Long Time No Blog

I've been preparing for Christmas, and working such hours and at such a pace that I am sure a nervous breakdown would be in the offing, were I not about to take two months' off to finish my book.

All the things I would have commented, and to which I would have linked, are by now passé. Those about which I am still thinking are nowhere near digested, and so I pass on commenting them for now.

I would say one thing, however, about Stanley Cavell's new book, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. The book may be as important asThe Claim of Reason. The essay on Astaire’s assertion of (the right to) praise merits and will continue to merit the close attention and critical energies of professors in every human discipline, perhaps most especially those who work in registers not often associated with the humanities, these days.

I will, one day soon, produce the list of highest praise: the elenchus of books I would see on a list of required freshman university at every institution of higher learning in the United States.
A good deal of Cavell’s work would find itself on such a list. This new book is making a bid, but there is a resistance (whether in the text, or in myself, or both, I cannot tell as yet, the Cavell himself would only approve of my acknowledging the presence of the tension without essaying further to establish its source or direction, I think) I have not encountered since first reading Cavell, and then I never so much overcame it as I did overcome my fear of it, to the extent that I have.

I Figured Out Titling

Only took a month. Has anyone read Ed Oakes and Alyssa Pitstick on Balthasar over at FT?

I am not terribly interested in beginning with a major, substantive post. I have spent the past hour or so catching up on my blog reading. I was and am intrigued by some of the remarks R.R. Reno made regarding the lack of spiritual seriousness in First Things. My initial reaction is to say that the "crisis of confidence" diagnosis is not a very good one. It may be that the substance of his diagnosis is good, and I am distracted by the unfortunate terminology. Otherwise, I might be missing the interpretation and expansion of our understanding of a crisis of confidence. Sloth has always struck me as a main reason for spiritual frivol: especially systematic spiritual frivol.

Is This How A Title Gets Made?

Just wondering...

How's this?

Still not much time…


Still not much time for blogging. For now, just a question: what is the difference between U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan’s comments of this weekend to the effect that Iraq was better with Saddam Hussein in power, on the one hand, and some Italians’ insistence that quando c’era il duce queste cose non succedevano (These things didn’t happen where there was the duce –Mussolini- which means, idiomatically, things were better with a dictator.)? Do the Shi’ite Muslims and the ethnic Kurds agree?

The Mega-Post:


THe mega-post on Islam and civil law, etc., did not materialize, as you will have noted by now. It is already become a much bigger project than I at first anticipated, and much too big to pursue for the moment. In the meantime, I suggest The Middle East by Bernard Lewis, especially the cross-section on religion and law. It is brief, accurate, and introductory without being either overly simplistic. As always, caveat lector verba romana, that is, the reader is reminded to maintain the proper critical awareness of the use of Western nomenclature and terminology to explain Islamic institutions.

Thoughts on first week of Advent forthcoming

Apoligies for lengthy absence. I am preparing a mega-post for the week-end, dealing with the following:

1. Muslims' understanding of Mary

2. Why it is difficult to speak of "Muslim" understanding of Mary

3. Muslim Law

4. Why Muslim Law and Civil Law are basically incompatible (basically is a scientifically precise word here)

I will also have thoughts regarding the Pope in Byzantium, especially this http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1561120,00.html article.

Happy Reading, and we'll see you soon.

Cheers.

Response to APERITUS:

The verb, "to English" is not of this author's coinage, neither is it current coin. It means, "to render in the tongue of the Angles." As for thaumazein, it is best Englished with, "to stupefy" and functions as a subtantive infinitive, so that it sands to say, "stupor," and "wonder," at the same time.

More soon.

Just a line to let everyone know that all is well and that I will return very shortly to regular blogging. Orate pro pontefice.

Just a line to let everyone know that all is well and that I will return very shortly to regular blogging. Orate pro pontefice.

I realize I should have posted this yesterday, as a part of the post on Cavell, Emerson, St. Paul and life in (the conceptual space called) America.

