Τοῦτο τοίνυν τὸ τὴν ἀλήθειαν παρέχον τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις καὶ τῷ γιγνώσκοντι τὴν δύναμιν ἀποδιδὸν τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέαν φάθι εἶναι, αἰτίαν δ᾽ ἐπιστήμης οὖσαν καὶ ἀληθείας ὡς γιγνωσκομένης μὲν διανοοῦ...
This reality, then, that gives their truth of the objects of knowledge and the power of knowing to the knower, you must say is the idea of the good, and you must conceive it as being the cause of knowledge [ἐπιστήμη] and of truth [ἀλήθεια] in so far as known.
Plato, Republic, 508e, Republic II [translated by Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1930, 1969, pp.102-105, color added]
μὴ σκοπούντων ἡμῶν τὰ βλεπόμενα, ἀλλὰ τὰ μὴ βλεπόμενα· τὰ γὰρ βλεπόμενα πρόσκαιρα, τὰ δὲ μὴ βλεπόμενα αἰώνια. Non contemplantibus nobis quae videntur, sed quae non videntur; quae enim videntur temporalia sunt, quae autem non videntur aeterna sunt.
While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:18;
something upon which mathematicians,
as well as Platonists and Christians, can agree.
In these pages, a system of Kant-Friesian metaphysics has previously been set out in detail. As I have done with Kant's theory of geometry, I am going to present the metaphysics all over again. Thus, it is again a "Deuteronomy," from Greek Δευτερονόμιον (Latin Deuteronomium), a "Repetition of the Law." This will be a repetition, however, with a different approach. Othewise, what's the point?
Where before I began with Brentano and Husserl, now the place to start is all the way back with 
René Descartes, the father of Modern Philosophy. Once Descartes realized that his experience and knowledge of the world were all artifacts and contents of his consciousness, he had some difficulty explaining how he really knew that the world was even there. It could all be a dream or a hallucination. This created the basic epistemological challenge for Modern Philosophy, and it gets called the "Problem of Knowledge," creating "epistemology" itself as a separate discipline, whose contents had previously been part of logic, as that had been first laid out by Aristotle, in the Ὄργανον.
What was long regarded as "First Philosophy" then shifted from metaphysics (ontological priority), where it had been since Aristotle, to epistemology (epistemological priority), where it has largely been since -- with a modification, for some, of a further shift to language in "linguistic analysis" -- paradoxically often involving people with little knowledge and no respect for natural languages. "Analytic" philosophers liked to think that mathematics was enough of a "language" for them [note].
Thus, the Great Debate in the Middle Ages, which was between Realism and Nominalism, metaphysical theories about essences, shifted to the debate between Rationalism and Empiricism, about theories of knowledge. We should not be surprised, however, that Modern Empiricists are generally Nominalists, and Rationalists Realists. There is a connection between the metaphysical theories and their epistemological reflexes. Why the Nominalists and Empiricists tended to be British, and the Realists and Rationalists Continental, is another question.
Once questions were raised, by Hume and Kant, about the source and even the existence of metaphysical knowledge, metaphysics itself, if it was to survive, became entangled in the epistemological debates. Since forms of Skepticism and Nihilism came to dominate 20th century philosophy, with metaphysics sharply rejected by Positivists and Wittgenstein, the inertial tendency (it is no better) is for this attitude to persist; and we have the curious phenomenon of philosophers taking strongly metaphysical systems, like those of Hegel and Heidegger, and trying to denature them, denying that they are really metaphysical. The motivations for this range from confused, to the dishonest, to silly.
Descartes thought he had solved his problem by going through God; but his arguments for God have since seemed a lot less persuasive, certain, or reliable that the certainties we derive from our daily experiences of actual life. John Locke sensibly observed that dreaming of being in the fire and actually being in it are really two quite different things, and that our conduct of life will not be much different whether we worry about the doubts of Descartes or not. However, Locke failed to provide a cogent or satisfying answer to the real problem, which was an artifact of the role of causality in perception, i.e that causes are only sufficient to their effects, meaning that different causes can have the same effect. Who let the dogs out? Could have been anyone.
The Empiricist tradition founded by Locke headed downhill to the full Skepticism of David Hume, whose philosophical doubts about the world, far more extreme than those of Descartes, were explicitly dismissed by him as irrelevant to daily life. Devotees of Hume, who we could well say constitute the entire Anglo-American philosophical tradition, have often failed to grasp the difference, and they attribute to Hume an expectation that experience will be full of violations of causality, or that there is no basis for morality, when he believed exactly the opposite in both cases.
With someone as clear, direct, and elegant a stylist as was David Hume, this amounts to a remarkable failure of reading comprehension. There is also the irony that Hume believed the axioms of Euclid to be self-evident, while Immanuel Kant didn't -- with the result that Kant is generally accused of believing that the axioms of geometry are self-evident. And what Hume says is entirely ignored. Go figure. How this has happened warrants as much a psychological as a philosophical examination, and it is an indictment of the very foundations of the sterile and devastating Oxford Philosophy. The only philosopher I know of who was fully aware of the paradoxes of the interpretation of Hume is F.A. Hayek.
After all, it was over 250 years ago that Hume observed that "the rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason." Yet Hume's claim has not sufficed to deter most modern rationalists from continuing to believe -- curiously enough often quoting Hume in their support -- that something not derived from reason must be either nonsense or a matter for arbitrary preference, and, accordingly, to continue to demand rational justifications.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, The Errors of Socialism [University of Chicago Press, 1988, 1991, p.66]
Such problems plague interpretations of the larger theory of Kant, whose definitive answer to Descartes is frequently, if not usually, lost in the confusion. Thus, Descartes held that we do not have direct knowledge of the external world, but what we know are the objects constructed in the mind, caused by the world, whose connection to the world, as faithful representations, is certified by God and by the innate knowledge with which he has packed the soul on the occasion of its creation. Otherwise, the external objects might not even be there, or have a very different character from what we think. God might be more like the Aztec deity Tezcatlipōca, the "Enemy on Both Sides," Necoc Yaotl. We don't need Descartes' "deceiving demon" when we have Aztec religion.
Kant is frequently read as believing something of the same sort, except that we do not really have knowledge of external objects at all, the "things in themselves." They are concealed from us, and all we know are the artificial objects constructed in our minds, the "phenomena" or "appearances," which serve us just fine, like the things of Hume's world, but which do not deliver up the mysteries of the transcendent.
Indeed, this could be construed as little more than a version of Hume's philosophy, which has only been muddled by the common impression that Hume did not believe in the necessity of things like causality, while Kant did. But Hume did too, only with the provision that reason could not account for that certainty, while Kant proposed that the certainty was an artifact of the manner in which the mind unified consciousness into a single, durable theater of experience -- a problem, "betwixt unity and number," that had puzzled Hume, and for which he had no answer. In those terms, Kant's basic view could still maintain the Cartesian separation between our consciousness and the real external things, whatever they are like. Various successors, "Idealists" or even "Neo-Kantians," judged that this would all work better by eliminating things in themselves altogether. The judgment, reasonably enough, is that if we do not and cannot know anything about things in themselves, then it is pointless to retain them in the theory.
But Kant's philosophy is very far from being a version either of that of Descartes or that of Hume; and the "Idealists" ignore the fact that our connection to things in themselves involves perhaps the most important thing in all of Kant's philosophy: The Moral Law, the thin anchor line of value that holds us to the transcendent. The confusions over Kant's theory are partly the fault of Kant's own terminology, where the name for his system, "Transcendental Idealism," does almost nothing to tell us what it is all about, and is a source of endless obscurity and misunderstandings. I have gone over this in some detail 
elsewhere. The diagram of a Square of Opposition for Kant's terminology contains the paradox that terms that should be contradictories both have the same truth value. Here all we need are the basics, in which "Transcendental Idealism" is best set aside for the moment, if not permanently. I will not use it.
Instead, the key terms are (1) what Kant calls Descartes' metaphysics, which is "Transcendental Realism," (2) what Kant called Berkeley's denial of the existence of external objects, which is "Empirical Idealism," and (3) what Kant alternatively called his own theory, which is "Empirical Realism." The last means that the real objects, the ontôs ónta, ὀντῶς ὄντα ("beingly beings"), of Greek metaphysics, are the objects that we see, and are directly acquainted with, in experience. This is the appropriate term for Kant's system. On the other hand, the real objects for Descartes are not more than the hidden causes of our perceptions, we are not directly acquainted with them, and thus our life is in a kind of internal movie theater, like Plato's Cave. Thus, "Transcendental Realism" means that the ontologically real objects are external, i.e. transcendent, to experience [note].
Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
The world is my representation.Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Band 1, §1 [Reclam, 1987, p.3], The World as Will and Representation, Volume I [Dover Publications, 1966, E.F.J. Payne translation, p.3]
In turn, even sympathetic followers of Kant, like Schopenhauer, thought that his system was comparable to that of Berkeley -- what we call "Subjective Idealism," where external objects and matter do not even exist.
However, since Kant asserts that the existence of things in themselves is transcendent to the contents of our minds, which do not make things exist (that would be "intellectual intuition," a term misunderstood by all "Idealists"), and that things in themselves possess features, like free will (denied by Schopenhauer), that do not and cannot belong to phenomena, there are important points on which Kant does not and cannot assert a "subjective" or, as he called it, "Empirical Idealism," i.e. that what is immanent in experience ("Empirical") consists of things, which are the only things, that are in our minds ("Idealism").
Misunderstanding Kant carries over to Schopenhauer himself. The actual Café Schopenhauer in Vienna says that Schopenhauer's thought was itself subjektiver Idealismus, "Subjective Idealism." But since Schopenhauer accepted that there were things in themselves, although construed differently than in Kant (hence his use of the singular, "thing-in-itself"), he was not, as was Berkeley, a Subjective Idealist. There is quite a bit of mess here to clean up.
When the Neo-Kantians, or Hegel, eliminated things in themselves, the result was directly, starkly, and unambiguously solipsism. Hegel avoided that only by making consciousness collective and universal, an "Over Mind," the "Absolute Idea," in which individual existence dissolves like sugar in coffee. If Neo-Kantians avoided that, it may be because they didn't understand the problem. And, indeed, they didn't.
When Nicolai Hartmann (1882-1950) abandoned the "Idealism" of the Neo-Kantians for his own brand of stubborn (Transcendental) Realism, with a favorable nod to Hegel, he ended up betraying a misunderstanding of just about all the issues involved. 
This is a clue about how confused the Neo-Kantians were, which is why Leonard Nelson wrote his dissertation against them.
This all sharply separates Kant from Descartes, although it is certain to leave us unclear and perplexed about just what we end up with. It's so unusual. The sticking point is the conclusion that Kant's theory forces upon us, that the "real things" of the world are both external objects and the internal contents of consciousness. This is not something easily accepted. How could it be? Must it not be one or the other? Right? Perhaps not. Approaching the right idea, Robert Paul Wolff called this "the dual nature of representation" [Kant's Theory of Mental Activity, Harvard, 1963] -- although Schopenhauer is the clearest that world and representation are identical.
The source of the difficulty with this may be the idea, basic to Descartes, 
that external existence is the substance of matter, while internal existence is the substance of soul -- they exist independently and separately. The former cannot somehow be inside the latter; and if experience is in the soul, then it is metaphysically separate from matter. The premises of the Cartesian dualism are still accepted by materialists, who simply eliminate souls. But in Kant, substance, although it exists, is a concept that we apply to phenomena. If it exists among things in themselves, for instance as souls, or matter, or God, we don't know how that works in any positive or systematic way. In its application to phenomena, "substance" simply tells us that objects are durable, separable, and identical. It is not about things we cannot see, which puts the idea of substance in Descartes in an ironic light. If we judge the bodies of experience to be durable, separable, and identical, this is not about things entirely outside experience [note].
What Kant was looking for would not have been surprising to Aristotle, who identified the ὑποκείμενον, the "underlying" thing, that we might think is equivalent to substantia in Latin, with ὕλη, "matter," and not with οὐσία, which looks like the equivalent of essentia ("essence") in Latin, but which traditionally is translated "substance." Indeed, in the Latin transcription of Aristotelian philosophy, "substance" and "essence" -- and ἐνέργεια, "actuality" -- are ontologically identical. Aristotelian matter is not substance, but relatively free of it, down to "Prime Matter," which has no actual existence -- it is pure potential, δύναμις, potentia in Latin. This is what suggests features of things in themselves. Aristotelian substance is the visible "form," εἶδος (Latin species), of things -- 
(色, sè), "Form," in Chinese Buddhist terminology.
But Aristotle was not aware of the systematic doubting of Descartes, where the Problem of Knowledge arises and solipsism threatens. In turn, Kant's argument against solipsism takes a clue from Hume, contrary to Descartes, who had said that "the mind is better known than the body." Kant, following Hume, denies this. The mind is not better known than the body, both are given simultaneously in the perception of phenomena. Phenomena are the material objects, but then we reflect that they are at the same time mental contents. There is no "mind" to be substantively distinguished from the contents of perception and thought, what Hume, in the course of his critique and dismissal of Carestian "soul," would have called "impressions" and "ideas." Hume actually might not have been able to rule out solipsism, since he makes no metaphysical judgments about external reality -- his is a kind of Pyrrhonian epoché, ἐποχή, a suspension of judgment, like Edmund Husserl. For Kant, however, "external reality" is always a feature of phenomena.
Formally, Kant's theory gives us a structural equivalent of the metaphysics of Spinoza. For Spinoza, only God exists. The Cartesian attributes of extension in space and of thought and consciousness, which exist as separate substances for Descartes, are not independent, but are attributes of God. So whatever correspondences there are between internal and external, i.e. between the objects in our minds and the objects in the world, are accounted for by their identity in the underlying substance, namely, God. Of course, these days we usually hear about Spinoza from materialists who think that Spinoza is really just a materialist. This is even more grotesque a distortion than we get with interpretations of Hume. We probably get it because of the durability of Cartesian categories, even in people who think that Descartes' philosophy is a kind of joke. The "ghost in the machine." Ha, ha.
With Kant, phenomena themselves are the unifying element, which is exactly what a common sense philosophy might claim. The things we see have an internal reflex, in our minds and representation, but also an external reflex, in all the hidden features of the world, including, as it happens, the physical character of things as atoms, molecules, forces, etc., which are all invisible to our casual inspection. What perhaps challenges common sense is that Cartesian metaphysics has essentially been turned inside out. What was a mere relation between substances now becomes the centerpiece, as it was with the substance of God in Spinoza. I have previously used this metaphor to distinguish cause from purpose.
