The trouble

It is easy to see the trouble one has reading Kant for the first time when the following passage is regarded as constituting an introduction,

"Kant holds that we do not know our noumenal selves by any act of rational intuition (light of nature). For Kant, pure apperception is an act of spontaneity and as such is different from sensibility, which is a passive receptivity for sensible intuitions. The self for Kant becomes aware of itself and gains knowledge of itself only by bringing to self-consciousness (through a transcendental act of synthesis) the manifold intuitions provided by sensibility. Accordingly, the self knows itself only as an appearance (phenomenon)."

This is an introduction to the Prolegomena, which makes it an introduction to an introduction, and yet the writer still seems unaware that he is using at least nine words in one paragraph in a specialized manner.

A critical journey

Now for my New Year's resolution: I am going to read the Critique of Pure Reason.

(Which translation? A Kant scholar told me, "Kemp Smith all the way.")

For help I have enlisted Gardner's Routledge guide.

I will post once per chapter.

Notice: the following text and associated context are approximations

Reader,

The following blog entry is notice that the blog you are reading is at best an approximation to the truth.

Therefore the conditions of this blog impose on readers the usual antideconstructivist responsibilities. 

The Wartburg Convention Protocols for the Reception of Persuasive Text is binding on readers within this jurisdiction. It requires that any reader aware that he is receiving an approximation to the truth in textual format participate in the construction of the blog's thought in the three aspects:

1. ACCURACY. When reading, keep in mind this blog's limiting nature as an approximation. Should you encounter a word that is a shade of meaning off, please replace the word mentally with one that is more accurate, and continue reading. The mental replacement will enhance your ability to learn.
2. SPIRIT. Read the blog for its spirit and not for its literal meaning. If a blog entry contains a statement that seems out of spirit with the rest of the text, assume the author is of one mind and mentally modify the color of the statement to fit. Statements that are unnecessary or peripheral to the blog's spirit should be regarded as not having been written.
3. SUFFICIENT REASON. Moreover, should the blog in the course of its reasoning use an assumption that is insufficient to the conclusion, replace the assumption with the weakest common refinement assumption (the "meet" assumption) that is still sufficient to the conclusion. The reader is responsible for assuming the text is essentially correct. Again, exercise of the antideconstructivist responsibilities will maximize the profit that can be gained from a text.

The Wartburg protocols can in certain cases result in much or even all of the blog's verbiage being replaced in the mind with different language in order to preserve its self-consistency or to preserve the assumption that the author is of one integrated mind and personality. It is a heavy cost to pay, but failure to apply the Wartburg protocols results in literalism, deconstruction and hence a loss of meaning.

As should be apparent, the reader must identify the meaning and spirit of the blog's conclusions before performing any of the necessary mental replacements. Otherwise the reader cannot identify which replacements to make. The Wartburg conventions acknowledge that any persuasive text underdetermines which conclusion it advocates in the universe of conclusions, so context must be used to narrow down the list of possible conclusions that the blog might be advocating.

However, no amount of context is sufficient to identify the meaning of any text. Lacking other tools the reader must make recourse to what he already knows to be true to the text in order to correct errors it makes due to its nature as an approximation.

Because the reader must participate in the construction of both text and context, before reading anything the reader must first choose what every text concludes.

No reader may lawfully receive a persuasive text in this jurisdiction until he has chosen what he desires to be true and to be advocated by the text.

(While this blog is in general an approximation to the truth, this blog entry is not to be regarded as an approximation and may safely be taken literally.)

A reflection on Tertullian

So many people have learned so much from Tertullian, even despite his eventual capitulation to an early heresy. So many people also regard him as the foremost representative of the irrational and the fideist in Christianity. It is easy to see him in bad light, but suppose we give him the benefit of the doubt, just for a moment.

When a great writer such as Tertullian writes something patently absurd, I can think of just two explanations:

1: The "great" thinker is not so great.
2: The great thinker is exploiting paradox or hyperbole for rhetorical purposes.

Consider that Tertullian may be doing something profound with language.

We can certainly say he did not try to preserve an absolute philosophic consistency, sentence by sentence, as if he were practicing mathematics. Suppose furthermore that Tertullian wrote as he pleased, always in the moment, trading away a literal consistency with his past words for something he valued more: the dramatic potential of exaggeration. Nietzsche would agree. And as Adam Smith wrote, if a bow is bent one way it is necessary to bend it too much in the opposite way in order to make it straight. Could this be what Tertullian is doing?

