Distinction: Social Constructs and Arbitrariness

A distinction that SJWs often fail to make (in fact, I don't think I've ever seen it made by such people) is between the fact of something being a social construct and the degree to which the signifier for that construct is an arbitrary relation. (You'll learn something to this effect in any introductory semiology course, which is rooted in modern philosophy, regarding the relation between the signifier and signified in Saussure's--mistaken--conception of the sign, but I've never seen the connection applied in this conversation.)

For example, English uses the generic word "dog" to refer to a number of animals of a certain genus and species. The particular use of the letters "d-o-g" is an arbitrary historical accident; hence the same concept may be expressed by different letters, a different word, in a different language, e.g. "perro."

The concept of a dog is derived from a combination of accrued sense perceptions by multiple individuals over time and an implicit, public agreement to use a common word to express the concept constructed by these sense perceptions of different dogs. Hence the concept of a dog is literally a social construct, AND the word used to label dogs as dogs is also a social construct.

The difference lies in the degree of arbitrariness. The concept of dog is not an arbitrary concept even though it is a social construct that has evolved over time. In fact, it is not arbitrary at all but based on common perceptions of a class of objects, in this case, the domesticated canine. These perceptions are not random, arbitrary, or fruitless, but of the sort that can be further refined by scientific (ideoscopic in John Deely's language) investigation.

The very fact of a certain thing's being a social construct says nothing about whether it has an arbitrary relation to the "reality" that it expresses, such as the relation between the letters d-o-g, the concept of a dog, and the actual, individual dogs going about their daily business, so to speak.

Hence, even if one were to grant that gender is merely a social construct, it would require FAR much more work to establish further that gender is an arbitrary construct, that it has no relation whatsoever to biological sex ontology and functioning (or put in other words, that they vary totally independently).

Most social constructs are not arbitrary constructs but exist for very good reasons. In fact, one could argue that society is held up by a deep, historic foundation of social constructs, and society itself is just such a construct necessary to preserve its unity and continuity.

Jonathan Snow: Creating a Self Identity in a Social Media World - Some Thoughts

http://www.thewritingofjonathansnow.com/2016/05/creating-self-identity-in-social-media.html

Some thoughts on the above excellent article.

If I have any criticisms, they would mostly pertain to the ambiguous use of the notions of identity, self, and human nature. A consistent point of Snow's essay is that technology "fundamentally changes" humans, leading to or, more weakly put, encouraging a "cyborgian form of being and self-identification." The exact extent of this modification on the level of being isn't explained although its influence on the level of action and reaction is, especially in the areas of "human emotions and traditional forms of communication" as well as the action of "autobiographical self-writing." Snow repeats several times throughout his essay that "our very human nature is fundamentally shifted through" our use of various social media technologies into "a cyborgian form of being," but the demonstration is not clearly made.

The notion of identity isn't explicated. Snow jumps immediately into the psychological effects of Facebook's algorithms on constructing a "coherent narrative" that presents certain bits of information for the user instead of others. The precise effect is that the range of possible identity formation is inhibited or directed by those algorithms in such a way as to prevent deep thought and more extensive forms of self-expression, reflection, and discursive thought characteristic of humans. The permanent effect of these technologies is not argued for; in fact, Snow gives an anecdotal account of how he was able to personally reverse some of the effects after limiting his own use of those technologies. His essay ends with a call to be more wary regarding the use, implying that the shift into a cyborgian mode of living is not permanent. This lack of permanence only raises the further question of what Snow means by saying that human nature is "fundamentally changed."

Part of the inhibition occurs through the use of templates either in the form of the message (text, pictures with a single line of text as in Snapchat) or in terms of length (Twitter's 140 characters, Vine's 6 seconds).

Traditional natural philosophy (and metaphysics) distinguishes between the orders of being and the orders of action, or between the entitative and the operative. The traditional axiom is that action follows or flows from being. In other words, the very essence or form of a being delineates the range of actions of which it is capable. If we wonder why a rock cannot see or fly or speak, we can answer simply that its nature or form prevents it from doing so. Furthermore, the range of actions that may flow from a being may be hindered in various ways from being exercised, either externally as from some violence or internally as from some defect within the subject.

A claim that human nature is fundamentally changed must ultimately be intelligible metaphysically, that is, explained with respect to a modification in human being or doing. My criticism is that Snow's essay shows only changes on the level of doing, of actions characteristic of humans yet not so fundamental as to change the very essence of humans. It would be hard to see how a person could undo the effects of such technology if his very essence were changed, if he were no longer the same kind of being.

The effects of habits on human action are thoroughly explained in traditional natural philosophy. Examples of communication, human emotion, and the ability to focus or reason in an extended, discursive fashion are all examples of operations that flow from human nature. The argument of the essay is that the changes in these activities indicate a change at the level of being. It is not clear, however, that these changes cannot be explained as the formation of certain habits, which are accidental or non-essential changes, that inhibit the full operations of human nature as mentioned above, hindrances coming either externally from some form of violence (whether physical or perhaps in the case of Facebook algorithms on the level of sensory and intellectual input) or some defect.

We know from a growing number of psychological studies that attention and reasoning abilities require training to improve and can deteriorate over time either through misuse or lack of use. It seems more reasonable to say that social media fosters this deterioration and encourages the formation of habits that inhibit the full functioning of actions proper to human nature, rather than effecting any change in human nature on the level of being. In other words, the cyborgian form of living is not an essential or fundamental change but rather an accidental and secondary change, one that admits of degrees and can even be reversed by a change in one's actions.

This criticism brings us to a second possible criticism of the essay, namely, a confusion between the orders of being and operation. For example, Snow writes, "Furthermore, technology inhibits the deep thought and work that makes humans unique." If action flows from being and is determined by being, then the above quotation gets things in the opposite order. Deep thought and work do not make humans unique but are manifestations of a fundamental nature, and it is the nature that makes humans unique, and from this nature flows certain actions, namely, deep thought and work. Deep thought is a work that only humans can do because of their nature and not because of their environments. Their environments either help or hinder the exercise of this form of activity but do not cause them. To suggest so could imply that humans don't have a proper, stable nature to themselves but are constituted wholly by environmental factors, at which point it no longer makes sense to speak of a collective human race but only individuals that reflect certain actions at some points that can be called "human" for an otherwise arbitrary reason.

The opposition between deep work and mindless boredom is interesting but again ambiguous. Strictly, boredom is a lack of interest, and deep work is more than interest but an application of rational activity on some object. Perhaps it would be more precise to say that boredom is a symptom of a person who does not engage regularly in deep work or lacks the opportunities or environments to do so. Our attraction to novel distraction is not strictly correlated with the lack of opportunities for deep work but may also reflect a profound crisis in the modern notion of one's self-identity being in contrast with the demands of reality, even on the unconscious level.

The relationship between characteristically human activities and existential boredom is not clearly explained either. The need to have a certain self-identity is certainly a contemporary dilemma, but the importance of identity was not stressed in the past when certainly much deep work was done by plenty of humans.

On the other hand, digital technologies afford a certain distraction that can legitimately be used as a form of leisure. The same cautions that St. Thomas gives to leisure in general certainly apply to modern technologies and even more so by their ability to stimulate our nervous system in ways that traditional, physical forms of leisure could not. Above all, the need for self-control in the use and engagement of these technologies stands at the forefront. So while one may not be able to "effect a fundamental change in existential temporality" while playing Doodle Jump, on the other hand there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with Doodle Jump in itself when certain restrictions are kept in mind and it is remembered that Doodle Jump (hopefully) isn't trying to effect such a fundamental, existential change or at least prevent it from happening in the rest of the user's life.

It is not clear the extent to which technology cannot aid us in participating in or entering into "something beautiful, powerful, or peaceful." Social media technologies don't claim to try to do this although they do try to provide a platform in which we can share such experiences with each other, such as sending a photograph or video of a sunset or sharing a poem that was particularly moving to us. The Internet is a polymorphous technology with many possibilities of action, but at the end of the day, it is only one form of technology. We have to remember that writing is a technology, and so are pianos and musical instruments, yet these latter certainly are regularly part of many beautiful, powerful, and peaceful experiences. Is it conceivable that digital technology might provide a similar experience? Perhaps we can find something close in movies that contain noble themes and artful craftsmanship.