"Substance" is a formal property, whose nature is both open for inspection and a characteristic of the underlying laws of nature, like the conservation of mass and energy, which are gradually ferreted out by science. Protons are "substances," because they are durable, separable, and identical. For decades, physicists have tried detecting the natural decay of protons. Hasn't happened, Only an anti-proton can kill a proton, something no one heard of before Paul Dirac. Meanwhile, we can insert the quantum distinction between determinism and randomness into Kant's dualisms of conditioned and unconditioned, freedom and determinism [note].
If we abstract the material contents of perception from our representation of the external world, the result is a privative emptiness. I call this "Negative Transcendence." The same move, of course, abstracts the contents of our own minds, in which the external world is represented, producing a corresponding privative emptiness, which I then also call a form of "Negative Transcendence."
The emptiness of external transcendence conforms to the emptiness or hiddenness of Heidegger's "Being," Sein, εἶναι -- as opposed to the "beings," Seiende, ὄντα of phenomena. In turn, the emptiness of internal transcendence is described by Sartre as The Transcendence of the Ego [1936]. These elements of the thought of Heidegger and Sartre are part of the fallout of the "Phenomenology" of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), which was the origin of useful ontological distinctions. However, we will see below how wrong Heidegger and Sartre would go, which included Heidegger's personal betrayal of Husserl.
Thus, we cannot think of Kant as having a theory like that of Descartes, for external objects are not different in kind from phenomena. We are directly acquainted with them, and our given is something that is a synthesis of subject and object, internal and external, Sanskrit We can see this as going back to Kant's argument against solipsism. Contra Descartes, the mind is not better known than the body. Against Materialists, the body is not better known than the mind. Samuel Johnson kicking the table did not refute Bishop Berkeley. Or perhaps it did. This is a feature of what I have called "Ontological Undecidability."
Where we have difficulties with things in themselves is that there are features that seem to belong to them that cannot be contained in the representation of phenomena. This happens because of the way in which consciousness is constructed, in Kant's theory, through the activity of "synthesis," which produces the unity of consciousness and conscious experience. In those terms, everything in phenomena is conditioned by everything else, and unconditioned realities cannot be contained or represented therein. If the existence of unconditioned realities must be entertained or accepted, then they can only belong to things in themselves.
We have seen this before. In The Buddhist doctrine has a soteriological purpose. Saṁsāra is bondage and suffering, We get one passage that would seem to be directed personally to René Descartes: In similar terms, Kant considers that things in themselves can contain unconditioned realities that cannot be represented in phenomena. These are the "Ideas" of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," which involve unconditioned substances and causality. Unlike the world of Descartes, there is an intimacy to this. Things in themselves do not exist in some other world (like Plato), or in Cartesian substantial separation. They are in this world; and they are no more than the interior of phenomenal objects, just as, in material terms, atoms and molecules are the hidden inner existence of the things that exist in experience. And my body is not even substantially separate from me, even while I am not just an epiphenomenon of my body. We are the interior of our own phenomenon, with contents of the mind that are undoubtedly part of the unconscious -- like all of my currently unaccessed memories. Before Freud and Jung, no philosophers had ever noticed this, certainly not Descartes -- although Locke had noticed that he was not the Cartesian "thinking substance" while he had been sleeping the previous night.
Descartes tells us that the status of the soul in the body is not like that of "a captain in a ship." It is more intimate than that. However, his metaphysics cannot account for this. It is not clear how body and soul can affect each other at all; and since the soul is without extension, The philosophy of Descartes thus sank under the weight of the connection, or lack of connection, certainly the lack of identity, between body and soul. In Kant, as in Spinoza, the "underlying thing" of body and soul is a "third thing," about whose full character we have clues and beliefs but is beyond the reach of empirical science. Thus, "freedom" means my freedom, and "immortality" means my immortal soul. What "God" will mean depends on one's construction or experience of ultimate reality, for which Vedānta lays out the alternatives better than Western theology. Buddhism, of course, suspends judgment.
This makes monotheistic theology look relatively naive. Indeed, monotheistic theology tends to uncrtically accept its own constructions of the divine, a complacency also evident in Kant and a great deal of academic philosophy of religion, where St. Thomas's five proofs of God always seemed to be treated as of central concern. They aren't, even while, of course, they did nothing to establish the existence of the particular God of Abraham and Isaac, let alone Jesus or Paul -- or the fact that Thomist metaphysics, from Aristotle, posits an impersonal and literally impotent deity, who is already doing everything he can do.
However, naiveté or complacency in theology do not justify the dismissals of Western religion we find in popularizing figures like Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) or Rupert Sheldrake, whose own naiveté, lack of sophistication, and biases, now insensibly buttressed by the "New Atheism," are painful to behold. Elite hostility to Christianity, is then coupled an atheistic interpretation of Judaism, in which it only consists of political activism (except for Zionism), and a hypocritical and incoherent tolerance for Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, winking at all the Muslim social conservativism for which Christians are excoriated every day, while viewing terrorism with complacency, or sympathy, even when it involves mass murder, rape, or actual slavery.
Kant's "Ideas" of God, freedom, and immortality are subject to Antinomies, and ordinarily contradictions imply falsehood. However, among the Antinomies is that of space and time, involving the question whether they are finite or infinite, something addressed by the Buddha himself. Since the universe (or the now popular "multiverse") as a whole itself is an unconditioned reality, and it cannot be the object of a possible experience among phenomena, the logical inference from its Antinomy would seem to imply the falsehood or non-existence of the universe itself. Since this is its own reductio ad absurdum, we must consider that it all means something else. The present tangle of cosmology highlights this circumstance.
Guàndǐng (561-632), Introduction, Zhìyǐ (538-597), Móhē Zhǐguān, "The Great Calming and Contemplation," translated by Jacqueline Stone; Chinese Tiantai School. So, is all we are left with are abstract Antinomies and otherwise just something like Buddhist One thing everyone seems to agree on is that sensation is just an epiphenomenon, of no ontological significance. I come across someone, Victoria Finlay, who has written a book about color, appropriately called Color: A Natural History of the Palatte [Random House, 2002], who simply says of colors, "they don't really exist" [p.2]. A color of light is simply a particular wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, as this interacts with the cones of the retina, even though these are all phenomena that are invisible to our casual inspection of the world and that no one knew about before the 19th century. This is a materialistic reductionism under which the qualia of sensation just evaporate into a metaphysical nothing, even while "matter" itself, in all its modern paradoxes of virtual particles and fields, is itself hidden and invisible, even unobservable, as such. In other words, we can't see anything of what is supposedly "real," while colors, that we do see, Victoria Finlay says, "don't really exist." Not much respect for something you write a whole book about. But perhaps Finlay just doesn't know what else to say.
Nevertheless, sensation is clearly a kind of "third thing," like Spinoza's God again. Sensation is what I experience in my body, but it also consists of the colors, tectures, scents, tastes, and sounds that I perceive in the world. Out among phenomena. When a geologist tastes a rock, as geologists often do, he searches for clues to its minerals, not a clue about his tongue. When the pathologist smells almonds, it can mean that the autopsy has exposed cyanide poisoning. The chemical is in the body. On a nicer note, the Mahābhārata says of Princess Draupadī, "whose blue lotus [ But there is more to it than that. The very concept of "sensation" is itself a product of abstraction. When I feel my wife's skin, it is at once both in my touch and in her skin. She feels it too. When I taste the brandy, it is at once in my tongue, in my nose, and in the brandy. When I smell the perfume, like the "blue lotus fragrance," it is in both nose and scent -- and Draupadī. When I hear the music, it is in ear and air -- and soul. When I see colors in the world, I see beauty. Indeed, the Chinese term So sensation, which is minimally a tingling in my flesh, before we even get to that "lust" thing, has an ontological side among things in themselves, in the transcendent. As such, it possesses a content of value; it is "Positive Transcendence," returning to fill the Void of Negative Transcendence and Emptiness. What I feel as I exist not only consists of all my sensations and the qualia of my perception, it has roots that consist of the beauty and any of the other values that are born by those sensations and qualia. If I get carried away with the New Mexico sunset, let alone from the touch of my wife, my heart "sings" in response. Confucius would just say "delight," St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 5, Article 1 [note].
नासतोविद्यतेभावो
नाभावोविद्यतेसतः
Nāsato vidyáte bhāvo, nābhāvo vidyáte sataḥ
The unreal never is; the Real never is not.
The Bhagavad Gita, 2:16, Juan Mascaró translation [Penguin Books, 1962, p.49]; Why this is I have examined in a "Lecture on the Good"; and, to my embarrassment, it is conformable to Heidegger's idea of the "Truth of Being." This truth, however, is not "uncovered" (ἀληθής, "true") in violence and δειμός, "terror," as described, and doubtlessly witnessed, by Heidegger, as acted out by his Nazi friends. Instead, we aleady see it pretty much every minute of every day, whether in that sunset or in the watchfulness of the blue jay, a riot of blues, blacks, grays, and whites, surveying our yard. I never tire of the tribute that Plato pays to beauty:
Plato, of course, as Aristotle said, separated the forms from the things. We need not do that. Even Plato could not really explain how the things of Becoming "participate" in the Forms, which give them their reality. As it is, in seeing beauty we are seeing right through the surface of phenomena. Not perfectly -- no one sees the same beauty, or all of it. But we can state it as does St. Paul: βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾽ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, "For now we see through a glass, darkly" [1 Corinthians 13:12].
Beauty can be moving enough, especially with the sublime, like that sunset; but there is more. The full depth through the glass is what is Śākyamuni Buddha is not God, or even a god, but he radiates light. The Buddha Amitābha descends in lights and purple clouds and fragrance to collect those destined for the Pure Land. Are Christians going to believe that? Well, no. To Hume, the way that all faiths contradict each other meant that they were all false. But this can be more like the way in which they are all true. They each represent a distinct Way ( This is why traditional religion was often syncretistic, even in religions that officially reject syncretism. But the combination of traditions was conspicuous in the Chinese "Three Ways," of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, with the pointed exclusion of ʾIslām and then Christianity. In Japan, the saying is "Born Shintō, wed Christian, die Buddhist" -- where Christian weddings for non-Christian Japanese are not consistent with Christian doctrine -- Jesus also said, "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me," οὐδεὶς ἔρχεται πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα εἰ μὴ δι᾽ ἐμοῦ [John 14:6] -- but they are wildly popular with the Japanese, especially for the clothing. Otherwise, Shinto christenings and Buddhist funerals are solidly traditional.
καὶ ἔσται ἐὰν ἀκοῇ ἀκούσητε πάσας τὰς ἐντολὰς ταύτας, ἃς ἐγὼ ἐντέλλομαί σοι σήμερον ποιεῖν, ἀγαπᾷν Κύριον τὸν Θεὸν ἡμῶν καὶ πορεύεσθαι ἐν πάσαις ταῖς ὁδοῖς αὐτοῦ, καὶ προσκολλᾶσθαι αὐτῷ·
Si enim custodieritis mandata, quæ ego præcipio vobis, et feceritis ea, ut diligatis Dominum Deum vestrum, et ambuletis in omnibus viis ejus, adhærentes ei...
For if ye shall diligently keep all these commandments, which I command you, to do them, to love the Deuteronomy 11:22 ["to walk," infinitive of πορεύομαι] Does "Salvation" just mean immortality? No, because immortality is not always what is expected or promised from religious practice. "Walking in the ways of the LORD," confers a certain attitude, a certain condition, and a certain feeling. We may get the same thing, in more concentrated form, in prayer itself -- as the call of the muezzin ( But these are isolates of experience, both for this life, in mysticism (whose states St. Teresa herself called "prayer"), and for the next, in the Beatific Vision. When we are looking for the "meaning of life," Pie in the Sky may seem insufficient, even in believability. And mysticism, as Oscar Wilde says of socialism, sounds like it would take a lot of evenings. The meaning of life should be about what we do moment by moment, day by day, hour by hour, in the course of ordinary activities and ordinary life. We just want the ordinary to be more than ordinary. Otherwise, it can become an Existentialist Void.
Indeed, something like marriage can be a sacred state. This is not always featured by religions. It became a Sacrament in Christianity, but with the rather sour principle that "It is better to marry than to burn" [1 Corinthians 7:9]. The most throughly religious construction of marriage may be in Hinduism, where the Stage of Life of being a "householder," Or, having mentioned the New Mexico sunset, we might notice the Najavo practice of greeting the sunrise with a blessing and an offering of pollen. Indeed, modern life has few enough blessings, and for many marriage itself might not be much of a blessing. But few modern meals have the meaning and blessing, as part of the weekly round of life, of the Sabbath dinner in Judaism. But even the American Thanksgiving dinner, which began as essentially religious, has drifted away to the point where it is not religious at all. This is a loss. On the other hand, ordinarily, we might not think of laundromats as connected to religion; but in Japan they generally feature small Shintō shrines. The Japanese may not think of themselves as religious, but what we see exposes the fundamental nature of religion as more a matter of practice than of confession. A deity, The Mediaeval principle is de gustibus non est disputandum, "There is no disputing taste"; and we might suspect that religion is largely a matter of faith. However, taste and religion are constantly disputed. Art, theater, and movie critics and book reviewers often do nothing else, and St. Thomas Aquinas would not have written his Summa contra Gentiles if he did not think that Judaism and Islam could be refuted by argument. Yet Aquinas himself affirmed that there were matters of faith, like the doctrine of the Trinity, that were not amenable to rational demonstration -- a doctrine, as it happens, for which Christians were specifically rebuked by Jews and Muslims, as a violation of monotheism. Yet one antecedent of the Trinity is the doctrine of the Λόγος, the "Word," formulated by the Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus. The Λόγος was not original with the Evangelist John.
Allāhu nūru s-samāwāti wa-l-ʾarḍi maθalu nūrihi ka-miškātin God is the light of the heavens and the earth. The parable of his light is a niche wherein is a lamp, the lamp is in a glass, the glass as it were a glittering star, lit from a blessed olive tree, neither eastern nor western, whose oil would almost glow even if untouched by fire, light upon light. God guides to his light whom he wishes.
ʾal-Qurʾān, Sūrah 24, Verse 35; the "Verse of Light"
although Aristotle himself thought that substances could be transformed into each other, as cows turn grass into milk, meat, and other things.
