Read this…

This is a sort of "guide" to James Ross's "argument from non-physical formality" against physicalism. It includes numerous objections and my answers to them, as well as some general thoughts on Ross's argument in contemporary philosophical work. It's a rough draft so I might tweak it now and then.

Eye know, eye know...

Look, I know I'm just a big white guy living in a small Asian country, but do I really need to have Western eyes to see that driving forklifts, large and small, on the road with all the other vehicles is just a bad idea? Or that willfully not looking either way when crossing the street is just bad form? Or that smoking while delivering big metal tanks of compressed gas on motorcycles is just asking for trouble? Having been here over half a decade, I guess I do. Sigh.

That's the way...

It went down like this: I deployed one of my trusty carrots in a kindergarten class this morning--a rubber balloon--, only this time I inflated it and taped it on the wall over the board. The idea being that any kid whose name made it into the balloon drawn on the board could get that very balloon. Kids are very concrete so having the prize almost literally floating over their heads helps them focus. Anyway, we played our games and drilled our vocabulary, and I gave stickers to the winning team. And then the Large Ethical Conundrum walked in the room.

Or rather, up to the board. It was the usual rush of small hands vying to "help teacher" with his supplies and books and the like, plus the usual flutter of big hands batting away the small hands so teacher could get his things himself. And then three of the little ones started pointing up and chanting, "Buh-lun! Buh-lun!" I had not named the prize winner and giving it now to anyone was just an act of desperation so I could get out of the room and they could have lunch. I looked from one face to the next, trying to break the stare of six small almond eyes looking at the buh-lun by looking through me. The default winner--a bit of a teacher's pet, but worthy of the name--is Belinda. And yet Elmo had done so well after a brief sour-puss spell. Then again, giving the balloon to Carrie this time might be the trick to motivate her out of mediocrity. Who? Whom?! I reached for the balloon to give it to Elmo, and then a very funny thing happened.

The balloon popped! The tape tore a small hole in it as I pulled it from the wall and the next instant it was a cold tatters on the floor. The six almond eyes were at a loss, as were the three small mouths below them. I braced myself for a bout of crossed arms and pouting lips, but then another funny thing happened: I laughed. And I laughed some more. And then the three little mouths broke into small laughter with me. And in their laughter I heard deep wisdom.

Only moments before they had pinned their hopes (the next five minutes' worth, at least) on getting that balloon. Then, in the very act of its coming to them, it burst! Gone! Over! What a loss! And yet they saw me laughing. Somehow it reminded, or assured, them that in fact it's not such a big loss after all. For the fun of seeing a balloon pop in teacher's hand somehow outweighed the satisfaction of getting that balloon for the day.

How many times do we live with our eyes on a balloon floating just up ahead--and then it pops, and "our life is ruined"? On the other hand, how often do we simply "shut u and laugh" when our little balloons burst before our eyes? I submit that there is a direct correlation between how we weigh those two questions on a daily basis and how happy we are on a daily basis. As Jacques Maritain notes in an essay on Human Immortality, on the one hand we realize that nothing is more precious than even a single human life, but on the other hand we live recklessly with our own lives to seize risk after risk. Why are we so cavalier with what we know is such a priceless treasure? For no less pellucid a reason, says Maritain, than that we know we are immortal: death is an episode, not a terminus. On the one hand, we sense the immense value of a human life because it is an immortal principle of unique personhood. On the other hand, we are consistently reckless and pioneering with the immense value of our lives because they are immortal principles of unique personhood. Balloons pop. Get over it. Now laugh! Be wise like foolish children: go for the balloon and say Thank You when you get it and laugh all the way home when you lose it. Otherwise, you are just a balloon, fragile and hollow, ready to burst at any moment; or, filled with laughter, ever-filling with the breath of life.

Strange as it may seem, we are born more "tangled up in blue" than we will ever be later in life. Life is a progressive unraveling of the genetic, cultural, psychological, and spiritual ball of yarn which went into weaving of on the loom of Providence. Despite its apparent immaturity and powerlessness, a newborn child is an inconceivably dense knot of potential, and its maturation is a regimented process of fundamental decomplexification by way of modalized complexification––a steady trimming of brilliant but ever-lost loose ends and a not-always-so-steady healing of hard knots deep within. We become more complex in increasingly narrow ways so that we may be simpler in a fundamental way. The infinitely complex potential of what an infant could write gradually refines into what the infant must learn to write (a native language), and then more finely into a unique penmanship, and finally into a strikingly unique "voice" which every writer must find (even though every adult of course has one). To be a human-knot is not to be not-a-human but to be too-much-of-a-human in a single body so small. As the Daodejing (or, The Book of the Way of Power) says,

"含德之厚，比於赤子。… 骨弱筋柔而握固。未知牝牡之合而全作，精之至也。終日號而不嗄，和之至也。
(The impunity of things fraught with the “power” May be likened to that of an infant. … Its bones are soft, its sinews weak; but its grip is strong. Not yet to have known the union of male and female, but to be completely formed, Means that the vital force is at its height; To be able to scream all day without getting hoarse Means that the harmony is at its perfection.)"