An interesting counterpoint to Snow's essay is that it is precisely through the Internet that more and more people are being exposed to the findings of psychological studies stressing the need to relax and to strengthen our natural ability to focus through regular self-discipline, such as mindfulness practices. In other words, the very technologies that have been destroying the exercise of our natural capacities have also been the vehicle to warn us of that fact.

It is further unclear what the effects of networked and fragmented thinking are on human nature itself. Such broad statements as "what does this lost ability mean for our humanity" are too vague to give much of a response to. As indicated earlier, it is perfectly explicable that intrinsic actions flowing from an essence or nature may be inhibited by habits that deform the natural exercise of those activities, and although habits have a certain semi-permanent quality, they are reversible and do not alter a subject on the order of essence. It is uncertain that networked thinking is really possible without a linear process in the mind on the level of consciousness and that the ability to shift rapidly between multiple elements is really anything different than what humans have always done in discursive reasoning.

Speculative questions about the potential future of human thinking and evolution and the "hive mind" are almost always too ambiguous to respond to.

The importance or even nature of a self-identity are left without the needed explanation to understand their relationship to existing and living in our world. Snow's invoking of Crawford's autonomy/heteronomy distinction is confusing because its contribution to his thesis is unclear. It remains unclear why whether a subject "flits about" or pursues "settled purposes and ongoing projects" is a problem to be solved. The notion of a sense of self can occur on multiple levels of discourse, psychologically, philosophically, socially, etc. What sense Snow is using isn't clear.

Finally, the actual danger of technology-guided or aided self-reflection also remains unclear. While an unquestioning reliance on algorithms that we have no understanding of may strike a note of fear in those desiring to construct an autonomous identity, perhaps on the other hand we should recall that many forms of modern identity are constituted precisely by the intersection between the false individualism and the totalitarian consumerism existing in a social-media soaked culture, and the very attempt to preserve any notion of coherence to this sort of identity is merely an unconscious fantasy desire to continue promoting what is at its very root in opposition to the full demands of reality and human nature itself. Perhaps an embrace of human nature rather than the non-essentialism so prevalent in academia and now popular culture would remind us of the basic need for restraint in the leisurely use of our technologies, whether digital or mechanical, and that identity formation must firstly run the way of reality and not virtual reality before it can lead to any genuine promotion of human flourishing. Technologies can certainly aid us in the exercise of properly human operation, for technology in its traditional understanding falls under art, which is simply the production of things according to right reason (recta ratio factibilium), and as such technology ought already to be a reflection of the right order of things, extending and aiding our natural faculties and operations, the way a telescope aids our natural sight to see what is truly there but without which we could never discover, or a simple organization schema can put into order the jumbled and quasi-related elements of our thought as we try to form coherent discourse.

Repost: "Whose Sex Change Was It?: Caitlyn Jenner and the Boundaries of Public Identity"

Below is an insightful commentary on the importance and power of collective social construction in the notion of gender and "reality."

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Lately, there has been no shortage of commentators eager to discuss Caitlyn Jenner’s recent Vanity Fairy cover (featured above). In the public eye, Jenner has been a famous male athlete-turned reality show husband-turned transgender femme fatale, and this series of transformations has inspired plenty of ogling. Conservative outlets seem to decry the former Bruce’s sex change as something bewildering and strange (if not disgusting and unnatural), while more progressive ones praise her as a heroine who has had the courage to publicly reveal her “true self.”

But in the midst of the back and forth over the acceptability of Jenner’s identity change have been several other voices who recognize that for all the talk of liberation, Jenner’s female identity means that she’s now subjected to new restrictions that she likely did not experience before making her sex change public. While her athletic prowess and strength were conversation points when she identified as a man, as a woman her appearance is now center-stage. Her body has been scrutinized to ensure it matches unreachable beauty standards, down to her tight, restrictive clothing and made-up face. The public chatter surrounding Jenner has thus largely focused on the degree to which she has accomplished the physical markers of proper womanhood down to every last, painful detail. No matter whether one thinks Jenner “really is” a woman – an authenticity debate with an endless variety of twists and turns – what is perhaps more intriguing here is that she is absolutely being treated like one.

For those of us interested in the politics of identity there is yet another implication, for what Jenner’s case reveals is the fact that while we may perceive ourselves to be self-determining agents exercising our free will in shaping our own destinies, we can only do this to the degree that we are socially legible beings. In other words, the public’s intense voyeuristic interest in Jenner would hardly be satiated with a photo of her donning a baggy tee-shirt and sweatpants. Had she worn such attire, I suspect her sex change would have been pronounced a failure in the minds of many. While Jenner may thus have physically initiated the act of a sex change herself, the lingering irony is that the sex change was also imposed back upon her by a public that expects her to symbolically bear the burden of sexual proof in order to achieve the privilege of a specific social categorization, “woman.”

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Source: Leslie Smith, "Whose Sex Change Was It?: Caitlyn Jenner and the Boundaries of Public Identity," Culture on the Edge blog, June 5, 2015, accessed June 5, 2015, http://edge.ua.edu/leslie-dorrough-smith/whose-sex-change-was-it-caitlyn-jenner-and-the-ironies-of-public-controversy/.

Repost: "Creative Incursions into the Mine of Fictional Desire"

But I also admit a creative appetite to destabilize what we identify as erotic in contemporary society and to invite the reader to consider that our erotic arousal may not be as natural or innate as we think it is. That far from being the liberation we proclaim it to be, it is more socially proscribed than we care to admit. Moreover, many the tropes we identify erotically transgressive are often centered around nostalgic themes of past prohibitions; thus making them socially ‘safe’. [...]

Indeed Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Barthe’s formulation of the difference between texts of pleasure and texts of bliss (or jouissance) seem like an almost too obvious, too simplistic ‘fit’ for creative writing in the erotica genre. And yet, the vast majority of erotic fiction available accepts, employs and perpetuates normative erotic signification. There is little recognition or interrogation of the fact that we, as subjects in the Symbolic world, are unconsciously adopting the desire of the Other as our own, including the explicitly erotic desire of the Other. Our world is inundated in pornographic memes that act as ‘erotosignifiers’ – incredibly effective triggers for things we believe we must, as normal erotic beings, desire. But these very erotosignifiers are the ones that most efficiently serve to maintain conformity and reinforce structures of hegemonic control over the erotic via, as Zizek has described it, “the Law’s obscene supplement” (The Parallax View 366). For all our mainstream culture’s disavowal of mindless hedonism, sexual objectification, decontextualization, etc., these disingenuously disavowed, but implicitly employed erotosignifiers serve contemporary power structures in myriad ways. They provide a libidinal valve for the enormous pressure of the socially responsible humans we are enjoined to be. They rationalize our concepts of eroticism, in terms of gender designations and roles, heteronormativity, socially validated forms of sexual expression. Finally, train us to a commoditized understanding of our drives, our identities and our intersubjective relations.

According to Bruce Fink, one of the central jobs of the Lacanian analyst in clinical practice is to get the analysand to become curious about their desires and the structure of their fantasies, to begin to question and critically consider how much of their desire is, in reality, the desire of the Other. (52-53)

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Source: Madeleine Morris, "Creative Incursions into the Mine of Fictional Desire," Investigations into Reading and Writing Erotic Fiction blog, June 5, 2015, accessed June 5, 2015, http://www.remittancegirl.org/2015/06/05/creative-incursions-into-the-mine-of-fictional-desire/.

A Revised, Semiotic Definition of Technology - Take 1

I wrote in "The Disconnected Connecting Self" (https://www.academia.edu/12172637/The_Disconnected_Connecting_Self) that technology may be defined as "a constructed (Not necessarily a tangible, physical construct; it may also be a mental construct, e.g. latitude and longitude lines) extension of humanity’s semiotic capacity to recognize and model the difference between subject and object" (2). But this definition seems too broad because of the ambiguous use of "constructed."

All objective reality, all experiential reality, is constructed according to the biological mechanism of the cognizant animal and then, for humans, further by the social structures that surround us. Hence we speak of social constructions but wouldn't necessarily call these technologies. Within this Umwelt, we may often have moments in which we recognize the difference between the objective and subjective reality of any particular object we are encountering, and this same capacity may model the difference between those two features through, for example, an exercise of the imagination. But surely, the products of our imagination do not count as technology. Imagined products may be the starting point for some particular technology, but otherwise the above definition includes the totality of the imagination.

