Maverick Philosopher

Should We Just Tend Our Private Gardens?

From Thomas Mann's Diaries 1918-1939, entry of August 5, 1934:

A cynical egotism, a selfish limitation of concern to one's personal welfare and one's reasonable survival in the face of the headstrong and voluptuous madness of 'history' is amply justified. One is a fool to take politics seriously, to care about it, to sacrifice one's moral and intellectual strength to it. All one can do is survive, and preserve one's personal freedom and dignity.

I don't endorse Mann's sentiment but I sympathize with it. Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. Imagine the effect that must have had on a man of Mann's sensitivity and spiritual depth. You witness your country, the land of Kant and Schiller, of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers, in Heinrich Heine's phrase, transformed into a land of Richter und Henker, judges and hangmen.

My response to Mann would be along these lines: It precisely because men of the spirit must survive and survive to create that they must be concerned with politics and with those who can kill and suppress them. You escaped to the USA, but what if there were no such country to which to escape because all of the people of high quality practised your cynical egotism, your selfish limitation to the personal?

I will have to find the passage in Plato's Laws where he says that the good who refuse to get involved in politics will end up ruled by the evil.

Wittgenstein's Level

There are philosophers whose ideas are worth  little, but whose lives were in many ways exceptional and pitched at a level of spiritual intensity that the rest of us reach only occasionally if at all.  Simone Weil is one example, Ludwig Wittgenstein another. This Wittgenstein fragment gives me shivers and goose bumps:

A beautiful garment that is transformed (coagulates as it were) into worms and serpents if its wearer looks smugly at himself in the mirror.

Ein schoenes Kleid, das sich in Wuermer und Schlangen verwandelt (gleichsam koaguliert), wenn der, welcher er traegt, sich darin selbstgefaellig in den Spiegel schaut. (Culture and Value, p. 22)

Standing on the Terra Firma of Antecedent Reality

That beautiful line is contained in the following passage from the pen of Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963):

It is my contention that a conservative is a realist, who believes that there is a structure of reality independent of his own will and desire. He believes that there is a creation which was here before him, which exists now not just by his sufferance, and which will be here after he is gone. This structure consists not merely of the great physical world but also of many laws, principles, and regulations which control human behavior. Though this reality is independent of the individual, it is not hostile to him. It is in fact amenable by him in many ways, but it cannot be changed radically and arbitrarily. This is the cardinal point. The conservative holds that man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and to the fixed nature of things . . . . The conservative I therefore see as standing on the terra firma of antecedent reality; having accepted some things as given, lasting and good, he is in a position to use his effort where effort will produce solid results. (Quoted from Fred Douglas Young, Richard M. Weaver 1910-1963, University of Missouri Press, 1995, pp. 144-145.)

An aphorism of mine supplies the contrast:

With one foot in a past from which he will not learn, and the other in a future that will never be, the leftist stands astride the present — to piss on it.

The Gun-Totin' Obama Protester Was Black!

If a black man exercises his Second Amendment rights, is he really black?  For liberals, the answer, apparently, is in the negative.  For them, apparently, the only real black is a liberal black.  Take a gander at this video clip.  You will see an Obama protester with a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, a pistol on his hip, and an ammo clip in his pocket.   But the shot has been edited so that we cannot see that he is black.  And you liberals have the chutzpah to tell me that the MSM does not tilt to the Left?  To depict the man's color  would not fit in with the leftist party line that opposition to Obama's policies has its origin in racism.

In this clip you can see that the man is indeed black.

Here are two points that need to be made again and again in opposition to the willful moral and intellectual obtuseness of liberals and leftists.

1. Dissent is not hate.  To dissent from a person's ideas and policies is not to hate the person.

2. As a corollary to #1, to dissent from the ideas and policies of a black man is not to hate the man. A fortiori, it is not to hate the man because he is black.

 

The Aristotelian and the Old Man

For the one, potency is reduced to act; for the other, potency is just reduced.

The Ne Plus Ultra of Music

For me, it doesn't get any better than the late piano sonatas of Beethoven, especially Op. 109, 110, 111. This is music preeminent and unsurpassable, though some of Brahms comes close. Here is Claudio Arrau performing the First Movement of Sonata 32, Opus 111.

I am a musical elitist, but not a snob. An elitist in that I maintain that such popular genres as blues, jazz, folk, rock, and so on are not music in the eminent sense: they do not speak to what is highest and best in us. Or at least not in their typical manifestations.  I admit that there are some exceptions.  Example.  But there is nothing wrong with popular music's being geared to our lower self.   The claims of the lower self have their limited validity. Not a snob, in that I enjoy and appreciate music of all kinds, with only a few exceptions.

To say that the best of the blues is the equal of the best of Beethoven is a bit like saying that the best of Carnap is equal to the best of Plato. Either you see what is wrong with that or you don't. If you don't, I can't help you. Here we enter the realm of the unarguable. Positivism is to philosophy as muzak is to music.   Positivism is to Platonism as blues to Beethoven.

Saturday Night at the Oldies

Something different this week: Sylvia Plath, Daddy.

