William Vallicella's Mighty Tetrad
(Actual first date of this post: December 28, 2008. Recentest significant change: October 23, 2010.)

Vallicella discusses his Mighty Tetrad in three posts linked at http://web.archive.org/web/20070811194657/http://maverickphilosopher.powerblogs.com/posts/chain_1115071783.shtml:
• "Money, Sex, Power, and Fame" (May 2, 2005 at 3:09pm)
• "Radix Omnium Malorum" (May 2, 2005, 3:33pm)
• "Radix Omnium Malorum Update" (May 3, 2005, 9:24am)
and in
• "The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition," versions Jan 15, 2008, 9:33am, Jan 22, 2008, 3:06 am, but gone from the Internet, and Feb 8, 2008, 3:01 am, also gone from the Internet.
• Update (10/23/2010): "Beguilement," September 21, 2010. (Pause of update.)

There's definitely a correlation with one of my tetrachotomies - that of I tried to post a comment about his Mighty Tetrad at his blog some years ago, but it took a month or two before I received posting privileges there, and I pretty much forgot about it.

Normally I wouldn't forget about a correlation but his jocular label "Mighty Tetrad" suggested that he didn't mean to plant his flag on his Mighty Tetrad as consisting in mots justes for exactly four philosophically systematic chief motivators of behavior; he was more interested in arguing that neither money nor power nor sex nor fame (nor any other motivation of their kind) is evil or the root of all evil, and that each of the four is a good liable to perversion. I agree with him about all of that. Update of October 23, 2010, resumed: In his September 21, 2010 post "Beguilement," he says:

The Russian prelest means 'beguilement.' It is indeed a beguiling world. The four chief beguilers: sex, money, power, fame. In their grip a man finds this empty and ephemeral world a veritable plenum of reality.

And that's the whole post. (Pause of update.)

Meanwhile, on the other hand, I was of course interested in getting four such ideas, getting them just right, and relating them to other fourfolds. I had continually sifted through common phrases such as "fame and fortune," "power and wealth," etc. I had long been playing with ideas of four disparaged motivators, four modes of that which anthropologists call "mana," etc. It was one of many paths that I took to developing my fours. I was relating them back to Aristotle's Four Causes. At one point I regarded the motivators as
1. power,
2. money,
3. sex, and
4. too narrowly, a kind status awarded for being smart or knowledgeable, which would also lead to the awardee's learning things, since people try to trade info for info.

By the time that I read Vallicella's posts, I was thinking:
1. power,
2. wealth,
3. glamour/wattage/glory (including vitality, horsepower, sex and sexuality, "action" as they say, etc.), and,
4. still all too narrowly, some sort of "guruship" in a loose sense.

Much later, in considering the idea of legitimacy, I saw that honor and standing are the attribution of legitimacy to a person or thing in some respect (legitimacy and, sometimes, authority in the sense of authoritativeness), just as glory, glamour, etc., are the attribution of intrinsic value or importance to a person or thing in some respect. The value/legitimacy difference parallels the affectivity/cognition difference and the goodness/truth difference (and seems related to the role/status difference). As you may or may not have noticed, I was conceiving my "mana tetrad" according to ideas of
1. will,
2. ability,
3. affectivity, and
4. cognition,
as well as the Four Causes.

By 2008, Vallicella had replaced the idea of fame with the idea of recognition. In a 2008 post on the Mighty Tetrad, Vallicella says, "One might wonder about recognition especially as it shades off into fame, and beyond that, into empty celebrity. Is it really good?" I'd say that as recognition shades off into fame, it is becoming glamour or glory rather than honor and standing but it not in itself a bad thing for all that, if you like occasional applause, sexuality, "good vibrations," and so forth; it is, so to speak, another incarnation of Aquinas's third requisite for beauty, claritas, "radiance" or "brilliancy" as of coloration; beauty itself has often enough been called the splendor of truth.