This is from Page 261 of Cities of Words, at the end of the essay on Ibsen's contribution to the register of what Cavell calls Emersonian moral perfectionism (about which a note at bottom):

begin quote

When Nora says she realyy doesn't know, that it's hard to say (a wonderful expression) [and I invite you all to remember that "wonder" Englishes thaumazein, so that Cavell is also making a statement about what it is that philosophy does, i.e. the hard thing, saying that which is hard to say.], whether she has some moral sense, she is not expressing an uncertaintly about some fact about herself but an ignorance of her relation to her experience. The inability to judge amounts to the lack of that possession of speech which Aristotle declares fits one for membership in a polis, makes one able to participate in a Rawlsian conversation of justice.

Let's move to a conclusion by noting that [Ibsen's play, A Doll's House] closes, after all, in a religious register, upon the image or invocation of a miracle, indeed of a greatest miracle, one produced by this woman's sense of having lived a life of violation, of having accepted the denial of her existence as a human being, the realization of which makes her want, as she cries out near the end of the play, "to tear herself to little pieces" (perhaps as if to show the world, which she cannot tear to pieces, what she thinks of its worth). SHe describes the miracle as creating between her and Torvald a genuine marriage, namely a change which would be redemption.

There is a change associated with salvation in the Christian Bible, 1 Corinthians 15 (a portion of which Emerson quotes in "Self-Reliance"): "Behold! I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be, in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For the corruptible must put on incorruption and the mortal must put on immortality." Linking this to the change called marriage puts marriage (whatever that will be recognized to be) under mortal, or say religious, pressure in the modern world, namely to achieve incorruptible union in a world none of whose corruptible institutions can validate the fact of genuine marriage, not church or state or family or allowed sexuality. The uncanniness of the fit between Paul's Letter to the COrinthians and the end of Ibsen's A Doll's House is unlaughably comic, or dreamlike, when you consider that the twinkling of an eye in which Nora's change comes about occurs at bedtime, when, as Torvald abruptly discovers, she is not, and he is, preparing to go to bed ("We shall not all sleep"). But perhaps it is no more comic or dreamlike than Ibsen's use of the image of changing clothes as a modern parable for being changed.

Some extreme statement is being suggested here about the secularization of modern life, about the relocating or transforming of what is important or interesting to human life, as turning our attention from celestial to terrestrial things, or rather suggesting that their laws are not different.

end quotation

About moral perfectionism, I ought to say that I understand Cavell to mean a perfect committment to the good life, where perfect means "thoroughgoing" in its acception of "absolute" or "unstinted". Emersonian moral perfectionism is lived, so far as possible, in and through the constant and unflinching consideration of the questions: what does the good require of me? This question can manifest itself in many guises. One of the most important is the following acception: given that a situation x requires me to choose between the preservation of the current state of my relation to the good (the beautiful and the true), against the incursions of a potentially deleterious element, on the one hand, and on the other the chance to move into a further, better, relation to the good (the beautiful and the true) by stepping out of myself, and therefore risking the loss of myself (my undoing, which is the opposite of perfection), which (if either or any at all) path does my committment to the good life require me to take? To pull the trigger? To say, "I do."? To turn the other cheek? To come to a full stop? To cross against the light? To play poker in the garage? To have a drink? To take a nap, a walk, a coffee or a movie, and alone, or in company, and if in company, in which company?

I think here of Robert Frost's reflection in "Road Less Travelled", among the myriad pertinent instances of what I will call Cavellian facets of perfectionism. In that poem, Frost says "I took the road less travelled-by / And that has made all the difference." I understand the poet here to be reminding us that we can only know the difference our choices have made, and never the difference they will make. The poet, in other words, is admonishing us against our basing our decisions on something that is very like an intention, and even more like a belief (which on this reading can be nothing more than -?an expression of?- a desire). Does this place us outside the radius of prudence? I think not. I have the sense that Cavellian perfectionism, over and against Emersonian perfectionism, would be (going) after virtue in the way of Augustine, i.e. recognizing the need for virtue in our limitations and the possibility of virtue in our recognition of our need-ful-ness. Is the choice to go down the orad less travelled a prudent one? The poet is saying that responses like, "no, because there are like to be lions and tigers and bears," or, "Yes, since the chances for character-building adventure are greater," are unhelpful to our efforts to determine moral status, whether that of the act or that of the agent.