A Rare Find: The Anatomy of Bibliomania

One of the pleasures of the bookish life is the 'find,' the occasion on which, whilst browsing through a well-stocked used book store, one lights upon a volume which one would never discover in a commercial emporium devoted to the purveyance of contemporary schlock. One day, after a leisurely lunch, I walked into a book store on Mesa, Arizona's Main Street and stumbled upon Holbrook Jackson, The Anatomy of Bibliomania, a 1978 Octagon Books reprint of the 1950 original. There is something of Jungian synchronicity in this, as I had recently made the acquaintance of Mr. Jackson at Michael Gilleland's erudite salon. The author describes his purpose thusly:

Living in the Past: Is That Why You are Still a Dem?

To understand a person, it helps to consider what the world was like when the person was twenty years old. At twenty, give or take five years, the music of the day, the politics of the day, the language, mores, fashions, economic conditions and whatnot of the day make a very deep impression. It is an impression that lasts through life and functions as a sort of benchmark for the evaluation of what comes after, but also as a distorting lense that makes it difficult to see what is happening now.

Augustine on an Analogy for the Incarnation

On this, the Feast of St. Augustine, it is fitting to meditate on an Augustinian passage. There is an interesting passage in On Christian Doctrine that suggests a way to think about the Incarnation. Commenting on the NT text, "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us," Augustine writes:

In order that what we are thinking may reach the mind of the listener through the fleshly ears, that which we have in mind is expressed in words and is called speech. But our thought is not transformed into sounds; it remains entire in itself and assumes the form of words by means of which it may reach the ears without suffering any deterioration in itself. In the same way the Word of God was made flesh without change that He might dwell among us. (Bk 1, Ch. 13, LLA, 14; tr. D. W. Robertson, Jr.)

 

What we have here is an analogy. God the Son, the Word, is to the man Jesus of Nazareth as a human thought is to the sounds by means of which the thought is expressed and communicated to a listener. Just as our thoughts, when expressed in speech, do not become sounds but retain their identity as immaterial thoughts, so too the Word (Logos), in becoming man, does not lose its divine identity as the second person of the Trinity. Thought becomes speech without ceasing to be thought; God becomes man without ceasing to be God.

Does the Left Own Dylan?

Not according to Sean Curnyn of RightWingBob.com.  (Via Paul J. Cella) 

Dylan is an artist not an ideologue, arguably America's greatest troubadour.  For a taste of Left-Right polarity in Dylan's work already in the 1960s compare Subterranean Homesick Blues with Father of Night.  The Weatherman faction of the SDS got its name from the line, "It don't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows" from the former.  It is worth noting that Dylan's farewell to ideology came early, in 1964, in My Back Pages, thus a year before "Subterranean Homesick Blues."  If you can't stand Dylan's voice, give a listen to this high-powered version of "My Back Pages" featuring Roger McGuinn, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young, et al.

"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."

Slow Thoughts in a Fast Medium

There is a bit of a paradox in my project, the blogging of philosophy. Sauntering along life's byways, cooling his heels at the margins of society, the philosopher bids us slow down! Whither the headlong mad rush? Quo vadis? Take thought, he suggests, take heed. Socrates knew how to stand stock still in the scene of strife and consult with his daimon. Wittgenstein, denounced in these pages as a Cave philosopher, yet had the good sense to recommend as salutation among philosophers, "Take your time!" (Der Gruß der Philosophen untereinander sollte sein: Laß dir Zeit! Vermischte Bemerkungen.) And in a place unknown to me, Franz Brentano, once a Catholic priest and no stranger to the contemplative disciplines, observes that "He who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis." (Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft.)

So in the belly of the blogospheric beast I too do my bit to slow things down.

Truth Is Absolute! Part Two

Part One is here.

Michael Krausz, "Relativism and Beyond" in Relativism, Suffering and Beyond, eds. Bilimoria and Mohanty (Oxford, 1997), pp. 97-98:

The classical 'self-refuting' argument against relativism runs roughly along the following lines. If relativism is true then the thesis of relativism itself must be relatively true. It would be contradictory to affirm that relativism is true in an absolute sense. But while one could affirm that relativism is true in a relative sense, the counter-argument goes, to say that relativism is only relatively true has no general force. In order for the thesis to have general force it should include itself and should be presumed to be absolutely true. But that, again, would be contradictory.

In response . . . one might observe that there is no reason to rule out of court any non-general thesis of relativism. That is, the claim that the thesis of relativism is a thesis embraced locally does not itself show that it has no content or is not locally defensible. Local knowledge is knowledge nonetheless. Rather along lines suggested by Nelson Goodman, the aim of justifying local claims, including the thesis of relativism itself, need not be the establishment of of a general or a universal or an absolutist claim but may well be in the name of unpacking local understanding.

Bryan Magee's Tribute to Brand Blanshard

Brian Magee spent a year at Yale University where he attended a seminar given by Brand Blanshard on empiricist epistemology. In Confessions of a Philosopher, p. 124, Magee remembers Blanshard:

He was reminiscent of Bertrand Russell in his commitment to rational analysis and argument in forms that did not subordinate them to considerations of language. [. . .]

At first his teaching method struck me as a trifle chilly, but then I realized that it was the first philosophy teaching I had encountered that was not sectarian and excommunicative. The interpretations put on everything by Oxford philosophers had been analogous to the interpretations put on current affairs by active members of the Communist Party: partisan, belligerent, propagandist, intolerant, nakedly self-oriented and one-sided. Blanshard was quite different from this. Although he was himself in opposition to the tradition he was discussing he presented it with an admirable fairness in its relationship to other traditions. [. . .]