This of course goes a long way towards the defense of all unborn humans. We have no way of knowing what amazing potential we are depriving ourselves of by "flushing" away an inconvenient fetus that puts a kink (!) in our own comfort. We know the temptation of regressing to our infantile knot-state when we say things like we "just want to curl up" and sleep. By contrast, we know the challenge of being Homo erectus sapiens precisely in having to stand straight and having to untangle irrationality into rational life-lines. The Daodejing goes on,

"益生曰祥，心使氣曰強。物壯則老，謂之不道，不道早已。
(If the heart makes calls upon the life-breath, rigidity follows. Whatever has a time of vigour also has a time of decay. Such things are against Tao, And whatever is against Tao is soon destroyed.)"

An obstetrician was once asked by a colleague about a difficult case. "The mother has syphillis, the family is destitute, and her current pregnancy will be the sixth child they have to raise. What do you recommend?" Without a pause, the obstetrician said, "Abort it." Nearly as quickly his colleague replied, "Well, you would have just aborted Beethoven." Abortion is a dominant way in our age by which the knotted may protect themselves, and therefore works against the great life project of unknotting ourselves so we may be limpid strings to be strummed in the universal harmony. Abortion is a hallowed "technique" by which the reigning generation may tighten themselves around themselves, instead of unraveling some of their life-thread for the good of a new, uniquely vital knot woven by them. It is nothing less than how "the heart makes a call upon the life-breath," whereupon, being against the Way, rigidity and decay follow.

Prayer is the way we untangle out life-knot so that we may be refilled with that Breath on a regular basis. A sealed balloon can only lose whatever air it has, slowly or in a sudden rupture. Paradoxically, only a balloon that is wide open––that literally can't keep itself together––can be refilled. I think this "ties into" St. Augustine's description of sin as a curvatus in se––an inward curvature on oneself. Like an intractable knot, those of us most "complete" in and of ourselves are also those least open to the fresh air others––and the great Other––might blow into us. It is precisely by letting go of our little "love-me knots" that we both face the perpetual risk of leaking and withering in our own power and enjoy the privilege of being filled anew in ever-novel ways.

Being, good...

Being is intrinsically good. We all know this. This is what we see in a purring cat: it is most content when it can simply be itself, within itself. This is also why, analogically, we say a well tuned engine "purrs": it is being able to be itself, to be an engine without constraint. And while happiness is not a warm gun, a warm gun is happy in its own way, for it is radiating the fullness of its being as a firing weapon. Why else do so many people find guns so alluring? Such a small clump of matter can generate such a dramatic change in the face of being. It is the same goodness of being that we see in a sleeping baby: it does nothing, can do nothing, but is superior to us precisely in its immersion in sheer being. All this and more is good just because it is.

What does this mean? It means that being--existence--is not morally neutral. The world is and therefore the world is good: finality is coterminous with existence. We will to live because the goodness of being animates the deepest levels of our appetitive being. As St. Thomas says, a donkey cannot desire to be a tiger, since this would mean the destruction of what it is in itself. (Cf. the outrage of the cat and the donkey in Shrek 3 when they are transmogrified into each other's body.) All things, just in virtue of being, desire to continue in being: and this is a form of desire at all levels of being. We sense, in turn, that anything which is more completely "being" than ourselves, is somehow also morally better--more desirable--than ourselves.

Alas, under the guise of sickness, death, fear, loss, disillusionment, and so on, our own shallowness and progressive diminution of being is all too apparent. As such, we leap from one being to another in a vain attempt to tap into the source of Being Itself. Only by relinquishing all specific beings, however, can we hope to swim in the sea of Being Itself (just as a man can only hope to survive at sea by casting his trinkets into the water so he can stay afloat). As St. Jerome puts it, "Christum nudum nudus sequitur" (Follow a naked Christ naked). Once we "intuit" Being as such, we have only two choices: either a retreat to fragmentary idols of being or an act of total adoration and thanks to Being Itself for giving us a share of itself. If "the intuition of Being" (Maritain, Gilson, et al.) does not issue in gratitude, it is not a genuine intuition of Being as the source and medium of all good. Further, if the emergence of gratitude in the face of Being cannot terminate in giving thanks to a Giver, it is the hollowest gratitude, and not worthy of the name, at which point non-being becomes more desirable than being. As Chesterton (nodding to Dante Gabriel Rosetti) said, "The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank. ... All goods look better when they look like gifts." As such, a love of being in the act of being itself without a love for the Being Who is the Act of Being itself, is the greatest metaphysical and ethical travesty man can bring upon himself.