It is Saturday AM in Rome. The iron is dead and the sky is threatening. I came across a passage from Stanley Cavell's Cities of Words, in which Cavell discovers that Henrik Ibsen has “secularized” the transformation presaged inPaul's 1st Letter to the Corinthians (15:51-53). I find this claim to dramatic secularization extremely close to Eric Voegelin’s lcaim that modernity is essentially a project dedicated to the immanentization of the eschaton. Indeed, Cavell could have found just another instance of the modern project in Ibsen.

There is, however, more to Cavell’s claim. Cavell notes that Emerson (who is responsible for discovering what counts for Cavell as philosophy in America) cites from the same passage. Cavell in turn interprets Emerson’s use of the scriptural passage, not so much as a secularization, but rather as the locus of Emerson’s recognition that another, a prior transformation needs to take place. If the mortal needs to put on immortality in St. Paul, then those who have forgotten their mortality must re-acquire (cognizance of) their mortality before they can truly pass into immortality.

The divinization of man and all creation in St. Paul, in other words, must be preceeded by a re-discovery of humanity. I point out, and do not at this point ask you to come with me, but I say that I see here at least the possibility that Emerson has discovered in America the need for responding to the Delphic command: γνώσε σεαυτόν, that is, “know that you are a man,” which must mean, “know that you shall someday die.” To paraphrase (and not by much, either) St. Augustine, we are mortalitatem circumferentes, i.e. we are carrying our death around with us.

Recognition of this fact is one of the conditions that Augustine puts on our ability rightly to sing the praise of God.

All of this would make America the place in which philosophy and true religion are constantly being dis-covered.

Just a line to say I'm still here, and very busy. Love to all.

Just a quick thought relating to Jimmy Akin's analysis (link takes you to Jimmy Akin's Blog. For pertinent post see archives for August, Aug. 1) of a question regarding the morality of gambling in a state where games of hazard are prohibited:

While I am in general substantive agreement with Akin’s analysis, I wonder whether the moral center of the question as it has been raised does not lie elsewhere.

Supposing the in-house poker game to be illegal, would not the general requirement that we obey the law, ceteris paribus inform our consideration of the morality of the question?

In other words: capricious disobedience of the law in some cases is at least as dangerous to civil society as blind and uncritical adherence thereto in all cases.

While the latter tends to stem from cowardice, the former more often stems from a relatively low opinion of authority (the authoritative expressions of society's organs for the maintenance of order and the protection/promotion of the common good are relatively less important than, say, my desire to do what I will, when I will, in the manner I will). Neither benefits ordered liberty.

So, in a place where legitimate authority has passed a law (or ordinance) prohibiting a certain activity (provided the activity is not necessary to the health of individuals or groups, or directly bearing on the health of civil society), were it not better simply to obey the law (with pertinent exceptions, e.g. in cases where doing so would directly result in injury or death to an innocent)?

Regardless of the other possible considerations, would not obedience be the act most conducive to fostering a habit of thinking first of the common good, as well as conducive to the development of the critical sense of justice that is indispensable to citizenship in free society?

At rock bottom, is not obedience to the gambling law a simple matter of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?

Some Random Thoughts:


Today is the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time and hebdomada IV psalterii. That is not so much a thought as a fact. It’s just that I was thinking about it. The Antiphon to the Magnificat is: Vidua illa pauper de penuria sua omnia, quae habuit, misit, totum victum suum.

The widow’s mite is more easily admired than imitated.

On praying the Liturgy of the Hours: Morning and Evening Prayer (Lauds and Vespers) require a total of 12 minutes out of each day. Hora Media requires maybe 5 minutes. Most of us can spare that kind of time at least a couple of times per week. I’m just saying.