Interestingly, some may want to call fiction a technology, but fiction in its produced form and not its seminal form in the imagination. Thus, fiction books and TV shows are technologies. Explanatory metanarratives that may take some shape in the imagination may also be a technology. But at this point, one wonders if the analogical use of technology is being stretched too thin.

A possible revised definition: technology is a produced application, whether physical or mental, of the human semiotic capacity in order to model some feature of subjective reality through a certain objective exaptation of that subjectivity.

This exchange of construction with produced application places technology within the traditional, Scholastic realm of the arts, that which is produced. Further, a general purpose is introduced: a modelling of some feature of subjectivity through exaptation, the "application of evolutionary adaptations to new ends beyond that one or ones in terms of which the adaptations originally emerged" (John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding [2001], 11). Thus technology is not simply the whimsical product of imagination, a random modelling of subjectivity for productive purpose; technology must be an art, a production that deliberately models some feature of subjectivity.

The True Self

Here's an excellent essay: https://www.academia.edu/12250379/_Kierkegaardian_Deconstruction_and_the_Paradoxes_of_Faith

I had a realization: when one realizes that "just be yourself" doesn't mean anything, and even if there were some static "true self," most people lack the self-reflection and sensitivity to even know what that true self entails. Why else do we have to "find our passion," as though passions are pre-packaged dimensions of our selves and not reactions to experience? If I already have a set of passions, shouldn't I already know what those are?

From where does the static notion of the self arise? Why do we speak of the majority of social or intellectual traits as being genetic, inborn, innate, "natural" rather than learned, studied, trained, practiced? Why do we possess down to the dot a complete package that is unalterable and to which we must be true? Do we?

It will further be interesting to consider Kierkegaard's definition of the self as a relation relating itself to itself in light of semiotics.

The Being of Identity

What is identity? It is not substance. Is it a quality? Is it a relation?

I propose that identity is the accumulation of actions, passions, qualities, and relations by and in which one not only tends to characterize oneself but is characterized by others. The relations that arise from these changes remain accessible in the memory and are re-asserted when relevant.

Hence identity is not identical with a full understanding of my being and its history, an understanding possible only when every transcendental relation arising from the subjective modifications of inherent accidents are taken into account objectively. In fact, identity may go contrary to transcendental relations that arise regarding my subjectivity; e.g. I identify myself as a certain gender or sex when this assertion has no correspondence to the transcendental relation that exists suprasubjectively, i.e. independently of my thoughts, beliefs, or feelings regarding my identity. Thus, identity is further characterized by what I assert or say of myself and what others say of me.

But identity isn't merely what others say of me, which is reputation and perception. Identity is principally self-perception and the expression of that self-perception with an accompanying acceptance from others regarding this self assertion. Secondarily, since how others perceive me and my assertions is not entirely within my control, identity must also encompass something of these uncontrollable variables.

Identity as self-perception and expression of that self-perception carries with it the implicit desire that others accept this self-perception. Hence this desire of acceptance is constitutive of identity. A person who describes herself with a certain label is upset when people deliberately mischaracterize that identity characteristic.

Because identity exists in the order of ens rationis, that is, the objective, cognitive constructions natural to the species-specifically human form of semiosis, identity will for all concrete purposes be inextricably tied up with the influence of cultural symbols. A person's identity is always expressed with language, with labels, words created and agreed upon by a larger society to mean certain things, and hence, even if identity is primarily self-perception, expression of self-perception, and desire for acceptance, its sources are always outside the cognitive activity of the subject forming the identity.

The strange paradox arises, then, that identity is what a person asserts is most personal and yet is formed exclusively of cognitive constructs originating outside of the person and which constructs the person simply determines will be his own identity, his own uniqueness.

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, our uniqueness is not and should not simply be a matter of what I say I am. My inherent accidents are unique to me not only in principle (that is, metaphysically) but in concrete; further, the transcendental relations that arise from my intersubjective activities are unique to me, that is to say, no one else in history has or ever will have the same personal history of events and behaviors. It is impossible to reproduce in principle and in concrete even if it can be imagined.

Finally, identity must be appropriated in the Christian life. St. Paul states it simply: "Now I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me" (Gal. 2:20). Through grace and progressive union with God, we come to identify ourselves as Christ and an extension of His mystical body. But this isn't simply self-determination; it is above all cooperation, perfect cooperation through perfect docility to the interior promptings of the Holy Ghost. The transformation that occurs in our psyche must be so thorough that everything is through God, with God, and in God, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. As Aquinas so profoundly put it, grace is the beginning of eternal life.

What can we learn from this paradox of identity then, namely, that that which is most personal to me is inevitably external to me? And further, what can we learn from the fact that our ultimate identity in Christ must be founded in the self-determination, through grace, to cooperate with God's grace in progressive transforming union? We can learn that self-determination is inevitably linked with cooperation, and these two dynamics of independence and interdependence must co-exist for the proper flourishing of any living organism. This balance must be a corrective to the overemphasis in today's society on atomistic independence, the mutual apathy that follows naturally from mindless consumerism, especially of relentless social media. It is also a corrective to a lack of proper boundaries insofar as interdependence does not mean a dissolving of individuals into an incongruous whole but rather their optimal coordination with each other for their mutual and collective benefit.

The Trinity is the perfect model of this balance between independence and interdependence, where substance and relation coincide perfectly and infinitely, where self-determination and cooperation achieve a total co-incidence.

Memo: Semiological Exercise Analysis

Memo to analyze this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnOJgDW0gPI) as an example of semiological exercise, the swapping and rearranging of signs and sign systems unique to humans that allows for fictional worlds.

What are its further implications in light of semioethics? What are its assumptions? What does it say and leave out?

Memo: Semiological Replacements—the Natural for the Supernatural

Memo to examine semiological replacements of the natural for the supernatural.

Question: when the supernatural is increasingly displaced, will the natural replace it?

Working definitions: 1) Supernatural: the whole realm of the object of faith and its relations, especially sociological-moral; 2) Natural: the realm of creatures, finite objects, particularly touching sociological-moral matters.

Examples of some sociological-moral matters: global market and economy (capitalism vs. communism); eugenics; smoking (http://www.thetruth.com/about); environment; health and dieting; Saints vs. celebrity role models; hierarchical and informed authorities vs. popular authorities; etc.

The above can be aptly summed up in humanitarian activist work; working for world peace in various ways is especially popular.

Creativity in business also is on the rise in ways that combine cultural values, such as independence and relation.

Modest Dress and "Evil" Beauty

Some liberally minded people object to modest dress because they say modest dress enforces a notion that women's bodies are evil, that the beauty of a woman cannot be anything but temptation, and therefore modesty is degrading to the dignity of women.

And it may be admitted that modest dress may enforce such a notion among some people. But is this possibility a sufficient reason to reject modest dress? No, because the connection is not a necessary one. There is no logical connection between modest dress and the idea that women's bodies are evil. In fact, quite the contrary.

As semiotic beings, we organize and interpret sensation into coherent experience through signs and sign processes proper to our biology. Due to this primacy of sign usage, every subjectivity with which we come into contact is experienced as an object. An object is already an interpretation of a subject. As semiotic beings, we may then differentiate the objective and subjective dimensions of any being presented in experience, understanding that what I experience has its own subjective constitution. In this case, a woman with her dignity.

But a man, as with any animal, experiences the woman firstly as an object to be sorted into three possible categories of fundamental interpretation: 1) an object to be desired; 2) to be avoided; or 3) ignored. Such a categorization isn't evil; this is fundamental to animal experience. To reduce the totality of a woman's subjectivity to my preliminary, animal objectification of her would be evil, but the act by which we categorize any object of experience into 1, 2, or 3 is natural and necessary.

Men who struggle with lust obviously categorize women into the first: an object to be desired. Why? They interpret this object of their experience as possessing desirable features and characteristics, and the object then presents itself with future possibilities of fulfillment in multiple ways: animal, physical, emotional, familial, spiritual, etc. But desirable objects must possess positive goods that are recognized as such in order to be categorized as desirable. Hence, a man who struggles with lust is precisely someone who is stuck on one feature of a woman's positive goodness in relation to himself, namely, his own pleasure-seeking. As we noted above, the reduction of a woman's subjectivity to this simple objectification is precisely the objection to modest dress, but notice that our analysis up until now has had nothing to do with modest dress. The objectification occurs all within a man's psyche.

Where does modest dress enter in? It enters precisely in two ways: 1) women seek to help men overcome this objectification; 2) men seek to admit their weakness.

