Pope Francis and Sts. Francis and Francis

By Tom Ward Published March 13, 2013
 

Habemus Papam. Pope Francis, formerly Jorge Bergoglio, is not just the first South American pope but the first pope named Francis. John Allen said that it’s a shocking name choice, because St. Francis is such a unique figure in Church history. There can only be one Francis, Allen says. Well, he’s wrong: there’s St. Francis Xavier, S.J. (Pope Francis is also S.J.)

St. Francis of Assisi is by far the better-loved saint. But St. Francis Xavier had an extraordinary calling: he preached the gospel in many part of Asia at a time when the Church was not so keen on missions.

I don’t know which St. Francis the new pope had in mind, but I hope he had both in mind. St. Francis of Assisi received the admonition to rebuild the Church of Christ. And St. Francis Xavier took the gospel to the ends of the earth. Sounds like just what we need.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Concerning My Fountain Pen

By Tom Ward Published February 19, 2013
 

My little essay on my fountain pen is now up at The Hipster Conservative. Since I wrote the essay several months ago it’s worth saying that the pen which the essay concerns still enjoys daily use.

Posted in Autobiography | 1 Comment

Update

By Tom Ward Published February 18, 2013
 

I know there are a handful of you who have this blog in your RSS feeds. So in case anyone is wondering why I’ve stopped writing again after a few months of sort-of consistent posting, I thought I’d say why. I’ve begun to feel that my mental energy is better-served on longer-term writing projects. Blog-posts, therefore, will be even less frequent than they’ve recently been, and will tend to stay away from topics that require deeper reflection than a hastily-written 1000-word post can sustain. 

Posted in Autobiography | Leave a comment

On the Dangers of Waiting to Write Up Your Ideas, or, How Shall We Praise Both Walmart and Black Friday?

By Tom Ward Published January 14, 2013
 

On December 3, 2012, I created a “reminder” on my iPhone. It reads, “Post idea: Black Friday at Walmart not so bad.” Now, I wish I had taken the time to write the post I had in my mind when I made this reminder, because thinking about it just now fills me with more embarrassment than inspiration. 

Look, I really don’t like shopping at Walmart. For any item you want or think you need, its flimsiest, lousiest, ugliest incarnation lies waiting for you down some crazy Walmart isle. That particular Walmart smell of new plastic and McDonald’s french fries is unwholesome and repulsive.

And I really don’t like Black Friday, or at least the extremes of Black Friday. I have no objection to bargains. But I do have objections to acquisitive families cutting short their Thanksgiving holiday to go to bed early in order to rise refreshed to stand in line for the 5am opening. And like everyone I sneer self-righteously at footage of deranged shoppers dog-piling over some stack of Chinese electronics. But. 

But what? What did I have in mind five weeks ago when I wrote that reminder? I wish I knew. 

Interlude…Tom puts on his Chesterton hat and tries to find the best in every popular practice, acknowledging vulgarity and wickedness but finding far more interesting whatever golden slivers of goodness shine through…Hat doesn’t fit well…Still interluding…Ok, maybe….Maybe?…Well, let’s give it a go…

Commerce is intrinsically good. With a few exceptions, anything you can buy is, under some imaginable circumstances, worth buying. It is, in general, good to buy things. This is because, 1) things in general are good and because 2) possessing things is good and because 3) in buying a thing you give someone else the opportunity to possess things. 

While it is good to recognize that there are inappropriate times and places for commerce (see Jesus and the moneychangers…this is probably not the point of the temple cleansing…but like Church Fathers I’ll adapt the Bible to my own high purpose), it’s also snobbish to separate commerce overmuch from your day-to-day, real life. You are not wholly an economic entity, but you are an economic entity, made that way not by capitalism but by nature. You are a finite, fragile hunk of dust and rely on all sort of external goods to keep you going, and hence rely on all sorts of other people to supply you those goods. So it’s not good to poo-poo commercial activities like going shopping and hunting for bargains. Even if these activities are done in a mini-van, even if they’re done in a (the squeamish may skip the following word) suburb, even if you must transverse a parking lot so expansive that all of old Oxford could fit into it, still, the activities are good and noble. Food and textiles and electronics and toys: they’re awesome!

So here’s my thought. Black Friday shopping wraps a noble human activity into one of our most cherished national holidays. While we’re taking time to be with family and friends in an extra-intentional way, while we’re taking time to reflect on all the good things we enjoy and to express gratitude for them however and to whomever we know how to express gratitude, we’re also taking time to buy things for ourselves and others in a way that prudently stewards the resources we have. 

