesome carafes, a hasty disowning of the past, T.E.'s installations, myself, bad intonation, fast food, loudmouths (remember: empty barrels make the biggest sound), hypochondriacal foresuffering, pre-ground supermarket coffee (also called dirt or sod), reductionisms, plastic, television, muzak ...

Both beautiful AND ugly? ...

The Philosopher

The Aristotelian-Scholastic (hereafter A-S) philosophy of beauty was my gateway into Aristotelian metaphysics. And here was a very welcome spelling-out of what was hitherto unspellable. Yet not everybody feels the same way. (Meiosis.) And that's what I want to talk about.

But first a high-speed run-through. Ex hypothesi, beauty is a transcendental, standing alongside truth and goodness—that is to say, it is something over and above the genera, supra-categorical. (Whence the fact that beauty finds its way into all ontological categories: concretes and abstracts, subjects and objects.) And being modes of being (or Being), the transcendentals are interconvertible. But how can such very different things—truth, goodness, and beauty—interconvert? The answer (ex hypo.) is that they are not as different as they seem. Consider an analogous case from the philosophy of logic. Necessity, analyticity, and apriority are separate notions. But they all look at the same thing from different viewpoints: those of metaphysics, semantics, and epistemology. To use the Fregean jargon, they differ in sense but not in reference. And so it is with the (similarly coextensive) transcendentals.

Ye be warned: the terms are used extendedly. For example, truth is not here to be understood propositionally, not as a "truth-value," but rather as realness or genuineness. (Truth with an uppercase "T".) For classical thinkers, both Platonists and Aristotelians, something is true insofar as it is an exemplar. The triangle drawn with a straightedge is truer to triangularity than that drawn freehand. A tree with a strong root-system is truer to treeness than a root-fallen tree. Etc. Further, the well-drawn triangle is good, whereas the poorly-drawn triangle is bad.  A strong-rooted tree is good, whereas a weak-rooted tree is bad. Turning to mankind, trueness and goodness finally comprehend morality. The virtuous man is more true and more good than the vicious man. So if you want to be a real man, a manly man, then be virtuous. (Why do the classical philosophers use the terms so oddly? They don't—we do.)

Anyway, it follows from all the above that if something is beautiful, it must thereby be true and good. But most find this troubling. Roger Scruton, in his wise—if overmuch Kantian—book on beauty, writes the following (about Aquinas specifically):

If that [A-S transcendentalism] is so ... how can there be dangerous beauties, corrupting beauties, and immoral beauties? ... I don't say that Aquinas has no answer to those questions. But they illustrate the difficulties encountered by any philosophy that places beauty on the same metaphysical plane as truth, so as to plant it in the heart of being as such.

Here Scruton puts forward the most common objection to the A-S philosophy of beauty. And it seems to me rather weak, even point-missing. After all, what the traditional thinkers are saying, using the terms in the traditional ways, is that just insofar as a thing is beautiful, it is true and good. Take, say, a beautiful sophism—more correctly, a beautifully-phrased sophism. Objectors will say, 'Look, here's something beautiful that's also false and bad. So there!' Well, yes, but really we are talking about two things. For just what is it that's beautiful? Answer: the phraseology. And insofar as it is beautiful, it is true and good. What is it that's false and bad? Answer: the sophism. And insofar as it is false and bad, it is ugly. Put it this way. The beautifully-phrased sophism is both beautiful, re its form, and ugly, re its matter. (And there is always some such multiplicity in these cases.) Ergo there is no contradiction.

Socks

Let's keep going. Take the puckish Socrates, a short, fat, fubsy, snubnosed, popeyed, potbellied baldhead. His friends likened him unto a flatfish (Plato's Meno). (Oh, but as a contrario, see ch. 5 of Xenophon's Symposium, in which Socrates enters a beauty-pageant.) Unshod and unwashed, it didn't help that his fellow citizens beat him and pulled at his beard (Diogenes Laërtius' Lives, Book II). Socrates was the ugliest man in Greece, let's say. Must we then add that he was the falsest and the baddest man in Greece? No, that would be a fallacious athroposcopy (à la the physiognomon Zopyrus). For it was Socrates' body that was ugly, whereas his soul was true and good. Yes, his soul was exemplary. Crito was so struck by it that he took him from his father's sculpturing workshop and saw to his education gratis (see Diogenes L. again). 

