Sunday, February 23, 2014

Dashed Off V

Exchanges and markets, like everything else, must be set in order.

rhetoric as the logic governing the social use of knowledge, belief, and suspicion

Kant is curiously quiet about teleological judgment of human design -- scattered mentions, but he seem to have no clear way of recognizing design in things we know to be designed by others like us. -- Consider how oddly sect. 77 reads when we are considering human products. -- Also note the antinomy; the proposition would include products of human art.

The human body clearly exhibits technique as well as the mechanism of nature.

Forgiveness of sins is not merely something the Church receives from God; it is a mission of the Church (Jn 20:22-23) as Spirit-filled.

Catechesis is in part a teaching of the forgiveness of sins.

taste as partly precedent-governed

All inquiry is a pursuit of the beautiful in some form or another.

the implicit civilization of forensic investigation

The kinds of inquiry one pursues demonstrate one's character; the pursuits of inquiry come from deep inside us.

If we are genuinely interested in truth conditions, we should use a typed logic.

Note Kant's ironic diagnosis of Spinozism as an outgrowth of teleological judgment!

One of the key skills of a good democratic citizen is to know what preferences not to politicize.

sacramentalia & liturgical purposiveness of things, given purpose

We feel ourselves analogous to other things.

presential self-knowledge as allowing self-knowledge by remotion (cp Malebranche)

Note that Kant seems to give more weight to analogy than probable opinion (it is causal parity).

Proofs tend to conviction not because of the proofs but because of the end and tendency of the intellect.

Steiner is in effect what Kant was trying to avoid. We see something of this in Kant on Swedenborg; Dreams is a tracing of rationalized vision and visionary reason to show them the same.

To posit an end is to posit many means.

pleasure as the minimum of (discernible) good with respect to a faculty

Kant's account of happiness is inconsistent with attributing happiness to God.

A soldier must make sense of his orders or he is a liability he has the duty not to be; and the same is true with a commander giving orders that make sense, in themselves and in context. Battles and wars are won and lost on the basis of understanding or failures of understanding.

We can await grace while doing much; waiting for grace does not mean doing nothing.

Integrity in inclinations is the result of prudence.

Life-giving is the work of love.

natural law as prefiguration of total good & thus the Beatific Vision

Kant's account of Christ's use of Mosaic law borders on Marcionite.

As a teaching faith, Christian faith must be both scholarly and open to all, even the simple, for we are all in the school of the Holy Spirit as students, and yet we are all also teachers in the same school, each specializing in his own way and teaching according to his own method, according to talent, vocation, and gifts. For it is really the Holy Spirit who teaches; but He calls us all to be instruments of His teaching, each one in his or her own way.

Some saints, like visionaries, teach us by encouragement or warning; others, like the just, by example to imitate; others, like extraordinary mortifiers or great ascetics, by showing us that human nature is not so limited as we think, and thus that we cannot easily appeal to such limits as excuses in our own tasks, which are usually far from the limits they show; others, like doctors, by words of doctrine; others, like virgins and martyrs, by being themselves signs and in a special way human sacramentals; and many by some mix of these.

Kant's view of anthropomorphism is almost backward; theoretical anthropomorphism is more dangerous than the practical.

Not all grace is invisible and secret.

Without good life-conduct, none can be pleasing to God, but from this it does not follow that, when it is had, nothing over and above it can be pleasing to God.

The yoke of law is not a pseudo-service, whatever its limitations.

Kant's account of conscience is rigorist (unsurprisingly -- no room for prudence).

rites as schemata for duties

Kant is so worried about the problem of us being well-pleasing to God that he neglects the problem of us finding God well-pleasing.

The sacraments, being signs of the Word, point to something from which even reason itself comes.

Kant mostly assumes that the means of grace are our means rather than God's.

We serve God by receiving His grace.

Contingent truths of history prove necessary truths of reason by establishing possibilities.

The natural law leads directly to God, serving as a pledge of divine reason; God reveals Himself through it.

To want to be worthy of happiness is certainly to want to be happy; for who can be worthy of happiness who does not want those worthy of happiness to be happy? (Kant gets this, although he sometimes does not explain it clearly; many of those who have studied Kant don't.)

the Ideals as providing genetic explanations of real experience

The possible is not opposed to the real.

teleological judgment in historical work

Human language develops primarily between humans, but also between man and environment (including other animals).

If philosophy is the love a reasonable being has for the ends of human reason, the question of the Beatific Vision is of crucial philosophical significance.

The constitution of something *as appearances* depends on the cognitive powers.

discursive reason as the faculty of as-if

the interest of wisdom as above the speculative and practical interests of reason

beauty, sublimity, and design as forms of order in experience

There are many different kinds of pleasure, not all qualitatively the same.

trying things out as a philosophical activity

occasions of rational reluctance vs occasions of deliberate evasion

some kinds of beauty can be known only by inference.

Through the sacraments God consigns His truth to perpetual remembrance. Those who are moved by the Holy Spirit are taught through the sacraments, which as instruments of the Holy Spirit carry their own evidence with them, so that participating in them we find ourselves sealed with the divine image, and our faith is not merely one of inference or opinion, but union with that in which we have faith.

the wrath of God: holiness as swift and overwhelming (furious in the sense that storm is furious)

inclusively disjunctive transcendentals vs exclusively disjunctive transcendentals

the sense of novelty as being in some (all?) cases a sense of apparent causation

Artistic movements represent possible world situations as ideals.

the preternatural in Shakespeare as expressing objectively the secret subjective

Appearances must themselves at some level be treated as things in themselves.