1) modest dress ought to be a means by which a woman says, "I recognize that you have trouble controlling your desires, that you struggle with objectification. I want to help in the way that I can." We are not responsible for each other's actions; hence a woman cannot be required to help a man work through his own psychological mechanisms. But she can help remotely by not encouraging the man's habits by presenting herself in an overtly sexual manner. In so doing, modest dress represents that a woman recognizes the power of her physical beauty to attract the gaze and attention of another, and, wishing to help the other remain both attracted but not enslaved to solely that dimension of her subjectivity, she wears modest dress as a reminder that she is more than her physical beauty. Her mystique is more than the physical although the physical is certainly part of it.

2) men must be willing to admit their weakness. There is a trend in our culture to object to modest dress on the basis that men should be able to control themselves, and having women wear modest dress implies that men can't control themselves. And yes, that is precisely the problem. Women are not responsible for men's lack of self-control; that is not what is claimed by proposing modest dress as a help. We must stop fooling ourselves into believing that we have self-control; look around and be honest. Most do not exercise self-control. This is a problem, and it leads to problems. But modest dress may help take first steps by not encouraging the man to be stuck at the physical level from the very first moment. If a man doesn't notice and become fixated on the physical beauty of a woman from the first instant, an environment is encouraged in which the man may expand his conception of women beyond the pleasure he derives from physicality.

Modest dress ultimately is objected to because it hampers pure individuality, which is the core of the indifference we exhibit towards each other in the spheres of our lives. Because of this indifference, cooperation is characterized cynically as mutually accepted manipulation. Real cooperation, however, means that we cannot exist as self-sufficient beings, but we must exist always in relation to each other, helping and complementing each other, seeking support from each other. We can do this without having to be responsible for the personal choices we each make as individuals; on the other hand, we don't have to go to the other extreme and leave each other alone in our struggles to achieve moral freedom.

Internal Semiosis, Resonance, and the Interior Life

Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange compared the interior life to the internal conversation that occurs in a man. If this interior life is natural, the conversation occurs simply with oneself, making oneself the ultimate referent of all experience: "As soon as a man ceases to be outwardly occupied, to talk with his fellow men, as soon as he is alone, even in the noisy streets of a great city, he begins to carry on a conversation with himself [....] If a man is fundamentally egotistical, his intimate conversation with himself is inspired by sensuality or pride." (Three Ages of the Interior Life, trans. M. Timothea Doyle, ch. 2, http://christianperfection.info/tta6.php).

At the moment that a man seeks the good in honesty, the nature of this conversation changes: "He converses with himself, for example, about what is necessary to live becomingly and to support his family. This at times preoccupies him greatly; he feels his weakness and the need of placing his confidence no longer in himself alone, but in God" (ibid.). Even in the state of grace, egoism confuses and mangles this interior conversation, pushing God out as much as possible despite the soul's clearer vision of its inadequacy and dependence on God. In fact, Garrigou-Lagrange suggests that this interior conversation cannot end and implicitly points to man's need for God as well as man's final fulfillment in God, who alone can finally satisfy this interior dialogue: "The soul must converse with someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him" (ibid.).

Modern psychology at its best provides scientific precision to analytical explanations of the interior, psychological processes of the intellect and soul. Often, however, where psychology gets something correct, we find such points already explicated in the writings and experiences of the Saints, at least in nascent or unscientific form. St. Paul famously experienced the interior struggle between what he saw was good and what he hated as evil:

For that which I work, I understand not. For I do not that good which I will; but the evil which I hate, that I do. If then I do that which I will not, I consent to the law, that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that there dwelleth not in me, that is to say, in my flesh, that which is good. For to will, is present with me; but to accomplish that which is good, I find not. For the good which I will, I do not; but the evil which I will not, that I do. Now if I do that which I will not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 

I find then a law, that when I have a will to do good, evil is present with me. For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man: But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord. Therefore, I myself, with the mind serve the law of God; but with the flesh, the law of sin. (Romans 7:15–25; DR trans.)

And Psalm 19 says, "Who can understand sins? from my secret ones cleanse me, O Lord" (v. 12). These verses posit that there exists a dimension of the broken personality, caught up in sin, in conflict with the conscious striving towards virtue. There is a contrast in Paul between flesh and mind yet almost as if the flesh had a mind and will of its own. Modern psychology would distinguish these dimensions as the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious. The exact nature of these different aspects can lead to serious error in a philosophy of human nature, and it's clear that much of modern psychology has tended towards a mechanistic reductionism of the human psyche, where the unconscious takes on some kind of overwhelming force. Without going to these extremes, it seems reasonable that we often act out of a plurality of motives, some of which we do not discern until we reflect later on our actions with deeper insight. The increase of self-knowledge is not merely quantitative—I know more and more truths about my personality—but also qualitative—I know my personality more deeply than before, its patterns, tendencies, weaknesses, and also very importantly, its strengths, some of which due to my God-given temperament.

Perhaps a semiotic analysis of human psychology would provide some helpful insights for spiritual growth. We know from experience that when a man works on growing in self-knowledge and discernment, the unconscious aspects of his moral actions eventually come to light. We also know from the experience of the Saints that where sinful tendencies reside in these unconscious dimensions, grace and asceticism eventually purify and heal the psyche of these tendencies. Here is a simple refutation of the omnipotence of the unconscious. Transformation in Christ is where the Saint may say truly, "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).

This internal dialogue, often the source of many self-destructive tendencies, especially to despair in various forms, is nothing other than a process of "private semiosis," the internal activity of signs in the human mind as it processes its environment and itself in some unified way. Conversation is speech, and speech consists of signs; human language is nothing other than that form of sign use unique to humans: anthroposemiosis. This semiosis is private insofar as it occurs immanently in the mind, seen in its immediate, raw form only by the individual and God although it may be expressed in a mediated way to others—mediated because only we can experience the fullness of what we experience.

But sign activity, or semiosis, for humans occurs in multiple dimensions since the human alone of all animals can distinguish between signs as such and all other forms of reality, between subject and object, between actual and ideal. Much of the activity that informs our conscious semiosis is subconscious. For example, when we read a novel, we subconsciously take on the role of a reader who understands that we are entering into a fictional world. Did we make the conscious, private semiosic choice to take on this interpretive stance? No (although we could if we so chose). We switch between interpretive modes for all genres of text, and we do something similar when we enter different social settings and engage with different people. Even where there is the conscious awareness of making certain switches, for example, "I must not use vulgarity when I'm around grandma," we might tell ourselves privately, there are other aspects of this switch that we often are not aware of; for example, what is the prior condition that prompts us to tell ourselves that we ought not to use vulgarity around our elders? This prompting is a semiosic process that we might become aware of, just like we might become aware of our breathing at any moment if we so chose to pay attention and knew what to look for, but just like our breathing, these processes often remain on the subconscious level.

Perhaps we can see the distinction between conscious and subconscious precisely in terms of relation, a relation to intentional awareness or the lack thereof. Following a Lacanian line of thinking regarding the unconscious, the unconscious is precisely everything other than the conscious remaining in human experience, encompassing the aspects of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic; this residue or overflow occurs because conscious processing of our experience always leaves something to be desired, something missing; language is often insufficient—we find ourselves at a loss for words as the saying goes. Hence analogously, just as God is precisely everything other than created, finite beings (and by extension, the concept of God is precisely a concept consisting of an amalgamation of relations by which we conceive that God is not this, nor that, nor that), so too our unconscious is everything other than consciously filtered experience through our private semiosis.

Hence the conscious, unconscious, and subconscious all converge simultaneously to create the presently processed experience of our environments. Deepening our self-knowledge allows us to identify these different strands and how they are functioning at any given moment. Perhaps this lack of self-knowledge or despair of possibly attaining to it in atheistic psychologies has led to the idea that the unconscious inescapably dominates all our behavior. There is truth to the experience that often we seem to lose control of ourselves, that our emotions seem to be out of our control, our thoughts run on endlessly, often laboriously (even St. Teresa of Avila complained about this on multiple occasions). Much of this lack of control for the average person certainly stems from a lack of self-knowledge and the tools to deal with and integrate the different dimensions of our experience. (We might also postulate that this lack of control may be the result of a sensitive temperament that is more attuned to the multiple effects of one's surrounding and/or the result of a sensitivity that comes from ascetic and mystical purification by which one is keenly aware of the different spirits affecting our behaviors, thoughts, etc.; maybe some combination of the above was the case with St. Teresa, whose almost constant contemplation bombarded her soul with new infusions of grace, overwhelming her and overflowing into the bodily dimension of her being, sometimes painfully.) With self-knowledge and discipline, these different dimension can be identified, organized, and trained even on the natural plane.