Note: nothing here calls for a substance dualism or treblism. It is enough that the analysanda be separable in some way, not necessarily ontologically.

If it turned out that something good was eo ipso ugly, or that something bad was eo ipso beautiful, then goodbye transcendentalism. But I can't see how such a thing would be at all possible. Can you?

Soul—atoms ...

Leucippus

The atomic thinkers were all-out mechanists. And they tried to reduce consciousness to a hurly-burly of atomai, pushing and shoving, elbowing and shouldering. These atoms are all made of the same world-stuff, ('like many pieces of gold separated from one another,' says Aristotle in De caelo). But there are both soul-atoms and body-atoms, of which men are mishmashes. What makes some atoms soul-atoms is a particular shape and size. Soul-atoms aren't bent-backed or crook-necked, as some of the other atoms are. Contrario, they're smooth and curvaceous. And most of them go—whoosh—right to the head. So that's where thinking happens. Yes, thoughts are nothing but atoms, and atoms are nothing but qualitiless sizes and shapes.



Democritus, the chortler

Well, such 'nothing-but' stuff is always foredoomed. We can't reduce the irreducible—the irreducibly qualitative to the quantitative, the irreducibly subjective to the objective, the irreducibly first-personal to the third-personal—so don't let's try. Still, we'll give the atomists a break, for nobody had ever before set out a reductive mechanico-materialistic philosophy of mind. (And doing so wasn't, after all, a primary concern of the school.) Sure, it was a sort of childish philosophy, but, then, Philosophy was still a child herself, still holding Mythopoeia's hand. She spake as a child, she understood as a child, she thought as a child. But now that she's a grownup, she has put away childish things—yes? No. She's gone rather into a second childhood, elsewise she's senile. (And they say that infancy and senility are alike.) Today we talk of neurons and ganglia rather than atoms, but the philosophico-conceptual errors are the same. Back then it was Leucippus and Democritus with a reductionism. Now, millennia later, it's Paul and Patricia Churchland, neurophilosophy's primogenitors, with an eliminativism. Poor Philosophy! The last state is worse than the first. And she really should know better by now. (She is almost three-thousand years old.)

Grandpa's books ...



Grandpa as a sea cadet. (Digby, Nova Scotia, 1944.)

Grandpa (a long-time engineer for CN) died a few years ago, and Grandma is in a nursing home now, so we're preparing to sell their empty house. At present, we're boxing Grandpa's sizable library. And what things I've found! Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Erasmus, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Darwin, Nietzsche, James, Russell, Freud, Jung, Köhler, Einstein, Sartre, Barth, et al — most underlined and annotated — as well as some (bad) single-volume histories of philosophy. Why, there's even an Aristotelian-Thomistic anthropology textbook, written by some Jesuit scholar. It's also annotated.

(Yarmouth, N.S., 1950.)

He seems to have sipped willy-nilly from almost every major thinker, without ever drinking deep. (Leastwise there's but a single book per writer.) Yet he never spoke of his readings, not to me anyhow. And I thought he'd nothing but the standard old-man books (about steam engines, military history, decorative gardening, Canadiana). Too bad. We might've had some good talks.

To my reader ...

Diogenes

A report that Philip was marching on the town had thrown all Corinth into a bustle; one was furbishing his arms, another wheeling stones, a third patching the wall, a fourth strengthening a battlement, every one making himself useful somehow or other. Diogenes having nothing to do — of course no one thought of giving him a job — was moved by the sight to gird up his philosopher's cloak and begin rolling his tub-dwelling energetically up and down the Craneum; an acquaintance asked, and got, the explanation: 'I do not want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude; I am rolling my tub to be like the rest.'  

Lucian, The Way to Write History

My reader: I don't want to be thought the only idler in such a busy multitude, so I'm writing a blog to be like the rest.