II-II Q. XLVI. ART. II.
Article II.–Is stupidity a sin?
R. Stupidity implies a dulness of perception in judging, particularly about the Highest Cause, the Last End and Sovereign Good. This may come of natural incapacity, and that is not a sin. Or it may come of man burying his mind so deep in earthly things as to render his perceptions unfit to grasp the things of God, according to the text: “The sensual man perceiveth not these things that are of the Spirit of God;” and such stupidity is a sin.
2. Though no one wishes to be stupid, still people do wish for what leads to stupidity, by withdrawing their thoughts from things spiritual and burying them in things of the earth. So it is also with other sins; for the lustful man wants the pleasure to which the sin is attached, though he does not absolutely wish for the sin; for he would like to enjoy the pleasure without the sin.
A Matter of Chance? *Chuck* and Jane Austen, and the Final Episode, Again
A passage from Stuart Tave’s Some Words of Jane Austen:
All the heroines find happy endings and they all deserve them, as each has, in one way or another, worked, suffered, learned. But if they do not get more than they deserve they often seem to arrive at, or be helped to, the happy ending by a stroke of luck…at the right moment. The happy ending is not guaranteed by their actions. What seems to be more important than the sudden and fortunate event, however, because it precedes the ending again and again, in whatever manner the end is produced, is that the heroine is prepared to accept unhappiness. The endings of Jane Austen’s novels are never sentimental because before she will allow the happy result the heroine must face the fact that she has lost…The reader may refuse to believe that any of these things will happen because he has been given a different set of expectations, but the heroine must believe. She must not simply see the threat as another obstacle that she can do something about, and she must not despair because, having lost, there is nothing in her life for her to do. She must really see it as a loss, absorb it as an irreversible fact, and then come to terms with herself and go ahead with what she must do now. She often finds herself in the same place and in the same company as she was at the beginning, but she cannot be the same person herself because time has made a difference and things will never be the same again. She must in the same place face a new time, and it is very hard…[The heroines] must accept their unhappiness before they are granted happiness. The reward then is not the essential thing because it need never have arrived; that may well be dependent on chance; what is important is that at the time it is granted the heroine is worthy of a happiness that has a meaning. She would have been worthy of it even if her lot had proved unhappy because in her place she has used her time well, and that is not a matter of chance.
This is a promising candidate for the most important paragraph ever written about Austen, but I want to appropriate it for thinking about the final episode of Chuck. Of course, to do so requires changing out the ‘heroine’ for ‘hero’–but it is also worth remembering how insistently the show portrays Chuck himself as ‘feminine’. (His girlish screams, his only learning the woman’s part of the tango, etc., etc.)
Think particularly about the scene after Sarah has shot Quinn and Chuck has grabbed the Intersect glasses. Chuck knows that Ellie can use the glasses, after modifying them, to restore Sarah; that has been Chuck’s plan and he tells Sarah so as he looks at the glasses. But if he does not use them himself and download the Intersect, Beckman and everyone in the venue will die when the bomb explodes. The Intersect is necessary to defuse the bomb. Chuck explains this to Sarah, and she nods, acknowledging the necessity. She understands what the choice means for her, but especially she understands what the choice means for Chuck. Chuck puts on the glasses and downloads the Intersect. He defuses the bomb.
I isolate this moment because it brings into clear focus Chuck’s willingness to accept unhappiness. His last chance to do something himself to bring about his happiness goes up in the smoke that issues from the Intersect glasses after the download. But he does not despair, he does not simply give up. He saves everyone. In doing so, at least from his point of view, he loses Sarah. He believes that. He sees it as an irreversible fact. He may hope that something will change; but he can no longer expect it to do so. He must now in the same place, in Burbank, face a new time–and it is very hard. He is alone again and anew in Burbank. Choosing to save everyone from the bomb rather than to bring Sarah back (and her willingness for him to do that) is his way (and, it turns out, I believe, hers) of showing that he (and she) is worthy of a happiness that has a meaning. They have made similar choices before, but never one where they lose so much–not just their life together, but even Sarah’s memory of their life together, and all of her growth during the time of their life together.
This is perhaps the central reason I think the kiss works. Is it a Disney-esque device, as Morgan himself admits when he suggests it? Yes. But the point is that Chuck has worked, suffered, learned. (We can also say these things about Sarah mutatis mutandis.) He has used his time well, and that is not a matter of chance, not Disney-esque. As much as we viewers may want that reward, the success of the kiss, for them both, that is not the essential thing. The essential thing is Chuck’s acceptance of his unhappiness.