Update of October 23, 2010, resumed. Now Vallicella characterizes his mighty tetrad as "the four chief beguilers." To beguile means to charm, captivate, delight, but also to lure, to mislead by causing desire or pleasure. Beguilement itself is related to the idea of glamour. But what of deception, is it part of some foursome? Here's my current best guess:
1. coercion,
2. pay-to-play extortion,
3. manipulation, incitement, sycophancy, etc.,
4. deception, fraud.
(End of update.)

Correlations, parallelisms, etc.

Inter-behaviors:	Vying — confict, competition, rivalry, contention, arenas.	Cooperation, tolerance, occupational spheres.	Distinctive unitings, communities by value.	Checks & balances, supports, disciplines.
Vying's prizes:	Power, influence.	Wealth, means, resources.	Glory, wattage, 'action'.	Honor, validation, standing.
Vying's arenas:	Decision processes about decision-making, beginnings, archai, leaderships. Deciding who or what gets to decide. Political & martial affairs; also vis-à-vis nature (hunting, firefighting).	Decision processes about means. Economics (business, commerce, finance).	Decision processes about values, ends, perfections. Popular culture (sports, fashion, ostent, entertainment, etc.).	Decision processes about establishments, legitimacies. Society (teachings, statuses, traditions, debates, etc.)
Aristotle's 4 causes:	Efficient cause, agent cause.	Matter.	End (should be revised to ending, teleiosis).	Form (should be revised to structure), entelechy.
Mechanics analogs:	Net momentum, impulse, force (directional & opposable).	Rest mass, rest energy, internal work & power.	(Non-rest) energy, work, power.	Internal, balanced momenta (potential & kinetic), impulses, forces.
Human causal principles:	Agency, impetus: Will & conation. Character.	Patience, mediation: Ability, dealing. Competence.	Actualization, culmination: Affectivity. Sensibility & values.	Borneness, establishment: Cognition. Intelligence.
Basic subsistence:	Hunting or gathering the food.	Cooking or otherwise preparing the food.	Presenting, consuming, enjoying the food.	Digesting & reflecting on the food.
Sectors:	Assumption, adoption, control.	Processing, production, adaptation.	Consumption, expression, conversion.	Rumination, digestion, assimilation.
Greek gods:	Zeus, Ares, Athena, Diana.	Gaia, Demeter, Pluto, Vesta, Hephaistos.	Aphrodite, Persephone, Pan, Dionysos.	Apollo, Athena (again).

In tracing correlations among four-folds, it becomes evident that the four motivators are four prizes of vying, prizes of conflict, competition, rivalry, contention.

Now, power, wealth, glory, and honor, are in a sense beginning, means, end(ing), and establishment or entelechy, such that each of them is seen as an end. Means as end: wealth as goal. Entelechy, establishment, as end: how many times, in practical matters, have you heard one person ask another, "What are you trying to prove?" People don't act to prove things only in inquiry. In daily life, people sometimes act to prove themselves as being legitimately this or that, deserving of some sort of recognition or honor or accorded status (or in order to avoid a status) or to prove that some people do or don't deserve some status. Ours is an honor culture, but we have rather different ideas about honor than, say, a culture which hinges a family's honor murderously on the chastity of its unmarried daughters. Honor is about legitimacy and reality (which we recognize and acknowledge, and therein is the connection which I had been seeking with the idea of cognition and knowledge); to honor something is, as by a contract made in the imagination, to treat it as having the force of the actual even if it doesn't have the prompt and direct effect of the actual; and so we honor mathematical postulates, our contracts, and our fallen warriors in one way or another.

In the mind there is a continual play of obscure images which coming between the eyes and their prey seem pictures on the screen at the movies. Somewhere there appears to be a mal-adjustment. The wish would be to see not floating visions of unknown purport but the imaginative qualities of the actual things being perceived accompany their gross vision in a slow dance, interpreting as they go. But inasmuch as this will not always be the case one must dance nevertheless as he can. — William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell.

"Interpreting"? Calculating, translating, decoding, converting? Make it marking bounds and objectifying; measuring and representing; converting and interpreting; and entraining and verifying (or overturning). - posted by The Tetrast @ 10:19 PM [top of post] [top of page] Copyright © BenjaminðA.ðUde11.