, nāmarūpa (नामरूप), "name and form" or "mind-body" -- which Chinese Buddhism could call 
(事, shì), "phenomena" -- a Chinese term that we have otherwise seen meaning "affairs." We also get the Chinese principle, 色心不二, sèxīn bùèr (Japanese shikishin-funi), "body-mind not two."
,
Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form.
The Heart Sutra
Buddhist philosophy, the phenomenal world of 
, saṁsāra (संसार), also contains mutually conditioned realities, expressed through the doctrines of "dependent origination" and "relative existence." If we separate objects from all their conditioned relations, all that is left is "emptiness," 
, śūnyatā (शून्यता) -- which, contrary to the general impression, does not mean nothingness or Not Being. That is a misunderstanding and, as it happens, a serious heresy in Buddhism. But this is also exactly the meaning of "Negative Transcendence" here.
, duhkha (दुःख). To achieve liberation and salvation, we must become free of these conditions, which enables us to achieve an unconditioned reality, namely 
, Nirvāṇa, (निर्वाण). Buddhism has its own ἐποχή, since metaphysical questions that "do not tend to edification" are set aside. Only Salvation is important, and the Buddha would not answer purely theoretical questions, motivated by no more than curiosity. Later, we get a different take, that such questions cannot be answered, because of the nature of things -- like Kantian Antinomies.
But it were better, O priests, if the ignorant, unconverted man regarded the body which is composed of the four elements as an Ego, rather than the mind. And why do I say so? Because it is evident, O priests, that this body which is composed of the four elements lasts one year, lasts two years, lasts three years, lasts four years, lasts five years, lasts ten years, lasts twenty years, lasts thirty years, lasts forty years, lasts fifty years, lasts a hundred years, and even more. But that, O priests, which is called mind, intellect, consciousness, keeps up an incessant round by day and by night of perishing as one thing and springing up as another. [Buddhism in Translation, by Henry Clarke Warren, "The Mind Less Permanent than the Body," translated from the Samyutta-Nikāya, xii.62, Antheneum, New York, 1982, p.151]
I actually once had a student point out that the body would be unable to move the soul along with it -- let alone hold it in the pineal gland, where Descartes had (farcically) guessed it was located. Pieces of matter have surfaces to press on each other. The soul has no such surface; and the physics of Descartes has no form of causal connection apart from an application of force between surfaces -- hence his theory of planets carried along by "vortices," which unaccountably are free from friction. Newtonian empty space and action-at-a-distance took care of all of that.
Of every color and fragrance, there is none that is not the Middle Way.
, śūnyatā (शून्यता), itself the subject of the Four-Fold Negation? No, we aren't.
, utpala, उत्पल] fragrance wafts as far as a league." I would like to know what that was like -- although in Egypt in 1969 I bought an "essence of lotus" perfume. I do remember that fragrance, and I kept the bottle until giving it to my first wife. We could put "blue lotus fragrance" into Chinese as 
(青蓮香), a marvelous expression.
, "form, appearance" (色, sè; Sanskrit 
, rūpa, रूप), in its marvelous ambiguity, also means "color, beauty" and even "lust" (otherwise 
, yù, 慾). And while people tell me, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," that is not the way I see things. The beauty of the New Mexico sunset is, happily, in my eye; but it is also in the sun, the sky, the clouds, the wind, and Mt. Taylor -- Navajo Tsoodził -- in the distance, from Albuquerque -- as the light may be pink or orange on the snows of the majestic cliffs of the Sandias to the East -- the most dramatic backdrop of any city I know of.
(樂, lè) -- to which we might add "flavor," 
(味, wèi), as well as "color" and "fragrance."
The Good and Being are really the same thing.
the Parmenidean principle of the Bhagavad Gita.Now beauty [κάλλος], as we said, shone bright among those visions, and in this world below we apprehend it through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight [ὄψις] is the keenest of the physical senses [αἰσθήσεις, singular αἴσθησις], though wisdom [φρόνησις] is not seen by it -- how terrible [δεινός] would be our love [ἔρως] for it, if such a clear image [εἴδωλον] of wisdom were granted as would come through sight -- and the same is true of the other beloved [ἐραστά, singular ἐραστόν] objects; but beauty alone has this privilege [μοῖρα], to be most clearly shown [ἐκφανέστατον] and most lovely [ἐρασμιώτατον] of them all. [Phaedrus, 250D, R. Hackford, Plato's Phaedrus, Library of the Liberal Arts, 1952, p. 93, translation modified; Greek text, the Loeb Classical Library, Euthryphro Apology Crito Phaedo Phaedrus, Harvard University Press, 1914-1966, p.485]
ecce facta sunt nova [omnia].
Behold, all things have become new.
2 Corinthians 5:17
holy. This is rarer; and many are indeed insensible to it, as not a few are blind to beauty, like Kant's deaf ear for music. But as Plato thought that beauty was a clue to the transcendent, what is holy is right there. It is the root of things, beyond what reason can even articulate. In those terms, we find a living Antinomy.
-- 道, dào) of life and means of Salvation, whose variety is, after a fashion, perfectly reasonable. After all, Jesus said, "In my Father's house are many mansions," ἐν τῇ οἰκίᾳ τοῦ Πατρός μου μοναὶ πολλαί εἰσιν [John 14:2].
, muʾaððin, مُؤَذِّن) says, 
, ʾAṣ-ṣalātu ḫayrun mini n-nawmi (أَلصَّلَاةُ خَيْرٌ مِنِ ٱلْنَّوْمِ), "Prayer is better than sleep." We certainly see these days how atheists seem to despise prayer more than the Deity himself. But prayer is on a continuum with flashier goals like mystical transport, or the Bliss that might be expected from such transport and from the union of Salvation -- Arabic 
, Falāḥ (فَلَاح); Sanskrit 
, Mokṣa (मोक्ष); Mandarin Jiětuō, 解脫, Japanese Gedatsu -- and immortality in the hereafter.
, gārhasthya (गार्हस्थ्य), absolutely requires marriage. Household rites cannot be performed except by husband and wife together. This even carries over if they become forest dwellers. Marital union can endow every word, every touch, and every affection to one's spouse with transcendence -- as Martin Buber (1878-1865) says we can see the great "Thou" (Du) in a lover's eyes.
(神, shén; Japanese kami; Korean sin, 신), is watching over your wash.
fīhā miṣbāḥun-i l-miṣbāḥu fī zujājatin-i z-zujājatu ka-ʾannahā kawkabun
durriyyun yūqadu min šajaratin mubārakatin zaytūnatin
lā šarqiyyatin wa-lā γarbiyyatin,
yakādu zaytu-hā yuḍīʾu wa-law lam tamsas-hu nārun,
nūrun ʿalā nūrin, yahdī llāhu li-nūri-hi man yashāʾu.
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| Pierre-Auguste Renoir, "Dance at Bougival," Bal à Bougival, 1883 |
However, when beauty no longer recommends art to us, it is not clear what does. And when the answer to that becomes "politics," as it often does these days, the result is very often, not just ugly, but stupid and vicious. Meaningless art would have been better. There may be a silver lining to that. When we realize that most Nazi and Soviet art was so bad that we don't need to pay any attention to it, then we don't need to pay any attention to it -- with some disturbing exceptions like Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003).
The public, which loves Impressionists like Renoir, whose art bespeaks joy and pleasure, already despises most modern art, but our "betters" in government and fashion keep buying it and even putting it public spaces. And when we realize that politicized art is not just ugly, but that it is part of an ideology of anaesthesia and anhedonia, which is a positive denial of beauty and pleasure, we should be properly alarmed. The ugliness of modern art often simply reflects the ugliness, not to mention the viciousness, of modern nihilism. Wilde again, "No artist desires to prove anything" [ibid.]; but the modern artist has a head full of things to prove, almost none of which translate into beauty, but which do reflect deep-seated ignorance and hostilities [note].
Thus, while the "full depth" of value is beauty and the holy, with the former sometimes condemned by the latter, much of what is involved in aesthetic and religious disputes is what we must pass through before reaching the "full depth."
χωρὶς δὲ πίστεως ἀδύνατον εὐαρεστῆσαι·
πιστεῦσαι γὰρ δεῖ τὸν προσερχόμενον τῷ θεῷ ὅτι ἔστιν
καὶ τοῖς ἐκζητοῦσιν αὐτὸν μισθαποδότης γίνεται.Sine fide autem inpossibile placere,
credere enim oportet accadentem ad Deum quia est
et inquirentibus se remunerator fit.And without faith it is impossible to please him.
For whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists
and that he rewards those who seek him.Hebrews 11:6
Religious people may like to believe that a full and proper morality is an intrinsic part of religious doctrine. However, there are plenty of historical religions in which moral issues or teachings figure not at all, unless we see pollution as a substitute or antecedent. 
Other religions, with particular moral doctrines like the tolerance of slavery in Islamic Law or the Caste System in Hinduism, are open to a severe moral critique. Rudolf Otto thought that the evolution of religion over time involves its becoming increasingly moralized.
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| Moses at the Burning Bush(es?), removing his sandals; mosaic, Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna, 527-547 AD |
Such a counter-example may serve to discredit Kant's entire philosophy of religion; and it does so because of what it reveals. Kant is essentially a rationalist and a moralist. "Faith" (
-- 信心, xìnxīn; Japanese shinjin), does not mean to him what it means to anyone else.
Meanwhile, Otto himself was part of the process of modifying and qualifying Kant's philosophy. Here, following Nelson and Otto, the result is the polynomic theory of value, where separate categories of value exist in axiomatic independence of each other. In the diagram at left, this is represented as rather like the "magnetic substates" in 
quantum mechanics, where categories of value constitute increments that vary inversely between strength of necessity and concrete ontological transcendence.
Thus, Kant's wet dream of morality is in fact the strongest mode of necessity and obligation in phenomenal reality, with full "imperatives," moral commands. Only morality has this value in phenomenal existence. But it is also of an abstract and limited content, essentially the general sine qua non of value. Imperatives in fact characterize all that is fundamentally right and just -- ὀρθός, rectus or jus, and δίκαιος, justus. It is the purpose of law to effect justice.
| Good Will | z |
|---|---|
| +5ℏ | |
| Justice | +4ℏ |
| Right | +3ℏ |
| Good | +2ℏ |
| Beauty | +ℏ |
| Holy | 0 |
Other modes of value decline in the visible and phenomenal force of necessity, just as what we see when the angular momentum vector in quantum mechanics falls away from the z axis. The final mode of value, the holy, shows no necessity in the phenomenal world, just as the perpendicular angular momentum vector zeros out in the z axis. This means, for value, that no one is obliged to believe the doctrine or adopt the practice of any religion. Religious orthdoxy, ὀρθοδοξία, "correct belief," long thought to be morally imperative, sometimes enforced with the death penalty, is no obligation at all -- unless a contractual one, for those who accept religious authorities.
But the perpendicular vector, for value or for angular momentum, retains in itself its full value, as do all the other vectors, for the just, the good, and the beautiful. What this means here is that among things in themselves, the necessity of the holy and the others is just as strong as is the imperative of morality in the phenomenal world.
| Good Will | 仁 rén | z |
|---|---|---|
| +6ℏ | ||
| Justice | 公正 gōngzhèng | +5ℏ |
| 正義 zhèngyì | ||
| Right | 義 yì | +4ℏ |
| Good | 好 hǎo | +3ℏ |
| Beauty | 美 měi | +2ℏ |
| Sublime | 升華 shēnghuá | +ℏ |
| 崇高 chónggāo | ||
| Holy | 聖 shèng | 0 |
Indeed, the sense is that all other modes of value are subsumed in it, which is what we tend to get in how religions see themselves -- or the way that Kant sees the "holy" as expressing no more than the force and content of a moral imperative. We could also imagine that in mystical insight, the necessity of all value, including the religious, would become evident, albeit in an ineffable (ἄῤῥητον) form.
Although, as Calvin Coolidge says, law must be based on "the eternal foundation of righteousness" in moral imperatives, 
complications arise in the application of justice to the formulation of positive law and the administration of justice. A law about which side of the road to drive on is essentially arbitrary, but without it there would be mayhem in automobile traffic. This attenuates the force of law, since the principle is meaningless on an empty road, and we might not consider much of the law of property and contract to clearly embody natural justice. Thus, I see these provisions, not as full imperatives, but as "jussives," which are still commands but with their force obscured by tangential, accidental, and historical elements.
We see the care that must be taken with this, for example, in the serious issues in the area of mala prohibita, prohibitions by fiat, or the use of mens rea, criminal intent. Indeed, the urge to make penalties for mala prohibita harsher than for mala in se, natural evils, just so people will take them more seriously, and the urge to eliminate requirements of criminal intent, i.e. the mens rea, just to make prosecutions and convictions easier, are both intrinsicly conspiracies to perpetrate injustice, for which officials ought to be prosecuted themselves. It is hard to imagine how these abuses could take root in a democracy, although Jefferson did say that if the people "become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves" [1787]. We face the wolves now -- and Jefferson didn't even consider the unaccountable bureaucrats and other "deep state" actors, who feel justified in the malicious treatment of citizens and the sabotage of elected officials.
Καὶ τοῖς γιγνωσκομένοις τοίνυν μὴ μόνον τὸ γιγνώσκεσθαι φάναι ὑπὸ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ παρεῖναι, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸ εἶναί τε καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν ὑπ᾽ ἐκείνου αὐτοῖς προσεῖναι, οὐκ οὐσίας ὄντος τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ, ἀλλ᾽ ἔτι ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας πρεσβείᾳ καὶ δυνάμει ὑπερέχοντος.
In like manner, you are to say that the objects of knowledge not only receive from the presence of the good their being known, but their very existence and essence is derived to them from it, though the good itself is not essence but still transcends essence in dignity and surpassing power.
Plato, Republic, 509b, Republic II [translated by Paul Shorey, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1930, 1969, pp.106-107, color added]
καὶ ἡ εἰρήνη τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἡ ὑπερέχουσα πάντα νοῦν, φρουρήσει τὰς καρδίας ὑμῶν καὶ τὰ νοήματα ὑμῶν ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ.
Et pax Dei, quae exsuperat omnem sensum, custodiat corda vestra et intelligentias vestras in Christo Iesu.
And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
Philippians 4:7
In the structure of value, pride of place goes, after a fashion, to "the good." Most things in life are goods without being moral goods. Because of this, the force of obligation attendant on such goods cannot be the sort of "imperative," or command, that Kant associated with morality, or for which St. Thomas had said, "The good is to be done and pursued," bonum est faciendum et prosequendum [Summa Theologica, I-II, Question 94, Article II]. If Aquinas were correct, and if high heels are good, then there would be a duty to wear high heels. Which is absurd (I suspect). Not being obligations at all, exhortations about such goods are not even "jussives" [note].