That he has accepted it is borne out on the beach. He tells Sarah to trust him, that he will always be there for her. But crucially he also says that he does not expect anything of her. He is reconciled to losing her, but that has not changed how he feels about her or his desire to be there for her. As I said in my book, Chuck will be her husband even if she chooses not to be his wife. He is worthy of happiness; he is worthy of her. The boy-man Nerd Herder is gone. A fully grown and self-possessed man is beside her. Seeing him, and seeing him to be what he is, she wants to be kissed. She is ready to remember.
A. C. Ewing’s F. H. Bradley
I have been on a Bradley kick of late, obviously. Yesterday, I received a used copy of his Principles of Logic in the mail. The volumes were clearly much handled and carefully annotated. There were a occasional words in the margins and frequent slim vertical lines alongside passages. I flipped to the inside of the cover and, lo!, it turns out that I have A. C. Ewing’s copy. Funny thing. I immediately recalled several lovely mornings with my teacher, Lewis White Beck, talking over coffee about Ewing’s* Idealism: A Critical Survey*.
A small event, admittedly, the finding of Ewing’s name, but one that brought me considerable pleasure.
John Herman Randall, Jr. on Bradley’s Book of Life
I compare reading JHR’s peculiar paper, “F. H. Bradley and the Working-Out of Absolute Idealism” (JHP Vol 5, No 3 July 1967) to trying to find a penny on the floor of a room in which the only light is a strobe light. Just when you start to see, everything goes black; and just when you give up on seeing, light flashes. Anyway, here is a memorable paragraph from the paper, one in which Randall is describing Bradley’s Appearance and Reality.
To use a metaphor, Bradley was trying to get the whole of life expressed in a book, to express all aspects of everything in words. A book about life never succeeds in doing that, it always falls short, it remains one-sided and incomplete. So Bradley was driven toward the perfect book–an Encyclopedia Britannica more glorious. But he tried to write it as James Joyce would have written it: He follows the method of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The book ought really to be a play, like Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, where the characters express all their private feelings, in their contradictions, all at once. The perfect play would include and express everything. This effort would end in more than a book or even a play: It would be life itself. Bradley is trying to write the drama of life as it is, with all the stage directions, to express, not only what the actors do, say, think, and feel, but also what they are expressing. If one could succeed, the result would be life itself, completely known. We would see why, we would understand–and also we would feel the very tang of life itself!
Applause.
Remarkable. The metaphor and its deployment are inspired. There’s the happy linking of Joyce and Hegel, of Ulysses and the Phenomenology. There’s the reference to the O’Neill play; but also the charm of thinking of Bradley’s book as itself a Strange Interlude. There’s the joyous detail of taking Bradley to want to include even the stage directions. And there’s the tangy conclusion.
Here Randall sees deep into Appearance and Reality. The paragraph not only characterizes Bradley’s aim as a philosopher, but it suggests why poets of the caliber of Eliot and of Geoffrey Hill could take Bradley as (a) master: two poets who want us to see why, to understand, but also to feel the very tang of life itself. (It also suggests why it is that passages in Bradley seem often to echo Browning, to share in Browning’s gift for ventriloquy,: Bradley employs that gift masterfully in giving voice to the views caught up in his dialectic.)
The Old Story, A Fake Empire
IT is an old story, a theme too worn for the turning of sentences, and yet too living a moral not to find every day a new point and to break a fresh heart, that our lives are wasted in the pursuit of the impalpable, the search for the impossible and the unmeaning. Neither today nor yesterday, but throughout the whole life of the race, the complaint has gone forth that all is vanity; that the ends for which we live and we die are “mere ideas,” illusions begotten on the brain by the wish of the heart — poor phrases that stir the blood, until experience or reflection for a little, and death for all time, bring with it disenchantment and quiet. Duty for duty’s sake, life for an end beyond sense, honor, and beauty, and love for the invisible — all these are first felt, and then seen to be dream and shadow and unreal vision. And our cry and our desire is for something that will satisfy us, something that we know and do not only think, something that is real and solid, that we can lay hold of and be sure of and that will not change in our hands.
