Maverick Philosopher

The Trump Phenomenon

Two penetrating essays. 

Bruce S. Thornton, Donald Trump and the Other Class Warfare

Victor Davis Hanson, How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off the Public

Political Burden of Proof

As contemporary 'liberals' become ever more extreme, they increasingly assume what I will call the political burden of proof.  The onus is now on them to defeat the presumption that they are so  morally and intellectually obtuse as not to be worth talking to.

Recently Read

Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015, 865 pp.  NYRB review here. 'KL' abbreviates Konzentrationslager.

Like a Moth to the Flame

Jean van Heijenoort was drawn to Anne-Marie Zamora like a moth to the flame. He firmly believed she wanted to kill him and yet he travelled thousands of miles to Mexico City to visit her where kill him she did by pumping three rounds from her Colt .38 Special into his head while he slept.  She then turned the gun on herself.  There is no little irony in the fact that van Heijenoort met his end in the same city as Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky.  For van Heijenoort was Trotsky's secretary, body guard, and translator from 1932 to 1939.

The former 'Comrade Van' was a super-sharp logician but a romantic fool nonetheless.  He is known mainly for his contribution to the history of mathematical logic.  He edited From Frege to Godel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (Harvard University Press 1967) and translated some of the papers.  The source book is a work of meticulous scholarship that has earned almost universally high praise from experts in the field.  

One lesson is the folly of seeking happiness in another human being.  The happiness we seek, whether we know it or not, no man or woman can provide. And then there is the mystery of self-destruction. Here is a brilliant, productive, and well-respected man.  He knows that 'the flame' will destroy him, but he enters it anyway.  And if you believe that this material life is the only life you will ever have, why throw it away for an unstable, pistol-packing female?  

One might conclude to the uselessness of logic for life.  If the heart has its reasons (Pascal) they apparently are not subject to the discipline of mathematical logic.    All that logic and you still behave irrationally about the most important matters of self-interest?  So what good is it?  Apparently, van Heijenoort never learned to control his sexual and emotional nature.  Does it make sense to be ever so scrupulous about what you allow yourself to believe, but not about what you allow yourself to love?

SOURCES (The following are extremely enjoyable books.  I've read both twice.)

Anita Burdman Feferman, Politics, Logic, and Love: The Life of Jean van Heijenoort, Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1993.

Jean van Hejenoort, With Trotsky in Exile: From Prinkipo to Coyoacan, Harvard UP, 1978.

Related:  Trotsky's Faith

The Last Words of Leon Trotsky

 

Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, with van Heijenoort standing behind Frida.

Related articles

Alan Dershowitz: a Liberal Who's Just Been Mugged

How Frida Kahlo's bright, beautiful garden inspired her

Vallicella on Orilia on Bradley's Regress

The other day I was pleased to receive an e-mail message from Francesco Orilia whom I hadn't heard from in several years.  He inquired about some correspondence we engaged in back in the spring of 2004.  I thought it had evaporated into the aether, but the Wayback Machine came to the rescue.  I reproduce it below, warts and all.  But first a demonstration of how Italians speak with their hands.  This is from our meeting at a conference on Bradley's Regress in Geneva, Switzerland in December of 2008. 

 

More proof:

Also relevant to the topic below are two entries from November 2008, Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part I, and Francesco Orilia on Facts and Bradley's Regress Part II.  Professore Orilia enters the ComBox of the second post to respond.

Decision and Conclusion

How much of decision is included in every conclusion?  Did you conclude that there is no God or decide that there is no God?  Some of both?  Which then is the major player here, reason or will?

An Old Man's Lament

"My old friends are dead," he said, "and my new ones will never be old."

Are You a Natural Writer? Take the Gide Test

Here is an interesting passage from André Gide's last work, written shortly before his death in 1951, So Be It or The Chips Are Down, tr. Justin O'Brien, Alfred Knopf, 1959, pp. 145-146, bolding added, italics in original. Brief commentary follows.