Just very briefly, and with the promise of more fulsome reflections: There is an important sense in which the Regensburg Manifesto is all about Islam, or rather, the relation of Islam to the West. It was the influence of Islamic thinkers that led to Scotus (and Okham). The pseudo-plausibility of a rejection of analogy begins with the influx of Islamic thought into the Western intellectual milieu.

A brief note to erstwhile critics of the “opportunity” of Pope Benedict’s remarks: if you say that Pope Benedict ought not address remarks in a pointed way to intellectuals, because the words of the Pope are sought by billions who are not trained in the disciplines of the academy, then you are wrong in judgment due to coarseness of analysis. The fact that the Pope’s words are sought and read by billions means only that they must be, on some level, accessible to the person of slightly-below-average intelligence. Good writing often works on several levels of interpretation, and service to truth requires only that the message conveyed through each interpretative level be reconcilable to the messages contained on the others.

Pope Benedict told a story of an Emperor who, during the decade-long siege of his capital city, bravely sallied from the city gates are rode into the enemy camp, only to… have a talk with one of the enemy who was esteemed for his wisdom. When the emperor, in the midst of the enemy camp, entertained very bluntly challenging language regarding the religion of the enemy, his interlocutor did not cut off his head, did not rip out his entrails, did not do anything of the sort. In other words, Pope Benedict told a story in which political leaders freely seek dialogue in the middle of the most trying conditions, and do not allow the difficulty or perceived uncouth-ness of their interlocutors to justify acts of violence. A five-year-old could get that. If, as it seems, much of the world has become so barbarous as to be incapable of elementary reading comprehension, the Pope cannot certainly be blamed.

More on Parents’ Rights.



The basic question my brother and I were attempting to address was the following: how do groups attain rights? We answered that one way for a group of individuals to attain rights is incorporation. It is, at that point, the legal fiction known as a corporation, which attains rights.

That was largely unhelpful, however, since the motive of our investigation was Carol Shea-Porter's statement on matters of “privacy” taken from her campaign website (link above):

I believe that we have a right to make our own medical decisions. Women have a right to make their own reproductive decisions, and families have a right to make end of life decisions.

Our starting point, then, was a consideration of groups called “families”. We reflected that a “family” as such has no rights it may exercise corporately, either in nature or under law.

It has generally been the case that certain individuals, who have entered into that union, which constitutes the basic familial unit, i.e. the marital union which creates the married couple, do have certain rights over and relating to the putatively legitimate issue of their union.

Individuals, then, standing in certain relations to one another, relations arising from accidents of nature such as marriage and parenthood in marriage (I am assuming, without argument, that marriage is a union enjoying logical, temporal and ontological priority over the state, which may legislate in behalf of the union and those entering or entered upon it, but cannot legislate to alter the fundamental structure of marriage) do acquire rights which necessarily attend the proper execution of those natural offices to which an individual has attained by accident (accident here means something which falls to a subject without altering the substance of it.).

More later…

Jimmy Akin…


Has criticised the press reportage of recent statements from the Cardinal President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He has also criticized the Cardinal’s statements, as reported. Look for the entry dated 9 November.

This is going to have to be brief.

I was on the phone with my brother, the lawyer, about an hour ago. The question we were debating was: how can a non-corporate group of persons come to attain rights as a group (e.g. a couple or a family).

WE do often speak of parents' rights, though I think the right way to understand the term, "parents' rights" is as follows: "parents' rights" are those rights, which individuals hold ceteris paribus, who are the parents of children.

More on the issue, including significant background, either later on or tomorrow.

I’ve been following, i.e. catching up with John Neuhaus’s essay on the Regensburg Moment, as well as the exchange over at The Corner (beginning at 11:57 AM of the 10th, inst.) between Wesley Smith and John Derbyshire.

Tomorrow morning I will say something appropriate. In the meantime, if you have not seen the items, then follow the links.