Bradley, Ethical Studies
A. E. Taylor on Bradley and Religion
Bradley on Purgatory
Possibly some of my readers who know Bradley only from his books may be surprised at a remark called from him by a passing reference in the same conversation to Purgatory. “But what do you mean by Purgatory? Does it mean that when I die I shall go somewhere where I shall be made better by discipline? If so, that is what I very much hope.” In another mood, no doubt, he might have dwelt on the intellectual difficulties in the way of such a hope, but it was characteristic, or at least I thought so, that he evidently clung to it.
Bradley the Mystic
Bradley’s own personal religion was of a strongly marked mystical type, in fact of the specific type common to the Christian mystics. Religion meant to him, as to Plotinus or to Newman, direct personal contact with the Supreme and Ineffable, unmediated through any forms of ceremonial prayer, or ritual, and like all mystics in whom this passion for direct access to God is not moderated by the the habit of organised communal worship, he was inclined to set little store on the historical and institutional element in the great religions.
Bradley on the Incarnation
Thus while the conception of the meeting of the divine and the human in one ‘by unity of person’ lay at the very heart of his philosophy, he was wholly indifferent to the question whether the ideal of the God-Man has or has not been actually realised in flesh and blood in a definite historical person. Like Hegel, he thought it the significant thing about Christianity that it had believed in the incarnation of God in a definite person, but also, like Hegel, he seemed to think it a matter of small importance that the person in which the ‘hypostatic union’ was believed to have been accomplished should be Jesus the Nazarene rather than any other, and again whether or not the belief was strictly true to fact. The important thing, to his mind, was that the belief stimulates to the attempt to the achievement of ‘deiformity’ in our own personality.
Oakeshott on Philosophical Debts and Professionalism
My debts, however, are many. And if I have omitted to acknowledge the source of my arguments, it is for the double reason that in most cases I have forgotten it and that, since there are no ‘authorities’ in philosophy, references of this kind would but promote a groundless trust in books and a false attitude of mind. A philosopher is not, as such, a scholar; and philosophy, more often than not, has foundered in learning. There is no book which is indispensable for the study of philosophy. And to speak of a philosopher as ignorant is to commit an ignoratio elenchi; an historian or a scientist may be ignorant, philosophers merely stupid.
Connecting this with Bradley’s comment (previous post) is worth doing. I plan to do that soon. For now, however, I will just note this point: A philosopher is not, as such, a scholar. I believe this. But of course it raises all sorts of questions about current professional practice, the understanding of the discipline in the academy, etc. On the previous page, Oakeshott observes
Thinking, however, is not a professional matter; if it were it would be something much less important than I take it to be. It is something we may engage in without putting ourselves in competition; it is something independent of the futile attempt to convince or persuade. Philosophy, the effort in thought to begin at the beginning and to press to the end, stands to lose more by professionalism and its impediments than any other study.
Bradley on Philosophical Debts
Posting this now to comment on later.
It is not that in this book or elsewhere I lay a claim to original discovery. In these pages there is perhaps no result which I do not owe, and where, if my memory served me better, I could not acknowledge my debt. But when a man has studied, however little, the great philosophers, and felt the distance between himself and them, I hardly understand how, except on compulsion, he can be ready to enter on claims and counterclaims between himself and his fellows. And all I care to say for myself is that, if I had succeeded in owing more, I might then perhaps have gained more of a claim to be original.
Bradley, F. H. (Francis Herbert), 1846-1924. The principles of logic (Kindle Locations 24-29). London : Oxford University Press.
How Dark My Shadow’s Grown (Music)
Bradley on Faith and Works
But that faith is…merely ideal, is a vulgar and gross error, which, so far as it rests on St. Paul, rests on an entire misunderstanding of him. In faith we do not rise by the intellect to an idea, and leave our will somewhere behind us. Where there is no will to realize the object, there is no faith; and where there are no works, there is no will. If works cease, will has ceased; if will has ceased, faith has ceased. Faith is not the desperate leap of a moment; in true religion there is no one washing which makes clean. In Pauline language, that ‘I have died’, have in idea and by will anticipated the end, proves itself a reality only be the fact that ‘I die daily’, do perpetually in my particular acts will the realization of the end which is anticipated. Nor does faith mean simply works; it means the works of faith; it means that the ideal, however incompletely, is realized. But, on the other hand, because the ideal is not realized completely and truly as the ideal, therefore I am not justified by works, which issue from faith, as works; since they remain imperfect. I am justified solely and entirely by the ideal identification; the existence of which in me is on the other hand indicated and guaranteed by works, and in its very essence implies them.
“…[I]n true religion there is no one washing which makes clean.” Yes; even so.
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 