Saturday, November 26, 2022

How to interpret the Pope

Mike Lewis, editor of WherePeterIs.com, wrote a blog post in June that contains the following passage:

So the question becomes whether you are able to accept the teaching in good conscience or not. If the pope was to, say, add a sentence to the Catechism mandating that all Catholics were morally bound to be Yankees fans, I would (obviously) dissent.

Fortunately I believe Catholicism to be true, so that will never happen. But the point is that I lack the authority to change the actual Church teaching. Yet many Catholics think they can undo Amoris Laetitia or say the Church approves of the death penalty because it doesn’t align with their understanding of Catholic doctrine. They can’t.

He’s right to think that this will never happen. But in that post, he seems to think that this can never seem to happen, either. And I think this isn’t right.

The Church could seem to teach absurdities, but never truly teach them

If the Pope added the sentence to the Catechism, “all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans”, this sentence in that context wouldn’t necessarily mean to teach that all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans. This is because faith cannot contradict reason, and the Church herself teaches this, and it would be contrary to reason to believe that all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans.

If the sentence “all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans” were added to the Catechism, the proper interpretation of it would therefore be as meaning something figurative, or as a misprint, or something else like that. It certainly can’t mean what on the surface it appears to mean, since that would be irrational. And since it never meant to teach anything wrong, it would not be dissent to disagree with the idea that all Catholics are morally bound to be Yankees fans; it would only be dissent to disagree with whatever the sentence’s “true meaning” was in that context.

Absurdities are different from contradictions with (the apparent meaning of) Tradition

I do not mean to propose a standard of what I agree with, but only one of conformity with the nature of human reason itself, which cannot believe absurd ideas like “murder is okay” or “circles are not round”. These sentences are impossible to accept on their surface meaning, and if we wanted to be charitable with an ordinary friend, we certainly wouldn’t believe he meant to teach their surface meaning if he said the corresponding sentences. We should be much more charitable with the Church, which necessarily never contradicts herself or human reason.

Mike has a point when he raises examples about the Trinity or about traditions more broadly. Unlike matters of reason – such as morality – we don’t have knowledge about the true interpretation of matters of faith. Private interpretation is Protestant, after all. So, if the Pope said that “the Trinity has four persons in it”, it is possible that the surface meaning of that is actually correct, and the previous Church teachings that seemed to teach the contrary were the ones who misspoke. Either way, the Church is consistent, and it is possible for a reasonable person to accept all her teachings, as we are required to. Mike seems to think that in some cases, it would be impossible, and we would have to dissent from some – even though it would still not be right to do so. But we can’t have a moral duty to do the impossible.

Surface interpretation can be dissent, while rational and consistent interpretation cannot

Mike seems to think that this sort of rational and consistent interpretation of sentences is itself some kind of Protestant private interpretation. But it isn’t, since the Pope remains the authority on which persons are Catholic. If the Pope really meant to teach that murder is okay, he could exercise his authority by excommunicating everyone who interpreted his sentence “murder is okay” in a more rationalized way. If he did this, of course, it would mean that Catholicism is false, since it would obviously be necessary to believe something irrational to be a Catholic. But until the Pope did this, it would be the Catholics who actually believed that the Church taught that murder is okay who would be the dissenters, since it is blasphemous to interpret the Church to have meant something irrational.

Anyway, Mike has recently said these arguments in the context of a discussion with Ed Feser about the death penalty, and I don’t agree with either of their opinions on the topic.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Agnes Callard

This blog post is my fan page for Agnes Callard, a philosopher who teaches at the University of Chicago. It is inspired by an earlier fan page, which, at the time of writing, I thought had gone down because its URL had changed. That page, made by Sravan Bhamidipati, summarized Agnes’s opinions on various topics and linked to all of her articles.

This page reproduces Sravan’s list of links and adds other links, as well as some biographical information about Agnes that I thought was worth noticing. Unlike Sravan, I have not attempted to summarize Agnes’s opinions on any topics here, although I have a separate post that summarizes her book. This page has benefited from having been noticed and praised by Agnes herself and pinned to her Twitter, which has helped bring some information I had missed to my attention.

For biographical information about Agnes, touching chiefly on the event christened “Arnoldgate” below, I also recommend the profile of her that was published by the New Yorker on 2023-03-06, which Agnes herself seemed to think was fair.