It is certain that the man who wonders as he takes up his pen: what service can be performed by what I am about to write? is not a born writer, and would do better to give up producing at once. Verse or prose, one's work is born of a sort of imperative one cannot elude. It results (I am now speaking only of the authentic writer) from an artesian gushing-forth, almost unintentional, on which reason, critical spirit, and art operate only as regulators. But once the page is written, he may wonder: what's the use? . . . And when I turn to myself, I think that what above all urged me to write is an urgent need of understanding. This is the need that now prompts the ratiocinations with which I am filling this notebook and makes me banish all bombast from them. I hope the young man who may read me will feel on an equal footing with me. I don't bring any doctrine; I resist giving advice; and in a discussion I beat a hasty retreat. But I know that today many seek their way gropingly and don't know in whom to trust. To them I say: believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it; doubt everything, but don't doubt of yourself. There is more light in Christ's words than in any other human word. This is not enough, it seems, to be a Christian: in addition, one must believe. Well, I do not believe. Having said this, I am your brother.

1. Writers are born, not made. For the born writer, doubts about the value of writing are insufficient to impede the process of putting words on paper. Something similar goes for the born philosopher. Doubts about philosophy are just more grist for the philosophical mill and have no tendency to impede the thinker's inquiry. No real philosopher is put off by doubts and objections of the sort cataloged and refuted in Philosophy Under Attack.  You are either driven by a need to understand the world or you are not.  If you are driven by that need you will gravitate toward philosophy whether or not you call it 'philosophy.'

2. The writer writes to satisfy a pressing need, the need to understand himself and the world. Driven by that need, he scribbles away, well or poorly, with or without a readership, under gusts of inspiration or in the horse-latitudes of the spirit, and whether it fills or depletes his belly.

3. The truth-seekers are to be trusted, the truth-finders doubted. Makes a good aphorism!

4. Unlike Bertrand Russell and others, Gide discerned truth in Christ's words, but was unable to believe. This shows that the discerning of truth is insufficient for belief. So much the worse for doxastic involuntarism. Belief requires something more, an act of will. There is something voluntary about belief. In many cases, not all, we decide what to believe and what to disbelieve. Josef Pieper who, in his Belief and Faith, p. 26, refers to the last of the Gide lines just quoted, remarks, "A free assent of will must be performed. Belief rests upon volition." (p. 27) See here for more on doxastic voluntarism.

5. Memo to BV: Get hold of the André Gide-Paul Claudel correspondence and explore why Claudel but not Gide embraced the Church of Rome.

A Prediction of Mine Come True

A June 1st entry, 'Structural Racism' and Conservative Cluelessness ended with a prediction:

. . . I predict things are going to get hot in the coming years.  The summer of 2015 should prove to be positively 'toasty' in major urban centers as the destructive ideas of the Left lead to ever more violence.

But liberal fools such as the aptronymically appellated Charles Blow will be safe in their upper-class enclaves.

It seems I was right about the summer of 2015.  Here is just one item from a pile of of evidence:  L. A. Sees Deadliest August in Eight Years.

On May 30th, my prediction assumed this form:

The 'Ferguson' Effect

A Turkish proverb has it that "the fish stinks from the head."  And indeed it does.  From Obama on down, the vilification of law enforcement has lead to a nation-wide spike in violent crime.  But while liberals caused the Ferguson effect, they won't suffer from it.  Urban blacks will.   Having seen how Officer Darren Wilson's career was destroyed, cops can be expected to hang back and avoid pro-active interventions.  I predict a long, hot, violent summer.  On the upside, Dunkin' Donuts will do better business and more cats will be rescued from trees.

Some of us are old enough to remember the Watts riots from the summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, 50 years ago.  At the time a joke made the rounds.  "How much power would it take to destroy Los Angeles?"

Five or six Watts.

Related articles

Los Angeles Marks 50th Anniversary of Watts Riots