At Oxford the assumption has always been that the empiricist tradition was philosophy. There had been one occasion when I had raised a question about the existentialist tradition as represented by philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger, only to have it explained to me that these were "not philosophers." Among other things Blanshard's seminar was for me an object-lesson in academic fairness . . . .

What Blanshard Might Have Said to Derrida

A correspondent reminds me that today is Brand Blanshard's birthday.  Born on 27 August 1892, he died on 19 November 1987.  Here is a line from Blanshard's On Philosophical Style, Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 52-53:

Persistently obscure writers will usually be found to be defective human beings.

The entire essay is available online here.

Political Correctness in the U.K.

Is there no limit to PeeCee idiocy?  Apparently not.  Liberals will throw themselves into the arms of any incoherence.  See this Times of London piece.  'Ethnic minority' is to be blacklisted as offensive.  The same of course goes for 'blacklisted.'  But if you are offended by these words and phrases, then your stupidity offends me!  And you should be offended by it too. You should deeply regret that you have let yourself sink into this bog of nonsense.

Stateside, the totalitarian thrust of the Obama administration will bring in its train even more PC.  So get ready for ever deeper assaults on common sense.  Just remember what I told you: PC derives from the CP.  See my Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness for documentation.  And while you're at it, take a gander at Of Black Holes and Political Correctness: If You Take Offense, Is that my Fault?

Do you value liberty? Do you value free speech?  Then speak out against the liberal-left assault on common sense and the English language. 

Job One: Tort Reform

The Obama administration's health care initiative is looking more and more like a totalitarian power-grab pure and simple. If they were serious, they would address the logically prior issues of tort reform and border control.  See Sarah Palin, No Health Reform Without Legal Reform.

Truth is Absolute! Part One

In an earlier piece I argued that one can be both an absolutist about the nature of truth while being a fallibilist about the knowledge of truth. But a reader demands to know why we should accept that truth by its very nature is absolute. One reason is that the doctrine that truth is non-absolute (relative) is self-refuting. Herewith, a first installment.

The alethic relativist holds that truth (Gr. aletheia) is relative. Some call this cognitive relativism to distinguish it from ethical and other types of relativism. I prefer to avoid this terminology because it tends to conflate truth and knowledge, which are obviously distinct. (If S knows that p, then p is true; but a proposition can be true without being known by any (finite) mind.) To be relative, of course, is to be relative to something. Among candidate relata are individuals, social groups, cultures, conceptual frameworks, historical epochs, zoological species, and others besides. Thus there are different types of alethic relativism depending on the parameter or index to which truth is said to be relative. This being understood, there will be no harm in speaking simply of truth as relative.

The Fiscal Irresponsibility of Liberals in the United States of Ponzi

Paul Krugman as case in point, here:

There’s been some hysteria about the administration’s new estimate that the cumulative deficit will be $9 trillion over the next decade. Don’t get me wrong: this is bad. But it’s being treated as an inconceivable sum, far beyond anything that could possibly be handled. And it isn’t.

What you have to bear in mind is that the economy — and hence the federal tax base — is enormous, too.

Please note the typical leftist tactic of imputing mental instability to those who dissent from liberal-left ideas: you are 'hysterical' if you question the wisdom of running massive debt and thinking that we can spend our way out of it.  To take a second example, if you point out the very real threat of radical Islam, the leftist will call you an 'Islamaphobe' which of course implies that your concern is not rational but simply an irrational fear.  Examples can be multiplied.  Oppose the morality of homosexual practices and you are a 'homophobe.'  Obama treats criticism of his socialized medicine proposals as fear-mongering.  This shows what little respect liberals and leftists have for their fellow citizens.  It is a  sign of  profound disrespect for one's interlocutor when one treats his thoughts and utterances as mere symptoms of an underlying psychological malaise.  But that's the Left for you.  They are elitists.  They don't respect you, but they want to control you.

Note also Krugman's point about the size of the federal tax base.  The Feds have plenty of opportunity to fleece the taxpayer.  And that is what they will do.

Now read something from an economist with his head screwed on properly, Nouriel Roubini, The United States of Ponzi:

A government that will issue trillions of dollars of new debt to pay for this severe recession and socialize private losses may risk becoming a Ponzi government if--in the medium term--it does not return to fiscal discipline and debt sustainability.

A country that has--for over 25 years--spent more than income and thus run an endless string of current account deficit--and has thus become the largest net foreign debtor in the world (with net foreign liabilities that are likely to be over $3 trillion by the end of this year)--is also a Ponzi country that may eventually default on its foreign debt if it does not, over time, tighten its belt and start running smaller current account deficits and actual trade surpluses.

To Oppose Relativism is not to Embrace Dogmatism

There is much popular confusion concerning the topic of relativism. One fallacy I exposed earlier, namely, the mistake of thinking that Einstein's Theory of Relativity implies either moral relativism or relativism about truth. Even more widespread, perhaps, is the notion that one who opposes relativism about truth must be a dogmatist. But there are two distinctions here and they must not be confused. One is the distinction between relativism and nonrelativism, and the other is the distinction between fallibilism and dogmatism. The first distinction has to do with the nature of truth, while the second pertains to the knowledge of truth.