There is an aesthetic variety to such goods, which means it is not even possible to pursue or fulfill all of them. Nor would we want to. But if a friend is reluctant to buy something she likes, and can prudently acquire, our recommendation is an exhortation, a "hortative" rather than an "imperative." This can involve more serious matters. You may urge your friend to give up smoking. You cannot force him to do so, but you urge the prudence and wisdom of the step. This is also a hortative.
In England, a freight train is a "goods train." Honestly made shoes are goods. Whether they are then good shoes depends on a number of things, including how well made they are, the purpose of particular kinds of shoes, the taste and preferences of the wearer of the shoes, and the fashion trends to which the wearer may be responding [note].
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| Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), "L'Estasi di Santa Teresa," 1647-1652, Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, 2019 |
The spectrum of value from the imperatives of morality to the practice of religious piety goes from the more abstract, with the stronger obligation, to, not just the increasingly concrete, but to the increasingly meaningful. We enjoy the goods of life. We may be moved by the beautiful and the sublime. But Salvation is the meaning of it all.
| Good Will | z |
|---|---|
| +5ℏ | |
| Justice | +4ℏ |
| Right | +3ℏ |
| Good | +2ℏ |
| Beauty | +ℏ |
| Holy | 0 |
I return again and again to the "Ecstasy of Santa Teresa." I have seen nothing else quite like it. The charisma of Teresa becomes something beautiful, sublime, and glamorous. We know about St. Teresa from her own account, in detail. So we know about the meaning that filled her life. But, as I said, her example is an isolate. Few people become such mystics, let alone achieve the results that she experienced. But she also knew what her daily religious practice was. That already had meaning, and her mystical experiences simply served to magnify the meaning of her daily life and observance. Indeed, Teresa always called her forms of mystical practice kinds of "prayer," oración, leading, not just to moments of ecstasy, but to the more permanent union of "spiritual marriage."
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| "The Scream," 1893, by Edvard Munch (1863-1944) |
Meanwhile, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), like Dr. Strangelove, never lost his love for the Führer. 
Since Heidegger's Nazism was successfully whitewashed after the War, the magnitude of his involvement took some years to emerge. My professor at the University of Hawai'i, J.L. (Jarava Lal) Mehta (1912-1988), who knew Heidegger personally, claimed that when Heidegger resigned the Rectorship of Freiburg University in 1934, he washed his hands of politics and no longer had anything to do with the Nazi Party. However, Heidegger never resigned from the Party, and information published postumously, including a magazine interview, prove that Heidegger's commitment and involvement with the Party never waned. Yet apologists continue to try and protect him. Emmanuel Faye sees this as the actual Nazification of the philosophers and intellectuals who are responsible for it [Heidegger, The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935, translated by Michael B. Smith, foreword by Tom Rockmore, Yale University Press, 2009]. The accuracy of this accusation is becoming evident.
How vicious and totalitarian ideologies would appeal to Sartre and Heidegger should be clear from their philosophy. There is no rational basis of morality or liberal democracy in either; and, as atheists, they also have no religious basis for morality. Although certain kinds of atheists as such might nevertheless believe in rational morality, atheism and materialism are a combination that tends to remove that possibility. So we see a statement, for the Los Angeles "Center for Inquiry," which is a organization for "secular humanism," by Elisabeth Cornwell, identified as an "Evolutionary Psychologist" and now the Executive Director of the "Richard Dawkins Foundation," even as Dawkins is a prominent atheist:
Religious people often assume that those without a belief in the supernatural cannot find beauty and inspiration in this world. Non-believers know that meaning in this world is of their own making and not dictated by a higher being... ["I Don't Need God to be Inspired," 7 October 2012]
Cornwell might not realize that a principle that "meaning in this world is of their own making" allows that Sartre and Heidegger, and the Führer, were free to formulate "meaning" as they preferred. Sartre was quite clear about that. Without God, "All is permitted." A later desire, I suppose by "humanists," to claw part of that back, and say that, perhaps, Auschwitz ought not be permitted, crumbles both because no proper basis is proposed for the objection and because people like Sartre and Heidegger knew quite well what they were doing, and were comfortable with it. Thus, as Karl Löwith (1897-1973) said, "It is not Heidegger, who, in opting for Hitler, 'misunderstood himself'." Instead, Heidegger apologists seem to misunderstand Heidegger, and the logic of his thought.
Elisabeth Cornwell goes well beyond atheism. Saying that "meaning" for her is not "dictated by a higher being" also precludes the "higher being" of the Form of the Good, ἡ τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα, in Plato or the dharma in Hinduism or Buddhism -- the "dharma body" of the Buddha, the 
, dharmakāya (धर्मकाय), embodies a great deal of "higher being," even while there is no God in Buddhism. So what is behind Cornwell's "humanism" is probably just materialism and rejection of transcendence.
A principle like "meaning in this world is of their own making" precludes the very existence of moral right and justice; for no "meaning" that you have formulated for yourself imposes any duties or obligations on me. Yet "secular humanists" seem to think that "society" inherits from God the authority of moral legislation. It doesn't. So you cannot "impose" what you think is right on me, unless it actually is right, and unless there is, one way or another, an "eternal foundation of righteousness." Atheists and materialists may not understand the question. Or they just think that they have the authority to themselves legislate for humanity.
Indeed, with the ideology at American universities now, there is no interest in providing a rational basis for morality, certaintly not for liberal democracy or capitalism, or even for any objections to Auschwitz. One gets the impression that the only objection to Auschwitz is that the wrong people were put there -- although, even worse, certain academics seem comfortable with the idea that the right people were put there -- Columbia University is said to be the most anti-Semitic in the country, largely the fruit of the alliance between the radical Left and violent Islamic fundamentalism. Columbia has now confirmed its status, after the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, when 100 faculty of the school endorsed an apologia for terrorism and the murder of Jews, earning themselves and their institution enduring shame and disgrace. As an incitement to violence, it may even be legally actionable.
How can things have fallen so far? This is explained when we see what describes a straight line to the present from people like Sartre and Heidegger, who have never been properly discredited with intellectuals. The disease was made worse with later sickly flowerings of irrationality like "deconstruction." In fact, the line goes all the way back to Nietzsche. The truly dominant ideology, about which Nietzsche was ostensively warning, but actually was promoting, is Nihilism. Not believing anything.
There is no truth; only power. If falsehoods serve power, so much the better. And all that matters is having the right enemies, i.e. the race, class, and gender enemies identified by "oppression studies." There is a veneer of Marxism there, but usually it is what Robert Hughes called "lumpen Marxism," which means a distorted "English Department Marxism" of people who really don't even know their Marx, and certainly nothing genuine of economics, political science, history, or even logic.
It doesn't matter how ignorant or incoherent this is. It is not meant to be debated. Logic itself is part of oppression; and anyone raising objections is clearly eo ipso an enemy. The Hitler Youth of modern academia, often in the full black uniforms of Fascisti, masked like the Klan, pour out to silence any debate or any contrary voices whatsoever -- calling themselves, with bitter irony, "anti-Fascists." This is destroying American education, and it bids fair to destroying America altogether, which is its overt purpose [note].
ὅτι πᾶν τὸ γεγεννημένον ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ νικᾷ τὸν κόσμον·
καὶ αὕτη ἐστὶν ἡ νίκη ἡ νικήσασα τὸν κόσμον, ἡ πίστις ἡμῶν.Quoniam omne quod natum est ex Deo vincit mundum,
et haec est victoria quae vincit mundum: Fides nostra.For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world;
and this is the victory which overcameth the world: Our faith.1 John 5:4
| Good Will |  | z |
|---|---|---|
| +6ℏ | ||
| Justice |   | +5ℏ |
| Right |  | +4ℏ |
| Good |  | +3ℏ |
| Beauty |  | +2ℏ |
| Sublime |   | +ℏ |
| Holy |  | 0 |
On the other hand, cultural conservatives either still rely on religion, or on the value of tradition that we see in Edmund Burke and, for that matter, in Hume -- whose own atheism seems to shield awareness of his Tory sympathies from the bien pensants. However, Hume himself famously observed that fact cannot justify value, which means that tradition alone is actually without real moral authority.
Meanwhile, religious appeals to the authority of God are still troubled by the Problem of the Euthyphro, which is that a benevolent God must do what is good, which cannot be just whatever he wills, since this would render the term "benevolent" vacuous. If we must obey God just because he made us, and can smash us whenever he wishes, which seems to be the argument of the Book of Job, this means that might makes right, a principle that the religious otherwise want to deny.
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Thus a benevolent God must observe a standard of goodness, exactly as Plato describes it in the creation story of the Timaeus. But this contradicts the freedom and omnipotence of a monotheistic, and theistic, Deity. Hence the Antinomy that we might expect.
But there is no Antinomy for goodness itself, except for the dilemmas with which the structure of value troubles us. But the very existence of dilemmas demonstrates the reality of the right ( or -- justice, or ) and the good (
or ). The reality of beauty () has a different kind of evidence, which is denied mainly by those who dislike its independence from morality or politics. And at the end of the line, left with all residual questions about meaning, is the sacred ().
How we know these things, how we have cognitive access the reality of the good, these are epistemological questions separate from metaphysics, and so have been treated in many essays separately.
A New Kant-Friesian System of Metaphysics
A Deuteronomy of Kant's Geometry
In 1968, I signed up for a Philosophy of Language class at UCLA. At the time, I had studied French, German, and Greek, and was beginning the study of Arabic. I was interested in language and Philosophy of Language.
On the first day of class, the professor announced that the "language" we would be studying that quarter was mathematics. I still wish I had asked him how to say "Where is the bathroom?" in the "language" of mathematics. We obviously didn't mean the same thing by the word "language."
At the time, UCLA was notorious as a center of Logical Positivism. Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970), on the short list for the worst philosopher in history, was still alive. I don't know if he was ever on campus anymore. I certainly never met him. It is impossible we would have had anything meaningful to say to each other.
So I dropped the class. It still bewilders me how someone could build a career in philosophy talking about "language" and yet have no real interest in actual languages. I would not find anyone with a proper regard for language until I began taking classes in Linguistics. And the only philosopher I ever found who seemed to have the right idea was Jerrold Katz.
And, of course, those otherwise engaged in "Linguistic Philosophy," like Wittgenstein, also had little interest in natural languages. As with Logical Positivism, Wittgenstein constructed vast circular arguments founded on incorporating all his dogmatic conclusions into his own lofty conception of "grammar," which, not being a philosophical "theory," was immune to criticism. Socrates would have had a delightful romp with him.
Philosophy of Science, Linguistics
Semantics and "General Semantics" With that in hand, the theory of Descartes as "Transcendental Realism" means that the real things, which can exist independently, are outside of phenomenal reality and experience. Then the theory of Berkeley as "Empirical Idealism" means that "ideas," as the term was used by John Locke, are all we have, and that these, which are no more than phantasms, are in experience and consciousness. The implication is that there are no real objects that exist independently, certainly not outside of consciousness. Berkeley denied that anything external existed (apart from God and other souls); but there is a variation on this in Hume, who simply denied that we have any knowledge or evidence of such things, and so no reason to believe in them in the first place (including God and souls).
Kant's "Empirical Realism" then means that the real things, which exist independently, are within experience and perception. This could strike almost anyone as paradoxical, or, alternatively, as little more than common sense -- i.e. that we are directly acquainted in experience with the real things. At the same time, consciousness, after all, is what only exists in the mind. How can real, independent things be in it? Hence the urge, as in Schopenhauer, to match Kant with Berkeley. But to Berkeley the objects that we perceive do not exist outside consciousness at all, while even Schopenhauer says that something about them does, as the thing-in-itself, which in Schopenhauer's system is the Will. Schopenhauer does not believe that number and individuality reach from phenomena to the thing-in-itself, but Kant does -- allowing for the souls and God whose existence Schopenhauer denies. Kant preserves the sense that things in themselves are simply the interiority and externality of the same things we see among phenomena, beginning with their existence as independent things.
Well, maybe it works because of the ambiguity of "transcendental." Maybe truths of external reality only exist as a priori knowledge within consciousness. But metaphysically, that still sounds rather like a contradiction. If external reality only exists as any kind of representation or knowledge within consciousness, then we are saying that it doesn't exist externally -- which cannot be quite the right idea, and certainly not what Kant ultimately wants to say. If there is some kind of knowledge of external reality, whatever it is, then there must be some kind of external reality.
As Oliver Hardy would say to Stan Laurel, "This is another fine mess you've gotten me into." And this is why I shy away from characterizing Kant's system as "Transcendental Idealism." The paradoxes that result could lead to almost anything, even the philosophy of Hegel. No, "Empirical Realism" is good enough, and quite paradoxical enough, but some sense can be made of it, however challenging to conventional categories. Once that is done, perhaps we could just say that "Transcendental Idealism" actually means the same thing, with "transcendental" for "realism" and "idealism" for "empirical." But this is the same as to say that "Transcendental Idealism" is so meaningless that we cannot derive a helpful definition from it.
The lord whose oracle is in Delphi Heraclitus of Ephesus, quoted by Plutarch, De Pythiae oraculis 21, 404 E, The Presocratic Philosophers, G.S. Kirk & J.E. Raven, Cambridge, 1964, p.211 Or, there may be a more radical solution. There is something wrong, of course, with the square of opposition I have been using for Kant's terminology. Diagonals are supposed to be contradictories, and they should not have the same truth values. But in formalizing Kant's terminology, it looks like contradictories must have the same truth values. This has bothered me for a long time. But what if this is a clue? What if we rationalize the square of opposition and try that out?
As it happens, if we take "Transcendental Idealism" to be self-contradictory and false, then the square can be rationalized by making "Transcendental Realism" true. But "you said crossing the streams was bad." Well, let's see. Do we necessarily end up back with Descartes? We would if we deny that the real things are empirically real. Mostly, we don't want to do that. The charm of "Empirical Realism" is that it even sounds like quantum mechanics, that real things are determined by both objective and subjective, internal and external factors. But we can ask: Are there things in Kant's metaphysics that are real objects that do not and cannot exist within consciousness? Well, yes. That would be God, immortal souls, things with free will, and, we shouldn't forget, the universe itself. These are objects that, if they exist, are transcendently real and not the objects of a possible experience. Anything that would be an unconditioned reality can only be transcendently real.