Drama

Agnes Callard has been involved in three main drama events, which I have named “Arnoldgate”, “Picketgate” and “Candygate”, after the -gate suffix pattern.

Arnoldgate

Arnoldgate refers to the fact that Agnes Callard (maiden name Gellen) left her husband, Benjamin Callard, and married a graduate student named Arnold Brooks, who she had met while still married to Ben.

She and Ben hosted a talk about it as part of her “Night Owls” debate series; the talk may be watched here. Ben seems to still be on good terms with Agnes and her children.

This created some drama at the time and since, and was brought up again by some people when Candygate happened. Arnoldgate was the chief topic of the now-famous profile of Agnes for the New Yorker.

Picketgate

Picketgate refers to the fact that Agnes Callard did not stop teaching her classes around the beginning of June 2019. This was during a ‘strike’ of graduate students – or whatever the proper name is, since apparently the union wasn’t ‘recognized’ yet. Anyway, she was crossing picket lines to teach class, and on June 5th she published a column about why she did it, which apparently caused a lot of Twitter drama that was also brought up again a lot during later events. (This wasn’t on the first version of this page because I had personally missed it, but I was just informed.)

She hosted a public “Night Owls” event with a union representative to address this, but this one apparently wasn’t recorded.

Candygate

Candygate refers to the fact that Agnes Callard, who often tweets stories about her children, once (on 2022-11-01) posted this tweet:

9yo: mama you DIDN’T throw out the halloween candy?!—

[background: we have a halloween tradition where after the kids go to bed, I throw all their candy in the garbage. The next morning, they are filled with rage.]

—thank you SO much!!! [hugs & kisses]

Reader, I forgot.

Agnes’s supposed Hallowe’en tradition created a lot of Twitter drama, which was famous enough to end up on BuzzFeed. At the time, she was proud to end up on BuzzFeed, and thought that her 2020 essay “Acceptance Parenting” was relevant to the topic. Later, she was interviewed by the Daily Nous about it.

Links

Social media profiles by Agnes Callard

Videos with Agnes Callard

She has a YouTube channel, and in that channel she has a playlist of videos from outside her channel. So that covers most of the videos.

But at least one video is missing from that playlist, as of now:

There’s also this Instagram reel of her being asked about her clothing.

Podcasts with Agnes Callard

As a host

As a guest

Articles about Agnes Callard, and written interviews with her

In English

In other languages

Articles by Agnes Callard

Boston Review

Cato Unbound

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Daily Nous

Harper’s Magazine

The New York Times

The New Yorker

The following are the articles by Agnes for The New Yorker, but of course, this profile written by Rachel Aviv about her is famous.

The Point Magazine

The Toronto Star

Unherd

The Wall Street Journal

Academic papers by Agnes Callard

Books by Agnes Callard

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Tuesday, November 15, 2022

Catharsis

It is famously unclear what exactly Aristotle meant by “catharsis” (“purgation”) in Book VI of the Poetics, where the last part of the definition of tragedy is that “through pity and fear, it brings about the catharsis of such emotions”.

It is worthwhile to try to look at what the term has come to mean nowadays. Today, the OED says that catharsis is “the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions” – where “strong” is a typical interpretation of what the “such emotions” part meant in Aristotle,[1] but “or repressed” is actually mixing it with the Freudian definition, which I will explain next.

The Freudian definition is often given as “the process of reducing or eliminating a complex by recalling it to conscious awareness and allowing it to be expressed” – which seems to be accurate, but was written by a pair of historians (Schultz & Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology) and is often (e.g., here, here, and here) misattributed directly to Freud & Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria, where I believe it is not found. The best text I have seen on the development of the concept within psychology is this one. I think it is probably unrelated to Aristotle, but it is interesting to try to see it that way.

Merriam–Webster actually gives the Aristotelian and the Freudian definitions separately – “purification or purgation of the emotions (such as pity and fear) primarily through art” and “elimination of a complex by bringing it to consciousness and affording it expression”. Notably, the Aristotelian definition is translated almost literally, without trying to give a specific interpretation of what “emotions (such as pity and fear)” are. So the OED and M–W together seem to try tell us that the term has retained (one version of) its obscure Aristotelian meaning, but with the addition of Freud’s take on the concept as a possible sense of the word.