Is the Libertarian Principle of Self-Ownership Axiomatic?

See Ed Feser's outstanding post on this topic.  For background on libertarianism, see Stephan Kinsella, What Libertarianism Is.

Einstein, Relativity, and Relativism

A correspondent writes:

British (Catholic) historian Paul Johnson in his wonderful Modern Times attributes relativism's rise to Einstein! So does Einstein's latest biographer.

There are two questions that must be distinguished. The first is whether Einstein's Theory of Relativity entails either moral or cognitive (alethic) relativism. The second question is whether Einstein's revolutionary contributions to physics, via their misinterpretation by journalists and other shallow people (am I being unfair?), contributed to an atmosphere in which people would be more likely to embrace moral and cognitive relativism. The first question belongs to the philosophy of science, the second to the sociology of belief. The questions are plainly distinct.

Is There Any Excuse for Unbelief? Romans 1: 18-20

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities -- his eternal power and divine nature -- have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens (philosophy, the autonomy of reason). And so I must point out that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is not evident to the senses that the natural world is a divine artifact. 

I may be moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me" (Kant).  But seeing is not seeing as.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a nontheistic interpretation.

At the end of the day you must decide which of these interpretations to accept. You will not find some plain fact that will decide it for you.  There is no fact you can point to, or argument you can give, that definitively rules out theism or rules it in.

If the atheism of some has its origin in pride, stubborness and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as is plainly the case with many of the cyberpunks over at Internet Infidels and similar sites, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Paul appears to be doing what ideologues regularly do when pushed to the wall in debate: they resort to ad hominem attacks and psychologizing:  you are willful and stubborn and blinded by pride and lust; or you are a shill for corporate interests; or you are 'homophobic' or 'Islamophobic' or xenophobic; or you are a fear-monger and a hater; or you are a liar or insincere or stupid, etc. 

Objection: "You are ignoring the deleterious noetic consequences of original sin. Because our faculties have been corrupted by it, we fail to find evident what is in itself evident, namely, that the world is a divine artifact.  And it is because of this original sin that unbelief is inexcusable."

This response raises its own difficulties.  First, how can one be morally responsible for a sin that one has not oneself committed but has somehow inherited? Second, if our faculties have been so corrupted by original sin that we can no longer reliably distinguish between the evident and the non-evident, then this corruption will extend to all our cognitive operations including Paul's theological reasoning, which we therefore should not trust either. 

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

When I asked Harry if he uses the Internet to look up old friends, "Let sleeping dogs lie" was his reply.  His attitude, qualified, recommends itself.    The friendships of old were many of them friendships of propinquity.  They were born of time and place and circumstance, and they died the death of distance, whether temporal or spatial or circumstantial.  They are relics that can be fingered but not reanimated. They are best left in the boneyard of memory.

Leftists and Guns

Leftists who fear a 'fascist theocracy' in the USA ought to consider joining with their conservative brethren in support of Second Amendment rights. That way, when the 'fascist theocrats' kick down their doors at 3 AM to haul them off to church services, the leftists will be well equipped to defend their liberty. Was it not their own Chairman Mao who said that "Power comes out of the barrel of a gun"?

There is a serious point here. ACLU extremists will torture the First Amendment to mean anything they want it to mean while nary a peep will you hear from them in defense of the Second Amendment -- when it is the Second that backs up the First and all the rest.

There is an old saying: "If liberals interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the First, gun ownership would be mandatory."

Companion post: The ACLU on the Second Amendment

Studiousness as Prophylaxis Against the Debilities of Old Age

The abuse of the physical frame by the young and seemingly immortal is a folly to be warned against but not prevented, a folly for which the pains of premature decrepitude are the just tax; whereas a youth spent cultivating the delights of study pays rich dividends as the years roll on. For, as Holbrook Jackson (The Anatomy of Bibliomania, 121 f.) maintains:

No labour in the world is like unto study, for no other labour is less dependent upon the rise and fall of bodily condition; and, although learning is not quickly got, there are ripe wits and scholarly capacities among men of all physical degrees, whilst for those of advancing years study is of unsurpassed advantage, both for enjoyment and as a preventative of mental decay. Old men retain their intellects well enough, said Cicero, then on the full tide of his own vigorous old age, if only they keep their minds active and fully employed; [De Senectate, 22, tr. E. S. Shuckburgh, 38] and Dr. Johnson holds the same opinion: There must be a diseased mind, he said, where there is a failure of memory at seventy. [Life, ed. Hill, iii, 191] Cato (so Cicero tells us) was a tireless student in old age; when past sixty he composed the seventh book of his Origins, collected and revised his speeches, wrote a treatise on augural, pontifical, and civil law, and studied Greek to keep his memory in working order; he held that such studies were the training grounds of the mind, and prophylactics against consciousness of old age. [Op. cit. 61-62]

The indefatigable Mr. Jackson continues in this vein for another closely printed page, most interestingly, but most taxingly for your humble transcriber.

Pushing Sixty?

If three-score are at the door, the Laudator Temporis Acti has some Emerson and some Martial for you.  Whether or not they help you over the transom, they will provide matter for salutary reflection.