Additionally–and this is anecdotal–Black Friday, if celebrated as a holiday instead of endured as a chore, can be a time of genuine solidarity with your neighbors. For those minivan driving suburban Walmart shoppers, Black Friday may be the one old-fashioned “market day” of the year, where all manner of people come out proffering their wares or, on the other side of the counter, demanding the best deals; everyone rubbing elbows together and embracing manfully our humble economic humanity, not wincing or sneering like an aesthete or a rich man. My in-laws were standing in some enormous line waiting for one of the hot-ticket items to become available, and struck up many conversations with those around them. My father-in-law bought fries and a coke for a few people behind him, my mother-in-law asked the other ladies where else they were going and traded notes about the best deals. Too busy to wait in one long line, my mother-in-law offered to pay a purchasing fee if anyone in line would pick up something for her (all demanded too high a price, as it turned out). 

You see, ordinarily shopping is not so interactive or so festive. So keep making your criticisms of Black Friday–they’re probably all valid–but don’t dismiss the tradition (yes, it’s become that).

Postlude…so how was that? It was okay…no idea if this is what you were thinking about on 12/3…Rhetoric a bit forced…but point about economic human nature genuinely insightful…and I almost imagined Walmart as a Turkish bazaar as you were talking about the crowds and the interaction…still, will you actually celebrate Black Friday next year?…I plead the Fifth…  

Posted in The 21st Century! Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments

One More Thing about Eros

By Tom Ward Published January 12, 2013
 

One last thought. Eros is sometimes described as a need-based love. On this view, God can’t have eros for anything, because he needs nothing. Since he can’t be mistaken, he can’t mistakenly believe that he has a need.

I don’t think that it’s right to call eros a need-based love. Better to call it a self-concerned love. But God can be self-concerned. In fact, in the classical theistic tradition, God is so self-concerned that everything he does is ultimately for his own sake. We look to God’s love for us as a paragon of agape. But how can this be if he does everything for his own sake? 

God wants the good for you. This looks like agape. But he wants to be wanted by you. He wants you to enjoy him. So he is also a lover in the mode of eros! But he knows that your good just is to enjoy himself. Back to agape. Is he acting for your sake or his own sake? Yes!

Posted in Philosophy, Theology Tagged: | Leave a comment

Eros and Agape: A Correction

By Tom Ward Published January 11, 2013
 

My last post about eros and agape is all wrong. 

I said eros is a love of love and agape is a love of a person. This is stupid. You can’t distinguish these loves on the basis of their objects but only by their modes of loving. To see this, look at my bad definition of agape: love of a person. Well, what kind of love of a person is agape? Agape? So agape is agape for a person. Really insightful, Professor. It’s even worse with my bad definition of eros: love of love. What kind of love of love is eros? Eros? So eros is eros of love. And what kind of love is loved by eros? Eros? So eros is eros of eros. How tautologically delicious. 

So we’ve got to distinguish them in some other way. The first step is to say why we categorize them under the genus, love. How is each a love? Well, this is tricky, but I think it’s because each is a way of desiring or willing. But this says more about the genus, love, than it’s species, agape and eros. It says that love just is desiring or willing. At first glance this seems to characterize love in far too general a way. We’re not ordinarily inclined to think that we love whatever it is we choose or desire. But Augustine thought this is just what love is. My will is my love, he says. So as there are different ways of willing, so there are different ways of loving. 

Classically, eros is the sort of desiring that is for one’s own sake, and agape is the sort of desiring that is for the sake of another. A more abstruse way of putting it is to say that agape is a desire for another’s good and eros is a desire for one’s own good.

So in the last post I talked about eros as a love of love. The definition is incorrect, but the kernel of truth buried under the nonsense is, I think, something like this. To love and be loved is a great good for oneself. And it’s also a great good for one’s beloved. Insofar as you are concerned about her , you are loving in the agape mode. Insofar as you are concerned about yourself, you are loving in the eros mode. But eros, unlike mere libido, has as its object a particular person and desires a certain kind of relationship with that particular person; you desire to be desired and you desire her to desire for you to desire to be desired. It’s not just that you have a longing for this person, but you have a longing for this person to endorse your longing, to delight in being longed for and to delight in satisfying your desire to be desired. 