In a proper square of opposition, the sub-contraries can both be true. "Some pizzas have anchovies" and "some pizzas do not have anchovies" are both true. So we can resolve the paradoxes of Kant's terminology by making "Transcendental Realism" and "Empirical Realism" both true. And the principle of the distinction is a simple one. To the former belong unconditioned realities, to the latter, conditioned ones. In those terms, "Transcendental Idealism" is not just a bad and confusing term for Kant's philosophy, it cannot be a term for it at all; and the square of opposition for Kant's terminology is regularized. It does means, however, that "Transcendental Realism" is ambiguous, depending on whether we take it in a Cartesian or a Kantian sense. So the proper, unambiguous term for Kant's system, as I have already been using it, is "Empirical Realism."
Est autem fides sperandorum substantia, Faith is the foundation of things hoped for, Hebrews 11:1 There is another difference between what would be a Kantian and a Cartesian "Transcendental Realism." Transcendent objects in Kantian philosophy cannot be known by theoretical reason and will generate Antinomies, where contradictory theories seem to be equally well motivated.
The Antinomy of space and time cannot be resolved and continues to haunt cosmology; but Kant thought that his Dialectical "Ideas" of God, freedom, and immortality could be established, after a fashion, as "Postulates of Practical Reason." His arguments for these are good, to uneven, to fallacious.
Thus, freedom of the will is certainly presupposed by morality. But I do not see this as entirely a problem of transcendent objects. The difference between cause and purpose, determinism and freedom comes down to the division between Negative Transcendence as either external or internal. Negative transcendence will be discussed in the main text above, and the reality it gives to purpose is treated separately. Where the problem of transcendence arises for free will is the way that internal and external correspond to each other. This is the problem of Ontological Undecidability. Materialism or a behavioristic psychology simply reject the phenomena of the internal as no more than epiphenomena or illusions, grounded in externalist determinism -- we see John Searle objecting to that, without, however, ceasing to endorse materialism.
But the difference between the two is one of the strongest features of a Kantian philosophy. Science can only study the human mind in terms of causality and determinism. Criminals behave the way they do because of their genetics, their physiological development, the experiences of their childhood, and perhaps traumas in adulthood. In those terms, everyone is morally innocent and "criminals" can't help what they do -- it is fashionable again now, as it was in the 60's, to say that poverty is the cause of crime and so criminals are no more than victims of "society" and capitalism. The best we can do is to "condition" criminals to behave differently -- or give them money, I suppose, so that they aren't poor. Some can call that conditioning "punishment," but it must be continued until effective, not arbitrarily ended because a "punishment" must be proportional to the offense. This is what Hume, as well as Behaviorists, are led into. "Soft" determinists try to sell this as an acceptable principle behind political freedom -- despite authoritarian and self-anointed "conditioners" lurking in the background.
That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis, 1945, 1946, Scribner, 2003, pp.67-68. A Kantian then can introduce an entirely different, parallel dimension to causality and determinism. Given freedom and purpose, human beings possess a dignity far beyond the status of being materialistic automata. They are morally responsible for their acts. Thus, punishment is not conditioning, it is Nor is this simply a philosophical distinction. In law, there is a boundary. That is between sanity and insanity. The insane person does not know the difference between right and wrong, or has completely lost control of his actions. The insane person has become an automaton, and he can be treated accordingly -- within the limits of humanity, which recognizes that even the criminally insane are still human beings. And they might even get better, when they may at least owe their victims restitution. In the book and movie, A Clockwork Orange [Stanley Kubrik, 1971; book by Anthony Burgess, 1962], we see a classic send up and reductio ad absurdum of "behavior modification" therapy, as this is recommended by a psychological determinism.
Thus, we have a curious case where a characteristic among transcendent objects, namely freedom, so enters into human affairs as to be part of criminal and civil law. Some, of course, want it out of there, but that cannot properly be done. There are, indeed, uncertainties about the boundary between sanity and insanity; and few people are comfortable with insane criminals, certified sane by psychiatrists, released back into society, scott free. Much of that, however, is well warranted skepticism about the competence, not just of psychiatrists, but of psychiatry itself. This often seems to be no more reliable than the exorcist pronouncing that the victim of a possessing evil spirit is now free of it. For the insane as for the possessed, caution is warranted.
For my purposes here, the practical boundary between freedom and determinism is a case much like the status of the finite or infinite nature of the universe. There is not a theoretical resolution than can reconcile both or resolve the duality. This vindicates Kant's sense that freedom is not just a matter of theoretical reason. A different level of reality is impinging on us, and we can do no better than live with the duality, without being able to fully explain it. But unlike the cosmological problem, the Antinomy involving freedom has intimate consequences. Are we free or automata? We must live with a awkward acknowledgement of both, adding to all the other paradoxes of the human condition.
With it there is, however, a clue, and a datum, that there is more to reality than appearances in phenomenal objects. We are caught in the duality ourselves. Descartes did not need to worry about things like that. But, also unlike other Antinomies, there is a certain theoretical level where we can make a metaphysical distinction, that between internal transcendence and external. This pushes the paradox back a level, to the purely metaphysical question how internal and external fit together in reality, which is the same as to ask, not just how our internal existence fits into the deterministic world, but how the entire phenomenal world fits in among things in themselves -- the Buddhist question of the relation between Saṁsāra, The duality of determinism and freedom is also relevant to moral objections and other strained critiques offered against Evolution by natural selection. Sorry, Evolution is science, and "Creationism" or "Intelligent Design" are not. Since science addresses blind, deterministic, naturalistic causes, Evolution counts as a scientific theory, and the others don't. However, the idea that Evolution dictates a certain approach to morality, like the "social Darwinism" of Nietzsche, is a grotesque error -- a Postivism based on the law of the jungle.
The failure of philosophy to provide for moral freedom in the transcendent, while trying to conjure morality out of some kind of naturalistic or materialistic premises, leaves in fact a stark choice between the world of causation and a cogent morality that perhaps can only be provided by religion and revelation. The meaning of an empty, Existentialist universe will be considered further.
2 Corinthians 5:7 Kant's "Ideas" of God and immortality concern objects that are wholly in the transcendent. This is where his arguments are the weakest, including some that are entirely fallacious. Thus, he says that we must be immortal because morality demands a perfection of which we are incapable. Perfection can only be approached, like the asymptote of a tangent, in eternity. However, it is not clear how a rational morality, rather than Matthew 5:48, is demanding moral perfection. This may be no more than an artifact of Kant's residual, fractured Christianity. As it happens, moral perfection is impossible, because of dilemmas. Sometimes, if the good is chosen over the right, this is preferable, or at least not blameworthy; and this means that morality cannot reasonably always be enforced. The issue is particularly acute, and generally misunderstood, in relation to the advice of Machiavelli -- but it also appears as a problem in the story of Abraham and Issac, where God requires immoral action, i.e. the sacrificial murder of Issac.
In fact, we can make a moral argument to almost the opposite conclusion from Kant, using his own principles. Thus, Kant believed that morality was based on a "Categorical Imperative," which means a moral command that must be obeyed regardless of the consequences. But immortality implies that there can be consequences, which we should take into consideration. If there is no immortality, then we would have no charge to reach for moral perfection and become worthy of reward. Thinking in those terms, Dostoyevsky had said that "without immortality, all is permitted." Kant even allows himself to vent his anti-Semitism by claiming that:
Kant then makes the paradoxical argument that because Judaism requires moral action regardless of considerations of reward and punishment, heaven and hell, it therefore also cannot be a religion. Thus, Judaism is condemned because, according to Kant, it observes his own principle of moral value! The bitter irony of this goes beyond mere incoherence.
It will, indeed, be the agent unconvinced of immortality whose motive for moral action will be the purest. Otherwise the Categorial Imperative becomes what Kant called a "Hypothetical Imperative," i.e. a maxim of prudence.
While Jesus does instruct Christians to be perfect, there is a strong sense in the religion that this is not possible, certainly not for most people, regardless of the problem with dilemmas. The principal appeal of Christianity is thus not punishment or eternal striving for goodness, but the forgiveness of sin. That may be the whole point. Jesus Saves. Jesus took the sins of the world upon himself and gave up his life in expiation. I get no sense that Kant was aware of this or included it in his view of religion.
Thus, one is not necessarily redeemed by a "moral attitude," moralische Gesinnung, but by repentance and by faith, where the former follows from consciousness of sin and latter from the acceptance of the Savior. There is a certain moral attitude involved, of one's unworthiness, but that is different from accepting the Savior, who redeems that unworthiness, through no virtue of our own. If Salvation washes one free of sin, then the issue of moral perfection in eternity may become moot. Can the Saved be sinful in Heaven? This question does not seem to arise. Yet a negative answer erases Kant's entire argument for immortality.
We should also note that consciousness of sin is an essential feature of In all this, we must recognize that Kant does not simply reproduce, from his place and time, Christian prejudices. His whole system is idiosyncratic and rationalistic, involving the wholesale rejection of essential features of the Christian religion. It also, of course, poorly suits him to understand the message or the appeal of any religion, which is a problem with many philosophers, if not for the whole discipline of "philosophy of religion."
With so little allegiance to Christianity, we might wonder at the vehemence with which Kant twists, distorts, condemns, and rejects Judaism. It is all a kind of confused nightmare, with little connection to human, religious, or historical realities. It is a kind of phenomenon I have noted in other cases, where long-standing antipathies are continued even after their source has itself been rejected. Thus, Kant does not (perhaps) hate the Jews for killing Christ, but simply for not accepting Kant's novel view of moralistic religion, which they (or anyone) actually would have never heard of.
The paradoxes attending his argument for immortality are compounded in Kant's argument, if we can call it that, for God as a Postulate of Practical Reason. For with that, Kant claims that God must exist in order to provide the reward or punishment warranted by one's actions. This completes the destruction of the Categorical Imperative as a moral principle. Moral behavior is now motivated by the hope of a reward in heaven, and all of morality is thus reduced to a matter of prudence, not morality at all. Self-interest replaces moral selflessness.
From this shambles we can draw our lesson. First, however, we should note that Kant's argument for God is not even necessary for its own purpose; and Kant can have offered such an argument only because of his ignorance of world religions and of the history of non-Western philosophy. Thus, in Indian religion and philosophy, the theory of karmic recompense is maintained by Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. We do not need to trouble God, if there is one, for the reward or punishment merited by action. Karma, Of course, that is not the way that causality works in the phenomenal world. Events obey the laws of physics. But we can say that the idea in India is that actions interact with the laws of morality, or dharma, So it may be God, or it may be karma. Either way, the Categorical Imperative, to maintain its character, requires that we cannot know. Do you think you can get away with evil? Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Blaise Pascal would have wagered that the prudent thing is to suppose that there will be recompense; but obviously not everyone thinks that way. Crime is common, and the shamelessly lying politician clearly does not worry about punishment, mundane or divine.
So we will have no Cartesian certainty about God, immortality, or even karma. I have seen this as an application of the principle of "need to know." You do not need to know whether there is immortality or karmic recompense. All you need to know is that you should do the right and the good, without an expectation of reward, except to the extent that prudence, in worldly terms, can be rewarding itself. This is not just a Kantian principle (ruined by his hostility to Judaism), but something also found, a constant of world ethics, in Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita.
Karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana / Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. The Bhagavad Gita, 2:47, Juan Mascaró translation This principle has a further effect in the Gita. By doing good for its own sake, Arjuna avoids rebirth -- a very different kind of "reward." That is the Karma Yoga.
Since the Transcendental Realism we might want to attribute to Kant differs in many ways from that of Descartes, it might be convenient to make a distinction in terminology. In this, I would borrow a clue from Advaita Vedānta, As we will see, "meaning" itself looms as perhaps the most significant criterion. Nominalist, Externalist, Positivist, or Wittgensteinian semantics empties the world of real meaning and drops us into the horror of an Existentialist Void, like a sacrificial Phoenician baby dropped into the altar furnace of Moloch. In photographs, Wittgenstein ("imploring eyes yet with intense rage flaring just behind the iris") looks like this has happened to him. I will examine this is more detail in the main text above.
Kant says that the basic meaning of "substance" is that which is always subject and never predicate. This is a very minimal logical criterion that tells us nothing about the manner of existence of a substance. We are then given to understand that this principle alone is what would apply to "substances" among things in themselves.
Kant has a bad habit of trying to pull substantive meaning out of the bare forms of logic. He does that with the "Categories of the Understanding," where "substance," "causality," etc. are derived from basic relations of logical grammar, like predication or implication. But "material implication," which was already understood by the Stoics, actually implies no real connection between the antecedent and consequent of a conditional, which is absolutely necessary for a causal relationship. Similarly, Kant wants to get all of morality out of no more than the criteria of rule making, universality, and consistency. In those terms, making "bricks without straw" would seem easy.
However, for "substance," Kant produces no metaphysical rabbits out of his bare definition. But there must be more to it. We want an analysis, not of logic, but of the essential elements of meaning in the kinds of things that get called, or that we want to call, "substances." "Durable" means that a substance persists over time. "Separable" means that a substance is not dependent for its existence on something else. And, "identical" means that it possesses an identity that is intrinsic to it, persists over time, and stands in contrast to other independent things. This is all fairly clear already in Aristotle.
Failing Kant's rabbits out of logic method, the epistemology required for a definition of substance depends on the Freisian theory of non-intuitive immediate knowledge. That explains how an Aristotle, or a Socrates, has something to work with for a metaphysical definition. It shows us that concepts of substance, causality, and morality derive from something very different from the bare forms of grammar or logic.
The argument of St. Thomas Aquinas for the immortality of the soul is that a "simple substance," as the soul is, is incorruptible. However, this requires proof that the soul, if such a thing even exists, has no parts. Otherwise, as the Buddha said, "Decay is inherent in all composite things." But the existence and simplicity of the soul asks for much, much more than we can expect just from durability, separability, and identity. These apply well to phenomena, but it is not clear how they apply to transcendent objects outside of experience, which are not available as such for our inspection. Thus, although there is more to it than Kant thinks, there are still limits. We are not back with the open skies of speculative metaphysics, which never achieved all that much anyway.
The Egyptians have left us no proper metaphysics, but it is noteworthy that they had a strong sense of a particular attribute of substance. Thus, the Egyptians were very preoccupied with what was A traditional interpretation of quantum mechanics is that, in the words of physics book author Jerry B. Marion, "the wave function itself, ψ(x), has no physical significance." I recently came across a more extreme example of this in a review by retired physicist N. David Mermin, who says, "in quantum physics unobserved things have no properties whatsoever." Such views are versions of Bohr's "Copenhagen Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, where "nothing exists until it is observed," and where the job of science is simply to make predictions, without any commitment to the reality of phenomena. That is called "Positivism," characterized by Kurt Gödel as "really the end of all theoretical science in the usual sense."