My Favorite Pascal Quotation

Blaise Pascal, Pensees #98 (Krailsheimer tr., p. 55):

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping.

Please forgive the following reformulation. Point out to a man that he is crippled, and he won't contradict you, though he might take umbrage at your churlishness. But point out to a man that his thinking is crippled and he is sure to repy, "No! It is your thinking that is crippled."

On Wasting Time With Philosophy (And a Jab at Pascal)

People talk glibly about wasting time on this, that, and the other thing — but without reflecting on what it is to waste time. People think they know which activities are time-wasters, philosophy for example. But to know what wastes time, one would have to know what is a good, a non-wasteful, use of time. And one would presumably also have to know that one ought to use one's time well. One uses one's time well when one uses it in pursuit of worthy ends. But which ends are worthy? Does this question have an answer? Does it even make sense? And if it does, what sense does it make? And what is the answer? Now these are all philosophical questions.

'Blog' and 'Blog Post'

I note that there are still people who confuse 'blog' with 'blog post.'  'Blog' is elliptical for 'weblog.'   They are interchangeable terms.  Presumably, no one will refer to weblog entry as a weblog.  It makes as little sense to refer to a blog entry as a blog.   

A blog is composed of blog posts.  It is not itself a blog post, nor is a blog post a blog.  Roughly, a blog is to its posts as a book to its chapters.  Since you wouldn't refer to a chapter of a book  as a book, you shouldn't refer to a post on a blog as a blog.

Every weblog is a website, but not every website is a weblog. A weblog is a regularly updated website consisting mainly of relatively short entries called 'posts' which are arranged in reverse chronological order.  That's the essence of it.  Hyperlinkage and comments I would not build into the definition, nor would I require daily updating. You are free to differ.  I admit, though, that comments -- assuming you can attract people capable of making good ones -- and hyperlinks add considerably to a blog's interest.  As a general rule, if you are quoting from a source that is available online, you ought to link to it.

The Incontinental Congress

An apt appellation for the present dominated-by-Dems bunch of fiscal incontinents.

Does the Left Own Dissent?

Battles in the ‘culture war’ are often fought and sometimes won on linguistic ground. Linguistic hijacking is a tried-and-true tactic, one sometimes found on the Right, but more often on the Left: a term whose natural habitat is some neutral semantic space is hijacked and piloted toward a Left Coast semantic subspace.

An example is ‘dissent,' a word in which leftists fancy they have a proprietary interest.  It has two senses, one broad, the other narrow. In its broad usage, to dissent is to withhold assent, or else to differ in opinion. These are not the same, since if I withhold assent from your opinion about X, it does not follow that I hold a different opinion about X: I may suspend judgment by holding no opinion about X.

Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

The Greek Omphalos  = the German Nabel  = navel. So omphaloscopy is navel-gazing, and an omphaloscopist is one who 'scopes out' his navel. But have there ever been practioners of meditation (Versenkung) who literally gazed at their navels or who came close to doing such a thing? A little gazing at my well-stocked library reveals that something like this practice is recommended in the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention, which tradition attributes to St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople. Referring to the central passage of the Method, the anonymous author of The Jesus Prayer reports:

In order to pray, it is said, the disciple must close the door of his cell, place himself in a state of quiet, sit down, rest his chin against his chest, look towards the middle of his stomach, restrain his breathing, and make a mental effort to find the "place of the heart" while repeating all the time "the epiclesisof Jesus Christ." (p. 47)

Of course, the term 'navel-gazing' is almost always used in a deprecating manner by the worldly to refer to any sort of idle practice of 'philosophizing' whether discursively or non-discursively, and when Adorno refers to a man who gazes at his navel, ein Mensch der seinen Nabel beschaut (Philosophische Terminologie I, 142), he shares in the deprecation.

Anti-Commie Haiku

Utopic heads in fog,
They broke real eggs
For an unreal omelet.

Roots of Leftist Viciousness in Alinsky's Rules for Radicals

One reason that leftists are vicious is that they take to heart Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals  #13:

RULE 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Study Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals if you want to understand the tactics of the Obama administration.

David Horowitz will appear on the Glenn Beck show on 24 August to explain Alinsky's tactics.  See Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and Me.  Excerpt (emphasis added):

So Alinsky begins by telling readers what a radical is. He is not a reformer of the system but its would-be destroyer. This is something that conservatives have a very hard time understanding. Conservatives in my experience are all together too decent, too civilized to match up adequately, at least in the initital stages of the battle, with their adversaries. They are too prone to give them the benefit of the doubt. Radicals can't really want to destroy a society that is democratic and liberal and has brought wealth and prosperity to so many. Oh yes they can. That is in fact the essence of what it means to be a radical -- to be willing to destroy the values, structures and institutions that sustain the society we live in. Marx himself famously cited Alinsky's first rebel (using another of his names -- Mephistopheles): "Everything that exists deserves to perish."

This is why ACORN activists for example have such contempt for the election process, why they are so willing to commit fraud. Because just as Lucifer didn't believe in God's kingdom, so the radicals who run ACORN don't believe in the democratic system. To them it's a fraud -- an instrument of the ruling class, or as Alinsky prefers to call it, the Haves. If the electoral system doesn't serve all of us, but is only an instrument of the Haves then election fraud is justified, is a means of creating a system that serves the Have-Nots -- social justice. Until conservatives begin to understand exactly how dishonest radicals are -- dishonest in their core -- it is going to be very hard to defend the system that is under attack. For radicals the noble end -- creating a new heaven on earth -- justifies any means. And if one actually believed it was possible to create heaven on earth who would not willingly destroy any system hitherto created by human beings?