By contrast, in the mode of agape the relationship that you have with your beloved, that you desire to have with her, is incidental. You desire whatever is good for her. If your relationship with her is good for her, great, but it’s not great because it involves you. It’s great because it’s good for her. If your relationship is not good for her, you will get out of the way. That you happen to be the one doing good for her is irrelevant from the point of view of agape. That there is good being done for her is what matters. 

In a great relationship these loves are transformed. As my agape meets her eros, I see that it would be against her wishes for me to act disinterestedly. I see that a necessary condition for selfless love is the assertion of self. Likewise as her agape meets my eros. 

So, the old old question about how we ought to love God. The saint loves God for his own sake, but sees that what God desires is to give good things to her and to delight in being delighted in. Her solemn obligation is to find deep joy in him.

The old dichotomy between agape and eros just can’t stand up when we consider, instead a lover in the abstract, lovers together loving each other. 

Posted in Philosophy, Theology Tagged: | Leave a comment

Eros and Agape

By Tom Ward Published January 10, 2013
 

Two romantic cliches: “We have a good thing going here.” “I love what we have together.” What is it that is had together that I love? Well, our love. I’m saying I love our love. Hopefully I also love her, but if it’s really love I’m loving then I must be loving her, because there wouldn’t be love to love if I weren’t loving her. Now loving love is something I do, but it is something I don’t at all understand. Why love love? 

If she and I are lovers, then my love for her is different from the state of unrequited love not just in the trivial sense–that it’s requited–but in a deeper sense. If we’re lovers, it’s not just that each lover is in love and is therefore thinking about and delighting in the other. From my beloved I become aware of being loved as I love, so that my delight is not just in her but in her love for me. And in beholding her love for me I see as in a mirror my love for her, and this too is delightful. So there’s a reflexivity about romantic love. It’s like this: I love her, I love her love for me, I love my love for her.  

This makes we wonder whether we can understand the old division of agape and eros in a new way. Let’s say, speculatively, that eros is a love of love and agape is a love of a person. To avoid making this definition of eros obviously circular, we need to distinguish between mere sexual desire and being in love, and I want to say that eros is the latter and not the former. When a man purchases the services of a prostitute he has a sexual desire he hopes she will satisfy, but he is not in love with her. (This might be specifying eros a bit too much, but let’s just go with it for now.) Sexual desire is a part of being in love, a necessary part maybe, but it’s not the whole thing. Being in love adds to sexual desire at least this: that if I am in love with her rather than merely desire her sexually, then I desire for my desire to be satisfied by her rather than anyone else. And if we’re lovers, then I have the delight of having my desire satisfied by her, plus the delight of knowing that she desires her desire to be satisfied by me rather than anyone else. 

It’s a desire that a particular person feel about me the way I feel about her, so that my desire for her can be satisfied. I do not wish to use her in a particular way; I wish for her to give herself to me in a particular way. It’s not just about sex, but it’s about sex. It’s her or no one. It doesn’t seem forced or artificial to distinguish here between your love for her and your love of her love (or perhaps your love of your love for each other).  

So eros is as we always thought it was–essentially a desire- or need-based love, but it’s not quite so self-regarding as we might think of it–this, at least, if we’re distinguishing being in love with X from sexually desiring X and honoring eros with identification with the former rather than the latter. 

Posted in Philosophy Tagged: | Leave a comment

The Paradox of Multiculturalism

By Tom Ward Published January 9, 2013
 

Multiculturalism is something stronger than a mere appreciation of different cultures. ‘Isms usually mean ideologies, and multiculturalism is no exception. If you’re a multiculturalist, you think that institutions and political communities should have some sort of official sponsorship of the values and practices of other cultures, especially cultures that have minority representation or which have at some time in history been treated badly. 

The problem with multiculturalism is that it’s a self-defeating ideology. Here’s why. If you take stock of the things you value, you’ll see that there are some which you consider to be universal values and some which you consider to be personal or local values. For example, you might have the belief that it’s proper to wear a tuxedo when you get married. But you’d be silly to think that any man getting married anywhere should wear a tux at his wedding. It’s a local value; you think it only applies to a certain culture, for example modern Western culture. (That’s probably too broad; I actually don’t know what’s the proper dress for grooms in Denmark or Austria. But you get the idea.) By contrast, your belief that people who are governed should have some say in how they are governed is a universal value. You think it applies everywhere there are people governed, regardless of the current authoritarian practices or beliefs of some community. 