The allegation that he is a fideist originates in two things. First, there is Tertullian's tendency to speak against the pretensions of the philosophers. For example, he excoriates Greek philosophy. Yet he quotes Aristotle often and relies on Aristotelian distinctions. Tertullian was well-read and uses rational argumentation despite his stated disavowal of Greek rationalism. What is going on here? Perhaps it is that someone who understands Greek philosophy very deeply can also understand its limitations. Or, if you are not willing to give up philosophy, consider this: Even if the flight of the intellect is unlimited, as Platonists believe, one may still excoriate Greek philosophy for how commonly it is abused. Greek philosophers were fond of proposing grand and rather silly systems—all is earth, all is water, all is change, etc. Given how well read and how indebted to philosophy Tertullian was, he was aware of these abuses.

Second the claim he is a fideist also originates from his quotation that Christianity "is to be believed because it is absurd." I find the phrase interesting to contemplate because of how absurd it is itself! It proposes we are to believe things that are absurd, that is, unbelievable. This phrase is itself absurd. So there is no contradiction in taking its advice! But due to its self-consistency, could it also be reasonable? Take as an assumption... this is a big one. But take as an assumption that a mind left to its own devices, without the light of the divine Logos, will fall inevitably into despair and madness. Perhaps it is a big assumption but it has precedence, for it is what Nietzsche predicts. Since the mind left by itself will ultimately produce nothing good, in order to identify what is good we ought therefore to believe the opposite of what it thinks of—namely what is absurd! I think Tertullian is providing us a more interesting "food for thought" than some of our contemporary theologians. If you read him thusly, namely if you see him as someone who was well-educated in philosophy, but someone who has lost faith in it and therefore tests its limits at the margins of language, you might see him here not as claiming we should believe what is absurd but rather trying to awaken us from our dogmatic rational slumber through irony and overstatement.

Superfluity in a bookstore

I have been in D.C. for two weeks visiting G and using the change in scenery to motivate myself to write this dissertation. G lives near the Dupont Circle so in between the hours spent checking equations I have wandered through its many used book stores.

Today I found myself looking at The Undercover Economist and thinking about buying it, since it would help me motivate the eventual Econ 101 I want to teach... and then looking at Amartya Sen's popular work on development, since he's someone I "should have read," and thinking I couldn't read them both in the next month since I would be writing a thesis. In fact, the thought occurred, I probably couldn't read one shelf of the books before me in the next year, or a case of them in the next ten years. In bookstore wanderings last week I developed an ambition to read Edith Hamilton's two books on the Greeks and the Romans. Realistically I probably won't have the time for those either, or if I make the time, it will be at the price of something else important. I can't read all these books. Why do I want to? And moreover what good would it do?

People who do mental, primarily abstract work ("cognition") for a living tend by nature to enjoy collecting the fine ideas for sale at a bookstore. We experience pleasure in holding an idea in the mind and peering at it, turning it around, seeing how the light one idea provides might glint off another idea, appreciating their relations, even their contradictions. Uncomfortably the pleasure does not differ too greatly from that of a satisfied pirate, snug in his secret treasure hall and sieving diamonds through his hands. Mental pleasure is pleasure—a higher one but a pleasure nonetheless. All at once I felt Sartre's nausea for himself—watch as I take pleasure in the literary aspects even of my own pain. It's never ending.

I cast around for a justification. (It must be in one of these books.) For a while I had justified myself saying I read books for the same reason an athlete runs laps. The mental workout mirrors a physical workout; I am ready to "contribute more mental work." But Edith Wharton is not going to make me a better economist, and I am not employed as a humanist. Perhaps some of it will make me a better person, more mindful, more prayerful even—but merely reading St. John of the Cross won't make me a better Christian. I've read Christian mysticism enough to get the idea; what more I have read has been for the pleasure of understanding it more fully. And I struggle to pray ten minutes. Further reading about the interior castle will not make me explore it.

Something else not a justification came to me. Sometimes in these moments you remember something someone once said to you, or something you once read and never quite understood or even had rejected. I recalled the Enneagram type 5 (which I suppose would have to be my type). The enneagram lists under the type 5 attributes my "characteristic" sin: greed. Greed? How could type 5, the thinker, one born with no envy for these... I don't even know, that's how refined I am... these fine cars and chocolates and jewels and money bags, and who is losing even a desire for technology, how could I possibly be characterized by greed? Now it makes sense. It is a greed not for things but for thoughts. Already I have quite a book collection; G talks about reserving a room in our house for a library.