 

The Race Card, the McCarthy Card, and 'Death Panels'

There are two cards no leftist leaves home without: the race card and the McCarthy card.  The Henry Gates case was a particularly egregious recent example of the playing of the former.  For a recent example of an uncommonly  sleazy deployment of the latter, see Richard Cohen 's attack on Sarah Palin in which he mounts the lunatic thesis that "Palinism" is "an updated version of McCarthyism."

An excellent antidote to Cohen's delusional tripe is provided by Thomas Sowell in Whose Medical Decisions?  Excerpt:

As for a "death panel," no politician would ever use that phrase when trying to get a piece of legislation passed. "End of life" care under the "guidance" of "some independent group" sounds so much nicer-- and these are the terms President Obama used in an interview with the New York Times back on April 14th.

He said, "the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there." He added: "It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. That is why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance."

But when you select people like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel to give "independent" guidance, you have already chosen a policy through your choice of advisors, who simply provide political cover. The net result can be exactly the same as if those providing that guidance were openly called "death panels."

Timothy Treadwell and Nature Idolatry

In the weight room one day I made the acquaintance of a man from Alaska.  I steered the conversation onto Chris McCandless and others of the wild and crazy crew who seek Something More in the last American frontier. My interlocutor was not familiar with the McCandless story, but he reminded me of the case of Timothy Treadwell, who camped among grizzlies, and whose luck ran out. This piece from Outside magazine tells the tale. And here is his final letter.

In the Outside article, the author, Doug Peacock, reports that Treadwell "told people he would be honored to 'end up in bear scat.'" And in his last letter, Treadwell refers to the grizzly as a "perfect animal." There are here the ummistakable signs of nature idolatry. Man must worship something, and if God be denied, then an idol must take his place, whether it be nature with its flora and fauna, or money, or sex, or the Revolution, or the crotch-grabbing one man melting pot, or some other 'icon.'

Addenda, 19 August: 

1. Theists need to consider whether they are worshipping the true God or a theological fabrication.  There is the almost irresistible tendency to identify God with one's conception of God.  But the two cannot be the same.  There are various conceptions of God, some better than others; but God is obviously not a conception.  It is easy to succumb to the worship of a product of  the human mind, whether it be an individual product, or a collective product such as the conception authorized by a particular cult or church.

2.  The knee-jerk use of 'icon' throughout the media is a good indicator of contemporary idolatry.  What we need is a new iconoclasm.  Memo to self: develop this 'stub.'

The ACLU on the Second Amendment

The following is verbatim from the ACLU website:

The Second Amendment provides: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

ACLU POSITION
Given the reference to "a well regulated Militia" and "the security of a free State," the ACLU has long taken the position that the Second Amendment protects a collective right rather than an individual right. For seven decades, the Supreme Court's 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view.

The Supreme Court has now ruled otherwise. In striking down Washington D.C.'s handgun ban by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, whether or not associated with a state militia.

The ACLU disagrees with the Supreme Court's conclusion about the nature of the right protected by the Second Amendment. We do not, however, take a position on gun control itself. In our view, neither the possession of guns nor the regulation of guns raises a civil liberties issue.

Two main points. First, the concluding sentence of the quotation, which I have bolded, is so preposterous as to take the breath away. Whether or not there is a right to keep and bear arms is plainly a civil liberties issue.  I would have thought that this would require no argument. Apparently I was wrong: liberals of the ACLU stripe are so preternaturally stupid as to be blind to the obvious.  You will see this if you understand what a civil liberty is.  Here are some definitions:

one's freedom to exercise one's rights as guaranteed under the laws of the country

fundamental individual right protected by law and expressed as immunity from unwarranted governmental interference
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Civil liberties are freedoms that protect an individual from the government of the nation in which they reside. Civil liberties set limits for government so that it cannot abuse its power and interfere unduly with the lives of its citizens.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_liberty

Even if you think of the right to keep and bear arms as a collective right -- a right an individual has in virtue of belonging to a militia-- it is still a civil liberty by the first and third definitions.

But, and here is my second point, one cannot correctly infer that the right in question is a collective right from the wording of the Second Amendment.  Carefully read the Second Amendment, quoted above, and note that the subordinate clause provides a reason, which is not the same as the only reason, for the right in question not to be infringed.  One cannot therefore validly infer from the formulation of the Second Amendment that it refers only to a collective right.  ""A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" gives one reason for the protection of gun rights.  This is consistent with there being other reasons.  Three other reasons come readily to mind.  There  is the need for the means of self-defense of oneself and one's family from the criminal element.  There is the need for the means of defense against wild animals. (Would you backpack in grizzly country without any protection?  You might end up bear scat like the benighted Timothy Treadwell.)   And there is the need for the means of defense against a usurpatious government.

Five Serious Uses of Argument

Even among calm and reasonable people, few are persuaded by argument, even when it satisfies the canons of logic. Changes of view under dialectical pressure are seldom seen. Most just dig in and fortify their defenses. This raises questions about the utility of argument, debate, and discussion. Call me sanguine, call me naive – but I believe in their utility. Herewith, a preliminary catalog of the uses of argument.