Now look at multiculturalism. We can suppose that there are local and universal varieties of multiculturalism. A local variety would hold that one’s own community should be multicultural; a universal variety would hold that all communities should be multicultural. The problem with universal multiculturalism is easier to see than the problem with local multiculturalism, so I’ll start with it. Universal multiculturalism, if implemented, would become uni-culturalism. The culture of every community would just be to affirm the culture of every other community. Soon we’d have nothing to affirm except copies of ourselves. We’d all look reverently on a past that included many cultures, maybe promote the study of culture as a historical phenomenon. But we’d no longer have a plurality of real, live cultures to affirm. So as good multiculturalists we shouldn’t want universal multiculturalism.  

The problem with local multiculturalism is that it doesn’t extend to one’s own culture the same reverence it does to others’. If I’m a multiculturalist I want all those primitive tribes in Africa and South America to be able to go on doing their thing without interference from the outside world. I want all the strange, local customs to endure all over the world. I don’t want them to be obliterated by the ominous evangelism of American missionaries, American pop culture, and American foodstuffs. I want cultures to go on being cultures. But I don’t want this for my own culture. My adoption of multiculturalism has forced me to look at culture, all cultures, including my own culture, from the outside looking in. But you can’t inhabit a culture if you’re looking from the outside. And there’s no culture to inhabit if everyone’s looking from the outside. So as good multiculturalists we shouldn’t want local multiculturalism, either. But this means that multiculturalism entails anti-multiculturalism, which is a contradiction. 

The motivation for multiculturalism is to avoid the sort of cruelty that is born of ignorance. “You’re not like us, so we don’t have to treat you with the same respect with which we treat ourselves.” And cruelty born of ignorance is very good to avoid. So the thought is that if we could get everyone to just play down their membership in their own cultures and be more knowledgable about and affirming of other cultures, we’d be better to one another. One way this is done in practice is to teach children about all the bad things their own culture has done, and all the good things about other cultures. So for example it’s very popular to subvert inspiring narratives about revered leaders. But this is a sort of cruelty too. A cruelty born, maybe not out of ignorance, but out of fear. It’s cruel to the culture which instilled in you the liberal values that have allowed you to appreciate other cultures, and it’s cruel to those young people who won’t have the chance to inhabit authentically any culture. 

The best way to really value the wonderful diversity of cultures is to sustain your own. 

 

Posted in Philosophy, The 21st Century! Tagged: | 3 Comments

Notes on the Semantics of Family Relationship Terms

By Tom Ward Published December 19, 2012
 

Sometimes people talk about their marriage. “Our marriage is in trouble.” “We need to work on our marriage.” “We’ve had a long and wonderful marriage.” 

This sounds so normal, but it’s actually a pretty odd thing to say. Contrast:

“Our brotherhood is in trouble.”  ”I wish our sisterhood were more intimate.” These aren’t totally weird, but we usually don’t talk like this. There was the teen-lit series about the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but notice that none of these friends were literally sisters (of each other). Monks and frat boys might talk about their brotherhood, but again they’re not talking about literal biological brotherhood. When it comes to these biological relations, brotherhood and sisterhood, we tend not to reify them in ordinary talk. Even weirder is:

“My fatherhood is strong right now.”

I think this sounds so weird because fatherhood is not a symmetrical relation. If x is the father of y, y is not the father of x. So fatherhood is not something shared between two or more people, the way that brotherhood and sisterhood and marriage are shared, because these are all symmetrical relations. With symmetrical relations, it’s easy to imagine there being this one thing, a relationship, that we share, in which we’re equal shareholders. Not so with asymmetrical relations. 

Now here’s a tidbit from the histories of logic and metaphysics that might actually be illuminating. Way back in the day (Aristotle, the Medievals) people thought of relations as belonging to just one thing, and somehow connecting that one thing with another thing. So if Jane and Joan are sisters, we’d say that Jane has a sisterhood relation to Joan, and Joan has a sisterhood relation to Jane. To the extent it makes sense to talk about these two sharing their sisterhood, therefore, we’d have to say that they share sisterhood because each has the same kind of relation–a sisterhood relation–and these relations are mutual. We add the mutual condition here because we wouldn’t want to say that Betsy and Barbie, who are just friends but who each have a sister and hence a sisterhood relation, share sisterhood. 

Nowadays (post-Frege) people tend to think of relations as holding between two or more things, sort of like glue. So Jane and Joan share sisterhood in the sense that there is this one thing, a sisterhood relation, that connects these two as sisters. But this theory of relations as holding between things doesn’t just apply to symmetrical relations but to asymmetrical too. So if Chip is the father of Chuck there is this one thing, a fatherhood relation, not in Chip but between Chip and Chuck. 