But first, we need to understand why the process of the constant bombardment of shifting emotions and internal dialogue occurs. To begin metaphysically, all being contains positive and negative dimensions, positive perfections and negative lacks due to its finite structure and the circumstances that may have vitiated its due development towards its final end. Being is simultaneously communicative and receptive, sharing its proper perfections around it and receiving the perfections of other beings, hopefully in ways complementary to its own teleological needs—e.g. rain is necessary for plant growth, but too much rain may drown the plant. Hence we may say there is complementary communication and non-complementary communication (where complementary is understood in relation to aiding a being's fulfillment of its final end).

Our relation to reality encompasses these perfections in an intentional form, and our semiosis communicates these intentional realities and perfections, which in turn constantly are those elements that bombard us. So much of this communication is occurring all the time that it seems impossible for any individual to process all of it, and we know from neuroscience just how much processing our brain does behind the scenes in order to maintain our practical functionality at any given moment. Within this bombardment is the opportunity for help or hurt. It is a common experience that we find ourselves in pain or ambient anxiety, and it seemingly arises from nowhere. Demonic influence and psychological disorder momentarily set aside for theoretical reasons in this analysis, it may very well be that a steady bombardment of non-complementary being has slowly accumulated within our souls, leading to affective experiences of pain, anxiety, etc. It may also be that this accumulation resonates in a certain way with already present stores of past accumulations of pain, going back even into early childhood or gestation. Psychology has been able to show just how influential these formative years are and how devastating they may be if a child is not given a properly nurturing upbringing.

The old children's rhyme about sticks, stones, and words never hurting us is simply a child's denial of a very painful reality, its attempt to gain control over what feels beyond its control, the overwhelming overflow of communicated being (or perhaps non-being in the sense of moral evil) leading to pain. The rhyme then seeks to contain the pain through the use of words, but this misses the point because the child clearly does not have the experience or psychological maturity or discernment in order to properly face such pain.

As different webs and spirals of semiosis accumulate in the soul by forming qualities in the manner of habits—and here I am being more speculative than before—perhaps it is precisely in this way that the soul informs the body in a secondary manner—the primary manner being that the soul provides the basic constitutive framework of this kind of living animal—, in the manner of how quality is respect to form as quantity is respect to matter. Habits, while being qualities in the soul, clearly have physical effects in the body; neural networks are formed in habits, for example. As the soul is informed by semiosic processes, so too the body responds accordingly. And perhaps the movement is reciprocal: as the body is affected by external forces beyond the soul's control, the soul is affected, or at least its full and proper expression through the body. Hence, physical and mental disabilities that impede the proper development and expression of normative human intellectual activity.

Regardless of how the above process works, the accumulations of semiotic webs within the soul, both conscious and unconscious, then lead to qualities that affect bodily development and render certain patterns of behavior easier, swifter, and accompanied by a certain spiritual and bodily delight. The quality of a soul informed by a habit and its subsequent informing of the body renders a person apt for the actualization of these habits, creating what we might call a "resonance."

Just as in acoustics, room resonance depends on the wall matter, sound, and location all interacting simultaneously to create a booming effect, or just as pitch resonances may create sympathetic vibrations when certain conditions are met, when certain semiosic processes converge in a human informed with this habitual quality, a resonance may occur, rendering the actualization of the habit immediate, facile, and delightful, perhaps even overwhelming in a certain sense.

Thus the pain of a person trapped in vice—the convergence of these semiosic processes is nothing other than what is called a temptation. At the moment of this convergence, the communication of intentional non-complementary being creates a certain resonance, striving to activate the soul, whose vicious quality renders it apt for reacting in this vicious way. Thus the psychological experience of the temptation may feel overwhelming.

Similarly, for a person formed in a virtuous habit, when the proper semiosic conditions converge, the virtue is activated, the morally good action executed with delight, sometimes with a deep relish at having accomplished the good, even simple goods.

And just as conditions may create resonance based on the qualitative predisposition of a soul formed in this habit, so too opposite conditions may resonate very poorly if at all in people with the opposite qualities respectively. Hence what used to be a temptation to a soul now is hardly a blip in its habitual, qualitative orientation towards the good; likewise, a stimulus to good may be experienced for a soul trapped in sin as painful, dissonant, and hardly moving. The semiosic communication is jarring with the quality of the soul; the being that is being communicated is not converging properly with the soul informed or disformed by these qualities. We see analogous clashes in the realm of physical organisms all the time, where external conditions and the subjective constitution of an organism or seed do not converge to lead to the flourishing of the organism.

But lest this process seem to be another form of omnipotence, shifting from the unconscious to these semiosic processes, it must be remembered that conscious semiosis in the human is the discursive reason, guiding and directing the will, creating the conditions for freedom. Clearly the freedom of a soul trapped in sin is encumbered but can never be totally destroyed without destroying discursive reason itself. Hence these semiosic processes are both the condition for freedom as well as the possibility for either its hindrance or development, just as water is a necessary condition for the growth of plant life, but too little, too much, or contaminated water will kill the plant. The will must still choose, and the will can direct the intentionality of these semiosic processes, guiding them in certain limited ways, depending on the various conditions, both external and internal. Qualities are supposed to aid the soul in the proper guidance of these processes, in the proper flourishing of the rational aspect of human nature.

Grace enters. We say that grace perfects nature. Grace is a communication in the divine life, a participation, or in other words, a relation. This is precisely semiosis on the divine level, entering through an analogous, accidental, created, physical mode into the soul. Without grace, the private semiosis of an individual would begin at conception and crash into oblivion at death. Grace thus creates a relation between the soul and God and creates an elevation of those dimensions that exist in the soul, giving them an orientation to the divine or at least the conditions that make possible the development of this orientation. Hence the accumulated semioses remain, but grace now offers and provides a "defrag" program for the soul. There is certainly an extent to which the soul may do this itself—the active purifications and ascetical stages of the spiritual life constitute this extent. But the end for which God has made man goes beyond man's natural, immanent capacities, and besides which, the wounds of sin that remain render the accumulation of harmful semioses sometimes overwhelming, something experienced sometimes as loss of total control, addiction.

The conversation, the private semiosis, may now turn to God. God's semiosis enters into the soul; the Trinity makes its dwelling in the heart. The Logos communicates the fullness of the divinity. The Holy Ghost consumes and transforms. The Father guides the soul lovingly, teaching, listening, aiding, assuring.

We also believe there is a Communion of Saints. Communion involves communication, reception, relation, a sharing, a participation. The semiosis of grace extends not only to the Deity but to those who are linked by grace to God.

These are the helps that the soul needs. Nevertheless, those resonances remain, the resonances of already formed habits. The struggle is arduous, but the soul is assured of divine assistance, a true omnipotence, the omnipotence of God and the shared, participated omnipotence of the Blessed Mother, who obtains for us all that we need. The theological virtues create wellsprings, new qualities in the soul, by which the old resonances may be combatted not only on the natural plane but also the supernatural.

Here it must be remarked one particular difficulty people have in allowing grace to establish a new, supernatural quality. Faith is the virtue by which we attain to God as revealed and revealing Truth. St. John of the Cross interestingly argues that living faith alone is the proximate and proportionate means of union with God. What does this mean semiotically? Simply that the semiosis of faith is experienced psychologically as pure emptiness, darkness, nothing except the will's constant clinging to God despite all other competing strands of semiosis in the psyche.