Both Marion and Mermin, however, have incautiously made metaphysical assertions, which themselves are both false and senseless. The wave function is definitely of "physical significance" when the wave nature of light, or matter, is the only explanation for the interference patterns in the "slot" experiments of Thomas Young and Louis de Broglie. In turn, if "unobserved things have no properties whatsoever," then there is no determinate reality to cause the phenomena that are observed by the Positivist physicist. Mermin talks like the phenomena are caused by the mathematical models in the mind of the physicist. We could do that, but it would call for a "mind only" metaphysics that most physicists would probably find more than a little alarming. In Western metaphysics, such doctrines are called "Idealism," with Hegel as the principal exemplar. Scientists who know about Hegel, like Jacob Bronowski, have a well motivated dislike for him. And Mermin seems dismissive, even contemptuous, of realistic interpretations of the wave function, despite these being the views of de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Einstein.
What is possible in a specifically Kantian Quantum Mechanics is to give both Schrödinger and Heisenberg, both waves and particles, and both determinism and randomness their due. What makes everyone uncomfortable is that boundary; for what distinguishes the former phenomena from the latter is the existence of knowledge -- not observation or measurement, mind you, just knowledge; for if we can even infer where the particle is, this has already collapsed the wave function, and wave phenomena, like interference patterns, vanish. The role of knowledge, i.e. consciousness, in this is what troubled Einstein the most deeply, and it seems to be the sort of thing that a physicist like N. David Mermin seeks to avoid by clinging to Bohr's anti-realism, without understanding, perhaps, that this gives to consiousness a reality far beyond what is required by quantum mechanics -- something a lot more bizarre than simply affirming that the world exists and that things, like the bear in the woods, or Schrödinger's Cat in the box, have properties before they are observed. Nota bene: According to Mermin's principle, there is no bear, and there is no Cat, just as "there is no spoon," for all these things are what they are and exist as such just because of their properites.
One might be troubled, however, with the implication that Kantian phenomena exist even before our individual minds can be brought to bear on the sensory manifold and, by synthesis, generate the perceptual contents of consciousness. This fits into Kant's own thought in a certain way. Kant often speaks of "possible experience" and reasons in terms of the "conditions of possible experience." Possibility is already part of the metaphysical mysteries of the world, and popular "many worlds" theories already are determined to eliminate real possibility and replace it with actual existence in multiple universes. This generates excitement in both philosophy and physics. But it is reductionistic, and an infinite number of universes violates Ockham's Razor in a very big way. Reality is appalling enough as it is, without our needing to imagine universes where Heisenberg built a Bomb and Hitler won World War II. Thus, both internal and external existence are the sources of real possibility.
I think it is the case that internal existence is an ontological reality that is responsible for the "properties" of "unobserved things," specifically the quantum wave function, while the internal existence of my own consciousness adds that extra element, knowledge, that collapses the wave function into the discrete particles and random elements of actual experience. Furthermore, the possibilities of internal existence as "will," with a nod to Schopenhauer, empowers my consciousness to cause events. This complicates the metaphysics on this page. What is the ontological difference between general internal existence, responsible for the unobserved properties of phenomena, and my own individual internal existence, For now I can leave it at that. However, I have already considered this issue, under Thought Experiments on the Soul. Considering the possible existence of a soul does not simply open the cabinet of Thomist theology, which causes the modern materialist to get the vapours. Nowhere near. It is a matter of identity, and now it is a matter of a physical difference in the universe, a physical difference that depends on something like a "soul," perhaps as a substance, being a particular form of internal existence.
The vocabulary and grammar in this statement by Aquinas seem pretty transparent, with two exceptions. This is a nominal sentence, so why does secundum rem look like they are in the accusative? Also, what does secundum even mean?
What I get so far is that secundus, "going after, second, going the same way, attending, supporting, favorable," in the accusative can be used as an adverb or even a preposition, "after, behind, following, after, in favor of, to the advantage of." As a preposition, it takes the accusative. Fair enough.
But then, in the translation, the word "really" seems to correspond to nothing apart from secundum. But I don't see "really" among any of the meanings of secundum.
Since I was reading a book, How Dead Languages Work [Oxford, 2020], which covers Greek and Latin, I actually wrote to the author, Coulter H. George, asking about this. His answer I thought was revealing. Classicists aren't interested, apparently, in Mediaeval Latin. I had run into that with Greek already, when I found out that my old UCLA Greek professor didn't know anything about the (extensive) works of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.
So Professor George didn't know what to make of secundum either.
With that, all I've got is the dictionary. My Oxford Latin Dictionary [2012] has, for secundum, after meanings of "next to," "next in order or sequence," etc., things like "in conformity with, in accordance with," "in a manner consistent with, in keeping with," and "in favor of" [Volume II, p.1897].
As philosophical terminology, I suspect that the word is going to mean "logically follows." This is in tune with the basic meaning of secundus as "following" and with the more technical "consistent with." If it logically follows, then it is consistent with.
This would indicate a translation more like "It logically follows that the good and being are the same." Since Aquinas has been giving an argument for this, and examining objections, his conclusion, this, would logically follow.
There are three uses of "secundum" in a text by Aquinas I quote here.
In the first example, secundum is simply translated "according to." In the second, we have secundum absolutam considerationem translated as "absolutely speaking." Google translate gives us, "according to absolute consideration," which amounts to about the same thing. So each translates secundum and "according to."
The third example is more obscure. Google translate gives us, "but in some respects it is involuntary." So both translation use "respect" or "respects," first modified by "a certain," the other by "some." But there is no "certain" or "some" in Latin, while we don't get a word that obviously translates secundum. "According to," or the earlier suggestions of "it follows," or "is consistent with," don't seem quite right. The larger context is, "Consequently it is voluntary simply, but involuntary in a certain respect"; for which "is consistent with" might be acceptable for the sense -- St. Thomas is saying that what he is talking about is both voluntary and involuntary, so we have a paradox of opposites are, in some way, consistent. Nevertheless, this leaves me still unclear about the basic usage of secundum.
The following discussion of the ugly is from the essay "Radical Chic," by Judith Thurman, in her collection A Left-Handed Woman, Essays [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022]. This refers to an exhibition of the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute, Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada: Impossible Conversations [2012]. Schiaparelli (1890-1973) and Prada (b.1949) are, of course, classic clothes designers; and we might be reminded of Camille Paglia's remark that, where art has become increasingly ugly, beauty fled to high fashion -- especially in the era of the striking "supermodels." The "curators" here are Andrew Bolton and Harold Koda, of the Costume Institute.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), a founder of the Italian artistic and political movement of "Futurism," is actually a little misquoted here. The awkward thing about Marinetti and his movement was that he, and most of his friends, were enthusiastic about Fascism and Benito Mussolini. Since they had always thought that war, if not dictatorship, was good, this should not be surprising. Thurman's reference to Umberto Eco (1932-2016) also worries me. When I read his book, The Name of the Rose [Il nome della rosa, 1980], which was very popular at the time, it struck me as endorsing the irrationalism that had been characteristic of nihilistic Fascism -- and that continues today with violent anarchists.
So it is not clear to me if there is a coherent point in Thurman's paragraph about the ugly in art. I'm not sure that the fashion of Schiaparelli or Prada has ever seemed generally ugly. And if the ugliness we otherwise see in art and music is actually due to the Fascist leanings of "Futurism," and other such expressions of its time, where we can add in the other Mussolini enthusiast, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), we might conclude that there is nothing edifying about the whole business. The put down of "bougeois complacency" is itself a coded rejection of liberal democracy.
The reference to the ugly "features of a witch, the primal fear of female carnality," seems incoherent, since it would be a young, beautiful witch who would represent "carnality," rather than an old, ugly one. The witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries occurred more because canon law was changed so that those who accused witches could seize their property. A lot of old widows, with property, became targets of very ordinary greed. That the ugly or deformed reflect the disfavor of the gods, or the presence of sin, was a very ancient and general belief, applying to men as easily as to women. The Iliad contains the archetypal ugly, deformed, and vicious fellow Thersites, Θερσίτης. No one had any fear of his "carnality." A nice example of politicized art is mentioned in the February 27-28, 2021, Wall Street Journal.
In a review of the art of Alexis Rockman ("A New Life for Old Wrecks," by Peter Saenger, C14), we are told that he:
While this image is visually intriguing and technically masterful, unlike a lot of modern art, I have my doubts that Oscar Wilde would consider it beautiful. It is, after all, a representation of wreckage.
The advantage of art as propaganda poster is that it doesn't need to present any actual information, let alone argument, about the subject. It also may be inherently ambiguous. Thus, Rockman's painting of the Brooklyn waterfront could illustrate, not the rise in sea levels from melting Arctic ice, but the result of the massive tsunami that would result from a flank collapse of the one of the large volcanoes in the Azores or other volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean -- a "megatsunami." This is a real threat that could happen at any time, and the resulting tsunami could be hundreds of feet high. Such a wave funneling into Lower and Upper New York Bay would even be magnified in its effects. Sea levels, which have risen and fallen over geological time, are something that allow time for adaptation. A tsunami would come without much warning. "Apocalyptic," to be sure.
Thus, if Mr. Rockman wants to inform us about "climate change," he should make documentaries that are both unambiguous and open to critique, like the "Polar Extremes" NOVA episode that I have reviewed. But he's an artist, whose work then has all the subtlety and intellectual depth of an advertising agency.
The review ends with a reference to some sort of complaint by Rockman about animals, like rats and bats:
Of course, it is some of the poorest people on the planet who tend to eat bats. But that is the way Environmentalism works, with what activists call "privilege." Mr. Rockman probably doesn't worry about his next meal, living in New York City, but African children may start Ebola epidemics by catching bats for food. Perhaps Rockman expects the children to starve, or not exist. Maybe he contributes to organizations to feed them, but then that draws on Western money and mass market agriculture -- possibily things that Rockman doesn't want to develop in places like Africa. So the upshot is often that the poor are supposed to stay poor. Death is natural. They're in harmony with Nature. More like the way we should be, without things like electricity. Like California.
Philosophy of Science, Meteorology
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) wrote a lecture, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts" [1967], of which we might expect great things but that I found rather disappointing.
I will comment on just a couple of things. Murdoch says "A genuine mysteriousness attaches to the idea of goodness and the Good" [The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971, 2001, p.96]. I think this is true, especially in line with the circumstance that the word resists definition. However, Murdoch does not discuss the simple possible definitions for an instrumental good, failing to distinguish such goods from goods-in-themselves, and how important a clue this is; and she does not follow up the clue from St. Thomas, that Being and the Good should be, in some metaphysical sense, the same.
Instead, in short order we get the statement, "the genuine sense of morality enables us to see virtue as the only thing of worth" [ibid.]. I think this is seriously flawed. I would prefer to say that, in moral terms, the only thing of worth is righteous action. The value of virtue, as moral virtue, is that we expect righteous action from it. Yet the virtuous person can do wrong, often when faced with dilemmas. Indeed, Murdoch might have mentioned Kant's claim that the only perfectly good thing is good will -- but even the person of genuinely good will can do wrong. And the virtuous person, without good will, can turn their virtues to evil ends. I have analyzed "virtue ethics" as only one of three basic parts of the value structure of action.
We might suspect Murdoch here of an Aristotelian bias, since Aristotle did not analyze the righeousness of actions as such, but described virtue as something acquired through the habit of imitating virtuous persons. We might concede to Murdoch that Plato also failed to analyze actions as such and, like Aristotle, spoke mainly in terms of virtues -- virtues properly acquired, however, through knowledge of the Good and not by imitation of others.
But in relation to Plato's theory, Murdoch has narrowed and reduced Plato's perspective. In the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the journey of the philosopher seems to begin, not with a "genuine sense of morality," but with beauty. The beauty may even simply be the physical beauty of a lover -- although I would prefer the female over the male version -- and this eventually detaches from the physical and carries us up to the Forms. Having achieved the vision of the Good, "genuine morality" and virtue will then be a kind of fallout, since it will have provided us, as Socrates says to Euthyphro, with the "model," the "paradigm," παράδειγμα, to judge everything we experience. This is a very different approach from Aristotle; and Murdoch, for all her seeming Platonism, does not apparently follow that path.
Continuing on, Murdoch says, "There are few places where virtue plainly shines: great art, humble people who serve others" [p.97]. Again, this seems unnaturally cramped and reduced. And we might even wonder, "How does great art embody virtue?"
Is this the virtue of skill of the sculptor, painter, etc.? Artists themselves are not always famous for their moral virtue. Caravaggio (1571-1610) was a violent man who was condemned to death for a murder, escaped, but later may have died from a wound in a brawl. From the skill of the artist we certainly expect to see beauty, but this hardly seems to be the focus of Murdoch in this case. And beauty far transcends its place in art -- especially when a lot of recent art has become deliberately ugly.
Does Plato raise his eyes from the beauty of the lover to the beauty of the sunset, or just the sky -- Kant's bestirnte Himmel über mir? Indeed, where does Plato particularly celebrate, rather than suspect, art, or focus on "humble people"? The latter, indeed, are worthy of notice; but what about those remarkable in history for that sort of thing, like St. Francis of Assisi? Or the humble carpenter of Galilee? Again, Murdoch's perspective seems narrow and constricted.
Instead, Murdoch proceeds to a rather sour note: "We cannot then sum up human excellence for these reasons: the world is aimless, chancy, and huge, and we are blinded by self" [ibid.]. A Platonist cannot say that the world is "aimless" or "chancy," for it is subject to the meaning, and ultimately the τέλος, of the Forms -- wherein dwells the Form of the Good, whose "sovereignty" Murdoch is supposedly promoting. But if Murdoch in this is not a very good Platonist, the more serious problem is a kind of hostility towards Kant. "Blinded" by the self reveals a grave defect in Murdoch's thought. Plato, "Symposium," 211e-212a, Plato III, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, Loeb Classical Library, translated by W.R.M. Lamb, Harvard, 1925, 1991, p.207, translation modified, color added. In "The Idea of Perfection," a companion essay to "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts," in the same volume, Murdoch gives rather more credit, as a Platonist should, to beauty:
While Kant has nothing to do with the "existentialist-behaviourist view," the characterization of art as "quasi-play," or as "a sort of by-product of our failure to be entirely rational," does not misrepresent him. She may miss, however, that Kant simply has a moralistic system where morality is ultimately the only form of value. Kant does think that being "rational" is a function of that, but he would have the same problem even if his epistemology were more Platonic.