All beings are, then, ontotropic: all things seek to maintain their own thingness and to increase it, if, that is, they possess an immanent principle of growth and motion. Just as plants lean towards the light and stretch their roots towards moisture, so finite beings naturally lean towards greater being and stretch their inner capacities towards that which activates them. None of this need be "conscious", but in the case of humans, it is quite often a conscious, intellectual drive. This is why, unlike non-intellectual animals, humans can desire to become tigers, or dolphins, or etc. It is by abstracting the intentional form of what-a-dolphin-is that we can "transplant" ourselves, in an intentional mode, into that form of being, while still preserving the subsistent vitality of our own Self as intellectual beings. Because the intellect becomes what it conceives, we in fact become dolphins and tigers by the mutual bond of intentional being in ourselves and in those creatures. All that prevents us from actually crossing that bridge to dolphinhood is, first, our lack of adequate metaphysical power to actualize such a potency by overcoming, second, the material limitations of our formal nature. We can conceive of "being made of cheese" but we can't bring it about since cheese is simply not an adequate material for existentiating the human form; neither is the human form an adequate metaphysical principle for raising cheese to sufficiently complex levels of formal order that it can existentiate the human form.

In any case, to return to the human ontotropism: its parallels with plants' phototropism is less than merely coincidental, for the Source of Being Himself is also the Light of Lights. It is only by shining in His Light that we are actual beings. Otherwise, we are overshadowed as mere potential essences in their super-actual light of His own sovereign Donation of Being. Indeed, possibility is only coherent if some principle of choice is integral to Being itself, a coherence sheer naturalism cannot provide, since all that is, on naturalism, necessarily is, and the possible becomes totally vacuous in contrast to the eternally-necessarily actual. Nature being devoid of any will and wisdom, benevolent or otherwise, cannot not be of its own actual character, which includes all sub-entities within it.

All things are intelligible in the Light of God as it shines on that which He makes a substantial medium for receiving the light in the first place. The more a being is open to that light, the more it will (ontotropically) swell in that light. By contrast, beings who decrease in their initial quantum and mode of being, will lose more and more ontological "surface area", whereby they will only diminish even more. It is precisely this cycle which clarifies much of the riddle of evil. For the divine wrath is not a positive infliction imposed on sinful beings, but is rather a negative superposition of light upon what should be a medium for its reflection. Evil is nothing--a lacuna in being--and so we can imagine "the evil within us" as holes and tears in the fabric of our being. As these holes grow, they let more of the Light pass through, and we become that much darker. The punishment we feel--the absence of the warmth of Divine Light--is but the negative superposition of Light which is meant for us, but which can find no surface to illuminate. Evil is nothing and its punishment is its own vacuity. Evil is literally invisible to God, since it is literally that-which-is-not, that which cannot be seen in the Divine Light. Insofar as it cannot be seen ("Adam, where are you hiding?"), it cannot be healed.

Nazi paganism...

It is no secret that Nazism drew upon centuries of Christian anti-Semitism in its campaign against Jewry. What is less known, and less discussed, is how rooted in Germanic paganism Nazism was. As Jacques Maritain says in his essay "Christian Humanism", "A Nazi people were led away from Nazi paganism only by a crushing defeat of Nazism in its undertakings of world conquest" (A Maritain Reader, Image Books (1966), p. 224). (It is also too little known how Nazism, and fascism generally, collaborated with Middle Eastern leaders in their unprecedented anti-Semitic efforts, but that is a topic for another post.) It is a canard that "Hitler was a Catholic," since in fact by his aspirations began to take serious shape in the 1920s he had renounced the Catholic hierarchy as dull to the signs of the times, and had found his true spiritual sustenance in Nietzschean Germanism and Germanic paganism generally. A literal case of spurning the Blood of the Lamb for das Blut des deutschen Volkes!