Polytheistic gods are shadowy without rituals, stories, and art to mark them out. Even then they can blur into each other.

Humor is at its highest when it makes "what is substantial emerge out of contingency" (Hegel).

Nothing disenchants the world except by sapping our ability to tell stories about it.

the sense of the magical -- liminality, perhaps, rather than sublimity

Luther's faith, like the Calvinist Scripture, is an indirect way of talking about the Holy Spirit.

the sublime, the beautiful, and the magical as the numinous-suggestive

Phil 3:8-14 receiving the righteousness of God depends not merely on faith but on the power of His resurrection & sharing in His passion

the conditions for rational suspicion that there is more than experience thus far shows

music as the natural analogue of signs and wonders

the power of the keys as the effluence of Christ's kingship

Our relation to Christ and our relation to the Church must be two facets of one relation.

divine causality as posited by the experience of absolute dependence

As rational we both are one or individual and yet already belong to a whole greater than ourselves.

Faith is a Godward attitude participating in a confidelity, which confidelity is itself the work of the Spirit of God.

the prophet as the artist of religious proclamation; the artist as the prophet of aesthetic proclamation

The Eucharist is the homiletic sacrament because it expresses in fact what the homilist is to express in words; it is the truth of which the homily or sermon is the caption or poetic description. The homilist intimates verbally what the Eucharist accomplishes internally.

'Quality of teaching' is too general a label to be of much practical use to anyone.

Autobiography is argument.

Every metric presupposes a mereology.

Grothendieck's heuristic: never try to prove anything that is not already almost obvious

Civilization is rooted in the power of exchanging good for good.

adultery as looting

The future is a usurious lender.

The key issue in distributive justice is prioritization of needs.

To philosophize is to recognize the consolation of lucidity, and to theologize is to recognize the freedom in faith.

One who judges for himself will find that this often requires being answerable to another.

It is not enough to recognize that there is a good; one must bear witness to the good.

Sacraments are not only signs; they are questions.

One can imagine an account of obligation modeled on Hume's account of necessary connection.

hell as definitive self-exclusion from God.

Cast widely, sort strictly.

The blossom does not refute the bud, but explicates it.

scholarly history of philosophy as philosophical culture

It is in actual knowing that philosophy best expresses the love of wisdom.

dreams as symbols of grace

divine wisdom as the final end of philosophy (cf Plato on Eros)

Association of ideas presupposes affinity of ideas.

Christ is judge as Truth.

Christian justice as foreshadow of heaven

liturgy as the social breath of the Church

the public works of the liturgical commonwealth

To veil is to teach, as it is easier to understand what a thing does when one hides or suppresses it for a while; suppresses, in the case of things that can be removed, and hides, in the case of things more essential. Human learning proceeds by a pattern of veiling and unveiling.

We have to be careful about treating disputes as being merely about words; disputes are often categorized as such when they are in fact disputes about the relevance of entire fields of thought.

the importance of the rhetoric of trivial truths: reminding people of what they know, in contexts in which their knowledge is relevant

philosophy as possessing a massively intricate and constantly moving teleology, like a living thing

All inquiry is an unfolding of oneself.

cognition as truth in us, whether clearly or confusedly

quantification as discrete mereology

cut scenes in philosophical argument

Enthymeme as the substance of advice.

To advise well, one must reason logically, cultivate good character, and understand human passions.

The greatest art is that which is truly priceless, in that its proper exchange, the only kind of exchange doing true justice to it, is generous gift rather than sale.

In the Ascension we discover that the body itself is capable of a being-with-God, as we learn in the Transfiguration that the body itself is capable of proclamation of the Kingdom of Heaven.

the Ascension as teaching the destination of the body

the Ascension as the beginning of a sacramental dispensation

Now and Here are not immediate results of sense, certainly not of external sense; they become recognizable through the experience of sensus communis.

human being as a medium

The interpretation of experience in terms of substance and accident presupposes the interpretation of it in terms of being, one, true, good, and so forth.

Divine relevation cannot merely be to us; divine revelation is such that it can be in us.

permanent deacons as clerisy

marriage as sacramental sign of salvation as covenant (and thus as mutual fidelity)

Ordination is distinct from the clerical state as tree is distinct from fruitful tree.

What is contained in the Word of God is written or handed down in Tradition.

Tradition actualizes Scripture.

Since Scripture and Tradition work as a unity in the Church, partim/partim cannot be regarded as egregious in effect even if (as I think) wrong.

Profit on goods derives from the service of making them available to buy.

Tradition as evangelism precisely insofar as its agent is the Holy Spirit

the intrinsic link between liturgy and catechesis -- all catechesis is at least indirectly liturgical & all liturgy is in some way catechetical

liturgy as exchange of gifts

Torah prefigures Christ as Church.

philosophy as interpretation so as to make clear (cf Socratic pursuit of definitions)

body vibration as liminal hearing

Wolff : Stoicism :: Kant : Skepticism :: Hegel : Unhappy Consciousness

After every Palm Sunday in the Church's history there comes a Spy Wednesday.

indelible character as (1) positive disposition to grace (2) seal of divine protection (3) vocation to worship and service

By faith assenting to the word of God, we participate in the sacraments.