Art "for its own sake" -- l'art pour l'art, Théophile Gautier (1811–1872); ars grātiā artis -- however, simply means that aesthetic value is independent of moral value. Since Murdoch does not have a polynomic theory, she cannot express such a thing clearly.
The Platonist, however, begins with beauty as such, not with art, about which Plato will always have mixed feelings. Murdoch, however, has a very different emphasis, which generates its own problems.
Unfortunately, "great art" does not belong to the class of "simple things." That would be more like a sunset, or, as in Plato, the beauty of a lover. The very idea that great art is involved with "moral insight" or "moral achievement" may be a distortion in Murdoch's approach here.
This will be false. And we will see why next.
This is falsified by cases of good art that represent bad things or that are made by bad people. We see this in the Nazi progapanda films of Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) -- Triumph of the Will [1935] and Olympia [1936] -- in Birth of a Nation [1915] by D.W. Griffith (1875-1948), and in the poetry of Ezra Pound (1885-1972), who became an enthusiast of Benito Mussolini.
Because we can see beauty, Plato thought it would function as a ticket to the Forms. So, as Murdoch says, it is "an introductory section to the good." But this just means that, having been carried up to the Forms, then we can grasp the Good, which is abstract and not seen here below.
In Plato's own terms, we already face the dilemma that the beauty of our lover may belong to someone who is a bad person. The Greeks, like Miranda, didn't want to think so; but Oscar Wilde develops the issue vividly in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Indeed, flipping the polarity, in Socrates we already had a paradigmatic example of someone ugly on the outside but good on the inside.
Only a very reductionistic concept of "virtue" would enable us to apply it, in somehow the same way, to the good man and the artist. It is hard say that Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was a good man, albeit a great artist. And the principle here in common, selflessness, is a false and dangerous principle for Murdoch to promote, as I will examine below.
A lesson that we can take away from this passage is that Murdoch is, after a fashion, just as moralistic is Kant. But instead of reducing the aesthetic to a subordinate function, however, she wants to collapse together the aesthetic and the moral so that "virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man." This cannot be done without considerable violence to both morality and aesthetics, and it precludes any understanding of how good art can represent evil causes or evil artists.
The virtues that enable the contract killer to be successful at his job may compare to the virtues of technique and design that characterize the good artist or composer, but these stand wholly apart from the moral quality of any such enterprise. Indeed, the contract killer may seem as "selfless" and disinterested as any other superior craftsman. In turn, the moral issue may be very different when the killer's virtues are found, not in the private commission of murders, but in war.
To be "resolute" is certainly a virtue; but when this is recommended by Heidegger to his Nazi audience, it might give us pause. At the least, we must become aware that the moral valence of virtues depends on the motive and purposes of their use. I detect no awareness of this in the essays by Iris Murdoch examined here.
Earlier in "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts," Murdoch has said, "Kant abolished God and made man God in his stead" [p.78]. I don't see that this is even remotely true. So what does Murdoch mean by it? She seems to mean a rejection of the moral dignity and autonomy of the self -- the "dignity of rational man": "who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason" [ibid.].
Kant, indeed, seems to concede little, if anything to Christ, but then this is almost the last that Murdoch herself mentions him in her essay. So he doesn't contribute much to Murdoch's epistemology of the good, and the reference serves no purpose except to impeach Kant for something that Murdoch herself cannot sensibly maintain. If Christ provides the paradigm, why don't we hear more about it? The whole episode begins to look dishonest.
Murdoch detects little of Plato in Kant's conception of reason, which is a resource calling us to no less than divine perfection, τέλειος [Matthew 5:48]. Murdoch does not detect, or at least does not clearly acknowledge, the roots of the transcendent in Kant's rationality. In fact, she says:
This is nonsense. No one says that morality is "inscribed in the heavens" in any practical way. What? Do we get a telescope to learn of it? That is absurd. And Murdoch cannot produce a reference to Plato or Aristotle or Kant that finds morality in "the human will."
That is a Niezschean principle; and while Murdoch does want to blame Kant for something of the sort, the argument is unfair, inaccurate, and absurd. Kant is damned merely by drawing on a resource from within, despite the precedent of Socrates, Plato, or even John Locke (with an appeal to "reason" rather than experience) in doing the same. Murdach must dismisses the whole principle of "conscience." She seems to say that the place to find morality is at something like Hyde Park Corner, where perhaps we can intuitively recognize the Messiah.
For all the deficiencies of Kant's conception of reason as the source of moral knowledge, which are considerable, it does not warrant Murdoch's ultimate judgment about it: "In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name in Lucifer" [ibid.]. Lucifer, of course, is in rebellion against God. So Murdoch sees Kantian conscience and autonomy as rebellion against God? That is no less than a smear. Yet Murdoch does not offer the Gospel as the guide to goodness, only the Platonic Good itself. What access does she think we have to it? We never are told, and since for Plato the knowledge is drawn from within, as in Kant, it leaves us with Murdoch creating a self-refutation and a hollow center for her own theory.
We get other comments about Kant in Murdoch's essay "The Idea of Perfection" [pp.1-44]. In another companion essay, "On 'God' and 'Good'" [pp.45-74], it is Heidegger, not "Kant's man," who is compared to Lucifer, much more suitably [p.70]. So this is not as nasty about Kant as what we have just seen:
The principal lesson of his passage is what is evidently Murdoch's total unconcern about any fallacies of heteronomy or positivism. A short tutorial by Socrates would help. How do we know that Jesus Christ represents goodness, ideal or otherwise? How can the example of any denoted person convey the sense that value does not depend on matter-of-fact examples? The paradigm of Christ could be established by faith, but Murdoch herself does not ask us to take such a step. Her essays are not Christian apologetics, and she does not consider how we might choose one religion over another for moral guidance.
Basing our morality on the imitation of paradigmatic and heroic exemplars, "role models," is the approach of Aristotle, who was of a generation "who knew not Socrates" (cf. Exodus 1:8, ὃς οὐκ ᾔδει τὸν Ἰωσήφ), leaving us to ask, as Socrates would, how we know that our exemplar is what he is said to be. Socrates found that those with "the geatest reputation" for wisdom, were actually the most deficient. Murdoch never raises this problem, and we are left to wonder if she was even sensible of it.
While Murdoch is tempted to smear Kant as appealing to an Existentialist will rather than an internal Platonic knowledge of Reason, she does, mercifully, pull back from that. Kant's ideal of reason and pursuit of perfection is conformable to Murdoch's own ideas, and we get some acknowledgement of that. But there is something missing here, and it is not just that Kant's notion of "reason" is deficient and underdetermines the content of knowledge that is necessary for morality. Murdoch warns that turning away from external examples, to which we might owe "blind obedience," leaves us subject to "just as many dangers attaching to the ambiguous idea of finding the ideal in one's own bosom." Well, yes, it got Socrates condemned to death. So she is actually committed to heteronomy and positivism, without being able to pull a metaphysical rabbit of "perfection" out of the hat of some kind of Christ-like role model.
So the problem is not really an "ambiguity" in Kant, it is the blindness of Murdoch to the challenge of the Socratic elenchus, ἔλεγχος. For someone who examines the Good with some kind of Platonic overtone, this is a grave deficiency, especially when Kant seems to be condemned for an epistemology that goes back to Plato and Socrates.
As with her colleagues, Philippa Foot and Elizabeth Anscombe, the call back is more to Aristotle than it is to Plato, with all the dangers and misconceptions attendant to Aristotle's heteronomy and positivism. But I don't see any proper Aristotelians or Thomists ever invoked, like Jacque Maritain (1882-1973) or Mortimer Adler, the "greatest philosopher of the 13th century." So even the references to Aristotle seem half-hearted. Since Anscomble converted to Catholicism, and she references Aristotle and St. Thomas, I don't know why we don't hear from her about Maritain. Did she ignore contemporary Thomists?
Returning to "The Sovereignty of Good," Murdoch's real complaint about Kant seems to be the existence of the self. We are "blinded by self." As we have just seen, Murdoch says,
But unless Christ himself is taken to be a "dazzling object," he is no use as a paradigm. Apart from faith, there is no more justification for that than for consulting the self. But Kant is not consulting the self. It is just that Kantian Reason, like Platonic Recollection, comes from within -- "inward to Reason" is not the same as introspection on the self. The objects are different. Plato was "dazzled" by the Sun of the Good, not of the self.
At the same time, the essence of morality, as Kant understood, was respect for the dignity and rights of others. Kant's formulations of the categorical imperative, including even treating our own self and not just others, as ends and not as means only, revolves around the value of the individual, which would seem to be the work of God, not a rebellion against him. I do question what "respect" would mean for our own autonomy; but then, like Jefferson, I do not think we have duties to ourself. But, it seems, Murdoch wants none of this anyway.
While morality requires consideration for others and a limitation of self-interest, the drift we get from a statement like this in Murdoch is that ultimately the self must not just be limited, it would need to be abolished, were the "veil" to be entirely removed.
Having raised the issue of Christ herself, we might object that this actually is not a Christian moral conception. Matthew 7:12 does not enjoin the abolition of the self:
So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them. There is no veil of "selfish consciousness" there. The desires of the self are a guide in how to treat others. We see exactly the same thing in Confucius, where "using the self as a guide" is the key to morality: 夫仁者, 己欲立, 而立人, "Now the benevolent man, wishing to establish himself, also establishes others" [Analects VI:28]. Is the Confucian "one who is benevolent," 仁者, also "Lucifer"? Probably not. Confucius can even sound like the New Testament: 己所不欲, 勿施於人, "What you don't want yourself, don't do to others" [Analects XV:23/24]. Confucian morality is the balance of self, 己, and others, 人. I see nothing of the sort in Murdoch.
We might get a sense of this with the Chinese term 克己, kèjǐ, "to deny self, bring the self under control, self-less" [cf. Mathews' Chinese Dictionary, Harvard, 1972; under k'ê, 克, character #3320, binome 3 under "(a) to subdue," pp.498-499]. The self "under control" is, of course, rather different from a complete denial of self, or complete selflessness.
A kind of hostility to self spills over into Murdoch's interpretation of Plato, where she sees the fire of the "Cave" in the Republic, as representing the self [p.98]. I get nothing of the sort from Plato. Leaving the Cave, is not leaving the self, it is leaving the visible world. But Murdoch says, "The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion" [p.91]. So the imperfection and limitations of the visible world are all dumped on the self. But the soul, in ascending to heaven and the Forms, in fact carries the self with it.
Murdoch's antipathy cannot be reconciled with the "Myth of the Chariot" that Plato describes in the Phaedrus. The soul is like the driver and the two horses of a chariot, representing the three parts of the soul that we find in the Republic. Between lives, the chariot ascends to the heavens; and the problem turns out to be, not the presence of "self," which is intrinsic, but the horse representing "desire," ἐπιθυμία, which would rather remain in the carnal realm. This is off the radar for Iris Murdoch. I cannot say where she got the notion to condemn the self and consequently to misinterpret both Plato and Kant. It is not in Aristotle or even really in Christianity.
Murdoch wraps up her essay with love, whose Platonic and Christian pedigree is obvious. This carries us up to the Good, or to God, whether in Platonism or Renaissance Christian Neoplatonism. But Murdoch cannot forbear a final attack on the self: "The acceptance of death is an acceptance of our own nothingness which is an automatic spur to our concern with what is not ourselves" [p.100]. But Christ promised eternal life, not death; and, not just Kant, but the Golden Rule and Confucius both enjoin recognition of "what is not ourselves" without some sort of annihilation or extinction of self.
And finally, "The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are" [p.101]. But you cannot apply the Golden Rule without consciousness of "whatever you wish that men would do to you." So Murdoch erases Christian ethics in one sentence. The "humble" man may be ashes before God, but he has a right to expect some moral consideration from other persons.
Mystics have always been sensible that compared to God, we are as nothing. For the Sufis, in Arabic, this was called فَنَاء, fanāʾ, "extinction." However, if this was meant to say that we cease to exist independently of God, this got Sufis in trouble. If God created us, then we exist separately and are not part of God. "Union" with God is heresy, and Sufis were executed for this. I don't see Iris Murdoch expressing an opinion on the nature of mystical transport, at least not here, but the annihilation of self will not work for morality in this form -- Platonic, Christian, Confucian, or otherwise.
So I see two grave defects in Murdoch's treatment. Where Plato starts with beauty, Murdoch starts with morality, and in fact just a part of morality, about virtue. Then, her idea of morality involves an erasure of self, which is actually morally wrong and in this day and age might remind us of totalitarian politics, beginning with Hegel, where individuals are unreal. None of this is good, and it has only the flimsiest relation to Plato's Good, which is ostensibly Murdoch's inspiration.
The most remarkable example I have seen of this in life was on an occasion that I visited the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles for an event of the Marijuana Policy Project. Since there is no parking in the neighborhood of the mansion, parking was at UCLA, with a shuttle bus running to the event. As it happened, waiting for the shuttle bus at UCLA, there was a young woman in high heels, which had enough of a heel that the instep of her feet was indeed all but vertical. I had never seen anyone actually wearing anything so extreme before. She was not a large person, so there wasn't much weight on the shoes. And she seemed to walk quite normally, to my amazement. So apparently, it can be done. I didn't try to ask her how long she could wear shoes like that before experiencing any unpleasant effects.
I was for a long time blissfully unaware of the problems imposed by high heels. In Hawai'i, my wife owned some high heels, but I don't think she ever wore them out. We didn't dress at that level there. Instead, the issue came up when I went to see Roberta Flack (b.1937) at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in 1980. My girlfriend at the time wore strappy sandal high heels, which were very sharp. These were not a problem until we were leaving, and we had to hike a bit up hill to get back to where I was parked. We were with another couple that night. I wasn't that familiar with the area; but driving down Vermont Ave, past where I was born at the Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, the street reached an on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway. I expressed some relief at being off the relatively unfamliar surface streets. The other fellow with us, who was from San Francisco, commented that I sounded like a true Angeleño -- fully comfortable once we were on a freeway. Well, yes.