Notice right away that the old-school theory gives a better way to talk about the difference, metaphysically speaking, between asymmetrical and symmetrical relations. On the new-school theory, metaphysically an asymmetrical and a symmetrical relation on the surface involve the same sort of arrangement: one thing connecting two (or more things). But in the old-school, symmetrical relations involve two things–e.g., a sisterhood in Jane and a sisterhood in Joan–whereas asymmetrical relations involve just one thing–e.g., a fatherhood in Chip. Now sonship might be and in fact is a necessary correlative of fatherhood–so if Chip has a fatherhood then it’s necessary that Chuck has a sonship. So we do have two things. But here are two things of different kinds whereas symmetrical relations are two things of the same kind. 

The old-school theory lets us say, 

“My marriage is just fine but I don’t know about my wife’s.” 

And that’s funny. 

But is it reason not to prefer the old school theory? Not sure. Metaphysically speaking the situation above is not non-sense, but given the nature of marriage, of married love, it’s probably practically nonsense. 

But this does make me wonder how we would distinguish, metaphysically, asymmetrical from symmetrical relations. 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Philosophy Tagged: , | Leave a comment

The Innocence of Voluntarism

By Tom Ward Published December 4, 2012
 

I think I’m a voluntarist. But many people think voluntarism is a very bad and dangerous and harmful idea, and I don’t think that my beliefs are very bad and dangerous and harmful. So this makes me question whether I’m a voluntarist or should be. It also makes me question whether I understand what voluntarism is. But in the end I think I do, and in the end I think folks who think it’s bad are sort of overreacting. 

Voluntarism is a view about will, whether divine or human (or angelic!) will, which says something about how the will is related to the intellect when the will wills. Specifically, voluntarism holds that the intellect does not determine the will to will what it wills. This makes most sense to me when I think about it in terms of reasons for action. Voluntarism does not say that the will wills what it wills for no reason. Instead it says that–with perhaps some exceptions–no reason(s) determine what the will wills.

Here’s an example, courtesy of Al Ghazali. Imagine a starving man under a date palm. Before him hang two delectable dates. He will eat one; probably he’ll eat them both since he’s starving, but he’s going to eat one before the other. How will he decide? Suppose that both dates are equally tasty-looking. Neither is closer to the man than the other. In fact, with respect to any consideration relevant to the deliberation about which date to choose, there is nothing to distinguish one from the other. Voluntarism says that we get no Buridan’s Ass result here. The man will choose a date. And of course he’ll choose a date for some reasons (I’m starving, the date will satisfy my hunger, etc.). But as far his reasons go, he might just as well have chosen the other date. Inspect all his reasons and you won’t find any reason why just this date was chosen and not the other. But the man will choose a date. 

It’s a correct application of the term to say that the man’s action is “arbitrary.” But when people complain that voluntarism makes willing arbitrary, usually what they mean is that voluntarism means that the will wills for no reason. And that’s just wrong. The man under the palm chooses for reasons, lots of good reasons. It’s just that his reasons don’t determine precisely one course of action.

Let me clear up a slight ambiguity that is difficult to avoid here. When I say that the intellect does not determine the will, I mean two things. First, I mean that, given some reasons, almost always there will be two or more acts of willing that can be described equally well as actions for those reasons.  Second, I mean that, given some reasons, almost always there is never an act of willing that necessarily occurs upon the intellect’s apprehension of those reasons.

Let me also say something about the possible exceptions to the voluntarist claim that the intellect does not determine the will. I think that the intellect does determine the will to assent to some necessary truths. Suppose you’re doing a logical proof and you come to QED. Obviously your intellect is at work in working out the proof. But so is your will. You assent to the conclusion when you “see” that it deductively follows from premises. But, given that you understand the premises and the relationships between the premises, in other words, given a certain action of your intellect, your will necessarily assents. Here your intellect determines your will. 

In a future post I plan to address a couple sticky issues arising from the application of voluntarism to divine action, and specifically how voluntarism about God’s will determines (ha!) a view about the foundations of moral imperatives like “Thou shalt not kill.” Is the voluntarist committed to the apparently insidious claim that God could have commanded instead “Thou shalt kill?” We shall see. Hint: Yes and No. 

Posted in Philosophy Tagged: , | 6 Comments

Swedish Greys - a WordPress theme from Nordic Themepark.