Idolatry, Desire, Buddha, Causation, and Malebranche

What is idolatry? I suggest that the essence of idolatry lies in the illicit absolutizing of the relative. A finite good becomes an idol when it is treated as if it were an infinite good, i.e., one capable of satisfying our infinite desire. But is our desire infinite? That our desire is infinite is shown by the fact that it is never satisfied by any finite object or series of finite objects. Not even an infinite series of finite objects could satisfy it since what we really want is not an endless series of finite satisfactions -- say a different black-eyed virgin every night as in popular Islam's depiction of paradise — but a satisfaction in which one could finally rest. "Our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee." (Augustine) What we really want, though we don't know it, is the absolute good which is goodness itself, namely God. This idea is common to Plato, Augustine, Malebranche, and Simone Weil.

Master Desire and Aversion

It is a curious fact that a man who has no time for his own wife easily finds time for the wife of another. Not valuing what he has, he desires what he does not have, even though at some level he understands that, were he to take possession of what he now merely desires, the pattern would repeat itself: he would again desire that which he does not possess over that which he does possess. He should learn to appreciate what he has.

The Buddhists have a saying, "Conquer desire and aversion." But this goes too far: desire and aversion are not to be conquered or extirpated so much as chastened and channeled. They are to be mastered. Without self-mastery, the highest mastery, there can be no true happiness.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Les Paul

The legendary Les Paul passed away this week at the age of 94.  Here is a taste of his impressive chops. 

On Reverence

In The Weblog Handbook (Perseus Publishing 2002), Rebecca Blood writes:

If you asked me what the weblog community needs, I would answer, stronger ties among webloggers from various clusters, more independent thinkers, and more irreverence. Much, much more irreverence. Everyone seems to take themselves so seriously. (p. 164)

This passage demonstrates a pretty thorough misunderstanding of the concept of reverence. Blood appears to be confusing reverence with self-importance. Reverence, however, is more like the opposite of self-importance. Reverence is an attitude of honor, respect, devotion, deference toward a sufficiently lofty object distinct from one’s surface self. What Kant calls the moral law is an appropriate object of reverence. Like the starry skies above me, the moral law within me stands apart from, and superordinate to, my lower self. The divine, and anything or anyone sufficiently close to the divine, are also appropriate objects of reverence.

 

The truth is an appropriate object of reverence. A necessary condition of being a good journalist, for example, is reverence for the truth. A good journalist aims to establish the facts. Facts, by definition, are what they are regardless of what anyone believes them to be or desires them to be. The reverence appropriate to the competent and honest journalist has nothing to do with self-importance.

It is a commentary on the decadence of our culture that ‘reverence’ and ‘reverent’ have ceased to be terms of praise, and have almost become pejoratives. In tandem with this, ‘irreverence’ and ‘irreverent’ are constantly used nowadays to express approbation. Open up the New York Times Arts Section and read the blurbs on contemporary films and plays. Expressions like ‘witty and irreverent’ abound. The tacit message is that to be irreverent is good, and that there can be no form of reverence that is not either phony or hypocritical, or else devoid of an appropriate object.

In part this is due to the sort of confusion exemplified by Blood, the confusion of reverence with self-importance. Another part of the explanation is that the belief in reverence-worthy objects is on the wane in the upper echelons of our culture. Truth, for example, is no longer believed in by many. To the ears of decadents, all truth-claims ring hollow and are good only as fodder for deconstruction. Nietzsche clearly saw that the death of God is tantamount to the death of truth. (Cf. Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sec. 27.) It may be twilight time for the West as the reverse-Crusaders (as Oriana Fallaci calls them) gather to storm our gates. The owl of Minerva, spreading her wings at dusk, may take flight only to be decapitated by an Islamo-terrorist. But I’m not quite ready to enter into the Splengerian gloom or adopt the scowl of Minerva.

Crude Conservatives and Harsh Language

It is no surprise to find crude liberals. After all, liberals are big on toleration, including toleration of every manner of bad behavior. Indeed, some of them are so tolerant that they tolerate those with no respect for the principle of toleration. This is part of the explanation of why they tend to be soft on terrorism. And, since their toleration extends to the toleration of illogical thinking, they cannot see that to tolerate everything is to tolerate the rejection of the principle of toleration.

It is more of a surprise to find crude conservatives. Tucker Carlson on C-Span a while back used the ‘F’ word. Using it, he detracted from an otherwise excellent presentation, cheapening it, but also removing some of the force from a word that ought to be reserved for very special occasions. One occasionally meets people who need to be blasted with the strongest language one can muster, just as there are some folks who need shootin’ -- as a Clint Eastwood character might put it. But just as you should never shoot a man who doesn’t absolutely need shootin’, you should never verbally blast a man who doesn’t absolutely need blastin’. And just as you can’t properly shoot a man without the right caliber of ammo, you can’t properly deliver a proper verbal blast if formerly strong words have been weakened by overuse.

So there are two reasons to avoid the overuse of harsh language. One is that it demeans its users, cheapens debate, and makes the world uglier than it already is. The second reason is that the overuse of harsh language, while coarsening its users and polluting the social atmosphere, drains these words of the punch they need to do their job on the occasions when it is appropriate to use them.