Thus, in taking the side of authoritarian government, the "anti-Fascists" exposed their actual Fascism. The only real question is the extent to which the "anti-Fascists" are simply shock troops of, say, the Democratic Party. The tolerance of Democrat politicians and prosecutors for them is obvious. Few get arrested for rioting, violence, or assaults, and fewer get charged, let alone convicted. Some Democrat politicians go out of their way to claim that the "anti-Fascists" don't even exist and are a "myth." The further question is then whether, after Democrat politicians unleash criminals on the public, they consciously see anarchists and criminals as the effective militia of the Democrat Party. We may never get an honest confession of this, whose disruptions can be used as the pretext for a dictatorial, one party police state -- the ideal of every politician we have seen making the Pilgrimage to Cuba.
The Post-Modern or "Leftover" Left
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 1
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 2;
Kant's Transcendental RealismIn expressions like "Transcendental Idealism," there are two variables -- "transcendental/empirical" and "idealism/realism." The first variable looks mainly epistemological, the second metaphysical. However, "transcendental" in Kant's terminology is ambiguous. It can have an epistemological meaning, that it refers to a priori knowledge; or it can have a metaphysical meaning, that the "transcendent" is what "transcends" or what is outside of phenomena and experience, i.e. among things in themselves.
Which brings us to "Transcendental Idealism." Where "Empirical Realism" looks, at least, paradoxical, as will be examined in the main text above, "Transcendental Idealism" looks like an actual contradiction, both in its sense and in that both of its terms contradict the terms of "Empirical Realism." Thus, we may be given to understand that all reality that is external to phenomena, experience, and perception ("transcendental") only exists within consciousness, experience, and perception ("idealism"). Come again? I think you just said that external reality only exists internally. How does that work?
οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει.
neither speaks nor conceals but gives a sign.
Physical things become actually different when present in consciousness. That's what Einstein didn't like, but it is what makes a Kantian Quantum Mechanics appealing. So we don't really want a full Cartesian "Transcendental Realism."
πραγμάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεπομένων.
rerum argumentum non parentum.
and the evidence of things not seen."You've got to get the ordinary man into the state in which he says 'Sadism' automatically when he hears the word Punishment... what had hampered every English police force up to date was percisely the idea of deserved punishment. For desert was always finite; you could do so much to the criminal and no more. Remedial treatment, on the other hand, need have no fixed limit; it could go on till it had effected a cure, and those who were carrying it out would decide when that was. And if cure were humane and desirable, how much more prevention?"
retribution, and it must be proportional to the offense. "An eye for an eye" may be harsh, but it is less harsh, in a sense, than life in prison for the possession of a "controlled substance" -- which sometimes has been the effect of drug laws.
, and Nirvāṇa, . That involves an Antinomy a bit more like the cosmological one. And the Buddhist answer, of course, may go well beyond a simple Antinomy, where the two are subject to the Four-Fold Negation.
per fidem enim ambulamus et non per speciem.
For we walk by faith, not by sight.
since no religion can be conceived of which involves no belief in a future life, Judaism, which, when taken in its purity is seen to lack this belief, is not a religious faith at all. [Religion With the Limits of Reason Alone, translated by Heodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, 1934, Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p.191]
Pure Land Buddhism, where the Vow of the Buddha Amitābha snatches the sinner away from the Hells for rebirth in the Pure Land. Unlike Christianity, that is not the end of the matter. One must still work out one's Salvation, which may take a long time, but certainly will not take forever. The goal, which all senient beings will reach, is Enlightenment and Buddhahood. In those terms, Kant's idea that moral perfection takes eternity is rejected. A Buddha achieves it.
(कर्म), takes care of that itself. And this would have interested Kant, because karma is simply said to mean, particularly in Buddhism, no more than causality. You reap what you sow. What goes around, comes around.
(धर्म). The laws of physics cannot be disobeyed; but the laws of morality can. At the same time, conformity or violations of morality result in recompense, the reward or punishment for good or evil, which follows in a law-like way from the action. You can choose to do wrong, but you cannot choose to avoid the karmic consequences.
mā karmaphalahetur bhūr mā te sango 'stv akarmaṇi,
Work not for a reward; but never cease to do thy work.
[Penguin Books, 1962, p.52]
(अद्वैतवेदान्त), where we find "Qualified" and "Unqualified" varieties of doctrine. We certainly have an "Unqualified" Transcendental Realism in Descartes. It is the only way that things exist. A Kantian Transcendental Realism, however, stands with many qualifications. Transcendently Real things are not objects of experience, and so our relationship to them is mediated by something besides perception and science. Also, they are subject to Antinomies, which can only be resolved, if at all, by their interaction with morality, faith, and meaning, which derive from our internal resources.
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 3
, i.e. "stable" or "enduring." This concerned them both morally, with fortunes or institutions that were durable (as in the literature of moral instruction), and eschatologically, with personal survival. So we also get the verb, 
, "be stable, enduring," and the causative, 
, "make permanent." Each of these words features the "djed pillar" ideogram, which is used as a talisman of survival. A copy in the round is typically placed in one wall of the burial chamber of a tomb -- where one was found in Tutankhamon's tomb. Of course, if permanence goes far enough, you achieve "eternity," 
, which is the goal of the Egyptian afterlife. Yet, as we know, the truth of human and even cosmic existence is that very little is truly durable. So the Egyptians had a concept of something that is contradicted by experience. As such, it can only be derived from the unseen, not the seen, as at 2 Corinthians 4:18.
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 4
The boundary between "determinism" and "randomness" is the subject of many questions. We have seen Roger Penrose affirm that in quantum mechanics there is a dualism between the determinism of the wave function, described by Schrödinger's Equation, and the randomness that results from the collapse of the wave function into discrete particles, with the random elements particularly associated with Werner Heisenberg and his Uncertainty Principle.
In Kantian terms, we simply must divide phenomena into those observed and those unobserved. There is necessarily a certain asymmetry to this, far beyond what could be shown in the diagram, because I am presently observing very little, more with windows and daylight, in comparison to the rest of the universe, the vast majority of which I can never observe, even if I wanted to. No one even observed mountains on the Moon, until Galileo turned his telescope there. Were there no mountains before Galileo, since such "unobserved" things could "have no properties whatsoever"? A few years ago a French intellectual, a "deconstructionist," denied that Ramesses II could have suffered from the diseases recently identified in his body, because these were not discovered until the 19th century. This was properly taken as the reductio ad absurdum of such epistemology -- not to mention that French intellectuals are often fools.
All of that is part of "observation." Does this then throw us right back to "Idealism" and Hegel? Not necessarily. For that we would need to eliminate external existence and things-in-themselves, which is not what this does. It does, however, give to internal existence, and to consciousness, an ontological status beyond our individual existence and beyond what could be represented by, for instance, the Cartesian soul. Internal existence is part of things-in-themselves just as much as is external existence. Without it, N. David Mermin would be correct, and "unobserved things have no properties whatsoever."
responsible for perception and will? The traditional metaphysician, and even Descartes, might have a ready answer. The soul.
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 5
according to the order of divine justice
and although satisfactory punishment, absolutely speaking, is against the will
but involuntary in a certain respect
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 6
As a moderator for the imaginary conversation between Schiaparelli and Prada, the curators turned to another provocative Italian -- Umberto Eco. In the last chapters of On Ugliness, his lavishly illustrated iconography of the repulsiave, the obscene, and the bizarre, Eco suggests how the worship of beauty, like any established religion that turns reactionary, is vulnerable to attack by freethinking apostates. Until the twentieth century, physical monstrosity was an almost universal metaphor for sin, disease, and corruption, greed, inferiority, and, in the features of a witch, the primal fear of female carnality. But when the modernist avant-garde revolted at the pieties of academic art, and the bougeois complacency that it flattered, it embraced what Ezra Pound called "the cult of ugliness." (It was also the cult of dissonance, as in Stravinsky's music, and of fragmention, as in Picasso's Cubist portraits of his lovely muses in which he smashed their features into shards.) "There is no more beauty," Marinetti exulted in The Founding Manifesto of Futurism. "No work without angressive character can be a masterpiece."
His full statement was "Except in struggle, there is no more beauty" [Manifesto del Futurismo, 1909]. So Marinetti did not endorse the ugly in general, only requiring that beauty be the result of the violence and mechanization valorized by "Futurism." Perhaps this amounts to the same thing.
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 7
...is best known for his apocalyptic panoramas of climate change, pollution, and species extinctions. In one of the best-known works, "Manifest Destiny" (2004), the ocean has submerged the Brooklyn waterfront, and the arches of the Brooklyn Bridge crumble before our eyes.
"These animals have been minding their own business," Mr. Rockman says. Humans "disrupted their habitat... or wanted to eat them."
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 8;
Iris Murdoch's "The Sovereignty of Good"
Yet from Murdoch we get a strong sense that she does mean that moral virtue "plainly shines" from art.
"But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the fortune to look upon beauty itself [αὐτὸ τὸ καλόν] entire, pure and unalloyed, not infected with the flesh [σαρκές] and skin [χρωμάτες] of humanity, and ever so much more of mortal nonsense [φλυαρία]? But what if he could behold the divine beauty itself [αὐτὸ τὸ θεῖον καλόν], in its unique form? Do you call it a pitiful life [φαῦλος βίος] for a man to lead -- looking that way, observing that vision by the proper means, and having it ever with him? Do but consider," [Diotima] said, "that there only will it befall him, as he sees the beautiful through that which makes it visible, to breed not illusions [εἴδωλα] but true examples of virtue [ἀρετή], since his contact is not with illusion but with truth. So when he has begotten a true virtue and has reared it up he is destined to win divine friendship [θεοφιλής]; he, above all men, is immortal [ἀθάνατος]."
The existentialist-behaviourist view could give no satisfactory account of art: it was seen as quasi-play activity, gratuitous, 'for its own sake' (the familiar Kantian-Bloomsbury slogan), a sort of by-product of our failure to be entirely rational. [p.40]
Such a view of art is of course intolerable. In one of those important movements of return from philosophical theory to simple things which we are certain of, we must come back to what we know about great art and about the moral insight which it contains and the moral achievement which it represents. [ibid.]
Goodness and beauty are not to be contrasted, but are largely part of the same structure. [ibid.]
Plato, who tells us that beauty is the only spiritual things which we love immediately by nature, treats the beautiful as an introductory section of the good. So that aesthetic situations are not so much analogies of morals as cases of morals. [ibid.]
Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature: something which is easy to name but very hard to achieve. [ibid.]
But does this mean that when Murdoch encounters someone on the street claiming to be the Messiah, perhaps holding a sign, she will just do what he says? Or does she require, say, a miracle, for verification? But don't false prophets do some miracles also? Doesn't Jesus warn about that? And doesn't St. Thomas judge moral goodness by rational standards, just like Kant? Shouldn't Murdoch herself "turn away" from Christ and ask, "How do I know this man is good?" Maybe his sign proves it.
The centre of this type of post-Kantian moral philosophy is the notion of the will as the creator of value. Values which were previously in some sense inscribed in the heavens and guaranteed by God collapse into the human will. There is no transcendent reality. [ibid.]
We might consider in this context the ambiguity of Kant's position in the Grundlegung, where he tells us that when confronted with the person of Christ we must turn back to the pattern of rationality in our own bosoms and decide whether or not we approve of the man we see. Kant is often claimed as a backer of the existentialist view: and these words may readily be taken to advocate that return to self, that concern with the purity of the solitary will, which is favoured by all brands of existentialism. Here I stand alone, in total responsiblity and freedom [like Socrates on trial?], and can only properly and responsibly do what is intelligible to me, what I can do with a clear intention. But it must be remembered that Kant was a 'metaphysical naturalist' and not an existentalist. Reason itself is for him an ideal limit: indeed his term 'Idea of Reason' expresses precisely that endless aspiration to perfection which is characteristic of moral activity. His is not the 'achieved' or 'given' reason which belongs with 'ordinary language' and convention, nor is his man on the other hand totally unguided and alone. There exists a moral reality, a real though infinitely distant standard: the difficulties of understanding and imitating remain. And in a way it is perhaps a matter of tactics and temperament whether we should look at Christ or at Reason. Kant was especially impressed by the dangers of blind obedience to a person or an institution. But there are (as the history of existentialism shows) just as many dangers attaching to the ambiguous idea of finding the ideal in one's own bosom. The argument for looking outward at Christ and not inward at Reason is that self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may be nothing else. But as I say, so long as the gaze is directed upon the ideal the exact formulation will be a matter of history and tactics in a sense which is not rigidly determined by religous dogma, and understanding of the ideal will be partial in any case. Where virtue is concerned we often apprehend more than we clearly understand and grow by looking. [pp.29-30]
The argument for looking outward at Christ and not inward at Reason is that self is such a dazzling object that if one looks there one may be nothing else.
'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful. [p.91]
Πάντα οὖν ὅσα ἐὰν θέλητε ἵνα ποιῶσιν ὑμῖν οἱ ἄνθρωποι,
οὕτος καὶ ὑμεῖς ποιεῖτε αὐτοῖς·
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 9
The high heeled shoe we see here might be thought, not only to impose pain and deformity on its wearer, but also present challenges to simply walking. The heel is raised so high that the instep is all but vertical, which means a woman must walk as though on her toes. A large stride might even break off the heel, which would also sink into many kinds of surfaces, let alone the grates that, for instance, one finds on sidewalks in New York City, which provide ventilaton for the subway tunnels -- where the breeze from a passing train famously blew up the dress of Marilyn Monroe (initially shot in New York but then reshot on a sound stage in Hollywood).
I didn't meet Hugh Hefner (1926-2017), and they didn't even let us in the house. But the back yard was large, and I got to see the famous pool and grotto.
This was not easy for her, and she took off her shoes. This was news to me.
A Deuteronomy of Kant-Friesian Metaphysics, Note 10
Although their character had previously been evident, the so-called "anti-Fascists" more blatantly 
revealed their true character when they organized an attack on people in Los Angeles who were demonstrating against Covid vaccine mandates. Thus, radicals who were supposedly anarchists, came out to support a dictatorial government against people who did not want to be forced by the government to take an experimental vaccine, 
whose ineffectiveness and side effects were already becoming evident.
As I said, this was already evident from their previous behavior, whose violence and targets had already told their own tale. It is also evident in their iconography, where the red flag of Communism is usually more prominent than the black flag of Anarchy. Indeed, before the Revolution, the two are complementary; and the sensible Anarchist knows that after the Revolution, true Anarchists are the first to be exterminated by triumphant Communists. Thus, the Anarchism of the "anti-Fascists" is a pose and a deception, except for the complete fools.