Here we can see why so many people get lost in secondary matters of faith and, although they intellectually adhere or profess to the matters of faith and their extensions to different aspects of the Church and Christian life, this faith doesn't seem to transform them as it ought. For example, focusing on issues, such as the pro-life movement, personal devotions, political topics, like women priests, sexual morality, marriage, or issues of liturgy, tradition, and doctrine—these are all secondary to faith. Faith primarily attains to God and secondarily applies to all else insofar as it stands in relation to God revealing. Hence faith is meant to unite us perfectly to God and not to these secondary matters. St. John of the Cross insists that a person who places importance on these secondary issues is, despite these issues being related to faith, hindering their union with God through faith. The following quotation focuses only on devotions and the Mass, for example:

These people attribute so much efficacy to methods of carrying out their devotions and prayers [....] They put more trust in these methods than they do in the living prayer [....] For example, they demand that the Mass be said with a certain number of candles, no more nor less; or that it be celebrated at a particular hour, no sooner nor later; or that it be said after a certain day, not before; [...] And regarding other ceremonies in vocal prayers and other devotions, one should not become attached to any ceremonies or modes of prayer other than those Christ taught us." (Ascent of Mount Carmel, 3.43.2, 44.4)

St. John of the Cross says the way to the top of the mountain is: nada, the emptiness of pure faith, a total clinging to God in absolute darkness of intellectual and finite semioses. The divine semiosis of faith stands in absolute difference (but not indifference) to all human semioses, and to inject human semiosis into the divine semiosis of faith is to kill faith. Meditation, as St. John of the Cross teaches, is a heuristic process, temporary, by which the soul is actively weaning itself of previous vicious habits and working towards developing virtuous qualities. Think of St. Teresa of Avila's comparison of meditation to drawing water out of a well with a bucket. Meditation simply frees up the soul to a sufficient degree so that its accumulated semioses may not get in the way of the divine semiosis of faith because it often is the case that our accumulations stifle and mute faith without our even intending it to. Perhaps more precisely we should say our accumulations stifle and mute the expression and development of faith but not faith itself; otherwise, it would be impossible to remain in a state of grace unless we were already perfect! No, God, seeing our weakness, accepts the conscious intention of our will to adhere to the faith, and this is sufficient for faith to remain in the soul. Nevertheless, this state is only the beginning, and it's easy for the individual, so accustomed to created, finite semiosic processes, to confuse the divine semiosis of faith with these other finite processes, which extend to our conceptions of the Mass, of the Pope, of what the Church really should look like, and even what our spiritual life should look like. As long as we cling to human semiosis, we hinder faith.

To repeat: meditation is not a clinging to human semiosis, but an efficient tool to redirect human semiosis to free the soul of its accumulated vicious qualities so that these accumulations don't completely stifle and freeze the flowering of faith in the soul. Meditation should be leading us to become more and more humble and detached from our private conceptions and semiosis and becoming more and more attached to God, conversing with Him, remaining recollected in Him, not ourselves, going out of ourselves as St. John of the Cross would say, forgetting ourselves.

Someday, by God's grace, we shall attain to that state where our private semiosis is directed by the Holy Ghost perfectly, so that although we experience reality with our accumulated past and individuality, it is filtered and subsumed harmoniously and without resistance by the divine semiosis of Christ: "And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me" (Gal. 2:20).

Alasdair MacIntyre on the Fiction of Human Rights

[81] I take it that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, [82] rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him. I have already characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why should anyone else now listen to him? It was and is to this question that both utilitarianism and analytical moral philosophy must be understood as attempting to give cogent answers; and if my argument is correct, it is precisely this question which both fail to answer cogently. Nonetheless almost everyone, philosopher and non-philosopher alike, continues to speak and write as if one of these projects had succeeded. And hence derives one of the features of contemporary moral discourse which I noticed at the outset, the gap between the meaning of moral expressions and the ways in which they are put to use. For the meaning is and remains such as would have been warranted only if at least one of the philosophical projects had been successful; but the use, the emotivist use, is precisely what one would expect if the philosophical projects had all failed.

Contemporary moral experience as a consequence has a paradoxical character. For each of us is taught to see himself or herself as an autonomous moral agent; but each of us also becomes engaged by modes of practice, aesthetic or bureaucratic, which involve us in manipulative relationships with others. Seeking to protect the autonomy that we have learned to prize, we aspire ourselves not to be manipulated by others; seeking to incarnate our own principles and stand-point in the world of practice, we find no way open to us to do so except by directing towards others those very manipulative modes of relationship which each of us aspires to resist in our own case. The incoherence of our attitudes and our experience arises from the incoherent conceptual scheme which we have inherited.

Once we have understood this it is possible to understand also the key place that three other concepts have in the distinctively modern moral scheme, that of rights, that of protest, and that of unmasking. By 'rights' I do not mean those rights conferred by positive law or custom on specified classes of persons; I mean those rights which are alleged to belong to human beings as such and which are cited as a person for holding that people ought not to be interfered with in their pursuit [83] of life, liberty and happiness. They are the rights which were spoken of in the eighteenth century as natural rights or as the rights of man. Characteristically in that century they were defined negatively, precisely as rights not to be interfered with. But sometimes in that century and much more often in our own positive rights—rights to due process, to education or to employment are examples—are added to the list. The expression 'human rights' is now commoner than either of the eighteenth-century expressions. But whether negative or positive and however named they are supposed to attach equally to all individuals, whatever their sex, race, religion, talents or deserts, and to provide a ground for a variety of particular moral stances.

It would of course be a little odd that there should be such rights attaching to human beings simply qua human beings in light of the fact, which I alluded to in my discussion of Gewirth's argument, that there is no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by our expression 'a right' until near the close of the middle ages: the concept lacks any means of expression in Hebrew, Greek, Latin or Arabic, classical or medieval, before about 1400, let alone in Old English, or in Japanese even as late as the mid-nineteenth century. From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.

The best reason for asserting so bluntly that there are no such rights is indeed of precisely the same type as the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no witches and the best reason which we possess for asserting that there are no unicorns: every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed. [There is also a connection here to that form of relative being within the realm of ens rationis, crucial to the possibility of confusing reality with fiction and vice versa, but MacIntyre doesn't bring this up.] The eighteenth-century philosophical defenders of natural rights sometimes suggest that the assertions which state that men possess them are self-evident truths; but we know that there are no self-evident truths. Twentieth-century moral philosophers have sometimes appealed to their and our intuitions; but one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become [84] the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor. And the latest defender of such rights, Ronald Dworkin (Taking Rights Seriously, 1976) concedes that the existence of such rights cannot be demonstrated, but remarks on this point simply that it does not follow from the fact that a statement cannot be demonstrated that it is not true (p. 81). Which is true, but could equally be used to defend claims about unicorns and witches.

Natural or human rights then are fictions—just as is utility—but fictions with highly specific properties.

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Source: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2007), 81–84.

St. Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Lacan on Desire and Sin

It seems that Lacan is saying in psychoanalytical language precisely what Aquinas showed was the source of sin: an apparent good that isn't truly in accord with reason. When we see things under right reason, we look at them, in Lacan's terms, straight on, directly, for what they really are. An object becomes desirable when seen "anamorphically," distorted by a subtle projection of our subjectivity into the object, a mistake in the intellect's judgment; this is the subtle relation between beings in nature (substances) and beings of reason, as Aquinas puts it, and their very close intermingling in concrete experience; the separation of the two requires a lot of reflexivity usually. It would be interesting to see a semiotic synthesis between these two thinkers because the experience is clearly rooted in the semiosic process.

First, St. Thomas, then Lacan as interpreted by Zizek.

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Objection 1. It would seem that the will is not of good only. For the same power regards opposites; for instance, sight regards white and black. But good and evil are opposites. Therefore the will is not only of good, but also of evil.

Objection 2. Further, rational powers can be directed to opposite purposes, according to the Philosopher (Metaph. ix, 2). But the will is a rational power, since it is "in the reason," as is stated in De Anima iii, 9. Therefore the will can be directed to opposites; and consequently its volition is not confined to good, but extends to evil.

Objection 3. Further, good and being are convertible. But volition is directed not only to beings, but also to non-beings. For sometimes we wish "not to walk," or "not to speak"; and again at times we wish for future things, which are not actual beings. Therefore the will is not of good only.

On the contrary, Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv) that "evil is outside the scope of the will," and that "all things desire good."

I answer that, The will is a rational appetite. Now every appetite is only of something good. The reason of this is that the appetite is nothing else than an inclination of a person desirous of a thing towards that thing. Now every inclination is to something like and suitable to the thing inclined. Since, therefore, everything, inasmuch as it is being and substance, is a good, it must needs be that every inclination is to something good. And hence it is that the Philosopher says (Ethic. i, 1) that "the good is that which all desire."