Doom and Gloom

Gerald Celente predicts economic armageddon.  Per usual, consume cum grano salis.

Notes on Mark Anderson, Pure: Modernity, Philosophy, and the One

Professor Mark Anderson kindly sent me a copy of the above-captioned book the other day.  I am about a third of the way through its 108 pages.  To write a proper review is hard work, something I will not attempt in the humid heat of the Arizona monsoon.  But I will offer a few somewhat random comments over one or more posts.

PURE is a stimulating collection of aphorisms, observations, and obiter dicta which document "one man's struggle against the intellectual and existential disorder called Modernity." (1)  It is written in a partially aphoristic Nietzschean style against Nietzsche who for Anderson is the anti-Plato.  So while the packaging is Nietzschean, the content is Platonic. Indeed, the author sees "the intellectual history of the West as a prolonged struggle between Platonism and Nietzscheanism." (3)

Ronald Reagan on Socialized Medicine

Here.

Political Correctness Watch

Yale University Press bans images of Muhammad in academic book.  What wimps these liberals be! And there is no wimp like an academic wimp.

Cynthia Tucker: 45-65% Of Townhall Protesters Are Racists.    'Racist' is the all-purpose semantic bludgeon of choice among liberals.  Disagree with a liberal on practically anything and you are a racist!

Is 'Socialist' Code for 'Nigger'?  One of the most despicable characteristics of present-day liberals and leftists is their refusal to take anything a conservative says at face value.  Warped by the hermeneutics of suspicion, the liberal/leftist cannot credit the plainest and sincerest asseverations of the conservative.  So if the conservative points out the obvious fact that Obama's health care proposals are socialist in nature, then he must really be doing something else, namely, expressing his hatred of Obama.  You see, libs and lefties do not want to discuss the issues, they want to win by intimidation, by slandering the people who disagree with them and calling them racists.  This is why there can be no discussion with these people.  You cannot have a discussion with someone who interprets your opposition to radical Islam as a phobia, or your opposition to socialism as racist.

Allow Comments or Not?

This U. K. reader prefers no comments:

I 'm pleased that your blog no longer publishes readers' comments. Since this has been the case, I read it more assiduously. I usually find something in your daily observations and ruminations from which I can profit. When you used to allow even very well informed people to comment on what you had to say, my concentration withered and I was "turned off" by esoteric discussions of technical problems that interest professional philosophers. 

I think all serious bloggers should follow your example and exclude not only the vacuous and insolent wreckers who infest blogs, but also the erudite correspondents who can transform such as Maverick Philosopher into a kind of country club for intellectuals. 

 This U. S. reader prefers comments:

First of all, your blog is much more instructive than most of my formal education. Thank you for that.

 

However, recently you linked to your post on use and mention, and I followed the link and read the discussion.  Here is what I notice.  The educational value of any of your posts is exponentially compounded when there is a dialectic that follows.  The reason this is so is that when I can see someone who disagrees with you I can then see what positions they are forced to take in the dialectic.  Also because it highlights the distinction between good reasons and bad reasons for holding a position based on your responses. 

The Conservative Disadvantage

We conservatives are at a certain disadvantage as compared to our leftist brethren. We don’t seek the meaning of our lives in the political sphere but in the private arena: in hobbies, sports, our jobs and professions, in ourselves, our families, friends, neighborhoods, communities, clubs and churches; in foot races and chess tournaments; in the particular pleasures of the quotidian round in all of their scandalous particularity.

 

We don't look to politics for meaning. Above all, we conservatives do not seek any transcendent meaning in the political sphere. We either deny that there is such a thing, or we seek it in religion, or in philosophy, or in meditation, or in such sorry substitutes as occultism. A conservative who denies that there is ‘pie in the sky’ will certainly not seek ‘pie in the future.’ He will not, like the leftist, look to a human future for redemption.  He understands human nature, its real possibilities, and its real limits.  He is impervious to utopian illusions.  He will accept no ersatz soteriology.

A conservative could never write a book with the title, The Politics of Meaning. Politics for a conservative is more like garbage-collecting: it is a dirty job; somebody has to do; it would be better if nobody had to do it; and we should all lend a hand in getting the dirty job done. But there is little by way of meaning, immanent or transcendent, in garbage collecting and sewage disposal: these are things one gets out of the way so that meaningful activities can first begin.

I’m exaggerating a bit. To write is to exaggerate, as a Frenchman might put it, which amounts to a meta-exaggeration. But I’m exaggerating to make a serious point. We conservatives don’t look for meaning in all the wrong places. And because we don’t, we are at a certain disadvantage. We cannot bring the full measure of our energy and commitment to the political struggle. We don't even use the word 'struggle.' We are not totally committed to defeating the totally committed who would defeat us.

But now we need to become  active.  Not in the manner of the leftist who seeks meaning in activism for its own sake, but to defend ourselves and our values so that we can protect the private sphere from the Left's totalitarian encirclement.    The conservative values of liberty and self-reliance and fiscal responsibility are under massive assault by the Obama administration, and there are indications that they are poised to clamp down on dissent.  So if you value your life and liberty, you are well advised to inform yourself and take appropriate action.