Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Following up on yesterday's observation. The original Hebrew word for Satan is a noun meaning obstruction or opposition. Likewise, the Greek "diabolos" means "slanderer." These are hardly terms one employs for a faithful employee. So the etymology would seem to pose a problem for the warden/functionary view I mentioned yesterday. But well after the origin of such terms, and well before Dante's time, Satan had taken on some of the contours of a functionary. The concept of a Great Chain of Being suggests, after all, a harmonious universe where everything has its place, presided over by God, so that the very concept of an active adversary of God on the cosmic level comes to seem absurd, and there is little left but room for a warden who is sometimes also a trickster. The Nicolas Cage movie DRIVE ANGRY comes to mind in this connection.

I recently encountered a critique of Arthur Lovejoy's well-known book on the "great chain of being." I've discussed that book in this blog , focusing on what it says about theodicy, that is, efforts to justify the ways of God to man. But the critic I encountered recently, Jaakko Hintikka, the fellow portrayed here, focuses on the "principle of plenitude." So let's look at that for a moment, gentle reader. The P of P is one of the "unit ideas" in Lovejoy's account of the great chain. It is one of the atoms that came together to form that molecule. In Lovejoy's formulation, the P of P is the idea that every kind of creature that is possible is also actual. In one form, this means that in the fullness of time, anything that is not the case now either once was the case or at some time will be the case, as when Descartes wrote that due to the laws of nature "matter takes on, successively, all the forms of which it is capable....

One of the points that Lovejoy makes in the book of that title I mentioned last week is the importance, in the Neo-Platonist conceptions and in the later development of the "chain of being" metaphor, of what he calls the principle of plenitude. This is the underlying notion that everything that can exist must exist, that creation would not be possible at all were it to leave gaps. The value of this idea for a certain type of theodicy is clear enough. This caused theological difficulties when these ideas were absorbed into Christianity.  I'll quote a bit of what Lovejoy has to say about those difficulties: "For that conception, when taken over into Christianity, had to be accommodated to very different principles, drawn from other sources, which forbade its literal interpretation; to carry it through to what seemed to be its necessary implications was to be sure of falling into one theological pitfall or another." The big pitfalls were: determinism on t...

I'm still working my way through Leon Chai's book on the relationship between Europe's Romantics and America's mid-19th century Renaissance. I'll say something today about Chai's take on Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor. We begin, as usual in this book, with the relevant European, Balzac. Chai writes about Balzac's attachment to a particular understanding of the "great chain of being," and of how it implied that matter is continuous with spirit, animal nature continuous with that of humans, etc. In this connection, Chai alludes to Balzac's tale, Une passion dans le désert, published more than half a century before Billy Budd .  the passion between panther and soldier is plausible on the assumption that there is a smooth continuum, no sudden break separating soul-endowed humans from organic-but-mechanistic felines. Related: in Seraphita Balzac writes of the body and the spirit in these terms, "The body has redemanded...