But it must be noted that, since every inclination results from a form, the natural appetite results from a form existing in the nature of things: while the sensitive appetite, as also the intellective or rational appetite, which we call the will, follows from an apprehended form. Therefore, just as the natural appetite tends to good existing in a thing; so the animal or voluntary appetite tends to a good which is apprehended. Consequently, in order that the will tend to anything, it is requisite, not that this be good in very truth, but that it be apprehended as good. Wherefore the Philosopher says (Phys. ii, 3) that "the end is a good, or an apparent good."

Reply to Objection 1. The same power regards opposites, but it is not referred to them in the same way. Accordingly, the will is referred both to good and evil: but to good by desiring it: to evil, by shunning it. Wherefore the actual desire of good is called "volition" [In Latin, 'voluntas'. To avoid confusion with "voluntas" (the will) St. Thomas adds a word of explanation, which in the translation may appear superfluous], meaning thereby the act of the will; for it is in this sense that we are now speaking of the will. On the other hand, the shunning of evil is better described as "nolition": wherefore, just as volition is of good, so nolition is of evil.

Reply to Objection 2. A rational power is not to be directed to all opposite purposes, but to those which are contained under its proper object; for no power seeks other than its proper object. Now, the object of the will is good. Wherefore the will can be directed to such opposite purposes as are contained under good, such as to be moved or to be at rest, to speak or to be silent, and such like: for the will can be directed to either under the aspect of good.

Reply to Objection 3. That which is not a being in nature, is considered as a being in the reason, wherefore negations and privations are said to be "beings of reason." In this way, too, future things, in so far as they are apprehended, are beings. Accordingly, in so far as such like are beings, they are apprehended under the aspect of good; and it is thus that the will is directed to them. Wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. v, 1) that "to lack evil is considered as a good."

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Source: St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, 1a2æ.8.1, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2008.htm.

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[392] [T]he Lacanian objet a whose status is that of an anamorphosis: a part of a picture which, when the picture is viewed in a direct frontal way, appears as a meaningless stain, but which acquires the contours of a known object when we change our position and look at the picture from the side. Lacan’s point is even more radical: the object-cause of desire is something that, when viewed frontally, is nothing at all, just a void— it acquires the contours of something only when viewed sideways. [...]

This is the objet a: an entity that has no substantial consistency, which is in itself “nothing but confusion,” and which acquires a definite shape only when looked upon from a standpoint distorted by the subject’s desires and fears— as such, as a mere “shadow of what it is not.” As such, the objet a is the strange object which is nothing but the inscription of the subject itself into the field of objects, in the guise of a stain which acquires form only when part of this field is anamorphically distorted by the subject’s desire.1 [...]

[403] The objet a is the point at which the subject encounters itself, its own impossible objectal counterpoint, among objects—“ impossible” means here that a is the obverse of the subject, they can never encounter each other in a direct opposition or mirroring, i.e., there is no relationship between $ and a, they are like the two sides of the same spot on a Möbius band. What this means is that the objet a stands for the “object as such,” the frame of a variable; it is in this sense (Lacan’s version of) the transcendental object, a mark of the “pure” faculty of desire: it has no substantial consistency of its own, it is just a spectral materialization of a certain cut or inadequacy— or, as Lacan put it concisely: “The object a is a cut” (“l’objet a est une coupure”).

[404] [...] the objet a is not the inaccessible ideal object to which no empirical object is adequate—“the object a is this inadequacy itself.” In this sense, the objet a is “the presupposed void in a demand,” the void that sustains the experience of “this is never that”: the universal (“object as such”) comes to exists as a pure gap.

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Source: Slavoj Zizek, Absolute Recoil: Towards A New Foundation Of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso Books, 2014), 392, 403–404.

Memo: Semiotics of Vulgarity

It would be interesting to see what may be revealed about the phenomenon of vulgarity through a semiotic analysis.

My initial impression/intuition—the vulgar is distinguished not by the denotation but by the cultural connotation associated with a word; it's a negative phenomenon rather than positive, where the vulgar exists precisely in that space between pure description and connoted association.

Memo: Semiotic Theology

It would be interesting to see theology done in light of semiotics, especially spiritual theology.

The notion of relation with God through grace in my mind takes on a more explicit character; its strength is not only affirmed but clarified.

David Foster Wallace on Mediated Experience

Time stamp: 28:05-29:59

Those of us who write partly as a subject about popular culture are, I think, doing something important, which is that television and popular culture has become so saturated for people our age that we don't notice it's there. We don't notice that much of our experience is mediated, but it's got an agenda. It's trying to sell us things, that an attempt to—I don't know what you would call it—get behind the scenes, humanize, defamiliarize the experience of a mediated world is I think a good and important thing if nothing else to slap people kind of unpleasantly across the face and say, "There may not be something wrong with 68 hours of television, but it would be very nice for you to remember that you are essentially being offered a sales pitch and a seduction, six to eight hours a day." If we forget that, then for some reason just intuitively, I think we're in huge trouble. At a time in the US when I think it's very hard to find and commit to things that you think are important or good, at least for me, in some elements of fiction, it seems to me, it's a rather high-minded agenda to try to wake people up to the fact that our experience is weird now. There is something weird and thrice removed from the real world about it, and a lot of us don't realize it. What's at stake is in many ways human agency about how we experience the world. Would I rather go muck around in the hot sun by the seashore or watch a marvelously put together documentary about the death of egrets. But by the time I go to the G**d*** seashore and have seen the egrets, I have already experienced this smooth documentary so many times that it becomes quickly incoherent to talk about an extra-mediated or extra-televisual reality. Now that fact in and of itself is frightening, and it's that kind of—almost just sort of shooting flare into the sky and inviting people to say how weird that is. I can go to the ocean that I've never seen before, but I've spent a 1,000 hours... I mean, who would want to live when you can... watch?

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Source: Endnotes: David Foster Wallace, BBC Documentary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIjS4K2mQKY.

Fiction Disproves Nominalism

If there is no such thing as a mind-independent relation, i.e. relations that obtain independently of my awareness of them, then there is no such thing as the distinction between fiction and reality.

Fiction is purely objective reality, depending totally on mind-dependent relations. If there are no mind-independent relations, one is left with mind-dependent relations alone, hence total solipsism and hence also fiction. The distinction of fiction from reality would then itself be a fiction.

Circumstance as sign and opportunity

We often view circumstances in a fatalistic way. Circumstances "happen." The famous bumper sticker comes to mind. Circumstances are interpreted as beyond our control, or otherwise they are placed in an evaluative framework of what is in our control and not.

Maybe it is not so. Maybe circumstances are very deliberate processes, deliberate but not deterministic. Maybe circumstances are the expressions of conscious processes, meeting, connecting, bouncing off of and bumping into each other.

If we take it as true that all things are governed by God's Providence, then a thread of intelligibility, of love, of wisdom, runs through all things. All things have a conscious direction even if asymmetrical. Perhaps intelligibility doesn't equate with symmetry and balance, but perhaps reality as intelligible is intelligible precisely as a mixture of symmetry and asymmetry, of order and chaos, of articulate and ineffable.

Maybe, then, circumstances even those circumstances that are not apparently caused by human consciousness are nevertheless not things we can try to control or fall under the control of but rather the sort of possible encounter that reality proposes to us here and now.

I am sick. In the common view of circumstance, my sickness is not under my control, but I do everything I can to alleviate it. I complain of its grasp on my life, my livelihood. Perhaps sickness is something else; perhaps it is a link in a chain of possibility, connection both to God, to myself, to others, to the underlying intelligibility of the universe, an opportunity for transcending myself here and now.

I am late. Therefore I try to speed to work. Maybe there is something else going on here; maybe the circumstance is a symptom, a sign.

If circumstances are signs instead of chance events, then I can dialogue with circumstance and draw it up into a greater conversation, the conversation of my life.

Repost: John Deely, "Solipsism"

The following article on solipsism by Dr. John Deely is so fantastic and straightforward. It explains all the hesitations and frustrations I experienced while studying modern and contemporary philosophy (aside from the frustrations of actually trying to understand what was being said by the convoluted style so infamous and probably genetically passed on among philosophers). Not only does Deely provide a solution to epistemology, but he also provides a powerful framework for cultural criticism and assimilation.

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[1439] From the Latin solus ipse, “the self alone,” solipsism is the view that knowledge does not extend beyond our own subjective existence. Sometimes used to describe a pathological medical condition of a person who has lost capacity to communicate, the term is also used philosophically to name the view that all we directly know and experience reduces to a state of our own consciousness or “mind,” beyond which we have no direct access to anything at all.