While the interpretation of catharsis as “purgation” in a sense of giving “release” to the emotions is common, and probably how the word should be used in (out-of-context) modern English usage, it is worth noting that Leon Golden has forcefully argued, in the last part of his Aristotle and the Arc of Tragedy, that there are various philological and theoretical grounds for reading “catharsis” in Aristotle as “intellectual clarification”. Sure enough, this definition is even listed in the LSJ. The idea seems to be, then, that the essence of tragedy is that it makes our emotions intellectually clearer to us.

In the case of the Oedipus Rex, which Aristotle analyses in the Poetics, this would happen through our realizing that Oedipus had to suffer for the prophecy to be fulfilled, so that his suffering fits into this larger cosmic context. As Golden himself says:

The events of Oedipus Rex, Othello, and Death of a Salesman are riveting and persuasive because we are convinced that necessary or probable forces (not irrational, aimless chance) are controlling the events that are unfolding in these mimetic representations and so leading meaningfully to deep learning and understanding about the human condition. That intimate and valuable connection between ourselves as human beings and the work of art is not made if we have recourse to interpretations of catharsis that bear no cognitive connection to the imitative pleasure that is a defining element of our humanity and, it can be argued, the very purpose of our being human.

[1] Addendum, 2022-12-25: I would take this typical interpretation to be exemplified by Malcolm Heath’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the Poetics, though it does not say so in so many words. 

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Wednesday, November 9, 2022

Poets

Three years ago, I used to think that, similarly to Plato, I had an argument against the poets, or rather, against fiction in general.

The basic idea was that fiction is not limited to what has happened in the real world, and therefore contains distortions. So, if someone spent a large proportion of his time reading fiction, the distortions would probably begin to affect his expectations about reality, and he would become a less reasonable person. This would be worse, I reasoned, with more poorly-written fiction, since it would probably be more distorted than well-written fiction.

I actually still believe this argument, but I no longer think that it suffices to recommend that people not read fiction. The reason is that I have come to believe that works of history and science are not faithful representations of the world either, and they are just as likely to mislead someone. So it makes no sense to avoid fiction exclusively. And since nowadays, it is more or less impossible to live without news, history, scientific reporting, and so on, it makes no difference to read fiction too.

I noticed then that it is ridiculous when some people constantly compared real events to events in Harry Potter. But now I also notice that it is no worse to have one’s worldview shaped by certain news outlets.

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Saturday, November 5, 2022

Historical exposition

I believe that there are four main types of historical exposition.

First, there is analysis, which takes recorded facts and expounds them according to assumed causal or logical connections. Analysis may be given according to the synthetic method, giving first the causes and then the effects, or the analytic method, giving first the effects and moving on to the causes. But this is a difference of style, and both methods are nevertheless historical analysis.

Second, there is conjecture, which proposes facts beyond what is recorded. Conjecture is divided into abductive conjecture, analytic conjecture, and synthetic conjecture.

Abductive conjecture proposes possible causes for a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that a sudden disappearance of a people was due to epidemic disease, although there are no traces of the disease left. Analytic conjecture proposes possible components of a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that a recorded stabbing was done with daggers, although the source does not mention the particular weapons. Synthetic conjecture proposes possible effects of a given fact. For instance, a historian may conjecture that an epidemic caused the afflicted population to save less of their income for the distant future, since their survival was uncertain, although there is no record of the amount of their savings.

All history involves at least some conjecture, since it must be supposed that at least some of the known records are truly records and not fabrications, which is an abductive conjecture, albeit often highly certain.

Legend, myth, and fiction (added 2022-11-30)

In view of the terms just mentioned, I have found it useful to distinguish myths and legends from purely historical narratives, as well as purely fictional narratives.

A narrative exposition may propose facts that have no connection with any given facts; such proposals are not to be called conjectural but arbitrary, and insofar as a narrative does this, it is not historical but legendary.

Insofar as a narrative proposes facts, whether arbitrary or conjectural, that are incomprehensible either by concepts of experience, or by a definite analogy with those concepts, such a narrative is mythical. So, by this division, some myths are legends, and some legends are myths, but not all.

A narrative is purely fictional when it is not intended to be connected with present experience by a chain of efficient causes.

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