Saturday, February 01, 2014

Dashed Off IV

Still trying to catch up on these. As always, it's exactly what it says on the tin -- dashed off.

pleasure and pain as ingredients of cognition

the suitability of the world as a stage for moral lives as rational animals

intelligibility - congeniality for thought - purposefulness

All tradition presupposes the tradition of human nature itself, as educable and as having a cultivation or education appropriate to it.

Ought implies can because ought is needful can.

The (sensible) beautiful as concerning us precisely as both rational and animal.

Polytheism tends to move from subjects to agencies or roles, especially when faced with other polytheisms.

Rhetoric is concerned more with the conditions of persuadability than with persuasion as such. The basic principle is that people must be under conditions so as to be persuadable in order to be persuaded: that is, they must be ordered, disposed, to persuasion.

analogy as an indeterministic logic allowing different answers according to level of focus, contextual assumptions, and (perhaps) trial-and-error search in a conceptual field marked out by them

We know divine reason or eternal law by image in reason and by indication and symbol in revelation.

Language is natural to us in the sense that coming up with language is natural to us; and even our everyday use of language is just a coming-up-with-language. We invent on the fly, even if we make extensive use of previously discovered solutions.

sign languages as dynamic 3D written languages
sign language as iconic presentational spoke languages

consensus gentium as abstracting from merely individual biases (still leaves systemic biases)

Practice and habit smooth over waverings in genius and temper.

books as licensed discussions, the licenses for which may be leased or traded under contract

(1) Do we reason practically with regard to means and end?
: Obvious to experience
: Required for communication and structuring of argument
(2) Does this reasoning admit of analysis in terms of principles?
: Experience shows ability to make principled distinctions and to give reasoned, principled arguments
: Intrinsic to its character as reasoning
(3) Do these principles concern the good?
: Obvious to experience that we consider good in practical reasoning
: Agents act for ends under aspect of good
: Convertibility of being and good guarantees good-based principles of reason
(4) Is bonum est faciendam et prosequendam a necessary first principle?
: Cannot distinguish good and bad in practical life without it
: Necessary given nature of good as desirable
: Results when converting the principle of noncontradiction according to convertibility of being and good
(5) Does moral life fall under these principles?
(6) Are these principles precepts?

Marriage makes more reasonable the loves even of those who are not married.

One may marry because of love, but one certainly marries in order to love.

The meaning of every work of art at least partly contains the history of art.

pauses in reasoning as part of the reasoning

Being a means and an instrument, the state must be constrained not merely by aims but by procedural and institutional constraints that preserve it as an appropriate means and instrument.

The purpose of argument in general is not to persuade but to reason.

probability as modal logic with proportions

will to power as thymos

Game-theoretical explanations presuppose stable demerit and benefit.

first principles of natural law -> general reflex principles of aesthetics -> canons of aesthetic ends -> cases of productive reason

clarity as dialectical success

Beyond a certain expanse of time man can only plan ahead by appeal to the timeless.

The only true sign of learning is understanding what it is that we do not yet know.

the beautiful as occupying us cognitively

Our sensibility is not structured independently of our capacity to understand the world.

reflex principles as rules for the unification of taste with reason

An exhaustive account of beauty would require an exhaustive account of cognition.

The beautiful as that which is cognized as the exemplary object-of-satisfaction.

beauty as an apparent preadaptedness to our minds

The pleasantness of the pursuit of the pleasant does not depend wholly on the pleasant that is pursued.

The state is the child of the populace.

the familial destination of man

Art reflects our cultivation of ourselves.

Overwhelming joy stuns like terror.

Every sublimity is in some sense an intelligible sublimity.

rhetoric as the logic of advice

cultivation of taste for beauty as related to cultivation of freedom of mind

universal communicability of taste as the sociality implicit in reason

Nothing can be regarded as an appearance except by regarding it as being given.

The maximum of saturation is not revelation but union.

An interpretation is an interpreter interpreting.

Love is not univocal & is told in many ways; to recognize a single garment of love does nto requrie us to hold it is a single unwoven thread. The weaving of the garment is precisely what it is for love to be told in many ways.

love as rationality-giving

God is presupposed in making distinctions.

The apophatic opens out into confession, and confession returns at its end to negative theology.

hierarchy as the work of teleiosis

In transubstantiation, Christ is first exterior and we must come to Him in order to commune.

Transubstantiation is not an account of change so much as an account of presence in mystery (sacrament).

There are few mistakes worse than criticizing theology for not being omniscience.

transubstantiation as an account of the beginning or genesis of our theosis (bodily through sign and spiritually through faith Christ in His full humanity unites us to God) - > cf "This sacrament is nothing else than the application of our Lord's passion to us."