I mention this not to excuse the role of historical Christian anti-Semitism in the Nazi period, but to emphasize the fact that, like all great historical moments, it was a spiritual phenomenon. It is legitimate--though I would say not completely correct--for Daniel Goldhagen and Thomas Bernhard, et al., to say that "ordinary Germans" were extraordinary (and willing) Nazis, as long as their willingness is understood as a function of a larger spiritual attachment with which they grew up and by which they were hypnotized. Insofar as "Christian anti-Semitism" is a contradiction in terms, and thus a perversion rather than a perfection of the Christian ethos, the "Christian" roots of Nazism must be taken as political exploitations of defects in the culture at the time. By contrast, the logic of die Endlösung als die Auslöschung was endemic to the evolutionist, theosophical blood-madness of Nazi paganism.

A day of firsts…

It's been a while since I got out of Taichung, but on the first day of the new year, I joined some coworkers for a day trip to Tainan (Taiwan's former capital). After a few hours in Tainan, we drove to Guanziling to enjoy some hot springs (as well as one nippy 13˚C pool!). Afterward we drove down to a grilled chicken restaurant for dinner. It was a day of a few "firsts" for me here, even after six years in Taiwan.

First, I had for the first time some "mala" jerky. "Mala" is the Szechuan (Sichuan) flavor you might know: tingly, sweet, spicy, and numbing, in waves.

Second, I had a kind of plum Fruit Roll Up which I had never seen before. It included not simply the smallest plastic yellow spoon, but the smallest spoon I've ever seen, full stop. (Asia: little, yellow, different.)

Third, I saw a machine that makes flat steamed rice cakes, and it was interesting not just because the (Korean) cakes tasted a bit like Parmesan cheese, but also because of how the machine operated. Two thick steel cylinders clamped shut with grains of rice inside and a few seconds later they sprang open, with a small booming sound, and a rice cake shot out a few inches to land on the vendors table so he could bag a half dozen at a time as they stacked up.

Fourth, I encountered a Chinese character that no one in our group could read, but which I was able to track down later that night online. Nothing like obscure local flavor!

Fifth, while it was not the first time I bought a bokken, it was the first time I saw an all-black, uncurved bokken, with a braided hilt, to boot. It was only $NT250, so I decided to get it, whereupon I became a white shogun strolling among the other tourists with a bokken slung in my belt. As some readers of FCA might know, while I am hardly a serious student of any single art, I have a soft spot for martial arts, especially judo, taiji, and gongfu. For the past couple years I have made bokken drills a part of my fitness regiment. I also like using plain sledge hammer handles for drills. Bokken drills are deceptively challenging, for two reasons. First, the sword is light enough that––as with all martial arts––the exertion lies in the will, in the amount of effort you put into each movement. Second, when the motions are properly executed, they use many muscles and muscle groups in unison, which does wonders both for strengthening tendons and ligaments and for building "core strength" (i.e., in those too easily neglected "inner" muscles around the hips and spine).

Sixth, it was the first time I recall dabbing myself with mud as part of a hot spring experience. As one coworker told me, "It make you become black!"

Seventh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, the first day of 2010 was also the first time I have eaten fried insects. And not just little ants ensconced in batter or small larvae so brittle as to resemble rice, but I mean full Asian giant hornet pupae with heads, legs, and eyes (虎頭蜂蛹). As soon as I saw the dish, I knew it was a matter of eating one of them as quickly and as thoughtlessly as possible or I wouldn't eat any of them once critical reason set in. Even as nearly all my Taiwanese co-eaters announced their refusal and distaste, I pinned one pupa in my chopsticks and pitched it in my mouth. Chew, chew, chew––and I won't delude you by saying "It tastes like chicken." Actually, Asian giant hornet pupae taste rather buttery, which was the hardest thing to get over in the first moments; the texture was not upsetting. Even so, their "tail end" is substantial enough that you can definitely tell when you're biting into that end versus the "head parts." (Ever chew vitamin E caplets?) Only I and our bus driver were willing to eat them, so I ended up eating dozens of them, as well as nearly all the peanuts and scallion rings on the plate. I can't say I regret it, but I also don't expect to order (or to be able to order) the same dish anytime soon.

Eighth, it was the first time I was able to watch the first two-thirds of 2012 three times in one day. Gotta love short bus trips and long movies!

Ninth, it was the first time the thought crystallized in my mind that, regardless how popular and successful Korean entertainment is these days (in Asia, at least), I find the Korean sense of entertainment extremely grim, sadistic, and crude. I know this can't hold for all Korean TV and cinema, but from what I have heard and see, the Korean sense of "humor" invariably involves biting, slapping, pushing, arguing, cursing, weeping, and heavy drinking––sort of like The Three Stooges as directed by Quentin Tarantino.

To get a clearer picture of some of my "firsts," you can see some of the photos I took yesterday at my Flickr Photostream. May you have a happy new year in the Risen Light that makes all things new!