The term is often associated with René DESCARTES' formula “I think therefore I am” and with Gottfried Wilhelm von LEIBNIZ's formula “Monads have no windows.” Our consciousness is a kind of bubble: We have no direct awareness of anything that is not itself a product of our own mind.

The term itself seems first to occur in Alexander Campbell Fraser's 1874 edition of Selections from Berkeley: “Berkeley's reasoning implies that we can know only our own notions… thus leading, by a reductio ad absurdum, to Egoism or Solipsism” (47). EGOISM has generally come to designate self-interest, whereas solipsism has come into general use primarily in the context of modern theory of knowledge or “epistemology.” “In this respect,” [1440] Bertrand RUSSELL, in his book My Philosophical Development, summarized: “I agree with Berkeley. The starry heaven that we know in visual perception is inside us. The external starry heaven that we believe in is inferred” ([1959] 1997, 20).

There is good reason why solipsism is connected with EPISTEMOLOGY. Both terms arise from modern philosophy 's preoccupation with the theory of knowledge. Epistemology dates to James Frederick Ferrier 's 1854 Institutes of Metaphysic: “This section of the science [of Metaphysic] is properly termed the Epistemology—the doctrine or theory of knowing, just as ontology is the doctrine or theory of being” (46). Of course, knowing being depends upon what knowing is. And what knowing is, according to modern epistemology, is precisely the intervention from within the mind of mental representations that stand between ourselves as knowing and whatever there may be around us. Bishop Berkeley, in A Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge ([1710] 1948, Part I, Section 10, p. 45), advised simply that all sensible qualities are “in the mind and nowhere else.” David Hume put it this way: “No man, who reflects, ever doubted, that the existences, which we consider, when we say ‘this house’ and ‘that tree,’ are nothing but perceptions in the mind.” (Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding [1748] 1975, Sect. XII, Part I, last par. in marginal section 118).

The isolation of the knowing self within itself, generally traced to Descartes, is more properly traceable to William of Ockham's view on relation. As Julius R. Weinberg (1965) noted, all the moderns (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant) adopted Ockham's view that relations have no being in the order of what exists independently of our awareness. Against this background of NOMINALISM Descartes made as his first step toward a “new beginning” in philosophy the bare certainty of our own existence as thinking things. The first unmistakable version of the problema pontis, the “problem of the bridge,” resulted: How can we cross from the cognitive states of our own subjectivity to the world of things existing independently?

John LOCKE agreed with Descartes that the immediate objects of awareness are our own ideas, “mental representations.” But Locke disagreed that our first idea was the rational idea of God. Locke argued instead that ideas of sense are first. Followers of Descartes came to be called rationalists; followers of Locke, empiricists. But both lines agreed that objects as directly apprehended or known are one with our subjective cognitive states. Immanuel KANT, “Master of the Moderns” by virtue of his synthesis of RATIONALISM and EMPIRICISM, introduced a distinction between objects and ideas. But the relations between ideas and objects he attributed wholly to the working of the mind itself (the a priori forms of reason introduced into the phenomenal appearances of sense to give us the necessities of science). Thus Kant concluded that there is no possibility of a bridge passing from consciousness to “things in themselves.”

As a term designating the study of knowledge, epistemology seems straightforward. But when we consider the context of the term's introduction, in particular the assumption that is common (albeit in varying ways) to Descartes, Locke, and Kant, that the direct object of apprehension in every respect of every case involves “ideas” or (after Kant) the “phenomenal veil,” the usage carries the implication that the realm of being as existing independently is “unknowable,” that is, closed to us in principle. Study of “knowledge” reveals a closed circuit wherein the access to “being,” and hence the prospect of ONTOLOGY, is foreclosed.

John Poinsot (1589–1644), a contemporary of Descartes who received no consideration in the context out of which mainstream modern philosophy formed, presciently warned in 1632 (Treatise on Signs, Book III, Q. 2) that any assumption of the view that all awareness terminates directly in mental representations would create an insoluble “problema pontis.” Poinsot's argument (drawn from St. THOMAS AQUINAS) is that sense perception is founded on relations directly consequent on physical interactions between our bodies and surrounding bodies. The resulting awareness does not involve mental representations, but provides rather, within perception, the basis upon which only secondarily as interpretations of direct experience mental representations are introduced. “On this principle, as in a root,” Poinsot states, is founded the knowability of being as having within our awareness a directly awareness-independent dimension concomitant with the objective interpretations that we introduce through mental representations. Otherwise, Poinsot warned, there is no way out of our mind if mental representations are the whole basis of perception within experience.

Leibniz (1704) called the modern development of epistemology “the way of ideas” precisely because of the modern denial that awareness directly involves any relations that are awareness-independent. Leibniz saw at once that, given the assumption that defines this modern path, solipsism is a logically inescapable cul-de-sac—“Monads have no windows”; hence, being is unknowable.

The proposition that the “external world” is in itself unknowable, as Percy Bridgman remarked (1959), “is usually felt to be so absurd as to constitute its own refutation.” From the time of Kant to the present day, however, many have avoided facing up to this consequent, but no one has been able to explain how, starting with the thesis that what we are first aware of is a mental representation, we can get beyond solipsism. Bertrand Russell summarized the modern “epistemological dilemma” concisely. Despite the fact that, given the [1441] assumption of modern philosophy common to Descartes on the Rationalist side, Locke on the Empiricist side, and Kant in his synthesis of Rationalism and Empiricism, “we cannot witness or observe anything else at all” except “what goes on in our heads,” yet “those—and I fear they are the majority—in whom the human affections are stronger than the desire for logical economy, will, no doubt, not share my desire to render solipsism scientifically satisfactory” (My Philosophical Development, 1959).

Solipsism, in sum, is a term that precisely summarizes in the context of modern epistemology the logical consequent of the antecedent mainstream assumption that the human mind has a direct awareness only of its self-constructed mental representations.

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Source: Deely, John. "Solipsism." New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012-2013: Ethics and Philosophy. Ed. Robert L. Fastiggi. Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale, 2013. 1439-441. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 11 Oct. 2014. <http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE|CX2762500669&v=2.1&u=gonzagaufoley&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w&asid=5eb7130d8b53c771f1c1dd6321615811>.

The Definition of Faith & Invoking the Dictionary

There exists a strange tendency to use the dictionary as a source of authority for arguments in many topics. Kory Stamper, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, wrote a penetrating blog article on this strange phenomenon whereby she shows that the dictionary's primary if not only function is and always has been to describe how language actually is used at the present moment as well as to catalogue how language has been used and evolved over time (read the article here: http://korystamper.wordpress.com/2013/01/25/the-voice-of-authority-morality-and-dictionaries/). Accepting that no one has a monopoly over language, Stamper argues that not only for sanity's sake but also for the simple fact that a rigoristic prescriptivism has always stood awkwardly and arbitrarily aloof from the rest of language users we must draw true wisdom from deeper reflection and not a "slot machine" usage of the dictionary.

What are the implications for rational dialogue? Primarily, while we can look to a dictionary to understand how a word is being used by the majority of people, we also know that in specialized fields of study, some words must take on specialized meanings that while being related to their quotidian signification will also differ from them. To take one example that comes up very frequently: faith. Atheists will very often wave the dictionary definition of faith in front of apologetic (in the Greek sense) believers so as to stop any possible conversation dead in its tracks because, after all, atheists have SCIENCE, and believers have

firm belief in something for which there is no proof (definition 2b [1], Merriam-Webster)

Hence from the start the discussion introduces a seemingly-insurmountable dichotomy between science/rationality and faith/irrationality. Of course, the attempt to point out to the atheist pseudo-scientist that the entire enterprise of science presupposes cenoscopic knowledge that transcends the scope of science while simultaneously grounding its very possibility, and that this same semiosic dynamic provides the same very psychological-intellectual framework by which the act of faith is made, leads to the response, "Nya, nya, nya, nya, nya-nya! I have science, and you have blind faith!" The irony as many theists have already noticed is that such behavior, closed to the possibility and openness of any dialogue, is reminiscent of three year olds and is itself a manifestation of the blindness that it denounces.

Unfortunately, with these sorts of people, wherever they exist, after the calm, deliberate attempt to show them their practice of invoking the dictionary as a "voice of authority" has failed, the only remaining option is to let them go on their way and to pray for them in sorrow.