In transubstantiation, sacrifice is no longer merely exterior (priestly) nor moral-symbolic (prophetic).

Without real presence in some way, Christ's sacrifice is not for us, not made ours in particular, but is merely a generic sacrifice, at best.

Hope is lifted up by signs of charity, for it exists itself by inspiration of charity.

Covenant presupposes law; in particular, it requires our being able to act together under one law, or in light of one law.

Transubstantiation is the way in which Christ's presence in sacrament and liturgy goes beyond His presence in creation; and rejecting it turns Christian worship into the contemplation of God in His creation. In other words, all accounts other than transubstantiation are accounts of a particular way God is present in creation and cannot distinguish communion from these. (Possibly consubstantiation, taken in ways other than ubiquity, has some room here, as well.)

the heresy of Modernism as flight from the body in theological matters, flight from the theological body (informed by rational soul, with divine vocation)

transubstantiation
(1) real presence
(2) conversion (real difference)
(3) this conversion is neither annihilation nor creation
(4) this conversion is not a natural change (material transformation)
(5) symbolic (accidents remain)
(6) but complete
(7) and nongradual, being a pure expression of divine power

pharisaism as the failure to give alms to oneself (Augustine Ench XX sect 76)

natural law as first tradition

The Eucharist symbolically represents glory; one's account of it establishes the limits of human glorification by God.

Marriage expresses in holy sign that which Eucharist accomplishes in holy act.

Marriage becomes a sacrament in part because Eucharist is the sacrament of sacraments.

The sacraments each transfigure different aspects of rational life: e.g., eucharist community, reconciliation repentance, matrimony covenant.

sacramentals as showing how grace ripples out and transfigures the world around us, giving it new significance (the work of bees)

The epiclesis establishes that transubstantiation is not merely of bread and wine but of bread and wine made holy sacramentalia by prayer and grace.

Scripture as the principle and matrix of all sacramentalia

liturgy and the sublime in the picturesque and harmonious

unction as the hylemorphic sacrament -- why the rational soul must in some way be form of the body (not origin of Vienne, but the sacrament requires Vienne's insistence)

Kant's moral philosophy throughout presupposes the impossibility of the Beatific Vision.

Christ's Baptism shows that baptism is the sacrament of being a child of God; in baptism, we stand in Christ's place, the Spirit descends, and the Father says, "This is My Son."

Christ had not only to take on human nature, flesh, but also the tradition of it, which chiefly consists in each generation being part of the previous, invested in it, by each being part of his or her mother. (This closely ties to Mary as New Eve; Christ must take on not merely mankind as Adam, dust, flesh, man; but also in some way mankind as Eve, life, the being-given of a new generation.)

cause as explaining resemblance, contiguity and regularity

The modern world does not handle symbolism well because it approaches it purely associatively, leading to insuperable gaps and strange incongruities.

liturgy as a participation in eternal reason

natural law as teleology of the will precisely as free (Chastek)

Given that Kant makes the subject of ontology objects of thought rather than being, Hegel was perhaps inevitable.

practices helping to fix metaphorical meaning (alchemy has some excellent examples of this)

Humean curiosity & Nietzschean will to power

Randomness in evolutionary theory is randomness with respect to fitness outcomes; i.e., you can always substitute 'not tending in itself to fitness'.

Leviticus as the book of vocation (cp Vayikra)

shelamim as showing the Israelites to be a priestly people

the sacrificial system as uniting the Israelites so that they could together carry the burden no one of them could carry alone

sacrifice & vocation as connected: no vocation without sacrifice

The first step in carrying the Cross of Christ is to take up the compassion of Christ.

In judgments of taste we posit the unity or oneness of human nature.

enlightenment, universal standpoint, consistency

humanity (rational nature) -> sociability -> taste as having universal import -> civilization

genius as exemplary originality, originating standards for freedom

As judgment of sublimity concerns the supersensible in ourselves, so Kant's judgment of design concerns superhuman art in nature.

taste as the discipline of genius

Stimulus is not a distinct event from receiving of the stimulus.

taste as unification of experience

articulation, presentation, modulation

rhetoric as imaginatizing the intelligible; poetics as intellectualizing the imaginable

poetry as intimating the supersensible with the sensible

the attraction of gambling as based on free play of sensation

For Kant teleology is as if we treated the beautiful as determinative for causation.

teleological judgment is problematic for Kant; this makes possible the use of it as analogy
->indeed problematic modality seems analogy-linked; it is the as-if modality, so to speak

Kant's 'ontology' is necessarily just empiricism.

Treaties establish international law obligations on states (assuming they are legitimate) but only the obligation and only on states: the obligation on the state is an obligation to legislate and enforce, not itself the legislation.

You cannot plan away the need for prudence.