Franny said it best reflecting on her school days:

"I got the idea in my head—and I could not get it out—that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth [Matt. 6:19] and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money or property or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping—and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge—when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake anyway—is the worst of all. [The highest resembles the lowest.] The least excusable certainly. I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"

When we die our charming divine philosophy, "not harsh and crabbed as some fools suppose, but musical as is Apollo's lute, and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets," will die with us.

It is hard to adopt and to keep a regime of prayer, especially when there are so many juicy ideas to pick and to consume.

Maximizing freedom for private appetites

George Will on conservatism and libertarianism—and this, in 1981:

Many conservatives  insist that America's great problem is just that government is so strong it is stifling freedom. These people call themselves "libertarian conservatives"—a label a bit like "promiscuous celibates." Real conservatism requires strong government.

The overriding aim of liberalism, properly understood, is the expansion of liberty. (American "liberals" long since became what Europeans call "social democrats," preoccupied with equality.) Conservatism, properly understood, rejects the idea of a single overriding aim.

Real conservatism tries to balance many competing values. Striking the proper balance often requires limits on liberty, and always requires resistance to libertarianism (the doctrine of maximizing freedom for private appetites) because libertarianism is a recipe for the dissolution of public authority, social and religious traditions, and other restraints needed to prevent license from replacing durable, disciplined liberty.

The truly conservative critique of contemporary American society is that there is too much freedom—for abortionists, pornographers, businessmen trading with the Soviet Union [Iran?], young men exempt from conscription, to cite just four examples. ...

Professor James Q. Wilson of Harvard wonders, reasonably, how conservatives can reconcile their idea that government should do less with the desire for the nation to play a more assertive role internationally, a role that may require, in addition to more weapons, more government activism in the management of international trade.

On forensic/juridical theories of the atonement

Here is Timothy Ware:

In the words of an Orthodox Christmas hymn, `Sharing wholly in our poverty, thou hast made divine our earthly nature through thy union with it and participation in it.' Christ shares in our death, and we share in his life; he `empties ourself' and we are `exalted'.

As Christ said at the Last Supper, `The glory which thou hast given to me I have given to them, that they may be one, as we are one: I in them and thou in me, may they be perfectly united into one'. By assuming our humanity, Christ who is Son of God by nature has made us sons of God by grace. In him we are `adopted' by God the Father, becoming sons-in-the-Son.

This particular notion of salvation as sharing implies two things in particular about the Incarnation. First, it implies that Christ took not only a human body like ours, but also a human spirit, mind and soul like ours. If Christ did not have a human mind, then this would fatally undermine the second principle of salvation, that divine salvation must reach the point of human need. The importance of this principle was re-emphasized during the second half of the fourth century, when Apollinarius advanced the theory — for which he was quickly condemned —that at the Incarnation Christ took only a human body, but no human intellect or rational soul. To this St. Gregory the Theologian replied, `The unassumed is unhealed'. Christ, that is to say, saves us by becoming what we are; he heals us by taking our broken humanity into himself, by `assuming' it as his own, by entering into our human experience and by knowing it from the inside, by being himself one of us. Had his sharing of our humanity been in some way incomplete, then man's salvation would be likewise incomplete. If we believe that Christ has brought us a total salvation, then it follows that he has assumed everything.

Secondly, this notion of salvation as sharing implies — although many have been reluctant to say this openly — that Christ assumed not just unfallen but fallen human nature. As the Epistle to the Hebrews insists (and in all the NT there is no Christological text more important): `We do not have a high priest who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but he was in all points tempted exactly as we are, yet without sinning' (4:15). Christ lives out his life on earth under the conditions of the fall. He is not himself a sinful person, but in his solidarity with fallen man he accepts to the full the consequences of Adam's sin.

St. Paul goes so far as to write, `God has made him who knew no sin to be sin for our sake'. We are not to think here solely in terms of some juridical transaction, whereby Christ, himself guiltless, somehow has out guilt `imputed' to him in an exterior manner. Much more is involved than this. Christ saves us by experiencing from within, as one of us, all that we suffer inwardly.